Transcript of #2432 - Josh Dubin

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Brother Joe. Good to see you again. Nice to see you, man. What's happening?

Everything's happening. I got a lot on my mind. I got notes today and everything. Beautiful.

So let's kick it off. What do you got?

No, I was thinking that the more you do this work, the more routine the stories would get, and you would start to see fact patterns and situations repeat. But I'm starting to think the more you do it, the more nutty and bizarre it gets, and you find yourself in these situations where you're like, That can't be. You got to check that So I have multiple cases going on where I feel that way, and they range from wrongful convictions to why was this person charged in the first place, where you're seeking clemency. I mean, yeah, it's a weird world.

Yeah, your world in particular. The world of wrongfully accused and wrongfully convicted people is one of the darkest worlds in the world because you're taking away a person's freedom. Yeah. And they do it all the time for corruption. They do it because they're corrupt. They do it because they're dirty. They do it because they want convictions. They do it because they said someone was guilty, and then they just want to fucking lock them up anyway.

I started to read this. Malcolm Gladwell just published a new book called Revenge or the Tipping Point, and I'm only 15 pages in. And the way he starts it out is about, I think, he's going to come back to it at the end, but I think it's the opioid skin He's leaving it blank until the end of the book about how when the executives of the company testified before Congress that they couldn't bring themselves to apologize or admit that they were wrong, and they keep on using the words Our drug has been associated with addiction, and it's almost this. So I'm starting to think that this inability to admit fault, that you're wrong, that you're sorry. It transcends the legal system. And I'm starting to believe that the cases where these cops are out to frame someone are far more... Well, maybe not far more, but they're less common than the cases where law enforcement is trying to do the right thing, and a detective has a hunch, and they just get to where they think they need to be on the evidence by following the hunch, which is often wrong. So, yeah, it's a mix of all that shit.

Yeah, and people don't like to admit they're wrong, ever, especially when it comes to something as crazy as pharmaceutical drug company releasing some opioid that's going to kill a million people. They can't admit they're wrong. They almost have to say things associated with, especially during hearings.

Yeah. During congressional hearings, I guess there's a lot on the line if there's anything that smells like an admission.

Yeah, they can't admit it. They have to not lie, right? Because then they can hit with perjury. So they come up with different terms associated with.

Yeah. I mean, I'm interested to see where he goes with it. I listen to his podcast a lot. It's actually really good. Some of them are good. Revisionist history because he's a curious dude, this Malcolm Gladwell. And some of his stuff I agree with, some I don't. But I like that he looks beneath the surface and tries to figure out what is motivating people or what they're tricking themselves into believing. I was watching this Man, a Scalco bit the other day, and he was like, Can you just say, I'm sorry. He's talking about his wife. That's all I want. And him and this dude are going back and forth. I forget the guy's name on the podcast. Some other comedian. And the bit is so fucking funny. And so I just find myself apologizing all the time. Because what's wrong with just admitting that you're wrong?

Nothing at all. Good. It's actually a show of strength. And people that don't recognize that, they just believe that they're never wrong or that they want people to know they're never wrong or think they're never wrong. So they just don't admit it. They just bury it deep inside.

But you find yourself apologizing all the fucking time, sometimes when you're conscious of it, I'm like, am I apologizing a lot? Maybe I did That's really good. All this shit.

Well, better to apologize for something you didn't do than to not apologize for something you did. Well, I don't know. As long as you mean it.

Yeah. You got to mean it. That helps. Meaning it helps. Just saying it just to get it out of a fight.

Yeah, that's not good. It's not worth it.

Yeah, I just finished this trial on a case that was super important to forensic science. It was actually the namesake of my center, the Perlmutterers, the Perlmutterers Center for Legal Justice at Cardoza Law. So Ike and Laurie Perlmutterers DNA was stolen by a neighbor. It's a nutty story. You could read about it online.

I did read about it online. It's crazy.

Fucking crazy. But I had a I had an expert, a so-called expert on the stand, and there was an email where it was an unaccredited DNA lab, and someone that worked for him gets the results of DNA testing, one round of the results. And she says, The good news is we have a full profile. The bad news is it's not associated with the pro-matters. I said to him in words or substance, Why would it ever be bad news for a scientist if one particular person was implicated in a crime or not, aren't they supposed to just give the facts? In a moment of candor, I think it's one of the few times this has happened. In all my years doing this, the guy said, I wouldn't have used those words, and it had no place. And it wasn't an email that he wrote. It was an email that someone that worked for him wrote. And I almost said right in front of the Jerry, Good for you, man. That's super rare. And I mean, the case is, I think it's an important one for forensic science because their DNA was stolen at a deposition over some petty shit.

It was about a tennis dispute in their community. And they're lured to this deposition, and And their neighbor takes their DNA without their consent. How did he do it? He had a former crime scene analyst and some retired Deputy Chief of Police from Toronto, because this guy's from Canada, come down and the former crime scene analyst sits at the deposition, and they planned it all beforehand, and they made sure that they did not handle paper that Ike Perlmutter would handle, and they made sure that no one touched this water bottle that Laurie Perlmutter was going to handle, and they hand him this phony exhibit, and they had it worked out before that they would only touch the bottom corner of it. They have a water bottle sitting in front of Laurie Perlmutter, and they ask questions about this dispute over the tennis center. When they leave, it was treated like a crime scene. It was like some vigilante justice type of shit, where they send all this stuff to an unaccredited lab who then sends it to an accredited lab. Instead of waiting for the results to come in from this accredited lab, the unaccredited lab starts interpreting it, and they're having pressure put on them by this man that ultimately accused Ike and Laurie of being involved in this awful crime.

What was the crime? All right, so it doesn't make sense without context. So here's what happens. Ike Perlmutter is the former chairman of Marvel. He's very reclusive by all accounts. He and Laurie don't have children, and they live a very quiet life in Palm Beach. He was an avid tennis player. This is about 14 years ago. Avid tennis player, and he became very friendly with the woman that was the tennis pro. She was a single mother. She would set him up with tennis games, and he became friendly with her. She sold real estate on the side. I mean, this is like a fucking episode of Seinfeld or Kerbier enthusiasm at the beginning. Then it goes off the rails and ascends into the depths of hell. So bear with me. Okay. So a man had been living at or moves into their neighborhood, and he becomes She comes friends with this other couple who also sell real estate. The wife sells real estate. And apparently, they approach the tennis pro and they're like, We should team up on real estate. And she's like, No, it's just my side hustle. I'm going to do it alone. So this guy from Canada writes this memo And in the memo, there's all these accusations about this woman that she could go to federal prison, and she's committing she could be...

That there's bid rigging going on because they never sent her They never sent her tennis pro contract out for bid. It was just like nutty stuff.

Just because she wouldn't go in the business with her.

I mean, that's our theory. That's my opinion. And, yeah, that was our theory in the case. So Ike stands up for her. He's a very loyal guy, stands up for the people that he is friends with, and he thought she was getting bullied. So she sued the guy for defamation, and Ike and another resident in this condo complex paid for her legal fees. So about a year later, mail starts to arrive in this community, and it is the most awful shit you have ever heard. And it's accusing the Canadian guy of being a child molester, of being a murderer. It's horrific, twisted, sick shit. So it's about a year after this tennis center dispute, and there's misspelled Hebrew words and Jewish stars all over it. So this guy thinks naturally that Ike and his wife are behind it, like they have Nothing better to do? All right. So because he's so convinced that they did it or that they were involved, and he initially suspected that other people might be involved, this guy's going around and swabbing DNA off of... With a Q-tip, off of cars. He's digging through trash in the condo community, and he's on this mission to collect people's DNA.

So he calls them to a deposition about the tennis center case, and that's where this all went down. So once they collect their DNA, this unaccredited lab claims that DNA taken off of the hate mail matches Laurie Perlmutter's DNA from the water bottle at the deposition. The problem was that this unaccredited lab didn't wait for the report from the accredited lab, and that run of the DNA that this woman was relying on, the accredited lab discarded it because the man that actually did the test and contaminated the machine, and he knew it, so he didn't rely on it. So years and years and years go by, and well after, they knew that Laurie had nothing to do with this. In fact, in 2017, a man got arrested in Canada, and he got arrested because a package got intercepted at the border by Homeland Security, and it had samples of the hate mail, latex gloves in the package. It was a former business associate of this Canadian guy, and their relationship went sour. And I thought the case was over. In 2019, I believe, the guy gets arrested again, and there's a detailed affidavit. So it's clear that this man is responsible for it.

So in any event, in 2016, I believe it was 2016, there's an article in the fucking deal book in the New York Times saying that Laurie Perlmutter DNA is on that hate mail. And then there's another one in the Globe and Mail, which is a big Canadian paper. So it was a defamation case against this guy and against this lawyer for Chubb, because Chubb helped this Chubb lawyer federal insurance, also known as Chubb, helps him draw up the blueprints for collecting their DNA at the deposition. So it was a super gratifying case. We won a $50 million verdict, and he was found liable for defamation, abuse of process, which is abuse of the legal process. And it's taken Ike and Laurie all of these years to have their name restored in court. And they'd kill me if I admitted it in a violation of their confidence and my professional obligation. But they've spent an untold fortune. And the case is It's important for forensic science because DNA is supposed to be the Holy Grail. And you can't have private citizens running around trying to collect people's DNA without knowing what they're doing. You could be leaning on someone and have good intentions to get results.

But if I told you or if I said to Jamie, Here's my suspect. Take a look at these fingerprints and tell me if they match him or her. Or, Here's my suspect. Here's their genetic profile. Tell me if it matches. You don't realize the... I mean, sometimes the error rate skyrockets by as much as 50 %, with fingerprints over 80 %. And fingerprint analysts will agree, and they will say, Yeah, I know that that happens. And if someone tells me who the suspect is and only who the suspect is, and I'm comparing it, I think the error rate goes up, but not with me. Not with me. I mean, again, it's that phenomenon where you just can't think that you would be biased. Look, the case was super important because I think it... But beyond restoring their name, and it's the namesake of the center where we do this work, it also preserves the integrity of forensic science, and especially DNA, which is really one of the few super reliable forms of forensic science. But even that, when put in the wrong hands, or if it's exposed to subjectivity and people's belief that they have the right person, it's vulnerable.

And science shouldn't be vulnerable. It's either A or B. It's either yes or no, especially with DNA.

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So what happens is I don't want to go too deep into DNA analysis, but it is actually interesting. When you're conducting DNA testing, the manufacturer of the machine, I think it's called the PowerPlex Plus, they ask you to run what's called a positive control and a negative control to make sure that the machine is correctly calibrated, because it's what it's doing through electrophoresis is shooting out what's called an electropharogram on the other end so that you're able to do what's referred to as calling alleles. So you're calling a chromosome pair at a specific genetic marker, right? And they called them... There's various different loci or locations where you either have two alleles or one. You get one from your mom, one from your five, one from your mom, one from your dad. And sometimes the one from your father might not show, but your mother's will show, but there'll be two alleles at most at a specific location. So they want to make sure that the machine is working properly. So the manufacturer has the lab analyst every time you do it, run a positive control, meaning that you'll put a solution through the machine, and it should, on the other end, give you very specific results.

And he accidentally pipetted or took the solution from her DNA mixture instead of from the positive control mixture and put that through the machine. So when he was running the test, her DNA is already mixed in there. But he realized he made a mistake. So when he issued his report, he didn't rely on that run, because when I say run, it's another... You'll run the DNA on different occasions and Sometimes on different dates because you want to make sure that your genetic profile will never change. My genetic profile will never change. So when you are looking at somebody's genetic profile, it should be consistent. So when he saw that, wait a second, the first run of this doesn't match the second and third or the fourth, he realized he made a mistake. But without having the lab analyst that's doing the interpretation, You're weighing in on the results, and you're antsy to get an answer, and you're leaning on an unaccredited lab saying, Interpret the results, interpret the results. Money is no object. There's an email that said that. So instead of waiting, she relies on this run of the DNA. And then what happens, happen.

But at some point, this Canadian guy came to learn what actually happened and kept on going and kept on going, and kept on going. And there was evidence that he wanted hundreds of millions of dollars from my clients. I think what turned out to be a shitty situation for him, because no doubt, getting hate mail like that has to be disturbing and upsetting to the family.

Did it turn out that he had any relationship with the Canadian man who was sending him the hate mail?

Yeah, that was one of his former business colleagues who he had a vicious falling out with, and he kept it from everyone. So I think that the inference, in my opinion, the inference is that at some point, and in fact, there's an allegation in the hate mail. Where it says, You were involved in the murder of these two people. He accuses this man in Canada, months after the hate mail began to arrive, of spreading that rumor. So I believe that he knew it was him the whole time. And at some point, I believe he was trying to shake the Perlmutterers down.

So he wanted money from them, otherwise he was going to go public?

And he went public.

How much did he request?

Look, there's an article in the Globe and Mail saying that he wants $600 million. There was an article. He admitted on the stand that it was $100 million.

So he was just trying to get paid.

Well, that's my opinion. What's his background? That was the jury's opinion. What does he do? He was, in my opinion, an embattled businessman in Canada. He had like an executive recruiting company, but there was all sorts of public information out there that he worked on the Toronto Harbor Commission and then been involved in what the press called Cloak and Dagger campaigns, where he was wasting public funds. So he bragged about all the lawsuits he's been involved in. So I think the jury saw through it. Look, again, sometimes you become really close with your clients, and that's not always a great thing. I'm guilty of that a lot. But these are wonderful people, reclusive. They give most of their money away to charity. And to watch these people will get dragged through the mud for over a decade. And there was evidence in the case that this is interesting, because I initially fought this. On the first day of jury selection, they had been invited to go to Mar-a-Lago and sit at the President's table for a Halloween party. It was just prospective jurors filling out questionnaires. So the defense, and it was really, I think, the attorneys for Chubb or for the lawyer that worked for Chubb, wanted to introduce evidence.

They got photos of the party, and they wanted to introduce this evidence. And there was One day during the trial where they went to the White House because one of their close friends was appointed to be the ambassador for India. And they used that against them during the trial, and I fought it tooth and nail. And then I finally said, You know what? Fuck it. I'm going to let it come in. I stopped fighting it, and I knew that the jurors on their questionnaire filled out who they publicly admired most and least. Two of them wrote they admired the President the most. One of them said they admire him the least. I really had to speak to that juror and say, During my closing argument, what they're doing here is they're trying to say that Laurie Perlmutter her reputation doesn't matter, that she can't emote and suffer humiliation or public ridicule, and that you should disregard her because of who she's friends with, who she votes for, the fact that her husband came here, and literally with $200 in his pocket, and ascended. It's the weird paradox about success. You get there and people are like, Oh, these fucking rich people.

But these are like, they represent the best in all of us. Laurie Perlmutter, with her free time, started to work at the gift shop at NYU because she liked the feeling of selling flowers and little gifts to people that were going through terrible times. And she ends Who ends up becoming a board member at NYU, and they give $50 million dollars to start the Perlmutter Cancer Center. I mean, who among us wouldn't want to aspire to that? And they were trying to say, But she doesn't matter. At one point, she was asked the question, Because with defamation, your reputation is on the line, right? And you have to argue reputational damage. And they said, Well, isn't your reputation bound up in your husband's? And they said this to a jury of four or five And I thought, what a dumb fucking thing to say. In my opinion, at least it was like... And I was able to say to them during the closing, they're saying she doesn't matter, and that she's not her own person, her reputation. So it's like These little victories help restore my faith in the system, because if billionaires can get awarded $50 million, which is what they got awarded, I I think that that's the jury saying, her reputation mattered.

And not only did her reputation matter, but it mattered to the point where you can't just tear somebody down when you know the facts. Which just seems so insane that he would pursue that.

I mean, the guy literally owns the Ike Perlmutter Center for Legal Justice. And you're like, Yeah, I'm going to test that. I mean, I'm going to test that justice. Just bullshit my way.

I mean, the irony of that is that the center was born out of their experience in this case. Really? Yeah. The center was born out of... At one point, I was offered this role to start a new post-conviction center. Up until four years ago, five years ago, I did work at the Innocence Project. When I was offered this position at the same law school, at Cardozo Law, where the Innocence Project was born, they said, If you get that role, the Perl Mutters, we're going to fund it for the first 10 years because we realized that if you're wrongfully accused in this country of a crime you didn't commit, if you don't have the resources to fight it like we did, that you're really in trouble. And for them to have that insight while going through this, it's remarkable. I'm indebted to them for life. I mean, they've become like surrogate family to me. But, yeah, the center was born out of their experience in this case.

So good came out of it. Does the guy have the money to pay them?

I don't know. I don't know, but I'm going to find out. But we have post trial motions that the judge has to decide. And then once we get, hopefully, we get the judgment entered. Ike is not the guy to pick a fight with. He was standing up for his wife's honor, really. And look, sometimes you pick a fight with the wrong person, and what do they say? You fuck around and find out.

There's a lot of people that fuck around a lot until they find out. It sounds like this guy might have been one of those people.

I don't know. I don't know. Perhaps. Perhaps.

Allegedly. It just seems like there's people that are involved in conflict their whole fucking life, man, and they never get out of that pattern.

I don't get it.

Yeah. Unhealthy people. They develop a pattern. They develop a pattern of thinking and behaving.

Well, I don't know if it's the empath in me, but I try to see, what are you thinking? Why can't you realize I've gone down the wrong path? Let me course-correct. And you just end up with theories. I mean, look, I can understand why a former detective might be concerned about liability, so they can't just say, Well, here's what I was up to all this time. I guess I can understand that, but I can understand the thinking and not just saying, I've gone down the wrong path. And some people start to believe their own lies, I think. Some people start to believe their own theories. Human psychology is like, it's vast and abstract and so complicated.

It varies. Varies from individual to individual. What they can justify, what they can rationalize in their head.

Look, I told you at the beginning that there's only been a handful of cases where I was like, That can't be. There's got to be something missing from that story that you're not telling me. But watch this. Two officers in 1998 were on patrol in New York City, in Brooklyn, on Pitkin Avenue. Gunfire breaks out. And literally, as they're rolling down the street, the gunfire breaks out. One of the officers looks to his left and sees the muzzle flash of the gun that was used to kill this young man, Trevor Vieira. He exits the patrol car, draws on the man, and says, Drop the gun. The guy's pointing the gun still that was used to shoot Trevor Vieira. And there's a tense moment. And this officer has testified that there was a 14-year-old girl in the area, or he otherwise would have just shot the guy. So he literally catches the murderer with the gun smoking in his hand. Why use that expression over the past two decades? Oh, it's a smoking gun. This is the fucking smoking gun. He finally drops the gun. His name is Eduardo Rodriguez. He's put in handcuffs. And you get documents as you're going through the discovery process during post-conviction.

You get it from the prosecutor or from the police. And there's a radio call by a detective that says, Perps in custody, contemporaneous with the arrest. They arrest two men One guy standing next to him, and the guy that, Eduardo Rodriguez, that shot the gun. He's placed under arrest. He's brought to the precinct, and he is delivered into the arms of of no other than one of the most corrupt, sadistic detectives to ever work homicide in Brooklyn, in my opinion, Louis Scarcella. Now, why should that name sound familiar to you or to others? Because Louis Scarcella is the guy that framed Derek Hamilton, who's the Deputy Director of the Perlmutter Center for Legal Justice at Cardozo. Louis Scarcella and his partner, I think his name is Schmil, or Chimil, Kimil, C-H-M-I-L. These guys were so notorious for framing people for murders they didn't commit, that there have been 21 cases where people's convictions were vacated, where they were the lead detectives. 21. Derricks is one of them. So Eduardo Rodriguez is delivered to the precinct, smoking gun in his hand, and a couple of hours later, he's brought to the home of Nelson Cruz, who was 17 years old at the time, 16 turning 17.

And it's the story of these cops that while he was in the precinct, that he was yelling and screaming and tearing the place up. I didn't do it. Nelson Cruz did it. He shot him and ran and dropped the gun, and I just picked it up. The officer that arrested him never saw Nelson Cruz. He didn't see someone shoot and drop a gun. The story is literally ludicrous. Nelson Cruz is arrested and charged with murder. So when I heard the story, I was like, There's no fucking way that this is what happened. You're leaving something out. And I then read the trial transcript. There's another guy that shows up at the precinct named Andre Bellinger. And Andre Bellinger says, Yeah, I saw Nelson Cruz do it, too. And He shows up at the precinct, and he's told what gun was used. He's told that Nelson Cruz is the suspect, and then he picks him out of a lineup after being told we're going to put Nelson Cruz in a lineup. All three of those things are gross violations of investigatory practices, and this has been established for decades. So This guy ends up put on trial, and they somehow claim that they can't locate this guy that is saying that he witnessed the crime.

They can't locate him. He's not around to be located. So the person who had the gun in his hand that is shooting the gun, who they believe, who says Nelson Cruz did it, in Nelson Cruz's trial, He's nowhere to be found. Wouldn't you think that the prosecutors would put that man, Eduardo Rodriguez, on the stand so he could explain how he picked up the gun? He could explain, What did you see? You saw Will Nelson Cruz do this, and he ran and dropped the gun, and he's never put on the stand. It's like a three-day trial. The only person put on the stand that claimed to have been a witness is this guy, Andre Bellinger. So I mean, some people have bad luck, shitty luck, or cataclysmic fucking apocalyptic bad luck, and Nelson Cruz just happens to have won that shit lottery. Nelson Cruz ends up before a judge about eight years ago and about six years ago. And it's a post-conviction hearing. And this guy, Andre Bellinger, who claims that he watched Nelson Cruz do it, is outed as a a liar. There are eyewitness that were with him that night who said he wasn't at that murder scene.

He was blocks away with me. He was outed as a liar on so many different occasions. It It becomes like it would become laughable if it wasn't so serious. After these post-conviction proceedings, during which 20 some odd witnesses were called, the courtroom is packed on the day of the decision because the expectation consultation amongst the press and in the legal community is Nelson Cruz is about to get exonerated. This judge had exonerated people that had been investigated by Luis Scarsella, and she's acting weird and erratic. And she rules against Nelson Cruz and contradicts herself on multiple occasions. And this is in 2019, 2020, and we later learn she never takes the bench again, and she resigns because she has advanced stage Alzheimer's disease. Oh, Jesus. I have an affidavit from an investigator that says her husband said that she had been suffering from these symptoms for years before. There was a judicial complaint filed because she wasn't showing up to court. There's a pro-publica article about it, about this whole debacle. It's stories like this. The Perlmutter Center for Legal Justice is working on the case. Thankfully, we're before the Conviction Integrity Unit in Brooklyn, and it's led by a really special guy, Eric Eric Gonzales is the district Attorney in Brooklyn, and he listens to these cases.

He has a real conviction and integrity unit. So I'm hopeful that once we present the case to them, that we'll get him some relief. But to think about, he was paroled in 2023. He's a mess. He walks around nervous. He's got terrible anxiety and paranoia. He's a wonderful guy, and he's so stone-cold innocent And you just wonder how and why this shit can happen to someone. And it's like the perfect constellation of you got these crooked detectives who have already been found to have ruined a bunch of people's lives. You have the smoking gun found in the hand of the murderer who mysteriously disappears. And if you're wondering, so why did they believe this guy? How does he go to the precinct? And he raises hell and says, Nelson Cruz did it, and I picked up the gun, even though there's no evidence of that. What would be your guess?

Well, he's probably some a witness and something else.

It was pretty well known back at the time that Louis Scarsella, other detectives in Brooklyn Homicide, and all the boroughs had informants. I mean, that's my best guess. Why else would you just believe? And They've gone as far as to try to discredit their own and say, Well, Piatty must not have seen him drop the gun and run. This guy has been consistent throughout. He hears the gunfire, looks, sees the muzzle flash. He literally witnesses the murder. So there was a joint FBI task force with the NYPD going at the time. So, yeah, they relied on informants.

What's the state of the guy who actually committed the murder currently?

He's out.

Jesus.

He's running around the streets. Who knows where he is.

So if your guy gets exonerated, does this guy get tried?

No, that very rarely happens.

So that guy just committed murder, and he's free.

Oh, that's happened. You know how many times that's happened to anyone that's done post-conviction work?

But you don't even think that's a possibility. You're just dismissing it. Like, No, the The murderer is going to go free.

Yeah. Because in order for me to expect that that would happen, it would be to defy logic, as I know it in this world. Because think about what happens. If a municipality admits we did something horrible, and it was a mistake, and we did the wrong thing, there's going be a civil rights lawsuit. I mean, look, to Brooklyn's credit, with this DA, they have done that and done the right thing. But in terms of then going after the person that they think did it, it's 2000, almost '26, and this crime happened in 1998. It's 30 years later, to be able to reassemble the witnesses, and some of whom are probably dead or hard to find. But it's very rare that once there's an exoneration and you're able to point to who the true killer is, very rare that law enforcement will go after the person that defense council has established actually did it.

That's insane.

Is it? Yeah.

Because if the defense council has ruled that this other guy is innocent and that the police officer did see the guy execute that person, how do you not try that person with murder?

Now, you're stumbling into the how could that be's of our legal justice system. It doesn't happen. I mean, Clemente Aguirre, who I've talked about before, who was exonerated from death row. If there's any doubt about this phenomenon of children killing their parents, I think that that was laid to rest a few days ago. It happens. It happens a lot more than was recently publicized. The real killer was the daughter of her mother and her grandmother. Clemente Aguirre gets charged, put on death row, and in the middle of his retrial, she all but confessed on the stand to me. They have her blood mixed with her mother's blood at the crime scene, and in a trail leading to the bathroom where the killer cleaned up, she confessed on six or seven different occasions, not under duress, not to law enforcement, to various people around town. She's roaming the streets. The day that Clemente got exonerect, exonerated. I said, I think I might have quoted Jim Morison. I was like, There's a killer on the roam, and she's in Kentucky, and you better go get her. And they were like, Oh, objection. But, yeah, it happens. I mean, it's my belief that she's stone cold guilty, and they haven't gone after her, and that happens a lot.

I mean, look, the word exoneration is thrown around, but Derek's case is rare. He was declared actually innocent. Sometimes the conviction gets vacated. Sometimes they decide not to retry the person and agree to time served, but you're pushing a massive boulder up a steep hill every time. Like, Nelson Cruz should not have to carry this weight around anymore. He's had other lawyers that have done a great job representing him. We've come in now-How much time did he wind up doing? I think 26 years.

Jesus.

Yeah, it's horrifying.

Jesus.

I mean, when you've done so much time that you've paroled out and are still trying to prove your innocence.

Jesus.

I hate to give you indigestion on I mean, but this is like... I'm past tears at this point. I'm more like, we just got to keep going and keep fighting. And when you get these little victories here and there, we've had a few releases recently that were super encouraging, where you're able to get people a second chance, where you're able to get it to the point where they could, even though they didn't do it, plea guilty. We just had a release. She was actually my co-counsel in the Clementia Geary case, Mari Palmer, and her client pled guilty, but He didn't believe he's innocent. He did it to get out. He had done 24 years, and he had enough. But for her to get it to the place where he could even plea guilty after serving all that time, innocent people plea guilty all the time.

Yeah, they do, just to get a lighter sentence.

Yeah.

It's a dirty business you're in, buddy.

It's filthy. It's filthy. And it's got all these tentacles. Because if you're doing post-conviction work, it's not just the wrongfully accused and convicted. It's also we do clemency work, commutations and pardons. You start to wade into the human mess, and you see that People have made mistakes and are worth a second chance. What they do with it is up to them. But some of the stuff you can't explain, some of these prosecutions are political. Look, I'm dealing with a case right now that's at the intersection of wrongful conviction and what the fuck are we doing with our immigration policy in this country? I don't even want to mention his name or the state, because I don't want to sacrifice the good work that we're doing to get him a public hearing. But I can say this much. This is a guy from Albania that came to this country in the early '70s and had to sit in a refugee camp in Italy for damn near a month under horrid conditions just to come here to try to live a life. He's in his early '20s. He's at a gas station. He has a $100 bill for $5 gas.

He goes into the gas station. The guy takes the $100 bill. He doesn't have change. He says, When you get $5, come back. I'm going to hold on to this $100 bill. And they get into an argument. He won't give him back the $100 bill. So he leaves and goes to get his brother, and he tells his brother about it. They return to the gas station. They have a gun in the back seat of their car. His brother tells him, You stay here. I'm going to go in and try to talk some sense into this guy. Get your money back, give him five bucks. My client's sitting in the car and gunshots erupt. He goes in the back seat, gets the gun, goes around to the side, comes into the gas station. It comes into the... You remember back in the '80s, where you would go in to pay, and it would be like a little front desk area, and the gas station attendant is holding the gun, and he looks to his left, and his brother is bleeding out. The gas station attendant had shot his brother in the stomach, still holding the gun shaking, he shoots him one time dead, shoots the gas station attendant dead.

His brother miraculously survives, and he's put on trial for murder. And he goes to trial the first time. Remember, he's in his early 20s, and it's a hung jury. Most of them are in favor of acquittal. Goes to trial a second time and gets convicted. The judge must have seen that this was damn near as close to self-defense as it gets. He got sentenced to four to seven years. He was out in just under four years. He had become an accomplished boxer in prison. He's lived the last 51 years of his life without so much as a traffic ticket. He goes to New York, joins the Union as a super for buildings. He pays taxes, social security, pays into his pension, builds a life for himself, has five kids, eight grandchildren, and he's living in upstate New York. Leaves the country a couple of years ago to go to Albania to see family, comes back and gets stopped at the border. Somehow, is not detained at the border, but they start removal proceedings on him.

Why?

Because there is- Is he a citizen at No, he's not. But he's a- Is he a green card? Yeah, he's a green card holder.

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He's exactly who we would want in this country. A guy that comes here and And by the way, I want to mention the state. There are self-defense laws that did not exist then. Many states have stand your ground laws. I think under different circumstances, he doesn't even... And if the laws had evolved, he doesn't even get charged. I mean, you see your brother shot, and the facts are not in dispute about this. I've researched it exhaustively. Isn't that the type of person we want who has contributed to this society for 51 years and built a family?

What happened with the brother and the attendant?

They got into an argument, and the attendant called him some slur against Albanians, and they started to argue, and he just shot him on the stomach. This isn't even... It's not in dispute at all what happened. And there's a law that if you committed a violent crime, you're removable. But for 51 years, he was not removed from this country. And he lived here as a green card holder, and he paid taxes, and he built a family and a life.

And now- So this removal was all during the Biden administration?

No. Unfortunately, it was during the Trump administration.

But you said it was two years ago?

It was when he He was first asked at the airport, and they flagged him. I believe it was during the Biden administration, but no enforcement action was taken. It was during the current, and this isn't an indictment of the President. This is just during the current administration that they started removal proceedings against him to try to have him removed from the country.

So did they just go through all the old cases and find out anybody that had any a violent offense?

I believe that that's what happened. Nobody knows, but that's what I believe happened. So again, I made the mistake, or maybe it's a virtue at this point, of getting to know this family. And I've met every sibling. There's two boys and three girls, and they're literally like some of the most wonderful people I've ever met. I wish I didn't like them as much as I did. And I stay in close contact with one of the... I guess I could give first names with one of the sons, Anthony and his sister, Joanna, and to see the love that they have for their father and the fear that they're living under This man could get deported and sent to Montenegro.

Why Montenegro?

Because that's where you get sent if you're Albanian, if you have Albanian citizenship.

Why there, I think that that's the Protectorate of Albania at this point.

Okay. And to watch them, they went to one removal proceeding, and the judge... I have the transcripts of the proceeding, and the judge is saying to the prosecutors, at one point, he said, What are you doing here? He starts speaking Albanian to my client. And look, I don't know immigration law that well. I'm not an immigration lawyer, but I spoke to the immigration lawyer, and he's like, Look, I'm afraid that they're going to take him. I mean, ICE is waiting outside courthouses, and they're going to take this guy, he's in his 70s, take him away from his family and his grandchildren? So again, you don't just see these wrongful conviction cases. You see cases that are like, this man has built a life. And if you start to get beneath the surface and you see the pain and agony and fear that people are living, they're living it day to day. We were able to get a delay into February for his removal proceeding. So I'm now trying to get him pardoned because if he gets pardoned, there's no basis upon which to remove them. We have a team in my center that's working on it, and these are the people you want to fight for once you get to know them.

So I don't want to just tell nightmare after nightmare, but the reason why it's important, I think, for people to hear this is it's not just what you're seeing on TV or what you're hearing about. What basis do we have to remove a grandfather who's lived here for 50 years and contributed to this society and paid his taxes and paid into Social Security and was part of a union. And just like, I'm looking for a flaw. I really am. I'm looking for a reason for me not to like them, and I just get drawn in more and more. They're just wonderful people, and these are the kinds of things that are worth fighting for.

I think what's going on with ICE is one of the things that's going on with quotas for speeding tickets and things along those lines is that they have numbers that they want to achieve. And they've openly talked about this, that they want to remove a certain amount of people per week. And when they do that, I think everything's on the table. Then they start showing up at Home Depot. Instead of looking for gangbangers, looking for criminals and cartel members, they go to whatever's easiest pickings so they can get numbers up. Do you know Ed Calderon? Do you know who he is? He was a Mexican military guy who now is an American citizen, but he reports extensively on the cartels and just was telling me some horror stories about ICE rates. And one of them was they took this guy who had been brought over here when he was a baby but didn't have American citizenship. His family came over here illegally. Lived here for 20 years. Can't speak Spanish. They deport him. Send him to Tijuana.

Can't speak Spanish.

Can't speak Spanish. Does not speak Spanish. He is essentially an American citizen. He just never lived anywhere else. He just doesn't have the paperwork. He's not a criminal. They sent him over to Tijuana, and now he has to live in Mexico. He doesn't know what the fuck to do. He's on the streets. He has no idea. He doesn't have any money.

I don't understand. I wish that there was... It's a black box, immigration, in terms of what the policy exactly is? And why do you want to continue this narrative that seems to be, again, more of a human rights issue than a political issue? What is the end game here?

The end game is to get as many illegals out as they can because so many were brought in over the last four years.

Well, that's a fair argument. I understand that. But do we want to be getting rid of seven-year-old men that No. Really... I mean, I got to tell you, I have an older brother, and if someone had did something like that to him, I can't tell you I wouldn't have done the same fucking thing.

Of course. Almost anybody who has family would say that. Go and you see your brother shot, and you know the whole circumstance is surrounding it. Yeah.

So I just don't. And it's not... These immigration judges, I've come to learn, don't have much flexibility. They're hard and fast statutes about whether or not someone is considered removable. My appeal is really to the prosecutors. It's like, why are you doing this? But then they're following orders from someone above them that's telling them, This is your case. You're assigned to it. Do the best job you can. So that shit just rolls downhill, unfortunately. Yeah. And I try not to wear this... From my own mental health, I'm trying to keep the empath in me in check a little bit more because... But sometimes it's difficult. Like Nelson's case, this case that I'm talking about. And the only reason I'm not using names in that case is I don't want to alienate. There's great people in the state that this happened in, which wasn't New York, that I think actually care and have shown that this doesn't seem right, and we want to make sure that you get a public hearing. I'm confident that we will before February, and I like my chances if we do, because I think that the story... He's worth pardoning. He's worth saving.

But I don't understand. I mean, that's what I meant by this human mess. It's like, I wish there was a more transparent process of how and why people get pardons, certainly on the state and on the federal level. I don't get it.

Well, I mean, the nuttiest thing is that the President can pardon people. You could just decide because you're the President or the governor. You could just decide this person, I like him.

It's an amazing responsibility, and it's an awesome power to have, and how you go about exercising it becomes challenging, right?

Well, it gets real weird. How about during the Biden administration, when some of them, Biden clearly didn't even sign the pardons. It was all autopen, and he had the most pardons of any President ever. So you have political influence. You have people that would like to get someone pardoned, and you know someone inside. Do you think you can make this happen? Well, he's pardoning 9,000 people. Fuck it. Let's just throw that one in there. Yeah.

I don't really know the autopen issue that well. I don't know if he saw those, didn't see them. I don't know what... It's like organized chaos for every presidency. Bill Clinton pardoned people at the end of his terms. That fucking bananas when you look at them. Biden did it with his son. Biden did it with family members that weren't even accused It was preemptive pardon. I don't even know that that was a thing before. It never was.

He did it with Fauci. Preemptive back to 2014.

Yeah, listen, some of the pardons that the current administration issues are good for him. Others are like head scratchers, and you're like, what the fuck? But what makes one person deserving and another not is a difficult thing to understand. I've been to the White House. I've advocated for pardons. It's a frustrating experience because you know that there are thousands of people doing the same thing, and you try your best to say, This is why this case means something. But where it goes from there is hard to understand. I think I have tremendous respect for an admiration of the current pardon Tsar, Alice Johnson, because she's been there before. She was actually incarcerated and pardoned by the President, and she's now in that role as the pardon Tsar.

Who Who was she pardoned by?

President Trump. Wow.

During his first term? Yeah. Wow.

Yeah. And she's- What was she wrongfully accused of? Some drug offense. And she did a ton of time, and she's gone on to become this amazing, not just human being, but advocate for people to get second chances. And he designated her the pardons are. Now, I think between her and getting to the President and making her case for pardons is difficult because there's layers of influence in between. But I have cases before them right now that have very prominent people backing them. You would hope that they end up on his desk and seeing, getting some relief. I have one client that I know Mike Tyson backs him publicly, privately. He was a childhood friend of his. His name is Spencer Bowens. And he's one of many people that were sentenced under these crazy regimes of, let's weigh the drugs. So what's heavier, crack or cocaine?

Cocaine.

All right. What's heavier, heroin or crack? Heroin. All right. So they start to weigh. And what's more destructive? Who fucking knows? Jack was pretty damn destructive. And, you know, Spencer has been in prison for more than three decades, and he would have been out if these nutty drug laws didn't exist and if they applied retroactively since they have been abolished. And he's a guy that's sitting in there, and I speak to, and I start to lose hope. I don't lose hope. I start to feel his hopelessness over the phone because he should have been granted relief in the courts, and he's someone that just really, really deserves to be out. There's a bunch of cases like that where we're trying so hard, and You have to, at the same time, you express confidence in the people that are responsible for this stuff. But you also want to make sure that you're not offending them by saying, Look, I know you have a bunch of cases. Emory Jones is another one. I do a lot of work with Jay Zee's mom, and Jay Zee, he has a foundation. I have one, and we mentor college students together in the summer, pay for their last year of college.

Emory is a childhood friend of Jay Zee's and has his full support, Rock Nation, Jay Zee's company. They're behind him, and he's another one that was convicted and spent decades in prison for some drug crime. And he's come out and checked every box. He's a mentor. He's a pillar of the community. He's done so many amazing things, but he's under the weight of this old conviction, and he's denied job opportunities. And you just got to keep pushing and keep fighting, and hopefully your timing is right, and you speak to the right person and you get good news one day. But the odds are so... I don't want to say stacked against you, but yeah, it's who you know, who has influence at that particular time with the right person, the administration.

What punishments are there for people like the corrupt guy in Brooklyn that you were talking about? Whatever happened to him?

He's roaming the streets. He's roaming the streets. And look, that's the most... The cop, Louis Scarcella? Yeah. He denies any... I mean, in the face of these 21 cases that have been vacated, He denies any wrongdoing.

So 21 different people.

21.

He incarcerated them.

Yeah. One of the things that I'm thinking might be a good idea, because we can all go on the Internet and look this shit up. If you look up Louis Scarcella on the Internet. I bet you there's a Wikipedia page that talks about his corruption and lists all the people. We could all go on the Internet. One of the things that I think has been underused, and I think should be part of people's calculus rather than reading a headline or listening to me, or you, or anyone, is read the trial transcripts. Make your own judgment. I don't know what better way there is if you want to say, Well, what actually happened? What happened at this person's trial that And why do they deserve a second chance? Listen, there's a dear friend of mine who runs an amazing organization called the Reform Alliance. Her name is Jessica Jackson. Fantastic lawyer, and is in the bowels of the system fighting for change. Right now, there's a bill that the President's own Polster, if you I got the guy's name, has found that 80 % of MAGA voters support this act. It's called the Saper Supervision Act.

And it's actually a system that rewards people for when they get out for doing the right thing so that if you want to make sure that when you get out, there are terms of your supervision. How many times you check in with your parole or probation officer? How often are you being subject to drug tests? Is there an end in sight? This act actually is a merit system, and it's heavily supported by Republicans, by Democrats, by everyone in between. And you would hope that something like that would get passed and get pushed through because the Saper Supervision Act is a way that we can reward people for doing the right thing and hold people accountable that aren't doing the right thing when they get out. But But your question about what happens to the cops or the prosecutors that do this, they have immunity. It's one of the most frustrating things in the world is that most of the time, qualified immunity applies.

I mean, I could see immunity for a mistake, perhaps. But if there's a pattern and it's clearly corruption, and you have a person that is taking away people's freedom, How is there not a crime committed? How are they not convicted or at least charged with crimes?

Well, listen, for those listeners that want to get involved in the process and actually make a difference, you got to get involved. This isn't just like, activist speak. You can make a fucking difference. The person that ends up in a position to actually exercise their executive authority, executive clemency, whether it's a governor or a president, you should be a little more invested. I mean, I had this situation. I gave this guy every benefit of the doubt, and I thought I made a breakthrough. This is almost sadistic, I think. I'm sure I'll get a bunch of hate mail about this, and I could really give a shit. I went through this process with Governor DeSantis in Florida, and I think he was actually fucking with me, to be honest with you. He listened to the case as a favor, and there's a public hearing of the Clemency Board. This guy's name is Michael Giles. Again, read the transcript. As a matter of fact, I brought a passage to read here. This is another mindbender. This guy's in the Air Force. He is in Tampa. He ends up taking leave for the weekend and goes up from Tampa to FAMU in Tallahassee.

Tallahassee. Never been there before. He has a firearms that he's licensed to carry. He actually went into a police station to get his carry license. Military guy, never been in trouble in his life. Goes up to Tallahassee, and a massive fight breaks out in this club where they're at. Literally zero testimony that he has anything to do with this fight. The fight spills out into the parking lot, and it's being instigated by one guy. And this guy that's instigating the fight was thrown out of the club. And his own friends testified in the trial, We were afraid he was going to hurt someone bad. My client, Michael Giles, ends up in a car with the people he came there with, waiting for the person that had the keys to the car to come out and emerge from this Mele. And this fight It is going on all around him. People testified they were petrified, and he takes his gun and puts it in his pocket. He's standing there on the outskirts of this fight, after he gets out of the car and goes to look for his friend that has the keys to the car.

The car was left unlocked, but they couldn't leave because there was no ignition key. And he gets sucker-punched. And the guy that punched him says, Yeah, I'll look for the first person I could. Here, don't take it from me. Here's what he said at the trial. Here's what he said at the trial. First of all, his friends are testifying, this is from the trial, right? This man was acting, quote, crazy, that they were afraid he was going to, quote, attack someone. He was excited and acting crazy and talking and cursing Were you upset and upset and agitated? Were you concerned that he was going to attack someone? Question. Answer, yes, I was. Or get in a fight, answer, yes, I was. That's why I told him to leave, and that's why he was told to leave the club because he was wanting to fight someone. Isn't that correct? Witnesses testify. Question. You saw Courtney thrower. This is the guy that punched my client. Jump on the individual with the plaid shirt, didn't you? The guy with the plaid shirt is my client. Yes, I did. Your testimony is Courtney Throer leapt and attacked Mr. Giles from the front.

Yeah, I was. That was the thing. Courtney then leaps toward Mr. Giles and takes a swing at his face. And it goes on and on and on, that he took a running start, left his feet, and punched my client in the face. And look, there's a Mele going on. So he's on the ground after getting punched, and the person that punched him didn't hold back. He was asked at the trial, Question, Mr. Throer, is it your testimony that you ran with your entire body to strike this person? Answer, yes. Question, so you, at a full run or a sprint, use the weight of your body to impact this person in the head? Answer, yes. Question, was it your intention to knock him out? Answer, yes, it was. Question, and is there any doubt in your intention? Answer, no. Question, had this person actually done anything to you at any time whatsoever? Answer, physically, directly, no. Question, was it your intent to hurt this individual? Answer, yes, that's normally what you do when you punch someone. So on those facts, as My client is laying on the ground and there's a Mele going on where people are getting punched and kicked.

Is he justified at that point to take his gun out and shoot in self-defense? He shoots this guy in the leg, and fragments of the bullet hit two other people. That's the case. That's it. He is sentenced under Florida's mandatory minimum to 25 years in prison. 25 years. He's been in for 15 years. I have gone to visit him. He is the only client that I've ever represented that has never got a ticket in prison. What is a ticket? You didn't listen to a correction officer when they said, Get against the fucking wall. No. You didn't follow the rules. You didn't do that. He's not a ticket. So various powerful people that know the governor, finally finally got him to listen. Now, before I got involved in the case, the family was told that the governor was prepared to grant him clemency and traveled to Tallahassee the day that they thought he was going to get released, and were told on that day, the governor changed his mind. So I knew this all going in. I went and I appeared at a clemency hearing, and I was as What do they say? The word's escaping me.

When you're not subservient, but you're I'm trying to think, articulate it the right way. I mean, I was not only respectful, but I understood the gravity of what I was asking for. This is a governor that has never granted clemency, commuted a sentence to someone that was currently incarcerated. And he went through a laundry list of things that he would like me to do. His parents live... Michael Giles' parents live... That's the name of my client, Michael Giles. His parents live in Georgia. The governor, could you get in touch with the state of Georgia? I mean, This is all at a public hearing. It's online. And see if their governor has any problem with abiding by the terms of release. You want me to contact the governor? Okay. Submit a supervised release plan that is exhaustive and runs all the way through the term that he would serve out his incarceration so that he should be on supervised release for another 10 years. Contact this one. Contact that one. So I learned on good information that the governor was like, he'll never be able to get all that done. I got it all done. I had people help me, went to the governor, spoke to the governor in Georgia.

He said, Yeah, of course. We'll abide by it. There's something called the Interstate Compact. States have to abide by each other's supervision requirements when someone goes from one state to another. This had the support of John Ashcroft, Mike Muket, right-wing Republicans that otherwise wouldn't support this thing. It was like I had a list of 40 people, former US attorneys. It got so much that the head of the Florida Commission of Offender Review, they gave him a positive recommendation to get out. Super rare. The attorney general was in support. Everyone was in support. A week before, I was told we were going to grant him relief. They actually had me speaking to the prison to transport him to the clemency hearing. We were down to whether he would be able to change into a suit, because at the public hearing, Governor DeSantis said, I want to actually look at him eye to eye. And at the last second, for no fucking articulated reason, he said, You know what? I've changed my mind. That is brutal. It's evil, in my opinion, and it's It's precisely why, sometimes the King has to show mercy, and it's precisely why this guy is not very popular, I don't think.

And I ask this because it's relevant. Does Michael Giles get prosecuted if he's not a tall black man? I don't think so. The prosecutor that prosecuted him, I'm not calling him anything. I'm giving you the facts. The prosecutor that prosecuted him went through a DOJ investigation because something was found in his office targeting Hispanic residents for harsher punishment. A whistle blower took a photo of it. It was a memo hanging over a water-cooler. It's all over the place. It's all online. You can read about it. He had to enter into some agreement with the Department of Justice. How was it phrased? How was what for you?

How was the determination to- If prior criminal history or Hispanic, and then it has an arrow.

Or Hispanic. Oh, yeah, you can pull it up.

Prior criminal history is the same as just being innocent in Hispanic.

Oh, yeah. This is the South. Wow. I mean, it's out there. His name is Jack Campbell. I mean- That is so crazy that they would not just, but actually print.

There is a- The prior criminal history is equal to being Hispanic.

I don't think it said equal. I'd love to see- But it's the same or Hispanic.

I'd love to see- might as well be saying.

Yeah, there's a whistleblower that took a picture of it, and then he had to apologize for it. So should the thought enter my mind? I mean, I was putting my daughter to bed one night, and I just looked up his name, and I stumbled across this, and I was like, Oh, okay. Because I spoke to him one time, and I asked if he would give a letter of support. And he said, I won't give a letter of support, but I stand by what I did. I said, Do you want to know what he's done since he's been in? No, I don't care. I'm not going to support it. I just won't. Oh, there it is.

That's There is. If no criminal history, diversion, if limited criminal history, withhold costs, if extensive criminal history and/or Hispanic.

Adjudicated guilty.

Plus costs, and/or extensive criminal history and/or Hispanic, and Hispanic is in capital letters.

Yeah. And so this whistleblower takes a picture of this, and it leads to a DOJ investigation where he agrees He apologizes publicly, and he agrees to go into some training program and have the prosecutors that work for him in a training program for racial sensitivity. So you think, I deal with the facts, and I deal with what I see every day. So should it beg the question, is Michael Giles getting charged with this crime under the facts, as I just told you with the testimony that I just read to you? And they said, Well, he ran initially. And when the police initially spoke to him, he didn't say he shot the gun. He's a Black man in America. Later that night, he admitted it. So what does it make a difference? And what How does it make a difference anyway? The guy was attacked with a running start. Someone leaves their feet and punches him in the face. Isn't 15 years enough? Fifteen years? He's had to go through... I mean, you read the letters from his kids who have now grown up without him, your heart ends up in 50 million pieces. And so a guy like Governor DeSantis, I think it's like there's no humanity there.

And the The easiest part about it is that you never know who you'll meet and why this is all, to me, human rights issue. The only person that gave me a sympathetic year when I would go to Florida, before I lived there, when I was still living in New York, and talk about clemency cases was Nikki Fried. I think she was the Commissioner of Agriculture. She ran against DeSantis in the last governatorial election. The The fascinating part about it is that this is like a woman that's dedicated herself to public service, and she's a major marijuana advocate. Legalizing marijuana has been her mission for so many years. She's on the board of Normal. She'd be an awesome guest because she became super unpopular in Florida because of her stance on legalization of marijuana. She was a tacto over it, about how weed is a gateway drug. Somehow in the minds of people that don't get it, that it's some pathway to heroine addiction. And, you know, Personal marijuana, cannabis for healing, all of those things she's been a major advocate for. And she told me, You're being strung along. After she was out of office, she's now the head of the...

I think she's the head of the Democratic Party for Florida. Wonderful woman. She's like, You're going to get strung along. I said, No, watch. I'm going to be the first one to get clemency from someone in prison. And he still can do it. Why won't he? Fuck knows. I have to talk to Michael's mom, and I have to talk to him. And it's like you run out of words. And yeah, it's not just is this a dirty business. It's heartbreaking.

It's got to be particularly hard for you. You are a very sensitive guy, which is odd. You're a very empathetic guy, which is odd for a lawyer. Or usually, lawyers eventually develop some a shell just to don't let enough in. You get hurt too many times. Even if you start out empathetic, you eventually develop a thick skin.

Listen, I'm a cryer, and I don't hide that.

That's why you're able to do the work you do, because you still are sensitive to this, and you still are empathetic despite all the shit you've seen.

Well, I mean, look, I have to be... I don't think you're good. I used to think that it was something to shrink from. In other words, that... Because it becomes It becomes a heavy cross to bear when you start wearing other people's hurt and emotions. I found myself sometimes inferring that people feel a certain way when they don't, and I have to make sure that I'm careful about that. My son Carter is 13. He's going to be 14 in April, and I sometimes feel like I have to be careful with the empathy because sometimes I'll be reliving some traumatic event from my childhood, and I'll think, Oh, he must feel this way at this point in time at 13. I'm imputing an emotion to him that isn't there. And sometimes I'll do that with a client or their family. I've gotten better at it. But when you have to deliver hard news or bad news, because there's so many these exonérations, the commutations, the pardons, they're like each one of them is its own miracle. Each one of them is so hard, so hard to get it done.

I got to pee. We'll be right back. So today, right before we started this, Trump rescheduled marijuana. So it's now schedule three. So it's in the same category as Tylenol, which is interesting. That's a compromise, right? It should be legal and regulated. That's what I think.

Isn't there been a stain on Tylenol, though, under this administration?

Sure. Yeah, sure. Acetaminophen is responsible for at least 500 deaths a year. I read a horrible case about a lady who had COVID, and she was struggling in pain, really hurt, and kept taking Tylenol. Tylenol is with Codin? Codin? That's on schedule three. Okay. Tylenol with Codin. Tylenol three. That's schedule three. That's different. It's different Tylenol, different regular. So acetaminophen.

How do you feel about it being rescheduled as well?

Well, it's better. Certainly, it's better. I believe if it's rescheduled, what does that mean? It could be prescribed now, and it can be prescribed state by state. Even in Texas, there's some medical uses. I feel like it should be like alcohol. I think you should be of a certain age to be able to use it. And I think it's not for everybody. I think that's important, that it isn't for everybody. There are people that have very particularly vulnerable psychological states, mental constitutions, whether they have a history of mental illness or whatever, especially high dose marijuana. Alex Berentzen wrote about this in a book called, I think it's called Tell Your Children. And he highlights the instances of people that have schizophrenia breaks from high doses of THC. And whether or not they would have had those schizophrenia breaks anyway, we We don't know. There's a certain percentage of the population that's just schizophrenia. What causes it? We don't know. Or we don't know clearly why something can cause it. But you should be aware of those things. It's not for everybody. I know a lot of people don't like it, but I know a lot of people who do.

A lot of people, it enhances their life. It makes times more enjoyable, makes sex more enjoyable, and food more enjoyable, and fun times with friends. It's like anything else. You can abuse everything, including exercise. I And a lot of people are addicted to exercise, and they overdo it. And people take CrossFit classes, and they go too hard, and they wind up getting rhabdomylosis.

What is that? That's some thing with your kidneys or liver or something? Yeah.

You literally... Your muscle tissue breaks down faster than your body can heal. Rhabdo is dangerous. People die of that.

I remember reading about it when I did CrossFit 15 years ago, whatever it was, and I was like, I'm not going that hard. I didn't get that.

It's for psychos. It's the David Goggins of the world. I think he got Rabdo, went to the hospital, got out, and then completed his race.

He's not human.

Yeah, he's a psycho. He's amazing.

I wonder how he runs and speaks at the same time.

Well, he's in insane shape. I mean, he does it every day. He runs 13 miles every fucking day. And then on top of that, he does a series of very rigorous workouts. He does two or three workouts every day.

Yeah. He's a fascinating guy.

He's awesome, but he's a great guy.

Stay hard.

Great human being, though. He really is. He's great to talk to, great to hang out with. I love him. But point is, you can get addicted to video games. You can get addicted to gambling. The gambling thing is a big argument people use all the time because one of our sponsors is DraftKings, online gambling. I think you should be able to gamble. I don't I don't have a problem with it. Me personally, I don't have a problem with gambling, but I know a lot of people that do. They shouldn't fucking gamble. Gambling is an evil addiction. You watch people get gripped by it. It's crazy. I've known quite a few people that have had gambling addictions, especially from my pool hall days. I was just always around hardcore gamblers. And the boy, man, it might as well be heroin. It might as well be for those fucking people. But I think you should be able to gamble. I know it devastates some people's lives, but their choices devastate their lives. And there's help. And you should learn how to manage your mind.

I think you have to learn restraint in anything. Yes.

You can't nanny state the whole fucking world. You can't nerf every hard edge on the planet. That's not how it works.

I love that. I'm going to steal that.

Listen, I do things that you can get hurt doing, and I think you should be allowed to do that. I know people that have been very badly hurt doing martial arts, including competing. I did a lot of that. You should be able to do it. You should be able to ride bulls. I don't want to ride a bull. You should be able to ride a bull. I think one of the things about being a human being is as much freedom as you can give people, the better. And also inform them about the dangers of whatever choices they make. Give them an informed ability to make a decision for themselves. This is what it means to be a free human being. And you're going to make some dumb choices and you're going to make some dumb decisions. And that's okay. That's how we all learn together collectively. And I think marijuana is far better for you than alcohol. It has legitimate medical uses, legitimate psychology biological uses. It relieves stress for a lot of people. You can't criminalize something for something you don't agree with. It's crazy. Also, the LD50 of it is off the fucking charts.

Literally, the only way to die from marijuana is it would take about a 50-pound package hitting you in the head from a CIA drug plane.

That's how you die. What's an LD50?

Lethal dose at 50% of the population. It's very high. So if you're saying that marijuana should be illegal because it's dangerous. Okay. Dangerous how? When there's so many things, like we talked about Tylenol, which I fully support Tylenol being legal. You should be able to... If you're in pain, you can go get some Tylenol. Cetaminophen fucking kills people. Like I said, responsible for about 500 deaths a year. And I was telling you about the COVID story. This poor lady, she was hurting because she had COVID, she kept taking Tylenol and didn't understand that you can't... There's an amount you can take, and you should never take more than that. And she had liver failure, and she fucking died. Of something that... It's horrible. But I think you should be able to take Tylenol. Just don't take enough to fucking kill you. I think that should be the case with alcohol. Same thing. I'm for legalization of alcohol. When you make things illegal, all you do is prop up illegal people to sell those things to people that want it. There is a demand. They will supply it. This is the situation that we live in this country in regards to heroine, in regards to cocaine, in regards to so many different things.

They're being supplied, and they're being supplied, and you're propping up these illegal cartels, and these motherfuckers are killing people, and they make it ruthless. It's ruthless. It's what happened during Prohibition of alcohol in this country. What did it do? It propped up the fucking the Mafia and that's what they did. They sold alcohol. They propped up organized crime.

Yeah. I mean, we could learn something from countries in Europe that decriminalized not just marijuana, but other drugs. And if you look at the statistics on the The rate of crime, the rate of the incidence of overdose, it plummets.

Plummets. Portugal is an excellent example. Yeah. But the problem is when you all of a sudden make things legal that didn't used to be legal, you're going to have a bunch of people that abuse it. They're going to say, Oh, it's legal now. Let's go. And a bunch of people are going to do it that don't do it. You'll have problems, but you're taking the bandaid off. You put a fucking bandaid on this country in the 1930s for something that doesn't hurt people.

Which is Marijuana.

Oh. They did that in the 1930s. It was a vast conspiracy, by the way. The marijuana legalization thing, the illegalization of it, is a vast conspiracy.

I don't know much about this backstory.

Okay, I'll fill you in. William Randolph Hearst, who owned Hearst publications, also owned Paper Mill. So a popular science magazine on the front page, Hemp, the New Billion Dollar Crop. And the reason why hemp was problematic before that was because hemp fibers. A friend of mine used to grow marijuana, and he had a hemp stalk on his desk, and he's like, Pick that up. And you pick it up, and it's hard like oak. It's hard like this table. It's an oak table. It's hard like that, but it's light like styrofoam. It feels like balsa wood. I was like, This is crazy. He goes, Yeah, it's like an alien plant. There's nothing like it. Hemp fiber is incredibly durable, and it makes superior paper. It makes superior clothing. Canvas, all the great paintings were all made on hemp. That's what canvas was made out of.

Light, but very strong and durable.

Very strong. The first draft of Declaration of Independence was written on hemp fiber, on hemp paper. So hemp was used to make paper. It was used to make cloth. It was used to make so many different things. But it was very difficult to do. Then Eli Whitney came out with the cotton gin. Well, cotton replaced a lot of the things that we made with clothing. It replaced a lot of that. It was an easier textile to process. Well, in the 1930s, they came up with a new invention called the decorticator, and the decorticator allowed them to effectively process hemp fiber much more easily. So then, Popular Science, S. S. Magazine.

There's a machine?

Yes, it's a machine. It's like a steel cylinder that has all these protrusions on it, and that would grind up the hemp fiber more easily. Because before it had be done manually, and it's very time consuming. But the process was an incredible and very superior product. So William Randolph Hearst recognizes this as a threat to his industry because he owns paper mills. He owns forests that he's using to make paper out of. Also, you should say that to make paper out of a forest, you have to chop down all those trees. It'll take 20, 30 years for them to grow back. With hemp, you get a new crop every year. The same amount of land, you're processing four times as much paper, and you can do it every year. It's way more effective. So he starts demonizing this plant called marijuana, this new drug. Now, marijuana was not a name for cannabis. Marijuana was a name for a Mexican slang for wild tobacco. So he just tags this name and starts calling hemp.

Which is just the leaves on the hemp plant.

It's just the flower.

The flower on the hemp plant.

The flower of the hemp plant. Yes. But it's also you can make and grow hemp that has no THC in it as well. I believe it's... Is it the female that contains THC and the male doesn't? Anyway, point is, so a They sponsor all the Refa Madness films, all those propaganda films of the 1930s. They start printing these stories about blacks and Mexicans that are raping white women after they take this new illegal drug. So they pass laws on this drug, not even really understanding that they're making the textile, they're making the commodity, hemp, illegal or making it very difficult to regulate. And so William Randolph Hearst gets together with Harry Anslinger, and they do this. They also take all their police officers and all the people that they had used to process Prohibition of alcohol and go after illegal alcohol sales, and now they turn it to to cannabis. We've been stuck in that same horseshit since the 1930s.

So self-interest plus profit incentive, add a dose of hysteria, and you have prehistoric lobbying that leads to the demonization of... I don't fucking get it. I mean, listen- It's also nylon.

Nylon was involved because they're using nylon for ropes. They hemp was always used for ropes, and now they have this new product. So there was a lot of people that were involved in making sure that hemp was very difficult to acquire so that their commodity could thrive. And then how many people suffered because of that? How many people were jailed? How many people were jailed? How many people were incarcerated? You're dealing with literally 90 years at this point, 90 years of bullshit.

I do believe that there are some drugs that are so addictive that you start to lose your sense of free will. I don't think weed is one of them.

It's not to me. I wouldn't say it's not one of them to everybody. I don't know. I hear horror stories about people that are addicted to weed and can't get off of it. I do Sober October pretty much every year. I didn't do it last year, but we take off everything. We don't do anything. We usually do a little fitness challenge with it. I've never had a problem. Stop doing it. I got on these nicotine pouches. I like nicotine pouches during podcast. It keeps my mind popping. It's a cognitive enhancer. And I was like, Man, maybe I'm addicted to nicotine. Went on vacation, didn't bring any nicotine pouches. Had no problem.

I'm happy I smoked a lot of weed in high school. A lot of weed. It was different, though. For me, it was, at least. It wasn't as strong. Oh, yeah. And I've- You got scientists involved now.

He's botanist.

You know what the fuck I want to do it. I one time smoked weed with Lennox in Jamaica. Oh, no. That should be the song. That's like- By the time that Blum was being passed around, four people. When it came to me the second time, I was like, the room went sideways on me. I could not fucking cope. The furniture seemed readjusted. I've had other times where For me, I got to a point where I could not function on it. And the last time where I was like, This is just not for me anymore. Maybe I smoked too much of it in high school. I mean, almost every day It was 15. But then I was at a casino. I was at the Aria one time. This must have been 15 years ago, and I was playing craps. I had I had taken one or two toks, and I convinced myself that the guy at the other end of the craps table was an undercover officer that was going to frame me for something. Fucking the lady next to me was stealing my chips. This guy was going to have me fucking hatcheted. I ended up in the corner of the casino for literally two hours trying to collect myself.

You went too deep.

I went... Man, It's just too strong for someone who doesn't use it.

See, there's a lot of people like my friend BeReal from Cyprus Hill.

I can't even watch the podcast because my blood pressure goes up when I watch how much weed these guys smoke. Him and Everlast and those guys? Yeah.

Well, BeReal lives in the cloud. There's a lot of those dudes that call it living in the cloud. They're just high all the time. Well, BeReal has his own weed business. I did his show, The Hotbox, where you in a car. He has this dope car that's set up as a studio. So there's cameras inside the car, and you just get obliterated because they're just constantly smoking in the car. I got out of there, I just sit down for two hours afterwards.

You were okay or not?

I was okay, but I was just like, Jeez, boys, you guys go fucking far.

But the problem is for me with weed is that sometimes I've smoked it and been I'm talking about as an adult. Yes. Post-30. Yeah. Sometimes I've been like, Well, that was really great. Other times I've been like, I don't want to contemplate my existence tonight. I've done that enough. It's all unanswerable questions, and I'm going to have a panic attack. Man, one time I was on the platform at Penn Station, and I started to like, You you get to that point when you're thinking about dying, and we could talk death, dying, and we could say it and talk about it. But I got to that point where that fifth dimensional wall crumbled, and I was like, Oh, my God, I'm not going to exist one day. And I started to have a panic attack where I had to leave and go up onto eighth Avenue and get some fresh air. And I'm just like, at this stage, I can't I would have to be like, so what weed is this? And how do you know? And I don't want to interrogate someone that just wants to get me high.

But here's the thing. If you don't get high a lot, and this is my message for everyone out there. If you go months and months and months without ever taking it, one hit, a small one. Don't get crazy. Don't get crazy.

You don't want to break yourself. What if that one hit leads to nine hours of being high?

It shouldn't.

For me, it has.

Well, it's like, how much are you smoking? You must be taking a giant hit. And it also depends on what joint you have. There's crazy people. In California, they'll sell you a joint that's like a $50 joint, and this joint has keef in it. So it has all the You have a grinder at the bottom of the grinder. There's a filter, and you have all this- The sticky keef. Thc crystals. They take those THC crystals, and they put it inside with the marijuana, and then they wrap the outside of the joint, and roll it in the THC crystal. It's on the outside of it, and it's just a pathway to paranoia. It's just a rocket ship to your inner monolog screaming in your ear.

I can't talk about it. It's scaring me.

But it doesn't have to be like that.

Have you ever got paranoid smoking? Oh, yeah.

It's part of the fun. I don't mind it. I like it because there's always some a revelation that I get on the other end of it. If I'm paranoid, there's always a reason that there's a thing that's bothering me. What is that thing that fucked with you during that time? And maybe there's a thing in your head that you need to address. But generally, if I'm in a good place and I get high, I feel great.

I must have been in a great place at 15, 16 years old because getting high back then and listening to Zeppelin and Pink Floyd and hearing the lyrics for the first time being like, Oh, my God, someone else had that thought that I'm afraid to say, and they put it down in lyrics, and I'm not alone.

And you feel profound. You say profound things that aren't really profound. There's benefit to it. And I think that when you're young, also, you don't have bills, you don't have obligations, you just have to go to school. Your burden is so much lighter. When you're an adult and you have a family and you have business and you have things you have to do all the time and you have conflicts and all the stuff that's in your life, it can fuck with you. But I think generally, for a lot of people, not for everybody, but for a lot of people, those moments of paranoia, of just dropping the veil, it's Probably beneficial.

Oh, I think that in the long run, it opened the third eye of my mind at a time when and fostered creativity. And I I think changed my perspective on the world smoking that much weed. I just got to a point where I was like, I can't parent on it. For me, you have to be mature enough and introspective enough and self-aware enough to know yourself. For me, It just didn't work anymore. Just drinking. At some point, I was like, it's not worth the fucking pain. It just got too painful.

Right. But that's the decision that you should be able to make as a man or as a woman, as an adult. Make that decision for yourself. Decide what you want to take into your life or not, including all sorts of other things that are bad for you, like fucking processed food and sugar. Do whatever you want to do as long as you know what you're doing. And we should educate people on what these things are. And the problem is with marijuana, there were so many years of lies. There were so many years of misinformation, and it was just constantly put out there as propaganda. And this is your brain on drugs. Like, shut the fuck up.

Well, listen, I remember those commercials from being a kid, and I remember one in particular where there's a father that finds weed dating myself in a son's room. And he said, Where did you learn to do this shit? And he goes, I learned from you, dad. And I I remember thinking, Man, my dad's a motherfucker. He's a bad guy because my dad was a big weed smoker. I would find it all the time. I'm telling you, I think in my mind, that commercial led me to thinking, Dad, you're immoral. Look.

They poison a lot of people with those commercials. But you know- Meanwhile, your dad could be sitting there watching TV with a cocktail, and you wouldn't think a damn thing about it.

My dad on weed was like an alcoholic with a whiskey bottle. Oh, my That's it. That's it? I'm not going to do this stuff. You, all right? I learned it by watching you. Parents who use drugs have children who use drugs. Jamie is a fucking lizard.

Yeah, he's the best. You know my favorite one, though, is the girl comes home from school and the dog starts talking to her?

Wait, before we get to that, you know how a song or a smell can have you tumbling back in time? Oh, yeah. I'm drunk on nostalgia right now. In the wrong Oh, my God.

This is my favorite.

I wish you didn't smoke weed. You're not the same when you smoke. I miss my friend. I'll be outside.

How would you tell a friend? Like, who fucking- Yo, that one is evil. Signed off on that commercial. First of all, that girl- I've never seen that. Is not on marijuana because if you were on weed and your dog started talking, you'd be like, What the fuck? You can talk?

The first thing I thought when that started a roll, I looked at Jamie all wide-eyed and what did you put in my drink? The dog is talking. The only other time I saw that was Mr. Ed.

Yeah, right? Well, or what's that movie? Zookeeper. All the animals talked. It's like, come on. It's fucking ridiculous.

When you peel the layer back, I had never known. That one slipped through the cracks on me, the criminalization of weed and the backstory.

Backstory is really crazy.

It's crazy. I remember a science teacher in high school telling me, You don't think that they can make a tire that doesn't wear? He told me this story about how all the big tire companies bought the patent for a tire that can't wear. It has the same give and composition as rubber when it came to handling, but it was a material that doesn't wear. I just thought it was fucking crazy. And now I believe that that's probably true. It's probably locked in a vault somewhere because what would happen a good year in Firestone and the rest of those tires? You're telling me we could put a man on the moon and hear conversations behind the walls of the Kremlin, but we can't make a fucking tire that doesn't wear?

Well, I think one of those is true. But the other one, the thing about tires is that a tire has to have a certain amount of softness to it in order for it to have traction. When you have softness and then you have a rigid surface like asphalt, you're going to have some of that tire is going to rub off on that rigid surface because one is hard and one is soft. Just like when you take a file and you rub wood, you're going to make sawdust.

You know, You would know about fucking tires. Here I go, giving an example of something that I think is so out there that there's no way this guy is going to... And you know about tire wear.

I know a lot about tires because the softer the tire, the more traction you get on a racetrack. So with a really good tire, you only have a certain amount of laps on a racetrack.

So the science teacher was bullshitting me, basically.

The scientist teacher probably was right directionally, that there are things like that where they would hide patents to certain things and hide certain compounds. If they found that these compounds would compromise... If you had something that people had to buy all the time, like light bulbs. Here's a better example, light bulbs. So there are light bulbs that have been in continuous use, on continuously for 50, 60 years, and they don't burn out because these are your original light bulbs. The original light bulbs, they made the filaments much more durable. And then they realized, why would we do this? Well, we could have these light bulbs just burn out, and then you have to get a new light bulb.

And the element would pop. Exactly. I have read about this.

See if you could find those old light bulbs. I think there's one that's been on continually for an extraordinary amount of time, decades. 120 years. 120 years. Let's see that light bulb. So if you look at the light bulb-Light bulb, huh? And you see the filaments of that light bulb, you realize, oh, they could have just built light bulbs like this from the beginning. And instead of paying $5 for a light bulb or whatever a light bulb costs, maybe it would cost $10.

Got a firehouse in California. Interesting. The Centennial light 1901.

That light bulb. Look at that.

Look at that beautiful fill.

Yeah. See how thick those filaments car. So that's a light bulb that's built to last. These motherfuckers, they figured out, well, we'll just make it real skinny and eventually it'll wear out and pop.

That tire patent is sitting in a fucking vault somewhere.

It might be, but the problem is it doesn't make sense because it has to be softer than the ground. And whenever you have something that's softer than a very rough, hard surface, the softer thing is going to give. Something has to give. If you have metal and you drive around with metal wheels on the asphalt, you know what gives? The asphalt gives. You have scratches on the asphalt.

Let me ask you this. So going back to the weed. Okay. Because I got us on this diversion tires.

I want to find out about the tires eventually. I got something for it, but not exactly.

Let me just do it now.

What do you got? It's not full on never. Oh, but this is different.

It doesn't last way longer. There's no air in this fucking tire.

Yeah, this is an airless tire. But this is something that people have said forever. Why would you have to fill up tires? Can't they come up with something where it just gives? And so Michelin has done this.

You're telling me that there's nothing out there about tires that don't wear?

I don't think so. It doesn't make sense.

But watch this. I have a question. So So weed is criminalized by some self-interested industrialist, right?

Before that, ubiquitous use for centuries, including in churches.

So cocaine, you can make the same argument for. You could. And then You have the Clinton administration comes along and dubs people. In other words, what is the moral inequivalency between someone that is selling cocaine, a lot of it, and someone that's selling a lot of weed. Now, I understand the common retort as well, cocaine is a lot more addictive, destructive.

There's a physical pathway to addiction.

There's a physical pathway to addiction.

Yeah, it's a different addiction. I think there is an addictive quality to marijuana, but I have a feeling it's same or similar to the addictive quality of a lot of other behavioral addictions.

But I guess my bigger question is, so With the advent of the super criminal, I think it was, who was it? Hillary Clinton or Bill Clinton that came up with this term. Biden. Or Biden. I know he's a big supporter of that Bill as a senator. Without going down the rabbit hole of private prisons and the prison industrial complex. What bothers me about these old drug convictions that we were talking about earlier is it's just a perspective shift that somehow has in a psyche of America, writ large, that you hear cocaine or crack equals someone that should be locked away and forgotten about. That was why I mentioned Spencer, Bowen, and other folks that I've mentioned, because I feel like there's no... What's the right way to explain it? There's no rhyme or reason to why we're leaving old people that have not much left locked up. Right. Look, Larry Hoover is a good example. Larry Hoover was pardoned or a sentence was commuted by President Trump. And he was then put in... He was in the side of a fucking mountain for decades. The man is 75 years old. He's been in prison for over 50 years.

He has He has renounced gang life. He has renounced any affiliation with it. And then his sentence is commuted, and he's put in state custody on some old tenuous homicide charge, where the person that actually pulled the trigger is out, has been out for like 30 years. Larry Hoover is sitting there in Colorado because he was in the side of that Supermax facility, the side of that mountain in Chicago. And since- Colorado or Chicago? No, in Colorado.

He was in- You said Chicago.

Well, he was. Then I misspoke. He's from Chicago. He was the leader of the Gangster Disciples. You're familiar with Larry Hoover, right? Yes, sure. Leader of the Gangster Disciples in Chicago. He's in prison, state prison. Then he goes into... While he's in state prison, they have a CCE conspiracy against him, and he gets- CCE? Continuing criminal enterprise. I'm talking lawyer-speak. Sure. Then he goes into federal custody, and he's put in the side of a mountain where he's on lockdown 23 hours a day for decades. The man's 75 years old now. Since he's been put in state custody, he's had three heart attacks doing prison work. And what is the utility in keeping someone like that in? Because Governor Pritzker could just say, You know what? Enough is enough. There's interesting stuff out there about what they call sea criminals. So it was before February of 1978, I believe it was, 1998, where people would get indeterminate sentences in the state system in Illinois. You'd hear these sentences of like 100 years, 200 years, where there's no hope. And there were thousands and thousands of them. There's only 30 of them left, and he's one of them.

He's got an indeterminate sentence. Isn't 50 years enough? So that's another one of those cases that bothers me because if we're a society of reform, deterrence, rehabilitation, he's it. What better message is there to say, You know what? You've done enough, and now let's see what positive you can do. The proposed terms of his release are like, At the strictest supervision. He just wants to live out his life with his family. He's got a great lawyer backing him named Justin Moore. I helped advocate for his pardon to President Trump.

So he was pardoned?

His sentence was commuted by President Trump, his federal sentence. But he had some crazy 200-year sentence in state court. Look at this is it. So it was 1978. He's one of just 35 people still incarcerated under Illinois' pre- '78 indeterminate sentencing system. So the case was from '73? Oh, yeah. He's been in prison for 50 some odd years. God. I just feel like at this point, is it enough enough?

And he didn't even do the killing.

No. And the person that did it is out. The allegation was that he ordered it, and I don't even believe that.

Andrew Howard, the guy who killed him, was paroled more than 30 years ago.

It just doesn't. I don't understand. And what's going on, I think, is that someone like Governor Pritzker is just they don't want the political cost of taking a chance like this. And this is another one that keeps me up. Some people would say, Why care about that guy? Because I know his wife. I know his son. James Prince knows the family so well, and supported them on this journey for over a decade. There's so much public support for this. The guy is 75. So why are we wasting taxpayer money? And why are we keeping someone incarcerated? I mean, in the most-So I don't understand.

If they commuted his sentence, how he's not out.

His federal sentence was commuted. So as soon as he was released from federal custody, he was taken into state custody. And they didn't even take him from Chicago. Chicago Excuse me, from Colorado. His state sentence is in Chicago, where he could be at least closer to his family. Colorado state system said, We'll keep him here. So he was transferred from federal to state custody. So that's one It's just like there's one heartbreak to the next. Look, I'm super, super, super careful. You can help people with second chances. You can't help them with what they do with it. But I'm now at a point where I really want to think long and hard about what people do with their second chances. I just wouldn't get behind someone that I didn't think was... It's an indictment of society that we have these disparate sentences that are doled out, and a lot of it is driven by what is considered worse behavior. Is it worse behavior that you sold cocaine or marijuana? I guess the I mean, is that cocaine was more destructive, more addictive, you could die from it. Well, same thing with alcohol. And alcohol is legal.

So I just don't... I have a hard time grappling with what is considered a controlled It's a controlled substance. Because alcohol, if abused, if put in the wrong hands, it's highly addictive, it's highly destructive to your body if you abuse it, it ruins people's lives. I mean, how is it that alcohol is is legal.

It is weird.

It is weird.

And the real problem is history. So we have a long history of all these drugs being illegal now. So you have a long history of people that are criminals selling these drugs. So it's got this criminal history attached to it. If you were to make cocaine legal in the United States, you'd essentially put the cartels out of business, right? Because that's probably their main business is probably either fentanyl or heroin pills, Oxy pills or cocaine. And you would have way less accidental overdose deaths, because a lot of it is not people overdosing from actual cocaine. It it's getting fentanyl.

Or whatever else they're fucking mixing.

All sorts of different amphetamines. We have a long history now dating back to the '30s of alcohol being legal. People are accustomed to it. It's normal. They are accustomed growing up, being able to have a couple of beers with your friends, go into a party when you're a kid, there's a keg party. People know how to handle it. It's been around. Cocaine has not. You get scared. What's in it? How do I know where it came from? You get a fucking beer, you know it's a beer. You crack open a bud light, it's a bud light. It's what it is. Cocaine is unregulated. It's crazy.

If you think about it, if you're someone doing cocaine these days and you're trying to think, Am I going to die? You dip what are the fentanyl strips that you can test it and see what's in it. But if it was regulated and if people want to do it, let them go Bang their head against the wall and do it.

Yeah. The problem is people would be profiting off of that. No one has a problem with Anheuser-Busch selling beer, right? But meanwhile, there's alcoholics, and it's going to ruin their life. But If Anheuser-Busch all of a sudden started selling cocaine, the social stigma that's attached to it because of all the years of it being illegal would be a real problem. Like I said, it would be like ripping the bandaid off. You're going to have a lot of problems initially. For quite a while, I would imagine, there's going to be a lot of people that do cocaine that would never do it previously because it was illegal. But if they find out that you can go to the cocaine store and buy a certain amount of cocaine and go do it. But you also would be getting pure cocaine. So you would be getting this experience that people have used way back to the fucking who knows what time. There's Egyptian mummies that have tested positive for cocaine.

Look, I'm not advocating for it one way or another. It just seems like anything that I've looked into and read about in countries that have legalized- Or decriminalized. Or decriminalized it, at least, and you could get it and not have to worry about it being adulterated generated in some way. It seems like the statistics are overwhelmingly- Yes. Pointing in one direction.

A hundred %. But those are smaller countries, and it don't have the consumption problem that America has. We uniquely love to consume drugs, and we are propping up the cartel by doing that. If you want to go to war with the cartel, if you want to really stop the flood of illegal drugs in this country, unfortunately, one of the only ways to really do that accurately is to both stop them from bringing in illegal drugs and then give people access to legal, air quotes, safer drugs.

It's a problem. Politically, it's a suicide. I was going to say you got to swim upstream through a river of shit in order to pull that one-off.

Yeah, for a long time.

This has struck me more lately in dealing with these old drug cases where these people have spent decades and decades in prison. And you hear them on the other end of the phone. He's like, Look, I was a kid. I was in my 20s. I'm 50. I'm 60 years old. Isn't it enough? It's getting to the point where it's putative to the point of harmful and barbaric.

Yeah, and then they don't want to let those people back out on the street. It's more convenient for them to keep that person locked up forever.

You know, That's fucking crazy. If you saw what's behind it. This is an interesting update on the Ohio 4 case, and we don't have to go back into the whole thing again because people could watch the last time. But you remember we had the former prosecutor, JD Tomlinson, on at one point with the case in Ohio, where these guys did not need to assume the burden of being demonstrably innocent, but we were able to prove it. Jd Tomlinson Tomlinson agreed to vacate their convictions. Then when he left office a few weeks later, the incoming, their equivalent of the district attorney, overturned it, right? Since coming on this show, JD Tomlinson has been under attack for a previous exoneration that he granted by this same sitting Lorraine County prosecutor who just filed a 300-page brief saying that he committed fraud on the court and all kinds of nonsense over a crime that never happened. This is why he was so reluctant to ever speak to me in the first place because- He knew he'd be targeted. He knew he'd be targeted. They're trying to undo an exoneration for this poor woman that's already been exonerated. I thought I would talk about it publicly and say, I trust him.

I made a presentation to this new prosecutor. I got myself, along with the Ohio Innocence Project, public defenders. I got a bar complaint filed against me by the original prosecutor for standing up to exonerate someone. That was summarily dismissed in Ohio. The question becomes like, what can you do? So Derek Hamilton and I are trying to, do we go to the city council and raise awareness, don't you care that you have a prosecutor that is seemingly more interested in settling personal scores and in vendettas than he is about letting innocent people go free. I have this guy, John Edwards, who's one of the Ohio 4. I feel like when I see him calling from prison, I'm running out of things to say to him. I'm so desperate for help. If anyone is living in Lorraine, Ohio, or Illyria, you got to take a look at your local elected officials. Demand to know what happened in the Ohio Four case. We have it online. You can read about it. You could read the trial transcripts. I just don't get why people can't let go and say, Maybe I made a mistake. Maybe I was wrong. I mean, these guys are so demonstrably innocent, where you have the person that claims he witnessed the whole thing, went to the FBI and said, I made the whole thing up.

It's a horrible case. It's horrible. No. Nobody wants to admit it.

The problem is, I think if they do admit it, someone's going to start digging into their past, and they're going to find out these motherfuckers have been wrong a bunch of times.

Well, I'll tell you what. One thing that's different about me and why I hang around Derek so much is I want his superpowers to rub off on me because I realize that if you don't stay aggressive and keep the pressure on, the truth will eventually... What What was the truth crushed to earth shall rise again? Was that like an MLK quote? I always think about that because at some point, the truth comes out. It's a stubborn thing. And whether it's old files of an old case and who you used to hang out with, and if you have photos sitting in a vault, whatever it is, it's going to come out. And it just seems like you're doing so much more damage to hold on to these old beliefs rather than... And because one thing is for sure, I'm stubborn, and I'm growing more stubborn as time goes by. You have to have the resolve and the wherewithal that every time you get a no, and every time you get rejected, you're like, All right, all right. I see you. I'm going to get my beast on now and keep coming back, and I'm going to bring people with me.

And We're going to make as much noise. One thing that people don't like is to have the light on them. We now have the ability to do that, not only through this platform. I was talking to someone before I came here today that works at the center, and I said, You can't be afraid to speak to the press. I said, As long as you have some control, some control over what you're saying. And then I quickly stuffed the words back in my mouth, and I said, just forget about that. You got to be very careful speaking to the press because it gets edited and chopped up. Sure. I did an article with the New York Times about something recently. Man, I told that reporter, lose my fucking phone number because you took one sentence of a throwaway quote and disregarded everything else. Of course. And that's why I'm really careful about it.

That's why nobody wants to talk to them. Everybody knows the game now. They have a long history doing that. What they care about is a juicy story. That's all they care about.

Yeah, and suffering cells and human tragedy cells. And I would really love to be able to tell the triumphant stories that a prosecutor did the right thing on the front-end, right? On the front-end, rather rather than after 20, 30, 40, 50 years. So all of these cases that we talk about, we're going to do something a little bit different, is I'm going to set up a repository where people can go in and look at the public records. No one Who has really ever done that. This way, you don't have to rely on my word, a headline, a clip from a video, where there were people that started to consume the Ohio Forecase in a writing in and are saying, How are you letting this stand? Eventually, enough drips of water fills the bucket and the bucket overflows. At some point, something's got to give, right? Yeah. I mean, if you believe in What? Good over evil? Yeah. I don't know. I mean, something's got to give.

I mean, if you really believe in good over evil... I mean, we all believe in good over evil, but sometimes it doesn't work. And is it for lack of trying or is it just the world's not fair? I think it's both. And I think there's a lot of people that have a lot of power that will keep good from winning because it would somehow another derail their life or their career because they have done something evil.

But this is a sick trait that we possess as mammals, as humans. Whether you're a safety patrol as a fourth or fifth grader or a bouncer outside of a club or a TSA agent, there's something about that authority, something about that power that people get drunk on. It's almost like it courses through their veins to the point where they're like, Oh, I like this. I'm going to exert this. I understand it, but I don't understand how how at some point your conscience doesn't kick in and say, All right, devil on this shoulder, let's do the right thing. Because I always feel bound by some social contract, right? Did it ever feel good to harm someone? I don't know. Never did for me as a kid.

No.

I could look back on my childhood and be like, That was a shitty thing you did. I still feel guilty about things I did as an elementary school student. Because you're a good person. No, I don't think that. It is. You are a good person. I don't think that that's what it is.

Part of being a good person is when you do make a mistake or do something bad, you feel something.

I appreciate that, but I don't actually think that's what it is. I think that We all know when we're saying something hurtful or harmful, at some point you know it or you're doing something harmful. And it's just, I don't understand, I guess, the disconnect between having that realization and just saying, Fuck it, or actually taking a pause. Right. And I guess if I could solve that, I'd have the key to many of the world's problems. But I guess I'm just dealing with these in the meantime.

Well, you would have to completely rewire the way people think. And there's ways to do that. And all those ways are illegal. That's where psychedelics comes in. It's one of the things I had a conversation with my friend Jesse Michael the other day, and one of the things I said is, one of the things that's really interesting about psychedelics is there's no criminal cartel that sells them, even though they're illegal. That's true. There's no criminal mushroom industry, where there's a bunch of evil assassins selling kids mushrooms. It's such a uniquely beautiful experience that it's really only connected to kind people who sell it, for the most part.

Let me ask you the same thing. Let me ask you something in reference to what you said earlier. Do you think you have to have a particular mental constitution to take psychedelics?

I think you should. Yeah. I don't think it's for people that are very vulnerable. I think there's a lot of people that just regular reality is difficult enough to manage. I'm saying this objectively, right? Because it's not me. But I don't want to be arrogant and say, I can do it. You can do it, too. That's ridiculous. There's a lot of people that shouldn't be doing anything. They shouldn't be drinking. There's people out there that shouldn't do caffeine. People have very different biological vulnerabilities. There are some people that I believe are biologically vulnerable to alcoholism. Their whole family is an alcoholic. It might be a genetic trait. It seems to be like there's something wrong with them and their ability. And then there's also genes. This was the issue with Native Americans. When we introduced alcohol to them, they didn't didn't have a history of alcohol. They didn't know how to handle it. They got wrecked. There's alcoholism to this day. It's an enormous problem in Native American tribes and reservations.

It's a major problem in Canada.

With First Nation people, right?

Yeah, because they were given reparations. And my experience with it up there is that there's a serious problem, especially in Western Canada, with it. But the reason I When I talk about it with psychedelics is that at probably the lowest point in my life, I was with you, and I remember you recommending ketamine therapy or thinking That might be something I should look into.

Yeah, this is something that I've never done, but I do know quite a few people. My friend Neil, Neil Brennan, he went to a doctor to get ketamine therapy. Yeah.

So I raised it with my therapist at the time, and she was like, The body of research on this is so overwhelming that I would be remiss if I told you, Don't try it. Something we should talk about and think about. It helped me tremendously in a way that very, very low dose, but it's like, I thank you for even suggesting it because it was something that I had always associated with my roommate in college in the fetal position in his bed. And I was like, Yo, what's wrong with him? And someone said, he's in a K-hole. I was like, what the fuck is that? He's in a K-hole. And it was always like, oh, man, I'm staying away from that. He looks like he could expire any moment. He was not a lighter shade of pale. He was like, translucent. And I was like, but then it's- It's under supervision.

That's the key. Under supervision and then with the correct dose. And I think that would probably be the case with most psychedelics.

And it would turn the field of psychiatry on its head, and there would be such a lobby against it. And the drug companies that make all these great drugs that rewire your brain would hate that shit.

Yeah, they would. And I think they're wrong. Yeah. I think humans throughout history have been using it to various degrees of success. I think for some people, it's not good. It's like a lot of other things. But it's up to us to figure out what's good for you and what's not good for you. This is part of the freedom of being a person. There's a lot of things that you could easily protect people from that we allow people to do.

Here's the one that I saw a documentary about this, and the one that I can't make a decision on, what's the one where you take it and you're fucking puking, you're wretching to the point where you're puking out of your eyeballs?

Ayahuasca? Ayahuasca. Yeah.

And people are like, fucking, how can that be good?

Well, the reason why you puke... Well, here's what ayahuasca is, first of all. Ayahuasca is orally active dimethyltryptamine. Dimethyltryptamine is an endogenous drug that your body produces, your brain produces. It's produced in the liver, in the lungs. It's a natural component of the human body. Terrence McKenna had a great line about it. He said the thing about DMT is everyone's holding. Meaning everyone has it. If it's illegal, it's making blood illegal. So what does ayahuasca do chemically? So ayahuasca... So dimethyltryptamine, which is the active drug, the active compound. Dimethyltryptamine exists in thousands of different plants. It's in a bunch of different grasses and plants. It's not orally active because your body produces something called monoamine oxidase. Monoamine oxidase breaks down dimethyltryptamine in the gut. So that if you consume things like these grasses or different plants that have high levels of dimethyltryptamine in it, your body breaks it down so it doesn't become active. What ayahuasca is, is the one plant that contains dimethyltryptamine and another plant that contains harmin. Harmin, which is a monoamine oxidase inhibitor. So you take the MAO inhibitor and then the dimethyltryptamine, they brew it all together. And then you have a slow release, orally active dimethyltryptamine.

That's that motherfucker with the or.

Yeah. He's working on what he's making. That's what he's making. All right. And so that is what it is. So you take it orally. It takes a long time because it has to go through your digestive process. It gets in your bloodstream. You have this trip. And when you're puking and shitting and all that stuff, it's like your body is like, whatever the fuck this is, this is not good. But the result of it, the end of it, is this extremely impactful experience that leads many people to quit alcohol. Many people quit cigarettes from it. They quit destructive behavior. They release trauma and learn to get over things that have happened in their life and move on. You have these experiences where you are in contact with what seems like entities, an incredibly wise, loving entities that connect you to nature and to the Earth. I'm sure people have bad experiences. I'm sure it's a very powerful psychedelic.

You shit yourself, too?

Yeah, you could shit yourself. You could throw up. Yeah. I mean, it doesn't happen with everybody, but it happens with a lot of people that do it. But that's not the case with smoking dimethyltryptamine or with IV drip dimethyltryptamine. We had a guy on recently that they're doing a clinic. Where was that island that doing that? They got it legal in some place. And so you could fly to this place and do an IV dimethyltryptamine experience without the shitting, without the vomiting. And it's even more intense than ayahuasca, unless you have a really high dose of ayahuasca. But the pure smoking of DMT is much more powerful, but very short experience. Your body brings it back to baseline very quickly because your body knows how to process it. Your body doesn't know how to That's what it says, alcohol nearly as well as it knows how to process DMT because DMT is natural in the body.

Yeah, but you don't shit yourself impute.

Well, that's not true. But you don't with the IV. With the IV, you don't. You don't with smoking it. You don't shit yourself impute.

It's just when you drink that fucking witches brew in the forest. That witches brew in the jungle. Yeah. You know what's interesting?

Hanging out with hippies.

You could do all these forms of psychedelics that lead to some resolution or peace on the other side. You have to still, even if you do it in modern psychiatry, I did something called EMDR. Are you familiar with that? No. I think it stands for eye movement desensitization. Emdr. Yeah. I don't know what the R stands for. But it is something that... I mean, you have to go through a similar amount of suffering, and it's to deal with past traumas, eye movement desensitization and reprocessing. All right, so I went through this, and it helps you... You could do it. Sometimes you're doing it with your eyes, but you ever use Flones?

No.

You know what it is? Yeah. All right. And it has a green cover on it. You hold on to these two paddles the way I did it. And they're hooked up to this little transistors, this little box, and it's like it buzzes your hand. You hold on to them and it'll buzz your hands, no more than the buzz of a cell phone in this rhythmic pattern. And before you do it, you really set up what the trauma is. So I went through months of trying to identify what were the things from my childhood that were haunting me. And once you do, you then relive those moments with this rhythmic buzzing, and you do it again, and again, and again. And after each session, which could last anywhere between a minute to 10 minutes, where your eyes are shut and you're getting this rhythmic pattern, and you open your eyes and you explain what just happened. But you start in that place You're 12. And I have to tell you, it was one of the most painful, agonizing things I had ever done. And it was the most religious experience I had ever had. Because you're almost in a trans-like state, and your mind is going, and you then explain what happened.

And it's It's almost like a guided daydream. And then when you explain it, you then go back again and start. And when I was first doing it, I was like, This is just torture. It's just straight up torture. But then you start to see an improvement in your mood and an improvement dealing with that particular. And I learned more about myself, my childhood, my behaviors, than I did doing any drug, any psychedelic, which I did in my youth. And it literally saved me. Interesting. Yeah. And it sounds to me... I just had this revelation as you're talking about. It's almost like you have to purge the pain. You have to relive it almost in order to get rid of it. The theory behind EMDR, as I understand it, is that you don't have the same physiological response at calling the trauma. You could think of something that happened to you 10 years ago, and you can still get the heart palpitation and the adrenaline rush and the other whatever is being released in your body, whatever hormones get activated, and it doesn't happen anymore. The way that it was introduced to me was that my therapist did it with combat veterans who could get triggered by a grain sand on the beach because they were in desert storm and spiral.

So I find it interesting because it seems like the same methodology is at play, but it's just a different way of getting there than.

There's other ways that they do it without the psychedelic drug that induces psychedelic experience, like holotropic breathing.

What is that?

Put that in a perplexity, young Jamie. It's a particular style of breathing that allows you to achieve an altered state. I don't want to misspeak on exactly how to do it. It's an intense structured breathing technique designed to induce an altered non-ordinary state of consciousness for emotional healing and self-exploration. Typically involves prolonged deep rapid breathing while lying down, accompanied by evocative music and guidance from a trained facilitator. Developed in 1970 by psychiatrist Dennis Groff and his wife, Christina, after LSD-assisted psychotherapy, became restricted as a way to reach similar therapeutic states without drugs.

Wow.

Yeah. So there's a bunch of different styles of breathing that James Nestor writes about some of these in his book, Breath. Is it breath or breathe?

Spelled the same way now. Is it?

Doesn't one have an E?

One has an E.

What country you're from? I think breathe has an E. But the point is, there's ways of inducing a psychedelic state without drugs. Obviously, the best one is the sensory deprivation tank. That takes you to a very psychedelic place, and it's completely natural and safe.

A float tank.

Yeah, float tank. Yeah, done that. Which is invented by John Lilley, who also was a ketamine guy. He was really into ketamine.

You got me into that float tank. I was in there one time, I was like, I didn't know if I was facing north or south. I didn't know if I was submerged in the water. You're flying. It's crazy.

You feel like you're flying through the universe.

There's so much the salt content keeps you so boiant that you go into this trans-like state. I I really recommend that shit. I have a question for you off topic. Who the fuck wins this fight Friday night?

Oh, God. Okay. If you have money to bet on it, you're betting on the Olympic gold medalist who's a multiple-time heavyweight world champion, who's one of the greatest knockout artists in the history of the heavyweight division. That's Anthony Joshua. What's fun is you don't think Jake Paul can win. And so the underdog rooter in you is like, Well, let's see. Let's order this. Let's see. I mean, the size difference is insane. Anthony Joshua's 245 pounds was the weight limit that he had to reach. He had to drop He's down to 245 pounds. He's probably a little heavier, but that's normal for him. That's fine. It's not like he's going to be dehydrated or anything. He weighed 243, and Jake Paul weighed 216. So that's a big gap. It's a big gap in weight. It's a big gap in experience. Experience. I mean, you're talking about a guy who fought Usik twice and wasn't stopped by Usik, who's one of the greatest heavyweights, if not the greatest of all time, one of the greatest boxers of all time. You're talking about a guy who beat Vladimir Klitschko. Again, fantastic.

In a great fight.

Great fight. You're talking about a guy who just knocked out Francis Nganu like it was nothing. I mean, he's fucking dangerous. Anthony Joshua is still in his prime. He's still one of the best of the best. And Jake Paul is a guy who's been fighting guys like Ben Ascren and Tyron Woodley, who was a great MMA fighter, but fought Nate Diaz and had a tough fight with Nate Diaz. And now he's going to fight Anthony fucking Joshua.

I got to say, the reason I ask you- Kids got balls. He's got balls. You know, Shakur just went and sparred with him recently. Yeah. And all these kids, I don't think I've ever wanted two people that are fighting each other to lose more. So I don't know which one I want to lose more. Because Anthony Joshua, as great as he is, I don't know, he beefed with Lennox. So I got to be with my guy. Of course. And And then the other guy is just so smart in the way he's playing this from a marketing standpoint, I think. Brilliant.

He was supposed to fight Jervante Davis, who's a 135 pounder, who's tiny in comparison to him. And then he flip flops. Flips it. But he's taking a lot of heat for almost fighting Jervante. But Jervante had some legal troubles. He got out of that. And then his response to that is, okay, I'll fight the biggest, baddest fucking heavyweight alive, or one of them. Yeah.

And It's almost like a parallel universe because two guys that I manage in their professional career are both calling the fight. So Lennox and Andre are both there. And I was talking to them last night because they were at dinner together. I said, How are you taking this? Isn't this fucking nutty to you?

It's definitely nutty, but that's the Jake Paul show. It's a side show.

And all the young kids, like Shakur, they want to be around him. They think he's brilliant, and they're right in a way, right?

Oh, yeah. No, he's brilliant in his marketing, for sure. He's made an extraordinary amount of money, right? So he's doing great, and he's young. And he's super dedicated to boxing. I mean, you watch him train. I've watched many highlight reels of his training. He's very dedicated to boxing.

He works his ass off.

He keeps getting better with every fight.

If you're Anthony Joshua and you don't knock that fucking kid out, how do you show your face again in the UK?

And look, he might knock him out. I mean, That would probably just show that Jake Paul is legitimate in his ability to take a very difficult fight, that he's willing to not just fight guys that he could beat, like Ben Askren, but fight guys that... No experts picking him to beat Anthony Joshua.

I think I'm going to go. I think I'm going to go. Well, it's in Florida. Yeah. It's the first time that I'm like, I want to see this shit show. I want to see him. Anthony Joshua, for all bullshit aside, for all his shit-talking length, he's a big moose of a man.

He's fast as fuck. He's built like an Adonis. If you're betting, I don't know what the odds are, but the odds have to be heavily in Anthony Joshua's favor. Are they? They have to be. He's an Olympic gold medalist. What are the odds right now? He's a two-time heavyweight world champion.

I mean-Let's both get hooked on gambling right now. Yeah.

Let's put that in DraftKings, find out what the odds are. If you bet to win. Let me guess. 10 to 1. 10 to 1 seems reasonable.

I'm going to guess it's 17 to 1.

Yeah, that's even more reasonable. I'm trying to be polite. Maybe it should be 30 to 1. What was Buster Douglas when he beat Mike Tyson? I think it was 42 to 1.

Jamie doesn't gamble. I definitely don't sound loud in Texas. He is a minus 1,000 favorite. You're right. Yeah. So it's a 10 to one. He got 650 for Jake Paul. Ten to one, right? Yeah. Holy shit. That's a great bet. You got to bet a thousand to win 100.

Yeah, but you got to feel like you're going to win if everything is normal.

Joshua It was Chinny, though, man.

Is he that Chinny, though? He fought in Gano.

There's a minus 10,000 favorite on that card also.

Who's the minus 10,000? Chino Marley versus...

It's the very first fight, but minus 10,000 is an insane number.

Who else Listen, my feeling is who knows what's going to happen? It's a fight. Fights are crazy. But if I had to guess, you got to lean towards the guy who's a two-time heavyweight champion. Is that on that card, too?

Yeah.

Anderson Silver versus Tyron Woodley. Interesting. Yeah.

You got to respect this Jake Paul kid. As much as it pains me to say that he takes two guys that he beat and puts them on the card together.

Listen, he also supported Ben Askerman. Ben Askerman needed multiple or double lung transplant, and his insurance didn't cover it. He footed part of the bill for that.

I'll tell you what's going to be a great fight. What? Shikor against Tiafima Lopez.

That's a very good fight.

Yeah. It was- That was a very good fight. Jay, Prince, and I were, Here's a kid that'll fight anyone, literally. The only other fighter that we've managed over all these years that was like, I don't care who it is. Put him in front of me. I want the best. It was Andre, Ward. Everyone else is chest playing. Shaqar is like, I want Jervante Davis, Tia Fima. Get me the biggest name you can. And I just think that's going to be an awesome fight.

That's a phenomenal fight.

That's at the Garden. When is that? January 31. I would love for you to be there.

That'll be great. That's an exciting fight. Yeah, we were super excited about that.

We were just up there for the press conference, me and Jay, and it's going to be a good one.

Yeah. Two guys in the prime. I love it.

I have one more thing I wanted to throw in here.

Jolly Roll received a full pardon today. Wow.

Governor of Tennessee.

Fuck, yeah. Good. That's amazing.

Yo, Man, that moment on the show, what was it? Last week? Mm-hmm. Man, I was a puddle. Yeah. That was so cool.

He's an amazing person. That dude's lost 300 pounds.

He's amazing. Let me see that picture of him Look at him. He looks like a different fucking person.

He has different hands. He's got a different face, different body. And we worked out together, man. He ran 2. 6 miles on the treadmill out there. And then we got in the sauna together. He's He's doing great.

That moment when he said, Can I hug you? Yeah. That was beautiful.

He's a beautiful person. It really is. And you are, too, brother.

Good for him. Thank you, Brian. Thank you. Thank you as always for having me. Thank you for being here.

You're awesome. Appreciate you, brother. Appreciate you, too. Goodbye.