#1993 - Josh Dubin & Bruce Bryan

Because you could see everybody, like you became like the celebrity of the green room. You know what I'm saying? Like everybody wanted to hear the story, everybody wanted to talk to you, everybody was blown away by it, and by the grace that you displayed. Like the fact that you could be wrongfully accused, spend 30 years of your young life in a cage, and then come out and just be this wonderful, fun guy, having a good time, everyone's laughing, having conversations, it was beautiful. It was beautiful. Look, I'm standing next to him last night, you know, worried most of the night because we had got on a plane and that was his first time flying in over 30 years. There was a lot of stimulation and, I could tell you that I'm still in shock, even sitting here now that we're sitting next to each other because I spent the last several years visiting him at Sing Sing, which is not a great place, Sing Sing Prison in New York. But I don't wanna throw cold water on anything, but there's a lot of stealing yourself for the moment last night going on that people didn't see. From you? I think for Bruce, I mean, there was one point where we were sitting in the balcony watching Atel, and by the way, congratulations on that amazing club. Thank you. Just an amazing, the comedy mothership is really a dream for the comedians, love it, the crowd was amazing, it was just so awesome to see, so congrats on that. Thank you very much. How fun is Dave Atel? He's a master. My side hurts. He's a master, he's a master. But we were sitting there and some other folks came in, and at some point, Bruce kept looking over his shoulder. And I realized that he was uncomfortable, and he switched seats very quickly so that he would be side to side, shoulder to shoulder with them. I think I know why you did it. Why did you do it? Well, I think in prison, you become accustomed to not wanting people behind you, right? And then I got this scar in prison from behind, and so you're always conscious of what's behind you. Of course. No one goes through that experience unscathed, right? You come out with these idiosyncrasies or these quirks that you, these defense mechanisms that you develop while you're incarcerated. You know, you're in an abnormal environment for decades, it's gonna have an effect on you, psychological. How old were you when they put you in? I was 23, going, I just turned 24. And tell us the whole story of what happened. Well, I was arrested back in 1994 for homicide. I think that everyone knew that I didn't do this case at all. Everyone knew I didn't commit the crime. I mean, I literally woke up that afternoon because my girlfriend wanted to change her niece's costume. And she also had a taste for chocolate cake. So just imagine waking up to change a costume for Halloween, a child's costume, and then disappearing for the next 29 years of your life. All right. And being charged with a homicide while the prosecutor involved in your conviction has a history of misconduct, and it wasn't until some 27, 26 years later that he finally gets arrested and gets convicted, former Queens prosecutor, John Scarper. He gets convicted for the very same misconduct that I've been telling them about that he's been doing for decades. So he would just find someone, pin it on them? Yeah, he would concoct the story of theory as he did in my situation. And he did this just to convict someone? Yeah. Anyone. Yeah. So it wasn't that he was targeting you, it just he just decided it was you? Anybody that he felt was involved in a criminal lifestyle or in drug dealing, it's easier to get someone that has a history of being involved in the streets to put a case on them than it is as someone that doesn't. So, you know, once they find out that you have a record, it's easy to say, all right, well, he did this homicide. What kind of a record did you have at the time? I had a drug sale prior to that. So that's enough for him to say, okay, he's a part of a drug crew and you know, let's arrest him and lock him up. This particular prosecutor, his thing was a bribery. He would pay off witnesses and he ended up not only getting convicted, but went to federal prison for it. You know, I should give some context here because to the extent that Bruce is gonna be guarded about certain details of his case, I wanna explain why. Last time I was on with Derek Hamilton, we were, you know, sort of previewing the center that we would open. So I left the Innocence Project, I was the ambassador to the Innocence Project. And I think that there was a real need for work being done on cases that didn't just involve DNA. So we deal with cases that involve all matter of what we think is junk forensic science that we've talked about, ballistics, arson, bite marks and so on. But we also want there to be an aspect that dealt with clemency for people that we think got over sentenced and deserve the second chance. So Bruce was our first client at the Perlmutter Center for Legal Justice at Cardozo Law. And I got a call from a guy named Steve Zideman that runs a clemency center at CUNY Law. And Steve said, you know, congratulations on the new center. I have the perfect guy for you. His name is Bruce Bryant with the T at the end of his name. That becomes important in a minute. And he said, I'm gonna send you some information about him. So he emails me this list of accomplishments. It was more than most human beings can accomplish in seven lifetimes. From the degrees that he achieved to starting a gun buyback program from inside to starting something called Voices From Within, these community, these galvanizing sort of community outreach programs. And, you know, I went to go visit him with the mindset that I was gonna support his clemency application. And getting clemency in New York in easy from the governor. And, you know, clemency is supposed to be all about rehabilitation and transformation and historically, especially in New York, you have to express contrition and explain to the parole board if you are granted clemency and it is a commutation of your sentence, that is a shortening of your sentence. You have to explain to the parole board, here's what I have done to transform myself and accept responsibility. So keeping that in mind, I went to visit Bruce for the first time. And I said, nice to meet you. He says, nice to meet you. You know, I wrote you four years ago. He said to me, and, you know, I felt ridiculous. It was at a time where I didn't have the Promoter Center for Legal Justice and I sort of was doing one off cases, sometimes with the Innocence Project, sometimes by myself. And I was really struck by his presence, by how articulate he was, one of the most well-read human beings. He was telling me about, you know, how he finished the Victor Frankel book, Man's Search for Meaning. And we had this amazing conversation about meditation and yoga and we turned a half hour visit into three hours to the point where they told me I had to, you know, go. So I went back and I looked for the letter because I keep all the letters that I get. And I find this beautifully written, super articulate letter. And I'll never forget how he signed it because it stuck with me. He said, oceans of gratitude, Bruce Bryant. And I just got curious. I agreed to represent him along with Steve Ziedman in connection with his clemency. But Innocence wasn't on my mind. And then I read the trial transcript. And I realized that this guy wasn't just innocent. But I think what struck me was that the Innocence claim was so strong that it didn't make, you know, it was hard for me to get behind a clemency petition without him being able to say, I'm innocent, you know, when he got before the parole board. So his case is being reinvestigated right now by what's called the Conviction Integrity Unit in Queens, which is a sensational arm of the District Attorney's office. District Attorney Melinda Katz. And we have to be respectful of that reinvestigation of the case because it's pending right now. And that is, you know, to hopefully exonerate Bruce completely. But, you know, and there's a great guy that runs the unit and they're involved in an intense reinvestigation of the case. But Bruce got clemency a couple of months ago by Governor Hochul in December. And he got to stand before the parole board. And it was a scary moment for me as one of his lawyers. That when they asked him, did you commit this crime, for him to say, no, I didn't. And to be granted clemency and to be then granted parole on an innocence claim is extraordinarily rare. So I think it spoke to both how powerful his innocence claims are and his accomplishments, the only thing that I think that he did in his accomplishments, the only, there's only a few other people, one of them is, Derek Hamilton that went before the parole board and said, I'm not gonna, you know, admit to something I didn't do just to get out of here. So I just wanted to give you that context because details of the case, specific details of the case are gonna be difficult to discuss. And I think what's amazing about Bruce is what he has been able to accomplish from inside in the face of his innocence is mind blowing. A lot of times when we're on the show, we get inquiries about how people can help and how do people overcome this? And I think why people are attracted to these stories of the wrongful incarcerated, I had to search myself. It's because I like being around this kind of strength. I don't know how, you know, people like him summon the strength to get through it. And, you know, in talking to Bruce the last couple of weeks, what he endured in prison is something we haven't really talked about on the show too much, like the ingranularity about what it's like in these institutions. And I was hoping we could talk about, among other things, some of that today because he was in some of the worst penitentiaries in New York, from Attica to. I was in Clinton, Great Meadows, Sing Sing, all maximum securities, all maximum security prisons, way upstate in some towns that are essentially, you know, a lot of racism is pervasive in those towns. And the prison is the only economic development in that town, so you got brother, cousins, aunts, and uncles working in the same prison. So you get into an incident with one officer, you got a problem with the entire system. And that's just how it is when you go deeper upstate, I mean, borderline Canada, you know, Clinton, Danna Mora, Great Meadows, and different prisons like that, so. And the economy of the area depends upon the prison. Because there's really nothing there. But snow during the winter time, and farming, so there's nothing else there. So the prison is the driving force behind the economy, so everyone's there, right, siblings. So nepotism is prevalent in these prisons. And one of the things that you encounter is that, you know, these prisons, it's not just cold in those areas, it's a cold environment, and it's up to you to create your own heat. It's a dark environment, and somehow you gotta find that light within yourself in order to travel, in order to do something with your life, more meaningful, you know what I mean? And it's difficult, it's not easy. You watch guys, you know, guys you talk to today, and you know, tomorrow they're swinging from the light, they're dead, right? Yesterday they were fine. You know, the next morning you wake up, they've hung themselves, you know? And these are the things that you encounter day in and day out, and you still have to maintain a sense of humanity, right? You gotta become, you gotta do two things. You could become bitter, or you could become bitter, you could become bitter. I chose the latter, because one of the things I did early in my incarceration was make a conscious decision to not serve time, but to have time serving for me. I made up my mind that if you were going to have me incarcerated for a crime I did not commit, then I was gonna take this time and use that cell as if it was an office. I was gonna use that school building as if it was a university, and there'd be a chance I had to just self reflect and engage in introspection, and do the things that I needed to do to protect my soul. I was gonna do it. You know, and I made it my business to do so, and I started delving into material that I probably never have read, you know, being a free man. I started reading everything from philosophy books to very few novels, but I tend to learn from the experiences of others, so autobiographies became my thing. You know, from Quincy Jones to Miles Davis, and just continuously studying, right? And then studying the system, and what drives the system, and why it has become what it is. You know, from education to the whole system of why education system looks at a guy in the third grade and determines whether or not he's gonna be caught up in the criminal justice system as early as the third grade, based on your reading level. They can determine how many prison beds that they're going to develop. These are things that most people don't know, right? Like 50% of the incarcerated people in New York State, or probably in the country, are living with dyslexia. So they're unable to learn the basics of education like reading, and these guys go home, and they commit crimes over and over again, because they were never corrected. And these same systems that were built on the premise of rehabilitation are just a little draconian, in that they do nothing but steal a person's humanity, and allow them to become or look that has nothing more than a number. You gotta wake up six o'clock in the morning, and sometimes when they're coming around, they're asking you your name, and they're not asking you your name, they're asking you your numbers. What cell location you in? They're not calling you Mr. Brian, they're calling you 60 cell. And a lot of people begin to internalize that, and lose their sense of self. And so I remain guarded, and try to maintain a sense of humanity through my meditation, through fasting every now and then, and just do deep introspection and reflection. For me, that was the hard part. The easy part was education and learning. The hard part was introspection and fighting a system. Not just a prosecutor or court, but fighting a system that was premised on oppression. I was premised on, it's a business, a prison industrial complex. You got cheap labor. 13th Amendment says you allowed to be enslaved if you're convicted of a crime. You see? And so, in a system like that, you have to find a way. You gotta find it within yourself too, to rise above the fray. Did you meet anyone else inside that showed you this path? Yes. Early on in my incarceration, there was a group of guys called the Resurrection Study Group. And it was founded by a guy named Eddie Ellis, who has since passed on. And what the Resurrection Study Group did was, they developed this program called the Non-traditional Approach to Social and Criminal Justice. And it helped them understand why the vast majority of incarcerated people in New York State came from, at that time, they came from seven basic neighborhoods, right? And these were neighborhoods that were all impoverished, that were all plagued with what we call crime-genitive factors, from substance abuse to dilapidated housing, to just poverty, right? And so, you see violence. And what I've come to realize is that poverty is violence. So, wherever there's poverty, you're going to see violence, because poverty itself is violence. And so, these neighborhoods, you begin to learn and study, and you begin to see that this is not by accident. These prisons were built for a purpose. There's a saying, they say, you build it, they're going to come. That's the same thing with prisons. You build them, they're going to come. Similar to the 1994 crime bill that was signed by Bill Clinton and co-authored by our now President Joe Biden, and incarcerated more people across the country than in any other time, right? It perpetuated the three strikes you're out. You had guys who stole a slice of pizza, third strike, he gets 25, 10, 10 life. We're looking at cases now where guys stuck $200 even in jail for 20 years. Some guys sentenced 70 years for armed robbery. Like all of these things come under the 1994 crime bill. When you begin to see it as a system that was designed to do certain things, it's a wake up call for you. And you begin to say, hold on, man, I fell for the trap. It's time for me to begin taking a different route and begin to educate myself more. And so the Resurrection Study Group, these guys steered me in that direction. They steered me in that direction, and I began to learn from another gentleman that was a part of it by the name of Dr. Gary Mendez, who also died. And he had a program called the National Trust for the development of African American men. And what it did was it's helped us restore those values that we straight away from. So this is what got me on the right path, early in my incarceration. How difficult was that to stay on that path? Because it seems like obviously you did find a way to be very disciplined and stick to it. And you give off this energy of a person who's been on a long voyage in that regard. But how difficult was it as a young man? Extremely difficult, because the norm is, a microcosm of what takes place in society, drugs, violence, the hustling, everything that goes on in society, it happens in prison, right? You know, relationships with staff, all of that takes place, right? And so it's extremely difficult. It's almost like a battle, because the guys in my age group, they were not doing what I was doing. They were in the yard either gang banging, selling drugs, getting high. Very few of them were in the law library. But I come to realize also that is when you're wrongfully convicted, you fight a little different than a guy that's actually accepted his fate for what he's done. I think that your fight and your pursuit of your liberty, but also your pursuit to rise above your circumstance becomes a little different. Where I was didn't have to define who I was. Or who I can become. And once I began writing and putting these things on the cell walls, you know, like affirmations or quotes that I would develop, not that I, you know, will take from anyone, but ones that I would develop myself, right? After reading and studying, and then you have these epiphanies, I used to sleep with a pen in the paper. That's what the guys whom resurrection study group taught me. I would sleep with a pen in the pad. Because they say some of your most pure thoughts come in the midnight hour, in the midst of your sleep. In certain things, principles that I began to live by would come to me in those late hours. And I would write them down. And the next day I would wake up and I would stick them on the wall. And I would begin to internalize these principles and these morals that I began to develop that reconnected me to, you know, my own humanity. Because prison strips you of so much of that, man. What was it like on day one of your release? What was that? Is it even possible to describe that feeling? It was the best feeling that a human being can feel. To see my mother, to see my loved ones, my siblings. Still breathing, still alive, because I lost my father in 2017. So to see love is what I saw. It's indescribable. It was beyond being elated, you know, joy. It was just a deep, deep sense of bliss. It was almost like heaven, man. If there was such a thing as heaven on earth, there was heaven the day that I walked out of prison. I'd like, I walked out of hell and straight into heaven. There was no, there was no purgatory, right? There was no purgatory. So I went straight from hell, straight to heaven. This one, this one, I gotta tell you for me, you know, I've had the fortunate experience of walking, you know, my fair share of people out. This one was like, this one was what they based the movies on. This was so stunning in the way it happened. The super, the warden of Sing Sing is actually a great man. His name is Mike Capra. He's too bad he's retiring soon. And he really believed in Bruce. And, you know, he was responsible for making sure that there are a lot of programs in Sing Sing for the people that want them. And they typically release people out of Sing Sing, which is in Ossining, New York. It's about an hour and a half north of the city, on the Hudson. And they usually just take them from a prison van to a bus stop and just drop them off. I was outside the prison gate, and so was Bruce's family and friends and other loved ones that had come from around the country. And I called the super about a half hour before he was released because we had got word from another guard that was standing outside, oh, they're not gonna release them here. They're gonna- Drop them off at a train station. Yeah. And I called him, I said, please, you know, let them have this moment. And he said, we're gonna do that. And if you picture this 30 foot wall, steel green wall, that all of a sudden just parts, and you see this figure emerge with a net with his worldly possessions. And, you know, it was, and he was walking his sister, Justina, who was oddly enough, a court officer in the very courthouse where he was convicted. They were walking to each other and the walk started to turn into a, a fast walk and then they both at the same time just ran to each other and embraced. You know, I'm a crier. I just like, I just stood back and watched and everyone was just weeping, you know, and his mother had just pulled up. She got, you know, sort of like lost on the way to the prison, it's not easy to find. And, you know, I was like, I'm fine. And that one for me, this one, Bruce and I have a deep special relationship. He had spoken to my children on the phone before he got out. They call him Uncle Bruce. And, you know, I'm sitting back. I feel like a proud brother, listening to him speak, you know, what an impressive human being just to hear him articulate in his command of not only, you know, his knowledge base, but his understanding of the world around him. It just, it always hits me like, what, what a weird irony that this man in the face of his innocence still recognized I gotta change my life. I didn't commit this crime, but I don't like the way I'm living. And, you know, I mean, we say the words 29 years and you hear of what he overcame, but, you know, it wasn't without incident. You see the scar on his face. There were stretches and solitary confinement that I'd rather him describe because I didn't live it. And, you know, dealing with the violence of prison. And, you know, he's explaining to you like waking up in the night with a thought and writing it down on a pad. And it's like, it conjures up an image, at least for me, of someone blissfully sleeping. I mean, this is against the backdrop of him living on a tear that is full of people, many of them suffering extraordinary mental illness, screaming, yelling, having rap competitions until two, three in the morning. I mean, deafening noise on a cell block for those that have never been there. Yeah, 88 men, 88 cells on a gallery and things, hey. And you have four galleries right on top of each other. The longest tears. So you can see a guy getting stabbed in 88 cells and you may be in 10 and a guy is waiting on there getting stabbed. The guard is by the staircase and this guy is screaming for dear life. No one hears him, but you know he's getting hit. And you know the prison culture. You got to fend for yourself. It's not, you know, you know what happens in the environment like that. Guys keep quiet. Sometimes a guy gets shoved back in his cell. Either he's left to die or he prays an officer comes and finds him in there laying in his blood and he survives. I watch guys, guys that I'm close to, you talk to him today, you have coffee with him today and tonight when they call on the child, he doesn't move out of his cell. You find out what's going on with him. You find out he OD'd off a fentanyl 15 minutes earlier. There's no Narcan in the cell block suit hit this guy to wake him up. They know that they know drugs are ubiquitous in prison. They're everywhere. Yet, you know, the procedures that are in place are not there, the safeguards are not there to protect lives because they don't see your life is it doesn't matter, right? There's a huge sense of being devalued. Human life is completely devalued in these institutions, your numbers and once you leave someone else will take your place. And that's the attitude of the prison and that's your complex as a whole, you know? What's terrifying is there's been no talk to mitigate all the problems that lead to the prison industrial complex. There's no one's talking about getting rid of it. No one's talking about getting rid of private prisons. No one's talking about trying to figure out a way to other than just policing to do something about these communities that keep decade after decade being a place where no one has hope. And every politician says let's get, it's either get tough on crime or light on crime, right? Right. Right, so but no one says instead of getting tough on crime, why don't we get tough on the social conditions that produce crime? Yes. Because no one is born a criminal. These are conditions that people come out of that drive them, unless you're a nut, right? Unless you have some serious mental health issues and you're just like this, you know, you're obsessed with children, little boys like we talked about last night in the company club or you're a pedophile or something and you need some serious mental health work. No one is talking about dealing with the crime generative factors that exist in poor communities across the country. When you look at in New York City, the Bronx is the poorest community, poorest borough in New York City. Brownsville is the poorest community. Both of these communities, both of these places are, you know, crime is high, violence is high, right? Drug use is high. Because the social conditions are that bad, right? And the cycle continues. You know, it's a cycle because people are living in not just poverty, they're living in concentrated poverty, generational poverty. So my family grew up, one family grew up in the projects, their children wind up growing up in the projects, right? Unless someone comes and breaks that cycle and there's this serious intervention to break the cycle of incarceration or intergenerational incarceration, it continues to be perpetuated. And the problem seems to be that every politician is just concerned with getting elected. So they wanna say whatever the people wanna hear. And if the people wanna hear get tough on crime, it's not. But you don't hear we need to eliminate all the areas of our country that are creating these issues. We have to fix that. They have to fix, it has to be a concentrated effort. It has to be, I've always said, you wanna make America great, have less losers. How do you have less losers? You have more people with opportunity. You figure out where people don't have opportunity, you provide opportunity and you pour all the money into that. We obviously have billions of dollars to provide to Ukraine. There's always something. There's always something that they come up with where they need trillions of dollars for this and billions of dollars for that, green energy and this and that. No better use of resources than making better human beings, giving human beings opportunity. And maybe it's time to stop relying on the government for it because politicians, it's almost like when I think of a politician now, in the context of helping solve these problems, it's almost like, wouldn't it be nice for me to be able to fly? Yeah, that'd be nice, but it's not gonna happen. So what we're trying to do at the Perlmutter Center for Legal Justice is to get the word out to even the private sector. If we can create self-driving cars and artificial intelligence and send people into space, this is a solvable problem. I mean, one of the things that has been... I mean, I don't know why I needed this as like some epiphany because I've been doing this work for close to 20 years. But lately, I have been struck by the cases that we're working on in a way that I haven't before. And if you ever want to see like... The true... It's the best way to articulate this. How fucked up this country is in terms of racial disparity and the mistreatment of minorities in this country, go visit a prison. Sing Sing has a program where we'll talk about it, where they take people from the community in and say, here's what is going on here. I have routinely sat across a table like this in a small room, in the legal visiting room at Sing Sing. Let's just take Sing Sing, for example. We recently... One of our new clients... was sentenced to 70 years. 70 years for a first offense in which the extent of the victim's injuries were four stitches. This man, Sheldon Johnson, served... 26 years. 26 years. And I took a look at this case and I said, how is this possible? A few weeks later, I'm visiting with a man who's serving 25 to life for the alleged robbery of $200 in which the alleged victim has a condition where one eye is shut and the other eye had multiple surgeries that were never disclosed to the defense. That is an eyewitness count? Yes, there's no evidence. And he's the only eyewitness. And he's the only... He only has one eye. No pun intended. He's just even to have a good one. And he could not identify the person... And that wasn't disclosed. And then not the extent of his eye issues. You couldn't hide the fact that one eye was closed. But the point I'm trying to make is that it is extraordinarily rare for me to be hearing these stories and the person sitting across the table from me as a white person. It's always a black man or a Latin man. And it begs the question, well, what do we think? African Americans have a higher propensity to commit crime? That's not it. It's exactly what Bruce is talking about. And what I hope to do is to continue to get the word out because we so often have people writing us, calling us, sending us emails, DMs on Instagram. How can I help? And one of the ways that you can help is getting involved in communities that are poor, whether it's volunteering at a community center in areas like Brownsville, whether it's donating funds to community-based organizations, whether it's corresponding with someone. And it's just getting the word out in a way. And if you're going to be a politician for the young generation, you have to actually not look at what the public wants to hear or what you think the public wants to hear. It's OK to run and lose as long as it becomes a way to propel a message in a certain direction. What people try to do, their idea, is to run and run with, they have these ulterior ideas that they don't divulge, run, and then try to implement them. This is the idealistic utopian view of a president. Here's the problem with that. I think when you get into office, they sit you the fuck down and they explain how everything really works. And I think it's very terrifying. And I think we're probably a brink of conflict all over the world. And there's all sorts of problems they're constantly dealing with. And they don't want to hear jack shit about what you want to do for communities. They want to know how much money can we get for these military industrial complex corporations that have been sponsoring your campaign, that have been helping get things across on, whether it's social media or mainstream media, whatever narratives you want pushed, whatever the pharmaceutical drug companies want pushed. All of this is very clear. This is not conspiracy theory anymore. Now that we know, like with the release of the Twitter files from Twitter, with the FBI, we know they're involved in narratives. We know they're involved in doing these things. We know they're involved in putting agent provocateurs into all these organizations, like that Governor Whitmer lady who got the kidnapping plot to get her 14 people, 12 of them, where FBI informants. That's just fucking insane. So all this stuff exists. This is not conspiracy theory anymore. I think that's the problem, what happens when you get into office. You're dealing with a fucking tsunami of bullshit. And it's just deeply ingrained. It's just like the system of these impoverished communities is deeply ingrained and generational. I think the culture of the deep state is also deeply ingrained and generational, the culture of the relationship that they have to money, to whether it's money from the bankers, money from the pharmaceutical drug companies, and military industrial complex. There's sensational amounts of money that can be had. And we're seeing it in motion right now in what many people are framing as a just conflict in Ukraine. But there's also an insane amount of money involved in this. And you have to be very careful of whatever the fuck the narrative is that's being discussed when there's an insane amount of money involved. That's what's going on right now. And I think that if we as people, what I like what you're saying is the United States, and if you can get businesses involved, and businesses can actually generate revenue from rehabilitating communities, if they could figure out, if Halliburton can figure out how to rebuild Iraq after they blew it up, which is one of the craziest things of all time, you've got a guy who's the CEO of Halliburton, just happened to be the vice president of the United States, and then they get no big contracts to rebuild shit. He decides to blow up. I mean, it's wild, right? But if they can do that, if there's profit in that, how is there not profit in rehabilitating neighborhoods? It seems like profit for everyone. But that's why we're continuing to do this show. I cannot tell you. I say it every time I'm on here. You'll get tired of it maybe. Maybe it sounds like, you know, ass kissing, and I will kiss whatever ass there is to kiss. This show has become such an important platform for us. Because watch this, ready? I spoke about this before. There's a case in California right now, the case of this guy Pierre Rushing, right? The attorney that's handling it is from a big law firm named Greenberg Troig. His name is Jordan Grazinger. He is, this kid really was accused of murder. In 2011, he's sentenced 50 years to life. There's one witness. This guy's name is Robert Green. He's a serial felon, a seven-time felon. He doesn't identify Pierre Rushing until three weeks after the crime. He is a crack addict who admitted that he was high at the time the crime was committed. No physical evidence implicating Pierre Rushing. Two other witnesses at the scene when this shooting took place say it was not Pierre Rushing. So Jordan Grazinger sends me a direct message on Instagram because he heard this podcast. Now here is a global law firm that has vast resources. And he said, I just wanna do something. How do I get involved? And he learns about this case and gets the pro bono department at his law firm to take it up. He now has declarations from the only witness. This guy, Robert Green, who has totally recanted and said he made it all up. He has another declaration from another witness saying that Pierre Rushing, actually the other guy that was convicted of this crime said Pierre Rushing had nothing to do with it. So the question becomes now, what can you do? So look, it's a testament to the power of this show and this platform that this guy is hopefully on the precipice of getting out or saving a life. But the question becomes, well, what can you do as a listener? Grab your pens, all right? You can write to the Alameda District Attorney Pamela Price at 1225 Fallon Street in Oakland, California, 94612. And I know you can just rewind it if you miss the address. Write DA Pamela Smart and ask her to please release Pierre Rushing. There's a petition called a petition of habeas corpus, which I think translates in Latin to the holding of the body. Can I stop you for real quick? Spell Fallon, F-A-L-O-N, F-A-L-L-L. F-A-1, so it's Alameda District Attorney Pamela Price, 1225 Fallon Street, Oakland, California. Two L's. Yes. So Fallon with two L's. And I know that the case is on her radar. I think that she is, read about the case, Pierre Rushing, just how it sounds. And the more we let district attorneys, politicians know that the public is paying attention, I can tell you from my experience of being on this show that the DA's listen. I've had them reference appearances on this show, acting like, how could you say that about Douglas County, Kansas? But then they get a thousand letters and they realize that politically, it's not gonna look very good to keep an innocent. What is the holdup? These wheels of justice grind slowly. And for a man like Bruce, who is sitting in there and having to witness violence on a day-to-day basis, unthinkable conditions where he sleeps in a room when he's put in what they call the box or the hole and has rodents crawling across his chest as he sleeps. I'm not making this shit up. This was his day-to-day existence. Pierre Rushing is in similar circumstances. You can make a difference to write a letter, read about the case. The habeas petitions are out there to read them. And I think that we just need all I can do, all I can think of, we could have grandiose ideas. It would be amazing if a big corporation didn't decide to donate a lot of money because they felt guilty about what happened to George Floyd. And then all of a sudden it became the summer of corporate guilt and everyone starts donating. You don't donate because it's in vogue. You donate because you actually want to make a difference and take it from little old me. I know that I'm one grain of sand on a massive beach, but what Bruce said, and I've said it before, I'll say it again. I've done my fair share of drugs and mind-altering substances. There is no feeling like helping restore somebody's life and freedom. Nothing, nothing comes close to it. So if you want to be another grain of sand on that beach, hopefully the grain of sand will form a sandcastle. And then there'll be more sandcastles and people will start paying more attention. That's all I can think of as just an individual and an organization to keep on doing, is to keep banging the drum. And the more we bang it and the louder we bang it. So again, I thank you for the platform and I want people to be able to see and witness these marvelous human beings. It's such a waste to have them locked away behind prison walls when you hear him speak. Bruce just accepted a position with the Perlmutter Center for Legal Justice. He's gonna be a criminal justice reform advocate and a student mentor, not because I feel bad for him, not because I think, oh, because he's earned it. Listen to him speak and listen to his command of the issues. So I sometimes find myself, I feel like I'm trying to climb, I feel like Sisyphus sometimes, right? And the boulder keeps rolling back on me. Rolling back on you. Yeah, and then you get a little taste of what that's like to help stand next to him last night and watch him watch a comedy show. And then we were walking down the street and just hear him inhale a breath of fresh air. Or this morning before we came here, he saw the pool at the hotel and teared up. And he said, I'm going in. And I heard this with childlike wonder, the splash. And I went over and he had both arms in the air. He said, take a picture of me. I still got it. And I fucking blanked. And I thought to myself, this must be the first time he swam in over 30 years. And it was just to be able to watch that and to be even a small part of it, it's just like makes you feel like getting up the next day and with a smile on your face, with the will to want to do it again and help someone else. I want to touch on something that Joe said. I think investing, what people don't realize is the huge talent pool that exists behind prison walls. These guys can, they can help drive the economy outside of just being incarcerated. You spend the $80 billion a year on incarceration across the country. These guys, you got artists, you got guys that guys will make anything in here, man, out of just, you know, just anything. I've seen guys make statues like this from paper towels and soap, you say what the hell? So the talent pool is broad if we're willing to invest in people, right? If we invest in the social infrastructure and tap into that cultural capital that exists behind prison walls and just start beginning to invest in people instead of things and prisons, right? You know, we got to learn to just really say, well, is prison the right answer? Who's corrected from prison? The prison corrections has never corrected anyone. It's the person that engages in introspection and says, I want to make a change. But even when you look at the investments that they make in law enforcement, if law enforcement were the answer to crime, we'd be the safest place on planet earth. America would be the safest place on planet earth because we got more cops than anywhere else, right? So we give so much over time and we give our money to the police officers and they grant it, they're important, right? But they don't solve crime, they don't prevent crime. It's just that simple, they just don't, right? When you invest in people and you provide them with opportunities to create better lives for themselves and to allow a hand up so they can pick their families up out of poverty, that's the change, that's the difference. I mean, incarceration will go down exponentially if people begin to feel like they were important to feel valued because someone's invested in them. This is where it gets dangerous because the prison industrial complex is a business and the business protects itself. There's been prison guard unions that have lobbied to keep marijuana illegal in states because they want work, which is one of the most evil things you could ever consider that you're using human beings as batteries so you can generate money. Keeping them in a cement box, essentially using them as batteries to generate money. The whole thing, it's fascinating that you brought that up. I read about that recently. And I thought that I misread it. I did not understand the connection at first. It kind of went over my head that a union would fight to keep marijuana illegal until I started to say, well, wait a second, you're just missing the obvious conclusion here. One of the obvious conclusions is the leading cause of contraband in prisons aren't family members stuffing things down their pants and coming through, it's guards, it's prison guards. Of course. And I just think that, I guess where I get frustrated when you said this is where it gets tricky. Where it gets tricky for me and where I get frustrated and feel overwhelmed. I'm listening to the two of you speak and thinking to myself, you both get it. The question becomes to me, well, how do we make it happen? So how do you rebuild a community like Brownsville, Brooklyn? Everybody knows Brownsville because Mike Tyson comes from there, Zab Judah comes from there, some pretty famous fighters come from there, Biggie Smalls comes from there, Riddick Bowe. And they're not going back there. Shannon Briggs. Shannon Briggs. Yeah, Shannon Briggs. Let's go champ. Shannon, the cannon. Shout out to Shannon. Yeah, that's my guy. So I don't, they go back and try to do what they can, but it's like, we'll start with Brownsville. How do we solve the problem? Is it us trying to convince the owner of a sports team, a billionaire, a philanthropist, someone to go like, here's a plan, let's go to the mayor, Eric Adams, and propose to this community center. I mean, I just don't know what, and this is like not, this might be out of ignorance for me because I can only take on what I can take on. I'm sure there's some people out there trying to get this done, but I think the more influential voices we can get behind an idea, let's try this experiment in one community. I just, I'm at a loss for, I know what I know how to do. I know how to see a case and know that someone's innocent and fight for it. I feel like I know the right levers of the pole to get that done. It gets way more difficult and intimidating to me trying to figure out, well, how do we solve this bigger social problem? But I think it starts with shows like this. It's just a conversation now. From different walks of life, coming together and really talking about real issues. So it's really an honor to be here with you, Joe. It's an honor to be in your comedy club last night, and it's definitely an honor to be here. It's an honor to be here with you too. And I really, really appreciate it, man. And it just gets the conversation out there, right? And hopefully people will hear the conversation and people will begin to galvanize and say, well, what can we do? At least the thought is out there now. The thought is out there. And we've put it out there many times now, and I feel very blessed to be your friend. And I feel very fortunate that you have, you've come on here and trusted this platform with all these stories, because it changed the way I thought of our system, our legal justice system. I have a completely different opinion after having conversations with you. And it's not just me. It's everybody who listened to these conversations. So you're talking about millions and millions and millions of people have heard these conversations now. It's a crazy number. And we've done a lot of them now. We keep doing them. And as we keep doing them, it gets out more and more and more, and slowly but surely something's gonna happen. It's going to have to. If we value humanity, if we really value our community, which is what our country's supposed to be, it's supposed to be a united group of human beings. That's right. It's supposed to be a big community. And we can isolate it into neighborhoods. We can isolate it into cities. But reality, we're supposed to be on the same team. If we're on the same team, if you care about these people, how is it possible that you can continue to ignore it, decade after decade? And it's going to take a lot of work. This is not gonna be a thing that you're gonna fix, because you have grown people that have been indoctrinated in these horrific ways. And these people have to somehow or another have hoped to change, which is a big thing for people. It's hard for people to lose weight. You know? It really is. Just stop eating food is hard to do. It's all you have to do is not do something that you know you shouldn't be doing. And it's hard to change your whole life. Have you been involved in gang banging and drug dealing? Because you had no other options, and you had no other role models, and you had no other examples anywhere around you of people that had hope. And you felt like, well, the rest of the world is different, and what we got here sucks, and that's just the way it is, and I'm just gonna be a part of it. And that's how human beings do. We imitate our atmosphere, whether it's positive or negative. We're a part of a tribe. And this tribe should be expanded, it should be expanded to the whole fucking world. But at the very least, we have to be an example here in America. We have a possibility, because of these kind of conversations, because of this narrative, we have a possibility to change, particularly the way young people look at it. This idea that people that live four blocks away are different than people who live right next door is nuts. We're all just humans. And if there is a community that's fucked, it's better for everyone if we chip in and do whatever the fuck it takes to re-engineer that. And it's gonna take a long time. There's an old saying from gambling in pool. They would say, you gotta get better the same way you got sick. Meaning if you're gambling, say if I got you stuck like $10,000, you're like, okay, all or nothing, like fuck you. Fuck you, double or nothing. Fuck you, we play for $1,000. So then I went 11,000, and then another 1,000. Now I went 12,000. You can't just win one and get it all back. You gotta get better the same way you got sick. It's a long road. Hey, listen, that's, you made me feel better, both of you. So, you know, look, there's no, you know. There's no magic bullet. Yeah, there's no magic bullet. And, you know. Nor is there any one size fits all. No, and look, I told Bruce last night, you know, it's an odd thing to get recognized for. But, you know, a bartender said to me, hey, aren't you that guy that helps get people out of jail? And I was like, man, that felt so good. I don't know if you saw me on 2020. Most definitely it was probably on this podcast, or, you know, like I was pulling into the Aria in Vegas. And, you know, the valet guy goes, hey, aren't you, I've seen you before. You helped innocent people get out of jail. I saw you on Rogan. I get that a lot. And I always take a minute to stop and say, you know, do you want me to help, you know, point you in the right direction of how you can help? I had so many people take me up on it. So you guys made me feel better. I mean, look, I just, there are moments where I feel like is the problem ever going to get, you know, solved? It is frustrating to me. So frustrating. And that's why I'm so in your debt, because we, Joe and I had this idea, Bruce, you don't know this a couple of years ago, where, you know, he, you know, committed to doing this once a quarter. And of course I thought, really, is he really going to do it? And not only has he done it, but allowed me to bring, you know, an exonereon every time. And, you know, first we had Robert Jones, then Derek Hamilton, and now Bruce. And I hope that people not only see the humanity in these men, but see the talent and see the, I mean, think about these three men, right? Robert Jones said, I'm going to one day get out of here and put on a suit and come back in and help the people that need help. And he did it. Derek Hamilton, known the country over as probably the brightest legal mind in the prison system, said one day I'm going to get out of here and I'm going to help the people inside. And not only has he done it, he's like a, he's like a meteor. You know, he's like a streaking comet of a human being. I've never seen anything like it. District attorneys, conviction integrity units, when he calls, they pick up the phone and they have meetings. The district attorney in Manhattan, you know, Alvin Bragg, say what you want about him. My opinion is he picked up the phone when Derek called about Sheldon Johnson. And, you know, there was this great group of lawyers called the CAL, the Center for Appellate Litigation, and they had brought the case right to the goal line. And they said, you know, we need the DA's ear. You know, can you just sort of get this? And there's some great people in that office, Brian Crow, that really want to make a difference. And, you know, we met with the DA in Manhattan and he spoke to Derek and then, you know, Sheldon gets released. So, yeah, it does make a difference. And I think that for Bruce, you know, when I heard about some of the programs that he created from on the inside, can you tell Joe about, and the listeners about the Gun Buy Back program and Voices From Within? Yeah, Voices From Within, I'll start there. There's a group of men that founded it prior to me coming into Sing Sing. Lawrence Bradley, John Najin, Velazquez, they started this program. And it was a progressive program that was designed to, they wanted to redefine what it means to pay a debt to society. And they've been doing just that. So they began doing this progressive work inside and created this event called Choices, which is choosing healthy options and confronting every situation. And what they do with these Choices events is they bring in children whose parents are incarcerated. And then begin, you know, having what they call playback theater, which is they'll have a young person talk about a dilemma in their life. And then they'll have two of the guys incarcerated actually play it out. So the person can actually visualize what it is that they went through and see the opportunities to make better choices. So that's one of them. And but also the Civic Duty Initiative we founded in Sullivan. Myself and a guy named Joseph Robinson and Stanley Bellamy, who was also just granted clemency. He had 62 years, he did 37. What we did, we begin, you know, finding these poor impoverished communities and whether they've been upstate or in the inner cities and decided that what we're gonna do is we're gonna do a book drives. We're gonna raise money in prison through these prison organizations to buy backpacks and school supplies for children of incarcerated parents. And we did just that. We gave, you know, we gave thousands of books away. We raised tons of money to contribute to a gun buyback hopefully through a church bomb in Albany with a Reverend by the name of Charles Muller who had a program, Albany was being ravaged by violence and his program had run out of money. And so I reached out to him and we collaborated in Sullivan, you know, correctional facility and decided that we're gonna pull out resources and see how we can come together. We also had him bring in some young guys so that we can talk to about youth violence. And this has been going, this continues to go on, right? The youth assistance program, YAP, that they have both in Sing Sing and in a few other prisons in New York state. I was on the YAP team in Sing Sing where they bring in 30 at-risk youth. In my group, I had, you know, I had some young kids that were from El Salvador who were dealing with, you know, MS-13s and I had one young guy, one young girl tell me that they had to leave El Salvador because where they lived, you know, their friends were all in gangs and what they did was they would play soccer with the heads of the rival gangs. And I had that, that had made me cringe. I had never heard anything like that until this, and this kid, these kids were like 18, 19. And they had to, I literally leave the country because their family was like, if they stay there, they have to be in a gang. I mean, these kids said that their friends would literally play soccer with the heads, the decapitated heads of rival gangs. So these are some of the kids that we've, you know, we've been able to reach and talk to through the YAP program. It's never enough because sometimes they bring in kids that'll never be at-risk. Sometimes they're bringing kids from high-end society that have no business coming in there. They're gonna be successful, right? So, you know, sometimes we have a little issue with that, but the other program is Children of Promise, and YSU, I've been working with them for the past decade. They- Can I stop you there? Yes. Why are they bringing children from privileged society? It makes a lot of sense. I think that, for me, if you want my personal opinion, I think that they bring them in to show them what they can do and what they can control, right? You can possibly one day be in control of a prison or a corporation because you're bringing these kids from high society that they're literally never going to, they're never gonna see the inside of a jail cell. So they're bringing them in so they get the inner workings of prison so they can enter into the prison industrial complex? On some level, on some level, but not become, we know they're never gonna be incarcerated. Because it's a viable business, it's not going away. It's never going away. And you have, if you decide to go down that road, you have a guaranteed source of income. I mean, the product that we made in New York State Prison is called Core Craft. This is on the stock market, Core Craft. You know, the Core Craft is making upholstery in one prison. In Greenhaven, they make couches, tables like this. How much do you guys get paid? Oh, they make 16 cents an hour. 10 cents an hour, literally. And they have to do it. Oh yeah, you don't go to the program. You go into the box. In 2000, guys refused to go to the Core Craft because they didn't want to build cells. They had a group of guys that found out that there was steel coming off of the van. They unloaded a truck. Group of prisoners were forced to unload a truck. And they realized what they were unloading were bars. Bars and doors. And they said, hold on, man. They opening up a shop where we have to build cells. So a few days later, these guys says, we're not doing that. We're not building cells for our kids. All these guys went into the box and they shipped them from a prison that's close to their family, Greenhaven. They shipped them to Clinton. And the box for the listener. The box is solitary confinement. So if you don't do labor for 16 cents an hour, you get confined to solitary confinement. Yeah, you get a misbehavioral port. Nine times out of 10, when you go for that misbehavioral port, you're found guilty and you're penalized for not engaging in slave wages, slave labor. That is a fact. This has gone, every prison, when COVID started, a lot of people don't know where the hand sanitizer was coming from. It was coming from great medals, right? It was coming from great medals. And at one point, Governor Cuomo, he had it on the news. We got a hand sanitizer the guys are making. And this was for sale at one point. And so that's another form of extraordinary profit. Oh, of course. Even more profitable than making iPhones for China, which is wild, because it's already evil. Yeah. I mean, from everything, you go from, okay, New York made 11 million bottles of hand sanitizer. Now it has 700,000 gallons it can't get rid of. Wow. They said, a spokesperson said he makes no apologies for single-handedly solving a hand sanitizer shortage. Oh, really, spokesperson? Hey, how'd you do that? Maybe you should make an apology for how the fuck you did that. I absolutely love this show that you can pull this stuff up in real time. In real time, you can see guys like former Queens prosecutor John Scarpa. In real time. In real time. In real time, you can Google former prosecutor. Yeah, let's Google them right now. Former Queens prosecutor John Scarpa. And you can see what his conviction was. And this is a guy that has a history of doing this for decades. This core craft, that's what it's called? Yeah. The fact that this is a profitable entity that you could trade on the stock market. And the very people that are working there are essentially slaves. Not even essentially. When Stephen King wrote Rita Hayworth and the Shawshank Redemption, which became the movie Shawshank Redemption. And there was a part of the movie where they talked about the work program and how some genius figured out that there was cheap labor to be had in prisons. He didn't base that off of some fictional whim when he was up at night chopping away on that typewriter. That was based in, this has been going on for decades and decades. And I think that it should shock people and it should be a rallying cry if you've never been in a prison before. And it's just sort of occupies a space in your mind because it's just a bad place that I don't want to be in ever. And I wouldn't want my family member to be in. That's okay. You could live your life that way. But you can also take notice of the fact that somewhere between 4 and 7% some estimates of the people in there are innocent. And some of the other people that are in there just made a mistake. And you don't throw away a life because they made a mistake. And to see some of these sentences, 50 years, 70 years, and it's not just in California where there was a three strikes rule, to see sentences getting doled out that are de facto life sentences to children. To children. Michael Dawson, Sheldon Johnson was, I think 17, or had just turned 18. And the guy gets sentenced to 70 years on a first offense. Look, this is a beautiful moment. I don't know if Jamie has a picture. I sent it to him. Like two weeks after Bruce got out, we got word that Sheldon was gonna get out and get re-sentenced. So Bruce said, I want to be there when he walks out. And you know, he got, oh. So that is them FaceTiming me as Sheldon walked out of the gate. And JJ Velasquez is the other gentleman on the other side of Sheldon. JJ Velasquez is, you know, it took one guy who believed in JJ, this investigative reporter named Dan Slepian, who believed in JJ amongst many other people that believed in JJ. JJ now goes into Sing Sing regularly and runs a program there called the Frederick Douglass project. And he does it with the professor from Georgetown, Mark Howard. And he goes in there and he brings people in from the community to try to show them the humanity that is behind prison walls. There was over a hundred years of over-incarceration and wrongful incarceration in that a century and that picture. It'd be nice to invite Joe to go in one day. Go in with JJ. We tell JJ, man, we all, we extended the offer to Joe Rogan and his team to come into Sing Sing one day with the Frederick Douglass project. Come in and meet some guys and see what it's like. We should do that. You know what else we gotta do? I gotta take a leak. So pause right here. Anybody needs a leak. We'll be right back. Sorry. So would you find that dude? This corrupt, let's pull this guy up. Look at that fuck head. Queens lawyer convicted of robbing witnesses get 30 months sentence. That's it? That's it. That's it? So that guy put you away for 29 years and he gets 30 days for being a piece of shit. 30 months, excuse me. Whatever. And he's done this for, you know, to countless people. It's incredible. People versus Nathan May, people versus Gary Steadman. 30 months is not. They all got out. They all got out and they all got cases were subsequently overturned. How many cases do you think this guy was involved with that were dirty? To be honest with me, countless. Because even as a prosecutor and as a defense attorney. He's been around forever. Yes, he has countless lawsuits against him, several allegations against him. How crazy is the only guy that guy in less than three years? Well, look, it's crazy. It's crazy no matter any way you look at it. You know, the thing that gives me some hope in situations like this is the current district attorney in Queens is a woman by the name of Melinda Katz. And she did something pretty extraordinary in this case, which, you know, you have to recognize it when it happens. When the governor is considering someone for clemency, they check with the district attorney's office where they were convicted. And the Queens County District Attorney's office, who is also reinvestigating Bruce's case, its conviction integrity unit is, you know, I mentioned earlier is reinvestigating his case, did not oppose Bruce's grant of clemency. Extremely rare in a murder case where an 11 year old boy was murdered for them to not oppose. So that's, you know, I think that she deserves recognition for that. Her office deserves recognition for that. And what we can hope is that we keep on making believers out of them by presenting cases like Bruce's. You know, people like to make broad generalizations, whether it's police officers, prosecutors, I think I hate it when people do that about anything. There's good and bad in all professions. And I just think that, you know, when you see people trying to make change happen, even if it doesn't go sometimes at the pace you want it to happen at, as long as it's moving in the right direction, it deserves to be recognized and applauded. So I just wanted to make sure because it's easy to like see this guy who was a former Queens prosecutor and then, you know, make a dangerous leap that therefore all prosecutors and Queens are bad, which is not the case. Exactly. He just said, he just happened to be a bad one that finally got caught. And it was interesting, he didn't get caught until he was a defense lawyer. He became a criminal defense attorney and he got caught bribing witnesses in connection with a defense case. It's kind of ironic, right? Because the other cases that were, he was a prosecutor and it got overturned, he was doing the same shit. He didn't just come down with a, like you come down with a cold, like a case of the bribes one day, you know? He wasn't like, oh, this sounds like a good fucking idea. This is learned behavior. This is the way he learned to work the system, in my humble opinion. And you think there's others like that. I mean, this goes back to the 80s. Absolutely, absolutely. There's others like that. And it happened in New York with the so-called mob cops, right, Scarcella and- Well, how about that guy in Pennsylvania that was sending foster kids to jail? Oh, you're talking about the kids for cash with the private prisons. Until the young kid killed himself. He was a young up and coming wrestler. And he was sent to jail for, I think, pushing his stepfather and cutting schools. They sent him to juvenile. But what happened was in the private prisons, you had to maintain a certain capacity. It had to be filled to like 80% capacity. And what happened was these judges, if they were charged with keeping these jails filled, so as long as they kept them filled, they got a kickback. It's called Kids for Cash. There's a documentary on it. Yeah, I know about it. You know, it just, when Joe asked me, and this happens and there's others like it, I think it goes down, it comes down to this ugly part of human nature, where, you know, I love the quote, absolute power corrupts absolutely. But I also think even a little bit of power can be super dangerous. And you see it in all facets of life. People get a little bit of fame. They get a little bit of notoriety. Or they get the ability to have influence over someone else. I'll give you an example. As it relates to Bruce, for people that don't think that this doesn't happen. As soon as Bruce was granted clemency, all over the papers, you know, when a governor grants clemency, it's news. There's people that oppose it because they get, you know, the 60,000 foot news headline view of it and don't know shit about the facts of the case. How could she have done that? You know, letting a killer out. They have no idea about this guy, Scarbor, about any of the facts of his case. And the people that read those papers are often corrections officers too. And just to show you like the final stretch of discipline, I think for Bruce is, you know, there's good corrections officers that I'd go in and visit Bruce and knew what we were doing and knew what the Perlmutter Center for Legal Justice is about and knew that Derek Hamilton used to be in prison and turned, you know, his life into basically a mission to help others that have been wrongfully incarcerated or just that need a second chance. And there are others like the COs that find out he got granted clemency and don't wanna see him go home. That's right. And all of a sudden, he starts getting fucked with by one corrections officer that is baiting him on a constant basis, calling him the worst names that you could possibly think of trying to get Bruce to do something so that it would somehow- Keep him in jail. Yeah, keep him in jail. And it was happening so often that one time, you know, there was a lot of people involved in the effort to get Bruce out on clemency and legal aid and a great attorney named Elizabeth Felber working on his exoneration cases, my co-counsel, but there were also students of mine, right? Part of our legal justice center is that we have a clinical program where Derek and I teach these students. We get 10 a semester. They have a seminar where they come in for two hours a week that we teach in the law school. And we teach them about all disciplines of forensic science, how it goes wrong, what to do if you spot it, whether you're a prosecutor or a defense attorney, how to, if you're a prosecutor, rely on it in a way that does it justice in the name of science, right? There are certain conclusions you can draw about blood spatter. You just can't make ridiculous conclusions like saying what instrument and from what angle in the manner in which it was swung, right? So you get my point. But then they also have 10 hours a week of field work where they come to my office and do work on actual cases. So they worked on Bruce's case, as did, I have a partnership with Jay-Z and his mother. They have the Sean Carter Foundation and we have the Josh Dubin Fellows at the Sean Carter Foundation. They worked on Bruce's case and they wanted to meet Bruce. So they came in and met Bruce, some of them, and some of my students came in. I hadn't really ever seen Bruce mad, exacerbated. I'd seen him emotional, but never losing his cool. And I came in one day and when you go to visit someone in a maximum security prison, it's a real ordeal getting in. And it's really sad. You see families coming in and it's very emotional. Sometimes there's kids with them. You would think as an attorney or as law students, you might get treated a little different, but you come across the wrong CEO, the wrong corrections officer. Yeah, I don't like the way your shirt, saying to a female student is a little bit too low or you're not wearing a bra. I mean, it's kind of like, really? That's what you're saying. Take your pockets and pull them out. I want to see the bottom of your feet. You know, in any event, we're waiting to get into the visiting room and all of a sudden there's this loud crash against the door. It's behind bars. And all of a sudden there's a lockdown because an inmate punched a female visitor in the face. And it was the person that was visiting him and they were rewinding it on the surveillance as we were waiting. So the students were already like, wow, this is some crazy shit. And then we go in the visiting room after they sort of cleared that situation out after 40 minutes or so and Bruce came down. And he's as cordial as he is intelligent, which is to say he's always just super warm and comforting. And two of the students that have worked on his case for quite a while were in the visiting room with me. And he sort of like blew past them and said, I can't take it anymore. Everywhere I go, every time I see this corrections officer, he is trying to goad me. He is trying to get me to do something. And it was the closest I had seen him to tears because of the prison experience. This guy still works there? Absolutely. And it was during a major lockdown where over 200 incarcerated people, let's say, were brutalized. It was so bad that day, they locked the prison down for about a week to bring in a special search team. So when we were called for visits, what they would do was they would have an officer come to yourself, get you, handcuff you and bring you to the visiting room. I get called for a legal visit. And who decides that they want to be the officer to come and escort me? This officer, John, right? That's had a hard arm for me for some reason. He comes. So I'm like, oh man, I got a visit. Now this guy is gonna handcuff me and take me. So I can't even defend myself because the prison was locked down. And in fact, that was a major New York Times article as well. The abuse that took place at Singsing in November of last year when they locked the whole prison down. That's the case that Bruce Barquette and Epstein and Martin Luther King took on. Big article, they came into the prison, shut it down and began picking certain guys out, cracking ribs, cracking heads open, just abusing guys. So to hear this guy comes to get me, I had no idea it was you that was on the visit. But in my mind, I'm saying, I swear, I hope it's my lawyer coming to visit me, man, because this guy is taking me. So he's antagonizing me, hurry up or you won't go on your visit. And just joking at me, joking at me. So I'm handcuffed and I'm maintaining my composure. I see a sergeant down top, listen, man, get your dog off me, man. So the sergeant knew me and he tried to say something to the guy, but the guy, he listened right then and there. En route to the visiting room, he steady trying to go with me, trying to pull me out of my character. So it just became so stressful, man. That's why I came down there, I was like, man, I was so glad that it was you that came that day. But I was just glad that he didn't actually put his, because he was on the verge of putting his hands on me. If it was in a, because I was handcuffed, if it was an isolated area, he would have definitely jumped on me because it was open season in November. During that lockdown, it was open season on guys in the joint, at Sing Sing that day. For whatever reason, that special team came in and just started crushing people. And some of these guys I'm talking about are six, eight, six, nine, they're from different prisons. So they come in with their military uniforms and they're stomping. They're stomping the floor like they're doing a, like a walk, like on a military run. And they're pulling guys out to cell, man, and they're crushing them. So it was a moment for me because I had no idea how this guy was gonna respond or how I was gonna be able to defend myself. And I knew I'm on the verge of getting out. And I know what he's trying to do. So my mind was just focused on getting out, trying my best not to pay this guy no mind, but it's hard. It's hard dealing with them in those situations because they got the upper hand. And a lot of them are abusive because you can do that with them. And like you talked about power. When you can do things, knowing that there'd be no repercussions. Are you aware of the Stanford Prison Experiment? Oh, very much so. Where they took the students and they divided them into correction offices and incarcerated people. And what they did was the officers took on, a group of students took on the role of correction officers and these group of students took on the role of prisoners. And it became so intense. I don't know if you're familiar with this. It became so intense. Very much so. The group of students who were acting as a, playing the role of correction officers became so abusive based on the false sense of power that they literally had to end the study. They had to end the study, they had to stop it. But what is that? This is the part where I start. It goes back to power. Well, yeah, I know. This is the part where it gets me feeling real shitty about humanity because you see it even in TSA agents. You see it in, you know, last night we were going into a place to eat and I had the audacity to ask again, where are you order from? And the guy was working security at the door. And what a shitty attitude he gave me about it, right? Like, cause he's the bouncer. And I was like, you know, five or six years ago, I learned the strength in silence and I learned the strength in restraint because I was- You're not going to fix that guy. You don't have to respond to him. Right, right. Yeah. You're not going to fix him. He's going to be who he is. I've learned from being around people like you and you've taught me a lot about, you know, what it means to really listen. And, you know, sort of impressing upon me how important martial arts is, right? And just watching you move. You don't feel like you have to peacock your accomplishments in front of us because you have a sense of- Assilments. Yeah. Security. Yeah. Knowing who he is. Watching guys like James Prince, who is so comfortable with the silence because he doesn't need to show off. And I learned that it's the insecure among us. It's the weaker among us that will either abuse the power or pop off. And the more I exercise that restraint and, you know, resist the urge to say something back, the more gratified I feel afterwards. But what bothers me about this power thing, that's fine. I could exercise restraint. It's taken me many years and a lot of therapy to get there. A lot of introspection. But what does that say about humanity when you have a bunch of kids that are at an Ivy League school, a Stanford or an Ivy League school? I think it is. And they know they're in an experiment and they're given that taste and then they abuse it. And I see it at the airport with TSA agents. I see it, you know, if you make a kid a safety patrol in an elementary school, it just seems to be something that has to be guarded and approached a lot more, a lot more intentionally and carefully. I worked as a security guard when I was 19 at this place called Great Woods. Great Woods is in Mansfield, Massachusetts, a concert place. And almost immediately, everyone on the security team developed this attitude of us versus them. The audience, the people that were coming to the show, they were all fuckheads, they all didn't listen, you had to yell at them, you had to tell them what to do, and there was a culture of doing that. And these people behaved almost exactly the way you described in the Stanford prison experiment or you described with cops in some occasions. These people, they were terrible to these people and it was normal and I found myself doing it, like yelling at people and stuff. And you realize, like, what is this? I realized at 19, I was like, what is this weird inclination to make it us versus them? I go to concerts, I could be them. I'm the same person, I'm only 19. None of this makes any sense to me. But there was a clear, natural pattern of behavior that emerged, that it emerges in war, it emerges everywhere. It emerges whenever people have ultimate power over other people. And it's power that's not earned. That's a big part of it. To be a person that has that kind of power and influence, that is an extraordinary position to be in. And you have to be an extraordinary human being to manage that ethically and morally. And most people are not extraordinary. That's the reality. So if you're given these jobs, you have this extraordinary responsibility to people that have never developed character, they've never really developed compassion and a true empathy for other people and a true understanding of their strength, and they're always trying to puff their chest out, they're always trying to peacock. That's the worst person to ever have that position, because now they have this unqualified position of power. They didn't do anything to earn it, but they have it. And they want people to listen. If you don't fucking listen, no, you have to listen. You have to listen. That's what it is, you have to listen. I mean, is it natural or are they socialized into thinking, this is how a correction officer is supposed to act, because we've been taught that this is how he acts. We've been taught that a bouncer has to be this way, and it's tough, and he has to have this attitude of us versus them. So I'm not sure if it's a natural inclination as much as I think we're socializing to believing that. There's that, but then there's also another element. The other element is the person that's in that position of power, particularly police officers, you're dealing with an input of negativity and people lying to you and people committing crimes that's never ending. You want to talk about PTSD. I mean, guys go in combat and they come back with PTSD and we recognize it. We recognize it, we understand it. We don't think of cops that way. How many cops have PTSD? How many cops are terrified every day, every time they pull someone over? How many cops are deeply ingrained in this blue gang, this us versus them mentality? And they, you ever see the 7-5, the documentary, Michael Dowd? Yes, yes. Great documentary. You recommended it. Holy shit. It's about a super corrupt precinct in New York. Brooklyn. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's amazing. It's amazing documentary, but this guy first day on the job, witnesses someone get murdered, witnesses and they shut the fuck up. They threw a guy out a window. Like, you know, like you shut the fuck up and it's like, I guess I shut the fuck up. And like, this is what we do. Stealing money from drug dealers, like setting up hits. I mean, it was all inside the business. Maybe we have to rethink the way we teach people because I think that, I think it's a combination of what both of you, I think it's innate, unfortunately, in human beings because one- But not with everybody. It's innate with people that get unqualified power. Well, look, maybe there needs to be, there needs to be, not maybe, there needs to be better training of law enforcement, for sure, because they need to be desensitized or sensitized, you know, whatever their background is, needs to be taken into consideration. But I couldn't agree with you more. You know, I can't stand when people that are so far left start talking categorically about police officers. What a fucking hard job. And of course there's great cops out. I mean, you know, so I, look, I went through it myself recently, teaching. I had done one-offs before, but I'd never taught consistently. And I'm looking at these young future lawyers and they look up to you just because you're the professor. And I had this moment, and it took a lot of work for me and a lot of therapy and deep introspection and a particularly humbling experience for me to really take a long, hard look and say, who are you, Josh? And who do you want to be? I had always equated vulnerability with weakness, probably my whole life. And I, you know, there's issues tied up with my father and all kinds of shit that sort of led me that way, to thinking that way. And I don't know if I told you this, Bruce, but I had a moment with you actually in public where I had to fight the urge. My instinct told me, don't do this. And then my sort of, my new project, project of sort of reinventing myself and how I think and sort of having this as close to an awakening as I could have, sort of won the day for me and said, it's okay. I had Bruce come to my class at Cardozo Law School and teach four days after he got out. I wanted him to, the students to see the fruits of their labor, because some of them hadn't met him yet. And he came to my class and, you know, like the faculty was cheering when he came in. It was a really a beautiful moment. And he came and sat in front of a group of lawyers. Jamie, I think I sent you a picture of this also. This is an extraordinary moment for me. I sat next to him and I was so overcome with emotion. And I was like, I bit a hole on my bottom lip because I was trying to fight this feeling of guilt that I had for letting this man sit there for four years. And I didn't write him back. And I had never addressed it with him. And I, I apologized to him in front of the class. And I just started weeping. And I felt so good that I allowed myself to be vulnerable in front of these students. And I gotta tell you, I felt a shift in the way they looked at me from that moment. I wanted them to know that it was okay to be vulnerable. And that just because I have a quote unquote position of power that they need not look at me as being on some sort of pedestal. I started sitting sometimes in class so I could be at eye level with them because I read a lot about, you know, being a young father, how sometimes just getting on a knee and being at eye level with an adolescent, changes the dynamic when you are trying to teach them or discipline them. And it was, you know, it was like a great moment. I felt more like a man in that moment, more like a man, a strong man in that moment than I have, you know, many other times in my life when I thought I was being cool or really filling some insecure void in me. Yeah. You know, and that's something that I've learned dealing with guys like Derek, Bruce, a lot of other exonerees. This is a big strong man, right? And he's one of the more vulnerable people I've met. Authentic, allows himself to cry when the feelings come over him. I've seen you do it, you know, it's the strong and secure among us that I think you're, this is a long way of saying I agree with you, that I think if we teach our kids more, that just because someone is in a position of power, doesn't make them better or more commanding. And if you were ever put in that position of power, you remember what it's like to be on the other side of it. I really go to great lengths to try to do that with my children, with my students. Am I perfect at it? No way. I'm trying though. And maybe, you know, the more we do that with, how great is it when a police officer helps you? You know, it feels great. I had some help with the ATM card, remember, on my first day coming and taking the train. Right. You came over and said, you need some help with that buddy. I said, yeah. And you had every reason not to want to trust him. Of course. It wasn't, it was your MTA card to get on the subway. Because when he was, before he was in, there was no NBA cards or a token. Yeah. It's hard, it's hard to get your shit together and there's no guidebook. It's why, it's why one of the things, before I came home, one of the things that Josh said to me, he says, what's the one thing that I can do for you, that I can help you with? And I thought about it and I said, the most important thing is therapy. I need a therapist because like you said, PTSD, right? The trauma that we experience from being kidnapped for 20 something years. The trauma that you experience from being behind prison walls and being dehumanized and being labeled the number for decades, as opposed to being a human, right? See, it's easy to dehumanize. First they dehumanize you, right? And they take that from you and then you begin to internalize that in a few of this way about yourself. Feel like you're less than. So I asked Josh, I said therapy and I think that kind of surprises you when I said that. It did. It surprised me in that, it surprised me and it didn't. I think, Bruce is like a highly evolved person for the, especially considering the circumstances, but your emotional intelligence, is such that it shouldn't have surprised me as much as it did, but it's very rare for me, just in my own experience for people to get exonerated or serve long prison sentences to recognize that they need that. I mean, for me, it's had such a profound impact on my life to have a person to speak to that understands how the human mind works and what human psychology is. Some people don't believe in therapy. I'm a strong believer. And if you get the right therapist and you're willing to take that journey, I feel like it's like going to the gym for your mind, like the feeling that you get after you go to the gym and you feel like that release of endorphins and whatever else gets released, which I'm sure Joe knows way better than I do, but I just feel that way from my mind and being able to trace back sort of like where my trauma comes from. And we all have traumas, human beings. It surprised me, but it didn't. I'm grateful that you entrusted me to help you with it. And I think that more people that, we read these stories about the wrongfully incarcerated and they seem like feel good stories, right? But the sad truth is that the vast majority of my clients that get out struggle terribly when they get out. There's just no way to undo the psychological and psychiatric damage. You could hope to keep it in check, but the vast majority of them struggle really terribly with PTSD, social anxiety, general anxiety, difficulty sleeping, difficulty trusting, and a whole litany of issues. That was why it was so great to see you just out last night smiling and you had a couple of- That's the top of the line comedian. Them guys deserve to have their own show. Them guys are funny, man. That was good, man. But at least I didn't ask you what the guy says, oh, you gotta take him to a strip club. The average guy that comes out here normally says, what's the first thing they ask for? Man, you gotta take me to a strip joint, man. Yeah, it was like, well, the person will remain nameless, but I was like, nah, I was like, actually- That sounds like Tony Hinchliffe. I'm not gonna say who it was. But I was like, actually, nah, not only do I not wanna go there, because I find them to be sad places with girls that probably have a lot of trauma, but more importantly, he doesn't wanna go there. And he was explaining to me, it was interesting, he had dinner with someone that had gotten out recently, and he said, this guy reeked of the penitentiary. And I don't wanna give off that vibe. I have a second chance to reinvent myself. And I just think it just speaks volumes about him, not that he should be like, applauded for not wanting to go to a strip club right when he gets out. Some people wanna do that, and that's cool. I don't begrudge that much. They gotta make their dollars too. Yeah. They gotta make their dollars too. Also, you're still on this path of improvement. Yes. You're out, but now you're on a more free path of improvement, and why divert that? Yes, right. And like I said, I made a decision that prison wasn't gonna define who I was, nor what I can become. So once you begin that process and you say, I wanna take this particular path, you gotta go all the way with it. And I'm with them guys, once I'm in, I'm in. I'm going all the way with it. Because once you begin to really reflect and you become aware of how you've been duped by the system, and how the system was designed to continue to do that, and to create this permanent underclass, because that's what it does, right? It creates a permanent underclass. So you got a group of formerly incarcerated guys who, many of them still dealing with this. Next year, they can't really, can't get educated. Many of them are still dealing with barriers towards getting a decent job. A lot of them can't go back to the housing projects, because if you're convicted from projects, oftentimes they won't even allow you back there to live, to reside there. Really? Yeah. So now you have to find housing somewhere, and you're limited to a menial job with a lack of education. Do you know Jelly Roll? You know, the musician Jelly Roll? No. Fantastic guy. Got arrested for armed robbery when he was 15. Wound up doing time, gets out, turns his life around, becomes this mega huge artist. I mean, he just won. He does, like some of his music is country, some of his music is hip hop. It's like country hip hop. It's all kinds of, his voice is sensational. And he's such a good dude, such a good dude. I'm just an assault of the earth person. He couldn't buy this house that he wanted. I mean, this is a guy who won three country music awards just this year. He came, it was in Austin. He came to the mothership that night on cloud nine, because he wins these awards, comes to see Ron White, and then finds out that this house that he thought he was buying, he can't buy now, because he's a felon. Are you serious? They won't let him in the community. It's a gated community on a golf course, his beautiful house, his dream house. This guy's been out for a long time. He's been a productive member of society, not just productive, but he's a massive celebrity and a great guy. You'd want him as your neighbor. Yeah, it breaks my heart to hear stuff like that. And he was convicted at 15, huh? At 15. He's a grown ass man. And it wasn't him carrying the gun with somebody else. He was there. The whole thing was a disaster, hanging out with the wrong kids, young and dumb, not raised well. It tells the story about his childhood. It's horrific. He's a guy who pulled himself out, and there's people that still don't want to believe, just meet the guy. Just go meet. And he's got tattoos all over his face. People get weirded out by him. Just go listen to this motherfucker's voice. Is he singing in this? [\"I'm a Guy Boss\"] This is the Ryman, right? He's playing in Nashville at the fucking Grand Ole Opry. The man is amazing. Get it, Jelly Roll. I love it. But a great guy. I'm a big boy. Like, you would want him in your community. So this is underscoring the point that we made earlier, right? It should not take being wrongfully incarcerated for Bruce Bryan to realize his potential. It shouldn't take wrongful incarceration for Derek Hamilton and the scores of other people that realize their potential. There should be opportunities as their children. Right. They give people a path and they learn during that path that it feels good to improve and grow. That is like the most important thing you can teach a child. That you want to, if you want to be lost, don't do anything. If you want to be depressed, don't do anything. That's right. But if you find something that you really love and you do it and you pursue it and you get better at things, you get better at being a person, you get better at all things. And there's a great value in that and it's difficult. And it has to be difficult. Because if you don't struggle, you don't grow. And no one teaches people that. No one teaches kids that. No one teaches that there's a beneficial kind of struggle. That's right. And you have to become disciplined and you have to have a mindset of improvement and you have to understand that you are very blessed to be a human being that's existing in this incredible time. 2023 and you live in America. Go get it. And somebody needs to guide people. They need to be there. You need like real mentorship. You need hope. You need a place where someone can go when shit's fucked. You need like real guidance. It can be done. It can be done. Look, I have. It's like my mom was my hero in ways in which mothers can be heroes to kids. But for me it was something additional. We go into the community. She was a fourth grade teacher and she taught kids that had, you know, special needs. You know, learning disabilities. And we would run into her former students and they'd come up to her with a tear in their eye or give her a hug and a kiss and say, they called her Doobie. All her kids called, you know, my last name can be Doobie. Doobie, Doobie. People used to play with it a lot. With my mom, it was, you know, all her students called Doobie. You saved my, you know, you changed my life. And so I always have had deep reverence for teachers. And I had this experience with my son where I think he was in kindergarten or he might've been in like pre-K. And here I am a civil rights attorney. And I remember him coming home in pre-K, you're like four. And he's telling me about Martin Luther King getting killed. And I remember thinking to myself, that's God, that's so young for him to be learning about death. And isn't this too young? And I had a great rapport with his teacher, this really awesome guy named Olu Bala. It's still at the elementary school where my son went. And I went and spoke to him about it. And he pulled me down the hall. And he said, listen, I've been watching the way African American men have been treated my whole life. You know, he's an African American man. And he said, and the only way I know how to try to write this is to help create different human beings. You know, a different kind of human beings that understands empathy young. And then I read the book that they were reading and it was so fucking appropriate. And I felt really idiotic in that moment because everything, the way that he articulated it to me was, you know, I want them to understand now that difference is beautiful and to be celebrated just as I know you teach them at home. And that stuck with me. I mean, my son's 11 now, this is, you know, seven years ago and it stuck with me. And every time I see him and he said to me sometimes, he didn't know what I did at that time. Every time I see him, I say, man, I'll never forget what you said to me. It really like changed my perspective on how important it is to teach our kids at a young age that difference is good. And it means strength to be vulnerable and that power is not something to be abused. It is something to be treated, you know, with the intention to help other people. To provide a service. Right. So yeah, there's something that we can all do. Having children and bringing a human being into the world is a, that should be like such a sacred thing. You know, so I feel like I get, you know, my advice that I get on parenting is from people that are sometimes younger than me, but had kids earlier, you know, like some of the best parenting advice I got was from Andre Ward. He's 10 years younger than me, but he had teenage kids when my kids were babies. And I just loved to watch him as a father. But it's another good example. That's a guy who's gone through the fire, right? This is a guy's developed character. Through struggle and through accomplishment. And that's why he's that guy. And sports is one of the great ways to do that, especially combat sports. The problem is there's also the downsides of it, the people that don't make it, the people that get brain damaged, the people that get fucked up. There's that too, that's real. You know, it's not a fucking 100% path if you choose combat sports. But if you do choose combat sports and you become an Andre Ward, that's an exceptional human being. That's a guy with one world titles with one arm. Yeah, not only that, but, was from the worst possible situation and the worst circumstances with parents that had real struggles. A biracial kid that was like sometimes very confused about where he fit in. And that's why I like to surround myself with people like him because he's just, he's a beautiful parent, he's a beautiful husband, and he does so many great things. Even his response when Canelo knocked out Kovalev and they offer him a big money fight with Canelo while he's still in his athletic prime. He says, I think I serve boxing better as a commentator. This is a guy who, they'll probably throw millions of dollars out of him, millions and millions of dollars. Many, many, many, many, many, many, many. Probably the biggest payday of his career. And he's like, you know what, I think I did it. I'm done, I won gold medal in the Olympics. I won two division world champion. That's it, undefeated, that's it. Takes a lot of- That's an incredible character. It's a guy that's grounded, man. But there's no growth without pain. Growth comes with pain. Comes with trouble. And that's been anything. They tell you that in physical condition, right? No pain, no gain. You gotta rip that muscle when you're living that steel. You can't think you gotta live an easy life. And that life's gonna be exemplary. It's not going to be. See, my question for you, Bruce, is, having been out three and a half weeks, four weeks, are you feeling overwhelmed? Not at all. I'm feeling good, I'm feeling great. I'm here with you and Joe Hogan. We just had a comedy night last night. I got a good man. Last night if anybody met you, they would have never guessed in a million years. You just look like a dude who's seen his friend, haven't seen your friend a while, out having a good time, big smiles all around. Nobody would have guessed. Three and a half weeks ago, you were incarcerated. No one. The way you handle yourself is incredible. I appreciate that, man. It's incredible. The lack of bitterness, just the sheer joy that you have, just interacting with people. Mm-hmm. You know, it's amazing. Life is about relationships, man. If I can sum it up in one word, it would be quality relationships. And that's what life is about. And you can't build those relationships being bitter. Bitterness only consumes you. Yeah. Right? You know, there's a study that came out recently. I won't, I'll get it wrong if I try to attribute a source. But there was a study that came out recently about longevity and happiness. Who lives the longest and who lives the happiest lives. And it's the people that have close personal relationships. Right? Have you read about this? Yeah. And yeah, that's hit home for me, you know, lately more than anything is that having a few good quality people around you, it just makes you, it propels you forward. People that are happy for your success, that propels you forward, not looking to, you know, tear you down. Which brings us back to these communities that have been just immersed in violence and crime forever. You know, there was a guy we had on way back in the day who was a cop in Baltimore. And one of the things they found while he was on the job was a docket, was a list of crimes that were committed in like 1976. It was all the same crimes in all the same areas. And this just like feeling of futility, just like this feeling of wash, like what are we doing? Like what is this? This is insane. Like this is not fixing anything. This is not, you're not making it better. Malcolm Gladwell wrote about that in one of his books. I don't know if it was Outliers or one of his books about that. It might have been David and Goliath. Yeah, maybe it was that. And he talked about Baltimore specifically, about how, it's the same point you made earlier, that the vast majority of the prison population in New York comes from the same seven neighborhoods. So we know what the problem is. Look, maybe the best thing to come out of today for me personally, is the fact that in times where I feel like, is it enough? It is enough. This show is enough. I mean, doing this work brings you into a community of people. You know, and I would encourage folks listening to this that get sort of like intimidated or like, I don't know anything about that. You'll find a community of just great people. That's right. That wanna help. Like there's this photographer named Rick Winter, who is a super well regarded famous dude. He's taken these iconic portraits of like Christopher Walken and a whole bunch of other celebrities. And you know, my wife somehow, you know, was referred to him to take headshots of Derek and I for the opening of our center. And his style is that he gets to know you and talk to you as he's photographing you. And he was so moved by the work and just meeting, I think it was really meeting Derek, right? That, you know, he kept in touch with me and said, I have this great idea for a project that I wanna do. As you get people out, when you find out you're gonna get them out, I'd like to go interview them in prison and then capture sort of the contrast between them being inside and then them getting out. So it seemed pretty ambitious to me because most prisons aren't letting some photographer in with a film crew to film people. And he was super persistent. And you could see like how inspired he was to do it. And his agent told me, you know, I've never seen him this dedicated to something. And you speak to the guy and he's sort of infectious in his humility, you know, there's something special about him. So I floated the idea to Bruce and Bruce was like, yeah, let me meet him. So he's now embarked on creating a documentary about Bruce and our first three releases. So he sent me a trailer to this documentary that he's working on with Bruce. And I think it's a good sort of summary of what we've been talking about. Would you mind if I showed? I don't know if you're familiar with the parabola. The dandelion and the wild orchard. Well, the wild orchard, it only thrives and grows in a particular environment, right? A dandelion can thrive in just about any environment. So sometimes there's snow outside and the snow melt and you see a dandelion just coming through the grass or the crack in the concrete, right? So I decided that, you know, I had to be that dandelion. I was gonna thrive despite where I was at. When they took him, they took me. I get him back. Whether you're guilty or not, you still wanna honor the potential of that life that was lost. Despite being not guilty, incarceration was always in some way trying to honor the potential of Travis. Gotta be there to support him no matter what. He deserves everything that's gonna be coming to him. You think I'm walking? I'm waiting for you to walk. I wanna talk. Hugging my sisters and brothers, hugging my mother and seeing my mother is gonna be the joy of my life. And seeing them is gonna be the joy of my life, right? Mommy! Mommy! He said anytime from school, he had mommy. Hi, baby. How you doing? Hey. Man, I can't even describe it. I'm excited. I feel the love and the support that I'm just, free. No cuff zone, I feel free. I felt like a load was lifted off of my shoulder. Like, I can relax now. I realized that a lot of times I've been tense. My shoulders are up, but they just were able to just drop down. Without me even acknowledging it or realizing it, it just dropped down and I was just so happy to see how my mother went. So yes, I have tremendous regrets. The course of my life, I've learned that. I can have those regrets and still love what I see when I look in the mirror, because I've done the work to become better than I was yesterday. I'm still able to live and do and be better and more than I was before. So I accept my regrets and I still love what I see when I look in the mirror and I try to just live these days better and do better, right? Because if you want more, you got to be more. Just those quotes right there are so powerful. Whoo, that's a tear check. It's amazing. So this is the trailer, and when will this whole thing come out when you see it? It's a work in progress. For those of you that wanna help, look, there's a GoFundMe for Bruce Bryant. It's interesting, you saw the T disappear at the end. I always knew him as Bruce Bryant with a T at the end. That's not his name, that was the name the prison gave him. They added a T. That was why it disappears at the end. So there is no more Bruce Bryant. That was the prison version of him. He has an Instagram, it's at bruce.bryant24. On his Instagram, we will have a link to his GoFundMe. He has any little bit of help. Bruce is trying to get back on his feet. There's his GoFundMe. So, and for those of you that wanna get involved in any way, I try to answer as many of your messages as I can. I have a lot more help now because we have the center. But whether it's writing to the district attorney of Alameda County, Pamela Price, reaching out to Bruce and making a donation on his GoFundMe page, even just dropping him a nice line. So many of the people that were there the day he got released, it's almost like hanging around with you where you never know if there's gonna be someone interesting hanging around. We were talking to one of the comedians last then. He's like, I'll be hanging out with someone and not know that they mapped the human genome or. You know. That's right, that's right. Yeah, and I bring some weird people that agree. And it was the same thing like on the day of Bruce's release. I would see these people and say, how do you know Bruce? Oh, he reached out to me because he saw.