Dan Thayer, a former death row inmate, details his journey from a violent youth in New Jersey to a transformative prison experience where he studied sociopaths like cannibal Lurch and questioned the Jeffrey Epstein autopsy. He critiques the "devouring mother" dynamic that traps families in addiction cycles and advocates for nonviolent spirituality over rigid rules. Thayer shares his near-death revelation that ego creates separation, urging listeners to embrace humility, seek mentors, and recognize that true help requires confronting destructive patterns rather than enabling them for others' approval. [Automatically generated summary]
Transcriber: CohereLabs/cohere-transcribe-03-2026, WAV2VEC2_ASR_BASE_960H, sat-12l-sm, script v26.04.01, and large-v3-turbo
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Evacuation After Irma00:06:04
All right, Dan.
Welcome, man.
Thank you for doing this.
Hey, thanks for having me.
You live in Naples, right?
Yeah.
Yeah.
What's it been like down there since the hurricane hit?
What was that, two weeks ago?
Yeah.
Yeah.
It's, you know, it's funny right now in East Naples, we're doing all this cleanup.
We're doing a lot of stripping houses out, getting all the water out and stuff like that.
But down in Gulf Shore, which is the, you know, more richer part, I seen it today.
It was a wreck.
And yesterday, yeah.
Yeah.
I was down there working, and they're not so quick to clean it up.
It's almost like they're cleaning the poorer parts up first this time.
And that's the first time that's ever happened.
All I see is the obviously like the pictures and videos on social media and stuff like that.
And I saw like one bridge was completely demolished and then there was like houses that were captivated.
Captiva, all that down there is Sanibel.
My buddy's got a bunch of stores down there.
They're all wiped out.
He was flying around in the helicopter taking pictures.
I got a bunch of pictures of it, but the whole causeway is knocked out, you know?
So what was it like driving up here?
Um, for people that are listening, nothing on 75 that I seen, yeah, but go ahead.
So, yeah, I was gonna say, people that are listening, Dan lives in Naples, which is we're in St. Pete right now, so he lives what you live like three hours directly south of us, yeah, which is almost exactly where Hurricane Ian made landfall, yeah, yeah.
Fort Myers, where it came in, and uh, we got hit with the flooding real bad, like quick.
My sister and uh, my nephew got wiped out completely, there's like five feet of water in their place in no time, like they were calling me saying, Come over, we got power, and I'm down, down Naples, I'm right on the beach.
It didn't hit around my place, but the water came in and it came up the whole East Trail was just like all those houses flooded, all those first floor houses.
Five feet of water in like two minutes.
It's so crazy how, depending on which side of the storm you're on, because of the counterclockwise rotation, if you're south of the storm when it hits land, you're going to get flooded.
We were north of the storm when it hit, so all the water got sucked out of the bay.
Sucked out, dropped on us.
It was the opposite.
Crazy, man.
That's how Irma hit me and the guy we were just talking about earlier.
We were on Gulf Shore and the surge came in and it died right down because of a cold front.
And it just came in five feet real quick, but it went right back out.
But before that water came in, the Gulf went out a mile.
You can walk like a mile out.
Yeah.
And he got caught on a newscast or whatever.
He was down there and he was just walking around looking at the muck of all the Gulf being dried out.
It was a good mile out.
You can walk out and the TV reporter says to him, Hey, is low tide usually like this?
He goes, That ain't low tide.
He goes, I don't know what's going on, but you can never walk that far out on dry land, you know?
I mean, muck, like, you know, sand all pulled back with the water.
Irma was one of the craziest storms I've ever been through around here.
Yeah.
We were terrified to hear, like, what was going to happen.
Everyone was, and then, you know, it turned the last minute, I feel like.
Yeah.
And when, and because it was supposed to hit Tampa directly, and it was lit maybe a couple hours before it just made a random turn right and went right.
There were three factors that happened.
We would have all been wiped out.
Like three, you know, just flukes, a cold front, some other thing.
But it just made it to where it changed the whole dynamic just enough for us not to get wiped out, you know.
And this time we got hardly any warning.
We thought it was going to hit Tampa or Fort Myers, you know, north of Fort Myers.
They said it was coming in, but we didn't expect that surge, you know.
I didn't see it.
I don't watch the news, though.
That's my fault.
But, um, yeah, the news does everything they can just to fear monger, yeah, sell ads, yeah, and it's never accurate.
I mean, if, yeah, it's never what they say, and if they do get lucky every now and then, it's, uh, you know, you can just get just as lucky guessing.
So, the worst thing that happened to you with Ian was you just got like five feet of flooding real quick, yeah, I lost a couple trucks, but yeah, nobody got hurt, pulled some people out of floods, and you know, stuff, some people were stuck down there.
And, uh, so what is it you do?
What, like, what were you doing?
I have a moving company, okay, yeah, and then I have a, I, Semi demo company, too.
I was doing that first because when I came out of corrections or whatever, being locked up so long, I really didn't have any legal ways to make money.
So I just started picking stuff up and putting it down, like the big muscle guy or whatever.
I could pick anything up and put it down.
So I started doing that and it just started making more and more money.
And people just kept using me.
So, what were you doing to help people after the hurricane?
You're just like helping people get out of their houses, get out of the floods.
Yeah, yeah.
Some of them were okay with.
Drinking and hanging out there, but they were really die, yeah.
They were gonna die, yeah.
They would have died, and then you know, my sister, it looked like a bunch of refugees running up to my car, really.
Yeah, I mean, like you're talking water, and one guy went to the hospital with like a bacterial infection from it, yeah.
He had like a bum leg, or yeah.
And we're cleaning his place out now, and he's just a mess, but uh, serious burning, he couldn't stop burning, and uh, so finally he goes to the hospital, and and yeah, he's got some serious infection from that muck, or what do they call that, brackish waters.
Yeah, yeah, man.
I mean, fuck, they got really fucked up in that one area, but I keep thinking, like, how much, how many more bullets are we going to be able to dodge?
Like, especially right here in St. Pete, you guys in Naples, like, you can be just a couple, like, 10 to 20 miles away and get away from kind of like the worst parts of it.
Right.
When you see like the photos and videos of like the worst parts of Irma or the worst parts of like even Hurricane Andrew, like, there's whole entire neighborhoods that got just.
Demoed, flattened, totaled.
Probable Cause Arrests00:07:44
We were in a brand new prison when Andrew hit, and it was brand new and now it's condemned.
But in Miami?
Yeah.
Yeah, South Florida.
Down, you know, so we got evacuated.
We got sent to Lake Butler, which is not that far from here, I think.
We were in the reception center there at that time when Hurricane Andrew was coming, and that place was wiped out.
I mean, Miami was a wreck, homestead and all that.
All right.
Yeah.
Yeah, dude.
It was totaled.
Yeah.
I heard you talking to, uh, Matt on the other podcast about how they keep you kind of safe.
Yeah, he was saying that they're like the safest places to be.
Yeah.
Unless you're getting flooded.
Yeah, unless you're getting flooded and they ship whole.
That happened to us too.
We got evacuated.
Did they put you guys on Conair?
Nah, nah, nah.
You know, the funny thing is, though, I was indicted on some charges I didn't do, and they put me on this bus in Clayton County, Missouri, and I was wanted down in South Florida for triple homicide and an armed robbery.
I didn't do it, but they did.
They swore I did it and they had people saying I did it.
But anyway, I was running and they get me, and I'm in the fugitive block on the eighth floor in Clayton County Jail.
And they come get me and they lock me up.
I look like Silence of the Lambs walking down the street.
And I get on the bus, and this bus, when you said the Con Air thing, that's what they showed.
They showed Con Air lockup.
They had like a Greyhound that was restored into a prison bus.
And we're on this thing for like weeks, and I'm traveling.
I ended up in Cook County in Chicago, all these places.
I'm sitting next to this guy, and I go, Is everybody on here wanted for murder and armed robbery?
And he goes, I'm wanted for child support.
And I was like, What?
He gets up, walks away from me, you know?
And, you know, I get down to Naples, and this is a long time ago, but my daughter lives in Missouri.
And so I was going up there trying to, you know, at the time she was still a kid.
So I got, you know, trying to do legit, trying to do the right thing.
I get picked up.
It's like, you know, 500 cops hit on me.
You know, they hit me at the place I'm working.
And they bring me back down.
Like a month later, I get back to Naples.
And I couldn't believe the whole ride.
And they take you to all these county jails to park you overnight or, you know, after so much driving, they have to stop at a county jail.
Process you, go to the county jail.
Yeah, you kind of sit in, you know, no man's land and you don't get fully processed there because you're not staying.
But so I go to all these different county jails.
I get back to Naples.
And, but the whole way, what was funny was they're showing all these breakout movies, like everything.
Like they're trying to give you ideas or something, you know.
They got, you ever see the Sylvester Stallone lockup or, oh, yeah, they're in and out breaking out of prison, Conair, you know.
And it was like, I was like, what are they trying to do here?
They're trying to encourage you to, you know, try some stupid, you know, escape move because you're, you know, I wonder why they do that.
I don't, I don't know the people.
They must have been minimum wage workers that were driving these things because there was a guy and a girl, they were fighting with each other.
And it was, it was like, this is what we got here.
And, uh, It was just, I don't know.
So, you got actually charged with this homicide?
Yeah, I got.
Well, yeah, I was.
Well, what they do is they get probable cause.
They lock you up.
And I don't know if they do this everywhere, but in Florida, they lock me up a lot first and found out if I was guilty later.
And so, this is what happened to me.
They had enough people saying they witnessed me being there or me being around there or whatever.
And.
They had enough probable cause to arrest me and indict me on it.
They didn't have enough to get me because of an armed robbery, which I did do.
I robbed this drug dealer.
I didn't know you could get arrested for that.
So I robbed this guy, and he's not a very nice person.
So I didn't have a problem with it.
And at the time, and I took his stuff, and he called the cops on me and told them, and so I couldn't believe it.
But so I get there, and they're like, look, if you give us a three lie detector test, Do a hair and blood sample.
They took a hair and a swab and prove you didn't do these murders and we'll let you go on this armed robbery, which I know I did do and I could have got screwed.
Right there, they could have got me for 40 years or something.
And I already had a priors and everything else.
So I was like, sure, you know, let me get my lawyer down here.
And, you know, I couldn't afford a lawyer on these charges, but I had a friend that was a lawyer and he's always looked out for me.
So he came down and made it all official.
I only failed one question.
It had nothing to do with this, but they slid it in there and, uh, It wasn't, you know, it was a very generic, didn't make me look too good, but I beat the whole thing.
So I ended up walking out on that.
And that's happened quite a bit.
Like, I think, I don't think they do very good police work.
You know what I mean?
I think they do a lot of, you know, they got like a force there and they don't have a lot of people looking into stuff.
So they just kind of lock up who they think did it and hope they tell on themselves.
Yeah.
Somebody tells on you or something.
It's getting better now.
Like, the more it was very.
In the dark ages down there when I first moved there, like 30 something years ago, and I got in so much trouble so quick.
But, uh, yeah.
So let's, uh, let people know like how this whole journey started for you.
You, uh, I believe the story is you got sentenced to five years of prison at the age of 15.
Is that right?
Yeah.
Yeah.
My first.
How did that happen?
Um, I got into a fight with a cop and, um, I was coming out of, uh, you know, someone's house at late at night, kind of snuck out of her house and I was walking home and, um, they said I was, they rolled up on me and said I was loitering and prowling.
And I said, I, you know, I don't know what that is, but I'm going home.
So, this is the quickest route to my house.
You know, I live here.
She lives here.
They wanted to call, and her dad was, you know, Spanish and wasn't going to understand nothing.
He's just going to know I was there late at night.
So, I just said, ah, well, it's none of your business.
I'm going home.
And I walked away.
And he horse called me, like, pulled my shirt back, like, by my neck real hard.
And I wasn't really thinking.
I just kind of spun and hit him, and I cracked his jaw.
And yeah, I ended up having to pay his hospital bills and everything.
You got some hammers for fists.
Yeah.
I would not want to get hit by one of them.
Nah.
And I boxed a little bit and I was just quick with my hand.
I've always been real quick.
I don't look quick because I'm huge, but I've just always been real quick.
My dad was quick and it's just genetic or whatever.
So I got in more trouble than I signed up for.
And so I just ran.
I took off home.
They were at my house.
They came deep, you know, and then the judge kind of made a, at the time, single.
Single moms with their kids was not really something they wanted down there in Naples, Florida.
And not to make excuses, you hit a cop, you should go to jail.
But I kind of got made an example out of, you know, I was a big kid, about 315 pounds at that time, six, four in my ninth grade year.
And so, you know, the judge didn't have any kind of, you know, I just told the truth.
I said, look, this was a fight, and, you know, I know I'm wrong, but we can work this out.
Prison Life in the 90s00:03:24
And he's like, yeah.
Five and a half years.
Good luck, son.
He set me on my way, and that was it.
And it seems insane, even for punching a cop.
Right.
I understand it's way worse if you're assaulting a police officer, but just like a punch.
Yeah, yeah.
They're very strict about that down there.
Like, you can't even get in a fist fight without catching a battery charge.
Like, that's probably normal now.
But where I grew up in Jersey, I mean, a fist fight, you know, it was just a fight.
Even if a cop challenged you in a fight, and, you know, and they said, you know, I'll put the gun down, put the badge down, they fight you.
It was, it was total different.
Thing where I was from than right where I moved into that's wild, yeah, yeah, it's pretty wild.
By the time I what town are you from, uh, originally, yeah, uh, well, I was born in Camden and then I was raised in Newark, in Jersey, right, yeah.
And then I moved to Florida though when I was 14, I think I had like one good year there and then I went to prison, yeah, one all right year.
I did good in sports, but I couldn't concentrate in high school, sports was the only outlet I had.
So, this is an interesting question.
In your, if you could summarize it, what is the difference between Jersey and Florida?
Oh, man.
If I could summarize it, well, not all of Florida, but.
Not necessarily like the geography or the nature, but the people.
The people.
Yeah, that's what I was going to say.
What is the difference in the people?
I found my kind of people that I grew up with, that I'm comfortable with in Miami, like inner cities.
And I found that this is a nice place to live if you know how to live there.
Naples or St. Pete, I don't.
St. Pete actually has got a rough.
Yeah.
A lot of people don't know about it here, but I was caught up here one time at a concert or whatever.
One dude got slammed on his head, another guy got shot.
I mean, this place gets off the chain.
South St. Pete is pretty nice.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Another friend of mine got stabbed at a Cannibal Corpse concert.
They stabbed him in the lung.
Yeah.
What?
Yeah, my buddy stabbed him.
A Cannibal Corpse concert?
Yeah, he was just moshing, and next thing you know, somebody stuck him.
I've been to a few Cannibal Corpse concerts.
Yeah, yeah, they get off the chain.
But, But a lot of people think, oh, Tampa, St. Pete's, nice area.
Same thing with Naples and Fort Myers.
Well, we got tons of unresolved murders and tons of them that they just don't publicize.
And I don't know, maybe I shouldn't say that because it's nice there, but that's the truth.
You know what I mean?
And they just don't, because what do they call that?
Tourists.
Yeah, tourists.
Yeah, they don't freak everybody out.
Miami, too.
Miami's off the chain.
I mean, Miami's not even really Florida.
Nah, Miami's a whole different country.
Yeah, it's a whole different world.
I lived there for a couple of years, too, but.
Not one good day.
Not one.
I mean, I had great days, but not one productive.
Miami to me is like Vegas.
Like the best two days there, the day you get there and the day you leave.
Yeah.
Now it is.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I had a lot of good times.
I had some good Cubans that were good friends of mine to this day, or, you know, the ones that are alive, but they were thorough people, you know.
What years were you living in Miami?
Oh, see, in the 90s, mid 90s, 96.
All that time was kind of a blur.
Trauma and Miami Memories00:04:53
I was out of my mind.
Yeah.
Yeah.
The early 90s.
I've heard, I've seen some documentaries about Miami in the 90s and the 80s.
Yeah.
I was in prison there in the 90s, early 90s.
And all those guys are coming in there from the worst to the, you know, it's just from the worst parts of society, you know.
So what was your early childhood like in New Jersey and how did that shape you?
That's a good question.
So I reacted.
It was about eight years old when I identified a lot of pressure to, um, To live up to something.
You know what I mean?
I felt like there was a lot of pressure.
I had to live up to something.
I didn't know what it was, you know, and nobody gave me direction or.
What were your parents like?
Both good people.
My dad was a chemist, always working.
My mother was always cooking.
You know, she had a place in Montclair called the Gourmet Pantry.
And, you know, good parents, but no real time with four kids to like.
And we had a lot of like.
Other kids living in our home too, because my mom would take in any, you know, sad case or anything like that.
So everybody just kind of assumed I should know what I'm doing, and I had to act like I knew what I was doing.
I felt like I did.
I didn't know how to say 104.
So, yeah, 104.
I'm the third born, I guess.
Second, my little brother is the baby, and he's like 44 now.
But yeah, I always kind of had to know what I was doing.
And I had no clue.
Like, really, I was a slow learner.
I didn't get nothing.
Like, I didn't understand nothing.
People gave me, like, my mother, one time when I came in drunk, I fell through the door and I was a young kid.
I was trying to impress this girl.
Ended up puking in her face and she ended up helping me to the door and I fell down.
And she's like, You're just like your father.
And I was like, Oh, cool.
I like my dad.
He said, Good, too.
It went right over my head.
Like, and you would think I was some sarcastic, you know, but really, I meant it.
At the time, I didn't know nothing, you know.
That's funny.
Yeah.
And nobody taught me nothing.
Like I had to learn all this stuff.
All those years in prison, I read a lot and tried to figure things out.
But there was no real, you know, there were people that tried to talk to me.
Like they had me go to a shrink and an anger management school when I was a kid in Wayne, New Jersey.
I threw a chair and hit this teacher because she humiliated me.
And I just whipped the chair and I hit her.
I didn't mean to hit her.
I was just angry.
And so they sent me to an anger management school.
And Bobby Ches used to come there and they had this goat and they taught me how to box.
So now I'm an angry kid who can fight real shit.
So it was just, you know, it just got worse and worse.
They'd sent me to a therapist.
And when I got to the therapist, it was so calm there.
He'd have me punch in a heavy bag.
I was like, Yeah, I'm good, you know.
And then when I had to go to my house, it was like sometimes people be breaking in the window, some weird person will be sleeping in my room.
You know, there was nothing but like trauma going on around me.
Somebody's trying to steal a car, you know, they were big on stealing cars there.
And uh, you know, you don't know somebody's gonna come in and cut your throat, you feel like you just feel a fear.
And uh, and and so you know, when I got to these places that I could have got help if I knew how to be honest about, because they'd say, How are you doing right now?
Right now, I'm great, I'm in this office, I'm right here with you.
This is safe, you know.
I got a punching bag here.
What I don't need, nothing else, I'm good.
But then, uh, I couldn't talk about what wasn't in this moment, you know.
And so, if you ask me if I'm fine right now, yeah, I'm fine.
You know, I couldn't talk about yesterday or whatever because I don't want to relive that, and I don't know if talking about it's going to bring it up again.
So, like, you're afraid to full of fear relive the past or think about the future, yeah, or piss on a good moment, you know what I mean?
This is a good moment, why would I want to bring that up, not knowing because I couldn't trust where they were going.
I didn't see the point in something, so I won't do it.
You know what I mean?
And you couldn't get me to do it.
And if you kept trying to pry, you'd find out real quick not to do that.
So it looked like I was confident, but all the while I'm batting off the only things that can help me because it's not my thinking.
So it was a real, real trap, you know?
So when prison went up around me, I was just like, it doesn't make any difference.
I've been in prison all my life, you know?
So the walls go up around me, but I was in prison my whole life.
I have to be in this moment because.
You know, if I bring any of my real life into this, it's going to suck, you know?
Right.
Yeah.
So, how did, how would you say that growing up, at least until you were what, eight years old, growing up in Jersey, how did that sort of like mold you or hardwire you?
A lot of ways.
I left there when I was 14.
Finding Value in Walls00:17:05
When I was 11, I was working for these gangsters out of Hoboken.
And they were, at this time, they were doing legit, you know, rubbish removal.
But their whole, Presence was kind of illegal, just their whole aura, you know, just said, Don't mess with these guys.
So, I would go in and do these rubbish removal jobs.
I was a big kid at that time, I was like 11, I was 6'2, 220, and I'm throwing like furnaces on the truck.
I'm having a great time because I'm making good money.
He started me out 60 a day cash, and then uh, he goes, I'll buy you lunch.
I said, All right, and then I ate like 40 dogs, 40 hot dogs the first day.
He goes, I'll give you 100 bucks a day.
You buy your own lunch.
I was like, oh, I got a raise.
And it went right over my head that it was too much food.
You know what I mean?
Right.
I was just like, I must have done a great job.
Give me a $40 raise in one day.
Because I got, I remember it was Archie's or JJ's down in Newark.
And I go, yeah, give me 20 cheese dogs, 20 chili dogs.
You know, these are like one bite, two bite hot dogs, 30 water dogs, you know?
But it was like Christmas for me because my mom, she only cooked healthy shit.
And I wasn't allowed to drink Pepsi or have, you know, toy guns or nothing.
They were.
They were a little strict when they were around.
You know what I mean?
Your parents were?
Yeah, yeah.
They would always steal.
You know, I'd be on my own.
My mother was.
They became Jehovah's Witnesses.
No shit.
Yeah, the only kind of Jehovah's Witnesses I've ever seen were them and another family.
And the other family didn't seem judgmental.
They were very nice.
But our family seemed like they had to tell everybody how to live, and we didn't know how to live.
So it was pretty comical.
But they had this thing where you couldn't have a replication of a pistol or anything like that.
They're not allowed to fight in wars or none of that.
So you think that had an effect on you at all?
Oh, big time, because it made me, I love pistols, I love guns.
The only reason I think I love guns is because I didn't have any toy ones.
So I bought a real one.
I was like, Yeah.
Yeah.
I was like, I'm hiding this because they would break them right in the, right in the, and it was like heartbreaking to me because I wanted to play with it, you know?
And so anyway, I got this job just so I can have money to do my own thing a little bit because I, as much as it seems crazy, I didn't know how to do anything, but I wanted to do everything, you know?
And I didn't let anybody else tell me how to do anything.
So a lot of it was my fault or my, What you said, it shaped me into a very defeating way of living because I couldn't say you're real good at podcasts.
If I said, Hey, I want to do a podcast, but don't tell me anything, I'm just going to figure it all out.
And you go and give me some good insight.
And I'm like, and I shoot that down.
That's kind of what I did with life.
You know what I mean?
I'd ask how to do this thing.
Then I'd shoot down the messenger and I'd come up with some crazy shit that told me it was the best way to go.
Well, I don't think that's a bad thing.
I feel like a lot of people fail in life.
In all different aspects, because they think too much about the future or the past.
Yeah.
And I feel like one of the craziest examples of this would be I don't know if you saw it, if you're a basketball fan, but the Michael Jordan documentary that came out on Netflix, I think.
Parts of it, yeah.
I forget what it's called.
Last Dance.
Yeah.
Yeah.
One of the biggest takeaways from that was he talks about not thinking about anything.
When you're playing basketball and you're doing everything, you obviously prepare, but when you're doing it, you're living in that moment.
And that's how you achieve the fullest.
Potential you possibly can is just staying in that moment, not worrying about the future, not worrying about the past.
That's, I believe, the best way to live.
The problem is when you start out from a place that's not whole.
Let's say, George had a lot of demons too, man.
Yeah, he does.
And that's the problem.
Like, you might think he's a success, and he is in his own right.
He's, you know, way more successful than probably anybody, but there's this success that I found is more important.
It's the success of like going inside.
And either living above those demons or beating them.
So I had ones, and the guys that were influencing me showed me that power overrode having to be, you're always right.
You could always be right.
And that's no way to learn.
So you got elements like the obsession of what you're into, being all into it.
I think that is the best way to do it.
If you're into something, like I told.
Like I said to Julian, like when I'm here with you, you're the most important person I'm talking to because you're the only person that I can transmit and receive with.
So I take that very serious.
And, you know, a lot of the things I deal with people with is that kind of seriousness.
Like they're going to die if they don't do something about these problems, some of them, you know.
So, in Jordan's case, and in a lot of cases, people don't have to beat their demons.
They get enough success everywhere else.
But if you're not a success to yourself, You're not living.
Like, I don't think you're living.
And he might be, he might have conquered enough.
And, you know, it looks like he's a well rounded, great guy.
But the guys on death row that I learned this serious lesson that it's just growing.
It's just a concept that when you're close to death, you think about a couple things.
And one of them was, did you live to your potential or did you help others live to theirs and how you treated everybody?
Well, what I didn't know when that concept was introduced into my head through experiences is that that's the wholeness I need.
It might not be what everybody's interested in, but a legacy or contributing to the whole is something I.
I feel it is my greatest call.
You know what I mean?
And if I'm not living true to that, it doesn't matter how much money I get, how much success I get, according to other people, I'll always feel like a failure inside.
You know what I mean?
And I can get to where it doesn't matter what you do to me.
If that's not in question, nothing else matters.
Like the pain doesn't hurt.
I can deal with whatever.
So that's my obsession.
His might have been basketball or whatever.
And I don't think anybody's is better or worse than anybody else's.
It's all about do you like living to your potential or do you like people thinking you're living to your potential?
And you have that choice.
Right.
Yeah.
At what point?
So, when you, okay, going back to your story when you were 15 and you broke the cop's jaw, you got sentenced to five years in prison.
Five and nine.
Yeah.
And you're 15 years old.
Yeah.
Yeah.
So, you're essentially like living out the most important developmental years of your childhood in prison.
What was that like?
Well, yeah, you manufacture and play with things in your head that you're supposed to be experiencing, but you got to live in your head.
So, you can only think about the things you're supposed to be growing in, your fundamental growth.
So, you're saying when you say living in your head, do you mean by that like you're always being forced to think about the past or the future?
No, what I mean is like, So, your fundamental growth is physical, mental, all these things.
So, you get a growth spurt.
So, most people out here would just experience their growth spurt.
Me, I would read a book differently, or I would work out differently, or I would come up with some new idea differently than being in a place where people are just living their lives.
I'm in a place where you're being told stuff and there's violence and there's.
You know, you got to distract yourself, right?
Not experience life.
You got to kind of distract yourself from the lack of life.
Does that make sense?
Yeah.
Wow.
Yeah.
So, are you the youngest kid in there?
In there?
At that time, I was the youngest in adult prison because I got, when I got to state, I was classified because of my size.
They disregarded the youthful offender.
And so I ended up in, which was better because kids my age were just off the chain.
They were, um, You know, doing a lot of dumb stuff, I would have been, I probably would have been a lot worse off.
I don't know.
In some sense, I would have been worse off.
In some sense, I would have been better off.
But I didn't like, I like reading, working out, you know.
So it was fine for me.
I had a job collecting in there because my mom didn't have a lot of money.
People didn't send me nothing.
So, you know, I collected for guys.
It was easy.
It was kind of like camp for me, you know?
Yeah, it seems like most people I've talked to spent quite a long time in prison.
They found some sort of ways.
They, I mean, To find a way to make themselves valuable.
Yeah.
To increase value, whether it be like learning law and like helping people with their cases.
Yeah.
Matt's example was learned how to tell stories and write people's stories, made people, you know.
There's some talented people.
I know guys that can slam dunk from the foul line.
I know guys that can create a picture that's more lifelike than the real thing.
You know what I mean?
You got nothing but time to work on something.
It's something, it's out of all the negative things about the prison system, it seems like it finds some of the best aspects you're able to discover within yourself.
That's the whole point of jail.
Yeah.
When you have all that time to just reflect.
Right.
And you have these boundaries you're living within.
It seems like something, there's some sort of magic that happens.
That's exactly why, you know, prison and jail was created.
That was the good idea to let you sit with yourself and say, is this the way you want to live or not?
Now, the problem is going back to distractions, they thought, oh, let's introduce education.
I got my GED in there and stuff.
It's all distractions.
My last bid, where there was no correction deemed necessary, was the only prison bid where I changed.
Really?
Yeah.
Yeah.
And I wish it would have been the first one, but I wouldn't have known it.
I would have blew it up, you know.
But at that time, I was ready to change.
And I had a guy writing me that was helping me read certain things and redirect my thought processes.
It was a really good guy I met through the craziest person I ever knew.
But he always had a good heart for me.
And he introduced me to this one guy.
And this guy ended up, you know, giving me concepts that are still coming alive today.
And he's been dead for.
10 years or so.
You know, when you met him on your last prison stent, uh, no, no, no, no.
I met him.
No, before I went to this last prison stent, I was trying to do the right thing for a minute, not on purpose.
Somebody tricked me when you were out.
Yeah.
Yeah.
So somebody tricked me into going to a detox.
I went in this detox and, um, this guy came in.
I thought he was a clown, you know, he was doing, you know, good things for good people.
And I, I thought he was, you know, weirdo.
But I ended up, you know, I ended up getting to know him.
I ended up staying on his food time for like six months.
No.
Because he had such interest, he was speaking to the inside of me without me having to know he's doing it like, without me having to say it, you know what I mean?
He was pulling stuff out of me and talking in a way that he knew where I was coming from, and all I had to do was listen.
I was like, huh?
And then so he did this about that, and he did this about that, and it was a worth issue.
And there was this, he said all the things about his stuff.
I got to listen to it and start practicing things, and then I got to see it differently.
And the guy stuck with me up until his last breath, you know.
No fucking.
Where was this?
This was in Fort Myers.
Fort Myers.
Yeah.
Right before my last prison bid.
So 2004, maybe.
Yeah, I met him.
Yeah.
And then I was with him for a while, doing good.
And, you know, I went off on my own thinking again.
And, well, I started using drugs again.
And I went to prison, but he never gave up on me.
He always wrote me.
When he was dying, I came out of prison.
I was like, as long as I got him and my mom, I'm good.
That's all I need.
You know what I mean?
And both of them started dying of cancer like immediately.
Yeah, so I'm going to hospice, back to her house, back to hospice up in Fort Myers.
And yeah, I was like, wow, there is a God.
He's got a weird sense of humor.
Right?
Ain't that the truth?
Yeah, these two were keeping me out of trouble and the only two that can do it.
And yeah, they both started dying at the same time.
But he did get across to me all his experience and it's still.
It's still even this.
This is what it led to.
Like coming here and talking to people.
I would never do this.
You know what I mean?
I was isolated and I liked it.
You know, I didn't like it.
I just didn't like the react, the feelings you get from dealing with people.
Yeah.
That's interesting.
Yeah.
So I'd much rather do a life sentence or death sentence.
I didn't care than have to deal with all the uncontrollable variables of dealing with people.
You never know how they're going to act.
You know, I like controlled environments.
You somewhat knew what was going to happen, it was always going to be shitty.
It's a control thing, huh?
It's a control thing.
I try to control how I feel.
The good ones I would chase.
You know, till they were dead.
And then the bad ones I would avoid, you know, didn't matter.
I had to avoid them.
And when you build a life like that, you become deranged, you know?
Right.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Interesting.
Yeah.
I want to get to that because I'm sure there's a lot of insight that you can provide from the people that you've met.
Yeah.
So let's go back to you're doing five years, you started at 15, and you spend five years in prison from 15 to 20.
Well, I got sentenced to five and a half.
Okay.
And then I broke a guard's jaw in there.
Jesus Christ, perfect.
Yeah, another.
God damn.
Yeah, so I ended up doing two more, and then that wasn't that bad.
He was kind of at fault, too.
Well, at that time, it was always somebody else's fault.
I didn't do it, it wasn't me.
In retrospect, you're supposed to have a timeline when they wake you up, they're not supposed to touch you.
And I might have got around the timeline a little bit and hit them anyway just because I didn't like them.
And at that time, I was like, nah, he woke me up.
I didn't know what I was doing.
I was just swinging.
So, in retrospect, I got what I deserved, you know, somewhat, you know what I mean?
Some of this stuff is just crazy.
But, you know, because I've been, like I said, I've been questioned and indicted on murders.
I ain't killed nobody, you know what I mean?
But I hung around people that were capable of these things, you know, and I was always around them, mainly because they made me look kind of sane, you know what I mean?
And then we became friends and stuff.
But they made me feel okay with my fucked upness, for lack of a better term.
You know, because that's all you can hang out with to make yourself feel better, you know.
Right.
So, how old were you when you got out the first time?
22.
You were 22.
Yeah.
And what did you start doing when you got out?
Well, I had a resentment against cops.
So, I played semi pro ball.
I tripped on acid a lot because I couldn't do drugs.
And yeah.
And then I would play football, tripping on acid.
I got invited to come play for the Giants, which was my childhood team.
And then I got in more trouble.
Every time I was about to do something positive, Which, in retro, like in hindsight, it's good that I didn't get no resources because I would have been a lot more dangerous than what I became.
And if they would have put me in the NFL or something, I don't know what kind of damage I would have did, but it would have been a lot.
If they hid my fear the way I hid my fear on a bigger scale, I would have caused a lot of damage.
That's something I think about a lot.
Like, could you imagine hypothetically, If you would have been, that was the person you were.
And now all of a sudden, you're surrounded by people just enabling you, telling you, yes, you're the best.
And on top of that, handing you millions of dollars.
Right.
That person with unlimited resources to do whatever the fuck you wanted.
It could cause some serious.
I know what kind of trouble I would have caused.
I got kicked out of prisons.
So I knew that society wasn't, I knew they were kind of right about me being a menace.
They deemed me a menace, kind of right.
Like, I didn't know because I wasn't malicious.
I wasn't trying to hurt nobody.
I was just trying to carry out what I want to do, but I just didn't care about laws or guidelines or rules.
Enabling Dangerous Behavior00:14:48
And that's dangerous.
You know what I mean?
Because if you spread that out and somebody is malicious and they're a part of your crew, now you've just given them a pass to do that.
So, and you're kind of guilty too.
Right.
So, that's, I didn't look at big picture stuff.
I didn't look how it's impacting the whole.
When I seem kind of like they're picking on me, you know what I mean?
But really, I've helped so many people now.
Some people I won't take on because they're dangerous in nature.
You know what I mean?
Like the way they don't think of the whole, you know, if they're not willing to work on that first, I won't take them on because, and what I mean by that is walking them through their fears and getting them, helping them.
If they're not willing to acknowledge first that this is dangerous to the whole, you know what I mean by that?
Without being too descriptive, let's say, you know, somebody wants to get right so they can do what they do, and doing what they do causes a lot of destruction.
I won't help.
They want to get right so they can do.
Yeah, they want to clear ahead to be able to harm people or contribute in something that doesn't look harmful.
It sounds, it could be even legal.
But to me, I know it harms a lot of people personally, and I go on experience, I don't go on.
What theories about it or nothing, I go on what I you know could see and and know from experience that that is a dangerous thing, okay?
Yeah, interesting, yeah, and I know it because I've seen the worst cases of it, you know what I mean?
I've seen the worst, you've seen everybody, yeah, I've seen every kind of person there is, not to say one's the same as the other, but if this thing leads to destruction 50,000 times, I'm not helping you get right to do this thing, right?
Whatever it is, you know what I mean?
So, um, yeah, it's hard to do, right?
Like, how do you How do you figure out which people can be helped and which people can't be helped?
Like when you look at people and you see them going down the wrong path, if they're on like a fucking pattern of destruction, either self destruction or just destroying everything around them, like how do you know, like, can this person be taken off this path or are they unhelpable?
Oh, nobody's beyond help.
And I know that because they deem me that.
And it's just not true.
Nobody is.
But if the person's not willing.
So here's the thing I identify with many, many people.
I've been.
I've experienced many of those beginnings, knew where they were going.
So when I talk to them, they say, You've had these same thoughts and you didn't do it.
Look at all the money you can make, or something like that.
I say, Well, this is the reason.
And then they trust me and then they start to work on that first.
Now, if they say, I hear you, and they know I'm talking the truth when I speak to them, they feel it.
They know it's true, but I have to let them go for a while.
It takes a year or two to get up the courage to work on that thing first.
Then they come back to me.
And the whole time, I don't reject anybody.
I always help everybody, but I focus on what the real problem is that I see because I only know my experience and I know where that's going.
Now, I have been accused of being too intense or so, like playing around, like say somebody's horseplaying.
I've seen people get gutted over horseplay, just joking around or being disrespectful.
I've seen guys get cut up.
That doesn't happen all the time out here, but in my mind, it goes that intense sometimes.
Not so much now.
As when I first came out.
But I'd be like, oh, that clowning around right there is going to get you killed.
You know what I mean?
And I've seen it happen.
But it's not so intense.
But eventually, if you keep being disrespectful and you don't check the temperature, you don't know how people are doing.
And you just come in playing around, and that dude's, you don't know if his mom just died, or you're not checking the temperature at all.
You're just thoughtless.
You're probably going to get punched in the face a lot.
You know what I mean?
And so.
They don't know how to read the room.
Yeah, read the room.
Yeah, yeah.
But they go in oblivious.
Like nobody could be.
You know, having a bad day and just take it out on you because you were a clown.
Right.
So I've been too intense in the past and I've learned to light up on that.
But me personally, I feel like you should always check the temperature of a person.
If they seem like they're down, find out first.
Right.
I'll just play with them.
Yeah.
There's also, you know, patterns in people that they can't figure life out or they're on like a destructive path.
They're repeating a destructive pattern and they finally get back on track.
They start to get, you know, they start to get on the right path.
They achieve some success and then they intentionally sabotage it.
Yeah.
Like they sabotage themselves on purpose.
Like everything's going fucking great.
You're on a great trajectory.
Right.
And then.
Well, it's going great according to the person looking at them.
Right.
That's what it is.
Right.
That's a big difference.
That's what I was talking about.
You see your friend, like, oh, this guy, he's fucking doing great.
He's making money.
He's fucking finally got his own place.
Right.
And then, like, he drives his car off a fucking bridge.
Yeah.
I see it all the time.
It's because you're doing what's right by the people saying, like, you're going off reactions to people rather than a heartfelt, I'm doing this for myself, kind of.
But even though everybody's benefiting from it, if the person is not attached to what they're doing, they're better off being in conflict, talking their stuff out and saying, Yeah, I hear you.
You think I'm doing good.
But the truth is, I hate this.
And the only reason I'm doing it is because you want me to do it.
And then get real honest.
And even though they can't take the action, say they're doing something destructive, they're using drugs periodically or whatever.
But you have to be able to accept them as they are.
Or that acceptance doesn't get transmitted, and it ultimately causes the breakout of, you know, like all of a sudden they don't care about your opinion anymore because their brain's driving them crazy because they're not recognizing and respecting how they really feel.
The pressure builds, and they're doing this stuff because they want to make you happy, but they don't really want to do the work of making themselves happy, you know?
And part of that is because when you go to saying, hey, dude, I think you're an asshole for making me do this right now.
You know what, get a job, yeah, yeah, yeah.
You know, like if they don't get that kind of honesty and do the right thing anyway, that's what they can't handle.
It's not keeping the bad action down, the bad action just happens as a result of not feeling accepted, not a part of it.
They feel alien because it's so easy for you to do it, but I can't do it.
You know, I can keep it going for a couple weeks and months, but I can't keep it going because it's not me and I'm not honest enough to say how I really feel, you know.
And so, how do you get around that?
How do you?
You get a guy like me that knew all that stuff and got to a point.
And there's tons of people like me out there, but you'll find them when you start doing it.
Like, you get family will keep you the sickest when you're like that.
Really?
Yeah, because they'll accept you with your bad behavior sometimes and they'll yell at you constantly.
So they slowly take away your life force while keeping you there.
My mother did it to me by accident.
She didn't know.
It's like the term they call the devouring mother.
Yeah, yeah, something like that.
Yeah.
They keep the, because it's a weakness that they're, or like a band aid, they're keeping their kid around.
Right.
Because it's, they don't want to deal with the heartache of cutting loose, which is ultimately the best thing.
Yeah.
The only way they can do it is throw them out of the nest.
You know what I mean?
But it's, sometimes they die, you know, sometimes, but that was happening regardless.
And it might have happened more so because you coddled the thing.
And it's not a tough love thing either, because I deal with a lot of families of like addicts and stuff like that.
You have to know you're using courage, that you're doing this.
And the first thing I get them to do is practice what people are not so close to.
You know, go somewhere and start talking to people and get real honest.
Like, you know what?
If this kid dies, I'd be better off because I'll sleep at night.
Or if this kid goes to prison, like my mom was able to do that.
When you're in prison, I feel safe.
I feel like you're safe.
That's what she would say.
And I didn't really understand what she was saying, she didn't know how to detach from me and still look like a good mother.
You know what I mean?
And it's ingrained in a woman to not give up, period.
But when you got certain destructive forces in there, they end up being your enemy.
They end up being the worst one to help you for a time.
Yes, I've seen that.
Yeah.
Oh, man.
It's one of the most heartbreaking things to see and try to talk somebody through.
Sometimes I don't like doing that because I feel like they probably hate me for telling them this, but I got to tell them sometimes stay out of it.
If you really want this kid, if you want this, you want what's best for this kid, or do you just want to look like you did it?
Are you willing to play the back role and get the best benefit, or you want to look like the great mom and have your kid die?
Right.
That's what it comes down to, you know, in some of those cases.
But they're all unique.
They're very, people are sick in different ways.
People hide it better than others.
And it's very difficult to get people to know you could tell me the truth.
I'm not going to judge none of that.
And we can't get anywhere until you do.
So it might take us six months of talking honestly before you tell the truth about what's going on.
And you might not even know it.
You know, most of the time they don't know it.
Right.
Yeah.
That's fucking wild, man.
Yeah.
How many people like this have you helped, dealt with?
Are you still doing it today?
Oh, yeah.
Yeah.
I don't know.
I mean, hundreds.
Wow.
Yeah.
Like, it's weird how many people are in my life because I never talked to really anybody.
You know, if I did, it was just to get something or, yeah.
Yeah.
It was.
Right.
Yeah.
But yeah, when somebody asks me a question like that, or I think like that for a second, it's overwhelming.
It's way too many people.
Like, yeah.
And I don't know how it all, well, there's this life force that seems to give you limitless resources to do it, and time slows down and all that stuff.
I don't know about really, but that's the only way I can explain it.
That when you're on the side of life, you have everything you need to do it.
But it is a struggle to stay on that without.
You have this whole, you have this whole, Psychology and this whole mentality like you see these people, and you have literally been through all this.
You have it mapped out, like, yeah, yeah, it's experiential for sure.
It's not, um, even though I read tons of stuff and all that, and it all comes to the front of my head when I need it.
But if I tried to look smart, I would go right back to that dummy grown up, yeah, yeah, right.
If I, yeah, I'll recite this or whatever, I'd be like, yeah, I don't know what you're talking about, right?
Yeah, but when I'm in that mode of, um, sincerity, humility, and, um, It all comes right to the front of my head.
Everything I need is right there.
Like, even when me and you were talking, I sensed you got something going on that where you want answers to that truly and sincerely.
You know what I mean?
You could see you have an investment in that through friends or something.
Yeah, yeah, something.
And that type of stuff only comes like I'm not interested in nothing else, you know, or nothing else pulls my interest in.
Everywhere else, I look like a dummy.
It's one, it's, I mean, dude, I mean, it's a fascinating thing that like I have friends that are, that, Fit this description perfectly.
And, you know, it's a thing that it's like I freaking rack my brain over it all the time.
Like, how is this happening?
How does this guy fucking get go on the right path for so long?
Like, look how fucking good he's doing.
Like, like clockwork, once every five years, fucking right back down to zero.
Yeah, I did it twice at five years.
That's funny.
Yeah, that's the timeline.
I went out twice.
And when I say I went out, I went, I gave up hope that I can change.
You know what I mean?
I do it for my kid.
I would do it for all kinds of reasons.
And it would look great.
I would build up and everything else.
But I was still missing that completeness of why I was doing it.
Right.
Yeah.
And there was something pulling at me.
I mean, hard.
And it would take about five years to get to that point where it was so unbearable that most of the time I gave up.
This time I didn't give up because I messed up two major organs and I was just too lazy.
That was the only reason.
It was just old age.
And I mean, maybe, you know, this God or something intervened.
I don't know.
You know, I don't know.
But this time I stuck through it.
And about three years after that five years, I was like, Thank God.
This is what they're talking about, about living.
You're one of the lucky ones.
Oh, man.
Yeah.
If you could live through it all, because the things I know, I know.
I don't have to go read a book or not.
I just know them from doing it wrong every way you can imagine and then doing it to the point where I can get a life sentence or a death sentence and still doing it.
I found out what works and what doesn't for me.
But I do not suggest that.
Like, read a self help book.
The survival rate's not very high.
Yeah.
But the ones like me won't listen to that.
You know what I mean?
And the only people they listen to are people that did that.
So that's why I get a poll of a lot of people.
I mean, it's amazing how many, you know, families and stuff I'm intertwined in and stuff like that.
Because, I mean, if you read my history on record or anywhere, it's not a good read.
Yeah.
It's not a good read for family fun.
Yeah.
But it's like they love me.
I love them.
And it's so weird.
It's like a whole nother.
Yeah.
It's a real human connection.
Human connections.
Yeah.
And I thought that was the worst part of life.
It was connection with others.
Right.
I really did.
Growing up, that's somehow I picked that up.
And I just thought nobody's to be trusted.
Live in your head and only deal with people when you need some more material to live in your head because they're not to be trusted.
Nothing's consistent.
It's all going to go to shit.
Like I had this negative outlook.
And I don't know.
I guess I just purchased it from fear and the lack of control over my emotions.
They were so, I was so hypersensitive.
And you would think I was like a stone.
Sensory Deprivation Tanks00:04:17
Killer, right?
You get the way I walked and I didn't express nothing, but I just learned to do that because I didn't want nobody asking me no questions, you know?
Right, yeah.
The truth is, I had like I was ruled by emotion, you know?
Wow, well, you were also so young, too.
Like, dude, you were like, you, I mean, in prison at fit from 15 to 20, I mean, your hormones are firing all the cylinders.
Yeah, yeah, it was.
I smashed this finger in prison, and um, and this nurse was giving me a sponge bath because they didn't want my hand getting infected because I'm a minor, I think they're illegally.
Put me in with adults and stuff, but whatever.
And uh, and so they're giving me SpongeBob, and I'm like, I you know, it was crazy how much I was like, you know, a bare touch or anything like that would just make me nut.
I did, I wasn't gonna say that, but yeah, It was like, oh, god damn it.
She's like, oh, that's normal, that's gotta be torture for a kid, man.
Yeah, dude, it was a crazy thing, yeah, yeah, because I mean, I've heard stories about state, like, I've heard the story, uh, a guy, I had a guy in here who was in state prison for a while, he's actually a friend of mine.
Brother, right?
He said that whenever a female cop would walk through, all the dudes would be fucking jacking, yeah, because it's deprivation.
Like, if you, if the idea of jail was what they wanted at first, sit with yourself, think about what you're doing, you know.
And of course, there's people that exploit that and make it horrible and shit like that.
But if you really had a place where you were just set aside from society, you don't want to be a part of society, okay, sit somewhere and see if what you really want because you can't go around harming people, you know.
And so, if you had that ideal prison thing, um, I think it would work.
You know what I mean?
As far as like, you know, it doesn't even have to be called a prison.
Like maybe just throw them in a cave unless they're.
Throw them in a cave?
Yeah, yeah, or something.
I don't know.
Throw them in a cave with no sensory, you know, because.
Yeah, sensory deprivation.
Yeah, sensory deprivation tanks.
Joe Rogan talks about those all the time.
Yeah, give them some mushrooms and put them in a sensory deprivation tank.
I believe that's where it's all going eventually.
I think so too.
Yeah, I think it's really, you know, that's just the way it's going.
But because.
It's got enough money in it though.
Not enough money.
Yeah.
Yeah.
That's the problem.
People putting money over welfare and they don't realize that's a time bomb.
That eventually your money's not going to make any difference.
You know what I mean?
There's nothing, there's only so many resources, whatever.
Yeah.
But not looking out for the welfare and helping things get better instead of people, it's a ticking time bomb.
Absolutely.
Yeah.
Yeah.
They even said that about the prison system.
They said, you keep locking people up for drugs, you got a time bomb on your hands.
You're going to have all these people in here who weren't criminals.
Now, they're becoming, they've done some criminal acts, but it was due to desperation or whatever, crimes of emotion.
And you're treating them, you're putting them in with hardened criminals who are chasing money like you're chasing the drugs and all this other stuff.
And they've done this over and over again.
You're creating a time bomb.
So I think it was a governor or something back then that said that, but it's true.
They privatized the prisons, they're making money off of it.
Yeah.
You know, people buy a prison, whacking huts.
George Wackenhut, you know, those guys are making money off of locking people up.
Like there's an incentive to get locked, you know, lock people up.
That's crazy.
You know what I mean?
But it is crazy.
Yeah.
I don't get into politics.
I don't feel like I got the right to talk about that stuff sometimes.
You know what I mean?
I don't know enough about it.
Well, you know more about the prison system than most people.
Oh, yeah.
Yeah.
The inside.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I wonder what the percentage is of people that actually get help, like do better after prison versus the people who just, Don't the people who are either they die or they never get out or they just fucking I don't know they don't get better.
I don't know the statistics.
I should have never been out of prison more than a week.
That's my statistics as far as the state goes.
I should have never been, and it's been 15 years since I've committed well, fixing myself.
I choked people getting right took a little bit of bumping.
You're still the same person, you're just trying.
Spiritual Bible Interpretation00:04:24
So, right.
But the commitment and everything else.
So it's been about 12, 13 years since I've gotten in any trouble, or I think like that still, but I don't act on it.
Sometimes I'll think about stuff.
I'll be like, this fucking dude trying me or something.
It'll go through my head, but that shit is old stuff coming up, but it has no real emotion behind it.
So going back, what was your question again?
I'm sorry.
I forgot.
Yeah, we've been on like five tangents.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
I wanted to get to the religious aspect of your upbringing, though.
Like, how much of a part was religion in your early life?
Well, I read the Bible four or five times by the time I was, I don't know, 10, trying to fix my family.
Yeah, because I really thought everybody was stressed out way too much, you know, and I felt all this pressure to like fix them.
I don't know what it was, but what I didn't know and why I turned my back on all that stuff.
My mom was a Jehovah's Witness.
My dad was Catholic.
Me and my dad would skip out most of the time when they went to church and we'd go do something, but anything other than go to church.
But when I did have to go, it was miserable for me because everybody else seemed like so pleasant and they were getting it.
Me, I was like, I'm going to hell.
That's all I seen out of that place I'm going to burn.
I can't act like these people.
And I couldn't sit still.
I was like, Uh, this is driving me crazy, and um, so me and my dad would escape from that, and um, so I avoided it, but at the same time, I did read the Bible over and over again, trying to see what this was all about.
Because if how come some families can be somewhat functional, you know, our family like there was threats running back and forth, and be quiet, you know, every there was always like an impending doom feeling around you, right?
So, uh, so I did read it front to back, I studied a lot, and What I didn't know at the time is I was looking at it for my own power, which is a selfish, self centered way to try to look at spiritual things.
It's an own power?
Yeah, like for my own will, like to fix the people I want to fix, like playing God and reading the Bible.
And I didn't know it at the time.
Of course, I'm a kid.
I just, you know, I'm thinking, oh, this God's up here taking requests.
Let me read this Bible, put in some requests for this family.
But what I didn't know is spiritual is all inclusive.
Like, and so these religions are just about certain people, the people, not the spirit that's behind it.
A lot of them, like, some of them really do understand the deeper meanings and stuff like that.
But then, if they tried to tell me at that time, I wouldn't have got it because I'm still trying to fix physical people.
What that does, like, it's only good if I took those spiritual truths, applied them to everybody, and it became my nature.
So, you can't just take stuff like that.
Throw it on somebody and be like, Hey, act like this, you know what I mean?
So, so I didn't know that, but you know, later in life, getting all that stuff came to life, and I see where it's all true.
It's people's uh religious accounts of spiritual matters, you know what I mean?
It's all true, it's just their culture at the time.
They're there, and if you read it in a spiritual way, like it's all inclusive, it applies to everybody, but it's more about acquiring that way of looking at things, nonviolence.
This and that, rather than taking a kid's guns, you live nonviolently.
Right.
Right.
You can't be cursing everybody out and doing all the crazy stuff you're doing and then break a kid's gun and think he's going to get the message.
It's just a total conflict of.
Yeah, it's kind of like a moral framework for society, right?
Yeah.
Well, kind of.
It's a way of living.
So you got all these different religions, and I've got to know people in all of them.
And basically, the people who are looking for all inclusiveness, They find a way of being that allows them to live and let live.
And this seems spiritual, or what some people would call, uh, you know, what I experience today going to places the same places I go to now are euphoric to me.
Whereas in the past, it was going here, this sucks, dealing with these people sucks, you know, everything was sucked, it sucked.
Reaction Over Thought00:08:26
But all I gotta do is come here, meet you, I'm having a good time.
Like, that's the difference.
It's an inside thing, you know what I mean?
Yeah, yeah, you bring.
Like, I'm not bringing here an agenda.
I'm bringing here just a connection.
Right.
And you're connecting with me, and that's all I need.
You know what I mean?
For today.
And it might lead to wherever, or it might be just this.
Either way, it's fine.
You know?
Right, right.
That's fascinating.
Yeah.
All right.
So back to the linear timeline.
You get out at what, like 22, 20, 22 years old?
Yeah.
How long did it take and what were you doing the next time you got in trouble?
Well, I got out.
I remember going and having a drink with a friend of mine.
And I didn't do anything more than that because I said I wasn't going to get, you know, to part.
And then at that time, I didn't do any drugs.
That was later.
That really got confusing.
But so I drank with him one night and then I went to making money.
I had some friends I met in there and we went to the other coast, picked up a bunch of sheets of acid and all kinds of stuff and brought it back over and sold it for, I don't know, 300% profit.
Cocoa Beach?
Yeah.
Well, Boca Raton.
Yeah.
Boca Raton.
So at that time, my buddy, I was actually after the last podcast, I was trying to look him up, but it says he died like 10 years ago.
Yeah.
I wonder why I didn't hear from him, but.
I don't know.
I actually paid for the little thing where you could find somebody.
Oh, yeah.
I thought about it.
I haven't thought about it.
Is it one of the scam websites?
No, it was a good one.
Yeah, it worked.
It showed the guy, his address, and everything else.
And it showed he died.
I was like, oh, man, that's horrible.
He was a really happy, good dude.
That sucks.
But yeah, but he killed himself.
He loved the party.
Oh, I mean, you know, killed himself driving.
Yeah, driving drunk.
And, you know, he was always doing that, like driving real fast over there and drunk.
Yeah.
Yeah.
But he swore he was the one that knew how to do that.
But anyway, he.
I was going and getting stuff and then trying to play semi pro football.
And I had all the same people.
Oh, and I had this reputation because I went to prison and came back.
People thought that was cool.
And yeah, just kind of, I don't know, you just get like a.
It felt like I was kind of idolized a little bit, you know what I mean, for a while.
And I didn't pay really no mind to it, but in hindsight, I look at it like a lot of people made me feel like I did something good going to prison.
You kind of like owned the identity of it, yeah.
Like, well, I wasn't really thinking about it just because I lived that.
And then you were never, you never, you were never like analytical of anything, especially like self analytical.
No, no, I was analytical of stuff, but it was nothing to do with self.
Okay, how right, yeah, it was how am I gonna fit in?
How am I not gonna go to prison again, right?
So I was always analyzing that stuff, missing out on the.
I'm the cause of that, a lot of that, you know?
So, yeah, I would, I would, and all this stuff I looked at in retrospect, like, it's pretty much how I lived my whole life.
It was reaction, reaction, reaction.
You get some time to sit on your hands, you look at it, but what can you do about it?
And then you keep going.
And it wasn't until this guy kind of explained to me that I bought into some things that even though I'm honest, it's not true.
You know, even though I'm being honest with him about what it is, It's still not true, and that goes back to what I was telling you about being honest about your emotions long enough to find the truth, you know.
So, you give your best honesty, you're on a lie detector test, it comes out, you're telling honest, you're if you believe it, right?
You're being honest, yeah, but you're convinced in the mind it's still not true.
Slightly, those lie detector tests all they really do is just to detect how nervous you are, right?
Your heart rate, I don't really know.
They put me on one, yeah, they were pretty accurate, you know.
I mean, I wasn't trying to hide nothing because I was actually.
Legitimately, yeah, that time I had this guy on here a couple months ago and he got arrested for rape and murder when he was, I want to say, 12 years old, 13, 12 or 13.
And he didn't do it, right?
But he was really friends with the, he was like the closest friend of the girl who got raped and murdered.
It was in like one of the first years of high school, maybe.
So maybe he was like 14 or 15.
I forget.
But they put him on a lie detector test and like the cops were acting like his friend and he like, Failed the lie detector test.
Yeah, even having that charge is making nervous.
Yeah, yeah.
And he ended up going to prison for 16 years until they caught the guy who actually did it.
They matched the DNA.
So they fudged his DNA just to fucking get a conviction.
Right.
But he explained to me basically how fucking bullshit the lie detector tests are and how the specialists, I forget what you call them, but the people who actually administer the lie detector tests, the polygraph tests, how they can manipulate the people.
That are doing it in the way they ask the questions.
Wow.
And I believe that they're not, they don't hold up in court anymore.
It might be because of that guy.
Oh, really?
Yeah.
Yeah.
You can't use them as evidence.
They're too unpredictable.
Right.
Yeah.
The inconclusive, they call it.
Right.
Yes.
So, yeah, they, you know, when they did mine, it was just for, because they already had the DNA.
They had this guy's DNA that did it.
So, all they needed was the match of DNA.
They wanted to slip questions in there, but my lawyer fixed it all to where they only got one in.
Did you ever?
Mame somebody or some shit like that.
I kept, fuck knows.
I don't know.
Yeah.
I busted a lot of people up.
So, how do you answer that question?
Right.
Stumbled on.
Yeah.
Find me.
Yeah.
I stumbled on that one three times, but every other one of them passed it.
So, it was good enough for them, good enough for me.
It was probably just some bullshit to set me up, but who knows?
I walked out on that.
And then 60 days later, I got like 11 million sales and manufacturing heroin charges.
So, I was facing life again.
60 days later, you think I'd turn manufacturing heroin?
You got all I was doing was buying pure heroin and cutting it and selling it.
Yeah, and how do you get life or something like that?
They tried to give me 180 years with the habitual offender.
Oh, yeah, yeah.
Later on, they tried to give me life for one pill out of the bottle that I had a prescription for Xanax.
They tried to that last bit, I got two years for it.
I was on like 800 milligrams of methadone a day, which is a lot of methadone, and um.
And I remember them going, you know, the judge was like, Why aren't we giving you life today?
I was like, Dude, I had one pill.
I have a script for that Xanax, and I took it out and put it in my sock.
I said, If you want to fight this, I can fight it, but I really want to kick.
So give me two years, I'll go right now.
Really?
He did.
He gave me two years.
Wow.
But he was trying to give me life as a career criminal.
I was like, Jesus, this place is ridiculous.
And how old were you when you finally got locked up the second time?
The second time, it was only a couple of years later.
Okay.
Yeah.
I kept going in and out, and a couple of them were small bids, you know.
Total of about 15 years.
And I kept going in and out.
And then they finally, they were just getting sick of me.
They were trying to give me life for almost, and I always thought I was going to get life because they've been telling me that, you know, all that time.
I started buying into it.
Convincement of the mind, honest, not true, you know.
I honestly thought I was going.
And if you thought, if you talk to me for any period of time, it's like live right now because we're going away forever.
Right.
So yeah, I kept making things work worse with the reaction, reaction, reaction, you know.
Not really processing or thinking, not living, you know, not experiencing life.
And state prisons are like the worst, right?
I've heard the state prisons are the worst.
Yeah.
I mean, they're a lot worse than the feds in some senses.
Most people, if they have a lot of time to do, they want to go to the feds.
Right.
Yeah.
Because they got like paying jobs there.
They got, you know, mopping the floor gets you 10 cents an hour or something like that.
Whereas in prison, you only got like a couple pride jobs that you work all day long in the hot sun, might get two bucks or something.
Fear and Exploitation00:14:48
But me, I just, you know, I lived off the land, I guess you'd say.
Yeah.
What was it that you found when you got locked up the second time?
Like, How did you find value and how did you fit in the community that you were in there?
Like, what did you do to find any sort of meaning or purpose or value when you were in there?
I liked conflict a little bit.
In hindsight, looking back on it, I would hang with the Jewish people sometimes to piss off the Aryan guys.
Then I hang out with the Aryan guys to piss off the.
They were so racist.
I was like, what a bunch of clowns.
You know what I mean?
You're all in the same place.
And it's always been.
That's how it is in all prisons, right?
All the different prisons.
Well, they're a lot more segregated up north, but down here, they have, you know, everybody's thrown in together.
And then you got these clowns that are, you know, they're so hell bent on hating something because it's a distraction.
It keeps you from looking at yourself.
And for some reason, I was always in conflict with that, you know?
And I would even say mean things and do mean things just to start a fight over that type of stuff.
Really?
Because you just wanted to be.
Because I didn't get it.
I didn't get it.
Yeah, when I moved to Naples, I had black people hate me at first.
I'm friends with everybody now, but I had black people hate me because I was white.
I had white people hate me because I was a Yankee.
And they would just say the stupid, most stupid things.
So I just started beating the shit out of everybody.
You know what I mean?
And then I, you know, because I really, my dad, one time when I was a little kid in Jersey, we had like a line.
It was almost like an imaginary line.
And I remember saying some racial slangs to this guy.
You know, we're like seven, six.
We don't know what we're saying.
We just hear the older kids in the neighborhood.
We're yelling these things back and forth.
He's calling me this.
I'm calling.
My dad snatches me by the ear and snatches him by the ear.
He's like, This is your new best friend.
Ever since then, I never had a problem.
He was a great kid.
You know what I mean?
Turned out to be one of my closest friends growing up there.
And all his family and over, they were racist as shit towards me.
You know, when I go over there, I have to deal with that.
And I'd be like, yeah, whatever, you know.
And I'm here for this person.
Fuck off.
What ethnicity was he?
He was black.
Yeah.
And then, you know, and then his sister, too, she used to like riding her bike, but it was a girl bike, but I could ride wheelies on it for a while.
And the guy would all, you know, the older kids would be all, you know, that cracker, you know, they'd said hunky up there or whatever.
Yeah.
They would call you hunky down Florida.
They call you cracker.
But I'd be like, yeah, go fuck yourself, you know, and they would beat me up or something.
They would beat my ass.
Really?
Yeah, I wasn't big yet.
And I didn't know how to fight at that time.
So I would get beat up.
But anyway, I learned through taking a beating and giving a beating that people are just stupid.
And same thing on my side.
I'd be sitting there helping somebody who's trying to help me because of my color, not because he likes me as a person.
You know what I mean?
He's just looking out for his own.
And you're helping them with the change in the wheel.
Next thing you know, it's some shitty conversation about it's their fault because of this.
And I'm like, And then, oh, and then one was yelling at me because I hung out with a Spanish guy, my friend.
In prison?
No, no, no.
This was on the streets in New Jersey.
Okay.
And it was weird too because they weren't stupid people.
They were highly intelligent, but they were blinded by this.
All of them.
All of them.
I mean, tribalism.
Yeah, tribalism.
Yeah, exactly.
And it was so, you know, such a conflict for me.
So finally, when I didn't care and I knew how to fight and I didn't care about my welfare, when I got in prison, I kind of antagonized people of all races.
Like when you were in prison and because of this experience that you had from a young age, like with violence and seeing people and being beaten.
Getting beat up and beating other people up.
Could you look at people and kind of like read them and see like how far they would go and know that?
Yeah.
Yeah.
You could always see they're like, their lights go off.
It's just, this is what I say when this happens, you know, like automatons.
You know what I mean?
They stop thinking and they go into pure ritual.
You know, that's how clear it is to me because you're all of a sudden you're not having a conversation when you, there was this big dude I got no fight with.
And as soon as I said something, because the dude, uh, The dude in question that he was talking about was a nice guy, but he had some problem with whatever he did or whatever.
And I don't know the history.
All of a sudden, I wasn't talking to this guy anymore.
He was just all full of hatred.
He jumps off the bunk, tries to hit me.
I just stiff armed him, threw him back, punched him.
And then you don't really want to get locked down for periods of time, especially I had a good job.
So he huffed and puffed and ran around.
And he's a big dude.
I mean, when you scare me, I try to.
How big?
How tall are you?
6'5, 380.
Pounds, but he was like a big stock.
Yeah, when I'm ripped, I'm a little less fat and stuff, and I look bigger.
But this guy was ripped up.
I mean, you know, see the same height, same weight, roughly.
Yeah, and his name was Danny, too.
Was it?
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
So I felt like one minute we're fine.
He actually sought friendship because I could lift like anything in there.
And so he's like, oh, I need you to, you know, so we were working out.
Next thing you know, it's like a robot.
Oh, this is what I do when this gets threatened, and it all comes you could see it so clear.
Like, I could see it so clearly because I've seen it so many times.
Rash, they get fearful, yeah, they get fearful, and all of a sudden, there's a there's like a robot you're talking to, you ain't gonna get through.
And so, he was acting all huffy puffy.
And you know, I told him, I said, Dude, want to go to the box?
We'll go to the box, I'll beat your ass right now.
He's like, Oh, I'm gonna get you, whatever.
I was like, Yeah, all right, shut up.
And uh, you know, he squashed it.
It was a little kid, it's funny too, because the dude that um.
Try to keep everything calm so we don't get the place locked down.
He was, I don't know, maybe I know he was Muslim, but I don't know if he was like from there or whatever.
And he's the one that broke it up and held him back and was like, I was like, nah, don't hold him back.
I said, if he wants to, you know, let it go.
And he was like, nah, nah, we don't need the trouble.
You guys are friends.
And that's what I thought.
But then I don't trust people that flip like that anymore.
Like after that, you know, in that mentality too, this is before I changed, you know.
Once you got in that bracket where you can't control your emotions, you're done with.
I'm done with you because you're unpredictable and eventually you're going to cause problems that we can't get out of.
Interesting.
Yeah.
So I'm not going to be tied in with that.
You know, you can get enraged and all that, but you should never let anybody know what you're feeling.
So when you were trying to fuck with people by like hanging out with different groups, different races of people, and you were, what was it in turn?
Like, what were you trying to do?
Or like, what?
I was trying to destroy that bullshit pride.
Like, It didn't make any sense.
Were you trying to teach them a lesson?
Yeah, I think so.
I think in a way, I was like, because if somebody else did what I did, they would, you know, hurt them or make them not do it anymore.
And I wasn't going to stop.
So I felt like I was the only person that can get through to them.
This is all crazy, but that's how I processed it, you know, at the time.
Because I wanted to play basketball.
And sometimes, you know, other people play basketball.
And these guys wanted me to not play basketball because of the color of my skin.
Fuck you, motherfucker.
Yeah, I grew up in Jersey.
We took it serious.
You know what I mean?
Yeah.
So, and plus, it's a good way to lose weight and everything else, stay in shape.
So, whatever, I just did it.
And I would just sit there and bounce the ball, look at that.
Stare them in the eye.
Yeah.
And it wasn't nothing perfect because some of the guys I play with, they were just as bad too racism.
And they're going to do this.
And they run into your chest bone with their shoulder real hard when you're hacking them or whatever.
So, I wasn't hacking.
And somebody tried to do that.
And I just kind of shifted and threw them into the concrete.
And I felt perfectly fine with it.
You know what I mean?
And all his friends on the court were like, dude, he's just playing.
You know what I mean?
You ain't got to go trying to run into him like that.
You know, they kind of stuck up for me.
But that's what I, that's basically what I wanted to see.
Like, fair is fair.
Right.
Right is right.
Wrong is wrong without being one of these, like kumbaya or, you know, right.
Yeah, I'm not trying to say everything's, you know.
Well, you had the unique ability to do what you were doing too because I feel like a lot of those people.
People who stick to their little tribes, they're doing that because they're going to get protected.
Yeah.
When somebody else comes out of you, you didn't give a fuck.
You were going to beat the shit out of whoever.
Or they were going to beat me up, but I wasn't going to stop.
Right.
You know what I mean?
And you weren't seeking protection from a group.
Not only that, I was doing this unconsciously.
There was something always in me to try to care about stuff and do stuff.
But at the same time, I didn't like caring about things because you get wounded too bad.
So there was a big contradiction going on inside of me, which I That's why I couldn't clearly know what I was doing.
I'd be like, Why do I start so much shit sometimes?
I mean, and I don't know that there's like a life force trying to bring life lessons through everybody at all times, really.
Right.
But most people are so fearful.
And I was too.
I was fearful of, you know, never figuring out how to live right or keep a job or be able to stay in society.
I was fearful of all these things too.
But when I thought something was right, you couldn't kill me.
You couldn't stop me.
Right.
You know what I mean?
And, but the clarity got.
Harder and harder to see, you know.
What lessons did you learn about regarding empathy for other people?
Like before, when you were younger growing up, was there what sort of lack of empathy was there?
And then at what point, what took it, what did it take for you to develop a sense of empathy for other humans?
Well, at an early age, there were certain people that didn't seem to succumb to fear.
I thought, and until I got enough courage to really.
Pushed that to the test.
I thought there were just some people that are just like, man, they're really tough.
They're really hard or whatever.
I found out later they're just really good at hiding it and they have apathy.
Like they have a lack of care for their welfare or anybody else's that gives them the ability to appear fearless.
I did the same thing myself.
So I knew what that was.
But not until I pushed people who looked fearless to the point of putting fear in them did I figure out everybody's full of shit.
You know what I mean?
Like, everybody deals with fear.
So, empathy came for me through some hard ass lessons.
Like, I knew what people were saying was true and telling me this stuff, but they were trying to tell me that empathy was a necessity.
And I said, nah, there's some people that know how to get by without dealing with all this, you know, fear and feelings and stuff.
And in my mind, I always contested it, but in my heart, I knew they were saying what they were saying was everybody has a level of.
Things they got to deal with.
And I was like, yeah, not right now.
I'm busy.
And I put that off so long that I had so many circumstances where I was like, shit, this is because it's kind of a feminine trait, really, empathy, I think.
Yeah.
So it wasn't something I was going to do.
I can't appear weak or anything like that.
But what I realized is it doesn't matter what you think or feel, there's reality and then there's not.
Right.
Yeah.
And so When I had enough courage to phase that, that was all of a sudden that became a language for me.
Um, I guess because I never used it or never really thought to use it, I always hid my true intentions, I hid my feelings, my thoughts.
I learned to hide them better and better over the years.
Every time somebody found out I felt like I was exploited or vulnerable, um, what I was really thinking or feeling, you do a bunch of coke and start, yeah, yeah, see, you start letting everything out.
Well, I learned that if you do a bunch of coke with anybody, they let it all out too, they do, yeah, so you find out who the who the.
Uh, snitches are like your boy, uh, Matt Cox.
Yeah, yeah, he's you don't have to give him coke for him to tell you he's proud of it.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, that's funny, but good for him.
I mean, you know, if you're doing wrong, whatever.
I mean, I can't.
He thinks he believes that if someone claims that they're that they if they were in his situation and they weren't going to be a stitch, it was foolish pride, foolish either that or they're lying to themselves.
Yeah, well, both of them.
Yeah, the foolish pride is yeah, lying to yourself because it's uh.
You know, but my line of reasoning with that was if you're doing something, calculate what the worst you can get is.
And that's how I did it.
And that's how I got the clarity of mind to carry out certain things that I had to carry out I already accepted the worst possible scenario as a possibility.
And I accepted it before I did it.
So that way there was nothing but calmness.
And most of the time I didn't end up getting caught.
Wow.
Yeah.
I probably shouldn't share that.
That's a good recipe for people that want to.
Do bad shit.
But that's the answer to it.
And it all ends like you'll get that.
You'll carry that through and you'll get that.
But in the long run, it destroys you.
Did you ever meet anybody to where there was just like nobody home?
Like empathy does not exist within this person.
It's just you look into their eyes and it's just there's nobody, like nothing there, like no feelings, no regard for any values, no regard for it, doesn't give up, like would just.
Murder anybody, cut your head off without any sort of remorse, any sort of human feelings whatsoever.
I know, I know, I knew people, they're dead now, a couple of them.
Sociopaths Without Remorse00:07:19
I knew people that in circumstance, certain circumstances were like that, but I don't know anybody like the Iceman, like he's just like that 24 7 or whatever, like Kuklinski or whatever.
I didn't know guys like that, but they were all from where I was from, like Jersey City, you know, they had a breed of people there that.
This is what I got to do, you know, and that I think is generationally from putting production and technology advances above human welfare.
You know what I mean?
And when generationally that gets worse and worse, you get a lot more sociopaths and a lot more people acting like sociopaths to be successful.
You know what I mean?
And if you act like something long enough, you purchase that.
The reason I ask I have a friend who's a lawyer who's represented a lot of murderers.
And he explains his clients and he gets deep into the human behaviors and the human nature and how they became this way.
And he explains what it's like going on to death row, going through all the security.
And getting in a room and talking to these guys that are on death row, like one of the guys who murdered like a dozen women or something, right?
And he's talking to the guy and he explains what it's like sitting there across the table from him, right?
And I asked him, How could you describe this person?
He goes, The best way to describe it is you look into his eyes and it's just deadness, there's nobody home, right?
Well, you're if you're talking about in prison, like I've seen people like that and I've got to know some of them and talk to them, but like.
There's a lot of like, so a doctor that's what he was a doctor, a lawyer, a lawyer.
So a lawyer sees him in a certain capacity.
Um, he doesn't see him 247, right?
Whereas, like, when you're living with them or you're around them all the time, you know, it's only certain things that trigger that, you know.
Um, okay, yeah, there's there's times when, like, so eating is a normal thing, so everybody eats, all of a sudden, they're a different person when they're eating.
You know what I mean?
Like the rituals of being human are all of a sudden there.
Yeah.
And maybe from their childhood or whatever, they learned manners or something.
But all of a sudden they're different.
They're not nobody's home.
I'm killing you.
Stuff like that.
So there was a guy, I talked about him before, but there was a guy who ate his parents and he was.
Ate his parents.
Yeah.
He was a cannibal, killed and ate his parents.
And he outlived his life sentence.
So he got out in like 2012.
I really don't want to talk about this guy.
Wait, how do you outlive a life sentence?
They gave like.
25 years back then, or until you die.
So, 25 years you considered.
So, 25 years or until you die.
Yeah.
Oh, okay.
Yeah.
So, he was under a guy.
They got different guidelines at different times.
So, he was under these guidelines.
Yeah.
25 years or life.
So, and he was already a certain age.
What are the health benefits of eating human beings?
Jesus Christ.
You know, he ate his own leg.
He had a pair of dentures.
They gave him his teeth.
You know, they took care of him.
And he took the dentures and bit a part of his calf out with the dentures.
Teeth, it was just chewing on it, you know, and that's how I got to meet him.
I was running these, I'd have to run these baths, and they'd walk him in, you know, he'd go in there and do his thing.
But how a guy gets to that point, you know, there were certain things like when he did his ritual of that compared to his ritual taking a bath where, you know, two different people, he would talk different and everything else.
So he would be like different people during different times of the day?
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Like I'm saying, nobody can consistently, now there is people that are 247 like that, I'm sure.
I don't really know any of them because you always need something, even if you act like you don't.
You always need something.
So your whole demeanor changes.
It might be fake, but it's different.
But as far as nobody home, I've seen that.
And it's a scary thing when there's nobody, there's no lights on.
And my buddy used to get there all the time.
He would stab people all the time.
I was like, dude, what the hell is wrong with you?
Yeah, quit stabbing people.
And he would do it all the time.
You break a plate, he'd stab you.
You know what I mean?
Like he broke.
One guy bumped the plate on the wall, and it was his old lady's dad's or that's dead.
Plate hits the ground, and the guy didn't seem remorseful enough, so he stabs him.
And when he goes to stab him the second time, I grab his arm and I pulled him back and I'm like, calm down.
And I grab the guy and I throw him down the stairs just to make him feel better.
You know what I mean?
But not stab him anymore because he's going to leak out all over the place.
Oh, God.
It was just crazy.
But I used to hang around with that guy all the time because he, you know, just made me look normal.
What was this cannibal guy like?
Oh, so Lurch.
Lurch was his name?
Was he tall?
Tall, 6'6, white, pasty, you know, been down 25 years, 20, whatever.
What was his ethnicity?
I think he was a white guy.
I don't know.
He could have been like Scandinavian or something.
Oh, interesting.
I saw a documentary about like an Asian guy who was a cannibal.
Yeah.
Yeah.
It was some, it was ingrained.
I don't know where he got it from.
I don't know.
But he'd been down for a long time and I didn't have a lot of interactions with him.
But a few, I had to, you know, get a shank out of his hand and choke him out one time.
He was going to kill his nurse.
Yeah.
And I didn't want that known.
But yeah, he was going to.
This lady just talked to him like real disrespectfully and was rude.
And not to say like the guy didn't do bad stuff and he deserves this and that.
But when you don't, you just don't talk to people that don't have nothing to lose like that.
Right.
You know what I mean?
And think you're going to be okay.
Unless you're, you know, unless you're a tough person and you're going to handle yourself.
But she wasn't.
She was just reckless with her mouth.
So I warned her about it.
And then I was, you know, I don't like to get involved, but I ended up doing that.
What was he trying to do?
How was he doing?
He was going to cut her, you know, or eat her.
I don't know.
Who knows what his plans were?
But he had a knife and he was like, he just kind of shared it with me.
And I just, I said, hey, pop this door.
I went in and got it from him.
At least that she'll get a chance.
And then the guards that seen it, they said something to me.
I said, look, don't put that out there.
You know what I mean?
At all.
So I don't know.
It kind of made me feel like I was, I don't know, conflicted because I don't like to get in people's business.
Did he ever talk about, did you ever ask him, like, what the fuck happened to you?
Nah, I wasn't that interested.
Really?
I've always, well, because I've always had a strong thing that you should look out for your mom and dad.
Of course, his, who knows, maybe they beat him.
Right.
Who knows what his deal was.
They probably weren't that nice to him.
Probably.
Maybe.
Maybe it was just crazy.
I don't really know.
And I didn't want to know because anytime I got an idea in my mind that you're a bad person, then I got to do something about it.
You know, so I just stayed out of it.
You know, and if I hear you're beating old people or something like that, or beating your parents up and they didn't do nothing or something, you know, I'm going to do something to you.
So I don't want to know.
At that time, I didn't know how to just process that and say, Oh, you're learning.
Okay.
The Electric Chair Debate00:08:07
Yeah.
Okay.
A plus B equals me in the box.
Yeah.
Yeah.
That's it.
And I don't want to be there.
Yeah.
You tell me some crazy shit you did and I don't like it, I'm going to hurt you.
And at that time, you know, so yeah, I just stayed out of it.
But yeah, there were people I got to know like that were.
Nobody was home at times, and there was a doctor that dealt with Dahmer that worked there.
He told me some crazy stories about Dahmer, really.
Well, he told me that the guy can run like 20 miles and not break a sweat like crazy things.
He can mind over matter, certain things he can lose 10 pounds and like that, or he can gain strong mental capabilities, but nobody's home.
He would say, like, and he had some memorabilia, and he had the first woman executed.
In Florida, too, he had her sheet.
He would buy weird things like that off of, you know, the blood spot and the starch board.
It's like a starch board, those sheets they kill you on with lethal injection.
He would buy this shit?
Yeah, he would like to get it.
You know, he had hookups on it, but on eBay, you could sell that stuff for like, I don't know, $300,000 or some crazy number.
I got to sit in the electric chair.
So if I could have taken a piece of that with me, that would have been cool.
So because they couldn't lift these packs in the back of the electric chair, they're like 450 pounds.
All the guards are kind of fat and out of shape.
But so I go down there, I said, I'll do this.
I'm going to pull them out.
I want to sit in the chair.
You know, at the time, I was still crazy.
And I got to sit in that thing, and it was eerie.
It was eerie.
Have you ever seen the documentary called Mr. Death?
You got to watch that shit.
Yeah, I'll check it out.
It's on Netflix.
I'll pull up that Mr. Death trailer.
It's on.
No, I don't think it's on Netflix.
I think I watched it on Amazon.
Amazon, okay.
So it's this guy, the synopsis of it.
There's this guy.
Maybe we can just watch the trailer.
Yeah, that's it.
Fred Lucher.
Fucking fascinating story, man.
So this guy was contracted by all the prisons to improve.
All of the execution methods.
So he like reinvented the electric chair, the gallows, the gas chambers.
Right.
And basically his whole life was dedicated to fucking executing people.
Play this trailer.
You got the audio hooked up?
What, like the most humane way or just.
Yeah.
Yeah.
So, this guy's real.
He lives in, I think he lives in Alabama.
Oh, that's where all the Nazis are.
And then chamber and then experts and out come 10 Fred Leuchters.
No, there's nobody.
Fred Leuchter was our only hope.
I don't think he's naive.
I guess if the godfather called you up and said, You got to do this job for me, you just do it without thinking about it?
Come on, guys.
To me, it looks like he's almost under a spell.
He truly believed what he was doing was right.
He saw everything he had built up in his own quiet, humble way destroyed by these people he had never met, whom he had offended.
It's kind of a shitty trailer, but.
This guy, Joe, asked me if I knew what Fred did for a living.
I said no.
And he said he kills people.
And that kind of surprised me until he explained exactly what he did, which wasn't that he killed people, but he made things that killed people.
Anyways, you can stop it.
It's kind of a boring trailer.
But yeah, anyways, he was contacted.
I forget what happened, but his father worked for the BOP, I guess.
And He somehow got the contract to because the electric chair, when they first developed it, it wasn't killing people, the right, like it was electrocuting them, and they'd be fucking like coming back, they would be coming back and be up and like throwing up or like, is that guy German?
No, it's so it gets crazy, okay?
He's not, I don't think he's not German, but anyways, he got contracted, he fixed, he learned the inner workings of the electric chair, how it worked.
Eventually, he figured out how to get it to kill people the first time and not.
Have them suffer.
Right.
Then they're like, okay, now you can fix our gas chambers.
Now you can work on the gallows.
And now we want to do something more humane, lethal injection.
So he fucking developed the lethal injection.
Right.
Perfect combination.
And after doing this for so long, he learned, holy fuck, it's so hard to kill a human being.
Right.
It is so, he learned how difficult it really was to kill a human being.
It's not easy.
It's not as easy as you would think.
Nah.
And then it goes off the rails towards the end of the documentary because he's.
Basically, he says, I don't believe the Holocaust was real.
He goes, I he says he doesn't believe that all these Jewish people were killed in gas chambers.
Wow.
He's like, There's no way it could be.
He travels to Germany, he visits Auschwitz, visits all these places, and he's they show him in there and he's like studying it, doing the science on it.
And ultimately, he believes it was fake.
Wow.
So, so he's kind of a crazy, you know, I don't know enough about it.
I don't, I mean, if you believe that, you're.
A crazy person.
Yeah.
So, and then, so he had Mossad following him around.
He had like Israeli intelligence following him around.
He got sued, went to court over it.
It's an insane story.
He got sued because he didn't believe the Holocaust was real.
Yeah.
It was like a freedom of speech thing.
I'm going to, I'm butchering this.
Yeah.
But if you watch the documentary, there was a guy who came out with a book claiming the Holocaust wasn't real.
This guy went to court.
He was sued over it.
And, Somehow, this guy, Lucher, got deposed in the lawsuit because he studied, he was like the expert on death.
Right.
So he was deposed to sort of talk about how difficult it was to kill people with gas, with cyanide and all this stuff.
And he was basically making the case that if these are the places that you're saying all these people were executed, it would be impossible.
Right.
He's like, I couldn't make these rooms, I couldn't kill people in these rooms.
It would be impossible, especially thousands of people.
Right.
So it's a fascinating documentary.
The guy's crazy.
Yeah.
But, um, Anyway, I don't know how we got on that tangent.
I'm talking about the electric chair.
Mr. Death.
Yeah, Mr. Death.
That's what it's called, Mr. Death.
Mr. Death, yeah.
On Amazon.
Yeah, I was just watching that.
Hunters, and they were talking about getting the Nazis, and they were all in Huntsville, Alabama.
Oh, really?
What was it called?
Hunters.
Okay.
Al Pacino, and just a bunch of that one kid's in it, whatever.
But it's really, it's pretty wild, man.
How the government took them in, all their scientists, and helped them with their.
Their rockets and all that, everybody knows, but they infiltrated for a fourth Reich.
They infiltrated the highest levels of, uh, you know, politics and all that, or the government.
Yeah.
Yeah.
That's a pretty wild story.
They said it's based on a true story, dude.
There's so many wild stories, yeah, like spiraling off that World War II and everything after that, man.
That's there's a lot.
Yeah.
Yeah.
They're coming.
Yeah.
It just comes out now.
And that's how it always is.
It comes out later, and everybody's like, what?
The hell, right?
Yeah, yeah.
Prison System Secrets00:03:35
By the time you find out, it's old news, you can't do nothing about it.
So, you sat in the electric chair, yeah.
Yeah, I sat after I took those packs out.
I didn't want the thing haywire and electrocute me by accident.
And you, so you were like actually legitimately on death row.
Well, I stayed in a open bay dorm with the other workers, and then I was, um, I worked in death row, but it's all in the same prison.
Um, but where I go, most of these inmates don't go, the workers.
You know, I'm down in the cells and all the places where they're housing the people waiting to die.
And, you know, and then I'm in the medical part, you know, waiting for something to happen.
Somebody gets cut or killed on anywhere in the prison.
I have to go clean it up or whatever.
You volunteered to do this?
No, no, they give you a job.
When I got there, I was kicking so much methadone.
I told the guards, I said, Lock me up if you want to.
I'm not doing nothing for like 30 days.
Yeah.
I was still kicking.
And they sent me so quick.
Through the prison system and sent me to this place, I was like, ah, geez, like the Twilight Zone.
And I was still kicking.
I had like atrophy.
My legs were weak.
And so I told them, I said, look, give me like 30 days.
I'll get my strength back.
I'll do a job then.
And then they gave me that job.
So it was, you know, it was pretty interesting.
Pretty interesting job.
What was like the most fucked up thing you saw?
Ah, so many things.
But one guy bit another guy's penis off.
What?
Through the, I should laugh.
My mind still goes to humor when I can't comprehend something.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
It's immature, but it's just the way I am.
So the guy, you know, gets blown by the other guy.
And I guess he found out he cheated on him with another guy.
I'm in medical and he bites his penis off.
They come flying down there with the guy.
They're like, Thayer, grab a bag of ice, go get this guy's penis.
And I was like, Yeah, no, I ain't doing that.
And I can't even say the rest of the story because I'll probably get in trouble.
But they wanted you to go rescue his dick?
Yeah, put it on ice to try to throw it back on.
I don't know.
I don't know.
I don't know if it was like a piece or a chug, but when I got down there, it was a bloody mess.
I just kind of kicked it down the drain.
Yeah.
If that's illegal, don't put that on the thing.
You know, I don't know.
I just, I wasn't going to touch it.
So, oh my God.
Yeah.
It was pretty crazy.
But that's just one of, I mean, people have been smashed.
And so, whenever like somebody, what was more prevalent?
People committing suicide or people getting people trying to commit suicide, killing people or trying to commit suicide?
What was more prevalent?
Well, so, So, everybody in there was kind of sick, like from the guards down to the inmates.
Everybody kind of gets sick in that environment.
And when I say sick, I mean like your thoughts just get twisted and annoyance, where say you had a friend and he was being annoying, you'd be like, hey, dude, you're being annoying.
I'm going home.
These people would plot to kill you when you were annoying.
So, that's kind of, and if you were real annoying, the guards would plot to kill you, you know, and tell other inmates to kill you and give you the free time to do it.
What happened a lot was so somebody would try to hang themselves.
There's no real way to do it.
So they tie the sheets around the corner of the bed and then they flip themselves.
Twisted Thoughts in Cells00:10:20
And a lot of times what happened, they break their neck and they start swelling.
So I would have to go snatch them up, put them on a thing and run down this thing and end up cutting their throat, putting a trach down there and trying to keep them alive.
And they turn into like a vegetable or something.
So it can get worse.
I mean, even though you're waiting to die in life in prison, now you might be waiting with no, you know, being paralyzed.
So, I wouldn't want to be in that.
So, most of the times trying to hang themselves or kill themselves would be a failed attempt.
Yeah, cutting themselves too.
They cut themselves a lot.
Sometimes they do it for attention.
Sometimes, you know, if you're really trying to off yourself, I guess there's no stopping you eventually.
Unless you do like that, you paralyze yourself.
But then this one guy was beat to death.
Another guy was lit on fire a bunch of times.
Yeah, I've seen that.
You know, they put him out.
If they really want to torture him, they'll burn him and then put him out.
Stuff like that, you know.
Um, I have to ask you, yeah, Jeffrey Epstein, did he kill himself or did he get killed?
I don't, you know, if you were to, I know you don't know, yeah, but give me an educated guess.
Well, first of all, I hate to say this, I don't know that story.
I've heard that name, I'm so, uh, okay, yeah, I don't watch hardly anything like that.
Like, and it's funny, I got little bits and pieces from people.
He's a high profile guy who basically was friends with a lot of presidents and politicians and a lot of.
Billionaires, rich people.
Right.
He has a lot of secrets that could potentially fuck with powerful people.
Clinton's, right?
The Clinton's.
Yeah.
Mainly the Clinton's.
Yeah.
A lot of people.
And he was found hanged and by, it was the bedsheet, I believe.
Yeah.
And completely dead.
But the main thing, there were these two vertebrae in like the lower part of his neck that were broken.
Mm hmm.
And I guess there was an expert that did the autopsy.
He said when those vertebrae are broken, it's usually strangulation.
Yeah.
Or like violent choking out.
Just thumbs to the front.
Yeah.
And I guess the guy who was in the cell with him was like a fucking monster, like an enormous motherfucker.
Yeah.
Yeah.
He probably was killed.
But because hanging yourself is not easy.
Like I knew a guy.
And conveniently, the cameras went out when that happened.
Yeah.
Yeah.
There was definitely probably a conspiracy going on there.
Because I seen a guy, this guy.
Was serious.
Never committed a crime in his life.
His wife was having a mental breakdown or something.
So he's out in the grass of the road.
He pulls up, he tries to like get her out of the road.
The cops in Naples pull up on him, think he's abusing her and lock him up.
And his parents were like, you know, all on the side of locking him up and on the side of this woman.
And I really don't believe he was guilty.
I think he went a little overboard with trying to help somebody who didn't want their help.
You know what I mean?
So, but he was a nice guy.
He made signs, he had a business, he was really, he made this D for me that was my first initial or whatever.
He made a cool ass picture of it.
And anyway, I got to know this guy.
He wouldn't eat.
He kept not eating.
He got himself real light on Christmas Eve morning.
I hear bong and I was like, man, I hope he didn't try to kill himself.
You know, because you hear the metal pulling on the thing where he jumped.
He took a running jump, tied the sheets around the thing.
He had enough room to run, go out, and come down off the second floor and, you know, and do that.
So he was a vegetable.
For a little while before he died, I'm picking the guy up.
Now all of a sudden, they went from being against him to believing he's innocent.
And because they can sue the county for negligence and false whatever, they wanted money.
I told them, go fuck yourself.
You know what I mean?
I said, I.
I said, that's messed up how you switched out.
Even if he did it, even if he was rough with that lady, that's your kid.
You know what I mean?
And I hated them for that.
At that time, I had no ability to see the sickness in people and no real empathy for it.
I just thought they were pieces of shit.
So I didn't help them at all.
And he ended up dying.
But my point of that is if you're going to kill yourself, first thing you got to do is lose some weight.
And to be able to do it in those circumstances, second, If this guy's been sheltered from his consequences and this is his first gig at getting in trouble, he probably doesn't have the temperament for going all out, you know.
And it's a certain kind of, I mean, some people I know did one day in jail and they just lost it.
They couldn't do jail time.
Yeah.
And it's not because they were a week or anything like that.
Just certain people can't be locked up.
And that was a friend of mine who blew his head off because he was facing a jail bid for, he hit somebody.
It was really their fault.
We should have taken off.
Well, whatever.
But it was their fault.
There were two drunk guys on a motorcycle, illegal.
They stole the motorcycle.
They cut in front of his car and it chopped one of the guy's legs off.
But the other guy was picking him up.
We already called the ambulance.
I was like, let's leave, dude, because you've been on acid.
We just came back from a concert over in Miami.
And I said, let's just leave.
There's nothing else we could do.
And he was like, no, I got to stay.
And he stayed.
He went to jail.
I bailed him out.
And he's like, I can't do jail time.
And he blew his head off before he went to court.
How much jail time was he facing?
I mean, what's the worst for, you know?
He didn't kill anybody.
Yeah, he didn't kill anybody.
It was an accident.
You know what I mean?
And it was their fault.
You know what I mean?
But he did fail the alphabet thing.
Oh, yeah.
I couldn't do that shit clean.
But we were just tripping on acid.
We weren't drunk or nothing like that.
And yeah, they really screwed him over because he was a nice guy, good guy.
And he tried to do the right thing.
And totally got screwed and ended up blowing his head off right down the street from my house, too.
Yeah, but to kill yourself, you got to have a lot of fear of what's coming.
You got to have a certain resolve, you know, and it's got to be like you said, it's really hard to kill somebody.
You know what I mean?
For the human body to just give out, right?
Because everything in it fights it, you know?
So I don't know that dude Epstein, if I had the pressure of the Clintons coming to get me, who knows?
You know what I mean?
Yeah, because it's spooky.
It's like, how do they come get you, you know?
Right.
And then you got to sit there and all kinds of, you know.
Well, I think the conspiracy is that the Clintons, Had him killed because they didn't want him giving up any secrets and they wanted to make it look like a suicide.
Yeah.
But the autopsy claims that because of those broken vertebrae or those broken bones in his neck, I forget what the name of the bone is.
There's a bone like deep in your neck.
And I guess it out of there was a study done out of all the suicides by hanging.
There was like less than a half percent where those bones were broke.
Right.
And this wasn't like a violent thing where he ran and jumped off a fucking thing either.
It was right in a cell.
Right.
What's the percentage of ones that it is broke?
They're all dead.
Or did any of them live through that?
I'm not sure.
Yeah, because I imagine if you got it that deep, and because there's a thing on the Americans, you ever see that show?
Yeah, I got to watch it, and my brother said it was good.
But the guy puts the guy up against the wall and he goes right in here, and just like what you were saying.
Yeah.
And he pushes it in, just like, you know, he's done.
Really?
Yeah.
When the guy's like a Russian sleeper or whatever.
Hey, find out.
Can you find out the name of that bone, Austin?
Okay.
Yeah.
Just look up Epstein autopsy bone.
Huh, it'll be the first one that comes up.
I think if you hang yourself, you're not going down here, it's going to be up here, right?
And then the lack of oxygen afterwards.
I mean, eventually, that but you could be resuscitated, maybe brain dead, you know.
But, um, yeah, if you break something here where it permanently cuts off, I think that's why they stuck the yeah, trach down people's throats when they so they would cut their throat open, yeah.
It's like, uh, yeah, there's another movie.
I don't know why I'm going to so many movies, but that nobody, you ever see that one, along came Sol or whatever.
But anyway, he's an accountant or a cleaner when it comes in when you want everything to disappear.
But he looks like an average Joe.
He ends up getting in a fight with these guys.
He hits the guy in the neck, crushes his thing, the Russian guy, and he's on the ground.
He just cuts his throat with a knife and puts a straw in there.
And the guy's gurgling, but he lives.
You know what I mean?
Yeah.
Yeah, I couldn't believe it.
Yeah, human beings are resilient, man.
Hyoid bone.
Hyoid bone.
Okay.
So close that little thing.
All right, it says Jeffrey Epstein's autopsy report indicates that the various bones in his neck were broken, including the one near the Adam's apple called the hyoid bone.
According to the Washington Post report, the news is sure to add even more controversy and conspiracy theories to the jailhouse death of the disgraced billionaire.
Such breaks can occur in those who hang themselves, particularly if they're older, according to the forensics expert who studies the subject.
But if they are, But they are more common in victims of homicide by strangulation.
So I don't know the exact percents, but something's fishy.
Yeah.
Yeah.
You're into those conspiracies and stuff?
Yeah.
Yeah.
You study that a lot?
Yeah.
I'm fascinated by them.
I'm fascinated by, you know, a lot of them.
There's a famous joke that, what's the difference between a conspiracy theory and the truth?
Conspiracy Theory Fascination00:09:34
Six months.
That's funny.
That is funny.
I like that one.
So out of all the people that you met that, You know, knew that the Grim Reaper was on their heels, whether they had like a death penalty and they knew they were going to die being on death row.
Like, what did you learn from people who knew that they didn't have long to live?
Yeah, there was a way to tap into this being okay on the inside of your, you know, behind your thoughts, behind your.
There was a way to like find peace.
And actually, as long as you're breathing, doesn't matter where you are, you can take sufficient action to alleviate it, you know, just by surrendering and accepting.
There's these principles in 12 step programs.
That's where a lot of this stuff I practiced and, and, Had paradigms and shifts in perspective that put words to all this stuff that happened kind of.
Oh, sorry.
No, you're good.
Yep.
Keep going.
That kind of happened organically, or I found out it just happens.
That's the reality of something that's going to work out and stay in reality.
So these guys defied reality so long that either they went to denial and went insane, or they surrendered and accepted reality and then did something about it.
You know what I mean?
They took some action towards making good on their bads or whatever, some redemptive thing.
But I noticed this as a universal truth that if you're going to, like you said, there were five years where people would do good.
The reason why people sometimes give up is because doing good is not feeling good.
Right.
Yeah.
Doing good is not fulfilling them somehow.
Well, it's, yeah, it's not meaningful because of all the baggage they're holding on to that they didn't deal with.
So, it takes about five years to clear the fog.
You see the reality of how much work you got to do.
Either give up or you get to work.
These guys knew to give up was just more horrible than doing something about it.
Somehow they figured that out because there's no mercy.
There's no mercy.
It's like give up or go crazier.
And it can get worse.
It can get to where you're eating your own feces and doing, you know, crazy stuff, trying to kill yourself, all that.
Because the brain will just won't leave you alone.
Right.
It'll just drive you nuts.
You're going to do something about it.
You're going to shit or get off the pot.
One or the other.
You know what I mean?
You're not going to just not deal with this.
And I look at it.
You've got a choice.
Yeah.
There's no choice.
Yeah.
Because you think about it when you're a kid, clean your room.
No.
You know, you eventually get to that.
But at first, you're just like, I don't want to clean my room.
You buck a little, whatever.
There's no relentless coming at you, you know, unless it's abusive or something.
But there's mercy somewhere.
There's going to be a middle ground somewhere.
There's no mercy at that point.
You know what I mean?
There's no.
There's no coddling.
There's no forgiveness.
There's no, I'll do it later.
Your conscience just says, You're going to do this now or you're going to, I'm going to make you crazy.
You know, and I call it like unpaid tickets.
Like you heard it so many times growing up clean your room, do this stuff.
You don't do it.
And then eventually the bills do and there's no calling for help.
There's no getting out of it.
You got to pay this bill now.
That's what death is.
You got to pay this bill right now.
You know, it's an interesting way to put it.
Yeah.
So when, so yeah, it, because there's no mercy, man.
It's just not going to, Not going to let up on you.
You don't get another five minutes, you know, sometimes before the brain just snaps.
And then you go into this other place.
And even if you do, you eat your own shit and do all this stuff.
These guys still have to come to that conclusion or die that way.
You know what I mean?
And some of them can't successfully die.
They just got to sit in that for years and years.
The guys that had sort of accepted it and kind of faced their inner self, so to speak, what were they like?
Very, very, they didn't talk unless it was something meaningful.
There was nothing trivial.
If you joked about like responsibilities or something like that, they would not even deal with you thinking you're an idiot.
You know what I mean?
Like you were joking about playing games with girls or women or whatever, or not being a good dad or something like that.
There was no time for anything trivial.
When they talked, it was very deep, very intense, very meaningful, very few words.
They didn't really talk to guys like me that much, but like I told.
Julian, I've always been blessed with psychopaths just opening right up to me.
I don't know why.
I have no idea.
But yeah, they've always been good to me.
You know what I mean?
And I don't really judge them, just interested in what they're saying.
You know what I mean?
Because it's ridiculous to try to play God.
I mean, I can see it because even though you are big and intimidating, you have a very disarming spirit to you.
Like, I can see why people would want to open up to you a lot.
Yeah.
That's it.
Is it true that you actually died at one point?
Yeah.
I had a couple minutes of, or the doctor said I was dead.
I didn't really know, but I had this experience and I was floating.
I thought it was like space.
But it really, and when I look back on all this stuff, it changes over time, but it's still the same thing.
But like I tried to explain before, I thought some voice was talking to me and it was actually just revealed to me the truth of.
How nobody's disconnected from anybody, and that every time you think they are, that's just your body, your brain making sense of something that it can't make sense of.
Right.
Yeah.
So, you know, somebody say somebody's, you know, they're beating up old people or doing something crazy.
That person is just as much life as you are.
Like in that sense, you are the same.
What they did with their stuff and, you know, why they're so the other way, those make you think you're separated from that person.
So then, here we go with the prison thing where you sit somebody in a place and let them come to terms with that.
Uh, they're overriding somebody's will, you go and bash their head now.
You're now you're overriding their will, so so you're separating the life force even more.
You get what I mean?
And and this is just how I look at it.
I'm probably murdering the words, but but like I didn't get this when I was younger because I was very prideful and man, I'm not going to be tied up with that people or or these group of people doing this or whatever.
And uh, It was all nonsense because your life force has no color, has no creed, has no religion, has no nothing.
It's the same life force.
So if this guy's wielding it to do what you say is bad, then you do those things to him.
You just created your own world of that in your world.
You know what I mean?
But really, it's all the same.
So everybody's impacted by what you're doing.
Everybody.
You know what I mean?
And I brought this up a couple of times.
I should have looked up who originally said it.
I think it was Plato or something.
You could judge a society by the way it treats its prisoners.
Interesting.
Yeah.
If you look, yeah, look that up for me, please.
I heard him.
So you could judge the quality of a society by the way it treats its prisoners.
Because if the whole society is like, murder them, kill them, they're all a bunch of murderers and killers, whether the guy deserved it or not.
That is their answer.
You know what I mean?
So now they look justified.
They look cool.
They took care of the bad guy.
But the next generation don't know nothing about that scenario.
They're just yelling out, murder that guy.
And it turns into like, make a difference, support.
Society should be judged not by how it treats its outstanding citizens, but how it treats its criminals.
Oh, it's from the book my mom made me read.
Dostoevsky.
Yeah, he wrote Crime and Punishment.
Yeah.
Scroll down.
Awesome.
Interesting.
That was a weird book, man.
My mom had me read it.
He was a Russian, right?
Yeah.
Yeah.
You know, it's funny.
My mom, I don't know, I get mistaken for being intelligent sometimes.
And people give me stuff.
I don't.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Oh, man.
It's a real curse because I got to go back and tell them I'm not really.
It went right over my head.
Yeah.
Yeah.
So, and it's not like I'm tricking them.
There is something, there's an intelligent life force.
I think it's behind you, it's behind me.
But we fuck it all up when we become too self aware.
So I don't play with it.
You know what I mean?
I just kind of stay out of its way.
But my mom gave me this book, and I'm like, this is a horrible book.
And it's like everybody I know that's intelligent.
It's like, oh, this is a great book.
And I tried to read it again.
And I'm like, it's about a murderer or something.
I'm like, what the fuck is this?
What kind of message is this?
My mom was trying to send me.
And I haven't gotten back to it.
It's still sitting on my shelves.
You've been dead for like 10 years.
Oh, wow.
But it's like the bane of my existence because that guy and that book is always coming up.
I got to read it now with the new way I look at things.
That's interesting, man.
I wonder what would happen if you read it now.
I wonder what you'd make of it.
Yeah, because I don't have to be intelligent.
Intelligence is everywhere.
You know what I mean?
Like, you only mess it up when you think it's yours.
Pain from Separation00:04:48
Yes.
Interesting.
Yeah.
Yeah.
There's also that, you know, the thought that some people have, Buddhists in particular, where, you know, they look at everyone as themselves.
Like, everyone is me.
Like, you are me.
I am you.
Like, the person that you're getting in a fight with, the person that you hate, or whatever.
If you guys are both starting from zero and you guys go on the same exact path, you're the same person.
You guys just went on different paths, ran into different people, different experiences, different environments, and ended up in different places.
Right.
But, Everyone is essentially the same.
Wow, that's probably where we're, yeah, because a lot of these religions put words to stuff that I experienced.
And so I just say that that seems like the truth.
That's, you know, my experience too, because that's what I mean.
That's better words to the life force thing that I use.
It's the same thing.
Yeah.
Yeah.
It's like it doesn't matter who's wielding it.
If you don't like what they do and you do what they do, then you are condoning what they do.
Right.
Yeah.
So, so yeah, then.
Yeah, that's the same.
I like that then.
Yeah, I'll probably read more of their stuff too then.
So, yeah, going back to when you died, how did that happen?
You were like, weren't you legally actually dead for a few minutes?
Yeah, they flew me to a private hospital in Coral Gables.
It was weird too because I thought I would have got arrested.
The drugs?
Well, no, not the drugs.
They didn't fly me.
Is that why you.
Oh, yeah, I did a bunch of heroin.
Yeah.
Oh, it's a heroin.
I shot a bunch of a new bag or something that was over in Miami.
And I was in the Hyatt, and I was in a nice room.
I was a high maintenance person.
I liked a nice cold bathroom.
So I would stay in these nice rooms because it made me feel better than when I stayed in the hood and stuff.
So any chance I got, I stayed in nice places.
And so I was in this place, and I was with my daughter's mother at the time.
And I came out of the bathroom, and I go, I did too much.
I knew it.
And I went, bam, hit the ground.
And I don't remember nothing after that.
So she put my gun and my drugs all up under the plants on a Balcony on the high floor, and then somehow talked them into thinking she was important.
And not like, you know, she was not important, but like really important.
Like, if I die, this whole place will be in trouble.
So they fly me over there and they, you know, the doctor fixes me or whatever, brings me back.
And I remember coming back and seeing all this stuff in this tube and being like, you guys are getting me fucked up.
You need to stop pumping that shit in.
He goes, sir, that's the shit coming out of you.
It's like, and I was like, all right.
And, you know, and I remember when I came back also, they had ripped my shirt.
And I was so ungrateful because that peace I felt when I was in that, that, It wasn't space.
It was like, it might have been space, but it was so big.
But yet I was connected to every living thing ever.
And that thing that came over me was revelation that we've never been disconnected.
That I've never been disconnected because the first thing I asked is, Where's my mom?
Where's this person?
You know, fuck, where's, you know, who's, you know, and it just said, like, it didn't say anything.
It just kind of, I just knew it.
It relaxed me and said, Relax.
The only time you've been separated from anything is, is, um, It's been an illusion, like you made it up.
You made it up, your separation from life.
You made it up.
It's not never been true.
And I was like, wow, that's cool.
And I, you know, I felt really good for the first time.
I felt peace and never felt it before.
I never experienced nothing.
And then this, I didn't have nothing to deter me from the experience.
Right.
No body, no nothing.
Just a, I don't know if it was a singular identity, but I think I only had eyes because I can only see out.
And I didn't have nothing out, nothing weighing me down.
It was kind of free.
And so I don't know how to describe it more than that.
But when he pulled me back, I was like hostile, pissed off, I had a headache.
And I said to him, I was like, who ripped my shirt?
You know, just nice guy brought me back to life.
And I didn't have handcuffs on, which was surprising.
I still have bullets falling out of my pocket.
I was like, what's that?
You know, I heard this ching, ching, and it kept falling out of my pockets.
And the doc's like, it looked like bullets, you know?
I said, well, they ain't mine.
He goes, well, they ain't mine.
He goes, I didn't bring bullets to work today.
You know what I mean?
So he was really nice and compassionate.
And he said he saved my life.
So he asked me if I could forgive him about the shirt.
And I was like, yeah, all right.
Reaching an Open Mind00:11:48
Yeah, you're good.
But yeah, he was just very, just a good guy.
He saved my life and I was a dick.
You know what I mean?
Because I just kind of was pissed.
I really wanted to stay where I was at.
You know, for the first time I found peace and I didn't even know what that was.
It wasn't until years later that I put together that all my pain is caused from doing things that separate me from the whole.
You know, that's how things that separate you from the whole.
Yeah.
Like, like doing things that I know I wouldn't give my loving, caring, you know, I wouldn't love and care about somebody and tell them to do it.
But doing those things because I think I can handle it.
My ego says I can do this, but you can't.
But it, But it causes isolation, antisocial behavior.
Yeah.
Like those.
And they identified those in these 12 step programs that I told you about.
Oh, really?
I go to them all the time.
Yeah, because, well, I go to a specific one, but it's really good at introducing you to society and keeping you in it without, if you do it right, you can't become like an automaton.
You can't go into robot mode.
You have to constantly, spontaneously be in the moment without the brokenness, without the fear or expressing them.
You know, it's so it's a really good way to practice because it's an environment conducive to that if you're there to practice it.
But there's so much misinformation and so many robots or so many self centered people looking to do the same thing a different way.
So you only get like one out of it, it's like a church or anywhere else.
You'll get one person who really grasps what they're doing here and says, This is great and practices that.
The problem is if you try to predict who else is going to do it or whatever.
So sometimes it's kind of lonely.
But sometimes it's great.
Like everybody's just doing good.
There's plenty of resources.
Help for people that want it.
There's a big environment for it.
Sometimes it's crazy, but I just keep doing it anyway because it's good practice.
Yeah, definitely.
Yeah.
Yeah.
It's the near death experience thing is crazy.
I think there's like studies that say that the pineal gland in your forehead releases like chemicals in your brain, helps you see lights and all that.
Yeah.
It's like a psychedelic trip or something.
I've heard that.
I've heard, but I've never experienced that from, I've done a lot of psychedelics.
I've never got that.
You know what I mean?
Not to that level.
That was so awesome.
Like it was so comforting.
And it's a kind of thing that I don't need anything else to know that everything is cool.
You know what I mean?
Right.
Yeah.
Interesting.
Yeah.
So it's my own little personal thing.
I don't even bring it up unless somebody asks.
But it's just something that happened that I stumbled upon that tells me give everything you got.
With anything you're doing and just live to your potential because it's all fine anyway.
Yeah.
Or you could take it like, oh, we're going to, you know, that's incredible, man.
Yeah.
That's incredible.
Yeah.
What do you say to kids growing up the way you did in environments that you did, headed down the path that you were headed down, who seek out advice or don't?
Like, what do you say to them and how do you get through to them?
Anything great.
So if you're in a shit position or you're in a.
You're in a position where you want to grow or you just want to be able to be you.
Anything that anything different is going to come through unfamiliar means, so you have to be okay with humility and overcome your fear.
And that everyone has that fear everyone you're not unique, you're not special in that sense.
Like you get to experience your share of it.
There are some people that hide it well and make you think they're in way more control than they really are.
So, don't let that deter you from, you know, because if I could have been so much smarter, if I just would say, I don't know.
I don't know.
I've just been using that for like 10 years now.
I don't know.
And it works great for learning.
Yeah, it does.
Yeah, yeah.
You don't have to act smart.
No.
Act dumb.
You learn more.
And I used to just keep my mouth shut, like, man, I don't know.
And I'm afraid to ask because you look like you know this stuff naturally.
You know what I mean?
Right.
And a lot of them are faking, some are, you know, intelligent people, whatever.
But here's the thing if you're a kid growing up, don't let nothing fear you to not express where you're at, like in this moment.
And if you got people around you, it kind of sucks because when you're a kid, you're kind of thrown in with a lot of stuff.
Like I got, I got, I don't know if I should speak about that because I'm working on, I'm working with somebody right now and it's still going.
So, but, um, so you're kind of locked into, as a kid, you have to be certain places, you know, as a minor, you have to be.
Sorry.
No, you're good.
I got to fix my butt.
Sorry about that.
Race that.
So, as a person who's not independent, you're locked into certain areas.
It doesn't mean you have to conform to everything, but as far as like, so if I was a kid and I was in a rough environment, like I was growing up and it was kind of crazy, how I could have done it now, if I look back on it, is I had, there was always some person that's like a, I used to call them like Duke Gurgers, or I didn't even know what they were at the time.
It's like all of a sudden I'm hanging out with this person going to these places.
I've heard some horrible stories about that, but I've had good people that one person out of all the mess would show up and say, hey, you want to go to this monster truck.
Thing or whatever, and what they were doing was trying to help me, and I didn't even know I needed help.
When I look back on it now, and I help a lot of people, I realize there's always that one person around that you can talk to, it's just you don't see them being helpful to you, you know what I mean?
But they've got 30 or 40 trips around the sun, they got tons of experience, so you don't open your mind to the fact that you could be you don't know everything you think you know.
This guy is willing to show you that it's okay to not know everything, yeah, and so but that gets tricky because like all the fear they put on these.
Shows, and there's like all kinds of crazy shit.
But I got people sometimes that, you know, put their kids in my pretty much my, you know, to take care of them or just like help them learn the stuff, like kind of like these guys did for me different times in my life.
And so if they have a person like that, it doesn't matter who they are, if they're willing to listen and share their experience with living, you know, I tell these kids, man, try to use that.
You know what I mean?
Try to use that.
I had to do it with my nephew a few years back.
I kind of had custody of him 12 years ago.
He was at the time, he was nine.
And there were so many things I had to work through with him.
And then, you know, even to this day, now his dad's there doing a great job and helping him work through now.
But at one time, it was, you know, I had to figure this out.
And it was tough.
You know what I mean?
But he learned.
That he can come to me and he does, he decompresses.
I'll say, Let's take a ride and we'll go take a ride in the truck and he'll just start blabbing about everything.
And I just let him go and go and go.
You know what I mean?
And the reason being is he's decompressing.
You know what I mean?
And I don't need to judge it.
I don't need to stop him or correct him.
I wait and then there's a question at the end of it.
So, what do you do if this happens?
You know what I mean?
And I just answer it.
And I don't pay any mind to dramatically acting over some crazy words he might say or whatever.
You know what I mean?
I just kind of let them get it all out.
So, if you got a guy like that, I've been able to do it with my nephews.
I got a couple of them.
You know, one's now a 50% partner in the moving business.
You know, he's doing great.
I mean, I couldn't be prouder of all my nephews.
But so, luckily, I didn't know when I was doing this turnaround.
So, here's the biggest thing if you fight your demons, you turn that around inside of you, you're automatically a help every time you show up.
Because Two things.
One, you're mastering yourself so you're not all crazy, so you're not contributing to the problems.
Two, you know how to get out of all these problems.
Right.
So it's not, I'm not telling you something that I didn't do.
That was the difference between growing up and hearing actors say, because they were all actors.
Yeah.
They didn't really go inside first.
And it's not their fault.
Nobody's to blame for that.
But I found out that that's not enough.
You know what I mean?
And I was willing to go to any lengths to find out why is this.
Bothering me so much that what you say and what you're doing is two different things.
Right.
I didn't know why it bothered me so much, but it always, I can always prove that what you're saying is not the truth in your life.
So why are you giving it to me?
You know what I mean?
And in that sense, I was really sharp because I could see that in a second and I lost hope in people.
Right.
Yeah.
So I did that at an early age.
And what I didn't know was that they're just trying to make it.
You know what I mean?
So I just took it like everybody's full of shit.
Just, you know, lie, whatever you got to do, get back to living in your head where it's safe.
Right.
Yeah, that's fascinating, man.
Well, thank you very much for coming in on here and sharing your story.
Where can people find you, reach out to you, contact you?
I'm always in Southwest Florida.
I mean, I've got, I don't want like an open line.
I got tons of people, but if my experience is anything like a certain, like you've experienced that certain stuff, you'll find me.
You know what I mean?
And if they reach out to you and they say, hey, you know, that's what happened with Julian too, some.
A good guy, you know, he was he had some questions, and I was able to help and quite a few people actually, really through that.
Yeah, and that's all I really care about.
I don't care about money, property, I work for what I need.
I do this because I really think it's needed.
And I mean, you probably can't even, from my description, I can't figure out what exactly I do other than stay out of the way of good and try to help good.
Yeah, yeah, that's about it.
So I don't know what they call that.
But you're an inspiration, man.
Yeah, yeah.
You're definitely that.
I appreciate it, man.
That's awesome.
Yeah, there's a lot of people that get impacted.
What I hear the most is if you can do it, I can do it.
Right.
And that's the truth.
Anybody can turn their life around if they can realize their solution's not coming from, you know, kind of like Einstein, one of those smart guys said, you can't get out of a problem with the same thinking that you got into the problem or something like that.
I'm murdering.
Right.
But you get what I mean.
Yeah.
So, if you can get an open mind enough to say, you know what, that guy was there.
I felt like I was there.
He's here.
And that lines up, then you'll find me or you'll find a guy like me.
And if you really think I can help, then just reach out to you and I'll call him.