Sept. 11, 2018 - The Joe Rogan Experience
01:44:40
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| Speaker | Time | Text |
|---|---|---|
| Three, two, one. | ||
| Stir it up, Nick. | ||
| We're live. | ||
| Hello, everyone. | ||
| Hello, everyone. | ||
| Put the ear cups on and cheers, sir. | ||
| Oh, man. | ||
| Thank you, Joe. | ||
| Thanks for being here, man. | ||
| Yeah, thank you for bringing me out here, man. | ||
| I know we meant to do this before, but I hope now, with all this good energy between us, we can do this properly for your audience. | ||
| Yeah, for sure. | ||
| Listen, man, to say that you've had a crazy experience in this life is one of the most understated things a person could ever say. | ||
| I mean, where do we begin, right? | ||
| Let's tell everybody your story. | ||
| So you were wrongfully committed of murder. | ||
| You spent 22 years on death row before you were exonerated by DNA evidence. | ||
| Hello everyone. | ||
| My name is Nick Yarris and I was, as Joe said, convicted and sentenced to die for a rape and murder I didn't commit at the age of 21. In 1981, a woman named Mrs. Craig was murdered in Delaware. | ||
| I had never met the woman. | ||
| I was in prison on unrelated charges, and I stupidly made up a story to try and get out of those charges. | ||
| The police soon realized that I was a liar, and they fabricated the charges around me then. | ||
| So it's ironic that in a few days you're going to Upper Derby, Pennsylvania, and that's where the murder happened, really, basically. | ||
| Linda May Craig was leaving her job at 4.05 p.m. | ||
| on December 15, 1981. She's going home. | ||
| She gets abducted. | ||
| I don't know any of this, but I tried in desperation to get out of a lie that this officer put on me. | ||
| I got pulled over in a stolen car. | ||
| The cop beats me up. | ||
| He puts charges on me. | ||
| I'm facing life imprisonment and I'm a junkie because all of my life I was destroyed by what happened to me at the age of seven. | ||
| I had my head beaten by a man with a rock in his hand after he sexually assaulted me. | ||
| And I did all the stupid things that people can do in the aftermath. | ||
| I kept it a secret and I let it foster all the anger in me. | ||
| I became very aggressive as a child and I ended up in trouble all the time. | ||
| And when I was in prison on these unrelated charges to the murder, I stupidly fell into that mindset of desperation of trying to get out of it. | ||
| So the police put a prisoner in the cell next to me. | ||
| He said I confessed to him. | ||
| I was given a three-day trial. | ||
| I was sentenced to death and put on death row. | ||
| And then, stupidly, I escaped from prison in 1985 and end up on the FBI's most wanted list. | ||
| How did you get out? | ||
| I was being transported to court and the sheriffs were being cool with me at first. | ||
| They were talking about what was going on in Philly. | ||
| They were two nice guys, like 68, 67. And we drove five hours from one of the hardest prisons in America called Huntington. | ||
| And I left there after spending two years of my first two years in silence. | ||
| So if you opened your mouth, they would come in and beat your head in. | ||
| So I was so glad to get in the car because my mom was waiting in my lawyer's office because they were going to give me a review of my trial because they withheld so much evidence. | ||
| So I was eager to go to court and it was the coldest day of 1985, February 15th. | ||
| We stop at a gas station in Exton, Pennsylvania. | ||
| And as I got out of the car, the officer driving pulled past the cubicles. | ||
| Now, we all got out of the car and ran over to the cubicle together, and I went in and started peeing. | ||
| And the officer's holding the door for me, and my eyeglasses start fogging up. | ||
| You know what I mean? | ||
| Because you go from the freezing cold to the warm to the cold, your eyeglasses. | ||
| So all I know is I turn around and I come out, and he has the door like that, and I put my head down, go under his arm, and I turn left and go back to the car. | ||
| And the dude smoking a cigarette doesn't know that his partner went into the cubicle to piss. | ||
| And as I'm running back to the dude, he pulls his pistol out and point-blank shoots at me, Joe, like pow! | ||
| And as it went past my face, I was like, oh shit! | ||
| I hit the ground. | ||
| I ran and he followed me with the gun. | ||
| I could feel it like I was waiting for him to blast me, you know? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Why did he shoot at you? | |
| Because he thought I overpowered his partner. | ||
| He doesn't know. | ||
| His testimony at trial was, I turn around, Nick's running at me, my partner's down or gone. | ||
| I pulled my gun and he runs and I wasn't going to let a death row prisoner run, so I've tried to stop him. | ||
| I shot. | ||
| So I run around the corner, I hit the ground, I ripped all the skin off my hands. | ||
| I run around the corner and I fly towards this restaurant and there's all these people innocently eating dinner. | ||
| And I'm running right towards the plate glass window because he ain't going to blast me, you know? | ||
| And I ran like I knew he couldn't shoot and then I shot around the corner and I ran down to a gas station. | ||
| I tried to steal a car. | ||
| That didn't work. | ||
| Then I ran like 400 yards, 400 yards, 400 yards and I hid behind the car I just escaped from. | ||
| And I was laying in the weeds behind the gas station about 50 yards from them while they were screaming, who was the bigger idiot for letting this happen? | ||
| And I was thinking, oh my God, like, what am I doing? | ||
| What do I do, Joe? | ||
| Like, how do I just jump up and say, wait a minute, it was a mistake. | ||
| You know, they already tried to shoot me in the face. | ||
| So I go high behind the police station and the next four hours, oh my god, I'm being chased by a helicopter. | ||
| And he chases me and he pins me and he chases me. | ||
| And I was so fit that I ran for four hours through the woods without caring what the branches did to my face or nothing, man. | ||
| I blew out both quads. | ||
| I did my hamstrings. | ||
| I ripped my feet open. | ||
| I ran so hard in terror that I didn't care, man. | ||
| And I got away, and I made it all the way to Florida, and I was going to leave the country and all this, and I said, I got to go back. | ||
| How did you get to Florida? | ||
| I stole a dude's wallet in New York, and I got on an airplane, and I went down to Florida, and I tried to rob a drug dealer, and I tried to do this. | ||
| I was sitting there, I was so angry, I was going to kill myself. | ||
| I'll never forget this day. | ||
| I didn't want my folks to see me in prison handcuffs no more, you know? | ||
| So I was going to buy a raft and I was going to go out in the ocean and I was going to have one last party with all the foods that I loved. | ||
| Then I was going to stab the raft, wait for the sharks after I cut my wrist, you know? | ||
| Then I was going to cap myself and go. | ||
| Then I said, no, I'm going back. | ||
| So I turned myself back in. | ||
| They put me on death row in Florida. | ||
| And I went back and I faced it, you know? | ||
| So they beat me for four minutes, man. | ||
| They broke my face, broke my back. | ||
| Crushed me, man. | ||
| Tortured me. | ||
| And I thought, I'm going to get you back. | ||
| You know, for all the days you made me go in a cage and beat some other prisoner while you stood there with a club laughing at me. | ||
| I'm going to get you back. | ||
| I'm going to make sure I start being a loving person again. | ||
| So I'm sitting there in 1985, 1986 with 105 years plus the death penalty. | ||
| And I decided, fuck this. | ||
| I'm going to be a nice guy. | ||
| So I started to learn... | ||
|
unidentified
|
Okay. | |
| I suffer from aphasia. | ||
| I had my head beaten in with a rock. | ||
| What is aphasia? | ||
| Aphasia can be identified simply in people who have stuttering disorder. | ||
| Their brain and their vernacular abilities are distorted by a disruption in their brain. | ||
| Either their brain is functioning too fast or their mouth is functioning too fast. | ||
| There's a combination of misfiring. | ||
| And aphasia can be through trauma or through genetics. | ||
| And aphasia affected my life so much as a young person, I never had the respect to listen to people because I couldn't function, I couldn't articulate, I couldn't speak. | ||
| When I was at trial, people spoke words that I didn't understand and it frustrated me. | ||
| And when I tried to speak and I'd stutter, people would be like, duh, duh, duh, come on, retard, what do you got to say? | ||
| So, after that beating, well, they beat me for four minutes and they broke my face. | ||
| I began practicing speaking to myself. | ||
| Every day I learned new words and I taught myself how to correctly articulate that word into a sentence beautifully for my own self and myself every day. | ||
| And then I became very, very good at writing. | ||
| I began helping other prisoners. | ||
| I became the most dangerous prisoner that they held because I cared about other men. | ||
| I wrote to their mothers. | ||
| I wrote letters to their lawyers. | ||
| I gave up opportunities for people to write books about me so I could help another innocent man. | ||
| I did all those things because that's how I got back at them for what they did to me. | ||
| So, in 1988, I'm sitting in my cell and I read about DNA. And I knew right then I could prove my innocence. | ||
| So I was the first man in America in February of 1988 to ask for DNA testing to prove my innocence. | ||
| And they threw away all the autopsy material. | ||
| And when I discovered new evidence, they destroyed that. | ||
| And this woman who came to meet me and started visiting me fell in love with me and she believed in me. | ||
| So, she stood by me and told me that she would be with me Either to the gal who's walk or to the moment I proved my innocence. | ||
| And for nine years she stood by me, you know? | ||
| And finally, we found some evidence that was testable in 1995. What was the evidence? | ||
| It was sperm from a rape. | ||
| And it was being sent out here to California to Dr. Edward Blake. | ||
| And it broke open in transport and spilled. | ||
| So, Jackie left me. | ||
| Had nothing left. | ||
| And then they put me in a special unit. | ||
| And they started torturing me. | ||
| I keep this part. | ||
| Quiet. | ||
| I never told this story. | ||
| It would ruin what happened in Fear of 13. It's now out on Netflix. | ||
| But they finally closed down the old prison I was in for 12 years where the average rate of survival was only 5. And I was one of the hardest dudes there and I made it. | ||
| They closed the prison down and they opened up Greene County Supermax and the courts ordered that every prisoner in Pennsylvania be allowed out of their cell for eight hours. | ||
| The administration looked at each other and said, fuck that, not the crazy cannibals and not the serial killers, not the dudes that have been assaulting and raping each other. | ||
| So they picked 48 of us out and they put us in Pittsburgh in a special penitentiary setting in which we were in a sealed unit. | ||
| And they put all these guards in there that weren't allowed to touch other prisoners because they were so violent. | ||
| And told them, we're giving you the craziest of the crazy. | ||
| You know, Buffalo Bill from Silence of the Lamb was a real man, right? | ||
| His name was Gary Heidnik. | ||
| He abducted black women in Philadelphia and put them in a pit under his house and fed one of them to the other survivors because he was building a master race. | ||
| He was my neighbor, man. | ||
| Like, so they started torturing us and doing all this psychological crazy shit to us where they were feeding us to each other like wolves. | ||
| So I kept it all quiet until this year when, once again, misfortune fell on my life and I released Monsters and Mad Men, the new book that I was going to give you today. | ||
| And I thought, you know, I got to tell that story, you know? | ||
| But it's been so hard to come back from these moments, Joe. | ||
| It's just like I look at what they did to me and how I went to that moment where the DNA is gone. | ||
| Jackie leaves me. | ||
| And so I find that I'm dying from hepatitis C that they did when they infected me of it when they broke my teeth when they beat me. | ||
| So I asked to be executed. | ||
| I said, I studied all the world's religions. | ||
| I read over 9,000 books. | ||
| I did everything in piety my mother asked me to do while I was in prison. | ||
| I don't want to die like Dale Carter did with the guards coming to his cell and taunting him, you know, teasing him and listening to a man scream in agony because the bile in his belly is killing him. | ||
| So I wrote to the courts and I asked to be executed. | ||
| I said, fuck it, man. | ||
| I want to die as a man I love who can respect himself. | ||
| The court intervened and ordered the DNA testing that was going to be done on the evidence expelled. | ||
| In July of 2003, the DNA test came back and they proved me innocent. | ||
| So the evidence spilled and they just captured it once it spilled? | ||
| It was in a box with all this evidence. | ||
| And Dr. Edward Blake, who did the O.J. Simpson trial DNA, said that there would be challenges to it if he did the DNA in 1999, 1998. In 2003, they had advanced mitochondrial DNA separation so well that he felt confident in his results. | ||
| So the federal court got involved and said, look, I don't want to have this man executed. | ||
| I want the DNA done. | ||
| So they did that. | ||
| And it was amazing that on the day that I called the lawyers, they revealed the truth to me. | ||
| I called this lawyer and I'm like, what's going on? | ||
| He goes, Nick, we got DNA from three separate sources that prove you innocent. | ||
| And I said, that's amazing, Mike. | ||
| I'm really grateful. | ||
| He goes, you know, we used to tell people you're crazy, that we never believed in you. | ||
| I'm really sorry for that. | ||
| Man, really? | ||
| You want to take away my joy now, man? | ||
| So I was really downcast that the day I called my mother, my brother Mikey was having a seizure at her feet because he was an alcoholic after he fell off the roof and he died shortly after. | ||
| So it just went fucking crazy from there. | ||
| They take me off death row and they put me in a psychological cell and they tell me they can't trust me. | ||
| That no human being who has done to them what we've done to you cannot be angry. | ||
| That if we open this door up and we let you out, you're going to get us. | ||
| So we're going to leave you until the day they let you out. | ||
| We're going to leave you in this cell because we don't trust you not to kill us for what we did to you. | ||
| What did they do to you? | ||
| They used to have a thing called Gladiator Day. | ||
| So the lieutenant will be off on a Sunday. | ||
| And the guards who started to come from the Philadelphia area were black. | ||
| And they didn't like the guards up in the hillbillies beating on black prisoners. | ||
| So a weird thing happened where this lieutenant came up with an idea. | ||
| Well, look, let's let the prisoners get this frustration out of you guys. | ||
| You pick out the biggest guy and you pick out this guy. | ||
| So one day I'm sitting there minding my own business and they open up my cell and there's four of them with clubs. | ||
| You're up. | ||
| So I gotta go in the cage and I gotta go and hurt somebody while they stand outside. | ||
| And if you don't fight, they're gonna come in and they're gonna beat you worse than you can beat a man or get beaten by one man. | ||
| So they did all this for their entertainment. | ||
| Were they ever punished for this? | ||
| Not until after the riot when one of them testified against the others for the murder and stuff. | ||
| I watched 11 people commit suicide. | ||
| I've been stabbed, strangled, beaten senseless. | ||
| The guards used to taunt me because I was accused of a psychological murder, of going out and stalking this poor woman because she looked like my girlfriend, they said. | ||
| So I was never treated like a prisoner. | ||
| I was treated with deference, the worst word I know in the English dictionary. | ||
| The way I was treated was so harsh that it was cruel beyond cruel. | ||
| And yet, All I wanted to do was have enough within me to learn to beautifully speak so that on the day that they executed me, I could tell them how much I cared about myself. | ||
| That was more important to me than living because somehow when you suffer like I have suffered, your head cracks open and you have a hypersensitivity to life. | ||
| So that when you touch the human beings, you never forget the 14 years no one was allowed to touch you. | ||
| You know what? | ||
| Fuck this. | ||
| I ain't crying no more. | ||
| It's alright, man. | ||
| There's nothing wrong with crying. | ||
| No, I just thought about it. | ||
| You know what, Joe? | ||
| I do because I feel bad for the heart. | ||
| You shouldn't feel bad about crying. | ||
| No, because I look in your arms and your eyes and I see the hurt that I'm causing you for doing this. | ||
| No, no, no, no. | ||
| Don't worry about that, man. | ||
| Alright, well, this is what I know. | ||
| All I'm doing is trying to imagine what your life has been like. | ||
| Don't you worry about me at all. | ||
| I'm harder than life and I'm kinder than love. | ||
| Secretly, I'm a saint. | ||
| I never hurt no one. | ||
| I try my best to be polite every day. | ||
| And I've had misfortune at every turn. | ||
| And I'm very sorry that I sit in this chair today after it came about. | ||
| You see, I believe in good. | ||
| I believe good is gonna win, Joe. | ||
| I believe that I had good again almost three years ago when I met my current wife, Laura. | ||
| See, I had a woman in my life before that who used me and left me here in Los Angeles. | ||
| I ended up homeless on the streets here. | ||
| I was actually living up in this area on the streets because my good friend Noah lives around here. | ||
| Him and Jason took care of me in my bad times, I call it. | ||
| So I go back to England. | ||
| I meet this woman. | ||
| I fall in love. | ||
| We have a baby and she's born on your birthday. | ||
| And I start to believe in hope again. | ||
| I go do a podcast in England with my good friend Brian from True Geordie and I start to spread my message again and I want to get all these young kids to believe in themselves. | ||
| Then one day I put the baby down for a nap and I get Laura to lay on my arms because she's sick and we get up 20 minutes later and the baby's dead and I'm coming down the steps with the dead baby and I'm getting, you know, all fucked up again and then people are so cruel that in the village they started, you know, Maybe the baby was killed by the guy on death row and all this shit. | ||
| And I have a stalker ex-wife, Karen, who just won't leave me alone, contacts the police and tells them that I put out a tweet that night. | ||
| And it only happened because my good friend Anthony Samandani, who's in the green room, told me the day before my daughter died about a good close friend of his, they lost a baby that day. | ||
| And so when our baby died, I put out a tweet just saying, you know, appreciate the people in your life because they're so precious. | ||
| And the police came to our house and humiliated me and wanted to know how I could tweet about something because my clock was nine hours off because I was living on the streets of Los Angeles and my time was still on LA time because Anthony and I are developing a major motion picture about my life. | ||
| And I told the police, are you crazy? | ||
| Like, why would I? So, I can't even get a break on the death of my daughter. | ||
| Like, that was the moment that the director of the film Fear of Thirteen decided to rip me off for my rights to the film. | ||
| He decided to rip you off how? | ||
| He owed me 50,000 pounds from doing the film Fear of Thirteen. | ||
| He decided to rip you off because he thought you killed your baby? | ||
| No, he decided to rip me off then, not pay me my money. | ||
| When I asked him, I needed money to bury my daughter. | ||
| So I end up in a shouting match with Arthur DeMoulis, the billionaire from Boston. | ||
| I promised to get on his plane and come kick his ass over the money we're arguing over because it was crazy. | ||
| I'm still confused. | ||
| So your child dies? | ||
| My child dies and everything goes badly. | ||
| Yeah, SIDS. And everybody that I counted on to have my back. | ||
| Including director David Sinkton, who promised to pay me for my participation in the film, all then tell me, oh no, I'm not paying you. | ||
| And I'm like, how can you do this when I need this money to bury my baby? | ||
| Why did he say he wasn't paying you? | ||
| Because he said he didn't owe it to me and all this. | ||
| I said, why are you crazy? | ||
| You have a written contract. | ||
| So it's the same thing. | ||
| You know how the entertainment businesses, once they get what they get out of you, that's it. | ||
| So he just said he wasn't going to pay you no matter what the contract said. | ||
| Right. | ||
| So, Arthur Demoulis invested in the film, and he owns most of it. | ||
| So, I write to Arthur. | ||
| I call him. | ||
| I say, Arthur, David's not paying me my money. | ||
| Can you help me? | ||
| Because he owned most of the film by that point. | ||
| So, Arthur gets all annoyed at me. | ||
| I said, look, man, my daughter just died. | ||
| I blew up at him. | ||
| I told him, send me your private jet. | ||
| I'll come to Boston. | ||
| We can have a fistfight. | ||
| You love to fight. | ||
| You know, all that shit. | ||
| I lose control. | ||
| And then the author, out of his grace, sends me some money so we could bury the baby. | ||
| But I went through all this terrible shit. | ||
| So I said, now I'm going back to America. | ||
| So I leave England. | ||
| I come over here. | ||
| I got two daughters with Laura. | ||
| We're over here now in Oregon. | ||
| And Anthony, my God, I meet this amazing man only because of Muhammad Ali dying. | ||
| And now he's going to help me make a major motion picture about my life. | ||
| So I get away from all that drama of losing the baby and being humiliated by people thinking I would do some shit to a little girl. | ||
| I go back and I rebuild everything. | ||
| And then I try to go to Canada and they won't let me in. | ||
| That's crazy. | ||
| So I can't go do my job there. | ||
| They won't let you in because you were on death row for 22 years? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Even though you're innocent. | ||
| Not only that, I just came from speaking before the United Nations, sitting next to the president and former presidents of Switzerland. | ||
| And I have a security clearance from that. | ||
| I worked in a high-profile job in England, going around speaking all over to governments, but Canada holds it against me because I escaped from death row. | ||
| So I can't enter the country of Canada. | ||
| Robin Sharma tried to have me come up there and speak for him with his conference. | ||
| And I had to humiliatingly do it from my home via Skype. | ||
| It's like I'll never stop being punished for what happened, you know what I mean? | ||
| But I don't care about that. | ||
| What really bothered me was that all those things started to befall me and I started losing hope again. | ||
| So I go and I even tried recently just to have a normal job and give up everything. | ||
| I'm a beautiful speaker in schools and I go around and try and help people with their education, right? | ||
| So I was trying to do that the last year with a friend of mine named Wayne Sharp from New Zealand. | ||
| He has a company called MyVerse and he wants to help children find the correct path. | ||
| Education is so important. | ||
| We can't get that going. | ||
| I decide I'm going to give up everything and just go get a normal job. | ||
| But that doesn't work. | ||
| So I'm sitting there and it's Jamie's birthday. | ||
| I'm angry. | ||
| Like, what the fuck? | ||
| How could it fall apart again? | ||
| So then you contact me after I tweeted. | ||
| And it all starts again. | ||
| And I'm back to believing that it doesn't matter how I got in his chair, or it doesn't matter that the man preceding me has everything and I have nothing. | ||
| I still believe in good. | ||
| It's called you this time. | ||
| And I told you in that message I sent you, I said, fucking hell, Joe, you're going to change my life doing this, man. | ||
| You didn't have to do this. | ||
| You didn't have to be nice to me. | ||
| You are. | ||
| And for that, man, I'm willing to keep going. | ||
| I can't, I mean, I don't think anybody can imagine what it's like to spend 22 years on death row for something you didn't do. | ||
| I want you to go back to the night that you got arrested and tell us, because you kind of, there's some tissue right beside you if you want it. | ||
| Yeah, I'm good, man. | ||
| I'm done with all that crime. | ||
| Go ahead, brother. | ||
| It's just... | ||
| The night you were... | ||
| How old were you? | ||
| 20? | ||
| 21? | ||
| 21. 20. I turned 21 before he sentenced me to death. | ||
| I'm 20 years old. | ||
| I'm a Philly kid. | ||
| And I'm high on meth. | ||
| And the music's blasting. | ||
| I'm driving through Chester, Pennsylvania. | ||
| In a stolen car. | ||
| Yeah, man. | ||
| Everything in my life is just chaos. | ||
| I'm fighting with my two brothers all the time and no one has respect for me. | ||
| I was ugly. | ||
| And it's two o'clock in the morning. | ||
| I just came from a bar. | ||
| I go through a stop sign and the next thing I know I saw the lights. | ||
| I pull over and the beating of my head is out of control. | ||
| And I'm sitting there, gripped with fear. | ||
| I took a beat in Philly in December 4th of that same year in which they ripped all my teeth up with a blackjack. | ||
| So I was really scared, you know? | ||
| I was like, don't move, don't run, don't do nothing stupid. | ||
| You took a beating from cops earlier. | ||
| Yeah, you know, Philly cops put me in my place because I ran my mouth. | ||
| So... | ||
| There I am sitting there and the next thing I know, BAM on the window, BAM! And he rips open the door and a track from Bad Company was playing really loud. | ||
| And I can't hear or make focus of what he's saying, you know? | ||
| And the next thing I know, BOOM! Right up out of the car and he's got me on the car and his name is Benny Wright. | ||
| And he's six foot four and he's got me pressed against the top of the car and he's holding me down and I can't breathe so I start resisting. | ||
| I popped his arm off and the adrenaline goes, boom, here comes the beast out of me. | ||
| Because at 6'2 and that age, I was crazy tough, man. | ||
| I was like off the charts. | ||
| And so I pushed him back. | ||
| I remember that. | ||
| And he couldn't believe it. | ||
| He pulled out his stick and raised it up and I just snatched it out of his hand and chucked it away. | ||
| I was looking at him like I was like that zombie guy. | ||
| And he went furious, man. | ||
| He pulled out the pistol, and I seen it coming, and I grabbed his hand, and I pushed down. | ||
| And I had my arms outstretched, and the gun went boom down into the ground like that. | ||
| I looked at him, and he put the gun up there, and he said, motherfucker, you almost... | ||
| And he puts me in the car. | ||
| I'm sitting in the back seat. | ||
| I'm freaking out, you know? | ||
| He gets in the car and he's like jumping back and forth in the front seat. | ||
| Then he waits and he looks at me in the mirror and he grabs the mic and he's going like, shots fired! | ||
| Officer says shots fired! | ||
| He looks at me one last time and he goes, help! | ||
| Help! | ||
| Help! | ||
| Like it's still going on. | ||
| And I'm like, what? | ||
| What's going on? | ||
| Dude tells them when they get there, the backup officers get there, he's like, he tried to kill me, he's got my gun, and I got it back from him! | ||
| I'm like... | ||
| No, this is going south. | ||
| They jacked me up, take me out of the car, beat me down, take me to jail. | ||
| Now I'm charged with attempted murder and kidnapping of a police officer. | ||
| I'm 20 years old and I meet Skip DiMatteo, the public defender, who then tells me I'm facing life imprisonment and that's it. | ||
| And they're going to put me in the security wing because my bail is going to be so high. | ||
| I looked at him and I said, what do you mean, man? | ||
| I was just driving home. | ||
| I'm in a stolen car. | ||
| He said, no, man, you ain't never going home. | ||
| So I broke down. | ||
| And I went through detox with no help, you know? | ||
| So three days I'm in a cell with nothing but this newspaper. | ||
| And it's the headline on the newspaper, Mrs. Craig's Murder. | ||
| And it starts taunting me and taunting me and taunting me. | ||
| Somehow in my head I came up with this crazy mantra. | ||
| If I knew something about something that big, I bet you'd let me go about this lie. | ||
| I didn't try to kill nobody. | ||
| I was sitting on my bed and the guard was walking by and he goes, What's wrong with you? | ||
| And I started telling him what was going through my head, the whole story. | ||
| And that was it, Joe. | ||
| Oh my God. | ||
| He ran down the block. | ||
| He went to the sergeant's office. | ||
| They got me to the warden. | ||
| The warden's now been told... | ||
| So when you say you're telling them what's going on in your head... | ||
| I repeated it. | ||
| So in your head, you had a plan... | ||
| To tell him a story. | ||
| To tell him a lie. | ||
| And when that officer responded because he heard the story, I didn't have any idea what the impact of my words were. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I was so stupid. | |
| Well, you're also going through detox. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And so they take me to the warden's office and he starts praising me. | ||
| They take me out of solitary confinement. | ||
| Praising you how? | ||
| Telling me I'm doing a great job. | ||
| What did you tell him? | ||
| I told him that a man that I knew in the area had told me he had done the crime and that if they let me out, I would tell them all about it. | ||
| And he told me I was helping the community. | ||
| They were taking me out of solitary confinement and all that. | ||
| They told me that they spoke to Officer Wright and he was going to retract his charges and only charge me resisting arrest and they were going to drop the rest of the charges and everything was going to be good. | ||
| And then three days later they came back and said, dude, you lied. | ||
| And the only reason you lied is because you want to tell us that you did this. | ||
| They put me in a room and start doing all this shit. | ||
| So how did they find out that you lied? | ||
| The dude that I made the story up was no longer a drug addict and he had an owl by me. | ||
| So you just tried to pin the story on some other drug addict? | ||
| The dude that robbed me, he rolled me up in a rug and tried to kill me with a 357 Magnum. | ||
| I figured, I heard the story that he was dead and figured they won't even find him anyway, you know? | ||
| But a 20-year-old doesn't have any concept of, you know, complex stuff like this. | ||
| Especially in the 80s, right? | ||
| Dude, they came right back to me and they had me in the Delaware County District Attorney's office. | ||
| And this Detective Martin told me in no certain terms I was going to tell him why I killed that woman and I wasn't leaving that room. | ||
| So for 13 hours they tortured me, man. | ||
| Started bringing up my childhood and all that shit. | ||
| I told them, man. | ||
| I just wanted to blow up my whole world. | ||
| And they said, oh, that's good. | ||
| So this is what my confession consists of. | ||
| I never killed anyone. | ||
| I never meant to kill anyone. | ||
| That's good, Nick. | ||
| That's good. | ||
| You never meant to kill her. | ||
| What are you talking about? | ||
| I went to trial and I was given a three-day trial for the murder of Mrs. Craig after the jury found me not guilty of all my original charges. | ||
| So I was really frustrated that a jury heard the testimony of Officer Wright. | ||
| He would later be fired from the force, being caught up in a drug gang in Chester. | ||
| He was dirty. | ||
| But they didn't know that at the time. | ||
| But a jury found me not guilty. | ||
| That prosecutor went mental when that happened and he decided to seek the death penalty. | ||
| So a month after I was found not guilty of all my original charges that I made the stupid story up, they gave me a three-day murder trial that in essence was a joke. | ||
| And what they did was they preyed upon the poor jury and showed them pictures of the victim and stuff like that, man. | ||
| And they had an inmate who burglarized the prosecutor's home And was facing 20 years, come into court and say I confessed to him. | ||
| That was it. | ||
| So the inmate said that you confessed to him. | ||
| Charles Catalino. | ||
| They got a guy to do that. | ||
| Yep. | ||
| So I'm sitting there and they dropped a bomb on me. | ||
| I know it's coming. | ||
| The jury was so crass that they went out to the Wagon Wheel restaurant and put their dessert order on hold while they found me guilty. | ||
| And then during the sentencing phase, they had their dessert. | ||
| I was 20 years old, man. | ||
| I'm like, this isn't real, man. | ||
| Like, I never killed or raped this woman. | ||
| How can this happen, you know? | ||
| And then the only mistake I truly think I made was that I told the judge to go to hell when he sentenced me to death because he couldn't look me in the face. | ||
| Why do you think that's a mistake? | ||
| Because he decided to send me to Huntington Prison, the hardest prison in America at that time. | ||
| And what was he going to do before that? | ||
| I don't know, but he made sure I went to the place that they broke you. | ||
| See, Huntington was designed as the prison. | ||
| If you raped another inmate, they sent you there. | ||
| It was the first SHU program in America. | ||
| It was the first— What is SHU program? | ||
| A special housing unit or security housing unit or level five supermax, you know, like Pelican Bay. | ||
| And your punishment was that you weren't allowed to speak in your cell. | ||
| And if you got caught speaking in your cell, they came in with a nurse and after they beat you down, she jabbed you in the ass with Thorazine and they knocked you out for a week and you lost your mind. | ||
| So it was horrible. | ||
| Like I told you, the first two years of my sentence, every day I kept my mouth shut. | ||
| I didn't care what was done around me or not. | ||
| You weren't allowed to say a goddamn word. | ||
| And they meant it, man. | ||
| You're not allowed to talk to other inmates? | ||
| Nothing. | ||
| I dare you to sing happy birthday to yourself like I did. | ||
| I paid for that one. | ||
| They fucked me up, Joe. | ||
| But I don't care about that. | ||
| Look, I realized I was in a race. | ||
| I had to kill off the person that I was. | ||
| The person that I initially was upon entering prison was a deceitful lying coward with no fortitude because no self-respect resided within me. | ||
| And in utter humbleness, I took everything that they did to me And I paid for every window I broke, everything I stole, every lie I told. | ||
| And then I started to love myself. | ||
| I figured I ain't getting nothing out of this but misery, so I'm going out like the dude. | ||
| I'm going to stand up, and I'm going to speak beautifully on the day they execute me. | ||
| I'm going to walk to that walk, man. | ||
| I'm going to do this. | ||
| I didn't kill that woman, but I damn sure ain't no coward. | ||
| I'm going to find out everything I can about life. | ||
| And then, I'm going to face my death. | ||
| I'm going to do it with Jadavid, man. | ||
| Like, I had this beautiful, beautiful speech ready for him, too. | ||
| I was going to lay it out and just be at peace because I realized there was nothing else to do. | ||
| I couldn't fight. | ||
| I couldn't argue. | ||
| It didn't matter because God's in control of my life and I really believed that I had a choice. | ||
| Either be a bitter pill and get sucked dry by all the misery around me or get my shit right and start loving myself. | ||
| So I taught myself how to speak and overcome this aphasia that affected me my whole life. | ||
| And I found out that I was giving myself neuroplasticity healing and I became very graceful and calm in prison. | ||
| I was so serene and so powerful. | ||
| How did you find out you were giving yourself neuroplasticity healing? | ||
| I found that out from Robin Sharma. | ||
| Robin Sharma is the foremost authority on speaking about neuroplasticity healing. | ||
| And when he found out what I speak about, he said, I am the living embodiment of his teachings. | ||
| That through grace and dignity and kindness, I've developed my own charisma that carries me with confidence. | ||
| And that is the description of what he teaches professionals, billionaires, everyone. | ||
| Can you explain neuroplasticity for people? | ||
| Neuroplasticity is a reward system within your brain wherein your interactions, especially with other human beings, heals you. | ||
| So people who suffer from PTSD, people who have had trauma in their lives, Can actually heal themselves by being meticulously polite. | ||
| And I began all of this when I was released. | ||
| My mother sat me down and she said, Nikki, listen to me. | ||
| For you to get out of prison and not be a nice man is a waste of everyone's time. | ||
| Every prayer, every time someone called me the mother of a monster, every time a woman spit in my face, Everything that I went through is a waste of time for you not to be a nice man. | ||
| So I want you to promise me one thing. | ||
| Every day, I want you to go out and say, yes ma'am, yes sir, and thank you. | ||
| Because I want you to show respect for who you are in that way. | ||
| They hurt this family badly. | ||
| It's the only thing I ask. | ||
| I didn't know that she handed me the tool to healing. | ||
| Because neuroplasticity is the self-contrived act of rewarding yourself for being a nice person. | ||
| And my gift over the last 14 years is that I made myself so amazingly pliable and gifted at helping others find the good within them. | ||
| That's the reason I'm truly here today. | ||
| The thing that I've been able to accomplish through my writing and through my efforts is to show people that you take things personally in life, you'd be then a fool. | ||
| Because what you've done is you've taken all the hurts and you've made them the justified reason why you have to be an asshole to somebody. | ||
| Whereas you keep forgetting that you've been given a break over and over just to be here, man. | ||
| Dude, I've been shot, stabbed, strangled, run over by a car. | ||
| I hung myself in prison, two drug overdoses, and I had a cannibal trying to murder me for two solid years. | ||
| I know that I could fall at any moment from my own hand. | ||
| But God bless me. | ||
| I believe so much in my purpose in life that I won't kill myself. | ||
| I won't give up. | ||
| And it's only because I've been tested that I know that it has to be for a reason. | ||
| I had dreams about all this. | ||
| While I was in death row, I had the most amazing, intense dreams because of my suffering, and they play out now. | ||
| So what happened? | ||
| Did I manage to touch something we're all chasing, or am I in a delusional world? | ||
| What do you mean by that? | ||
| I told people last year, I told everybody on Facebook something bad was going to happen, and it did when my daughter broke her elbow. | ||
| So I told everybody before it happened. | ||
| Two years ago, I told my wife, Laura, I was coming back here to meet Anthony Samandani and go on the Good News Network and do a thing with Maymay Ali, who's a good friend of mine. | ||
| And I told him how things would happen. | ||
| And sure enough, every time it's played out. | ||
| Why did you think something bad was going to happen when you said something bad was going to happen and your daughter broke her arm? | ||
| Dude, I'm in a meeting with a guy named Kevin and John and I look at them and I say, I have to... | ||
| And I'm on Melrose Boulevard. | ||
| My daughter is playing in the playground a few blocks away and I'm in this meeting with these men about my film. | ||
| I stand up at the table and I say to them, I have to go right now. | ||
| I run outside and I ask my wife Laura, is she okay? | ||
| My daughter fell and broke her elbow and had to have six pins put into it in Cedars-Sinai. | ||
| We have a $63,000 bill that it stuck us with. | ||
| But I knew it was going to happen before it did, and I even told people it was going to happen. | ||
| How can I have that touch? | ||
| Did you know that was going to happen specifically? | ||
| I saw the event, but not in real time, so I could make sense of it. | ||
| But I saw the greenery at the park when we pulled up. | ||
| It was the same. | ||
| And I had the flash last night when I met Stedman Graham. | ||
| I had all these moments. | ||
| A woman last night pinned a thing on my collar, and she looked just like my mother, and I had this dream. | ||
| Because my mom died on September 9th. | ||
| And 10 years ago, I was actually on a flight September 11th for her funeral. | ||
| I saw all these things in my dreams on death row and they play out. | ||
| And it keeps happening with witnesses to my life that are recognizing it with me. | ||
| So I can't make it up. | ||
| Do you know what I mean? | ||
| I wish my friend Jason was here. | ||
| He's been able to help me just put this in context and I'm doing this badly, but I just think that somehow I went through an experience so intense that it has truly cracked open something that has given me a hypersensitivity to things. | ||
| I think that it has allowed me truly to be humble enough to really give my life for a purpose and not be ego-driven. | ||
| Like, I have nothing at this moment where we sit here, but I am so proud of the fact that that doesn't ever stop me from believing in good. | ||
| And you could beat me all day. | ||
| You could put me in a cage. | ||
| You could do whatever you want to me, but it's up to me to then make it misery. | ||
| I'm choosing not to, man. | ||
| I don't care how much I got to struggle from this point on or what graces I'm granted. | ||
| I just want one thing to stay true in my life that I don't lose who I am. | ||
| I fought so hard to be this man through a childhood of feeling so inadequate because another man raped me. | ||
| To the feelings that I was so low of being cast aside as a condemned human being to then rise up and go and speak before governments to the point that Kofi Annan told me that I was one of the finest speakers in the world. | ||
| To then go and follow that and stand at the base of the Coliseum where human beings were put to death for entertainment and blow 20,000 people away and have it flawlessly done. | ||
| And to recognize that I had it all within me to do because of one thing. | ||
| That neuroplasticity gave me charisma. | ||
| The kind of charisma you exude. | ||
| So I don't know where it is that you hit that point where you decided to really believe in yourself. | ||
| But like you said, you didn't listen to that shit that people were telling you. | ||
| And once you did that, you started to contrive all this beautiful charisma. | ||
| Because I didn't even watch the fight Saturday when you were talking. | ||
| I listened to you. | ||
| And I thought... | ||
| He's so flawless, it's not even thought of. | ||
| But people would never grant you that. | ||
| You had to do something in your heart, something within you made you believe in this guy, man. | ||
| Listen, I have not had much resistance at all. | ||
| I'm going to be honest with you. | ||
| Like, what you're saying about me is very kind. | ||
| I really appreciate it, but I really haven't had much resistance. | ||
| Yeah, but what it is about you that makes you believe in yourself, yo? | ||
| What happened? | ||
| Where'd you hit that point? | ||
| Well, I'm pretty sure it came from martial arts. | ||
| From martial arts competition when I was very young. | ||
| Pretty sure from... | ||
| The first beating or the first win? | ||
| Neither. | ||
| Neither. | ||
| Just how difficult it was. | ||
| Just doing it from 15 to... | ||
| Before I was 22 I stopped. | ||
| Somewhere around 22. But there's just the fact that it was so difficult, that it taught me hard work, taught me focus, and I didn't have anything before that. | ||
| Before that, I thought I was a loser. | ||
| Like, I really thought I was a loser. | ||
| I don't know my father. | ||
| My stepdad's a very nice guy, but there's something about growing up without a father that is still alive that doesn't talk to you. | ||
| And, you know, my mom worked all day. | ||
| My stepdad worked all day. | ||
| There was no one around. | ||
| You know, I just... | ||
| And we moved a lot. | ||
| I didn't have any friends. | ||
| So I just... | ||
| I never felt like I was worthwhile. | ||
| That's what I mean. | ||
| It wasn't anything like what you experienced. | ||
|
unidentified
|
No. | |
| But it was enough within you that it was the point. | ||
| I needed to prove myself. | ||
| That's what it was. | ||
| I wanted to show... | ||
| There was something inside me that I needed to show that I wasn't useless. | ||
| And the only way I could show that I wasn't useless was by being good at things. | ||
| And initially it was art and then after art it became martial arts. | ||
| And the martial arts thing was more important than art because the martial arts tested me. | ||
| Like art was beautiful because I could draw things and people would love them and then it made me feel good that people liked my work. | ||
| But there's a big difference between that and the martial arts. | ||
| The martial arts was so difficult to do and to compete at a national level. | ||
| It was every time I did it, I was terrified. | ||
| But after it was over, I felt better about myself and I understood that I could actually be good at things. | ||
| So it was the first thing that I ever did that gave me a feeling of value. | ||
| So I went from being a loser to being an extreme winner. | ||
| That's brilliant. | ||
| But that is your point, though. | ||
| But you're saying that people held me back, and that's not really the case. | ||
| I'm sure people judged me one way or another because of fear factor or some of the other things, but the thing about going through the martial arts competition and everything when I was young, I don't give a fuck how other people view me. | ||
| I don't. | ||
| I just do what I like. | ||
| I do what I like and I try to be nice. | ||
| But that's where your charisma comes from. | ||
| And where you got that from is still yours, man. | ||
| I admire that. | ||
| A lot of people don't have the confidence to do that, to shut off that noise, that thing that makes us all react to everyone else's opinion. | ||
| Well, I react to it. | ||
| I mean, I most certainly feel it, but I just don't let it change the way I go through life. | ||
| And I think because of the lessons that I've learned, I try to express that as much as possible for people that haven't gone through those same lessons. | ||
| So I can express that information and maybe people can absorb some of it without having to go through what I went through. | ||
| I think what you went through is infinitely more difficult, more trying, and I think that your message and your story Can show people that in the worst possible scenario the beginning of your life as a man You're wrongfully committed to life in prison You are going to spend the rest of your life until they execute you on death row and | ||
| all the horrors that you've gone through to come out of that and And to come out of that with a purpose of being a nice person and learning how to speak and learning how to speak clearly and confidently. | ||
| Like, there's a lesson in that that's at a... | ||
| I mean, this is almost like at a... | ||
| At a religious level. | ||
| I mean, you talk about someone who's created a diamond from pressure. | ||
| I mean, that's what you've done. | ||
| What you've done is you've figured out a way, despite all this raging hurricane of emotion that goes through your mind that causes you to cry when you think about these things, you can express yourself In a very clear way that lets people at least peer through the window into what you've experienced in your life. | ||
| And it can give people a perspective that it's very, very rare that someone gets fucked over in life as bad as you did. | ||
| Very, very rare. | ||
| And it's even more rare to come through at the end with a sense of purpose. | ||
| Every day of my life someone writes me and tells me they didn't kill themselves today. | ||
| Did you know that? | ||
| Every day, man. | ||
| They didn't stop drugs. | ||
| There's a young man living in my house named Zach Kurz. | ||
| He's a really good friend of mine. | ||
| He really changed his whole life since meeting me. | ||
| Even my close friends have told me that I've changed their life. | ||
| And I appreciate it because I recognize a lot of times it's the good within them that's resonating. | ||
| And I'm proud of the fact that I have sat and listened to the words I kind of deserve for what I've tried. | ||
| And I'm going to learn in the future to accept the graces that you just did for me because in the past I always tried to, as you see, diminish it. | ||
| I have worked very hard, Joe. | ||
| I have worked very hard to craft my work into writing. | ||
| And like your drawings, I was so proud of having a number one bestseller in my first book. | ||
| And I was so proud of using my talent as a writer to then articulate what it's like to lose a baby in my journey through her eyes or to use this last effort in Monsters and Mad Men to tell people it's okay to have a bigger secret than the one that people know you by and still live with it. | ||
| And then when it's right you can share it. | ||
| Or I've made a point that I'm done writing because I've accomplished all my work as a writer and now I want to do one thing well. | ||
| I want to help young students around the world take themselves seriously with their education. | ||
| I did over 500 of them in schools all over England and Europe and stuff. | ||
| I loved it, man. | ||
| I got all these young lads and lasses to come back to me and show me degrees that they got when I showed them how important their education was. | ||
| And I really thrive in that environment because I think that's where everything still is for me. | ||
| Somehow, like I'm that kid, you know, who won't let go of needing to still chase the good in my life. | ||
| And I know there's bad things in the woods. | ||
| And I know there's brilliant things in the woods. | ||
| I'm still willing to walk that path and find something meaningful and that's what I came here to really say is that I want to make an impact with my words but not overdo it. | ||
| So I don't want to do any other podcast after this one except for my friend Brian's but I want to do the meaningful thing without it having to be attached. | ||
| To the social media draw that has hurt my life so much. | ||
| The social media draw that has hurt your life, how has it hurt your life? | ||
| Well, when my daughter broke her arm and we put up a GoFundMe page, I was viciously attacked because people expect me to have funds, but they don't know, you know? | ||
| They expect you to have funds because of the movie and the book? | ||
| Yeah, and I'm not. | ||
| I have nothing. | ||
| I borrowed money to get here. | ||
| Like, people don't know that. | ||
| I'm wearing a shirt for my friend because he funded me to be here, you know, so I'd have food while I was here. | ||
| It's like that real, you know? | ||
| So... | ||
| People don't want me to not succeed. | ||
| Like I hurt their image of me if I don't have wealth in addition to being this person before them. | ||
| Well, I just think people just they don't understand, you know, the people see someone else's life and they like to assume the worst and they like to criticize you whenever they have an opportunity. | ||
| So if they see any vulnerability To pounce. | ||
| You know, what you've gone through is the opposite of what most people go through. | ||
| People have difficult times in their life, but more than difficult times, you know what they have? | ||
| They have long periods where they don't have anything happen. | ||
| Where life is boring and life is just a dull gray and life is just work and coming home from work and the trials and tribulations of that and traffic and The kind of insane experiences that you had being wrongly convicted and spending 22 years confined in a cage forced to fight because of vicious psychopath guards that those | ||
| kind of experiences are the experiences that allowed you to come out of it this Very kind, very open-minded person who's trying to better yourself and wants to see the best in other people. | ||
| The people that go through their life in this dull state of jealousy and bitterness and resentment and just Constantly focused on themselves, the self-obsessive culture that we have. | ||
| And one of the things about social media that's most fucked up is you're looking at all these other people's lives and shitting on them and comparing yourself to them and finding faults in them and attacking them in the comments section and attacking what they... | ||
| And the people that are doing that, they're all doing that because they're in agony. | ||
| They're in a different kind of agony than you, but it's an agony of nothing. | ||
| I know. | ||
| And I looked at it and I thought, I try to craft a beautiful message on the social medias so that I don't get caught up in the arguments. | ||
| And I always try to show the good in the world. | ||
| And that's why I love like the Good News Network. | ||
| I'll try and deliberately stay away from things that poison my mind because I don't want to contribute. | ||
| I don't want to get caught up in the Trump argument or the previous argument or the new argument. | ||
| I want to post meaningful messages of good because that's my overall message. | ||
| So I thought recently, maybe I can contrive three beautiful messages for Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram, and I could leave out this wonderful message, and then I can go about my business of going back into schools and talking to students because it gets too chaotic. | ||
| In addition to all the lovely messages of the wonderful human beings that listened to me speak or they saw the film Fear of 13, read one of my books, There's also a lot of women out there, man, and they've been harassing me and bothering me, and it's put a lot of conflict in my life, and I don't want that. | ||
| Harassing you and bothering you how? | ||
| A lot of women fall in love with me because of the film. | ||
| The film made me look very attractive. | ||
| Yeah, what is it about women and men that are on death row, too? | ||
| That one, too. | ||
| Yeah, I know. | ||
| So, yeah, they'll contact me and tell me about their inmate. | ||
| I'm not an inmate. | ||
| I'm not a death row prisoner. | ||
| I was on death row. | ||
| That is a strange obsession that some women have. | ||
| Yeah, and it goes to a psychological feature of women who can fix things with their love. | ||
| So they want me to deceive my wife to be with them but not be deceitful. | ||
| They want me to ignore all the social chaos I could cause to go and leave a family to be with them but they still want to harass me. | ||
| And it was so bad recently even on my anniversary I had to cut off people who were bothering me. | ||
| I have an active stalker in my life. | ||
| It's all kind of crazy. | ||
| I've gone through a lot of experiences where the social media has really tested me. | ||
| So I thought I'm going to try and be like the dude. | ||
| All right, so they're going to execute me. | ||
| You said that twice, the dude. | ||
| Yeah, the dude is the guy that knows art. | ||
| So this is my last scene. | ||
| You don't mean like from the big Lebowski. | ||
| Kind of like the dude, man, like the dude. | ||
| So seriously, Jeff Bridges, one of my heroes. | ||
| Hey, what a moment. | ||
| You know, Chris Pine, Jeff Bridges, Ben Foster being interviewed about Hell in High Water. | ||
| And they asked Chris Pine, what are you watching? | ||
| He goes, oh, my God, I got to tell you about Fear of 13. I got to tell you about Nick Yaris. | ||
| Man, this dude is the shit. | ||
| You know what I mean? | ||
| And my phone goes, yeah. | ||
| I had dinner with him. | ||
| He's a really, really cool dude, man. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Wow. | |
| You need to have Chris on. | ||
| He's a really cool dude. | ||
| He's really introspective, and he's deep. | ||
| Like, he's a real good conversationalist. | ||
| Chris Pine. | ||
| What else has he been in? | ||
| Pull his image up. | ||
| Oh, dude, he just did the... | ||
| I know who he is, but I'm blanking on him right now. | ||
| Oh, he just did the one with Oprah, too, and he did the one before that with the Star Trek. | ||
| Oh, that guy. | ||
| Yeah, Chris. | ||
| He was in Wonder Woman, too. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| That guy's great. | ||
| I'm telling you, man, to invite me to dinner and hang out with him. | ||
| And even Harvey Weinstein pops in for a minute. | ||
| Holla. | ||
| I'm like, I know. | ||
| And he's like, Harvey, you just produced that documentary about the dude that was in jail. | ||
| This is before everything hit the fan with him. | ||
| Yeah, this is before things went tits up. | ||
| I know. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| No, I had this real great blessing. | ||
| So Alejandro Monteverdi, who did The Little Boy with Kevin James, he has an amazing life story himself. | ||
| I mean, his family was abducted by kidnappers and executed. | ||
| This is real drama. | ||
| The day I meet this man, I'm at a red carpet event in LA and he goes home and watches Fear of 13 and he comes back and he tells me, I'm going to make your movie. | ||
| I'm going to help you. | ||
| I don't know how, but God told me there are certain movies I have to make. | ||
| And he's making one right now with Tim Ballard from the CIA about rescuing children from the sex trades and stuff. | ||
| So he's doing really serious work, you know what I mean? | ||
| So he wants to make a feature film. | ||
| So they're going to make a feature film about me called Conviction right now. | ||
| It might be changed, but I got the script and it's fucking hard, man, to read. | ||
| But we have all these A-list actors. | ||
| And my dream, of course, is Chris Pine because I think he's one of the best, right? | ||
| But I have no say. | ||
| But I get this amazing chance to come out here and meet all these people for the film being made, and I realize it's all meant to be, man, like all this crazy stuff. | ||
| So maybe if I craft my message right, I can step back and let people appreciate the message I had without distorting it, because I don't want to ruin it. | ||
| I don't want to go too far and end up making a fool of myself when I thought the right thing to do was teach people about neuroplasticity and how to make yourself a really badass outside the ring by being a kind man. | ||
| And how to really make yourself a really nice person to the family and loved ones by having the self-respect about yourself to be patient in life. | ||
| And things like that, you know? | ||
| And don't ruin it. | ||
| So that's what I... You keep saying don't ruin it. | ||
| You know, when you're talking about social media, I think one thing to take into consideration is when you do something like a GoFundMe or any time there's anything controversial, those are magnets for hate. | ||
| And you might think that everyone hates you, but what you're dealing with is a very small amount of people from a very large amount of people. | ||
| I know that, sir. | ||
| If you're thinking about the whole planet, all the English-speaking people, you're dealing with hundreds and hundreds of millions of people that connect. | ||
| I believe so much in what you said. | ||
| That's why I'm here now, because on my website, nickyarris.org, we organize so today's listeners can go there and download copies of my book. | ||
| I can get out of destitute times. | ||
| I can get my life together. | ||
| We did everything we could knowing that this podcast has reached a million people. | ||
| So you're right. | ||
| I mean, even your social media. | ||
| What I mean is just, the thing is to not get caught up. | ||
| In the numbers that come at you that are negative. | ||
| Because it's just a sheer matter of volume. | ||
| If you're reaching people through the internet, you're reaching who knows how many human beings. | ||
| I think one out of a hundred is going to be the type of person that wants to send a hateful message because it's easy. | ||
| Because they don't have to look you in the eyes when they do it. | ||
| They don't have to feel any social consequences. | ||
| They don't have to feel your pain when they insult you or say awful things about you or your family. | ||
| They're doing it because they want to affect you because they're hurting. | ||
| And they're hurting for a very different reason than the way you're hurting. | ||
| But this is what's wrong with social media is because human beings are not meant to communicate that way. | ||
| We lose our humanity in this very shallow form of interaction. | ||
| Because all those parts, what's important about people is looking them in the eyes, talking to them, hugging them, shaking their hand, communicating honestly. | ||
| And anytime you're missing any of those pieces, When you communicate dishonestly, when you don't want to shake someone's hand, when you don't want to look them in the eye, when you don't want to interact with them, when you don't care about them as a person. | ||
| All those things leave you feeling like shit. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Amen. | |
| All those things. | ||
| That's true. | ||
| You're right. | ||
| The social media is the worst form of it. | ||
| Because it's just text. | ||
| You have to interpret it yourself. | ||
| You don't know what the fuck is going on in their life. | ||
| You don't know who they are. | ||
| But you read that text and you absorb it personally. | ||
| You absorb it personally, you take it in the worst possible form, and you feel that critique in your chest. | ||
| You feel it. | ||
| You feel it in your head. | ||
| I know. | ||
| I guess I got caught up in this notion that I could just go be a normal guy and have a normal job and people would leave me alone. | ||
| Well, they would if you weren't on social media. | ||
| And I've already entered that form. | ||
| Well, you don't have to stay in that form. | ||
| That's true. | ||
| But here's the thing. | ||
| Even if you do use that form, you know what you can do? | ||
| You just don't interact. | ||
| That's what I was doing. | ||
| That's the thing. | ||
| That's what I said I was going to do. | ||
| It's hard for people to understand that are on the outside. | ||
| They're like, well, you asshole. | ||
| I love you. | ||
| I want you to interact with me because I love you. | ||
| And I want you to recognize that I'm recognizing you, and I appreciate that from people, but they have to understand the volume of people that someone like you is dealing with. | ||
| That's what I try to convey, and I try very sincerely never to be ignorant to people. | ||
| You know, it's fucking mind-blowing, Joe, because I had my mind made up, and now I've realized that I do. | ||
| And it all goes back to a conversation with my boy Jason Daly. | ||
| Me and him were driving along to 405 one day, and the film Fear of 13 is about to come out. | ||
| And I told him I didn't want it to come out. | ||
| And he said,''You don't own that film.'' Every kid that's ever had a shitty childhood owns that film. | ||
| Everybody who's got a broken marriage or a shitty life or is really struggling owns that film. | ||
| If you fuck this up, I'll never be your friend again, man. | ||
| And he was right. | ||
| I don't own the fear of 13. And I don't own really anything of it, but its message is so beautiful. | ||
| I did what I could to tell my story because we're all living our life as an experience, but we can only convey it as a memory. | ||
| And I did beautifully for myself. | ||
| I'm so proud of the effort I made. | ||
| I don't care that the director robbed me. | ||
| I'll make my way. | ||
| I don't care what I went through to this moment because I truly appreciate the person who wrote me last night and said, two weeks ago, I was released from a mental hospital after trying to kill myself. | ||
| And my mom sat me down and made me watch a film. | ||
| Now, in the last two weeks, I've been going to therapy and I'm getting my shit together. | ||
| I don't own the film, Joe, and I don't own my message. | ||
| I guess my message is taken on by the people who love me, or not. | ||
| And you're right, I'm not going to be bothered by the negatives. | ||
| I had a terrible experience with a stalker for 12 years who won't leave me alone, and it cost me my daughter, and a divorce. | ||
| It's all kind of crazy stuff. | ||
| So it was really affecting me and my current wife, and I didn't like it. | ||
| But I think I'm going to actually beat a dude and just hang around for a little bit longer and make you proud of me for what I do from here on. | ||
| Well, don't worry about me, man. | ||
| No, everyone that I love is going to always be on that list, man. | ||
| That's what you use for motivation. | ||
| That's great, and there's nothing wrong with that. | ||
| But I think that what you can do and what you are doing is show that you can overcome things. | ||
| You can overcome horrible things. | ||
| Some of the most horrible experiences a person could ever face, you can overcome them, and you have. | ||
| And those messages, they give people inspiration. | ||
| And inspiration is one of the greatest things you can give a person. | ||
| I know that, man. | ||
| You're inspiring me today. | ||
| I told you since this man, ever since we started communicating, I told you, I mean this. | ||
| I even went out of my way today to Matt. | ||
| Matt rang me, your producer. | ||
| And I wanted to make a point right away. | ||
| I said, dude, I know a lot of people climb right past you to go to Joe. | ||
| But I wanted to tell you, thank you for helping me and my family today. | ||
| Thank you for helping organize. | ||
| I made sure that Jamie got my love when I came in the room because he organized my trip. | ||
| It was so cool how he got me into the right airport and everything right. | ||
| Because I know that is so important to that man. | ||
| Because a lot of people won't make that effort, Joe. | ||
| And I don't want to be that guy that misses my chance. | ||
| So I'm going to say thank you and yes ma'am and yes sir to everyone like my mom asked me. | ||
| And make sure never to overlook people because that's truly my message. | ||
| My kindness makes me able to come back. | ||
| My good heart is made better by the fact that I want to believe in good. | ||
| And it's crazy how it's come back to reward me in so many ways. | ||
| Like, do you remember when Muhammad Ali died? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah, well, I didn't know Anthony Samandani. | ||
| I didn't know his story. | ||
| But one day, I get contacted by a man who's seen the fear of 13. And I learned that he went to university out here and he became a lawyer because of a promise to his mother to be a good person. | ||
| He goes to the mosque every Friday and becomes close friends with Muhammad. | ||
| And they go to dinner every night with Maymay on Fridays, you know, and they become real close. | ||
| And he tells me this story how, at a young age, Muhammad looks him in the face and says, you're going to be one of the men that carries my message in life. | ||
| And he's like, I'm 22. What could I possibly have to offer anyone? | ||
| So he goes through this experience and on the day that Muhammad Ali had approval from the government patent office for this bracelet that says, within good there is God. | ||
| He called me in England where I was at the time and he says, I have a question for you. | ||
| I saw your film and I learned a lot about you since then. | ||
| Why aren't you bitter, man? | ||
| Why are you still willing to believe? | ||
| And I said, my mother never prayed for anything but good. | ||
| She always told me the only good there was was within God. | ||
| He said, are you kidding me? | ||
| Hold on. | ||
| And he starts sending me this stuff. | ||
| I didn't know that earlier that day Muhammad Ali's bracelet would be, you know, approved by the patent. | ||
| I didn't know any of that. | ||
| But it was those words. | ||
| You see what I mean about the synchronicity of all this craziness in my life? | ||
| The next thing you know, I'm in Los Angeles. | ||
| I'm meeting Alejandro. | ||
| He wants to help me make the movie. | ||
| I meet all these wonderful people like Adam Callanan from Bottle Keeper. | ||
| He's such a sweet guy. | ||
| They came up with this company on the beach a couple years ago and now it's doing very well for keeping drinks cold. | ||
| Wonders for me and my wife. | ||
| This man is such a lovely guy that I wouldn't be in this chair without him or Anthony or any of these people, right? | ||
| And then Anthony sets up Maymay Ali and he brings me out and we have a podcast and he doesn't tell her a word about me beforehand. | ||
| Now, what's crazy was, I'm doing this interview right behind where I used to sleep on the street, and I kept all that quiet. | ||
| I did some of my best work when I was homeless. | ||
| And I do this thing, and Maymay looks at me and says, no disrespect to my father Muhammad Ali, but you're one of the most influential men I ever met in my life, and within five minutes of meeting you, I'm already changing things about my life. | ||
| I decided right then, Okay, then I have to own that, man. | ||
| I have to live it for her, man. | ||
| Like, I can never go back. | ||
| I can't go back and be an average, retarded, mindless, angry person. | ||
| I can't be caught up in the drama of everyday stupid shit. | ||
| Like, I gotta owe it to that girl, you know? | ||
| And I have ever since I met her. | ||
| She's one of the nicest people in my life, man. | ||
| I have some amazing friends, Joe. | ||
| I really mean it, man. | ||
| And there's so many connections to your life you wouldn't even know. | ||
| Dude, when people found out I was coming to meet you, every one of them said the same, pretty much the same thing. | ||
| Joe's such a nice dude. | ||
| He's so intelligent. | ||
| I love listening to him. | ||
| I work with educators on a platform called Nepris. | ||
| They love your STEM broadcasts. | ||
| I know people up in Waterbury, Connecticut that teach out of the self-defense class called practical self-defense. | ||
| They're right now going crazy because they know Jesse Kozakowski is on the first Bellator card. | ||
| These guys are really crazy like Alex Cortez and all of them. | ||
| They're like, Joe is so next level. | ||
| I'm saying, so are you. | ||
| It's like Joe showing you to believe in yourself because he didn't get there because he had been handed this shit. | ||
| I remember reading stories about you going to the MMA and just doing it so you could have drink money, man. | ||
| Like to get free tickets and go in, right? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| That's true, ain't it? | ||
| Yeah, when I first started working for the UFC, I did the first 15- Not for money, right? | ||
| I did the first 15 shows for free. | ||
| For free? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| See what I mean? | ||
| Well, I was probably foolish financially. | ||
| My manager didn't think it was a good idea. | ||
| I just didn't care. | ||
| I was enjoying it. | ||
| That's what I love. | ||
| That's what I want to do, man. | ||
| I want to be the dude, man. | ||
| It was also a struggling company that I believed in, and I wanted to help them. | ||
| But what you're saying is interesting because one theme that you keep repeating, that you want to do things for other people. | ||
| You keep saying that, like you wanted to do that for Maymay. | ||
| You wanted to make me proud. | ||
| This is a constant theme that you want to do good for other people. | ||
| That's an amazing... | ||
| Amazing mindset for someone who's been through everything that you've been through that that sentiment that that and then your gratitude that's another very very powerful thing gratitude Love and gratitude are two of the most incredible expressions and Some of the most influential because when you show true gratitude to people and true love to people They feel that. | ||
| That affects the way they interact with the rest of the people that they're going to experience. | ||
| Like if they run into a new person just moments after meeting you, they will be nicer. | ||
| And they will feel that gratitude and feel that love. | ||
| That's real. | ||
| And that's one thing that we all can do. | ||
| You know, this thought that we're all powerless and helpless. | ||
| It's one of the problems with this society, is that this society is so overwhelming. | ||
| We have so much information coming at us, and the message is that what's important is, you know, beautiful girls with short skirts and fast, shiny cars and big, giant houses and private jets and diamond rings and expensive watches and all this horseshit. | ||
| And this is what people seek. | ||
| They seek that instead of seeking love and gratitude because it doesn't seem that that's important, but that's way more important. | ||
| It's everything because that literally changes the world. | ||
| You know, I always thought that that expression, the wings of the butterfly eventually become a hurricane, that's fucking stupid because that doesn't work that way. | ||
| A butterfly just generates a very small amount of wind and they're small and it doesn't really work that way. | ||
| But the idea behind it, what it represents... | ||
| As a metaphor, is that you literally by your one person that lives amongst 300 plus million people in this country, one person with love and gratitude and inspiration, especially the way you can express yourself. | ||
| That affects people you come in contact with. | ||
| And that in turn affects people they come in contact with. | ||
| And that literally can change the world. | ||
| It actually can change the world. | ||
| That's real. | ||
| Neuroplasticity, man. | ||
| That's what I'm good at. | ||
| I know it. | ||
| I've helped so many people heal their lives when I've interacted with them in intense time. | ||
| I've made an effort. | ||
| Let me stop you. | ||
| Because this is one thing that you said to me before the podcast and you said it again during the podcast. | ||
| You only want to do this one podcast. | ||
| You don't want to say anymore. | ||
| And I want to ask you why. | ||
| Because if you have this powerful message, the more people you reach and the more you express yourself with this message, you're not going to cheapen your message. | ||
| What you're gonna do is you're gonna get it out to more and more people. | ||
| And the more people that you can get out your words and the way you express yourself, that's gonna affect people. | ||
| It's gonna affect people in a very, very positive way. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| But the other side of that that no one can appreciate is that I'm failed. | ||
| I haven't been able to get anything going. | ||
| I tried to start a podcast. | ||
| No, no, no, no. | ||
| I have. | ||
| Let me stop you. | ||
| Let me stop you. | ||
| You're not failed. | ||
| First of all, you've only been out of jail for 13 years. | ||
| That's fucking crazy. | ||
| You were in jail for 22 years on death row. | ||
| There's not a whole lot of people who get through that experience and can tie their own fucking shoes after they're done. | ||
| You have every right in the world to be shell-shocked and incapacitated. | ||
| You're not. | ||
| It's hard to get things going. | ||
| The world does not open its doors for you and success does not come easy. | ||
| It doesn't work that way. | ||
| So for you to say you failed, you haven't failed. | ||
| You've already written books. | ||
| You already have a documentary made about you. | ||
| You're in the process of making a feature-length film about your life. | ||
| That's not a failure. | ||
| No, I just failed in getting the platforms together that I need. | ||
| It's not even failing. | ||
| It's just it doesn't always work out right the first time. | ||
| It's not a failure. | ||
| You're not a failure. | ||
| Okay, then here's the deal for you, sir. | ||
| Prove your words right to me and come on. | ||
| When I get my shit together, you come on my podcast and we finish the conversation later on. | ||
| I would do that. | ||
| But even if I didn't, it doesn't matter. | ||
| You can do anything, but I just want to show you, you yourself, this idea that you've failed is crazy. | ||
| You have not failed. | ||
| If you've done things, look, first of all... | ||
| Everyone does things that don't succeed and then you recalibrate and you adjust and you try again. | ||
| No one succeeds and wins the world championship in their first fight. | ||
| No one writes a book without learning English and without practicing essays that becomes the greatest book the world's ever written. | ||
| You take time and you learn. | ||
| This is what life is about. | ||
| Life is about this process. | ||
| And through that process, you find yourself. | ||
| Through the difficult tasks that you undertake, you adjust and you become better. | ||
| You said you started a podcast. | ||
| How long did you do it for? | ||
| I didn't. | ||
| Never got off the ground. | ||
| No one believes in me. | ||
| That's not a failure. | ||
| I know. | ||
| I'm just saying... | ||
| First of all, podcasts are easy, man. | ||
| That phone you have right there, I'm sure that phone has an audio recorder. | ||
| My $11 phone probably does. | ||
| Oh, they all do. | ||
| Every phone does. | ||
| That's not an $11 phone, man. | ||
| That's a regular Android phone, right? | ||
| It's a good phone. | ||
| It's thin as shit. | ||
| It's like a wafer. | ||
| I mean, look, if you had this phone fucking 10 years ago, people would think you were a wizard. | ||
| Yeah, man. | ||
| If you were in the 5th century, of course you would be. | ||
| Well, that phone, I'm sure, has a voice recorder. | ||
| Joe, you know you're kicking me into this, right? | ||
| And I'm going to have to respond because of the way I've always been wired. | ||
| I'm gonna do this then. | ||
| I am. | ||
| You can do anything. | ||
| It's not just this. | ||
| No, listen, I am. | ||
| Alright? | ||
| You need never again encourage me, sir. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| If I go around doing that for others... | ||
|
unidentified
|
I don't want you to beat yourself up. | |
| No, I have been rough on myself because I thought I'd have a platform and accomplish the things that I wanted to. | ||
| And I felt really shitty that I wasn't able to take care and provide for my family. | ||
| And that's the heart of it. | ||
| Really, there's the struggle on that side. | ||
| I wouldn't give a shit about fame. | ||
| I've had the most amazing experiences of my life, man. | ||
| One of my first interviews was the Village Voice and the woman learns me at the end, Jennifer Gonnerman. | ||
| She says, man, you know you're living one of the greatest stories ever told, man. | ||
| This ain't no joke. | ||
| And every time she's told me that words in my head, I realize it comes with a hell of a ride and a price. | ||
| So if I'm going to own it, I got to own all of it. | ||
| I keep telling people to own it when you do well, so... | ||
| Maybe I needed to bounce back and this is the day I step forward and start kicking ass again. | ||
| Maybe that will get me out of those tearful days that I've had to go through. | ||
| Well, you have every right to have a struggle. | ||
| I mean, if anybody has any right to have difficult emotions and a difficulty expressing those emotions, it's you. | ||
| And I understand how you could dwell on things not succeeding the way you anticipated and wanted them to. | ||
| But you just got to keep going, man. | ||
| No, I'm such an honest person. | ||
| I could never come on here and fake it. | ||
| You know, I could never do that for you, man. | ||
| I thought that would be so insincere. | ||
| So I just came on here and I decided I was going to pour it out, honestly. | ||
| Well, you did. | ||
| And I feel like the best thing about it is... | ||
| Joe, you're so like me in so many ways on the down low. | ||
| You just want good. | ||
| You just want to have a purposeful message that you want to share. | ||
| And that's what I thought was really cool. | ||
| I had a really cool experience last year. | ||
| I went to East Germany to speak before a company. | ||
| And I met all these Lebanese refugees after meeting Navy SEALs. | ||
| The dudes on the plane loved me, man. | ||
| I built them up for being part of our military system. | ||
| I made them really respect and honor themselves. | ||
| Then I was on the streets of Berlin hanging out with these Lebanese refugees, and I made them feel so good about the fact that they still believed in each other. | ||
| So I have some magical ability to go around and touch different groups and my message resonates with people who have been in the military or been through trauma or not been through trauma and I have a gift. | ||
| I know it. | ||
| And I've spoken in some of the most prestigious places and one of them is still to this day one of the highest honors. | ||
| I spoke at St. John's Church in London where Thich Nhat Nhan, the Vietnamese monk who marched with Martin Luther King in Selma, Alabama spoke. | ||
| And he used to be my pen pal on death row. | ||
| He was the first man that gave me respect when I was on death row. | ||
| And he questioned why I didn't have respect a lot like you're doing for me today. | ||
| And he taught me to look at myself differently. | ||
| So I went through a whole one-year period of my experiences before I could speak at that church. | ||
| And when I did, I was absolutely flawless because I knew that my friend was there and he was guiding me. | ||
| And somewhere within me I have some magical ability. | ||
| I don't know where it comes from, but I have. | ||
| An orator's skill. | ||
| And once I'm past these dark days, I'm sure I can lay it down well so that I can carry a message beautifully to educational fields, purposefully into the corporate fields or wherever I want to go. | ||
| And I love it that I do have a winning hand and I have a gift behind it that was earned. | ||
| You taught yourself how to do this. | ||
| I mean, think about what you were saying earlier about learning how to speak so that you could speak at your own execution. | ||
| That is a powerful motivating force. | ||
| Yes, sir. | ||
| And to learn all of the world's religions so that you understood what it means to speak. | ||
| Do you know in the Sanskrit religion a lot of the words are used as descriptive forms of things, so chair isn't the object, it's the feeling of sitting. | ||
| So you have a responsibility and not only in the words that you choose to speak but in the manner that you deliver them and the vibrations within you that you caringly share with another person because there is a receptor within us all to the truth and it resonates and it rises within us and so I found that powerful ability to talk to myself in that manner so that I could love myself. | ||
| And I would stand in the window of my cell and talk to myself or quote beautiful texts. | ||
| And I loved reading The Prophet by Khalil Gibran. | ||
| I read it over 20 times because I thought his message was so powerful because he lost his entire family while he wrote this book over a three-year journey. | ||
| And although I might have come back from the ashes like Peachy Carnahan and The Man Who Would Be King from Roger Kipling, I still feel like I have a valid message motivating me to go forward. | ||
| And my idea from this morning on is I want to go home to Laura and the kids and regroup, get myself together. | ||
| And I know a lot of people are going to contact me because of your grace to have me on this show. | ||
| And what I plan to do over the next couple years, Joe, is I want to show myself, not just you, sir, that I'm right. | ||
| Being a kind man, being a good-hearted man, being meticulously polite, doesn't mean you're a loser. | ||
| Doesn't mean you're a fool. | ||
| And if people take advantage of you, it's down to you to take it as an insult or rise the fuck up about the insult and just move past it. | ||
| The reason I'm not bitter is because I didn't take it personal when they broke my teeth and put me in death row and tortured me. | ||
| I didn't take it personal because right now there are two million people incarcerated in this country. | ||
| I didn't take it personal because 150 other men got off of death row. | ||
| That's why I'm able to function, because I don't take life personally, but I take love personally. | ||
| I take it so personally that I'm willing to love myself. | ||
| A lot of people can't do that. | ||
| Do you know how hard it is to get a woman to look at herself without looking at a flaw? | ||
| They can't stand it. | ||
| Do you know how hard it is to get a man to be honest with his emotions, thinking that he's weak if he does? | ||
| I would rather have tears on my face walking down the street in frustration than to just rip on somebody and hurt somebody. | ||
| That's the kind of caliber of level of humanity I want to find in myself, and I think we all do. | ||
| I think the message, like you said, has been distorted by the social media so badly that we need more talking. | ||
| And I would dream of having a late-night talk show and play some of my coolest music and talk to people, just average people, and just open it up. | ||
| Like, I want to just share what's good about me because my mother was right. | ||
| Wouldn't it have just been a terrible waste of time if I got out of jail and I was just another asshole on the street? | ||
| It would. | ||
| You know, one of the things that keeps coming up is you're longing for community. | ||
| And this is something I've been thinking about a lot lately because I think one of the things that people are constantly searching for in this world is happiness, right? | ||
| So one thing that people don't have that they wish they had that comes up over and over again. | ||
| It's a reoccurring theme. | ||
| One of the things that's also a big part of this life that we all are living right now is this very recent disconnect between our neighbors, our friends, by commuting to work and being stuck in this stuffy environment where you can't express yourself normally. | ||
| And this is the majority of your life, the majority of your time. | ||
| And then we wonder why we're sad. | ||
| We don't spend enough time together with friends. | ||
| Here's when you aren't sad. | ||
| When you're having fun with your friends. | ||
| Because that's what human beings are meant to do. | ||
| They're meant to work together, to do something together, like something meaningful. | ||
| It's the core of your healing. | ||
| We're meant to have community. | ||
| We're meant to have friends. | ||
| We're meant to laugh. | ||
| We're meant to share experiences. | ||
| We're meant to care for each other. | ||
| And when that's not happening in your life, you feel like shit. | ||
| What you're doing is spreading the fingers of your community. | ||
| You're spreading the branches of your community. | ||
| By expressing yourself and helping other people. | ||
| By expressing yourself and inspiring other people. | ||
| By sending your message out there. | ||
| This is a type of community for people that are longing for community. | ||
| You're connecting with people. | ||
| People that are longing to feel a connection. | ||
| This is something that's missing. | ||
| This is something that's greatly missing in our society. | ||
| And you understand it more than most. | ||
| Because your time That they forced you to be separate from community. | ||
| That they gave you the opposite of community. | ||
| If you communicated, they beat you up. | ||
| They gave you the opposite of community. | ||
| They locked you in a cage, didn't let you mingle with other people. | ||
| And then the people that were around you, you didn't want to mingle with them. | ||
| Horrific people that are just the worst examples of a life gone wrong. | ||
| And you're surrounded with them and you still emerged. | ||
| And just that alone gives people hope. | ||
| And that hope is something that everybody needs. | ||
| I was a good person on death row to the point that a man named Tom Lowenstein wanted to write a book about me. | ||
| And I turned him on to Walter Ograd, who's still sitting on death row. | ||
| And I asked him to write the book about Walter. | ||
| And then CNN Death Row Stories wanted to contact me and have Susan's friend and narrate my story two and a half years ago. | ||
| I told him again, Walter's still on death row, man. | ||
| Do it for him. | ||
| What's Walter's story? | ||
| Walter Ogreib was convicted of killing a little girl and putting her in a TV box, but he didn't do it. | ||
| And he had the misfortune of having his brother attacked in his house and nearly murdered and being brought in for that investigation. | ||
| And then simply asked by a detective, hey, there's a girl killed on your street. | ||
| Did you know anything about it? | ||
| He goes, yeah, I know about it. | ||
| Next thing you know, he's facing death row. | ||
| So a jury finds him not guilty, but for the sabotage of one juror, he ends up on death row. | ||
| What do you mean, sabotage of one juror? | ||
| He voted not guilty. | ||
| And then he blurts out during the Valdir, I lied, I lied, he's guilty. | ||
| So they declare a mistrial. | ||
| Get the guy, they call the Monsignor to come in and say that now he confessed to him. | ||
| They have a second trial. | ||
| So they put Walter on death row and I meet him and everybody's abusing the shit out of him. | ||
| So... | ||
| I did the unnatural thing. | ||
| I stood up for him, for all the bullies, and I told the two men that were abusing him, if they put their hands on him again, I was going to get involved. | ||
| And I started helping Walter with his lawyers, and ever since I got out of prison, I kept my word to stick by him and fight for him. | ||
| So I gave up opportunities, could have changed my life, and now Death Row Stories is back, and they're going to do my story. | ||
| And Walter's still on Death Row right now. | ||
| Yeah, and he's innocent. | ||
| What can be done to help Walter? | ||
| Contact Tom Wolfe and ask him why the Innocence Projects and the Integrity Unions won't take up his case. | ||
| There's no evidence. | ||
| And it was clearly, I mean, when you see the show on Defro Stories, it's just laid out so clear. | ||
| I was a little disappointed they didn't mention me that I turned them on to Walter. | ||
| My selfless act was overlooked, but that was just my ego. | ||
| But I always am like that. | ||
| And that's what I love. | ||
| I know that they were despicable, Joe. | ||
| And the acts that a lot of men did were despicable. | ||
| But if I let that stop me from loving any of them, then I was going to be nothing. | ||
| So, yeah, a lot of them were really messed up, man. | ||
| But the ones that needed it, I set aside everything and still cared about them, man. | ||
| So spell out Walter's name for people. | ||
| O-G-R-O-D. Ogrod. | ||
| Walter Ogrod was convicted of putting a little girl in a box in Philadelphia. | ||
| We need to get Kim Kardashian on the case. | ||
| Yeah, man, because this is... | ||
| She's getting people released from prison. | ||
| Hey, Kim, if you want to get someone a pardon, it's Walter. | ||
| This man has suffered enormously. | ||
| What prison is he in? | ||
| He's in Greene County Supermax in Pennsylvania. | ||
| I fought for my other friend, Ernie Simmons. | ||
| He got out. | ||
| Here it is. | ||
| The Trials of Walter Ogrod. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| The Shocking Murder, So-Called Confessions, and Notorious Snitch to Sent a Man to Death Row. | ||
| Tom Lowenstein came to me while I was still on death row in 2002. And he said, Nick, my God, your story. | ||
| I want to write a book about you. | ||
| And I said, yeah, that's brilliant. | ||
| But how about the guy sitting next to me who doesn't have lawyers or DNA or anybody to help him? | ||
| How about helping him? | ||
| He goes, are you crazy you're giving up an opportunity? | ||
| I said, dude, it ain't like that. | ||
| I love this man. | ||
| He has no lawyers like I do. | ||
| So that's who I am. | ||
| So I didn't take credit for it, but I really did try to help another man because I felt like I would be so disappointing if I just took and took and took for myself. | ||
| And you know, I'm actually grateful I didn't go on your podcast two years ago. | ||
| I was a homeless person without a family. | ||
| And now I got the two amazing girls, Zara and Bethany, and my wife Laura. | ||
| These two English girls get the dream life change. | ||
| They get to move from Somerset, England out here to Oregon. | ||
| And my little girl gets on a yellow school bus, Joe. | ||
| She goes the bus. | ||
| Every day she's in school. | ||
| I'm in the community. | ||
| I got all these wonderful friends up in Oregon like Donnie Hobbs and these guys that are my personal friends now. | ||
| I built my community again. | ||
| I got all these cool people up there that love me. | ||
| My wife's right now in Salem with her friend Carly and they're opening up a new shop up there and all this stuff. | ||
| So I really did it. | ||
| Despite not having anything, I did exactly what you said. | ||
| I went and overcame the deprivation and found community and built my tribe. | ||
| Look, I know a lot of people struggle to have people in their life that aren't causing them conflict. | ||
| It's you who's allowing it, man. | ||
| Go out and find new people to be around because a lot of people want you if you're a nice person. | ||
| It's just hard for people to find those people sometimes, and that's where they lose hope. | ||
| One of the things, they don't know where to get started. | ||
| They don't know how to get their life going, how to get moving, how to feel good, how to get success. | ||
| There's so many different things. | ||
| To those people, I say, just do something. | ||
| The more things you do, the more things you can do. | ||
| Do something. | ||
| Do anything. | ||
| Whether it's commit to walking around the block ten times a night. | ||
| Whether it's committing to writing your life story. | ||
| And you know what stops a lot of people is their self imagery, right? | ||
| All right. | ||
| I was convicted of a rape and murder and in everyone's eyes I was a psychologically deranged person. | ||
| I had to live with that stigma every day, right? | ||
| Then when I got out, everybody thought I must be crazy as fuck because I spent 8,057 days in solitary confinement being tortured. | ||
| So there's no way I could be sane, right? | ||
| Right. | ||
| Their perspective had no effect on me because by that time I had given myself enough education to know the difference between what was done to me and who I am. | ||
| And this is the problem with a lot of people. | ||
| They failed to stop doing this thing where I am this or I am that. | ||
| And this is the problem. | ||
| So I really have never cared about the perspective of anyone in the negative, except for when they got it wrong for my intent to do good with them. | ||
| And then it just became a battle of my own ego. | ||
| So I realized that the truth is, As long as I know I'm doing right and I'm doing good, it isn't going to matter about their perspective because the same person who thought I was a rapist scumbag murderer now thinks I'm one of the most eloquent speakers they met in their life. | ||
| Their perspective about me changed, but mine surely shouldn't. | ||
| But it did. | ||
| And that's what a lot of people suffer from. | ||
| They let that negative comment make them feel like they have to overcome it or they have to live with it. | ||
| And I tell you what, Joe, I really never expected this, but for the first time in my life from conducting an interview, throughout the whole process, I've been reevaluating who I am and what I'm saying. | ||
| It's like a fucking slap in the face, man. | ||
| Like I came in here bedraggled with my emotions, carrying them on my sleeves and all the stress. | ||
| I haven't slept well for days. | ||
| I haven't taken care of myself. | ||
| That's bullshit. | ||
| I didn't do well in articulating and you gave me a wake-up call that I've never had before in any experience. | ||
| You can go back and look through the history of the many experiences I've had of interviews and I've done some outstanding ones. | ||
| I've never had a personal experience where throughout the course of speaking to another man, I started to reevaluate everything I held firmly to. | ||
| And I promise you, I'm gonna go and think a whole lot about this and get my shit together because I do owe it to a lot of people to be one badass motherfucker with a hell of a message. | ||
| You owe it to yourself. | ||
| Damn straight, man. | ||
| I'm going to do that. | ||
| I really am, man. | ||
| So, if you want me to come and speak before your corporate functions or a high school or a university, I'd do that better than anyone. | ||
| In fact, I'm one of the finest speakers on the planet and I learned it because I watched Bruce Springsteen. | ||
| Do you remember that speech he gave at the Oscars for Philadelphia? | ||
| No. | ||
| I never watched the Oscars. | ||
| Dude, get that up. | ||
| My God. | ||
| Bruce Springsteen is one of the finest speakers. | ||
| I think we'd get yanked off of YouTube, unfortunately, if we put it up. | ||
| No, but just the image. | ||
| But dude gave one of the most profound speeches I ever watched. | ||
|
unidentified
|
He's a beast. | |
| Dude can speak beautifully. | ||
| Bruce Springsteen's a bad motherfucker. | ||
| He made the nexus point between music and imagery so poignant. | ||
| That I was blown away by it so much so that when we made the documentary, Fear of 13, that's all I kept imagining when I spoke was the imagery we would be lended. | ||
| And I love the fact that I worked very hard to bring the whole audience into my cell one time to spend with me my story in a way that no one ever did before. | ||
| And I fucking rocked it. | ||
| That's awesome. | ||
| Yeah, I like that. | ||
| I like the fact that I know I have talent in that field. | ||
| I don't want to boast, but I have a gift. | ||
| And it came light years ahead of me when I watched. | ||
| I had 400 students in Ealing enraptured at a conference. | ||
| My friend, an educator named Edmund Dobson, set this whole thing up. | ||
| I go there. | ||
| You can hear a pin drop. | ||
| Because all along, somewhere along the way, an energy clicks in and I can hold the room in the palm of my hand. | ||
| I've had some amazing experiences with it. | ||
| I don't know how to stay it, but that cult of personality lure of being on the stage and talking to people is powerful, man. | ||
| And I can see why Tony Robbins and everybody gets up and they do that. | ||
| I'm not a life coach. | ||
| I can't coach no one's life. | ||
| But I can tell you about your life in ways that would make you really invigorated to want to make a better life for yourself. | ||
| But no one could truly be your life coach. | ||
| You got to do that shit yourself. | ||
| And I love it. | ||
| I love it that I understood those moments because one of the coolest things was I used to... | ||
| Go to the Globe Theatre. | ||
| Anybody that understands Shakespeare understands the Globe Theatre is the center of the world for Shakespeare. | ||
| They would perform Titus Antronicus and then after which Cleopatra would come out on stage and introduce me to the cloud. | ||
| Now I had eight minutes, ten minutes tops to do this thing. | ||
| And in eight to ten minutes, I had a crowd who had been spending for three hours long play, crying, putting money in a bucket for what I said to them, and did it flawlessly every time. | ||
| And I did it for a whole summer in London. | ||
| It was the most amazing experience to stand there and look out over this vista of London after you did this amazing thing where people never expected you. | ||
| And you are nothing to do with the theatre. | ||
| You are just a human rights charity chosen by the theatre to come out and speak. | ||
| And I realized at that moment I had a gift. | ||
| If I could get people who had been standing for three hours watching a play to have wet tears in their eyes, put money, shoving it into a bucket for me, Then I knew I had some ability to finally speak. | ||
| I was no longer an aphasia-affected, destroyed, distorted mind, addled by drugs, and used beyond belief to distortions of... | ||
| Like, I was so screwed up to come back to do that. | ||
| I knew I was... | ||
| Do you know I wrote this whole book in only three days? | ||
| I have a gift, Joe, like seriously. | ||
| I wrote, and I have witnesses, I wrote the whole book in two and a half days, man. | ||
| Because it was in me. | ||
| This story, Monsters and Mad Men, was so powerful. | ||
| That when I met Laura, my wife, I told her, I said, you know what? | ||
| I'm going to finally do it, man. | ||
| I'm going to get this out. | ||
| And it just came out. | ||
| For two and a half days, I barely slept, ate, did anything. | ||
| All I did was make love to my wife on a break or write, and I mean poured it out. | ||
| And I poured out the whole book, and I realized that was needed to move on. | ||
| And it's the best book I ever wrote in my life. | ||
| And I'm so proud that it's my last one because I don't have to worry about no more stories. | ||
| I did the thing that was great. | ||
| All right, so this one changed. | ||
| This is really Fear of 13, my countdown to execution. | ||
| It went through hell. | ||
| It got canceled. | ||
| It's now Fear of 13. Then I wrote The Kindness Approach. | ||
| I did one called My Journey Through Her Eyes. | ||
| I didn't bring a copy. | ||
| Wait a minute. | ||
| Do you not want to write? | ||
| Why do you say that you're done? | ||
| Because I crafted my series of books that create and captivate my whole entire message, and I want to leave it pure. | ||
| I don't want to then go on and make up falsifications of things that didn't happen. | ||
| So all these are non-fiction? | ||
| All these are non-fiction. | ||
| All these events are true and poignant to my life. | ||
| And I think that's the best thing to do. | ||
| Stay true to who I am. | ||
| I was going to tell one story called That's Enough for Me as a fictionalized writer, just to show everybody my talent. | ||
| Because people in the past have said, wow, you can write anything. | ||
| So I was going to do that, but I held back because I thought, I want to leave it cool. | ||
| I want to leave it like this is my series of work. | ||
| My work is I wrote two prison books and I wrote two books that will guide people in life how not to be screwed up or bitter. | ||
| And I want to leave that as my message. | ||
| I want to go and do other things, but those are my books and I'm proud of the work I did. | ||
| I got it out of my system. | ||
| I'm a published author. | ||
| I can go down in history as that, right? | ||
| I'm cool with that. | ||
| I don't really want to then push it and think that I can then lure people into reading more works that I can try because that's not really fair to them. | ||
| Do you know what I mean? | ||
| I want to keep it that way. | ||
| I think that's one of the things I want to try and stay true to. | ||
| Now, speaking, that's my love. | ||
| Now, Nick, if someone wanted to hire you to speak, where would they go? | ||
| NickYarris.org. | ||
| So it's really simple. | ||
| Everyone on the podcast can easily find me on the other social medias. | ||
| But I have, like I said, my really close friends, Adam Callahan and his wife just had a baby. | ||
| So they're running my website, NickYarris.org. | ||
| And a lot of people can reach me for functions like that. | ||
| I really love the fact that I have a chance also with this myverse.com to go ahead and go into schools. | ||
| And there's a really cool thing. | ||
| You know, this X generation times three, man, they're like so computer savvy, right? | ||
| So much so that you actually are starting a trend. | ||
| There's no longer 15 minutes of fame. | ||
| There's the five second video clip of fame now. | ||
| And it's been reduced. | ||
| It's just like everything's five seconds. | ||
| You know what I mean? | ||
| It's no longer. | ||
| So everything in the education field is coming faster and faster. | ||
| So we need to use the analytics of something like Myverse to go ahead and get a child to figure out who they can go and be in their careers and then follow that correct path. | ||
| You can't just throw it against the wall anymore, Joe. | ||
| You have to really work hard to get children to feel good about being a taxi driver, a painter, It's not no shame to be a person who goes out and does a simple manual job. | ||
| If that makes you happy as a human being, you should be able to do that without the stigma, right? | ||
| But the school's not going to tell you that. | ||
| They're going to tell you you could be anything, right? | ||
| But why wouldn't you want to find out what would make you happy in life and be that, right? | ||
| That makes sense to me. | ||
| You're not going to learn that from school. | ||
| You'll learn that from people. | ||
| You'll learn that from people and you'll learn that from online more than anything today. | ||
| And that's why I want to be involved in the educational field. | ||
| I think that's my greatest gift is someone who went to prison, who hadn't ever read a book, who accomplished the things that he did, then can share how the purpose of my education was so that I was able to process life enough to handle it. | ||
| To give myself enough separation to realize who I was as a human being is not the sum total of my misery. | ||
| And that I could then help others structure their lives through politeness to go and get a good education. | ||
| And I love that fact that I worked so hard through all these different things to not lose that message, man. | ||
| And it really does work for a lot of young people. | ||
| They find that their self-respect really does grow when someone gives them just a small little bit of a break, man. | ||
| They're so honest. | ||
| I love it. | ||
| I'll never tire of it in that one regard because I've touched so many young people's lives, man. | ||
| That's beautiful. | ||
| Nick, that's a great message. | ||
| And thanks for being here, man. | ||
| I really appreciate it. | ||
| I'm glad we did this. | ||
| Yeah, me too. | ||
| I really do. | ||
| Can I give a quick shot at this? | ||
| All right. | ||
| So I got some good friends of mine. | ||
| I really messed up on Alex Ortiz and I like these young dudes, these fighters. | ||
| Joe, they're all mad about you and I like it. | ||
| What do you think about the Bellator anyway? | ||
| Love it. | ||
| Yeah? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I think we need more. | ||
| We need more organizations like that. | ||
| But I think Bellator is doing a great job. | ||
| Yeah, Jesse Kozakowski is going to fight this month up there. | ||
| And I like the fact that his father teaches that Kung Tao with that prison style of martial arts. | ||
| I don't know what that is. | ||
| Oh, well, it's the old style. | ||
| It's like, it isn't like the martial arts that most people would know because it's... | ||
| Derived from the Filipino prison systems. | ||
| It's like really pure styles of quick attacks and stuff like that. | ||
| So this isn't the boxing. | ||
| But no, I like it that dudes like Mike Kimball and all these guys have been really supportive to me. | ||
| And everyone, like I said, that knew I was coming on here, I just want to tell them, if I forgot who you are, thank you all for being so supportive. | ||
| And I really want to say thank you to my wife for being so there for me lately. | ||
| And I'm really grateful that we've learned in this wonderful lesson that I might belong to you, sweetheart, but I also have some good left to do. | ||
| And I'm going to try and do both well. | ||
| And I'm very grateful to everyone listening, especially to you, Mr. Rogan. | ||
| You're a really nice young man. | ||
| Thanks, man. | ||
| I'm grateful to you as well. | ||
| No, I mean that, Joe. | ||
| And I know you're going to do something. | ||
| I know, but you said I'm a nice young man like my grandma. | ||
| You're a nice young man. | ||
| Hey, even better. | ||
| I'm your sexy granddad. | ||
| Give me some love, boy. | ||
| Thank you, man. | ||
| Go and have a good day, everyone. | ||
| I love you around the world. | ||
| Bye, bye, bye. | ||
| Martin Mucci. | ||
| Oh, man. | ||
| Bye, bye, bye. | ||
| Bye everybody. |
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