#2475 - Andrew Jarecki

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What's happening, man? Go ahead. I'm good, how are you? I'm great. I watched your documentary, the Alabama solution last night,

and it was wild. It's very, very disturbing. Kind of shocked, I hadn't heard more about it. Because it's such a terrible story. It's a joke.

It's just an unbelievably awful situation. And I think you covered it really well. It's very, very heartbreaking. Yeah, thanks for watching it. Yeah, it's sort of a question of why people don't

know about things that are happening with our tax dollars in our backyards. Are there things that we don't want to know? There's a reason why people sort of drive by prisons on the highway, and they see the little metal sign.

And it says, you know, X, Y, Z correctional. And they probably think, as I did for many years. Well, I'm sure it's not great back there. But it doesn't need to be great. And if anything terrible was happening back there,

somebody probably told me about it. But because of the secrecy that surrounds prisons, we treat them sort of like black sites. There's no way for us to really look inside. So the press doesn't get lit in.

And the public doesn't understand what's happening. And we know that when you get people total control over other people, bad things happen. Bad things happen every single time. And this is one of the worst things.

What's really terrifying is the sheer numbers of people that died there with no investigation. That's what's really terrifying. Yeah. Because you even detail that at the end, like since then,

how many people have died. And it's just like, good Lord, thousands. Yeah. Well, there's a attorney general in Alabama named

Steve Marshall who's always run on like tough on crime,

strategies and saying, you know, we got a lot more people up. And people who are in prison for violent crimes should potentially never get out of prison ever. And he says in the film, as you remember, that I ask him about the nature of crime.

“And he says, well, I think there are evil people in this world.”

People who have absolutely no regard for human life. And this is a guy who's presided over a system that's killed. That's led to the deaths of 1,500 people. Just since we started making the film. So this question of like who are the good guys

and who are the bad guys? And, you know, what's the nature of cruelty? What's the nature of punishment? Are we putting people there to try to make them better, rehabilitate them, or we putting them there,

because their drug addicts and we're trying to get rid of them as opposed to rehabilitate them, or as opposed to try to get them off of drugs. So obviously prisons have become pretty much a catch-all for the ills of society. So if you have mental illness, much more likely to go to prison.

Once you're in prison, if you're mentally ill or you have bad social skills, you're much more likely to get into a scrape with a guard, who probably isn't trained to deal with some to use mentally ill. And you're much more likely to get murdered, which is what we saw happening in Alabama.

“But you even, it's the old expression who's going to watch the watchers, right?”

Because one of the things that you detail is very obviously nonviolent people who spend all their time writing and reading and they're getting retribution, because they're calling attention to the terrible conditions at the prison. So the one guy with glasses who was beaten blindly was his name?

Robert Ode Council. I mean, there's so many stories that you show in this documentary from smuggled cameras. So these guys all get contraband cameras from the guard. From the guard.

The guard's cell, the camera, cell the phones to the men inside, which is also crazy. I mean, there's so many drugs in the Alabama state prison system. And I spoke to one of the people who is incarcerated there early on on a contraband cell phone.

And I said, you know, we're all the drugs coming from the amount of drugs here.

This is an incredible, you know, human wasteland.

You're seeing just high, high percentage. Maybe 80 percent of the people are addicted to drugs. Many of whom were not addicted to drugs before they came in. And how are you getting all the cell phones? And the guy looked at me like I was, you know, stupid.

And he said, you know, we don't leave, right? And I thought, oh, I get it. The people that come and go are the guards. Those are the ones that go out. They get the packages.

They bring them in. And I've spoken to guards who said, you know, we make $36,000 a year without the drugs without the cell phones. So, of course, we got to sell the cell phones and the drugs,

Oh, God. Yeah.

“Oh, so what are the main drugs these guys are addicted to?”

What are they getting them? Well, there's originally right. It was sort of more traditional drugs. And people were using heroin and using whatever they could get a hold of. But as the drugs have gotten more complicated and easier to bring in.

Now they can actually put, there's a drug called Flaka, which is a very significant problem there. It's a phantom, obviously, also, but these drugs can be brought in on a piece of paper. So somebody could send you a letter, and it could be in the letter. They can actually put the drug into the paper or sort of like acid when they put acid on paper.

Yeah. And so, you know, there's this effort to kind of stop that, but then does it lead to people

being unable to communicate with their loved ones, ultimately, the easiest way to get the

drugs is for the officers to sell the drugs. And so, you know, we say, and I think it's sadly true that the Alabama Department of

“Corrections, and it's not just an Alabama, but obviously we use that as the lens through”

which we saw incarceration more generally. But the Alabama Department of Corrections is the largest law enforcement agency in the state of Alabama, and it's also the biggest drug dealing operation. You're much more likely to dive and overdose inside the prison than you are out in the street in Alabama.

Statistically? Yeah. Oh my God. Oh, boy. You know, one of the things that was very heart-wrenching is this callous approach, you showed

at the one time where all these prisons want on strike, so they all communicated with each other through these contraband cell phones. They all got them to guard. So I guess it's ubiquitous throughout the state, it's not just one correct. And these people on the radio were like, "Well, it's prison, it's supposed to suck."

You know, maybe if they saw your film, they wouldn't have such a cavalier attitude about it. Yeah. It's that attitude. It's like, these are human beings, and some of them barely did anything, like one guy

that wound up dying from, you think they did something to, or they think they did something to a cigarette that they gave us, guy. The all he did was break into an abandoned building. Yeah. He didn't steer anything.

And entering an unoccupied building. Yeah. His name is Gene. I mean, I don't even know if he broke in. Right?

It was unoccupied and might have even been open. Yeah. Said entering. So he entered a building that he wasn't supposed to enter and he got 15 years in a cage, and then on his way out, the least they're inferring that they killed him, because

he had too much information about what was going on inside, and he was going to get out. Yeah. Yeah. That's goes back to the story of a woman who we had met in her son when we were first communicating with the man using these contraband cell phones.

And they were telling us what was going on inside the prison, inside the various prisons. We sort of, in the early days, we couldn't believe it, because the way we got into the

prisons that begin with is I had gone down to Alabama because I was always interested in

incarceration and the problems of that system and the justice system I made other films about the justice system, and I was always curious about Alabama because it's sort of famously maybe the worst prison system in the country, but it mirrors a lot of others. And my daughter was 14 at the time, Jeremy, and she said, "You know, I'm reading this book by a guy named Anthony Ray Hinton," and it's a book about his wrongful imprisonment

in Alabama, and maybe he should read this with me. So we end up reading the book together, and then we both sort of just spontaneously decided to take a road trip to Montgomery because we just didn't know anything about it. It had never been there. She was growing up in New York, and it was just not in her frame of reference.

So we went down there and we met a man who was the first black prison chaplain in the state of Alabama chaplain Browder. And I said, "Well, I'm really curious about what's going on in the prisons."

“And he said, "Well, you should just come in with me."”

And I said, "Well, I'm a filmmaker, they're not going to let me just walk into the prison in Alabama." And he said, "Well, just don't come in as a filmmaker. You just don't have to bring it camera, you just come in and talk to some of the guys."

So I went into film, ultimately, we were allowed to film, ultimately, in one of the prisons.

to find a warden who felt like, you know, he wanted to show an example of how Christianity

was active and important in the prison system, which I agreed with. But then while we're in there filming with like five cameras, which was just unheard of. The men inside couldn't believe that there were any cameras in there. And they started taking us aside and saying, "Listen, what they're showing you here is a very curated version of what's going on in this prison.

“You have to get into these other buildings.”

You've got to see what's going on in that dorm over there called the behavior, modification, dorm, where guys have been killed by guards. And you've got to look at that dorm, where people have been in solitary confinement for five years at a time. You know, don't let them show you just what they want to show you.

And I felt much safer, you know, even though the warden had said to us when you go in there,

you know, don't talk to any of the men, they're all very dangerous. I immediately felt safer talking to the inmates that I did talking to any of the guards. And when we left, it was really because we got kicked out, right? We start, you saw in the beginning of the film, we sort of start getting nosy and we start trying to look in some of these other areas and then they shut down the filming, they throw

us out. And then we thought, well, you know, maybe we're stuck now, how are we going to make a film about this?

“We feel we have to, because we're the only people that know what's going on in here.”

But they're not going to let us back. So it was then that we found out that there was this network of men inside who had access to these contraband cell phones, who were documenting what was going on. So that was our way of getting into those buildings that we couldn't see inside.

And one of the first things we learned was one of the guys inside, Melvin Ray, taxidust

to say, hey, you know, this, this, this, this guard, it was a guard that we had been tracking already who was a particularly violent guard. He just beats somebody very badly and he's now that person, the victim, is at UAB Hospital. So we jumped in a car and we went to UAB Hospital and just walked up. I just put my, I found in my pocket and we just walked up to the intensive care unit.

And when we got there, we found that this young man Steven Davis had died from his injuries. And as we started to get deeper into it, we went and visited his mother, because we didn't even know if she knew that she had lost her son. But in fact, she had been with him when he passed away. She had sort of turned off the life support.

And we said, we want to make a film about this, we're, we're trying to tell the story. And she immediately said, I'm in, I want to help you. I don't want this to happen to any other mothers. You know, and this is a very nice white lady from Union Town, Alabama with an oxygen tank. I mean, she's, she's not somebody that you would see ordinarily is kind of a heroic person.

But when she loses her son, she really becomes so activated. And she ends up telling us the story. And then she says, look, you know, they're lying to me already. You know, my son just died last night. And they're already calling me and telling me things about how he was the one that attacked

guards. And none of this is true. This all seems like it's fake. So teach me how to record my phone calls, you know. So this, this older woman suddenly became a really important partner in making the film.

And this gets back to your question about Stephen Davis. So her son, who was a drug addict, right, didn't kill anybody. But was in a car when a drug deal went bad. He went to try to buy drugs in his friend, went in the house and they had a fight and somebody got shot.

“And then he got arrested and was charged with murder because that's how the felony murder”

statute works. And so here you have drug addict who goes to prison in Alabama and is in the highest security prison there and is targeted by a particular guard who is especially violent and it's just beaten to death in front of 70 witnesses. And then of course, as we go through the film, we start tracking that in our investigation

and we start looking into the cover up and why they lied about how he had died and how they scrambled witnesses and how the Department of Corrections is organized so that they prevent people from finding out what really happened to their kids or their loved ones. And they avoid liability and so on. And there was one person that we ended up hearing from this guy, James Sales, who originally

tells just the police side of the story, just says, well, you know, yeah, it's exactly the way that the guard said. But then he kind of hints on the phone, listen, when I get out of here, I'll tell the real story. They have access to these communications as their way they could be hacking into it, known

that sales had said that to you. Well, the the person that he said it to was the lawyer for Sandy Ray, so so he was supposed

But we do think that the Department of Corrections doesn't abide by that.

I think they, I think they do listen to attorney calls. Sales didn't say exactly on the phone what he was going to say, but I think they knew that he was a problem because he was a good person. I mean, sales, the one who entered an unoccupied building and was locked up for 15 years for that was obviously decent person.

“That's why he says, you know, when when I get out, I'll speak to that.”

I'm not going to lie to that man's mother. But right now, this is their world, bro, I'm not going to I'm not going to say more. I'm not going to put myself, but just by saying that might have been his death sentence. He also, as he started getting closer to getting out, you know, because he was he was killed a month before he was getting it out.

And so as he started getting closer to release, he just started getting more frustrated and more angry and started to say things to guards about like, you know, you know, what I've seen in here and I'm going to, you know. And then, low and behold, he gets found in a cell that and, you know, he's bleeding from orifices in his body and it was pretty clear that he was given what they call a hot

shot, which is they give you a cigarette that's got something bad on it and it can kill you. Boy.

So when you first started, when you first showed up with cameras, did you know basically

what was going on? Do you have an understanding what was going on?

“Like, what were you attempting to do when you got there?”

We're just going to try to investigate and figure it out, or did you already have reports? We already, we knew a bunch of stuff, you know, we knew because we had had this, this, we had visited some prisons as volunteers. And I had gone on the death row with my, my filmmaking partner, Charlotte Kaufman. We had gone into Easterling.

We had gone originally into Holman Prison, where they have the death row and we went in there with the chaplain and the Lieutenant came down and said, you know, unfortunately

we're so understaffed right now, which is an understatement, that, you know, we don't

have anybody to take you around, but, you know, chaplain, I know you want to show your friends around the death row, so, you know, just go for it. So we ended up walking around the death row for like two or three hours, just talking to men, and those men were very helpful. They weren't, you know, we weren't talking to irrational people, we weren't talking to, you

know, there, there are people who were trying to get the story out. And so we knew going in that there were a lot of bad things happening. We didn't know exactly what, and then when we went into Easterling and the men started calling us aside and saying, you know, they beat me so bad, I'd defecated on myself, or, you know, I just saw there were five stabbing this week and none have been reported.

We started to realize that it was really a huge crisis, but it was just being kept secret. This episode is brought to you by Surfshark, with the help of AI, scammers are getting smarter every day, sending emails that look legit, but are designed to steal your data, passwords and money.

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The guards are aware of the phones because they provided them to the inmates and they're contrary, they're not supposed to have them but yet they all do. So they have to ignore it if they want to keep selling them phones. Well, another way of looking at it is that there's so little accountability that they don't actually think they're going to get in trouble for anything and they're kind

Right.

“And if you remember that that guard who kills Stephen Davis, Rod Gadsson, you know, this”

guy might be the most violent prison guard in America, he's still working in the Alabama

state prison system after he's just has a starring role against his will. I'm sure, but after he has a starring role in our documentary, which has been seen by millions of people, they still have him employed there. They still have him interacting with people and he got hired to hire a position. Yeah.

Yeah, he's been promoted twice and now he's up for another promotion. So I think to some extent the guards just say, well, you know, I can do whatever I want. I can sell the cell phones and by the way, not all the guards are bad, right, that there are guards that we met there who were pretty heartbroken because they went into the system, hoping to make change or trying to maybe they wanted to work in the police department

and they weren't any jobs, but in their town, they had the ability to work in a prison so they kind of went in there and described to us that they wanted to help people with addiction. They wanted to see if they could help rehabilitate people, but when they got in there, they realized very quickly that was not what was in the offing, that wasn't an opportunity

for them. So the guy, this Rodger guy that beats Stephen to death, the story was that Stephen had some sort of an implemented weapon, correct? Yeah, that he had a plastic knife, right, was there any evidence of that? He had some kind of like a, some kind of plastic thing that he had made.

It did not appear to be anything very serious because the reason he had made it is because

“somebody had called him gay and you have to fight your way out of that, right?”

He wasn't gay as it turns out, but when they fight your way out of that, so some of you told you gay, you have to fight them? Yeah, in other words, you can't put up with that because otherwise they're going to turn you into what they call a Siczy, they're going to turn you into somebody that gets raped. And there's so much rape in the prison that the DOJ report that came out said that there's

rape occurring in all hours of the day and night in all areas of the prison. So rapists such a significant problem and when Stephen Davis was in there and was accused of being gay, he had to make a show of fighting the person that was calling him gay.

He never went after the guards or anything like that.

And everybody that the lawyer spoke to, you know, it doesn't witness as who had seen what happened. All of them said, as soon as the guards came in, he immediately lay down on the floor and put his weapon about 15 feet away from him, put his, this plastic knife, 15 feet away. And then the guards came in and just started beating him even though there was no threat.

And the guards would say, "Guards and was saying to Stephen Davis, you know, it's quit resisting, quit resisting." And he wasn't resisting at all. And that's what all the witnesses said. So they just have to say that so the yell it out.

Yeah, it's almost, I think it was almost, like, it was almost just a warning to everybody out. So like, look, I can do anything that I want. I can say that he's resisting isn't it funny, you know, and the way, you know, the way he kills him, he stomps on his head with his size 15 boot.

This is a guy who's almost 300 pounds, I think he's about six foot five. And he's been implicated in 24 other excessive force cases. And the attorney general in Alabama every single time is defending the guard. How many other people have died in those cases? There've been a lot of other injuries, the only, I think that there have been two people

who have died out of the 24, 25 cases that we know about. But there are a lot of just maimings, there are a lot of situations where people are just damaged, often permanently, you saw what happened at Connecticut just as when he, you know, Robert Earl Council, when he leads a nonviolent workstrike that guards come and attack him. And he loses sight in one of his eyes, he's dragged out of the cell, there's huge amount

of blood. So you know, especially these guys who are leading a nonviolent effort to try to improve

conditions, they're always met with violence.

Right. He was the guy that was at the head of this strike. Yeah. And then the strike really highlights something that I think a lot of people are on a where of as how many industries actually use the prison system essentially for slave labor.

Sure. Yeah. I mean, that was it shocked to me, I think, is that, you know, I guess we all sort of

“assume, well, if you're in prison and they ask you to mop the floor, you need to”

help serve the meals or something, you know, that's a reasonable thing to do. I think what we don't realize is that those people are least out to the governor, to the mansion where the governor lives. Praise. You know, that was crazy.

Yeah. People that were denied parole were allowed to be on the grounds of the governor's mansion doing like groundwork, exact landscaping. Yeah.

So those guys are sent out in the mornings and vans, they go work at McDonald's.

They work at Burger King. They work at Kentucky Fried Chicken. They work at the Hyundai plant. They work at the Budweiser Distributorship. And it's all sort of under the heading of, well, this is good for the guys.

They get to get out into the community. But it's a forced labor situation, because if they don't, if they don't accept those assignments, then they're going to be punished. And they're going to be punished with long stays in solitary confinement. They're going to be given disciplinaries so that their sentences can be extended.

They are often just beaten for that. So it's really an extension. I've heard you on your show talk about, you know, talk about the Jim Crow laws, which led to convict leasing. And what we're seeing in Alabama now, it's not like convict leasing.

It is exactly convict leasing. They are just selling the labor of incarcerated people to industries for pennies on the dollar of what you would get if you had to pay people. Yeah. And they get paid well.

They get paid well. But not the, you're saying they meaning the prisons get paid well, but not the prisoners. Correct. The prisoners get any money? They get a little money.

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

“And now is that standard across the board for all those of the jobs?”

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

They're charged for the uniform that they have to wear. So it's sort of like their kind of fees and fines that knock everything down to almost nothing. And in a lot of cases, the $2 a day is a lot. They're required to do lots of work on paid in the prisons.

They do all the construction. You could see that even the drug dorm where the counselor decided to leave his job, there was a professional drug counselor in one of the prisons. And nobody replaces him. And so Raul Poole, one of the guys in our film, just starts running the drug dorm.

And that's a drug dorm that's getting money from the federal government to pay for drug treatment program in prison. And that money's just not going anywhere. Where money's just going into the coffers of whoever's running the prison system. And is there any accountability for all the money?

Is there any, do they do an audit of the money?

“Is there, is there just, there really is not any meaning for that?”

There's no accountability. There's like the state auditor who we actually interviewed and spent a lot of time with. Just sort of threw up his hands. He said, there's just no way for me to keep track of this money. And for example, they got this incredibly horrible set of findings from the Justice Department,

the DOJ went into the Alabama State Prison System and did an investigation because for reasons I can explain that are kind of incredible. But anyway, they went in there and they investigated the whole prison system, which I think

they'd never done before, you know, usually they investigate an individual prison or something

like that. And they went in and issued a report that said, this is a, you know, beyond the pale. There's horrific things that are happening in your prisons, people being murdered and there's the highest rate of drug overdose and highest rate of rape. And Alabama's response was to say, well, you know, we think that's just anecdotal and

you don't know what you're talking about. And then they decided that their solution, the Alabama solution that we sort of ironically talk about in the title of the film, the one the governor talks about, is just to build new prisons. And meantime, the DOJ did not say to build any new prisons.

The DOJ said, your problem is with corruption and brutality. And you're operating really a criminal enterprise.

“And therefore, you need to address the underlying problems.”

And Alabama's response was, well, the DOJ says the prisons are no good, so we got to build new ones. Well, that, you know, so they get a massive contract. Yeah, exactly.

So we, you know, we always call it the Alabama Department of Construction because they

don't really change anything unless they have the opportunity to build something. And that's really good for all the governor's supporters and all the other people who are, you know, in the construction industry and, you know, they've now started construction on these massive new prisons. You know, Alabama is at tiny state.

It's like, you know, smaller population, I think, didn't know her way. And they've got a tiny budget, and yet they figure out how to put together a multi-billion-dollar prison construction plan. They can't fund it at first.

for and are not going to solve the problem. And they admit, by the way, that they're not going to affect overcrowding, which is a huge problem.

The prisons are operating at like 200 percent capacity.

And, you know, when they're asked about it, the head of the Department of Corrections, they ask him, you know, is this going to affect the overcrowding or is it just the same number of beds? And he goes, no, it's the same number of beds. We're, you know, it's not going to affect overcrowding.

So they're building these massive new facilities. The governor can't get them paid for, she can't raise the money in a bond offering. So they go after the COVID money that they've got from the government, which is not designed to build prisons, right? It's very hard to argue that building prisons is something that's going to relieve some

other kind of health problem or whatever. And then, I think they get fined for that, or they have to pay a fine if you use government or money for a thing that's not supposed to be for. And then, when they start construction, they still can't raise the money. But they start building the new prisons, even before there are authorized by the legislature.

“That's how clearly it was communicated that these prisons were going to happen.”

In other words, we had a crew in Alabama that was watching this site of this one massive prison that they were planning on building, and they were just being fields. And it's quite beautiful, actually. And one day I get a call from somebody and they say, "We got to start filming because there are 25 earth movers here."

And I said, "Well, that's impossible because the legislature hasn't even approved the new prison construction." And they said, "Well, the prison construction companies know it's happening and they're already spending hundreds of thousands of dollars just to clear the site." So the fix was in on this new prison construction, and the governor announced that it was

going to cost $900 million to build three new prisons.

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

So when you open that door, a whole lot of, a whole lot of commerce comes in, a whole lot of companies come in, and they ask them why it went, "Why was it so expensive? How did it go from $300 million for one prison to $1.3 billion for one prison and counting?" And they said, "Well, well, it's inflation," and I mean, I'm pretty sure that the government's not going to say that we got 400 percent inflation at the moment.

So it's kind of institutionalized fevery. It's organized crime. Yeah. It means when you are in charge of deciding what's crime, and you're running a state-like Alabama.

Yeah. Yeah.

“And I think money in the justice system is a very perverting factor.”

I made this film, this series called The Jinks, and rather great fucking series, by the way. Oh, thank you. Thank you. Crazy. Yeah.

Like, your watch says going, "What?" Yeah. Is this real? Yeah. Me, too.

I mean, he's an incredible person, a watch.

But one thing about him is, you know, that family is worth $9 billion. This is not like a regular rich person in America. This is an extra, super, duper rich person in America. And he's killed three people over 30 years and just walking around, gotten away with it. Me and time, you have young women, moms in Brouss' County, Jail in Texas.

You know, our mutual friend, Jeff Ross, did a documentary there. And he interviews the girls that are in there, and he says, "What are you in here for?" And two of them say, "I'm in here because I stole baby formula." So, you know, that's a money, money means a lot in this equation. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. The money stuff is all over the place, you know, it's the perverting of the system with money, you see, because, you know, for example, these big prison companies like Geogru, Ben Korsovic, make money by having full prisons.

You know, they're private prison companies, but there are a lot of companies that provide services to public prisons, to state prisons like Cisco and all these companies that sell food there. But everybody makes more money if the prisons are full. And so, you have the head of Korsovic just did a shareholder call not too long ago.

“And he's an engineer, I think, his name is, and they said, "You know, what do you think?”

What's the outlook?" And he said, "Oh, with all the new immigration prisons and all the prisons and all the increased emphasis on law enforcement and incarceration."

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

“And all these people are doing, they're all doing bad stuff.”

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

And is a private equity guy worth about $10 billion.

And his company Securus does communications for the prison systems. And they made deals that have now been sort of exposed. But they made deals with sheriff's departments where they had jails. And they said, instead of letting kids visit their parents in jail and actually get to see them and hug them and maybe have some kind of normalcy, let's install video visit terminals.

So the cover story was, the video visits are going to be great because you don't have to drive across the state to see your loved one. But the contracts specifically said that they had to replace in person visits. So when a kid went to go visit his dad, even if he was 20 yards away from him in the

prison waiting room, he had to use a video terminal, which cost 1299 for 20 minutes.

And he was not allowed to see his dad in person. So that's an example of, you know, and that's in the contract that's in the Securus contract that said that they have to eliminate the in person visits. So when you allow that for profit motive to be driving things in these like state institutions where theoretically we should, you know, have some kind of like moral approach that makes sense

for society or, you know, can help community or build our relationships or help people stay in touch with their loved ones when they're incarcerated. When you add that for profit motive there, the system is just designed to exploit. It just is natural that all those people have to get, you know, they all have, it's all, there's a kind of a value to every visit, every time a visit, you know, every

time a kid comes and visits a parent, it's worth 1299.

“Well, why do it for free if you can get 1299 for it?”

It's one of the darker aspects of human nature in regards to our relationship with money if that so many people, if unchecked, if you give them the opportunity to make more money to expense some other people, they do it. They just do it. Yep.

They do especially under the framework of a corporation. The framework of a corporation allows you to have a diffusion of responsibility because you don't think that you're the one doing this horrible thing. It's this thing that you work for and I'm just doing my job and also if you're involved in a corrupt system and this is your job and you think of these people as all good people

that are part of the corrupt system, it sort of minimizes the horrible feelings that you have about that corruption, you just dismiss it.

“I really believe, I've heard you talk about the fusion of responsibility before, I think”

it's such a huge part of what drives all this is that you have people who don't really have to ask themselves the hard question, am I the person that's exploiting somebody, am I the person that's overcharging a mom, am I the person that's charging somebody a crazy amount of money for their medication or allowing somebody to die from medical neglect? Because once you have a corporation and you look at that org chart, you know, you can

see the org chart. So that's a nice orderly way of getting commerce to move forward, but it's also a fouls and points of responsibility. Every one of those persons just takes a tiny measure of responsibility. Well, I'm just in the accounting department, I mean, I don't make the rules, I don't

make the laws, you know, and you see that in the health care industry, people recording their calls with their healthcare providers or their insurance companies saying, "I'm sorry, I really can't answer that, that's not my job, somebody else makes that decision." And so when you have these massive organizations, there's a way for very bad things to happen, and it's like the death of a thousand cuts.

And it's also everybody's trying to maximize profit. And when you're trying to maximize profit, you just find some ways to justify things. Like your main job is not to help people, these prisons aren't rehabilitation centers, trying to make like you, you actually profit off people becoming like functional members of society.

Once they get released, that would be amazing.

Like imagine if their profit was based on people being rehabilitated, re-entering society

“and becoming, you know, functional proper members of society where they contribute.”

Yeah, I mean the incentives are so, they're so, they're so twisted. Yeah, they're so twisted. It's like that saying money's the root of all evil. It's not the root of all evil. It's the root of most of it though.

It's like a giant percentage of it. Maybe it's 75% of evil. The rest of it's like what lust? Yeah. I mean, my, I can't count you.

Yeah, good. That's the root of a lot of evil, you know, whatever, whatever the other percentage is. But money, 60% maybe, let's be charitable. The root of a lot of fucking evil, man, it's, and when you can do it inside of this framework of corporation, it's so twisted because it's ubiquitous.

It exists in almost all industries.

There's always, whether it's the, like, this is the reason why people celebrated when

that healthcare executive was shot, right? They were like, "Hey, man, fuck you guys." Like, yeah, finally one of you guys got it. I lost my dad. I lost my mom.

I lost my sister. You know, that kind of shit is in every fucking industry. Yeah, whether it's military industrial complex, whether it's the health insurance complex, whether it's pharmaceutical drug industry, when you look at the Sackler family and what they did with opioids, you, I'm sure you've seen the Netflix, the Peterburg, Netflix,

Payne Keller series, fucking incredible.

It's just incredible that that guy's just walking around.

You're irresponsible for the death of who knows how many people, because who knows how many people that had relationships with the people that got addicted, also lost their lives, also lost everything, because you're dealing with a brother or a mom that's completely lost, and the dick, you've got your life as hijacked now by this situation. You've lost your dad, you've lost your mom, you lost his spouse.

Fuck. Yeah. I mean, you know, I heard you talk a lot about mental health, and obviously there are a lot of causes of mental health problems, and, you know, that includes social media, it includes sort of alienation, it includes a lot of things that are present in society, but the prison

industrial complex and the experience of having somebody incarcerated has a huge impact on mental health.

“I think people don't realize when you have two million people locked up in these facilities,”

and many of them are just being traumatized every day, whether they're seeing somebody get killed, or they're constantly in fear for their life. The idea that those people are going to somehow be okay when you want to let them out 10 years later, and they're going to rejoin society, you give them $50 in a bus ticket, and you say, "Hey, I hope you can become a taxpayer."

meantime, they don't have enough money to pay for one red roof in for one night. They can't do anything when they get out of prison, and then we say, "Well, why is there such high recidivism?" I guess that means they're bad people, so let's put them back in, right now. So, the mental health implications for the people that are incarcerated are huge, and the

people who are in their families, as you say, you know, imagine the anxiety you don't have any family members, and they're going to give you $50, and now you're out, and you have to figure out how to eat, how to get a roof over your head, and try to figure out a way to earn money, the $50. And there are ways to do it, you know, if you go into the, I mean, all this sounds very

dark and horrible, and it is, but there are a lot of, there are a lot of positive developments that you can see when you give them a chance to grow in society, you know, so, for example, I love what you say about community, you know, about the importance of building community, and seeing the country as our community, and, you know, if we're torturing people that are in our community, if we're being cruel to people that are in our community, what does it say

about us? Right.

“You know, what does this say about, about Christianity?”

What does this say about, you know, about, about God? What does this say about forgiveness? Clearly, we see that there are so many instances where people are trying, you know, trying to do things better. There's that there's a woman named Erica in Alabama, who was a mental health professional,

and she described to me what it was like to try to give mental health services to people who were incarcerated, and I was trying to figure out, you know, looking at these images of the places that they keep people, and these cells, these solitary cells, with just a little trace slot, and, you know, they're in there for, in a five by eight room with no windows,

And I said to her, well, can you tell me, like, when you do a obsession with somebody and

“you're trying to, you know, talk to them about their suicidal ideation or their various”

problems? You know, how does that look like? How does that work? That's well, you know, it's a little uncomfortable, because I, you know, I got to be on my knees, and I said, why are you on your knees?

She said, oh, well, I have to be able to talk through the trace slot. And I said, so when you're giving a mental health counseling session to somebody who's incarcerated, you're not allowed to open the door, you're not allowed to see, assuming that person's not like having a violent fit or something like that, you're not allowed to sit down across from them and have that conversation.

She said, no, no, no, but it's okay, I just put my mouth up to the trace slot. And I just thought, you know, when you think about the idea that that's going to be somehow something that will give a relief to somebody who's really struggling with a mental health crisis in prison, you know, we're doing the absolute minimum. You know, we're checking the box that says, yeah, once a month, this guy has a psychiatric

evaluation.

“But nobody's taking a picture of that and showing what it really looks like to have this”

nice, you know, young lady, this idealistic young, mental health person, kneeling outside of a metal cell with, you know, blood stains on it, talking to somebody inside through a food slot, through a food slot. And that's probably the only interaction that's person has with human beings other than the guards.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That's a very cruel. Yeah.

And you're alone in that cell, which is also terrible for mental health, but there's nothing worse for mental health than complete total isolation with no access to anything. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

“Have you ever had experiences with people, friends or family who've been incarcerated?”

Oh, yeah. Yeah. What have you? What's that been? What's that been like?

Well, I had this one friend that I used to do martial arts with when I was a kid. And when I was probably around 16 or 17, he wound up going to jail. I didn't know him that well, but I knew him as this guy who competed in tournaments and, you know, he would show up and train with us and it's pretty tough guy.

He went into jail and he came out, first of all, much bigger.

He used this as like stacked with muscle, all of his tattoos, he burned off, so he had scars, like these big, key-loid scars over all of his tattoos now. And he was a completely different person, like a violent animal, like a terrifying guy to spar with. You spar with him, you were in a, it wasn't, there was nothing, no holding back.

Being for the most part, when you like people, you're hitting them only a certain percentage of your strength. This guy was not doing any of that. He was full blast with everything, it was like a cage animal. And as I got to be closer to him, actually, he came closer to him after he got out of prison

than he was before. And then because I just spent more time sparring him and hanging out and training with him and being in these group classes with him, he started telling me to be stories about what it was like in jail and just fighting for his life. He had to take on three guys and he picked up a broomstick and he was beating, he's just

telling me it's crazy stories of guys trying to kill him in jail. And he was in there for three years for drug selling and then he went right back to selling drugs. And he eventually got arrested and I've told the story before, it's got kind of crazy. They found a guy that had every bone in his body broken with hammers and they kept him

awake by injecting him with cocaine, they kept injecting him with cocaine and then they cut his arms off, they cut his hands off and then they cut his head off and they found his body but it's like all of his bones have been shutted and this guy that I knew as a kid got arrested for that.

They never went up trying him for that.

They brought him in for questioning, he definitely knew something about it. He knew either the people that did it or knew something but it was all drug related and he was selling cocaine and then I lost touch with him after that. That's a crazy story. Oh yeah.

I knew quite a few guys like that because the world of fighting like people that are interested in entering in competitions with people, you get a lot of troubled people, a lot of very angry people, you know, a lot of them that come from violent households, they were beaten as children or they were bullied as kids, depending on where I came from, the most mild of those environments, I didn't have any buddy abusing me.

I just was interested in martial arts and then I was fascinated by this idea of bettering myself through competition because it was so scary and then also I'm around like Hitman, a new one guy who was a Hitman for YD Bulger and he, I would train him, he would teach this guy how to do martial arts and he was an assassin, that's amazing, it was very strange. I knew a bunch of organized crime figures for mostly with the Irish mob, a lot of those

guys came and trained and especially because they knew some other guys that we knew that were a couple of one of my friends who was a block, he was a professional boxer and he lived in South Boston and he was very tight with a lot of these guys, some of these guys

came to training with us and it was very weird exposure for me, I've never been around

any of that, I've never had anyone in my family that went to jail, no one was a criminal, no one was a drug addict, no there's nothing really crazy and then all of a sudden I was around a lot of these people that either went to jail eventually or had been in jail because

“I think there's that question of people say well if you don't like the prison system the”

way it is or if you don't think people should get locked up forever then you're just soft on crime and obviously you're some kind of snowflake but clearly there's a role for prison, there's a role for jail, the question is whether we should be putting people into institutions that just further damage them, further retraumatized them, right?

Just making them hardened, there are going to be worse criminals if they get out, if and when

they get out, and there's no emphasis on rehabilitation, so that's the thing it's like if you're releasing them back into the street like what are you doing to the rest of society, if you're taking a person who's committed a violent crime, making them way worse in jail and then releasing them, this is like a slow bomb, you know, it's slow release bomb and then also they have no options because don't want to hire our next convict, especially someone who went to jail

for like aggravators, halter, something like that, so it's is a very, very difficult for these people and very, very difficult for society to make a decision, you know, you want to make a quick fix of something, you want to protect people, just keep them in jail, keep everybody in jail,

but there's zero emphasis on how to take a person from a completely broken childhood, broken home,

violence, drug addiction in the home, all the chaos complete, completely being accustomed to violent crime because it's all around you, it's in your neighborhood, you imitate your atmosphere and then what do we do with these people? You know, there's no emphasis on what's a webrunner, it's just

“using them as human batteries to generate money and that's evil, that's what's really crazy,”

and this is where people have subverted this idea of incarceration being some sort of a rehabilitation or correction, like right, they call them correctional facilities, you're not correcting anything, you're just making money, you're just making money off of people and you're taking advantage of the fact that no one wants to pay attention to it because society generally looks at people that are criminals and they've committed violent crimes, it's like, oh, well, fuck them, push them aside and look,

there's some people that I agree, yeah, fuck them, if there's people that have, you know, killed a bunch of people and raped a bunch of people and they're constantly robbing people and breaking it houses a violent, yeah, fuck those people, fuck those people, but that's a small percentage of what's in jail, a large percentage is nonviolent drug offenders and that's where it gets really weird, and it's like so a person is deciding, you can have the drugs that we sanction,

you can have the drugs that we tax, you can have these drugs, you can have these prescription drugs, you can have this drug that you buy in the liquor store that we call alcohol, which is clearly a drug, you can buy your cigarettes, you can buy your coffee, you can get all these drugs that we like, out of raw, you need out of raw, and sure I think you've got a little ADHD, maybe you seem to use some fucking speed and we'll sell you that speed and we'll tax that speed, anything else,

we'll put you in a cage because you're not following our rules and it's like a grown adult

“telling another grown adult what they can or can't do with their life is responsible for what”

50% of the people that are in cages, that's kind of crazy. It's almost time for spring break, so maybe you're headed to the beach or maybe you're taking the kids on a road trip or maybe you're just taking some extra time for yourself, no matter what, you deserve a break and a reset and AG1 can help. AG1 is your daily health drink, just one scoop combines your multivitamin, pre and probiotics, superfoods and antioxidants to help support a healthy immune system and digestion.

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111 value at drinkag1.com/showrogan. Yeah, and I really crazy. Yeah, I mean, there's this kind of illusion that everybody that is in prison for something that we don't think the average person doesn't think they should be in prison for for many, many, many years. Like a drug crime or being an addict, basically, that those people, that all those people have been let out already. You know, that's somehow like prison, nativist people have said, well, you know,

all the people that are in there for drug crimes should be released. But it's not it's not really true. You have enormous criminalization of drug addiction. So you're already

“making people sort of feel hopeless, then they're turning to drugs, and then you're putting them”

into cages. So like Steve Marshall, for example, the AG and Alabama says, well, we've already

released all of the nonviolent criminals, right? So the only people that are locked in there are the worst of the worst. But you know, that's clearly not true, just because of sales from your documentary. Yeah, of course. So you have, you know, and he was put into a maximum security facility for entering an unoccupied building. That's because there's sort of an inflation of this concept of violence. So they will, in Alabama, I think there are 44 different crimes that are considered

violent crimes, and they include crimes that you and I would not consider violent. You know, so if somebody threatens somebody verbally, like most people do in arguments with, you know, people that they're mad at or whatever, but doesn't assault somebody, that could be considered violent crime. If somebody enters a building, whether they steal something or not, that could be considered a violent crime. And so it makes it easier just to, as you say, like, I like that

image of the battery. I think about it as like, sometimes like the matrix, that, you know, for Alabama to do what it's doing, it's got to have 20,000 people in suspended animation,

“because that's how you can use them for labor. Yeah. That's how you can use them to sell them”

stuff. That's how you can charge them for fees and fines. You know, that, that you need that many people. I think they did a terrible thing when they allowed private prisons. I think it's a terrible thing. I think, like, if you think about the people that found this country and the people that wrote the Constitution, they had a great understanding of where how tyranny can emerge. And so they tried to create a system again, 1776, crazy to think that we're still following those same rules

today. You know, but they had a great understanding. Don't wear it. We're not following those rules. But the checks and balances and make sure that one person couldn't accumulate all of the power. Whoever first initiated the policy of allowing and paying for private prisons to exist in this country did not think it through like that at all, did not think of incentives, did not think of how

people always, when given the chance to make more money, figure out a way to justify making that

more money and come up with rules or regulations or carve outs, caveats, some reason why they can continue to accelerate. And then you don't think about the fact that prison guard unions and these private prisons, these people that own them actively work to keep some laws on the books that maybe the general public would not want to be illegal anymore, certain things. And they do that just so they can keep their prisons full so they can keep making more money. So then they take the money

that they get from these private prisons with the using people as human batteries to make sure there's still laws in place that are ridiculous so that they can keep arresting people so they can keep filling up their buildings and making more, and the fact that nobody saw that coming. Nobody saw that coming. They thought coming. I don't even know if they did. I mean, they probably short-term which is saying, oh, this is a good business. We get into it. Then the business is like,

we got to grow this business, just like everything else. Like if you're selling tires, you know, you got to make better tires, sell more tires. We're trying to say, we want to be number one in the entire business. Well, they're trying to be number one in the human battery business. Yeah. And that's what's fucking insane about allowing that in this country. And how do you put that

a way to get into a whole new bottle. Because a lot of people say to us, well, this film that you

“made, the Alabama solution is obviously about Alabama State prisons. Are those private prisons?”

And we always say, no, those are state-run institutions. But they kind of function like private prisons

in a way because they're able to make deals with securious about their prison phone system. And that makes millions and millions and millions of dollars that's extracted from the poorest people in the country, right, who are being charged like high, you know, daily and even per minute fees for being able to communicate with their families, then you have companies who are selling the food to the prisons. You have companies that are doing health care contracts with the prisons.

And so there's so much money in that that they sort of, even though the state owns that piece of land, it's still kind of functions the way that private prisons function. Right. So we've sort of just

given over the care of two million Americans to companies that are accountable to their shareholders

maybe, but the shareholders don't know. Well, they're certainly not accountable to humane living

“conditions. That one scene where Connecticut justice that general, what's his real name?”

Robert Earl Council. When Robert Earl Council was in solitary and you see the rats swimming in his toilet, rats are swimming in his toilet and he has rats in a water jar and what do you say? Like, catches 11 caught in one night. And why are they there? Because, you know, he tries to put his food in a bag that hangs on the door of the cell, but then they write him a disciplinary for doing that. But if he takes his food out of the bag and he puts it on the counter, then the rats are going to

get it during the night. They're just everywhere. Yeah. Yeah. So they're rats all, they're rats throughout the prison. And so that's a sleep in this room where these rats are crawling all over

them at night. Yeah. And people just to get into him for a second. I mean, he is, he is, frankly,

one of the most, one of the bravest people I've ever met in my life. You know, this is a guy who's incarcerated when he was 19. And he was selling drugs in his neighborhood. Somebody is trying to chase him down with a car and almost run some over and he shoots the person through the window in the guy dies. So this is now 30 years ago. In any other condition, you would have thought that's a self defense case, right? That's, that's, that was clear that he was trying to prevent

somebody from running him over the car. And yet, here he is 30 years later with a life without parole sentence in a Alabama prison. And he's spending his time trying to organize non, peace, non, nonviolent labor strikes. He's trying to do hunger strikes. He's trying to use every, every method that he can use to call attention to the problem that 20,000 other people have. And he's using a contraband cell phone to talk to us, knowing that he's probably going to get retaliated

against by the authorities once the film comes out or once they know that he's organizing a labor

“strike. He's, he would be an unbelievable asset to society. If he were out in the world, right?”

He's, he's advocating for nonviolence. He's obviously smart as a whip. And he's incredibly motivating to other people. You know, he's got that entire prison system listening to him when they want to be violent because they're so angry at their, at the treatment. And, and, and the prison system starts starts bird feeding them. Starts to cut off their food rations to force them back to work. And kinetic rubber, or is the person who says, you know, that's not going to solve anything.

We don't want to do that. So, you know, you see this huge level of humanity, talent, thoughtfulness in people that are locked away. And we just assume, well, if they're in prison, that means that they're bad people. I mean, time, there's so many other people on the outside who don't get locked up for doing things in a much worse. You know, so it's a, it's a very confusing message to be sending. Well, especially if you're someone you who did the jinx

and then you do this. Yeah, I mean, it's a good really good point. You know, as I, I worked for a long time on the story of Robert Durst. And when we discovered evidence that showed that he had killed his wife and his best friend and his neighbor and Galveston dismembered him, we found the only evidence that proved that he did those things. And suddenly, I was in a dialogue with the LA district attorney, the LA PD, talking about how to get him arrested. You know, and even

prison. And there's clearly a guy like Bob Durst who keeps killing people needs to be taken

“out of society. What kind of prison is he in? Well, he's, he died now. And he was locked up in”

in a facility Northern California. It was sort of a facility for senior citizens who had medical problems. So, you know, a lot of really rich people, as you could tell from, you know, there've been a bunch of cases on this, really rich people hire consultants to help them navigate what prison they're going to end up going to. They can negotiate for better conditions. And so you end up, you know, with that sort of situation where a guy who maybe has stolen $100 million and not paid his taxes

or taken money from his workers or committed some horrible act of fraud, ends up in a prison farm, ends up in a pretty nice facility where, you know, he has access to lots of things. And then you have four people that are locked up in places that have rats in their cells and vermin. But yeah,

it was, I was always sort of amazed that Robert Durst was able to get away with what he got away

with for so long. And why do you think that is? Well, you know, how much did you know about it before you started the documentary series? Well, I knew a lot because I had made a film, a narrative film called All Good Things about sort of Robert Durst's origin story. His relationship with his beautiful wife when they were both young. Before all, the bad stuff started happening and he became the guy that he became. There was this kind of strange love story between this kind of

difficult man and this very lovely girl, Kathleen McCormick. And I made this film, Ryan Gosling played the Bob Durst character and Kirsten Dunst played his wife and really investigated that story so that we could tell the tale of what had happened to them in an accurate way. And while I was doing that, we reached out to Robert Durst to the real Robert Durst and I said, you know, we're making this film about, I guess we spoke to his lawyer so we're making this film about you,

about your client. And we'd like to talk to him to get his input. Make sure that we're trying to tell

the story out. What was the premise of the film? It was basically the story about him and his wife

when they first met this rich guy and this girl from sort of the other side of the tracks. And then how eventually that relationship got toxic, eventually he kills her and then later his best friend, Susan Burman, who knows about what happened to his wife, starts to become problematic. Then he kills her and then later he moves to Galveston, Texas and disguises himself as a deaf mute woman. If you remember this and he ends up becoming friends with his elderly neighbor and this guy named Morris

Black and they go out shooting on in Pelican Island and so on and eventually they have a little altercation because he figured out who Bob Durst was and that he was sort of on the run and he dismembers that man.

“He kills him and dismember some. This movie with Kristen Dunst, when was that released?”

I guess we started working on that in around 2005 and it came out in 2010. So in 2010 it's about to come out in theaters, this film and there was a big article in New York Times about how accurate it was and how much we had done to make sure that the details were right and so on. And the real robber Durst reads the article and calls me out of the blue and you know I've had tried to get in touch with them before without any success and he actually calls the distributor of the film first

Magnolia Pictures and he asked for the president, Amen Boles and Amen and I would use Bob's voice like when we would talk to each other because Bob had a very recognizable voice so when I

would call him we would hang up and I would say bye bye and that was always sort of Bob's tone

and then one day somebody calls Amen's office and says this is robber Durst and so a secretary walks in the office and says like you know an error quotes like it's robber Durst on the phone thinking that it's me and he picks up the phone he's like hey Bob I you know I'm not surprised

“you're calling I think we did a hell of a job on the film and there's long pause and he says the”

guy says who am I talking to and Amen says oh who's this and he says this is robber Durst and so he reaches out to me I knew that he was trying to get trying to reach me so I could record my very first phone call with him and I call him and I say listen I'm keen to talk to you

the film so I range from to see the film and he calls me immediately after he sees the film and he

says I want you to know I like the movie very much movie kind of shows him killing people right and I said well why did you like it and he said well you know you did a beautiful job explaining what I was going through is a child and the difficulty I had and losing my mother and Kirsten Dunst was just like my wife Kathy and I cried three times and I would like to do something with you you know I would like there there to be something out there from me my ability to sort of tell

my story and I said alright well why don't we sit down I'll ask you a bunch of questions and he said that's fine okay let's do that so I so I end up sitting with him for three days I've just finished a movie about him a dramatic film which is now in theaters and I sit down with him an interview for 21 hours and you think you do long interviews he's he's 21 hours with this one person and he is fascinating I mean absolutely extraordinary he's he is incredibly honest about things

that most people would never be honest about like you know he talks about how you know he had

violent arguments with his wife or he says you know that he he says crazy stuff I mean he explained to me that I said you know I think you were kind of offensive when you went to visit her mother you know she had this mother who was in her 80s and you went to visit her mother and you know I think you did some odd things he goes well yeah you know I visited those people and they were you know that woman she reads Yankee magazine and you know and she asked me how I

liked her daughter and I told her that Kathy had come out of the shower and my penis was hard

“like you said that to her aging mother yeah yeah I mean what am I gonna assure that's what I thought you”

know you know or I you were you say to him well what did you say you know why did you tell the police that after your wife after you put your wife on the train you went to the neighbors to have a drink when that clearly wasn't true oh yes I lied about that I so why didn't you lie to the police well you know I needed to be somewhere and I wanted them to stop asking me questions so you know I told them that I went to the neighbors I said well that was so easy to disprove they just

talked to the neighbor well yeah but you know I don't people don't usually do that so he's very candid he speaks very very openly almost like it having a level sort of aspers did you believe him in at any moment while he's telling you this because obviously he's proclaiming his innocence right yeah I mean he is so good at telling the story his way and he tells you so many facts that are true

“that when he occasionally lies about really critical things I think a lot of people just didn't”

pay attention that I did because I had already researched the story so I knew when he was trying to tell me something that was that was bullshit that that it was bullshit but you know I did have to put myself in a position of of giving him the benefit of the doubt whenever I could partly because that was the only you know you got to just get into that mode where you're trying to hear his version without debating at the whole time right because otherwise he's not gonna tell you his version and you

know you want to hear his his theory about all this stuff and and in the course of that he really indicts himself I mean he you know he sort of came into it with the attitude that he wanted to tell his version of the story so people would stop thinking he was a murderer but during the course of it he admits to so many bad things that you know you just pretty quickly assume that he is guilty

how old is he when you first started filming him I can't see was in his he was in his early

70s so he's probably already experiencing some kind of cognitive decline and then you have the years and

“years of hiding all this which wears on you yeah yeah and I do think there was a I think he had a”

compulsion to confess you know I think most people that aren't complete sociopaths they get to a certain point of time or it's almost too much and they want to tell people yeah yeah I mean in that ultimately what happened with him as you as you may remember is he we find this evidence the evidence I thought was determinative I thought it was gonna be something that police would

so there was a famous note that that the killer of Susan Burman this friend of Bob Durst in California

“had left behind when he shot Susan Burman and the note said 1527 Bennett Eccanian”

cadaver and it was sent to the Beverly Hills police department and that very seldom happens but people speculated a lot well why would somebody who killed somebody have sent a note to the police well maybe if he liked the person if it was his best friend this woman Susan Burman and it was Bob Durst that did it then maybe he wouldn't want her body to lie there and you know she has dogs she didn't want the dogs to mess with the body so he may have just killed her and then left

this note but then later when he was asked about it he said I've not I've no knowledge about that note so when we're doing our investigation we discover a letter that he had written to Susan Burman that has almost the exact same words on it because it's addressed to her at 1527 Bennett Eccanian

“so we can see the handwriting on that not just a handwriting sample but a handwriting sample that”

sing exactly what it said on the letter that with the same misspelled words exactly and he writes 1527 Bennett Eccanian Beverly Hills California and misspelled the word Beverly put it in an extra E at the end and of course this letter that we find he also misspelled the word Beverly so nobody had ever seen or the police had known about this letter so we find it and then I immediately

start planning away for me to show it to him in a second interview and he had always said to me

like oh if you ever need me to sit down again I'm happy to come back and I'll ask him you know I'll answer any question you want but I start to call him about doing the second interview and he gets very skittish and then this goes on for two years and so we have this evidence but we need to show it to him and I had done a bunch of research I talked to Marsha Clark for example you know who is smart about how the LA district attorney's office works and she said if you have the

opportunity to sit down with him and show him the evidence do that before you go to the police because it's going to be very the police are not going to be able to do something like that and he's going to lawyer up but you guys before you're even in contact with law enforcement you could show him the evidence and he's going to have to react to it and I bet it's going to be interesting so we finally get him to sit for the second interview and I show him the evidence in the

“interview and he has this incredible meltdown you know I don't know if you remember this but he's”

he starts burping uncontrollably and he starts rubbing his face and breathing and and he's obviously very very surprised to see that there's this that there's this letter that matches the cadaver note that he admitted could only have been written by the killer so he's sort of in a he's he's trapped and I finished the interview with him and he gets up and goes to the bathroom and he leaves his microphone attached and while he's in the bathroom he confesses to the murder

he's you know he's a guy talks to himself a lot and he always said that to me he said oh

sometimes I talked to myself for long periods of time and I get in fights with people because they think that I'm hassling them but it's just me I just talked to myself so when he goes in the bathroom the first thing he says when he when he goes in is there it is you're caught he says that to himself and it's it's it's it's and then he goes on to say killed them all a I killed them all of course and it's such an extraordinary thing to have about what he's doing

no and that's that's kind of fascinating so I didn't know that he said anything when he went to the bathroom and so we're working with the LAPD we're giving them the printed evidence this the letter that matches the cadaver note and it's pretty strong case already and we don't know that he's said a word in the bathroom and it's not until 26 months later that we have an editor Shelby Siegel who is just going through audio and kind of cleaning up all

tracks because we're getting ready to deliver the film to HBO and she sees on the the on the editing system that there's a little waveform there's a little squiggle that shows that there's some audio when he's in the bathroom so she the the problem was that I had a microphone it was a microphone in the room and he had a microphone on so there's a lot of noise we're finishing I just finished the interview I'm incredibly excited that I got him to give this crazy reaction

and so I'm out there kind of whispering to the crew there's noise in the room and there's noise

in the bathroom and so she mutes the other microphones and she hears him say there it is your car and she screams and she runs in the next room to where my other our main editor was Zach

“and she says you you have to hear this and he listens to it and he says wait a minute I was there”

that day and we have audio that's a continuation of that that audio stops at at there it is your car but there's he was in the bathroom for seven minutes so they go and get the drive that has the other seven minutes of audio on it and it's this long rambling confession and I come over and I listen to it and I I can't believe what we're hearing it was extraordinary and I had to call the LAPD and the L.A. District Attorney and say hey I know literally two days ago we gave you the

the documents we gave you the letter so that you could start this prosecution we found something else and so they come to New York and they listen to this confession and it's just you know absolutely mind-blowing that that that happened and then when the film come when the series comes out you know we've been working with the with the police then for a couple of years while they were

building the prosecution and when the film finally comes out when the series comes out on HBO

he is arrested the day before the final episode so it's in the final episode that he makes that confession and they arrest him right before because they knew that he was going to go on the run. Was he aware that you have the audio of the confession? I don't think you remembered saying anything you know I don't think he's even all that aware that he sometimes just burbles out with these. Do you think he started I mean this pure speculation but do you think he started going crazy after

he started killing people? Just like the ability to shut that part of your brain off and put that aside and lie about it just the struggle of having that information in your head.

“I think the way that he would have thought about it you know from inside the killer right he doesn't”

think of himself as a murderer right Steve Marshall and Alabama doesn't think of himself as you know this incredibly a moral person he thinks himself as law enforcement right Bob Durs thinks of himself as just a guy trying to get along you know like we all are so I think what happened was in 1982 he and his wife who were having problems in part large part because he had big personality problems I mean he was he was not a he was not easy person to deal with at all and was also very spoiled and was

also you know had all these resources and had a lot of power over her and so I think something happened between the two of them where they were at their lake house and there was an altercation he admitted to me that that they had had a pushing and shoving argument that night and then he and then you know

“he says he took her to the train and sent her into the city but none of that makes any sense so I think”

what happened was he either accidentally or semi accidentally killed her I think they had a fight they ended up getting into some altercation and she landed on the you know maybe on the stone of the fire place or something like that and she was dead and then he thought well it doesn't make any sense for two people to go down I mean my unfortunate that this had to happen but I got to get rid of the body and so he found a way to make her disappear we don't know exactly

what happened to her but we know that you know he alleged that he had put her on the train to go on the

city and they never found the body so after that he's sort of widely believed to be a likely

person to have killed his wife there's no other explanation for it and how long did it take before they realized the wife was missing and when did they determine that she was dead it was a few days later because he kept sort of he held off on telling anyone and then later he said oh Cathy you know she likes to put her on the train to go on the city and then I haven't heard from her what's going on so he had a bunch of explanations about why you know somehow she had

run off with a drug dealer or she had run off with some boyfriend or something like that but none of those really held water but it took him a while to report her missing he waits five days to report her missing and does a brilliant thing which is he reports her missing in New York City

late house in Westchester she disappears and he goes into the city five days later and he says oh my wife was at our apartment so he complete this is why I'm saying he's very smart he completely redirects the police so that they make because you know the police aren't organized for a guide to come in and give a phone story about what happened is wife most of the time somebody comes in says my wife is

“missing and they say oh where did you last see her let's help you try to find her so I think he was”

smart enough to flip that on his head and he says that my wife was in the city and so they do their whole investigation in the city they don't look at the lake house they don't figure out where she really truly might have been um did they ever do an examination of the forensic on the lake house yeah they did and they and they it was sort of because it was so late in the game because it had taken so long for him to report or missing they they didn't find anything that showed that she had

been killed in the in the house um and she may very well been killed somewhere else but they never

find the body ever and so her family is bereft and they don't know what to do and did he ever confess to that he didn't um but during the course of his interview with me I mean he never did it publicly but in but in the bathroom he says killed them all of course so he's being accused of three murders his wife his best friend and his neighbor and galsen who he then cuts up and his confession

“the bathroom is killed them all of course so I think we you know we I think we know what happened”

we don't know how it happened did they find his neighbor's body or his best friend rather his friend yeah his best friend's body was in her house where somebody shot her and that's where they left that cadaver note the notes saying 1527 better canyon and then in Galveston when his elderly neighbor disappears the reason they find this out is because a bunch of black trash bags wash up in Galveston Bay and a little kid is fishing with his dad and they see something bobbing

around in the water and they see these bags and the police come and they look in the bags and they're all these body parts so he had actually taken off the legs and the arms and all that so I mean I think you know I think it's fair to say that there are people like bobgers who need to be out of society you know and are and are repeatedly causing problems for others but that's as you say you know that's that's the extraordinarily rare case you know and I think a lot of the sort of

tough on crime politicians will say so you guys just want to let Jeffrey Domar out on the street like nobody thinks that nobody really believes that people are saying well no what we're saying is

that people who are in prison for having entered an unoccupied building probably never should have

been in prison at all and the people who are in prison with good reason because they robbed somebody or something we don't necessarily have to believe that those people can never ever have a chance to come out of prison and be productive citizens you know there's a there's a you just have to take a nuanced view you know you can't just say well they're bad people and they're good people especially because they've got so many bad people walking around and so many good people locked up

and vice versa yeah the nuance part is so important because the real question is like what causes so many people to become bad people and how come no one's examining the root of this how come no one's looking at these deeply impoverished crime written communities that have remained that way for decades and decades and decades and offered up some sort of a solution you know it's almost

“like you have to financially incentivize a company to to radically improve the economic”

and the justice situation in any random community that's experiencing a lot of crime like it's almost almost like you have to figure out a way to privatize peace and safety you know it's almost like the one way I mean it's really what I was saying before like imagine if these prison companies got paid based on the amount of productive citizens emerge from their prisons

and then wind up doing really well like you get incentivized like this is these never

committed another crime now we started his own business he's doing this that has got a family yes kids all get straight days everybody's happy this is a success and we got a bonus because of that success yeah I mean you're right in the way that it's the root of some way we are we sort of are privatizing it because like in my neighborhood in New York there's a group called the Doe Fund which has been around for a couple decades I think and they take guys who are who are have

as you were describing and they give them a bed they give them a bank account where they give them a certain amount of money each week for working and it's not a huge amount of money but it's sort of

is the first step toward even being able to sort of have a checkbook and be able to say oh okay so

I've got a hundred dollars and I spent 50 and this is what I have left and they give them a job which is they make deals with neighborhoods around New York for them to come into like street cleaning and clean up the neighborhood and they give them a uniform which is clean and they put them out on the street with a big blue trash bucket and some you know functional broom and things like that and sometimes they'll put them out in pairs so that they have you know

they can they can work in tandem and these neighborhoods become incredibly clean the guys stay in this facility for as long as they need to until they sort of get back on their feet they can't do drugs when they're in the facility so there's a little bit of tough love going on there too but they end up bringing people back they end up bringing people back who are otherwise abandoned and you otherwise would have been additional homeless people lying on the street in San Francisco

or additional people who are you know bothering people outside in ATM or whatever because there's a level of desperation that you you know you have we all know like if we absolutely had absolutely nothing and we thought that our kids were going to starve we would do a bunch of things that you know would probably get us in trouble 100% and taking care of people that are in that situation

“and providing them some sort of a vehicle for improving their life is going to be a good thing”

and it's going to have some impact but the real real impact is going to be when you address the environment in which they came from like if again if we're our community where this entire country is a community why do we have these places that have been fucked for 50-60-70 years like why haven't we put resources into community centers and education and providing some method for these people to get peace and safety why aren't we doing something

about that if we really care well there is a lot that can be done you know one of the places for example this can be done inside and outside of of prison obviously and and I think you're pointing at a really important thing which is the earlier the better so when you look at you know

head start programs which are one of the first things that people go to cut because you can't put

your finger on exactly what they do but if you track people that got early education you see that it dramatically reduces the likelihood that those people are going to go to prison later in life and if you look at people who are even in prison like in the main state prison system which is a very humane prison system I've pictures on my phone of guys who are sitting at a bench working on models of tall ships these beautiful stunning pieces of art that they've been trained

by other prisoners to to build and they give them a proper workbench and they give them some time to do this work and they give them training and then they sell that stuff in the prison store

and they make a couple million dollars a year that goes back into rehabilitation programs.

“So where do you mean love the best places for that? I think main is the best”

prison system I've seen in the U.S. and partly it's because it's run by this very brilliant guy Randy Liberty is his name that's correct and he first uh he first went to he first visited the main state prison when he was 14 because his dad was locked up there and later in life you know he became a sheriff and I think his dad was in his jail at some point and it was like Randy get me a coffee sorry dad that's you know and but over time he just said well why are we throwing

people away when we put them into prison for having made a mistake of some kind or even a series of mistakes you know what can we do to bring these people out because 95% of the people are coming out and you know are these people that we want to be our neighbors you know and that that that this issue of community is so important because you know how are you going to get back to some kind of

“brotherhood in this country you know it's so important and if we can demonize people so quickly”

and just say well look my neighbor you know he put his tractor on my lawn and therefore he's a horrible person and I'm going to go over and smash his tractor and you know as opposed to the guy saying oh I couldn't put my tractor my garage because it had a flood oh yeah you had a flood let me help you you know that it's that there's a level of you know rage right now

people that are going into it because of damage that they suffered it's like more Americans are

“becoming like that you know more Americans are sort of well we're getting radicalized by the”

internet for sure yeah 100% on both sides of the aisle people are being radicalized by hate and anger and frustration online and a lot of it isn't even real people that are writing these things or it's state actors and organizations that push certain narratives and you're being fed a lot of hate porn and people are sucking it up and it's highly addictive so it's consuming an enormous percentage of your available resources in terms of your attention span the people that I know that are

addicted to Twitter x whatever are like genuinely mentally ill like whether they realize it or not because they're still functional they still do their jobs but they are fully addicted to a

thing that is just people bitching back and forth with each other and they check responses all

the time they can't wait to type in another response and they're sitting there looking at someone else's response and getting angry it's illness it's an illness it's like this is not in your life like if you put that down and look around what do you see you see the people that you know you see the neighborhood that you live in you could the stores that you visit and none of that exists it exists in this weird fucking cloud world that you choose to enter to get upset for no fucking reason

and if you put it down you will feel better but yet you think you're missing out on something

“so you have to go check it and when you're on the toilet well I'm on the toilet what am I going to”

do let me check to see what people were pissed off at and why don't fucking agree with that oh you guys in idiot and then you're mentally ill and then it's it becomes because we have this bizarre political system in our country we have two sides only two we only have two perspectives you know and then you have a conglomeration of ideas that are attached to each perspective that you might not agree with at all but you have to because you're a right wing this or a left wing that

and so you have to say whatever the fucking party wants you to say and if you don't you're a Nazi or you don't you're whatever you are a communist whatever it is and I loved your when in your comedy special which was so fucking funny and you know I'm like a big fan of comedy but in your last special you sort of talk about how people like sign up for oh yeah well I agree with that that makes perfect sent oh yeah I agree with that oh and by the way if you're going to agree with that you

know you're also going to have to agree that you know that yeah except the men get pregnant you're like what wait so that those are my choices yeah I have to go along with like you know it trans people should be allowed to be in every sport and it doesn't matter like I have to go along with that one too if I want to be part of my tribe yo yeah that's part of the tribal initiation ritual you're going to have to sign up for that I think it's a really great way of delivering

it also because it makes people laugh at themselves yeah and everybody wants to be on a team yeah and you're like you know oh we believe that everybody should you know be free to do whatever you want and as long as you're not hurting anybody I agree you know yeah yeah yeah exactly along with it this sounds great yeah hey I'm with you guys yeah yeah yeah like oh fuck that's right this is a

“package deal I have to yeah and that's what people are agreeing to and then you get group think and”

then you get also ostracish you get ostracish from the community if you don't do it so you you know you get kicked out of the kingdom and you don't want that yeah because being excommunicated from whatever group that you identify with is terrifying because then what are you going to do you going to join the fucking Nazis I'm going to join those people and the right because the left kick me out because I don't think that men can get pregnant maybe I should just apologize maybe

and then you just wind up apologize if there's something you don't even believe in you're like "cough" I can't believe I have to say this yeah you know and it's just it's a bad way of communicating it's online communication is a terrible way of communicating and it's the primary source that young people experience you know young people like my kids they don't even fucking text each other they snapchat you know they're all snapchat and with pictures and shit I'm like

this is like the minimal amount of communication you can do and when they have to talk to people

just put their phone down and talk to people that lost they're always like reaching for their phone

oh yeah it was when I grabbed their phone the middle of you talking yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah they have to check like it's like you're perpetually distracted yeah yeah it's going to get worse I think when you have glasses and you could be walking down the street or you can meet somebody and be like hi Joe so when you went to college at and then you learned you know it's like they're they're

constantly deleting Instagram or deleting TikTok yeah well our kids are doing that no yeah but you know and then it comes back for some reason or they'll say well I felt like I needed to do this or whatever but follow but it's very encouraging to see them recognize that you like you have to go cold turkey on social media well that narrative's out there fortunately for a lot of

“kids Twitter which I think is maybe the most toxic in terms of what it can do most beneficial in”

terms of like whistleblowers getting news like everything's happening in the world I almost immediately

go to Twitter it used to be a little better for that because now part of the problem is with AI

generated content there's a lot of weird stuff when it comes to like especially war stuff there's a lot of videos that are just completely fake and it's hard to tell or they take a video that is real and highly exaggerated and they add AI to it it's it's very strange and if you got you got to wonder like who's doing that and why are they doing this is this our government doing it is it the Iranian government who's who's fucking who's releasing these fake videos and are we

doing it to ourselves by the way 100% yes a lot of people are doing that just for clicks because there is an actual economy based on engagement so you can make money if you're you know if you're putting up these posts these posts are getting millions of millions of interactions you're going to

get more money and so there's a lot of people doing that so it used to be better because it

was used to be just pure information and if it was a video it was just a video that someone took of their cell phone generally now it's like a lot of weirdo stuff a lot of weird fake stuff so it's hard also there was a there's a piece in the paper today that talked about how like Trump gets a like a few minute video every day that's a compilation of all the attacks and all the explosions that have happened in Iran you know but it's not getting a more nuanced picture of it so

to some extent is kind of you know drinking his own cool aid how do they know what he gets

“I think that there was a enough of a leak to say that he was given a that each day he's given a”

chunk of video to watch and that I think historically has been something that happens with him as he'd rather watch it than read it and that by putting together just it's not even that they're saying their fake videos and we're actually there are a lot of fake videos but he's only getting the positive videos he's just getting explosions right he's just getting a lot of pictures of explosions so he's saying you know we're destroying their uh here it is inside Trump's daily video montage briefing

on the Iran war this is NBC news the montage typically runs for about two minutes has written that's enough time to give you a nuance perspective on a fucking international war has raised concerns amongst those the president's allies that he may not be receiving the complete picture of the war yeah yeah of course he's done yeah and of course the people that tricked him into doing this

in the first place don't want him to get a full nuanced perspective of the war let me know

what he thinks it's a good idea yeah he's the people they videos it's a series of clips of stuff blowing out hilarious you know that's the world we're living in it's a tick-tock president I made it or a tick-tock briefing yeah for the president you know but video I mean what we saw

“in Alabama and I know you have some some clips of this and I think if if you feel like running one”

there's the level of uh uh depravity that's going on in our prison system is so much higher than the average person thinks it is and one of the reasons why we've seen so much outrage from people finally millions of people have seen the Alabama solution because people have HBO or they have watched it at theater and it's the first time they've been able to see inside it's the first time they've been able to really see it as opposed to reading a statistic there are a lot of people

dying prison or whatever and I think it does tap into our sense of humanity and it taps into our sense of community and the feeling that like I don't want to be a part of that I I don't want to be a part of doing that to other people you know I could be tough on crime you know we've shown the film to a lot of conservative viewers uh including one of the founders of CPAC and various people who are you know pretty pretty right wing people and have said look I might be tough on crime

that's not what I'm talking about right that's that's a human rights crisis and where's the DOJ and where's the government doing anything to protect where are the inspectors yeah how are they allowing any of that yeah you know and that's the one of the great things about your documentary is it's clear I mean it's there's no ambiguity at all it's like laid out there full color you could see the blood on the ground you could see I mean it's horrific when kinetic justice when that

guy's beaten in his cell and you see how they dragged him out face he's faced down bleeding all

the blood trail from his cell with the contraband cameras from the cell phones and had those cell phone cameras not existed you'd have zero idea like if those guards only decided to sell money bring drugs in and not not phones with cameras who knows what you would know you would know very little yeah yeah and it does I mean you know I would like to believe that the average American does not want to harm the average other American you know and even if you get hyped up on twitter

or you get to see you know too many videos of people blowing up stuff or whatever

that ultimately people had that experience of saying you know I went to that like coffee at

the church and I sat there with that guy who I really can't stand and you know we ended up having a conversation you know people are there kind of a maze at how much commonality they can feel with people where if they just see the person and we all know like if you text somebody your kids or your wife or whatever there's just some places where texts are not good it's not enough it's not enough it's going to make some of these feelings hurt you know but when you

get to sit down across from somebody you realize that it's another person you can kind of relate to so it's really disturbing that that weathered social media or just the demonization of people

the way that we just turn people into these one-dimensional figures and then we could just

rage at them and just hang them and distract yourself from your own problems that's a big part of it people love something that takes the focus away from whatever shortcomings they have or whatever things in their life they don't like they'll focus on external things I know some people whose lives are completely fucked up in so many ways their health is fucked up the relationships are fucked up their job is fucked up and all they want to talk about is politics like hey man

clean up your backyard like clean up your life like why are you spending so much time paying attention to what's going on with USA aid like how much does that affect you does it does it really affect you that much all this fucking fraud right but what about your life man

“your life is a fucking disaster and all you care about is the government you know and what they're”

doing to fuck people over like I don't think that's really the problem I think you you're getting in your own way son you know and that's a lot of people out there in this world and anything that you do distract yourself whether it's start drinking gamble get on pills whatever it is people find ways to distract themselves from whatever is wrong with their life and that's part of what social media is providing you it's providing these alternative avenue for your attention to divert you

from all the things that really are making your life a fucking disaster yeah there's also that I think sort of nuance falls into that also because people are made calm by the idea that they can just identify problems and that they're simple right so if you say to somebody hey like locking people up her 75 years probably doesn't make a lot of sense that's complicated wait now I got to make a determination of what's the right thing to do with another person and you know

so you end up with a lot of politicians who say well I know this is these the bad people these the good people we got to promote the good people and get rid of the bad people not recognizing like everybody's a little both and that some people certainly do a lot more bad stuff in the world

“than good stuff and vice versa but you have to see yourself you know as you're describing like”

you have to recognize what's happening in your backyard in order for the community to work

you can't say well look I'm always right my neighbors always wrong and therefore I'm just going to

keep raging over this you have to say like you know I could see myself doing something I could see myself boy if I really got out of hand I could see myself having a you know taking a swimming at somebody and it's probably not a good thing but I don't want to say that somebody else that did it is automatically just a horrible person and that's what you know if you see this this attorney general in Alabama you know this idea that you know he says they're these horrible

people in the world people who have no respect for human life and yet he's presiding over 1500 of them dying but it doesn't imagine that he's part of the problem you know and it's

“respect for human life while human life is dying in these places where people are taken”

if they show no respect for human life and they're being killed by the people who are watching over them yeah so it's a very topsy turvy yeah like what world you know and also cruelty plays a part in it we you know we know that if you sometimes we say about this film that

human beings have a little bit of a propensity to want to put a firecracker in a frog's mouth

“and just see what happens you know there's a level of cruelty that I think we have intrinsically”

you know certainly once you're other a person right absolutely and and I that's to some extent why when it's exposed right when there's transparency when the press is allowed to report on what's happening inside prisons people kind of get a conscience because they start realizing yeah I wouldn't want to do that in front of my kid right wouldn't want to do that if it ends up in the paper I wouldn't want you know and I think that is kind of a balancing effect which is

one of the reasons why this like war on you know on transparency is a it's a huge problem right we're not allowed to see what's happening in prisons even though we're paying for them right you know the Supreme Court had this ruling that said that wardens could uh deny access to journalists simply by citing safety and security but meantime the last 20 years no journalist has been hard on inside of prison so who's all the secrecy keeping safe right it's it's it's we're we're

sort of perpetuating the system our job going into the Alabama State prison system was just showing a light on that it shouldn't be that these guys who are incarcerated have to take life in death risks using contraband cell phones to show what's happening in institutions that I'm paying for and you're paying for you know those that we're spending you know 116 billion dollars a year in the United States on prisons jails parole that is an insane number and if we're spending that much money

we should sort of know what every one of those dollars is going to and we should have watch dogs who will say hey guess what in Alabama they're supposed to be paying for a drug treatment program

we don't know where the money's going right you know yeah transparency is always good especially

in something like that I mean to me the idea of preventing journalists from it if almost as akin to these ag ag laws that they've slapped in states that have factory farming to prevent people from filming the horrific treatment of some of these animals because they would be bad for business you know it's just fucking crazy like it should be bad for business and people shouldn't tolerate they should take their business elsewhere which is what transparency is all about you don't want

to buy chickens from place that brutally beats their chickens or pigs or whatever it is yeah yeah and I mean and a lot of people say oh well you know it's going to upset it's we don't need to upset the public what are you doing something uh for inside us lot of house that would upset the

“public like their ways to because if you want to euthanize an animal or some act there they're”

ways to do it where you're not using like a bolt and smaging your skull with it well the bolt is actually the most humane way kind of instantaneously kills them all right the other way is my name by their ankles and slip their neck that's a little rougher but that's if you want kosher there's a lot of weird ways that they kill animals but it's really the beating and it's the horrific torture that the cruel people that work there sometimes do because there's been some

videos that have been released of people like beating animals with crow bars and stuff for no fucking reason just just sadistic sick people they just happen to work in these places they become very accustomed to treating these animals badly just like security guards become very accustomed to treating prisoners badly it's kind of being the same ones I totally agree and and just imagine what would happen if you know what if if Tyson foods or any of these companies just the policy

was just if the press wants to come in and photograph and the press wants to come in right about it they're allowed to come in once a week or whatever and just do whatever they want well it should be not negotiable it should be a part of the ability to run a facility like that because of the consequences because if you don't do that there is the potential for you being a horrific abuser animals of course and nobody wants to buy your chicken or your pork or whatever it is if you're doing

that and yeah we should know but like criminalizing taking video crazy of animals being abused crazy like how could you justify that you know you would only do it if you value profit

“over ethics over morals but the only thing if you profit is more important than educating”

people on the horrific nature of how these animals are treated yeah but it's more important you well it's really important is we have cheap bacon okay yeah but it is a big it's like a big tapestry because the diffusion of responsibility figures into it and you know the converting effect of money figures into it but it's a very I mean I think it's just being accustomed to

horrors you know I knew a guy worked at a slaughterhouse and he told me like you never get the

because you got to understand like if you're working a slaughterhouse you're seeing who knows any thousands of cows die a week just thousands just thousands of death constant death most farmers

never saw that like the way people used to raise animals for food you know you would kill a cow

and you would eat it for six months you know what I mean like you would you could kill the occasional chicken you weren't seeing thousands of dead animals a week you weren't like seeing thousands of them get disemboweled a week it's like after a while and you're in a factory they're going by on hooks on a conveyor belt like what are we doing this I went to visit a prison um we I went sort of on a series of prison visits in Berlin and Norway and a few other places and I was there

“with this sort of elderly woman that that was like a deputy commissioner I think in North Carolina”

and the prison system uh Virginia Ginny and I I loved her she was so smart and the first thing

they do is they bring you to a concentration camp so they bring you to socks and house and

before they take you to the prisons to see how the prisons are run and we're standing there and this concentration camp with the guide and the woman says well this is where they would bring in the people on the trains and then they would take them out and then this is where they would you know shave their heads and then they would strip them down and they would spray them with fire hoses and water and then they would put powder disinfectant powder on them they would take away all

of their you know any kind of distinguishing marks that put them all in the same outfit and they would give them a number instead of their name they would be you know and everybody sort of looking

at it like very disturbed and Ginny leaves over to me and she says you know we end through

we do every one of those things in our prisons today and you realize that this dehumanization this homogenization this like making everybody look the same is part of just desensitizing us to what we're going to do to those people because they just look like they're look like bad people

“because you know that's what happens when you shave your head and you're pale and you have the”

same outfit and you look like a convict you've turned them into another gave turn them into another because of the tribal nature of ancient human civilization we have almost like a deep-seated DNA that allows us to other people because those people were coming and they were going to kill your tribal members and steal your resources and do whatever they could to the survivors and that it it was all horrific and so we have this thing that we're able to do that allows us to attack

or to go after people and just to not think of them as your brothers and sisters and neighbors and fellow human being sharing this wonderful spinning ball no these are evil people these are others you kill them these are fill in the blank these are the Japanese these are the Germans these are the this these are that whatever it is that we're at war with those are the people

“that are not us and we kill them yeah and that's how you feel about prisoners and then there's the”

other side where you go too far the other way and you have these crazy no cash bail policies where you've got violent offenders in and out of jail constantly you've got people that have been arrested 40 times pushing old people in front of the train in New York City you've got people that are just like mentally ill violent criminals punching women on the street and Seattle and they just keep getting out of jail and you go how was this possible how was this okay too yeah

no I that's not good either yeah you can't but I think the extent to the extent to which we could get everybody which only is going to happen in little bits and little areas where we can make an impact but we're trying to say well look it shouldn't be you know it's it shouldn't be that everybody who says that we shouldn't be running our prison industrial complex the way we are is soft on crime it's okay to be tough on crime it's okay to recognize as some people need to be

separated out from society but but if you if it becomes so polarized then you get the progressive DA who you know there's a there are some very smart ones and then you get some who are just saying well you know we just should abolish prisons and therefore you know we don't need any of this and that scares everybody and probably doesn't lead to any level because we all want public safety like everybody wants to be serious about public safety that's different than being tough on crime yes

the the again same neighborhoods what happens over and over and over you know this is that you

know have like there's rampant crime that's developing in Beverly Hills right it's all happening and these impoverished gang infested neighborhoods like why has there been no resources put into

“that imagine the amount of return that you would get like I always say if you want to make a”

America great again here's the best way have less losers how do you have less losers give more people an opportunity to succeed well when it's it's it's it's not like we're all the same starting block we all know that no one will say that no one will say everybody's at the same line and how you get by in this life is depending upon how much work you put in once you're at the line well that's not true so how do we figure out these people that are at the far of this

end of the starting line the most fucked put some money into that fix that put some engineering into that put some like some actual thought and trying to devise some sort of a method to increase the odds of having more productive people come out of these places and give them hope and you would have better neighbors you would have more people that are thriving in whatever business more people that are artists more people in the economy the world would be a better place like why wouldn't

“you invest in that well because there's no money in it you have to spend money on it okay so”

there's more there's money in it but the but nobody really wants to to to do the work to figure there's money in it but you can't make that money they're going to make that money right you're going to help people make money in order to contribute to the GDP it'll contribute to the tax base to the overall economy but it's not a business where you can like say oh if I get into that business of helping people I can get rich and that's the problem yeah I mean if you try to make

if every if the if the you know the ultimate a duty cater of everything is whether it is turning a profit you know you sort of erase the bottom right everybody sort of nobody really wants to do anything smart they just want to do things that enable them to get the most money the quickest

but ultimately right now spending 116 billion dollars a year on our prison system you know we've

“got 5% of the world's population we've got 20 25% of the world's prisoners crazy like this”

fucking wild what a wild statement yeah it's incredible that's a broken society like if that's not evidence of a broken society look not like it's better in some of these other places that don't have a high percentage of people because they just kill them like there's a lot of places where you do something bad they just kill you there's no the thinking about you know but I mean it's like modern civilized society you know we don't do this well no we don't

rehabilitate well that's for damn sure yeah we don't as you're saying we don't invest in kids we don't you know like how are we how are we in a situation where we are paying teachers so little money that they have to use their own money to buy books and school supplies we're beating the shit out of our teachers who are the people that are going to turn our kids into part of our community how can we be surprised we don't have a community yeah

it's almost like it's a conspiracy I mean that's you you realize why people slap that tin foil hat on tight knit down to the chin because like at a certain point on like why wouldn't we put more money into schools it seems kind of crazy when you've got like in California they've got programs that like spend hundreds of billions of dollars and go nowhere like where where where's the railroad you spend so much money where's where's all the tiny houses didn't you guys get hundreds

of millions of dollars for tiny where they're fuck us the tiny houses no tiny houses it's like not a one tiny house has been built but there's a lot of that stuff the 24 billion to the homeless people increase like imagine if they put 24 billion into the education system guess what you

would probably ultimately wind up with less homeless if you put 24 billion into education community

centers god imagine the work that you could do in California with 24 billion dollars just in education California would have the greatest education system in the country if you just paid teachers an exorbitant amount of month had a amount of year had fantastic oversight he's incredibly well structured education systems great counseling social workers that can help work with kids people that can give them productive ways to expel some of this excess energy that they have

figure out how to focus figure out like what kind of jobs they may be excel at based on their personality type educate them towards that you could you could get a lot done you could get so much

no one knows where it went is no accountability they veto everybody tries to put it all

it on it yeah right out and out of Alabama's prisons go from 300 million dollars for one

point three billion and they described his inflation and no one's like no one's investigated no one's

“going to jail no one like fuck you yeah yeah yeah yeah I mean there's and they're I think that”

when you say it's a conspiracy I really believe that you know conspiracies do not have to include people in dark back rooms right it's very often just everybody's sitting around the table I really knows what the motivation is and they just go okay I don't do the thing you do the thing there's not it nobody has to be rubbing their hands together and having secret meetings they all know what's in their financial interest well clearly if you beat prisoners to death and then

lie about it and you all agree that you're gonna lie about you're conspiring right yeah I mean that's that happens obviously all the time clearly meetings like that all the time clearly but I think

there's an insidious element to the fact that you know that people are agreeing that 24 billion

dollars should be spent on x y or z nobody really needs to get like a secret memo saying how they're gonna steal that money like they just go okay in Alabama what now we're allowed spend one point three billion dollars on one person great okay well I I'm not personally taking the one point three you know I'm not personally taking the billion dollar overage myself but you know it's going into the system the way that you know but your first red flag is they start construction before the deals even signed

they already start so the fix is in they know what's going on look I grew up in Boston and Boston was a part of the most corrupt construction site in the history of the country the big dig big dig right fuck it they was supposed to take like I don't know how long it was supposed to take but it went on long after I moved out and then came back to Boston like 10 years later was still going on I'm like this is crazy yeah and by the time it did at the population in Boston

increased so it didn't even really alleviate traffic yeah but there's always going to be stuff like

that if you have no oversight or if you have people that can figure out a way to inflate this and add on that that that that that that that next thing you know it well the press is extremely important which is why government this government or prior government they don't like the press right nobody likes getting in trouble because the press does when it operates at its best and when when you have the people that are able to make a living being journalists and you're not you know firing

everybody who's a good investigator reporter then that should be it's one of the reasons why the country was founded in that way why for it in the press is so important is because it's the only

“disinfectant it's the only way and it doesn't mean people don't use the press in”

malevolent ways or people don't but people will show everything yeah but like the public kind of has a sense or at least used to have a sense and hopefully will again that when somebody doesn't investigate of story and they are able to produce the facts and figure out who's really responsible for a certain kind of corruption that it reduces the corruption just as the case you know and it's like you can't really regulate it or you can regulate it but if you regulate it nobody's

paying attention to it then the press has to identify the people are breaking the rules you know the DOJ right now is supposed to be the monitor of making sure that government institutions and others don't defy the constitution right so in Alabama clearly every time you see one of these events that happens in our film those are all crimes those are being committed by a state actor by a prison guard right those are crimes being committed against our fellow citizens the fact

that some of these people are incarcerated doesn't mean they're also supposed to be killed or blamed right and so who really monitors that is the US Department of Justice because at the end of the day their job is to maintain a constitutional level of care and and it's not by the way that's not

“that great right it's like you have to make sure that there's no cruel and unusual punishment”

well clearly in Alabama there is well they started starving though which is really crazy during the strike they were giving them like a tiny ration yeah they sometimes drinking their food for days yeah and so the DOJ's job is to do that what was the DOJ doing you know a few years back is they were doing a kind of a sort of an okay job pursuing just the worst actors the worst of the worst so they would find a police station that was just regularly harming people

people were getting murdered like in Alabama and that was going okay well that whole civil

rice division of the DOJ is now basically gone right it's been totally repurposed so now it's

dealing with you know reverse racism and and various things like that but they're not doing those other cases anymore they don't care about what's happening in a police department or what's happening in a so you don't even have that level of scrutiny so you don't wonder how it's changed

“I mean I think most recently you've seen the DOJ just dismantled the civil rice division”

so that's been in the current administrative and the civil rights division wasn't charge of looking at the prisons yeah so what have they done during the last four years before that they they didn't they also didn't do a great job but they did bring actions that had impact in a bunch of different states so for example they sued the state of Alabama

which happened under the first Trump administration actually the the the the case against

Alabama started under Obama then under Trump Jeff sessions had to approve the issuance of these letters these findings letters and then they had when Alabama said you know take a hike you you're wrong we don't agree we're not going to make a consent decree we're not going to settle then they had to sue them so that happened under that happened under Jeff sessions and that was now you know two administrations ago the Trump administration brought this action but it's just

being dragged on and dragged on and now the DOJ isn't really care about this kind of litigation so the people that were running it are gone all those people well I have to also imagine that you're there are so many cases and if the press was allowed to weekly if there was weekly access the press had to these correction facilities all over the country the amount of cases would be fucking extraordinary but because they've been allowed to hide because they've been allowed to do

this stuff in complete secrecy with total control of whether or not things get released or don't get released like it's it's just it's become just a part of the system it's like standard operational procedure yeah and it's I mean but the cases would go down right oh as soon as you can see that they would hide if you're beating people in your care if you're a prison guard like Rodrick Gadson and you've had 24 cases of excessive force yeah it's sport for them you know you would say at one point

well this is not working so great for me so I want to at least behave similar of course well I think

your film was probably the first time most people ever got a chance to see and I would hope that

your film and then also this conversation and the other ones that you've been having will move this conversation in a different direction where people start talking about it openly

“where they're forced to do something because it seems like you have to force them to act”

and they're probably dealing with so many other cases as well this is just another burdened them and if it's the prisoners all well that's the least priority situation we have to deal with these people are bad people they're in jail like those the radio people that you used their voices like it's God it's like shut the fuck up like you're listening to them as a person who's had multiple podcasts with people that were wrongfully convicted I've done a ton of them with my

friend Josh Dubin who was originally with the innocence project and he's now with the like pro-mutter center for legal justice like his passion project is besides being a successful attorney outside of that is passion project is finding these very obvious cases of people that were wrongfully convicted that have spent a giant chunk of their life in jail and through these podcasts we've gotten a bunch of these people out and you've got a chance to have conversations

with them I've had a few on here and you have these conversations with these people and you realize like these are brilliant people who lost a giant chunk of their potential to nonsense yeah and I think if it's first of all I think Josh is really smart and I know I've you've done

“a lot with him and I think that's so important there's you know there's always a tendency to sort of”

think of only wrongful convictions because you know everybody can agree that we shouldn't be locked out for something that we didn't do we've had people on that weren't wrongfully convicted that did an extraordinary amount of time for a minor crime right but unfortunately one of them wind up getting out and then killing your guy yeah cutting off his head we're in a wig he didn't

it's a technology problem it didn't understand the technology was dealing with because he put

on a wig and he thought it oh I'm a little bit like a woman like bro it was like HD you were

“the wig it was learning from a bob first yeah well I think he you know he probably acted out”

a passion and then was trying to figure out a rectify this problem that he created yeah but one thing I wanted to I haven't met Josh but I want to talk to him and one thing I want to talk to him about is the fact that there's like a level of of conviction on the part of a lot of prosecutors that they're on the as you're saying they're like they're on that team and therefore they have to subscribe to everybody's guilty everybody should be locked up for as long as possible because

they're all these other people their defense lawyers and people like that around the other team right but then you end up with people like Steve Marshall who by the way is running for Senate right now and we're pushing to get him to step down from his Senate run because you know he's

sort of been exposed for what he's and by the way he said that he had never been in the film he never met

“me he just came out with a whole public statement saying I had nothing to do with those people”

I never met them I got like 50 pictures of my phone of him walking me around the statehouse in Alabama you know it's it was there's a missing piece there but that's being very charitable but why is it that I'm a charitable person but why is it that you know in Alabama for example there's a guy named Tafaris Johnson who was arrested for a murder a million years ago he's been on death row the entire time and the evidence against him totally fell apart

there are dozen people that gave him a alibi that said we were with him at this club that was across town he had nothing to do with this crime and yet and by the way the DA who that office is the office that should prosecute that crime they've asked for a new trial they've said that they're not confident that he's guilty and yet the Attorney General's office is continuing to try to execute him they're trying to kill him for something which he clearly did not do there's

another case the guy named Chris Barber where there's DNA evidence that showed that somebody else committed the crime and the DA is trying to execute Chris for Barber and see you know they there's this teaming you know where you become a part of law enforcement and then somehow you lose your sense of judgment or nuance your ability to decide who's guilty and who's not guilty and that's a really dangerous thing because your career depends on you getting a win you career advances

if you get a win the way you get a win is convict people and not getting convictions overturned that's a loss that fucks up your career so better to kill him yeah which just really crazy yeah which is I mean it's it's it's disturbing that we haven't come up with ways to identify fairness right that that that that that fairness should be the method by which you judge how a district attorney performs is like well we decided to prosecute certain number cases some of

those cases weren't worth prosecuting some of those cases were going to turn into wrongful convictions we're not just kind of prosecute everything which is why this whole thing about like Brady material where you're supposed to give the other side anything that comes out in the investigation that might be used to prove their innocence you know if there's something that goes against

“the criminal case you have to provide it to the lawyer on the other side but regularly prosecutors”

is buried this information you know you have some witness it said I was with that person at the time and that witnesses testimony disappears or you have something that shows that the gun that they thought was used to commit the crime wasn't the one that was used to commit the crime so there's just a that's the thing the teaming the decision that you have to be part of one side or another you know I really think that that that part of your special

where you're sort of like putting me in the position of somebody who's having to make a decision about what team I'm on and where I lose the thread you know that's like that's a very significant thing that you did there you know because it was like a way of bringing to the average citizen that feeling that they're all having right now which yeah you all got lumped into it everybody gets lumped into it because there's only two choices in this country and that's stupid

or you could be one of those wacky libertarians you know and then you're like oh bobs and libertarians

I was like that's it's never gonna work you know what else you get I mean I'm always I'm always curious

about I'm always asking myself what I should be you know what I should be spending my time on and I get involved in a film and it kind of grabs you and it could how do you decide

I don't need to make another one of these things they're very exhausting you know and then

something happens or you know my shrink says to me yeah I know you always say you're not going

to make another movie but I think you're better when you're making a movie you're better when you're engaged in something like this and I'm curious for you know you built this incredible platform and you have access to just a remarkable number of people in the universe and what do you feel like your mission is what do you feel like is the you know when you get to the end of a week and you look back and you think like I did what I was I did what I set out to do this week

all I ever do is try to talk to people I'm interested in talking to and that's it

“and I feel like that's what I started with and that's what I stuck with and if I deviate from”

that path if I say oh I'll get this guy on because he's famous and then I'll get more views or I'll

get her on because she's controversial and I'll get more views I don't think like that at all I don't allow it into my head I get a list of people on my phone that are interested in coming on the show and I spend a couple hours a few times a week just going over this list and then I'll go that's interesting let me look into this and so then I'll do a search on this person and what they're interested in and then maybe I'll watch a documentary or I'll get an audio book and I'll

start listening to it on the way to work and then I'll decide and I'll go yeah okay I like this this is cool I'm into this this would be a conversation that I'll be genuinely curious about and so that's

“the only way I do it you know I've done it that way from the very beginning I either talk to my friends”

or I talk to people who I've seen a documentary that they did or read one of their books or I've watched a YouTube video with them and I thought they were fascinating and then I've reached out to my guy and I say hey can you see if this guy's interested in me and on and that's the only way I do it so I feel like as long as I do that I will continue to give people the same service and this service is this is an extension of my curiosity my honest curiosity to the world

so whoever I'm honestly curious about sit them down talk to them do my best that's it and if I try to make an anything more than that if I try to change it or to store it or move it into general direction or make it have a message or make it make more money or whatever it is I'll

“fuck it up that's what I think I think that's really smart and I think you know this is what's”

lacking is sort of authenticity and everybody's like authenticity so important how can I manufacture that right and I think your approach is really smart I also think you know I think you talked about that you really like playing pool and that if you weren't doing this you might just play pool yeah I like playing pool but I'm wondering like you know something's keeping you from playing pool right now right well I still enjoy this if I didn't enjoy this I would stop like

I don't need any more money I could just stop if I didn't enjoy it but I do enjoy it I am a very curious person I'm fascinated by different people's perspectives how they view the world how they got to where they are what was their first step like why they make these choices like what what is it about the way they think that makes them unique and I don't think I'm ever going to lose that I think that's a very important part of my understanding of us as a species us as a civilization

and I'm very fascinated with the history of the human race and how we got to this point and where we are and how we define what is normal and what is not normal and what our standards are and how you know how they get manipulated I don't think I'm ever going to stop being curious about

those things I may stop doing this publicly I will never stop being curious I'll never stop watching

well these documentaries are reading books or I don't think I'll ever stop trying to have conversations with people even if I don't do it publicly because it's I mean it's probably this is totally accidental I don't know if you know the history of this podcast it started out with me and my friends is bullshitting in front of a laptop and there was no expectations it made no money for years and then it just kind of grew and I never promoted it I never went on anywhere and said please watch

my show I never took an ad out anywhere I just kept doing it and it just snowballed to the point well like all right and now I just feel like I have this responsibility and then I get up and I go

and I work out and I get in the cold plunge I get the sauna and I clear my mind out and then I'm like make sure I'm prepared and just show up at work yeah I notice that you're not like you don't look at yet you don't look at your phone you know that distracts people I totally agree it's very it grows yeah especially if you're talking to someone that has something really important to say

I mean if I'm looking at my phone for a brief second is because it's something relevant to what

“we are talking about I want to send it to Jamie so we can pull it up on the screen but I think”

it's one of the great benefits of having these long conversations with people on a podcast is that that's time where you're not staring at a fucking device and most people lack that so I've gotten this completely unexpected education in life and human beings and how they think and what drives them and just what what makes them interesting and you know how does it how does it impact like your your you have girl you have two girls three you have three you have three girl

how how how does it impact sort of how you interact with them you feel like you you learn

something and then yeah I'm a way more educated person than I ever was when I was younger I'm

just I just know more about humans I know more about myself like you know you're thinking and you're constantly thinking so it's just adding to this database of understanding that you have about human beings and about just life in general just education and you know unfortunately my kids are really smart and so I have it's cool conversations with them about stuff and you know one of my kids has this crazy recall that my wife insists comes from me she's it's nuts like she can

recall things about the Titanic and specifics about like the the voyages because she's just got down this Titanic kick for a while you know and Lately we've been talking about the Mongols because they're she's studying jengas con and school and so we had these long conversations about Mongols and and what they did and what was and you know I'm telling her some stuff that she is known that she tells me some stuff that I didn't know well how did she this one's 15 but

so it impacts my not just my relationship with them but really my relationship with everybody in my life and the which really hard is talking to people that aren't interested in anything and don't engage with all these different things and then when you talk to them it's like they're operating

“on this frequency that's like time and and work and life is sort of ground down all their”

sensitivity and call list all of their their their senses to the world or their thoughts of the world or their perspectives of the world and they've developed these sort of placeholder opinions for things that's how awkward and you know an over time like you know Tony Robbins talked about this once that if you make small changes in your life like if you're both going in parallel lines right and then you make a small deviation a few degrees to the right over time you'll be way

over here where they're kind of on the same path and that's what I find in life that's weird and then I think about how many people don't have the opportunity to do that because they have a job that's like mundane and it's consuming and they're involved in it all day long when they get

done they're exhausted and they never really satisfy their curiosity or encourage and engage with

their curiosity foster it you know and it's uh it's what to me makes people fascinating when I talk to someone who's curious about things and it's really like and it went down a while I was curious so then I started researching and this is what I found out like that's the kind of person I want to talk to you know yeah it's real I mean I think it's also you know you're probably because it got big without a plan to get big and because I think you're the essence of it

is wanting to express curiosity wanting to take in information how to deal with the people

“who say like oh you know you had so and so on you should have asked them this or you should have”

I don't know that they're saying that because you don't hear it or you don't pay attention I gave up on that years ago like you used to follow like yeah and you realized like oh I'm at the will of other people's opinions constantly and some of them aren't logical and some of them are petty and some of them are shady that is shitty people they're mean like why are you being mean for no reason like you know I being insulting for no reason and a lot of it is jealousy they're not

getting enough attention they think you're an idiot why are you getting so much attention I'm brilliant I should be getting more attention there's a lot of that it's a lot of ego involved but there's a lot of like very it should be nice like just people with shitty perspectives and you don't want

people that are constantly surrounded by negative shitty people they develop negative shitty tendencies

it's just we imitate our atmosphere which is why like this idea of pulling yourself up by your bootstraps is so fucking crazy when you're asking some kid who's you know dad's been in jail since he was three and lives in a crime-infested neighborhood and there's 11 kids living in a one bedroom apartment and you're saying well how come you want to jail shut the fuck up bitch you wouldn't want to jail too if you live there you don't know what you're like what we need to do is

figure out why are these kids in this situation why are so many of our citizens a people of our community stuck in these situations with no attention paid to art whatsoever and then you're wondering why so many people commit crimes you're wondering why your prisons is so full like that that when you engage with people that constantly have shitty perspectives and shitty you a little about that a little when your young is good but once you're by time you're like 19-20 you know what

an asshole is you know you don't want assholes in your life you're like avoid at all costs and online if you're engaging with people online you're getting at least 10% assholes it's like there's no way

of avoiding you so I don't get in your head yeah gets in your head I am probably as critical like

logically critical as anybody is ever going to be about me like and what I do and the way I do it

“and like interviews that went well or didn't go well I I examined them you know I think about it”

like when they're done like that was like I should have stopped them from talking about that because I should have said like wait that doesn't make sense like you let people ramble a little bit too much and then they change subjects you want to go back to it and then something else comes up and you look like I should have really challenged that a little bit more or I should have done this or should have done that but you know you're you're you're free-balling you don't know what I don't

have any like questions I know I'm gonna ask I just have an understanding of the subject that I let it play out and I think that's why it's good I just think when you listen to people when I know you grew up in bababa you did this you did that it's like the same tone there's just questions and then the person answers the question and then another question comes like you're not having a conversation and I don't think of them as interviews I think of them as conversation

“something I think that's what I want to hear so that's what I do and if people like you should”

have done this and ask them it's like no you should go get a fucking podcast pitch make your own podcast and then get popular enough we can get that person on then you ask them that yeah I'm gonna ask them what I ask them and when I'm done I'm done that's it yeah I mean I haven't you know I do interviews for when I'm doing documentaries I'll do interviews for seven eight nine hours at a time not that I suggest you do it but it's the reason I do it is because I want to I want to like

converse I want to really understand the other person I want to give myself time to really hear them out and also you know to some extent the most interesting stuff comes out whenever everybody just feels comfortable in their defenses go down yeah yeah Elon was talking about that he's like that's that last hour last hour you can really get them because it's it's it's hard for especially if someone has an agenda you know you could after a while you're talking to them

the tendencies the way they view the world comes out if I really want to know how someone feels about love or life I want to ask him you know how they got to where they are in life how they how they became who they are like give them a chance to brag give them a chance to inflate their accomplishments or give them a chance to pat themselves on the back give them a chance to dismiss other people's accomplishments give them a chance you'll find out who people are without even

pressing them certain things yeah no they want to tell you they are they really yeah and they also like a lot of people they have a them in a agenda you know they really want to project

something to the world and then there's people that don't those people are amazing there's some

people that come in they just open books they just like could just a mind a curious person just a person who followed a path an artist a singer a comedian of this so that an athlete like whatever it is

“like what made you you how do you get there that's why I love comedy so much because you know just”

let's say there's a joke in in pumping mics this little series that we did with Jeff you know Jeff Ross and David tell and I I got to watch you know six versions of Dave just incredible telling they're both great but but Dave telling the same joke like six different times right because we we filmed it over like a long weekend and we did two shows a night at the seller and so he's got this line when he says they're talking about like in in memoriam you know people

astrophysicist you know we lost him and and and James Jeff says that and Dave says

yeah I knew something happened because my printer stopped working and for some reason like this joke makes people say so many people laughed at this joke because it's so insanely like impulsive right I knew that Stephen Hawking I knew Stephen Hawking died because my printer stopped working and the next night he did a different version of it where he said I was because my computer stopped working and it got no laughs at all and just being able to see the spontaneity and like the unlocked

quality Dave's mind the tweaking of the joke but also just like the freedom right which maybe some some of that for some people come being stoned some people but I see like the feeling like given your comedy special the feeling that that that is coming in the moment even though I know a lot of those things are things that you've been thinking about talking about and honing over a lot of years it's the moment when it feels like it's coming naturally that's that's where like

the the biggest laughs are it's also like where the biggest connection the biggest human yeah so the dances the dances like staying in the moment no matter how many times you've

talked about a subject don't think about that think about the actual subject it's basically

doing like a form of hypnosis you you're leading people to think the way your mind is working

“and the only way you could do that is even mind is actually thinking that way if you're thinking”

about some other stuff for some reason even if you're saying the words the exact same way they can smell it on you they can tell yeah yeah well hey man thank you for everything you've done thank you for the jinks and thank you for the Alabama solution because it's really awesome and I really hope that through that film a lot of people get outraged and the right people and a lot enough attention gets put on it where you force people to do something about it and I don't think

people have any idea how bad these fucking presents aren't totally see that yeah and I think those contraband phones and what those inmates have done and and the inmates themselves through the way they conduct themselves and when you can see how intelligent these people are and you know and that you realize like this is not right none of this is right this is I mean on the positive side I would say just so we don't end on a really negative note that the film has had an impact in Alabama

it's having an impact in Alabama already and there are incredible demonstrations that have been

“happening there's actually I don't know if you have it there's a still of this if you want to look at it”

but there's hundreds of people showed up on the steps of the capital people really showing up with the intention of showing their loved ones being there and saying let's this really happening and giving the rest of the public permission to understand that this is you know 45% of Americans have had an incarcerated relative or been incarcerated this is an infection this is happening many many many many places so for us the film has been unlocking that giving people a feeling that

there's that that they're not alone that they don't have to be ashamed of having somebody yeah so you know these are people who've seen the film who've decided that they want to express themselves and this is happening more and more and we just saw there was a bipartisan bill that was just introduced by by a senator Larry Stutz who's a Republican senator who said he saw the film he couldn't unsee it and he said this is not he wrote an at it up at about it not being an example of Christian

values and he introduced this bipartisan bill for prison oversight which is a real bill it's not a bullshit bill it's a real bill about how you take the investigations because you saw in the film the investigations are run by the same department that the crimes so I think we're seeing a

“lot of positive action as a result of the film and I think that's what transparency is all about”

is if the public can see it and I appreciate your talking about this and having this be in the public conversation because it's really important if people see it they they're not happy about it they understand that something more he may need to be done that's a universe oh oh they're anybody could watch that and not think something should be done so thank you really appreciate it thank you