San Quentin To Saved: Chris Schuhmacher’s Last Mile To Redemption

This is a story of mistakes made. Of penance served. And the hard wrought path to atonement, self-forgiveness, and ultimately redemption. It begins with a young, standout volleyball player. A smart guy who later joins the Air Force, spending nearly two years at the Defense Language Institute in Monterey, CA studying Korean. His career looked bright. But it wasn't long before Chris Schuhmacher started making some bad decisions. A laundry list of errant decisions, in fact, that deposited him into a dark, hard partying crowd in Hollywood. Decisions that led to dealing weed to support that lifestyle. And decisions that ultimately culminated in a suitcase of drugs under his dispatch being stolen from him. In a drug and alcohol fueled rage, desperate and fearing the consequences should he be unable to retrieve the contraband, Chris took another manʼs life. And for that offense he was sentenced to sixteen to life. Well aware that he might never see another day outside San Quentin, inmate number T31014 nonetheless committed to taking responsibility for his actions. Searching for spiritual purpose and meaning, he got sober — and stayed that way. He made amends for his crime, began running and earned a college degree. He even studied software engineering, developing a promising app called Fitness Monkey under the tutelage of The Last Mile, a non-profit program that trains incarcerated individuals for successful reentry, All told, Chris transformed himself into the kind of person he always knew he could be. Then came the impossible. In 2017, after serving 17 years, a parole board granted him his freedom. Re-entry hasn't be easy for Chris. But he has emerged from the experience a better man. Now a productive member of society reunited with his family and gainfully employed, he is intent on sharing his cautionary tale in service of others. I had the privilege of hearing Chris speak at The Nantucket Project last year. In a time where prisons and prisoners are mostly forgotten, I was deeply moved by his story of change, rehabilitation and improvement from the lowest points. And I was compelled to use this platform to better understand both his humanity and the current state of our prison industrial complex. There is no “un-doing” what Chris did. There can be no sufficient apology for taking a life. And yet there are lessons to be gleaned –both profound and instructive — from his deep dive into self-examination. The support he leveraged to reinvent himself wholesale. And the innovations afoot that can better rehabilitate the current and future incarcerated among us. Indeed, this is a story of drugs, alcohol, addiction, betrayal, anger, and tragically, murder. It's about what currently ails our prison industrial complex. And it's about how society can do better. But at its core, this conversation is about atonement. It's about second chances. And it's about empathy. With that, I urge that you entertain Chris' testimony with an open mind and even more open heart. Peace + Plants, Rich Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Rich Roll?

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• 0:44Rich Roll?

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• 1:05Speaker 01

  It was definitely a blur. You know, I want to take, you know, total responsibility for everything, but if you'd asked me, you know, that morning, was I gonna wake up and kill somebody? There would have been no way. And I think initially, I was trying to scare him, and more came out of me than even I knew was there. This is one of those things that, no matter how many amends you make, you can never take it back. There would be nothing that I would wish more than to be able to give Morgan his life back.

• 1:36Rich Roll?

  That's Chris Schumacher, and this is the Rich Roll Podcast.

• 1:51Rich Roll?

  The Rich Roll Podcast.

• 1:54Rich Roll?

  Hey everybody. How you guys doing? What's happening? My name is Rich Roll. I am your friendly podcast host. Welcome to the show. Quick reminder up top, if you're struggling with your diet, if you are truly desiring of mastering your plate, but you feel like you lack the skill in the kitchen, or the time, or the culinary acumen you believe you require, I can't stress enough how much I know for a fact, our Plant Power Meal Planner can help you out. It truly is an extraordinary product I'm so proud of. We worked very hard on to solve a very basic problem, making nutritious eating convenient and delicious. When you sign up at meals.richroll.com, you will get access immediately to thousands,

• 2:38Rich Roll?

  literally thousands of delicious and easy to prepare, plant-based recipes thoroughly customized based on a battery of personal preferences that you input when you sign up. You also get unlimited grocery lists, grocery delivery in most metropolitan areas, and a team of crack nutrition coaches at the ready to guide you. And you get all of this for just $1.90 a week, literally a cup of coffee. So to learn more and to sign up, go to meals.richroll.com, or click on Meal Planner on the top menu on my website today. Today's guest is a man I met through my friend, Tom Scott, who you may recall from the podcast, episode 360, at the Nantucket Project last year.

• 3:22Rich Roll?

  His name is Chris Schumacher, and his story is a story of mistakes made, in particular, one very profound, life-ending mistake. It's a story of penance served, and really, the long, hard, wrought path to atonement, to self-forgiveness, and ultimately redemption. It's a very human story. It's raw. It's messy, perhaps controversial. But it's one I felt moved to tell. And it begins with a smart guy, a standout volleyball player, an Air Force veteran, a guy who spent nearly two years at the Defense Language Institute in Monterey, California,

• 4:05Rich Roll?

  studying Korean. But along the way, Chris starts to make some bad decisions, a long line of errant decisions, in fact, decisions that lead to a hard-parting lifestyle in Los Angeles.

• 4:19Rich Roll?

  Decisions that led to dealing weed to support that lifestyle and decisions that conspired that ultimately culminated in one fateful day wherein a suitcase of drugs he was dispatched to sell were stolen from him. And then in this drug and alcohol fueled rage, really desperate and I would imagine fearing of the consequences of what would happen if he didn't retrieve this suitcase, Chris ends up taking another man's life. He's convicted of murder. He's sentenced to 16 to life and he walks into prison having to navigate the gangs,

• 5:01Rich Roll?

  the racial tensions, all the unwritten rules that are part and parcel of that lifestyle, all while knowing that as a lifer, there was a very good chance that he was never going to get out. Now, I'd like to preface this conversation by saying that there is a lot more to Chris's story, but of course, before we get into it, I have to warn that this is a tough one. Not because it's graphic or because of the language, but because of the gravity, of course, of taking another human being's life. It's not something to be minimized. It's very serious and not to be diminished. But Chris's journey is as instructive, I think, as it is profound. So my hope is that you will listen with an open mind.

• 5:51Rich Roll?

  Okay, Chris Schumacher. So, one of the reasons that I felt compelled to have Chris share his story is to provide some nuance to the debacle that is our current criminal justice system. Right now, there are somewhere around 2.3 million locked up in more than 6,000 correctional facilities across the United States. And from 1972 to 2010, the number of people in prison in the US has increased 700%, 700%. 25% of the world's incarcerated population is in the United States. And in California, we spend more on prisons than we do on higher education. It costs about $47,000 to keep one prisoner in jail in California for a year.

• 6:36Rich Roll?

  And more than 67% of the state prisoners released in 2005 were arrested within the next three years. So. This isn't a great picture. There's a lot that's not correct about how we're doing all of this. So is there a better way to deal with people who commit acts of violence? And how do we prevent them from committing them again? So, look, crime, punishment, these are a part of life, sadly even murder. But we do need to face these issues. We need to prioritize, in my opinion, rehabilitation and innovate new solutions that promote it for a more effective result.

• 7:17Rich Roll?

  And Chris is the product of this movement into innovative rehabilitation. You know, on the off chance that this guy would get a second chance while he was inside, Chris committed to taking responsibility. He got sober, he got a college degree. He joined this amazing program called The Last Mile, which we're going to talk about, where he learned programming, software engineering, and ultimately develops this app, this fitness app, called Fitness Monkey. And then about two years ago, after serving 17 years, a parole board granted him his freedom. And he's now blazing his way into becoming a productive member of society. So like I mentioned up top, this one is intense.

• 8:00Rich Roll?

  We recorded it several months ago when I was visiting the Bay Area, so there's no video for this episode. And it's a story about drugs, alcohol, addiction. It's about betrayal, anger, and of course tragically murder. But it's also about atonement. It's about the path to redemption and his journey towards becoming this productive member of society. And so I think baked into that, it's really about empathy. So there's no undoing what Chris did. But I do think there is something profound and something instructive about how he leaned into self-examination, personal responsibility, faith, sobriety, fitness, and education

• 8:44Rich Roll?

  to ultimately transform himself into being the kind of person that he always knew he could be. And so here we are, and this is his story.

• 8:58Rich Roll?

  All right, Chris, thank you so much for doing this today, man. It's a pleasure to reconnect with you after Nantucket Project.

• 9:05Speaker 01

  Yeah, great to be here, Rich. Thanks for having me.

• 9:08Rich Roll?

  So we're taping this in a nondescript little business meeting conference room in a hotel in Palo Alto. I just flew up here this morning from Los Angeles. And for those of you that are listening, we're on day three of the Malibu Calabasas Inferno. And it looks like the firefighters are finally getting the upper hand on this thing. But we're still displaced from our home. And it's been a pretty chaotic, insane past couple of days. Lots of friends who lost their homes and not a lot of sleep on my part. So if my thoughts seem disjointed today, Chris is gonna have to pick up the pieces

• 9:52Rich Roll?

  and make this thing move. But I'm gonna do the best I can. I've been looking forward to having this conversation for a while. I first met Chris at the Nantucket Project. Was that like two months ago or something like that? Through our mutual friend, Tom Scott. Was very impacted by his message and felt strongly that I wanted to share it with all of you guys today. So thank you again for carving out the time. You have the day off. It's Veterans Day. Otherwise, you'd be at your job fandom. So what are you doing there? Like, what are your responsibilities?

• 10:28Speaker 01

  I'm working as a software engineer. I work on the website. We're currently working on a new community builder. And fandom is like the Wikipedia for everything. Marvel's superheroes, Game of Thrones, Netflix, anything people binge-watch. We have a place where they can create communities around. Uh, these shows and these video games, uh, we get over 200 million, uh, unique views on the site every month. There's over 400,000 communities.

• 11:01Rich Roll?

  Uh huh.

• 11:01Speaker 01

  I mean, if you've ever heard of, uh, like Star Wars has a huge community called Wookiepedia.

• 11:06Rich Roll?

  I didn't even know that.

• 11:07Speaker 01

  Yeah. I mean, it's huge and, and anything, uh, RuneScape is big, Elder Scrolls. If you, if your kids play any video games and look up anything online, I guarantee you they've been on one of fandom's sites.

• 11:19Rich Roll?

  Right. So is it like message boards, like Reddit for pop culture?

• 11:23Speaker 01

  It's, it's similar, but it also gives them a chance. It's more like, um, like a webpage, like, and they can upload, uh, video content, uh, images, uh, they can share. There's chat features, um, and right now the project that we're working on is, I mean, we've been around since 2005. And the project we're working on is updating all the tools that people can use because so many things are going mobile now. Uh, we want to make a more friendly, intuitive, mobile experience.

• 11:56Rich Roll?

  Right. And so you're, you're a coder, right? You're a code monkey.

• 12:00Speaker 01

  I am. It's awesome. You know, I've always been, uh, a math guy. Uh, I also had an aptitude for languages, uh, that I found while I was in the military. So, uh, shout out to all the veterans out there on Veterans Day.

• 12:13Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 12:14Speaker 01

  Um.

• 12:15Rich Roll?

  You studied Korean, right?

• 12:17Speaker 01

  I did at, uh, while I was in the air force, uh, in Monterey, uh, super tough. Uh, but I found that with coding and, you know, I found coding inside prison.

• 12:31Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 12:31Speaker 01

  I was serving a 16 year to life sentence for murder. Uh, and really decided early on to get clean and sober and to try to use every day that, that I was locked up inside there to try to, try to better my situation, to make the most, uh, out of my time inside. And it wasn't until 2012 that a program called The Last Mile, uh, started an entrepreneurship class inside the walls of San Quentin.

• 12:56Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 12:56Speaker 01

  So it was a six month class. They taught us how to write business plans. They taught us to cultivate our own ideas about something that we were passionate about, something that involved technology and something with a social cause. And for me, my passion was around staying clean and also working out, running, playing tennis, doing yoga. So that was what inspired Fitness Monkey. And I designed it to be an online life coaching platform that empowered addiction recovery through physical fitness.

• 13:28Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 13:29Speaker 01

  And that's why I was actually so impressed by your talk at the Nantucket Project, because I felt like you were one of my people, you know?

• 13:38Rich Roll?

  Definitely one of your people. I was spared the prison sentence, which we're going to get into in a minute. But I certainly share your passion for fitness and for recovery from drugs and alcohol. And where those two coincide and Fitness Monkey, you know, really is unique in that it bridges that gap. Like, I have apps on my phone for recovery, and then I have fitness apps. But I don't have an app that combines the two of them and kind of is a platform for using fitness as a tool in sobriety. So it's super cool. And are you, you're not on the, you're not, are you in the App Store yet?

• 14:18Speaker 01

  Not

• 14:19Rich Roll?

  Because I looked for it, I couldn't find it.

• 14:20Speaker 01

  Not quite yet. We have a website, and the app is currently in development. I was working with Santa Clara University here, I think in Palo Alto.

• 14:31Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 14:32Speaker 01

  Right here in the South Bay. And they were assigning me grad students to help me build the mobile app. And so I would go down and I would meet with the students, and I would lay out the vision of how we're going to build this thing. And then two weeks later, one of them would get a job, and I'd have to start all over again. So I think I've come to the conclusion that I'm gonna have to build it myself.

• 14:54Rich Roll?

  Hmm.

• 14:55Speaker 01

  Thank you to The Last Mile, who, you know, for the last two and a half years while I was in San Quentin, learned how to code.

• 15:01Rich Roll?

  Yeah, now you know how to do it.

• 15:02Speaker 01

  And figure it out. So, and I think there's like a lot of

• 15:10Speaker 01

  Empowerment and being able to build this thing myself.

• 15:12Rich Roll?

  Right. But the development cycle is going to take a little bit longer.

• 15:16Speaker 01

  Maybe just.

• 15:17Rich Roll?

  Yeah, right.

• 15:18Speaker 01

  It's gonna be a very rough prototype.

• 15:21Rich Roll?

  Well, let's walk it back. I wanna work our way towards this present moment. You have a pretty incredible story of redemption. It's remarkable that you're even sitting here today. And it's inspiring, man. It's inspiring how you took this, you know, bottom that you had and grabbed onto a lifeline with the help and support of others, like the last mile, to really rebuild your life in an amazing way. So, let's tell that story from the beginning.

• 15:55Speaker 01

  Sure.

• 15:56Rich Roll?

  So, you grew up, you were raised by your grandparents initially, right?

• 16:01Speaker 01

  I was adopted very early on by my grandparents.

• 16:06Rich Roll?

  Uh huh. And so, just paint the picture of your childhood for me a little bit.

• 16:11Speaker 01

  Sure. I was adopted by my grandparents. I grew up knowing my biological mother as my sister. And I just knew my grandparents as my mom and dad. And that's what it's been my whole life. So even though biological relationships are still there, the roles that people played in my life are super important to me. They divorced when I was five and I went to live with my mom, who was my grandmother. And it was just me and her growing up. Grew up in Southern California, had a pretty good home environment.

• 16:55Speaker 01

  Went to school, wasn't super great at it, didn't take it seriously. I feel like I was one of those kids that had a lot of potential, but kinda chose to do other things, screwed off.

• 17:05Rich Roll?

  Yeah, so much potential.

• 17:08Speaker 01

  Which is a blessing and a curse, I think.

• 17:11Rich Roll?

  So, I mean, were you like class clown or just partier from day one? Or, you know, were you playing sports? I mean, what, you know, what kind of kid? Who was your crowd?

• 17:21Speaker 01

  Yeah, I was definitely, I was a volleyball guy. You know, Southern California, fell in love with beach volleyball. Everything that Sinjin Smith and Randy Stoklos and all those guys were doing. That's what I saw that I wanted to do.

• 17:37Speaker 01

  And also, right about the same time, you know, I think I got into drinking, just like a lot of high school kids do. And I thought it was normal, you know, I really did.

• 17:49Speaker 01

  The way I drank, you know, and at the time, it just seemed like everybody was doing it like that. And it really wasn't until later on that I realized that I was probably going overboard. And there was a lot of consequences and a lot of like warning signs that I blew right past.

• 18:06Rich Roll?

  Right. Was there a moment when you first realized like, hey, you know, my relationship with alcohol is a little bit different from my buddies? Like, I know for me, I mean, I started a little bit later than you, but pretty early on, you know, I normalized the whole thing and just, you know, I was like, I'm just doing what every college kid does. But looking back on it now, I was like, oh yeah, I was always kind of like the last guy to leave the party or the one who had the most embarrassing story, you know, that we would laugh about. It was no big deal at the time. But there were those clear, you know, those like red flags were being raised pretty early. And it would be many, many years before I would take responsibility for that.

• 18:49Rich Roll?

  But looking back, it was kind of like, yeah, from the beginning, it was a problem. I mean, was that for you or did it start off, you're just, you know, doing what everyone else is doing?

• 19:00Speaker 01

  I feel like it started off like I was just doing what everybody else was doing. I graduated high school. I started college. I didn't finish one unit while I was there. I moved down to the beach to be closer to volleyball and to what I thought I wanted to do with my life. Um, but after dropping out of college, uh, I kinda wandered for a while.

• 19:22Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 19:23Speaker 01

  Um.

• 19:24Rich Roll?

  Down to the beach like South Bay or where, where?

• 19:26Speaker 01

  Uh, San Clemente.

• 19:28Rich Roll?

  Uh huh.

• 19:28Speaker 01

  I lived in San Clemente for a little while and then lived in Newport Beach for a while. Uh, and it turned out that maybe I kinda wanted to just hang out on the beach and party a lot more than I wanted to become a pro beach volleyball player.

• 19:41Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 19:42Speaker 01

  Uh, got a little bit sidetracked. Um, so I had to get a job, uh, went to work for a while. Uh, and I was.

• 19:51Rich Roll?

  What's grandma doing around now?

• 19:53Speaker 01

  Uh, you but around that time or?

• 19:56Rich Roll?

  She like, hey man, you know, wake up or is she just letting you, you know, do your thing?

• 20:01Speaker 01

  You know, I wasn't living at home, so, uh, I don't think she.

• 20:06Rich Roll?

  She didn't know.

• 20:06Speaker 01

  Had a full grasp of what was going on. She was always supportive. She was always, um, there for me when I needed her. And, you know, if I think that if I had just kept drinking, you know, I, I don't think I would have got as in much trouble as I did, but it was actually when I started using, you know, drugs. For me, it started with pot, mushrooms, uh, uh, and then some guys at work introduced me to speed, uh, which I thought was cocaine at the time, you know, uh, everybody was kinda doing it. No, I mean, I wouldn't say that, but they were doing it and they were the older guys and, and, uh, they thought it was cool. So I, I tried it and thought it was cool too.

• 20:46Rich Roll?

  Math, yeah, snorting it or smoking it?

• 20:49Speaker 01

  Snorting it.

• 20:49Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 20:50Speaker 01

  Yeah. Um, you know, which, which is just as bad, right?

• 20:55Rich Roll?

  Mm hmm.

• 20:56Speaker 01

  Uh, and the crazy thing about that drug is you think you're doing great for a while and, uh, you're on top of the world and, you know, six, seven months down the road, everything's falling apart.

• 21:05Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 21:06Speaker 01

  Uh, and I had that happen in my life two or three times where, uh, I felt like the most powerful and productive person on the planet. And then next thing I know, uh, I don't have a place to live. I don't have a job and I'm moving back home.

• 21:18Rich Roll?

  Uh huh.

• 21:19Speaker 01

  Uh, and that's where, where mom, you know, kinda stepped in and said, hey, you know, what's going on? You gotta find some direction for your life. Uh, and during that time, I decided to enlist in the military. Uh, figured I needed a job. I needed some training. I thought it was maybe be a chance to see the world. They offered me a linguist, you know, job where I could learn a foreign language. And that sounded like a pretty good deal. Uh, went to basic training in San Antonio, made it through that. Uh, went to Monterey and was doing great in my classes and then started drinking again.

• 21:54Rich Roll?

  Right. So you were off the meth during that period of time, I would imagine.

• 21:57Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 21:58Rich Roll?

  Yeah. Still, still drinking though, or do you cut everything out for a period of time?

• 22:03Speaker 01

  You know, during basic training, there was, there wasn't any drinking or smoking or anything like that. But, uh, once we got on base there in Monterey, it was almost like a college dorm setting.

• 22:13Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 22:14Speaker 01

  Uh, and everybody was away from home. Everybody was kind of looking to click up socially. And drinking is, is very prevalent in the military.

• 22:22Rich Roll?

  Yeah. So you pick it back up and then what happens next?

• 22:27Speaker 01

  Uh, for me, it was, I would call them small things, you know, things like, uh, having too many beers in my barracks. Uh, that was a, an infraction.

• 22:36Rich Roll?

  Mm hmm.

• 22:36Speaker 01

  Um, drunken disorderly with some Marines. Uh, that was an infraction. Breaking curfew to, uh, uh, spend the night in my girlfriend's barracks, who was in the army at the time. That was an infraction and all these little things kind of added up to an early discharge.

• 22:51Rich Roll?

  But along the way, are those sort of like points in, you know, the, the, the social camaraderie with the dudes that you're hanging out with? Like, right on dude. You know, or?

• 23:05Speaker 01

  I don't think so.

• 23:06Rich Roll?

  Trouble, but it was like, oh man, you, you, you tore it up last night.

• 23:12Speaker 01

  Maybe, but I mean, that, that's, that's all false. I mean, that's, that's not real.

• 23:17Rich Roll?

  Of course, of course.

• 23:18Speaker 01

  Like people could, uh, hey, you, you know, you party harder than anybody else did last night. And then what do you have to show for it?

• 23:25Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 23:25Speaker 01

  You know, an embarrassing story, uh, discharged from the military.

• 23:28Rich Roll?

  Uh huh.

• 23:29Speaker 01

  Hangovers. I mean, what's the best part about sobriety? Never waking up with that damn headache again.

• 23:35Rich Roll?

  One of the many great things. Um, all right. So you get discharged. What year was that?

• 23:40Speaker 01

  That was ninety, nineteen ninety-five.

• 23:43Rich Roll?

  Uh huh.

• 23:44Speaker 01

  Moved back home for a while, started working again, you know, I have lots of stories of of starting over and trying to pick myself up from the bootstraps. Went to work in some restaurants for a while. But then, once I started getting back on my feet and starting to do alright, then the drinking started again. And I wasn't in the military anymore, so I didn't have to worry about drug tests. So, you know, I started using again. Found myself in Hollywood with these big visions of becoming a rock star. You know, I loved to play guitar. And I think, you know, all of these big visions of grandeur were, like, I didn't really know

• 24:28Speaker 01

  what direction I wanted to take in my life, so I set these big, huge goals, so it really didn't matter if I made it or failed. You know, it's like, at least I tried to be a rock star. But I think that, at the same time, they were also aligning myself with what I really wanted to do was to drink and to use.

• 24:44Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 24:45Speaker 01

  And avoid responsibility.

• 24:47Rich Roll?

  Right. Because if you're a rock star, then you can do whatever you want, and everyone cosigns it.

• 24:53Speaker 01

  Right. I mean, the whole sex, drugs, and rock and roll. I mean, it just seemed like the lifestyle. And I was already leading that lifestyle, except, you know, I wasn't a musician yet.

• 25:04Rich Roll?

  Right. Did you have a band? I mean, were you guys playing out or rehearsing at all?

• 25:10Speaker 01

  We had one band. There was four of us, and we had four white guys in a reggae band, and we called ourselves The Naughty Dreads. No one hits, no wonders.

• 25:21Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 25:22Speaker 01

  Lot of dope smoking.

• 25:24Rich Roll?

  And living, like, in Hollywood, like, around Sunset, or where exactly?

• 25:27Speaker 01

  Living right off Hollywood Boulevard.

• 25:29Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 25:30Speaker 01

  Right around the corner from The Man's Chinese.

• 25:32Rich Roll?

  Right in the middle of it, man.

• 25:33Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 25:34Rich Roll?

  So that was, what, 95, 96?

• 25:36Speaker 01

  That was around 99.

• 25:39Rich Roll?

  Oh, 99.

• 25:40Speaker 01

  98, 99, moved to Hollywood.

• 25:42Rich Roll?

  Uh huh. And where are you hanging out? Like, what are the bars you're going to?

• 25:45Speaker 01

  You know, a lot of the ones on the Strip, you know, the whiskey, the Roxy. One of our favorite places was called Insomnia, and that's where you could go take ecstasy. It didn't open up till midnight and didn't close till 9:00 a.m. in the morning. It was speakers that were seven feet tall and... There was a lot of crazy nights.

• 26:06Rich Roll?

  Yeah, living the dream.

• 26:07Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah, right.

• 26:08Rich Roll?

  So where does, uh, you know, where does it start to turn super dark for you?

• 26:14Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, that lifestyle is, is, it wasn't sustainable for me, you know? Uh, I was working at a restaurant, uh, ended up getting fired from that job. Uh, wasn't really quite sure what to do and a friend asked me if I wanted to start selling some weed. And I'm thinking, you know, buy an ounce of weed, sell it, make a couple hundred bucks, you know? Maybe, maybe this is, is my way to, uh, keep living this lifestyle. And it was actually pretty lucrative, uh, for the first few months. And I was actually starting to, to get more customers. I was kind of starting to make more money. Uh, and I really thought like, maybe this was like the career path for me. Maybe I wasn't going to be a volleyball player or a musician or a rock star.

• 26:56Speaker 01

  But for some reason, uh, drug dealer seemed very appealing.

• 27:00Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 27:00Speaker 01

  Uh, at the time. And I remember as I was, I was moving up the, the, the food chain in, in the drug world. Uh, my dealer asked me to store a six pound suitcase full of marijuana for him.

• 27:16Speaker 01

  And I thought, great, now, now I have, uh, unlimited supply. Uh, I can start recruiting my friends to start selling for me. And I, and I thought that this was, was a viable plan. Uh, and that was until, uh, the two friends that I, that I had told about it, decided they were going to steal it from me.

• 27:36Speaker 01

  Jeff stole the suitcase from my apartment, from me, uh, and took off with it. And Morgan, his roommate, stuck around and tried to tell me that he was convincing me that, that he wasn't in on it. And that he would help me find Jeff and get the weed back.

• 27:52Rich Roll?

  Mm-hmm. So how does this unfold? Like you come back to your apartment, you look for it, can't find it. Are your, i- is that guy there or do you call him up? Like, how does it go step by step?

• 28:04Speaker 01

  You know, it was the craziest story. I mean, these guys would come over and hang out and have a couple beers and smoke a couple joints. And it was a weekday morning, it was about 10 a.m. And all of a sudden I get a knock on my door and it's these two guys. And usually they have a, you know, they have a day job, they have a, a moving van job or something like that. And it just seemed odd to me that, uh, they were there, but they had a 12 pack of beer. And, uh, that was the lifestyle that I was living at the time. So I said, screw it and invited them in. And during that time, Morgan and I had stepped out to have a cigarette on the roof. And while we're on the roof of my building, looking over the side, I see Jeff running through the park with the suitcase from my closet.

• 28:45Speaker 01

  And from that moment, I mean, it was like every scene from a bad movie that I've ever seen. Me interrogating Morgan, me calling everyone that Jeff knew to try to find him and get this weed back. You know, it's extremely stressful situation.

• 29:02Rich Roll?

  Did you immediately assume that Morgan was in on it? Or did you think he was innocent and Jeff had just pulled a one-er and took off with it spontaneously? Or that they, did they plan this whole thing and that was the whole reason they were coming over?

• 29:15Speaker 01

  Right from the beginning, I thought Morgan was in on it. But I was also giving him the benefit of the doubt. You know, I didn't absolutely know and he was my only link to Jeff. So I thought, keep him as close as possible, you know, during this time and see, see what happens. I also had to tell Mark, my drug dealer, that I had lost the six pounds of weed that he had trusted me with.

• 29:40Rich Roll?

  And what are the stakes there?

• 29:42Speaker 01

  You know, the crazy part is it probably wasn't more than 10 grand. You know, $10,000. It, I look back now and think how stupid. But in the middle of it, I mean, I think there was more than money involved. There was reputation, there was ego, there was feeling betrayed by people that I trusted.

• 30:01Rich Roll?

  Yeah, trust.

• 30:02Speaker 01

  You know, there, there was a lot going on inside that situation.

• 30:05Rich Roll?

  Right. All right, so, you know, what happens next really changes the trajectory of your life forever. So walk me through it.

• 30:15Speaker 01

  Yeah, Morgan had been staying with me over those four or five days while we looked for Jeff. At the end of four days, my girlfriend Angela, who I'd been living with, was on vacation with her family. She was scheduled to come back. So I told Morgan that he was gonna have to take off. You know, that, that's when things changed. That's when he said he really didn't have anywhere else to go. He told me that he was actually in on it with Jeff, but he didn't realize how much trouble I would be in. Or, you know, kind of like the situation that it was gonna cause me and that he was in on it and that he was sorry. Uh, and I was, I was stunned. You know, it was like what I already knew to be true was actually being confirmed.

• 30:59Speaker 01

  Uh, and I just sat with it like I didn't know what to do. I, I, I had no idea, you know, what to do. I talked to Mark, my drug dealer about it, and he basically made it seem like it was my, my problem to solve.

• 31:13Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 31:15Speaker 01

  Uh, and in that moment, I did what I always did. I drank, I used, I got high. Later on that night, a friend of mine came over, uh, to sell me some more weed so I could sell that. Uh, and he suggested that, uh, we started interrogating Morgan to figure out what he really knew. You know, if he, if he was just copping to this, what else did he know? Uh, and in that interrogation process, it went from asking questions to, uh, getting angrier, to verbally abusing Morgan, to the point where, uh, I was actually physically abusing him. I was hitting him, I was, I was berating him. I mean, all of this like anger and rage and violence and frustration was pouring out of me. And more than I even knew was there.

• 31:59Speaker 01

  And during that night, I went in my kitchen and I grabbed a knife, uh, from my butcher block and I, I stabbed Morgan in the chest.

• 32:06Rich Roll?

  Was there a particular inciting incident that he, like he said something? Or the altercation kind of tipped into a new gear that prompted you to escalate it to that level? Or were you just like high and out of your mind?

• 32:24Speaker 01

  You know, I, I don't, other than the fact that he had actually admitted to, to being in on it. I mean, it was like when I knew for sure that, uh, this person that, that I was still trying to trust, uh, still trying to, to use, you know, to, to find Jeff, uh, had basically told me that, you know, I screwed you from the beginning. Uh, and that was, that was the turning point for me. Uh, and when the floodgates opened with, with, with the questions and the, you know, the first punch was, was the same punch that led to the, then the knife.

• 32:59Rich Roll?

  Hmm. And was there an intention to, like what, you know, were you like, I'm gonna kill this guy? Or I'm just gonna scare him or I'm gonna just injure him? Or was it just a blur?

• 33:14Speaker 01

  It was definitely a blur. You know, I want to take, you know, total responsibility for everything, but if you'd asked me, you know, that morning, was I gonna wake up and kill somebody, there would have been no way.

• 33:25Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 33:26Speaker 01

  And I think initially I was trying to scare him. You know, more came out of me than even I knew was there.

• 33:32Rich Roll?

  Right. So you just go after him? And how many times did you stab him?

• 33:37Speaker 01

  One time in the chest.

• 33:38Rich Roll?

  One time, that was it? And did you know that was a fatal blow? Right away?

• 33:46Speaker 01

  Pretty quickly.

• 33:47Rich Roll?

  Yeah. So what'd you do?

• 33:54Speaker 01

  The next steps were really a blur. You know, because if you think like all the steps that were leading up to it got me to that point. What do you do now that there's a dead body in your apartment?

• 34:08Speaker 01

  My friend and I tried to wrap him in a blanket. Tried to put the body by

• 34:14Speaker 01

  the dumpster that was in front of my apartment building.

• 34:19Speaker 01

  It was, I thought it was the middle of the night. Turned out it to be, it was like 6 a.m. in the morning. The sun was coming up. There was people on the street that saw the whole thing.

• 34:28Rich Roll?

  Oh my god.

• 34:29Speaker 01

  I mean, it was it was horrible.

• 34:33Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 34:36Speaker 01

  You know, there's a lot of shame around the the harm and the impact that I caused to Morgan and to his family. And my community too, right? Like Hollywood, I mean, I'm sure it's known for some pretty crazy shit, but for me to be responsible for that piece of it, that's something I still carry with me.

• 34:57Rich Roll?

  So when you recount the story, you know, you've told the story many, many times.

• 35:05Rich Roll?

  What are the emotions that come up now? I mean, still some shame, obviously.

• 35:11Speaker 01

  You know, it's one of those, this is one of those things that, you know, no matter how many amends you make, you can never take it back. Like, there would be nothing that I would wish more than to be able to give Morgan his life back. To give his daughter her dad back, to give his aunt her nephew back. And that's something I'm never gonna be able to do. I mean, it's... There is guilt, there is shame, there's...

• 35:40Speaker 01

  It's been something that I've had to work through.

• 35:42Rich Roll?

  And you've, if you've attempted to make direct amends, like communicate with his family directly?

• 35:50Speaker 01

  Yeah, so there's actually rules against that, laws against that. You're not supposed to make direct contact with the family. While I was inside San Quentin, I was able to write

• 36:02Speaker 01

  letters of apology and letters of remorse to his family, and then file them with the Office of Victim Services in California. And they stay on record there, so if the family ever wants to receive them, they can, you know, and... And part of that was not seeking forgiveness, it was just being genuinely sorry for the pain and the harm that I caused.

• 36:29Speaker 01

  You know, sometimes I feel like when people say, "Oh, you know, wouldn't it be nice to be forgiven?" It's like you're asking for something else from the family members, right? Like, "I've already taken so much away, now can you forgive me too?" You know, and I really wanted it to be more of something that I could offer them. And so in that letter, I said, like, "If you ever have any questions, or if there's any further explanation that I can give, you know, I would always make myself available to them."

• 36:57Rich Roll?

  But they haven't reached out to you?

• 36:59Speaker 01

  No.

• 37:00Rich Roll?

  And are you notified if they actually pick those letters up?

• 37:04Speaker 01

  I'm not sure if I would be notified. I doubt it, just the way things work in California.

• 37:12Speaker 01

  You know, with the life sentence, I had to go to a parole board before being granted suitable for release. At the first one, I was denied three years, and I wasn't found suitable till the second one. But at both of those hearings, the district attorney contacts the family and invites them to, they can attend the hearing, and they can also make statements as to, you know, how it impacted them and whether or not I should be released. At neither of my hearings, did Morgan's family show up.

• 37:43Rich Roll?

  Right. And what became of Jeff?

• 37:48Speaker 01

  I found this out later on, and I think it's mostly true. He testified in court, you know, during my legal proceedings, that he got on a Greyhound bus to Las Vegas with the suitcase full of weed. They got almost all the way there and then got pulled over. Police stepped on, you know, I guess they asked everybody to get off the Greyhound bus. The police went on with dogs, grabbed the suitcase, confiscated it, and no charges were pressed.

• 38:24Rich Roll?

  No charges?

• 38:25Speaker 01

  No charges.

• 38:26Rich Roll?

  Why would that be?

• 38:28Speaker 01

  I don't know if they could tie it to him, you know, being where it was at on the bus, or they were just, I'm sure that the suitcase that size full of weed has a certain odor to it, so, and it wasn't legal back then like it is now.

• 38:42Rich Roll?

  So it wasn't, it was a random search? Or was there a BOLO out on this guy because you had been arrested?

• 38:50Speaker 01

  I'm not sure.

• 38:51Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 38:51Speaker 01

  I'm not sure.

• 38:52Rich Roll?

  I mean, all they would have to do is dust it for prints, right? Guy's prints would be all over the thing.

• 38:59Speaker 01

  I don't even know that. I mean that.

• 39:01Rich Roll?

  You're nodding, yeah.

• 39:02Speaker 01

  This story is, you know, if I didn't go through it, I wouldn't have believed it myself.

• 39:10Rich Roll?

  Um, wow. So, uh, how long is it before you're apprehended?

• 39:17Speaker 01

  I was arrested the same day.

• 39:18Rich Roll?

  Immediately, yeah.

• 39:19Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, there was too many people on the street. They were, the police were called. Uh, within an hour, there was, there was helicopters, uh, over my apartment building. Uh, you know, I was arrested and detained immediately. You know, drunk, high, handcuffed in the back of a police car.

• 39:39Rich Roll?

  And what was the interrogation process like? I mean, did you keep your mouth shut? Did you cop to it?

• 39:48Speaker 01

  Uh, kept my mouth shut, you know, uh, it was, it wasn't until 15 months, you know, uh, going through the, uh, arraignment process and talking to an attorney, uh, trying to figure out what the, the, the best next move, uh, would be. Um, it wasn't that I didn't know I was guilty. It's just, uh, I didn't feel like I knew how to, had all the answers in that situation. You know, I was talking to my family. I was talking to an attorney. Uh, and in the end, I decided that the best move for me was to plead guilty. Uh, and to accept a plea bargain for 16 years to life. Which was incredibly tough because at the time Gray Davis was the governor in California and he said,

• 40:33Speaker 01

  if you take somebody's life, you're never getting out of prison. And back then, uh, it didn't matter if you had 15 to life, 25 to life, 100 to life, you weren't going home.

• 40:42Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 40:44Speaker 01

  But, you know, that, that was also a moment when, when I knew I had to, you know, take ownership of this thing. And regardless of the circumstances, I was gonna try to become somebody different.

• 40:56Rich Roll?

  So you had that awareness from the beginning?

• 40:59Speaker 01

  You know, from the moment, uh, that I took Morgan's life, that was my, my turning point. That was the moment where I realized there was no more rationalization. There was no more normalizing where drugs and alcohol had gotten me to in my life. You know, I was, I was able to justify just about anything, but not that.

• 41:28Rich Roll?

  And what is the emotional experience of digesting the possibility that you may never get out of prison?

• 41:42Speaker 01

  You know, I think there's a lot of sadness and there's a lot of fear. I didn't want to go to prison, you know. If I could have found a way out of it, I would have taken it, you know. And that's who I was back then, you know, selfish, self-centered. Didn't want to take accountability, didn't want to, you know, believe that I was that person. And if there was any way out of it, you know, I would have taken it. But the moment that I actually did say like, "I'm gonna accept this, I'm gonna plead guilty," you know, it actually freed me in a lot of ways to move forward.

• 42:21Rich Roll?

  Because you were just aligning yourself with the truth? Like, there's no more hiding from this reality?

• 42:29Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly. I mean, that's what it was for me. You know, I didn't even know how to be real and honest about what had actually happened. And you didn't talk to a whole lot of people about it during that time.

• 42:42Speaker 01

  But just the act of kind of resigning myself to whatever fate lay ahead, you know, I realized that there was a chance that I would never get out of prison. However, I think one of my superpowers is optimism. And I gave myself, you know, a hope, along with the hope that I got through spirituality and God, that there would be a chance for me. If I did everything in my power, at least I would have a chance. And I kind of used that to propel me forward.

• 43:13Rich Roll?

  So ultimately, you end up in San Quentin, but that's not where you were initially?

• 43:19Speaker 01

  No.

• 43:21Speaker 01

  San Quentin, you know, has a notorious reputation, but it's a Level 2 prison now. Level 2 being kind of the middle-of-the-road prisons, and Level 4 being the most violent and lockdowns and a lot of racism and a lot of craziness going on. And when you're a young guy and you have a lot of years to do, that's where you start. And for being, you know, a white kid from the suburbs, going to prison for the first time on a Level 4 yard was a pretty scary experience.

• 43:52Rich Roll?

  So, explain it to me. Like, my only frame of reference is you know what I see in movies and TV. So, what is the reality of being dropped down into that environment where it's about, you know, racial identity and gangs and alliances and survival?

• 44:13Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, I think, I've seen all the prison movies, right, before going in, but I don't think I understood how racially segregated prisons are. So, when I went in, I was expected only to hang out with the white guys. There was actually politics saying, you know, you don't eat with anybody from another race, you don't play games with anybody from another race. I mean, it was almost ganging up, you know, by race instead of neighborhoods, but...

• 44:43Speaker 01

  And that wasn't the way I was raised or grew up. But in that situation, you kind of conform to what everybody else was doing inside there.

• 44:53Rich Roll?

  Right. And, and what is the kind of general threat level? Like, are you just on guard constantly? Or you just learn how to align yourself with the right people to be protected? Like, what is the day-to-day experience of just trying to wrap your head around, like, what to do and what not to do, just to get through it?

• 45:13Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, I think you learn from the guys that you hang around with.

• 45:19Speaker 01

  I tried to learn as quickly as possible, right, to figure it out, talk to as many people as possible and figure out what's going on here. For me, it was difficult, not really knowing who to trust. And I had turned to God very early on, when I was in the county jail even. And so, I continued on that path while I was in prison, which is not very popular in prison, you know? I think the majority of guys say that anybody going to church while they're in prison is hiding behind the Bible. Meaning that they're, you know, they were this badass coming to prison. Now, why are they going to change all of a sudden?

• 45:57Rich Roll?

  Oh, that's interesting. I wouldn't have, I wouldn't have thought that. So, uh, so you are, so you, you make that decision under like some level of threat then?

• 46:09Speaker 01

  You know, I still remember the, the first day on the yard at, at High Desert State Prison.

• 46:16Speaker 01

  And all the, all the white guys come and hang out at their table and they shake hands, they greet each other.

• 46:21Rich Roll?

  And is it like a white supremacist thing too? Like if you watch the movies, it's like if you're with the white guys, then they're skinheads and they have like swastika tattoos and stuff like that.

• 46:31Speaker 01

  Those guys were there, but actually, um, they were kind of like a, a more supremacist group out of the white guys.

• 46:41Rich Roll?

  Right. Like there's another fringe white dude group.

• 46:44Speaker 01

  Yeah, they, they definitely took it to the, to the next level. But, you know, so just because you're hanging out with the white guys, doesn't mean that you're a white supremacist or that you were a skinhead.

• 46:56Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 46:57Speaker 01

  Uh, so everybody's greeting each other and they do the call for church. They say whoever wants to go to church, uh, go and line up by this, this gate and we'll, and we'll let you in. Uh, and so I knew that that was the path that I was on. I knew that, that God had, had gotten to me this far. Uh, I was doing a lot of, uh, my own, uh, study and research inside the Bible. I was trying to understand some of these stories, trying to figure out who Jesus Christ was. You know, I grew up a Christian, but never really knew who, who the God of the Bible was. Uh, so it was really important to me, uh, to stay on that path. And I remember breaking away from the group and walking across the yard to go to the, uh, the door that lets you into the church. And when I looked behind me, I was the only one.

• 47:44Speaker 01

  I was the only guy, you know, making, making this walk across the yard and it was an incredibly like scary feeling, like I was separating myself from, from the fellows, so to speak. And, you know, I, as scary as that was, I think that was the decision that, that made all the difference in the man that I was gonna become.

• 48:04Rich Roll?

  Uh huh. What was it that made you feel like this was the path for you though? Like you, you, you said, oh, you were very clear that like, you know, God had delivered you to this moment. Um, was there an instance in which something happened that made that clear to you?

• 48:26Speaker 01

  You know, other than the fact that the way that, that God came to me while I was in the county jail, I mean, it was at, uh, there was a small group, uh, and there was like a Sunday school teacher who almost taught the Bible to us like we were, we were little children. And I remember telling this, this story about, uh, Zacchaeus, you know, that this, this small man that, uh, wanted to see God and wanted to see, heard Jesus was coming through the town, uh, and he wanted to see it, but the, the, the town was too crowded, uh, and he was kind of a, a smaller person. So what he did was he climbed up in a tree, uh, to see God. And I just remember that story like touching me in a way like,

• 49:06Speaker 01

  I needed to be explained about God and the Bible as if I was a child. You know, I, I wasn't in a place of spiritual maturity. Um, and that's the first time. I mean, that was the turning moment for me.

• 49:21Rich Roll?

  And did that coincide with you getting sober?

• 49:25Speaker 01

  I mean, I think they happened at the same time, but I don't think one led to the other.

• 49:29Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 49:30Speaker 01

  Uh, for me, honestly, like, like waking up and realizing that I was a person that, that took somebody else's life.

• 49:37Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 49:37Speaker 01

  Was the thing that said, I will never use.

• 49:40Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 49:40Speaker 01

  Again.

• 49:41Rich Roll?

  Yeah. And did you see, were you going to like AA meetings in, in prison and jail?

• 49:47Speaker 01

  Yeah, at San Quentin, you know, they had AA meetings. We had a Saturday night home group. They, they gave out chips that they made in the furniture factory. They, they let guys share, you know, about their sobriety. Uh, some are real, some are bullshit, but.

• 50:00Rich Roll?

  How many people show up at the AA meetings in San Quentin?

• 50:03Speaker 01

  Uh, there was actually quite a few, you know, they had, they had five or six nights of AA during the week.

• 50:08Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 50:09Speaker 01

  And as lifers and as guys that have to go to the parole board, and especially if your crime had something to do with drugs or alcohol, uh, you need to show the parole board written documentation of, uh, your attending.

• 50:21Rich Roll?

  Right. So lots of guys there are just getting, getting the sign offs.

• 50:25Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 50:26Rich Roll?

  Right. Did outside groups bring meetings into you? Cause I, you know, I've done that kind of thing at LA County Jail.

• 50:33Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 50:34Rich Roll?

  Where you go in and, and do meetings with the guys.

• 50:37Speaker 01

  Yeah, there was, um, several, several outside groups. I mean, almost all of them. I don't think any of them were inmate led.

• 50:43Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 50:44Speaker 01

  Uh, they had, you know, and that was the nice thing about San Quentin too, is they did allow and encourage a lot of community support to actually come inside the prison and offer these programs.

• 50:55Rich Roll?

  So it seems like it was almost a relief then to get to San Quentin, which seems ironic and not what you would expect.

• 51:03Speaker 01

  Yeah, it took, uh, seven years, you know, I was incarcerated seven years, uh, and I think to, to go from level four to level two in seven years was, was a blessing in itself. I think that was well below the average, you know, a lot of guys don't make it for 10 to, 10 to 15 years. Just because there's a lot of trouble that you can get in along the way and any kind of write-up, uh, makes your points stay jacked up.

• 51:28Rich Roll?

  So you gotta keep a low profile and just, I mean, the idea is to just be as visible as possible?

• 51:35Speaker 01

  I think that's a, a pretty good strategy as much as possible. Uh, and, and you are in a chaotic prison environment where anything could go down at any time.

• 51:44Rich Roll?

  Right, right. So you were able to get through that part though, without any scrapes?

• 51:50Speaker 01

  Yeah, you know, and I think, uh, a lot of that was, was, um,

• 51:57Speaker 01

  Like God had a plan for me and I think he kept me out of certain situations and he also provided a lot of opportunity for me along the way. And if I knew that was gonna happen on day one, uh, you know, the fact is I didn't, I didn't. It took fifteen, sixteen years inside prison and looking back and going, you know, wow, a lot of things added up and aligned themselves along the way.

• 52:23Rich Roll?

  When you reflect back on it now, um, setting aside the, uh, you know, the fact that a life was sacrificed, uh, in the context of this, can you find some gratitude for the experience because of the principles by which you live your life today?

• 52:45Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, definitely. It's very easy for me to say that San Quentin saved my life.

• 52:52Rich Roll?

  And if somebody were to ask you how it saved your life, how do you answer that?

• 52:57Speaker 01

  It, you know, I think, uh, when little kids get in trouble, right, the parents put them in timeout. This was my timeout.

• 53:05Rich Roll?

  You had an extended timeout.

• 53:07Speaker 01

  I mean, it was huge, but it caused me to wake up, you know, it gave me a lot of time to self-reflect, uh, which I don't think people outside of prison have, or, you know, they're, they're busy with their jobs and their lives. And, and here I was, you know, I was sat down for a while, uh, you know, it wasn't the best of environment or most conducive environment, but it also caused me to take my life very seriously. Uh, and I never wanted to let that time be wasted. You know, I applied myself to every group and program and educational opportunity that was available. You know, I was able to go back to school, uh, and earn that college degree that I was

• 53:46Rich Roll?

  You got your degree.

• 53:47Speaker 01

  I was never able to do, you know, in the, in the free world. Uh, you know, there was a veterans group, uh, inside San Quentin where I was probably a much better, uh, airman than I ever was, you know, while I was at the Defense Language Institute. There was a run club, there's a thousand mile club. Where they would meet. You know, every week and at the beginning of the year, we'd, we would run a benchmark mile to see how fast you could run a mile. And then over the course of the year, we would train and increase the distance and every year in November, they actually run a marathon. Uh, the San Quentin Marathon, which is. You know, we don't, we don't have a very scenic course. It's, it's a hundred and five laps around the same.

• 54:32Speaker 01

  Quarter mile loop of a prison yard. And I think just the, the training and the camaraderie and the discipline that goes into that. I mean, you're, you're an endurance athlete, so I'm. I'm sure you can relate. You know, that, that was my training ground. For things so much more than just the physical. I mean, the, the mental and the, and the emotional and the spiritual, you know, that's where everything tied in. For me.

• 54:58Rich Roll?

  You had this facility though, this ability to grab on to all of the lifelines that were available to you. You know, within the confines of this situation. Most people. Don't, right? I would imagine. What do you think it is? Or was within you? That gave you that like? Engine or that desire to reinvent yourself? With the prospect that you may never get out.

• 55:32Rich Roll?

  Whereas so many people. Just can't get to that place.

• 55:38Speaker 01

  Yeah, I, I mean, I understand what you're saying and I, I agree with you.

• 55:44Speaker 01

  For me, it was, it was faith and it was optimism and, and not giving up. I just.

• 55:52Speaker 01

  That piece was, has never been in me. Like I said, I think optimism is, is. Had been my greatest and my worst quality at the, at the same time, because you know, here is this person with, with un. Unlimited potential, you know, he could do anything he wants. But yeah, he wants to screw it off for, for becoming a drug dealer. But at the same time, when I was at my lowest, you know, and, and things were at the darkest. It's like I refuse to, to give up on myself. And not just for me.

• 56:19Rich Roll?

  Yeah, I was gonna say, how much of that was fueled by this sense of? Attempting to atone?

• 56:26Speaker 01

  Quite a bit. You know, you know.

• 56:32Speaker 01

  You know, and like atone to Morgan, atone to his family, atone to my family. Right? The people that have loved and believed in me, you know, my whole life and wanted better things for me. You know, it's really hard for me to even understand the shame and the embarrassment that I caused them. And yet, my mom and my sister were there, you know, every month and spent a lot of holidays inside prison, inside San Quentin, sharing, vending machine food, but sharing family time together, supporting me through an incredibly difficult journey. And, you know, hard on me and hard on them, too.

• 57:10Rich Roll?

  Yeah, I mean, you could have just gone down a spiral and become further entrenched in the behavior patterns that led you to that place. But you have this ability to really take advantage of the limited resources available to you. I mean, you didn't just graduate from, you didn't just get your degree. I mean, you were the valedictorian, right? Walk me through the speech that you gave that left everybody in tears.

• 57:38Speaker 01

  That was pretty incredible, because when I got to San Quentin, you know, I had gone to a grad, I went to the graduation that was going on there, and a friend of mine was actually giving the valedictorian speech. And, you know, I'm like, how'd you do that? And he's like, well, I had the, I had the highest grade point average. And I'm like, oh shit, I think I can do that. And I want to make that speech because I've served seven years in prison at institutions where there wasn't a whole lot going on for guys. There wasn't school, there wasn't AA, there wasn't self-help. And I was pretty pissed off, you know, I was angry. There wasn't a lot to do except work out and read books and, you know, watch your time pass by. And I said, okay, I can, I can get this valedictorian, and I

• 58:22Speaker 01

  can make this speech, and I can go up there and I can rage against the machine and tell them everything that I thought was, was wrong. And it took me two and a half years of going to every class, of showing up early, of staying late, of doing all the homework. I remember there was one time I even got a B plus on a paper, and I wrote an additional paper explaining why I thought it was an A paper, and they actually changed the grade. But what I'm saying is I was dedicated and I was committed and I really believed in in this speech that I wanted to write.

• 58:56Rich Roll?

  That's interesting. So the speech was really the driving thing behind all of it?

• 59:01Speaker 01

  I think so. I felt like I had a lot to say and for those first seven years I didn't have much of a voice.

• 59:06Rich Roll?

  Right. That's like the ability to have a little bit of power in a powerless situation.

• 59:12Speaker 01

  Yeah. And I got to that day where it came down to me and one other guy and I actually beat him out with the GPA. And so they told me and I went down to write the speech and as the words started, you know, coming out my pen, it was different, right? Somewhere along the way. Somewhere along the way, my message changed, right? It went from anger and despair and feeling like I didn't have a voice to one of gratitude because there was so many people

• 59:56Speaker 01

  and I was able to wake up and see and look around and see like, you know, these people that came in and teach these college classes, they didn't have to do that, right? They chose to do that. They saw something in us, not that the guys in San Quentin and the guys in the college program and the guys in the last mile, I mean, the running club, they saw something in us that I didn't see in myself. And so I wasn't angry anymore. It was like I felt accomplished, you know, and like in those courses, like the more I learned about the world, the more I understood that I had a place in it. I had a responsibility

• 1:00:34Speaker 01

  to it, you know, and it didn't serve where I was going to be angry about it or to complain about it, you know? I really wanted to take ownership of my voice and my place and I felt like I had a lot to offer. At the graduation ceremony, I was allowed to have my mom and my sister attend and hear this speech. It was pretty amazing to allow them to actually come inside the chapel and have to see this graduation ceremony. And I remember when I was going through trial, my sister, or my biological mom, had gone back to school. And the week that her graduation

• 1:01:17Speaker 01

  was scheduled for was the same week as my trial. And without hesitation, she skipped her graduation to come support me during my trial. And so, this was my, this was my moment to try to say thank you to her, and thank you to my mom, and thank you to just all the people that had been there for me and supported me on this journey. The warden was there, and I remember asking her to stand up and just telling them that story and recounting how it happened. And the entire place gave her a standing ovation. I was crying. She was crying, she was crying more than me, I guarantee you, but I wouldn't be surprised if the warden was crying that day.

• 1:01:58Rich Roll?

  It's interesting. I mean, that's a huge breakthrough, right? To be plotting and planning this speech where you're gonna, you know, say everything that's been on your mind about how you were wronged, or what needs to be changed. And then to be delivered to that place and take a totally different tack, you know, is spiritual growth. So then, the last mile comes in after that, right? Or do I have that wrong?

• 1:02:29Speaker 01

  No, that's right. Actually, you know, the same friend of mine that had made the valedictorian speech, he just happened to be the same guy that invited me to the first last mile demo day, my friend Kenyatta. And he said, hey, you should come check this out. And I hadn't heard about The Last Mile before. It was a new program. I think there was five guys involved. And so I went to their demo day. And these five men shared their business ideas. You know, half the guys filled from inmates, you know, inside prison. And the other half were venture capitalists and media and tech people from the surrounding community. And they were talking about these mobile apps that they were developing and the business,

• 1:03:13Speaker 01

  you know, ideas that and the value proposition and who it was going to impact and who it was going to help. And and they did it in such a slick, professional way. I mean, I felt like I was watching Shark Tank. And it was just amazing. I mean, I was so impressed. They were talking about tech that we had no access to. For 17 years, I didn't have access to a smartphone or email or the Internet. And I knew that this was a program that I wanted to be a part of.

• 1:03:38Rich Roll?

  So essentially, The Last Mile was started by these entrepreneurs who wanted to bring coding education to inmates as a way of giving them some skills, some training, so that when they get out, they have something marketable to share. And part of that is this demo day where the inmates who have been studying coding create these businesses and then they have the opportunity to pitch them to the outside world, these VCs, these investors and other startup companies, I guess, right?

• 1:04:11Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 1:04:11Rich Roll?

  Is that that's accurate?

• 1:04:13Speaker 01

  Yeah, fairly accurate. I mean, it started out as an entrepreneurship program. They didn't know if it was going to work there. You know, it was a brand new idea. And then Chris Redlitz and Beverly Perini, the people that founded the program, came up with the idea to introduce computer coding, which at the time, I would have said was a crazy idea, you know? It just it just never happened before. You know, inmates didn't have access to computers.

• 1:04:40Rich Roll?

  Yeah, how are you supposed to learn how to code when they they you're not connected to the Internet, right?

• 1:04:45Speaker 01

  That's a great question. But, um, you know, they set it up and they talked to the people, uh, they talked to administration inside the prison, they talked to, uh, officials in Sacramento, uh, and they got the green light. You know, they partnered with the, uh, PIA, uh, Industry Authority, uh, there at San Quentin.

• 1:05:03Rich Roll?

  Uh huh.

• 1:05:04Speaker 01

  And they created a computer lab, you know, 18, uh, computers, uh, they had applications and interviews. I was accepted as one of the first 18 guys to go in there. You know, it was a pilot project. They didn't know if it was gonna work. They didn't know if we were gonna be able to learn it, that, you know, you're gonna teach them computer coding, how you know, you're not, they're not gonna go back there and kill each other, you know, uh, learning something so challenging. But they gave it a shot. Uh, and we gave it a shot. And we didn't have access to the internet, but what, I mean, what the hell, we barely even knew what the internet was.

• 1:05:36Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 1:05:37Speaker 01

  Uh, except for what we saw on TV or, or in magazines, something like that.

• 1:05:40Rich Roll?

  So did you grow up with any kind of inclination around tech or was this a brand-new, Bizarro new world?

• 1:05:49Speaker 01

  You know, I was a video game nut, uh, when I was a kid, you know, long before I was addicted to, uh, drinking or, or using, I was addicted to video games, uh, used to play them all the time. You know, I never thought that maybe I could turn that into, you know, actually coding or writing the, uh, the software that, that makes these games. Um, so I think I had that much experience. Uh, I remember messing around on American Online, you know, before getting locked up. That was about the hottest thing going. They had cell phones back then, but they, they weren't very smart. So there was no Facebook, there was...

• 1:06:22Rich Roll?

  Yeah, and it's weird, like, all this technical innovation is happening so quickly without you being able to access or be informed about it. It must've been wild when you got released, like, it was a whole new world all of a sudden out there.

• 1:06:37Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's so crazy good.

• 1:06:39Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 1:06:42Speaker 01

  But yeah, so you know, they started teaching us HTML and CSS and JavaScript, how to write, build basic pages and write some applications and some functions and data structures, algorithms, you know. We didn't have access to the internet, so we didn't have the same resources that guys and gals on the outside would have, but there was a lot of like grit and determination and also this exposure to computers that I think really inspired a lot of guys to try to learn this stuff. I know I did, I fell in love with it because I felt like it combined the math and the language perfectly for me. You know, I would go back to my cell at night with a computer coding book and get

• 1:07:27Speaker 01

  my little notebook and a number two pencil and practice writing toy problems, you know, how to figure stuff out with code. And it wasn't until I was back in the class the next day that I could actually see if it worked.

• 1:07:39Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 1:07:39Speaker 01

  But when it did, I mean, it just, I feel like it really strengthened my own problem solving abilities, which applies to code, but also applies to life.

• 1:07:49Rich Roll?

  And how many guys were part of this program?

• 1:07:52Speaker 01

  So there was 18 initially selected to take part in the program. It was just supposed to be a six-month, you know, web development course. At the end of six months, 11 guys passed with a high enough proficiency to where they started a track two, you know, so continued learning. And so there was a track one and track two for additional learning. You know, we started learning Node and WordPress and React, some backend coding languages too, like Python and Ruby. So it was pretty cool. I mean, the stuff that we were able to learn. One of our projects for the track two was actually to build the apps that we had been pitching in the entrepreneurship program.

• 1:08:37Speaker 01

  So Fitness Monkey was selected as one of the programs. So we developed a personal health and recovery tracker. Uh, which is the model for, for the app that I'm developing today. But what it does is it tracks people's clean time and it also allows them to log workout data and then combine these two metrics, uh, to give them charts and visualizations about how to stay clean and sober.

• 1:08:58Rich Roll?

  And so how long did you work on Fitness Monkey before your demo day where you got to get up and pitch it?

• 1:09:05Speaker 01

  Two months.

• 1:09:06Rich Roll?

  Oh, that's it?

• 1:09:07Speaker 01

  Two months and it was a group project. So we enlisted, uh, other, other people on the team and we kind of split it apart. Uh, we didn't have a lot of time and then of course you have to take a little time to, to rehearse, uh,

• 1:09:17Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 1:09:17Speaker 01

  Presenting this in a professional way, right?

• 1:09:20Rich Roll?

  Yeah. And so who shows up for demo day?

• 1:09:24Speaker 01

  Well, quite a few people. Uh, there was people from Facebook there.

• 1:09:28Rich Roll?

  Really?

• 1:09:29Speaker 01

  Uh, there was people from Airbnb.

• 1:09:31Rich Roll?

  Wow.

• 1:09:32Speaker 01

  Uh, MC Hammer was there.

• 1:09:34Rich Roll?

  Yeah, he's sort of one of the mentors, right?

• 1:09:36Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:09:36Rich Roll?

  Of the program.

• 1:09:37Speaker 01

  He's on the, uh, board of directors and also just a big supporter of The Last Smile and, and also tech. Uh, it's been amazing to have him. Um, you know, and I was there for, I was in the coding program for two and a half years, uh, before, uh, leaving San Quentin. So I went through track one and track two. I went on to a track three program, uh, that was kind of setting up the, uh, joint venture program. So in the track three, we were able to build a, a social media dashboard for Airbnb that went to Twitter and Facebook and pulled back their, their likes and their follower accounts and recent posts. Uh, that was incredibly difficult because we didn't have access to the internet and we had to learn how to use those APIs and get that data.

• 1:10:21Speaker 01

  We had to build our own fake Facebook and fake Twitter to practice passing the data back and forth to see if it worked.

• 1:10:28Rich Roll?

  Yeah, just so you could like test it out without being connected online. It's crazy.

• 1:10:35Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:10:36Rich Roll?

  Well, uh, I do know that when you did pitch it on this demo day, that it went well because there was an article on TechCrunch.

• 1:10:45Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:10:45Rich Roll?

  Where whoever was there said like, when you got up and did your thing, the guy was like, this, his pitch was like, is better than a lot of the Y Combinator companies that I've, you know, heard give their pitches. Like you had it dialed, right?

• 1:11:03Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:11:03Rich Roll?

  Which is amazing.

• 1:11:04Speaker 01

  That's a big compliment.

• 1:11:05Rich Roll?

  Yeah. Yeah, I mean, that's TechCrunch. I mean, that's no small thing. Um, and what's interesting Is that this program is the anomaly because when you canvass what's going on in our prison industrial complex, certainly not enough rehabilitation programs going on, right? And this is a maverick situation. You're a shining example of what this rehabilitative process can produce, but we need so much more of this, right? Like, when you kind of reflect on your experience, how do you think about prison reform?

• 1:11:44Rich Roll?

  What worked for you and what can be changed to produce more examples like yourself?

• 1:11:51Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's a great question. And I think you're exactly right, or I honestly believe that more needs to be made available to people while they're inside. Because, yes, crimes have been committed and people need to... I believe that prisons, for people that commit crimes, need to serve time, right? Like, I believe that. I believe that there should be consequences to our actions. But then, how you treat those... I mean, I believe that's the punishment, right? It's not like, oh, go to prison and then treat them horribly while they're inside. I mean, if it really is about rehabilitation, then you need to give these men and women

• 1:12:32Speaker 01

  skills and tools and self-help that's going to help them become better people, become assets to their community. And I think that more can be done from both sides. Like, from the private sector, people allowed to come in like the last mile, but also I think the state has a certain responsibility to be involved and engaged in that rehabilitation. For a long time, it was lock them up and throw away the key, so it didn't really matter. Now, more than ever, people are being released from prison who have served their time, who have rehabilitated themselves, who have gone to the parole board and been found suitable for release. And a lot of that was done under Jerry Brown, and then also, I believe Gavin Newsom's going to have a big part in that as well.

• 1:13:25Rich Roll?

  You know, I'm certainly no expert in this field, but I do know that statistically, the number of inmates incarcerated where the offense has some relationship to drugs and alcohol is super high. It's probably in the 80% range or something like that. And recidivism is super high. You probably know the statistics of how many people end up back in prison or reoffending. Certainly, it needs to be punitive, but it needs to be a balance of punitive and rehabilitative. And I think the pendulum is too far on the side of punitive and not enough in terms of rehabilitative.

• 1:14:10Rich Roll?

  And from a pure economic perspective, it's not a good way to operate the system. We don't want people going back in. And to the extent that we, it's like, what kind of society do you want to live in? I would like to live in a society where we're punishing people for breaking the law, but we're also providing them with the tools necessary to rehabilitate them such that they can be productive members of society whenever possible. Right? And this program should be considered like a pilot program for other types of programs that can bring these services into the inmates

• 1:14:54Rich Roll?

  and provide them with a sense of purpose as well.

• 1:14:58Speaker 01

  Yeah, no, I totally agree. It's been amazing to watch The Last Mile go from an entrepreneurship class to a coding program to having success stories inside San Quentin. But it's also growing. It's expanding. The Last Mile is in eight prisons in California now, including women's prisons. They're expanding outside of California to Indiana, to Kansas, Oklahoma in January. And one of the most amazing things, and it happened actually after I was released, was they started a Last Mile coding program in a juvenile facility down in Ventura. And they allowed the graduates of the program at San Quentin to get on a Skype call

• 1:15:43Speaker 01

  and mentor the juvenile guys going through the uh the program. And I thought, just what what an amazing experience, you know, because I think that the younger people that are in that situation are so much more apt to learn from people that have gone through and experienced it and have that kind of like street cred. So it's amazing to to watch uh The Last Mile grow and how it's evolved. When I did actually get released on uh May the 4th, 2017, I went to work uh for an internship with The Last Mile. Uh they asked me and two other uh uh members of The Last Mile to go down to Y Combinator and pitch a learning management system.

• 1:16:25Rich Roll?

  Uh huh.

• 1:16:26Speaker 01

  Uh so I was able to take all of the skills that I learned, you know, pitching Fitness Monkey to go and try and pitch. And basically what we were doing was trying to take the coding program that's at San Quentin and putting it into a piece of software uh that's now being distributed to all these other uh locations.

• 1:16:41Rich Roll?

  Oh, wow. That's cool. Yeah, that's amazing.

• 1:16:44Speaker 01

  So uh we didn't happen to get picked up by Y Combinator that time.

• 1:16:48Rich Roll?

  Uh huh.

• 1:16:49Speaker 01

  But then I also learned that they didn't pick up any nonprofits, so uh I felt like we did all right.

• 1:16:55Rich Roll?

  That's cool. Uh do you now go have you gone back to San Quentin in some kind of mentorship capacity to check in with the program there?

• 1:17:05Speaker 01

  Yes. Uh The Last Mile actually, uh you know, uh it started out as the one classroom and it was inside an old um print factory warehouse. Uh so there was a lot of empty space. The Last Mile has now turned that empty space into five different classrooms. Uh they're gonna offer a design program, they're gonna offer CAD CAM, they're uh expanding into IT, there's a new partnership with Google. Uh the guys in the program, in the joint venture program, have developed their own offline search engine called Jolt, which basically uh almost like if you're

• 1:17:41Rich Roll?

  Mimics being online?

• 1:17:42Speaker 01

  Yeah, like being on Google, but now it taps into all like the videos and the PDF files and the resources that are available.

• 1:17:48Rich Roll?

  Uh huh.

• 1:17:49Speaker 01

  Uh there it was just getting too unwieldy, you know, everything was every place on the on the server. And so they created their own search engine, which is amazing.

• 1:17:56Rich Roll?

  Wow.

• 1:17:56Speaker 01

  Uh you know, there's a lot of talent back there and a lot of You know, just a lot of guys that I really believe are doing the work to earn their freedom and to earn their humanity, right? And that's the part that I really want to shine a light on that I don't think a lot of people see.

• 1:18:13Rich Roll?

  So, explain that a little bit more fully.

• 1:18:16Speaker 01

  You know, I think, you know, a part of that, me saying like, I didn't feel like I had a voice for a long time. I feel like people in prison are portrayed a certain way in media and on TV and in film. And if that's all people ever watched, you know, what would they think about somebody like, oh yeah, I got an ex felon living next door to me, you know? I really wanted to see like the positive things that are going on, the college programs, the veterans group, the run clubs, you know, the last mile, you know, guys learning to code. I saw, you know, the prison yard change after the last mile arrived, meaning, you know, there used to be guys out on the yard doing pushups and pullups and playing handball or whatever, two guys walking across the yard with a computer coding book in their hand,

• 1:19:01Speaker 01

  going to the gym to sit down and, you know, practice studying together. I mean, it was amazing.

• 1:19:07Rich Roll?

  Yeah, that's a, that's a long way from pressing license plates.

• 1:19:11Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:19:12Rich Roll?

  Yeah, it's wild. So where does fitness come in?

• 1:19:15Speaker 01

  I mean, it's like an everyday thing, for me, you know, not everybody.

• 1:19:18Rich Roll?

  Was it always that way, though?

• 1:19:20Speaker 01

  I think very early on, it's encouraged, right? Because...

• 1:19:25Rich Roll?

  It's kind of the only thing to do, right?

• 1:19:27Speaker 01

  You know, and especially on the level four yards. If a riot kicks off, I think you're going to be wanting good shape as opposed to bad shape. So it was almost mandatory that the white guys be out there working out, you know? And that was out of survival, not, you know, out of this love for working out. But then it was also a great way to pass the time. And for me, I had a lot of, a lot of extra energy that I wasn't putting into drinking or using anymore. It became my sanctuary, it became my meditation, you know, either running, like you said.

• 1:19:59Rich Roll?

  You started doing yoga, right?

• 1:20:01Speaker 01

  Did yoga.

• 1:20:02Rich Roll?

  So there's like proper, there were like yoga classes?

• 1:20:05Speaker 01

  Every Tuesday night.

• 1:20:06Rich Roll?

  Really?

• 1:20:07Speaker 01

  Yep, in the Buddhist chapel, there was about thirty guys.

• 1:20:11Rich Roll?

  Really?

• 1:20:11Speaker 01

  And an instructor named James Fox that would come in from the outside. It was part of the Inside Prison Project. And yeah, I mean, you know, you're you're in a crazy environment, but but what a better place to like just explore the the body and the breath and the stretching and the and the breathing. I mean, for me, it would really made a lot of difference in just how to cope with a lot of difficulty.

• 1:20:35Rich Roll?

  Yeah. And then running.

• 1:20:37Speaker 01

  Yeah. I mean, running, that was something I fell in love with, and I wasn't a runner, you know, my whole life. Uh, I don't think I ran my first five miles until I got to San Quentin. You know, I was in the Air Force, but that was only maybe a couple of miles at a time.

• 1:20:54Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 1:20:55Speaker 01

  But I remember running that first, you know, twenty laps or whatever it was, uh, and the feeling that I had, you know, afterwards. And also, there's this, like in prison, you're never alone. And when I was running on the track, that that was my time, just to be with myself and be with my body, be with my breath, be with the things that were, you know, running through my mind.

• 1:21:16Rich Roll?

  So did it start with you just saying, I'm gonna run around the the yard? Or was there a group saying, come on, we go, we run at this time, join us?

• 1:21:24Speaker 01

  At that, no, actually, at the time, I was trying to learn how to play tennis. Believe it or not, San Quentin actually had a tennis court and a tennis team.

• 1:21:31Rich Roll?

  You're painting a very different picture of this place than I had in my mind. Yoga classes and tennis?

• 1:21:38Speaker 01

  Sorry to spoil it for everyone.

• 1:21:40Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 1:21:41Speaker 01

  But, uh, it was pretty amazing, and I really wanted to learn how to play this game, tennis, you know, I didn't grow up playing. Uh, and I remember that I wanted to be fast enough to get to every tennis ball that was hit my way. So that's why I started running. And I just found a love for running that went beyond, you know, just being quick or fast.

• 1:22:00Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 1:22:01Speaker 01

  I remember on my birthday, my thirty eighth birthday, I decided I was gonna run thirty eight laps around this track. It was nine and a half miles. A few months later, there was a half marathon. And then that November, you know, I ran a a hundred and five laps, twenty six point two miles around the the San Quentin prison yard.

• 1:22:19Rich Roll?

  All in the same direction? Or did you switch direction?

• 1:22:21Speaker 01

  No, it's all the same direction. Uh, under four hours.

• 1:22:25Rich Roll?

  That's pretty good.

• 1:22:27Speaker 01

  Not bad.

• 1:22:29Speaker 01

  One of the hazards is if there's an alarm, uh, everybody has to sit down. So, so right in the middle of your marathon, if there's an alarm, uh, you gotta sit down.

• 1:22:39Rich Roll?

  You get to pause your time.

• 1:22:41Speaker 01

  Yeah, they do. They do pause the time, but not your legs or your, you know, everything that's stretched out or sore. And, you know, you can't train like an endurance athlete while you're in prison. You don't have access to the same, uh, healthcare. You don't have access to the same foods. You know, that was kind of tough inside. I personally, uh, was diabetic. Uh, found out when I was 31 years old.

• 1:23:03Rich Roll?

  Wow. Type one or type two?

• 1:23:04Speaker 01

  Type one. Yeah. And it didn't hit me until late in life. Uh, so I had to learn to manage that, you know, um, insulin and food intake and, uh, storing some extra jelly packs from the peanut butter and jelly, uh, on the side, just in case my blood sugar dipped low while I was running.

• 1:23:22Rich Roll?

  And what is your relationship with running vis a vis recovery? Like, explain to me, like, the healing powers of running in weathering that, that experience of being inside?

• 1:23:38Rich Roll?

  And staying sober?

• 1:23:40Speaker 01

  Yeah. For me, for me, it gives me freedom. It gives me release. It gives me, uh, connection. You know, like I said, it, it's my meditation, you know, in a lot of ways. It gives me time to think. I have friends who I run with, uh, on the outside and that, that allows me, uh, camaraderie and friendship. You know, I recently had a, a friend of mine named Eddie. Uh, he did 14 years and he was released. And he had actually won the San Quentin Marathon. So he's, he's pretty fast.

• 1:24:11Rich Roll?

  Oh, wow.

• 1:24:11Speaker 01

  But it's all on a flat track. So I took him, uh, to my hometown 10K in Lafayette. Uh, thinking, you know, he might be a little bit faster than me, but I think I can get him on the hills. I'll be damned if he didn't get ninth overall in that.

• 1:24:26Rich Roll?

  That's pretty good.

• 1:24:27Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:24:29Rich Roll?

  I would suspect when you're inside, it also provides you with a sense of agency. You know, like it's something that you can control, right? Or you can try to, try to master, you know, in the same way that, you know, the last mile is providing you this, you know, ability to develop a skill. Like there's something about running like that you can own that's yours.

• 1:24:54Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, I think that's true too, you know, and especially, I mean, it's not always about the race or, or the event, right? It's, it's about all the training that goes into getting there. And who I was able to become during that process, right? There's a lot of discipline involved. There's a lot of preparation, learning to wake up and show up.

• 1:25:15Rich Roll?

  And what is the relationship with, between fitness and sobriety for you?

• 1:25:22Speaker 01

  For, for me, I think it's, it's, it's so strong. It's like that really helps me manage my life. Like even when things are at the roughest, I can go for a run and feel better. You know, I think that AA is a wonderful program. I go to AA and, and I believe in a lot of their spiritual principles. But I don't believe that that's the, the one size fits all for sobriety. I think there's a lot of different ways. And I think for me, fitness and running are really what helps keep me sober.

• 1:26:00Rich Roll?

  That's interesting.

• 1:26:02Rich Roll?

  Yeah, I mean, AA got me sober, it keeps me sober. I'm, you know, very active member of that community.

• 1:26:10Rich Roll?

  And fitness for me is a huge tool that I use to maintain my sobriety. I think the danger for me, and I'm interested in your response to this, is when I start to think that like fitness is my higher power, or that fitness is the solution to, you know, my addiction problem, that's a danger zone for me, right? Like it's a tool and it helps me, but it's not the full game for me.

• 1:26:37Speaker 01

  Yeah, and I would agree. I don't, I don't think it's the full thing.

• 1:26:41Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 1:26:42Speaker 01

  Uh, I think there's a lot of different pieces to it and it comes in a lot of different forms. You know, whether it's higher power, or whether it's AA, or whether it's the big book. Uh, whether it's running marathons, you know, I, I wa- I was very interested to find out how many people actually, you know, recovering addicts do, you know, train for, for endurance events.

• 1:27:02Rich Roll?

  Crazy numbers.

• 1:27:03Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:27:04Rich Roll?

  Especially in the, in the ultra community. So many people are in recovery, you know, lots of tattoos, lots of piercings and a lot of recovery time. Somebody should do a sociological study on what exactly that's about. Cause I think it's fascinating.

• 1:27:21Speaker 01

  Yeah. So I think there's definitely is a switch, you know, in the brain somewhere that, you know, you're trading one for the other, you know? You could say, oh, I'm becoming addicted to working out, you know, but did it ever cause the negative side effects that, you know?

• 1:27:35Rich Roll?

  Right. I mean, I think that it's too simplistic to say that, but it's also not something that should be dismissed. Like a lot of people in recovery are dismissive of that. No, I didn't, I'm not trading one addiction for another. But I think if you're being really honest with yourself, you, there is an aspect of that.

• 1:27:53Rich Roll?

  A friend of mine says that the drink or the drug was always the easy choice and like running's hard. You know, so they don't exactly correspond, uh, directly in that way. But I want to believe, and I like to believe that on some level addicts and alcoholics are seekers. They're spiritual seekers. They're looking for answers to what ails them. They're just doing it in a very unhealthy way. And on some level in sobriety and recovery, that search can continue through endurance sports. Because it is a template for self-exploration in a healthier way.

• 1:28:33Rich Roll?

  It can be misused, just like drugs and alcohol, not perhaps, you know, in, in as, as dark a way. But you can have an unhealthy relationship with running or sports or fitness, of course. Um, but I think that they are, uh, you know, uh, tools, uh, for, for that spiritual expansion if used correctly. And so it doesn't surprise me that so many people in recovery find their way, you know, towards these ultra events or marathons or what have you. You agree.

• 1:29:05Speaker 01

  I think I'm on board.

• 1:29:07Rich Roll?

  Yeah, okay, cool.

• 1:29:08Speaker 01

  I feel like we're saying the same thing.

• 1:29:09Rich Roll?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, right on. And you've gone on, you've run marathons, and I know that you, like, when there's like a structured running event in San Quentin, you get buddies together on the outside and do the same thing.

• 1:29:21Speaker 01

  Yeah, solidarity runs. As a matter of fact, this Friday, I imagine if the weather permits, you know, the air quality with the fires and stuff, but they're gonna have the San Quentin Marathon.

• 1:29:34Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 1:29:35Speaker 01

  So if you're free, I'd like to invite you to a solidarity run.

• 1:29:39Rich Roll?

  Oh, wow, cool. What day is that happening?

• 1:29:41Speaker 01

  We could do it Friday.

• 1:29:42Rich Roll?

  Up here?

• 1:29:42Speaker 01

  We could do it Friday.

• 1:29:43Rich Roll?

  Friday? So Friday is, well, I'm gonna be back home, but I could do it from where I live, maybe.

• 1:29:49Speaker 01

  That sounds good.

• 1:29:50Rich Roll?

  Yeah, all right. You're gonna hold me to that?

• 1:29:51Speaker 01

  Do you still run marathons?

• 1:29:53Rich Roll?

  It's been a while. It's been a minute. You know, I'm always relatively marathon-ready, but I might have to stretch.

• 1:30:01Speaker 01

  Maybe if we all took like a half or a quarter or something like that.

• 1:30:04Rich Roll?

  Yeah, all right.

• 1:30:04Speaker 01

  Break it up.

• 1:30:05Rich Roll?

  We'll follow up on that. So walk me through the parole hearing that culminates in your release. How does that come about? It's your second parole hearing?

• 1:30:16Speaker 01

  Yeah, the second parole hearing was in December of 2016. It had been 18 months since my prior hearing, which I was not found suitable, you know, basically for lack of insight and, you know, you really don't understand how you got to that place where you committed that crime.

• 1:30:32Rich Roll?

  And looking back, do you think that was a fair assessment at that time?

• 1:30:37Speaker 01

  It's hard to say. You know, I don't want to be too critical because I'm not in the role that they were in. I felt like I had done everything in my power to be found suitable that day, and I think there's a lot of other factors that go into whether guys do or don't get found suitable. I rationalize it now, saying it just wasn't my time yet. And really, what it allowed me to do was have another 18 months to work on myself, to learn more in the computer coding program, to gain more insight into my causative factors. And so I felt really prepared the second time, you know, when I went in. And there's no guarantees. I mean, I knew it. And what I did do differently was just start to open up more.

• 1:31:21Speaker 01

  I felt like maybe at that first hearing, I was a little bit closed off. You know, they'd ask a question and I'd give them a quick answer. And so I didn't want to make that second mistake the second time around. I remember that first hearing was about two hours and my second hearing was four and a half hours of talking about everything, you know, from childhood to drinking and using to becoming a drug dealer to how I'd use my time in prison and really trying to give them a clear picture of who I was today. It was pretty incredible that, you know, there's two commissioners sitting on the panel. And my attorney had submitted an article from the Christian Science Monitor to one of the commissioners.

• 1:32:06Speaker 01

  So while one commissioner is asking me questions, the other commissioner is reading about me and the Last Mile program. And so when it came time for him to start asking me questions, he was very complimentary, which I didn't trust inside that hearing because you don't know how it's going to go. But then he also said, you know, there's a lot of people that come in here and say that they've changed. And he goes, I can see by everything that you've done today that you have. And that was a pretty amazing feeling. And then you go through the hearing and they ask you to step out and they deliberate and they call you back in and then they read the disposition.

• 1:32:44Rich Roll?

  So they decide right then and there?

• 1:32:46Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 1:32:46Rich Roll?

  Wow.

• 1:32:47Speaker 01

  So you know, right then. And, you know, when they told me that I was suitable for release, there's a lot of release of emotion.

• 1:33:00Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 1:33:01Speaker 01

  You know, I felt like, you know, I never knew if I was going home. And now that, now that they said yes, you know, I knew that I was going to have a second chance at life.

• 1:33:11Speaker 01

  It was an amazing day. And you don't get out that day.

• 1:33:17Rich Roll?

  Yeah, it's not, yeah, yeah. There's, what is the time period?

• 1:33:20Speaker 01

  So there's a five-month review process. The parole board gets to review the hearing for four months and the governor actually gets the last 30 days.

• 1:33:27Rich Roll?

  So there's a possibility that it could be revoked?

• 1:33:31Speaker 01

  Yes, yes. And I've seen it happen several times, but usually around cases that involve women or children or multiple offenses.

• 1:33:43Rich Roll?

  So heavy, man. So you get out five months later, whatever. How do you begin the process of trying to piece your life back together? I mean, it sounds like the last mile. I mean, these guys, you know, God bless them. What a massive support system to have behind you as you try to integrate back into the world.

• 1:34:11Speaker 01

  Yeah. I mean, going into parole board, you had to have a pretty good, solid parole plan together. So I had a transitional house through the California reentry institute program. They run an 18-month life skills program inside San Quentin before you're released. And then, once I got released, I was able to transition there. The parole board required that I live in transitional housing for six months, which I think was a good thing, you know, after being away for so long. It was nice to have a soft landing, so to speak. The last mile offered me that position with them, to work with them over the summer to continue furthering my skills and figure out job prospects from there.

• 1:34:55Speaker 01

  I was able to reconnect with family, you know, mom and sis. And, you know, I felt like, just as much as I had been locked up for 17 years, they had too. So I feel like, you know, on the day that I got out, they were released from prison too.

• 1:35:10Speaker 01

  And I went about trying to rebuild a life and I'm still there, right? I've been out a year and a half and still learning on a daily basis and still grinding to try to learn more and, you know, a lot of that's for me and a lot of that's for my family and a lot of that's for just trying to continue to be a good person and make amends for my past.

• 1:35:31Rich Roll?

  What do you think people misunderstand or don't really appreciate about the process of trying to reintegrate after an experience like that?

• 1:35:42Speaker 01

  That's a good question. I think there's a lot of things, you know, maybe they don't understand. I think people try to be supportive, but just really don't understand like what it was like to be away for that long. I think there's a lot of things like, you know, technology, you know, for one. I was only inside 17 years, but I see guys getting out now that have been locked up 35, 40 years. So to put a smartphone in their hands and say, figure out Gmail or...

• 1:36:07Rich Roll?

  Oh yeah, Star Trek.

• 1:36:08Speaker 01

  Right?

• 1:36:09Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 1:36:10Speaker 01

  Oh, thank you.

• 1:36:11Rich Roll?

  So when you went in, it was basically like a little bit of AOL and then you come out and it's like iPhone 7, basically.

• 1:36:21Speaker 01

  Yeah, there's Facebook, there's Instagram, Google Maps kind of blows my mind.

• 1:36:26Rich Roll?

  And you had no exposure to that whatsoever when you were in? I mean, did you get some limited, like supervised internet time?

• 1:36:33Speaker 01

  No, no. I mean, I kind of knew what the things were because from watching TV and reading magazines, you know, Wired Magazine was one of my favorites. So I was kind of learning about the stuff without actually being able to touch it.

• 1:36:47Rich Roll?

  Yeah, that's weird to get wired and to read all about everything and not have the ability to experience it.

• 1:36:54Speaker 01

  Yeah. And I think, I actually think that all the video game training that I did when I was a kid helped, you know, figure out smartphones and figure out, you know, apps and, you know, Spotify blows my mind, the fact that you have unlimited music. You don't have to go to record stores anymore, which I kind of miss.

• 1:37:13Rich Roll?

  Not only you not have to, you really can't because they don't exist anymore.

• 1:37:18Speaker 01

  Right? Yeah.

• 1:37:19Rich Roll?

  Yeah, I mean, I, you know, I can't even wrap my head around what that would be like. And how do you think about like the ongoing process of like making amends for taking a life? And what do people not understand about that?

• 1:37:40Speaker 01

  I think, I think one of the misconceptions is that I need forgiveness to move forward. Like, what happens if, you know, one, I don't know if Morgan's family even knows who or where I'm at today. You know, I'm not really quite sure about the relationship, but what if I never received forgiveness, you know, from his family? And I think the misconception is there is that, you know, it's forgiveness, that forgiveness isn't about me. I can continue to move forward and be a positive person and try to make amends for the life that I took by becoming a changed human being, by somebody that, you know, all of those character defects that I talked about, selfishness and self-centered, is doing the

• 1:38:25Speaker 01

  opposite, right? Being someone who cares, being someone who's empathetic, being somebody that helps other people, being of service and sharing my story with other people is really important to me. And I think that's another thing, like, a lot of times when guys getting out of prison, they don't really want to talk about it, right? They're trying to become new people, so let's not really talk about the past, or let's skirt over the past. And I didn't want to do that because I didn't want there to be secrets in my life. You know, if there's something that I want people to know, I want them to hear it from me and not somebody else.

• 1:39:00Rich Roll?

  In observing you share your story and just kind of being around you at Nantucket Project, like, my sense is you feel strongly and compelled to share your experience. And it's not that you're reluctant, but there's a little bit of like awkwardness around it. Like, you strike me as somebody who's, you know, you're a quiet dude, you know, you're probably like a private guy. Like, you're not like some extrovert who wants to get up and like spin a yarn. Like, you're, you're doing this because there's a sense of obligation, and perhaps you've been called to do it, but it doesn't, it's not like this supernatural fit for you.

• 1:39:40Speaker 01

  I think that's-

• 1:39:41Rich Roll?

  Is that fair?

• 1:39:42Speaker 01

  That's totally fair. And the hardest part is-

• 1:39:48Speaker 01

  Not telling like the rehabilitation story, you know, because talking about myself and, you know, all the things that I was able to do while inside prison is pretty easy. But going back and talking about what led me there, I think that's the hardest part. And that's the thing that I struggle with too, is like, how much of that story should I tell? I can be really open and honest and graphic about it, you know, but what purpose does that serve? You know, it might, you know, some morbid curiosity for people that want to hear like, "Oh, what in town and how did that happen?" But I don't think that's the story. I think it's really about somebody that felt lost and insecure and felt betrayed and lied to and did something that was horrible.

• 1:40:33Speaker 01

  You know, and I'm talking about me. I don't feel like I was ever supposed to be on that path. But yet I found myself there. And if it could happen to me, I think it could happen to any one of us, really. I think we all have that power to decide inside of us like what path we're gonna take. You know, and sometimes we make good choices and sometimes we make bad choices. They don't always lead to the taking of a human life, but I think it's in there, right? I don't think people are inherently evil. I think they get distracted by things that happen in their lives, maybe their childhoods, maybe what's going on in their community, you know? And it's important for us to be aware, right?

• 1:41:16Speaker 01

  Like, never, never put ourselves on like a higher plane than where we're at. It's important to be aware that, you know, good and evil lives within us all and we all have the power to decide.

• 1:41:28Rich Roll?

  Yeah, it's very easy and convenient to point your finger at somebody and say, "I can't believe that person made that decision. I would never do that." And rather than snap to that kind of judgment.

• 1:41:42Rich Roll?

  Try to have a little bit of empathy and understand what led to that choice, right? Like you, you haven't walked a mile in that person's shoes or had their life experience.

• 1:41:55Rich Roll?

  You know, I think we're all, like you said, it's like, it's not a, a, a binary thing of good and evil. Like we're a mashup of all of these things and we're a product of our environments. And, you know, if you had had the life experience of that person who made that bad choice, chances are you, you know, very well may have made that same choice. And now to be on the other side of it with what you have learned and this path that you're continuing to blaze. I mean, it's only been a year and a half since you've been out. You know, what is the message that you're trying to convey about the rehabilitated version of yourself and what's possible?

• 1:42:36Speaker 01

  Yeah. You know, I think, uh, I think it's important for me to let people know that change is possible, that rehabilitation is possible, even for a murderer. Uh, and then I also want to give the guys that are following my footsteps a lot of hope too. Right? Because when we started, you know, the last mile or when, you know, when, uh, we were going through that program, we didn't know that there was going to be jobs waiting for us. And now that we're having success stories, you know, we have guys working at the Chan Zuckerberg Foundation. There's an apprenticeship program at Slack. Uh, fandom has now two last mile graduates, uh, working for them. You know, I've been with them for a little over a year. And another friend of mine, Jason Jones, just started his internship.

• 1:43:22Speaker 01

  So I would encourage him to keep working his butt off. And I think it's great that, that tech communities are starting to embrace this idea of a second chance.

• 1:43:33Rich Roll?

  Yeah, it had to be precarious to put all of this energy into developing this skill without any assurances whatsoever that you would ever be able to apply it in the context of a job that would, you know, pay you a living wage. I mean, you can, there's Fitness Monkey, you can have your entrepreneurial journey, but is anybody really going to give you a second chance was a question, you know, very much open at the time, right?

• 1:44:03Speaker 01

  Definitely. And honestly, my entire incarceration, that was one of my biggest fears. Right? I know how hard I can work. I know everything that I can accomplish while I was inside. Will that ever, you know, provide an opportunity when I get home?

• 1:44:18Rich Roll?

  Yeah. So fandom gives you this chance. I mean, it was an intense interview process, though, wasn't it?

• 1:44:24Speaker 01

  Oh, my gosh.

• 1:44:27Speaker 01

  It was an equal four and a half hours long as the parole board. Not quite as tough, but still pretty tough, you know? These guys are, had been in the coding industry for a while, knew a lot about what they were talking about, and they were kind of putting me through my paces to see what I knew. I was able to talk about projects that I worked on with the last smile. I showed them Fitness Monkey, the prototype app that we built. I showed them the Airbnb dashboard. And at the end of the day, they offered me a 90-day internship.

• 1:44:56Rich Roll?

  Uh huh. And in terms of that interview process, though, how much of that was based on assessing your technical acumen versus like, is this guy going to be safe? Like, are we going to be able to cohabitate with this dude, like, in a work environment?

• 1:45:13Speaker 01

  I didn't even think about that.

• 1:45:15Rich Roll?

  Really? Because it's like, all right, we're going to hire this guy. He's been convicted of murder, you know, he got out, but like, okay, he can code, like, he's got that part handled, but like, are we really going to hire this guy and take this risk? Like, if something were to happen?

• 1:45:30Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:45:30Rich Roll?

  You know.

• 1:45:31Speaker 01

  No, that's a huge piece.

• 1:45:32Rich Roll?

  The finger would like, really? You hired this guy like, and look what happened? You know, the liability.

• 1:45:39Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:45:39Rich Roll?

  So the exposure is so gigantic that it really is this leap of faith.

• 1:45:44Speaker 01

  No, I see what you're saying, you know, and, and, you know, I think there's a lot of truth to that. You know, maybe it was more than just the code. I was focused on that part of it.

• 1:45:52Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 1:45:53Speaker 01

  I figured that was my job. But.

• 1:45:56Rich Roll?

  I would imagine you probably convinced them of that in short shrift.

• 1:46:00Speaker 01

  You know.

• 1:46:00Rich Roll?

  It's more of like a character thing. Like if we have them around here for four and a half hours, eventually we'll be able to see who the real Chris is.

• 1:46:10Speaker 01

  Yeah. And so I met with like four, four members of the team, you know, the product manager, the, the tech, the tech lead, um, the engineering manager, uh, and got the internship. But two weeks into the internship, they asked me to present at the all hands meeting, you know, and there's over 500 employees at fandom in eight offices around the world. And they asked me to tell my story. And that was really tough too, right? Like here's these people I'd been working with for two weeks who didn't know any of my background story, but at the same time I wanted to share it with them because I felt like fandom did take a chance on me and believed, you know, not only in my abilities, but my ability to integrate, uh, with the culture.

• 1:46:53Rich Roll?

  Was that the first time that you kind of shared your story on a group level?

• 1:46:58Speaker 01

  It was. You know, I think, uh,

• 1:47:02Speaker 01

  you know, that the people that I was in the interview with knew, knew my story, but you know, the entire office didn't, uh, and I was able to go up there and, and tell them just in a real and open and honest way, just like I shared the crime with you today, you know, and kind of what led up to it. But then also the, the, the rehabilitation journey. And I was pleasantly surprised that, uh, after sharing my story with them, I went from the 45 year old intern to somebody with a lot of life experience and, uh, a lot of, a lot of information and experience to just to share with them.

• 1:47:41Rich Roll?

  Were there people after that who were like, oh, I just thought you were like, I couldn't figure out why you were so old?

• 1:47:51Rich Roll?

  I must have like blown a few minds. I mean, it had to be word must have passed around before that, though, like, hey, this guy got out of prison that's sitting next to you in the cubicle. No?

• 1:48:02Speaker 01

  I'm not sure. I'm not, you know, exactly sure how much. And, uh, none of them called me the old intern to my face.

• 1:48:09Rich Roll?

  Right. Not to your face.

• 1:48:12Speaker 01

  But I'm sure they are.

• 1:48:14Rich Roll?

  Is it weird that you're somebody who's kind of gotten a lot of attention? I mean, you were getting press when you were still in prison. Like, there's, you know, just researching, getting ready for this today. Like, there's articles being written because of the Last Mile Program, and you being a shining star within that. You were getting attention while you were still incarcerated, and that's just continued as you've gotten out. Is that like a weird thing? Like, it's sort of like, why me? For some reason, this is God's plan, perhaps. You know, the spotlight is being shown upon you. And I feel like you're somebody who recognizes that and has made this decision to carry that responsibility forward, to,

• 1:48:58Rich Roll?

  you know, share a message of, of, of hope and rehabilitation.

• 1:49:03Speaker 01

  Yeah, no, thank you, first of all. And, uh, yeah, it's weird. You know, I never imagined myself doing this many interviews or podcasts or, you know, being on, uh, news programs.

• 1:49:18Speaker 01

  It's not exactly the most glamorous thing to, to have, you know, the light shined on me for, for being in prison and doing all these amazing things. But at the same time, uh, that's where I'm at. You know, and I do feel an obligation to kind of pay forward, you know, all that's been given to me. I, I think, you know, whatever it was in my brain is I was one of the people that wasn't afraid to be interviewed and tell my story. Just like I wasn't afraid to, to go for that valedictorian speech and, and tell them everything that was wrong. But, you know, at the same time. You know, I believe in the message, you know, and that's one thing that the last miles taught us is to to believe in the process. And at first, I didn't even know what that meant because I didn't know what process

• 1:50:03Speaker 01

  they were talking about, you know, and it was believing in the program, it was believing in yourself and, you know, believing that you had the ability to figure things out, even when the answers aren't so clear.

• 1:50:15Rich Roll?

  So when you say believe, that you believe in the message that you're putting out there succinctly, like, what is that message?

• 1:50:24Speaker 01

  That change is possible.

• 1:50:29Rich Roll?

  Yeah, I mean, I think that everybody has pain moments and bottoms in their life, and perhaps they're not as severe as what you've had to weather, but the power in your message, whether you're a felon who's listening to this, or somebody who just feels stuck in their life with some obstacle they're trying to overcome, there is hope and inspiration in the ability or the wherewithal within all of us to tackle and overcome those obstacles that we face. And if you could come from a life sentence and staring down the barrel of having to live with the fact that you took another person's life and still find a way to move

• 1:51:11Rich Roll?

  forward and put your life back together to atone, to be in this process of of making living amends, I think that there is inspiration for all people who are struggling in their own ways with whatever they're contending with in their lives. And so there is value in continuing to tell the story. And I would imagine that this, the version of the story that you tell will continue to evolve. Because if there's one thing that I've discovered, it's like in telling a story, like, the story, you start to learn more and more about what it is, what's important about the story and what people are connecting with, you know, and I think that will be an evolutionary process for you as well.

• 1:51:53Rich Roll?

  But it was interesting to hear you tell, to share it at Nantucket. How did you, Tom told the story of how you guys first met, like, he was touring San Quentin. What was that experience like? There was something about you that he connected with. And he felt compelled to like stay in touch with you.

• 1:52:12Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, I still remember the day that that he came inside, even though I didn't really know who he was, you know, at the time. And we were talking about, you know, life in prison and the coding program. I showed him the Fitness Monkey Project. And somehow we got on the topic of sobriety, you know? And I talked about being clean for 16 plus years, you know? And he talked about, you know, recovery in his own life and kind of what helped him. And he says that there was one question that he asked me that really stood out is like, when I go back home at night, you know, am I happy? And the first thing I had to correct him on was I don't go back home. I go back to a cell, which we both chuckled at.

• 1:52:57Speaker 01

  But at the time I said, yeah, you know, I'm not exactly where I want to be. I'm not, you know, fulfilling everything that I think I could live up to. But, you know, in this moment, I'm doing everything I can. And that was enough for me, you know? And he said that he went down to another conference a few days later with all these millionaires and billionaires down there. And he said he looked at all of them and didn't see one of them that was as happy or content as I was inside San Quentin. So, I mean, I think that that's what impressed him. Since then, I've gotten to learn about the Nantucket Project. And I think it's an amazing organization, the way that they share conversations and stories

• 1:53:40Speaker 01

  about things that are going on in the world and with people. It actually reminds me, you know, on a bigger scale, but a lot of the different groups that I did while I was inside San Quentin, you know, where I'd sit in a circle of 10 guys and just get real and open and honest about what's going on in our lives and what's going on in our pasts, how we got to here and, you know, who we hope to be. So, you know, when Tom asked me to share my story for the Nantucket Project, that was an easy yes.

• 1:54:09Rich Roll?

  Yeah. How did that feel being up there doing that?

• 1:54:13Speaker 01

  Crazy nervous.

• 1:54:14Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 1:54:15Speaker 01

  Yeah. You know, especially the first time. I think the first time, not this year, but last year, you know, I got interviewed by Kelly Corrigan. And she was asking me all the tough questions, kinda like you were asking me today and sharing that conversation. And I'd only been out of prison for a few months.

• 1:54:34Rich Roll?

  You're like, what am I doing at this event with all these like posh people?

• 1:54:38Speaker 01

  And I'm sitting here in idyllic Nantucket and there's boats going by and lighthouses and it was beautiful. And I can't explain, you know, fully explain with with any kind of like reason or understanding how I ended up at Nantucket, except for I just kept saying yes to all the positive things that were going in my life, you know, and and saying yes to opportunities that presented themselves. You know, I truly believe that life is defined by the things that we say yes and no to. Yes to education, you know, yes to improving, you know, your condition, yes to trying to make the most out of bad situations, you know. So when

• 1:55:21Speaker 01

  they asked me to go give a talk at the Nantucket Project, you know, I wanted to say yes to.

• 1:55:27Rich Roll?

  Right. And this year, they they screened this East of Eden film that Tom and his team put together. Is there is that going to be available, viewable by the public? Do you know?

• 1:55:39Speaker 01

  From what I told, it's still a work in progress. So I'm not quite sure, to be honest.

• 1:55:47Rich Roll?

  Yeah, it was definitely impactful. So, following up, extending that question that Tom asked you that day about going home, what does it feel like now when you lay your head on the pillow? What are the thoughts that run through your mind?

• 1:56:03Speaker 01

  Life is pretty good right now.

• 1:56:07Rich Roll?

  I mean, there has to be a tremendous amount of gratitude for having this second chance. But I imagine it's more complicated than that because it's mixed with the confusing emotions around, you know, what led you to that point.

• 1:56:26Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, I feel like I have a good understanding of what led me to that point. You know, and I've taken accountability and taken ownership of all of it. You know, there's parts of it that I'll never understand. You know, how much pain or how much harm that I caused. But for the for the pieces that I can, for my side of the street, I feel like I've done my part. And that's really what allows me to move forward and continue to try to grow and progress and and build a life. You know, because I feel like in a lot of ways, I am grateful for for all the opportunities that's been provided. You know, a place to live, working. You know, opportunities to share my story.

• 1:57:09Speaker 01

  Getting a girlfriend, you know, like real, real, real life stuff. Getting my own apartment. You know, all these things are things that I haven't done in a long time and I'm having to figure it out.

• 1:57:18Rich Roll?

  You got a girlfriend now?

• 1:57:20Speaker 01

  Sort of.

• 1:57:21Rich Roll?

  All right.

• 1:57:25Speaker 01

  But yeah.

• 1:57:26Rich Roll?

  I'm not going to publish this for a while, so.

• 1:57:29Speaker 01

  You never know by then.

• 1:57:30Rich Roll?

  Yeah. How does that go? Like dating and having to, you know, be upfront and honest about your past.

• 1:57:40Speaker 01

  Oh, my gosh, have you heard of these dating app things?

• 1:57:42Rich Roll?

  I've heard of them. I've been married a long time.

• 1:57:44Speaker 01

  Oh, my gosh, they're a nightmare. They're such a blessing and a curse because they're supposed to allow you to interact with all these different single people. And I remember I was in, I had just gotten in the transitional house and I downloaded one of these apps.

• 1:58:01Rich Roll?

  What, like Tinder?

• 1:58:02Speaker 01

  It wasn't Tinder, but it's close. And I remember, you know, I didn't have a car yet. I didn't have my own place. I think I still had a curfew, you know.

• 1:58:13Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 1:58:14Speaker 01

  So I wasn't the most eligible bachelor.

• 1:58:16Rich Roll?

  A vision for you.

• 1:58:18Speaker 01

  But there was a girl in the town where I was living and I said, hey, look, I'm new in town. Why don't you show me around? And she's like, new in town? Well, where'd you come from? I'm like, oh, shit, the moment of truth.

• 1:58:31Rich Roll?

  Right, it just came right up front immediately.

• 1:58:34Speaker 01

  And it comes quicker than I realize it every time. But I said, San Quentin. And she goes, you were in prison? I'm like, yeah, and there's a story if you'd like to hear it. And this girl was nice enough and brave enough to hear my story. And we kind of texted and chatted for a few weeks and. Went on a bike riding date down to the park a few weeks later and dated for a good six months.

• 1:59:00Rich Roll?

  Uh huh.

• 1:59:00Speaker 01

  But I found like,

• 1:59:05Speaker 01

  like I said, I don't want there to be like part of my story that I have to hide with people. I want, I want to show up on a daily basis and be genuine and authentic and you know, that, that means telling some of the, the dirty truth too.

• 1:59:17Rich Roll?

  Sure.

• 1:59:19Rich Roll?

  Yeah. It's gotta be a challenge to navigate that. I want to wind this down and I'm trying to think of the best way to do that. I, I, I think, you know, on this theme of second chances, if somebody's listening to this and they are stuck, um, you know, maybe they just got out of prison or maybe they just want to, you know, lose a couple of pounds or run their first marathon or, you know, they're in a job that feels like a dead end or is unfulfilling. What is the, you know, message that you want to leave with that person about the prospect

• 1:59:58Rich Roll?

  or possibility of making fundamental changes that can alter the trajectory of your life and, and, and, you know, give these people their version of your second chance?

• 2:00:11Speaker 01

  That's a great question. You know, how do you, how do you, how do you boil it down to, to anything is possible?

• 2:00:20Rich Roll?

  Yeah, it's like when, when, when you have nowhere to turn, like you hit your bottom and you make these changes, they're forged out of pain and they're forged out of, you know, being placed in a cage where your options are very limited, right? And you're compelled to confront yourself in a very real way without very many other options. And in a certain respect, other people may be on a very slow drip version of that. Like they're not, it's not so bad that they have to change, right? But they're unhappy, they know they want to change. And it's almost like hitting that bottom is a blessing because.

• 2:01:04Rich Roll?

  You are compelled to change in a certain way, you know? Most people don't reach that. It's like a like a heavy drinker who's not an alcoholic. You know what I mean? Like that person may drink for the rest of their life and never get to that place of seeing sobriety like in the way that you or I do.

• 2:01:29Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, I think my bottom is as horrible as it was. And I needed it, you know, to make a change. I look back and wish it didn't take that much pain to make a turnaround. I wish there was a shorter cut for other people who, you know, maybe they want to change or maybe they think they should change to actually, you know, find the grit and determination to do so. I think decisions are made, you know, based largely around that whole pain and pleasure. You know, if one thing feels better than the other,

• 2:02:10Speaker 01

  that's most likely the thing that you're gonna do. You know? So if there's any... I don't know if there's anything to like be taken from that. Maybe it's, you know, spend more time in that unhappy place. Right? Just to get clear on like, this is really what I don't want. And then you can go around and start taking the steps to get to where you do want because it is possible. You know? I'm living an example that a life sentence can't hold somebody down. And at the same time, I don't think everybody's taking that path.

• 2:02:52Rich Roll?

  Yeah. It was good talking to you, man.

• 2:02:57Speaker 01

  Very nice talking to you, Rich.

• 2:02:58Rich Roll?

  How do you feel? You feel alright?

• 2:03:00Speaker 01

  I feel okay. I feel like we've been talking for a long time.

• 2:03:02Rich Roll?

  We have been talking for a long time. I feel like I want to go running.

• 2:03:06Speaker 01

  I brought my stuff.

• 2:03:07Rich Roll?

  You did? Alright. I did too. Cool. Thank you, man.

• 2:03:13Rich Roll?

  My heart goes out to you. I have a lot of empathy, or sympathy I should say, not empathy, because I can't imagine what it is to walk a mile in your shoes. And so much respect for all the hard work that you put into changing your life. And my hope and my wish for you is that you continue to

• 2:03:32Rich Roll?

  be a beacon of light for those that suffer, and continue to share your story of hope and transformation and rehabilitation, because it's powerful and there's a lot of people out there that are suffering. And I think you can be of service in a very fundamental, profound way to a lot of people. So, thank you for sharing your story with me today.

• 2:03:51Speaker 01

  Thank you.

• 2:03:52Rich Roll?

  Cool. And if people want to connect with you, if they want to learn more about Fitness Monkey and what you're up to, how do they do that? What's the best place for people to go?

• 2:04:03Speaker 01

  Sure. [email protected].

• 2:04:07Rich Roll?

  They email you directly? Sure you want to do that? You're going to get a lot of emails.

• 2:04:10Speaker 01

  I heard. I heard you had a pretty big following.

• 2:04:15Rich Roll?

  Cool. And are you on any of the social medias?

• 2:04:19Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 2:04:19Rich Roll?

  You are?

• 2:04:21Speaker 01

  I'm on Facebook and Instagram, @nuke schumacher.

• 2:04:26Rich Roll?

  Nuke Schumacher. And we should say, because it took me a beat to learn this, there's an extra H in your last name that's easy to overlook.

• 2:04:34Speaker 01

  Yeah. Should I spell it?

• 2:04:35Rich Roll?

  Yeah. S-C-H.

• 2:04:37Speaker 01

  U-H-M-A-C-H-E-R.

• 2:04:40Rich Roll?

  Yeah, it's that U-H in the middle there that might trip you up, so make sure you do that correctly. Cool, man. Alright, thank you.

• 2:04:47Speaker 01

  Cool.

• 2:04:47Rich Roll?

  Good talking to you. Peace.

• 2:04:53Rich Roll?

  How are you feeling right now? How did that one land for you? It's pretty intense, I get it, but I really appreciate you listening all the way to the end. I'm sure Chris does as well, and I think that was an important conversation to have, and I hope you agree. Do me a favor, let Chris know what you thought about our exchange. You can find him @nuke schumacher on Instagram and Twitter, N-U-K-E Schumacher with three H's, S-C-H-U-H-M-A-C-H-E-R, and Chris Schumacher on Facebook. If you'd like to support our work here on the podcast, there's a couple of simple ways to do just that. Just tell your friends about the show or your favorite episode. Take a screen grab of it, share it on your favorite social media platform, tag me.

• 2:05:36Rich Roll?

  Subscribe to the show on Apple Podcasts, on Spotify, on YouTube, wherever you enjoy this content. Leave a review on any of those platforms, that's helpful. And you can support the show on [email protected]/donate. I want to thank everybody who helped put on the program today. Jason Camiolo for audio engineering, production. Show notes, helping me with the scripts on the intros, the interstitial music, and also additional music today by my pal Moby. Blake Curtis and Margot Lubin for videoing the show in general, not today, but in general. Jessica Miranda for graphics. DK, David Kahn for advertiser relationships. And theme music, as always, by Analemma. Appreciate the love, you guys.

• 2:06:17Rich Roll?

  I'll see you back here in a couple days with a great conversation with Brian Koppelman. Very much looking forward to sharing this one with you. Brian is a former music business executive and record producer turned writer/filmmaker. You may know him from Rounders, or as the co-creator of the show Billions on Showtime, and we had a great exchange, it's a good one. So until then, be kind, be compassionate, be empathetic, be cool. Peace. Blinds. Namaste. [music]