John McAvoy: From Armed Robbery To Professional Athlete — One Man Reformed Through The Power of Sport

I can say without equivocation John McAvoy's story of metamorphosis is one of the most compelling, improbable, inspirational, and cinematic tales I have ever heard. Born into a notorious London crime family — think The Sopranos meets The Krays — John is a former high profile armed robber who bought his first gun at 16 and quickly became one of Britain's most successful career criminals and most-wanted men. But it took two spells in prison and a close friend's death amidst a heist gone awry to birth a desire to change — redemption he ultimately discovered through the transformative power of sport. Pulling one of the most improbable 180-degree life transformations of all time, John's greatest heist isn't a bank — it's his life. While serving a double life sentence on the Belmarsh high security wing — space he shared with extremist cleric Abu Hamza and the 7/7 bombers — John decided to take a spin on the prison gym's indoor rowing machine. That experience revealed a unmistakable fact — John's freakish natural aptitude for endurance matched only by an inhuman ability to suffer. The epiphany was miraculous. And it would change his life forever. In short shrift, John broke a cluster of British and World indoor rowing records while in prison. Upon parole, he began forging a new life as a professional endurance athlete. Today, John is the world's only Nike sponsored Ironman athlete, a stalwart mouthpiece for prison reform and a staunch advocate for the inherent power we all possess to course correct the trajectory of one's life, no matter how dire the circumstances. If John's story doesn't inspire you to be better, then you might want to check yourself for a heartbeat. In all honesty, I cant remember being so excited about sharing a podcast conversation. I sincerely hope the exchange inspires you to rethink your potential and the physical, mental and emotional limits you impose upon your inherent ability to live the life you desire. 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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• 1:05Speaker 01

  You're far more likely to get someone to do something productive with their life if they're passionate about what they're doing. And I know sport can play such a huge role in helping so many different sorts of people, not just criminals, but people in life. It's such a powerful thing, and I'm such an advocate of it because I've experienced it in my own life. And as I said, you're not going to meet anyone from that extreme of crime than me. I'll wholeheartedly say that I was one of the most entrenched criminals you'd ever meet in your life, and sport has allowed me to give that up.

• 1:38Rich Roll?

  That's John McAvoy, this week, on the Rich Roll Podcast.

• 1:56Rich Roll?

  Hey everybody. How are you guys doing? What is happening? Greetings. My name is Rich Roll. I am your host. Welcome to the podcast. We're going to do things a little bit differently upfront today. I don't have a script in front of me. I'm slightly time crunched and frankly, I'm attempting to streamline this introductory workflow a little bit, which I think we can all agree tends to feel a bit static. Runs on a little bit too long. Perhaps it's dead on arrival at times. So today we are experimenting. I'm going organic. Cannot tell you how excited I am about today's podcast. This guy, John McAvoy and his story, it is insane. John has, it is one of the most compelling, improbable,

• 2:36Rich Roll?

  riveting, inspirational, cautionary, and frankly incredibly cinematic stories that I have ever heard in my entire life. And that is saying a lot because I've had more than my fair share of extraordinary conversations over the years with amazing human beings. You're going to want to stick around for the whole thing, full stop. And we're going to dive into all of it in a minute, but first.

• 3:09Rich Roll?

  All right, John McAvoy. So I've been hip to John and his story for well over a year at this point, maybe two years. And I promised myself that if I ever made it over to London, that I would make sure to get him on the podcast. Indeed, I was in London recently and I was able to follow through on that commitment. So I don't want to say too much. I don't want to give it away. So I will only say this. John is a former high profile armed robber, a guy who was essentially born into a notorious London crime family, a guy who was bred from the get go to pull off bank heists. I'm not talking about pickpockets. I'm talking about armored vehicles and banks,

• 3:53Rich Roll?

  who ultimately found redemption through the power of sports. And in my humble opinion, John has pulled off one of the greatest 180 degree life transformations of all time, going from this guy in a prison cell, serving two life sentences to a guy who breaks both British and world indoor rowing records while in prison.

• 4:16Rich Roll?

  To becoming the only Nike sponsored Ironman athlete in the world, as well as a powerful voice for prison reform. He just spoke at the House of Commons the other week, helping to inspire positive change in others. In all honesty, I can't remember being so excited about an episode. And so with that being said, I give you John McAvoy.

• 4:43Rich Roll?

  And we're rolling. John, so good to meet you, man. I've been looking forward to this for a very long time. So super stoked to have you share your story with me today.

• 4:53Speaker 01

  Thank you for inviting me. It's a huge honor and a privilege and I'm looking forward to sharing it with you.

• 4:57Rich Roll?

  Yeah, good, good, good. We're coming to everybody from a conference room in Shoreditch, London. It's a little cavernous in here, so it might sound a little bit echoey in comparison to the way the podcast usually sounds. So you're just gonna have to bear with it, but I think it's gonna be all fine, right?

• 5:13Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 5:13Rich Roll?

  Because you're gonna get so lost in John's story. You're just, you're not even gonna know what's happening. Before we even get into that, though, what are you, what are you training for right now?

• 5:21Speaker 01

  So my season starts in three weeks' time. I'm racing Ironman Hamburg. I was meant to be racing two weekends ago, but obviously training for Ironman, you end up developing a lot of injuries, especially as I'm getting a bit older. So I had a problem with a tendon in my foot. So I had to delay the start of my race season. But my season kicks off in three weeks' time in Germany.

• 5:38Rich Roll?

  Cool, man. So feeling good, injury free?

• 5:42Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, I'm much better now. I've been a bit more consistent with my running. I didn't, I wasn't able to run for three months, which killed me because running is actually the thing that I enjoy the most out of training for Ironman. But yeah, so I'm back on course now and I'm ready to rock and roll in three weeks' time.

• 5:58Rich Roll?

  Right on. And you're 33 right now?

• 6:00Speaker 01

  I'm 35 now.

• 6:01Rich Roll?

  35, 35.

• 6:03Speaker 01

  I'm getting on now.

• 6:04Rich Roll?

  The gray hairs are coming out. And, and to date, what is your like best performance?

• 6:12Speaker 01

  My, probably my best performance would have been Ironman Frankfurt two years ago. So basically when I started doing Ironman in 2014, I went for a stage where I went an hour faster every race I did. And that sort of really took hold when I did Ironman Frankfurt. It was a massive step up in my form. I did like nine hours. I ran nearly a sub three hour marathon at the back end of it.

• 6:37Speaker 01

  Yeah, it was good and it was bad because the thing that kind of let me down was my riding a bit. Because I just lacked that riding because I didn't start riding until I was 30. So that technical element of riding a bike and my cornering and braking and that sort of stuff, like it cost me a little bit.

• 6:54Rich Roll?

  Well, I mean, 2014 was your first Ironman.

• 6:57Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 6:58Rich Roll?

  So you're still brand new to this whole thing.

• 7:00Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, like it's a massive learning process that I've been going through because it was frustrating as well because when I was doing my training and I was training on indoor like static bikes, the numbers that I was generating like power output and my physiology, like I know I was putting out the same sort of numbers like for FTP tests that what a lot of sort of like decent pro Ironman would be putting out. But I didn't seem to be getting that translation across into road cycling. Because again, I just lacked the experience of riding a bike and that's I've had to obviously work on it a lot over the last few years and I progressively have got better. But I used to be really, really bad. I used to be famous when we'd go on training camps, the Alps, I would descend on a bike

• 7:45Speaker 01

  quicker than I would climb up the other side of the mountain because I was just so frightened all the time holding the brakes.

• 7:50Rich Roll?

  So that's amazing. Yeah, there's a difference between the power that you can generate in a lab and then translating that into a real world context, right? So that's like the learning curve for you.

• 8:02Speaker 01

  It is totally different. Obviously, all of my training that I've ever done for obvious reasons has always been on static machines. So like the rowing machine years ago whilst I was in prison. And then when I come out of prison, I carried on trying to, I tried to become a professional rower, but I took up that sport too late and that's why I decided to do Ironman. So actually, power generating on a static machine.

• 8:25Rich Roll?

  Yeah, you got that covered.

• 8:26Speaker 01

  I was very, very good.

• 8:27Rich Roll?

  What kind of watts were you putting out?

• 8:30Speaker 01

  So I could hold like 365 watts when I was like 71 kilo for half hour.

• 8:36Rich Roll?

  Yeah, that's, that's serious. For people that are listening that don't have a frame of reference, that's like world class.

• 8:42Speaker 01

  Obviously, I was fortunate where the transition between rowing on an indoor rowing machine, that power, you tend to find a lot of rowers are very, very, very strong when they make the transition between rowing to cycling. Because obviously where it's a leg dominated sport and also I just think you have the ability to be able to hurt yourself. Like I've never physically felt pain. Like I felt on an indoor rowing machine in an Ironman or cycling, nothing comes close like to that when you're on the rivet.

• 9:11Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 9:12Speaker 01

  Doing like a 2K flat out test because it's like the lactate builds up in every part of your body, your back, your legs, your arms when you're on the rowing machine.

• 9:19Rich Roll?

  Yeah, and I, I think that, that like in thinking about your story, I mean, I think you have some genetic predisposition, like an ability to generate huge amounts of power, but your, your gift really is your ability to, to suffer over long periods of time.

• 9:34Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, I, I would, I would say that.

• 9:37Rich Roll?

  Born through pain and life experience as much as anything else.

• 9:40Speaker 01

  Yeah, but I, like, years ago, I wouldn't, I wouldn't have seen it like that. But obviously, some of the situations that I found myself in as a young man, and some of the things that I did to myself, like, when I was in prison, when I was a young, when I was a young teenager, and I segregated myself in a, in an isolation cell for, for a whole year. And that was like defiance against the system.

• 10:07Speaker 01

  The reason why I chose to do that was because I got moved to a prison and they tried to take all my clothes off me to put me in a special yellow boiler suit, so the prison officers could identify that I was an escape risk. And, and I was brought up to absolutely despise and hate the system and everything it stood for, government, politicians, banks. And then when I found myself in prison, the system become very real. And those prison officers that locked me up were real people and they took my freedom away from me. And, and when they tried to take my clothes off me, I refused and they took me down to this isolation cell and they took my clothes off me and they gave me this yellow suit so the prison officers could identify that I was an escape risk in the prison. And then when the seven days was up, because that was what I was originally put in there for, seven days.

• 10:50Rich Roll?

  Seven days of solitary.

• 10:51Speaker 01

  Solitary. They opened up the door and they said, you're going to go back onto main allocation and you're going to be a wind cleaner. And again, I, I hated these people and, and, and I said, there's no way I'm gonna go and do that, that you're not, I'm not going to do it, I'm not going to clean up your rubbish every day. So they put me back in front of the governor, the governor said to me, you're refusing another lawful order. And I said, yes. He said, well, you're going back in that cell for seven more days. And he, he gave me seven days confined to cell again. And then when I was in that process. And I was sitting in that cell, I read about Nelson Mandela. And when I went to prison when I was a young man, I made a decision I would not become institutionalized.

• 11:32Speaker 01

  And when the librarian used to come around, but this this lady from the library, she used to come around with a trolley and you'd take books off. And and I used to think I will not become institutionalized and I will educate myself to come out of here and be a better criminal. Not not to change, not to rehabilitate, because I was brought up to believe that if you changed, you was weak. And the system had broken you. So if you had rehabilitated and become a better person.

• 11:57Rich Roll?

  You became soft.

• 11:58Speaker 01

  A criminal wouldn't see it like that. They would see the system had broken you. So I had that mantra in my head. And when I was reading this book about Nelson Mandela. And in the book, he said that when he was in prison, he used to smoke tobacco and he realized that the prison officers used to use that as a punishment against him. He stopped smoking cigarettes. So then in my head, as at this point, I was nineteen, I thought, if you think by putting me in this isolation cell that you're punishing me, I will take it away from you. So when they come up the seven days to put me back up on the wing, I refused. And then I stayed in that room for three hundred and sixty five days.

• 12:36Rich Roll?

  By choice.

• 12:36Speaker 01

  By choice. And they would come around Christmas. And I remember this and and I look back on it now like there was a prison officer. I didn't see it at the time. I hated him. But I remember he opened up my cell Christmas and he said to me, he was just about to go off shift. And it was in the evening. It was about four o'clock. So obviously it was Christmas. People were going home earlier that day. And he said to me, do you want to phone up your mum? And I said, no. And I remember he opened up my cell door and he said, look, just you can phone your mum up. It's Christmas day. And I refused. I said, I'm not, I don't want to use the phone.

• 13:08Rich Roll?

  Because that would give them some tiny little bit of power. If they gave you something, they can take something away from you.

• 13:15Speaker 01

  Yeah. And I think it was me trying to wrestle control of me taking control back of my body. And also, again, it was that arrogance of not wanting to show them weakness that even though it was Christmas Day. I wouldn't break and they they wouldn't get anything out of me and I would sit and at that time, I thought I was getting something over on them. Well, in fact, I was only punishing myself and I was only hurting myself, but I didn't see it like that. I saw myself at war with them. And this was about me being defiant and me not showing weakness and me not giving in to them.

• 13:47Rich Roll?

  Well, I want to explore like how that ultimately ended up shifting and I want to get into like how you got there in the first place. But before we do that, like walk me through the experience of being in solitary for such a long period of time, like how that shapes you, how you spend your time, uh, trying to expand your mind, but also what you did physically.

• 14:10Speaker 01

  So, obviously, you got 24 hours a day to fill up. Um, you get into a habit of going to sleep very early. Um, I used to make two choices as well when I was in there, read, and I would not sleep in the day. I would not sleep my prison sentence off. So some prisoners would sleep all day in a segregation cell and I chose not to do that. So I got into a routine and when I was a child, I had no interest in sport or exercise whatsoever.

• 14:40Rich Roll?

  Never, you never played sports or never an athlete?

• 14:42Speaker 01

  Played football. I used to get put in goal. I was the little overweight kid that couldn't kick a ball, but they'd stick me in guard. I would always be the last kid to be picked and go, you can go in goal. Um, but I had no, I never idolized athletes as a kid. Um, I never really had any interest in sport bar soccer, football. Um, and that was about it. But when I was in prison, when I was obviously locked up, someone once said to me that when you go to prison, you don't live, you just exist. And I started off one day and I don't even know what the trigger was, but I started off doing press ups and I didn't know the names of the exercises I was doing. And then I would do, um, press ups, step ups. I'd get my, um, chair in my cell and

• 15:27Speaker 01

  put it up to the back of the wall and you could open up the tiny little vent windows just to get a bit of ventilation. And I'll start doing these step ups and then then I'll do sit ups and then I start putting all the exercises together and I'll do these circuits and I'd get up every morning at half five, six o'clock. And again, I was grossly unfit when I first went to prison. I was overweight.

• 15:44Rich Roll?

  So, yeah, so when you began, like, how many pushups could you do?

• 15:48Speaker 01

  Not a lot, not a lot. Um, yeah.

• 15:50Rich Roll?

  So you couldn't have been working out like at the beginning, like, okay, half an hour, I'm done.

• 15:54Speaker 01

  I, I, I kind of just kept pushing myself. So when, when I've run, like, if I did ten, the next time I'd wanna do eleven, until I'd get the pain and it hurt. And that would make me feel alive. And then, and I would bolt the other exercises on, do ten, ten, ten. And then as the months progressed, obviously, again, I didn't realize what I was doing, but I was obviously getting fitter. I, I lost weight.

• 16:14Rich Roll?

  Mm hmm.

• 16:15Speaker 01

  Um, and, and I'd end up doing a thousand of each exercise. And it, and in total, it used to take me anywhere between like, an hour to an hour and a half, depending on what sort of exercises, like, what I chose to do within it. Um, but it used to make me feel alive. And again, it was me taking control back from the prison officers, back to myself. And that would last in the morning from six to sort of half past seven. And then I'd have my breakfast. And then I'd read. And again, when I was in there, because of the sort of men that brought me up, I, I remember, um, sort of one of my stepfather, that was a, was in prison for long periods of time, sixteen years.

• 16:57Speaker 01

  And I asked him, how did he stop himself from becoming institutionalized before I went to prison? And he used to listen to the radio every day, and he would make sure that he read newspapers to stay connected to the real world. Cause he said, this is not my life. And that is the, that is sort of, again, the mantra that I took on. I refuse to accept where I was. And I used to think to myself, this is not my life. So I wanna stay connected to the real world outside of this wall. And I'd be, I'd, I'd be avidly reading about current affairs. And this is when I was quite young as well, like, politics. Um, I would wanna stay in touch with what was happening in the real world, cause this, where I was at the moment, these people would kidnap me. Again, they hadn't. I broke the law and I was in prison for it.

• 17:39Rich Roll?

  Right. And your sentence, you had, it was a life sentence, was it not?

• 17:43Speaker 01

  That, when I first went, when I was, when I was a teenager, that was, I got five years for possession of firearms. And then when I went back the second time, um, obviously because I had previous convictions and and the judge expressed my links to the criminal underworld. It was so extensive at such a young age, he said, no matter what sentence he gave me that day, I was still going to come out of prison a young man, because I was only twenty four. And he said that he believed that my risk to the public was so great that they would always need protecting from me. So he sentenced me to two life sentences with a with a with a minimum tariff of five years. And what that meant is, because sometimes people get confused what a life sentence is. So as we speak today, I am technically serving my prison sentence in the community.

• 18:25Speaker 01

  So at any moment, the police suspected I was involved in any organized crime, or I was seen with any organized criminals, they could recall me straight back to prison and I would go back on to my life sentence. And then I would have to go back up in front of a parole board and demonstrate to them that I wasn't a risk to the public. And that was what it was about. It was about taking the burden of proof from the police having to prove I was committing a crime to them suspecting I was committing a crime. And it was easier to recall me back to prison.

• 18:51Rich Roll?

  So to this day, you could easily go back.

• 18:54Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 18:55Rich Roll?

  If you even tiptoed anywhere near any of this stuff.

• 18:58Speaker 01

  Yeah, like, um, even when I want to go abroad to race, um, I did a, I did a talk last week, um, at Nike's European headquarters in Amsterdam. And I have to ask for permission off my immigration officer. And then when I come back to the country, I have to go and report into it to prove that I've returned back to the United Kingdom. So that will always hang over me. I don't, I don't look at it like, and be bitter and twisted about it. Like, I got the sentence, I know why the judge gave it to me back then. But my life's obviously moved on to such an extent now, um, that, yeah, it would be nice if it wasn't hanging over me, but it is how it is. And and there's no point me stressing about it every day, waking up, thinking I've got this sentence hanging over my head. I've got, I've got, I just let go of that, because I, I don't want to become bitter and twisted and angry over it.

• 19:42Rich Roll?

  Well, you could be back in right now. I mean, you could still be in there.

• 19:45Speaker 01

  Right.

• 19:46Rich Roll?

  So, I mean, every day is a gift based upon, you know, that judge.

• 19:50Speaker 01

  Hundred, hundred percent.

• 19:51Rich Roll?

  And your actions.

• 19:52Speaker 01

  Hundred, a hundred percent. And and that is why I've got an appreciation of life and how precious life actually is. Because when you go to prison, and and again, like, it's not a hard done by story, like, I put myself in there by poor decisions that I chose to make as a young man. But when you go to prison, it is as near to dying as what you could possibly get the and being in the actual being alive still, like it's like you entomb your body into a concrete coffin. Um. And when you get those life sentences, like, yeah, you've you've got a minimum tariff, but I can remember the day when my minimum tariff expired, I went to bed and woke up the next day and I'm still in prison. And then you realize how powerless you are to actually, if the system doesn't want to let you out, you will stay in there for the rest of your life, if if you don't play the game with them.

• 20:36Rich Roll?

  So books, you read the Nelson Mandela book. What were the other books that were impactful on you? Malcolm X, like I could, you know, there's like a list, there's like a bibliography of books that are most commonly read in in prison.

• 20:50Speaker 01

  Yeah, I I think when I was in there, I was very interested in history. Um. I've always had this fascination, even since when I was a little kid. Um. I think that was one of the catalysts why I ended up doing what I'd done when I was a kid. Um. So my my biological father passed away before I was born, and my mum explained to me about, he died, and I was only young, I was like five, six years old, when I was going to primary school, and because kids kept teasing me where my dad was. And my mum, um, she explained to me what death was, and I was too young to really understand what legacy was. But I developed this this sensational appetite for history, like, I can remember, my mum used to get me these magazines every month called Discovery Booklets, and it'd

• 21:34Speaker 01

  be about Napoleon, Winston Churchill. And I can remember being a little boy, and hundreds of years after these men were dead, people were still reading about them, and they left a footprint on the earth. And and that motivated me, like, I remember thinking, I don't just want to die, that I want to achieve something with my life. And that thread of that wanting to learn about the past always stayed with me. So when I was in prison, um, I kept reading about the past because I still wanted that legacy, I still wanted to achieve something in my life. And when I decided to make that connection about changing years later, like I said, the when I read Lance Armstrong's autobiographies, that had a profound impact

• 22:15Speaker 01

  on me. That opened up my eyes to a possibility of like, the characteristics that I had that were that I was using, like the will, the drive, the wanting to achieve something with life, wanting to be successful. The only people that I ever met in my life with those characteristics were all involved in organized crime.

• 22:36Speaker 01

  Then suddenly I was opened up to this man that did sport and they were massive attributes and he was successful and then I started reading all his other books of all these sort of Olympic athletes and endurance athletes and again they all had the same reoccurring blueprint of the same characteristics.

• 22:52Rich Roll?

  But you're thinking at the time like how you can channel those characteristics to become a master criminal.

• 22:59Speaker 01

  Yeah, and honestly like Rich, I'm very fortunate that since I've been out of prison, I have a lot of friends and associates that have gone to the Olympics and they've medaled, they've won gold medals at the Olympic Games, very pinnacle in rowing, in what sport they've chosen to do. They've been highly successful, they've worked for like Goldman Sachs, Merrill Lynch, big financial institutions. And when I, when we train together, there's a couple of them, we go for runs on the weekend, like long runs. And I've said to them before, you would be amazed, the conversations that we're having about the world, I'd be having exactly the same conversations with people that were in prison for being contract killers,

• 23:41Speaker 01

  for people involved in drug trafficking. You would be amazed the similarities in the mindsets of the two of them, but how from a young person, the lack of opportunity or the bad role models that have come into their lives that have warped what they've then chosen to do with those characteristics. And they've been exposed to criminality and they've thrown that into crime. And they was exposed to rowing or sport and their fathers worked for big corporate banks and they've chosen that path. And it even fascinates me sometimes like the similarities in the conversations between two groups of people and the mindsets are exactly the same.

• 24:20Rich Roll?

  That's profound and fascinating. The same mindset, the ability to focus uniquely on a specific goal and work your way towards that, whether it be criminal or athletic or professional. Yeah, I can see how those traits would cross over and the differentiator is of course the environment.

• 24:40Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 24:41Rich Roll?

  That's amazing.

• 24:42Speaker 01

  Some, and again.

• 24:44Rich Roll?

  So give me a taste of like that kind of conversation amidst, you know, the criminal underworld.

• 24:53Rich Roll?

  Because I know what the athlete conversations are like.

• 24:56Speaker 01

  Obviously, in the criminal fraternity, everything revolves around money, acquiring money, making lots of money. You tend to find with a lot of people that commit crime, what they've got that a lot of normal members of society haven't got is there's no real cutoff switch, like there's nothing they're not really prepared to do. I was brought up with a moral compass, and you don't hurt women, you don't hurt children, you don't sell heroin, you don't attack old people, you don't attack the working man. But the system, and everything the system is, is fair game. And everyone that I was around as a criminal all had that same belief

• 25:35Speaker 01

  system. And so you tend to find your whole conversations were based around making money, but making it through the system. And that would be through committing robberies, people committing fraud, but all against, not against business, but against government.

• 25:52Rich Roll?

  There is a code, right?

• 25:53Speaker 01

  Oh, yes.

• 25:54Rich Roll?

  And the way that you see it, you know, my only frame of reference is what you see on television and movies, you know, but if you watch Goodfellas or The Sopranos and, you know, movies of that ilk, stories told of that ilk, like, there's always that code, right? And that code cannot be transgressed. And when you're part of that universe, it all makes sense.

• 26:14Speaker 01

  Yeah, like, my stepdad used to say to me when I was a young boy, I must have been at 10, 11 years old, the only thing in that world that you've got is your name. And if people don't respect you because you've informed on your friends, or informed on anyone, and you sort of grassed rattled people out and told the police anything, your name's finished. And the only thing you have ever got is that, as a criminal, it goes before you. Like, if people don't think what you call class in crime in this country is being any good, that's the end of you is doing what you're doing, being involved in criminal activity. But like, again, if I was ever disrespectful to a woman in any way, like...

• 26:59Speaker 01

  Touched a woman, was disrespectful verbally to her. My stepdad would have gone absolutely mad. My mum would have gone absolutely mad, but my stepdad would would not tolerate it. Um, you always treat women with respect because your mum's a woman, your sister's a woman. Um, and and I and I found that quite fascinating because as my life's progressed, since I've been out of prison, there's been occasions where I've met women and their parents have found out about my past. And they're kind of like, oh, you've got to be careful. But the irony of it is they'd probably be safer with me than they would with someone else. And I've always found that quite ironic because the way I the way I see a woman.

• 27:33Rich Roll?

  You can't blame them though, you know what I mean? That's so funny, like, yeah, armed robbery, no problem, you know, good on you, pat on the back. But, uh, you know, sort of said a weird thing to a woman or touched her inappropriately and like, not so good.

• 27:49Speaker 01

  Hmm.

• 27:49Rich Roll?

  So let's take it back to the beginning. So you you never you never really knew your your biological father.

• 27:55Speaker 01

  No.

• 27:55Rich Roll?

  But give me a sense of like the family that you grew up in, what the environment was like.

• 27:59Speaker 01

  So my my actual biological father, he died, um, when whilst my mum was eight months pregnant with me. So he went to bed one night, he was thirty eight years old, um, and had a massive heart attack. It was, there was no symptoms, there was nothing leading into it that led him to believe he had a bad heart. My mum said that he was a, he was an absolute workaholic, like, he wasn't a criminal. Um, he owned nightclubs, betting offices, he had, um, shops, construction businesses, but all legitimately, he didn't, he didn't. My mum used to say to me, he used to.

• 28:29Rich Roll?

  That smells sort of like.

• 28:31Speaker 01

  It does.

• 28:31Rich Roll?

  The terrain of the mafia.

• 28:32Speaker 01

  And and all of, and to be fair, all of his brothers, like, they were from a big Irish Catholic family. Um, a lot of them were involved in crime. But my dad, my mum used to say, my dad used to look at them and think they were idiots because he could see the writing was on the wall with them. But what my dad did, because my mum told me that, because like he owned stuff like nightclubs and then he owned betting offices, because he had these different sorts of businesses, he was staying up all night at the nightclub, making sure that people wasn't stealing money. And then he was waking up again at five, six o'clock in the morning and then going out in the construction business. And so he was surviving on very little sleep, um, a lot of stress. And anyway, bad diet, dies at thirty eight years old.

• 29:12Speaker 01

  I get born into the world, um, and I had a relatively sort of what I would class as a normal upbringing. Like I wasn't abused, Christmases come around, everything I ever wanted, my mum loved me, I had loads of aunties. Um, no real men come into our lives, my mum was single, um, only uncles come into our home. Um, and it, and it was just a normal childhood, like I, I said earlier, um, the only thing that really made it a bit different was when I started going to primary school. People used to tease me about not having a dad and I asked my mum and my mum told me my dad died. And then my life completely changed when I was eight years old. And before my mum met my father, my mum grew up in a place in South London called Peckham.

• 29:56Speaker 01

  And she grew up on a council estate and she grew up with a man called Billy Tobin. And they got, they grew, they grew up as kids and when they were sixteen, they're both Catholics, um, they get married. My mum falls pregnant with my sister and she's eighteen.

• 30:13Speaker 01

  They're just a normal young family in London. Billy goes out with his dad one night and he's working as a plasterer. And he sees his dad get murdered in a pub and three men stabbed his dad's death. When that happened, Billy's life then completely spiraled. And then, I don't know, I couldn't tell you what was going through his head, but I could only imagine he then looked at life. And he then went on a journey of becoming a normal guy, plasterer, young family. To becoming one of the most prolific armed robbers in the United Kingdom. He had five or quarters at the Old Bailey, the police shot him two times on robberies. Um, he was a multimillionaire when he was twenty one.

• 30:58Speaker 01

  At eight years old, this man comes out of prison after serving sixteen years. And he come into our home when I lived in Crystal Palace with my mum in South London. First time I will ever, I had seen this man and he was, I can remember it as clear as day, like he come in, I was a young kid, I'm looking at him. He was immaculately dressed, massive gold watch. And he come in our home and he um he asked me to make him a cup of tea and I made him this cup of tea. And then as he was leaving our our house, he gave me um a twenty pound note. It was the first time anyone had ever given me paper and I you know, I took this twenty pound note off him. And he patted me on the head and he went, you're a good boy. And he left and then I said to my mum, who is he? And my mum explained to me that it was her ex-husband. He didn't say like, hey, if you want a job, you know, come and see me.

• 31:43Speaker 01

  No, no, he di- he didn't. I mean, he's very cinematic, you know, it's like I it's like I can see it happening, just like in the movies. He, to be honest, he never, ever, ever, ever told. So he didn't come into my life. But to my mum's life again, to be in a romantic relationship, but obviously because of my sister. Yeah, he's around. Yeah, he's around, he's around. He didn't live with my mum, he was living his own life. And when he used to take my sister out, he would take me out. He didn't have a son. I didn't have a dad, so you can already see what's starting to happen here. And he never, ever, ever mentioned to me anything he did. And he would take me to these restaurants and there'd be a lot, again, a young kid, a lot of older men, big watches, nice cars outside. People stopping by the table to say hello.

• 32:25Speaker 01

  All all of that stuff, like going into restaurants, being in good tables, never having to queue. You could see when you went into clothes shops, the people in the clothes shops treated them differently. Everything was cash. Christmas would come around and I remember like them all putting money together and giving you like a thousand pounds when I was a young boy.

• 32:42Speaker 01

  Always, always, always talking about money. Every conversation was about money and that was it. But no one really went into detail where the money was coming from. And again, you're a young boy, I couldn't connect your dots up. And it was only when my grandad died. That me and my mum and my aunties went round to my grandad's flat to clear it out. And as I opened up this drawer, there was a massive envelope. And I opened up this envelope and it had all of these front page newspaper clippings from all like the National Tabloid newspapers. And it was basically Billy on the front of them. And it was like how he sort of um nobbled juries, which meant corrupt juries, paid them off to find not guilty.

• 33:23Speaker 01

  How the Met Police were after him for years and how he was the most influential bank robber in the country and that they organized crime and millions of pounds. And I was reading all these newspaper clippings. And then I then connected up the dots where all of this sort of this money. And you were how old at this point? I was twelve years old.

• 33:42Speaker 01

  And it really.

• 33:45Speaker 01

  That didn't send me over the edge. That wasn't the catalyst for me deciding to do what I did. Um, that come a little bit further along, but it all started happening around the same sort of time. I asked Billy about this and he didn't really wanna talk about it. He didn't ever, ever, ever really talk about when he was in prison. He di- he didn't like really doing it unless I really used to push him on it. But then when I was twelve, um, big TV channel in this country, ITV, there was a doc- there was a film, sorry, not documentary, a film. And this film was about my real brother, my real dad's brother. And he committed the biggest armed robbery in the world and he stole twenty six million pounds worth of gold bullion at Heathrow Airport.

• 34:29Speaker 01

  And when I would go out with Billy as a young kid, again, all the dots started connecting up. Everyone would go, is that Mickey's nephew? And I never used to really question it. And and everyone used to always like, that was why they was giving me the money at Christmas. And that was why they was always making sure that if I haven't, if I wanted anything like, do you need, do you wanna drink? Do you want this? Do you want that?

• 34:51Rich Roll?

  So did Mickey, Mickey got killed or he was in prison?

• 34:53Speaker 01

  He was in prison, so.

• 34:54Rich Roll?

  Right, Mickey McAvoy.

• 34:55Speaker 01

  Yeah, and he he got twenty, twenty five years for the the armed robbery of stealing a gold bullion.

• 35:01Rich Roll?

  Right, so a way of of paying respect to Mickey was to slip you cash?

• 35:05Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 35:05Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 35:06Speaker 01

  Yes, uh, because within crime in in the United Kingdom, obviously, it was the biggest armed robbery in the world. You're then dealing with men that hate the system. You've attacked the system on an unimaginable scale and stolen, which if you put it into today's money, would probably be a couple of hundred million pounds worth of gold bullion, because this was like nineteen nineteen eighty three.

• 35:24Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 35:24Speaker 01

  So if you put it into real world terms to that, how much money that be worth? So within the criminal underworld in this country, it was it was the pinnacle of of doing anything against the system. And then you've got this young kid that's then out with this very high profile armed robber that's then going into this world with other high profile organised criminals as a blood relative of that man. So then what that then started doing, when I watched that film, that film inspired me that night. And honestly, Rich, I I genuinely feel embarrassed to say it, but it inspired me to become a criminal. Um, I didn't see the fact that my uncle was in prison for twenty five years for that offence. I saw a Hollywood actor sitting on twenty six million pounds worth of gold bullion.

• 36:04Speaker 01

  And that, to me, at that moment, was the pathway of how I could become rich and how I, my definition of success was how much money I would make, and that was the pathway in which I was going to choose to do it. So then, really, at that sort of age, I then sort of had complete disinterest in school, complete disinterest.

• 36:29Rich Roll?

  When we're talking about like a criminal enterprise and we're talking about armed robbery, we're not talking about holding people up on the street, you're talking major bank robberies like, like big heists and an organizational structure beneath this that's supporting this endeavor, right?

• 36:47Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 36:47Rich Roll?

  So how vast was the enterprise?

• 36:52Speaker 01

  When, when, when I started getting involved in crime, when properly, when I, when I left school when I was 16, I, I sat my GCSEs because my mum pleaded with me to sit them, but I knew that, well, if I got an A in English or Maths, it wasn't going to get me what I wanted in life, but I'd done my GCSEs. And, and I remember when I sat there and I, I got my grades at the end of the summer, my head of year was there and he gave them to me and he went, if only you would have applied yourself what you could have done. And I still managed to salvage some decent grades considering I did none of the coursework leading them. And I got these qualifications, I ripped them up, chucked them in the bin at the end of my school drive, and I thought, I know what I'm going to go and do. My stepdad found out that I bought a firearm when I was 16.

• 37:35Speaker 01

  And in his head, he believed that I would be safer committing crime with them than I would be people my own age. And as perverse as that is, like, it is.

• 37:48Rich Roll?

  Yeah, there's a logic there though.

• 37:49Speaker 01

  It's a warped sense of protecting you and trying to prevent me from killing myself or killing someone else.

• 37:56Rich Roll?

  And meanwhile, your mom had to see the, the signals, right? So where is she in this?

• 38:02Speaker 01

  My mum, like, when I was a young boy growing up, to the degree, my mum would not even let me play with sort of toy guns, like cowboys, she would not, like, she did everything she could to, to shield me, to the degree she told Billy, never, ever, ever take him and do anything with him.

• 38:20Rich Roll?

  So when he would swing by and take you out to these restaurants, was she, I mean, she must have said at some point, like, look, you gotta stay away from this guy.

• 38:27Speaker 01

  She did, but the problem that you start getting is when you're a young teenager or a young man. You become harder and harder and harder for your mum to control what you're doing, because you always think your mum's wrong. I look back now, my mum, everything my mum said was right, um, but it's very hard for a, a, a, a woman to control a young man. Just then around these such dominant, strong alpha males that are enticing you in to that world. It's like, a lot of those guys that, that I knew as growing up as kids, a lot of their kids went to private schools. They, they had the best education you could afford to buy, basically. They all went private schools. They went on lavish holidays around the world, they had nice things, tennis courts in the garden.

• 39:09Speaker 01

  Every single one of those kids left that private school and they become drug traffickers. And they've all ended up in prison.

• 39:15Rich Roll?

  Mm hmm.

• 39:15Speaker 01

  But they had the best of everything. And that just shows you what happens when you have that terrible role model. Like, they had the best of everything. They, they, they come out of school with top grades, top school, and come out and end up selling drugs. Because their dad sold drugs and it wasn't discouraged. In fact, most of the time dad's got the sons on board. And the sons got involved in their empire, in their drug empires, or got involved in whatever criminality they were committing. My stepdad realised that I was following him in that line. So like I said, he, he thought in a, in a false sense of protecting me, it'd be safer if I committed crime with him than other people. So. He then basically used to get me to go out and with video cameras and, and I would film vid, like lorries.

• 39:58Speaker 01

  Making deliveries to security depots in the suburbs and they would basically fill up the security depots. Um, and I'd give these CCTV tapes.

• 40:05Rich Roll?

  So it's like recon.

• 40:07Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 40:07Rich Roll?

  You're scoping out a job, you gotta figure out how the money's flowing, so you know where the vulnerabilities are.

• 40:12Speaker 01

  It's like my, my, my role in it become, I used to be very good at memorising number plates. So, like, I look back on it now, so I would go out in my, in a car or a motorbike. And obviously if you're, you're delivering money to sort of banks in armour trucks, that you, so we call them security vans, armour trucks.

• 40:34Speaker 01

  The same van used to make the same delivery on the same day, every week, week on week on week. And you knew how many sort of, how many times he's walking in at the bank, how much he was taking in and out the bank. So you would know on a Thursday, they was delivering X amount of hundreds of thousands of pounds into each bank. These guys that work for these companies aren't looking at a seventeen, sixteen year old kid. They're looking for middle aged men, stocky, stubble, like your typical criminal. Not some sort of spotty teenager that's a little bit overweight chubby, but they're not looking at me as a threat. So it's very easy for you to like get near them and and count and look and observe and then pass relay that information back on. I realised very quick that my goal was to be a millionaire. That that was it, bottom line. And I set myself goals.

• 41:18Speaker 01

  I wanted to be worth a million pounds when I was twenty one years old. And then as I got older, I wanted more and more money. But there was these goals.

• 41:24Rich Roll?

  And was your stepdad like, look, just, we're gonna bring you in, we're gonna start you with small stuff. But be patient and you will be a millionaire. Like, was there a, was it overt and explicit like that?

• 41:36Speaker 01

  Well, it was, it was, it was, the, the, the only way I can explain what he was like. So he, he never used to stop telling me that he was a millionaire when he was twenty one. So that was why that stuck in my head. And he always used to say to me, do you think you'll beat me? And and it was like a test. And even little things like when I was at school, he had a Porsche nine eleven. And I was being a bit cheeky to my mum because I was churing in, didn't wanna go to school. And I said, we live too far, don't wanna go, don't get in the bus. And he said, take the car. I'm sixteen years old. And I said, what? He said, take the car. He said, if you're a big man, take the car, drive to co- drive to school. So I said, all right. So I took his car and I drove the car to school. Now, most adults, you wouldn't let a child drive any car, but let alone a car like that. It was all, it was all, that was what he was like. He was always testing.

• 42:21Speaker 01

  He was always seeing. How much bottle I had and did did I have that sort of capability to keep pushing it? And what started happening when he was, when I was out with him, and I remember this, and he was relaying these stories on to older men that at this time I knew that were involved in crime. They would lavish praise on you and they would show you respect and and that starts feeding into psychology as a young man, especially a young boy. And you're getting these like forty, fifty year old men saying, you've got some bottle like I wouldn't have done that when I was a kid. And that starts feeding into it. And then you start again, you've got no fear. I had no fear. I didn't fear the police. I didn't, I was brought up, it didn't mean anything to me.

• 43:02Speaker 01

  Authority, prison, police, none of that bothered me at all. I had literally zero fear. So if they said to me, go and drive ten guns to the other side of the country, I would have put them in the car and drove there.

• 43:14Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 43:14Speaker 01

  Because it was all, and that actually did, I was gonna say that was a, but they actually did do that. There was a couple of times where they did do that. And sometimes I look back on it now and I think they're kind of exploiting me to a degree and I didn't, I was too young to understand that. I thought I was in, I was in with them and when actually it was about me taking these massive risks.

• 43:31Rich Roll?

  Right, because you're the one who's gonna take the fall.

• 43:33Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 43:34Rich Roll?

  Right? And you're, you're, you're expendable.

• 43:36Speaker 01

  Hmm.

• 43:37Rich Roll?

  Right? Yeah, the amazing thing is that we'd all like to think that if we found ourselves in your shoes, that we would make a different choice. And it's just not how it works, you know, it's like this slow drip of you growing up in this certain environment and, you know, a billion small encounters and exchanges with people that leads you to that place where the obvious choice is to do exactly what you did. And that if I had grown up in that environment, that I would have made the same choices.

• 44:08Speaker 01

  Do you know what, Rich? What's that? That's aided me like so much what I've gone on to do with my life. Because I can have this conversation that we're having right now with a politician. And and I've had countless times I've met people in authority and they sit across the table from me and they go, I cannot see how you've gone to prison for what you've gone in there for. Even when I was in prison on parole hearings, I was sitting with my probation officers that had been in that system for years. And they're like looking at a file, looking at me, looking at a file, looking at me going, I cannot see how you come across the way you do and you've done this. And that, what that has done for me is I can express and show them what can happen to young people.

• 44:51Speaker 01

  The most intelligent, articulate, driven, focused young men that there are up and down this country, when negative people come into their lives and how that intelligence and drive and focus can compete completely and utterly warped. And, and that's why we've got this huge problem in our country at the moment with young kids killing each other, getting involved in gangs like in America. They're not ambitious and they're not not driven, like they're incredibly ambitious and driven, but it's all channeled into the wrong thing because the wrong people have come into their lives and channeled that energy into something so destructive and they don't see the destructive nature of what they're really doing until it eventually leads to them being killed or spending their lives in prison.

• 45:35Rich Roll?

  Yeah, a big part of what you do, probably the most important part, you know, everyone knows you as this triathlete, but you know, with this incredible story, but it's your advocacy on behalf of prison reform, you know, that, that, that I think, you know, holds the most power to really shift culture. And if you just scroll through your Twitter feed, like you're constantly talking about what's not going right, what needs to be changed. There was just the thing the other day about somebody's trying to get incarcerated individuals into sport while they're incarcerated, but it was like dismissed or something like that. And you had a few, a few words to share about that.

• 46:13Speaker 01

  Yeah, like, so you talk, yeah, a tabloid newspaper sort of with political agendas that don't necessarily want things to change. When I was in prison the second time, there were eighty five thousand men incarcerated. There was twenty eight of us out of that eighty five thousand that were deemed to such a high risk that we had to be put in a special high security prison unit in Belmarsh Prison called the HSHU. We were completely and utterly segregated out of the whole prison system because we were either deemed to be a threat to national security or our escape was so highly likely and if we did escape, we'd pose such a risk to the police that escape must be made impossible.

• 46:58Speaker 01

  And I was kept in that unit for two years with Islamic suicide bombers. The system wrote me off, said I'll never change. Yeah, you were in there with like Hamza? So Shaq, Shaq Abu Hamza. Right. Um, the twenty one seven suicide bombers that tried to blow themselves up on the underground system and the guys that tried to actually blow up the Transatlantic flights going over to the States with their liquid bombs. So I'm in there with them. I'm told basically, you're here because we believe you're going to escape and the likelihood of you changing, got two life sentences, is so slim, it will not happen. And I can remember someone from the Home Office, who was at the Ministry of Justice, coming to the prison. And I was trying to get off this unit to try to get into the main prison because I did actually

• 47:39Speaker 01

  want to try to escape or get out as fast as I could. And she said, we're not stupid. We know people like you will never, ever, ever change because again, serious crime and, and if I've managed to do what I've done through sport, why can't the other eighty five thousand people do it? And, and that's what makes me so passionate because I understand that once I had an awakening in prison and I wanted to do something else with my life and I discovered sport, what sport done for my life and sport allowed me to be successful. It gave me, it's given me everything that I've got today. And it isn't even about being a good athlete. It's about what it's done for my life. It's about the people it's brought

• 48:21Speaker 01

  into my life. Incredible people, not just Olympic athletes, but it's allowed me to go in and speak to kids, thousands of them up and down the country. Um, I've met some of the most amazing, incredible people I've ever met in my life through sport. Now, it doesn't mean you have to come out, you have to break world records in prison, but it gives you access and exposure to positive people. And that is what sport done. And when I got released from prison, my social circle completely changed overnight. And, and I'm friends with nearly everyone that I was friends with when I first come out. And it broke me away from that, those negative people that were involved in crime. And I know sport can play such a huge role in helping so many different sorts of people, not just criminals, but people in life. It's such a powerful thing. And I'm such an advocate

• 49:06Speaker 01

  of it because I've experienced it in my own life. And as I said, like, you're, you're not going to meet anyone as it's from, from that extreme of crime than me. Like, I, I will, I wholeheartedly say that I was one of the most entrenched criminals you'd ever meet in your life. I wasn't a horrible bully. I didn't bully normal people walking up and down the street. I wasn't that sort of like mafia don boss that went around and bullied people and tried to take money from restaurants and stuff. But I was driven by greed and every day and sport has allowed me to give that up and.

• 49:38Rich Roll?

  I would imagine one thing you come across regularly is this idea that the more you accomplish, the more you achieve, the more you become an outlier. So that somebody can say to you, yeah, John, like, look what you did, but you're you're like, you're the you're the unique example. Like, this is not going to be the case for all these other people. So like, why even try?

• 50:03Speaker 01

  I would say to you, I would say to anyone that says that, like, I have, I've gone and visited prisons and I've gone and visited young offenders and schools. And and I'm not the only person. There there are countless stories of other people that have used sport. And it's played such a massive role in their lives and they they've it's allowed them other opportunities to to be better people. Again, I understand there's varying, there's varying levels of it. And I know I've probably taken it to the extreme because of the characteristics which I've always possessed, the ambition, the drive. I was in prison. I mean, I was as good at sport. Went to be a millionaire. Next thing was, I want to be a professional athlete. But I've always had that. I've always been ambitious and driven and and I know you you can get varying levels of of that.

• 50:47Speaker 01

  But it's about what sport can just give people to be better people and access. And as I say, again, it comes back to, like I said earlier, about having negative role models in people's lives. This can expose them to positive role models in people's lives. And and I've also noticed that when when I go into these prisons and I talk to inmates, you're far more likely to get someone to do something productive with their life if they're passionate about what they're doing. And I am yet to go into a prison or young offenders and talk to an inmate one on one. So you tend to find. I've got this sort of, I'm fortunate where, when I go into a prison environment, prisoners don't see me as the system, they don't see me as the enemy, so they're quite open with their talking, so they'd be quite open about what they really think.

• 51:30Speaker 01

  And the amount of conversations I've had with inmates where they've gone, I said, like, what would you want to do if you got out of it? And it's been be a personal trainer, be a coach, work with children, give back.

• 51:40Rich Roll?

  Do they ever say be a better criminal?

• 51:42Speaker 01

  But I don't wanna be, but if they wanted to turn a life, they want to change. It's about they, you're more likely to get them to stick at it if they're passionate about it. And most prisoners in prison are passionate about the gym. The gym is the most popular thing in prison, other than food. So they're food, then it will be gym. And the take-up rate, again, like, we, I was having this conversation with Ministry of Justice, like, within the prison system, so ethnic minorities make up, I think, 25% of our prison population. They attend the gym more regularly than Caucasian men in the gym system, in the prison system in this country. So you can engage with some of the most disenfranchised people involving gang activity straight away. You, you've got them in, they're susceptible then to change.

• 52:27Speaker 01

  And if you say, look, this, you, you've shown them positive role models and you've shown them ways that way, they can get away from that life by becoming a personal trainer or doing something that they're passionate about. When they get released, they're far more likely to stick at it than if you basically give them a qualification that they've got no interest in doing that when they get out of prison.

• 52:45Rich Roll?

  Yeah, I, I, I mean, I'm not that familiar with UK's prison system, and I'm certainly no expert in the prison industrial complex in the United States, but, you know, at the core of this whole thing is not just, you know, punishment, but rehabilitation. And we've just lost any appreciation for how to properly rehabilitate people when they're in prison. There doesn't seem to be very much energy put into that. And what we do is we just create, you know, we're just perpetuating and increasing the,

• 53:25Rich Roll?

  You know, the criminal underclass as a result. And in the United States, I don't know what the statistics are, but it's far more ethnic and minority than I would imagine it is here. And the prisons are privatized. So we have a built in incentivization to incarcerate more and more people, keep them in there longer and longer and longer because money is being made. And there are vested interests and lobbying groups that are trying to only increase the scope of a system that is inherently broken.

• 53:57Speaker 01

  And what you're saying there is if you look at like the European model of incarceration, so the United Kingdom hands out more life sentences a year than the whole continent of Europe puts together. So that's staggering. Our justice model is far more similar to yours in the States than it is Europe. And we've got, what, 12 miles of water between us and them, between us and like continent of Europe. And again, privatization of prisons, incentivizing, so another example. I went into a prison recently. So a prisoner was being paid, so he had no money. So he was in prison, he's got no cash outside, no real family.

• 54:41Speaker 01

  He's being paid to go to the workshops, five pound a session to make a file fax. So he's either got that choice or earning one pound fifty to go to English or Maths. He's got no money. So what does he pick? He wants to buy tobacco and he wants to buy tins of tuna. So he goes and he even said to me, what am I gonna do when I get out of prison making file faxes? And that is the problem, like you've just said, if you incentivize that part of prison and you start putting in call centers and you're paying them fifty pence a session, you give them like five, six sessions a day and they're earning like twenty, thirty pounds per week, or they're gonna do education and learn something, can better their lives, and they're only getting paid four pounds a week.

• 55:23Speaker 01

  It's quite simple where they're gonna go, where that flow's gonna end up going. And then you get this huge problem like we've got at the moment where it's costing fifteen billion pounds a year on people just coming out of prison and going straight back in again within a year. It's a huge, huge, huge problem.

• 55:39Rich Roll?

  Recidivism. So if you had your druthers, what is the reform that you would like to see that you think is actually achievable?

• 55:47Speaker 01

  I think there has to be, I think, I do generally believe that sport in prisons could be a far more powerful use tool than it is at the moment.

• 55:58Speaker 01

  As things stand, we're just, it's like a dog chasing its tail. Like, there's shortages of prison officers, that needs to increase because, again, if you haven't got the prison officers, you can't let the prisoners out to engage and access the courses and stuff to help them sort of change. But I believe sport could play a far more pivotal role in what it actually does at the moment. Like, sport and exercise in prisons is used, but it's not used to the degree in which it could. I think if you used it in prisons, I think, straight away, a prison officer would tell you this, violence would drop dramatically because you're allowing young men to vent that anger and frustration through physical activity whilst they're in prison. And again, I think they're more susceptible to change. I think that they wouldn't necessarily just keep getting up every morning and be driven

• 56:43Speaker 01

  by hatred towards the system. And again, lots of, in the gym setting in prisons, that relationship's so different to the relationship it is between guards that work on the prison wings and prisoners.

• 56:57Speaker 01

  A prison officer changed my life. If it wasn't for that Darren Davis, the prison officer at Loudoun Grange, that didn't just notice my athletic ability, but he actually had an interest in me being successful with no agenda. Like, he used to come in on his days off and sit with me as I tried to break some of the records on the round machine, and he'd bring me in books and he'd talk about his family, and I've developed a relationship with him, and that's taboo, like. Yeah, you're not supposed to do that. That does not happen, and that just shows you, like, when you get people like the prison officers, that if you have, if they're like Darren, and they can reach out to people and they treat them like human beings and go, I want you to be successful, a lot of these young men, it's the first time someone's ever really wanted that for them.

• 57:38Rich Roll?

  Yeah, but I would imagine a lot of the, you know, these officers, they're just hardened. You know, they're used to being on the receiving end of, you know, a lot of difficult situations and they just become emotionally checked out. So, I mean, how unique was the scenario where this guy took an interest in you?

• 57:57Speaker 01

  He is a very special man, like, I should have a doubt. Like, the way, and that wasn't just with me, that's what he continues to do with his job to today. Like, the way he treats inmates, he treats them like humans. He gives them a chance, like, to the degree where there's been occasions where he's had altercations with other prisoners and the prisoners have stuck up for him over the other prisoners when they've been having arguments. I think someone like Darren and me, together collectively, we can change mindset because I think you can go in and talk to these prison officers and say, "You're not just paid here to open up a door and lock it up. You're here, like, you are the frontline to help these men change their lives and show them there's job satisfaction and you're actually being appreciated that

• 58:42Speaker 01

  you're doing a massive task." Because also, of course, like, you, when I've gone into prison, you talk to the prison officers, I totally get it. If you're underpaid and you don't feel like the system and the government are really looking after you, you've got complete disinterest in your job, really. And if you've got no passion for it and you look at prisoners like scumbags and you just think, "Oh, I'm just gonna lock them up. I can't bother to deal with them. I'm not paid enough." Again, the circle just keeps continuing. And these guys get out and they foster more hatred towards the system and they come out and then the offending gets progressively worse.

• 59:12Rich Roll?

  Yeah, so you should go, maybe you already do this, but when you go and you give talks, you should go out together with him, right? You guys do that?

• 59:20Speaker 01

  We've done, yeah, we've done some joint talks together, but it's something that definitely, like, I want to develop as, because obviously I've got the balance in action at the moment with what I'm doing in Iron Man. And then once that's put to bed, that will free me up a lot more to do a lot more things that I want to sort of do.

• 59:38Rich Roll?

  Right, right, right. Well, let's bring it back to, you know, this sort of development of your criminal career. So, you're scoping out the armored trucks and when does it get, like, more serious to where you're actually committing these crimes and participating in them?

• 59:55Speaker 01

  So, that was when I was like 17. I then started getting more and more involved. And my stepdad gets arrested, um loads of his associates got arrested and he was the only one that wasn't arrested. And I remember the morning of his arrest, I said to him, you need to go. And he was so arrogant, he was like, they'll never be able to touch me. And then later on that day, they did, they ended up arresting him with armed police. So I knew it was probably highly probable that the police were probably aware of me. And again, my arrogance was they can't do nothing to me. There's not enough evidence, if there was enough evidence, they would already arrested me because they knew where I was and they

• 1:00:35Speaker 01

  didn't touch me. But what they did do, they they set a surveillance operation up on me. Um, and when I was gonna go and commit an offence one morning, they were waiting in ambush. And basically, cars come from everywhere. Um, I had this car chase, I got away. Originally, it was the furthest I'd ever run. Like, I can remember, I jumped over all these garden fences and I was being chased by police and I actually got away from them. And I felt like I was gonna have an asthma attack because I was so unfit. And I was in this telephone box. What was the crime you were trying to commit? So we was waiting for, well, we went there the night before to park up all the cars and we were gonna commit a robbery on a cashing transit van that was making a delivery to the post office. Um, so what we did, we went there the night before to park the cars up

• 1:01:18Speaker 01

  in the vicinity. And the police had watched us do this. So they knew it was gonna happen next morning. And then they basically were waiting in ambush for us. And then on the way there, they decided to try to arrest us. And that's where the car chase happened. And as I said, I got away from the actual car chase. And I was jumping over all these garden fences and I got to a telephone box. And I remember I used to always tuck twenty pounds in my sock to get a taxi home if anything ever went wrong. And the next thing I know, I heard a screech and I looked around and I saw this massive man running towards me with a gun pointing to me. And I thought I was dead. Like, I genuinely thought, I'm dead. And he, they all, he come running to the phone box and there was loads of others in my peripheral vision. They dragged me on the floor. And then he identified himself as a police officer. And I thought, oh, thank God for that. Like, I thought I was gonna be killed.

• 1:02:09Rich Roll?

  And so that was your first arrest?

• 1:02:11Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:02:12Rich Roll?

  And did they get you, were they trying to spin you or roll you to get some bigger names?

• 1:02:17Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:02:17Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 1:02:18Speaker 01

  Yeah, like, yeah.

• 1:02:19Rich Roll?

  Cause you're the young, you're the lowest on the totem pole, right?

• 1:02:22Speaker 01

  Yeah, they, they, they were, they were trying to intimidate me.

• 1:02:29Speaker 01

  But then when we got to the police station, like, there was a very famous criminal lawyer in Britain. And every most high-profile criminal was using. So when I got to the, when I got to the police station, like-

• 1:02:39Rich Roll?

  It's getting more and more like a movie.

• 1:02:41Speaker 01

  It was, he was, he was, he was like a family lawyer and the, um, yeah, and they, he, he basically, he was on the phone. He said, "Don't, don't tell them nothing. I'll, um, I'll send someone down." And then I was there for three days and, and then, then they tried to get really pally with you and it's all like, you're really sort of, oh, you're like your uncle and they tried to like, you become, they tried to become pally with you, even though they're not, they're trying to get snippet, they're trying to get you to lessen the mask, you let something slip out. Yeah, and I was there for three days and it was just no comment, no comment, no comment. And he was well-drilled on it. He was well-drilled not to tell them anything. I didn't tell them my name and address. I didn't tell them my, like, my date of birth. I was being as awkward as I possibly could be.

• 1:03:25Rich Roll?

  And they let you go?

• 1:03:26Speaker 01

  No, they didn't let me go.

• 1:03:26Rich Roll?

  Oh, they didn't?

• 1:03:27Speaker 01

  No, that, that was when-

• 1:03:28Rich Roll?

  So is that when you got the five years?

• 1:03:29Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:03:30Rich Roll?

  Ah, okay.

• 1:03:31Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:03:31Rich Roll?

  So you were like, you were just fresh out of the gate? Like, your, your career hadn't even really quite begun yet?

• 1:03:36Speaker 01

  No, but that, that was the downside to mixing with such high-profile criminals. So I was mixing with criminals that had been doing what they'd been doing for 20, 25 years. Lots of them have never really been arrested or they had, Billy had been out of prison at that point for like 11 years. They wasn't sort of revolving doors of prisoners in and out, in and out, in and out. It's just that when they went in, they went in for huge periods of time. And then come back out and just carried on doing what they did before they went in there.

• 1:04:03Rich Roll?

  And how often was it getting violent? Like, how often were the guns getting discharged and people getting hurt?

• 1:04:10Speaker 01

  Very, very rare. Very, very rare. Very rare. No, no one, no one ever got hurt. In fact, like, I was, again, my stepdad always used to say to me when I was young about- You don't need to be violent towards people. It's all about verbalizing and talking. Um. So it was never like that you would watch a a a movie, a Hollywood film, and everyone's running around with machine guns, letting them off into the sky and stuff. It wasn't like that at all. It was very controlled, very verbalized, very taking control of a situation verbally, letting them know that using control. Um. And people get lost in that sometimes again, because you see these, you see these films and things get glamorized and you watch some people, as I said, with machine guns shooting helicopters and stuff and.

• 1:04:54Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 1:04:54Speaker 01

  And it actually isn't like that. But it wasn't to the degree with the people that I was with, should I say.

• 1:04:59Rich Roll?

  What else is the, are the differences between the reality versus what you see on TV or in the movies of this world?

• 1:05:09Speaker 01

  One, one, like, the, it isn't sort of as vi- like as violent as what it's portrayed to be, and you get these nutcases with with guns, putting them to people's heads. That, that does not happen. Um. The drug abuse, that side of it, that happens quite prevalent, I would say, quite realistic, because again, you don't realize this when you're in that world, but I think people are trying to always escape the reality of what's gonna, inevitable, what's gonna happen to you. And you're always living in that moment. Um. It's like a form of escapism that you know eventually that it's gonna run its course.

• 1:05:43Rich Roll?

  Yeah, that dissonance of like fronting, like it's all gonna be good, but knowing in your.

• 1:05:48Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:05:48Rich Roll?

  Unconscious mind.

• 1:05:49Speaker 01

  You know, it's coming.

• 1:05:50Rich Roll?

  A matter of time.

• 1:05:51Speaker 01

  Yeah, i- i- and it's inevitable, like, you can't help but everyone that you, even if they're not close to you, you're always hearing about people having their doors kicked off and the police arresting them and someone getting arrested for this. So it's always in your subconscious that these things are going on, but you kind of believe that it's never gonna happen to you.

• 1:06:09Rich Roll?

  Mm hmm.

• 1:06:10Speaker 01

  But I do think when I look back now retrospectively, like, a lot of the stuff around the drugs and the drink and the party and. All stems back from that belief that you know eventually that you're gonna end up going down that same road.

• 1:06:24Rich Roll?

  And were you, did you, were you part of that?

• 1:06:26Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, definitely. And again, like being a young man like with my stepdad, like it was never discouraged. Like never, ever, ever like, I remember taking young friends out of mine that were the same age as me.

• 1:06:42Speaker 01

  And there wasn't that many of them, but I remember going out and giving them drugs and, and offering it to me.

• 1:06:47Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 1:06:47Speaker 01

  And I was, I was eighteen.

• 1:06:49Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 1:06:50Speaker 01

  It wasn't like, again, most fathers wouldn't do that with their children. But when you're in that life, that lifestyle, a lot of people that is flagrant disregard, like they just don't care. They don't care about anyone really, other than that really tight grouping of people.

• 1:07:06Rich Roll?

  Mm hmm. And where's all the cash go? Like where you keep, where do you, I mean, is it literally under the mattress? Or you have places where you're stashing it or are you laundering it?

• 1:07:15Speaker 01

  You would be, you'd be surprised by how a lot of people live when they do that. They live like footballers and it's like a never ending well of money. So whenever they start getting to a degree where they're getting low, they just go and commit another robbery. And they're stealing like hundreds of thousands of pounds, like they're not dealing a couple of thousands or millions sometimes. But they spend it as fast as it comes in because it's that high octane, never ending well of money that's gonna, and.

• 1:07:46Rich Roll?

  And how do you steal, like you gotta pay, like on some, you gotta pay some taxes though, right? Or then you have problems that way. So.

• 1:07:53Speaker 01

  Well, yeah, you get, you get, you get people that, you get people setting up a lot of.

• 1:07:57Rich Roll?

  You start just buying a lot of stuff with, with cash, then, you know, that's only gonna last so long.

• 1:08:02Speaker 01

  Yeah, you, you get a lot of people that, that buy a lot of restaurants and they buy a lot of industry where it's a lot of cash.

• 1:08:08Rich Roll?

  Park it all there and right, right, right.

• 1:08:10Speaker 01

  And there's.

• 1:08:12Speaker 01

  Yeah, there's a lot of ways people get around it like they've closed all the loopholes off the now, but like people would for instance, give someone that owned a property. Whatever the value of that property was and give it to him in cash and that would go to a businessman. That then had half a million pound in cash, but his house didn't really belong to him anymore. It belonged to this criminal. And if the criminal ever needed the money out of it, the guy would remortgage your house to get the money. And there was ways around where how people would sort of circumvent, send the money abroad. Send it up, invest money, people would put money into drugs. A lot of robbery money would be invested in basically other elements of criminal activity. So it's just a never ending.

• 1:08:46Rich Roll?

  But it's a lot of work, right? So it seems like, oh, easy, you, you, you pull off this robbery, you got all this money, but like, there's still a lot of, like that focus, like the, the level of like. Attention you have to pay to all of those things if it was channeled in a different direction, you know, if they were at Goldman Sachs, you know, they could probably. Have the same result.

• 1:09:06Speaker 01

  Yeah, totally. I, I, I just, just the other day I was, I was, I was having this conversation with a friend of mine and I was saying about like. How, when, when you look at like a lot of people involved in like drug trafficking and. If you got like a, a kilo of drugs in South America. And you managed to get that from there, and they're not just one kilo of drugs, talking tons. Across the Atlantic into Europe without ever sending an email, without ever making a phone call. And you've orchestrated that. And then the people are actively trying to show that you're linked to it. And you're keeping such a distance and so many people in between you and that, that they can't link that back.

• 1:09:45Speaker 01

  The intellect to do that is incredible. And even I used to get impressed with it sometimes. I'm like, how on earth like. That you get that from there to that level of, of like money. From one side of the world to the other and never even make a phone call or never directly be linked to it. And then you've got actively people like the DEA and the FBI, a serious and organized crime, trying to link you to it and they can't. And they know you're involved in it, but they can't.

• 1:10:14Rich Roll?

  Oh my God. All right. So, uh.

• 1:10:18Rich Roll?

  Fast forward to you getting busted and getting the five years.

• 1:10:23Speaker 01

  So, so yeah, I originally I was charged with nine counts of robbery.

• 1:10:29Rich Roll?

  Uh huh.

• 1:10:29Speaker 01

  Um, I was at the Old Bailey. I was 18 years old.

• 1:10:32Rich Roll?

  What's the Old Bailey?

• 1:10:33Speaker 01

  So it's like the highest criminal court in the United Kingdom. So it's like the real sort of, yeah, you can't, you can't get that. It's like the Supreme Court, I'd imagine in America. It's like the highest court in the land, criminal court. And I was category A because again, they believed I was such a high skate risk as a teenager and that made it quite exceptional because I couldn't be kept with young offenders. So if you're under 21, you can't be kept with male adults. But because I was so high security, I had to be kept with them because they believed that, because my uncle and my stepdad. So I go to court. I was looking at 16 years and I was 18 and like to me, a kid that was like, I can't even imagine like, I can't imagine I'm going to be in there for that long. And before my trial was about to commence, I was offered a plea bargain and it was for the five years and my solicitor said, take it.

• 1:11:18Speaker 01

  Take it. Cause at that point I'd served a year and he went, you'll do another year and a half, two and you're out. So I took it. The police were livid. They were all sitting in the dock at the Old Bailey. I was in courtroom number one. Um, Judge Goddard sentenced me, a lady. And, and as I was walking down, the police were all sitting in the footwell and I was so arrogant back then. And I looked at him and I said, it's a shit in a shave. I mean, I'll be out of there. And I was smiling and laughing. And I remember as I was walking down the steps, saying back to the cells, the prison officers that took me to the court were all laughing. And they said, did you see the looks on their faces? And I said, yeah. And I, and I was buzzing off it like it didn't bother. Again, that arrogance, it didn't bother me.

• 1:11:58Speaker 01

  Um, and then I went to back to the prison I was held in. And then that's when I got moved to the other prison where I ended up going into the, um, to that segregation unit. Where the process of my training and exercising really begun.

• 1:12:10Rich Roll?

  Right. So the fitness began with the first sentence.

• 1:12:13Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:12:13Rich Roll?

  Yeah. And how long were you in before you started? Well, so you were in there for a while. You get the you get the solitary. You decide to stay there for a year. And this is where this all this all begins.

• 1:12:25Speaker 01

  And then then I I got released.

• 1:12:27Rich Roll?

  Uh huh.

• 1:12:27Speaker 01

  I come out.

• 1:12:28Rich Roll?

  So you come out looking like a totally different person.

• 1:12:30Speaker 01

  Look like I completely no no one could even really recognize me. My mom, I I look completely different. I went in there like overweight, come out like I had abs and. I was very skinny. I was I went down to about eleven stone. Um, and I remember some people said I looked ill and but I felt good and but you I relapsed. So I started going out. Very sporadically go to the gym. Um, again, the greed, it was all about money. I was determined then to make even more money than before I was locked up. And a year and a half later, um, I get arrested for conspiracy to commit robbery. And like I said, it complete the game completely changed the second time. Got the two last sentences. Kept in a high security unit in Belmarsh.

• 1:13:11Speaker 01

  The minute I was in there, I knew I was going to be in there for a long time. I knew I wasn't gonna. There was no get out of jail cards. There was no plea bargains. There was nothing on the table. I was completely boxed up.

• 1:13:22Rich Roll?

  And no smirking in the courtroom.

• 1:13:24Speaker 01

  No.

• 1:13:24Rich Roll?

  No shit in the shade this time.

• 1:13:25Speaker 01

  No, there there there was absolutely nothing. I I knew like my solicitor on the first legal visit, I said, how bad is this? And he went. You're fifty fifty. You're gonna get a life sentence. And I said, really? And he said, yes. He said, like, it's one of the one of the most. Shut and cut places that I've I've seen with evidence.

• 1:13:45Rich Roll?

  Mm hmm.

• 1:13:45Speaker 01

  Um, and. We kind of just then I just had to accept it. And so when I went back, I knew I couldn't escape because they made that impossible. So again, I.

• 1:13:55Rich Roll?

  How often do people escape?

• 1:13:57Speaker 01

  Uh. It does happen. It does happen. It's very rare, but it does happen. Maybe one or two a year, but normally it's people getting them out. So it'd be like people going to court and someone stopping the van on the way to court and breaking.

• 1:14:11Rich Roll?

  Right, right. Not in the complex itself.

• 1:14:13Speaker 01

  Not not so much. That's very it's quite rare. That's quite rare. Like then. From from high security prisons, I don't think anyone managed to break out in the last like twenty years.

• 1:14:22Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 1:14:23Speaker 01

  So it's the very sort of bolt down type that they've got it and and they have.

• 1:14:26Rich Roll?

  Uh huh.

• 1:14:27Speaker 01

  Because believe me, I when I was in there, like you would look and there is nowhere to go. Like there is nowhere. I I can concede that point.

• 1:14:37Speaker 01

  And yeah, and I kind of just had to get my mindset back into right, I'm here. I can't get out, I can't break out, my friends can't help me get out. How do I get out of it as fast as I can?

• 1:14:49Rich Roll?

  And when you hear a life sentence or two life sentences, that doesn't mean what you think it means. There's still this, this potential opportunity that you're going to get a parole after a number of years. So realistically, what did you think you were looking at?

• 1:15:03Speaker 01

  Um, I knew I wasn't going to get out of my minimum tariff straight away. But my mindset back then, Rich, was I didn't intend to serve that prison sentence. So in my mind, when he sentenced me, it meant nothing. So people say to me, when I got the sentence and he said life, you'd expect it to have an impact on you where you'd, you'd, you'd shrivel down and you think, oh my God, my life's ended. I didn't. I listened to it and it meant nothing. I didn't respect the man that was giving it to me. I didn't respect the police. I didn't respect the Crown Prosecution, Crown Prosecution Service. So to me, in my mind, when I was got that sentence was, you can give me what you want, but there's no way I'm going to sit here and serve that whole sentence. And like I said, like I had to think of other ways that I could get out.

• 1:15:47Speaker 01

  I knew I couldn't get out through running for the door, like literally breaking out. They made that impossible because of the level of security I was on. So it was like, however, what other ways can I do to get out of it? And it was basically play the system, do what they want me to do. So when they took me back to the prison, I said, what are reoffending behavior courses do you want me to do? And they said, we want you to do X, Y, and Z. And I said, okay. They transferred me out to a high security unit. They moved me to another maximum security prison. I turned up there and I did the courses. And then the next year on my sentence plan board, what do you want me to do? And it is basically like, we want you to do this, this, this, and, and you do this, this, this. And you tick in all the boxes and they start downgrading you through the prison system.

• 1:16:24Rich Roll?

  Is it like educational stuff or what is it exactly?

• 1:16:27Speaker 01

  It's a mixture. So when you sit on your sentence plan board, you'll sit there and they'll say like, for the next year, we want you to get like, um, enhanced thinking skills. We want you to do a victim awareness course and we want you to do your English and maths, like GCSEs. And then you do that and the following year they say, we want you to now do this course. We want you to do like your A levels in English and maths and you do that. And then what happens as you go through year on year on year, you basically tick all these boxes. And then when you go on your parole hearing, it says that you've done everything they've wanted you to do. It becomes impossible for the parole board to say, we're not going to let you out. As long as you've not been violent in prison, you've not been violent to staff and other inmates. But again, I didn't even think that I would even, I had no interest in going to a parole

• 1:17:09Speaker 01

  board. Like, my thing was, I just needed to get out of this maximum security prison. So, and it happened. It worked. After two years, they downgraded me to a category B prison. And I think, I'm out. Like, this, this is my release. Like, I'm nearly out now. So they transferred me to this open, like, this category B prison. And I can't explain the difference in security is huge. Like, I went from being on this tiny little wing in, in this maximum security prison in, um, Yorkshire, up north, to this prison where, yeah, it, it was so open. There was not that many prison officers walking around. Um, it was very sort of relaxed. And I got there, straight away. You know people that know people. And I said, anyone got a mobile phone?

• 1:17:51Rich Roll?

  Mm hmm.

• 1:17:51Speaker 01

  People have mobile phones, and you're not allowed to have them, obviously. And I got a phone. I phoned up my friends that lived in the Netherlands. My best friend, Aaron. And I said to him, I've just got transferred here and stuff. And straight away, his first thing was, tell me when, when, the first opportunity you get to go, we'll get you out. And, and, and, and I know it sounds like a film, but this is how my mindset was back then, like, um, my, when, when my uncle was in prison, when, when I was a kid, they tried to break him out of a helicopter. Like, so, so this was always in my psychology. Like, I knew these things were possible.

• 1:18:21Rich Roll?

  It's a possibility.

• 1:18:22Speaker 01

  Yeah. So when I'm in, I'm access to the phones, I'm in regular contact with my friends in, in Holland and Spain. Um, and it was all about first opportunity, wait. And I was, okay, let me just see how things are going to shape up. And in two thousand and nine, um, my life changed forever. When I found out my friend that I was on the phone to all the time, Aaron, had died committing a robbery in the Netherlands. And, and that was the catalyst for, for me being a different person.

• 1:18:50Rich Roll?

  Mm hmm. Was there, like, an initial sense of, of, like, hopelessness? Or what was it exactly that shifted? Before you start to channel that into a positive direction?

• 1:19:01Speaker 01

  I remember, like, that stuff, people dying, people getting murdered, people getting stabbed, shot, like. It never happened to me. That bad stuff happened to other people. And I would talk to my friends and someone would say, guess what happened to Sir Blah Blah or so and so. So I was from a young person that I was always hearing about these things that were going on. That never happened to me. Me and my friends were good. You're immune, you're bulletproof. Yeah, that doesn't happen. Even I was in prison. You're smarter. That's, yeah, you, you don't anticipate that one day that other person's going to be someone that you love and care for. So when that happened to him, I can remember when I was, I was in disbelief.

• 1:19:46Speaker 01

  And I remember sitting in this prison cell and I was in complete disbelief. Like I couldn't actually compute that he was dead. And then the following evening, um, on the news on channel three. Because it was so rare that these English criminals were committing crime abroad in the Netherlands. It made news at ten. It was our prime time news. And I remember sitting in this prison cell, watching my prison TV. And my friend run up to the CCTV camera and sprayed a can of CS spray into the lens. And the camera froze literally before he sprayed it. And, and I know it was my friend. I could tell by his eyes. I could see it was him. And I remember sitting in that cell, watching the last moments of his life.

• 1:20:27Speaker 01

  And then the camera crew then cut away to the car because as they were getting away, the car tyre blew out, the car flipped, my mate got thrown out the car. And the car was just a crumpled mess on the side of this Dutch motorway. And I remember sitting in that cell and, and I, I looked at my life. And it, and I, and I realized that precious life is like, that should have been me in that car. I should have been that person. I was the one that nearly got shot by the police two times. I was the one that had the mad car chases with the police. I was the one that drove guns up and down. My friend didn't. My friend got unlucky one night, never been in trouble with the police in his life. He committed a crime with a group of people and one night that cost him his life.

• 1:21:08Speaker 01

  And then I looked at my life in that place and everything that I was brought up to believe in about the system. Um, money was everything. It wasn't. And I I felt embarrassed. I it was pathetic. Like, I looked at my life in that prison cell and I had a sixteen thousand pound gold Rolex watch on my wrist.

• 1:21:25Rich Roll?

  In prison?

• 1:21:26Speaker 01

  In prison. No, because again, it was it was how arrogant I was. Because to me, that was a demonstration, an expression. That even though you've put me in here, I've still got money and you can't take that off me and you can't change me. And subconsciously, again, it was that expression of of of of power over the system. It wasn't about me saying to the working man, fuck you, like, you've got no money or anything. It was about me demonstrating to the system that I've got these nice things and you can't do nothing. And again, it is, it was it was controlled and I looked how pathetic it was and. All of these men growing up as a kid that I looked up to and they were my heroes. They were all old men sitting in prison or they were dead and my friend just lost his life. And I knew from that moment that that was me done.

• 1:22:10Speaker 01

  I honestly, like, I can't express it into words. It was like someone switched on a light in my head. And I had this awareness of how precious your life is as a human. Um, and the next morning I went down for breakfast in the communal eating area and there was all these guys. And they were talking about when they got out, they was gonna do this and that. And this person was an informer and he was a grass and he was gonna do this and that. And I thought, I can't be around these people no more. I can't listen to this rubbish. And the only way I can explain it is like if you was a drud addict. And you wanted to get off drugs, but you was locked in a crack den around drud addicts and you're trying to get off. And I needed, I I wasn't fortunate where I couldn't get up and walk out of that place. I was trapped physically.

• 1:22:54Speaker 01

  So again, I had to then develop a way of a form of escapism to take me out of that world. Like, take me out, not just prison physically, but mentally.

• 1:23:04Rich Roll?

  Mm hmm.

• 1:23:05Speaker 01

  And that's when training took on a far greater significance to me and exercise.

• 1:23:09Rich Roll?

  So did you then resume that, like, diligent, uh, you know, protocol of the pushups and the situps and the stepups and all of that? Or was there was there the rowing machine there and you just said, okay, I'm gonna try this or like?

• 1:23:23Speaker 01

  What what it was, when when you're in prison, you get limited to the amount of gym access that you can have. And I and so your gym, your wing gets gym certain times a week. That's it. So you get three gym sessions a week on your wing. And this will stop you from meeting people on different wings in case of fights and stuff. And when I went down to gym, there was this guy on the rowing machine. And he was down at every session I was on, and he wasn't on my wing. And I went up to him and I asked him, I said, what are you doing? And he said, I'm rowing this million metres for a children's hospice. And I said, what, and they let you row as much gym as you want? And he said, yes. So I went to the prison officer that works in the gym. And I said, can I do what he's doing? And he said, if you go back up on the wing with sponsorship forms and a prisoner sponsor you. Come back down, give it to us.

• 1:24:06Speaker 01

  You can row and raise money for children, for the children's charity. So I went up, I went and did it. Come back, gave him the shorts and he, he, he forms and he gave me a dispensation note. So it allowed me to get off the wing to go down the gym as much as I wanted. Uh huh. So it was to row a million metres and you could row it five K a day, ten K a day, twenty K a day, however you want to row it. Got on the rowing machine, first session I'd done at twenty six was twenty miles, so I rode thirty two thousand metres. And when I did it. I was in another world and I mean that like. People left me alone, prisoners didn't talk to me, prison officers didn't talk to me. And I remember looking at this little monitor in this prison gym and I could have been anywhere in the world. And I just honestly, it was like the only, it's the nearest I could say it was like meditation.

• 1:24:49Speaker 01

  It was a form, it genuinely was like a form, it transcended me out of prison. I could have been anywhere in the world. And obviously I didn't understand about endorphins, I didn't understand about that. But that is obviously what was happening. I did it the next day, I went back down thirty two thousand metres, next day thirty two thousand metres. And then I just, it become a compulsive to go down and keep doing the same distance. I did the first million metres, a thousand K in a month. And then I thought, I can keep doing this and this is going to help me get through my prison sentence. So I asked if I could do another million, said yes, did that, did the third million in three months. Mm hmm. Then a prisoner went to me, if you row five million metres, that's equivalent from around from Britain to America. So it's equivalent to the Atlantic. Uh huh. So I asked the prison officer, I said, look, can I just row the extra two million?

• 1:25:29Speaker 01

  Um, and it's cool thing to say that I've rode across the Atlantic, but really it was because it kept me in the gym for two more months. As I was getting through the fourth million, um.

• 1:25:41Speaker 01

  I woke up an ability in my body that I never knew I even had. I'm in this little bubble in a prison. Um, you, you're not in the real world, you're in this cocoon, you don't know what fitness is, you don't, you, it's warped. I've never been against athletes, I didn't know what was good, what was bad, I just knew in prison, on this ram machine, I could hold better numbers than Bob next to me. And a prison officer Darren Davis walked behind me one day and he looked over my shoulder and he went, wow. He went, that is, is quick. And he left. And then a couple of days later, he came back with all of these sheets of paper and they had all the world and British records on the indoor ram machine.

• 1:26:21Rich Roll?

  Uh huh.

• 1:26:21Speaker 01

  And he gave them to me. And honestly, Rich, at that moment, I remember looking at this list and I was like, I can break some of them records now. And I didn't think they were real, I genuinely didn't. And, and I'd woken up, this, this physical ability in my body, I never, I never knew I had.

• 1:26:36Rich Roll?

  Uh huh.

• 1:26:36Speaker 01

  I, I was good at endurance sport and I never realised it. And it planted a seed and I went back to my cell and I come back and I said, can I do this? Can I try to break some of these records? He went to a man called Gareth Sands and Gareth Sands was the governor of this prison. He was a deeply religious man, like really, really religious. And Darren went, this guy prisoner John, he, he, he wants to do something with his life, he wants to change and I believe this could help him. Will you let him try to break these records from prison?

• 1:27:06Rich Roll?

  Uh huh. And I don't want to interrupt you, but had you voiced your desire to transcend your criminal upbringing and change your life? Or were you just sort of quietly, you know, hitting the erg every day? Like, had you told this guard, like, look, man, I, I really.

• 1:27:23Speaker 01

  Do you know what, I, I never had, I never, I never had that conversation with him because again, like.

• 1:27:27Rich Roll?

  He could just see it and you sensed it.

• 1:27:29Speaker 01

  He, he, he could sense a physical ability and I, and I think he could sense that I was a good guy, I was, I, I, I wasn't horrible. I, the way I treated people in prison, um, even to the regard that the other week, like, I can't even remember this. A guy on Instagram commented on one of my photos and I'd read this, I read the message. And I met this guy, he said he was in prison with me. I can't remember meeting him and he was like, I remember the impact you had on my life when you was in prison. And you was on the ram machine, you was encouraging me. And he went, you made me feel so special and it helped me better my life. And I, I can't remember, but I, that's what I mean. Again, I wasn't a bully. I wasn't a horrible person. And I think Darren could see that in me.

• 1:28:12Speaker 01

  And he saw that I was good and he thought this guy could do something here. So he went away and the governor approved it. So Darren, a lot of the prison officers, they're not so sort of, they're not so open minded and stuff and.

• 1:28:26Rich Roll?

  They're trying to take you down a peg.

• 1:28:27Speaker 01

  A lot of them don't wanna, a lot of them then didn't wanna. I don't know if you, it might be not want you to succeed, but Darren did. So Darren had to come in on his days off, so he wasn't being paid by the prison. To sit with me, to, to basically validate the records. And they, they had to set a camera up, they had to put a special chip card in the ram machine to pull the data off. And take photographs and film it. So the first record I broke was for the marathon and I broke it by seven minutes.

• 1:28:56Rich Roll?

  So marathon twenty six point two miles.

• 1:28:58Speaker 01

  Yes, on indoor row.

• 1:29:00Rich Roll?

  Right. British record.

• 1:29:02Speaker 01

  British, British record.

• 1:29:03Rich Roll?

  Right. You broke it by seven minutes?

• 1:29:05Speaker 01

  Seven minutes, I broke the first one by.

• 1:29:07Rich Roll?

  For, in your first attempt.

• 1:29:09Speaker 01

  First attempt. And, and even to the degree, I can remember, so when, when we, when, when I did it. Like, I can't tell you my lack of knowledge on nutrition, like.

• 1:29:21Speaker 01

  Glycogen, sugar, energy drink, I, I did, I didn't have access to it for a start, so I didn't have gels or any of that sort of stuff. It was only my basic knowledge. So when I was doing the record, I, I promise you. A prisoner had to go and get me a sashel of these like sugars and I was putting raw sugar in my mouth and drinking water. Right, like what you would put in your coffee. Yes, that stuff. So I was having to put that in as energy. Um. And obviously, I like, it made me start feeling sick and stuff, but it just about got me through it. Uh huh. And I remember when I broke that record, I was laying on the gym mat after and I remember feeling this overwhelming sense of achievement and and everything I'd ever wanted as a young

• 1:30:05Speaker 01

  kid to be better than average, to achieve something in my life, to leave a legacy. I felt it, everything I could do it through that, through sport. Mm hmm. And I could use my ve- my body as a vehicle to get me out of that world and not only that, but be successful. Mm hmm. And this was the thing that I could do to find that success. Then from that moment, I become obsessed with being an athlete, like to the degree where I'd go down to the library every Friday and I used to get the librarian, she had to order books in from the outside library into the library because obviously there wasn't that many prisoners interested in sports nutrition. Uh huh. And training and stuff. So she would send to get these orders and and bring them in and I'd have a week, I'd read, read, read, read, read. And I started to understand

• 1:30:49Speaker 01

  about physiology, I started to understand about sports nutrition. Then I started reading all these books, Lance Armstrong's book, all these Olympic rowers. What year is this? This was in two thousand and nine. Hmm. And I started reading all these autobiographies of all these athletes and I was like, I've got these characteristics, I know I can be successful. And then from that moment, my dream in prison was being an athlete. That was it. Within sixteen months, I'd set eight British records and three world records on the indoor row machine. And I was, at one point, I was the only lightweight man in the world to have all three ultra endurance world records simultaneously at one point. And and that was it. I knew that I had this ability then. And and Darren said it to me when you've got the ability, not that you're

• 1:31:32Speaker 01

  fit, but you have the ability that you can suffer. And he went, if you come out of prison and you waste that gift, it will be the biggest travesty that I've ever seen as a prison officer. And those words to this day stick with me in my mind every single time I race in the Ironman on that marathon.

• 1:31:50Rich Roll?

  I'm trying to imagine how this must have shook up the rowing community. I mean, did this make news when you were doing this? I'm just, I'm picturing like the guys at Oxford and Cambridge who are getting the print out like, what do you mean? Who's this guy? Like, he's in prison? He broke these world records? Like, what's going on here?

• 1:32:07Speaker 01

  Do you know what? You'll be very surprised. It actually didn't. And the reason it didn't, so when the, when the records went on the system, they wasn't being put down that I was a prisoner. They were just putting my name and, and I was in Nottingham. So there was none of that sort of fanfare around it.

• 1:32:23Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 1:32:23Speaker 01

  The only time, like, again, it seems very cinematic. I broke the world record for the most amount of distance rode in 24 hours on an indoor rowing machine. And I rode 265,000 meters in 24 hours. And I remember Darren said, start the record at four o'clock in the afternoon, and then you'll finish at four o'clock the next day in the afternoon, because in that way you'll be able to go to bed that night and you, your, your, your body clock's not going to be all out of sync. And I remember I went back on the wing the following morning. I broke that world record by 13 miles. And when I went on, it even to today, I can remember it. They opened up the gates on this wing and I walked on, and all of the prisoners were being kept aware of what I was doing. They kept saying

• 1:33:05Speaker 01

  to prison officers, is he broken it? Is he nearly going to break it? And what happened? When I was in prison, I had become a bit of a champion because I was competing against people outside. And so the prisoners in prison wanted me to do it.

• 1:33:19Rich Roll?

  Yeah, of course.

• 1:33:19Speaker 01

  They wanted me to break their record. And I remember walking on and these prisoners were on the landings and they was all clapping that I come on and I broke this record. And I felt, I remember feeling, I felt shattered, but I felt amazing. I thought, wow, like, I've just achieved something amazing. And, and I've had that sort of impact. All these people wanted me to do it. And it was, it was an incredible feeling. And, and it's, it's only since, like, since I've been out, I've gone back to that prison, and they've got like pictures of when I broke the records on the, in the gym. And, and it's, it's absolutely incredible, like, to know that you can plant those seeds in other people's heads to show them what you can do with your life. But yeah, that, that was.

• 1:33:59Speaker 01

  It it was amazing, but then it did start becoming really frustrating when I couldn't get out. Um, I broke all the records I could break, but there was none left for me to do. I realised I had this physical potential. I was young, I was strong, I was the fittest or fittest rowing fit I've ever been in my life. Um, but I was trapped in prison and I couldn't get out. I was doing these life sentences and I remember I went through a real sort of stage where it becomes so frustrating to me. Like, I knew I changed, I was demonstrating it, I broke all these records and and people were saying how amazing it was and and but they wouldn't let me out. Cause I still had a year left to serve my prison sentence.

• 1:34:41Speaker 01

  Um, and that got delayed because they they sort of made mistake bureaucratic mistakes and that led to me end up being in there three years um over what I'd originally been sentenced to.

• 1:34:52Rich Roll?

  So when did you eventually get out and how did that work?

• 1:34:55Speaker 01

  So my first parole hearing, we sat there and I had to get released in front of a Crown Court judge, he had to come in.

• 1:35:02Rich Roll?

  And what year is this?

• 1:35:03Speaker 01

  This was in the first parole, two thousand and eleven. And I remember, so you get your Crown Court judge retired, he sits in front of you and it's a typical parole hearing, now you can imagine it, you've got your judge in front of you, directly in front of you, you've got to his left a layperson, a member of the public, you've got a criminal psychologist, you've got your probation officer sitting next to you and your solicitor sitting next to you. And the judge went to me, what are you, what are your release plans? So I said, I'm gonna be a professional athlete. And he'd sat, he sat back in his chair and he was smiling at me and he leant forward and he went, I have never heard a prisoner sit in front of me and sat, but I, Rich, I absolutely believed it. And I know you might think I'm making this up, but.

• 1:35:44Rich Roll?

  Oh, I believe, no, I don't think you're making that up. I mean, you just broke three world records, you didn't just break them, you crushed them.

• 1:35:50Speaker 01

  It was.

• 1:35:51Rich Roll?

  Without knowing anything really even about the sport and having never been in a boat and and having not grown up as an athlete. I believe you.

• 1:35:58Speaker 01

  It it was like, and he smiled and he went, I've never said, I've never heard a prisoner ever come and say that in all the years I've sat, life centres or parole hearings. So I had a criminal psychologist that does reports on you in prison. And he looked at him and he went, what we're seeing today, would you say this is all smoke and mirrors? And the criminal psychologists in British prisons, they're notorious. That people often say, a swoop of a pen can keep you in prison for years. Mm hmm. If if they believe, so they have to diagnose if you've got an underlying psychological disorder, so sociopath, psychopath. If you are, you're a massive risk to the public and obviously then you're probably never going to get out until you've gone through all these special courses that they want you to do.

• 1:36:44Speaker 01

  And I thought, oh my god. You said you're delusional. Please, yeah. And actually, the the psychologist said to him. If he he's gone well beyond what he would have had to have done to try to pull the wool over your eyes. He went like, he could have just done a couple of level three gym instructor courses and said the same thing. He went, but the stuff he's done, you could not black. Like he was talking about the the longest continuous row and those things. He went, you physically couldn't do it unless he he deeply, deeply had a desire to do it. So the judge basically asked me to leave the room. I went back in and they didn't release me. They, what they done. I get it. He went, I don't think your release plan is based in reality. He went, but I'm going to move you to a semi-open prison.

• 1:37:29Speaker 01

  So we can slowly integrate you back into society. Hmm. So they moved me to an open prison where I was able to go out every day and work voluntarily in a in a fitness first gym. Um. It's like halfway house. Yeah, basically. It's still, you're still in prison, but it all works on trust. So if you if you left and didn't want to go back, you didn't have to. But it did. It reintegrated me back in society. I got used to working. I never had a job in my life. Um, I started working as a personal trainer in this gym, in this little village up north. Um, and yeah, and I was there for a year and a bit. And then I ended up getting released in two thousand and twelve after the Olympics. I get released, I Google high performance rowing clubs in London and this London rowing club comes up in near Putney in southwest London. And it was like a feeder system into the GB setup. Yeah.

• 1:38:14Speaker 01

  So I go down there and just to give people a bit of an understanding. Physiologically, for my weight, for a lightweight man, I was putting out the same, so you get. Your two K and your five K in rowing, those numbers mean everything. Mm hmm. That that is it. So there's minimum requirements that you have to pull on a rowing machine. To even be looked at to become an international rower. If you don't pull those numbers, you won't even be looked at. They won't even watch you row in the water. So my two thousand meter time was fourteen seconds faster.

• 1:38:48Speaker 01

  What you would have needed to get into the international GB squad. And on on my five K, it was, I think it was like thirty eight seconds faster. So aerobically, I was much stronger over five K. But the problem that I had that I soon realised. Was rowing is such a technical sport that in rowing, you're classed as a veteran at twenty six.

• 1:39:09Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 1:39:09Speaker 01

  I took it up at twenty nine, I was nearly thirty, and I realised quite soon that I couldn't get to that level in rowing that I wanted to as an athlete.

• 1:39:17Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 1:39:18Speaker 01

  So I had to make a tough decision after four months that this isn't gonna work, this isn't gonna facilitate me doing what I wanna do. So I had to basically, I looked around and when I was in prison, I I saw this episode of Transworld Sport and there was a show called Ironman or a sport. Um it was an Ironman show within it and I remember watching Kona and and I just remember thinking, these men are. That is un- it's incredible, like watching them get off bikes and running like two and a half hour marathons. And it inspired me when I was in prison. And then when I knew I was I couldn't become a professional athlete being a rower, I went on Google. Googled the criteria and I thought, right, I'm gonna go and do Ironman. Um I went off on eBay and I bought a bike. As I said, I've never ridden a bike, I was thirty now. Um I taught myself to swim off YouTube videos.

• 1:40:04Rich Roll?

  Never swam.

• 1:40:04Speaker 01

  Never ever swam, ever. Like even when I was out of prison. You might have caught me in a sea bobbing around like when I was on holiday, but no swimming, no nothing. Um so I basically taught myself to swim. And the only race I could do was Ironman UK, because I wasn't allowed to leave the United Kingdom. And Ironman UK was in six weeks' time after I decided that I went to do Ironman. So that was where I was gonna do it. So I just thought, well, I'm going at the deep end. So I go into Ironman UK, I tried to enter the race, sold out. So I had to go and get a charity ballot place. And get into Ironman UK six weeks later. So the furthest I'd ever swam was the day of the race, the furthest I'd ever cycled was the day of the race. But I'd run, like I'd run further than that before, like as a longer than a marathon.

• 1:40:48Rich Roll?

  You had run longer than a marathon.

• 1:40:50Speaker 01

  Yeah, like so I probably I should have probably mentioned this earlier on. So when I was in the open prison, um I decided to run an ultra marathon. Because I was wanting to test my body, I wanted to, I wanted a different challenge. So. The governor there, there was the gym instructors in the prison. Um, there was a couple of them like in the Royal Navy. And then when they retired from the Royal Navy, they come to work in the prison service. And obviously they knew I was this really fit guy, um, come there. I broke all these records, so my reputation sort of proceeded before I got to prison. So all these prison officers are like this guy that's broke all these prisons. And obviously a bit of banter and stuff like that. And one of them started talking about ultra marathon running. And I was like, all right, what is it? And said, anything over a marathon and stuff. So I said, oh, cool.

• 1:41:32Speaker 01

  And when I was working out in the gym, I used to go to the library in the village before. I would go to the gym to work every morning. So I'd had like a little half hour window to get the bus, half hour, go to this library, go on there. Ultramarathons, there was an ultramarathon from London to Brighton, which was like fifty six miles long. And I went back to prison, I said, look, do you reckon they let me out to do it? So like for the weekend. So they go away, says, yeah, the governor says you can do it. So the only running I had ever done was on a treadmill in the prison gym. Um, furthest I've ever run was ten K on a treadmill. And the next thing you know, they've given me this note to start the London to Brighton ultra marathon. So they let me out. I'll go down to Blackheath where the London marathon starts and literally you run from there. It's a trail marathon down to the coast.

• 1:42:14Speaker 01

  And, and it was probably, as I said, considering I've never run, one of the hardest things. I think I'd ever done, like, I remember my legs, my quads. After I finished. You finished it. Yeah, I did it, I did it, I twelve hours I did it in. And then I remember like when I was running down the hills, I had to run backwards because my quads were completely gone. And then I paralyzed myself afterwards. I got the taxi coming back and I remember the taxi driver dropped me back from Brighton back to London. And he didn't want to take the money. He went, I cannot believe you run from London to Brighton. And I walked back to the prison, all my legs were bruised up, where all the swelling come out. But yeah, it was amazing. It was amazing, like, one million percent.

• 1:42:55Speaker 01

  When I've finished with Ironman, I will hundred percent do an ultra marathon in. Like to me, it is, it is amazing, like the, the, oh, the way you feel is so much harder than Ironman. So, so, so, so much hard. My, I'm psychologically, I feel like it's more challenging. Um, physically, it's cha- it is harder. Um, but I enjoy, I love running. I love it. I find like when I run now, like, I love, I don't like running with other people. I like running on my own. It's, it's like a form of meditation. I, I can really, I find it really hard to relax. Like, I'm always thinking about stuff. Like, when I go out riding my bike, I'm always thinking about things. To swim, I'm always think, I can't switch off.

• 1:43:34Speaker 01

  But when I run, just switch off. And I could be anywhere in the world again. And it's as near, if not more than when I used to sit on that round machine.

• 1:43:43Rich Roll?

  From 10K being your longest run on a treadmill, not even running 10K like on roads or trails to running 56 miles on a trail.

• 1:43:52Speaker 01

  It was amazing though.

• 1:43:54Rich Roll?

  And I'm still like picturing, we've kind of put rowing in the rear view, but you kind of rolling up on this, you know, semi-elite rowing club, having never been in a boat before and saying, oh yeah, here, here's my, here, you could look at these numbers, you know, and they're faster than probably most of the guys in the club, right? I mean, it must have been like, who is this guy?

• 1:44:16Speaker 01

  Like, the, one of the first sessions I've done, so I, I got released from prison on a Friday. Saturday morning, I, I go down to the club. Um, the head coach there was like,

• 1:44:24Rich Roll?

  Who are you?

• 1:44:25Speaker 01

  Yeah, like, I, I emailed him before I come down. I said, so he was aware I was gonna turn up. They did not take novice rowers. But he said to me, what, what's your 2K time? So I told him. And he went, all right, that, that is good. And he was like, and he, he had this philosophy and he said all the time, you can't coach what God's given you. And he, he used to say to me, if you've got a big engine, you can't, some people not, just haven't. And you can coach that big engine to row well. And that's all you need to do. That's my job. So you, I know you've got the raw power and it's my job to teach you how to use that power on a boat. But if you haven't got that power, doesn't matter how much you technically get good, the guy with a bigger engine will always beat you when he learns to get that sort of, the technical element.

• 1:45:09Rich Roll?

  But the problem is you just needed to get in a boat as a much younger person.

• 1:45:13Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:45:14Rich Roll?

  It's the same with swimming. It's really hard to learn swimming.

• 1:45:16Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:45:17Rich Roll?

  You know, older, when you're older, you know, in your later years, it's just something that you can pick up quite easily if you're in the right environment.

• 1:45:23Speaker 01

  Totally.

• 1:45:24Rich Roll?

  But like trying to, you can learn to run, you can learn to ride a bike, but like swimming, it's, it's, it's a whole different thing.

• 1:45:29Speaker 01

  And you see it when you see people like come across from doing like cycling, running backgrounds into Ironman, but they get to a point where they just don't progress. And the people that are like those low fifty, sub fifty minute swimmers, you tend to find come from swimming backgrounds that have swum their whole lives. And like to them, pumping out those sort of times isn't really a challenge. Where like the other guys are like trying to just get under the hour and stuff.

• 1:45:51Rich Roll?

  Yeah, and they're expending a lot more energy. Cause, cause the people who really know how to swim know how to make the water work for them. So they're so much more efficient and their output is, is de minimis compared to the guy who's, you know, just slashing the water.

• 1:46:05Speaker 01

  Me.

• 1:46:06Rich Roll?

  Yeah, yeah. So how did that first Ironman go? I mean, six weeks, like, there's only so much you can do in six weeks.

• 1:46:13Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:46:14Rich Roll?

  Especially when you don't know how to swim.

• 1:46:15Speaker 01

  So like the, the guys, there was a couple of guys at the rowing club that like were there just recreating and we were chatting about it. And like one of them said to me, um, he said, look, there's no point you going out doing massive bike rides now because you've never ridden a bike. You'll probably get injured. So you may as well just ride the distance in the race.

• 1:46:32Speaker 01

  So it was, it, it was, it was like, when I race, I put like, I've, I see this as an athlete. So I've nearly been killed two times, right? Literally been to the point where I'm fractions of inches away from a policeman shooting me dead. In the bigger picture of things in life, like I've nearly lost my life. So I look at everything like that through that lens. So there's a really doing a race, doing a swim in Ironman, it's, it's not really that big of a deal. Or getting on a bike, riding a bike, like it's just physical activity. Sack exercises is no real greater significance other than that. Like I'm not going to lose my life doing it. And I just put it into relative terms of like, when I've had my life taken off me for 10 years, that's in that, that, that's stress.

• 1:47:15Speaker 01

  That's a lot of stress to go through. Like when, when you're an Ironman, I see that as a privilege. I'm there that morning. I'm physically able to do it. One day I won't be able to like, and I, I see it as a massive honour and privilege to be there and be able to physically do it and compete it. And I did that morning. I turned up. I didn't have any fear whatsoever. And I thought, just experience it and see what it's like. And do you know what? The only thing that I really got from it, like Monday was amazing when I finished it, like to watch that TV show in prison. And then be there and actually do it and run down that red carpet was was incredible. But it was when I was on the bike, one of the pro guys went past me. And even though I'd never obviously ridden that dirt, he lapped me because it was like three loops of the same circuit.

• 1:47:58Speaker 01

  And I thought that will never happen to me again in an Ironman race. I remember that. And and that they those were the things that really stuck with me and I finished the race and. And I thought, right, I didn't, honestly, Rich, I didn't feel that touched by it. I didn't feel. I I felt comfortable. I felt I was within myself. Like, I didn't, I didn't feel like I was gonna blow up. I wasn't massively quick. Like, Ironman UK is quite hilly and I did it in like eleven and a half hours. So I finished, I think, a hundredth out of like three and a half thousand people. Um, but I just thought.

• 1:48:26Rich Roll?

  Eleven and a half in six weeks without knowing how to swim and having never ridden a bike.

• 1:48:31Speaker 01

  I was very rowing fit though. I was very.

• 1:48:33Rich Roll?

  Yeah, I get that.

• 1:48:35Speaker 01

  But it was, um, but yeah, and then I thought, right, this is, this is what I'm gonna do. This is it. And and then I I started, um, I made a lot of, I made a lot of errors then. Um, because then I thought it was too easy. And I thought I would train how I trained on a rowing machine in prison, the same Ironman. So I went from basically never really being a runner to running nearly a marathon every Saturday, Sunday morning around Battersea Park. Within eight weeks, I could comfortably run sub three hour marathons. It wasn't hard. It it was like, I remember, and what happened, it become very addictive because. I was talking to guys and they were like, they're talking about like running a sub three at London, singing. That's not hard. Like, I can do that in training. I do it all the time. I do it every Saturday.

• 1:49:18Speaker 01

  And and I I got quicker and quicker and quicker. And the and the and the same thing, bike, I was riding indoor bikes, what bikes in the in the in the rowing club. My watts just got bigger and bigger and bigger because I I kept training as hard as I could every session because the suffering.

• 1:49:32Rich Roll?

  And you're just, you're freewheeling it though. Like, you're not working with a coach.

• 1:49:35Speaker 01

  No program, no nothing. And again, that was something, this is something that stood stuck with me from being a kid of distrust. Like, I thought to myself then, this is my goal. This is my dream, not someone else's. And I don't trust anyone else with this. And and I thought I knew better. I thought that I could do this myself. And and as I said, I dug myself into the biggest hole, like. I was sweating, I was waking up in the early hours of the morning sweating, I was getting up early. And then to me, then it become. How much do I like, even though I feel like crap, I'm just gonna go out and just keep hammering it. And I'm gonna hammer it. And, and again, I just kept digging this hole and I was getting quicker, but my body wasn't recovering. It was breaking down, it was breaking down. And then I end up really getting sick. I started, um, I went on a training camp.

• 1:50:18Speaker 01

  And I remember going for a swim one morning and I, I couldn't breathe. And I thought, what, I've never felt anything. I, I could not breathe, physically breathe. And I got out of water and then later on that day I was in a car, couldn't breathe again. And obviously I was having like a panic attack where I was draining the life out of my body. Got a virus, then went back to Ironman, yeah, K D, the, the, the following year.

• 1:50:37Rich Roll?

  Mm hmm.

• 1:50:38Speaker 01

  And just absolutely fell apart. It was the most humiliated I'd ever felt in my life. I felt worse that day than I ever did being in any of those courts, getting that life sentence. I felt ashamed. Um, I, all my friends, like, like Terry come up, my really close friend and Darren, the prison officer come up. And I remember like them being on the side of the course. I feel I let everyone down. They put a lot of time and, and I come away from that race. And I realized I didn't have the skills to, to, to coach myself.

• 1:51:09Rich Roll?

  Or the humility.

• 1:51:10Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:51:10Rich Roll?

  You know, the humility is the big lesson there. Going from this stubborn guy who thinks he knows best. You can't be a great athlete without the humility to be able to take direction from people who, who wanna help you.

• 1:51:21Speaker 01

  Hmm. Totally. And I, and I had to realize that, but I had to realize it in that moment. That had to happen to me.

• 1:51:27Rich Roll?

  That had to happen. Yeah. Otherwise you, you, you're, you were unteachable.

• 1:51:30Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:51:30Rich Roll?

  Right?

• 1:51:30Speaker 01

  Totally.

• 1:51:31Rich Roll?

  So your most impressive world record is perhaps, uh, uh, a world record from going from complete novice to overtrained in the shortest period of time.

• 1:51:42Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah. I went from like, yeah, I went from like li- literally zero hours for Ironman training to like thirty five, forty hours a week. I've just, yeah, just as hard as I could do it.

• 1:51:54Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 1:51:54Speaker 01

  That was all.

• 1:51:55Rich Roll?

  The body can't absorb that much that quickly.

• 1:51:57Speaker 01

  But I thought he could.

• 1:51:58Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 1:51:58Speaker 01

  And I, and again, I thought he could, cause I was thinking, I've owed two hours a day every day in prison on a rowing machine. I remember like some of those sessions when I was in prison, um, on those rowing machines and, and I got to like a couple of million meters and it was, it was every day. Like there was no rest days and my hand, it was like the tendons of my hand become like a claw and I, you could unclick my fingers. So I, I knew I had that propensity to push myself that hard.

• 1:52:21Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 1:52:21Speaker 01

  And to me, that suffering of getting up in the morning and feeling like crap because I was overtraining. Was to me an expression of how much I wanted this goal because it was like I can suffer more than other people and that really become my Achilles tendon but it was the best thing that happened to me falling apart that day.

• 1:52:36Rich Roll?

  Yeah, better then than now, right? So it must have taken you a while to climb out of that hole.

• 1:52:41Speaker 01

  Yeah, like I had to go to hospital and I had ECGs done to make sure I didn't mess my heart up. I just had a re- I had post viral fatigue. I was very fortunate that my body did kind of over in a couple of months like I didn't stop training completely, but I completely backed off. Like I still

• 1:52:59Speaker 01

  the longest I've not exercised for in since twenty six years old or twenty twenty five was probably last year and I had twelve days off completely. I'd done literally no exercise and that was it's such an ingrained part of me. Like I couldn't ever imagine not being physically active of just doing something, even that means me getting up and going for like a ten K run or something like that. Like in that that was but I've learned that's what I mean I've learned about my body. I've learned I need to do that. I can't, especially as I get a bit older, I can't keep sort of like going to the well all the time and pulling the bucket down and and I'm trying to just absorb loads and loads and loads of load. I have to be a bit more intelligent with stuff.

• 1:53:36Rich Roll?

  Yeah, I mean, that's that's quite the arc. Like if you go to your website, like right there on the homepage, it's like you have all the people that, you know, comprise your team that are helping you. So from that guy who's so stubborn, who thinks he knows everything and won't let anybody tell him anything to having, you know, what I saw when I looked at your website, I was like, oh, that's that's humility, like he understands that this is a team effort and that you can't do what you do alone. We have Terry here who, I mean, is this around the time where Terry, you know, comes into your life?

• 1:54:07Speaker 01

  No, Terry Terry coming to my life, well, Terry coming to my life when I was working in the gym, someone was working part time. Terry was a member and

• 1:54:16Speaker 01

  a gym instructor that was helped like work with Terry sometimes doing massage with him. Come up to me one day, so see that guy up there, he's like a sports psychologist and all I had was sport. So even I introduce you, Terry's Terry was on like a treadmill and I've gone up and I've just introduced myself and I think Terry thought, who is this guy? And then obviously we sat down and I tell Terry my backstory and

• 1:54:36Rich Roll?

  Guy with the crazy eyes.

• 1:54:38Speaker 01

  Yeah. He thought, who is it? Who is this man and stuff? And and we just struck up this friendship and Terry was like, he just, he paid an interest to me and that that. He wanted to help me. And again, there was no agenda. And then when I used to get out on a Sunday, I was so far from London because I was up in a near just outside Derby, which is about 200 miles away. So I couldn't commute to London and go back up with my, you get like something they call a town visit, you'd be out of prison for 12 hours. And Terry, me and Terry used to go out for dinner or lunch in the local town. He would take me out for a Sunday dinner and we'd sit there and we'd talk about stuff. And then he was really just part of my journey ever since. And Terry was one of the first people I'd say that I really, really did trust.

• 1:55:20Speaker 01

  Like, I really opened up and everything I've gone into doing in my life, like without him being part of it, it wouldn't be where it is today. Um, he's been, he's been, he's been a massive part, role of what I do. Um, and again, you, it doesn't matter how driven and focused you are, you need good people around you to help you reach your potential in life. And it works both ways. I'm sure Terry's learnt things from the experiences that we've been through and vice versa. I mean, it's been amazing to share it with someone else as well.

• 1:55:46Rich Roll?

  Right, right, right, right. And then you bring on somebody who's triathlon specific.

• 1:55:51Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:55:51Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 1:55:52Speaker 01

  And then he's been, um, yeah, the physical element of it. Like, so we did some training sessions before that Ironman and I fell apart. And he knew how fit I was because he saw through some of the training stuff that we were doing together. And then when we did Ironman UK, he finished fourth, fifth overall. And, and I finished like a hundredth. And he went, like, he, he ran past me when I was walking on the marathon.

• 1:56:14Rich Roll?

  You had your way. Now we know what happens when you do it your way. Time to do it my way.

• 1:56:19Speaker 01

  He reached out to me and he said, look, I'll coach you for free. I just want to help you just be the best athlete you can be. And I've been working with him for the last sort of three, three and a bit years.

• 1:56:28Rich Roll?

  So then when was your big breakthrough race?

• 1:56:30Speaker 01

  Probably Frankfurt. Um, yeah, that, that was quite a step up, like.

• 1:56:34Rich Roll?

  And you went nine or sub nine?

• 1:56:36Speaker 01

  Nine, nine.

• 1:56:37Rich Roll?

  You went nine even.

• 1:56:38Speaker 01

  Yeah, like, again, it, I'm always learning. Um, the bike has really been the thing I've been learning the most. Like the running, for instance, like my Ironman marathon is like three hours. I can get off and run a three hour marathon. Fairly comfortable. Like, it, it's not really a push. Um, but the bike's been the thing where it's not been the power. It's been the, just the, the lack of riding years and that the, like, taking corners too wide, braking too much. And that starts adding up a lot over 180K. And then sometimes I've looked at races where. Guys that make my weight, I'm putting out similar numbers that I'm putting out and they're like 15 minutes up the road from me and you know, you can't give that sort of time away.

• 1:57:19Rich Roll?

  Yeah, you're not, you're, you have to learn how to translate that engine that you have into speed.

• 1:57:25Speaker 01

  And it's, and it is coming. Hopefully it comes in three weeks time.

• 1:57:29Rich Roll?

  Yeah. I mean, do you live in London proper?

• 1:57:32Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:57:32Rich Roll?

  You do? So where do you go to train and do your long rides?

• 1:57:35Speaker 01

  So I go out to like Windsor. Um, so after you leave, when you leave mine, you've got like a 20 minute of it, faff with traffic and stuff. And then it's kind of just flat, fast roads going out to Windsor Castle. Or you've got the Surrey Hills. Again, it's another 15, 20 minutes getting out and then you get clear roads around like all around the Surrey Hills and stuff, which is quite nice. Running Richmond Park, down the tow path. I like, that's one of my favorite runs, still the way down the tow path. Like you could run from, you can run from basically Putney, South West London, all the way up to Thames. There's actually an ultra map and the Thames 100. It's just up the side of the tow path.

• 1:58:09Rich Roll?

  Right, right. Cool. And, uh, and the swimming, you do, there, there is a pool where you get out in open water?

• 1:58:15Speaker 01

  Yeah, you've got Hyde Park, so you've got the Serpentine.

• 1:58:17Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 1:58:19Speaker 01

  Uh, yeah, or most of the other time I just swim in Lido's. There's quite a few of them dotted around London.

• 1:58:23Rich Roll?

  And do you train alone? What's the community like here?

• 1:58:27Speaker 01

  Quite good. South West London. You tend to find a lot of guys at Kona.

• 1:58:30Rich Roll?

  The Brownleys live in town here?

• 1:58:32Speaker 01

  No, they, they live up in Leeds.

• 1:58:33Rich Roll?

  They do.

• 1:58:34Speaker 01

  So they're Northerners, but like a lot of-

• 1:58:35Rich Roll?

  Tim Don's in Boulder.

• 1:58:36Speaker 01

  Yeah, Tim, but yeah. But a lot of the, um, I think he's from Twickenham originally. He's where he grew up. Yeah, he grew up in Twickenham. So that's not, that's not too far away from Richmond. It's about 15 minutes away. But a lot of really good Ironman triathletes actually live around South West London. So a lot of guys that are very, very good age groupers like are, are based that way. So you, you do get some decent guys going out, but I do train on my own a lot.

• 1:59:01Rich Roll?

  Yeah, you strike me as that. You're a lone wolf.

• 1:59:03Speaker 01

  Yeah, I don't, I, I, I go out, I do go out riding sometimes with people and then I think, why have I done this? It's different if you go out like, I go out sometimes, it's, it's hard sometimes because I go out with guys at Row and they are very, very fit. But then they want to push the pace too much and it's too, too, too hard.

• 1:59:19Rich Roll?

  Yeah, the discipline is you gotta, you gotta do what, what, you gotta fulfill the intention for that workout. And when you're training for Ironman or ultra endurance, a lot of that discipline. Plays into holding back.

• 1:59:31Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:59:32Rich Roll?

  Right? Yeah, because everyone, it's, you know, there's a dick measuring contest.

• 1:59:35Speaker 01

  Totally. Totally. I didn't want to put it like that, but yeah. We would just say it's like willy waving. Everyone was just like, see how quick they can go up a climb. And then they all blow up and then you're, you're all sort of, they're limping back coming. Like the other week I went riding with a friend of mine out to Henley. It's like a hundred mile ride. And I said, are you, are you sure you want to come? He went, yeah, yeah, I'll sit on your wheel. So I said, okay. So we were averaging like 35 k an hour. And he's on the back wheel and then we got to this like open stretch of roads. And he's, he's come out behind me, about 60 k of a ride tore off. Right. And I thought, what I'll do, I'll just keep him that 10 meter gap, just do a bit of practicing. So I'm not drafting him. It's a bit of Ironman work. And he's looking behind and he thinks he's dropped me and I'm thinking, oh, go on, I don't get it. And he's looking around and I can tell he thinks I've dropped him. So I thought, well, I'm just going to have to let him see now.

• 2:00:20Speaker 01

  So I've come up and through his wheel, closed the gap and then just tore around him and gone.

• 2:00:23Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 2:00:23Speaker 01

  And he's like, wow, like he can't.

• 2:00:25Rich Roll?

  But you weren't supposed to, that wasn't part of what you were supposed to be doing that day, but you can't help it.

• 2:00:29Speaker 01

  Well, I just, what happened to him, when we were coming back, he was quite tanned. And I looked at him and he started going like, do you know when you see someone going ash white? And I said, you all right? He's like, yeah, yeah, yeah. And then he went, no, I'm not. He went, I really feel bad. And we stopped and get a Mars bar and we used to be able to pull over to the side of the shop and he, he got, and that's, so that's probably a lot, a lot of the reasons why I don't like training with other people.

• 2:00:50Rich Roll?

  Well, here you are today and you have fulfilled this promise, this aspiration that you articulated to the parole board of being a professional athlete. I mean, you are a professional athlete. You're a Nike sponsored athlete. You're the only triathlete, triathlete that Nike sponsors, right? Ironman triathlete. Wow, man. How did that come together?

• 2:01:10Speaker 01

  Um, how can I put this, Rich? It was like, it was, it was like a fairy tale. It was like, honestly, it like, it was one of the biggest things in my life. My, on it, like as an achievement, like a man that was in prison at like 26 that said, I want to be a professional athlete. Um, people laughed that. People said, you never had to do it. Took up sport too late. You'll never do it when you get out of prison. You're a prisoner. You'll, you'll reoffend. It was hard when you get out, like you'll never be able to do that. Like you're just slipping through old crowds and you're starting to get involved in robberies and that did me. And then, but out of prison, overtrained, got sick. Made decisions to get a coach, carried on it, believing every day. I honestly, there's

• 2:01:55Speaker 01

  one thing, I I visualized and believed every day, everything I was doing would pay off. I I knew it, I knew it. I I didn't know what it would be and I just.

• 2:02:03Rich Roll?

  Where does that knowing this come from?

• 2:02:06Speaker 01

  Self-belief. I I always believed whatever I put in my mind that I I believed when I was a kid that I'd be a multimillionaire. I believed. I I I've just always had it in me, this intrinsic thing that's this overwhelming need to want to do something great with my life, um, from being a young kid. And that's that belief that I could do it. I've never lacked belief. Like, my mum said this to me recently. She said, even when I was little, she would take me to like a summer camp, and all of these kids would be in a corner, and they'd all be like, looking around and knowing what to do, and I'd just go off on my own and do it. So like, if it was rock climbing, everyone's like, I want to do a thing, I'd put the thing on, and I'd climb the wall. And then sometimes I didn't put the safety on, so they'd go mad at me. But I've always had that in me, like, I would always be very assertive, and I'd like, bang, I'm gonna do it and do it, from being a

• 2:02:50Speaker 01

  young boy. And and I had that belief. And I remember I was out of prison for two years, I overtrained, and I was around my mum's one day. And and I remember, like, I was talking to my mum about it, and I said, like, I can't, I cannot and will not give up on this. And I I had the CCG box on my heart from the hospital, they went to Martin for twenty four hours. And I went, I know mum, it will pay off. And my mum said, just carry on doing what you're doing and follow your dream, do not stop. And and I didn't. And I went up and I raced again the following year, and I had a much better result. And then last, the Christmas before last, Terry, that was obviously been a massive part of my life, um, he he acts as a bit of a firewall, he runs my website. And every day, we ring

• 2:03:35Speaker 01

  each other up in the morning, and he says, these are the emails that have come through last night or yesterday. And we talk about maybe a school wants me to go and do a talk, a prison, whatever it is, it'd be something. And he said, now I'm back to say something, it's gonna change the rest of your life. So I said, what? And he went to me, guess who sent us an email last night? And I went, who? He went, guess. And I went, who? And he went, it's a massive brand.

• 2:04:04Speaker 01

  And I, and again, like, you, it, it wouldn't even compute. And I said, who? He said Nike. And I was like, no, I don't believe you. He went, I'm gonna send you the email. And he followed the email on. And it was um a guy called Dan Smith that worked in London, head of track and field. And he basically said that they become aware of my story and they, they felt inspired. And at the time, I had like a relationship where I was an ambassador for a clothing range. It was another sportswear company called Craft. And they were giving me like T-shirts and stuff to raise him. And Dan said in the thing like, have you got any contractual obligations? And Terry said to me on the phone, he went, look. Do you wanna talk to him? Or shall I? And I said, I trust you implicitly. You talk to him.

• 2:04:47Speaker 01

  So Terry rang him up and had a conversation with him and it, and it was to and fro, to and fro, to and fro. Then it went really cold and I was like, Terry, like, this means everything. I, to me, what I'm trying to do in my life, like, this could aid so much to it, Rich, not just as an athlete, but what it allows me to do and what it represents. And, and it went cold and it, it heated back up. And then they said to Terry, can John come into the London office and do a talk to the staff? So me and Terry go down to Soho and do this talk for an hour. And at the end, there was a hundred of them in there. It was like a little cinema and they was all sitting down on the aisles and in the chairs. And literally, there was a line of them coming out and every single one of them shook my hand when they're out. And they said, like, it's incredible.

• 2:05:32Speaker 01

  And then Dan was standing next to me and he went, I have seen them, I have seen them being spoken to by some massive athletes. And he went, I have never, ever, ever seen them react to someone like that. And I said to Terry when we left that talk, I said, do you think that's got me over the line with him? And Terry said, you're in. And then two weeks later, Dan emails back and says, can John come out to the Netherlands? And talk at our European conference. It'd be about eight hundred and fifty people from like global. So people from the States would come into it. Um, Terry says to me, can you go? I had to ask my probation officer and I said, look, Nike want me to go out there. So they said, she said, look, you can go. So cleared it. I'll go out to the Netherlands.

• 2:06:16Speaker 01

  We go to this auditorium the day before where we're going to do a practice run of what we're going to do that day. And then I meet this guy called Edgar and I didn't realise how powerful he was within the brand. So he's head of VP Marketing in Europe. So he's one of the most powerful influential man within Nike within Europe. So I meet him and we go for this dress rehearsal. So we're going to open up this massive conference, these eight hundred and fifty people. And it was called the Power from Within. So it was about normal people achieving extraordinary things. No one in this auditorium would know anything about me because no one knew about me and the brand. Like, we're all new to them. So we do our dress rehearsal and then we go out for dinner that night.

• 2:06:57Speaker 01

  So we're sitting in this restaurant in Amsterdam and Edgar's sitting next to me and he was saying to me about, do you know, um, do you know how we sponsored you? So I said, Dan. He said, no. He said, I was reading about you, um, at an airport in, in Holland, in Skippel. And I read this sports supplement and I got halfway through and I put the paper down, I got my phone out. And I sent an email to London. I said, find that man and sponsor him. And he was talking to me and he was telling me a story about years before that, when he was a young guy working at Nike. When he first, he's been in the brand now thirty two years. And he said, there was an ice skater in Holland, in the Netherlands. And he said, the man was beautiful, charismatic, charming, good looking, outspoken.

• 2:07:40Speaker 01

  And I went to the brand and I said about sponsoring him. And at the time Nike didn't sponsor ice skaters. And he went, I always regretted that we never got him. And the next year he become Olympic champion, European champion, and he went to become this massive superstar in Holland. And I always thought, damn, like, if only I'd have got him. And he went, I always promised myself, if I ever got to a position in the brand where I could make that decision, I'd make it. And he went, and when I saw you, my heart told me it was the right thing to do. And, and that's how it all sort of come about. And, and, and I. When they reached out to me initially, obviously, as an athlete, it's the pinnacle. Like, I, Lance Armstrong was a massive hero of mine in prison when I read his books.

• 2:08:21Speaker 01

  Nike, Michael Jordan, Mo Farah, Paula Radcliffe, all of these endurance athletes that I aspired to be like, were all under that brand. And, and to me as an athlete, it meant everything. It meant like me realizing a dream. What I really come to realize, the power that that has, that Nike swoosh, when you go into schools, is unbelievable to young people. And I make a conscious effort, when I go to schools and I talk to young people, I do not scare them into crime, not committing it, because it does not work.

• 2:08:55Rich Roll?

  Mm hmm.

• 2:08:56Speaker 01

  It's fat. It's been proven time and time again, you can't scare them.

• 2:08:59Rich Roll?

  But every kid wants to be a Nike athlete.

• 2:09:01Speaker 01

  Yes. Or there's a rapper, or musician, or an actor, that is wearing that. They see that as success. They don't care about Iron Man. They don't care about the records. They see the swoosh. And when you're part of that, you're part of like, the England football team. All of these things that these kids are seeing as being successful. And I can demonstrate to them, and I don't preach, I just explain, I say, this is a set of decisions I chose to make as a young man. This is what happened. Then at that point, when I decided to do that, this is what's happened. You don't need to do that to achieve your dreams in life. You can do positive things with your life, and you can achieve your dreams. That doesn't mean every kid's gonna be an athlete. But that Nike swoosh to me was my dream. And I say, and if I've managed to achieve that in my life,

• 2:09:44Speaker 01

  from being that kid that was writ off and spent all those years in prison, and I've made my dream become real, you can make your dreams become reality. And the proof's in the pudding. And when you can demonstrate it and show that to those young people, it is such a powerful thing. Like, I've gone into assemblies where there's been like six, seven hundred kids, and you can hear the gasps when you turn around at the end and say, and you go, click the slide, last slide, the Nike swoosh. And they're like. And they all stand up with stand innovation like and it's so powerful to really connecting to some of the most disenfranchised young people in the country.

• 2:10:15Rich Roll?

  Yeah, and it's symbolically just underscores the incredible arc of your journey because you are in a situation where, you know, few people get that low and there's, there's few things, you know, more heralded or, or, you know, more coveted than being a Nike sponsored athlete. Like, it's just, you know, that point to the, you know, from A to Z is insane.

• 2:10:40Speaker 01

  Yeah, even.

• 2:10:41Rich Roll?

  And beyond that, like, let's not forget the compressed time period that we're talking about here. This wasn't 20 years ago.

• 2:10:49Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:10:49Rich Roll?

  When did you get out of prison? 2012?

• 2:10:52Speaker 01

  2012, yeah.

• 2:10:54Rich Roll?

  It's like, that was yesterday, man.

• 2:10:57Speaker 01

  Do you know what? When, when, when I was writing the book, so I was fortunate, I got an opportunity to write a book and it was really, really sort of, when, when, when I got the opportunity, it was, it was hard to, to take it because I knew I was going to leave myself wide open to be critiqued and people to criticize, but I knew that book would be a key to a door that would give me a platform to do good with the rest of my life. And, and I kind of, and it was the reason why I sort of chose to do it. And the ghostwriter that did it with me, um, we did, we did these sittings. We used to do two sittings every month and it would, the book was written quite quick. It was written within four months, five months. But we do these sittings and I'd be telling

• 2:11:41Speaker 01

  them, and sometimes, I have to be quite honest with you, I would be, I wouldn't be sort of as open with some of the stories to, because it embellished stuff. Like, I didn't really want to put too much detail in some of the stories because I thought I'd be involving other people that I didn't really, I wanted to keep the book all about sort of me and not talk about other people because I knew it could open up pandor's box of causing me issues later on in my life and stuff. And so I, I was very controlled with how the book was written and, and I was very sort of mindful about what I said. And and I remember like you sit there sometimes and like you you could see he was like thinking really like and then um and what happened he he never met no one else in the story. And then he met Terry and then him and Terry met each other at one of my races.

• 2:12:26Speaker 01

  And he was having a conversation with Terry and he was like, is this for real? And Terry was like. So he wasn't buying it. No. He thi- he thought you were full of shit. He kind of, I think in some ways he thought it was all pre-planned, like I was a sociopath, like I was thinking about this later on in my life. Like when I was in prison, I was like, oh, I'm gonna do this and do that and do this. Uh huh. And then he he couldn't get, well, I think the thing that he really struggled with was a lot of people helped me um for nothing. He couldn't get that. He he he he everything sort of about money. He was like, but they must have seen I was, they must have seen something in it. Like there must have been something in it. They must have seen there was an opportunity in them to help themselves later on. I was, no, there wasn't. There was none of that.

• 2:13:07Speaker 01

  Like Darren didn't do what he'd done all these years ago, thinking that I'd be where I am today. Terry didn't think six years ago, where I'd be where I am today, like, well, what's happened? There wasn't. And and and and sometimes we would sit there, as I said, do these sittings with him, and he generally didn't believe it. And and then, once he got involved, then what's happened afterwards, he rings me up now, um. And like he's, my life has never been normal, like from being a young. Clearly. Yeah. It it hasn't. Even I can admit that, like some, like Rich, like not many people know this. So um last year, I got invited to the Houses of Parliament to meet the minister. Mm hmm.

• 2:13:49Speaker 01

  To talk about using sport in prisons and in the community to stop kids from making bad decisions, right? The meeting ends, she says to me, would you like to come on the veranda of Parliament to come to this boxing event? So I said, yeah. So we walked through, I go to this boxing event and it was a bit of a showcase. It was about more boxing clubs in London to get more kids engaged in sport. Mm hmm. There was, I had all these young GB Olympic boxers, they was all doing a Q and A. Um, there was a young Muslim guy there from Bolton. And he wasn't very articulate. Guy said to him, why did you take up boxing? And he went, because I didn't want to be a bum, sitting on the streets, taking drugs. And he went, when I was a kid, I watched Amir Khan fight at the Olympics when he was sixteen. And I looked and he was like, at that time, he was eight, nine years old.

• 2:14:33Speaker 01

  And he went, when I'm, when I'm that age, I want to go to Olympics and fight for my country and win a gold medal. Anyway, he went to Rio, he come fourth and he was gutted. And he went, when I go back to Tokyo, I'm going to win a gold medal for Britain. And I thought, this kid is incredible, like, he, he's amazing. He's everything what sport is to me. And then I left. And as I was walking out for the car park of Parliament to get a taxi. They're all just screaming, look up. And like from here, ten feet away. Um, I walked straight into the middle of a terrorist, the terrorist attack at Westminster and, and I watched a guy get shot dead. And I saw the policeman running towards me and collapsing the floor. And he, obviously, I didn't realise at the time, the guy had stabbed him, stabbed him to death. But I didn't, I didn't see that part of it. I just saw the guy getting shot.

• 2:15:18Speaker 01

  And, and I remember, I got locked in Parliament at night, the whole thing was on a lockdown. It was completely like, you can imagine, all the politicians, we all got put in this like room and then we all got locked there to like ten o'clock that evening. And then when I left.

• 2:15:32Rich Roll?

  And you're actually kind of mentally and emotionally equipped to handle this in a way that everybody else isn't.

• 2:15:38Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, but even, even, even I, even I, like, even when, when it happened, it's because you're in an environment where you don't expect to see what you're about to see.

• 2:15:47Rich Roll?

  Uh huh.

• 2:15:48Speaker 01

  And, and that was the thing that took me out. But what happened, when, when I left that night, I remember they let us out one at a time. And they took all our names and addresses and details. And they said, have you witnessed anything? And I said, I saw the guy shoot him. And then they all stopped and I was like, because they didn't expect someone, do you know, you just don't expect it. Policemen are taking notes from everyone. And then one guy says, I actually saw it. And he's like, what? So he took my name and address and he said, okay, we, we're going to class you as a priority witness because you've actually witnessed the event. And I remember walking out of the Houses of Parliament and it was about half ten, eleven o'clock at night and the streets were dead. Like, there was no one walking around. There was cordons and you could, you, you could see blue lights flashing, but there was no sirens, it was dead. And I remember walking out there.

• 2:16:30Speaker 01

  And I thought, there is no way on earth I saw that for no reason. I, there was no way, like, the chances of me being there that moment. Being with all those Islamic suicide bombers all those years before, listening to that young Muslim kid talk about what sport meant to him, and then coming out and then witnessing that, the chances of me being there were so small that I thought, like, I don't believe in God, but I genuinely believe there's something where I was meant to be there and see what I saw, because it made me unbelievably driven to continue doing what I'm doing. I can remember that I walked home and I woke up the next morning and

• 2:17:13Speaker 01

  there was a guy that was with me, he was in the army that day, and he tried to save the policeman's life. And he was a battle-trained medic, like, been to Sandhurst, been out to Afghanistan, battle-armed, like, he was a hard man in that regard. And I said to him, there is a reason why me and you were there and saw what we saw, to continue doing what we're doing. And he delivers lots of courses into prisons. Because what I saw that day was a man that was disenfranchised with society, that hated the system. I chose to attack it through taking money from it, he chose to attack it through committing terrorism. But somewhere along the line, he got lost somewhere, and someone come into his life and warped where what he thought was right and wrong. And in my head, I thought

• 2:17:58Speaker 01

  that is totally preventable. You can stop that stuff from happening by stopping those people from having that mindset where someone negative can come in and not brainwash them, but completely warp what is right and wrong.

• 2:18:12Rich Roll?

  Yeah, it begins with the disenfranchisement.

• 2:18:14Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 2:18:15Rich Roll?

  You know? And if you're too late to address that, it's too late. And that stuff happens. But that's a profound awareness. I mean, that synchronicity of events is pretty remarkable. You know, it's almost surprising to hear you say that you don't believe in God, given like, what you've experienced and how far you've come. And when events like that, that seemingly don't make sense on paper occur, it's hard for me to hear that and not think that there is a purpose and a plan and some kind of, you know, map laid out for you.

• 2:18:49Speaker 01

  Do you know what, what was? What was quite powerful, I I did a a book festival um last year, like November. And it was in a very affluent area of the country, one of the most expensive places to live. And they invited me to go down and do um sort of a talk about the book and a Q and A. And I've gone in the room and I said, what's like the demographic for the area? And they went, you probably won't get anyone under the age of sixty. Uh huh. Very wealthy, retired, um very white, middle to upper class. So we, they start letting the guests in, I'm sitting there and I'm looking around like all these old people and I'm like, they're gonna, they're really gonna start trying to grill me on the Q and A at the end.

• 2:19:33Speaker 01

  And what happened was when we finished, they come up and they were offering me money. They were saying like, we wanna give you money like for what you're doing. And and I was saying that I can't take your money, but when my foundation's up. Yeah, I was like, you gotta have a foundation. Yeah, yeah, yeah, that's that went live um a couple of weeks ago. Oh, wow. And but I said, look, I can't take money for you, but when it's set up, please, like, um, please donate to it and and the money will go to sort of working with young people. And then um a priest come up to me and he went, can I ask you something? And I said, what? He said, has your book got a religious connotation to it, redemption? And I said, no. And he said, are you religious? And I said, no.

• 2:20:16Speaker 01

  I said, I used to be, but I kind of, I fell out of love with with, I I grew up as a Catholic. But I I lost that um when I went to prison, if I'm honest. Um and the reason why, before I ever used to commit a crime, I always used to pray that I'd get away with it. And I know it sounds, but I did, I did, like, my stepdad was really Catholic, my nan and granddad devoutly. Um and I got arrested and I went to prison and that completely and utterly switched me off. I didn't believe in it from that moment onwards. And he put his hand on my shoulder and he went to me, I have never seen a man put on earth to do what you're doing right now.

• 2:20:58Speaker 01

  He went, it's so clear to me, he went, and you might not believe in God, even, but I believe God's got a bigger plan for you. And and again, I don't, I don't believe, but it was quite a powerful moment where I was like, that's, that's, that's, and he was looking at me and I was like, wow, like, I didn't know really what to say because it's, it was something so above me where. He could quite, he could see something, what I'm trying to do with my life today, that I've been put here for a purpose. And I, and I, like I said, I, I believe, I don't believe in God, but I do believe things happen for a reason. And I think I was there, what I saw that day. And I think my stepdad coming into my life when I was a kid, the people that I met in prison.

• 2:21:39Speaker 01

  Um, my stepdad taught me a lot of good things. You, I can't just blame him for sort of warping my perspective of life. He taught me a lot of skills when I was a kid that have aided me as an adult. Um, one was never just hang around with criminals. When I was a young boy, he went, always make sure you mix with different groups of people. And that's allowed me then to be able to converse with different groups of people all the time and not be like, I can only talk to like criminals or I can only talk to school kids.

• 2:22:05Rich Roll?

  Right. Well, I would echo that priest's sentiment. Uh, you know, I can certainly understand why, uh, your relationship with Catholicism fell out of grace. But I think there's a difference between religious dogma and having a spiritual connection to something greater than yourself. And I would certainly, um, you know, echo his thoughts in saying that, that you're on the path that you're meant to be on. It's super inspiring that. And, uh, it's quite a remarkable tale. And we got to land this plane, but I gotta know, what's going on with the crime syndicate now? And how's your mom?

• 2:22:40Speaker 01

  Um, the crime syndicates fell away. Basically, all of them are in prison. All of them are in prison. My stepdad's never been out since I went in when I was a teenager.

• 2:22:48Rich Roll?

  Do you go and visit? Do you stay in contact or you completely?

• 2:22:50Speaker 01

  I just, I cut, I cut them all out. I cut all my, I cut all my dad's side of the family out. Um, I see, you'll see my mom's side, but my mom's side were all legitimate. Um, my co-defendant, he got released from prison recently, I found out. But yeah, everyone else is, they're either in prison or they're dead. Um, and my mom, my mom's good. I see my mom all the time. I'm still really close to her and she gets all the trophies and medals and everything. They're all around the house in vases and. But yeah, my mom's mega supportive and I think it's so nice now to make my mom proud of what I'm doing. But my mom was always proud of me, even when, even when I was in that high security prison unit. I remember she come up and she was left running the visits one day and she said to me, it was one of the only times she saw me in prison.

• 2:23:30Speaker 01

  But the first time she was like, I'm so proud of you. And I was like, yeah, mom. Yeah. But she is, she's a, yeah, she's your mom. Like, mom's lovely, going conditionally and she, she always has. And it's so nice now, like. Like when the neighbors say, I saw Jonathan on TV or the radio or sees me in the magazine, that she buzzes off it. Yeah, of course.

• 2:23:53Rich Roll?

  Wow, that's so, it's such an incredible story and I feel like it's just beginning for you.

• 2:24:00Speaker 01

  Thank you.

• 2:24:00Rich Roll?

  That's the beautiful thing is like this whole thing is just starting, you know, and I see a rich future ahead for you and the opportunity to impact a lot of lives.

• 2:24:11Speaker 01

  Thank you.

• 2:24:12Rich Roll?

  So what is the, to kind of end this, you know, what is the one sort of sentiment that you want to make sure you impart to somebody who might be listening to this, who is struggling or can't find their way forward, you know, I'm not talking about necessarily somebody who's incarcerated, but you know, somebody who just feels stuck in their life and is frustrated and feels like opportunity has eluded them.

• 2:24:37Speaker 01

  I think that you, it, I think it's quite simple and I know it's just never give up and always believe it can get better because it can. And I think life is so precious and you're alive and you're breathing and one day we won't. So you're winning the battle because you're still breathing and I believe that every day, like there's days where I get up and you have a bit of an off day and you just, but you have to be appreciative. I was out on my bike the other day and I was riding along and I thought, wow, I'm alive and I love this. Life, life's so lovely, it's precious. We're here, the chances of us being here right now are trillions and trillions of one. You've probably got more chance of winning a lottery a million times over than us actually breathing air. So just

• 2:25:22Speaker 01

  be appreciative of it and, and just believe that it can always get better, no matter how dark that hole is. You can always get out of it and, and I've done it. And if I've done it, and I don't think I'm any different to anyone else, like if I've managed to do it, anyone can do anything in life.

• 2:25:37Rich Roll?

  I think that's a good way to end it.

• 2:25:38Speaker 01

  Thanks.

• 2:25:40Rich Roll?

  Thanks for talking to me, man.

• 2:25:41Speaker 01

  Thanks, Rich.

• 2:25:42Rich Roll?

  Really incredible. Much luck in the upcoming Ironman. What are the other races you're doing this summer?

• 2:25:47Speaker 01

  I'm Challenger Almere in the Netherlands.

• 2:25:49Rich Roll?

  Uh huh. And is the, uh, is the goal to qualify for Kona or what's, you know, what is the kind of longer term view here?

• 2:25:55Speaker 01

  Just to finish as high up in the field as I possibly can and be in the mix of everyone.

• 2:25:59Rich Roll?

  Right, right on.

• 2:25:59Speaker 01

  And try to break that sub four hour marathon in an Ironman. That's been everything.

• 2:26:03Rich Roll?

  All right. Well, come back and talk to me next time I'm in London.

• 2:26:06Speaker 01

  Thanks, Rich.

• 2:26:06Rich Roll?

  Let me know if your parole officer lets you come to LA.

• 2:26:10Rich Roll?

  All right. If you're digging on John, um, the best way to connect with him, at John McAvoy, pretty much everywhere, right? And JohnMcAvoy.com?

• 2:26:17Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:26:18Rich Roll?

  That's it, right? And are you ever doing like talks to the public where people can come and see you? Like, do you have a schedule on your website, public appearances?

• 2:26:26Speaker 01

  Not, not at the moment. I do mostly school stuff, but yeah, I probably in the future, I'll probably start doing a bit more public speaking in the context of like events. But normally it's either schools, prisons, or maybe sort of business talks.

• 2:26:38Rich Roll?

  Right. And tell me, remind me the name of the book?

• 2:26:41Speaker 01

  Um, Redemption.

• 2:26:42Rich Roll?

  Redemption, yeah.

• 2:26:43Speaker 01

  And just that, all, all, all my office royalties and profits go into school projects.

• 2:26:48Rich Roll?

  Uh huh. So. And is there a different website for the foundation?

• 2:26:51Speaker 01

  Uh, not currently, no. So you go to my website, but all the information will be on there.

• 2:26:56Rich Roll?

  Cool. All right, man.

• 2:26:57Speaker 01

  Thank you.

• 2:26:58Rich Roll?

  Much love, bro.

• 2:26:58Speaker 01

  Take care.

• 2:26:59Rich Roll?

  All right. Peace.

• 2:27:02Rich Roll?

  I don't know about you guys, but I was profoundly impacted by that conversation. I sincerely hope that you enjoyed it, uh, but more than that, I really hope that it touched something in you, that it catalyzed a shift in your perspective about your own life, your relationship with gratitude, and perhaps the internal limiter that you place on your own capabilities. But more than anything, my hope is that you take what you heard today and you translate it into positive action for yourself and for the benefit of others. Do me a favor, let John know what you thought of today's conversation. You can find him on Twitter,

• 2:27:44Rich Roll?

  @JohnMcAvoy2, J-O-H-N-McAvoy2, or on Instagram, @JohnnyMac83, but that's J-O-N-N-Y-Mac83, no H. And give him a push for his upcoming Ironman. I'm sure he'd love to hear from you. While you're at it, check out John's book Redemption. There's a link in the show notes to that. Check out the show notes as always, where I have all kinds of resources to take your experience of this conversation to the next level. And if you're looking for some additional nutritional guidance, check out our meal planner, meals.ritual.com. We have thousands of plant-based recipes, literally thousands, I'm not exaggerating, all super customized based on your personal preferences,

• 2:28:26Rich Roll?

  with unlimited grocery lists and even grocery delivery in most US cities, with international cities rolling out shortly. All of this is available to you for just $1.90 a week when you sign up for a year. It is an incredible product. Last year, we just passed the one-year anniversary mark. Last year, we served over 250,000 plant-based meals by virtue of this program, and it's really helping people a lot. That's what I'm most proud of. And I'm proud that it's affordable, just $1.90 a week when you sign up for a year. So to learn more and to sign up, go to meals.ritual.com, or click on Meal Planner on the top menu on my website. If you would like to support my work, please subscribe to this show on Apple Podcasts

• 2:29:06Rich Roll?

  or Google Podcasts, or on whatever platform you enjoy this content. Share it with your friends and on social media. And you could also support me on Patreon at ritual.com/donate. And I want to thank everybody who helped put on the show today. Jason Camiolo for audio engineering, production, show notes, interstitial music. Normally, I thank Blake and Margot, Blake Curtis and Margot Lubin for video and editing, but there was no video on this show, but they did generate graphics, so thank you for that. And theme music, as always, by Analemma. Thanks for the love, you guys. See you back here in a couple of days with another amazing episode. And until then, be grateful.

• 2:29:44Rich Roll?

  If you got one thing out of today's conversation, it's that we should all be grateful for the freedoms that we have, for our ability to move our body. Till then, be well. Much love, peace, plats, namaste.