Pod Insights The Joe Rogan Experience #2228 - Josh Dubin About this episode Josh Dubin is the Executive Director of the Perlmutter Center for Legal Justice, a criminal justice reform advocate, and civil rights attorney.
https://cardozo.yu.edu/directory/josh-dubin
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Transcript 23,010 words · 6 speakers
Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
0:12 Joe Rogan? What's up?
0:12 Speaker 01 What's up, man?
0:13 Joe Rogan? Good to see ya.
0:15 Speaker 01 Good to see you.
0:16 Joe Rogan? Uh, so, I guess we just get right into it. The last case that we talked about, we had a very unfortunate incident happen after the podcast, about a month later.
0:30 Speaker 01 Yeah.
0:30 Joe Rogan? Uh, the gentleman beheaded somebody.
0:35 Speaker 01 Allegedly, yes.
0:37 Joe Rogan? Allegedly? There's a lot of allegedly's, but...
0:40 Speaker 01 Yeah.
0:40 Joe Rogan? There was so many crazy things to that case. The craziest thing was him, uh, trying to fool the security cameras with a wig. Like, I guess he didn't know how high-resolution cameras had gotten over the 25 years that he was in jail.
0:54 Speaker 01 I mean, apparently, there's a lot he didn't know. Uh, the only reason I say allegedly is because, um, I'd be a bit of a hypocrite if I started calling him guilty, um, before he has a trial, but...
1:07 Joe Rogan? Of course.
1:08 Speaker 01 Based on the surveillance, um...
1:10 Joe Rogan? It doesn't look good.
1:12 Speaker 01 What do they say in Texas? It ain't too shiny.
1:17 Joe Rogan? It's so crazy because, uh, you know, we went out with him that evening. We brought him to the comedy club. He was hanging out with us in the green room, and then the news broke, and then, uh, the comics were all like, "Hey, man, what the fuck? What the fuck you doing bringing that guy around?" I'm like, "Well, we didn't know."
1:32 Speaker 01 I, I, I mean...
1:34 Joe Rogan? Who could've known he was gonna do that, other than him?
1:40 Speaker 01 I'm as, I'm as, uh, I'm as shocked over and now as I was in the moment. I mean, yeah, I don't, uh, you know, there are no words. I, I went through, um, it's really not funny. I mean, I'm only laughing out of sort of nervousness, I guess.
1:58 Joe Rogan? Of course.
1:59 Speaker 01 I, I mean, yeah, I was in, I was in St. Louis, of all places, which is only memorable because that's where I was when someone called me and said, "Have you looked at the news?"
2:12 Speaker 01 And I said, "I was in court, and I was on a break, and, um..."
2:18 Speaker 01 You know, I called him a miracle on this show.
2:21 Joe Rogan? Yeah.
2:22 Speaker 01 And the, the media shoved that straight up my ass. I mean.
2:27 Joe Rogan? Of course, but that's what they're gonna do. Well, he was the only guy that you'd ever brought in that was actually guilty. That you felt was in jail for too long. You know, he, he got a 50 year sentence, correct?
2:37 Speaker 01 Seventy.
2:37 Joe Rogan? Seventy. And it was reduced to 25?
2:40 Speaker 01 It was just basically time served. He did about 30 years. Um, and they resentenced him. Look. I would be, um. I've had a lot of time to think about this and I know you and I have discussed it privately and I kinda went into a hole after this.
2:59 Speaker 01 My fir-, this didn't happen to me. A lot of people say, I'm so sorry. Um, but some people have said other things that weren't very nice. But the people that I, you know. Regard their opinion were sorry that. It didn't happen to me. My first thought was, I had two thoughts was. That poor guy that got killed.
3:25 Speaker 01 And it was a gruesome murder. You know, it wasn't just beheaded. I think he was dismembered completely.
3:32 Joe Rogan? Well, he was trying to get rid of the body, right? Allegedly.
3:35 Speaker 01 Allegedly. Um, and my first thought was for him and his family. And then. My, I think my second and third thought, maybe in tandem was.
3:53 Speaker 01 This tore down 50 years of work that a lot of people, um, have fought really hard for and really need. And I felt like I let you down.
4:07 Speaker 01 You know, you've given us an amazing platform to get stories out for people that really need help. I think we've made.
4:16 Speaker 01 Ton of progress. We've got some exonerations as a direct result of this.
4:21 Joe Rogan? Yeah, you didn't let me down at all.
4:23 Speaker 01 No, I
4:23 Joe Rogan? Didn't. I appreciate that you felt like that. It didn't feel like that to me at all. It was just, listen, there's a reality of prison life. There's a reality of being incarcerated. There's a reality of taking a person who's convicted of a violent crime and putting them in jail with violent people for 30 years. It was just a reality. And, you know, I don't know what history he had with this man that he allegedly killed. But, you know, it's like you can only take so much.
4:54 Speaker 01 Yeah, I mean, listen, I don't know. My first emotion, this is from me and my therapist, my first emotion is usually like guilt. So, I, once I, I took a little bit of time and thought it through.
5:09 Speaker 01 I mean, of course, I come on your show and then you're, you know, splattered all over the news for something not positive.
5:16 Joe Rogan? Good news is I don't watch the news. I don't pay attention. I don't listen to anything anybody writes about me. So, it didn't bother me at all.
5:23 Speaker 01 You're rare. So, look, for me, I have to take a hard look at what I'm doing and take the mirror out and look straight in it and say, like, what did I do wrong?
5:37 Joe Rogan? You did nothing wrong.
5:38 Speaker 01 Well, well.
5:38 Joe Rogan? I don't think you did anything wrong. You just, you just, listen, the man had great qualities. He, like, when you talked to him, he was very intelligent, very nice guy. He just thought he could get away with getting payback on somebody.
5:50 Speaker 01 Yeah, look, that's super gracious of you. I'm not, whether I did something wrong or not, I typically go to blame. And that's something that I have to, that's a kink I have to work out in my personality. But let me just articulate it because I think what I
6:06 Speaker 01 the platform is so important to me and getting these stories out is so important to me. And I think that where I've landed is that he didn't let me down. He didn't let, look, I was the public face of his resentencing. There was a lot of great people involved. And it wasn't just from the defense side. The Center for Appellate Litigation had some amazing people working on his case. The District Attorney of Manhattan agreed to this. So, on paper. Even in their personal interactions with him, there was nothing that raised a red flag for anyone. He didn't let anyone down if he did this, which it,
6:50 Speaker 01 people will draw their own conclusion, he'll have a trial. He didn't let anyone down if he did this but himself and the people that still need help. And I have to swallow the jagged pill that this work comes with some letdowns. The recidivism rate for people that have served long sentences like that is less than 1%. It just happened to happen on a case where I was involved. I have no...
7:19 Joe Rogan? Is it really that low?
7:20 Speaker 01 Yeah.
7:21 Joe Rogan? Wow.
7:21 Speaker 01 Yeah. If you look at exonerations, resentencings of people that have been incarcerated for more than 20 years, it's that low. And you know, the harsh reality is that if you put someone on a public platform and they then do what he supposedly did, it's going to make headlines. I realized something, though, that...
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10:16 Speaker 01 Look, no one could have imagined what's in the dark recesses of that man's soul. Whether it's, you know, his group home upbringing and abuse, the prison experience, it's not to make an excuse. He did it, if he did it. If he's convicted and he did it, that's on him. What I'm guilty of is giving a guy a second chance and I am, I'm... Why am I reluctant to say this? I can't apologize for giving someone a second chance and then, you know, they squander it. All I can do is say, "Well, what could I have done better?"
10:55 Speaker 01 I mean, I have a deep understanding, I think, of what incarceration means. I mean, I read this book. I always get his name confused. Henry Jack Abbott or Jack Henry Abbott. It's called "In the Belly of the Beast," when I was in college. And it's a series of letters that this inmate wrote to Norman Mailer. Fascinating book. And about what incarceration does to somebody from the standpoint of the practical day-to-day, from the deep psychosis inducing confinement and everything else. And two days before the book was released, and it was reviewed by the New York Times,
11:39 Speaker 01 the guy snapped and killed someone in the East Village. And no one will know what it is like to be in there. And again, I don't want to offer this as an excuse, but what it has caused me to do is reevaluate and say, "Look, maybe I need to take a much closer look at what sort of mental health counseling these folks are getting." Like Sheldon, I arranged for him to be speaking to a trauma therapist. Should I have been on him more to be going to those appointments? Maybe.
12:15 Joe Rogan? What was the circumstances with the guy that he allegedly killed?
12:21 Speaker 01 I don't know if I'm doing it just because I'm distancing myself from it subconsciously, but I don't know all the circumstances. But apparently, this was someone he knew from childhood and from in prison. I've heard rumors and, you know, stories about the guy threatened his son to...
12:46 Speaker 01 He slashed Sheldon when they were in prison. I don't know if you remember Sheldon had this big gash across his face. But I don't know. And I frankly don't want to know at this point. Because someone lost their life and that, you know. I think unfortunately for my mental health, I just wear that stuff. You know, if I felt even remotely responsible for that, which I do. And, you know, I have to, I can, I can be at peace with it, but I didn't cause that death. And I don't, you know. I can take some responsibility for it in the sense that what can I do going forward? Where, whether it's people that are being exonerated for crimes they didn't commit.
13:31 Speaker 01 Or if it's people that are getting resentenced, you cannot undo decades of confinement. You just can't. And they all need mental health counseling, all of them. And I have to put that on my shoulders. I just do. Because, you know, they all have issues. And they come out and need mental health counseling. And there's a stigma attached to it, especially in the African American community. And there shouldn't be. It's no different than if you have a problem with your liver, you know, and you have to take medication. I mean, I've always been upfront about the fact that I'm on medication. It's, it's nothing to be ashamed of. And it's especially warranted when you're in those circumstances.
14:14 Speaker 01 Again, none of this is to make an excuse, but I just think that there's a lot more emphasis that I can focus on. Assimilation more. And I think that making sure that they have job training and that they feel safe when they get out. I mean, there hasn't been one person who I've been involved in their case where. Even when they're innocent, they get out and it's a fucking shock. And I need to be a lot more sensitive to that, I think. And pay a lot more attention to what they're doing, how they're doing. Again, I had, I had the foresight to put Sheldon in touch with and ensure that we
14:57 Speaker 01 were getting him mental health counseling with a trauma therapist. But I, you know, I didn't want to meddle too much in that because it's on him to go. So, I mean, that's where I land.
15:13 Speaker 01 For better or for worse.
15:14 Joe Rogan? Well, if the guy really did slash his face, if you've been in literal mortal combat with a person and this person is allegedly threatening your son or whatever, you know, there's only so much you can do to stop a person from seeking revenge.
15:30 Speaker 01 I guess.
15:31 Joe Rogan? Especially if they don't have any hope outside of the system and they they've been completely institutionalized, which, given the length of his sentence, is reasonable to assume.
15:44 Speaker 01 Yeah, you're you're a lot more forgiving and understanding than um than a lot of people were and have been about this. You know, I've had, there's been two schools of thought and the reaction. I mean, I got pretty nasty hate mail. Um, and I got a lot of words of encouragement. I think the hate mail outweighed the words of encouragement.
16:08 Joe Rogan? Always.
16:10 Speaker 01 But.
16:10 Joe Rogan? Psychologically, always.
16:12 Speaker 01 I mean, by in in substance, number, and probably psychologically.
16:16 Joe Rogan? Yeah.
16:17 Speaker 01 Um, but um, that shit just gives me fuel. You know, if you're sending me, fuck you, you race baiter, you this, you that, you know.
16:27 Joe Rogan? Race baiter.
16:27 Speaker 01 Oh, yeah, I got a lot of that.
16:29 Joe Rogan? How are you a race baiter?
16:30 Speaker 01 Um, by telling the truth about the state of race and the criminal justice system in this country. I I see the thing is that one the one force field I have around myself is when that's incoming, I I'm able to say, okay, thanks for the fuel. Thanks for the fuel. I'll never respond to it. Um, you know, unless you're doing mental health counseling in a prison, unless you're a corrections officer, a police officer, um, know what it's like to be incarcerated, you have no fucking business giving me your shitty opinion about what you think I am or others that do this work. Get in the fucking arena and do it yourself.
17:11 Speaker 01 And I, you know, so I I take that with a big grain of salt. Um, I had, um,
17:20 Speaker 01 You know, I have enough common sense and practical sense to sort of let to disregard that. But I have to be a big enough person to look at myself and say, well, what can I learn from this and what could I do better? Because, you know, I was talking to Derek Hamilton, who's been on the show and the deputy director of the Freedom Clinic at the Perlmutter Center. And, you know, Derek said, look, um, mental health counseling, when I was incarcerated, was something that was like, it flew in the face of the us versus them mentality. I didn't think they could help me. And I didn't want to want the help. I was mad.
18:03 Speaker 01 And there was a stigma attached to it, that I was soft if I did it. I didn't want people inside knowing. So, I don't, um, we're trying to formulate a plan to normalize mental health counseling in prison. So Derek and I are doing a town hall at Shawangunk, which is a pretty rough prison in New York on December 6th, to try to get some of the inmates to understand that it's okay to ask for this help. I think when they see Derek and hear his story, it's, um, it's helpful for them. So.
18:41 Joe Rogan? I'm gonna say something that's gonna sound pretty controversial, but I think, you know, one of the, uh, one of the conversations that I've had repeatedly, I had it with J.D. Vance, I've had it with quite a few people, is psychedelic therapy for veterans. People with severe PTSD because of war, I think, are the most deserving of psychedelic therapy and the benefits of it. And the fact that that stuff is Schedule I and is illegal in the United States, I think, is absurd. It's ridiculous, it's horrible, it's a massive disservice to those people that put their lives on the line and went over and experienced horrific things that the average person like
19:22 Joe Rogan? myself can only imagine, and you're not gonna do a good job of imagining it. I think prisoners could benefit from psychedelic therapy as well. I think there's a lot of people that could be rehabilitated by changing the way they they view things, literally changing their mind, changing their perspective. And I think there's a lot of psychedelic therapies that could aid in that, particularly for people who...
19:47 Joe Rogan? You know, they're not violent people. Um, they're, they just had, they're victim of circumstance, or they made bad decisions in their life, or what have you.
19:57 Joe Rogan? And they're stuck. And they're stuck both mentally and physically. And if we want to use prisons as just a deterrent to crime, okay? I think we should probably put some effort towards rehabilitation. You know, sincere, significant efforts towards rehabilitation. And one of the best ways to do that is to try, kind of try to change the way people view themselves and view the world, and view themselves as a part of the world.
20:27 Speaker 01 The fact that you would even think that that would be controversial, I think is just a byproduct of the fact that anything that somebody articulates that's outside of like what's considered mainstream is rejected. Unquestionably, the research is overwhelming.
20:48 Joe Rogan? Overwhelming.
20:49 Speaker 01 That psychedelics are one of the best. One of the best, most effective therapies for PTSD. My therapist has, um, you know, counseled people with PTSD coming back from war. And, you know, has, has espoused the, the, not only the efficacy of it, but how remarkably
21:20 Speaker 01 different it is from conventional therapies in the most positive of ways. And I could not agree with you more. I think that if you look at some of the European countries that look at their prison systems as a real rehabilitative model, I mean, we have to decide that we, we incarcerated, we talked about the stats, and I'm not, um, gonna, you know, relitigate that here, but look, we incarcerate people at a higher rate than any other civilization on earth.
21:52 Speaker 01 So we have to decide as a society, are we just gonna throw people away and put them in cages and make them worse? Even if they committed the crime? Or, as you said, are we really going to try to rehabilitate people? Because some people are getting out no matter what. Whether they have people like me involved and other great people that do this work. But they're gonna get out. Do you want them out like they were just an animal let out of a cage? Or do you want them out where rehabilitation is a cornerstone of their incarceration?
22:26 Joe Rogan? Right.
22:26 Speaker 01 And it just doesn't happen in our criminal justice.
22:30 Joe Rogan? Well, there's a bizarre attitude in this country that we shouldn't do anything to make their life better while they're in there, you know, and that something like psychedelic therapy is like, that it's a luxury, you know, that it's something they don't deserve, that it's something that should be reserved for good people.
22:51 Speaker 01 Or that there's some like, it's for people that are like fucking off and, you know, the others that do drugs, that whole mentality.
23:02 Joe Rogan? Sure. Yeah, there's that too.
23:04 Speaker 01 So, yeah, I, listen, I mean, you talk about like looking up at the mountain and saying, can I scale it? I think what you have to do, and I'm talking about this, all it takes is one state, one municipality, one person who says, that's interesting, show us the literature. We have this amazing policy director at the Perlmutter Center named Sarah Chu, and she's in the trenches, having these arguments, having these fights, trying to get forensic labs, you know, ensuring that they have the proper training accreditation so that they're not introducing, you know, various forms of junk science. All it takes
23:46 Speaker 01 is just the effort going forward to try to start pushing that boulder uphill, or else, you know, again, this goes to, you know, the incoming hatred in a situation like we had here is like, what the fuck are you doing to help try to make the situation better? Because just calling names and pointing fingers and saying, you fucked up, or this person that we threw away is not worth saving. Listen, everybody has made some mistake that they wish other people didn't know about. You know, and it's not always homicide, obviously.
24:30 Speaker 01 But a lot of people have done something that but for the grace of God, go I, right?
24:38 Joe Rogan? Mm-hmm.
24:39 Speaker 01 Um, where if somebody was looking, if law enforcement was looking, it could be you that was there. And would you want a second chance? Would you want redemption? Would you want the help to overcome whatever demons? And I, I just think why psychedelics aren't, you know, looked at? Um, ketamine, the, the little bit that I did going through a dark time. It, uh, it almost snapped me in a different direction.
25:10 Joe Rogan? Yeah.
25:11 Speaker 01 And I mean, I, you know, you urged me onto it. I mean, you were the one that said you should really think about this. And my therapist urged me onto it. And I think, you know, so I know that the literature is there. It's just, we have to get past this whole, um, it's so weird that you mentioned that. I was talking to a guy on the plane on the way down who was telling, asked me, um, if marijuana legalization passed in Florida. Um, because I was totally, we were talking about, you know, where are you from this and that? And he was telling me that, um, and he was from Colorado.
25:55 Speaker 01 And he told me that, you know, in Colorado, when marijuana was legalized, that there was this whole, um, movement of people that were saying that it would be a gateway drug and that it was going to lead people down this slippery slope to doing other hardcore drugs. And he said, you know, the gulf between smoking weed and turning into a meth addict doesn't exist. He said that the bridge between the two doesn't exist. And if you start walking marijuana use and trying to link it to, um,
26:33 Speaker 01 Drugs that the US government considers a problem, the link just isn't there.
26:37 Joe Rogan? Right.
26:38 Speaker 01 So, I mean, I, you know, he was sort of, are trying to explain to me how he didn't understand how marijuana is any different than alcohol. And I said, "Well, go tell that to the state legislator in Florida. I don't know what to tell you."
26:53 Joe Rogan? Did it not pass in Florida?
26:54 Speaker 01 It got fifty-eight percent. And it needed sixty percent.
26:59 Joe Rogan? Really?
27:00 Speaker 01 Yeah. I don't get that. I just don't get.
27:04 Joe Rogan? Why would? It's fucking, more than half the people. That should be it. Why did it need sixty percent?
27:10 Speaker 01 That was the same thing with, you know, the amendment on abortion. It needed sixty percent. Maybe it was the abortion one that got fifty-eight percent. I might be wrong about that. But in any event, I don't, I don't understand the, the resistance to psychedelics as a therapeutic, both in mainstream society, let alone in the prison system.
27:33 Joe Rogan? Well, it all goes back to nineteen seventy. It all go back, it all goes back to the Nixon administration, the sweeping psychedelics act of nineteen seventy that turned everything schedule one, that was designed to, it was designed to cripple the civil rights movement and the anti-war movement. That, that's what it was about. It was about having new tools to imprison people that were anti-war, that were protesting the war. The Black Panthers, civil rights organizations, all these people that were doing drugs, you know, that were using psychedelics to try to achieve a different state of consciousness. And that brought them to these ideas that we're all one, and that war is evil, and
28:16 Joe Rogan? that the United States government is being controlled by the military industrial complex, and that this is a, a giant problem in our culture. You know, but people were so weirded out by the Timothy Learys and, you know, the, the whole tune in, you know, turn out, whatever the fuck his motto was, drop out. This whole thing of leaving polite society and being a loser, and just like traveling around. And doing drugs in a van, like this is, this was like the, the, the perspective that people had that was gonna take their kids and turn them into ne'er do wells and turn them into losers.
28:56 Joe Rogan? And that we were gonna have a society filled with, uh, people that didn't understand the ethics of hard work and what made America great and all, all this bullshit.
29:06 Speaker 01 Well.
29:09 Speaker 01 Look. What's born out of that is this, um. You know.
29:19 Speaker 01 Misunderstanding, I guess, is the best way to put it. Um, ignorance.
29:24 Joe Rogan? Well, it's propaganda. They're a victim of propaganda.
29:27 Speaker 01 Well, look, also, if you think about like Coin and Tell Pro.
29:30 Joe Rogan? Mm-hmm.
29:31 Speaker 01 Um, you know, all of a sudden you're spying on people that you think are others.
29:36 Joe Rogan? Mm-hmm.
29:36 Speaker 01 You're, um, legalizing that, um, intelligence gathering that allows you to start violating people's civil liberties so that you can gain intelligence on them because the way they think is unlike you.
29:57 Joe Rogan? Right.
29:57 Speaker 01 So, you know, it's the, again, sort of to me, um, all ties back to this very, I guess, tribal mentality that you're either like us or you're like them.
30:10 Joe Rogan? Right.
30:11 Speaker 01 And everything that you mentioned, the psychedelics act, um, the resistance to the civil rights movement, it was all based on the fact that, look, we're we have a, a potential uprising here of people that are gonna challenge the way we think and the way we do things.
30:27 Joe Rogan? Right.
30:27 Speaker 01 So for people to call me a race baiter, right? I, you know, I feel like I'm more of a truth teller and just taking the thread through history. And, you know, I, I have, at least I'll read and try to educate myself and get perspective.
30:48 Speaker 01 If it wasn't a fact that brown and black men and women get incarcerated at a higher rate, I wouldn't be talking about it. And I'm just talking about facts. So I think that it's just this tribal misconception about these are drugs and they're bad versus you sit and speak to someone and take some, you know, pharmacologic form of therapy that has probably way worse side effects, can be addictive and can lead to a whole host of other issues that you then have to take something else to address versus just being
31:29 Speaker 01 having the openness to take a look at a different way to potentially help someone. So I don't understand it. And the only thing that I can do is just to keep on being open-minded and, you know, try to figure out if there's other ways that we can convince the people that are in these penitentiaries and that run them to allow programs that at least give you a crack in the door to get in.
31:59 Joe Rogan? Well, I think the way the doorway to that is to first show the effectiveness with veterans and with other people that aren't incarcerated. And that once that gets established and once that becomes something, I think it's much, much more established now than it was when I first started talking about this stuff 20 years ago, you know. This episode is sponsored by BetterHelp. Look, it's good to prepare for the future. But when you start over analyzing what's happening around you, dreaming up every hypothetical situation of what could happen, that's when it gets dangerous. You can start to hyper-fixate and stress out and all over things that haven't even happened. That's no good for current
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33:26 Joe Rogan? at betterhelp.com. That's better H E L P dot com. This episode is brought to you by Chime. And I know people don't usually get excited about banking, but Chime is doing something different and it's worth paying attention to. In a recent survey, they ranked the number one choice for new checking accounts in America. That means real people, millions of them, are choosing this over traditional banks. That's because banking at Chime is fee-free. No monthly fees, no overdraft fees, and thousands of fee-free ATMs. But here's the real kicker. If you get their Chime card, it gives you 5% cash back on a category you actually pick yourself. Your savings rate, crazy high.
34:10 Joe Rogan? It's nine times the national average. They're calling it the most rewarding way to bank. Go to chime.com/Rogan. Takes a few minutes to sign up. Chime is a fintech, not a bank. Banking services and Chime card provided by Chime's bank partners. Terms and limits apply. Go to chime.com/disclosures for more details. Probably when I had my first experiences was a little more than 20 years ago. I think people had this very ignorant idea that was born out of propaganda. Because you have to think 20 years ago was only 30 years removed from the sweeping psychedelics act. So you're
34:49 Joe Rogan? dealing with a whole society that's been just programmed by propaganda and lies. And those propaganda and lies were established in order to villainize this one group of the population that was completely changing the culture. The difference in the United States' culture from 1965 to 1955 to 1965 was so dramatic. It was such an enormous shift. You know, then you have the Vietnam War, the protests, all these things that were happening in the 60s, the music. Everything was changing so radically and so drastically that the people in power had a very...
35:33 Joe Rogan? Like an accurate sense that they were losing control. And that change was inevitable. And they threw water on it and they did a great job. If you look at it from that perspective, the difference between me, it's terrible what they did. But it was effective in that from nineteen seventy.
35:51 Speaker 01 A great job of throwing water on it.
35:52 Joe Rogan? Yeah, a great job of changing culture, which was changing in a potentially beneficial way for everyone to get us to recognize that we truly are all one. And that the way to make things better for everyone is to make things better for the most disadvantaged. And this was the civil rights movement, right? And this was the anti-war movement. This was, uh, this was recognizing that people are being taken advantage by the military industrial complex and just sent overseas so that they could profit.
36:26 Speaker 01 Amen. I, uh, the first guy that I met that really like, um, changed my perspective on, on the world, especially in terms of what, what I could potentially do as a lawyer was Jerry Lefkort. Jerry Lefkort was Abbie Hoffman's lawyer. He was the lead attorney in the Panther twenty-one trial. I was like a kid. I was in my late twenties and I was, met with him to help him pick a jury on a case. And I had read about him before. And he saw something in me, we hit it off.
37:08 Speaker 01 He became like my, uh, like my surrogate uncle. And he would regale me with tales of his, um, of the Panther twenty-one trial. And here's a guy that was kind of winging it in his late twenties and can feel the change that you're talking about happening. And he could feel the weight against him, the pushback coming from the other side where he would get death threats. He would get, um, bomb threats at his office where he could not even see his client in
37:47 Speaker 01 jail approaching trial and had to get on a cherry picker in, in, outside the jail to be able to get even with the window so that they could communicate.
37:58 Joe Rogan? Jesus Christ.
37:59 Speaker 01 So Jerry Lefkort.
38:02 Speaker 01 And he, by the way, got a full acquittal in the Panther 21 trial against all odds. He was the first person that told me about Coin and Tell Pro. And what the lengths that the government will go to. When they feel like their message, their way of doing things is being challenged. And I think that you hit the nail right on the head, which is, this was like a flew in the face of,
38:32 Speaker 01 Leave It To Beaver, it flew in the face of, you know, Father Knows Best. It flew in the face of what white America was trying to instill as a value system that should be followed by all people without question for all time. And people started to say, what the fuck is this about?
38:56 Joe Rogan? Right.
38:56 Speaker 01 I want to explore the messiness and the gray areas of what it means to exist as a human being.
39:04 Joe Rogan? Right.
39:04 Speaker 01 And that expression, whether it was Richard Nixon, the people around him that got their backs up.
39:14 Speaker 01 You know, so if you are a student of history and you start to understand sort of why we're here, rather than just looking here and forward, I think these things for me are a little bit easier to understand. When somebody comes at me and calls me a race baiter for the work that I do, because I talk about the problem of race, I understand that that's born out of ignorance. And I don't mean ignorance like you're a dummy. I mean ignorance like you're-
39:46 Joe Rogan? You're not, you don't have access to the information.
39:48 Speaker 01 Yeah, or you chose not to have access to it.
39:50 Joe Rogan? Yeah, your perspective is incorrect.
39:52 Speaker 01 Read Ta-Nehisi Coates's book Between the World and Me. It's a fascinating fucking tale. It's a letter written from this, you know, black man to his 15-year-old son. And it is, it's a life-altering book for me because it puts you into his soul of what it has been like to grow up as a black man in this country.
40:22 Speaker 01 It stops me in my tracks when I think about it, when I talk about it, because it's like, the only way that we can get to a more common understanding is to, you know, I think to read books like that and to talk to people. And if you're so closed off and closed minded, and again, I keep on sort of adding this disclaimer, and maybe this is my aversion to like getting attacked. I am not excusing if Sheldon did this. I just think that it's not so simple as, "Oh, you let some guy, you helped some guy get out and get resentenced and look what he did and fuck all these people and fuck your movement." Okay, you're entitled to that opinion. That's where I leave it.
41:03 Joe Rogan? Yeah, you can't listen to those people. You just, you know what you're doing. You're smart. You can't listen. It's just that you're gonna have those people, they're always gonna exist. There's always gonna be people with limited information perspective, you know, and limited information people sometimes are the loudest and the most vocal about it. And also the ones who are least willing to objectively assess how they came to the conclusions that they're so vocal and loud about. You know, limited information people, that's a big, I mean, that's why clickbait headlines work.
41:39 Speaker 01 Well, look, I mean, that's why you get attacked sometimes by, you know, you don't know about it because you don't read it. That's why you get attacked sometimes.
41:50 Joe Rogan? Some people try sending it to me. It's funny. "Hey, man, fuck off. Stop sending me that shit."
41:54 Speaker 01 You know, someone, someone in my family, a cousin of mine, sent me a link to a story about you endorsing Trump and wrote, "What the fuck?" And I said, "Right, what the fuck? Why are you sending this to me?" Like, first of all, what the fuck? What the fuck are you, what, you're, because you all of a sudden support this woman who, by the way, probably should have accepted the invitation to come on the show? It might have been the difference between people getting to actually know who the fuck she was. But putting that aside,
42:38 Speaker 01 it's like, I have to do a much better job of filtering that stuff out because the notion that, you know...
42:49 Speaker 01 You are gonna be influenced by outside forces other than what you're doing. Like for you to say you know what you're doing. I like to think I know what I'm doing and I feel like I'm doing
43:01 Joe Rogan? You know what you're doing.
43:02 Speaker 01 Good things and I just gotta keep on working in that direction. Not let what happens slow me down, try to learn from it and go forward. Look, I don't want this to come across as like constantly
43:20 Speaker 01 being like a
43:23 Speaker 01 situation where I'm, every time I get on here, I thank you. But I think the importance of this forum was, was made clear by having the president on, by having the vice president on, because it's the only open forum where you don't have to worry about being judged, about someone chopping up what you say and twisting it or leaving some remarks on the cutting room floor. And it, it's, it's also important because you don't give a fuck about what other people say or think and you just do what you feel is the right thing to do. Because I've, I mean, I've told you privately, I'll say it now again.
44:06 Speaker 01 It would have been the, the easy thing for you to do would have been to say, well, fuck this guy. I'm turning my back. I don't need to have him on again.
44:14 Joe Rogan? That was never gonna happen.
44:15 Speaker 01 Yeah, well.
44:15 Joe Rogan? Listen, what you've done is amazing. And the people that you have brought on this show have changed a lot of people's perspectives about our justice system. A lot of people, you've brought on some incredible people and you've told some incredible stories. And, and as you said, people have been exonerated for crimes that they didn't commit. If you are a person who's listening to this and you had, you could be fucked by the system. It's possible. You could be trapped by a corrupt prosecutor. It happens.
44:46 Joe Rogan? Thank God it hasn't happened to you, but if it did happen to you, you would pray that there's a Josh Dubin in the world that pays attention to your case.
44:54 Speaker 01 You know? I appreciate it, and I mean, I don't, it's not just me, there's a
44:58 Joe Rogan? I understand.
44:59 Speaker 01 There's a village of people.
45:00 Joe Rogan? There is, but a person like you.
45:02 Speaker 01 Yeah.
45:03 Joe Rogan? You know, and I think highlighting that and highlighting the need for that and the understanding of how the system can railroad you and the system can really fuck you over. I think one of the things that we saw during the, the Trump campaign was the legal system being used against one of the most powerful people in the world and how they can get away with turning thirty-four misdemeanors, so essentially one misdemeanor, but thirty-four versions of it, thirty-four writing in a ledger incorrectly, that's a misdemeanor and is past the statute of limitations, can be converted into a felony and turned against a guy who's running for president as lawfare.
45:46 Joe Rogan? It's just completely using the legal system to try to attack a guy and try to take him out of the race and also try to label him a convicted felon. So, once you have this label, a convicted felon, you, you heard it on all the talk shows, convicted felon, convicted felon, but enough people had a chance to look at the circumstances of the case and, and understand what was actually, what he was actually being tried for, paying someone off to not talk about how he fucked them? Is that what we're worried about or are we worried about World War III? Is that what we're worried about? Are we worried about terrorist cells like being established in the United States because our border's wide open? Is that, are we worried about the price of groceries and people being able to feed themselves?
46:29 Joe Rogan? That's what we should be fucking worried about, not whether or not some guy fucks someone, like, who cares?
46:35 Speaker 01 It's so, it's so, um, interesting to me because the conversations that people in the legal community in New York were having at the time, I cannot tell you how many times, didn't matter what side of the spectrum you were on politically, but in New York, there's a lot of fucking Democrats. And I can't tell you how often I got this call. What is the crime here? What, I mean, with regard to that particular case, first of all, the DA of Manhattan seemed to realize that it was a futile endeavor to go after this guy and retreated. And then something happened and the, you remember, the, the special prosecutors quit
47:16 Speaker 01 because they were furious, apparently, that the DA wouldn't go forward with the case. Then, um, something happens in between. And Alvin Bragg, the district attorney of Manhattan, proceeds with the case. So many legal scholars said, what is the crime here? I understand there's a series of misdemeanors that somehow gets flipped into a felony. Legal scholars that had issues with it, and if they spoke about it publicly, they were attacked. Right. Alan Dershowitz was one of them. He was attacked. Anyone that would speak out, and there's this fear for good legal minds to get behind
47:56 Speaker 01 defending a case like that because it's viewed in democratic strongholds like kryptonite, right? Right. So, I mean, remarking on that case, yeah, it was weaponized against him. And that's why, I think it was this morning, the judge in that case agreed to a joint motion by the prosecution and the defense to put everything on hold because they're deciding whether or not they're going to dismiss that case. And if you remember, the, the drum that was constantly beat before this election was, he'll never get out of these state cases. The federal ones, we understand because he can pardon himself. But the state cases, oh, those are going to be a problem.
48:41 Speaker 01 Well, not so fast, right? Because now, if it was that much of a, a crime and that people were so up in arms about it, why are they now considering dismissing it? And I think that the, it puts the, the lie to the notion that this was really something that we wanted to make an example out of and you can't engage in this type of conduct. What conduct? You know, it was obviously politically motivated. And, you know, and it happens all over the country. It happens all over the country, on both sides of the aisle, though.
49:18 Speaker 01 We have, I have a case right now that, and for me to be able to say this is probably, you know, I had to think, is this, is this the craziest fucking case I've had? And, and it has to be, it has to be. Because the DA that is sitting in judgment of whether or not these four men that I'm going to tell you about in a moment, right before the election, for him to become DA, gets indicted. He gets indicted for allegedly like harassing a former employee and then trying to bribe
50:01 Speaker 01 her not to file a complaint against him, something like that. Right before the election. And all of a sudden, he is now embroiled in this, he loses the election a couple of weeks ago, and he is now finds himself wrongful, according to him, wrongfully accused of a crime he didn't commit. Well, my client is a guy by the name of John Edwards. And there were four guys, this is in Lorain, Ohio, Lorain County, Ohio.
50:39 Speaker 01 John Edwards, Lenworth Edwards, Benson Davis, and a guy named Al Cleveland, New York guys. In the early 90s, who were selling drugs in Ohio. They were going back and forth from Ohio to New York. And one morning, a man by the name of Epps is found dead in the street. His roommate is found about seven hours later, woman named Marsha Blakely, dumped in an alley.
51:20 Speaker 01 Behind the shopping center. The case is cold for a month. The police have hit dead ends. They have nowhere to go with the case. The prosecutor's office offers a $2,000 reward for anyone with information about the case. Wouldn't you know that the next day, a man by the name of William Avery Sr. walks in to the Lorraine County Prosecutor's Office. They sit him down with the police and he says, "I have information about the case." Now, this guy, William Avery Sr., was a known informant. The police knew him.
52:03 Speaker 01 He had come and tried to give information about other cases. Didn't pan out. He was also a drug addict. And they sit with him for over an hour and they say to him, "Everything you're telling us has been in the papers. So you're not giving us anything new here." He shows up the next day with his son, William Avery Jr. and he says, "He witnessed the murder." So William Avery Jr. talks to the police. At the end of that interview, he goes, "What about the reward money?"
52:40 Speaker 01 And the officer says, "Let's turn the tape recorder off and let's talk about that." They tell him, "We're not giving you the reward money because now you're telling us that information that's been in the papers and all you're telling us is that you saw Marsha Blakely assaulted in an apartment. You're not telling us anything about the murder." The very next day, he shows up and says that Al Cleveland told him that he murdered Marsha Blakely. So, let's put a bookmark in it because I decided I wanted to do something a little bit different today.
53:25 Speaker 01 At the end of the episode, I'm going to give you a Twitter account. I've submitted today a 40-page submission. All of the exhibits that are mentioned in that submission to the Lorraine County Prosecutor. His name is J.D. Tomlinson. So now I'm going to invite the public. Before you go writing a letter to him or calling him, you read the submission and look at the exhibits yourself. Because what often happens is that in these reinvestigations, prosecutors' offices have something called a conviction integrity unit, where they say they'll reinvestigate the case.
54:10 Speaker 01 And the very first thing they make you do is sign a no-media agreement, that you won't go to the media. Because the last thing they want you to do is what I just did, is to talk about the case publicly. So we're not in a conviction integrity unit. We're trying to appeal to a prosecutor, J.D. Tomlinson, who, from what I understand, has told Al Cleveland's wife, because I've spoken to her. Her name is Roberta, great woman. Came up to her in the summer at a barbecue and said, "When I was a law student, I sat in on your husband's trial, and it always bothered me. And I want you to come in and have your lawyers come in. I'm going to do the right thing."
54:53 Speaker 01 And now that he's been indicted, he has gone silent. I haven't heard from him. I've texted him. I see he reads my messages, because he has read receipts on. And I guess he doesn't know that. And I've asked him for his time. I think in his wildest dreams, he probably never could have imagined that the case was going to now become national news. He has between now and December 31st to do the right thing and exonerate them. The incoming DA would never do it, I don't think, from what I've heard. So I'm going to invite the public, and I'll give you the link at the end, and I want to tell you the rest of the story. Because some of the things I tell you, you're going to say, "Come on, that can't be true."
55:36 Speaker 01 So I have the exhibits sitting in a folder for everybody to read. But...
55:43 Speaker 01 You know, the, I think that the justice system has been weaponized against J D Tomlinson. Because he was coming up for reelection. There's all sorts of like, personal animosity between him and the guy that just got elected. There's allegations at least, that the guy that just got elected helped, you know, was somehow involved in,
56:08 Speaker 01 you know, getting him indicted by a special prosecutor. I don't know if it's true or not. But, it doesn't just happen on the big national stage. It happens all over the place, and you just don't always hear about it.
56:19 Joe Rogan? Well, I think the fact that it happened on the big national stage, the way it did, and not just the case of the hush money, but also the case of Mar-a-Lago being overvalued, which is preposterous. That was one of the most ridiculous ones. They, they listed it, what, seventeen, eighteen million dollars? I would buy five of those, if they're available for eighteen million dollars. You know how much money you would make for that kind of property?
56:45 Speaker 01 You ever been to this place?
56:46 Joe Rogan? No.
56:47 Speaker 01 It's, I've been there, a bunch.
56:50 Joe Rogan? I've seen it.
56:51 Speaker 01 It's fucking, it's magnificent.
56:54 Joe Rogan? Yeah.
56:54 Speaker 01 You walk in there, and you feel like, you know, Marjorie Post bought it and had it designed. It's magnificent.
57:02 Joe Rogan? Forbes, I think, had valued it between seven and nine hundred million dollars. Is that true? Find out what, what the valuation was. But like, independently, before all this shit, it had been valued, and I think Trump valued it over a billion, which of course he's gonna do.
57:17 Speaker 01 And he's doing it to the bank, right? Trying to get a loan.
57:20 Joe Rogan? Paid the loan off with interest. Everything was fine. Nobody, there's zero victims involved in this. And the fact that they want to say that it was actually, so what does it say here? Okay, three fifty, okay. So, the club had revenues of twenty-five point one million for the calendar year of two thousand seventeen, twenty-two in two thousand eighteen, and twenty-one in two thousand nineteen. Twenty twenty-two, Forbes estimated the value of the estate around three hundred fifty million dollars. I think Trump jacked it way higher than that, and I think, I've read- Somewhere that someone had said between seven and nine, if you could, like, what a real estate evaluation would be, like, what it's actually worth in the state that it's at.
58:02 Joe Rogan? I think there was an issue, though, that it was, uh, wasn't it, like, listed as a national historic landmark or something like that, Jamie? Right, so then you really can't do anything to it, which devalues it somewhat, but still.
58:15 Speaker 01 I would think, listen.
58:16 Joe Rogan? Eighteen million is fucking crazy.
58:17 Speaker 01 There's no property like that, anywhere. Um, you feel like you're in Europe when you're there. It is, it is a magnificent place and has some of the best food in Florida.
58:31 Speaker 01 So, I don't, and I don't know that, it, part of the valuation of something like that seems to me to be a bit subjective. It's now the home, um, of the sitting two-time president of the United States. Um, so, yeah, but putting all that aside.
58:47 Joe Rogan? Just the real estate alone. There was, there was a lot that was sold next to it, or a home that was sold next to it. It was fifty million dollars.
58:54 Speaker 01 And they, it's not just Mar-a-Lago, across the street they have the beach club that sits right on the beach. But the point is, is that they're meddling into, look, the bank could have said, well, we're gonna send an appraiser out there.
59:06 Joe Rogan? Right.
59:07 Speaker 01 And we're gonna determine whether or not we agree with you that it's worth that. That happens for anyone that's ever sold a home. So, yeah.
59:14 Joe Rogan? Again, the point is, there's no victim. The point is, like, there, it's not like he got this loan and then defrauded the bank and then defaulted on his loan and then pocketed the money. No, no, he paid everything back with interest. It was profitable for the bank. Everything worked out. It's like, this is a bullshit case. Everyone knows it's a bullshit case. So that's another one that was in the news that everybody got a chance to see.
59:38 Speaker 01 Well, hopefully, hopefully it opens people's eyes. Look, there's a lot of white-collar crimes that I've been, um, a defense lawyer on, where you see the human cost of a prosecution, what it does to the person accused, but also their family. And to somehow crawl out from under the weight of the, the federal government, these, these take years and a fortune to defend. And oftentimes, you're thinking, why did they bring this case?
1:00:16 Speaker 01 What, who are the victims here? And they come up with some lost calculation that's very theoretical. I'm talking about cases where you can't point to a victim that lost money. And, um, you know, you wonder why some prosecutions are brought and others aren't. And you see again what it does to not only devastate families and the accused, but is it really deterring anyone? I would never, ever enter an industry where I was working with stocks, bonds, commodities, anything that was regulated in any way by FINRA,
1:00:59 Speaker 01 the SEC, because they'll, oh, it seems like they can make a case sometimes when there isn't a case to be made. And hopefully, you know, regardless of what side of the political spectrum you're on, what happened to Trump should be eye-opening to people because you don't have to agree with him or his politics or his policies to see what's happening today as we sit here when everything's being reconsidered. And, and you think about the massive expense that, um, it takes to prosecute these cases. That guy has, I don't care what anybody says about him. He's gotta be one of the toughest motherfuckers you've ever met to stare down all of this. And most people would be in a puddle.
1:01:44 Speaker 01 To stare down these prosecutions and the threat of going to jail and everything else, that breaks a lot of people.
1:01:49 Joe Rogan? Yeah. And then two assassination attempts. Yeah. Jesus Christ.
1:01:54 Speaker 01 He's built, he's built different.
1:01:57 Joe Rogan? Yeah, he has. I mean, the guy's 78 years old and I talked to him for three hours. And he didn't pee before, he didn't pee afterwards. Just sat here, talked, didn't lose any energy and then flew off to do a campaign rally.
1:02:11 Speaker 01 Yeah, listen, I hope, I wish him all the success in the world. I hope he does well. I, I got these, um, well, you can't vote for Kamala Harris after what you've said about her. You're right. I voted for Jill Stein because this two-party system to me is fucked. You know, you gotta like, you gotta be with us or them. And then there's all kinds of gaslighting that goes on. You have to answer to people. I just feel like there should be more choices, but that's a different.
1:02:39 Joe Rogan? There certainly should be.
1:02:40 Speaker 01 That's a different existential issue.
1:02:43 Joe Rogan? You know, you spoke on the podcast about her history as a prosecutor and what she had done. And I know they contacted you after, after that.
1:02:52 Speaker 01 Yeah, I mean, what was happening, well, this was way back.
1:02:54 Joe Rogan? Yeah.
1:02:56 Speaker 01 When, I think it was days before she was selected to be the vice presidential running mate for Biden. But I think it was Carpenter who was, was that his name? He's a great congressman. He wears an eye patch.
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1:04:14 Joe Rogan? Oh, Dan Crenshaw?
1:04:15 Speaker 01 Dan Crenshaw, not Carpenter. Dan Crenshaw took a clip from the podcast and was circulating it on Twitter.
1:04:24 Speaker 01 And it was of me being critical of her. And, you know, and again, that's a situation where she had so many opportunities during this campaign to just say, listen.
1:04:34 Speaker 01 I obviously, I watched a little vignette about this family who was prosecuted for their truant child, and it ruined them. So, all of this, "I'm a prosecutor, and I'm gonna prosecute the case against this," that petrified me, because I have sat in rooms with prosecutors that just wanna be right and win, and I would just say, "Please, just open your mind a little bit." I was just, I just sat in a room with the conviction integrity unit, and there were prosecutors in the room where, and I can't, I signed one of those agreements, so I can't name the
1:05:18 Speaker 01 case, or the city, or the borough, but where the prosecutor went to federal prison for bribing witnesses, and is accused of the same conduct in this case, where he was giving money to someone who has recanted their testimony. And the prosecutor sitting in the room were like, it wasn't that they weren't open-minded, they had their mind made up before we got in there. And you feel like saying, "Can't you just listen? Just listen."
1:05:50 Joe Rogan? They just wanna win.
1:05:51 Speaker 01 Yeah, and I think that that is my problem with the two-party system, is that it's, you're either on this side, or you're on this side.
1:05:59 Joe Rogan? Right.
1:06:00 Speaker 01 And there's no room for gray area between the issues.
1:06:03 Joe Rogan? Right.
1:06:04 Speaker 01 I have, I have a friend who, I mean, I learned so much during this election. I have a friend who is from Central America, and she was telling me, I didn't, when Trump won the first time, I was furious. I couldn't stand the guy. But when I came to this country, I saw my mom fight for citizenship, and I saw what she had to go through, the right way for me to get citizenship. And she said, "So I just can't vote for anybody but him." So, everybody has their own reasons for doing it. It doesn't mean it has to be all about a cult of personality and you're voting for, you're endorsing everything about the
1:06:47 Speaker 01 person. And I think that, you know, having that understanding that, you know, look, a lot of people that, I spoke to a friend of mine the other day that grandparents, you know, were in the Holocaust. His grandfather survived the Holocaust and he voted for Trump because he's like, I didn't feel protected by the other side, you know, as, as the grandson of people that went through that. So, yeah, I just think that, um, watching a system get weaponized against someone in that, in that way, it's upsetting and hopefully, like you said, it opens people's eyes to the fact that if they could do it to the president, it could happen to you.
1:07:28 Joe Rogan? And it's so transparent. It was so transparent. It wasn't like he committed a murder. And there's a lot of evidence pointing to the fact that he committed this murder. No, it was just a crime that didn't make any sense. You're gonna spend millions and millions of dollars prosecuting this crime. You're gonna parade it around for the whole world just so the Democrats can have this talking point, convicted felon. And you just see it repeated over and over again on MSNBC and CNN. These pundits wanna say convicted felon. They wanna say that. Like, what's the fucking crime? Tell me what the crime is. But when you, you wanna get smart and spout off facts, why don't you tell me about the case? Because I've looked at it and it's fucking bananas. And if it happened to you, you'd be terrified.
1:08:09 Joe Rogan? Because they just made a crime. They made a felony out of something that's not a felony.
1:08:14 Speaker 01 I mean, listen, the, um, if you're looking for logic and reasoning in any of these, you're not gonna find it. I mean, listen, I feel-
1:08:29 Joe Rogan? Which is terrible.
1:08:29 Speaker 01 But I feel different about some of the cases. Like, I feel like the, you know, the election case is, had, has the most substance to it. You know, standing up and saying the election's rigged, the election's rigged. I have a problem with that, but, you know, obviously, more than half the country didn't have as much of a problem with it. And-
1:08:51 Joe Rogan? Well, that was one of the ones that I said was the weirdest, where he didn't have an answer ready. Then you should have an answer ready right away. And if I, if I had been accused of something that like that and I strongly believed that the elections were rigged, I'd be able to give you facts right away.
1:09:07 Speaker 01 But he can't. My, well, who's his facts? Rudy Giuliani and MyPillow?
1:09:11 Joe Rogan? Well, that's the thing is like, I don't know how much time he has to investigate the cases, right? So he has probably people telling him things. And who are these people? And what is their evidence? What's their information? I, I would, I would hope that if you have something that's so controversial, like you ran for president, you believe you should have won and they rigged it. You should have data that you could spit out at any cocktail party.
1:09:37 Speaker 01 But he's doing the same thing that you're talking about CNN and MSNBC do, which is just repeating the same thing. When people were standing in line voting a couple of weeks ago, he was saying the election was, this election was rigged. And poof, it must have, they've straightened it out because he won. But I don't, you know.
1:09:55 Joe Rogan? What he was saying was they were trying to rig the election and I think.
1:09:58 Speaker 01 What facts did he have to back that up?
1:10:00 Joe Rogan? Well, there's the one thing of bringing in people um to the country illegally and then pushing for amnesty, which was they were doing.
1:10:07 Speaker 01 Well, yeah, I just don't know the numbers on it.
1:10:10 Joe Rogan? Well, it's millions of people. If you think about the amount of people that came into the country, right? And you think about how some of these swing states, either cumulative votes was like 75,000 that switched it one way or another. And just you could imagine if you're bringing in millions and millions of people and you're moving them to swing states.
1:10:26 Speaker 01 Well, if that's, yeah, if that's true.
1:10:28 Joe Rogan? And the evidence against it was like, well, they're not all moving to swing states. Well, okay, you can't tell people where they can and can't move once they come to the United States. If they have family that's in Texas or if they have family that's in Arkansas or whatever, they're going to go wherever the fuck they want to go. But a significant number of them were in the country. If you're bringing in 10 million people, you have quite a bit of a buffer. It's not a perfect system, but if you're trying to let people in illegally and then give them not just protection, but also money, food, food stamps, housing, taking care of them. And then giving them an incentive to vote for the party that did that to them when the other party wants to, they, they want to round people up and mass deportations.
1:11:10 Speaker 01 Yeah, but putting party aside, what evidence did you see? Documentary evidence that people were.
1:11:17 Speaker 01 Registering to vote and how many of them?
1:11:20 Joe Rogan? Well, it's not that they were registering to vote. The issue is that there's no voter ID, which is fucking insane. You need an ID for everything. This ID that poor people-
1:11:29 Speaker 01 Where is there no voter ID?
1:11:30 Joe Rogan? Harris won some states that require voter ID, contrary to online claims fact checks. So, oh, so there's an online chart that's incorrect that people are passing around?
1:11:39 Speaker 01 See, that, this is, this is exactly-
1:11:41 Joe Rogan? So what states did she win that have voter ID? Well, she's good, there's certain like deep state, deep blue states.
1:11:48 Speaker 01 I hear you.
1:11:48 Joe Rogan? Colorado and Rhode Island are two.
1:11:50 Speaker 01 But look what just happened.
1:11:50 Joe Rogan? So is that two? Is that the two? Uh, Vice President also won New Hampshire, which requires voter ID, but allows individuals without one to either have their identity confirmed by a designated official or fill out an affidavit. Um, Harris also won both Delaware and Virginia. So there's a couple of states that she won that have voter ID. But these are, these are like these deep blue states.
1:12:14 Speaker 01 Fair enough. Look, I don't know-
1:12:16 Joe Rogan? The question is the swing states.
1:12:18 Speaker 01 I don't know enough about it and I, I'm, I live in a, in a world where I need the evidence. But backing up to the other election, look, if, I'm just saying if there was one case where I was like, come on, man.
1:12:28 Joe Rogan? You know what's weird about the, the one, the 2020 that we keep going back to? Is the amount of people that voted. That's what's really crazy.
1:12:35 Speaker 01 Way more.
1:12:36 Joe Rogan? Way more.
1:12:37 Speaker 01 Way more.
1:12:37 Joe Rogan? Way more.
1:12:38 Speaker 01 And I don't know what to make of that.
1:12:39 Joe Rogan? Well, it's the first time ever you have mail-in ballots that are used ubiquitously. You know, that wasn't a thing before. Mail-in ballots were essentially for people that were overseas.
1:12:47 Speaker 01 Well, I think, I think COVID had a big part.
1:12:49 Joe Rogan? Sure, it did, but also never, you know, miss an opportunity. And if you wanted to cheat, that would be the way to do it. And to try to keep voted mail-in ballots, keep people voting by mail-in ballots when it's not necessary anymore. It's not a pandemic.
1:13:04 Speaker 01 Sounds good.
1:13:04 Joe Rogan? Seems crazy.
1:13:05 Speaker 01 It does, but it's not, to me, I live in a world that you cannot say shit like that without backing it up. But listen, whether, I don't, I have started to really veer away from having a strong political view and just putting my head down and doing what I can. So I don't, I mean-
1:13:26 Speaker 01 I don't see the evidence on the prior election. I see the claim repeated a lot. I just didn't.
1:13:31 Joe Rogan? I don't see the evidence either, but I do see evidence that people are trying to make it easier for illegals to vote. That disturbs me. The, the, the pathway to citizenship has always been kinda difficult. And when you talk to people that have done it the right way, it's very hard. They have to go up for a review. They have to hope that this person decides that they're a person worthy of being in this country. And you had to be a person of extraordinary skill and talent where that talent and skill wasn't available in the United States.
1:14:03 Speaker 01 Listen, I recently moved out of New York to Florida. And I got my driver's license and registered to vote pretty quick after I moved there. My wife didn't. When we went to vote, they wouldn't let her vote because it hadn't been 30 days yet. So, all I could say is that in Florida, they required an ID.
1:14:26 Joe Rogan? Yeah.
1:14:27 Speaker 01 And they didn't let my wife.
1:14:28 Joe Rogan? Well, California literally passed a law where you're not allowed to ask for ID, which is crazy.
1:14:34 Speaker 01 Yeah, it is crazy.
1:14:35 Joe Rogan? That's crazy. Well, why would you do that?
1:14:37 Speaker 01 Andre, Andre.
1:14:38 Joe Rogan? What would be the most charitable version of why you would do that?
1:14:41 Speaker 01 Andre, Andre Ward and I have been discussing California quite a bit recently.
1:14:47 Speaker 01 And, um, seems like, uh,
1:14:52 Speaker 01 it's, it's a little bananas to live in California right now.
1:14:57 Joe Rogan? It's fucking crazy.
1:14:58 Speaker 01 Yeah, he's, uh.
1:14:59 Joe Rogan? It's not gonna get better either. You know, a lot more people voted red in California. Have you seen the map of, uh, 2020 versus 2024?
1:15:07 Speaker 01 Yeah, I did.
1:15:08 Joe Rogan? It's a giant, significant shift. And if that keeps going, the state's gonna go red. And I think if the state keeps falling apart, people are gonna come to their senses and recognize that the policies that they have in place right now are fucking gross. They're gross. And you've got a bunch of bureaucrats that are profiting off of the homeless situation. They're taxing the fucking shit out of people. The state tax is 14. If you live in LA, it's another one. So, 15% of all your money just goes to incompetence.
1:15:34 Speaker 01 It's the same thing in New York City. I mean, you, you're. Giving to the state, to the city, you end up paying way more than if you make enough money, you end up paying way more. Here's the rub I don't get about Democrats, alright? This is the thing that bothers me about Democrats, and this is why I registered finally as an independent. We hear about the American dream a lot, the American dream, the American dream. I was a son of a teacher. Now I sound like a politician. I was a son of a teacher in a sales.
1:16:07 Joe Rogan? Did you grow up middle class?
1:16:08 Speaker 01 What's that? Yeah, I grew up middle class.
1:16:11 Joe Rogan? The Kamala Harris.
1:16:12 Speaker 01 I grew up mid-middle class, right? And we had to grind it out, and there were financial problems and everything else. So the American dream is to make it on your own, to be self-made. And then you get to that point, and you get demonized for it. Now you need to give back in a way that, how dare you not give more than half your effective salary? More than half your income if you live in California or New York.
1:16:36 Joe Rogan? Right.
1:16:36 Speaker 01 You give it away.
1:16:37 Joe Rogan? Right.
1:16:38 Speaker 01 Fifty-two percent, fifty-three percent, you end up feeling like, what the fuck? What did I do wrong? I give back in so many other ways and then...
1:16:45 Joe Rogan? Here's my take on that.
1:16:46 Speaker 01 Yeah.
1:16:47 Joe Rogan? If they were doing a great job, and they were legitimately making people's lives better, I'd be fine with that. If there was a system where I had to pay fifty percent because I make a lot of money, and I had to pay fifty percent, but that fifty percent was changing people's lives, they could show you all these success stories. It's like revolutionizing the way poor people are allowed to make it out of that situation.
1:17:10 Speaker 01 You didn't feel that in California? No? I wasn't feeling it in New York.
1:17:14 Joe Rogan? Nobody feels it.
1:17:15 Speaker 01 Going to the state courthouse.
1:17:16 Joe Rogan? You feel bureaucracy.
1:17:17 Speaker 01 Yeah, it's, it's a...
1:17:19 Joe Rogan? You feel like corrupt politicians who are profiting off of narratives. And they're, they're a bunch of dirty people who don't even follow their own fucking rules, particularly Gavin Newsom. Doesn't even follow his own rules. It's the guy that got busted in the middle of the pandemic, wearing no mask indoors, eating at the French Laundry. It's all bullshit. It's all bullshit, and the people felt really fucking imprisoned by it. They felt really captured by their government, and that's why a lot of people moved.
1:17:43 Speaker 01 He's got great hair.
1:17:45 Joe Rogan? He does have great hair. Well, he's a great sort of version of what you would expect of a politician, just...
1:17:51 Speaker 01 Why does great hair get you so far?
1:17:54 Joe Rogan? Well, people want great hair. They want the good genes, tall and great hair. It means a lot to people.
1:18:03 Speaker 01 Yeah, I don't.
1:18:05 Speaker 01 I don't fuck.
1:18:05 Joe Rogan? We're stupid.
1:18:06 Speaker 01 Yeah.
1:18:06 Joe Rogan? People are stupid. There's a lot of stupidity involved in why we choose things, you know?
1:18:11 Speaker 01 I read, I read this article once about how there was a, a poll done of female voters when Bill Clinton ran the first time, and they asked the reasons why, and it was multiple choice. And one of them was that he was good looking and had a full head of hair.
1:18:28 Joe Rogan? Yeah. They want to fuck him.
1:18:30 Speaker 01 Yeah. And apparently, he wanted to fuck them.
1:18:36 Joe Rogan? He was a great president, though. I mean, when, in terms of policy, in terms of what did for the economy, guy was a great president, great orator.
1:18:42 Speaker 01 I agree, except for the fact that mass incarceration kind of started with him.
1:18:47 Joe Rogan? Yes, the, the crime bill of 94.
1:18:49 Speaker 01 Yeah. So I think that our prison industrial complex started with Bill Clinton.
1:18:55 Joe Rogan? Well, it was kicked off by Joe Biden.
1:18:56 Speaker 01 It was.
1:18:58 Joe Rogan? It did. It was just hilarious that this is the guy running against all that.
1:19:01 Speaker 01 Yeah.
1:19:02 Joe Rogan? It's all bullshit.
1:19:03 Speaker 01 Um, you know, I don't, it was, it was very interesting to me that this is playing out in real time with, with the incoming president. And I have this parallel situation going on in Ohio. This is called a weave, weaving back to Ohio. And I want to tell you the rest of the story about the Ohio four. So this guy, J D Tomlinson, is the prosecuting attorney in Lorraine. He's under indictment right now. He's got two months left. Like I said, he now knows, according to him, what it's like to be wrongfully accused of a crime. So watch this. You have these four guys
1:19:48 Speaker 01 who, so again, it's Al Cleveland, Lenworth Edwards, John Edwards, Benson Davis. Yeah, you got to light up for this one.
1:19:58 Speaker 01 So I told you, William Avery senior goes in, tries to get the reward money. They tell him, fuck off. Brings his son in the next day. They say to him, no dice. Then he comes back and says, okay, Al Cleveland told me he committed the murder.
1:20:15 Speaker 01 Comes time for their trials to begin and they're going to all be tried separately. And William Avery Jr. Gives this account of how this murder happened. And he says that he watches this woman, Marshall Blakely, get beat for 15 to 20 minutes inside of her apartment and that, you know, the reason he, this woman gets beat is because Al Cleveland wanted him to work off a debt and beat her up. And he said, no. So then these four men bust in the door and this is how the crime occurs. It comes time for the first trial of these four men.
1:20:57 Speaker 01 And William Avery Jr. Shows up as the prosecution's star witness. And he says, I want $10,000 to testify. He gave me two, I want 10,000. And the prosecutors say, we're not giving it to you. And he says, then I'm not testifying. The judge throws him in jail. He's in jail. He is cool in his heels, as they say. And he says, you know, I made this whole thing up. And I did it for the money. And no one believes him.
1:21:40 Speaker 01 And the judge says, what are you talking about? You're going to get on the stand and testify? He says, no, I'm not. And now he's facing potential perjury charges. The judge declares a mistrial. He then comes back with a news story to the prosecutors and says he witnessed the beating. He witnessed other details of the crime. He then goes on to testify at all four of their trials. After the first mistrial, they all get convicted. He then fully recants of his own volition. Says he got off drugs, says he wants to straighten out his life.
1:22:26 Speaker 01 He's in the process of cooperating with the FBI and the Secret Service. Now, these exhibits are sitting in this folder. You go to Twitter, it's Free the Ohio Four. Free the Ohio Four. There it is. And if you just click on that URL-
1:22:44 Joe Rogan? Only one person's following?
1:22:46 Speaker 01 Well-
1:22:46 Joe Rogan? Zero followers?
1:22:47 Speaker 01 There was a, there was a reason because I didn't put it up until right before the episode today.
1:22:52 Joe Rogan? I'm gonna be the first person to follow it.
1:22:55 Speaker 01 So-
1:22:56 Joe Rogan? I'm gonna get on right now and be the first person to follow it.
1:22:58 Speaker 01 If you click on that, it will bring you to a folder with this 40-page submission that I put in today. And references to all of the exhibits. So here, um, this is my first page. "At the Trials of Al Monday," that was his pseudonym. Al Cleveland's pseudonym. "At the Trials of Al Monday and those charged with him, I testified under oath that I was an eyewitness to Alfred Cleveland, who I knew as Monday, along with other people I knew, as JR Will and Shaquem, who was John Edwards, beat Marsha Blakely at Floyd Epps apartment and then murder her behind Charlie's Bar in Lorraine. All of this was a lie.
1:23:42 Speaker 01 I never witnessed the murder of Marsha Blakely, was not with her or Al Cleveland the night she was murdered. I only done it for the money and everything was not true." The entire case was built on this man. There's no forensic evidence, no eyewitnesses, nothing. So, this is not to be believed.
1:24:04 Joe Rogan? What was the reason why they thought this woman and that other man were murdered?
1:24:09 Speaker 01 They didn't know. They had no theory. Police had no theory-
1:24:12 Joe Rogan? There's no connection to them?
1:24:13 Speaker 01 No connection to them.
1:24:14 Joe Rogan? There was no theory, like, drug deal gone wrong, something?
1:24:18 Speaker 01 Oh, that was what they ended up coming up with, was that she was a drug user, Al Cleveland was a drug dealer, it must have been drugs gone wrong. So-
1:24:29 Speaker 01 Something involving drugs gone wrong. So William Avery Jr. is, after they get convicted, is working as an informant for the FBI and the Secret Service. Now, prior to this case, maybe this is how obtuse I am, I thought that the Secret Service's purview was the president, but apparently they have other investigative functions because he was working on some food stamp scheme as an informant. The Secret Service tells the FBI, and the testimony is in that exhibit file, the Secret Service tells the FBI, "This guy, William Avery Jr., he's not to be trusted. He's lying to us, and he's lying to us for money."
1:25:13 Speaker 01 They contact the prosecutor. The FBI calls the prosecutor in Lorain County and says, "This guy, William Avery Jr., he used him as an informant in that case against these four men. He's a liar, and he does this for money." So they end up getting Al Cleveland's lawyers, John Edwards' lawyers, Lenworth Edwards, Benson-Dave's, they end up getting an evidentiary hearing. And William Avery Jr. comes to testify. And he's coming to testify that I made the whole thing up. And he's, in very exquisite detail, his father, who obviously brought him there, threatened
1:25:58 Speaker 01 his life. He was, sat him down and smoked crack with him to calm him down. (laughing) You can't make this shit up. Wait till you read the affidavit. Smoke crack with him to calm him down. He sat him down to smoke crack with him to calm him down. Fuck calms down from crack. And told him, "I need that reward money for my drug habit." He was a fucking junkie. So he needs the reward money, and he gets his son to go in there. And it's obvious, if you watch the, if you read the interrogation and his testimony, that he's being led. They show him pictures of the apartment where this woman was allegedly beat. He's getting details wrong. They're, they're, um, you know, he changed his story. He was telling conflicting versions of the story.
1:26:42 Speaker 01 So at these post-conviction hearings, where these men should have all been exonerated...
1:26:48 Speaker 01 He gets on the stand and before he testifies, the judge says to him, "Have you been advised, um, do you have an attorney?" He said, "I don't think I need an attorney." And he tells William Avery Jr., "Well, you need an attorney. We're going to appoint you an attorney because you're about to perjure yourself because you either did one of two things. You either lied and that put four men in prison, or you're about to lie now to set them free. Either way, you've lied under oath."
1:27:23 Speaker 01 Think about the mindfuck of this. So this guy is coming to clear his conscience and the judge threatens him with prosecution. So he gets an appointed attorney and they go and ask the prosecutor, "Will you give him immunity so he can tell the truth?" They say, "No." His defense attorney asks the judge, "Will you give him immunity so he can tell the truth?" And the judge says, "No." Oh, God. And they tell him, "We're going to charge you with perjury if you tell the truth." He walks out of the courthouse, okay, after pleading the fifth and is interviewed by the
1:28:04 Speaker 01 local paper, walking out of the courthouse. That's in the exhibits. And he says, "They're all innocent. I made the whole thing up. I've been trying to tell the truth here, but I can't go to jail for whatever time they're going to give me." So here you have a guy that is the son of a known junkie. He has been, the prosecutors in this, in Lorain County have told, um, have been told by the FBI that he's not reliable, that he makes things up just to get money. He's been caught in lie after lie after lie and now he comes and wants to tell the truth and set these men free. And the crazy, and
1:28:49 Speaker 01 this judge puts him in this situation where he's, he can't tell the truth or else he's going to get prosecuted. This is what happens in this country. This is the kind of thing that, and these four men, two of them are out, two of them are serving life sentences. Al Cleveland's wife, Roberta Cleveland, saw this DA and he said he was gonna do the right thing. He knew that the case was problematic and now, because he's worried about his own indictment, you know, he's not responding. So what we're asking for is your listeners to go through and read this very detailed submission that I've made along with the Ohio
1:29:32 Speaker 01 Innocence Project, the Ohio Public Defenders, and a great attorney by the name of Kim Corral, who you actually, you actually had a good laugh over one time, oddly enough, because she was at the White House when Kanye West was there. She was, she was like, apparently like, standing over him, smiling, and you were like, "Look at this fucking girl." She just thinks that, like, "How the fuck did I get here?" She told me about it this morning.
1:30:01 Joe Rogan? Did she feel that way? Like, "How the fuck did I get here?"
1:30:03 Speaker 01 She probably did. She's super cool. I spoke to her this morning. She's a badass. And she was like, "I've never met him, but he seems awesome." And he did have a good laugh at my expense when Kanye was in the White House. So, yeah, there she is. That's her. Do you remember this?
1:30:19 Joe Rogan? Kinda, kinda.
1:30:22 Speaker 01 It's so funny, but she's-
1:30:24 Joe Rogan? Kanye in the White House, I forgot that.
1:30:26 Speaker 01 She's awesome. But, so, we're asking your listeners to go and read the exhibits, read the submission. And then I have a contact page. Call J.D. Tomlinson. Write him a letter. Look, these four men, thank you, Jamie, these four men certainly were drug dealers. Al Cleveland, we've established Al Cleveland's alibi, John Edwards' alibi. Check this shit out.
1:30:59 Speaker 01 His alibi witness was Damon John from Shark Tank. He testified at his fucking trial.
1:31:08 Joe Rogan? Whoa.
1:31:08 Speaker 01 At post conviction hearings.
1:31:11 Speaker 01 Damon John, back then, was a hard scrabble New Yorker. He was doing whatever he could to grind it out. This is before FUBU. And he was friends with Al Cleveland, and Al needed to move, to have a TV moved. And Damon had like a gypsy cab service, a car service in New York. You lived in New York, right? You remember what it was like. You call a cab service?
1:31:32 Joe Rogan? Yeah.
1:31:33 Speaker 01 A car service? And he was with Al Cleveland the day of these murders. Al Cleveland saw his probation officer the day after the murders. People saw him all over New York when the murders happened. John Edwards was with his girlfriend, his girlfriend's family, throughout the night. From like 10 at night till 3 in the morning. His girlfriend was pissed off at him because he was flirting with some girl in the bar. So these guys have alibis. There is no question, they had absolutely nothing to do with this crime. This woman, Marsha Blakely, was murdered, right? Here's one of the strangest facts in this case. She is seen all over town, all over town.
1:32:19 Speaker 01 At the time, they claimed that you, that this, that this guy, William Avery, originally claimed she was murdered. She's seen by family members, friends, she's looking for crack. She's walking down the street, way after this guy claims it happened.
1:32:33 Joe Rogan? How was she murdered?
1:32:35 Speaker 01 She, she was, throat was cut, and she was run over by a car. Alright, so we've talked about tunnel vision before, and when the police think they have the guy. They had a problem on their hands. They couldn't solve the crime, and they have these guys that are drug dealers in the area. So they become easy marks for this. There is a blade, sitting in a diagram, found right next to Marsha Blakely's body. They never tested it for DNA, they never collected it. They never tested it. It was at a time when DNA is the early 90s. DNA was around.
1:33:12 Speaker 01 Her roommate, Epps, Raymond Epps, is found a mile or two down the road with his throat slit and run over.
1:33:23 Joe Rogan? Same thing.
1:33:24 Speaker 01 Same thing. No one's been charged. No one's been charged. It's an unsolved case as of this day. Why?
1:33:32 Joe Rogan? Because they pinned it on these other guys.
1:33:34 Speaker 01 Because they pinned it on these guys and this guy, William Avery Jr., only he came in with information about one of the murders. The, the cases were so clearly connected that the medical examiner pointed it out. These people were killed in the same way.
1:33:50 Speaker 01 Why there isn't an outrage, a fucking outrage about this case is, is beyond me. When I got this case, I said, "There is no way what you're telling me is true." That this guy has come and wants the clearest conscience and tells you exactly what happened and the FBI told the prosecutors that he's a liar? And these guys are still, two of them are still serving life sentences? And when you have to live stamped as a murderer, even in the free world, you know, Al Cleveland is out and he's suffering.
1:34:28 Speaker 01 I mean, I had to listen to his wife, um, heaving.
1:34:35 Speaker 01 She couldn't get a hold of herself because she went down to J.D. Tomlinson's office and said, "You told me you were gonna help."
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1:35:14 Speaker 03 It's getting chilly outside, but you know what that means?
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1:35:44 Speaker 01 And he said, I can't now. I'm sorry, I've been indicted. The last time I exonerated someone, look what they did to me. Because he exonerated someone else and his political opponents attacked him. You know, human beings, we, we, we sometimes get in our own way because of outside forces. What we think other people are going to say, think JD Tomlinson's been voted out. He's been wrongfully accused of a crime. It's time for him to, to say, you know what? I'm going to do the right thing. All I ask is actually a meeting with him. I want to meet with you between now and December 31st. Let me lay everything out for you as I have in this submission.
1:36:29 Speaker 01 He's now going to have it in his hands. He wouldn't answer my text messages. I'll give him a break. He was obviously going through some serious personal issues, being under indictment, running for reelection. This is an easy thing. This is just doing the right thing. There is no way that you could look at this evidence, and this is why I think it's a good idea for, rather than give a snapshot of a case and have to rely on some process with these conviction integrity units behind closed doors where they run the reinvestigation.
1:37:11 Speaker 01 I like the public being able to get invested and look at the evidence themselves. Everyone loves a true crime story.
1:37:19 Speaker 01 So why not, as part of this, let the public help make the case? And when they write a letter, they'll do it more forcefully. Or they call him and say, "How could you ignore this?" So I would just encourage everyone to go on Twitter and go to Free the Ohio 4 and look at the evidence. And if you ever, I've gotten so many reach outs, "How can I make a difference? What can I do to make a difference?" This is it. You can write, you can call. You know, his cellphone number is online because he was running for reelection. You know, let him know that the public is watching and expecting him to do the right thing.
1:38:04 Speaker 01 You know, that's the best use I feel like I can make of publicly advocating for change is to help bring in the public and give them a vested interest in trying to help.
1:38:19 Joe Rogan? Well, this case is, this is just an amazing example, right? I mean, you said this is the craziest case you think you've ever seen.
1:38:28 Speaker 01 I don't think I've ever had a case, ever, where the sole alleged eyewitness recants and then is threatened with jail time, is actually put in jail after trying to extort the prosecutors, where there's no forensic evidence, and it was the most incomplete investigation I have ever seen. What would be the most logical thing to do if this guy says, "You know what? There was a beating at this house." What would be the most logical thing for police to do? There was a beating inside this apartment for 15 to 20 minutes,
1:39:12 Speaker 01 and this woman was brutally beaten. What are the police gonna do first?
1:39:17 Joe Rogan? Scan for evidence. Go to the apartment.
1:39:19 Speaker 01 They go to the apartment.
1:39:20 Joe Rogan? Right.
1:39:21 Speaker 01 They don't spray it for luminol. They don't see if there's, you use, luminol is a chemical agent that brings out hidden blood.
1:39:31 Speaker 01 You know, they do nothing. They go and do a scan of the apartment, a visual scan and see nothing out of order. They don't test that knife and this is-
1:39:41 Joe Rogan? Was there evidence that the woman was beaten?
1:39:44 Speaker 01 No eviden- oh, there was evidence that she was beaten, just not in that apartment.
1:39:48 Joe Rogan? So she's beaten before she was stabbed?
1:39:50 Speaker 01 There was, oh, there was an eyewitness that saw her that night with like a black eye, beg- begging for money for drugs.
1:39:57 Joe Rogan? Oh, okay.
1:39:59 Speaker 01 After he allegedly saw her killed.
1:40:04 Joe Rogan? Oh.
1:40:04 Speaker 01 So, it's, um, she was living a street life.
1:40:08 Joe Rogan? Right.
1:40:08 Speaker 01 And she was, there was, you know, suspicion that she was trading sex for money, um, so that she could feed her drug habit. So, um, I just don't, I don't, I've never had a case where the FBI calls the prosecutor and says, "This guy is a liar and he goes in for reward money and for financial gain and he can't be trusted." Never had a case where a judge says, "If you tell the truth, we're gonna put you in jail. If you tell the truth, it's just as bad as putting these guys, you know, um, you either told a lie to put them in jail or you're now telling a lie to free them." I mean, I just don't get it. I just
1:40:51 Speaker 01 don't get it. Um, I don't understand why, you know, in, in almost half of the cases where there has been an exoneration based on a sole eyewitness's testimony, over half the people recant. And the courts are very critical of these recantations. So in other words, if someone makes up a story and then they come back and say, "Look, I made that up because my dad was threatening me, because the police threatened me," that's somehow viewed very, very critically. Whereas the initial allega- it's really easy to put someone in jail. Real easy. Real difficult to get them out.
1:41:35 Joe Rogan? So, do you think that's because the system is set up to not reverse convictions because it's bad for the prosecutor's record, it's bad for the confidence of the judicial system? Like-
1:41:49 Speaker 01 All of the above.
1:41:50 Joe Rogan? Yeah.
1:41:51 Speaker 01 I mean, why did Kamala Harris block, uh-
1:41:55 Speaker 01 Why did she block access to biological evidence from crime scenes? I think the rationale back then was, oh, well, it would lead to a flood of requests. So fucking what?
1:42:06 Joe Rogan? Right. Flood of requests from innocent people, perhaps.
1:42:08 Speaker 01 Or, or people that want, you know, maybe they're guilty and they want to take a shot. Who knows? But isn't that worth the price of, of, you know, wrongfully incarcerating people? And, you know, why is, um, it's, it's, there's so much politics that gets wound up in this. I don't, you know, and, and for the life of me, I don't understand why, you know, it doesn't see the light of day more. I testified before the House Judiciary Committee in Florida in connection with the Perlmutter case when their DNA was stolen. All right, their DNA was stolen and they were wrongfully accused of a crime, Ike and Lori Perlmutter. And I testified before the House Judiciary Committee that
1:42:55 Speaker 01 stealing someone's DNA
1:42:59 Speaker 01 as a private citizen should be a felony. All right, it was a misdemeanor. And, you know, it was one of my finer moments of oration, I think, because I got a 16-0 vote. And I had a really interesting discussion. It's recorded, I should find it and, and send it to you sometime. But there were Republicans that asked me,
1:43:28 Speaker 01 hey, what is it that we can do to help you more? Because this story is crazy. And I said, well, there is, um, something that you can do as part of this bill. We would like to make it not only a felony, but give defense attorneys that have a good faith basis to believe that it's an alternative suspect's DNA. The same right to collect that DNA as law enforcement. And if they make a showing to the court that they have a basis to believe that this is an alternative suspect. So I had a former, um, police officer who was a member of the Judiciary Committee say, look, I was a cop and we used to do it all the time.
1:44:11 Speaker 01 And his exact quote was, what's good for the goose is good for the gander. And I think if you can make a good faith showing, I want to support that. When it came time for the bill to go to the senate, the guy that was sponsoring the bill wasn't responding to me. I said, "We got overwhelming support, not only to get the bill, you know, made from a misdemeanor into a felony, but also to allow defense attorneys, criminal defense attorneys with an adequate showing to collect the DNA of alternative suspects." And I said, "So we'd like to add that amendment." And he just stopped responding to me. And finally, I got him on the phone and I said,
1:44:55 Speaker 01 "What's the story? Why aren't you responding to this?" And he goes, "It's not happening, Josh. It's just not gonna happen." And I said, "Why?" He goes, "I'm not gonna go into that, but it's not happening." So, you know, obviously, there was some political pushback to it. He just wasn't gonna have that part of this bill. So, you know, I don't know what else you can do to push these issues, you know, other than get out there in the public and bang the drum about it and try to get people to pay attention. And this, I think, is a rare opportunity because it gives people, it allows them to invest in
1:45:35 Speaker 01 this. It allows them to see what the evidence is and actually, you know, write a letter and say, "Hey, I saw the testimony of this Secret Service agent, of this FBI agent, under oath in these post-conviction proceedings. Why can't, what more would you need? You have the power to exonerate these guys and end this 30-year-long nightmare for them. Why not do it?"
1:46:00 Joe Rogan? Yeah, why not? Well, I'm hoping that this is one of those cases where the people will get activated. And the way you laid it out is so crazy. I mean, and with more evidence online that people have access to, I'm sure there's a bunch of people who are gonna react to that. I'm curious to see what the response is gonna be.
1:46:20 Speaker 01 Yeah, FreeTheOhio4, @FreeTheOhio4 on Twitter. And, you know, like, I'm not a big Twitter guy. Or I can't say Twitter anymore. I'm not a big X guy.
1:46:31 Joe Rogan? I still say Twitter.
1:46:32 Speaker 01 Yeah. So, I mean, I guess I should get more into it. Yeah, we did. We threw this up.
1:46:40 Speaker 01 Hopefully that that that the number starts going up.
1:46:43 Joe Rogan? Oh, they will. As soon as it gets published, I'm sure we'll get a chance to see. It's gonna be interesting to see how many bots lock on to it.
1:46:49 Speaker 01 Yeah, and then it would be my um, it would be my dream to one day have the Ohio four sitting here. And have a, a toast.
1:47:00 Joe Rogan? Yeah. Wow. What a story they have, huh?
1:47:03 Speaker 01 Yeah.
1:47:04 Joe Rogan? Jesus Christ.
1:47:05 Speaker 01 And you know, the sad part about it is, is like, I hope that people don't say, well, there were drug dealers at the time and, you know. Again, that's not, because you commit one crime doesn't mean that.
1:47:19 Joe Rogan? Doesn't mean you're a murderer. Also, like, it's circumstances are different for every fucking human being. And for you to think that there's no way that I would do a crime, especially a crime like that, like, are you sure? Are you sure if you were in their shoes, if you lived their life? You know, we, we all like to think that everybody's life is the same as ours. We only have one life that we can kind of reference. When we look at other people's lives, we kind of imagine what it would be like to live their life. We don't know. People do desperate things in desperate times, depending upon your environment, depending upon how you grew up, what your influences were, what trauma you experienced, whether you were incarcerated at a young age.
1:48:03 Joe Rogan? No one has any understanding of that, other than the people that get trapped into the system. They just don't, you know, it's tough on crime. Yes, I think you should be tough on crime. I think you should arrest criminals and evil people that do terrible things and make society awful.
1:48:18 Speaker 01 Yeah, so do I.
1:48:18 Joe Rogan? But also, you should definitely not arrest innocent people. You should definitely not imprison them and then punish someone who's trying to say, hey, the reason why these people are in jails is because I told a lie.
1:48:31 Speaker 01 Yeah, I mean, I don't get the threat of punishing them. And you know, you, um, I, I hope you have the, the type of influence and following that just listen to that perspective, folks, right? You know, I have, in the last few years, developed a way deeper understanding of how relative trauma can be from individual to individual. I did not realize trauma that I had suffered until I started to travel those roads. And then how it can impact behavior. So I'm trying to make better decisions about how I judge things.
1:49:15 Speaker 01 Cause I don't want to say I don't make, I'm not judgmental. We're all judgmental.
1:49:19 Joe Rogan? Everyone's judgmental. You have to be. That's how you survive in life.
1:49:21 Speaker 01 Right. I have to form judgments, but I'm trying to make more educated judgments rather than judging someone based on, you know, not having a complete picture of what they might have been through and also not being able to put myself as best I can behind their eyeballs or in their brain.
1:49:44 Joe Rogan? Right.
1:49:44 Speaker 01 It's hard unless you really make an investment. And I think the easy thing to do is to make a quick judgment and keep it moving.
1:49:52 Joe Rogan? Yes.
1:49:52 Speaker 01 Right? And I think that words can be an excuse. The deep dive is too much of a time investment, too difficult. And I've had to understand behaviors that I never thought I would ever have to consider. And I can tell you, at least in my experience, it forces you to become a more compassionate human being, a more understanding human being. You get to know yourself better. Because if you're not just constantly trying to figure out more about yourself and others, what the fuck are we doing here?
1:50:25 Joe Rogan? Right. What the fuck are we doing here? Yeah. Yeah. If you're not trying to figure out more about yourself, I mean, if you're the most enlightened person alive, tell us how you did it. You know? You don't, you don't have any searching to do anymore? Tell us what you did. Cause I never met anybody like that.
1:50:42 Speaker 01 I can't thank you enough because again, it's a rare occurrence these days that to be unaffected by the outside noise. And I promise you, I'll do better in making sure that I'm a little bit more plugged into the help people are getting when they get out, whether they have done it or not. We've had two recent resentencings. One guy was paralyzed and blinded in prison. And he's in a wheelchair and he can't see. And part of the reason he was paralyzed is because
1:51:25 Speaker 01 of poor medical care that he was getting. It was a difficult decision to make initially because I said, shit, another resentencing, a guy that was found guilty. And then I saw the horrific medical treatment he was getting. And I said, you know, this just isn't right. You don't just throw out a human being like this. And what threat is he in a wheelchair, blind?
1:51:46 Speaker 01 But, you know, I have to do a good job of making sure that people are getting the attention and care they need. It takes resources. And, you know, we're thankful to everybody that continues to reach out and support any of these causes. The Pearl Mother Center, you know, the Midwest Innocence Project is a great one. The Ohio Innocence Project, those are all satellite projects. But the Freedom Clinic at the Pearl Mother Center, we've had some terrific folks, including the Pearl Mothers, that have given us the resources we need to make a difference. So I just, I have your, you're in my, I'm in your debt.
1:52:26 Joe Rogan? You're not. You're not. You're not. I appreciate you very much. And my thing about the outside noise is you should never put any effort or time or focus into something that has no net benefit. There's no benefit in the outside noise. It doesn't do you, especially if you're an introspective person. If you're a person thinks everything you do is awesome, maybe it's good to see people shit on you. Maybe it's good to see that some people don't like you. Maybe it's good. Maybe it's good to hear other people's perspectives, kind of like... You put your ego in check, but if you're a person that's introspective, and I know you are, if you're a person that is hard on yourself when you make mistakes,
1:53:09 Joe Rogan? no one's harder on me than me. I'm very hard on me.
1:53:12 Speaker 01 Oh, I know someone that's that's as hard on themselves as you. He's sitting across from you.
1:53:18 Joe Rogan? But it's, um, course correct, you know, if you if you look inward and you don't like what you're doing or what you've said or who you are, don't do that again.
1:53:27 Speaker 01 One of the best things I did in the wake of this whole Sheldon Johnson, um, incident is I turned my comments off on Instagram and turned my account private. I think I'll make it public again after today because I want to generate support for the Ohio Four.
1:53:48 Speaker 01 And but turning comments off is a nice thing because you can't believe the good stuff or the bad stuff. You just stay forward.
1:53:56 Joe Rogan? Especially for people in the public, the good stuff, you can get what they call audience capture. You know, you have enough people leaning you in a certain direction or giving you praise for a certain thing. You start doing more of that, you know, and this is a manipulative tactic that's used online, both for and against people.
1:54:13 Speaker 01 Hey, man, look, when I was on my way over here today,
1:54:19 Speaker 01 I was walking into the Uber and a guy at the hotel goes, I hope you're going to talk that talk over on the over on the J R over on the J R E. And I said, yeah, I am. And it turns out that he went to high school with Rodney Reed, who's on death row here in Texas. And I got into an interesting conversation with him. He's like, man, his older brother could pop and lock. I said, yeah, he goes, man, this motherfucker was popping and locking all the time. He's telling me about him breakdancing and he's like, no, for real, you know, shining a light on this stuff gives a lot of people out here hope.
1:54:58 Speaker 01 And I told him that, you know, I wrote a letter to the legislator here in Texas that's reconsidering that case. So it's just real cool, man, to get. To get people behind it that really care about this stuff and you know, the public can really help out. You don't have to be a lawyer. You don't have to be a psychologist. You don't have to be a therapist. You know, pressure does break pipes. So reaching out to J D Tomlinson and making noise between now and December 31.
1:55:29 Joe Rogan? And as you said, talking about things on this podcast have actually exonerated people.
1:55:35 Speaker 01 Yeah, I thought this one was probably better off just me.
1:55:40 Speaker 01 Let me think real carefully about about the next.
1:55:44 Joe Rogan? I know Jamie and I were both talking about this. You think he's gonna bring somebody in?
1:55:50 Speaker 01 Fuck.
1:55:51 Joe Rogan? You certainly can. I mean, you definitely can.
1:55:53 Speaker 01 Hey, listen.
1:55:54 Joe Rogan? Next time around, and if it's the Ohio four, great.
1:55:57 Speaker 01 Hey, listen, the guys that have been on here are all thriving.
1:56:00 Joe Rogan? Yeah.
1:56:01 Speaker 01 Bruce Bryan.
1:56:01 Joe Rogan? Yeah.
1:56:02 Speaker 01 Works at the Queens Defender's Office. He has not been without challenges. Trust me. But he's actually going, I'll leave you with this. Bruce is going to hope, hope that parole lets him because we're still working on his full exoneration, even though he was granted clemency on the innocence claim. Bruce is going to Nairobi and Uganda to speak to prisoners there.
1:56:30 Joe Rogan? Whoa.
1:56:30 Speaker 01 And he's a crime advocate for the Queens Defenders. Derek continues to be a whirlwind of positive activity. He's just amazing. He's getting people out left and right. Robert Johnson who we had on is continuing to do amazing things down in New Orleans. And all of them are just thriving. They're doing well. Not enough attention is given to the happy endings, right?
1:57:00 Joe Rogan? Right.
1:57:00 Speaker 01 Than we give to the bad stuff, but.
1:57:03 Joe Rogan? Of course. I mean, that's just how people are, you know?
1:57:06 Speaker 01 Why is that?
1:57:07 Joe Rogan? Well, you know, first of all, they're afraid of crime, you know, so they they highlight the instances where things are bad and things do go bad. And they don't want to look at the disgusting aspects of the legal system. They want, people want to live life through rose colored glasses and have this perspective that the the bad people go to jail.
1:57:30 Speaker 01 But it's not just about crime. Most of the headlines that get the most clicks are about someone having a fucking affair, somebody dying.
1:57:38 Joe Rogan? Right.
1:57:39 Speaker 01 There's not a lot of triumph in the news.
1:57:40 Joe Rogan? Well, people like when other people's lives suck.
1:57:43 Speaker 01 Why though?
1:57:44 Joe Rogan? Because it makes them not think about the suck of their own life. That's why they like it when a celebrity falls, like a PDD gets arrested. Because they see these people living these lives they could never imagine. Yachts and Rolls Royces and all that shit. And then they see them get taken down like, yeah. Because they were, you know, envious. And it's also like, it's a part of our culture is to celebrate wealth in the most disgusting and extravagant ways, you know? Like, I mean, how many, um, social media personalities have emerged just complete, just all about, look at all the stuff I have. Look at all the things I have. Look at all the famous people I hang out with. Look at all the girls. Look at the yacht. Look at the car. Look at the jet. Look at the this.
1:58:29 Joe Rogan? Look at the that. Look at all the things you can't get. And when those people get got, people love it.
1:58:34 Speaker 01 You know who, you know who, uh, folks are probably clamoring gets got?
1:58:38 Joe Rogan? Who?
1:58:40 Speaker 01 If that's the basis, and I don't agree. Who's that fucking guy? He's always got his shirt off. He's always taking pictures on yachts and shooting machine guns.
1:58:51 Joe Rogan? Oh, Dan Bilzer.
1:58:52 Speaker 01 Oh, man.
1:58:53 Joe Rogan? Yeah.
1:58:55 Speaker 01 I'd like to, I'd like to peek into his brain one day.
1:58:58 Joe Rogan? Mm. Yeah, there's probably a lot going on in there. It's, uh, it's interesting how people do become famous for that, though. It's like showing your stuff makes you famous. Showing a life that other people can't really imagine ever living.
1:59:15 Speaker 01 But think of the hypocrisy and the, and the inner conflict and turmoil that that exposes.
1:59:22 Joe Rogan? Mm.
1:59:22 Speaker 01 So in other words, we want people to fail. That's somehow innate in many of us. It makes us feel better about ourselves, yet you will have three million followers or 10 or 15 following someone that, and I'm not talking about that guy, whoever.
1:59:42 Speaker 01 Who is clearly just selling their looks or their lifestyle or whatever it is. So yet, we're drawn to it and we want to watch it. And then when the person fails, we want to fucking devour them to the point where they're a carcass laying in the street.
1:59:57 Joe Rogan? Sure. Celebrity marriages and divorces, that's another big one. Love it when celebrities get divorced. Ha ha. Ha ha, you're miserable too.
2:00:05 Speaker 01 Do you love it?
2:00:06 Joe Rogan? No, no.
2:00:07 Speaker 01 People love it.
2:00:08 Joe Rogan? I, I find it fascinating when people keep getting married and keep getting divorced. It's god damn, how many times can J Lo get married before the next guy's like, hey, I don't know if this is gonna work out.
2:00:18 Speaker 01 Yeah, is it really Ben Affleck that's the problem? Who's the problem?
2:00:22 Joe Rogan? Well, he's certainly a problem as well.
2:00:23 Speaker 01 That guy, Marc Anthony, seems like a nice fucking guy.
2:00:26 Joe Rogan? Seems like a sweetheart. Well, she married a bunch of dudes. But, you know, whatever. She's obviously a lot of work. So you want a diva? Good luck. That requires a lot of work.
2:00:37 Speaker 01 I just want to, I just want to understand it all. I just want to like, me, me and my brother, who sometimes go, what's it all about?
2:00:46 Joe Rogan? It's definitely not all about caring whether or not J Lo gets divorced again.
2:00:51 Speaker 01 You know what I find difficult? I've been playing with this idea in something that I'm writing right now. And it couldn't be more prescient than, than right now is the, this notion of what the truth is. I don't know what, like, we, we had, it happened to us right here. Are, are some of the swing states requiring ID or all of them? It's hard to keep a grasp on reality and the truth these days because there's information
2:01:22 Joe Rogan? Right.
2:01:22 Speaker 01 that is intravenously injected into your veins.
2:01:26 Joe Rogan? Mm-hmm.
2:01:27 Speaker 01 It seems like. So I have a hard time knowing what's true anymore.
2:01:31 Joe Rogan? Well, the, the news itself outright lies. It's not like a conversation like we have where Jamie checks it in real time. And I saw a thing that said the swing state or the, uh, the states that required no voter ID were the ones that she won. She won other ones as well. But when you, uh, have the news saying things, so they have researched it.
2:01:51 Joe Rogan? Do know that it's a lie. This is not like a live conversation like we're having where I didn't know we were gonna talk about that at all, nor nor did you. It just spontaneously came up. These people are putting narratives out there that are just flat out lies. And they're doing it all the time. I mean, Obama did it during the campaign where he repeated that lie. About Donald Trump talking about white supremacists, saying they're very fine people on both sides. So just a flat out.
2:02:19 Speaker 01 Oh, that was the uh, the unite the right.
2:02:23 Joe Rogan? Well, it was all about the statue, the statues of civil war people being taken down. And he's saying, you, I'm not talking, he literally said, I'm not talking about white supremacists and the KKK. They should be condemned. He said, I'm talking about people that.
2:02:41 Speaker 01 Did he say that in the same?
2:02:42 Joe Rogan? Oh, yeah. Oh, you can see it.
2:02:44 Speaker 01 So weird.
2:02:44 Joe Rogan? But go to.
2:02:45 Speaker 01 I never, I never known that.
2:02:46 Joe Rogan? J R E companion Instagram, cuz on that page, there is what Obama said. And then on the same video, there is what Trump actually said. And it's disgusting. It's a disgusting lie. And it's a guy who's as, and he's talking about George Washington. He said, George Washington had slaves. Said Thomas Jefferson, we take down Thomas Je- let's play it. So you can see it here.
2:03:14 Speaker 04 Said that there were very fine people on both sides of a white supremacist rally.
2:03:20 Speaker 05 And you had some very bad people in that group. But you also had people that were very fine people on both sides. You had people in that group, excuse me, excuse me, I saw the same pictures as you did. You had people in that group that were there to protest the taking down of, to them, a very, very important statue. And the renaming of a park from Robert E. Lee to another name.
2:03:48 Speaker 05 George Washington was a slave owner. Was George Washington a slave owner? So will George Washington now lose his status? Are we gonna take down? Excuse me. Are we gonna take down? Are we gonna take down statues to George Wa- How about Thomas Jefferson? What do you think of Thomas Jefferson? You like him? I do love Thomas. Okay, good. Are we gonna take down the statue? Because he was a major slave owner. Now, are we gonna take down his statue? So you know what? It's fine. You're changing history. You're changing culture. And you had people, and I'm not talking about the neo-Nazis and the white nationalists, because they should be condemned totally. But you had many people in that group other than neo-Nazis and white nationalists, okay?
2:04:31 Speaker 05 And the press has treated them absolutely unfairly. Now-
2:04:36 Speaker 01 See, see, see, that's crazy. I have never-
2:04:38 Joe Rogan? Isn't that crazy?
2:04:39 Speaker 01 I have never seen that last part of it.
2:04:41 Joe Rogan? Yeah, of course.
2:04:42 Speaker 01 So here, so here is my struggle with the truth on full display. I've never seen that part.
2:04:46 Joe Rogan? Because the news has said that lie over and over and over and over and over again. That the news, the mainstream corporate-controlled news that wanted this narrative, that Donald Trump was a Nazi, said that over and over and over again. They repeated it. They compared him. Up until the election, Joy Reid was literally comparing him to Stalin, Hitler, and Mussolini. And spent a whole piece describing right-wing dictators, that he is going to be a right-wing dictator, just like Hitler, just like Stalin. This is the lie of the media. So this is one of the reasons why it's so hard to tell the truth. It should be illegal to do that.
2:05:29 Joe Rogan? It should be illegal to say that. Because it's not true. And you're changing the perspective of millions of people, especially low-information voters that look at Obama like a thing from the past when time was sane, when the world was normal, a brilliant guy who was the president. If this brilliant guy is willing to lie for, in front of everybody-
2:05:52 Speaker 01 Yeah, but here's the thing. There's no question. They all lie.
2:05:58 Joe Rogan? Yes.
2:05:59 Speaker 01 Trump included. We talked about that earlier. He lies also. That, this is like the, the problem-
2:06:05 Joe Rogan? Right, but did he lie about Biden? About what Biden did? Did he lie about any of that? No.
2:06:13 Speaker 01 He's lied plenty.
2:06:14 Joe Rogan? I'm sure, for sure, but in the context of a campaign where you're completely distorting the perspective of the person you're running against, not just who they are, but what they've done and what they've said and what they stand for.
2:06:28 Speaker 01 He does the same thing, though.
2:06:29 Joe Rogan? But did he do that with Biden?
2:06:30 Speaker 01 Um, I believe he did.
2:06:32 Joe Rogan? How did he do it?
2:06:33 Speaker 01 Um, I think that there were many times where he would accuse him of having created the problem at the border, that it was all his creation. People don't seem to remember that when Trump was president, his border policies of separating families at the border was not great.
2:06:57 Joe Rogan? It was not great, but do you understand that Obama had those exact same policies?
2:07:01 Speaker 01 I'm not disagreeing with that, I'm just saying you can distort it.
2:07:04 Joe Rogan? But you know that this is just what they do with children, when children are, when a parent's arrested, they separate the families.
2:07:10 Speaker 01 It was, that happened under Obama, but under Trump, it wasn't just separating the children, it was separating them for indefinite periods.
2:07:19 Joe Rogan? So, is there a difference in the way Obama handled it in the separation?
2:07:23 Speaker 01 I'm not going to speak to something I don't know about.
2:07:25 Joe Rogan? Right, so that's a problem, right? So it's a problem if you're accusing him of that.
2:07:27 Speaker 01 Here's the, here's the thing, I think they all lie. I don't have, I don't, I didn't follow it closely enough to say.
2:07:33 Joe Rogan? I think they all lie too, but there's not a thing like that that I can point to where he was saying something about Biden that was factually incorrect.
2:07:41 Speaker 01 Here's the thing that turned me off completely about the election this time and why I said, "Fuck it, I'm voting for Jill Stein, a physician that probably is the least qualified of anyone, only as like my form of saying, "I'll protest it." You know, Kamala Harris during the debate said that there is not a single, um, it was some remark, like there's not a single American soldier deployed, and, and then I saw videos of American soldiers in a war zone watching it like in parallel reality, said, "What the fuck is she talking about?"
2:08:11 Joe Rogan? Well, did you see Dan Crenshaw post about that?
2:08:13 Speaker 01 Where are we right now? They were in a fucking foxhole or in a tent.
2:08:17 Joe Rogan? Dan Crenshaw posted all of the soldiers, all the-
2:08:22 Joe Rogan? The numbers that we have that see if you can find that post. It's on his Instagram in response to that. You know, Dan Crenshaw, who lost his eye in war.
2:08:30 Speaker 01 Yeah.
2:08:30 Joe Rogan? Was Navy SEAL.
2:08:31 Speaker 01 He was the one that was circulating the clip about of me being critical of her.
2:08:34 Joe Rogan? Well, it's a good clip.
2:08:35 Speaker 01 Yeah.
2:08:35 Joe Rogan? Solid clip.
2:08:36 Speaker 01 I stand by it.
2:08:37 Joe Rogan? Yeah, and you were correct. I mean, and then the crazy thing is you you had a conversation with her about that.
2:08:43 Speaker 01 Yeah, it was on Zoom and she couldn't answer a question then and she can't answer a question now. She still refused to answer a fucking question. That was the most frustrating thing. I mean, how about saying, look, obviously what happened at the border is a crisis. It was not handled well. Here is what I plan to do different. It's it's outside of of at least her.
2:09:12 Speaker 01 Capacity or willingness to do something like that.
2:09:15 Joe Rogan? But it was also the complicit nature of that. The the the media was in on it because they were fact checking Trump constantly. They didn't fact check her on that, something that should be immediately fact.
2:09:27 Speaker 01 Especially during a debate. I agree with that.
2:09:29 Joe Rogan? How did you not know? How do you not know that you're either lying or you don't know that we have troops deployed in a war zone?
2:09:37 Speaker 01 Maybe you're right. Maybe it is that Trump repeats things that he heard that are moronic and nonsensical sometimes. And that takes away from the great he can do.
2:09:46 Joe Rogan? He definitely does that.
2:09:47 Speaker 01 Right, like talking about people eating dogs and cats and the election being rigged. All sort of baseless shit takes away from the fact that, you know, the things that stick out to me. And it's like, get out of your own way, bro. He pardoned Jack Johnson. He um, he pardoned um, one of my clients. I think that he he has done more and cared more about criminal justice reform. Then certainly than any other president in my lifetime.
2:10:16 Joe Rogan? No one ever wants to highlight the good things.
2:10:18 Speaker 01 Yeah.
2:10:19 Joe Rogan? That that guy's done.
2:10:19 Speaker 01 That's why I just did it.
2:10:20 Joe Rogan? Yeah.
2:10:20 Speaker 01 And I, I, it's frustrating to me because it's like, just don't listen to the last thing everyone told you because you can be great. You can, I mean, the fact that he does what he wants and says what he wants and gets elected.
2:10:34 Joe Rogan? Look at this. This is what Dan Crenshaw responded with. No US troops active combat zones, question mark. How did ABC let Kamala get away with that during the debate? US sailors and Marines are fighting off Houthis attacks in Yemen. Over 3,400 troops are engaged in Iraq and Syria. We have forces in Western Africa battling terrorists. Just this year, three US soldiers were killed and 40 injured in Jordan by an Iranian-made drone. Nearly 1,000 troops are still deployed in Syria and 2,500 remain in Iraq under Operation Inherent Resolve. So that's crazy.
2:11:08 Speaker 01 Yeah.
2:11:09 Joe Rogan? It's a crazy thing to say, but it's also, it just shows you how corrupt the relationship is between the media and what we get to see. It's corrupt. There's a bunch of people that had decided that they were going to fact-check Trump continually and not fact-check her. And they were doing this because they wanted her to look better than him because they wanted her to win.
2:11:33 Speaker 01 Yeah, I mean, listen, the most I have, I have, and this is why I mentioned, you know, it's hard to know what the truth is.
2:11:41 Joe Rogan? Right.
2:11:42 Speaker 01 The reason why I posted all the exhibits, the reason why I put the letter up and the reason why I put the contact information up is that when, when you have a transcript and you have, you know, actual documentary evidence, that's hard to argue with.
2:11:58 Joe Rogan? Right.
2:11:59 Speaker 01 It's not a soundbite. It's not a clip. So I feel like maybe part of what appeals to me about this work is trying to get closer to the truth. A truth that is a bit more provable. You know, I would probably been very happy as a mathematician if I was any good at math. I stink at it. But I, I think that, um...
2:12:21 Speaker 01 There is, it's very difficult to understand. You know, I feel like I'm sitting here and I feel manipulated by the fact that I never, and it's really on me, that I didn't go and watch the entirety of that comment.
2:12:37 Joe Rogan? Right.
2:12:37 Speaker 01 Because I literally don't think I've ever listened to the part where he says, obviously, the neo-Nazis and, you know, the people that were there for the wrong reasons need to be condemned. You know, and I was watching recently, I was talking to the great Dubini about this. He's, he pointed out to me that comment about Liz Cheney. And then he's like, go watch the full clip.
2:13:03 Joe Rogan? Right, it's another one.
2:13:03 Speaker 01 And I watched the full clip and I was like.
2:13:07 Joe Rogan? It's enraging.
2:13:07 Speaker 01 This is so out of fucking context. So then you start to wonder, well, how much is my opinion of him been formed by my concern about other people lashing out at me?
2:13:22 Joe Rogan? Yes.
2:13:22 Speaker 01 I mean, you should hear the shit I got when I, when I spoke ill of Kamala Harris by, you know, I guess called them the left. I, you know, and it was like infuriating to me, you know? So I don't, politics to me is too, it's too much of, you know, you have to serve so many different interests that you sort of forget who you are.
2:13:49 Joe Rogan? Yes.
2:13:49 Speaker 01 And what you stand for.
2:13:50 Joe Rogan? Yes.
2:13:51 Speaker 01 So that's what turns me off about it. And, you know, I don't think that that'll change. That's why I sort of shifted to, this is the most I've talked about politics in probably five years. But that's why I've shifted to, let me just put my head down and get to work on what I can work on.
2:14:06 Joe Rogan? Yes. Well, I think that's very practical. And I think what you said is very important for people to understand, that a lot of what people say, they say it because they don't want people to attack them. They say it because they think that if they say it, it will clear them, they'll be okay. If you say you support X, you might not even support X, but if you say you support X, you're not going to get attacked and the right people will leave you alone or agree with you and appreciate you or praise you. Thank you for saying that. There's a lot of that out there. There's a lot of people that don't speak their mind. Do you know how many artists? That have reached out to me that are like fucking hippies, man, like, like artists,
2:14:47 Joe Rogan? like musicians, comedians, that thanked me for endorsing Trump because they can't do it.
2:14:55 Speaker 01 Hmm.
2:14:55 Joe Rogan? They said they want to, but they don't want to be attacked. They can't say it. They, they think the country is going in the wrong direction. They think that this control of social media by the government, which we would have had pretty much fully if it wasn't for Elon buying Twitter.
2:15:09 Speaker 01 Hmm.
2:15:10 Joe Rogan? This is a dangerous precedent to set, whether it's a right wing government or a left wing government. And that what you see that's happening in the UK where people are being imprisoned for tweets and Facebook posts.
2:15:20 Speaker 01 Yeah, in, in the UK, in the UK is the part that's mind bending about it to me.
2:15:24 Joe Rogan? Mind bending. The whole thing is nuts and it's a dangerous path that we were on. We were on that path. Trump has vowed to have free speech become a very important part of what he's standing for. And that this censoring of information needs to stop. And that we need to stop all government influence in what people have to say.
2:15:49 Speaker 01 Yeah, look, I,
2:15:50 Joe Rogan? That alone.
2:15:51 Speaker 01 That's, that's, uh, that shouldn't be as revolutionary as it is.
2:15:54 Joe Rogan? I know. It should be a core tenet of what, I mean, it's essentially the first amendment.
2:15:58 Speaker 01 You know, and I, and I think it's so transferable to what I do in this context because a lot of the, the reluctance of, of prosecutors not to do the right thing or what their conscience tells them is the fear of the backlash.
2:16:15 Joe Rogan? Yes.
2:16:16 Speaker 01 How will it hurt my chances in reelection?
2:16:19 Joe Rogan? Of course.
2:16:19 Speaker 01 What will, and so that's what I hate about politics is you serve so many masters.
2:16:24 Joe Rogan? Yeah.
2:16:24 Speaker 01 And, um,
2:16:25 Joe Rogan? It's a dirty business, man.
2:16:26 Speaker 01 It's a dirty, and you gotta have, you gotta have nuts of steel.
2:16:30 Joe Rogan? Or you have to be a fucking sociopath. It's either or, you know, you have to be a, a blindly ambitious sociopath that can weave your way through these sort of social and political relationships and to get to the top. For what?
2:16:45 Speaker 01 Yeah.
2:16:46 Joe Rogan? What do you, I mean, imagine if one of those person does wind up becoming president that has no, no real thought or no real care about the country, no real ambition other than the, the blind serving of their own success.
2:17:00 Speaker 01 Well, I think that that's what, for people that are so like,
2:17:07 Speaker 01 It's hard to explain if you didn't live in New York. For people that are just like, "Oh, my God. What's the next four years gonna be like?" And, you know, what, like it's a funeral. Like, get up and do something all four years that you think is gonna help make society better. You do that. Whether it's getting out and knocking on doors and making your, for whatever you're passionate about, not just when an election is coming up. But get out and knock on doors. Get out and get involved in some organization that you believe in. Do something that you think will help lend itself to bettering society in some way.
2:17:49 Speaker 01 What happens is, every four years, there's this polarization and people get on one side or the other, and they complain and bitch, and then they wallow in it too often for too long a time. I think that the people that actually make the most change happen are the ones that can sit and talk with people that might have different beliefs than them and don't make them other than. Absolutely. Right? I mean, anytime I've made an emotional decision in business, personally, it's never gone well for me. Right. So, people are gonna have different points of view than you. I was talking to my cousin about it, and I was trying to help her explain that just because you voted for Trump, that doesn't make you bad.
2:18:33 Speaker 01 I said, you know, her whole thing was, "Well, if you have daughters, there's no way you can vote for him." I said, "Here's the fundamental flaw in how you're looking at this. There are some people that are pro-life. Okay? That doesn't make them wrong. That makes you have a different opinion than them. You have a disagreement. And if the basis of your vote is that you're pro-choice and they're pro-life, okay, have a disagreement." You know? Um... I just don't understand how a singular issue like that, and I understand that, listen.
2:19:15 Joe Rogan? I understand it from a woman's perspective.
2:19:17 Speaker 01 Yeah, I'm a father of two daughters.
2:19:18 Joe Rogan? Yeah.
2:19:19 Speaker 01 I, uh, I talk to my wife about it often.
2:19:23 Speaker 01 You know, especially going to Florida where the laws on abortion ain't the same as they are in New York. And I, um, I understand it from a woman's perspective completely, and I actually disagree with, you know, overturning Roe versus Wade, but you cannot be that myopic. You just can't because if you're that myopic, you're gonna then find yourself in a corner on one issue. And life is a little bit more, uh, robust than that, isn't it?
2:19:52 Joe Rogan? It's more nuanced. Yeah.
2:19:55 Speaker 01 Yeah, that was the better word.
2:19:57 Joe Rogan? Yeah.
2:19:57 Speaker 01 It is more nuanced.
2:19:59 Joe Rogan? Well, listen, my brother, I love you to death. I appreciate what you do. I think the world's a better place because of what you do, I really do, and I think you've changed a lot of people's perspective on the legal system, and I'm glad that we didn't let what happened with Sheldon change that. And, uh, I think there's just so much more great work to be done.
2:20:18 Speaker 01 Well, my, my continued profound gratitude, um, to continuing to let me tell these stories. I promise the next time I bring a guest on, they will be well, they will be, they will be vetted.
2:20:32 Joe Rogan? Yeah.
2:20:33 Speaker 01 The guests will be vetted a lot more thoroughly, uh, you know.
2:20:36 Joe Rogan? There's no way you could have known.
2:20:38 Speaker 01 There's no way I could have known, and you know, it was interesting because I was, for 48 hours, I felt what it was like, I felt what it was like to be a headline.
2:20:48 Speaker 01 And then I was like, this sucks. For the wrong reasons. It was like, uh.
2:20:54 Joe Rogan? I know you were in a dark place, but I'm glad you got out of it.
2:20:56 Speaker 01 Yeah, and it's not about me.
2:20:58 Joe Rogan? Takes time.
2:20:59 Speaker 01 Yeah, and I, uh, I just, I'm really, really, really, um, appreciative of, um, of this, and, you know, if that can't shake the foundation of this, um, forum, I think we're gonna just keep on making great change happen, and hopefully we, we free the Ohio Four and keep on moving.
2:21:21 Joe Rogan? Yeah, and I hope we do do a podcast one day with them.
2:21:24 Speaker 01 Deep love.
2:21:25 Joe Rogan? Deep love to you too. All right. Goodbye, everybody.
2:21:42 Speaker 03 It's getting chilly outside. But you know what that means?
2:21:48 Speaker 03 It's time to cozy up with Panera Bread. Let's get toasty, cheesy. Oh, hello broccoli cheddar soup in a bread bowl. How about melty? Okay, Chipotle Chicken Avo Melt. It's dipping bread in soupy goodness season. Oh yeah, we are so back. It's Panera season. Order now.
2:22:11 Speaker 04 Espolone Tequila. Balanced, delicious. 100% agave, 0% ego. Just add ice, lime, and your mouth. For a real margarita, ride the rooster. Espolone Tequila, 40% alcohol by volume, 80 proof. Copyright 2026, Campagna America, New York, New York. Drink responsibly.
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