The Unmistakable Creative Podcast

Confessions of a Bank Robber with Joe Loya

Joe Loya’s life trajectory of rising up and moving forward took a radically different turn after losing his mother at an an early age, and stabbing his father in the neck at the age of 16. This was beginning of of a life of crime, and 14 month bank robbing spree in which he robbed 30 banks. In this amazing chat about his life, we discuss the amazing power of innovating with your story.

The loss of a parent at a very young age
Growing up with an abusive father
How stabbing his father unleashed Joe’s anger
The power of a story that continually changed
How being robbed caused Joe to ratchet up his game
The murder of an ex cellmate that changed Joe’s life
Achieving balance without acting against your consciousness
How writing starts to reveal the patterns of our lives
Why you must start to own your story
How Joe became a talking head for crime
The pain of victims that led Joe to working with female writers
Why your story is a fluid thing that you can own
How we deal with grief and why it’s a part of life
Why holding onto grief can be insidious
How being trained to look for meaning helped Joe transform
A look at what happens in the mind when you rob a bank
Why your story is a fluid thing that can change
Learning to laugh at the things you take seriously
Our cultural misperceptions of the people who are prison

Joe Loya is an essayist and playwright, as well as a contributing editor with the Pacific News Service. His essays have appeared in several national newspapers and magazines, including the San Francisco Examiner, the Los Angeles Times, and El Andar magazine.

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Duration:: 1h 30m
Broadcast on:: 21 Apr 2014
Audio Format:: other

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Recently, I asked Mint Mobile's legal team if big wireless companies are allowed to raise prices due to inflation. They said yes. And then when I asked if raising prices technically violates those owners to your contracts, they said, "What the f*ck are you talking about, you insane Hollywood f*ck?" So to recap, we're cutting the price of Mint Unlimited from $30 a month to just $15 a month. Give it a try at Mint Mobile.com/switch. $45 up from payment equivalent to $15 per month, new customers on first three month plan only, taxes and fees extra, speeds lower above 40 gigabytes in detail. At Sprout's Farmers Market, we're all about fresh, healthy and delicious. That's why you'll find the season's best local and organic produce, handpicked and waiting for you in the center of our store. Visit your neighborhood Sprout's Farmers Market today, where fresh produce is always in season. Joe, welcome to The Unmistakable Creative. Thanks so much for taking the time to join us. Thank you very much. I'm glad to be here. Yeah, it's my pleasure. So I came across you by way of some of the writing you were doing on Medium, and I was very intrigued by your story. So speaking of your story, tell us a bit about your background, your story, and how that has led you to the work that you're doing today. Okay, so, well, I guess, why don't we start with, I'll just go straight to the beginning and I'll rush you through it and get you to here because I'm doing a bunch of exciting things, but the beginning story is pretty intense, pretty amazing. I was born to 16-year-old parents in East Los Angeles in 1961, and they were dropouts at high school, but my dad ended up going back to night school, and eventually he got into college. We were beating these very Protestant Mexicans in a very Catholic part of Los Angeles among a brown sea of Catholics, but we went to church all the time, we went to church twice on Sunday. During the week, a couple of nights, I was raised a very religious boy. My father wanted to be a minister, so he went, like I said, went back to God's High School Depot, and then he started going to junior college. And when I was seven, very happy kid, my little brother, a year and a half younger than me, and I already really wanted to love Jesus, be loving Jesus, and maybe even think about being a pastor because I would gather the kids around and tell them the good news of Jesus Christ. I did this little flannel graph story board with them. I was already kind of preaching and teaching the word. My mother got sick when I was seven. She got a kidney disease, and for two and a half years, our home became this horrible place where she was dying. Basically, they couldn't do anything to help her. By the time they found out that she had this disease, and they couldn't give her a kidney because her body would have rejected it. She died when I was nine years old, horrible, like I said, a horrible death, very traumatized the home. And it traumatized the home in such a way that my father, who had even a young, violent man before he gave his life to Jesus. Some of the anger started coming out, some of the violence and the brutality of his early upbringing. He couldn't mask it anymore. He couldn't. It was just too under too much stress, so it started leaking out, and the home became a kind of aggressive place, and he would snap, and he would hit us, and the beatings became beatings, and it was a very hard time. Then my mother finally passed away, and I was nine. She was 26 years old, and my dad, we tried to stumble along for a little while. My dad, a couple of years later or so, he got married to a wonderful woman. I was 10 at that point. She was 20. My dad was 27, and she was a Christian woman from the church. Brenda Joyce Seal, a lovely woman, Irish American, and from Central Valley, California, people were farmers. It was in China with a culture shock in both ways. I got introduced to an entirely different way of existing on the planet with baked granola and she did her own jellies and baked bread and all that kind of stuff. My dad married this woman, a wonderful woman, and she exposed me to the Bronte sisters, and Jane Eyre, Wuthering Heights, a red Victor Hugo, she was reading Frankenstein, Dracula. I was reading a lot of interesting literature fiction that I would not have read otherwise. My dad in the meantime was now at UCLA, three classics major and philosophy major, so I was also beginning to be interested in philosophy. I was getting my philosophy, I was getting my literature on, and I was already writing short stories, so it was, I would already imagine that I would be a writer. I had a sense of darkness around me. The brutality in the home was still there, though my dad, eventually around this time with Brenda, a couple of years after they got married, he got his own pulpit. The violence was still, you know, still sort of urgent at home, and my stepmother was feeling oppressed by my father, and he eventually dropped out of the ministry because the home he understood, he was living a hypocritical life. That was the best thing he ever did, it was the thing I'm most proud of him, I thought at the moment of most integrity, but she had had enough after four and a half years of seeing the falseness and being scared, and she left him mid-70s, and in the 10th grade it was really, really, really a hard, super hard time because now he was just full of rage. There's two women, he had lost in a period of five, six years, and he was sort of shattered with grief and rage, and he dropped out of college and he never actually graduated, he was like a couple courses away, he went to sell insurance, but insurance was really hard to sell, he couldn't focus, he went bankrupt, and he brooded around the home like a drunk, and our life trajectory of rising up, and being full moving forward, and you know, he was always working in college because he wanted to be a minister, and I was thinking I wanted to be a theologian, he finally got the pulpit and he had to give it up because his life had been so, he had kind of sabotaged himself. All of this was alive in the moments after the divorce in the days and weeks and months, and soon after we moved back to East Los Angeles, when I was in 11th grade, my dad happened to be beating me very viciously one day, and later that night they would x-ray me at the hospital and find that I had broken rib and fractured arm, and so that day he was beating me that afternoon, he left the apartment, and I had a concussion, but I locked him my little brother, 14-year-old brother in the bathroom, and I went to the kitchen and I got steak knife and brought the steak knife out, and I went to the bed room and I waited, put the knife under the pillow, and he came back to the apartment. When I was 16 years old, I was skinny, and I weighed probably 95 pounds, and this man had been terrorizing me all my life, and he comes in there ready for round two, he stands at the door, the bedroom, and he looks at me, and I look at him in my days, and he looks over at the other end of the room, and he sees a weight set there, and he sees a long bar with these 25-pound weights on it, and he looks back at me, he looks back at the weights, he looks back at me with a smile, and he starts walking over to the weights, and I don't know what he's going to do, he's never used these weights or the weight bar before, but he starts disassembling them, and I wonder, what's he going to do? This is like, even for him, this is a new level of, you know, savagery, if he hits me at the bar, that's bad, if he hits me at the weights, that's even worse, I don't know what's going on, so I pulled the knife out and I stand up, he looks at me, he drops the weight, and he stands there and says, you know, put the knife down, put the knife down, and I don't say anything, I'm just still, and he starts walking, I think he realizes, you know, that I'm not going to do anything because I'm so scared, and I'm not saying anything, so he starts walking, I mean, give me the knife, give me the knife, and I charge him, he puts a left arm up, and we wrestle for a few seconds, but I'm able to stab him in the neck and I start twisting it to break the knife off, and he falls on the ground, yeah, you killed me, you killed me, he yells out, and I stand over him and I say something like you brought this on yourself, you know, I was a biblical guy, so it was probably something, this is what your sin had brought, sort of thing, my brother was at the front door yelling, Joey, what's happening, Joey, what's happening, and I book, and we bolt out the door, and we run in my aunts, there was a horrible, horrible moment, but my father survived, and when we survived it all, we went into foster care, the authorities understood now that we needed to be taken care of, we went into foster homes, my dad was taken care of, and he didn't go to, I mean, he didn't come, he didn't go to prison, but he, we got taken away from him by the county, and then my senior year, I came back home, and I came back home because he had showed legitimate penitence, you know, and, you know, repentance, he felt bad, and we knew that he wasn't going to hit us anymore, what supervision things should be well, so we came home, and I was there for my senior year, but the dam had broken, that stabbing my father with my hand, there's years of rage of being bullied by him and bullied by people at school, and it unleashed something in me that was so elemental, that I became an angry person who would let out my anger now, I felt like if I took out my dad, who was the man who'd been abusing me, string, just had no play with me, they had no play, they meant nothing, if they bothered me, I could attack them, and over a course of a few years, I lost my faith, I wanted, I felt entitled, I felt like something big was inside of me, you know, giant inside of me, this willpower, this fearlessness, and going to college and making, you know, getting out and earning $40, $50,000, it didn't feel like it was enough, so I dropped out of college, and I felt entitled to more money, I thought, you know, I shouldn't be making $40, $50,000 a month, I imagined myself super wealthy and I imagined myself big, bigger than I had been, and it's interesting because it's affected my, this was the beginning where, when I stabbed my dad, I was changing my story, up until that point, I'm going to put upon little kid, and at that point, I became a heroic, when we went to the foster care facility that night, all of your kids, all you wanted to do was hear that story, none of them had stood up to their abuser, I had, and I knew that that story carried great weight, at first night, not only because it was dramatic and cinematic, but also because it meant that I was different than them, and they knew I was different and I knew I was different than them, and that's what came up a few years later, like I said, I felt the sentiment, like, I'm different than all of you, I have something in me, I can change my story, I can move, I can innovate, I can improvise, and I can do it to my advantage, and I can, you sort of trade up, and so I, I wanted to make money, and I had, was very angry, and I decided I wanted to go do crime, because I can make money that way, and so it started off small, thieving, sentiment title, man, I didn't want to work, I just wanted to take that, I want to be able to give me things, they weren't giving me a fast, and I'm sort of taking things, sort of little petty robbery, honest checks, stealing the car against me, over time I was wanted, five counties, so I left to Mexico, you know, I thought I was a little badass, 23 years old, doing a little crime, 24, but I got robbed in Mexico, $30, something thousand dollars, I had to give like 800 bucks to my name, I was like, damn man, I, I need to, I need to make more money, and that's when I, I decided that I would rob banks, and the next day I came up to the United States, and I robbed my first bank, fortunately, I, I didn't get arrested for that bank robbery, the next day going into Mexico, they stopped me at the border, the Highway Patrol, and they arrested me for the warrants that I was wanted for, the five, and five different counties in Southern California, so I went to prison knowing, wow, I had done bank robbery, that was easy, 4,500 bucks, so I was there for almost two years, and waiting thinking, I know what I'm doing when I get up, when I get out in January 1988, I know what I'm going to do, I might wait a couple weeks because I don't want to go back to prison right away if I get caught right away, but I'll wait maybe two weeks a month, and then I'll get into it, and that's what happened in January 1988, I was 26 years old, and I went on a 14 month bank robbery spree in which I robbed 30 banks, now this is an interesting thing, when I was in Mexico and I got robbed and I realized I had been robbed by real criminals, I want to do a bigger criminal, I've been a petty criminal up to that point, and I didn't like that, I didn't like that the men in Mexico read off me weakness, they read off me vulnerability, they read off me that I was a low level criminal, I was suspicious and sketchy, but they knew that that was just, I could get played by them, and I got played by them, and so I wanted to ratchet up my game, turning myself into a bank robber, put me in an entirely different league, and there's another occasion where I innovated with my story, I tweaked it and said okay, my level of crime was not good enough, I need to amp it, I need to make it a little bit more cinematic, more dramatic, I need people to hear bank robber, I think different of purse snatcher, or snatching some of his keys and taking a car, that, it's a different thing, a whole different kind of crime, so turning myself into a bank robber was the next innovation, and it did, I got to prison, I was a bank robber, I went to federal penitentiary, maximum security penitentiary, and I committed crimes, and ran with guys who were mofiosos from all over the country, you know, rastafarians, Colombians, Italians, Irish, the Dixie mob, white supremacists, being Mexican, I just ran with all the Mexican gangsters on their soap, you know, I was trying, I really had this anger still, I had this rage inside of me, easy access, I had, I had learning, I had books, I had literature, I had all those defeat things for me for, but at this point, I put aside all my knowledge and thinking, and I was now just living by my loins, I was just a man of action, I wanted just my body to behave in the world, I didn't want to think about ideas, so I was in there for the first couple of years running crazy, I mean, with a group of guys who were really kind of bad, and you know, moving, moving, moving like that, and then my ex-salemate was murdered, and I was put in a solitary confinement under investigation for the homicide, with five other Mexican men, and you could read all about this in the men, my men were the men who all grew as prison cell, confessions of a bank robber, where I go into what happened in solitary confinement, it reduced me, it broke me, it halved me, it humbled me, and I changed my life after about a year, and they were struggling to keep saying, had a hallucination, a breakdown, which ended up being a breakthrough, and I gave up, I gave up the fight, and it wasn't, I just gave up being a criminal, it wasn't just, oh, when I get out, I don't want to rob banks anymore, it was actually, I want to be at peace, I want to find out who I am, I knew enough from my learning to know that there was an idea out there that we could become more whole, that we didn't need to act against our conscience and against ourselves, that there was a way in which you could achieve balance, people called it spirituality, people said you could find it in prayer, I had all that language, but that had proven ineffective over the years, nonetheless I was still attracted to the notion of a whole man, somebody moving in concert with everything they had, and utilizing it without judgment, but mostly just trying to achieve balance, and that's what I wanted because I knew my life had been so off-kilter, and I was unhappy, utterly unhappy, solitary confinement, and so I quit, I was let out after, like I said, two years, none of us were involved in the murder, they found the guy who actually had done the murder, he was still living out in the general prison population, they arrested him, let us all out, and I quit, so for the last three and a half years of my sentence, the second half of my sentence, I basically started reading and writing, and writing my story, trying to get to what had happened, and chronicling all the stuff that I've just told you, trying to write the stories down, ask story, not as ideas, but just what do I remember happening, and once I laid it out on the page, these things which had all been discrete, memories bumping around in my brain, and periodically being triggered, and I would remember something, and I would get angry, or I would get sad, or whatever, and once they were organized on the page, I could see all these patterns of my life, it's crazy, I could see that some things before I had thought had originated here in 1983, it turns out that when I wrote these stories out, I actually started my money obsession much earlier, I started my rule-breaking much earlier, I could see the origins of things now, because they were in place next to things before them and things after them, and then something had occurred in that moment, it was really fascinating to learn about myself by now having it on the page, and that's where I got the concept of I'm changing my life by owning my story, and I came out of prison, it was one of the first things I talked about, it's how do you change, I said I owned my story, I started an organization in 2008 promoting the concept of owning your story, that was the name of it, own your story, because if you own your story, it doesn't harass you anymore, it's not in your head, these discrete memories that can just pop up, and all of a sudden you're off-kilter again, I really began to see where I got angry, the origins of my rage, the origins of my misogyny, the origins of my racism, the origins of it all, it was right there, and then I did the work to try and read some things on mindfulness, I read some stuff on language metaphors you did by the linguistics professor at Berkeley George Lakehouse, went into myself, and when I read that book it blew my mind, because I understood that everything that I was trying to do and to really change myself was I was trying to change the way I talked about myself, and that's what I had learned from the little Buddhist readings and the linguistics stuff, and that is where I worked on, I focused on that, how am I thinking, what's the metaphors I used to describe myself, and how are they traps? I worked really hard on this stuff, and I'm writing a second book on this right now, but so I got out of prison in 1996, I changed man, and when I got out the last few years of my time in prison I had a correspondence with a man, a writer named Richard Rodriguez, and I talked in the first couple letters, he said, "Hey, you're already a writer, when you get out I'm going to help you publish," so when I got out I wrote a first piece three months out of prison about how I was scared of that 90 days coming up, because the first 90 days is when guys mess up and go back, and I wanted to make it a 90 days so badly, I wrote that piece for the San Francisco Examiner, an editor at the LA Weekly Reddit, and she said, "Well, you write a longer piece for us," I did, 1500 word I sent for them, she became the op-ed editor at the LA Times and asked me to write an op-ed in 1997, nine months out of prison when these two guys went into a bank in North Hollywood, a bank of America, and they robbed it, and they walked out with guns, just blazing the cops, they went international in this story, cops came where they were just shooting at the cops and shooting cops, and it was a big terminator kind of thing, they were just walking down the street shooting the cop, I wrote an op-ed about that, because everyone was calling it a botched heist once these guys got a kill, and I said it was a successful suicide, and that got me 48 hours, and it launched my TV career in terms of being a talking hit on crime, I would get to places like Nightline and CNN and eventually arguing with Bill Riley about the Scott Peterson case, that's what I did, that's what that helped, but it also got me writing about writing op-eds and almost every national newspaper, the exception of the New York time, and so that's the idea, I got tired of writing op-eds, we wrote the memoir, I got published in 2004, eight years after I was out, and I've turned to writing for writing scripts, and turned to writing workshops, and really most importantly, besides being a father of the last seven and a half years, almost eight years, has been the work that I do, trying to help women find their voices, a friend of mine has this op-ed project, named Katie Orange, and a good friend of mine when she launched it, I was there trying to help her, help women develop skills and use their expertise to write op-eds, so that we can have more female voices, thought leadership on the op-ed, internet, on the national op-ed pages, but I've done a lot more mentoring in juvenile hall, young writers, females in and out of prison, and the writing workshops I've conducted, when I was a bad man, the worst thing, the thing I regret the most was the emotional abuse that I did with women who loved me, I wasn't a physically abusive man, and that's not to say it was better than emotional abuse, but it was one of my greatest regrets, in fact the bank robberies, my greatest regret is not that I robbed banks, because I get time for that, it's actually that, I really, this rage that I took to the towers was ferocious, and I didn't even need a pool of gun, I just meant us enough for them to panic and give me all the money, and to see those faces is to make somebody that had reduced by your aggression is a really, it's a horrible thing, you know, I went out and make victims after I had been victimized, it's really a painful, painful regret for me, and I can never do anything about it, I can't approach you when I say let me be, please accept my apology, but I do live a life now in which all the work that I do and emphasizes to try to promote female voice, and thought leadership, and now I have a daughter, that's from all my energy goes there too, my creative energy is trying to make her strong enough and confident enough so that she will usurp my voice one day, and the advantage of being an older father is that I don't have as much evil involved like my dad did when he was young, and he took so much of what we did personally, I actually look forward for her to, you know, take over, I want her to have a stronger voice and a ferociousness that I have, and I try to cultivate that in her, anyway I'm trying to do work in Hollywood, but in the process, you know, I'm trying to do many things, but I'm working on that writing. The interesting thing is one of the people that I helped write, and how encouraged to write when Piper Kerman oranges in the black, and you're a husband, and when she went to prison, none of us knew that she was going to prison, and then she went and we all knew she was there, and I was asked to send her my book, so I sent her my book, and then we started our correspondence just like I'd have a rich Rodriguez, and which I told her, listen, all your friends, they love you, and all of them know you better than I do, but none of them know what I know you're going through right now, and here's how I can help, and she would ask me things, she would tell me things she was going through, and I would encourage her, and that voice knowing that I knew what she was going through out here, and me being a stranger, I understood what I was like because Richard was my stranger, and you could talk to strangers differently, and that's how friendship grew, and I told to write a book, write a book, you need to write this stuff down every night, write something funny that happened to you, you heard, or write something, and write something sad that you heard, or dark. She got out, and she still wasn't sure she wanted to write, me and other friends we did our work on, like you got to write, turns out when the book got published I didn't realize it, but there I was, in page 277 or something, one of my letters to her made it into the book, and that was instrumental, encouraging her to write, and eventually write that book, and that was really brilliant last week, we were at Stanford together on, and in front of, you know, 600, 700 people having a conversation about her book and the story and prison life, and I moderated a question and answer, and we had a conversation, and it was beautiful, it was amazing, I'm starting for these noises, let me turn that down, anyway, so that's where my life is, that's where I focus on, you know, I'm constantly trying to help people with a story, I learned about story, but I'm innovating with my story, and that's my greatest advice to people is once you own it, once you put it down on paper, you can see the patterns of your life, it's there, it's not just these memories bumping up against each other in your head, it's right there, and write it as articulately as you can with as much detail, the images as you can, and born from those details, you'll find some emotions in there that you've forgotten or you will label them correctly now, you labeled them wrong before, I remember discovering I hated somebody and thought I loved somebody, and I realized as I wrote it out that I actually hated them, or some people I hated when I wrote about them and the thing, I realized I was already halfway in love with them, you don't know these things when they're just memories in your head, but when you write out the narrative you can really accurately identify the emotions in your story, that was helpful, but I also tell people that my life is a perfect, it's like I embody the notion that you can innovate with your story, it's one thing but it's never locked, you're never locked in it, you can move this way, you can move this way, you can tweak this, you can tweak that, and your story is this fluid thing, when you own it then you can innovate with it, and then you can game it, that's my next concept, that's the next book, the idea of gaming your story, and that's, and I will go into that in my book about how part of change in my life was not realizing my identity was fluid and saying, okay, how can I create some propulsion to move it in that direction, and that's what I call gaming your story, figuring out exactly the things you need to do to move it in that direction so that you become this different person, it's not performance, you don't want to pretend to be somebody else, but you actually can change in very elemental ways, and change back to who you were to begin with that we've moved away from, you know, anyway, all that's to say, I'm living the dream, I'm doing good about my father, I'm proud of my daughter, I'm happy with the work that I do, I'm continuing to write, and as you, you know, you read that piece that I did, a medium which is a very popular piece, more popular than I ever imagined it would be, there's people who want to know about this topic, and hyper has opened up the subject in a way that's become more conversation and talk about the criminal justice system, a lot of stuff going on around criminal justice issues, you know, legalizing weed and not sending people to prison for weed, and now there's this big thing about the death penalty, a lot of people revisiting that, just a lot of things in that, that the oranges and the new black house, because it's a fish out of water story, and people are willing to think about prison, what would I do if I was in there, because this, this, this great Netflix series implicates people that way, it's really beautiful and wonderful, anyway, I'm super optimistic about my life, I'm in a great place, I'm happy, I'm far away from those years, you know, 17 years out of prison now, and I'm assuming this is, this is the 18th year in July, it'll be 18 years, so it's a beautiful thing, I'm here, you got what questions you got, what is it, what is that? Well, I mean, I'm sitting here, you know, obviously, I'm trying to balance listening to this amazing story and writing down whatever questions I have, that's why I didn't want to say a word or interrupt you at all, I have a ton of questions. 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Hey I'm Ryan Reynolds, at Mint Mobile we like to do the opposite of what Big Wireless does, they charge you a lot, we charge you a little. So naturally, when they announce they'd be raising their prices due to inflation, we decided to deflate our prices due to not hating you. That's right, we're cutting the price of Mint Unlimited from $30 a month to just $15 a month, give it a try at Mint Mobile.com/switch. $45 up from payment equivalent to $15 per month, new customers on first three month plan only, taxes and fees extra, speeds lower above 40 gigabytes in detail. Expand the way you work and think with Claude by Anthropic. Whether brainstorming solo or working with the team, Claude is AI built for you. It's perfect for analyzing images and graphs, generating code, processing multiple languages, and solving complex problems. Plus, Claude is incredibly secure, trustworthy, and reliable, so you can focus on what matters. Curious? Visit claud.ai and see how Claude can elevate your work. Hey there, it's Greenie and Hambo, and we are back and better than ever. Got your answers is for sale, and if you are interested in winning every sports debate you have for the rest of your life, this is the book for you. We take the 100 biggest sports debates and answer them, settle them once and for all. Meanwhile, Hambo, what's your favorite part of the book? 100 sneaky Hambo trivia questions. All that and a whole lot more, it's called Got Your Answers. It's available anywhere you get your books right now. I want to go back to the very beginning of this, mainly because the interesting thing about somebody like you to me is I see this really fascinating dichotomy of how you were on two potential paths. Somebody who potentially clearly was very religious, but you seem like you lost your way. I want to talk about a couple of things in the very early part of this, if you don't mind. One of the questions I want to ask is about the loss of a mother. I can't imagine such a thing, especially as a nine-year-old child. The reason that I ask about loss a lot is it seems like this is something that is a running theme. Loss and pain seem to be almost common threads between all our guests. Having been somebody who actually was negatively affected by that loss, I've seen both sides of this coin where somebody has been negatively affected by a loss, but for others it becomes a catalyst for making positive changes. I think you're really the first where it really led you down somewhat of a dark path. When you talk to people about loss, when you talk about these kinds of traumatic experiences, how do you get them to process something like that so it doesn't send them down into a downward spiral? The thing about it is that everybody experiences grief. That's just the way it goes. You have grief when you first love rejection. Everyone experiences grief, but grief hits people differently. If you've been told that if you've not been educated how to handle your emotions, and you're also full of self-loathing, then grief is going to hit you. There's an alchemy that's going to occur with the grief that's going to make it tricky to manage and get through without hating yourself, blaming yourself, or not even trying not to deal with it in the cream. All sorts of self-sabotage and things so that you can have these defense mechanisms. You don't have to deal with it. There's that people. That human material is out there. And then there's other human material who have love and strength and home and consistency and safety and they've been well fed and they've been told that they're pretty good and they have a good, they have a solid, they doubt themselves sometimes and sometimes they hate themselves, but overall they have a certain healthy approach to life. When they get hit with grief and if they've been taught how to, that their emotions are natural and work through them and process them on and here's how we do it as the group. Let's go to church. I have some semblance of handing them in a healthy way. Then grief is going to ripple through them differently and different alchemy in which you'll get process and work through and they'll come up with strategies to deal with it through healthy religious practices or whatever meditation, they'll do it. So we're working with there's no two, there's no one person is going to be hit by grief. There's several ways of, there's different types of human material when grief hits it and the one I usually work with are people not who've been through prison and most of them have been traumatized before they got to prison. They didn't get to prison because they were healthy minded. They got to prison because they were abused. There was a lot of grief in childhood. They didn't manage. There was a lot of morbidity, a lot of death around them. Gang members killed, family members killed. They saw a lot of blood on the streets. They were brutalized. Those people grief hits them hard and it hits them tricky and they end up dealing with their grief through violence which then creates more grief in their life because they're acting against their conscience and then it also allows them to get into drugs. That complicates their life because they have to do more things to act against conscience. They move farther away from being able to get to the origin of this behavior. That's the people I work with a lot and it's super challenging to get them to go there because there's so much cloudiness there. I do have friends who didn't have any of that. I had a friend. She lost her firstborn son to leukemia and she had two daughters and a baby boy when he died. The baby boy when he turned five, he got leukemia and he fought it off. There's a chance like the 15-year-old could come back and he could die too. She lives with the grief of the firstborn with the knowledge of the second one could happen to him again. She lives a lovely open life. She has these cafes in LA called death cafes where people go and talk about grief and healthy ways and they work through it. If you saw her and met her, she's so positive and optimistic, you would not know that this woman was once devastated by grief but she had a lot of love growing up. She bounced back from it and she manages it and she approaches life with a bunch of strategies that work for her. There's no one thing about like here's how you handle it. You have to deal with the material in front of you and kind of listen and learn what the grief was, how it rippled through them. If you have an imagination like I do, I can think of ways how we might get them to begin talking about it. In my case, the reason it worked badly for me is that when I cried after my mother died, the religious people around me were so uncomfortable with my crying. They told me not to cry because my mother was in heaven. In fact, I should celebrate because she was absent from the body but she was present with the Lord, which created in me a conflict because it was natural. Emotionally, it's natural degree the loss of your mother. That's your elemental connection to the planet. I was in her womb. We had connected by umbilical cord. We shared the end's blood. That's a big dislocation from the universe to occur. I needed to cry. I needed to suffer but what they created in me was the occasion to feel my tears now were selfish because I should be celebrating her presence in heaven and it made me feel inferior as a spiritual being. I created the occasion for me to despise my own nature that created confusion to me, emotional dissonance. What I know now, a child comes to me crying because her mother died. I'm never going to say some nonsense like that to make them move further away from themselves. They need to integrate tears and grief and pain into their life. No, it's healthy so they can move through it because in those emotions are beautiful strategies to get you out of it. If you're joyful and you hug someone and you laugh, the emotion carries with it its own intelligence. Hug someone laugh and it's out. If you're sad, cry, yank, yank out your hair, pound your chest, get it out of you. It has an intelligence and then it works through you, eventually works through you. That was the thing with me. All my emotions got clogged. Nobody gave me any language that had any dexterity, any subtlety, any no need to move in this area with a supple of intelligence. None of the people around me did had that. They could not help me and I was a very sensitive child and already at that point I had enough understanding to know that something was wrong here. I couldn't articulate it until I grow older. Does that answer your question about how? Yeah, absolutely. I love this. It's really, really just mind-blowing stuff. Like I said, I have a ton of other questions. One of the things that you brought up while you were telling me the whole story of what's led you to today was the early literary influences in your life. That's actually quite intriguing because as I said, it's such an odd parallel. When I imagine the life that you had, I don't imagine a young boy, if you tell me that story and you didn't tell me the literature part, I would never imagine the literary part. I'm very curious how those literary influences that you mentioned have shaped your own story and your own view of the world as you've gone forward with things. Well, you know, a lot of people ask me, "How did you, well, you know, solitary confinement were a few. We should put everyone in there." And I tell them, "No, the difference between me and most of the people who go in there, you know, and actually solitary broke me." So it was both the worst and best thing that ever happened to me as one of those paradoxes. But one of the reasons I could survive it and get out and move forward with the life that I have today after being so negatively impacted by my experience in there was that I went in the prison with resources that most people don't have, private education, language, resources of books all day long, ideas. I was trained to look for meaning and things. And I was given language. I was, you know, I had philosophy. I understood how to create arguments. I knew story arcs. I knew the redemptive story. I knew all that all day long. So when I could turn to my internal interior world, I had resources in there. One of them, you asked, you know, how's it affecting my story? Well, in the beginning, I saw it quickly as a Jonah story. I just saw it as, "Okay, Jonah, God called him to do something. He rebelled. He started going the opposite way, and God said, "All right, you know, I'm just going to throw in a fish, and he's going to spit you back on the on the shore where you need to be." I thought that that's what my story was. It was a simple, like, you know, quick acting against what God wants you to do. I quickly realized though that if I was going to change, it wasn't going to be with God. So that story changed, but I could still keep the redemptive arc, because you could have redemption stories that don't have God in them. It's a redemptive arc. And so I thought of my story that way, like I'm, you know, a prodigal son returns, you know, and is humbled and is willing to do whatever to get right with his community and his family, and in that case with his father. So, you know, I had stories that I could kind of say, it works this way. Let me think of it this way. And then, you know, as I'm assured and started working with my story more and more, you know, it becomes many things. You know, I'm breaking my story down now all the time. It's part of fiction and nonfiction. I'm merging fiction and nonfiction with my story, as I think about turning it into a film. It's this entirely new way of blurring those lines. And because I've written memoir and I tell my story, I understand that memory is fluid and porous, and there's a lot of other things. Anyway, story time becomes even more sophisticated than the rudimentary Esau's fables I was working with in the beginning. But I'm able to think about story that way, because I had literature, because I had ideas and because I understood, I had language that could, that I could grow off of. So when I started reading Foucault and other people talking about language or whatever, other ideas, they were a little bit more postmodern. I got them, but I didn't get them in an academic exact way. I thought, how can I, how can they mean something to me in my life? How can I turn them into, feed them into the coal of my engine so that it continues to move me forward and you drive me? It's part of the, it's part of the local motion of my story. So ideas and thinking was very, very crucial for me to have had that training as a kid. Now, I also had Greek and Hebrew under my belt because my dad always wanted us to grow up and translate verses. So I could read Greek even when I was a prison and I have a laugh and a friend in the letter one. I was like, look it, I haven't written a Greek alphabet in whatever like 20 years or so or 18 years. But there I was writing, I could just, I can't help it. Some of that stuff is all it just stayed with me. And I'm grateful to my father for that, because my dad actually provided me rigor. And rigor is important if you want to be a writer. You have to be able to sit your ass down, you need to be able to grab an idea and fight it onto the page sometimes. You just need to grapple with it. And you need to stay there and you need to keep thinking, how can I make this as sharp as possible? How can I hone this argument? And I was doing this stuff very early. So it was certainly helpful. But also in literary ways, it wasn't just how can it help the process, how can it help technique. It was important when my father was reading to me at night, and I was in ninth grade, and he's reading me Kafka as the hunger artist. And I write this in the book. I knew there were things in that story. And there was things in that moment being read to by this man who brutalized me, but was reading this lovely, amazing, far out, you know, absurd story to me. I knew there was something there I would one day get. I didn't know it was irony. I didn't know a lot of things of the words yet in ninth grade. But that feeling that like, I'm going to pursue knowing what this is one day, I'll know it. I was on the lookout for seeing meaning and stories and that sort of thing. So when I changed my life, it was like, okay, what is it meant to now? What does this mean? What can it mean? What did it mean in the past at one time? One of the things that people like about my writing is because I'm a different man, and I know what I was like before. I lived on the other side of taboo for so long. I can see how I saw something way back then very well, very clearly. And I could show you how I looked at it then. And I could show you how I look at it now. And the insights are surprising to people. And I can tell you exactly when I became a misogynist, I can tell you exactly when I, you know, like there's things I could tell you about and why from that perspective, I can look, I looked at women this way. I exploited them this way. It's in the book. It's in the middle of the book where I call the asshole chapters. It's where I was a really bad guy. And I break it down. I break it down. I'm an observer. I let you see. Here's what my thinking was in that frame of mind. And so now when I talk about things, it's always with an understanding that my ideas have migrated all the time. And I know the migration, I can recognize and spot it and highlight it precisely because I know that stories change. Because I know that things meaning changes. And what things meant to me before don't mean that to me today. They mean something else. Anyway, that's where literature was really great. And having my dad and mother exposed it to me was really helpful. Amazing. So it's even more questions, you know, from this part of the story that is such a mind-blowing perspective on literature and reading. I mean, it seems like the running theme throughout our conversation has been that your story is one that continually evolves. So, you know, I want to dig into the story itself. You know, there's two sort of things. I mean, I feel like the moment when you stab your dad is sort of a crossroad between two choices. I mean, they're college bound or I'm bound for a life of trouble. And it didn't look like actually, it's actually something different. But it is two choices. Yeah, please tell me. One is, and I'll just, I'll bring it on more in terms of aesthetics. One is I continue to be the one who loves language and loves books and loves, you know, literature and the arts and in thinking and abstraction. And I'm living away from my body because I have no ownership of my body. I'm just a punching bag. But at least my mind will be be pursuing the violin. I was playing violin. And I was like, I was what I call my quote unquote, like my feet endeavors. Or I can become a man who owns his body and lives by body. In simpler terms, I'm becoming a man of action, a doer, not a thinker, not somebody who postulates and theorizes. That was what I was going to be a philosopher, a theologian. That's what I wanted to be. I wanted to be sitting there with my glasses and my behind my desk and safe. Or I could be my body and be dangerous and just do and live like, I'm just going to act now. I'm tired of being put upon. That was a choice to me that day, more than anything, because that's exactly what played out over the years. I didn't know it at the time. But if you look at it, it was very clear when I would think about, oh, I could think like that, I would laugh. Yeah, thank you. Do subvert thinking. That's what you used to do. You used to be a thinker. Now just be a man of action. Be bold, be brave, run through your fears. Thinking was a place where you could hide from your fears. Think it was a place where you could hide from action. All you're doing is competing with a bunch of other nerds and geeks. Don't do that. Come over here and compete with real men and understand the codes of male codes. Learn how to spit far, learn how to laugh loud and obnoxious. Be a man. That was what was happening to me in that day. What was I going to be at feet? What was I going to be a doer? I think or a doer. That's what it was to me. Amazing. So on that note, I mean, you chose the path of doing, which obviously led to a lot of interesting things. But one of the common themes throughout all of this from everything you tell me is ambition. It's clear, but it's misdirected ambition. That's what I'm curious about. You talk so much about owning your story, and it seems to me like you wanted to own the story of I'm a doer. I am somebody important. It's interesting. I think that we all have the sense that it's something there inside of us. It's almost that childhood dream type of thing where we all have the sense that we were put here to do something, something that truly matters, something that's going to make a difference in other people's lives. Yet the way it played out for you, you've got to do it in a very sort of roundabout, normal, self-destructive way. But I'm curious, in that moment of saying, you know, I'm going to rob banks. What's the story there that you're telling yourself? I have really absurd questions, obviously, because this is a world that I'm completely unfamiliar with. As you're actually going through robbing a bank, what is going through your mind? Does it give you a sense of power? And how do you get away with it? That's the sort of silly question. No, I want to go to your first question first real quickly. The way I looked at it this way, growing up, I was abused and brutalized and put upon. And I decided I'm not that guy, man. I'm bigger than this. I knew in my heart that I was big. And I didn't know exactly how big, but I knew one thing. I was not supposed to be beat up like everybody. That's just a victim afraid. That's not supposed to be me. I thought I was a child, man. When it comes to weight loss, no two people are the same. That's why Noom builds personalized plans based on your unique psychology and biology. Take Brittany. After years of unsustainable diets, Noom helped her lose 20 pounds and keep it off. I was definitely in a yo-yo cycle for years of just losing weight gaining weight and it was exhausting. And Stephanie, she's a former D1 athlete who knew she couldn't out train her diet and she lost 38 pounds. My relationship to food before Noom was never consistent. And Evan, he can't stand salads, but he still lost 50 pounds with Noom. I never really was a salad guy. That's just not who I am. Even through the pickiness, Noom taught me that building better habits builds a healthier lifestyle. I'm not doing this to get to a number. 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Plus, Claude is incredibly secure, trustworthy, and reliable, so you can focus on what matters. Curious? Visit claud.ai and see how Claude can elevate your work. Hey there it's Greenie and HEMBO and we are back and better than ever. Got your answers is for sale. And if you are interested in winning every sports debate you have for the rest of your life, this is the book for you. We take the 100 biggest sports debates and answer them, settle them once and for all. Meanwhile, HEMBO, what's your favorite part of the book? 100 sneaky HEMBO trivia questions. All that and a whole lot more. It's called Got Your Answers. It's available anywhere you get your books right now. Hey I'm Ryan Reynolds. Recently, I asked Mint Mobile's legal team if big wireless companies are allowed to raise prices due to inflation. They said yes. And then when I asked if raising prices technically violates those onerous to your contracts, they said, "What the f*ck are you talking about? You insane Hollywood f*ck." So to recap, we're cutting the price of Mint Unlimited from $30 a month to just $15 a month. Give it a try at Mint Mobile.com/switch. $45 up from payment equivalent to $15 per month. New customers on first three month plan only. Taxes and fees extra. Speeds lower above 40 gigabytes of details. But evidence didn't support that. So it was incumbent on me to become the giant I thought I was. And in prison parlance, I coughed up on that second, I went and I became a man. I stabbed my dad, tried to kill him, thought I had killed him for several hours actually, and changed my life radically. I altered my story. I became a doer. I became somebody who could put a marker down for the rest of his life and say, "I am unimpeachmentally brave." Oh, look what I did. Nobody does this. They continue to get beat up. They grow up and they beat up their kids and their wives and their dog, but they do not try to kill their tormentor and childhood. I did. It marked me. Now, then I became a petty criminal. I'm like, "What am I doing? I'm big. I'm a giant. I'm not supposed to be petty." My story is supposed to matter. Who I am is supposed to matter. Even in the criminal world, I just got robbed by criminals. How did I not see that coming? Well, I'll tell you why, because I'm small. I'm petty, but I'm not supposed to be. Let me tweak this story. Let me innovate with it. And let me become a bank robber. Let me become this thing that's mythical in the American consciousness. We won't fantasize the bank robber. Every Hollywood hunk has played a bank robber. I mean, when Dillinger was killed in that theater outside of the theater, he was watching Clark Gable play a bank robber. Since then, we've had Rob Redford and Paul Newman, and then the next ones were Robert De Niro and Al Pacino. And then after that was Clooney and Brad Pitt, everybody plays a bank robber. It's the most romanticized criminal character in the American consciousness. I became that. And now I was like putting a thing down, boom. I will be unappeaturably cool for the rest of my life, because I am now a bank robber. I'm not a serial killer. I'm not a baby killer. I'm a bank robber. And so that was changing my narrative again. But then I go to prison. I get locked up and I'm looking at 99 years for this homicide that I didn't do. And I'm like, I'm not supposed to end up in this. This is crazy. How the hell did this happen? I'm supposed to be somebody. I innovated again. And I changed my life to become this person. I'm supposed to be a writer. I'm going to be a writer. Screw all this nonsense. And I innovated and I became the person now who comes out and is able to get on TV, is able to lecture, is able to write books and able to educate people about about the story and the power people and inspire people. And this is where I was supposed to be. I went a long way around. But I got here every time by innovating with my story and trying to direct it to be larger and have more impact. That's the one I get. That's out of the way. Let's talk about the banks. I'll give you a quick thing about going to banks. Driving every bank doesn't matter. From the first day to the last one, your body wants to rebel. Your body knows you're putting in at risk, putting it in danger. And this is what I loved about bank robbery, because on the way there, when my stomach would get nuts, everything in your body that happens when you're afraid, it happens in my body too. The difference is with most people, not with you, because I know you serve and you have to overcome your fear to serve. You've got to charge it that way that can kick your ass and kill you even. So I know you know how to march through something and push through the fear to make something happen, to get to that place of balance or peace or satisfaction whatever you're going for. But most people, for the most part, when they come from fear, they back off, especially fear that's so radical that it makes you afraid that if you die, if you keep going forward, you might be extinct. And that's a possibility of bank robbery. You walk out, there's a bunch of cops and they shoot you dead. Your body understands this. So once you go down and get headache, my jaw clenching, sweaty, my hands are just, can't, you know, jumping off the exterior wheel. I want a wave of fatigue goes over me so I can almost pass on this road. Pretty intense, very intense experience. What I needed to do is I needed to get angry. I needed to summon my rage by thinking of things that humiliated me in the past, you know, from bullies, from childhood, all the way to my dad, you know, to stabbing. And then this monster would rise up to me. And a level of peace, you know, struck me, you know, came over me. That was was was transcendental, man. It was spiritual practically. I was no longer afraid. In fact, I felt like I could just hand like it. It was endorphin high or something. It was something I just felt like I could handle anything. I that giant, I felt a giant like a giant. And I would go and direct that rage with great efficiency and make it through those banks. I just marshaled my, my, my intensity, took it into those places and, and just with my words, I can march them to the fall. I could just make them give me money. I can make a couple of dollars. Do once I was, I was so just satisfied with the little money that this little bank gave me. But even though the cops are on the way, on the way out, I just walked in the bank next door and robbed it too. I was that, that's how fearless I was. And crazy, which is partly what that fearlessness is. But that's what it was like. You had to push through the fear. And I did. Do you really, this is just mind blowing. So I have, I have one more question around this. And I want to kind of shift gears a little bit. There's a few more questions I have specifically around sort of the, the media work that you've done. You know, one of the things that, that has been an ongoing theme throughout our conversation is this notion of owning your story. And, you know, it's, it's very near and dear to my heart because it's something that I've realized. It took me a long time to get okay with that. And I realized, you know, what, what do people come and do on the unmistakable creative? They come and own their stories. I think that's really a, you know, one of the things that is what makes this so appealing to me and why I love the people who come to this show so much. But, you know, the thing that I'm finding as I'm talking to you is it seems like if we're stuck owning our story is such a fantastic way to get unstuck. And people who are caught in stories that are not serving them. I feel like that's, that's kind of an epidemic of our culture today. And I'm very curious, you know, what advice you might have for them. I mean, and the funny thing is I doubt that their circumstances are anywhere as near as dire as the ones you've been in. In fact, mine was tougher to change because I had to really do a lot of work on myself years and years and years to change. The problem I find the most people with owning their story is they look at story as a static thing. I look at story as a, as a fluid thing. And I look at story as a thing to play with. I look at life as being playful. The strategy for anything is to play. That's why gaming your story was such a big thing for me. The reason people have a problem bottom line with their owning their story as they're too attached to their story. By that, I mean too much ego is involved in story. One of the best things that happened to me, and I'll give you an example of what I mean by game your story right here. And this is, this is almost a meditative approach to, to your life story than anything else. When I was in prison, I started realizing very early in my change that I used to think that people did things that made me angry. And there was a very big, you know, I write about this in the book and I write about it in various essays and I've talked about it a lot. What the biggest thing occurred when I realized in solitary confinement that I got angry very, very, very angry and I want to hurt so much, but nothing had happened to me. Nobody had said anything, nothing. And I realized it was all in my head. But I had a rage like I had never, you know, as big and bad as anything I'd had before. And so what I did is I went in my head and said, King, what was I thinking about? And I traced a couple of thoughts back and I found the origin of my rage in my thought. That blew my mind. I realized, oh my God. It's just, it's my thoughts. It's how I perceive things. That's what's kicking off the rage. Not what's happening. I've been blaming people. I've been blaming the circumstances. I've been blaming it at all. And it works to our advantage to think that other people are the reasons we don't succeed. We are making mistakes. We're angry all the time. Well, I used to tell my girlfriend, why did you make me get angry? You knew that was going to get me angry when you said that. You must have wanted me to get angry. Actually, I would blame them for, I blame the victim, you know, for my insecurities. All that to say, eventually I realized we're tracing this over and over in solitary. The origin of most of my rage was wounds. I give easily find that I was wounded all the time. I got hurt all the time. I got angry. I got scared, felt helpless. I got angry. Weakness underworked my rage. And I was like, oh my God, all these years, my ego's been telling me, oh man, I'm a good guy. Other people are messing me up. They're throwing me off my game. So, finally, when I got out of solitary confinement, and I knew that I had this tendency to, you know, this really volatile temper, I wanted to, I wanted to play with it a little bit. So, I would go down to the child hall, and it's easy to feel quote unquote, "disrespected" by people in prison, just like it is, final search of ways of getting disrespected out here, and then feeling like you're obligated to do something about it. So, before I would go to the child hall, I would tell myself, okay, somebody's going to do something there that normally would have gotten me very angry. And in the past may have been a reason for me, it would have instigated attitude, action on my part. Somebody made it give me a broken cookie. Somebody maybe given me the last watering part of the jello instead of a fresh, you know, solid jello scoop from the next tray. Something I would feel like they thought I was some sort of weekly and some shitty prisoner or something. And then I would have to like, hey, man, you better respect me and throw it in their face and then get locked up in solitary confinement. That kind of craziness, right? But this time, I would go down there and say, okay, who's it going to be? Is it going to be the lasagna guys, you're going to give me a corner piece rather than the next piece, which is a nice big piece from the middle. Is it going to be the jello guys are going to be the cookie guy? Like, I didn't know, but I would try and tell myself, who's going to mess up? And then I would say, okay, it's going to be the lasagna guy. I'd go down there and it would be the cookie guy and on the way to my seat, I'd be like, I thought it was going to be the lasagna, but it was a cookie guy. But distancing myself from my insecurity and knowing that this in the past would have been something that upset me, I was able to play with it. And I knew that these are things that weren't in themselves things to get me angry. I chose in that instance, not to be angry by something that in the past would have gotten me angry. And at that point, I just kept doing it with my life and I do it today. I mock my seriousness. When I start getting angry, I mock myself, because I know if I'm angry, it's really disguised in a wound and I'm puffing myself up and it's ridiculous. And so I mock that ego. Most people are stuck in their stories because their ego is stuck in that story and they take themselves too seriously. You want to play with your story. You've got to take yourself less seriously. You have to be willing to play with it. You have to be light because owning your story and innovating your story means you need to be nimble. You need to know that certain things that you thought mattered about you, they really don't. Those things that you think, oh, I'm really that person, you really might not be. That might be exactly the reason why you're stuck because you're actually thinking you're this and you're not. You've thought that all your life and if you really investigate, you're going to find out you think that because people told you that. That's not really who you are. Getting away from being stuck is really investigating and playing and trying to be nimble with your identity. And that means that someone like me who is very important for people to take me very seriously, I like it when my daughter calls me annoying. That is another way for me is when my dad would never have let me call him annoying because his ego is too thick. I don't take myself so seriously, but I give bummed down when my daughter says I'm annoying. I don't care. It's not who I'm fine with who I am and I know that's not who I am and that's the way I might be perceived and that might be attitude for the day, but I do not lock into that nonsense. And so that makes me more able to move. I don't get stuck. That's my big thing with people and I find it all the time. You get somebody in front of me and say I'm having problems changing. I really want to change. I will test so much. I really want to change by helping them investigate how seriously they take certain things of their life, which are where they are stuck, which is where they're rooted and they can't move around that stuff. Then I say, well, you got to be willing to laugh at yourself here. It's very, very challenging for people to laugh about things that they take very seriously about their identities. Then you realize you might not innovate as much. Those of us who have seen how often we've been insecure and silly with vanity, they're just like, okay, I'm ready to move away from that. That's I'm ridiculous here. What do I need to do? It's like entrepreneurs constantly moving or moving because they're like, okay, I'm going to stop. I failed on that one. What's the next chance I get to fail? Where can I really they're not afraid to go out there and try to innovate and fail again? That's just what that's what you have to almost be with your spirit. That's what I believe. I could be wrong. Mind blowing. Let's do this. Let's shift gears a little bit and we'll start wrapping things up here. Part of how I found you was, first we had Meg Warden here, which really was a paradigm shift for me personally, and my perceptions of what people who go to prison are like. The media obviously does a certain job of portraying what people are in prison are like. You watch Shashank Redemption and you think, my immediate thought, I'll tell you very candidly, I thought if I ever got sentenced to jail, I would kill myself, so I wouldn't have to go. Then I get to hear the story of somebody like Meg and then that leads me to you because of the article you wrote on Medium and what our perceptions of life on the inside, I mean, you of all people probably have even a more interesting story, a more powerful story or a more crazy story than Meg's was even because you were in a maximum security facility, which sounds nuts. When I imagine maximum security facilities, I think of movies like Conair, things like Shashank. I'm very curious, what are our misperceptions that are being shaped by the media and for people who have not been in prison? One of the things that Meg said to me, she said, you'd be really surprised who's in there and you'd be surprised, there's some really nice people in prison and so I'm very curious about this from the perspective, especially given the nature of the work that you do. Well, I could say a few things. One of them, because you read my article, one of the things that when I was writing about oranges and new blacks is that we're funny and a lot of humor behind bars. Guys are very, very funny, prisoners are funny, darkly funny. I remember, I was there for three days and the maximum security prison is big. I mean, gigantic biker guy stands up big muscle, big tattoos. He puts his fingers under his armpits, and he starts moving his arms like he's a bird in flight and he's like, quack, quack, I'm a duck. I can't call games you're to fuck. He does that three times and he sits down and I wonder, what the hell was that? And I said, the guy next to me says, those are called quackwacks. When guys bet here, they sometimes will bet for money, but sometimes mostly bet for money or cigarettes, whatever, but sometimes to embarrass somebody if they lose, they will bet quackwacks in the child home. That guy lost the bet last night. He bet a game and he lost and so his bet was that if he lost, he would have to do three quackwacks in the, in the child home. And then I, you know, for a couple of years, I was at that prison periodically, you would see quack, quack, I'm a duck. I can't call games you're to fuck. And that was the way to all of that, you know, go and go back to eating. There's that kind of stuff there all the time. So the humor was a big thing. In fact, when I came out, my friends were like, Joe, right about how funny it is in here, right about the humor. So there's that. The other thing, too, is that most people think that falsely you are the crime you committed for the rest of your life. I guarantee you, Serene, if I got a video of you of the four or five minutes of the worst things you've done in your life, where you acted against your conscience, we get things that your worst regrets. And I played that to people and said, this was you 20 years later, 30 years later, you would say, Hey, wait, wait a minute. You know, I call bullshit here, man. Those are, those are like three or four minutes of the worst things of my life all put together. That does not compromise my identity. That's not who I am. And yes, I feel bad about them. But that's not who I am. The same thing with men who's a murderer. I had a friend who got drunk, cracked, smashed a bottle over somebody during a bar fight, killed the man. 20 years later, he's an AA. He's a changed man. He's leading all these groups. He's religious. He's a lovely human being. And he goes there and the victims and the DA don't let them out. He's a killer. He killed one person. And it took exactly 10 seconds. That's not who he is, the rest of his life. This is the big problem is that we hear somebody did something and we want to lock that in as our identity for the rest of their life. You wouldn't want that in your life. And yet we do this to people all the time. And you could see how patently unfair it would be. Even my father, I don't give him. I don't make him the man who broke my bones. If you read my book, I'm very generous with him. And to this day when we have, I was there in LA, two weeks ago having dim sum with him, took a friend from Norway to have dim sum with my father. I love that man. I call him all the time more regularly our conversations are, hey, dad, I just realized another thing that you gave me that's helping my daughter. Another way on which you were a good dad, thanks. I didn't see it before I see it now. Because my dad did a bunch of great things. He acted against his conscience a few times in very dramatic ways, cinematic ways, as I say. But the majority of time my dad was a loving generous guy when he wasn't demented with rage and out of control, which was less than the good. So in my head, I don't lock him in. The mistake I made growing up is I made him a monster. And then I looked at myself as being a monster because I did monstrous things because he did monstrous things. My dad was not a monster. He's a human being who acted against his conscience, and I made him into a monster for the rest of his life until I stopped. But he's not. That changed. Same thing with the guys in there. They're not locked into what the crime they committed for the most part. Most of them are not. Some of the crimes, the majority of the crimes that guys did in there should not even be considered crimes. The majority of the people were in there for drug crimes. They were using drugs or they were used to selling drugs. And most of those drug crimes in my book, they don't belong in there. They belong in treatment, they belong somewhere out, but they'll be long in prison. So there's that. The other thing is, of course, the kindnesses. Because there are people in there, they realize they're in there for the rest of their life. They want to live a life. You say, if I had to go on there, I would kill myself. The big secret is how much beautiful life exists with men who are never getting up. A sort of piece over time comes over them and they realize that's their home. And they have to give a shit about it. They care. They're mindful. They try to avoid problems. They gather together. The safest population in there, the ones that do the best are the lifers. They counsel people. That's their world now. That's what they have to find meaning in. And they find a meaning there. They counsel the youngsters. They lead the AA and the NA and they go to church and they raise money so that they could give to some cause of some kids dying in leukemia on the street. They raise money. The guys who have little money on their books, you can donate money. The guys who do that kind of stuff. It's crazy. They care about their lives. Their lives have meaning. They are not the guy they were when they were an angry 19-year-old drunk. They're now 39, 49. They're trying to live a good life. And so you find decent season there all day long. I go to my bed, myself. It's my birthday. It's the night of my birthday. And there's a can of Dr. Pepper on my desk and a Snickers under my pillow. Who does that? prisoners. That's who does that. Decency, man. All day long in there. All day long. Wow. Well, Joe, we've gone probably well over an hour, but I just didn't want to stop you because this is truly, truly been mind-blowing. I can't thank you enough for doing this. I'm going to ask you my final question. I mean, you're a writer and our show is called the Unmistakable Creative. And we've suddenly entered a world of noise in which everybody has a voice. And given your story and everything that you've been through, the question I have for you is in a world that we live in full of noise. How do you become unmistakable? You call it unmistakable. I call it unimpeachable, which means it has to be authentic. See, I walk into any room and there are some things about me that are unimpeachable. You can say whatever the hell you want and you cannot touch my narrative because I've lived it. I've done it. I demonstrated. I live and breathe it. And the thing that you need to do as an unmistakable creator is you have to be, you have to be driven to live an unimpeachable life, to do something that's unimpeachable. It is so clear once you've done it and nobody can touch it. People, I mean, people can say, oh, they want to get slinged stuff. But then you end up being gulliver and they end up being lilliputians and you're totally unaffected by the little arrows hitting your ankles. You can give a shit. And the rest of the world will know that the lilliputians slinging little bullshit arrows at your ankles. That, to me, is you have to find out what it is about you to make sure your most unimpeachable self and you have to be fine with it because your unimpeachable self means you're going to have to be also find your frailties and your vulnerabilities and live within them too. And that investigation and that willing to put yourself out there is a big thing. There's a lot of people who want to put themselves out there all day long. YouTube is full of those people. We get it. But they're unimpeachable all day long because they don't know who they are. They're performing. They're doing something there. When I'm talking about something so, you've heard me use the other word elemental, something so, and I'm not sure, you know, I'm not like literally doing an element that we're all this things are elemental. But in a lyrical way, you have to get to a place that is so almost fundamental as fundamental to you as you can be that nobody can take them that nobody can say anything about that nobody can say you're being false. And it will come through. I guarantee when you are you and you get in front of people, they're going to know that they've been in front of some dynamism that they don't generally bump into in the world. And, you know, I found myself and I got fine with myself and I move in the world like that with a confidence. You know, it took, it took, it took, it took, um, it took, you know, many years and it took a lot of tears and it took a lot of wanting to give up. But I'm here now and, you know, we're in an advantage because the great thing is there's this new medium, the internet, in which you can do a lot. We don't even know what we can do. It's not even all the way, you know, you know, there's a lot of ways in which we're seeing. But, you know, we're, we're doing things, I'm looking at it and I'm paying attention to it. But it's available to us there. There's people who are really looking for something that's true. There's a lot of falseness out there, but there's a lot of people who are more interested in what is true. And if you are unmistakable and unappeachable, people will come and find you because it's a big world out there. You know, on the great beauties of my story is when the documentary protagonist, which was, which was made by Academy Award winner, um, documentarian, um, Jessica, you, when that could people see it on Netflix, I get contacted from all over the world. When they see the, even the cheesier, you know, uh, our episode from, I almost got away with it, our investigation discovery, when they see that on Netflix or they see that on TV in South Africa or Kenya or Jerusalem or Ireland or Tokyo, they want to reach out to me too. My story, there's people out there, they want to know they're, they see, they know. And, uh, the great white web, man, the white web is opening up. They'll all these options and opportunities for us to, to be unappeachable and get recognized. And I'm excited about that. I love that. And story, it's all about, it's all about we can play with story now and ways we've never been able to play before. It's so much fun. We really can innovate with our stories so much more now. Awesome. That's right. Thank you. That makes sense. That makes all the sense in the world. Joe, um, really, I can't thank you enough for, for being here and taking some time to share some of your story and your insights with our listeners, uh, that unmistakable creative, you know, I, I'd said at a certain point this year, I have, uh, gotten to a point with my ability to do this, where I have an intuition for things that are going to be a really, really big hit. I think, uh, you're going to hear a lot from our audience. This is. Okay. My friend. Hey, listen, this is wonderful. You, I love your style. I've never been interviewed where people didn't have like questions coming in. I love that intuition. Stick with this. It works. I like that. Awesome. It's been wonderful being interviewed by you, Srini. Thank you. Thank you so much for having me join us. And for those of you guys listening, we'll wrap the show with that. Thank you for listening to this episode of the Unmistakable Creative Podcast. While you're listening, were there any moments you found fascinating, inspiring, instructive, maybe even heartwarming? Can you think of anyone, a friend or a family member who would appreciate this moment? If so, take a second and share today's episode with that one person because good ideas and messages are meant to be shared. 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The loss of a parent at a very young age
Growing up with an abusive father
How stabbing his father unleashed Joe’s anger
The power of a story that continually changed
How being robbed caused Joe to ratchet up his game
The murder of an ex cellmate that changed Joe’s life
Achieving balance without acting against your consciousness
How writing starts to reveal the patterns of our lives
Why you must start to own your story
How Joe became a talking head for crime
The pain of victims that led Joe to working with female writers
Why your story is a fluid thing that you can own
How we deal with grief and why it’s a part of life
Why holding onto grief can be insidious
How being trained to look for meaning helped Joe transform
A look at what happens in the mind when you rob a bank
Why your story is a fluid thing that can change
Learning to laugh at the things you take seriously
Our cultural misperceptions of the people who are prison

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