Dan Slepian (on The Sing Sing Files)
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Welcome, welcome, welcome to Armchair Expert, Experts on Expert. I'm Dax Shepard and I'm joined by Monica Padman. Hi. I couldn't say Dan Shepard today because our guest is Dan and that would have gotten really confusing. You're right. Dan Slepian. He is an award-winning investigative producer and a veteran Dateline producer, which we love. We love our Dateline. Yeah. The topic's rough, but he's a party. Yes, and he's a great...

storyteller, so you hear really intense stories, but you're riveted. Yes, and his retention of all the players is really second to none. Yeah. He has a book out September 10th called The Sing Sing Files, One Journalist, Six Innocent Men, and a 20-Year Fight for Justice. Man, this is a good episode. It shines a light on something that we talk about occasionally, which is like, there's a lot of folks in prison that shouldn't be there. Yeah. It

It's about the worst thought, too. It is. Being innocent and having your life stolen. JG. Yeah. But boy, his stories are riveting. The life he's led as a journalist the last 20, 30 years is incredible. Yeah. Please enjoy Dan Slepian. He's an archer expert. He's an archer expert. He's an archer expert.

I thought I was actually early. Where were you? I was sitting outside in the car. I thought it was 1130. Oh, that's okay. Listen, I'm so sorry. This is the bathroom you've been sitting in your car for. No, I was on the Today Show a couple of years ago for my podcast. And you got up and left? No, you did your research. Oh, my God.

It was very endearing because, was it Roker? He goes, what are you doing? You produce television. Why are you walking off the set? You know what I'm saying? I produce television and I'm like.

I'm late and I think I'm early. Oh my God. That is so funny. Oh my God. That's actually funny because I thought we were at 12 today too until this morning when I double checked the calendar. That's weird. Monica. Dan rolled in at 11. And I came in at 12. And I was the only one here. I think you're trying to make me feel better. No, I promise it happened. This is all I have to say to start. This is where I'm at.

- Okay. Emotionally? - Oh, emotionally. Well, you're frazzled emotionally, I imagine. - Yeah, 'cause I thought I was early. But my daughter got this for me because this is where I live.

State of gratitude. Yeah. Well, hold on, Dan. Do you live there or do you aspire to live there? That's an excellent question. Thank you. The power of now. I aspire to be in now. Can you ever really fully be in now? I don't know. You can have moments. This is the one thing about coming over here. First of all, I have so much gratitude for being here. Oh, wow. We're so happy to have you. That you care about this issue. And by doing this, I promise you.

you are going to be changing lives. Not by me doing this, by you doing this. Well, no, I think it's going to require you, Dan. You're going to have to participate. So I'm so grateful for being here. Thank you so much. And by the way,

Who doesn't know your podcast? Well, listen, I was just in Europe and I didn't think any... Some people didn't know it. Yeah, I was feeling very lonely and unobserved. I mean, you guys are killing it. Oh, thank you so much. I hope it comes across. We genuinely...

love doing it. We get interesting people who have spent 20 years of their lives doing something, i.e. you, and you're going to distill it down for us into two hours and we get educated. It's like we've not left college. It's the dream job. It's incredible. And it's incredible that you love it. And I know you love it. I hear it. I think that's what makes it work.

Oh, by the way, Dan. Yes, sir. Our fridge broke. Instead of offering you a hot water, I've gone and gotten ice cold water for you. I'm going to pour you a glass now. Look how nice you are. And it's in a pitcher. And I'm going to do a little ASMR because why not? We never have a pitcher. Can I have a hand and say I want a drink? Yeah. Ooh, I bet the listener got thirsty. I don't want to make them throw up, but here we go. Ready? Oh, yes, yes.

Oh, misophonia. You know what's really interesting, Dan? I don't know if you know about misophonia. Do you know about this? Misophonia? You were about to say misohonia? No, misophonia. I know.

- Not misophonia. - No, no, no, no. Misophonia, believe it or not, is an actual genetic condition where you cannot stand the sound of hearing people chew and eat. - I've heard of it. I didn't know the name of it. - We thought our friends who claimed to have this were just intolerant people. - My wife. - Yeah, see? - Has she done a 23andMe? It'll actually show you if you have misophonia. So once I saw that, I was like, okay, this is a real condition. I gotta be sympathetic to it. But now here's the weird thing.

I think misophonio people like ASMR, they would have enjoyed the water being poured in there. But then once it goes into a mouth, it's a very arbitrary distinction between it going in a glass in your mouth. It is. And I think that's a deep thought.

Actually, I've never heard about it for people need to weigh in who have it. Weigh in in the comments. Which you won't read, but I will. Which I won't see, but Dax will see. If it's drinking, I feel like it's chewing. Well, that I think is rough. But I've heard many people complain just about that like sipping sound drives them nuts. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Do you guys read your comments? He does. All of them? Yeah.

All of them. Do you have a take on it? Well, let's just start by saying our comments are overwhelmingly positive. That's what I mean. I would read your comments if I was you too. And you can help yourself in this pursuit by only allowing people who follow you to comment. You can't just get stragglers coming on to hate mom. You know, they got to follow you. So that's a great little tool that definitely weeds out a ton of negativity.

But the 5% that are negative, of that 5%, 20% is valid. Do you think so? Yeah. Like I had misrepresented OCD at one point in the way I was talking about it. And a lot of people with OCD complained, or I won't even say complained, they corrected me. And so I was like, well, let's get an expert. And then it turned out to be one of our best episodes. And I loved getting educated. This is what you do. You're in the life of education. Yes. For free. It's incredible.

Okay, I want to start with your own story before we get into the... I just want to let you know that I'm a little scared that you've done so much homework. That's a good fear. I need you a little on edge. You're a producer, you know. I am, but usually when I'm either telling other people's stories or I'm being interviewed about my stories, it's factual stuff. This is a different... Like, I feel it in this room, by the way.

I know we're on podcasting here and I have a face for podcasting, but there's something about the environment which you've constructed that makes me feel immediately like I'm home. Oh, good. That's lovely. I'm glad to hear that. We just added a door on the bathroom and I was worried that that was going to change everything. Someone said that to me. Don't pee before they only have a curtain. No, now we have a door, which is why I was so excited to offer you that option. But at any rate, before we get into your topic, which is very heavy and

It's horrific on many levels. It's not feel good story we're going to delve into, but we're going to have some fun before that because you have a very fun story. Take us from going to school and having always wanted to be working for NBC News. Because really quick, we could interview you just on your career.

We would have you on just to learn as an expert what it's like to produce Dateline for so many years. That could be its own episode, right? So I want to touch on some of that. We love you. My bosses, Paul Ryan and Liz Cole, love you. We love Dateline, as they know. Thank you for loving us. Oh, my God. Yeah. Keith Morrison's my greatest. I know. I'm sorry. I'm not him. We had him. We had him. I know. I found my research too. He was great. This is my Keith Morrison. Ready? Yeah. Oh, I want to hear it. Curious, isn't it?

That was good. I like that. Do you know he does it? You got his shoes on, too. You got his shoes on. He loves Converse. I know. He does our interstitial where he says, stay tuned if you dare.

Dude, that man can read the phone book. And I'll be like, hey. But you grew up in New York. Yeah, I grew up in Westchester, New York, which is just north of the city. White, middle-class kid, but didn't come from money. I mean, I came from nothing. My father was a special ed teacher in Spanish Harlem, later became social worker before he passed. And my mom was an administrative assistant raising four of us. I had three older sisters. So my parents were divorced when I was eight.

And so when they were divorced, you know, at the time my dad had a drinking problem. When you're eight years old and your family's ruptured, everybody has their trauma. My trauma's no worse than anybody else's. It was a time where I learned, oh, see, you call it the simulation. I call it quantum entanglement. Okay, sure. What happened? A24. I'm looking at A24 right there. A candle. A24 has been overused.

all over my universe this past month because JJ is in the movie Sing Sing with Coleman Domingo which we saw and we interviewed Coleman Domingo. Did you? Yes, we did. Beautiful movie. I think actually we're gonna have this follow Coleman. Coleman's a beautiful human being. I love him. Oh yeah. I met him as a result of this and JJ is part of that small ensemble. And so A24 was not part of all of this when they were making it but it's been all over my world because of JJ. So anyway, it just caught the corner of my eye. The Sim is lazy.

Yeah. You have to understand that the Sim is creating... Because it's hot out. It's hot out. Well, yes, which the Sim made, but the Sim makes assets and it doesn't want to make unique assets for every room. It has to duplicate for efficiency. And I don't even look for it. It just finds me. I don't know about you. Right.

So when your family is ruptured like that, at that age, I've been emotionally on my own since I've been eight years old. Growing up, I always had this need to focus on people who never had a voice. And the way that I found that for myself, I was always taken by video and music. When you put those two things together, I think people...

And I think when you emote, you care. I've had a camera in my hand. I don't want to age myself here, but pretty digital. Yeah. VHS days. Sure, sure. Big boys, big tapes. You're with me a little bit. I'm older than you. I was doing some reverse engineering and you were a junior in college in 1990. And I graduated high school in 93. So, yeah, we're looking at probably a five-year gap. But VHS tapes, that's of my gen too. Yeah, you're not in our demo, Monica. No.

I am. I'm just saying, we're in the same demo. She wants to be in all demos. I am. If we were talking about Gen Z, she would also be in Gen Z. I mean, emotionally, mentally, you might be in our demo. I'm 36. I'm not. Okay, okay, okay. But mentally, we're much younger than you. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Mature.

So I always just grew up watching NBC in my house. And you like the news specifically? I always liked the news. I mean, this is so generic armchair-y, but like Dad's Gone, all these NBC nighttime news shows we watched growing up, there was a patriarch in charge and he made you feel safe and Cronkite delivered it with a steady voice. Definitely, if you're longing for some maleness, I think those anchors of our childhood are obvious source of that as well. It's the first time I ever thought of that.

Okay, all right. I had a stepfather. God bless my mother. I love her. She's in Florida. The stepfather never spoke to me for 35 years, not present in my life, who was just a fixture in my house. You were an extra that came with mom. Exactly. Yeah, sure. Me and my sisters were just kind of extras. And I love my mom dearly, and she is a super woman for what she dealt with. But that analysis is actually an interesting one that I never thought of. It was, who am I...

paying attention to. I'll add, because I happen to be writing about it. So my parents got divorced at three and me, mom and brother went and moved into these welfare apartments in a town in Michigan. And I don't think I was so cognizant of it, but I can look and go like, it's real scary that dad's not in the picture. Crazy shit was happening in this apartment building. And you're like, who's stepping in when it gets violent? Like, where's dad? Where is the protector and all this?

There's something primitive about not having a male around. This is a little scary, I think. It is. My dad loved me very much and was in the picture, but he wasn't even allowed in my house. So it was confusing as a little child. And you did weekends? Weekends, sometimes weeknights, every once in a while. But my dad fell in love with another woman. And now as an adult, I get it. But when you're 10, 12 years old, you're like, wait, what happened?

Listen, I would not have changed anything in my life, warts and all, just because I luckily can say I love who I am today. All of that contributed to who I've become. But I had to go through it. So my mom would cook dinner every day and I'd come home and the two shows that we would watch, I'd be home by three something. Four o'clock was Phil Donahue. Sure. I'm sorry, you don't know who Phil Donahue is. This is what I'm saying. This is my arbiter with people I work with. Just to get a sense of generation. I'm like, have you ever heard of Phil Donahue? Yep. Yeah.

Sally Jessie Raphael. I know her. Yeah. When I say Phil Donahue, I could be saying Millard Fillmore to a lot of people. Yeah. And to put it into perspective, Phil Donahue was as big as Dr. Phil. Yeah.

You know, you couldn't have been born in the last 25 years and not know who Dr. Phil was. Similarly, you couldn't not know who Phil Donahue was. And he was the first of this ilk to have white nationalists on with the Black Panthers at the same time. Was it like an Oprah situation? It was, but it was Oprah before Oprah. That's right. But also a bit salacious. There were some very...

Hot, buttony, edgy. There were fights on the show. Phil got attacked. He broke his nose in an episode. That was Geraldo, actually. Oh, Geraldo. Oh, good. Thank you for that. Phil did get an area physical. Yeah, sure. There was stuff. Maybe not the broken nose. The broken nose was Geraldo. That is Geraldo.

He was the first person in television history to take a microphone and put it in random people's faces in the audience. That's really what he was known for. Got it. He went off the air in 1996. He was older at that point. He was what I call in the book the OG talk show host. So we would watch him at 4 o'clock.

And at 5 o'clock, we'll be live at 5 with Tony Gatta and Sue Simmons, which are the local news anchors at the time in New York. The news anchors in your town are the most famous people in the world. In Detroit, Bill Bond. They're like your family. I mean, they're Brad Pitt of your town. I'm going to see what's Tony saying, you know? So I always wanted to get into the news business. So I applied to WNBC and only WNBC, actually, and was rejected. And then I applied again.

And I was rejected. At the time, I was president of my student government in college. Did you have a degree in journalism? I didn't. What was your degree in? English and history. Okay. Yeah. You know. College kids should not be making these decisions for themselves. You know what I think the major is? Major is like topic of conversation and family conversations. What you want to talk about at the dinner table. You got to have an answer when people ask you. I guess so. Even a journalism major would not have prepared me for what I would end up learning.

Right. My major was Dateline University. Right. I would watch Tony Gatta and Sue Simmons every day. And so I got rejected twice from this internship. I got one internship offered at a place called Common Cause, which is a good government group. And it was down by City Hall in lower Manhattan. I was there for the first week and I was making copies in this hallway. I hated it. Every day I would go out with my brown bag lunch, 19 years old, sitting at City Hall, people watching. Yeah.

And one day I see a stream of journalists walking into the sea hall. Now, this is pre-9-11, not much security around. Willy nilly. You could wander into places. Anywhere you want. So I'm like, what's going on? I get online and I follow everybody in and there's a security guard there and people are showing their badges. He says to me, I'm 19 years old. He says, where are you from? Probably the proudest moment of my life. The quickest I was. I was like, I'm from independent media. Oh, nice.

Oh, nice. And he was like, okay, go on through. I'm like, what just happened? So I'm sitting in the back of the blue room. They call it the blue room. And I have my brown bag lunch on my lap. And out comes, at the time, Mayor David Dinkins. I'm like, whoa, David Dinkins. And then in the front row, four rows ahead of me, I see this snow white hair. I'm like, is that Tony fucking Guida? Yeah.

His local news anchor. Oh, oh, oh. Zero. The other Phil Donahue. Yeah. Oh, my God. The guy you had on your wall. No, no. The guy that I watched every night. Yeah, I know. My local news anchor. I was saying it to myself, like, is that Richard Gere? Is that like- Gwyneth Paltrow. Right. Exactly. I was like, is that Tony Gaida? And so I'm like, what do I do? So I waited outside City Hall for everyone to come out, and then I saw him walking out, and I-

ran up to him like a puppy off a leash. And I was like, Mr. Gata, my name is Dan Sloppy and I applied twice to be an intern at WNBC. I got rejected twice. I will do anything. I'll get you coffee. I'll do whatever you want. This dude was like, either I'm going to call the police. He took a napkin out of his pocket and he wrote, call Mike Callahan. And he wrote a phone number and he handed it to me. And I said to him, thank you so much, Mr. Gata. If he tries,

If he tripped over me two hours later, he would not have recognized me. Sure, sure, sure. That moment changed my life forever. This is problematic because this is a topic that comes up on here all the time. See, there's a couple of these stories and they encourage everyone else to go up to someone at a dinner table. Oh,

Oh, yeah. I heard on your podcast this guy. Yeah, there is a lot of that. Keith Morrison's like having a nice lunch with his wife and some guy's like, I want to be on Dateline. But it happens sometimes. In reality, I kind of think he was trying to get rid of me. Yeah.

What's great is he didn't do a ton for you. He gave you this number and you called the next day and the guy was nice enough to say, come down here. And then he just shoved you somewhere else. So you're kind of like a rock in everyone's shoe. But then you end up kind of interning without any real permission. And they're like, you got to be officially working here. But then fast forward to you apply and you get in this part fascinates me greatly. You were in the page program at NBC. I was. I was. Speaking of getting rejected, I tried to get in that program. So. Oh, you did. Did you really? Yeah.

You should have gone to City Hall to a press conference and met. I guess it would have been after college. I don't want to know. 2020? Yeah, 2024 was it? 2009! 2009, a long time.

A long time ago. Well, too bad we didn't know each other. I don't know if I could have helped you anyway, but you could have written something on a napkin. The funny part about that internship is that it wasn't an official. The internship director would be like, why do you keep showing up? I literally saw her in the hallways for decades. Now, this is the part of the story I stand behind. So like approaching people in public, I don't know about that, but showing up

over and over again and getting people coffee and doing the fucking grunt work. Just doing it. Just sticking around and doing the work no one wants to do. That I'm a huge believer in. My intent and my motivation was to understand this business and do what I could to give other people a voice. That was why I was the president of my student government in college. To answer your question, because of my internship, internship, I put in air quotes, I got accepted into the PAGE program. And so you were seating people at Letterman. Oh.

And at SNL. SNL, Letterman. In your 20s. I was 21. Were you pinching yourself? I can't think of anything more exciting than being able to be in the Dave Letterman Theater or the SNL stage. I can't explain how exciting it was. Probably never got better, actually. I don't know how to answer that. I haven't left that building in 31 years. Right.

Rockefeller Center. So there's something when I first walked in, it's interesting that you say this because when I give tours of the studio, there's a smell in the studios. The air conditioning is up high. There's an energy there that made me feel like I was part of something bigger than myself. It's the apex of New York show business, in my opinion, that building, the many things that are going on there. You have SNL on the floor. You've got David Letterman. You've got the news happening.

And I was the audience coordinator for the Phil Donahue show. That's the greatest. I did the warmup of the studio audience, but it was all within that time period. I was pinching myself. As a page, I'm seating people at Letterman. I'm seating people at Saturday Night Live. I'm doing tours of the studio. I'm seeing famous people all over the place. The real unbelievable moment as a page was they have what they call job assignments. So they give you like three months of assignments in various departments. I was only a page for three months because I got hired at Donahue right away.

But I had an assignment at NBC Sports. And this was in 1993 when the Chicago Bulls were playing the New York Knicks in the East Coast Finals. It was game five. And I was a runner. And my job was to get orange juice from Marv Albert. Oh.

Oh, wonderful. So I have this thing on my neck, all access. There's a sports truck at the end of the ramp. I'm in the truck the whole time. And they're like, Marv needs to do it, right? So I take the juice 10 minutes before the game starts. I'm running up the back. I swear to you, coming towards me in his uniform by himself was Michael Jordan. No. Baby. I didn't say a word. Well, good. You didn't tell me you wanted an internship. Ah!

You want to shoot a couple hoops, bro? I'm an aspiring Chicago Bull. That's when you're like 86 forever. Yeah, exactly. But the moment was when I come out the player's entrance and I ran to give him his orange juice and it was like 10 minutes before the game time. You know, 20,000 people looking around. I'm like,

Can't get better. Yeah. That's when you start believing in quantum entanglement. Yeah. Quantum entanglement. I love you saying that. I love it. Okay. So let's fast forward. So you end up over the course of your career, you land at Dateline. Well, you end up at NBC News and maybe help me with

Donahue. I was at Donahue. Yeah. And then Donahue went off there in 1996 and I started at Dateline right away. And so Dateline's a division of NBC News. Is that how it works? It is. And it's evolved over the years. And you've been there for... Going on my 29th year, 96. It was March 11th. 11 is a big number in my life. I'm trying to make that work with a... 11-11, it's very lucky. JJ's birthday is 11-11. 11 is all over the place. A chapter in my book is 11-11. But anyway, March 11th, 1996 was my first day at Dateline.

And how long there before you're actually producing segments? I started producing segments in about 99, 2000. Okay. 24, 25 years. Yeah. And so I think it'd be fun just for people in a very concise way to know when we turn on Dateline and

Lester or when Keith gets up there, someone has done a lot of legwork before he can report this story to us on camera. And that's what you're doing as a segment producer. That's exactly right. So let's just give like there's a murder in Ohio. Of course, a man has murdered his wife.

And how long before Keith goes out there to talk to people? Are you on the ground? What are you doing? How are you building the story? The way I describe it is being a good producer is like choreographing a ballet. By the time the talent shows up, everything is in place. Everything is ready. All questions are answered.

You know what the story is about. You know what the questions are going to be asked. The characters kind of know what to expect. You know why you're doing the interview, what the purpose of the interview is, the overall arc of the story, the location has been picked out. We know that there's not going to be trains. You got to find something for Keith to lean on. Exactly. And is up front. He is the leaner. The producers are working on several stories at once. The correspondents are working on more than that.

And it depends who you're working with. Keith, as you guys well know, has very much his own voice. Oh, God, yeah. You don't really write Keith scripts for him. Right, right, right. Keith writes scripts. Well, Dateline's a division of NBC News, and then Keith is a division of Dateline. Ha, ha, ha.

He's his own brand within the brand within the brand. Many, many years ago, Kristen and I created a movie for Dax. It was called Baby Director. We used Delta as a baby. I know, Keith did it. Yes, and Keith did it, but we were like, can you just maybe narrate this for us? And he said, sure. I think we said, like, it's going to be this. We gave him some script. He was like, maybe I'll do it.

Maybe I'll take a stab at it. So he wrote that himself as well. Listen, I just want to tell you, Monica, do not take offense to that. No, it was perfect. Who knows the dream come true? You can't actually write for him. It's a real thing. To feel insecure. You know, you write a script and you give it to Keith, whatever, and it comes back like a million times better and you're like, I freaking suck. Yeah. Well, you just can't write for him. He's so specific. Josh Mankiewicz is...

A dear friend also has his own voice. He knows his voice. He writes. All the correspondents write. But depending on who you're working with, Andrew Canning as well. But I work mainly now with Lester Holt. I'm his long-form producer for most stuff. And Lester is really, really busy. He's a very, very dear friend of mine. He is my role model, my mentor, without him even knowing it. Until now. He's not going to listen. Don't worry. No.

He's too busy. I'm going to make him listen to this stuff. He's my mentor by how he behaves. He wants to walk. Just by watching him. Here's my guess, having no knowledge of how this works. But my guess is you have a team at Dateline that's kind of got their lures in the water all over the country. They're monitoring stories that are coming up and surfacing. And then they're reducing that to some pot.

of compelling stories that Dateline might take on. And then my guess would be, do you then get that whittled down group and then some stick out to you and then you go pitch that to Lester? - There are, as you know, only certain 100 something hour slots a year. Primetime real estate is precious. There are literally thousands of pitches every year. The way that's decided,

Paul Ryan and Liz Cole are the executive producers of the show. There's a pitch pack and producers pitch their stories. And then the group of seniors in the morning meeting, Liz and Paul go through them and they'll talk about them. And there's a whole host of reasons that they choose certain stories. If we have a two hour slot, if we have a one hour slot.

You need variety. You can't have six men in a row that killed their wives. And I'm not really part of that process. I'm not part of the editorial process. And the reason why is because in the law firm of Ryan and Cole, I'm kind of like the pro bono unit. I came to Dateline when Stone Phillips and Jane Pauly were the anchors, when there were many...

different segments within an hour. Then I was part of a very robust investigative unit with Chris Hansen as the correspondent for many years, and we did some of that. Dateline since then has morphed and known as the True Crime Original, and we do these...

hour-long stories with twists and turns that keep viewers on the edge of their seats. Don't you even have a two-hour Saturday episode or something like that? Yeah, yeah, sure. And the reason why Paul and Liz pick the stories they do is because we're on all the time. Simply from a production perspective, when they get pitches, the pitches are, okay, so...

Here was the baby flower. It had this flower and now it ends with this tulip. So we know the beginning, the middle and the end. They need to do that by necessity because there needs to be a production schedule. You need to know you're going to get on the air. You need to know a beginning, a middle and end of a story. That's really the reason I have my job because that's what Dateline is. That's what they're so good at doing. The reason I say I'm the pro bono unit is because the way that I have come to view stories and luckily I haven't been fired yet.

is that I don't see a tulip. I just see fertile soil. The stories that I tend to navigate to, and this is what found me, I didn't find it.

are these stories of injustice, are these stories of people who society has thrown away, if society has considered other or less than, people who don't have a voice. - And they don't have an advocate. Some of these people are so disenfranchised, it's not like they have an uncle that has somebody's phone number that could get the ball rolling. They're like completely on their own. They have no resources. - Exactly right. - Like if you or I were thrown in jail and we were innocent, there's a lot of folks we can call

Maybe. You could call Lester Holt. But you might be surprised how hard it would be to get you out. Indeed. But I'm imagining the kid whose dad was in jail to begin with, who doesn't have any money for a lawyer. And I understand why you use the word advocate. It makes perfect sense. It's intuitive. There's a lot of things that are intuitive that we can talk about that are actually counterintuitive about the system. Okay, great. People have called me an advocate for a long time. What I'd like to say is that I'm really not an advocate for individual human beings.

I'm an advocate for the truth. I'm an advocate for elevating the stories and the truth behind the stories pertains to so many more people than just that one person. So by telling that person's story, we're really telling hundreds of thousands of people's story, which is why what I said to you when I came in here, I meant it. You are literally changing people's lives with this because when people feel hurt, they

They feel hope. And when they feel hope, that's their future. And very often people don't feel heard. Forget feel. Most people aren't heard. Right. Exactly. True. Exactly. Regardless of their feelings. Exactly. Yeah, yeah. Stay tuned for more Armchair Expert, if you dare. I think what would be fair and generous...

Might be weirdly for us to start with Las Vegas homicide into such a lesser degree. I have gotten to partake in ride-alongs because of my job, which is a great privilege. I found it to be a very conflicting experience.

And so I think it might almost be fair for us to paint where this process kind of starts. - My first real experience with law enforcement was through Vegas homicide. I had done stories, obviously, with police before, but I had done a story in Vegas, a murder story.

And I met a detective. This was 2000, 2001, before 9-11. No digital cameras and no first 48, no reality TV. I think the only show at that time was Survivor, maybe. There wasn't this culture of true crime. And I thought, wow, it would be really cool to follow these guys to see what they do every day. So what I pitched was this idea. I got a hold of an early handheld camera. And I said, if it's just me...

And not these crews or the big boom mics and this falling around. All this stuff that makes you self-conscious. Right, exactly. I'll stand at a distance. And we obviously discussed this through legal and standards at NBC. But we came to this conclusion that we could do this where I could follow them where they would be wearing microphones. And I would be able to go under crime scene tape with them and film them. So I literally went back and forth to Vegas from New York every two weeks for two years. I filmed maybe 40 homicides. Whoa.

And we did this series called Vegas Homicide. Some of it aired in 2003, 2004 we did a series. It was the first series that Dateline did without any correspondence because at the time what I was doing was coming back with these little mini DV tapes and I was bringing them to the dub room to tape them so I could see them. So I went to my boss Neil Shapiro at the time and I was like, there's this new thing called Avid Express DV. Like I could actually look at

the video. So they bought me a laptop and then I started dropping the clips in and I saw, okay, there's a clip of Dax, Monica and Dan sitting here talking. And then there's a clip of Dan in his car talking.

And then I was like, wait a second, I don't need a correspondent. I just need Dax to later say, God damn, I was so happy he left. Boom. And then that was a joke. So we did the series in the words of the detectives. And I don't know if it was because the camera was there or what, but I was very taken by the bravery of what these men and women had to do. And that was only elevated later.

on 9/11. I actually flew back from Las Vegas on one of these shoots on September 10th, 2001.

I landed at one o'clock in the morning on September 11th. I think it was the last flight that landed that night. And I went home to my wife, Jocelyn. We lived at the time at 63rd between 1st and 2nd. Seven hours later, those planes hit. I immediately went to St. Vincent's Hospital to report for Dateline about these people looking for their family members. And these men and women in blue and red rushing to the bottom of that island was the most

magical safe human human I had so much gratitude I felt so impressed you feel lucky right you feel like you live somewhere that has this in place and that the people actually rise to the occasion totally I remember feeling these people have different blood than I do I would not ever do that unless my kid was inside that building

I'm just being honest. Yeah, yeah. You're not wired that way. I'm not wired that way. I was running the other direction. Right. I decided at that time, I mean, these were the heroes of the city. I mean, the rock stars of the country. We were thinking about having a baby. We had gotten married in 2000. And I'm like, I don't want to go to Vegas every other week anymore. I was terrified. Don't forget, the following month after that, Anthrax showed up at NBC.

Right. Yeah, yeah. It's getting wild. I had to take Cipro. Yeah. I'm like, Osama bin Laden's coming for me. You know what I mean? So I wanted to be in New York. So I thought maybe we can get into the NYPD. I pitched this idea similar to what I had been doing in Las Vegas. And the NYPD let me in. It was this little sliver of time with this great deputy commissioner of public information that was like, okay, go ahead. They assigned me to these two detectives in the Bronx, Bobby Adelarado and John Schwartz.

And so I showed up in Bronx Homicide for my first day in April of 2002. And Bobby and John weren't like the Vegas detectives. They weren't so psyched to see me. Yeah, of course not. You know, they were like, all right, kid. There's, I think, about 5,000 detectives in New York City and a force of about 30,000 or so. There's first, second, third grade detectives.

So only a few hundred at a time are first grade detective. Bobby and John were the highest rank you could get. So I'm with them and I'm embedded with them and I'm doing their whole tours with them. And every murder is obviously horrible. There's something about the murders in the Bronx that were a little different. I don't know if it was the method of murder or maybe it was after 9-11. I'm not really sure, but it felt different. And Bobby and I are out to dinner one night. I formed a really nice bond with Bobby to this day. This is in 2002. And I say to him, Bobby, you must bring this job home with you.

He says, you know, I really don't, except one case has been bothering me for a decade. I said, what's that about? And he started telling me about this murder that happened in 1990 at the Palladium nightclub in Manhattan. At the time, he had never heard of the Palladium because he was a Bronx detective. It's like two different countries, almost two different police forces. 1990 happened to be...

The single highest, most violent year in the history of New York. 2,245 murders that year. Oh. 2,000. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And many of them were happening in Bobby's precinct. By the way, that number, we were,

so shocked and outraged by 2,000 people dying in 9-11. Yeah, exactly. And it's just like, it's the difference between dying by paper cuts or an ax wound, right? It's just like, they're just trickling all day long. At 2,000 a year, that's like nine a day. And so you miss it. Every day we miss it. Yeah. Every time there's a mass shooting, go to the newspaper and ask how many people were killed in Chicago. Vaguely.

right right yeah yeah so it's this trickle that escapes our general awareness so bobby was dealing with his own never-ending line of murders in the bronx which was one of the single poorest precincts in the entire country he worked in the 40th precinct called the 4-0 they called it the baddest station in the nation there's a doc about it i

if you like I say. Yes, there is. Fort Apache is the name of the building that they worked in on Simpson Street. And so at the time, Bobby was taking down this very, very violent gang called the CNC gang. That gang was responsible for dozens of murders. It became so big that...

that it became a federal case. Bobby was working with the United States Attorney's Office to arrest them, and it was a RICO case, meaning gang case. And as part of the U.S. Attorney's Office protocol, when people want to testify, cut a deal, it's called queen for a day. So basically, in the federal system, they say, Monica, you're going to prison forever. Ugh.

But if you tell us everything you've ever done, whether we know about it or not, don't lie about anything, we'll write a letter to the judge and you might be able to get a deal. So it incentivizes you. But it's a might. It's a might. And they agree that they're not going to try you for these new cases. Exactly. All one sentence. But. But.

But if we find you ever lie to us, even 10 years from now, the deal is torn up. This is what happened to Marion Jones. Yeah, she had queen for the day. So Bobby had an informant in the CNC gang from the Bronx who gave a proffer.

And he was telling Bobby about all these crimes. And this is in 1992, two years after the Palladium happened. Palladium happened on Thanksgiving night, 1990 in Manhattan. This informant named Benny Rodriguez says, you know, we did this, this. And Joey and Spanky shot this bouncer on Thanksgiving night at the Palladium. Bobby had never heard of it. So he takes Benny to the Manhattan DA's office. And Bobby is asked to wait outside. Years later, he thought that was a bit strange.

for good reason and the assistant district attorney who handled the palladium case comes out you go bobby kid you know a kid benny's off the money with his facts it wasn't joey and spanky we just convicted two other guys david lemus and made a whole doggo three weeks ago this is december of 1992. bobby says okay benny must be off he's always been good to me and he kind of forgot about it in 1994 they start taking down everybody and everyone's now cutting deals

One of the people they interview is a guy named Joey Palat. Joey's going through all the murders, and Bobby is working with an assistant district attorney named Steve Cohen in the U.S. Attorney's Office, and they're debriefing all these guys, including Joey. And Joey says, we did this, we did this. And Steve says, look, if you're holding anything back, if you don't tell us, your pals are going to tell us, and there's nothing we can do for you. And Joey says, you mean the Palladium case? A shiver went up Bobby's spine because it matched exactly what Penny said. So they did all of this research.

And they find a 911 call made days after the crime saying, "Joey and Spanky from 550 East 139th Street committed the crime." And they found admission witnesses saying, "Yeah, they came back and bragged about it." And they found other evidence that pointed to them. So as a result of that, Lemus and Hildago got a new hearing in 1996. Joey testified, I did it. Spanky said he would testify for immunity.

but the Manhattan DA's office didn't give him immunity. Steve Cohen testified. Benny Rodriguez testified. Joey's wife testified, saying we were at the Palladium. And the judge, which was the same judge that oversaw the original trial, denied the motion. Oh, my God. So they went back to prison. So Steve Cohen, who worked at the U.S. Attorney's Office, by now had left to go to private practice. And it always bothered him and Bobby. It always nagged at them. So in the year 2000...

Steve, who later became Andrew Cuomo's chief of staff. So really quick, they've now been in prison for 10 years. So in 2000, Steve got an article written in the New York Times, a front page. Two men remain in prison despite admissions. Somebody in federal prison reads that article.

a gang member from another gang named Richie Feliciano. And he calls the guy who locked him up at the U.S. Attorney's Office by a guy named John O'Malley. First thing John says, Richie, you read the New York Times? But Richie says, I was there that night.

I was mediating the dispute. Joey and Spanky did this. It wasn't these two other guys. The original detective 10 years ago knew there was a guy named Spanky. She ran his name in the database and it came back to several people, including the real Spanky named Thomas Morales, one of which was a guy named Frankie Figueroa, known as Fat Spanky. Hmm.

She shows his picture to the witnesses and they all pick him out as the guy mediating the dispute. But Frankie Figueroa could not have been there that night because he was in jail. They made the wrong ID, but it confirmed there was this guy mediating the dispute. You put Richie Feliciano and Frankie Figueroa's picture next to each other, they look like brothers. So the U.S. Attorney's Office and John O'Malley take this information and they bring it back to the Manhattan DA's office.

they say now we got this guy who said he's there what did they do nothing it's maddening two more years go by oh my god so 12 years of their 2002 I show up I asked this to Bobby and I start filming from the very beginning from the moment he writes the word palladium on a folder and I film everything in real time including an interview with David lemus's alibi her name was Janice Katala his girlfriend

There was a statement from Janice saying that she and David were at the Palladium that night. The car broke down, this whole intricate story. She never testified at his trial. We go unannounced to her apartment. This is all on TV, by the way, and will be part of this docuseries that Dawn Porter produced called Sing Sing Chronicles. We go to her apartment with me and Toe filming, unannounced. She lets me film there in conversation. She's sitting in her pajamas on her bed. She remembers the whole thing.

Oh, I remember that very clearly. Detective Theis, he was the one telling me that we were at the Palladium. She says it never happened, that they were home that night. Oh, God. There's no signed statement from her, but there's a statement in the file saying that she said that. Basically, the officer perjured himself, but she never testified at trial. So that's the first thing we got.

Then we go and I film Joey Palat in prison with Bobby, the guy who arrested him, interviewed him. They greeted each other as long lost friends. Yeah, yeah. I mean, it just shows the kind of respect that Bobby had. And Joey went through the whole thing again. There was a fight with the bouncers. We went to our trunks. We got the car. We came back. He had a .38. I had a 9mm. My gun jammed. Bullet came out. Didn't fire. Well, there was a live 9mm found at the scene. Yeah.

Only Joey could explain that. And this is among other information that comes up. So Bobby goes to his bosses. My presence became a little bit too much. And they went to the Manhattan DA's office to make a report. I was waiting outside. And they went with the belief that truth matters. That two innocent guys were sitting in prison and they know who did it. They carry their boxes.

of information into the DA's office onto the sixth floor. 45 minutes, they come out. Bobby looks at my camera. I said, "Bobby, you have anything to say?" "Nope." That was a stone wall we walked into. So they told them to just write a report and Spanky, who had been in federal prison for his CNC crimes, was getting out in three weeks.

Bobby wanted to arrest him before his foot hit the pavement. Never got a response. The case was taken from him. The Manhattan DA's office says, we'll reinvestigate the case. They assigned two new Manhattan detectives and asked Bobby and John to go to Manhattan to get them up to speed. I wasn't invited. By that time, I was kicked out. So Bobby is by himself in the precinct and he goes to the palladium case folder that he never could find for 12 years. It had been in the DA's office the whole time. And in the box, he finds notes.

For example, Spanky Morales' sister-in-law, Danella Troche, was interviewed the week of the crime. A border agent who said, my brother-in-law Spanky tried to rape me. My husband, his brother, admitted that he did the Palladium shooting. He was picked out by their own eyewitnesses. But there was never a photo array done. So he goes to his bosses and he says, what's my obligation? And he was basically ordered to remain silent. He ends up quitting his job. Wow.

Talking to me on camera about it. And the Manhattan DA's office launches their own reinvestigation. A DA by the name of Dan Bibb does the reinvestigation, which Steve Cohen, the defense attorney on Bobby, think is going to take weeks. Took 19 months. And Dan Bibb, who believed these guys were guilty at first, he comes to the conclusion the guys are innocent. This is what, 14 years after? November of 2004. He comes to the conclusion the guys are innocent. Aye, aye, aye. He's ordered to protect the convictions.

In January, they have a new theory now with him as the front man that he never wanted to be. He ended up on the front page of the New York Times for this because he claimed he threw the case and a bunch of other things. He felt that they would have stayed in longer. There was a paper written about him at Georgetown called The Conscience of a Prosecutor. But for a full year, he believed they were innocent and they were in Rikers Island. The theory of the case, the office's theory that he put forward,

was that it was now not a two-shooter case. It was a three-shooter case. Oh, God. There was a terrible front line called the witnesses, I think. And it was the same thing where they wrongly got a false confession out of one guy. Then it didn't add up. So they re-saw him and said, well, who else was there? So then they go get this guy. They get a false confession out of him. Five people by the end of this that they all...

into this thing and not one of the five had anything to do with it. And they wrote confessions. And this happens. All the time.

Yeah, it's crazy. So now it's a three-shooter case, which I even knew the DA didn't believe that was representing it. But let's see if the guys know each other. Lemus and Hidalgo said that they never knew each other. Not only did they not know each other, Hidalgo was like plucked out of thin air. No one had any idea how he got involved to this day. They all said they didn't know Spanky. I found Spanky. I brought him to Rockefeller Center.

I interviewed him at Rockefeller Center. He basically said, you know, I don't know these guys. I've never seen these guys. They saying I have something to do with this thing. He's a guy I can respect because he was a little upfront about, look, they say I have something to do with it. They said they couldn't find him. I'm always where I said I was. Come and talk to me about it, right? We aired that first hour in January of 2005.

with Stone Phillips. Two bouncers saw the show and said, "Oh yeah, it's Spanky." I mean, at this point, does it even matter? They've got like 15 people collaborating. By the way, I had done a story on WNBC earlier. The jury forewoman who worked at New York Magazine who convicted them was devastated and sat in court and fought with the mother to get them out. So there's a new hearing. The hearing lasts nine months.

Day here, day there. Meanwhile, they're going back and forth. I remember it being a very hot summer of July 2005. One day they come into court and out of nowhere, after 15 years of fighting, they say, okay, Hildago's innocent. We'll let him go. And he was handcuffed, brought back into custody, and deported to the Dominican Republic because of a prior gun violation from 20 years earlier. Oh.

After already serving 15 years. Lemus had to wait another two months in Rikers Island for the judge's decision. The judge, Roger Hayes, vacates the conviction. He comes out to his wailing mother. Dan Bibb ended up leaving and doing an interview with me for an updated two-hour show we did in 2007. To this day, not only has the Manhattan District Attorney's Office never admitted they were wrong, they retried David Lemus.

Oh, my Lord. Two years later, in 2007. For the same crime. And get this, the jury couldn't hear that he had spent 15 years in prison. What? What? Because it was prejudicial to the prosecution. Oh, my God. I hate everything. I hate everything. Because it had nothing to do with what happened on the day of the murder. Let me just back up for one second. The day the hearing for them started, after I aired this spanky clip on TV, he was arrested.

for murder 14 years later, the same day that Lemus and Hildago's hearing began, Spanky was arraigned. Spanky's attorney later filed a motion under a law called People v. Singer, which basically taught me a new lesson. There is a statute of limitation on murder. The argument was, you, the people, had so much information to arrest me, overwhelming, showing my guilt,

It is a violation of my civil rights to try me now. Wow. And in a scathing opinion to the DA's office for the mistakes, he won and he's a free man.

He got on the stand in David Lemus' trial and confessed that he was the killer. Oh my, oh my God. How are they able to retry him? And what else about double jeopardy? When you're arrested, you're charged with a crime and there's an indictment. The DA can do that singularly. Once your jury renders a verdict, only a judge can vacate that conviction. Once the judge vacates the conviction, it's like you were never convicted at all. It goes back to when you were arrested. So it's up to the DA to decide, oh, we can do this again or not.

And so David Lemus took two hours for the jury to acquit him. And that night he left for Florida.

I never came back. That was my baptism into this world where I could not fathom how people in power who control your freedom could just brazenly disregard facts as if they don't exist that are obvious to everyone. So is it because of that work that

That you are ultimately approached by JJ's mom. Why do people start reaching out to you? I used to visit David Lemus on Thanksgiving Day for the murder for which he was wrongfully convicted. On November 28th, I believe it was, 2002, his mother flew up with perfect makeup, as heartbreaking as it is endearing, with goodies and treats.

how difficult it is for her to see him once a year. Fly up from Florida. We got a car, drove her up for the visit. My intent was to interview her after the visit, which I did, which was part of the show. On that Thanksgiving day, I walked into the lobby and there was a woman holding the hands of two little boys. And she stopped me and she said, are you Dan? Even my mother hardly recognizes me, you know. My son, John Adrian JJ, he's innocent. Can you help us?

hello my name is maria velasquez turned out that david lemus and jj shared a cement wall

They were in cells next to each other. And JJ knew I was coming because David told him that I was coming. And he asked his mother to wait for me to try and get my attention. At that point, I was 70% convinced, but I wasn't 100% yet convinced even about those two other guys. Yeah, that's kind of one of my questions. And let me just hit you guys with some facts from the book. So there are...

2 million people incarcerated in our country, give or take, which is disproportionately huge around the world. And even the conservative estimates of how many people are wrongly imprisoned is 5%. So on a given day, that's 100,000 people that are in prison that are innocent. But...

That also means 95% of them are guilty and many of them are claiming they're innocent. Let's stop. Okay. I believe the number is higher than 5%. I just want to put this in perspective. Yeah. As we are talking, there are at least 100,000 people who have been stolen from their lives and their families and their communities that are looking at a cement ceiling right now. My belief, it's probably closer to 200,000. In the past decade,

35 years since 1989, just over 3,200 people have been exonerated in more than 30 years. You have 3,500 people in the last 30 years. This epidemic is a hidden epidemic that people think doesn't affect them. No one understands the gravity and the depth

of how badly it goes that's one two guilty people the world and the reason i can only manage barely to sleep five hours a night is because the injustice is too great

The stakes are too high. And that means for everyone. Yes. But my point remains that when someone approaches you, you do unfortunately have the fact that 90% are. I'm just talking about when one evaluates whether what they're being told is factual or not, it has got to be challenging. Very. Because the vast majority, in fact, are guilty. And how does one...

navigate that. This is one of those counterintuitive moments, the trope. Even news says it all the time. Everybody in prison says they're innocent. Have you guys ever been to a prison? Yeah. Have you visited a prison?

I visited JJ in particular more than 200 times over 20 years. I spent two nights on death row with Lester Holt in Angola prison. I've spent thousands of days in prisons in this country. From my experience, 80 to 90% of the people that I meet admit their guilt. Yeah, I could see that. That's the first thing. Now, there are people that have reached out to me and there have probably been more than a thousand by now.

No doubt or lying. Right, right, right. There's an algorithm. I can't tell you what it is. I don't even know it. There's a checkmark list that I go over in my head. This is my bar because I know my show. I know my platform and I know my responsibility. You inherited a bit of some journalistic integrity and measures by which it has to be factual to put on the air. It even goes beyond that. If you came to me and said, I got 25 to life from murder, I did not do this. It's okay.

And Dax Shepard, blah, blah, blah, committed rape in 2004. I'm not interested. Right. Somebody else can deal with that. The cases that I take on generally. Yeah. You don't have those priors. I have no idea what anybody is talking about. Right. Yeah. I was kidnapped.

Which happens all the time. A good amount of the time. And now generally it stems from a minor offense. You're in the system generally. Sometimes. There's a case that I did where a woman just didn't call a cab. They thought she did. It was part of Eric Lisson's case. It's insane. So there's a check mark in my head. This is very incongruous with who they were prior to this arrest. Right. A. Step one, yeah. Can I prove it?

C, are there visual elements that I can make a TV? D, how well can they tell their story? Do I have access to them? Do I have access to the elements that make it an hour-long television show? So it's very, very difficult to do, which is a lot of why my work...

has been verite work. My own investigation videotaped in real time. So the audience doesn't know the same way I don't know. They're on the journey with me. So there is a good amount of work in advance, reading trial transcripts. And I kind of know the markers of what really bad evidence is. Single eyewitness misidentification from a stranger, the worst. Yeah. Stay tuned for more Armchair Expert. If you dare.

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Well, in JJ's case, we should go through JJ now and how you decide that this is a case you want to take on. But I want to say the number was like they showed the eyewitness 1,800 photos or something. Insane case. Fucking preposterous. But what made it really difficult for me was that the time Maria approached me, I didn't know anything. And I'm thinking to myself, another guy in the same part of the same prison just happened, you know. Yeah, it's all so innocent. That's convenient, you know. Yeah, yeah. Just like you say. Yeah. Yeah.

And in the Palladium case, I had two active duty police officers and a prosecutor saying they were innocent. In JJ's case, there was nobody. So what was he accused of? JJ was accused of killing a former New York City police officer in Harlem during a botched robbery with another man. Someone came into his home. It wasn't his home. It was an apartment that they used as an illegal gambling partner. Oh, so he was there gambling. He owned it.

The retired police officer. Within the confines of the precinct he used to work. All right. Like one-armed bandits. Sure, sure. The stuff you see in a Bronx tale. Exactly right. Yeah, gangster stuff. Exactly right. And the first thing that got me to pay attention to JJ was his son. Jacob was five. He had these huge eyes holding his grandmother's hand. Thanksgiving morning, you know? I had no idea if his dad was innocent or guilty. I was very skeptical. But my first thought was...

this little dude should be running around with his cousins today. Yeah. Yeah. He shouldn't be in a prison. And I had not become a father myself yet, but I remember going home that day and not being able to get that kid's eyes out of my head. I told Maria at the time before that, I said, send me whatever. And I made a point. It's not going to happen anytime soon. She was thrilled.

No one was listening to her. And I vowed that for that kid, I would at least try and find the truth. And so I was knee deep in the palladium case. A week later, in 2002, he wrote me his first letter and his mom sent me a box with a jail transcript of 2,044 pages.

I hope you read faster than I do. I'll call you back in three years. And what was amazing to me is that he wrote to me and said, if I'm not mistaken, my mother only sent you 1,787 pages of them, which is not the typical letter you get from somebody in prison. Yes, this is a meticulous person. And so anyway, I didn't read it right away. I was busy. I was a new father. My daughter was born in 2003. I had this other case. And by the way, this was kind of my extracurricular work.

Yeah. This wasn't like Dateline was like, when's that Palladium story going to get done? Yeah. It was a passion project. And it kind of broke the mold of the formulaic narrative of how we normally get things on the air. It didn't even have an ending. So it took me several years.

before I was able to really read into JJ's case. And it was two days after David Lemus was acquitted and got out that I went to see JJ at Sing Sing to film him for the first time. I had visited him a few times in the course of those five years from 2002 to 2007. He was accused with another man of killing a former New York City police officer by the name of Albert Ward who ran an illegal number parlor. There were nine eyewitnesses in the place. All of them were black.

That's an important point when it comes to cross-racial identification, a science I later learned. I'm going to guess really quick. In-groups are great at identifying each other and out-groups are terrible. It's comforting to know black people think we all look the same. Asian people think all caucasoids look the same. It's just easier for us to out-group. It's science. But the reason I point that out is that within hours of the crime, every single eyewitness who made a description, their first description,

was the shooter was a light-skinned black man with braids. Some said he had braids, ones that he had cornrows. But all of them said light-skinned black man. And his partner's accomplice was a dark-skinned black man. They made a sketch of the suspect. They put it all over Harlem. They have one police plaza. When a former cop is killed, it doesn't matter if he's running an illegal numbers book. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's on. Full court. Exactly. And they set up a mobile command unit with a few dozen officers, and they arrested. They used the word debrief.

150 people in Harlem on the street to get any information they could. Three different sources that we heard talking about, his name is Mustafa. There was an all out search for Mustafa. They called him primary target Mustafa. I spoke to a guy who was black with braids walking his dog with that police stopped him and picked him up and brought him into the precinct. Somebody said, that's not him. And he left.

They were looking for Mustafa. Meanwhile, they were also looking for the accomplice. One of the guys who gave a sketch was looking at mug books, people who had been arrested of that area.

They picked out a picture of a guy named Derry Daniels. He said, that's your guy. And he was arrested. Derry Daniels had a list of 11 former crimes, including a robbery at a numbers parlor. And he said that he was home that day with his dad. He was doing crack with Starlene. But they still needed to find the shooter. Two other people fled the scene other than the shooters. Two eyewitnesses who were in the back room. A 20-year-old guy named Augustus Browne.

who is selling heroin to a 45-year-old guy named Lorenzo Woodford. That's a former police-run numbers farmer. I know. In the vicinity of the...

It was allegedly the first time Augustus Brown ever went there. But as soon as that had happened, the two of them took off. Lorenzo Woodford said he went across the street and watched the cops arrive. So while they're looking for their shooter, they're looking for Augustus and Lorenzo. They find Lorenzo first. He describes the shooter as a light-skinned black man, possibly with red hair. Puts him in the back of a police car. Go find your drug dealer. They find Augustus Brown, 20 years old, selling heroin on the streets. They bring him in. They show him mug shots.

starting with light-skinned black men, somehow ending with light-skinned Hispanic men. Okay. He had 10 bags of heroin in his underwear. They put it in front of the table. Oh. They told him that they were going to arrest him. In last? He looked at 230 pages, six photos per page, more than 1,800 mugshots of people who had been arrested in that area. And after several hours, he pointed to a picture of JJ, who was a light-skinned Hispanic man,

and said, this is the exact quote, which is also a red flag for anyone who knows anything about eyewitness identification.

that's your guy, but his eyes look different in the picture. Never did he mention ever seeing him before in this interview when he picked him out. He didn't say, oh, I recognized him from 95th Street. He was just like, that's the guy. He was allowed to leave the precinct uncharged with his heroin. No way. JJ's Hispanic? JJ's Latino. This gets even crazier. He had never been convicted before. The reason that his mugshot was in that photo array is because a year earlier, he was accused of shoplifting at the Gap in Manhattan. He wasn't.

He had receipts. But they had photographed him. No. They used it as a pretense to search his car. And they found some weed and cocaine in his glove compartment. The case was thrown out because it was an illegal search and seizure. The photo should have been expunged, but it wasn't. Oh, wow. And when Augustus Brown picked that photo out, the prosecutor immediately went to the court to get it unsealed. Mm.

To show to the other witnesses. Lorenzo Woodford said he was number two. He said, number three, number two, maybe number two. I'm not sure. Right? But of course, by the time of the trial. But I was told at the beginning by police and prosecutors, five eyewitnesses picked him out and his co-defendant pleaded guilty with him. JJ said he's never even met the guy. Never said a word to him before. And that guy is obviously cooperating. He never testified against JJ. He just disappeared and he would never talk to me and he slammed the door in my face. Oh.

When I started looking into it, there was no physical or forensic evidence linking JJ to the crime. The murder happened on January 27th, 1998. His father's birthday was January 28th, the next day. His father had died six months earlier. So the day after the murder...

He wanted to go visit the gravesite. He had two little kids. His girlfriend and his mother were not talking to each other. JJ was in the Bronx. His mother lived in Havistraw. JJ was trying to broker a peace for them to go to the cemetery. There's a 74-minute phone call from a landline showing...

there was a call from the Bronx to Haverstraw. If JJ was on the phone with his mother, there's no possible way he could have committed that crime. That was presented as evidence. He testified in his own defense. His mother testified. His girlfriend testified. And he was convicted. When I started to decontract, there was no physical evidence. There was nothing. It was only the eyewitnesses. So I started by

by going to speak to every eyewitness. Ultimately, I filmed Augustus Brown in a maximum security prison with a hidden camera to document whatever he said. And he said, they were threatening me, they were gonna lock me up. He basically recanted, which he has done since. Lorenzo Woodford, they must've had something else. It wasn't just me that locked him up. If they didn't think it's him, let him go. Philip Jones, the third one, signed an affidavit saying at the time of the trial, the police picked him up in prison.

And told him that he had the right guy and they would give him help if he testified. Augustus Brown didn't want to testify. He was in Scranton, Pennsylvania. Two detectives picked him up. This is the guy with the heroin. Yeah. They picked him up on what's called a material witness order. They put him in jail in the tombs in New York City for six days until he testified. The day he testified, they gave him money for a motel and food and let him go. Hmm.

Dorothy Kennedy, the alleged fifth eyewitness, was 86 years old and was asked to identify the defendant sitting at the defense table.

She picked out juror number six. Okay. And still voted to convict JJ, by the way. And I interviewed him and he said he made a mistake. And I recently interviewed another juror who said she thought he was always innocent from the beginning and made the biggest mistake of her life. At that time, they had to be sequestered at this terrible motel near LaGuardia Airport. It was Halloween weekend and everybody just wanted to go home with their kids. Yeah. That took me 10 years to learn about JJ's case. I did a report in 2012. Okay.

It aired against the Grammys the weekend Whitney Houston died. Obviously we won that one. Yeah, right. Yeah, yeah. And I'm saying this not with any sort of pride or arrogance. I'm saying because it was an act of journalism, it was nominated for three Emmy Awards. J.J. spent another decade in prison.

They came after me. I have evidence to this day they still haven't turned over. JJ, over the intervening decade, a couple things happened. One, he led me to three other people that I did stories on that helped get them out because it's always a team. After that first decade when I knew he was innocent and I saw the way the system was working, I felt like a character in a Kafka novel. My relationship with him fundamentally changed. And we started working together inside. We built a program called, with the superintendent and 10 other guys, Superintendents.

called voices from within about redefining what it means to pay a debt to society voices from within is now starting on the outside that jj is going to be running he got clemency from cuomo his last week in office biden made a public apology but it's a state crime he can't pardon him right so jj was part of now this news he was on a panel for criminal legal reform and he talked to biden about clemency what kind of uniform standards can we establish

And Biden said on behalf of society, I apologize to you. JJ, as of today, remains a convicted killer. Right. And what he did for me and what this movement did for me is it melted the ice for me. It poked a hole in Pandora's box.

for me to understand the perversity and pathology of mass incarceration as a whole. So when we talk about guilty people, we're not talking about Ted Bundy and Jeffrey Dahmer. Those aren't the people in prison. The people that are in prison are people like my friend Dario Pena, who now works at Columbia University Justice Lab, who when he was 17 or 18 years old and was dodging bullets because he didn't have a home life,

to try to go to school, brilliant guy. And his older brother was a member of a gang and he thought that was family. And he thought he was a soldier in an army and everybody knew the rules. It was either kill or be killed. And he made a horrible mistake as a teenager.

And then he went to prison for 25 to life. But by the time he was 25, his frontal lobe developed. He went to college. And then he had another 20 years. Another example is Johnny Hincapie. And so many other people like him, which are in for murder, but never killed anybody. There were seven teenagers that were sent away from

One tragedy happened on Labor Day weekend 1990. A kid was stabbed when a family was there from Utah for the U.S. Open. There was a bunch of teenagers going to the Roseland Ballroom, 50 of them. This is the Central Park? This is the subway tourist murder. Oh, subway. Kid named Brian Watkins was the victim. Yeah, this is in the book. Seven teenagers, a bunch of teenagers, depending on how many you believe.

stayed behind to rob someone to get money to go to the Roseland. None of them knew one of the kids had a knife. And as he was running away, he swung his arm and he killed Brian. All seven went away for 25 to life. Johnny and Cappy turned out not to be on the subway platform in the 25 years. But that's all I'm saying is that what I've learned is that the people that society has deemed as bad, as other, as the problem, with the right education, with the right rehabilitation are the solution.

Or can be the solution. Yeah. This is one of my questions. I feel like I already know where you stand, but I think there is often a temptation to make this binary, right? Like the entire system's fucked up. It's injustice abounds. Or we got to get everyone in there and keep everyone safe. And it weirdly lines up.

And this is going to be one of my questions of why you think this problem is so hard to tackle. There's a great framing I read recently, a book by Arnold Kling, and it's called The Three Languages of Politics. And it frames really conservatives and liberals having two different worldviews, right? Conservatives feel like the world is a battle between civilization and barbarism. And then the liberal worldview is the world is a battle between the oppressed and the oppressors. And I would argue that

unfortunately, and why it's so complicated is both things are true in the criminal justice system. There are most certainly tons of people that need to be removed from society to protect all of us. I've done stories about them. Yeah, hundreds. And yes, what files beautifully into the liberal view is like,

most of these oppressed are the conventionally and historically oppressed people that then find themselves yet again oppressed in an asymmetric way in our criminal justice system. And so I don't think a left or a right approach to this is,

can encompass what it is. It's both these things. And it's hard to rally some kind of movement or coalition when people are so fucking anchored into either these two worldviews, when in fact it's suffering from both are very true. And I'm just wondering how you think politics somehow is yet another force on this fucked up system. The problem. It's interesting how you frame it. Because I don't see it

as politics. I see it as fact. Just by way of example, we don't vote on how much arsenic should be in our drinking water. The EPA does that. There are scientists that do that. We vote based on the cover of the New York Post or the LA, whatever it is, a narrative of fear. I'm not saying there aren't bad people in this world. There are bad people in this world. Yeah, yeah. And there are people that need to be in prison. But from my experience...

With the nearly 2 million people that are in prison, we represent 5% of the world's population and 20% of the world's prisoners. Yeah, it's abysmal. Most of the people that I've met are not son of Sam, are young men and women of color generally, who, as my friend JJ says, weren't even habilitated in the first place. Yeah, forget rehabilitate. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I also think really quickly, there's a profound example of it in your piece you did in Louisiana with Lester, where you guys slept there for a couple of days. We meet an inmate.

who was sent there at 17, he's been there for 65 fucking years. That old, old, old man. And the notion that he needs to be separated from us is nuts. Well, I think what we first need to do is...

define what the purpose of incapacitation is. - Yeah, is it punitive or rehabilitative? A lot of people want it to be punitive, and I totally disagree with that. - When I say politics, I'm a registered independent. To me, this has nothing to do with politics. This has to do with numbers. When you look at, here are the factual numbers.

95% of these nearly 2 million people will come home, whether you like it or not. 95% are going to be serving you at Starbucks, waitresses, driving you in your car, whatever. Of those 95%, about three quarters of them, more than 70% are going to have some sort of interaction with the criminal justice system again, recidivism. Now.

If people are given an opportunity for education or trade, it drops by about 43%. That's the Bureau of Justice Statistics. One study has shown that when you give somebody an associate's degree, it's like 16%. Somebody with a bachelor's degree in prison, it's like 6% recidivism.

A master's degree, which is basically not offered only in a handful of places, 0%. Yeah. Like water puts out fire. But we won't do that. Even if you're fiscally conservative. Cheaper. This is my point. Yes. That it's intuitive for a single mom working two jobs trying to put her own kid through college at minimum wage. First of all, taxpayers aren't going to that. But why would my tax money go to that? It makes perfect sense.

I don't want my tax money killing kids in war, but it is. It's what makes sense for society. And by the way, those people that we're not giving any sort of attention to are going to commit another crime and reoffend you. So people vote for what they believe is

and are told tough on crime is when in reality, there is no prognostication or thought process as to whether these policies are actually effective or not. And what ends up happening is we spend more money to make ourselves less safe. Yeah, totally.

yeah okay so listen the book you're here to promote is the Sing Sing files one journalist six innocent men in a 25-year fight for justice you also have a podcast that you've made on the same topic which is letters from that's just about JJ's yeah and that was just named as a finalist for a Pulitzer so congratulations I want everyone to read this book and read the story you also have a four-part

documentary coming out called The Sing Sing Chronicles. Directed by Don Porter. Lots of ways to learn about the story, and I think you should, and it's very compelling. I had a couple of just rapid fire questions. Can I just say one thing? Yeah. And I totally appreciate you saying the word promote. It's difficult for me to hear that. Any profit that might be made for this on my behalf is going to be given back

To me. This to me is not here to promote a book. This is a tool. Well, you should a hundred percent be promoting. So people will read it.

But my goal is to get justice impacted people in front of students for the next generation of leaders who are going to hold people accountable. Yes. It's not self-serving. You want to make it. Yeah, I just I have that Keith Morrison syndrome. It's good. Yeah. So throughout the 20 years of being steeped in this criminal justice system through telling these stories, I wanted to know if you've drawn any conclusions about this.

the predominant issues that drive this. So I have some thoughts. I'm wondering, do you feel like this is racially motivated or is this a system that just demands quick arrests and convictions? Is this a product of

Pretty bad courtroom science, i.e. eyewitness identification. Is this a police culture issue that over the course of these careers you get numb and detached from it?

Or is it district attorneys who have too much pressure career-wise? What do we point at? Is it all those things? The answer is yes. Every single one. What do you think would be the most significant place to start? I went to Germany and Norway to tour prisons. The recidivism rates there are lower. Officers in Germany and Norway are trained in social work in addition to police work. Okay.

A good day for an officer there is to make sure somebody doesn't come back to prison. A good day here is to go home alive. Over there, you're called by your name, not by your number. Over there, you wear your own clothes, not the same uniform and your head is shaved. Over there, you take job training and go to school. Here, you're lucky to get it. Over there, you can close a door. Here, you can't. Now, there's plenty of people that say they don't deserve that. But the question is, who is they? Exactly.

I wrote an anecdote in my book about getting in a car accident in my neighborhood. On a Sunday, I had brunch. I had a Bloody Mary. It was 5 o'clock. I hit a tree in a rainy day. And it was a county road. State troopers showed up. The homeowner was like, he's acting drunk. Lights are flashing. That's just your personality we've come to find out. Shit, it wasn't that bad. I'm like, do I need a lawyer? All their shoulders went up. Well, take your license for $150. My wife was like, you know. So...

I blew into it. It was like 0.01. I'm sorry. I didn't even get a ticket, but it made me think, what if I had two Bloody Marys? What if I had a beer before I went and picked up that burger? What if in that split second, I drove through a fence and taken a child's life? I'd be looking at 25 to life.

That doesn't make me a bad person, but that would have been the weekend that I went from somebody in society who deserves some sort of human dignity to some other invisible line where I deserved whatever I got. And that's, I think, how we see change.

incarceration and corrections. We do not put people away to make them better. No, we put them in to punish them. In a bad way. I mean, the punishment is the incapacitation. But I literally would not put my dogs... But by the way, even if you have to remove someone to keep everyone safe...

I don't think that then forces you to be punitive and make them suffer. I don't think that should be the goal, just in theory. It should be protecting us and removing the people that are dangerous for some period of time.

But to make them suffer, it's implicit in their incarceration that they're suffering plenty. Yes, there's a culture among police which has been embedded in our culture for hundreds of years. They're human. I was in Afghanistan a couple different times for tours, and I certainly saw how those people responded to someone having just been killed next to them. It's different than what you and I would respond because we haven't been in that situation 45 times, and it's taken on a numbness.

There's a certain reality of the capacity people have to get through these jobs that are so fucking hard. I'm at both times critical in support of a police. I don't have to show up from a phone call and walk into an unknown home having no clue what's on the other side. I know violence is happening on the other side. Do that a couple thousand times.

and times. I wouldn't do it once. And tell me you're the same as you. And you want them. I want those people there when I need them. Yes. So it's very fucking complicated and it's very nuanced. Let me ask you this question. Yeah. When you drive around here four years ago or after George Floyd, we had Black Lives Matter and

And Blue Lives Matter. How many lawns did you see with both signs on them? I think you had to pick a side. And to your point, I don't see it as a binary choice. My moral compass is Detective Bobby DeLaRado. I'm friends with detectives and police. I think they're heroes. Yeah.

In your support for them, if you're a staunch Blue Lives Matter, it would be to be humane towards them as well and go like, well, humans have capacity. What resources exist for these people? How much help are they getting with this job none of us want to do? It just doesn't have to be mutually exclusive. Exactly. There's like compassion that can be going around in all directions. It's like how a paparazzi might treat you or how somebody might write about your life that's not true and are considered a journalist.

That's my profession. That's not me, right? So there's lawyers, there's cops, there's DAs, there's good people and there's bad people. Yeah, could you make an assessment of Starbucks cashiers? No, I've dealt with every version of a human being behind the counter. And by the way, to your point,

People who are policing certain neighborhoods who happen to deal with crimes that are committed by people of the same age, of the same color, at a certain point, you become immune to it a little bit. You become like, it's not my job. I have probable cause. The prosecutor will figure it out. And the prosecutor's like...

Well, he's arrested. Let the jury figure it out. And then the jury's sitting there like, we just want to go home for the weekend. Yeah, it keeps getting kicked down the responsibility. Yeah. Or even the person you talked about in the JJ case is like, well, I'm not so sure about this, but they're telling me I'm one of five people. So probably these other four people are pretty certain of it. I feel a little less guilty going along with it. Absolutely. A lot of it is arrogance amongst everyone walking around that it wouldn't happen to them. They're immune. They're good.

Yeah. But what's going to happen to you is crime. Exactly. And what's going to happen to you is you're going to be a juror deciding on someone else's life. Also, what's going to happen to you is you are going to fuck up. We all do. Oh, I remember the thing I think that most plagues us and I could be completely wrong.

There has to be some huge financial incentive for these cities to not acknowledge they erred because of the civil lawsuit that's on the backside of that. A lot of people say that. I don't buy it. You don't? If they come out and just flat out admit, we totally fucked this up. This person lost 15 years of their life.

They have to know that that's coming with a financial. But not from their budget. Here's where I'm going with this. Of the many ways that we have to figure this out, I think we all you want to talk about traveling the world. What you find out immediately is like we're the most litigious people on the planet. It doesn't even exist in most places the way we deal with it.

And while I think someone whose life was stolen from them deserves something, I also think when you look at the billions of dollars Chicago's paying out, you've created a very terrible incentive system where people are heavily disincentivized to come clean and be honest and admit error.

I feel like that has to be a big part of this that needs to get figured out. It might be, but these people aren't held personally responsible. It doesn't come from the DA's offices. It comes from the federal government or the city. You say something, this is $7 million. You don't think those calls happen? I mean, look, there's a former detective in New York City by the name of Louis Scarcello right now.

who is responsible for many false confessions. The New York City taxpayers have already paid $150 million in compensation to his victims.

This dude still gets his pension. Yeah, that's bonkers. But what I'm saying is like, I think it's more about ego. Yeah. Sure. This is where I get suspicious. Most certainly for the people involved in these original trials. Yes, they're going to the grave claiming they did the right thing. For the many people who inherit these cases who have no dog in the fight. It's very weird to me that they don't hop on board when it's obvious. So then my question is, why don't they? Because you're the one that made the arrest.

Monica is the one that's doing the reinvestigation. Meaning the people who inherit the case have a relationship with the previous. When you say inherit the case, you mean the person once someone's convicted. I'm talking about the two people in the DA that got the case spanky when it eventually got to their desk to reinvestigate. They had no connection with the original case. So it's not even their error to admit. Well, it's their office.

But okay, great. So it's their office. It's their same boss. Ego for sure. I buy in immediately for the original team who is responsible for it. But we even see it down river with people that aren't responsible for it. So it's not ego at that point. What is it? I personally don't think it's money because it never shows up with

these people who are, for lack of a better term, perpetrators of putting innocent people in prison. I think it's way more complicated than that. Part of it is ego. Part of it is precedent. Part of it is very slippery slope. I don't think that people realize the depth of the problems of mass incarceration. There are so many sciences involved.

that have been completely debunked for which people are currently in prison. Yeah, yeah. Forensic odontology, forensic bite marks. Handwriting experts. Blood spatter. Yeah, blood spatter is bullshit. Right, even tire tread marks. Shaken baby syndrome. There are kids that die...

From falling off beds that would appear with what they call the triad. And even the guy who made that diagnosis said it's wrong. Yeah, these things, they just carry on with a momentum. And we're too quick as a society. We have this false narrative like New York City a few months back had a terrible incident where a mentally ill guy shot a cop and killed him.

Big funeral at St. Pat's. Next day, the front page of the New York Post, this crying widow. And the big headline was, NYPD cops widow slams polls for spiraling crime. Slams polls for spiraling. What does that mean? Meaning slams politicians for spiraling crime. Right. When every single bit of data would argue. 2,245 murders in 1990. Right.

When there was a spike during the pandemic in New York, when everyone was terrified, that number was 488. Last year, there were 391 murders. There is not spiraling crime. But we're taught to believe there's a great tactic of all politicians.

We had a mayoral race here and we were talking with friends and this one mayor was going to be tough on crime. And I said, guys, tough on crime in LA. And it forced me to look it up. And yet LA is like almost the safest city in the country. It's like so fucking low on the list. You can't even find it. You know what tough on crime is? Providing opportunities for children who don't have them. JJ would write me letters every

When his son was 10, 11 years old, Dan, I'm scared for my son. There's an intergenerational, the cycle of incarceration. Guess what? His son went to jail for two years when he was 19. He called it. Had he been given...

Opportunities, a trade, an education, some attention. Well, had he not had to go to Thanksgiving in a jail, this is all part of it. To me, prison is like going to the doctor. They have a pad. You have a symptom. They want to make you feel better. They write your prescription. You're gone. That's prison.

functional nutrition and medicine is like, wait a second, why is that happening in the first place? Let's prevent that from happening. And that's what we're not doing in this country. You don't do preventative anything. Healthcare, just any of it. Did I talk way too much for you? No, this is lovely. I want everyone to check out your book, The Sing Sing Files. Let me promote it for you. You're uncomfortable with the term promotion. This has been a pleasure. I am

overwhelmed from being here. Thank you for having me so much. This is just a funny thing to say on the way out. So you love Power of Now, Eckhart Tolle. I'm triggered by it because my father wore a necklace with a clock and it said now in all directions. Have you seen that? Someone needs to get this for you for Father's Day. But it's funny when your parents do something that you would have probably discovered on your own. And I'm like, oh, it's on my fucking dad's necklace. Yeah. I can't like it. I can't embrace it.

anyways Dan this was really really fun and I hope this is fine yes it's important it's so important I'm really glad you've done all this work sincerely and by the way I just want to leave you by saying the truth is these guys have done so much more for me than I have for them there is absolutely no doubt about oh I believe I am a better person

I'm more thoughtful. I'm more humane. I'm more loyal. I'm more introspective. And I try to be better every day. And it's because of these guys. Wonderful. Well, good luck on everything. And I hope we get to talk to you again soon. Thank you so much. We hope you enjoyed this episode. Unfortunately, they made some mistakes.

Okay, I want to tell you something huge. Oh, wow. I've been waiting all day to tell you. Okay, and we've been together all day, so it must have been really gnawing at your craw. This is one of the craziest sim things that has happened. More than anything.

More than when you were listening to the conversation about Carly and looked up and saw her? Okay, that one's crazy. Also the one where you knew the song, I was thinking in my head. For me, that's the apex of all weird experiences. Me too. Okay, so fine. So that's number one. Carly's, that's up there. That's really up there. But this is nuts because we spend a fair amount of time talking about Phil Donahue.

Mm-hmm. Phil Donahue died yesterday. Yeah. Yes. 88 or something? Yeah, so maybe you're listening to it and you're like, boy, they're not showing a lot of reverie for this man who just passed, but he hadn't passed yet. And then he died the day before we're recording this. Yeah, that is very weird.

Yeah, it's a very Donahue heavy episode. Yeah. And he's explaining him and it's a whole thing. Yeah. And then I went to just find a clip this morning to play a clip of Phil Donahue. And then there was all these like remembering things and I didn't know enough about him. So I figured he died many years ago or something. Sure, sure, sure. And then I'm like posted two hours ago. What? And 88 is good, but I feel like it should be better when you're rich.

Does anyone else feel that way? Yeah, I can. I know what you mean. Yeah. Like you're rich. You probably have the very best health care imaginable. So I don't like that. I'm like, if he can't make it to 100 with great health care. 100 is like. Well, that's what you said for me the other day. I know. I know. I bought in. Now when I see anyone that dies before 100, I'm like, well, maybe I'm not going to make it. Well, like it's Steve Jobs dying, not at 100. Right.

But that had an explanation. He died very young, actually. Yeah, but you would hope that much money he would be able to solve it. But he was that unique case of he actually had the means to do it, but he did not want to take the course of treatment recommended. He believed in his frutivore diet and stuff. I mean, it's like, it makes sense and it doesn't. Like, at one point you're like, this guy's so fucking smart. How could he not be listening to an oncologist? But then the problem is, is

He was so smart and he was proven right so many times. He thought he had all the answers. It was misleading. I know. You got to be careful how much you believe your own shit. You have to be so careful in this life. And also, no one's above death. Yeah. It doesn't matter how much money you have. Death is the great equalizer. Will you knock on wood? Oh, okay. Yeah. Boy, I've been knocking all day for you. I know. I know. You're on a knock kick. Well, we've been talking a lot about that stuff. Yeah. Yeah.

It's funny, 'cause we have different takeaways from when we talk about it. Like when we talk about it for you, it invites it. Yeah, because I think I have strong manifestation. Right, and for me, it exercises the demons. It's like, you gotta talk about it and joke about it or it's too powerful or something, I don't know. We have the opposite. Like I generally like talking about ways I could die and stuff.

But you don't like it. Knock on wood. I mean, not knock on wood because you don't like it. You like it. You don't like it. I don't like it. Right. Knock on wood. But you like knocking on wood a lot. A lot. Yeah. Is today your birthday? No, my birthday's on Saturday. Okay, so your birthday's in three days. A couple days, yeah. Okay, okay. So we don't need to...

But people should, they should know. They should be at the ready on Saturday to blast the internet with well wishes for the young mouse. The old mouse. The old mice. You don't really think of mice being old, do you? I don't think they live very long, that's why. Fuck, knock on wood! Yeah, like if a mouse had made it to 88, we would be celebrating. But no, they don't. Did I tell everyone already that...

There was a mouse rat. I'm not sure which. Okay. Outside my apartment in the courtyard. Well, I can... Let me just tell you what to call it. If this story is going to involve death, say rat. No, I know. That's not fair. That's pretty person privilege. And so I don't like that. Okay. So it's a mouse rat. And I was walking into my courtyard and it was just in the courtyard. Oh, alive. Alive. Okay. Enjoying. Yeah. Enjoying, but...

And still, and I was confused because it wasn't moving. Right. But it wasn't dead. It wasn't like flopped over or anything. Or sitting on its hind leg. It was just regular sitting. Okay. And I thought maybe it was looking for its food and was like going to go run and get it. And it was just like looking. Yeah. But I also expected, obviously, for as I got closer, for it to scurry away. Right. Right.

And then that did not happen. Okay, couple things there. One is I don't know how good their sight is, so I don't know how far away it could see you. Okay. I just know a lot of animals do have worse eyes than we would imagine. Okay.

Secondly, you know, one of the instincts is to freeze. Right. You stay still so that the predator can't see you because we respond to movement. I know. And then when it gets so close, you go, oh, fucking, I'm moving. Exactly. If you watch these deer or these impala or antelope in the nature docks, they're frozen. And at the last minute, they go, oh, fuck it, this isn't working. Well, okay, exactly. So I thought maybe it's just...

freezing, but then that's dumb because it's very out in the open. Yeah. It's like on display, really. Hiding in plain sight. I was getting very, very, very close and it didn't move. Okay. All right. But I was like, it's fine. So then I went into my house. I took a picture of it from the inside of my house because I was like, oh, this is a good omen. There's a mouse here. Yeah, yeah. And then I kept going back to look.

And it was just not, it was never moving. And I was like, I think it's dead. And then I felt really guilty because I posted a picture of a dead animal. Oh, you posted. Well, because I was like, good omen. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And now it's a bad omen. But you think it died in the upright position like that? That's what I'm confused about.

about but why would it be how could it just stand there for that long well but was it there when you left your apartment the next day no but because it was that night you came in and didn't leave again i didn't i did not leave again that day and then the next morning it was absent yeah okay so i think it just was taking a nap or maybe meditating out in the courtyard okay yeah and then went on its merry way that or your landlord scooped it up right you could find out i guess

I'd rather not know. Just forget it. You know, one of my landlords very sadly passed away last year. Yeah. And he loved that courtyard. Oh, yeah. And he was always. Manicuring it. Yeah. He was really into manicuring it. And we wondered if maybe it was him. The spirit of him. Yeah. Yeah. That's nice. He wanted to come back and. Take it in. Yeah. I like that. Play around his little courtyard. And when you say we, that sounds like you and Jessica. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah, it was just this idea. It was just this idea, of course. I thought that was a sweet idea. And I wouldn't like the idea that he died again there. Yeah. I will come back as a crow. Okay. So that I can look in people's windows. Yeah.

Yeah, that's very you. That's very me. It's very on brand. A mouse, you're not getting, you know, you can't really choose to see everyone you want to see because you're not, you know, you're on the ground there. Real low. It seems like maybe he was there not to see people, but to see his environment that he loves so much. Right. I would be all about the people. Yeah.

Yeah. And I guess if you love that courtyard or if you love plants, if you love foliage, maybe as a human, you always wish that you could like be in it. And it would be bigger. Yeah. You could scurry in it and it could surround you. Yeah, that's a good. But I wonder when people are picking one animal to come back on, if they evaluate just how long the lifespan of that animal is. I don't think they're thinking about that. Kind of related. Out of nowhere.

Yesterday, I was in the garage all day and I came in and all of a sudden there were four flies, five flies. Get out of here, you jackass. That's from Angry RV Man. Oh. There was...

An explosion of flies. And they were the weirdest flies. You could kill them so easy. You know, flies are really hard to smash. Oh, no. Yeah. I was smacking them. I killed probably like 14 flies in 10 minutes. Oh, my God. We must have brought something in the house and these things hatched. Because I don't... It's not like we had the doors open or something. And that's a very unsettling feeling that you have something in the house. Then I was looking at this little...

Pot of flowers that had been brought in. I'm like, okay, well, that's new. Okay. That could have definitely been housing some larva. This was in the house? I thought it was in your garage. I had been in the garage all day, and when I came into the house, all of a sudden there was this proliferation of flies. Do you know, in my experience, there is a fly thing that is way too easy to kill. They sometimes hatch from grain. Oh, no.

My family had this at one point and we realized it was

the rice. It was in the rice. Yeah. So do you have new grain or anything? No, but that is a ding, ding, ding. So after I killed all the flies, I had had an egg white and feta cheese omelet in the morning. That was it. And then I was out in that garage all day. Then I was feeling like low blood sugar, right? Like, cause I hadn't had any carbs in that first meal, blah, blah, blah. I'm like, I need some rice and some protein. So I heated up

Some turkey taco meat and some rice. And as I was putting it in the bowl, Kristen said, that stuff's pretty old. And I was like, eh. The rice or the meat? Both, I guess. So I smell it. I don't smell anything. I'm just going to put it in the microwave for a long time. And I did that. And I ate quite a bit of it. This is a triple ding, ding, ding. I got to fast forward.

You know who's been out of rotation for a very long time and he just made a return is Michael the Tiger.

Delta's tiger, Michael. I loved Michael. Yes, me too. We had a lot of fun with Michael. Yeah, we did. And for people who don't remember those episodes, Michael had a bad habit of getting into tainted food. Yeah, he's a stuffy. Yeah, he's a stuffy, but he's a baby tiger. And he was always rummaging around trash cans and he thought it was so good. And then he would get really sick. Yeah. And all the stories Michael told were about him getting sick. Yeah. Okay. So I ate all this.

food and laying in bed with the girls and Michaels been brought back into the fold he got a bath that day and we were all greeting Michael and all of a sudden I was like I gotta go right now gotta go right now I'll see you guys later and then I went up I went a few times honest yeah in a very uncomfortable stomach in some burps that I was like oh please I don't want to start yeah the other side

That needs a cute title like Hannes. Like coming up both sides? Yeah, but just throwing up. We need a Hannes-esque word for it. But yeah, I paid the price. I was too brazen as I tend to be sometimes with my food. And then, you know, after I was sick, I think we started doing the math on when that stuff was made. And it was too long ago. I don't... The rice was crunchy. Ew. It was like hard. It had the...

Yeah, and I was like, oh, it's all right. I'll throw a little hot water at the bottom of the bowl when I microwave it. The rice is probably not the problem. I'm sure it was the old meat you ate. The old turkey meat? My God, Dax. Yeah. What? Maybe the flies came from that old rice. No, because that was in the fridge. Oh, that's true. Yeah, I don't keep the rice out on the counter. But maybe the rice... I think you have rice hidden somewhere in the cabinet that's too old and it's developing those flies. They're making me feel so itchy. Uh-huh, yeah. I'm sorry that happened, but I...

It's like. It's hard to feel bad for them. I do struggle a little with when I know someone's done something stupid. Yep. I do struggle with just. They deserve it. No, it's not. I don't. I don't ever feel like anyone deserves anything. Yeah. But it's also hard for me to feel really, really bad for them. Yeah. Mm hmm. It's weird because I normally tell them that sucks. Right. But I'm also like. What did you expect? Why'd you do that? Why'd you do that?

Yeah, if I were you, I wouldn't feel bad about that. To me, that seems really logical, which is if something bad has happened to somebody, the act of compassion and...

them is you kind of got to enter that space of like pain and discomfort and sadness. And so we don't want to feel pain and discomfort and sadness, even if it's to comfort somebody. So if you get a little, you know, you get a little excuse to not go down that road, you're going to kind of take it. I guess. Or I think there's just a part of me that's like, oh,

It didn't have to be this way. Yeah. And we don't have to both be here dealing with this problem. I guess. Yeah. I think it's Natch. I guess it's Fat Natch. But you do the right thing. You say, oh, that's a bummer. You're thinking you deserve this. No, I'm not. Even when you're hearing my story, you're like, I hope it hurt when you were. No. That's not fair. I don't think that. I think I'm like kind of mad at them. Yeah. Because why...

Did you have to have pain for no reason? Mm-hmm. Yeah. And now I'm at it, you, for your pain. I know. But the truth is, almost all of our pain is self-inflicted. Yeah, so it's just like you're picking what thing is okay to be stupid about and what thing is not okay. Well, I know. Yeah, we just figured that out. They're all the same. You should probably just... Because everyone's culpable for the most part. Of course. I mean, there are victims, let me be clear. Yeah, there are. But...

We generally play a role in most of our discomfort. Yeah, we do. What animal would I come back as? A chinchilla. Nope. I don't like those guys. I think I want to come back as like maybe a puppy or something because then like people would hold me and pet me and stuff and play with my hair. If you got a good owner.

Oh, true. How would I guarantee? You'd want to be a deformed puppy in the pound so that we would get you. You have to be deformed or we won't take you. But that's running a risk because what if you guys never come to get me and then no one else is going to come to get me if I'm deformed.

Although whoever gets you is going to have a really good heart. That's true. Pretty much. I think you probably weed out the irresponsible mean owners. You don't want to come back as an elephant or something that's going to live a very long time. It's a tricky riddle because you might not enjoy being an animal. I know. And it's hard to kill yourself if you're an elephant. I don't really know how you do it. There's no suicidal loud in this game. Well, if I didn't like being crow, I could just fly as fast as I could into the side of a building. No! No!

But was an elephant going to run and then fall down? No. They'd have to find a cliff. No, listen. No, no, no. We might not like being an animal. That's why you have to pick an animal that you do like that life. Okay. Okay? All right. You like flying around and stuff. I just thought of the pervious joke. What? It's so pervy and gross. I was going to say I would come back as a rabbit.

Oh my god. Yeah! That's actually as pervy as I thought you were going to do. That's very pervy. I'm saying I want to be a... A vibrator. A vibrator. Yeah. You want to be a dolphin. Oh! Oh!

Do you? No, they're too predatorial for me. Yeah. Like, I want the woman to choose to use me. You know, like, I want the woman to pick me up, you know? Right. The dolphin is too aggressive. As a rabbit toy. Yes, yes. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, I agree. If you had to come back as a fruit, what one would you come back as? Probably a strawberry. Not a peach? No, a strawberry. Because I'm ready to come back as something that everyone just likes. I know.

You don't have to work hard to like it. Yeah. You don't have to overcome an ugly exterior. Hey, you do not hear a lot of people say that they hate strawberries. Exactly. Yeah. It's very, very popular among birth. Very vulnerable fruit, though, in a very short shelf life. Oh, you're so hung up on the lifespan. Well, because I'm older than you.

No, I'm. So it's on the front of my mind more. It's really on the front of my mind this week. Well, as it should be. Yeah. This is the time. What would you come back as? Are you going to do shrooms on Friday night like Michael Pollan? No, I don't think so. Okay. What fruit do you want to come back as? Well, I was inclined to think an elephant. A banana. A cucumber. Eggplant. What'd you pick? Well, I'm inclined to say an elephant. Fruit? Fruit?

Oh, fruit. We're still on fruit. Probably an apple. They stick around a long time. Michigan's known for its apples. They are tough. They're tough. They travel well. You take them on an adventure. That's true. You would never take strawberries on an adventure. Yeah, you can't throw strawberries in a backpack and like, you're good. Yeah, that's really true. But a banana's really good because it has that protective layer around it. But it does, again, it goes brown quick. Very quick. Yeah. Very quick. Yeah.

Wait, so now you want to move to elephant as opposed to crow? Oh, right. I already picked crow. And they live a long time, so I'm sticking with crow. Okay. But you could be one of those lobsters that lives 230 years. Oh, and also lobsters mate for life. So that's cute. Yeah, that's cute. Also penguins mate for life, but that's too cold of an environment for me. Yeah, no, thank you. I'm going to stick with...

Really, really cute dog. Likeable. Yeah, with hair that if people pet me, it'll feel really nice, like hair play. Like a golden retriever or a Newfoundland? You don't know. I'm not so sure. A doodle. That way you could open yourself up to hypoallergenic people or people that need a hypoallergenic dog. And people also like doodles a lot. Yeah, they ask Aaron what kind of doodle he has. Exactly. Exactly.

Exactly. All right. Well, that was... Well, you had a weekend. Anything you want to tell me about your weekend? I went to Bob's on Friday. That was really fun again. Great. I finished my show. I finished JG. Wow. I just got really confused. Okay. You finished J... What do you mean? Gyllenhaal. Gyllenhaal.

Oh, you got confused about the days? I did, because Eric came over on Saturday, because you guys had a girls' dinner on Saturday. We did. Yeah, how was that? So fun. Yeah, we had a little girls' dinner for Kristen's birthday, belated at all time, and it was delicious. And Kristen tried lamb. Oh, she did? She tried the lamb ragu. She liked it. Okay, good. It was delightful. I heard the cake, I heard that they have got basically the hot fudge ice cream cake from

Bob's Big Boys, but the very elevated version. It's a chocolate cake. It's my favorite cake. We had it at my birthday last year, actually. Buttercream filling? Not ice cream, but buttercream. Not ice cream, but it doesn't taste like regular buttercream. I don't know how to explain it. It's so good. Liz and I had it pretty much every day during our egg freezing. Oh, fun. But it's so good.

Anywho, so if you're in LA, you should go get that cake. Yeah. Have you had their mochi cake that they have on weekend mornings? It's like from their pastry window. Oh, no one even told me about that. Is it so good? Vincent loves it. He's constantly asking for mochi cake. Oh my god. Okay, I'll try it. I'll try it.

Anyway, yeah, there's not much to report from the weekend except that that was a nice dinner. And then I finished JG. Was it great? It had me captive. Oh, good. I got to check it out. Okay, but you know what I didn't know? Kristen told me. I didn't know that that show is like based off an old thing. Oh, it's, yes, a movie with the greatest surprise ending ever before Sixth Sense. So then... And I was so curious with this show.

Were they going to have the same reveal? Because how would it be a big reveal if everyone already knows about the movie? Don't tell me because I don't know. But I think it's long enough we can talk about the movie because this is one of the funnier things I've ever heard. This is a Will Arnett story. Will Arnett was at his apartment one day, you know, 15, 20 years ago. Yeah. And so the movie presumed innocent. Ding, ding, ding. Damn. Wow. Wow. Didn't even plan that. Yeah.

Bonnie Bedalia is the wife. Side note. Oh. Mother from. Parenthood. Parenthood. So, and then maybe. Harrison Ford. Harrison Ford. Yep. Yeah. Is our guy. Okay. So, the huge surprise ending at the end of the movie is that his wife was the murderer the whole time, right? And he's like either a lawyer or a prosecutor or something. He's somehow investigating it. So, Will Arnett's watching it at home. And he gets a call from his buddy.

And he's like, hey, what's up? I'm going to call you back. I'm watching a movie. And his buddy goes, what are you watching? And he goes, Presumed Innocence. And he goes, oh, okay. I'll call me when you're done. Will hangs up the phone.

Phone rings again in two minutes. He picks it up and his buddy goes, the wife did it. And then hung up. Such a dick move, but it's really kind of worth it. It's so funny. It's really funny. Yeah. I won't say anything, obviously, but people should watch it. It was good. JG was great. Yeah. Was he making you horny? I mean, yeah. Okay.

He is really attractive in the show. Well, you'll report when Cooper was making you. It's always fun to clock who's...

You know, bringing you online. There's a lot of sexual activity in this show. Oh, there is? Yes. Okay. And you see a lot of JG's body. You do? Yeah. And is it phenomenal? We know he has a great body. Well, I haven't seen it, so I don't know if he kept the same one from Roadhouse. I know he changes it a bit. Yeah, I don't know which body's which or the timeline of the shooting. But whatever one this was is working big time? Yeah, he looks great. Yeah, not shocking. Do you see Penis?

Not penis. Okay. But butt cheeks? Yeah, you see his butt. Oh, wow. I can't wait. Yeah. I'm really looking forward to that. I think you'll like, I think you'll really like that. Yeah. You'll, you'll like his body and there's other bodies too. Some. There's some female bodies. Yeah. Yeah. I will like those, but I won't admit that I do. Why? You're making me admit. Because it's not safe. I'm not allowed to do that, but I can. Yeah. Come in a boy's body. So I just stick. I think that's right. Yeah. So I just stick to that. Okay.

So I'll like them and I just won't say anything. You don't need to keep saying that. So what I'll like the most about the female bodies, which I can't say anything about. Yeah. So now I kind of want to watch the original movie, but now I know. I have follow-up questions. I'm going to leave them alone. What? No. Did you pause at all? Yeah, I paused. Oh, wow. Okay.

Whatever. I'm a pyramid puzzle woman. I love a pyramid. It's scary to say because these people are in and out of our lives. And you do have to be respectful. You do, but I'm going to speak for JG. You can speak for JG. I could text him now and see if this is clear. I'm just telling you, me personally.

I would never mind that someone did some pausing in something I did. I would be very flattered. I know you would. All right. We're going to respect him and we're not going to ask him. Okay. I think, look, I think you're probably right that he would be flattered. Yeah. By people pausing. Yeah. But we don't. I would. I know you would. Okay. I already said that. Yeah.

Do you know where I stand on this? You've established that you would. And I'm going to go at it on a limb and say most people would. Most men. Most men. Most straight men would. And gay men. Yeah, probably. I don't know enough.

enough about that group as a whole. Uh-huh. To assume. So I feel a little bit less comfortable assuming, but. Well, you know, Jess would love it if someone had paused. Of course. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But that's a one, that's a sample size that's small. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Anywho. What if I started texting all my gay friends now? Right.

I mean, but really think like, is there someone? I don't know a dude. Really? I want you to really think. Yeah, I'm racking my brain. Unless that person dislikes their own body so much, they couldn't buy into the notion that that's really why someone was pausing. Like if they couldn't accept that someone was pausing because they were, you know, aroused.

Which is totally possible. Yeah. Right? I have friends. Yeah. Who's an example of... Oh, we had Bobby Leon. Yeah. One of my favorite episodes.

And I was watching his ex-girlfriend describe how much she loves his body. And she was saying all these things that for another person would be kind of triggering. She's like, I love his big pot belly. I love to rub it. And so I know she's sincere. That's her body type. But there is some guy with that body type that wouldn't really be able to trust that she was sincere about it. Right. But that's a little bit of a...

tangential because if he didn't know her and he just heard she paused yeah would he like that or are you saying that there could be a person that's like like when people like me and then i get the feeling for some reason that they just like indian girls oh right right right then i'm skeptical of them and what they like exactly yeah right so maybe it could be like that with bodies

Yeah, I just think if you hate your body, you can't really accept someone actually does like it. But if you're even neutral on your body and you found out someone was pausing because they were so excited to look at it longer, I just don't know how anyone could have

obscure that into something negative yeah unless okay because someone's screaming at their radio right now okay if you've been a hot woman your whole life and you've been objectified and stared at in the gym and harassed by dudes that won't leave you be and they found out someone paused on them

Yeah, they're probably over it. But I don't think any dude has that disposition. That's what I was not talking about women. Yeah, I wasn't either. I don't know why it took me that long. Yeah, because women really a lot would not like that. I know why, because we were talking about you and then also now the gates were open for women. Yes, but a lot of women would not like that. It could feel very predatorial and creepy and weird. Yeah. But men are in a, it's different. That's right. So straight men, most of them. Well, probably gay too, but we're not sure. I just don't know. Yeah.

Is it funny? You're not comfortable speaking hypothetically on what a gay man would want, but you are on a straight man. Yeah. You're already like, you're comfortable with a completely different gender. I've had enough interactions with straight men for me to feel pretty good. A lifetime of it. Pretty comfortable. Anyway, great show. Yeah, great show. And ding, ding, ding. And I'm going to pause the fuck out of it. Okay, I have a few facts.

Oh, I looked up a little bit of what used to be considered forensic science that's been debunked, basically. Oh, this will be a good list. But there's only a few. Oh, there's only a few? Yeah. Because virtually all the movies we were raised on

These are the knockout punch of the trial in the movie. And they're all bullshit. I think some of them are still used, though. Even the ones that. Handwriting analysis. Now, mind you, it's funny to say that because it was dead obvious in the Robert Durst case. Right. I do believe in handwriting analysis for that. Yeah. And spelling analysis, I guess. That was the real thing. Misspelled Beverly twice. But also, I think it's still. Well, it is still used. That case is not that old. Yeah.

Yeah, I don't know if that actually made it into the courtroom or not. Oh, and then- There's so much other stuff. There's also people use blood spatter still. Yeah, yeah. But okay, so there's a few here. Optography.

What is that? In 19th century Europe, especially in England, there was a widespread belief that people's eyes somehow recorded the last thing seen before their death. Oh, my God. It is unknown where this belief came from, but it was probably an old superstition enhanced in popularity by literary works. Kuhn came to develop studies on the light-sensitive protein named rhodopsin, also known as visual purple.

He discovered that not only was the rhodopsin extremely sensitive to light, but under certain ideal circumstances would act very much like a photography negative, fixing an image on whatever support it was currently in. Ew. After performing some rather gruesome experiments on rabbits. Ding, ding, ding. Rabbits.

Okay, so they put the solution in and then they look at the eyeball and they can see. Yeah. Okay. I don't know. Yeah. I have to imagine there's a ton of interpretation on what you're seeing, that little cluster of proteins. Famously, optography was used as a last-ditch effort to identify Jack the Ripper. Sure. The method being tried with the eyes of Mary Jane Kelly, the supposed final victim of the famous serial killer with no good results.

Okay. And then anthropological criminology. Ding, ding, ding. Careful. Criminology. Cred lightly. Caesar Lombrosco was an Italian physician and famous criminologist who rejected what came to be called the classical school of criminology. By classical school, he referred to the works of the Enlightenment era philosophers, such

In their works, both classical criminologists described crime as a purely social phenomenon caused by social problems that brought certain individuals to commit crimes to right or wrong resulting from said social imbalance. As such, classical criminology focused almost entirely on the social causes of crime rather than the personal motivations of the criminal or the characterizations of the victim.

Lombrusco rejected this view. While he admitted that social phenomena could influence the occurrence of crimes, he argued that the factors that determine criminal behavior were largely biological and anthropological in origin.

Oh, I was saying Lombroso, but it's Lombroso. Had the opportunity to analyze hundreds of criminals. After many studies that largely focused on anthropometry, the measurement of the proportions of a human's being body, he concluded that there were clear physical distinctions between criminals and non-criminals. Yeah, that's the field, anthropometry, that was heavily weaponized during the Third Reich's rise and went away. Oh, okay.

So they would have these facial pragmatism measurements, like how much did your forehead jut out or how much did your...

Lombroso argued that individuals who showed traits similar to large primates, such as large ears, sloping foreheads, wide and flat noses, long arms, et cetera, were clearly less evolved than the rest of humanity and thus less able to cope with social norms and more prone to criminal behavior. Okay, then the polygraph. We all know about the polygraph. We do, and what's crazy is they still are giving, every single one of these docs I watch about a wrongfully accused person is,

Or virtually any doc involving a murder dateline. They still give polygraphs. I know, but I don't know if that's like... They're not admissible in court, but they still do it. Okay, those were the three. Do you think you could pass a polygraph? If I was lying? Yeah. Hmm. Good question. I don't know. I think I could. I think you could. I think you could.

You know why? Because I think and I do think I could, too, actually. It requires a level of compartmentalization that I think you can do. Well, my past addiction would suggest so. But I have a whole technique in my mind I think I would use. OK. Which is I would anticipate whatever question was coming.

Okay. You know, did you kill your wife? And I would work on a definition for kill that would fall outside of what I did. So like I would really concentrate on the fact that like, no, killing your wife is when you murder her. You know, whatever thing I would find a way. I think that's the my I don't know what I'm basing this on, but I've decided if you could redefine the word they're going to ask you.

Yeah. You could believe it as you're saying it. I see what you mean, but that requires so much. It's like, think about how many people do this with cheating, right? Like, oh, is it, well, it's not cheating to text a coworker naughty stuff. Their definition would be, no, I would have to touch that person before it's cheating. Well, this is very arbitrary. Yeah. But they probably could pass a lie detector if they ask, have you cheated on your spouse? Well, yeah. Because the definition they gave cheating excluded the thing they did.

Does that make sense? It does. And I think that is compartmentalizing. Clinton, right? Like he was saying, I did not have sexual relations with that woman. It was like he selectively decided that intercourse was sexual relations. Right. You know what I'm saying? I guess. I mean, I think he was just lying to protect himself. Well, he was lying. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I think he knew. He knew he was lying. But it did feel like his word choice was so specific, it felt like he was intentionally...

Setting it up so he could say I wasn't lying because I say sexual relations is intercourse. Maybe. I don't know. Okay. Never a great topic. That is a way to do it. But I just think it all requires a profound level of compartmentalizing. Yeah. Like you're tricking your brain into forgetting a definition. Yeah. You're putting one definition in a compartment and adding a new one. Right. And deciding to live there. Yeah. Yeah.

I think that would be the technique at least. I guess I don't even know if I would pass one. I've just thought that that would probably be the technique. Yeah. Okay. Safest cities in America. I think we've done this before, but we're going to do it again. Okay. Because you... I always talk about how safe LA is. Exactly. Yeah. Number 10, Scottsdale. Arizona. Nine, Burlington, Vermont. Eight, Yonkers, New York. I wouldn't count these cities, by the way. I think this happened before. Yeah. Okay.

But they're cities. It's not fair. They are. Yeah. Okay. I'm thinking of just like St. Louis, Phoenix, Chicago. You're saying of the kind of violent cities. Well, just big cities.

Yeah. Okay. Casper, Wyoming. Yeah. You've never even heard of Casper, Wyoming. Portland, Maine. You mean Portland, Oregon? No, Maine. Okay. 4,000 people live in each of these. Warwick, Rhode Island. Gilbert, Arizona. I'll respect all these places if you live there. South Burlington, Vermont. I've heard of it. I think you've heard of Burlington, Vermont. I have, yeah. The coat factory. And from Armchair Anonymous.

We had a Burlington? Isn't that where she landed the emergency landing of the plane? Maybe. I think it was Burlington. Oh, maybe. Yeah, I think you're right. I guess it's not so safe. Okay, Columbia, Maryland and then Nashua, New Hampshire is number one. It's per capita. It's per capita. I get it. I get it. I get it. I think those are probably statistically the safest cities that you've not heard of in the

Again, lots of respect to everyone. Yeah, that's so elitist. I know, I know. To only count the ones, the big ones that you know about. Well, but also I think we could just say objectively, if you ask 10 people on the street, many of these, they would not have heard of them. That's also true.

I'm being elitist and it's also true. Okay. An FBI study places LA at number five of the safest large cities in the US. I can live with that. What are the four before? A 2023 Gallup poll places LA at number 14. Well, Gallup poll doesn't work. Okay. And some other studies. Hold on. Let me tell you why. Okay.

Gallup polls are opinion polls. I know. They're not factual polls. It's not death rate per 10,000. That's true. That's right. Thank you. That's all I want to point out. And some other studies don't include L.A. in the top 20. Theft in L.A. is reported to be the city's most frequent crime. Sure. And violent crimes are reportedly on the decline. Yeah, and I wouldn't include theft.

In my measure of safety. Yeah. Like having shit stolen on your car doesn't. Well, no, it's bad. Well, it's scary. Yeah. But I'm just saying it doesn't make you unsafe because someone's stealing cars. Do you want to know the safest neighborhoods in L.A.? In L.A.? Seven safest. Okay. Okay. Santa Monica. No, Beverlywood. You know, Beverlywood. Ish. Yeah. Palisades. Sure. Rancho Park. Encino.

Sawtelle. I'm kind of surprised. Well, are we thinking of the street Sawtelle? Because it's... That area like... Oh, wow. Because it's grimy over there. I know. No disrespect. I mean, you should feel disrespected. But I lived over there, so... Me too. Yeah. Sherman Oaks.

Yeah. And then Cheviot Hills. That makes sense. Was Cheviot Hills number one? No. Or were you going in reverse order? I went. Okay. Okay. I don't know. All right. Yeah, Cheviot Hills is very nice. Our neighborhood isn't in there. Of course not. We have one of the busiest police stations in LA. We do? Yeah. When I did my ride along, Los Feliz was part of the Hollywood station. Oh, Hollywood. Yeah. I know, but I count Los Feliz as different. Yeah.

Sure. But there were, you know, I was with the gang patrol. Yeah. And they rolled up on a bunch of different dudes with gang tattoos that were. Well, Hollywood's rough. Well, in our area. Really? Oh, yeah. That fucking corner where the Rouse's shit's popping off there. By Cara, where I go every day. Yeah, there was a dude, in fact, yeah, in front of a tree selling some stuff. Yeah. Yeah. And remember, someone got shot at the Rite Aid. Yeah.

There you go. All right. Well. Okay. So safe. Knock on wood. Knock on wood. Everything's fine. Now, if you're counting theft, I wouldn't even. Yeah, I think we got a lot of theft in L.A. This one says top seven neighborhoods, safest neighborhoods in L.A. is Highland Park, number one. I could see that. You could. Don't you think?

Oh, no. I'm thinking Hancock Park. Yeah, no. Highland Park. Westwood, number two. You still got the Avenue Boys are over there. It reminds me of Chicago so much over there. Yeah, but it says .017 crimes per 1,000 people. That's pretty good. Westwood.

Playa Vista, Sherman Oaks. That's the only one on both. Venice Beach. Okay. No, no, no, no, no. Throw this list in the trash. Yeah. All right. Well, you got what you wanted. An FBI study places LA at number five of the safest largest cities in the U.S. What are the four above it? Yeah.

Doesn't have that. Don't worry about it. I mean, I wouldn't hate if you did murder because... Murder rates we could do. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay. Should we do murder rates by city? Lowest murder rate, big city. Oh, my God. Why? That's good. It feels very... Cherry picky? Yeah. Okay. Let's do cities with most murders 2024, okay? Oh.

This is good. This is from... But if you don't do rate, it's not going to be per capita. It's from realpopulationreview.com. Okay. That's very trusted. Do you think my legs look as dark as yours right now? Just occurred to me, I think. Do you? Because of that surfing. Yeah, I think up here. Okay. Okay. Okay, ready? Mm-hmm. St. Louis...

These are. The scariest. Yeah. Yes. Yes. Highest murder rate. Yeah. St. Louis, Baltimore, New Orleans, Detroit, Cleveland, Las Vegas, Kansas City, Memphis, Newark, Chicago, Cincinnati, Philadelphia, Milwaukee, Tulsa, Pittsburgh, Indianapolis, Louisville, Oakland, Atlanta.

Atlanta. Yeah, there's not a surprise on that list. We all made it. Good job, Atlanta. But yes, to your point, L.A. is not on here. Yeah. All right. Well, I think we've talked enough about death for one day. Great. And if you want to watch the movie for free, Sing Sing, remember to go. It's on the post for Coleman and it'll be on the post for Dan as well. Where to go. Great. And you'll get your tickets for free. Free tickets. Go see that movie.

All right. Love you. Love you.