The Matrix. I'm Jonathan and I'm left of center.
And I'm rich and I tend to lean a little bit more to the right.
But the bottom line is, is together,
we try to look for the balance of what it means to be human in today's world.
All right. Welcome to living in the matrix. I'm Jonathan.
This is my cohost rich say hello, rich.
Hey everybody. Great to be back.
And I hope everybody's had a great week and looking forward to the weekend.
Yeah, absolutely. I love that we record these on Fridays. Um,
cause we're always going into something positive and I love the weekends.
Uh, today we have a really interesting guest. Uh,
his name is Wayne boat, right? And Wayne has this unique story that,
um, of someone who had sort of a,
a really interesting arc from having a lot of opportunity and then having a
fall from grace and then making his way back through that journey.
And now speaking to people who've entered that life and I'll let him unpack
it, but I'll give you this. Um,
Wayne pled guilty to gross vehicular manslaughter while driving under the
influence,
operating a motor vehicle with a blood alcohol level in excess of 0.08 and one
enhancement for inflicting great bodily injury on another person.
So that's the context. Uh, Wayne,
it is a pleasure to have you cause I know this is going to be an awesome hour.
Thank you. Appreciate it. Jonathan rich. Nice to be with you guys.
Um, yeah, that, that, that was, uh, the official crime.
Um, I, um, I, I do call it a, my fall.
You know, it's interesting to use that term that that is the way I perceive it.
Um,
but I think as I've gone on my journey of introspection and development since
that time,
I like to characterize the orientation I have toward those experiences as,
um, saying life,
life doesn't happen to you. Life happens for you.
There's something that I needed to learn and a terrible unimaginable price was
paid by others involuntarily so I could learn that thing,
but I had to learn it. Um,
I can't predict why I survived and my victim didn't.
Um, I try not to use names, but trust me,
I consider my victims sacrifice and her families, uh,
um, as, as part of that orientation I now have.
Um, I,
I think that's an important differentiation.
Too many people in our modern society seem to have embraced the cloak of
victimhood to justify just about everything that happens in their life.
Um, I,
uh,
I don't consider myself, um,
to be victimized by the criminal justice system. For example,
I,
I consult with a lot of guys who are getting ready to go in.
I was on the phone with a guy last week, um,
committed basically the same crime I did, but he did it in San Francisco.
He's not even going to go to prison. Um,
uh,
I committed my crime on the five freeway in a rural County where I was some
rich San Francisco lawyer traveling through town and so drunk that I was going
the wrong way on a freeway and I had a head on collision.
They threw the book at me. Um,
I was convicted of what's called the midterm, which is seven years,
eight months for my crime. Um,
so I asked them, I said, well, who gets the low term?
And they literally told me that only police officers get the low term.
The best I could hope for was the midterm. And I was,
I gotta be honest, I didn't make a big deal of it. I,
I committed the crime. I deserve to be,
the state had an obligation to enforce the law and,
and I wanted to facilitate that.
I took what's called a plea bargain in the process.
So I wasn't going to waste the court's time of going to trial on all that.
Um,
I was, I was, I was, I was, I was, I was, I was, I was, I was, I was,
I was, I was, I was, I was, I was, I was a model citizen.
Father of two Sunday school teacher,
gainfully employed.
I still got the midterm for my crime.
Um,
That's part of how the criminal justice system works every,
every county gets to set its own standards.
I think we've seen a lot of that as we've seen the protests,
whether it's BLM or what's going on in these college
campuses these days.
It's very idiosyncratic on how different places enforce
the law.
Wayne, Gorvodal once bemoaned the fact
that 90% of these criminal cases, there are plea bargains.
Is he incorrect in that?
What percentage?
Your lawyer, what percentage of these types of cases
are plea bargains versus full litigation?
Yes, he's incorrect.
The percentage is actually higher, closer to 97% to 98%.
All cases are settled in plea bargain.
It's not like on TV.
In fact, when you talk about the matrix,
we don't realize how our perceptions of the world
are shaped by the stories we hear and the stories we live.
I think it's somewhere like six or seven of the top TV
shows in America right now are criminal justice
procedural related, whether they're court cases
or who did it or scientifically related.
And so we've been brainwashed into thinking
that they always make good decisions
and everybody goes to court.
That's not what happened.
And it's part of the journey I've been on
is to learn public safety is number one.
And we should do whatever we can as a society
to seek public safety.
The question is, does our current criminal justice
system do that?
And evidenced by the fact that well over 90% of all cases
are decided by plea bargain, it should make you question
whether we're doing that because the facts are never heard.
Correct.
There's never a jury that considers it.
That's a systemic issue that we've got
and one that people don't know because they've
been brainwashed by TV into thinking
that everybody goes to court.
Well, it's like Indiana Jones, right?
He's talking at the beginning of his class
and he goes, X marks the spot, right?
Archaeology is a hell of a lot more than just two minutes
of digging up some golden chalice, right?
It's literally painstaking.
It's a lot of work and hardcore stuff.
So this is the undergirding of life, right?
You look at the success and you look at what you've gone
through and it just takes real depth, real experience.
But Michel Foucault wrote a book called, I think,
Discipline and Punish or Punish and Discipline.
He's a French philosopher and he was talking
about how the type of things that we have today,
the modern day prison and in some cases, the sanitarium,
this is actually much more terrible and dehumanizing
than getting just ripped to pieces by attempting
to kill a king in the ancient, in the Middle Ages, right?
The idea of this systemic, it's dehumanizing, right?
So I mean, that's what people don't realize is
that how insidious it is, right?
Yes.
And I didn't realize it.
I didn't know anybody who had gone to prison
before I committed my crime.
And I would assume virtually everybody in my social or business
circle as well didn't know anybody who had committed
a crime or gone to prison.
I think what people don't realize or don't focus on,
separating you from society is the punishment.
Now, to heap on top of that, the institutionalization process
that currently exists is like kicking somebody
when they're down.
This is not to say we should decriminalize everything
and let everybody go free.
I live in San Francisco.
It's insane in San Francisco now.
Shoplifting, breaking into cars to steal stuff,
it's insane because they don't enforce the laws.
I'm not saying don't enforce the law.
But the punishment is supposed to be
removing you from society when in reality, that's
just the first step of the punishment that you experience.
And our criminal justice system.
And unfortunately, I'm going to get into a little more details
for you guys.
We actually have three separate criminal justice systems.
You have the local jail system.
So that could be a county or city jail.
Then you have a state criminal system.
And then you have a federal criminal system.
They're all independent of each other.
They all operate with different rules,
all have different ways of doing things.
And so it's difficult to try to generalize.
But I think it'd be fair to say that all three
of those systems have a systemic fault in that the punishment is
supposed to be removing you from society.
But the real punishment is what they subject you to inside
or what they allow you to be subjected to when
you're inside.
Prison is kind of like the savanna.
Everybody's either predator or prey.
And you better hope you're not prey
or you're going to have a really painful experience.
And that reality shouldn't be there, but it is.
Did you go to San Quentin?
Yeah, so I was in San Quentin virtually the whole time
I was there.
And it's one of the most famous prisons in the United States.
And with good reason, the death row inmates of California
are held at San Quentin.
Even though we don't execute anybody anymore.
But also the prison is full of a lot of murderers.
But ones that have been inside so long that they had,
there's a point system based on the length
of the type of conviction and the length of your conviction.
So for example, I took a life.
So I was called a hard 19.
So the minimum number of points I could have was 19.
But other guys can be as high as 40.
And if you're 40, you're at a level four prison.
And then as you decrease, you go to a level three.
And then you go to a level two.
So my prison was at a level two, not because of the crime
these guys had committed, but because they had basically
behaved themselves while in prison enough
that their points would go down.
If you commit another crime in prison,
your points go back up, for example.
So that's the way the system worked.
And I heard many more of their stories
than you might think for two reasons.
First of all, San Quentin is kind
of like the Silicon Valley of criminal justice
reform in California.
It has a myriad of different nonprofit groups
and activist community that come in and try
to prepare these guys for coming back to society
to deal with many of the problems and issues
that they've got.
And when I say it, I am confident that San Quentin
has more of these, let's call them self-help groups
or realization groups than the other 30 prisons
in the California system combined.
So many so that Governor Newsom recently
decided to recast San Quentin as a rehabilitation center
rather than just a level two prison.
So they're going to try to spread
a lot of these concepts to other prisons
if they can find a way to scale it.
But yeah, a lot of hardcore guys.
And I got to know them because I participated
in a lot of these groups, Nonviolent Communications,
Victim Offender Dialogue, AA.
I mean, you can imagine, Restorative Justice.
I participated in these groups as a participant.
But even though I never disclosed
I was an attorney when I was in San Quentin,
I just said I was a business guy from the startup community.
My talent was recognized and they asked
me to be the managing editor of the San Quentin News, which
is a prison run newspaper run by the incarcerated
for their community.
It publishes 40 to 60 articles a month
about criminal justice in California and beyond
and what restorative justice principles are possible
and what people are trying to do with their lives in prison.
So as the managing editor, I got to help direct a lot
of the reporting that we did.
So I found out about a lot more of these groups
and about the work that they're doing.
So yeah, I went to San Quentin and I count myself lucky
to have gone to San Quentin.
I didn't go to San Quentin for those reasons, however.
I went to San Quentin because my children were five and seven
when I committed my crime.
And they were six and eight when I turned myself
in to go serve my sentence.
And I wanted to be at the prison that was closest to my children
because their mother and my wife had committed to bringing them
to visit me.
And I knew that was essential for their mental health
to see their dad, to spend time with their dad,
to know their dad was OK.
And all that stuff they hear on TV and everything else
wasn't happening to him.
And even though, so when you characterize what to do,
the fall is what it was for the outsiders.
The way I look at it is I burned down my psychic delusion
house with my crime.
That psychic delusion house was made up
of the cultural standards, the religion, the education,
my personal experience.
All of those things built this psychic delusion
house I was living in.
And I burned it down with two things, basically,
with my crime and then with the mother of my two children
less than six months into my sentence telling me
she wanted a divorce.
That burned down what was left of my psychic delusion
house after realizing I had taken a life with the,
the way I like to characterize it, there's a selfishness.
There's an arrogance that comes with basically any crime.
And that's just as true with alcohol and drunk driving
as anything else.
The way I see it now through my journey
as I've learned about myself through introspection
and these groups that I go to and the service
that I've done since then is that I had developed
a defense mechanism to protect my psyche, let's call it.
And that defense mechanism engendered a sense of pride.
And that sense of pride, when I couldn't
solve all my problems with the way I had taught myself to live,
the coping mechanism I sought out
was alcohol to deal with the pressures I was facing
and the challenges I was facing because I couldn't face them.
But the pride was so strong, I couldn't ask for help.
I couldn't even ask my wife for help.
I could ask the bottle for help.
That was the coping mechanism that I developed.
And I was so proudful that I couldn't ask for help
that I thought I could drive while I was drunk.
There's no rational part of that.
But that's what I told myself.
That was the story.
Those were the givens that I was operating under.
And the result in the loss of a life.
I mean, I took this woman's life with my crime.
Wayne, I want to slow things down at that moment.
Can you give us a walkthrough of the 24 hours
from the first drink to her death?
Even into, maybe sitting in the holding cell.
What was that like?
What was that moment like?
I'm happy to do it because you've asked.
I'm afraid if I do it, it might be perceived as an excuse
or a justification.
So I'm telling you that now in case we need to cut this out.
No, just say.
Wayne, let me say this.
You come across as very believable
because you're very humble.
So I wouldn't worry too much about that.
I got that.
I'm not going to lie.
I'm not going to lie about that.
I got the same feeling.
Thank you.
We know you're here for good reasons.
Thank you.
Regardless of what happened in those 24 hours,
the reality is I think addiction is misdefined.
Alcoholism is probably the largest addiction,
the most common addiction, is misdefined.
Addiction is a coping mechanism.
It makes part of you feel safe.
It makes part of you feel good, whatever that addiction is.
And it could be sex.
It could be gambling.
It could be working and earning a lot of money.
And in my case, it was alcohol.
And that coping mechanism unfortunately
becomes the focus when we should be focusing
on the underlying issue that drove you to choose that
as your coping mechanism.
So all this talk of it's a disease
or these other things, I don't think
that hits in the center of what the real issue is.
But if you can characterize it as a coping mechanism,
then you have a chance to actually deal with the whole
problem.
Neuroscience is validating that it is a disease,
but it's not something we can't recover from.
It is neurological, but it still is a disease.
I just want to clarify that.
It doesn't start there.
It doesn't stay.
Yeah.
Well, so what they're discovering now,
I'm reading a book on emotions, and she's breaking down
how we construct thoughts, feelings, and emotions.
And it's all constructed 100%.
So it is our responsibility to be responsible for whatever
we do.
Because we construct the emotion that drives the whole process.
But it's OK to still call it a disease,
because that's what it does to the body.
That's because it's a stress that creates inflammation that
causes disease.
And it becomes chronic, because you don't know how to face it.
The delusion is addictive.
You need it, right?
Yeah, absolutely.
But that isn't where it starts, and that isn't how you solve it.
I think just focus.
So I danced to the 12-step for a while.
I did AA for a while.
And I think it's a great group that's helped a lot of people.
And I cheer them on.
It wasn't for me, because I believe
its eternal focus on alcohol and alcoholism isn't healthy.
At least it wasn't healthy for me.
Oh, I agree with that.
You're always the alcoholic.
25 years later, you haven't had a drink.
You still call yourself an alcoholic.
I think that's a terrible framework.
It works for people.
And so I'm not going to tell them not to do it.
It didn't work for me.
We agree.
And this goes back to that concept
of a coping mechanism versus the underlying problem.
So I'm going to tell you about the last 24 hours,
but I got to set it up, so forgive me.
So I was raised by a single mother
in rent control housing, on food stamps, government assistance
all the way.
Shared a bedroom with my special needs brother.
And as a defense mechanism, told myself
I had to be better, faster, stronger,
or I was going to end up like them.
And that defense mechanism worked really well for me.
I got a job at 15 and 1.5, not 16,
when you're legally able to.
I worked all through high school, at least 20 hours a week.
My senior year of high school, I was only
going to class two periods.
And I was doing work study the rest of the day.
Better, faster, stronger worked for me.
Bought my family's first car, bought my family's first TV.
Literally my family's first TV.
We didn't have a TV when I was a kid.
But the danger of having this defense mechanism of better,
faster, stronger is it engenders a sense of pride.
I had a sense of pride.
And that pride suited me really well until it didn't.
And when it couldn't address the challenges I was facing,
I turned to alcohol to reduce my anxiety,
to reduce the pain that I was experiencing.
Is alcohol a solution?
Never, but it is a coping mechanism.
And it's one that I used more and more.
So in my case, I was a functional alcoholic at the time.
Let's say it that way.
Had a job, Sunday school teacher, church, all this stuff.
But I was drinking daily by that time.
And what pushed me over the edge to my crime
was about six months before my crime,
my mother had a severe fall.
She fell down a flight of stairs, two flights of stairs,
broke her hip.
And so she was in a hospice process.
So every three weeks, I was driving from San Francisco
to LA, which is a long ass drive if you've got any idea
how big California is, and trying to deal with the challenges
my mom was facing.
But my sense of pride meant I couldn't ask anybody for help,
not even my wife for help.
I had to deal with this problem.
They were my mother and my brother.
And in the day before my crime, I
had finally got my mother and brother
admitted to an assisted living facility
that would take both of them, which was a big challenge,
because my brother wasn't old enough to go into one,
and deal with my mother's health issues
and her being on hospice.
And on the day of the crime, I got
them admitted to this facility.
And then I gave myself the task of cleaning up
their apartment that needed to be rented out to somebody else
because they were gone.
But my mother and brother were hoarders,
if you know what I mean.
I mean, there were 10 years of TV guides, for heaven's sakes.
And there was cockroaches.
And there was all kinds of stuff.
And I thought it was smart to drink Red Bull Vodka's
while I was cleaning out their apartment.
That's how far gone I was.
I thought that was a smart move.
But I didn't stop drinking after I cleaned out
their apartment.
I kept drinking even when I was driving back to San Francisco.
That's how arrogant I was that I thought
I could drink and drive intoxicated
to the level I was.
Now, I don't remember the crime itself.
I do remember driving.
I remember stopping at a rest area,
going to the bathroom, refilling my drink
before I got on the road.
But I don't know how much longer I
was on the road before I committed my crime.
But I was so far gone that I was going the wrong way on the 5
3 way.
And I had a head-on collision.
And that's how bad I was going.
And you had to go across the grass, right?
Were you in between, let's say, Bakersfield and San Francisco?
Because there's this.
I don't know if I went across the grass
or if I just went on the wrong way on the on-ramp.
I don't have a recollection of that.
I woke up in the hospital with two highway patrol officers
telling me that I had taken a life and committed a crime.
What's the last thing you remember?
I think choosing music for the drive.
Like at the beginning of the drive?
So was it?
No.
Because that's something that you experience in the drive.
Somewhere on the drive.
Yeah.
We all know, I assume, what it's like to get behind the wheel
when you're driving.
I assume what it's like to get behind the wheel when
you probably shouldn't.
At least a lot of people tell me they do.
I know I had driven before that after drinking.
Never got in an accident.
Never hit another car.
Never got a ticket.
That doesn't mean it couldn't have happened before then.
But on the day, you said 24 hours before.
I'm telling you what happened that day.
I was under, see, what I realized on my journey,
let's call it a self-discovery, the introspection and work
I did after I went to prison was that in order to survive,
I taught myself that I had to shut off
part of my emotional self.
I couldn't be vulnerable.
I couldn't make mistakes.
I couldn't do these things.
I'd be better, faster, stronger.
The consequence of that was in generating a sense of pride.
But at its core, I would contend that both my coping
mechanism of alcoholism that resulted in the crime
and the crime itself were driven by that arrogance
that I had developed, that I could drive even
though I was drinking.
And the fact that I didn't realize how bad off I was
emotionally because of what I had dealt with with my mother
and my brother.
I couldn't face that.
That wasn't something that I'd admit to myself.
I was one of those guys who never cried.
I was tough and stoic, and I could deal with it.
And I was wrong.
I couldn't deal with it.
I was using alcohol as a coping mechanism.
If that isn't enough evidence I couldn't deal with it,
I don't know what is.
So you woke up when?
In the hospital.
And apparently I got medevaced to the hospital.
I don't have any recollection of any of that.
When did you first hear about what happened?
When the highway patrol officers were there to interview me
when I regained consciousness.
I don't know, maybe eight hours after the crime.
I'm not sure the exact time.
And did they tell you about her death at that point?
Yes.
And so my obvious question is, what are you feeling
at that moment?
What was that experience like?
Because I think that is something I've contemplated.
What would happen if I were to kill somebody?
Because that's sort of the first story
and after the Garden of Eden is Cain killing Abel.
The idea of killing someone is a unique experience
that you can speak to.
How did you feel?
I cried then, I'll tell you that much.
And there's no judgment to that.
Rather than focus on that feeling,
I would contend that taking a life is an immense power.
It's power incarnate.
It's tearing somebody out of their family,
out of their own existence.
The reason why I ask for the feeling
is because that's what people can reverberate in
and understand.
I think part of this is there's an opportunity for people
to empathize with you here.
And you have a unique experience in life
that very few people get, but you're
taking a very positive approach.
How do you help them resonate with what it feels like to?
Because you're trying to create a narrative about,
hey, this isn't a good path, but if they feel it,
it creates a tangible understanding to the learning
that you've given it.
Yeah.
But Jonathan, it's also not the end of the world.
It's not the end of the world.
I see the purpose, but what I like to say
is I don't like to do crime porn or prison porn.
And I'm afraid that's for me that one.
Yeah, for me, maybe it's my stoic upbringing,
but talking too much about that emotional part.
And again, I fell.
I burned down my psychic delusion house.
That's the way I try to characterize it
so I can deal with it.
Explaining the angst and the emotion
that I felt in greater detail, I consider a form of crime porn,
and I don't like to do it.
Fair enough.
Yeah, and the other part about that, Jonathan,
that I would say is that if you're actually
in the passion of killing somebody based on trying
to save your family, or if you've actually
got to premeditate it, I'm going to take this person out
because I hate them, and then you've got that.
You've taken them out of existence.
That's a different kind of taking away and killing
somebody than even paying for the able.
No, I think let me get a different perspective here.
I'm not talking about an external emotion.
What did you think about yourself in that process?
Because that's the internal struggle.
That I was the worst.
I couldn't believe what reality was telling me.
Yeah, because you didn't choose to do this.
Your body chose it by drinking, but it's life hitching that.
And then you're having to deal with the falling
that you didn't really choose to participate in
from an aggressive standpoint.
There was no malice here.
But you did an irresponsible move,
and that's kind of the conflict I think most people really.
A criminal irresponsibility, not just irresponsible.
I'm open to that.
Yeah, that's how it feels, and that's
what I'm trying to draw out here.
Are you guys familiar with Jonathan?
He's making a lot of NYU professor and psychologist
who's written a bunch of books.
He's very famous right now because he's
talking about the mental health challenges caused
by digital media recently.
You've heard of him?
I love a concept he came up with in one of his older books
where he was looking at parables and trying
to figure out how they relate to the modern world.
And he called it the elephant and the rider,
and that our existence was, in essence, that visual.
The elephant is your brain, body, existence.
And the rider is the emergent consciousness
that sits on top of that, that comes out
from the development of our frontal cortex
and everything else.
That's the rider.
And I think, well, too often in life,
we think the rider controls the elephant.
And we rationalize our actions by saying
we chose it as the rider.
But the reality is the elephant, more often than not,
does what it wants to do.
So in my case, my elephant, driven by my addiction,
wanted to keep drinking.
But my rider told myself that I had
to get back to San Francisco because I had stuff to do.
And the elephant convinced that rider
that I could drive safely.
Or another way of characterizing it
is different facets of ourselves.
Part of me was hurting so much because of what I was dealing
with with my family that I selfishly thought
that what I wanted to do was more important.
And I was so prideful that I couldn't call a friend
and say, hey, could you drive me back
or could you get me on an airplane
because I'm too drunk to drive?
I was so proudful.
I developed that sense of pride over so much time
that I didn't even think to ask for help.
I had to find a way to do it.
I was going to do it.
So that's what was going through my mind before the crime.
After the crime is when you realize that that persona
you've developed, that house that you live in, is bullshit.
It doesn't satisfy what you need.
I burned it down.
And that's what it felt like.
It felt like I was inside a house burning down.
All of the things you could imagine from that
was what your psyche goes through when you realize
you are the evil one.
You are the bad person.
You're the black hat, not the white hat.
That's not an easy thing to face.
It's not an easy thing to hear.
And most of us try to find a way around.
We rationalize that in some way.
I'm not going to blame my addiction for causing it.
I drove and I committed the crime.
And that's why I get fearful when people talk about alcoholism
as a disease, because I think it's
used to justify something that can't be justified.
I can't justify what I did.
And I'm not going to try.
But the power it represents, the power of taking a life,
that gave me the power to want to find out
how I could be that person, why I did that,
and what I had to do to make sure that would never
happen again.
Because that was my goal.
I had to make sure that I wouldn't do that again
for two reasons, not just for my victim, to be honest,
even though that recognizing that responsibility gave me
the energy to actually do the work,
to explore my psyche and my beliefs and my memories
and figure out how I could be that person.
But I also had two young kids.
And I had to be a role model for them.
What do you do when you do something horrific?
How do you serve sentence as society demands, honorably,
and to the best of your ability, and learn
from your mistakes?
That was just as important to me on my journey
and why I took a bunch of these self-help groups
and why I read all the books that I read
and did all the work that I did when I was in San Quentin.
Because I had to learn how I could be that person
and what I had to do to make sure I wouldn't continue
to be that person in the future, that I
wouldn't commit this crime again.
I've been home for five years, for example.
I take my sobriety very seriously.
I've worked at a fine dining restaurant.
I've worked at a catering company.
I have access to alcohol on a daily basis for free
if I wanted it.
And I haven't had a problem with alcohol since that time.
I don't need it as a coping mechanism anymore.
The way I characterize it, I dismantled the trigger
is the way I tell myself.
Matthew Perry, who recently died of an overdose,
he probably spent millions of dollars
trying to dismantle his trigger.
But the coping part of it, he wanted so bad,
he found a way around that.
And he got back to it.
And he used so much of whatever his drug of choice
was that he took his own life.
He overdosed on it.
And I think a lot of people focus on that.
They focus on building a wall around the trigger
when we're all smart enough to find a way around that,
usually.
You've got to dismantle the trigger.
You've got to find out what you're trying to cope for.
Or you're going to come back to that same challenge again
and have to face it again.
And I don't feel I'm at risk of that anymore.
He was doing it to be external, too.
What is the motivation?
Was the motivation to get past your true self
and to break what's really broken?
No, it's to actually put on that brave face
and actually be a functioning member of Hollywood again.
And because it was externally dictated,
he never really got to the root cause of it.
And it took, obviously, Robert Downey Jr. with help
from Mel Gibson to say, been there, done that.
Let's go into the deeper, darker parts of this
and let's see how we come out of that.
My first question is, what was prison like?
Because that's a big part of your story.
We don't have to stay there.
But what was it like?
Because it seems a big part of what you
want to help bring awareness to.
Everything you see about prison, the violence, the crime,
the interactions between the custody and the incarcerated,
all that stuff.
It's all true, but it's not all condensed into one day
or one TV show.
So were other inmates murdered while I was in San Quentin?
Yes.
Did other inmates die of overdoses
because somebody had smuggled drugs into them?
Yes.
Was there sexual abuse by inmates on other inmates?
Yes.
I wrote a piece on suicide because this little effeminate
guy was getting raped regularly in prison.
So yeah, that happens.
But it doesn't happen nearly as often as people think it does.
So prison is an awful place that I
hope nobody has to experience in its current form.
I think many people need to be taken off
the streets for public safety.
I just don't know if prison is the right way
to do that in the way it's currently constituted.
There's a real adversarial relationship
that goes on there.
A lot of guys are stuck in that street mindset.
That's who they are.
They don't want to change.
They still want to hustle.
They still want to use violence to solve problems and all
the stuff that they've got issues with.
And if they do, they're going to be
in a lot of trouble, and if they can't get beyond that,
maybe the best thing for them is to be removed
from society in some form.
It might not be the prison system
is the best way to do that.
Tell us about some of the things that you did,
the support groups.
And the rate of recidivism is terrible, right?
You're obviously an anomaly in terms of I
don't anticipate you being incarcerated anytime soon,
if ever again.
Neither do I, by the way.
Neither do I.
I'm confident.
So first of all, I've heard of Transcendental Meditation,
where people are getting together.
You're talking gang members who would kill each other
on the streets who are meditating together, right?
I've heard great stories like that.
I'm sure you've got other stories.
And do you have any hope for a change in a mindfulness
or a consciousness that could help
the situation moving forward?
You hit upon something that's great.
I didn't mention that.
Yeah, I took yoga from a process of mental health benefits,
not just physical activity.
That was the purpose of it.
I think the best way to characterize this,
if I were to recommend a book for people to read,
if you want to read a book about addiction,
it will be Gabor Mate's writings.
He's a Canadian doctor, very famous.
M-A-T-E is his last name.
But Gabor Mate's got some great stuff on what addiction is
and what it isn't and how to deal with it.
But if you want to understand the underlying process that
drove the maladaption for these guys to commit the crimes they
committed, you need to read Alice Miller.
She's written a number of books.
Probably the most famous one is called
The Drama of the Gifted Child.
She wrote it in German.
So gifted doesn't mean what it means in English.
So she's not talking about a kid with 140 IQ.
She's talking about all children.
But the drama of the child is an important understanding
of why many of these guys shut off
part of their emotional self.
I mean, how else could you explain the crimes
that they did if they had any ounce of empathy,
which we are all born with?
We all are born with it.
They had shut that part of themselves off.
And I would contend they did it as a defense mechanism based
on their experiences.
That's not to justify what they did.
But if you want them to be cured of that,
you've got to go back to the beginning
to find out what caused them to shut off
their emotional self to convince them they need to open back up
to that emotional self, which in essence
is what much of this work, this internal work,
is about, where you can meditate,
when you can do introspection.
And that introspection can be religious based.
It could be prayer.
It could be yoga.
It could be meditation.
There's a myriad of different ways
you can pass that can take you to introspection.
But you need to do that if you want
to find out why you're doing the things you are.
And a lot of these guys don't want to.
That would be admitting, think of how hard.
I had a bunch of reasons to give up my pride before my crime,
but I didn't take them.
The price that had to be paid by others for me
to be open to learning that is unimaginable, unexcusable.
I mean, in some cultures, it's a life for a life.
Yeah, I got sentenced to seven years, eight months.
And because I was a model inmate,
I only served six years, three months.
But so what?
A lot of people think that's not enough time in prison,
because prison's punishment, right?
Removing you from society.
But I had to learn how I could be that person.
And so introspection was an integral part.
So Alice Miller, Gabor Amate are great.
The conceptual frame that I think people
could benefit the most from is to learn what's
called nonviolent communications.
And nonviolent communications, at its core,
is for you to accept responsibility
for your emotional reaction.
And let me give you an example of that.
You know, Jonathan, I could have made you angry
by telling you that I didn't want to talk about what
I call crime porn, right?
That could have been a natural response for you.
And of course not.
But I understand.
Because you're an adult. But it could have, right?
But in reality, there's nothing I
can do that can make you angry.
You let yourself be angry.
I let myself be angry.
Somebody else may have done something,
but it's my response that I have to be responsible for.
And so nonviolent communications helps you learn that process.
And it's wonderful at helping you
develop the vocabulary to explain your emotional self,
either to yourself or to others.
When I was in prison, I think the greatest gift
I got while I was in prison wasn't necessarily
all the work I did or the groups I participated in.
It was a gift from my ex-wife.
You know, even though we were divorced a few months
into my sentence, she honored her commitment
and brought my children to visit me throughout my incarceration.
She honored that.
And that was essential for me, for my well-being,
for my mental health.
But I think it also was important for the kids
to have that.
And she honored that commitment.
And I will always be grateful to her for that.
I'll still call her ex.
Don't get me wrong.
But I'll always be grateful for her bringing my children
to visit me.
But there was an 18-month stretch
where my son wouldn't come.
And he had transferred to a different school.
And his classmates found out his dad was a felon and in prison.
And they made fun of him.
And they belittled him.
And how would a young boy of 10 or 11
understand those emotions?
Well, he thought he was angry.
That's the way he characterized it.
That's kind of a generic term.
And Nonviolent Communications teaches you
how to use words like shame.
He felt ashamed.
Or I felt guilty for what I did, not hurt for what I did.
It uses a lot of great vocabulary.
So I would recommend anybody look up Nonviolent Communications
and find a way to practice a better understanding
of your emotional self, which is very difficult to do if you
don't do the introspection, which can be driven
by mindfulness training.
The best mindfulness training I found
is an app by Sam Harris called Waking Up.
Waking Up is a great app.
It does a lot of good work.
It's non-denominational.
He's not trying to convince you to become a Buddhist
or any religious connotation.
But he's trying to help you do this work of introspection
and self-awareness in a very healthy way.
And by the way, for your guys, if you can't afford the app,
it is a for money app.
It doesn't matter.
Sam Harris is committed to anybody
who asks to have the app for free.
He will give it to them.
So you have no excuse to not try to go down this road
of self-discovery and introspection.
And there's a great tool for people.
Waking Up is the name of the app,
and I'd recommend it to anybody.
I find it a very effective tool.
Well, you know what's interesting about that is,
obviously, he's one of the four horsemen of the atheist
apocalypse, right?
So we both came from an evangelical background.
You've got Daniel Dennett, the philosopher, Sam Harris.
Sure.
Hitchens and Dawkins.
But one of the things that we're starting to realize,
and I think this is going to be something that,
as our consciousness evolves, God willing,
we'll actually see that it actually doesn't matter
if it's prayer or if it's secular meditation,
because they're all tapping into the same thing.
That unified field, that underlying part
of our consciousness, that is the self, the Atman,
that you would find in the Bhagavad Gita, right?
These things are all coming together.
This shit's been going on for millennia,
and we're just trying to put a new word on it.
And that would be, this is the hope.
Jonathan and I have is if we lead with love,
if we're trying to reduce the dichotomy
and get behind the root causes of these things,
just think the idea of drinking.
It's so much deeper than the addiction to alcohol
or the taste.
There's so much more going on.
And so when you drive deeper,
this is where an atheist and a believer can get together
because they're still tapping into the same thing.
One just calls it something else
and they're getting power from it.
This person's getting power from it too,
because it is that amazing part of ourself
where we're tapping into the collective, right?
This is where things can really happen.
That's what we're hoping for.
And I really commend you guys for that.
I do a weekly Bible study.
I'm a member, still a member of my Presbyterian church
that I was before I went to prison.
They've welcomed me back into their community
as a full member.
And so we do a weekly men's Bible study
because I've also found that when you talk about formats,
I find a small group format is the most effective tool
to get people to actually grow and learn.
I also do a business men's group called New Canaan Society,
which is faith-focused, but business-related.
I love New Canaan Society.
We have what's called an energy group.
We have a small group of us that meet every two weeks
and have a chance to be vulnerable, to be open,
to ask questions and to hear stories.
And I find that all of us have blind spots.
The way I like to characterize a blind spot
is I gotta go to the left,
but I'm so afraid of left-hand turns
that I make three right-hand turns
to get going the way I wanna go, right?
But it gets to such a common state,
you don't even recognize it's possible to turn left.
You think it's only possible to turn right.
It's inefficient, it's ineffective.
We've all got blind spots like that.
And the advantage of the small group format
is you can see other people,
nobody can see their own blind spot,
but other people can always see yours.
They can't really tell you about it, to be honest.
It doesn't work to point out somebody's blind spot.
They gotta figure it out on their own.
But I find the small group format
is the best way to find out your own blind spots,
because as you recognize them
and the other members of the group,
you'll start asking yourself,
well, I wonder where mine are.
But they've already told you in different ways,
and you'll figure it out.
Oh yeah, that is a blind spot of mine.
So I'll give you an example
of how that manifests itself across life.
I was raised by a single mother and a grandmother.
Men were bad.
They abandon you, they beat you, they become alcoholics.
They're just bad.
I could never have a mentor.
I was a lawyer by profession.
I could never have an older lawyer as a mentor in my career
because I didn't trust men.
I didn't realize I didn't trust men,
but introspection, looking back,
I never had a mentor throughout my life.
And I found out why.
It doesn't mean I can have a mentor now.
I'm not that great at it.
At least I accept authors and other people
where I can learn from deep people.
But I've never developed a trust for older men.
And I know that's the source of it, right?
I'm not trying to blame my mother and grandmother.
They had their own life experience.
But I was raised in that environment so young
that I didn't realize I had this blind spot.
That's an example of one of my blind spots.
I would contend my daughter has a similar version
of that right now.
She doesn't like, she doesn't,
whenever she has a problem, it's with a male coach
or a male teacher or a male classmate.
And her developmental level,
when she was five when I committed my crime
and six when I went to prison,
I know our time's almost up,
her developmental state was you can't trust men
because they abandoned you.
That's her developmental level of understanding.
I abandoned her.
And she doesn't wanna get abandoned again.
So she doesn't wanna open herself up.
And I'm working really hard to develop, regain her trust
and to help her realize that she can trust me.
And hopefully that'll help her realize she can trust
her coaches and her teachers and her male classmates
more than she does.
Because I think she's got a blind spot about it.
Yeah.
Wayne, it's been a pleasure having you.
I really appreciate you coming on the show.
Rich, any final words?
No, I wanted to ask and maybe it's not gonna,
we could have another episode of this,
but did you ever have a chance to either hope
or reconcile with the family of the victim?
Yes and no.
In California, you're not allowed to have direct communication.
Yeah.
So I wasn't allowed to communicate with the family.
I participated in a group called
Victim Offender Education Group,
which is a victim offender group
which is a victim offender dialogue,
18 month course, small group,
a lot of work to find out the consequences of your crime,
not just to your victim, but to their family,
to the community and learn how you could be the person
that could commit that crime and understanding yourself
as well and your childhood and the experiences
that led you there that culminated in a victim panel.
So I got to sit down with a group of victims
who had lost somebody to a crime similar to mine.
In my case, there was a woman who had lost her son
on his wedding night to a gang line shooting.
There was a mother and daughter that had lost their father
and husband to a drunk driver.
So yes, in that sense, I was able to sit down
and sit with them and help them hopefully,
as I wish for everybody to move beyond victimhood
and become a survivor.
Because I think that should be a goal.
It's not to say the wound doesn't there,
but to have it scar over, not be an open wound
that is constantly irritated and always at risk,
which is what I think victimhood gives you.
The goal is to have it scar over.
You should be proud of your scars.
After all, life happens for you, not to you.
There was something that you needed to learn.
Figure out what it is.
Yeah.
Yeah, Wayne, I really appreciate you sharing your story.
To all of our listeners, this has been another episode
of Living in the Matrix.
We love having you.
Please comment, review, and rate the show.
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To all of our friends and family, much love.
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Thank you.