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Let's get climbing that mountain.
Welcome to the Present Fathers podcast.
This is the show that focuses on climbing the mountain of fatherhood
together.
We believe that dads matter.
That's why this show is for you.
So gear up, dads. Get ready.
It's time to start climbing.
Hello and welcome to the Present Fathers podcast.
Our guest today is Wayne Boatright.
Wayne is an Ivy League attorney, a startup techie,
and someone who also served six years in prison.
He's a father to two children.
And tonight, we're going to hear his story.
So, Wayne, welcome to the show.
Thank you, George.
Brianna, good to meet you.
Likewise.
So, Wayne, let's just start from the top.
You know, you obviously went to school to become a lawyer.
You know, where did you grow up?
What was your childhood like?
And, you know, that's a great. Place to. Start.
First of all,
I'm a fifth generation Californian.
So you guys back there,
different worldview.
Right.
My family came out in the 1850s
and and I mention this because I think
a structural element for family is to have your family traditions
and your family history center into what you educate your children with.
My family, mom, my mother's side were French units
who came to the United States, came to the Americas in the 1650s.
And on my father's side,
Scots-Irish English, German, you know, I've got that mix.
But that French Huguenot group that came over in the 1650 still resonates with me.
Very similar to the Puritan mindset, which is
neither a lender nor borrower.
Be take care of yourself,
be respectful of others.
Don't be proud, fool. Don't brag.
But I got
some of that Scots Irish sauce in me as well,
which is more of the drink inside and the the argumentative side. So.
So I actually I am the classic American
meritocracy success story.
I was raised by a single mother who didn't have a college
education, myself and my half brother,
who was 13 months older than me,
lived in rent control, housing and with government aid.
My whole life shared my bedroom with my brother, brother, my whole life.
But always felt I could be more.
It sounds like faith is an important foundational element of your lives.
I found myself very lucky to be very involved
and in a church when I was young, and that gave me the structure that made
sure I didn't end up as many kids in my neighborhood did as a criminal
or doing just the wrong things at the wrong time.
So I was raised.
My family wasn't much into faith, but I got into it and that gave
me the structure to actually
get my life together.
I served a mission in
in Argentina for two years,
didn't start college till I was basically 21.
I started at a junior college and went to
Cal State, Northridge and and and BYU for two years
and then realized to go to the places I want to go.
That's why I went to BYU.
I found it gave me a better chance to get into good law schools.
And I, I went to Cornell Law School.
And so and I was totally out of my depth.
I had no family that were professionals.
I had no friends that were on a similar track.
I didn't go to a nice liberal arts college and have the sophistication
that many of my peers did,
and I didn't care at all.
I was learning so much.
It was such a great opportunity. And I
Cornell's very much
as an Ivy League school, very much in the theory.
And so when I listen to some of the podcasts
that you've done on the Present Fathers podcast and
and the goals you have, there's a lot more tactical rubber meets the road.
How do you deal with stuff?
I'm more of a theorist, and so a lot of the stuff
that I like to talk about is, is more at that level.
And so that may come out or it may not, but
but that allowed me to actually have a fascinating life.
So I've lived many different lives.
So I had that life, the poor life,
my life as a regular lawyer, which had me.
I was set to go to D.C.
and work at a you know, a D.C. law firm.
And my family were having real problems, my mother and brother.
So I, I realized that I had to go back to L.A.
to help them out.
So I took a job with an L.A. law firm.
And after I got them settled and got them back on track,
I got into international law, which had always been my passion.
So I went to Korea for six years.
And so when I talk about the ability to understand different cultures
and how to interact
and to recognize that cultural level of communication, I come from experience.
I had two years in Argentina.
I'm an California boy that went to New York
for law school, and I spent six years in Korea.
And, oh, by the way, I spent six years in prison.
And San Quentin is a pretty infamous prison in California.
It's one of the oldest ones that it's been around on an eye,
and it's a prison full of people who committed the most heinous crimes.
There are
death row, California's death
row, all of California's death throws at San Quentin, for example.
Well,
now I went to San Quentin
not because of the seriousness of my crime and it was serious.
And we'll talk about that in a second.
But because it was the closest prison to my family.
So I had it as a goal
before I went to prison that I had to stay in my children's lives.
There are 30 prisons in the California system.
I could have gone anywhere in California, but I did.
I pulled all the strings I knew how to pull as a professional
to make sure I got sent to San Quentin, regardless of it being a level
two prison on a level one prison, which is where I could have gone to.
So so I know I covered a lot of stuff quickly there, but I wanted to give you
some aspect of that career.
The final aspect is I had that lawyer part
and then I had to start up taking part before the crime part.
So I, I worked with a lot of startup companies in Silicon Valley
to help them launch their businesses and to advise them
both as a lawyer and as a businessman on how to do that.
So I have a lot of the consulting tech and
and vocabulary that I developed both at Accenture, where I went for two years.
And I had a great session as well as the work I did with startups.
Very good.
Well, that's my.
Foundation before the crime. Right? Yeah.
So I appreciate you walking over that so quickly.
Can we.
Well, you know, when did you get married and when did you have your kids
and, you know,
so you know, how how many years were you
there as their dad before you had to go to prison?
Yeah, I,
I got married in 1998
and I took marriage seriously,
So much so that I proposed at the handover
over of Hong Kong from England to the PRC to China in 1997.
So I had our a bunch of our friends, Phil and I went to a friend, had a
a penthouse in the mid-levels.
And after they celebrated the handover and get everybody off the decks
like I proposed because I didn't want to do it again,
their goal was to have that marriage be everything,
and I chose
my wife.
And I try not to use names just to respect people's positions.
I'll use the title
Wonderful Woman.
And and I knew she would be a wonderful mother.
And that was important to me because I wanted to be a father.
I was raised in a single parent household.
Never had
I had a father sized hole in my psyche.
Now, I was lucky that I filled a lot of that hole with faith and religion
and the Boy Scouts, for example, and playing on the football team,
for example, having a coach, having a scoutmaster, having religious leaders.
So I was lucky in that way.
But I still had that father
sized hole and I knew that I didn't want my children
to be raised without a father. So.
So we got married in 98.
Our first child was born in 2000 for our second in 2006,
because we decided we wanted to have some time together
as a married couple before we had kids.
Because you run around like crazy.
I think one of your other co-hosts just had a baby, right?
I remember that. Yep.
You don't see.
I thought I knew how to drink coffee.
I didn't know anything about coffee till I had kids.
And I knew I had to take serious caffeine to deal with that. So.
So that that was the foundation of of my life.
I was a Sunday school teacher at Calvary Presbyterian Church
in San Francisco as a deacon of my church.
Even today, I am I do a weekly men's Bible study on Monday mornings.
So we have one today.
For example, this is Monday, Will, where we're
reading this.
And I also belong as of launch, another organization called New Canon Society,
which is an organization of a businessmen of faith
that gets together and we meet twice a month, small group.
Four of us get together and talk about our lives
and work together as a group.
And I and I commend anybody who can find a group to be a member of.
I think it's essential for your role as a as a man
and as a father, because you're able to condense everything at one time.
And one member of our group has had two children since we've been meeting
another member left his job and started his own business
and got married since we've been together.
And so to talk about the guy who's got a business, how does he fire
somebody right?
How does he deal with a second child rather than just the first?
All of the challenges that we can face as men, we can
we can be much more vulnerable and open with when it's a men's group,
to be frank, and not a
coed group.
I think men tend to try to show off or hide too much when it's coed.
It's just instinctual.
You can't stop yourself, so it's good to have a men's group.
So I still use that format and those organizations as
a way of service
because I think that's
a central part of our existence or should be.
You have to be self-aware, begin self awareness, you have to express yourself
creatively in some way and then service to help others along that path,
whether they be your children or your community.
That's a skill that we all need to develop
and it's where we learn the most when we get into service.
Absolutely.
Now let's let's obviously get into let's get into the crime and what happened
and what was your low point throughout this situation, through the journey
and how did it change your priorities and even your ambitions as a father?
Let's let's get into that.
Yeah,
I mentioned
some of the good sides of my heritage, right,
that carry your water, take care of your own self.
The bad side of it is that it.
EJ Engender is a sense of pride
that you can do it on your own
and that pride is actually
a defense mechanism that
that you use.
It's misconstrued as an action, it's a reaction.
And so as I was facing challenges
professionally and and personally,
for example, six months before my, my crime,
my mother fell down and broke her hip.
And so we had to get her in hospice.
And so I was traveling to L.A.
about once a month from San Francisco.
It's a long drive
to deal with trying to get my mother
and my brother, who has special needs into the same facility
because they were codependent and they they needed to continue to live together.
And that wasn't a guarantee.
It was very difficult to do that.
And because I was a proud man, I didn't ask for help
when I should have, not even from my wife, when I should have,
and what did I do?
I coped.
My coping mechanism was to turn to alcohol and I was already drinking too much.
But during those six months I started drinking alone and daily
and using alcohol again.
Alcohol isn't the problem.
Alcoholism isn't the problem.
It's a coping mechanism.
You have to be able to face the underlying problem or you'll go back to alcohol,
which is why so many people fail in their element of sobriety.
I believe.
But of course I didn't know that at the time
and I was too proud to ask for help and so proud that I thought I could drive
drunk on the night of my crime.
And my crime was drunk driving.
I killed someone.
I, I was so drunk that by the time I got into the to the accident,
I was going the wrong way on the five freeway and I had a head on collision
and took a life.
The low point.
It's not a
it's not a bell curve.
There's a couple of loops in my case,
regaining consciousness in a hospital after being medivaced to a hospital
and having two highway patrolman there to explain to you that I had taken a life.
I've been in a car accident, I killed someone.
My I can't explain to you
to people who haven't gone through a similar
crisis what that feels like.
Trust me,
you don't want to go through it.
If you can learn from other people's experiences and gain
insight and develop the habits and the tools
to avoid
using any form of substance
as a coping mechanism, please,
I'm happy to help.
If if, if I ask, I'm happy to give the idea of the tools that have worked for me
that I've learned through hard experience and mainly in person
how to deal with those things, why?
What were the triggers?
What was the trauma that had me develop the defense mechanism,
a pride that then
went into a coping mechanism of alcohol.
When my defense mechanism wasn't working perfectly, that led to addiction
and led to my crime.
But there was a second low point
I mentioned.
I thought I was married for life and I was the father of two children.
They were five and seven when I committed my crime.
Being a man of of
of means, I was able to be on
probation. So. Right.
I was able to get out of I didn't go to prison
until I turned myself in after my sentencing and in crime.
So I was able to be with my children for a full year before I went to prison.
So they were six and eight when I went to prison.
But that year wasn't a full year.
I had 90 days in a hospital.
I had fractured my pelvis, shattered my foot, broken my neck, ribs,
concussion, all the stuff you'd expect from a head on collision on the freeway.
I got a plate and eight screws in my foot, for example,
that they had to reconstruct.
So I had 90 days in a hospital and then I was in a wheelchair, a walker, crutches,
before I was able to
actually spend much time with my children again
as young children before I and I took what's called a plea bargain.
If you know anything about the legal system,
literally 98,
99% of cases are decided by plea bargain.
And and I didn't want to waste the state's time or money.
I committed my crime.
I knew that I wanted to serve a sentence.
That's what the state demanded of me.
And and I knew that.
And and that was important for me
to just stay alive.
But while serving a sentence about
about four months, five months into my sentence,
my wife said she wanted to visit me alone.
And in San Quentin.
And I was at San Quentin State Prison because it was the closest prison
to my family.
And I wanted to make sure I could be close to them.
And so I'd worked and wrangled the
the levers of power to make sure I was sentenced to San Quentin.
She said she wanted to visit me alone.
And she came and she told me
she wanted to visit me alone because she wanted her divorce.
There is nothing
when that last support you have
to your identity and your self is taken
away.
That's a low point.
I, I almost got myself shot that day
because I was in such a distraught state
that I,
I when I was finished and luckily I had mental health help,
which is again, something I recommend that people do.
I was lucky to have that opportunity in California taking advantage of it,
that I was so distraught
that I was walking in an area you're not allowed to be in
and they can shoot you for that if they want you.
Luckily, they just called me back.
That was so.
Those are the two lowest points that I've ever gone through.
I like to to just we have to use metaphor
to to bring concept into understanding for other people.
So for me, I built this psychic delusion house that I lived in.
It was built by my education, by my faith, by my experience,
by my the view of myself.
A lot of people call it a mask.
I call it a delusion house.
I think it's more substantive than a mask.
And I have burned down that psychic delusion health,
both with my crime and destroying my memory.
My marriage was in reality, my crime destroyed two families,
the family of my victim and my own.
And I had to face that.
And that's not an easy
it's not an easy thing to look at about yourself.
Definitely not.
So both one, thank you for just being so candid
and honest about your experience.
I think it takes a great deal
of courage to come here and to share your story honestly
and to own it the way that you have and,
you know, regardless of anyone's faults, that's how you start.
The path to restoration is to admit it and to own it,
to start back on the path to the restoration.
So you said you hit these low points
basically right at the start.
What did you do?
How did you stay sane?
Really?
Yes. After So, yes, you know, because it's such a rapid thing, too.
Obviously, you didn't desire to do what you did.
Right.
So it's not like you woke up one day and decided you're going to be a bad person.
It happened and it's something you had to live with.
And then now you're getting divorced.
I can only imagine the state that you were in.
So to hear that you were distraught and could have been shot by the guards,
I'm not surprised.
What were the things that saved you then?
Because it's not like you could just go wherever you wanted to.
That the reason I'm on your podcast from
being a father was the thing that saved me
my children saved me,
and not because I was sure
my their mother had always said I was a great father.
You know, I might have had other issues, but I was a great father
and I had never seen a father in the home.
So I wasn't sure what a great father was, but I was trying my best.
I, for example,
my son was young and he was a big baseball fan.
We're big Giants fan.
And so when I was physically able,
I would take him to Giants games.
But that isn't what it was about.
We would go 2 hours early to go to batting practice and he'd bring his mitt
and we'd stand, you know, in the bleachers where they would hit balls,
and he must have a dozen balls that he got from batting practice.
We shared that those moments together.
We shared that time just father and son
one on one, bonding
before I went to prison.
But after my crime,
explaining to your children that dad is going to go away
as my sentence approached
and what that meant to again,
children who were six and eight, they didn't understand these concepts.
I was their dad, for heaven's sakes.
How could I do something so evil
right?
And they're both still
that trauma has impacted their lives.
And I.
I knew that if I were to take the easy way,
I'd lived overseas a long time, I could have skipped out.
No problem.
You're not going to just decide.
I was going to go live on a beach in Thailand.
Nobody would have caught me.
I knew how to do that or the other easy way, which is to take that,
you know, full bottle of morphine that they gave me before I went to prison.
And I can't say I wasn't tempting.
You know, I had a a long
$2 million policy and a short $750,000 policy that would both pay out
even if I committed suicide, because I got them so long ago.
And, you know,
you can't think that that money wouldn't have helped your family.
My civil settlement with my victim's family is 1.55 million.
Some of that insurance, some of it not.
And, you know,
that's a big financial hit.
It sucked us dry. My kids had to.
They had their boat.
Each had their own bedroom when I committed my crime,
when I went to prison,
even though they were boy or girl, they had to get bunk beds and sleep
in the same bedroom.
We had to downsize pretty majorly.
And so I was tempted
by providing that money for my family.
And I can't say it was my own worth that made me want to stay around.
It was the realization that if I did that,
my children would think it would be an acceptable path in their own lives
because you
never know what you're going to face going forward.
And I couldn't risk
that.
There were two wonderful, two beautiful two amazing
for me to risk being that
type of bad example for them, because unfortunately,
when you're that young, they think it's all about them, right?
They can't help that they're kids.
They think I took my life, not for them, but because of them
trying to explain to my daughter
that I wasn't leaving her because
my wife had told her
that I was depressed and that's why I drank a lot.
And so I had to explain to her that I wasn't depressed about our family life.
It was other things that I was dealing with
because I loved her and I loved her brother and I loved their mother
and I cherish my life.
So that's what gave me the strength
to get back up
and embrace the suck, Right?
Yeah.
And and
recognize that I had a lot of
blind spots that had led me to that point.
And so I developed the psychic tools and
and the ability to communicate with others, to identify
those blind spots and correct for them
so they wouldn't keep
tripping me up going forward. So,
you know, I've been home over four years.
I've had 27 jobs since I've been home.
You're disbarred
by the bar, so I can't practice law.
My former community hasn't
found a way to accept me back.
You know, they're the the urban, educated, atheist elite.
They've never failed at anything in their lives.
They don't know how to bring back a person's faith the way I have.
I don't blame them for that.
They still love me.
Tomorrow, I'm going to go to a friend's house.
She has me coming over to catch it for a week as she's gone away on a trip,
she trust me implicitly
happy to invite me over to take her house.
Doesn't worry about it at all, but she won't invite me to her birthday party.
That's one of the consequences that's probably underappreciated
when you come home.
So one of my first jobs was working at a fine dining,
high end restaurant with a celebrity chef.
It had two bars that never tempted me.
I one of the jobs I work right now is at a catering company.
There's alcohol all day, all night long.
If you want it for free, nobody will see you.
I've dismantled that trigger, as I say that that I think
many people who get into would try to deal with addiction and get into rehab.
They're building a wall around their triggers so they won't trigger it,
but that you can always find a way around that you've got to
you've got to find out what that coping mechanism,
why you developed that coping mechanism of addiction and dismantle that trigger
so that it's not a temptation anymore you don't need.
Yeah, And I think I've been able to do that effectively,
evidenced by the fact that I've been back over four years and I haven't had a,
an issue.
Ah, relapse.
That doesn't mean you don't still consider yourself an addict.
And I realize the risk that would happen to me if I ever were to drink again.
Of course I do,
but I'm not worried about it.
Yeah.
So backstage you talked about how you really dove
into philosophy.
Did you discover
and kind of really do this work that you're describing about
understanding why you had had a problem
with alcohol and why that was the thing that you were using to cope with?
And was it a journey of self-discovery or was it also like whether I don't know
if there was like counseling sessions,
but what was that process like to one break addiction?
And then I'd like to, after we talk about the addiction piece, get into
how you maintained and restored relationships with your children.
Sure. Sure.
You don't turn up
a cruise liner in a second, right?
I mean, your life doesn't doesn't change overnight.
So you need to use a bunch of different tools.
I mentioned I went to San Quentin
and it was a it's an infamous prison and it has California's death row.
What I didn't tell you is it's also the
the Silicon Valley of prison reform.
There are about 150 different nonprofit groups
that send volunteers into San Quentin on a regular basis.
It's the only person like that in the world, as far as I know.
It's definitely the only one in California
and and I believe the only one in the United States.
And I know that because I've
done a lot of work on criminal justice and criminal justice reform
while I was in prison, for example, I was the managing editor of the San
Quentin News, which is a for print newspaper done by inmates for inmates,
has a circulation of 35,000 print copies.
And we send all over California.
By the way, I never disclosed I was an attorney in prison.
I told them I was a startup techie guy and a business guy,
and that's all I left it.
I didn't want to talk about law, but I had talent that was appreciated.
And so they asked me to be the managing editor of this newspaper, and I did that.
And so I've learned a lot about the criminal justice
reform efforts in the prison system
national, local, state,
local, county, jail systems.
And San Quentin is unique that way.
So one of one example is I took a class on nonviolent communications,
which we don't realize how many times we speak violence with our words
and we
we give other people ownership of our own emotions by doing that.
And so how do we take responsibility?
How do we take ownership
so nonviolent communications
and learning how to communicate in that way was important for me.
And it takes a while to develop that skill.
You need to go to a class regularly.
You can't just read a book and think you'll understand how to do it.
You got to practice it.
The most important class that I did
culminated in a in a victim panel
where we brought in foster families
that had lost somebody to a criminal
and they got to meet with our small group.
We started with eight inmates and we were down to four
by the time
we met with the panel.
And that was an 18 month process
where you first learned to take responsibility
for your crime and understand the consequences of your crime,
not just to your victim, but to their families, to their community,
just society in general.
But also you have to explore
what trauma led you to that criminal activity.
And then that same process of understanding what that trauma was
and and why you had it and why the defense mechanisms you developed.
For example, many people shut off their emotions with trauma.
They're trained to do that.
How else could they put a gun to somebody's head and pull the trigger?
Right.
If they hadn't cut off a part of who they are?
So putting them putting us back in touch with our authentic self.
If you've ever studied college, Young, as an example,
was a big part of that process and part of this group
that is victim offender dialog group that I participated in for 18 months,
and the chance to sit with families that had lost someone
to explain you understood
the depth of their loss, to give them a chance to express it to you
in all of its painful detail
and to be able to sit with that,
to sit with their pain,
to be an enlightened witness to their pain.
Unfortunately, America is not very good at that.
And so we've created
multiple generations of victims that stay victims their whole life.
And you want to help a victim become a survivor.
You want to help a perpetrator become a survivor.
The process is known as restorative justice.
You've heard that terminology before.
Restorative justice is totally misunderstood, however, by most people.
They think it's about getting the criminal back into society.
And that's a very small component of it.
Restorative justice is about getting the community to survive their victimhood.
If you know anything about
the stats, African-American young men
commit homicide at about eight times the average of an American male.
A lot of that is revenge killings.
They've been insulted.
Their prize, someone in their family has been insulted.
Revenge is what restorative
justice is trying to short circuit.
An amazing amount of crime is driven by revenge and blood debt.
The military learned that in Iraq and Afghanistan.
What blood debt can do.
I learned it in prison.
And restorative justice is trying to short circuit that.
Trust me, that's what Chicago needs right now.
When you see what's going on there.
I, I did a podcast.
I did a podcast with three cops, call three cops, talk with.
They're trying to restore the trust between the police and the community
because they realized without that, they can't do their jobs effectively.
Yeah.
Is that.
That extreme of.
Oh, sorry, I was
was that experience?
You know, speaking with the victims and hearing their stories,
that's got to be one of the hardest things you've ever done.
I can only imagine.
But it sounds like that really,
really transformed you to this.
That's a great way of putting it. Yes.
Yes. I became a different person.
I think
my transformation was powered
by a unique force.
People of faith often can
believe God can empower them to change.
It wasn't God that empowered me.
It wasn't the love from my family.
It empowered me to change.
It was murder.
Empower me to change.
You think you know what powers take a life.
You want to know what power is.
If you want to know what you are capable of, the horrible truth of it.
Take a life.
I knew that I had to do everything
I could conceivably do to make sure I would never
take risks like that again.
I owed it to my victims,
her family, my family
to make sure that would never happen again.
That's what empowered me to change.
And to be honest, the group of men that I did it with
were all murderers as well.
And I call it the circle.
That's the the the metaphor I like to use that has no corners.
You can't hide. You can't get away from people.
The circle is where you got to
take off that armor you've put on your whole life
to protect yourself and have some honest discussion and vulnerability.
Unfortunately, that honest discussion isn't enough
because you've got blind spots.
You don't know why you do a lot of stuff.
If you want to talk to a lot of people who are frustrated by how they
keep coming back to
their
addiction and other problems, it's because they can't see their blind spots.
And so they're going to keep repeating
those same mistakes until they can find out what it is.
And that small group environment is a great way
to find your blind spots because other people see it, even if you don't.
Yeah.
When often we surround ourselves with people
who have similar blind spots or are too afraid themselves to like
tell us the thing we need to hear, you know, and kind of
it's why it's important to to build relationships
with people who don't see eye to eye with you on certain things.
Because if nothing else,
you check each other, you balance each other.
So, yeah, that's that's a challenge for everyone,
not just addicts or anything, but it's something to be very aware of that
it's virtually impossible to figure it all out on your own
because life forces are real and we all have them.
And those are areas for growth.
And that's not necessarily a bad thing.
It's just it is and you have to work on it so.
Well, I wanted to first applaud
you for a specific distinction that I caught.
A lot of people, when they do something that they regret, they call it an accident
and you specified that it was a crime.
So there's some ownership and some humbleness there.
And I appreciate that.
One of the things I wanted to circle back to real quick, you said you had 27 jobs
since then, so for dads who have made mistakes
and have like a felony on their record, for example,
what advice would you give them after being released
like that would help
them when they when they get released out of the situation?
What what's the best way for them to to get back on their feet
through that that tough time with with that
that record on on there hanging over their shoulders, so to speak.
Sure. Sure.
That's a
it's a challenge
to be a contributing
community member is the way I like to characterize it once again
and not fall back into old habits.
I've had 27 jobs.
I feel like a lot of my
so my former community was built up, built upon my ability to
to mediate and network and that it's like a tree,
if you haven't watered it for seven years, is dead.
You can't thank the water it's going to bring it back to life.
That life is over for me.
So I've had to start over from the very beginning.
And that usually means service jobs
being educated.
I've I've graded college business class papers for people
I manage three different websites.
I do content moderation creation for other websites
in the nonprofit Criminal justice space.
I, I think the thing I'm most proud of
will go to something that was started by
by my ex. I'm going to call her.
I don't want to call my wife
and I don't want to call her my baby mama or my children's mother.
She's my ex is the way I think about.
We're very big into co-parenting, by the way.
Anybody who's divorced
move heaven and earth to be
a good co-parent.
I've seen way too many that way too many couples destroy
their relationships with their children by using their children as weapons
against the other party.
Now, be a cult That just.
Keeps the cycle, darling. Yeah,
suck it up and face it.
And we've been able to do that very effectively.
My ex got remarried about a year ago
and the catering company that she had for her,
her second marriage
asked if my
then 16 and 18 year old children could work for them.
And so my ex knew the struggles I was having
financially by having to.
I tend to work about six jobs at one time.
I've helped draft
expert opinion letters
for doctors and malpractice cases,
nonprofit grant
applications, a lot of stuff.
But so she said, Hey, Wayne,
why don't you do that to and
and it wasn't too
I had to take that job at the catering company
because my daughter was 16 and I sure as hell wasn't going
to let her work in an adult environment without my supervision.
She's my little baby.
I don't care what you say.
And so that was not
this summer that just passed, but the summer before.
And I worked at the catering company and
I've always
I believe in the story of Joseph and the Crow.
Too many colors.
You should be the best that you can be,
whatever you are, and life will take care of itself.
A modern way of explaining that is it doesn't matter.
The cards are dealt how you play the hand, right?
That's what you have control over is the process right?
So I started working at this catering company and had the chance to work
with both of my children because even though my children
come from an elite existence,
you know, my son split his time between the catering company and working
at a hedge fund.
My daughter spent this summer
at the San Francisco DA's office, as well as
at a member of the Board of Supervisors office
in San Francisco
and cater because they have to learn what money is
and how difficult it is to earn or they're going to be
like so many of their peers that are just whiners and don't understand.
They've got luxury problems, let's put it that way.
And I don't want my kids to have those luxury problems,
but that at Father's Day this year, my, my children
took me to a great dim sum restaurant, and I'd ask them as their present.
For me, Father's Day was, you know, what have you learned?
What is it about me like?
What have you learned about me?
That that that shows you who I am?
And my son said,
You know, Dad, I came back
the second summer and work the job and
everybody loved you.
Your coworkers, the managers, the owners, the chefs,
everybody wants to work with you.
Everybody trust your opinion.
I now manage a number.
I'm working a gig tomorrow at a museum for a top
in law firm that I would have applied to a few years ago.
Right then, I'm now the catering guy serving orders.
I'm going to be a captain, so I'm in charge of all the serving staff.
So I'm moving up the the food chain
at that company.
But the fact that he realized that everybody loved me
and that they trusted me and how how he admired
the diligence
that I would lend a helping hand, even if it was outside the scope
of my responsibilities
to other people and make sure everybody could be the best they could be.
You can't make a dad prouder.
Yeah. Yeah.
My daughter is a senior in high school.
She's the vice president of her high school.
She goes to You guys can't see it.
She goes to Choate, Rosemary Hall, which is
a top boarding school in in Connecticut.
It's where John F Kennedy went to.
It's where Ivanka Trump went to
the Mellons send their kids there.
One of my son's good friends is from the Mars family of Mars.
Candy, I mean, that kind of school. She's the vice president.
She's the
then the captain of the golf team there for two years, the varsity golf team.
And she
let me meet her boyfriend,
Adam, fly out from Baltimore.
And I got to sit down and take him out to a lunch.
And she trusted me enough
to meet her boyfriend
and just ask her about that.
Yeah,
it's a great responsibility and a great experience.
And I'm and he's a great kid.
That's great.
So can we rewind a little bit on
you back stage?
You had said that your ex-wife
was very good about keeping you
involved with your children even when you went to prison.
So can you walk us through you know, did they were they able to come visit you
relatively frequently?
How did you maintain your relationship with them
while you were in and what have you done
since getting out to,
as in your own words, kind of, you know,
restore the tapestry of your relationships together?
Yeah. Now
prison is
exists in a time like past.
We still have those big old payphones.
We used to put quarter percent in prison.
If you have TV, it's broadcast TV.
None of this on demand video stuff
because I was in a prison full of of murderers.
So most of these guys have been down 20, 30, 40 years.
When I say a time like past
these guys still use the same hairstyle they had when they went to prison.
I'm talking,
you know, mullets, you know, Jerry curls.
I mean, all the stuff that they used to have, they still have in prison.
So you're in a time like past and you have very limited access.
You can have a 15 minute phone call, for example.
There has to be a collect phone call.
So somebody has to be willing to accept that call and you have to schedule that,
But it's
much less valuable than you would think because there's a bank of four phones.
I was living mainly in a dorm with 200 men.
I had a bunk, so it's a lower bunk in an upper bunk.
And there's four phones right in a row there.
There's a big sign right in front of the phones.
It says, Please keep your hands out of your pants, if that gives you
any idea what a lot of the phone calls are like when people are on those phones.
I'm trying to talk with my kids.
Right.
Not hear about the love people and to have with each other.
And you're right next to each other.
And, you know, we come from an elite culture
where we've taught ourselves not to listen in other people's conversations.
People in prison don't think like that.
They see a lot more and hear a lot more than you would ever imagine.
And so you have to be very careful about what you say
to your children.
And that also goes true for the visiting room.
And visits are limited.
I was lucky because even though
we got divorced,
my ex
honored her commitment to bring the kids to visit me and
try to do that as regularly as possible.
Probably averaged out to about once every six weeks
during the time I was in prison.
But it was regular until they went away to school.
They both went to the same boarding school or obviously that meant
I didn't get to see them.
But when they were around I did
and she brought them.
There was an 18 month span
where my son wouldn't come.
It'll go to your your issue of
how did you stay in touch and how do you keep that tapestry alive?
I felt
my son have way too much estrogen in his life.
I know some of you guys have daughters.
I've got a daughter, too.
But my firstborn was was a boy.
He had a mother, a grandmother, a sister and a cat, all female.
And the public school class
that he was in was over two thirds female teachers.
And so there were two male
private schools in San Francisco for boys only.
And I wrote letters to both of them.
My son's in fifth grade.
Here's a story. Here's where he's at. Here's my story.
Do you guys accept transfer students for sixth grade?
One of those schools wrote back.
They also had a very intimate relationship
with the preschool my kids had gone to, which was at the same church I got you.
And I was very active in my church.
They put in a word for me, and so my son transferred to a boys school
for fifth, sixth and our sixth, seventh and eighth grades for three years.
But the first 18 months of that time, he didn't talk to me
because his friends had found out his dad was in prison.
And they
asked as young boys, they use it against him and he was mad.
He was hurt and it was my fault
and he wouldn't come.
So to entice him
to get through that anger
and I've got to tell you, on this day, I'm still angry at those parents
because those kids were doing Google searches on me.
That's something they heard from their parents
in my belief.
And I don't blame those kids.
That's what kids do.
Am I?
Trust me, going to that boy school helped my son toughen up and be
able to choose to go to a boarding school
for his last four years of school before he went to college.
And his sister followed him there because she saw his example and she wanted
to have a similar challenge. Right.
I think one of the greatest fears I had before I went to prison
was how can I keep up with my kids are too damn smart.
I was frightened about that.
My kid would organize his toy dinosaurs in a timeline.
Okay.
His goal in life was to read all the Harry Potter books
the most times you could get in the Guinness Book of World Records.
Did he do it?
So you have to find ways. He ran him over.
He ran him, I think, eight times before he got.
That's a. Lot.
And there's a lot of Harry Potter books.
Yeah.
How do you stay connected to your kids?
You have to meet them where they are.
Too many parents try to instruct all the time.
Don't tell them where they should be.
Meet them where they are.
So I would I would use.
So I went to the prison library and read all the damn Harry Potter books.
I don't mind fantasy.
I wasn't reading Harry Potter.
For me, I needed to have a common vocabulary and examples
detail enough to show I'd read those books.
So my son and I had something in common to talk about.
When he had to keep me, he had to keep me updated
on his baseball career and on what the Giants were doing.
I demanded that he do it.
We still regularly debrief all the way
down to single-A with the Giants organization.
You know, we know all the players, everything that goes on.
No, I didn't play baseball.
High school.
No, I didn't love baseball.
For its sake, you better believe I learned to love baseball.
My son thinks I love baseball as much as he can
shoot during COVID.
When they weren't going to school, he got addicted to FIFA,
which is a game on Xbox, right?
It's professional soccer.
I to learn all about professional soccer.
I am now a diehard Tottenham Hotspur fan and in the Premier League.
Okay,
he's more Chelsea fan.
We battle about that.
By the way, those two teams played each other
and he's got bragging rights because Chelsea v Tottenham
421 this week and I got to go live with that.
I got to live with that.
I learned Premier League soccer and the rules of soccer
and the difference between a penalty and a foul
and what offsides are because
I had to meet my son where he wants
and use the vocabulary.
He was comfortable with. If I did have something I wanted to
show him.
You know, I think as parents, you know, we know that people learn from books
and they learn in school.
And you've you've heard the old cliche, you know, do
as I say, not as I do.
Children learn by observation.
First, we've forgotten that as adults,
only observation they don't have words to to put to that observation.
They don't have memories of it.
They learn by observation and they learn it from their parents.
That's only their. Master.
It is observation, too. Yes.
This is always more than always watching and always judging
and always interpreting only at the level they're capable of understanding.
I've had a real challenge with my daughter since I've come home to
to regain her trust.
I mean,
she was five when I did my crime and I was the apple of her eye and everything.
I was her dad, the dad.
You'd want to be the dad we all are to five year olds.
And then when I
went to prison at six, she had to
accept the sobering reality
that I was a criminal.
And so.
And I abandoned her.
That's the way a six year old looks at it.
She doesn't realize I had to serve a sentence.
That's the way I tried to explain it to her, that it was my duty as a citizen
because it's a crime I committed
and that I needed that time to develop
the tools I needed to develop to make sure I wouldn't commit that crime again.
Rehabilitation is the term that's used.
I needed that time, so I had to do it for multiple reasons.
But she couldn't understand that.
She just knew that I betrayed her
and abandoned her.
And so the defense
mechanism a six year old develops because of that is she won't trust men.
She's had a
hard time with male coaches since then.
She's had a hard time with male teachers
since then,
and I've had to work
very hard to earn her trust.
One example of that is my daughter is a cat person.
She's got a cat Milky Way.
It's the cat's name and Milky Way may join us during this podcast.
She's been hearing me talk for a while, so she might jump out here and talk.
My daughter's away in high school, and so when she's gone,
my daughter trusts me
to take care of her cat when she's gone.
So I'm earning her trust back step by step.
This is the most precious thing in her life, and she lets Dad take care of it.
And I send her a Snapchat literally every day.
By the way, I don't I've never used Snapchat
or my daughter told me that's the way I had to let her know.
And I send her a Snapchat virtually every day of her car
because I want her to know that her cat's happy and healthy and fine
and that she should focus on her studies
and being the vice president of the high school
and being the captain of the golf team and not worry about her cat.
But I also do it
because I want to show her she can trust me
and try to help her dismantle that defense mechanism.
You can't trust men
because that will mean that will haunt her the rest of her life.
If she can't get rid of that.
I love how focused you are on this,
and the examples you gave are very, very impressive.
Thanks for sharing those.
And it's so important too, because like you're mentioning
a book, Carl Young, obviously the authentic self.
You know,
one of the things that he says in the book is that finding our true selves
means that first we have to become conscious of the beliefs
that we created out of what have happened to us.
And obviously what's happened to you is pretty substantial.
And there's a lot of, I'm sure, guilt and shame, remorse, those kind of things.
And you have an agreed gain trust.
So what are
what are the words redemption and forgiveness?
What do they mean to you and how have you tried to earn those things?
At its core,
they're about accepting responsibility.
I believe all our crime,
all sin, for that
matter, is a form of selfishness.
Yeah.
You get alcoholism
as a form of selfishness to your own body.
You are so selfish that you are willing to destroy your own body with drugs.
Fentanyl is the crisis America is going through.
Now, that's a form of selfishness.
So how do you expect responsibility
for not only what you've done, but what you're capable of?
And then how do you
use that capability for the good of society?
That's the essence
of how I would characterize the definition of those terms.
Accept responsibility and develop the tools
to be a responsible, contributing member
at every in every facet of your life whether it's your family,
your friends, your community, your church,
your your country, your society, your your world.
How do you how do you contribute?
How do you find ways to be of service?
Because in essence, that's the only way I can live with
myself, is being of service in as many ways as I can find.
I'm since I got out, I've been on the board of a nonprofit called Man to Man,
which was created to teach fatherhood values to inner city kids,
which is a euphemism for black teenagers and black fathers.
Close to 75% of black children are born out of wedlock in the United States.
Most of them are raised in a fatherless household.
And see, these men need the tools to be fathers.
They don't have them. They didn't want them at home.
And so this nonprofit teaches in San Quentin.
These fatherhood principles also,
in many cases as a commission of what's called probation
for people who are outside as a condition of their probation,
they have to take a class on nonviolence
because many of them abuse their children and their spouses physically.
And so they have to take a course.
And so we teach courses to these men in county jails,
as well as the men who are out and awaiting trial
or out in probation
on how to develop the tools that they need for nonviolent communication,
for accepting responsibility for their own actions and how to
be a responsible father.
That's way for me on the
redemption side is supporting that group.
And because
California
is about 6% African-American, I've got to be honest about this stuff,
and it gets close to stuff people aren't comfortable talking about.
I apologize if it makes you uncomfortable.
California, 6% African-American.
It's about 36 to 38% of the prison population is African-American.
And it's not just because the police are looking at them all the time.
There's a real problem in this community.
And fatherlessness seems to be the the common factor
consistently fatherlessness
about crime, about dropping out of school,
about teenage pregnancy, boys and girls
it's just there's a myriad of these causes that that the wellspring
are the source of these problems is not having a father in the home
and and they need to be good fathers, not just fathers.
Yeah. So how can we deal with that?
I can't lead that group.
I'm a white man,
you know, Stuart's in charge of man to man.
Stewart's the one as an African-American
man, as a
a former Marine Corps sergeant,
as a volunteer in San Quentin, as a
as a minister who runs that group
and is able to communicate with these men, I can be in the back.
I'm aboard account Murray's money.
I can get him on podcasts.
And if you guys want to talk to Stewart, I'd highly recommend it.
And the work he's done with man to man is.
Pivotal of their.
Job in our society.
So that's that's the way I look at it.
Brandon Does that make sense?
Absolutely.
So this is kind of an open ended question.
It might take you a second to to think about it, but I think with your events
and what's happened to you in your life, it's important to ask.
So the question is, what is your purpose
in life?
I, I find that at this stage
of my life, being of service
is the way I characterize it.
And my guilty pleasure is learning
because I find that I can be a better and more service
with the more skills and tools I'm able to develop
in the vernacular of the startup world.
I don't care what your technology is.
Can you scale that technology to have real impact?
And so I look at things that are scalable.
I don't want Stewart to teach a class.
I want him to develop a coursework that we can put on
an iPad that a prison might have so that they can do this
course remotely or do this course on their own.
I want to scale it,
and a lot of the stuff
I work on is how do we scale a good idea?
Too many of them die
an early death because they're not scalable.
They're not scalable often because the founder's
so caught up in what they've created, they won't let go of it, to be honest.
But that's another story.
So I with a lot of people.
And how do you scale that idea?
I've been the web manager of the Sanquhar news since I got out,
and so I've worked very hard for the online content
to be as important
and to be honest, read much more often than the paper version.
You know, we have 15 or 19,000 page views
a month versus the 35,000 print copies we put out.
And so I work hard to make that a better newspaper because.
I think it's a great forum for people to hear from the men themselves,
the work they're doing to transform themselves,
to be worthy, to come back as contributing members of society.
So people aren't always afraid of them.
They can trust them to come back.
They need to see those stories and the needs
to motivate the other men in prison that there is a path forward.
I think many people,
that's the real truth.
They know what they should do. Come on.
We all do.
We just don't understand why we can't do it.
That blind spot
process and the tools, the psychic tools we need to work on that
our our
that they're not intuitive,
that you grow more to develop them and to deploy them and to use them.
And I don't think we're as a society very good at teaching us.
Faith is a wonderful tool for that.
But we've become a much more secular society, at least the circles
that I live in, especially in the Bay Area here in San Francisco, I
and so that guilty pleasure has led me
to do a lot of reading and a lot of my son got me into podcast.
So the reason I'm on your show is I do ask him, you know,
what he did with the digital media stuff and his I just watch YouTube videos.
I'm like, What are you talking about?
And I've learned to
appreciate YouTube videos,
but the best way for me to learn
something is I have to read at least one book by an author
because these concepts are usually I'm not smart enough to absorb
and deploy these concepts from a podcast or an.
I got to read a lot more than
that to understand a concept, to really learn it.
I think most people today have a
they have the appearance of learning because they know facts,
but they're worse than somebody who doesn't know anything
because they don't
know what those facts really mean, know
they haven't learned anything out of wisdom.
They just have facts that they spew out.
They're more dangerous than the uneducated, in my estimation.
So I work very hard to educate myself effectively,
which takes a lot of time in my case.
And and I think
I'm happy
to have 27 jobs since I've been back because it gives me
a lot of free time to focus on on other things that are important to me,
both to develop the psychic tools
I need to be a better person and to help my children
become adults.
So many things in our society.
I'll give you a characterization.
You think you're looking at the world
and you're not. You're looking at a mirror.
The world's the inverse of what you think it is.
How many parents try to keep their children safe?
The worst thing that could do for them?
They need brave kids, not safe kids.
They need kids who know how to face challenges.
You need a kid to fall down and scrape their knee.
Absolutely.
You have to help them take a few minutes to talk about it and to calm down
and to put a Band-Aid on it and tell them you love them
and to sit with that pain when they go through it.
How many kids do they have never even scraped a knee,
never gone camping, for heaven's sake, Our society looks at the world backward.
Restorative justice.
An example of that is what I talked about with restorative justice
when I told you that it's for the victims.
That isn't what restorative justice teaches.
That's what I believe restorative justice is teaching about
getting that person accept responsibility for their crime.
And that isn't what it's about.
Life isn't about happiness.
Your natural
state is fear.
Happiness is what is what
you have to learn to avoid fear.
And we go chasing this happiness in wrong ways, right?
We we chase transcendental or momentary
happiness versus true
accomplishment, right?
In the sense of,
you know, you have to have purpose in life
and that means you have to carry a burden system.
This is the real reason you need to be able to lug that.
Rocco. You should enjoy it
having So a purpose driven life is, you know, these cliches.
We verse terms are the essence of it.
But I think very often they're not.
They're seen as a mirror image of what they really are.
And and that's what I work on.
Yes. The authentic self.
I highly recommend you guys read the the
The Drama of a Gifted Child
by Alice Miller.
Alice Miller was a psychologist and is from Switzerland,
so these books had to be translated into English seminal work
on discovering the authentic self and facing
childhood trauma and what what every child goes through.
By the way, it's just they're different levels of trauma.
Some children may be physically abused or raped.
Other children may simply be yelled at or not get attention from their parents.
It's still trauma.
And so and trauma that we've
been trained by our society not to face and to shut off.
And so being able to open that door and face that trauma and deal with it,
that experience as a child.
Alice Miller is brilliant.
One of my favorite people.
And the drama The Gifted Child is the title of her book and I'd highly recommend
that that you read that.
I know that most people.
A name that most people no.
Good, good. Trust me.
You'll read everything she writes when you read that book.
She's an arrogant asshole.
I got that.
I love that woman.
One name
you've probably heard a lot of that I think is misunderstood.
Is Jordan Peterson.
I think any father, if they want to,
a starter book should read his 12 Rules for Life.
I think any
educated man that wants to the world should read maps of meaning.
His seminal work that came out in the nineties,
I found out about Jordan when Peterson in prison I read Maps of Meaning.
Didn't even know he was a YouTube star until after I got out,
but I went to see him
when he came to San Francisco and I wore a suit
and I paid the money to get a picture taken with him.
I'm very grateful to Jordan Peterson and the work that he's done,
especially for fathers and for men and a purpose driven life.
And even though half of America may hate him, I deeply admire that man.
And I think he's done a lot of good work.
I don't know how you can hate him.
I've had enough some meaning about a decade ago,
and it literally changed the trajectory of my life.
And then here it's like 12 rules for life
and then 12 more rules like, wow, like C.S.
Lewis and Jordan Peterson are the two titans in my my college years, for sure.
Man, I like it.
I like it.
Good. Great.
I'll I'll give you one that gave me hope for the future.
Jordan has a good he's not calling a problem.
He tells you what you should do,
but it doesn't give you a lot of hope for the future.
In a lot of ways. Right?
America is in trouble.
Have you ever read?
David Deutsch is an Oxford professor out of England.
There's a book called The Beginning of Infinity.
And after,
when we do a debrief after this, I'll send you guys an email with the links.
But David Deutsch, the Beginning of Infinity.
He came up with a concept known as constructor theory.
He's a follower of Karl Popper.
If you've done any philosophy, you might have heard of Karl Popper.
David Deutsch Give me hope for the future
because he's about the creation and deployment of useful knowledge
and useful knowledge is what matters.
And as humans were universal explainers.
We can create useful knowledge.
And he's about fallible ism, you know,
nothing's perfect. There's always a mistake.
You can always find a better, clearer answer.
But because he believes in useful knowledge, he can celebrate Newton.
Even if if Albert Einstein's concepts
transcended and replaced many of the things we learned from Newton.
Because at his time it was useful knowledge.
And so the key is what is useful knowledge
and how do we deploy it effectively?
And then we should always be seeking to make it better and that we don't learn
from example or experiment, that it's just a way of proving useful knowledge.
Useful knowledge comes from inspiration and imagination.
You have
to think of the idea and then test it first.
Science is not science.
Science is a methodology for testing ideas.
Yeah, people.
Are going to I'm going to flip the script and share a book with you.
My step brother actually wrote a very, very extensive book on
on how science,
as we know it, is essentially
kind of a modern phenomenon
created not actually by scientists, as we would refer to them, but by historians.
So I'll share the book at the afterwards.
Yeah, please, Please.
It's a really long title.
I don't want to misquoted on the episode.
Well, the conceptual framework of the of the right
and the Romanticist and all the others of these frames.
So I'm going to take you guys back.
I burned down my psycho delusional house
completely.
So when I say I went back, I went back,
I went pre-socratic.
I went before Socrates, Plato and Aristotle
in the philosophies that I was reading
A great book to start you off
is called Preface to Plato, by the way, by a guy named Havel.
I think it's Erich Havel preface to Plato.
It's so old you can't find it digitally, right?
It's one of those books.
But he explained the transition
from a mythic oral culture
into a written culture
that was created at the time,
and it was memorialized in the writings
of Plato, about Socrates and then of Aristotle, about his time as Plato.
Right?
They were three generations with great ideas.
Victor I'll definitely look at it.
I've definitely read it.
So, so Pre-Socratic
So what I've studied is the cultural
zeitgeist change from mythology
to written
and then the change from writing to print.
If you've ever read Marshall McLuhan, if you have it,
you can't understand the modern world.
If you haven't read Marshall McLuhan.
The Gutenberg Galaxy was a book he wrote.
I found it in San Quentin State Prison.
I never read him. I found him in a footnote.
And because I love footnotes, I looked it up
and I found the Gutenberg Galaxy.
I was the first person to check it out of prison, and it was written in 1962.
So I can't say that many of my peers in prison
were reading stuff like that, but it changed my world.
It completely,
utterly changed my view of the world.
The recognition that we live
in what's called linear sequential thought mindset.
We like
the instructions and we follow them step by step.
Right.
And the digital world,
which she saw the birth of called the electronic world.
But the digital world operates as a unified field.
It operates as a globe, not a line.
And the conflict we're experiencing right now is
we're trying to transition from our linear
sequential culture, which is reactive, right?
We respond to problems into a unified field
where everybody can work on the same thing at the same time.
You don't have to do it step by step,
where information has become limitless, frictionless and free,
where you used to have to have an expert to find a needle in a haystack.
And now technology gives you a needle stuck in any asshole
can pull a needle out and say, Look how I got the needle right.
I got the answer.
And so we have to learn a new way of critical
thinking, new way of thinking than we had in the past.
And Marshall McLuhan explains that in brilliant detail
and insightful understanding of linear sequential thought as a tip,
I you have to embody this type
of learning to switch from linear sequential, not to a unified field.
All of the massive online multiplayer online games are unified field games.
Any number of people can play it at the same time and come in at any stage, right?
They don't have to start at the beginning and work their way through.
Uber operates in a unified field format.
If you've ever had multiple, multiple stops on a new ride,
they always ask you to put in
your end stop first.
And most of us, because we live in linear sequential thought, we put in the stops
in the order we think Uber should use, and it asks us not to do that.
It says set, set the field first
and then put the stops that are inside that function, not outside of it.
So putting your last stop
first
and then putting your stops in between, and that's not the way we think.
So you have to learn to think in a new way if you guys haven't played Sudoku,
I play it daily because Sudoku teaches your mind to operate as a unified field
because it teaches you to look at rows and columns
and squares and big squares and positive and negative.
So it teaches your mind to think in a unified field format to take advantage
of the unified field functionality that our digital realm gives us.
And most of us can't take advantage of it because our mind has been trained
in linear, sequential thought because of how we read.
To be honest, literature helps us in a lot of ways, but it also hinders us
and limits us to take advantage, full advantage, of these new technologies.
I love Sudoku and it as far
as books are concerned, it's all principle until its application, right?
So that's the application is definitely the critical key component there.
I am so curious off all these books you get, you got super passionate
pretty quick about it.
How many books did you read in prison and how many have you read since I.
I have
four notebooks full of my notes
of the books I read in prison.
I would try to limit my notes to about one page because.
I wanted to get to the essence of it.
Yes, I was a voracious reader in prison.
I mentioned I was a proud man
and how that led to my downfall.
I also had to take care of myself
in prison so I wouldn't let anybody send me money in prison.
I had to work.
I had many jobs in prison.
My first job was an electrician.
I worked at a furniture factory
as a as a tutor
at the Sandalwood News, as the managing editor a lot of different jobs.
But when my friends on the outside wanted to help me or give me something,
they'd offer to put money on my books
because that's the best way you can survive in prison.
Rich guys in prison,
they tend to fall into just a couple of categories.
One, I call the ATM
where they become the ATM machine.
So they give gifts to everybody and everybody lines up.
So a lot of guys would have a lot of money on their books.
So They could go to the commissary once a month and buy things for other people.
That's how they would keep themselves safe.
And I was too proud to do that.
I would rather earn my $0.18 an hour
and spend those meager earnings on what I wanted.
I wasn't going to give anybody anything in prison.
I found a different way to survive.
There.
But to to go back
to the the concept,
which I've totally lost.
Sorry. BRENNAN That's okay.
I was just wondering how many books you've read in.
Books that's worth so So that was what I saw, what I would tell my friends to do.
As I say, send me a book.
Right.
Send me a book.
What do you find?
And it sometimes I'd ask them because I read,
I find footnotes in articles or books that I'd like to see.
Could you send me this book? You know?
And sometimes they'd have something that they'd send me maps of meaning.
For example, a friend sent me,
and you have to read that at least two or three times to understand it.
At least I did.
Have you guys ever heard of thinking fast and slow?
Thinking Fast and Slow was by Daniel
Kahneman and traversing two guys.
They won the Nobel Prize based on the research they did for this
book changed my worldview of how humans think.
And it's called There's a two track mind.
There's the the fast and the slow.
You want instinctual in one's rational thought
and how those interact with each other and how they help us make decisions.
This brilliant book, that's the kind of so I would get these kind of books
that you'd have to read two or three times and read the footnotes.
If you I'm not smart enough to gain it.
I needed all of that to understand it, right?
And so I would read books, I read voraciously.
I don't
I don't keep track of them.
I probably have
I tend to have five or six different books at the same time
because I read different books at different paces
and for different reasons.
I took I read it both my kids are taking sociology this year,
and so I got a book from a professor of sociology and
learned about sociology.
I don't remember taking it in school,
but I wanted to know the vocabulary they were developing
and the environment they were living in.
Right?
And so I got a book on sociology, so I tend to read
really deep thought books
and, philosophy, books and big books
and, you know, some entertainment, but but not a lot.
A lot of current events stuff.
Francis Fukuyama explained how political system, the political decay work.
If you understand what's going on with our
our global civilization and the governments and how they operate,
his concepts of political systems and political decay will blow your mind.
Brilliant Stanford professor.
Amazing stuff.
ROBERTS on Pelosi's another Stanford professor wrote a book called Behave,
which explains the neurological basis for our emotions and our actions.
So helps you understand how
how testosterone works, how dopamine works
and, what they really are.
For example, testosterone is not a violence
hormone.
What it does is it it takes your pre dispositions
and magnifies them is what I've done.
And so explains how testosterone works, explains how these different
neurotransmitters are impacted and how they how the hormones
and proteins affect us as human beings.
Seminal work at least 800 pages explains how to with anxiety
in great debt, which is something I've dealt with a lot in my life.
So yeah, I read a lot,
but I tend to find I look for people
who are heretics.
I like to find people who think in a different way.
Yeah.
I celebrate the advent of AI that's coming.
If you ever read Cass Sunstein, he wrote a book called Noise.
It's a longer title.
Noise is the first word, and Cass Sunstein is book on noise, I think is is a
template for how to to deploy
AI safely and effectively and explains the potential that AI will bring to make
our world an infinitely better place than it is right now.
And we won't all get turned into paperclips.
Don't worry.
We'll see.
We'll see, said the Zen master.
Yeah, Yeah.
At least that's what I believe. So.
So yeah, I read a lot of stuff across the spectrum.
Philosophic, societal, technological,
you know.
How is our world changing?
I want to understand that,
you know, I'm very curious about these large language
models like Baade and Chatterjee Beatty have come out,
and I'm really trying to unlock the potential of them.
But coming at it from a unified field perspective,
not a linear sequential thought perspective.
And what that means is it's all about the prompt,
not the database.
And the database
looks for pattern recognition and it will serve up to you
the things that are that
the deepest patterns, the most recognized patterns.
And so you have to be very sophisticated
in your prompt if you want to get a good answer. Right?
It's the same thing people art, it's
exactly the specifics of the prompt is 100 everything.
All the images end up looking. That's right.
Our society has switched from knowing the answer to how do you ask the question?
And we don't actually.
Yeah, it's interesting.
We have to learn to ask the question and and be.
And so another way to characterize some of these things guys, big data
and all of the information we have is analogous to a digital telescope.
So it shows us the sky
shows us how everything works on the macro level and social media
and the and the smartphone, our social microscope.
So they give us access to the individual in a very intimate level.
And our reactive mindset doesn't
the potential of these technologies is to become proactive.
COVID never had to be as bad as it was.
If we had been proactive instead of reactive,
if we had used the technologies of big data, going to.
Get blown up on a whole different topic.
Now we're going to have to shelve that one.
And and deploy them, deploy them with the microscope of
you know, the iPhone or smart phone and social media effectively.
I actually joined a nonprofit
started by a complexity theory professor at MIT
when we were trying to get in the trenches early with COVID and deal with COVID.
Some of my most popular writings in On Medium are about the early days of COVID
and and and broke my heart
how we couldn't stop being reactive
had so many people suffer
both on the front end by not dealing with
COVID, the early and on the back end,
where we kept restrictions in place for infinitely long periods.
And yep, you know, as adults it didn't harm us.
I do a lot of work with it.
We're seeing the fallout now.
Children Yeah, I mean, this.
Is the children.
Children, children, learning disabilities and other
you know, other disorders are exponentially through the roof.
And the achievement gap is widened from about a year.
And it's really. Two years where.
We're just we're just seeing the tip of the iceberg, unfortunately.
So, you know, I guess only take away from all that is
I just hope parents across the board are significantly more aware of
no one's coming to save you,
be a part of your own rescue, ensure that you put systems in place
for your children, because if you rely on other people, it's all that went.
So yeah, they're facing different risks than we did.
Yeah.
And so you have to have different tools to help them face it.
The main one is a parent is communication.
Alice Miller
deployed a concept called The Enlightened Witness.
She was a professional psychologist for patients for a very long time
before she really got into her writing career.
And in theory, that's what
if you have mental health counseling, it should be an enlightened witness
because nobody can point out your blind spot to you.
Even if they know it.
You have to discover it.
They have to be witness to that process.
And and so I think my biggest role as a father is to be an enlightened witness.
I didn't have to play FIFA with my son on Xbox during COVID
when kids were going crazy.
I had to be.
His front row is the way I like to truncate that concept.
I'm your front row.
I will always cheer you on.
I will always want to be there and support what you want to do
because I think way too many parents try to force their kids to either
avoid the mistakes they made or do the things they wish they had.
And I want my kids to be self-expression, and I work
very hard to find a way to do that.
Yeah, but make an.
Informed decision on your self-expression.
Yeah. You know,
don't get me wrong.
But yeah, the way in.
Philosophy, I have. Yeah, I like it.
Thanks for sharing.
I guess final question for you.
It's kind of one we we asked a similar version to pretty much everyone is
you know, it's just a core memory or, you know, a real
something that really jumps out at you when you think about just
one of the best times of being a dad with your kids and,
you know, just want to share what that is with us.
Yeah,
I read listen to some of your podcasts, as I said.
So I knew this question was coming.
So I've been thinking about it for a while.
I'm going to tell you a story.
Hopefully it won't last too long, but as I think
I told you, I'm a jazz player, not an orchestra player.
So if you need to, you know, wave me off the stage, go ahead.
I'm going to
tell you a story about astrophysics
and how it helped me
mend my relationship with my daughter.
Let's hear it. So
I'm sure my kids were I was scared because my kids
were really smart and they've proven that, you know, they
they score above the 99th, the other straight-A students.
You get what I'm saying? They're smart.
And I'm I wanted that.
I wanted my kids to be smart.
So my daughter was doing a school project
on space and looking to survive
in the vacuum of space.
And as a parent who tried to stay active in her life, she told me about this.
So I did some research on it.
It was trying to to be helpful with the stuff that.
Meet her where she is. This is what she's interested in.
She named her cat Milky Way for having sex, right?
I mean, this is something that she was fascinated by.
And so I,
I took a risk
and I asked for help
as fathers.
Asked for help. Don't be so proud.
Don't be so ashamed that you don't want admit your weakness.
Ask for help.
I wrote a letter to a famous astrophysicist
and asked, you know, what are some tools that I could use
as a father to help my children stay ahead?
Vested in STEM research, especially my daughter.
Because we know that's a real challenge for a lot of girls, right?
How can I help do that? Now, his name is Neil deGrasse Tyson.
If you've heard of him before, he saw it's on TV all the time,
you know, runs the Natural History Museum in New York is great, right?
So I wrote a letter to Neil deGrasse Tyson asking for his help,
and he wrote back
and he gave me some suggestions, and we started a correspondence
and he put my letter
in one of his books called Letters to an Astrophysicist.
Not very original, but he put it in his book,
and he told me that he would love to meet me and my daughter in person.
And so when he was on his book tour and came to San Francisco,
so less than a year after I was out of prison. Right.
I still have a lot of problems with my daughter and connecting with her.
My son and I were back on track.
We were talking Giants baseball every day.
We were fine.
The day he came home from school, he took it was raining in San Francisco.
He took me out to show me the five different pitches he has on a rainy day.
Right. Because wanted to show me his baseball talents.
And so I was that was good. My daughter was more of a challenge.
And so
Neil deGrasse Tyson said he would he would like to meet us.
And so he said he was coming to San Francisco,
wanted us to come meet him in the green room.
So my daughter and I went backstage an hour before his show.
He had sold out a 1500 seat auditorium in San Francisco
on his book tour, and we were the only people in his green room with him.
And he spent an hour talking to my daughter
one on one about her life and what our interests were about,
the stuff that she likes about space and where she was at.
And as far as the time was drawing near the end,
he said, Hey, you know, we've had a great talk here.
Would be, you know, if you parents don't mind, I mean, you know,
do you want to come up on stage and we'll talk about,
you know, both your dad's letter because that's his book,
but also about you're interested in astrophysics and space and science.
And my daughter said, yes.
And so she had a four minute conversation.
Neil deGrasse Tyson It's all there's videos of this.
It's easy to find
of her on
stage talking with Neil deGrasse Tyson and
the reason I say that's why I'm proud as a father is because
this was a singular father event wasn't something
that her parents both right.
It was something that her dad did that showed he loved her.
He went out of his comfort zone.
He wrote a letter to a famous person.
This famous person respects her dad enough
that he wants to meet her dad and meet her.
And so she could recognize
that I wasn't just an ex-con
and a broken man that I got out of prison
who may still have be doing 27 jobs but has a brain and somebody who who aspires
to war and aspires to excellence and asked for help and got help.
So I think for me, that's one of the proudest experiences I've had,
only because I had the humility to ask for help.
And that's what I would leave as the last word.
Everybody have the courage to ask for help.
Yeah, you never know where it'll come from.
And that was invaluable.
Invaluable for me to reestablish.
And we back together the tapestry of our relationship with my daughter.
That's so awesome.
And it's not just,
you know, it's not just a proud moment for you. It's
something that she's going to remember for the rest of her life, too, Right?
So it's
yeah, those those are the moments we all live for.
Just what an amazing story.
That's so awesome. And I hope that,
you know, it continues to be a catalyst you
to have deeper and further restoration with her. And
Wayne, I
just want to thank you, just man to man for coming up
and sharing your story honestly and openly.
Obviously, it's very difficult, very painful,
you know, but I think that this your story
is going to help a lot of people
because there's so much to relate in the story of,
you know, difficulty and loss and having to make amends and restoration.
And it's just beautiful.
So thank you for sharing.
I want to leave you with a little quote, too, because when Brandon asked you know,
what's your purpose?
And you said service serving people
and a little serendipitous, I just heard this quote
tonight in a meeting prior to us recording this.
It's from Garrett.
Uncle Buck is a former Navy SEAL.
He said, if you want to live a great life, make it about other people.
You want to live a terrible life.
Make it all about yourself.
So you you, without hesitation, said that your purpose is serving others.
And so I think that that is
just the most powerful response.
Given everything you've been through and it's such a great example too.
And then as well the intentionality with your kids and,
you know, learning what interests them and getting involved in it.
So you have something to connect with them on and restore a relationship is just
something that all fathers can do and should do.
So thank you so much.
I know you said you don't
really have a whole lot to plug, but you do write a lot.
You're on medium.
That's correct. And I think you said LinkedIn as well.
People can look you up and find lot of your stuff.
So thank you, Wayne.
Thank you for your time and any closing thoughts?
Feel free.
Yeah, Thanks, George. Renewal.
My closing thoughts would be pitch.
Yes, you can find me on Medium.
I've got it's all free to the public, even though it's behind a paywall.
I've made it all open for everybody to read and a lot of these ideas
and concepts I discussed a lot of the authors.
I just talk about geniuses and heretics quite a bit as well.
And so you can find that if you're curious about it.
A lot about my own journey about addiction and recovery and
parenthood, fatherhood as well.
But I also ask people to look for San
Quentin News.com.
It's a wonderful newspaper.
It's about average is about 24 pages, 40 to 60 articles a month
about different efforts
at restorative justice and redemption and rehabilitation
that are active across the world, not just a segment.
And to give you some idea of what's actually possible
with our criminal justice system and don't get me wrong, it's not happening now.
Sanctions unique.
It is like the Silicon Valley of prison reform.
It's got a lot of great new ideas in the news, talks about them.
And so if you're curious about that or you want to know how you can help read
the articles in the Sankei news and again at San Jose News.com, like the old style,
easy to find.
All right.
Well, Wayne, again, thank you so much.
I really loved speaking with you and learning from your story and
I hope this is going to help a lot of men out there to be inspired
and have the courage to stand up and own their faults and seek restoration
their own lives.
So with that said, that's enough talk.
Let's get climb in the mountain.
See you in the next one.
Thanks for tuning into this episode of the Present Fathers podcast.
Make sure that you subscribe to our YouTube channel
and follow us on Spotify to catch all of our amazing episodes.
We will see you in the next one.