Speaker 1: Hi, Steve Fishman here with a bonus episode. So usually
Speaker 1: we drop bonus episodes at the end of a show.
Speaker 1: Today it's a little different. Today's bonus episode is to
Speaker 1: introduce our next series, which is called Get the Money
Speaker 1: and Run. It's the fourth season in our Burden Feed
Speaker 1: and it's a fantastic story. It's about one of the
Speaker 1: most daring bank robbers of his era. This bank robber
Speaker 1: did it all disguises, body doubles, leaping counters, card chases,
Speaker 1: captain mass games with the FBI. For me, it's a
Speaker 1: kind of perfect show. It's entertaining, its illuminating and also
Speaker 1: incredibly moving. It drops on the Burden Feed April twenty ninth,
Speaker 1: and as always for subscribers, it's available early. It drops
Speaker 1: April twenty second. Subscribers get all episodes all at once
Speaker 1: and ad free to subscribe. Go to True Crime Clubhouse
Speaker 1: on Apple Podcasts. To introduce the show, we're going to
Speaker 1: talk with its creator, Ben Adair. Ben is one of
Speaker 1: the pod versus most accomplished producers. You've probably listened to
Speaker 1: one of his shows, among them Lost Hills, Strange Land,
Speaker 1: Ripple and Pulse. The Untold Story and that's just a
Speaker 1: few of them. Ben's going to take us through some
Speaker 1: of the high points of the series, but I just
Speaker 1: wanted to start with one of my favorite lines from
Speaker 1: the podcast, and I guess one of the scariest. It's
Speaker 1: from our bank robber slash star. Ben had just asked
Speaker 1: him what got him started in the bank robbing business?
Speaker 2: This was the thing that put me on the path
Speaker 2: trying to murder my father.
Speaker 3: Are we rolling? We're going there we go?
Speaker 1: So how do you end up getting to Joe? Yeah?
Speaker 3: So I was doing a podcast and this was before
Speaker 3: podcasting was even really a thing, but I was doing
Speaker 3: a podcast called first Time, Last Time, where I was
Speaker 3: interviewing various people about the first times they do different
Speaker 3: things and the last time they do that same thing.
Speaker 3: And so I was just thinking to myself, one of
Speaker 3: the hardest things to do for the first time must
Speaker 3: be rob a bank, Right, how do you psyche yourself up?
Speaker 3: How do you do how do you do that for
Speaker 3: the first time? So I started poking around, you know,
Speaker 3: doing my research, and at the time that I wanted
Speaker 3: to do this interview, there were essentially like three people
Speaker 3: who were out about being bank robbers. One of them
Speaker 3: was in Oklahoma, and he was a comedian who made
Speaker 3: us stay end up routines about his life as a
Speaker 3: bank robber with lots of jokes that were not very funny.
Speaker 3: The second guy was a guy in Texas, and I
Speaker 3: talked to that guy and I got the distinct feeling
Speaker 3: as I was talking to him that he wasn't quite
Speaker 3: done being a bank robber yet, and so the whole
Speaker 3: idea of doing it for the first time you're doing
Speaker 3: it for the last time didn't really work with him.
Speaker 3: And then I found Joe's memoir and so I just
Speaker 3: wrote him on Facebook and I was like, hey, I
Speaker 3: would love to interview you. We met app in Oakland
Speaker 3: and I interviewed him and the story was better than
Speaker 3: I could have hoped for.
Speaker 1: You must have thought when you heard him talk and
Speaker 1: tell stories, you was that, oh my god, this guy
Speaker 1: is amazing. What a gift.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 3: Absolutely, I mean as a storyteller myself, Like you know,
Speaker 3: we see each other and it's like, hey, I recognize.
Speaker 3: I recognize how unique you are for sure. And I
Speaker 3: had that from the moment I met Joe. Yeah, he's
Speaker 3: an extremely unique guy.
Speaker 1: Joe is definitely a uniquely talented storyteller, the kind who
Speaker 1: can take us inside inside a bank robbery and inside
Speaker 1: his mind, and that mind ranges far and wide. In
Speaker 1: this podcast, I will say that my experience of it is, Yeah,
Speaker 1: there's overwhelming violence, sadness, tragedy. There's also a lot of hilarity.
Speaker 1: There's a lot of fun in this podcast. Here's one example.
Speaker 1: In this one, Joe is out on bail for one
Speaker 1: set of robberies. He's not going to stop robbing, though,
Speaker 1: but he wants to be careful, so he decides to
Speaker 1: recruit someone to rob banks for him.
Speaker 2: I go to this guy and say, hey, listen, I'll
Speaker 2: teach you how to do this and we'll split the money.
Speaker 2: He says, really, I said yeah, but you have to
Speaker 2: do it exactly as I say. He's like sure, because he's,
Speaker 2: like I said, he had seen the loads of cash
Speaker 2: I had, so to him, he's thinking thirty forty fifty
Speaker 2: thousand dollars he could be his. So I take him
Speaker 2: to this mall where they have a bank in the
Speaker 2: mall my park. He goes inside. Whatever lame thing he's
Speaker 2: putting out, people are picking it up. Apparently he was
Speaker 2: good enough to at least get some money from them,
Speaker 2: because as soon as he hits that door, he's still
Speaker 2: holding the money in his hands, and he's holding it
Speaker 2: to his chest. And when he pushes that door open,
Speaker 2: an eddie of air catches that money. The money goes
Speaker 2: flying everywhere, whirling in the air, and there's him trying
Speaker 2: to catch it out of mid air, and I look
Speaker 2: at him, I'm thinking, what a fucking idiot.
Speaker 3: I think Joe has made a I mean, Joe has
Speaker 3: made a whole life of laughing at himself, you know.
Speaker 3: And it comes from the fact that he did so
Speaker 3: many terrible things over the course of his life that
Speaker 3: he just can't take himself seriously anymore, because to do
Speaker 3: so would almost be tragic.
Speaker 1: So let's go back to Ben's initial interest. How does
Speaker 1: a person like Joe Layer, a person who had an
Speaker 1: honest job at a restaurant, start robbing banks.
Speaker 3: He describes really well sort of what went into it
Speaker 3: for him, and how he would have to psych himself
Speaker 3: up by remembering all these traumas that occurred over the
Speaker 3: course of his life, at the hands of his dad,
Speaker 3: at the hands of people who went to school with,
Speaker 3: at the hands of other criminals. And it was those
Speaker 3: traumas that he would pull out, he says, like religious
Speaker 3: medallions and just rub them as he's walking to these banks.
Speaker 3: And he raged would come inside of him. And that's
Speaker 3: how he had the presence to really get people to
Speaker 3: do what he wanted to get them to hand over money.
Speaker 3: I mean, it's all fun and games and the retelling.
Speaker 3: And Joe is a he's a great storyteller. I mean,
Speaker 3: that's just his career now, he's a storyteller.
Speaker 1: This is Joe's first bank robbery.
Speaker 4: And as I walk up there, I slide the note,
Speaker 4: or she puts it. I put it down on the
Speaker 4: table and slided to her. She looks down at it,
Speaker 4: and she reads it and reads it and reads, has
Speaker 4: plenty of time to have read it, turned it over,
Speaker 4: copied it, turned it back over, read it again, like
Speaker 4: too long. So I reached forward and I realized I
Speaker 4: got to get her attention. So I grabbed a note
Speaker 4: and I moved around a little bit, like hey, let's
Speaker 4: do something about this.
Speaker 1: And she still.
Speaker 2: Won't look up.
Speaker 4: So I had to pull the note away from her
Speaker 4: because I realized, oh shit, I've given her something to
Speaker 4: distract her. She does not want to look up. And
Speaker 4: she doesn't have to look up. So I tried to
Speaker 4: pull the note back, and she tries to pull the
Speaker 4: note to her, and when she's pulling the note, we're
Speaker 4: doing this little bullshit tug of war. Now I'm just
Speaker 4: fucking pissed. So I leaned forward and say, I'm not
Speaker 4: fucking around. I'll jump the counter. And I reached down
Speaker 4: like I got a gun, and I pat my waistband
Speaker 4: like I'm coming over. I will fuck you up for
Speaker 4: this bullshit stuff. And it was in that moment she
Speaker 4: looks up and just with my eyes I menace her.
Speaker 4: And then when she looked at me, she saw I
Speaker 4: was serious. She opened her drawer and just gave me
Speaker 4: the money.
Speaker 1: One of the things that's really interesting for me about
Speaker 1: this is the interiority of this bank robber, the person
Speaker 1: of this bank Robert, his kind of internal journey.
Speaker 3: I mean, look, I've made a lot of true crime
Speaker 3: podcasts in my career from a lot of different angles,
Speaker 3: and to me, I'm always most interested in sort of
Speaker 3: the why of the crimes, even more so than the
Speaker 3: who or the you know, who's the victim, who's the perpetrator,
Speaker 3: It's the why do these things happen, and to me
Speaker 3: getting into Joe's story, you know, there are some good guys,
Speaker 3: there are some bad guys. Joe's definitely like a very
Speaker 3: compelling anti hero. His dad is also a bad guy,
Speaker 3: and so the nature of Joe's relationship to the story,
Speaker 3: I think, changes flip flops in a few different ways.
Speaker 3: And one of the things as I was making it
Speaker 3: that I wanted to be very clear with the audience
Speaker 3: about was that there's a lot of ambiguity, you know,
Speaker 3: And so we structured it so that in some episodes,
Speaker 3: you're feeling really great about Joe, and you're feeling that
Speaker 3: he's a victim, and your feeling that he deserves all
Speaker 3: of your sympathy.
Speaker 1: One of the points at which Joe deserves our sympathy
Speaker 1: is when he looks on as his father beats his
Speaker 1: younger brother. Joe is fifteen in this story.
Speaker 2: It is the worst memory of my life, and I
Speaker 2: remember that night thinking I want to die. I just
Speaker 2: want to die one because I had always been this
Speaker 2: brave kid who protected my brother, and that day I
Speaker 2: could not do. And I was haunted by my brother's
Speaker 2: face of water coming out of his nose and his
Speaker 2: eyes a supplication, looking at me like just terrified, and
Speaker 2: I wanted to die. I wanted it was seriously like suicides.
Speaker 2: Take me, Jesus christ Man. I don't want to even
Speaker 2: be here. I cannot live with my cowardice. I confronted
Speaker 2: cowardice that day. And here's the thing. I was smart.
Speaker 2: I was intense. I had this aggression, and I felt
Speaker 2: my heart was big and muscular, and even though I
Speaker 2: was getting beat down, I felt like I was made
Speaker 2: to be bigger than this.
Speaker 3: And in other episodes, you really hear him as a perpetrator,
Speaker 3: as somebody who's victimizing, as somebody who is not anyone
Speaker 3: that you would ever want to spend any time with.
Speaker 3: And so playing with that idea of is Joe a
Speaker 3: good guy? Is he a bad guy? Let's really get
Speaker 3: into the complicated reasons for how somebody becomes a bank robber,
Speaker 3: an evil person, how somebody becomes a monster.
Speaker 1: A monster who can commit murder when you kill somebody,
Speaker 1: And for a moment I thought my dad was dead.
Speaker 2: I killed him. That was a different power. When you
Speaker 2: do that, and you talk to me, you prison talk
Speaker 2: to people who kill people. And I had friends whould say,
Speaker 2: you know the the only thing stopping that man from
Speaker 2: being dead right now, and I say no one they
Speaker 2: would say, my decision. And to be a man who
Speaker 2: that's true to like, you know, the only thing that
Speaker 2: I'm like sitting here looking here and say, you have
Speaker 2: no clue, but the reason your life is because right
Speaker 2: now I choose to not kill you. That's a powerful
Speaker 2: way to move in the world. For a moment, I
Speaker 2: could feel that, Oh man, I'm the kind of guy
Speaker 2: who now can just say you you're done. You I
Speaker 2: let you live longer you you're done.
Speaker 5: You know that kind of thing.
Speaker 1: What do you think he would have been like to
Speaker 1: meet back in his bank robbing days?
Speaker 3: You know, I've thought about that a lot. It's it's
Speaker 3: an interesting question because Joe is not like thugged out
Speaker 3: Jolo from East Los Angeles. He was a nerdy kid.
Speaker 3: He ran track, He dressed in like golf clothes a lot.
Speaker 3: He played a lot of golf when he was robbing banks.
Speaker 3: So he's not the kind of guy who you would
Speaker 3: meet on the street and you know, be intimidated or
Speaker 3: not make eye contact with or go to the other
Speaker 3: side of the street. You would walk right by him.
Speaker 3: I think he looked like a normal person, but he
Speaker 3: did have those two modes, right, He had his normal
Speaker 3: guy mode and then he had his his rage mode.
Speaker 3: And I think Joe when he was raging, when he
Speaker 3: was able to become Joe the bank robber, and I
Speaker 3: think Joe in prison very similarly. I think would be very,
Speaker 3: very scary to meet on the street.
Speaker 1: Talking about that rage I found. I found that persona
Speaker 1: of Joe just captivating. Uh. In part it's the actual
Speaker 1: thing of it. In part it's the way he talked
Speaker 1: about it. It brought out in him a kind of poetry,
Speaker 1: spoken word poetry that I found irresistible.
Speaker 4: The animosity, the negativity. That stuff, It crackles differently, It
Speaker 4: changes the molecules differently. Yeah, rearranges you and gives you power.
Speaker 4: And I was getting stronger, I was not getting weaker.
Speaker 4: I was getting demented with a very powerful rage. And
Speaker 4: that's what eventually would come out.
Speaker 1: That's a wild image. It's like some kind of superhero,
Speaker 1: the Hulk, or somebody who's kind of shedding one persona
Speaker 1: one shell and suddenly becomes this using the word demented,
Speaker 1: give me your reaction to that, because trying to murder
Speaker 1: his father, unbelievably dramatic thing to say, dramatic thing to do.
Speaker 1: And my read of him is that it changes his life,
Speaker 1: oh at that moment one hundred percent.
Speaker 3: And I think Joe even when he was doing it,
Speaker 3: but when he describes it, it's very Shakespearean in the storytelling,
Speaker 3: and I think even as he was doing it, he
Speaker 3: realized that this was the stuff of Shakespeare. But it's
Speaker 3: a pivotal moment in the story because it's the moment
Speaker 3: where Joe goes from being a victim to being a victimizer.
Speaker 3: And we had numerous conversations as we were recording this
Speaker 3: podcast together, and I will say the one the one
Speaker 3: category of people that Joe has ultimate I don't know
Speaker 3: if respects the right word, but certainly strong feelings about
Speaker 3: are murderers he would encounter, murderers in prison, and murderers
Speaker 3: people who have taken another person's life are now capable
Speaker 3: of taking anyone's life. And so they have this ultimate
Speaker 3: power because everyone around them is still alive, because they're
Speaker 3: allowing them to still be alive. And so when Joe
Speaker 3: for those hours that you know, after he was arrested,
Speaker 3: there were several hours where he thought that he was
Speaker 3: a murderer, and that changed everything for him. A switch
Speaker 3: had been flipped in his head so that he was
Speaker 3: no longer somebody who would take being a victim. Now
Speaker 3: he was the bully. He was the victimizer. He was
Speaker 3: the one who was going to be able to go out,
Speaker 3: and he was the one who was going to be
Speaker 3: able to go out and express his will in any
Speaker 3: way that he wanted.
Speaker 1: And he liked that.
Speaker 3: It felt good, it felt powerful, Yeah, it felt like
Speaker 3: it felt like he was his life was on a
Speaker 3: different trajectory. There are lots of people who become victims
Speaker 3: and completely knuckle under and they just kind of collapse
Speaker 3: under the tragedies that are happening to them. Joe, I think,
Speaker 3: is a different kind of person. Joe is somebody who
Speaker 3: would have feelings about what was happening to them, and
Speaker 3: those feelings would propel him right, so he wouldn't feel
Speaker 3: like he couldn't do anything. He would feel as though
Speaker 3: there was an anger building inside of him that would
Speaker 3: eventually be, for lack of a better word, be useful.
Speaker 1: Yeah. Yeah, all right, So a couple more things to cover.
Speaker 1: Just a word about bank robberies. You having immersed yourself
Speaker 1: in this storyline and in Joe. It just strikes me
Speaker 1: that the nineteen eighties were a pretty good error to
Speaker 1: be a bank robber. You go in, you write a
Speaker 1: note on a deposit slip, and you walk out with
Speaker 1: five thousand dollars.
Speaker 3: Really, maybe what you're cottoning to a little bit is
Speaker 3: in the eighties and nineties there was this like the
Speaker 3: technology hadn't quite caught up, but the amounts of cash
Speaker 3: that were going in and out of the banks had
Speaker 3: risen dramatically since previous eras, Like, you know, people didn't
Speaker 3: go in wanting five ten thousand dollars in cash up
Speaker 3: until probably the late eighties early nineties, right, and the
Speaker 3: technology was still what it was. There wasn't a lot
Speaker 3: of high tech surveillance, There wasn't a lot of like
Speaker 3: GPS tracking all that sort of stuff. So yeah, I
Speaker 3: think there was kind of maybe a I don't know
Speaker 3: if it's a golden age, maybe a plastic age of
Speaker 3: bank robbing that was happening in the eighties and nineties.
Speaker 3: You know. The thing one of the things that really
Speaker 3: like amazed me as I was talking with Joe, you know,
Speaker 3: he talks about how he was a petty criminal, and
Speaker 3: now he was going to become a bank robber, and
Speaker 3: that meant that all the other criminals, you know people
Speaker 3: are he was finally going to get some respect being
Speaker 3: a criminal.
Speaker 1: Did you have a favorite bank robbery story that he told,
Speaker 1: because he tells a lot.
Speaker 3: My favorite one, like the first one, is an amazing
Speaker 3: story where he actually goes and tries, you know, he
Speaker 3: works all day to get his nerve up to rob
Speaker 3: this bank.
Speaker 4: What I do remember about the day is this. I
Speaker 4: started ten. I walked into the first bank and I
Speaker 4: grab a slip and I write, we have a bomb,
Speaker 4: just a bank rubbery, and I wrote a bank robber note.
Speaker 4: And then I'm like, ah, fuck it, I don't want
Speaker 4: to do this year. For some reason, this doesn't feel right.
Speaker 4: I start walking away, and as I walked away, there's
Speaker 4: like three cameras that me at the door, and I realized,
Speaker 4: think I could have been busted. Right if anyone just
Speaker 4: kind of like you know, zoomed in the guy who
Speaker 4: was writing something on the back of that slip, they
Speaker 4: could have seen I was trying to rob that bank.
Speaker 4: So I wrote my next one next note at McDonald's.
Speaker 4: I just wrote it there and I would walk in
Speaker 4: the banks and I would leave them all day long.
Speaker 4: You know, Like I would walk in and I would
Speaker 4: stand in line, go a couple of steps up, a
Speaker 4: couple of customers would be going and I'd like, nah
Speaker 4: that I don't got a feel for this. I'd walk in,
Speaker 4: I'd see, you know, guard some nah. God, I swear
Speaker 4: to God man, I probably nibbled a little bit of
Speaker 4: food from every fast food joint available at the time, KFC, Wendy's.
Speaker 4: If this was a short film, it would be a
Speaker 4: comic film because you would see me going in, Okay,
Speaker 4: I'm gonna do it.
Speaker 3: I'm gonna do it.
Speaker 4: And the next thing, we'd see me drinking coffee at McDonald's.
Speaker 4: You see me, Okay, I'm gonna do it. I'm gonna
Speaker 4: be all fucking nervy in there. The next scene, I'm.
Speaker 5: Biting the whopper at.
Speaker 2: Work, Like it would just be okay, let's do it,
Speaker 2: let's do.
Speaker 4: It, Taco Bella do it, let's do it. It was
Speaker 4: like it was fucking hilarious.
Speaker 3: And he finally does it, and he doesn't even get
Speaker 3: that much money. He thinks there's a lot of money
Speaker 3: at the time, but you know, in the scheme of things,
Speaker 3: it's not all that much money. I love that story.
Speaker 1: I also love the disguise story where he puts on
Speaker 1: I don't know how many sweatshirts, it's really burly, and
Speaker 1: the discards discards the costume. He seems kind of so
Speaker 1: slick and quick witted, and it has all those elements
Speaker 1: of you know, high jinks and caper and you find
Speaker 1: yourself just rooting for the bad guy.
Speaker 3: Well, and that one too, that does feel that one
Speaker 3: does feel a little bit like a relic of an
Speaker 3: earlier time, the idea that you could just like wear
Speaker 3: a disguise and get away with it, and then it
Speaker 3: works in a weird way. It's just like, yeah, it's amazing.
Speaker 1: The one of the things that I noticed, and I
Speaker 1: think it's true, is that as we kind of go
Speaker 1: along with Joe and he develops into bank robbery kind
Speaker 1: of in front of our eyes or ears, is there's
Speaker 1: a change in him and his personality. He knows that
Speaker 1: Cortis the FBI agent, is closing in on him. He's
Speaker 1: actually already been arrested, he's out on bail, and he
Speaker 1: goes on us a robbing spree. So what I believe
Speaker 1: is that there was something kind of taking over Joe.
Speaker 1: He was getting manic, he was getting obsessed, he was
Speaker 1: kind of getting out of control and maybe even self
Speaker 1: destructive in that way.
Speaker 3: I think he had become so twisted by his actions
Speaker 3: at that point that he had become untethered from everyone
Speaker 3: else around him, and even more untethered from a morality
Speaker 3: that kind of had governed his regular life, even while
Speaker 3: he would have this double life as a bank robber.
Speaker 3: And so when he gets or when he has arrested
Speaker 3: for robbing banks, his aunt puts her house up to
Speaker 3: get him out of jail, and he says very clearly
Speaker 3: that he was going to burn her and she was
Speaker 3: going to lose her home, and he didn't care.
Speaker 2: I figure out, you know what, I'm not going to
Speaker 2: go to prison, and this is where me. I was
Speaker 2: already in an asshole. I was just really bad. I
Speaker 2: was a bad boyfriend, I was a bad person in society.
Speaker 2: It was just a thief. It was kind of shit.
Speaker 2: And I decided, like up my shit game by putting
Speaker 2: my aunt's house in jeopardy because my aunt putor house
Speaker 2: up for me to go on bayl my aunt and
Speaker 2: she loved me and I was willing to risk it all.
Speaker 3: I didn't care, so he did it. It was quite
Speaker 3: a spree, you know. He puts it as thirty or
Speaker 3: thirty plus banks. He doesn't even remember how many banks,
Speaker 3: but he puts it at thirty plus over I want
Speaker 3: to say, eleven or fifteen months. Something like that. Wouldn't
Speaker 3: surprise me if it was, you know, a quarter million dollars.
Speaker 1: There was a lot. Joe's father huge figure in his life,
Speaker 1: as is his brother. But Joe's father, it's not giving
Speaker 1: too much away to say that his father is a
Speaker 1: violent man, and for me, in this story, that forms
Speaker 1: and deforms Joe.
Speaker 3: I mean, Joe would not have been who he was
Speaker 3: without losing his mother and then relying on his father.
Speaker 3: I think after Joe's mom died, his dad became unhinged.
Speaker 3: It gets to the point where a confrontation is just
Speaker 3: absolutely inevitable. Was somebody was going to get very badly
Speaker 3: hurt or killed, I have no doubt about that. And
Speaker 3: the reason that it went down the way that it
Speaker 3: did has only to do with the fact that I think,
Speaker 3: like his dad, Joe is very strong willed and is
Speaker 3: a survivor, and so when faced with what he thought
Speaker 3: was a life threatening circumstance. He was not going to
Speaker 3: knuckle under. He was going to fight back. And what
Speaker 3: that what that ultimately revealed to Joe was a new
Speaker 3: sense of power, a new sense of what he was
Speaker 3: capable of. Joe changed irrevocably, and his life was sent
Speaker 3: on an entirely new path.
Speaker 4: I stand up and I look at him, and he's like,
Speaker 4: oh shit, and then he like puts the weight down,
Speaker 4: and you know, I'm holding a steak knife, but I'm
Speaker 4: only holding and then he like starts walking to me slowly,
Speaker 4: so he put it down, put it out, or give
Speaker 4: me the knife, give me a knife. I'm like, fuck that,
Speaker 4: I'm not going to just do the knife. I know
Speaker 4: I have wanted this move right here. I run him,
Speaker 4: charging him, put the armor, go to attack.
Speaker 2: Him, and I believe I'm trying to kill him and
Speaker 2: he's gonna die, and I'm fucking a beast in this moment.
Speaker 1: M Yeah, tell me about Paul. Paul is Joe's younger
Speaker 1: brother by about eighteen months. They're very close. Well, I'll
Speaker 1: let you tell about the relationship, but the other thing
Speaker 1: to tell about it is how incredibly candid Paul is
Speaker 1: and to me how heartbreaking he is in his candor.
Speaker 3: I mean, the dynamic between Paul and Joe, as they
Speaker 3: both tell it when they were growing up, is that
Speaker 3: Joe protected Paul. Paul was weaker. Paul was more of
Speaker 3: a victim, and Paul never stood up to whatever was
Speaker 3: going to happen to him.
Speaker 1: Here's a moment where Paul is a victim. It plays
Speaker 1: out brutally for Paul, and it also reveals something about Joe.
Speaker 2: And he punched my brother in the rib in the
Speaker 2: back of the ribs, grabs my brother, but pounces on him,
Speaker 2: grabs by the back of the herd, starts dunking his
Speaker 2: head in the soapy dishwater.
Speaker 5: He stuck my head under the hot water, the scalding water,
Speaker 5: and Joe was sitting there rinsing the dishes, and he
Speaker 5: was just a Paul at what it was a kreem.
Speaker 2: And I'm paralyzed with fear, holding the plate, looking at him,
Speaker 2: scared to death, right.
Speaker 5: Because my dad started putting my face into the water.
Speaker 5: And what I did was just automatically turned my head.
Speaker 5: And when I turned my head, I think I turned
Speaker 5: my head to Joe, so our eyes met and for
Speaker 5: a split second there, Joe could see the fear, and
Speaker 5: it was one of those just one of those really
Speaker 5: poignant times in my life where I just had eye
Speaker 5: contact with Joe and Joe knew that I was afraid
Speaker 5: and Joe couldn't protect me.
Speaker 3: What's amazing to me about Joe's journey is how at
Speaker 3: the end it is a story of hope. And I
Speaker 3: think he's an amazing protagonist in his own story because
Speaker 3: he has been able to have a kind of philosophical
Speaker 3: distance from what's happened to him and a very unique
Speaker 3: ability to look at his life and change it. You know,
Speaker 3: there are multiple times in this story where he changes
Speaker 3: the trajectory of his life, he changes the path that
Speaker 3: he's on, and that is something that is extremely unique.
Speaker 3: I have not met many, many people at all who
Speaker 3: have the kind of will to do that. One of
Speaker 3: the things that's great about this story, and that I'm
Speaker 3: grateful for you, Steve, for giving the platform for it.
Speaker 3: Get the Money and Run is a much tighter, much
Speaker 3: more compact, much more clear distillation of Joe's story, so
Speaker 3: that it goes from hopelessness to hope a lot more quickly.
Speaker 3: So I think listeners will have a much more enjoyable
Speaker 3: time listening to it. If it's if it does get
Speaker 3: it's too sad, just hold on a few minutes. It'll
Speaker 3: get really fun.
Speaker 1: All right then, thanks so much.
Speaker 3: Yeah, thank you Steve.
Speaker 1: Now hopefully I have recorded this on my hand.
Speaker 3: Yeah, it's still running, all right,