0102 Sir Gene Speaks with Dude named Greg

Be sure you listen to the last part of the episode where we delve into prison life.
Here is the video version https://youtu.be/TWYMmAbPrWs

Chapters

• 1:15:04 Prison Talk

Transcript

Gene: 0:15

This is Sir Gene Joining me today is Greg Hoyt. We're gonna find out all about Greg, and he seemed like a very interesting person. And that collection of figures behind him is not a green screen image that is actually in the room he's sitting in. Is that correct, Greg?

Greg: 0:33

Yes. Yes. That is correct.

Gene: 0:35

Yes. So would you consider yourself a big nerd or just a moderate nerd

Greg: 0:40

I, I guess it's hard to say, because some people, define it and interpret it

Gene: 0:44

or you collector

Greg: 0:46

I, I, I, I'm more so a collector. I, I mean, I still

Gene: 0:49

So you buy and sell these things.

Greg: 0:51

Not so much sell. I'll sell something every now and then, but, That's more so to maybe make some room

Gene: 0:58

Mm-hmm. are you a completionist? Do you look for every single one released in a particular year or something?

Greg: 1:05

in some cases, like with respect to some of the nineties toy lines from Toy Biz. I, I do fancy myself a bit of a completionist in that regard. But you know, when, when you're dealing with thousands and thousands of toys that have been produced throughout the years, you can't be a completionist for everything. I, I'd have to get an extra four bedrooms or something like that.

Gene: 1:25

Yeah. And that, that looks like quite a few. Now is that a on a, like custom stand or did you just put some peg boards in the walls? What are they? Hang in.

Greg: 1:34

No, they're, they're just hanging on the original pegs that they have, like the, on some thumbtacks,

Gene: 1:39

okay. So those are like stand, like store displays basically.

Greg: 1:44

Yeah, yeah. You know, for, for these types of figures. I mean, they're, they're, they're, these ones are relatively lightweight. They're, they're not as heavy as some of the bulkier plastics that were used back in the day. So they're a lot easier to suspend from, their, their, their original peg holders.

Gene: 1:59

Hmm. Yeah. That's wild. All right, well let's, let's we'll get back to that. Let's go back, well, first of all, how would you describe yourself into a couple sentences?

Greg: 2:10

Well, it just depend, depends in, in what regard?

Gene: 2:14

Hi, you just met me. Who the hell are you?

Greg: 2:18

Oh, hi, my name is Greg White. I'm now an independent journalist with a primary focus on I guess what people would call cult culture war stuff. Prior to that, I worked for law enforcement today and Red Voice Media basically doing the same thing, That I'm doing now. And obviously I'm a toy collector and that's, that's pretty much long and short of it. And I live kind of somewhat off the grid.

Gene: 2:43

Okay, cool. So those are all interesting things we can kinda jump into, but let's go back further in time. Where'd you grow up and where'd you go to college? Just kind of let's, let's draw a path to kind of how you got to where you are.

Greg: 2:58

Yeah. So my father was in the military. He had been in the Air Force for four years and the Army for 26. He retired back in 1992. Roughly, he, he retired roughly when, when I was about six years old. I was born in Arizona. I was born in on, on base on Fort Chuka which is near Sierra Vista. But, Within months after being born, we hightailed it over to Chen, Italy. And that's where I, I grew up mostly up until 1991, late 91. We were in Georgia for a few months and. My dad's last post was at McDill over in Tampa, and he finished up the, the, the last few months. And and by late 1992, he was done with the military. And, and so a lot of my formative years were spent over in the greater Tampa Bay area.

Gene: 3:55

Mm-hmm.

Greg: 3:56

So

Gene: 3:57

So do you, did you learn Italian when you were a kid then?

Greg: 4:01

no, no, Because a lot of the, a lot of the people that lived around us, Even though we didn't live on base in Venza, we lived in an apartment building, but a lot of people in the apartment building, Were were US military, folks. So all our neighbors were speaking English. And so it, it really

Gene: 4:17

And you were there up until, how old were you?

Greg: 4:20

Not quite six. I was there up until I was, until I was, about five.

Gene: 4:24

Got it. Got it. Yeah. I lived in Italy for a little bit when I was eight years old.

Greg: 4:29

Yeah. I I mean, my memories of the places there was a lot of snow and a lot of hail during wintertime.

Gene: 4:34

mm-hmm.

Greg: 4:35

Unfortunately there was this one incident, one of where one of our neighbors cats had gotten killed during a hail storm from the hail coming

Gene: 4:43

Jesus. It's a big hail.

Greg: 4:46

Oh, yeah. Yeah. There, there would be, like, you, you, you'd find some baseball size pieces here and.

Gene: 4:51

Yeah. That's crazy. All right, and then really sort of after that, you were in Florida,

Greg: 4:58

Yeah. Yeah. That's, that's what I say, like, you know, my formative years were there, I lived in Florida up until I wanna say around August of 2002. At the time my father was moving to Arizona and I would've been not quite 16, but, I was like a month or two away from turning 16, and I moved with him to Arizona and I, I stayed for a few months, but my father and I had a falling out, which, I mean, it happens sometimes when you're a teenager. You're rambunctious

Gene: 5:29

Happens all the time. I don't know a single teenage boy in his late teens and doesn't have a falling out with his father. I think it's pretty damn normal.

Greg: 5:39

so, by October, I wanna say of 2002, I moved to San Bernardino, California, where my older sister was living at the time, and I stayed up in that area until around 2006. That there was a brief period in oh four where I took a job in Arizona doing a field engineer work for this company called Southwest Systems shortly after I turned 18. But ironically, I, I took a vocational course over at the local job course center in the Inland Empire. Back in 2003, early 2004 for culinary arts. Now I, I did it. I completed it, and I, I have done nothing with that vocational certification whatsoever.

Gene: 6:28

Do you like to cook though?

Greg: 6:30

oh yeah, no, I, abso I love, I love cooking, I love baking. I, it, it is a fun thing. So it was nice to, to, to learn how to navigate that stuff a little bit better. But yeah, predominantly what got me into the brief spat into field engineer work was just having a, a working understanding, Hardware, software, stuff like that. Cuz I, I grew up with computers in the house, Like the, the, the old Atari computers. And then you had the gosh, remember Windows 3.4,

Gene: 6:59

Yeah.

Greg: 7:00

you know,

Gene: 7:03

Yeah, there's I'm trying to think of what the, I think, I don't think I ever used 1.0, but I, I got a Windows machine at work shortly, shortly after Windows was released. And I, I was, I was mostly a Mac guy, so it was all kind of, Parallel oh, that's crazy. They're trying to do something the McRay does and not very well. That's that kinda attitude usually for me. But Yeah.

Greg: 7:31

Yeah.

Gene: 7:32

all right. So you never went into cooking but you're like, there's still no connection to the writing part, so let's keep going in your

Greg: 7:41

Oh, yeah. Yeah, because you know, we, we, we've only ventured up until the point where I was about like 18 ish when I was working. So I wound up leaving Southwest Systems after working there for about four months. And it really had a lot to do with the fact that there was, it, it was nonstop travel. I got hired there one day and approximately two days after getting hired, they had me on a van with a coworker, Up over to like the, the, the New England area because we were the Southwest Systems had acquired a a contract with Albertsons because they had Albertsons had purchased this grocery store in the northeast called Shaws.

Gene: 8:21

you, you ended up in the northeast, even though you're working for Southwest.

Greg: 8:25

Yeah, And I was there for months. Traveling from store to store, We would, we would basically do one to two stores a night depending on how large the store was. And, and we would be setting up the wireless access points running and terminating the cable, and then testing to make sure that, signal was available everywhere throughout the store for the folks using the P D T guns.

Gene: 8:49

makes sense.

Greg: 8:51

Huh.

Gene: 8:52

Makes sense. That's there was a lot less ease of deployment back then. I remember

Greg: 8:58

This is, this is going back to late 2004. The, and, and these were like the old Cisco aps that, that we were putting up at the time. Obviously things have changed dramatically those things. I, I mean, I, I understand like the need for an intranet in, in these places. So they're they're still operating that to an extent, but like with the advancements in technology with like cell phones and stuff like that, and, offsite storage and, and crap like that, a lot of that on, on-prem hardware, a lot of it isn't really necessary anymore.

Gene: 9:30

Yeah. No, that's true. And also, how long did you do the tech stuff or did you move on to another company doing the same kind of stuff?

Greg: 9:38

Yeah, no. What I wound up doing after that, I was just, I was 18 and I, I wanted to kind of act a little bit, frivolous, I guess, so I, I asked my sister, I'm like, Hey, I don't like this job. Can I move back in with you, And so I went back to California and I stayed there up until 2006 before coming back out to Arizona. And, and I, a girl and I, we met and we moved in type of thing. You know how that Suaree goes, While the relationship didn't work out, at the time I had been working for Target for a few years. Cuz when I came back to California, took a job at Target, doing like a front lanes work and stuff like that, you know, like guest services, all that crap. And when I moved to Arizona with this gal that I was dating at the time I took a job as like the they, they called them Target protection specialists, but it's basically like the security guard. I did that for a couple years, or, or about about 18 months, I wanna say before getting hired for the board of patrol. And that was, gosh, I was mid 2007, something like

Gene: 10:42

In the Arizona,

Greg: 10:43

yeah. yeah. Tucson

Gene: 10:44

Now, were you collecting action figures this whole time, or did that start later?

Greg: 10:48

Yeah. No, I, I've been collecting this whole time, you know? Yeah. And it's, and like when I try to explain it to people because they think I, I just go ape shit every time I go to a store and it's, and it's simply not the case. If I go to, to a store and, and people don't realize you can go to a store, what, 4, 5, 6, 7 times in a month,

Gene: 11:05

Mm-hmm.

Greg: 11:06

whether you're doing a large grocery trip or just getting an off and end thing. And, sometimes I'll see a toy, maybe two that, that I want on the trip and, it doesn't look necessarily crazy if you go to the store and you happen to get a toy or two. But when you do that consistently for years and years and.

Gene: 11:24

Yeah.

Greg: 11:25

Especially, when you're an adult and you have more expendable income and, and you don't necessarily have to, to beg a parent be like, Hey, come on, come on mom. It does add up. It, it before you know it, like you, you, you look and it's oh crap. This past year I acquired, 250 action pictures or something like that. You know what I mean? It's, it's not uncommon for that to happen, and that's how you get to a place where you wind up having, thousands of toys.

Gene: 11:51

Yeah. Yeah. No, I, I kind of can see that cuz I did that with CDs. I started collecting CDs or buying CDs when I was in high school and then obviously kept up with that as my income grew up until, I'm trying to remember when did I get rid of'em. I think I got rid of'em in 2003 ish or so, cuz it was a pretty obvious everything's going digital or two mp3. So, I ended up ripping all my CDs and there was a company that used to resell'em, kinda like an eBay, but for CDs only. I forget what they were. I ended up getting rid of'em, but it was I had thousands and thousands of CDs. It was just like, you don't, because you're right, you don't notice it when you buy two or three at a time. And then you notice how many racks'em you have when you and CDs are way more compact than what I'm looking here in, in behind you. So Yeah.

Greg: 12:48

Yeah. No, and, and I still have CDs myself. I've got, I don't know if I have thousands per se, but I got a few hundred. Cuz I, I like music, you know,.Yeah, And, And I still like physical media too, you know, I'm, I'm a physical media kind of

Gene: 13:01

God, I, I don't, I try to minimize everything into as small space as possible. I, I was a photographer for a long time and I just loved going full digital cuz instead of scanning film, I could actually just shoot digital and there was no film involved. So cheaper. Plus the it meant that I could shoot a lot more without run, having to count how many shots I've already taken to save some for the rest of the trip or whatever. So yeah, definitely, definitely a fan of just full, full digital all the way around.

Greg: 13:35

Yeah. I guess I gu I guess I can at least see it from the perspective with with regard to photography. Yeah. Because that's the, that's the thing. It, it's also one of the things that kind of, I know it shouldn't irritate me, but it kind of bugs me when I see a lot of people, giving us a, a selfie every few hours on their social media feed. And, it's, it's I, I kind of want to go back to that gatekeeping era, you know, it's Back in the day people had to take pictures of you,

Gene: 14:00

Yeah. Well, it was definitely a lot more expensive if you would've tried to do what you're doing. And even Polaroid the instant cameras, there was basically a bucket image.

Greg: 14:11

Yeah.

Gene: 14:13

you're gonna, you're gonna limit how many of those you take. And a bucket image when a buck was a much bigger portion of your income

Greg: 14:21

when, when, when? Back when

Gene: 14:23

cars were 10,$12,000 back then. Yeah. So it was it was definitely more expensive, relatively speaking. But anyway, so I, I interrupted you here. So you were, you were working for border patrol, so let's pick, pick up there. That sounds like an interesting job. I don't, I've never interviewed anybody that's done that. So tell us a little more about what that actually entailed

Greg: 14:46

so it's, it's not as

Gene: 14:49

or were you doing it for border patrol? Cause that would be very different.

Greg: 14:52

no, no, no. no. I was, I was a GS five. I got terminated under my probationary period Because you were on probation for about two years. I got fired back in I wanna say it was like March of 2008 or something like that. So I hadn't been there that long. And yeah, so as a GS five, you're basically riding along with somebody for the first year and then, Come your second year, they might let you out on your own, but you're still under probation and you're just doing a lot of line watch. You, you might, if you're at the station, doing anything, whether you're assisting with detainees transports or anything like that, you might have to do like a nuts and butt sweep or something like that. You, you get a lot of the, the work that nobody else wants to do when you're not riding

Gene: 15:32

Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

Greg: 15:33

But what I can say it's relatively easy to get fired from from that place when Oh, yeah. Yeah. I mean, I, I owned up to my mistake I was screwing around on the nForce database and I know this is probably not gonna make any sense unless, somebody else was working with legacy systems, mid 2000 systems with Border Patrol, but I was screwing around on Ed Force making a mock entry and, and joking around with a pal at the station, and apparently it got accidentally submitted. So, It, yeah, so, and that, that's not good because then it, it distorts numbers, it, it makes it seem though, as though an iwi was an apprehended, was apprehended when they weren't, all that crap. I, I got fired within about 24 hours after

Gene: 16:14

Mm-hmm.

Greg: 16:15

cuz the supervisory agent caught wind of it. And he was like, yeah, yeah, and, and, and he, he was disheartened because he, he knew that I. The chops to be a good agent, but he admitted that I got hired on way too young.

Gene: 16:31

Mm-hmm.

Greg: 16:32

And and I kind of agree. And he told me, he is Hey man, why don't you reapply in five years? That didn't exactly happen. Cause I went to prison in 2009.

Gene: 16:40

Whoops.

Greg: 16:43

Whoops.

Gene: 16:43

can't, you can't apply right from prison to be a border patrol.

Greg: 16:46

No, no, no. They've, yeah, that's, that, that ain't gonna happen,

Gene: 16:49

Ah-huh. So what'd you do between the prison and the border Patrol gig?

Greg: 16:55

I, I was depressed, man. I, I, I like Have you ever had one of those moments, like the Homer Simpson moment where you wanna disappear into the grass?

Gene: 17:02

No.

Greg: 17:02

Just Oh, oh, okay. Well, I was, I was embarrassed. I felt like I'd let down my family. I felt like I let down my dad, so I did what any rational, rational person would, would do in that situation. I left the state and went somewhere I hadn't been before. I, I, I moved to Texas.

Gene: 17:19

makes sense.

Greg: 17:20

Yeah. Cuz I, I, well, I was embarrassed. I, I got, I got fired from a job that my folks were all happy that I'd gotten you, you it was just, it was embarrassment at every turn. I felt like I couldn't show my face around town. So, so I moved to Texas and I lived there for, for about a year before coming back to Arizona. And the reason why I felt like coming back is I was never like, disgustingly obese or anything like that, but I was chubby. And when I was in Texas, I took an overnight gig with Target. They, luckily, they hired me back. I was like, oh, cool, thanks guys. Well, I didn't leave them on bad terms though, ever. So, I did an overnight gig there for a year, and all I did was just do this overnight wear truck unloading stuff. And then I would spend time at the gym. And so I, I, I, I decided to come back to Arizona. I'm like, you wanna know something? I, I can show my face around here, because even though I screwed up, I looked dead. Sexy

Gene: 18:20

So where, where in Texas were you?

Greg: 18:21

Flower Mound.

Gene: 18:23

Okay,

Greg: 18:23

Yeah. Yeah. I, I don't know if you're familiar with it, near the DFW area. Really nice area though. Flower Mound, Ville not Ville, Louisville. Gosh. And, and there was this, there was this

Gene: 18:34

I lived not too far from there. I was in Briscoe.

Greg: 18:37

G Grape Grapevine Mills. That place was cool, but unfortunately a

Gene: 18:43

side of the lake.

Greg: 18:43

were, a lot of the stores were shutting down around that time too. Like the Big Virgin records. They were having their closeout sales in mid to late 2008, early 2009, because a, as you mentioned earlier, the CD was kind of going by the wayside,

Gene: 19:01

So you came back to Arizona?

Greg: 19:03

yeah. Came back to Arizona and I was debating on what to do for work, you know what I mean? Because I, I had some money saved up and I'm like, oh, what am I gonna do? What am I'm gonna do? And this one guy that I'd known for a number of years, he, he told me, and, and, and it felt like a, a big step down initially when he suggested it. He told me, he goes, why don't you deliver pizza? Cuz he was working at do Domino's as a delivery driver. And I was like, I don't know man. I feel I'm not saying that work is beneath me, but it, it almost feels like, Cuz it, it, it, it felt very, and, and I don't, I don't harbor those same sentiments anymore. I think any work is awesome, to be quite frank. But at the time, I was, still had a bit of an inflated ish ego, but I took it once. He told me how much money he was pulling in since this location was right next to a military base, right next to Port Chuka it was pretty common to have on a bad night, 80 to$90 worth of tips for working four or five hours. On the weekends, you could pull in 2, 250 bucks in cash tips. And, everybody at this is Domino's location was on the same page. Cash tips don't get reported.

Gene: 20:13

yep.

Greg: 20:15

So I did that for a few months. But at, while that was transpiring, I was just kind of having like still a bit of a downward spiral. Cause I don't think I necessarily properly addressed all the things that had messed with me, you know, between The job loss with border patrol, Like there was still like a lingering issue, maybe you want to call it depression. I don't know exactly what to call it, but whatever it was, it clouded my judgment and, created scenarios and circumstances that made me more prone to, to do irrational things. And so it all came to a head, one evening in 2009 I hear this like little bit of a sob story about, somebody, somebody's sister got kicked out by an abusive boyfriend and he kept a bunch of her crap, and so me and a few other people went to go reappropriate the property and un unfortunately

Gene: 21:15

the guy was there.

Greg: 21:16

yeah. Yeah. And that is against the law. You you can't do

Gene: 21:22

What? Getting the posse together to go and round up some stuff that's against the law.

Greg: 21:27

Yeah. When it's done by force. Yeah. And, and at the same time, I look back, I look back at it, I'm like, dude, dude, that was so freaking stupid. And people, somebody could have been seriously hurt myself. The victim, anybody else I was with, somebody could have been hurt. And luckily nobody was.

Gene: 21:43

So why didn't she just have the cops go there with her and then get her stuff back? That seems to be the normal course of action.

Greg: 21:51

Well, I, I can't really speak with respect to what she would've done or

Gene: 21:56

Sure. But does it mean, doesn't that seem like a,

Greg: 21:59

Oh, yeah, no, that, that's, yeah. That seems perfectly logical. And, and, and it would've been perfectly logical for me at the time to be like, hearing that story and just being like, man, that sucks. And then walking away

Gene: 22:10

Yeah.

Greg: 22:12

But, I, I think most people, especially when they're younger, they, they are susceptible to getting wrapped up in and doing dumb things. It doesn't necessarily completely absolve them of their bad decision making, but, they are more susceptible. And so, I got arrested in October two 2009 for that. The original charges were kidnapping, arm robbery, and burglary. And,

Gene: 22:38

kidnapping.

Greg: 22:39

yeah, kid kidnapping in the state of Arizona is whenever. you vocalize or imply the threat of force to a degree where it makes feel, where it makes someone feel like they can't move.

Gene: 22:53

Oh, okay. Okay.

Greg: 22:53

Like if you say freeze, don't

Gene: 22:55

So somebody was there when you guys showed up, it wasn't empty.

Greg: 22:58

Yeah. Yeah. So that's, and and that's like when I explain that to people, they're like, that's not what kidnapping is. Kidnapping is when you take somebody, I'm like, there's, there's what people think kidnapping is, and there's whatever the state defines as, And, and other states call it something completely different. Some states call that false imprisonment,

Gene: 23:18

right, right, right.

Greg: 23:20

But it's, that's basically what it was.

Gene: 23:22

Yeah. So you, you ended up going out there to help this girl get her stuff back. The ex-boyfriend was there, you guys came in with a show of. and then you got her stuff back.

Greg: 23:36

yeah,

Gene: 23:36

Okay. You got her stuff back, and then police showed up

Greg: 23:40

yeah, police, police showed up the next day cause they, they didn't show up right then and there on the spot. But the following day they apparently arrested the girl's brother who, who, you know, kind of coaxed everybody. I don't wanna say coaxed, but you know, y Yeah. Arrested him

Gene: 23:56

then he gave everybody up.

Greg: 23:58

yeah. Yeah. He, he, he tattled yes. It's, it's whatever man, you know..I mean, I'm not too mad at him cuz I, I saw what happened to him when he was in county after folks found battled. So I, I, I don't hold that much of a grudge, you know? But yeah, so I got arrested October, 2009. A plea was offered, and, and it was, it was a plea offered for myself and, and everybody else involved. It was like, Hey, listen, dockets overbooked for 2009, tell you what, we'll plead it down. Attempted armed robbery, attempted burglary, five years. What do you say? And it's since there was a kidnapping charge on it it, it, it could have been a scenario where if I went to trial, that could have been like, that could have been 20 years. So I was weighing, you know, consequences and, and I was like, yeah, five years I did do this. So I, I, I, I gotta own up to it.

Gene: 24:55

Hmm. Yeah, that's a tough choice cuz I think there's, It's, it's all bargaining, right? Cuz you're, they're trying to make you think of the worst case scenario with a jury versus their offer without a jury, which is a guaranteed deal. And I guess it, it, it all depended on how connected you were to a good defense lawyer to decide that question.

Greg: 25:23

Yeah.

Gene: 25:24

cuz the way you, you explain it r right now, I think that, I would say the average person will say, well, he should do sometime he's guilty of something here. But I mean, just having somebody there while you guys show up to get her stuff back and you you're not robbing the guy, you're not, you're technically you might be, I don't know, legally speaking,

Greg: 25:45

yeah,

Gene: 25:46

but once you explained the rationale behind it, I, I would have a hard time in seeing a, a jury say that you were actually kidnapping somebody like that would be instantly No, he did not do that. And I

Greg: 25:57

yeah. Yeah. It was, it was legally, it was legally robbery. It was legally burglary. Because number one, we entered a, a domain that was not ours.

Gene: 26:06

And the girl did not have any she wasn't an lease. I, I.

Greg: 26:11

yeah, I have no idea whether or not she was on the lease or anything like that. You know,

Gene: 26:15

But I mean, if she was on the lease, she couldn't give you permission to enter even if she wasn't there.

Greg: 26:19

Yeah. Yeah. But at the same time, yeah, so I mean, considering she was kicked out, obviously there, there were. Circumstances, maybe, she was or wasn't on the lease. Not sure. But yeah. Yeah, unfortunately, the way, the circumstances, the way that the way it played out is, yeah, it, it is robbery, it is burglary because we didn't own the property and we're, there, there's no way we can operate on the behalf of somebody else type of thing in that manner, especially when, when force is being utilized.

Gene: 26:47

Yeah. And then when you say force, what do you mean by that?

Greg: 26:50

We, we basically forced our way in, in, into the home.

Gene: 26:54

Do you like Jimmy the door?

Greg: 26:56

no, no. I remember during, during the incident I was the only one with the vehicle, so I was the driver. I stayed in the car and kept it running while the my associates knocked on the door. Guy opens the door and then, my associates pushed the door open on him and then just went

Gene: 27:15

Got it. Okay. And the, the girl was not with you.

Greg: 27:19

correct.

Gene: 27:20

Yeah. Yeah. That's that's unfortunate cuz I, I. Obviously hindsight 2020. But I and age probably matters here cuz you were still fairly young, Vic then. But I, I would, even if there was a good reason to commit into a situation like that, I would've never done it without the actual person being there. Because like you said, you guys have no right to be in somebody else's dwelling, but if she has a right to be in there, she can certainly invite you.

Greg: 27:53

Yeah. That's, that's why I never go outta my way to try to condone my actions. I have no issue

Gene: 27:59

right, right, right. Yeah.

Greg: 28:00

And it, it's like something that I'm embarrassed that I did, but you know, there, there's no reason to be embarrassed to say that I did it. If I did it, I did it. That's why I had no

Gene: 28:12

How old, how old were you at the time?

Greg: 28:14

23.

Gene: 28:15

Oh yeah, yeah. You're still, your, your brain's not even fully, fully developed at that point.

Greg: 28:22

Yeah. Yeah. So, I mean, out of the five year prison sentence I served four years, three months before getting paroled.

Gene: 28:30

Wow, that's quite a bit. I kind of figured it'd be about half. So that's, you almost did full-time.

Greg: 28:34

yeah, no. In Arizona, they have truth in sentencing. So no matter what crime you committed, with the exception of first time drug offenders, certain drug offenses get a little bit more leniency, but just about everything after that, they have what's called truth and sentencing, and you serve 85% of your time no matter what.

Gene: 28:56

Wow.

Greg: 28:57

you could be the most best behave inmate. You could be completely rehabilitated in a year, but if your sentence says you're doing five years, then you know, you gotta do your four years, three months, some odd days or whatever.

Gene: 29:11

Yeah.

Greg: 29:12

So yeah, I got out January 9th, 2014.

Gene: 29:16

Okay. All right. And then what'd you do immediately after? So now all of a sudden you're an excon. What do you do?

Greg: 29:23

First thing I did I mean, outside of just en enjoying the, the, my first day out with my family and spending time with them, and also doing the initial PO visit and all that it was probably like my second or third day out that I secured my first job, which I, I held for like maybe a week, week and a half tops. And it was installing windshields and I was just happy to have a job. And I was like, And I I was thinking to myself like, oh, everybody said I wouldn't get a job. Look at me. I'm installing windshields, Doing one of those mobile installation type of

Gene: 29:52

Okay.

Greg: 29:53

And after doing that for about a week, week and a half, I realized, number one, that I kind of sucked at that job. And also that I felt like I could be doing better, even though I kind of psyched myself out a bit, saying This is as good as it gets. I'm like, no, no, I, I think I can do better. And applied to a place in Scottsdale Arizona called Synergy Solutions. Which they were a hodgepodge of a inbound outbound call center. Like the type of entity that tackles multiple clients, or they might do customer service for one company

Gene: 30:26

picturing someplace in India right now, but yeah.

Greg: 30:29

Yeah. But they also might do outbound sales for

Gene: 30:31

Mm-hmm.

Greg: 30:32

company. I, I, I applied for a CSR position over there and I felt like I had enough. Yeah, I, I felt like I had enough experience with it because when I was working at Target in, Sierra Vista doing security, I was working there 30 hours a week, and I was also pulling 40 hours a week at American Express. They had a, an American Express office open, and I did cs CSR stuff card member services for their high value card members. So like the people that had like centurion cards, platinum cards, stuff like that. And so, I figured that that would be enough to, to do some CSR work and, and I think they were paying like 12 bucks an hour or something like that. And I'm like, Hey, man, it's air conditioned comes with benefits. When I when I walked into the interview I, I remember the two people who interviewed me. The first guy with this was this guy named Mike Berg. And tall guy, bald goatee. I had just finished writing out, like the actual, tangible application and when I handed it back to the, the, the receptionist, that guy Mike calls me up, John, on the spot. He, he didn't even have an opportunity to read it type of thing. So he didn't even see that I was a felon yet. He takes me into the office and, he goes, Hey man, how's your day going? And, he extends his hand for a handshake and I, I shake his hand back and I said, man, I, I just got outta prison a couple of weeks ago, so I'm doing pretty good. That I, I was, I was willing to be ballsy with it because I figured it's going to get discussed anyway when he sees it. So I, I went with the approach of I'm going to make this as big of a deal as it should be by making it not a big

Gene: 32:14

Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

Greg: 32:16

And once he saw that I was lighthearted about it, he had a brief follow up question and, he, he wanted to know what I went in for and I, I told him, I said arm robbery, attempted burglary. And I said but I'm on the straight and narrow. And that was all we discussed with regard to the, the felony conviction. And after that, he just went through some run of the mill, interview questions, like, why do you wanna work here? What do you know about the company? So on and so forth. And he immediately gave me a second interview with another fella. And this guy's name was Scott Marshall and another bald guy, not as tall. He had a, a, a beard, not, not as big as yours, but you know, like kind of. A chin strap kind of beard, you know, like with the pencil ish mustache going around. And I could tell that guy was a little bit goofier, like a little bit more, Ladada. The time I had not seen the movie The Wolf of Wall Street, so I didn't know he was referencing a movie.

Gene: 33:13

so,

Greg: 33:14

He, but he told me, he goes, sell me this pen. And I was looking, I'm like, excuse me, So I can't remember exactly what I flung at him at the time, you know, whatever it was. I, I mean, it was the wall garbage bullshit. But he thanked me for the interview and he told me he, he was candid. He said, yeah, we we're, we're, we're probably gonna hire you. I get called into orientation approximately a week later after that interview. And I, I, I'd like to say there was probably about 40 or 50 people in that orientation. And I'm guessing it's because they had just landed like a big CSR contract or something, you know what I mean? So they had to hire a bunch of people and it was really uncomfortable because the, the person leading the orientation said, if I call your name, go into this other room. And my name was the only one that was called. And I'm like, oh, I guess I am not working here anymore. And it, and it turns out that wasn't the. That second guy that interviewed me, that Scott Marshall guy, he had ran an inside sales team that had one opening. And they were, they had a contract with RS means, which does like construction cost data.

Gene: 34:29

Mm.

Greg: 34:30

And so I got hired on over there, and so I was already making more money than I anticipated. I think they started me at 12 and a half bucks an hour plus commission. And the commission wasn't like crazy, crazy awesome. I, if my memory serves me right, it was about 5% commission. And you had to hit like a certain benchmark every month to even be eligible for the commission. But we're talking about like construction cost data, books that range anywhere in price from$150 to$550 for some of these books. And also, like kind of Excel based software for you know, 12, 1300 bucks. And, and I wound up knocking it outta the park while I was over there. It got to a point where my commission checks were usurping. My, my base rate of pay, you know, I'd, I'd be getting a, a couple thousand dollars in commission every month. And unfortunately there was a, a gal, there was a gal, a female coworker on that same team, and I think she was just, I don't know, grumpy or a, a hater. Didn't like the fact that maybe she thought I was taking money that could have been hers type of thing. She wound up calling RS means like the client directly and gave them a tip that they have a criminal working for

Gene: 35:51

Oh, Jesus Christ.

Greg: 35:53

Yeah. And I remember that that girl smugly admitted to doing that,

Gene: 35:58

Wow.

Greg: 35:59

Because, I got pulled in for a, for a meeting with the call center director, the outbound operations director. And RS means, had called up Synergy Solutions and said, you want something we don't want, we don't want anybody with a felony working on our team. And so they, they, they had to let me off the team. But it was a blessing in disguise because, folks a separate outbound marketing team had heard me, on the phone, doing stuff with RS means, and I guess they, they, they had caught wind that I was, somewhat knowledgeable around IT systems and what have you. They said the the folks from that team a couple of ladies named Heather Habin and Stacy, Stacy, I can't remember her last name they said we'd like to hire him on our team. We don't care that he's a felon, because apparently both those ladies were. like, we don't care. He as a felon

Gene: 36:51

Uhhuh

Greg: 36:52

And so I wound up getting a raise. I got relieved, but then I got a raise. And, and, and it was so funny because the gal that, that rat me out to RS means they, they also wound up firing her for pulling that stunt. They're like, Hey, guess what? You think that was funny? You're, you're jobless now,

Gene: 37:07

Mm-hmm.

Greg: 37:09

And, and while I don't necessarily rejoice in people losing their means or method of income, I was, I was totally on board with that lady getting fired. I'm like, all right, screw that lady.

Gene: 37:18

Yeah.

Greg: 37:19

And so, I I, I wound up going through the ranks through this it marketing outbound team. Like we went through various different names, but we just primarily operate under the Synergy solutions name cuz like they, they tried to name the team, like Star Marketing and, you know, all, all this stupid stuff. And I'm like, Let's just, let's just operate under Synergy Solutions. That sounds just fine too.

Gene: 37:41

So how long were you there?

Greg: 37:43

I started there in late January. Well, in terms of Synergy Solutions in general, I started there in late January. I wound up transferring, forcefully, forcibly transferring to that outbound mar i it marketing department. I wanna say maybe June or July of 2014, give or take.

Gene: 38:04

Mm-hmm.

Greg: 38:05

And I. There up until September of 2015, During, during my time with that outbound marketing team, I actually rose for the ranks really fast starting out as a standard outbound agent, working on the behalf of a number of clients a lot of third party resellers. Not a lot of direct manufacturers, but you know what I mean. Yeah. I'm pretty sure you're familiar with third party resellers. I, I, I did the, the, the, over the phone email marketing stuff for a couple months. Then I got promoted to quality assurance supervisor. Then I got promoted to the team lead of that department after, the gals that hired me got promoted and put elsewhere in the company. Then I got promoted to synergy Solutions corporate office as a, a director of business development for Synergy Solutions. So, I was in charge of actually

Gene: 38:53

So you're looking for new clients?

Greg: 38:55

Yeah. For, for Synergy

Gene: 38:57

Did you ever go watch Wolfville Wall Street?

Greg: 38:59

after the fact. Yeah, that's, that's, that's why, I, I knew it after fact cuz that movie came out while I was in prison. And so, and, and it was a, a movie that didn't hit network television before I got out. So, you know, there were some movies that hit that came out while I was in prison and it, they hit network TV and I was able to watch'em, if they would show on FX or T N T tbs, you know, you gotta wait a few years.

Gene: 39:24

So no premium channels in prison?

Greg: 39:26

I mean about as premium as it gets is like a M C and fx?

Gene: 39:31

No. No. HBO or Cinemax?

Greg: 39:33

no, no.

Gene: 39:35

Netflix. No. Netflix.

Greg: 39:37

no, no Netflix. No Netflix. Although nowadays they do have like little tablets, like little seven inch tablets and they can rent movies. Yeah. Yeah. They, they can rent movies once they hit video. Cuz I was talking to my gal pal and she had rented the Wakanda Forever movie a couple weeks ago. And I mean, the rentals aren't cheap. They're like$7 to rent a movie. And again, you're talking like you're watching a movie on a, on a screen like that big, you know, you're not exactly getting the theater experience

Gene: 40:10

Yeah. But so certain bucks to rent the movie and then don't you make 20 cents an hour working in.

Greg: 40:19

it just depends what you do. She works for a company that I used to work for ironically because after, after leaving Synergy I, I left Synergy Solutions when I was offered a corporate position for a company called Televerde Televerde operates outbound it marketing campaigns inside women's prisons. But obviously they have a corporate office in Phoenix and I mean, they have the, the who's who. Of big name clients. They're not working with third party, this, that, or the other thing. I mean, they, they're working with stuff like Evol or, or as now it's called Carbonite sap, Just Salesforce. I mean,

Gene: 40:58

And what are they? What? What are the gals in prison doing?

Greg: 41:02

They're, they're doing they're, they're kind of top of funnel marketing. So they, they'll work with a handful of, yeah, they'll, they'll work with a handful of account executives, For companies like SAP and, you know, Comal and, all, all those crap. And they'll penetrate companies, you know, like, An account executive, let's say they have, Midwest, large enterprise, and they, they have a list of, a thousand companies they either want to get into or they want to expand the

Gene: 41:31

Mm-hmm.

Greg: 41:32

And so what the gals in prison will do is they'll start calling into the company, finding out who does what. They have limited email access with, official, like a referees, whistle signatures branded emails for their client for the client they're collaborating with. And the girls who are doing that, they're making a minimum wage In there.

Gene: 41:50

In prison. Cause I'm making way more than other people.

Greg: 41:55

yeah. Yeah. Now, the way minimum wage works in prison in Arizona is.,a lot of it goes into a retention fund. So the most that the woman can, the, the women can keep on their books is$2 an hour.

Gene: 42:10

Okay.

Greg: 42:11

The rest get, puts, gets put into a retention fund and it accumulates, and then they can get it on a, a debit card once they step out. And, when I was working at corporate there would be a lot of girls that would come out of prison and then get a job at corporate and you know, they, they, some of them would have 40, 50, 60 K in the bank walking out of prison because they'd been working at

Gene: 42:34

I mean, that's great. That's a great thing to have when you're starting at nothing again.

Greg: 42:40

Yeah, no, absolutely. And, and so that, that's, that's where my gal works, but that's, like that's where I worked and I, and I, I stayed there.

Gene: 42:48

So, okay. Just to clarify so your, your girlfriend's in prison right now.

Greg: 42:52

yeah.

Gene: 42:55

Are you comfortable talking about how that happened?

Greg: 42:58

That's, that's her story. You know, that's,

Gene: 43:02

So just sufficient to say that you're, you're waiting for her to get out?

Greg: 43:06

yeah. Yeah. She gets out in August of 2024.

Gene: 43:10

Okay. So a little over a year.

Greg: 43:13

Yeah. Yeah. About, About what, 15 months

Gene: 43:16

Okay. And then I know we're kind of jumping around timeline here a little bit. So where, where did you guys meet?

Greg: 43:24

Tele Verde.

Gene: 43:26

Okay. So you did meet there.

Greg: 43:27

Yeah,

Gene: 43:29

Got it. All right. Go. I don't, I don't know. It could have been some random thing elsewhere, I guess, too. All right. Well, so you're working for this company now. We still haven't gotten to a point where you're writing, you're working for this company basically as a, a sales.

Greg: 43:47

When I, when I worked, when I went to work for Televerde, I, I went to work for them in late 2015. I stayed up until mid 2017. With them I, I was kind of like a client liaison, basically while, while a lot of the women in prison were really good at what they did in terms of navigating and, and creating what you would call like a, a an organizational map, which is this person reports to this person who reports to this person, They may not necessarily be very good at talking to the stakeholders with the current clients. And so that's, that's where people like me came in. Because sometimes, the, the gals in prison, they would, they, they may say something flippant, you know, my God, just, just because of their natural vernacular or what have you, or I should say they're an environmental vernacular. Yeah. So I was kind of like a client liaison type of person, I would just make sure the clients are happy. You know, some people would call it like client success.

Gene: 44:49

Sure, sure. So you're making good money at this point.

Greg: 44:52

Yeah, yeah. No, absolutely. That I took, I took some time off because post 2016 election, I, I got, I got laid off from Televerde in June or July of 2017, and it was, it was shortly after they, they hired this new HR guy and he was blatantly anti-conservative held a grudge up against anybody that, was in, five feet distance of somebody who liked Trump type of thing. So I could, I could see the writing was on the wall when that guy started targeting me, messing with me, pulling me into the office because of my posts on Facebook or LinkedIn, and it's like, all right, whatever, Jack off. So after I get laid off from there I took a brief, like a, a hiatus working at, at, at a, at an Amazon facility in Goodyear, Arizona, which I actually found that to be really fun. I know there's like a lot of people that say Amazon's terrible and, it's slave labor. I, I thought it was absolute fun. I had an absolute blast. And I, I was in charge of their b o d department while I was there. So I was there, I was there for close to a year. And b o d is like box on demand. Whenever Amazon has a very large or, or oddly shaped item that they wouldn't necessarily have a, a stack of boxes readily manufactured for them, they have this huge machine that 3D scans the item and then prints out a custom box for it.

Gene: 46:21

Really? Wow. Now, so does it cut really big pieces of cardboard or how, how does it make the box?

Greg: 46:27

It, that's, that's what it does. It, it cuts very, very large pieces of cardboard you know, Something to the extent of like, when you're loading up the machine it, it's probably eight feet wide by six feet pieces and some, and some of the pieces need to be glued together. So there was also a gluing press machine, Whenever you had a, a, a really big box. And this is like when stuff like mattresses would be getting shipped or, or absurdly, large stuffed animals, that, that, that would be the most common thing that I would see come through. There is big old mattresses, absurdly, large stuffed animals every now and then there'd be like some, like weight set or something like that. But, considering the obesity levels in the United States, obviously not a lot of people are Yeah. Anyway so a, after that, after doing that for about a year I started working with an IBM partner called Change Three. And then I stayed with them for, I don't know, when did I start working for them? I started working with Change three, I wanna say it was like in maybe, maybe May or June of 2018. And then in early 2019, I took an offer from a, a company called Demand Marketing Solutions, and, and this was all just the same, same shit. This is all IT marketing stuff. Although with Change three, I was kind of doing the client client liaison stuff. When I went to dms, I was doing more selling campaigns. But it's still in the realm of the IT stuff, the IT marketing and sales.

Gene: 48:02

so it's sales and you have it knowledge basically, so you can talk about the stuff.

Greg: 48:08

Yeah. And, and, and that's, that's an, it's an extremely important part for, selling IT campaigns or, or marketing campaigns, all that

Gene: 48:15

We still haven't gotten to rating.

Greg: 48:17

Yeah. So that's, that's when it happened in 2019, In 2019, I decided to leave the Greater Phoenix area, come out here to rural Arizona in the, in the herford pina area, roughly about a mile away from Mexico. It was, it was time. There, there's this large chunk of property that's been in my family's, name for, for a hot minute. And so the opportunity presented itself. I had or had I still have one of my brothers was trying to get out of a manufactured home that he didn't want anymore. And, There was about 10 years left on it to pay on it. And he just wanted to, dust his hands off of it. Now, when I came here, I took a look at it. I took a look at the place and, and the place needed Jesus and there's still things that I need to repair here. I just kind of tackle it when I can, and I'm trying to learn as I go. But he wanted, he wanted out of it. He, and he tried to charge me for the equity and I told him, I said, my brother in Christ, this house needs so much done to it. If you want out from it, cuz it's not like you can sell it to anybody else cuz he, he, he couldn't, it's family property 20 acres. So it can only be sold within family So, I mean, I was kind of, I was, I was leaning on that, but you know, at the same time, I wouldn't give anybody else money for the equity either, because that's how bad it was. I told him, I said, you just give up the equity and I'll take the rest of it and you can just, wash your hands at this. And so we did. And that's, I I was still working at DMS when this happened. Demand Marketing Solutions. So I moved in summer of 2019 in this area, and by October of 2019, I got a call from the c e o of Demand Marketing Solutions saying the company has gone tits up bankrupt. You know, everybody's getting their last check, but there's no more work to be done.

Gene: 50:20

Mm-hmm.

Greg: 50:21

And so that was, that was like, huh, I was, I was sitting around, I'm like, well, what am I gonna do? And so, I, I just happened to text a friend of mine, this guy Kyle Reyes. We had known each other for a couple of years. Had ghost written some stuff for law enforcement today. That, that he would either put under his name or something like that, or, he would just have it signed as former felon, thanks, X, Y, and Z. When I texted him that I wasn't asking him for a job or anything like that, but he, he hits me up, cuz he was national spokesman for law enforcement today and, and pretty much held the, the keys to the car on hiring people. He's Hey man, you want a riding job? And he is I'll give you a I think at the time he was. Paying like 20 bucks an article or something like that, 20 or 25 bucks an article. He say, Hey, you, you can I'll, I'll let you write up to eight article eight articles a day if you want. And so he kind of fucked up when he said that, cuz I, I, I went into workhorse mode, man,

Gene: 51:22

Like hell.

Greg: 51:23

It, it was, it was literally something where I fell into it by accident or, you know, circumstantial reasons, whatever. And I was with l e t up until I'm gonna say like October, November of 2021. So I, I was with them for two years. And, and like when I told you like when I wanted to work ho horse mode, I absolutely did. Like I, I, of saving up money with, with that and getting a, a decent chunk of money from Dogecoin, I was able to pay off the, the, the remaining

Gene: 51:52

you, you bought those coin back in the day?

Greg: 51:54

Yeah, yeah. But between Dogecoin profits and, money saved up, I was, I was able to pay off the, the, the 10 years remaining obviously in less than 10 years

Gene: 52:03

Mm-hmm.

Greg: 52:04

So, during my work with law enforcement today I did people were noticing me in certain circles, I guess, I did do a, what do you call those, like a fireside. With America's Future Foundation, where I spoke alongside, and this was, this was back in early 2020, I spoke alongside, Carlos Safaro from Arizona Talks, and Matthew Charles, one of the first recipients of The First Step Act under the Trump administration. So that, a discussion about criminal justice reform cuz they wanted to get my perspective on that. And, My work with l e t over the years red Voice Media, an offer came from them in late 2021, like around, November, 2021. And I'm like, Hey, yeah. Cool offer. Yeah, I'll absolutely take it because with law enforcement today, even though I would cover like some politics stuff, I would only cover politics stuff. If the politics had a direct, had some sort of direct conduit with law enforcement. So I was a little bit constrained with l e t. I've got nothing against him, I'm still good friends with, Kyle over there and, and the CEO Robert Greenberg, still good pals with him, great people. But, it, it, it is law enforcement centric and, and it does kind of get a little exhausting, it's okay, all right. And, and, and, cop did this, or, so and so was arrested, you know what I mean? At least with Red Voice media was a little bit more of a blank canvas. I mean, there were still, there were still some boundaries with r b. But considerably less, or, and yeah, so that's, that's how I got into journalism.

Gene: 53:35

Okay, cool. And then so you're still with these guys?

Greg: 53:39

No, no. red Voice Media. I don't know if you, you knew about it or maybe, maybe you're just baiting me into talking about it.

Gene: 53:45

don't

Greg: 53:45

No. I was, I was dismissed from Red Voice Media in late January, I believe it was January 30th of this year. Now, the reason afforded to me was that there were money issues with Red Voice Media and they couldn't afford to keep me.

Gene: 54:00

Okay.

Greg: 54:01

my suspicions that maybe something else influenced it.

Gene: 54:06

Hmm. you write a nasty hit piss piece on somebody, or

Greg: 54:11

That time between the days of January 27th, 28, 20 ninth, something around there I had co-hosted Twitter spaces discussing the Eliza Blue scenario.

Gene: 54:23

Hmm

Greg: 54:24

And some of these spaces were listened to by hundreds of people at any given time. Four or five, 600 people on some of these spaces. And at this time in late January, it was still a bit of a contentious issue to discuss because people were still getting from Twitter. People were still getting YouTube videos struck. Tim Pool was still having us meltdowns. And, and what was that gal? Former gateway, pundit lady? Fairbanks, Cassandra Fairbanks. She was still dogging people who were bringing it up. It, it was still contentious and, Eliza Blue had a lot of conduit within conservative media at the time,

Gene: 55:08

Yeah. Which I completely don't understand because the first time I saw her on Tim, and I think a lot of people still don't know who the hell she is cuz frankly she was not that big. But I remember when she was on Tim and I was like, there's definitely something to off about her and why are they platforming her? Because like this is not an area I've spent a great deal of time looking at. But I've certainly watched cuz I, I, I enjoy documentaries. So I've certainly seen plenty of documentaries including ones that deal with people that were actually trafficked and, and there, because YouTube has a shit ton of these both from Europe and from the us. Any large US major city has a trafficking problem at this point. And Eliza did not act like anybody in these videos. She acted a lot more like the church lady that goes to help somebody that got trafficked rather than somebody who got trafficked. So there was a disconnect between the messaging and the actions and

Greg: 56:23

I, I, I agree.

Gene: 56:24

Yeah, so I saw that way before, the first time she was on Tim Cast. I'm like, something's, something's weird here, but obviously who cares, right? She was on once, not a big deal. Then she came back a second time and immediately proceeded with accusations of Tate brothers.

Greg: 56:42

Yeah

Gene: 56:42

I'm in contact with women. These guys raped. And it's hold up. There's, they're not, they haven't even been charged that. What we are seeing coming from Romania is little bits and pieces that are clearly pr, whether it's for one side or the other. We're not getting anything from the government itself. And and she's been talking to women directly. It's okay, I'm, I believe this chick even less and because it, it just doesn't make sense. I'm a big fan of Occam's razor. The, the most the explanation with the least amount of jumps and hoops and twirls in it. The thing that's the, the cleanest to explain is the most likely explanation. It's not guarantees to be, but it's the most likely. And in this case, boy was there a lot of jumps and hoops and I can't talk about it. And that, that's usually a pretty good sign that that something isn't being portrayed the way that it actually. So, but you know, I've certainly never met her. I've never met anybody. She's mad. To me, this was just a curiosity thing in observing somebody that seemed not to be genuine and yet was getting an awful lot of people from Elon Musk to Tim Poole, completely bending the need to her and doing whatever she wants, which is a weird phenomenon. And then I'd interviewed a guy that like I'd interviewed a year previously at Def Fango. So I, I think I might, my original interview with him was a little over a year ago, and it was time for another one. I figured. And, and right in that process of, of talking to him, I'm finding out that he actually knew her when she was in their twenties in Arizona and has, is basically confirming what my suspicions are, which is that she's full of shit, except he's doing it firsthand. I was like, well, that's wild dude. This is very interesting stuff. Now I'm, now you're getting me to wanna dig in more into, I'm finding out about her. And that was kind of like the, the way I ended up getting on well really renaming the show which was his idea, but I highly encouraged it. He said it as a joke. I'm like, you have to do it. You, you have to change the name of the. To actually be grift cast. And and he totally did. He went full on, full in, full on into that whole image of it. But anyway, I'm, I'm talking and it's, I'm actually supposed to be interviewing you here, so

Greg: 59:24

No, I'm, I'm, I'm, all four for you

Gene: 59:26

Yeah. So, but

Greg: 59:27

dialogue.

Gene: 59:29

well, it's not, it's not, it's an interview dude. It's not a dialogue. But I figured this was interesting enough for you to hear sort of, the backstory on, on my side, because this is, this is how I ended up meeting you is through Def Fango and through this whole Eliza Blue thing. So it, it is interesting. And then, so continue on. So give me gimme your take or kind of what you started doing.

Greg: 59:53

Oh after, I got turned, because, my, my, me getting informed of, of my dismissal was literally five minutes after getting off of a Twitter space,

Gene: 1:00:04

Hmm.

Greg: 1:00:05

Where the update on the background and into Eliza Blue was, was being discussed. And I did notice that a coworker of mine was on that Twitter space just listening in. They weren't participating, just listening in. And yeah, five minutes after me getting off that space, boom, fired. But once again, like I said, the, the official reason given to me was money. So, as far as I know, it, it, it could all, it, it could be a coincidence, that's, that's why I'm not necessarily throwing rbm under the bus and being like f them. Because, even, even if it was at all influenced at the time,

Gene: 1:00:43

Mm-hmm.

Greg: 1:00:44

I wouldn't necessarily blame them either. Because in the conservative media space, access is everything. And, who am I? I, I mean, I've got access to maybe a handful of people. I, I, I think one of the reasons why they liked me is cuz you know, I'm, I'm chummy with Mindy Robertson. She's an nice lady. Her, her and her husband.

Gene: 1:01:06

Don't know who that is.

Greg: 1:01:08

She's the, the partner of gosh, why am I having a brain fart? She's gonna hate me for this Randy Couture. It's Randy Couture's

Gene: 1:01:15

Oh, okay. Got it.

Greg: 1:01:16

Yeah. They, they, they have some property here in Arizona. And, and they're just, just nice, nice folks. Really, really. Mindy is a very, very sweet gal. I, I had run positive press on her efforts when she was running for office in Nevada, cuz she ran for her office in Nevada twice. Unfortunately, didn't, didn't get the party nominations and that, that's fine. It's still good to, to see independent voices running. I'm all for that, shaking things up. So I think that, like if, if I get fired, worst case scenario, what they, they, they get maybe not as much direct conduit with her, but, then they lose the possibility of, of maybe being in cahoots with folks like Tim Poole or folks at the Daily Wire. Cuz cuz again,

Gene: 1:02:02

How big are they? I don't know how big they're,

Greg: 1:02:05

how, how big or who

Gene: 1:02:07

the company that you were working for,

Greg: 1:02:10

Yeah, they're, they're, they're they're not relatively

Gene: 1:02:11

do they call? Red?

Greg: 1:02:12

Red Voice media.

Gene: 1:02:13

red Voice? Yeah.

Greg: 1:02:14

Red, red Voice media

Gene: 1:02:15

So how many, how many employees do you think they have?

Greg: 1:02:19

Probably less than 10.

Gene: 1:02:20

Oh, okay. So they're tiny.

Greg: 1:02:21

Yeah. Yeah. I, I mean like, you, you take into consideration, you know,

Gene: 1:02:26

Temple's got 30, so they're just size wise?

Greg: 1:02:31

huh?

Gene: 1:02:31

Well, Tim Pool has 30 people, so they're about the third of that size.

Greg: 1:02:35

Yeah, yeah. And, I mean, so, like I said, access is everything. And so, even, even if it was at all influenced or, or fueled by that situation, I can't blame him. You know, I, I, I wouldn't be able to blame him. I could be pissed off. Sure.

Gene: 1:02:53

Mm.

Greg: 1:02:55

At, at the same time, business is business. So I figured like after that it's I, I didn't even approach Red Voice Media to write an article about Eliza or anything like that. Never even brought it up once because I knew it was kind of a taboo thing at late in late January. Cuz keep in mind, around the same time, this was one Red State published an article and then they immediately retracted it. And the excuse given was, oh, there was too much editorialized stuff in there. It's have you not read anything else that's on Red State and now you're complaining that there's too much editorialized content in a, in a Red State article,

Gene: 1:03:29

Yeah.

Greg: 1:03:30

It, the red state is a lot of op-eds. So I I I, I was kind of blown flabbergasted when I saw that they retracted that piece. But again, I understand why, they, they probably got some heat. They can say they didn't get heat all day, but let's face it, they, they probably did. They got a call from somebody.

Gene: 1:03:47

Mm-hmm.

Greg: 1:03:48

That being said, I'm like, screw it. I'll just go independent. I'll kick off a YouTube channel and I'll talk about Eliza Blue and anything else I want to talk about at any given time,

Gene: 1:03:58

So I guess my question is why a YouTube channel versus a what's that website that everybody seems to be on where you write stuff?

Greg: 1:04:06

CK.

Gene: 1:04:07

Yeah, that one. That's what I was thinking.

Greg: 1:04:09

My, my rationale was I do a bit of reading, but I do a lot more watching when it comes to digesting information because, you know, yeah, I, I, I like that audio visual stimulation. And I figured it's not that print media is dying, okay. It kind of is. Not a lot of people read stuff, more often than not. Like you can see a article that was shared, 50,000 times on Twitter, and it's like a really big, it's got a really spicy headline and a, and a cool little picture. I've seen, working on the back end of WordPress where law enforcement today has said articles like that where it'll be shared 50,000 times and have, so many thousands likes and all that, and you look and see how many people actually viewed the page. You, you, you might have maybe a quarter or half of that as views, but then when you start getting to the brass tacks of how long somebody actually stayed on the page, you can tell a large majority didn't even read it.

Gene: 1:05:21

Yeah. That Well there there's definitely something to be said for that. but also I think different people have different preferences. So you don't, you don't have a preference towards writing, you're fine with just doing speaking.

Greg: 1:05:33

Yeah, I'm, I'm, I'm fine with speaking because I, I was thinking like, I was wondering I, I want to be able to reach an audience that kind of resembles me in, in a sense folks who are open to maybe, more nuanced or critical thinking when it comes to, to certain topical matters. And I'm like, well, if I prefer to digest my information like this, I'm, there's no reason why people who would be lateral to me in terms of, a, a mindset would digest information in a similar fashion. And, and, and the numbers don't lie. More people are consuming video. More people are consuming audio podcasts and, and they are reading stuff. It doesn't mean there isn't a place for, for writing. And perhaps I'll kick off a sub if I want to do something that might be better presented in a written format, especially if it's like a dicey topic,

Gene: 1:06:24

Yeah.

Greg: 1:06:25

But you know, for I, in the meantime, no vi video seems to be where, where, where I'm, I'm happier doing things.

Gene: 1:06:33

Got it. Okay. Cool. And so how often are you doing videos?

Greg: 1:06:37

So it, it's sporadic. You know,

Gene: 1:06:40

that's not good. You need you definitely need regular.

Greg: 1:06:44

on, yeah, on on average, the channel has been up now for about five weeks,

Gene: 1:06:50

Huh.

Greg: 1:06:50

and I think I'm in excess 20 videos, but also a, a, a, a handful of them were reloads, like classic enemies. I think that that was like four of them. But, but on average, I'll, I'll do two videos a week, but sometimes it may be three or four. If, if there is an amalgamation of topics.

Gene: 1:07:11

Yeah. And it, it's the, the thing well, one of the recurring pieces of, of insider advice when I did a whole series of interviews with people that are that have very large YouTube channels, like Million Plus, is everybody talked about their early days. And the thing that really made the biggest difference was sticking to a schedule like Monday, Wednesday, Friday, every week, no matter what. Same time people get used to it, even if it's not at livestream. Obviously with livestreams that matters even more because you're actually asking people to consume the content at the exact same time you're producing it. But even if it's posted videos, just having that regularity it keeps you from losing people. So you could still gain people if you're not seeking to a schedule, but they were, it's gonna be somewhat offset by losing people. and by losing, I don't mean subs. I mean, viewers, there's a big difference. People that don't do YouTube, don't understand too, is the what, who you have as subs matters A little bit, but not a whole lot because there are plenty of channels that have 20, 50,000 subs and then have five comments per video. There's zero interaction going on regardless of the number of subs they have. So it's really how many people can you get to consistently consume the content itself that makes the most difference and

Greg: 1:08:37

no, and, and the one thing, That, that I have noticed with, with the content that I've produced particularly the last couple of videos that I shot out which one related to a story about an autistic boy who I had his romantic gestures denied by a young girl. And the other one was when I was just talking about things that debunking prison myths. And I noticed the interaction on there, on, on both of those were, were very, very healthy and, and they were healthy on a lot of other videos that I did too. And I, I noticed that. If I find something interesting or something and, and, and I think I'm doing the right thing, at least with some of the topics that I'm covering, I'm like, okay, if I find this interesting in conversation where the chances are other like-minded people

Gene: 1:09:23

Oh, absolutely.

Greg: 1:09:24

it, and it is showing in the comments, even though I have a relatively small channel in comparison to, you know, a a handful of other people, I'm, I'm, I'm slightly past 300 subs or something like

Gene: 1:09:35

Mm-hmm.

Greg: 1:09:36

To have, 10, 15, 20 comments on a video with that many subs,

Gene: 1:09:41

Yeah. It's a very good ratio. Absolutely. Yeah.

Greg: 1:09:45

and and you know, I mean, outside of the Lenny KEMs here and there most, most of the comments are, are positive. So, I I, at least I know I'm doing some things correctly and I know there are other things I could be doing better.

Gene: 1:09:59

Yeah. Well, so that's kinda your new direction. Now, obviously a small video channel isn't paying the bills, so you still gotta make money. What are you doing for that?

Greg: 1:10:10

So I, I took the month of February off, obviously and I think I'm gonna take this whole month off too. I'm not really worried about money in the meantime. I've, got a, I've got an nest egg that I'll be.

Gene: 1:10:23

Mm-hmm.

Greg: 1:10:25

but I'll, I'll find something to make money. You know, I, I I joked with my father about it the other day. What was it yesterday actually? Cuz my, my father's older. He's in his late seventies and there's a lot of things he can't do. Like when he fired up his car the other day, car battery was dead. He's not changing his car, battery, he's not taking So, so I, I took care of that for him. And I, I was, telling him like, yeah, he was like, so what your gotta do for a job? And I'm like, I don't know. And maybe I'll work at a gas station. And he was looking at me like I was crazy and I was like, dude, I, I, I don't need much money, man. That's the thing. As, as I, I've, I've kind of hit an age in, in a point in my life where I'm humble and I'm very content with, with what I have because number one, I know I can keep it, they can't take it away from me right now. And sometimes there, there is it, it, it kind of takes me back to like, when I took that time off, so to speak, when I was working at Amazon, it was busy work. It was, physically exhausting you, you're on your feet. But there was something just kind of fulfilling about it at the same time to just go somewhere, do a job for any number of hours, and then not have to think at.

Gene: 1:11:38

Yeah.

Greg: 1:11:39

about what you did because you, you did what you were supposed to do. It was done. It's not like sales, it's not like marketing or

Gene: 1:11:45

Yeah. Well, that, I think you hit upon the main difference between blue collar work and white collar work is that blue collar work doesn't have to be physical, even though it often is, but it's work that you can just sort of, punch out of. and then come back to,

Greg: 1:12:02

Yeah.

Gene: 1:12:03

white collar work. And incidentally, blue collar work can often pay more than white collar work in the today's society. I mean, you try getting an electrician, you you'd see just how much money they're charging.

Greg: 1:12:15

Oh

Gene: 1:12:15

It's 180 bucks an hour. So, but white collar work tends to be work that even when you're not on the job, you're thinking about or you're prepping for, you're at the very least worrying about, because there's always, it's continuous work. It's work that that is stretched over long periods of time. And even though you're not physically necessarily at the office and of course this all got screwed up during Covid, but you're still kind of, it's always in the back of your mind

Greg: 1:12:47

Yeah. Yeah. You know, when I was with Televerde, you know, when I was with Change three Synergy Solutions, especially like in the midst of sales negotiations. Yeah. You're never really truly off the.

Gene: 1:13:01

Absolutely. And, and it's a it does end up affecting the way that you interact with other people if you've had a bad day with your job again, because you can't just sort of punch out and not think about it until the next day. is it, it, it has a propensity to pull other people you're interacting with that have nothing to do with your work because they're, they're affected by your mood, which is very often because, you're, you're stressed out about something that you need to do in the future. You're not necessarily stressed about what happened that day, even though they're, that can certainly happen too. But very often the stress comes from the anticipation of future events. Not so much from the current or past events in white collar work.

Greg: 1:13:51

Yeah, no, absolutely. Yeah. And, and you, you are correct insofar as yeah, there, that that is one of the most tantalizing aspects of, blue collar work, you know, regular service jobs is Yeah. You, you go in, pretty much exactly what you need to do and you can realistically gauge what, what your day is gonna be like. I mean, of course there are going to be, variables, but for the most, You can already project whether it's largely gonna be a good day or a bad day, or a busy day, whatever. But when it's done, it's done. And you, and you go, you leave

Gene: 1:14:26

Yep. Exactly. So, I do wanna go back to something that I know a lot of people are gonna be curious about, which is the prison experience because that's not something that most people have gone through. So obviously it's gonna. Interesting to hear about that from people that have I watched a series of interviews, not even so much interviews, it's just the guy that was F PS Russia, I don't know if you know who that is.

Greg: 1:14:55

Yeah. I'm, I'm vaguely familiar with'em,

Gene: 1:14:56

so he had the largest YouTube channel on YouTube during the time that he was popular. I can't remember how many million viewers it was, but it was, it, it was the biggest even though the, I think there might have been some people that had more subscribers. He had he, he was making the most money for YouTube, let's put it that way from an advertising standpoint. But the events that led up to him ending up in prison for basically hamming marijuana I think were greatly affected by the fact that his business partner was shot in the back of the head by somebody that never was found. And that was, I think that kind of placed a dark cloud over him. And then led to the, the, I think it was, I, I don't remember if it was F B I or ATF or one of the agencies clearly decided that he needed to get taken off YouTube. And the best way to do that would be to put him in a place where he couldn't stream from, which should be prison. and again, the threatened with long duration prison sentences, blah, blah, blah. And eventually he, he did a plea where he would spend, I can't remember if it was nine months or six months. It wasn't, it was under a year for sure, but still ridiculous for just possessing marijuana in prison. And he lost all his guns and that's hundreds of thousands of dollars of guns that he ended up losing. And of course, as a, a felon, he can't have guns anymore. But listening to his stories about prison, not about the whole bullshit that led up to prison and how he was railroaded into it, but the actual prison experience was fascinating. So I'm curious to see what have you got for prison stories or what did you find that was totally different than what you expected before ever going to prison? What surprised you or what shocked you or what, what, either pleasantly or negatively.

Greg: 1:17:00

So when I, when I went into the system all I really had was a working knowledge from a law enforcement perspective in conjunction with much what most people have, what they see from TV and movies and, and maybe documentaries from a and e or, or whatever, whichever channel does the, a lot of those prison documentaries. Some, some, things are, nail on the head. There, there, there is a lot of amongst inmates and I, I expected that, There were some things I, I didn't know exactly how far reaching it was which is why I, I kind of raised my eyebrows because he sent me a link for an F p s Russia story where he was talking about his experience and, I, I kind of listened to some of the stories and I'm like, eh, the, that sounds a bit embellished, or, eh, that doesn't sound right. Who knows? What surprised me was just like how far-reaching the racial stuff wa would go. We at least for, for the white inmates and the whites have, it's not just like the whites, theirs. Different segments of different whites, different, different prison gangs in

Gene: 1:18:11

Mm-hmm.

Greg: 1:18:11

in Arizona. The Aaron Brotherhood runs I is the top dog for, for the whites. And then they have a lateral thing, which is a, a bit smaller but they're, they're the skins skinheads, Nazis, whatever you wanna call'em. And while people may think Aryan Brotherhood and, and skins are the same thing, no the skins are the legitimate racists. They don't like black people because they are black and Whereas Aryan Brotherhood they operate with a self-segregation mindset for the purposes of, just good political operations. Because at the end of the day, no matter, and, and, and you really see this in prison because people kind of revert a bit back to, lizard, brain esque tendencies,

Gene: 1:19:03

would expect?

Greg: 1:19:03

PE people are tribal. And, There's two types of tribalism people will fall into. There's interest that interest slash ideological. It's kinda like when, when kids go to school and, the, the, the jocks sit with the jocks and the nerds, you know, hang out with each other. But at the backdrop of ideology and. There, there is people who look like me and whether or not people want to admit that they have that tribalistic aspect resting somewhere in the background, they, they do like it exists. And when the chips are down and you're in an environment like that, you do kind of fall back on that. It doesn't mean that in prison you can, if you're white, you can trust every person who is white and Nor if you're black, you can trust every person is black. It's not that, it's just that you guys roll together. So the, there would be certain things that I wasn't prepared for. Like, when I first got my TV on the yard which TV at the time they were expensive. And it was, they were still selling CRTs back in 2009 and I think it was like 350 bucks for like a 13 inch c r t tv. Yeah, yeah, A little bit overpriced. But when I got my tv, it was like, it was probably like a, a month after I'd hit the yard cuz I had to wait for money to hit my books and then get it ordered and all that crap. A couple of the white guys came up and they're like, oh man, you got a tv? I said, yeah, and, and they go, here, let me fix it for you. I said, fix it. What's wrong with it? And so they go and they deke. They Deprogrammed. B e. From my television

Gene: 1:20:48

Nice.

Greg: 1:20:49

they're like, all right, now it's better

Gene: 1:20:52

So hold on. You had a TV in your cell?

Greg: 1:20:55

Yeah. Yeah.

Gene: 1:20:57

What the hell, man, that's not the way they portray it on tv. There's supposed to be one TV for everybody, and then there's big fights that break out over who gets a change of channel.

Greg: 1:21:06

there, there are certain yards that have community televisions. Community televisions, number one, are more common in jail. And that's one thing that kind of pisses me off when people confuse jail and prison. There are two totally different things there are some yards that

Gene: 1:21:22

Jail is, were the people that haven't actually been sentenced stay from

Greg: 1:21:26

well, yes, but there are also people who are sentenced to jail. So jailhouse is one of two type of inmates. Those who have not been sentenced, or those who have been sentenced typically for a non felony that renders less than 364 days of incarceration.

Gene: 1:21:45

Oh, interesting. Okay. I didn't know that. I thought jail was strictly for people that are pre-sentencing.

Greg: 1:21:50

Yeah, no j jail does harbor sentenced inmates. And those are, those are, typically your convicted criminals, which is different from a convicted felon.

Gene: 1:22:00

Right.

Greg: 1:22:01

So you,

Gene: 1:22:01

what, what are the levels of prisons? I know there's supermax is the ultimate, what, what are the different levels and what level were you in?

Greg: 1:22:08

So when I first went in I was on a level three yard. The levels that they have, there's level one, level 2, 3, 4, and five in Arizona, and five is basically the equivalent of the whole, like it's 23 hour lockdown and you are either by yourself or you have one cellmate. It's, One, one of two things for a level five slash the hole. They're one and the same level four. It might as well be a level five, but for some reason they felt as though that there needs to be something in between a level three and a level five. But, There, there is a little bit more movement in a level four yard. They are still able to have in-person contact visits on the weekend. So friends, family or whatever. But outside of that, it's pretty much a five a level three yard. It's called controlled movement. And in those yards you don't have cells. What you have are runs, and a run is basically like a long hallway with some cubes, which cubes would basically be the equivalent of a cell. It's a one person living quarter that is, has cinder blocks that, that are stacked about. Waste high, As dividers and each run will have about about 10 cubes. And they're reserved for phase three inmates, inmates who have been in the system longer than a year, and their number came up for an available cube. And the rest are double bunks, Double bunk beds that, that line those hallways. And in a controlled movement yard, you are in the run for a majority of the day, with the exception of either going to work, if you have a job on the yard or something. Or the rec times which rec you would get two hours of rec per day. And it would stagger like, like Mondays it would be in the morning. Yeah. Tuesdays afternoon, so on and so forth. And, and then also you would go to the chow hall, but you know, it still, it was controlled movement. For instance, like when you go to the chow hall or you go to rec on a three yard, all inmates are only allowed to walk in a clockwise direction from their housing unit to either the chow hall or the rec field. And when exiting the chow hall or rec field continue in that clockwise motion when returning back to the housing unit. And I mean, it is what it is. Like the run is not exactly glorious living you know?

Gene: 1:24:42

I mean, it sounds like the, the actual cells would be preferable to a living community like that,

Greg: 1:24:52

Yeah, yeah. Because the problem with the runs is now and then something would happen. Y Tensions, can rise in there pretty quickly when you have about 36 to 38 people living in a long hallway, and between these 36, 38 people, you're sharing two toilets that you can sit on to take a shit. And these are also completely open toilets. They're, they're, they're in full view of specifically like the correctional officers who are in the control tower, in the center of the room that hosts all the runs. And then there's also like a couple urinals in there couple of showers, peop people would get into, altercations frequently, maybe somebody smells bad and like the person living next to'em is Hey man, you freaking stink. You need a shower, and it turns into a fistfight. Maybe somebody's trying to work out in the restroom area and then somebody else is smoking a cigarette in there and the person working out is getting pissed about the cigarette smoke. You know what I mean? It, it's really easy to, to get into an altercation in a run. And, and if you spend any amount of time in there, You will get into one. It's inevitable.

Gene: 1:26:00

Now, do you know what a level two or level one, they're like

Greg: 1:26:03

I, I did go to a level two after I hit a level two in, I wanna say March of 2012.

Gene: 1:26:12

mm-hmm.

Greg: 1:26:13

And level twos, it's, it's open rec. And so what that means is no, nothing locks except for the exterior of, of the prison itself. So you're never locked in a cell, but you do have a cell. You're, you're, you're in a, a two person cell.

Gene: 1:26:29

Mm.

Greg: 1:26:30

And then you have a day room area. When I, when I first hit the yard, it was, it was called it was called Eagle Point. That was the name of the yard. They did have a community tv, but it was only there for a couple of months because, a lot of the inmates were like, Hey man, like we spent all this money on these TVs and you're saying we can't use our TVs cuz we got these big TVs. It's no, fuck that. We want our TVs. And so we got our TVs, that, that's, that's a thing like, I don't know why the inmates that were on that yard prior to didn't do that. But as far as I know, I, I think they were protective custody inmates that were on there before. Cuz they had like a mass, a mass move, a mass move from a bunch of yards. And, and I know PC inmates are kind of, they're woos, they I mean, they are, yeah. They don't, they, they don't necessarily know how to approach, you know, the administration and be like, Hey, do what the fuck

Gene: 1:27:22

Mm-hmm.

Greg: 1:27:24

but

Gene: 1:27:24

do, you know what the level ones are like? I mean, not from personal experience, sounds but in

Greg: 1:27:28

kind of, I kind of know. And the reason why is because in Arizona like you remember like in Harry Potter, where, where they put on the sorting hat and they figure out which, which house you go in.

Gene: 1:27:38

Didn't watch it,

Greg: 1:27:38

Oh, okay. All right. Well, basically in Arizona, in Arizona, when he gets sentenced to prison, and it's time for you to hit the big house because, like the day you get sentenced is not the day you go to prison. Like you, you actually just go back to jail. And it might be like a week, two weeks before they send somebody from A D O C to, to come pick you up. And, and they do the shuffle. They take you to a sorting center called Alhambra here in Arizona. That is a blend. It's one part level five, one part level one. And the reason why it is, is because when they're classifying inmates that are coming in, they don't know where they're gonna put you yet. So they treat you as a level five, basically. And you're in there for about a week, week and a half, maybe sometimes, because number one, they're, giving you some shots, to, to, to make sure you're not gonna get sick or anything like that. They also take make you take like a literacy and comprehension test. Which I, I found it to be absolutely hilarious cuz they asked me like do you have your high school diploma? I'm like yeah, And they, they were like, well, you still have to take the literacy test. I'm like, oh, okay. And the reason why if you score low on that literacy and comprehensive test, they actually make you take like these educational courses, like for math and shit like that in prison. Also does absolutely nothing to give you a high school diploma, which I think it's an, a complete fucking waste of time. Like, they should just let people get a G E D, which they do, but they should just completely get rid of those comprehensive tests and, you know, forced education that renders

Gene: 1:29:18

Well, I've heard of people getting their college degrees in prison as well.

Greg: 1:29:22

Oh, yeah. Yeah. No, people, people, I, I took some college classes while I was in there. I took enough credits to get a A N C C R electrical certification. Yeah. I'm never gonna use it but I know my way around a ground fault circuit interrupter. So, that's, that's about it. But with, with, with, with that being said Alhambra, like I said, you stay there for a week, week and a half, the level one inmates. are the ones who are permanently housed at Alhambra that handle pretty much 99% of the inmate classification stuff. They, take down information, all that crap. They help out, with serving chow, it's, it's the lowest of the low yards. Now, I, I honestly wouldn't know why there would be a level one based upon what I experienced on a level two yard,

Gene: 1:30:13

Mm.

Greg: 1:30:14

because level two felt pretty dang free in and of itself. I mean, I, I had cool jobs while I was on a level two. At one point, I, I worked at onsite hospital at the prison complex in the section called L 11, which was the retirement home basically, For the elderly inmates that are at the point of, shitting themselves. And so I worked alongside, a handful of CNAs and, nurses helping take care of the elderly inmates. I did that for the last eight months I think that I was in.

Gene: 1:30:47

Hmm. All right. What, what?

Greg: 1:30:51

but it's open yard, level two at least, and I'm guessing level one

Gene: 1:30:54

So what surprised you pleasantly, if anything, compared to what your thoughts about prison were before you went in?

Greg: 1:31:03

I, I found There are a lot of decent people there, and I, I don't want my words to get misconstrued or conflated to, for, for it to be digested as, These are innocent people or

Gene: 1:31:17

We've all seen Green Mile, dude. There's, there's always innocent people in

Greg: 1:31:21

Yeah. I, I don't want it to be misconstrued like that because, when it comes down to it, I've never met an innocent person in prison and I've met thousands of people. I've never met somebody who didn't commit their crime or commit other crimes that they weren't caught for. You know what I mean? Yeah. So that's, that's when I kind of roll my eyes when people bitch about, there's so many innocent people in prison. I'm like, oh, okay. Yeah. And yes, I know it's anecdotal, but I think, I think maybe my anecdotal experience of meeting thousands of people might carry more weight than, some fat person on the internet, with multicolored hair saying there's a, oh, my prison industrial complex, the school to prison pipeline. It's like, all right, shut the fuck up, But

Gene: 1:32:02

Were there many people with colored hair in prison?

Greg: 1:32:05

No, they don't let you dye your hair in prison.

Gene: 1:32:07

No, but I like do, do they shave your hair when you walk in, or would you not see somebody that had purple hair when they were booked?

Greg: 1:32:15

Yeah, no, that would, that would've been remedied probably in jail. And if they did have something like purple hair or something like that, hitting Alhambra, yeah. They would be told to shave their head, Because you, you can't have. any wild hairstyles in there, especially for the men. No dyed hair, no bleached hair, none of that crap. You can grow your hair out long and you have to wear wear. But no, it's, you're, you're pretty much constrained to either growing out your hair or maybe kind of like

Gene: 1:32:44

How about facial hair? Do you have to shave or not?

Greg: 1:32:47

So every inmate, yes, they, they have to shave unless they have a shaving waiver and, shaving waivers I was actually,

Gene: 1:32:55

My religion, man. I'm a beard. I'm a beard. Dietarian, it's my religion.

Greg: 1:33:00

There, there would some, there would be people who would claim religious exemption and get shaving wager shaving waiver. So those would be people who would make claims about, being Muslim. You as some folks claim the, a true stuff. And then there would be medical shaving waivers, and that would typically go to the black people, that get like the severe razor bumps. Yeah. And, and with that, you were not allowed to style your beard. You just had to let it grow and you could trim it that, but that was about it. But there was no, like styling or shaping it or

Gene: 1:33:28

Right, right, right.

Greg: 1:33:29

Anybody else, they could either be clean shaven or they could have a, a military must.

Gene: 1:33:33

Mm-hmm. Interesting. Okay. How about any, any I was surprised about the person on tv, anything else like that from a, like a privilege that people would be kind of surprised that you would have In the prison?

Greg: 1:33:49

I mean, at the, at the time that I was in you could get CD players, you know, And they had a limit on the amount of CDs that you could have. You were only allowed to have 20 CDs. If you were to get more, you were supposed to trade'em in at property, exchange them. And then the property officer would hold it like in your property file, whatever.

Gene: 1:34:07

How about, how about like publications, magazines?

Greg: 1:34:10

Yeah, you can get magazines. By the time that I got in, they were getting pornography removed cuz people used to be able to get stuff like Playboy or something

Gene: 1:34:18

yeah. Mm-hmm.

Greg: 1:34:19

And this is what I thought was funny because I found out it was a, it was a, a hostile work environment claim from female correctional officers at the time in 2009. And, and they were saying that the presence of pornographic books made it a hostile work environment. I kind of rolled my eyes at that. I'm like, you're working in a prison.

Gene: 1:34:38

Yeah.

Greg: 1:34:39

I, I, I don't think you should be allowed to say to make certain claims of hostile work environment. Now don't, don't get me wrong, I never had a desire to look at a pornographic book while I was in there, cuz I mean, there's, there's nothing really that's enticing being around a bunch of. I, I mean, I guess maybe if, if you're, homosexual may, maybe I, I don't know. But like in, in, in the general population, we, we ran off the homos you know, if they would hit the yard,

Gene: 1:35:06

yeah. So that's another question is what percentage of the men in their, over the course of your years of being in prison did you, I mean, I don't know if it's even necessarily directly or indirectly, but did you get a sense that they were screwing out their.

Greg: 1:35:24

I, I mean there were, there were some admitted homos that, that hit the yard that, that, that were white boys.

Gene: 1:35:29

Mm-hmm.

Greg: 1:35:29

and when they hit the yard, the heads came up to him and said, listen, we're not gonna do anything to you if you just pack up your bags and leave. And, and the reason why is because, homosexuals caused a lot of drama on, on, on the yard. It, that's like a, a trope that's some crap you see in movies. And for all the people that wanna say, oh, well, I saw a documentary and they interviewed a gay dude. And I guarantee you that, that that was filmed on a protective custody yard. Because in gp, the inmates are not going to let a camera crew come in in the yard and start interviewing people. It's especially not that private confessional interview crap, because Somebody does that, they're, they're gonna be assumed to be some kind of, one time on the yard or something like that. So, so yeah. The, the, the, the gay stuff doesn't happen in general population.

Gene: 1:36:21

So even as a power move, like if

Greg: 1:36:25

Yeah. No. If

Gene: 1:36:27

get fucked.

Greg: 1:36:28

No, no. Yeah. So, It was something that this guy, George told me when I, when when I first hit the yard, he was, he was one of the heads of the AB at the time, and he pulled me up and he kind of gave me the rundown. And, he asked me, he goes, so, did you see that candy bar video? And the candy bar video is something they show you in Al Hambra, and it's like a video that was produced in the eighties, and it's telling you what to do to avoid prison rape and all this crap. It, and it's if an inmate leaves a candy bar on your pillow, don't take it. It could be an invitation for sex. And it, it's actually a little bit of a joke in the men's system. When Phish hit the yard, people will jokingly throw some Hershey's bars or Twix on their, on their pillow

Gene: 1:37:09

Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

Greg: 1:37:11

But when George was giving the, giving me the rundown he, he explained it to me like this. He goes, he goes, yeah, yeah. He goes all that stuff, rape stuff, gay stuff. He goes, that, that doesn't fly here. He goes, if anybody tries to make a pass at you, says anything like that, you tell us, we'll get it taken care of. Because apparently rape was a problem in the eighties in the prison system. And from, from my understanding, apparently, like it was, it was really problematic a amongst black inmates. I. committing sexual violence against each other, but also, Spreading the love to other races too. And so it got to a point where people got sick and tired, I guess, of, of being sexually assaulted in, in the eighties. So people started getting stabbed, stabbed up on the yard, killed for it. And I'm totally down with that. It's yeah, if somebody tries to sexually assault somebody, yeah, screw it. Kill'em. Or maybe if you don't kill'em, at least give'em something to remember it,

Gene: 1:38:07

mm-hmm.

Greg: 1:38:08

So yeah, that, that stuff, even for power plays or anything like that, that doesn't fly now, now people can get beat up pretty bad and people can be killed. But sexual violence no. No, absolutely not.

Gene: 1:38:22

How many, how many people get killed while you were in, in, in that prison?

Greg: 1:38:28

I knew of at least one, Where, where, where I saw it. I did see people get previously injured.

Gene: 1:38:34

Mm-hmm.

Greg: 1:38:35

I don't know if they died later,

Gene: 1:38:36

Okay.

Greg: 1:38:38

there's not necessarily a good information wire once somebody gets helicoptered out of there, you know? But you know, at least, at least one person,

Gene: 1:38:47

Mm-hmm.

Greg: 1:38:47

I did see got killed.

Gene: 1:38:49

And so you mentioned people kinda spread it out by race into their affiliate groups. We hear on the outside obviously that like it's a crazy high percentage of black men that get incarcerated when you're actually in prison. What does the population breakdown by race, like what percentage are black, white, Asian?

Greg: 1:39:09

every, every yard that I was on it was, I mean, this is guesstimating. I'd say it was probably about maybe three to 5% black. And, you know, the, the, the remaining would be a mix of whites Chicanos and PIs,

Gene: 1:39:30

and what?

Greg: 1:39:31

pi PIs, Matos, wetbacks, illegals.

Gene: 1:39:34

Oh, illegals. Okay. Well, I'm not familiar with that term. Any Asians,

Greg: 1:39:39

I saw one Asian,

Gene: 1:39:42

So that's very stereotypical

Greg: 1:39:44

yeah. Well, unless, unless you consider Filipinos. Cause I, I think I did bump into two Filipinos. Dude. Do they count as Asian?

Gene: 1:39:51

I, I think so. I mean, they're basically Hispanic Asians, cuz Philippines

Greg: 1:39:56

I, I ran into like two Filipinos. Yeah. And, and the and I almost forgot to, to mention the chiefs. Yeah. It's like I said, three to 5% black and, probably about, to 5% chiefs, native Americans not, there's not a lot of of natives.

Gene: 1:40:11

In, at least in the Arizona where you were, it's predominantly white.

Greg: 1:40:16

it's predominantly white in Chicano.

Gene: 1:40:18

And what percentage of the Chicanos versus the whites, do you think? What's the breakdown? There

Greg: 1:40:22

it's, it's pro, it's it's probably one for one,

Gene: 1:40:25

it is. Okay. All right. And so, the, I guess, I'm, I'm trying to think of the way to phrase the question is so if you have somebody that is of a Latin American ancestry, but they're well educated and they got nabbed for a white collar crime, when they got to prison, would they then still have to, for their own safety, kind of get friendly with the Chicanos? Or would they be treated more like a white dude or would you

Greg: 1:40:58

Yeah. They, they, they, well, the number one depending on how they self-identify when coming into prison, if they put down, Latin American or anything like that under their racial identifier A D O C is automatically going to put them. if they're sharing a bunk bed, which they will. Cuz when you first hit, you're gonna be on a double bunk for, you know, at least a year. If you're on there, they're gonna sell you up with somebody that's your race. And a d c knows, knows how it goes. They, they, they know how it works

Gene: 1:41:28

Mm-hmm.

Greg: 1:41:31

they don't want problems.

Gene: 1:41:33

Yeah.

Greg: 1:41:34

Yeah.

Gene: 1:41:35

That makes sense. And.

Greg: 1:41:37

and their people will come up to'em and, they'll be like, Hey, I'm so-and-so. I run the run and, this person runs the yard, for, for the race. And they'll be like, Hey, do you have your paperwork yet?

Gene: 1:41:49

Mm-hmm.

Greg: 1:41:50

and, and they might have their paperwork on'em, or maybe it's, like a day or two late and they're like, all right, well we need to see your paperwork when it comes in. All that stuff.

Gene: 1:41:57

Mm-hmm. And they want to see it to do what?

Greg: 1:42:00

They wanna see what you're in prison for. They wanna read your court paperwork to make sure you didn't snitch on anybody. They wanna look at your time comp to see if you were imprisoned before for any other weird crimes, stuff like that. Cuz they, they, and they'll, they'll scan your paperwork up and down. They'll, they'll look at your court docs and they'll see What did you tell the police all that crap.

Gene: 1:42:20

The, it, there's, I think, a, an idea that on the outside that we have that people in prison will, will do to kind of take their own justice into their own hands when it comes to pedophiles. Is that true or is that just a myth that if you're a pedo and you're going in prison, you're probably gonna get

Greg: 1:42:43

It depends on what yard you hit. I, I mean, the, the reality is, if you committed a, an offense against a

Gene: 1:42:49

Mm-hmm.

Greg: 1:42:51

at, at a bare minimum, you're gonna go on a three yard and three yards have lifers and so if you hit a three yard and you did something weird with a kid, you might not make it

Gene: 1:43:03

Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

Greg: 1:43:04

Or at the very least, you're going to get just a monumental beating resulting in you getting shuttled off in a, in a helicopter or

Gene: 1:43:14

Mm-hmm.

Greg: 1:43:15

But more often than not, those inmates don't even hit the general population anymore. They, they usually segue directly into protective custody.

Gene: 1:43:22

Mm-hmm.

Greg: 1:43:23

That being said, though, protective custody is a hodgepodge of different types of inmates. It's not just sex offenders over there. You've got people who may be, ratted on somebody. You've got people who may be racked up debt on the yard and couldn't pay it. And so they checked in. Those people, as far as I know, still don't like pedophiles. they, they may not have the cleanest convict record, so to speak, the cleanest conduct scorecard. But you know, even the pedos, as far as I understand, they, they still get, chased off off of yards,

Gene: 1:43:55

Yeah.

Greg: 1:43:56

in protective custody.

Gene: 1:43:58

And as you said, we kind of revert to more of a lizard brain function in a situation like prison.

Greg: 1:44:06

It's, it's the ant farm.

Gene: 1:44:07

yeah. And it's amazing that we're moving in the opposite direction societally with pedophilia. It's like they're trying to normalize it. They're.

Greg: 1:44:18

it's, well, yeah, you have to keep in mind, I, I think one of one of the biggest downfalls of modern society is making society so livable, so flourishing that the week were able to survive.

Gene: 1:44:32

Mm-hmm.

Greg: 1:44:33

Because back in the day, they didn't survive. They didn't make it. And things have become so comfortable, so accessible that the weak survive and they outproduce, in terms of population versus those who are more conservative minded with how they start and navigate the nuclear family and so on, so forth. And so, I, I, I, I mean that's, that's why you're seeing a, an attempt to normal. Degenerate acts and various forms of unhealthy hedonism. It's, it's because we have reached an age where the, the, the weak can exist

Gene: 1:45:18

Yeah. And I, and I know you're

Greg: 1:45:19

their existence.

Gene: 1:45:20

trying to say it in a I don't wanna say polite way, but basically without too infl in too inflammatory. But yeah, I've been saying for literally decades that that we are as humans in the process of Killing our own species off because we're not letting the natural factors that used to control the population and really make evolution work. We're in the process of arresting evolutionary development. And I think we have, for the most part, arrested evolutionary development to where there's, there is no penalty for something today that would've made you not live long enough to reproduce a hundred, 200, 300 years ago. And in, and the vice versa. There's no benefit today to stay on the course that you would've had to stay on two, 300 years ago if you wanted to propagate your family. So we, we've eliminated those societal drivers that have been pushing us as a species, as humans towards progression in being the, the successful species on the planet. We've now said, okay, we've achieved our goal. We're now the most prolific successful species here. And now we're gonna just focus on making sure that we're as diverse and we survive as much as many people survive as possible, regardless of what that does to us as a species. And I think that's a problem. I know it's not a popular viewpoint. A lot of people really poo poo on, on EU.

Greg: 1:46:57

Well, yeah. Yeah, because that's exactly what it sounds like. You're, you know, promoting,

Gene: 1:47:01

Well, and I, and I am, the problem with eugenics, I think is that, is that you don't want humans in control of it. Right? So if you look at what, what is eugenics? Well, nature has been doing eugenics through every species of animal on the planet and plants and everything else. Eugenics is that not everything is treated identically, though certain characteristics are positive and they end up propagating into future generations. Other characteristics do not, and I certainly don't trust humans to be in control of that. So in the 1920s view of eugenics, yeah, I'm not for that, but I think there is a very real problem with just saying that we don't care what your brain does, how you act, what you function, or anything else As a human, y'all have exactly the same ability to survive and, great future generations. I think that as a species for humanity is not gonna be good for us. Something will end up happening that'll take a massive bite out of the human species because we've gotten to a point where we're no longer letting just the strong survive.

Greg: 1:48:14

Yeah. Yeah. And, and, and yeah. It's, you, you hit the nail on the head when he mentioned that. Yeah. Eugenic was controlled by unpredictable external

Gene: 1:48:23

Yeah. It became just a preference of certain wealthy elites, like the ones that started God, I forget the woman's name. Planned planned Parenthood. She was a major, yeah. Yeah.

Greg: 1:48:32

Yeah.

Gene: 1:48:33

So,

Greg: 1:48:34

Or, or Sanger, or what was it?

Gene: 1:48:35

Margaret Sanger. Margaret Sanger, yeah. So yeah, there, and, and certainly the Hitler using eugenics as a, as a means that was not particularly good for eugenics. But, but the idea is, I think of it's, you have to consider it, it is a reality. And even, I don't care whether you believe in God or you're an atheist and you believe pure evolution, but even if you believe in God, you gotta admit that evolution happens and that we, we have in every species out there, except for modern humans, there is a competition for resources. And the generations that survive to reproduce and the future generations after them are the result of the winners of the challenges to survival. And

Greg: 1:49:25

Yeah. Yeah. No, and that's

Gene: 1:49:26

that's not the case with humans.

Greg: 1:49:28

yeah, and, and that's what kind of bugs me today with, with some of these, you know, trendy communists, these young trendy communists, they're the college age kids that are always talking about, wealth gaps, wealth disparity, and, we are poor and, and we are in the poverty line and the breadline, it's number one, you're not in the breadline. Nobody's starving to death in the United States, with the exception of maybe like an infant who is being intentionally not fed by a parent,

Gene: 1:49:58

Right.

Greg: 1:50:00

No, nobody's starving. We are the only country that has fat homeless people.

Gene: 1:50:06

That's true. Yep.

Greg: 1:50:07

You, you, you don't see fat homeless people in India

Gene: 1:50:11

No No, you don't.

Greg: 1:50:13

You certainly don't see it in South America.

Gene: 1:50:15

Yeah.

Greg: 1:50:16

you know, you don't see it in Turkey. But but in in our country, we, we have such a, a system where everything is so accessible and things are doled out or merely existing. Know?

Gene: 1:50:33

There's a lot of safety nets for

Greg: 1:50:34

Yeah, yeah. Well, like even, even the poverty line who would be living in the poverty line and maybe, some Section eight housing or a crummy apartment and In comparison, yes, they are living not as well as somebody that lives in a mansion or a four bedroom home or something like that, but that person, who is maybe getting, snap cards, E B D cards, whatever you call'em, they might be getting wic. They might be getting cash assistance. Rent assistance. They probably have a TV or two in their home. They probably have a smartphone. A hundred years ago, you know, it was considered a, a a a a a a luxury to have air conditioning, and I guarantee they have air conditioning, people on the poverty line. You go back to the early 1980. a VCR was$800.

Gene: 1:51:19

Yep.

Greg: 1:51:20

Laser disc players were a thousand dollars back in the day. TVs that were, 15 inches, 17 inches, those run you four or 500 bucks. And going back to the, like the sixties and seventies and, people who are, in poverty now that, that may have access to some type of of housing they've got cvs, they've got a cell phone. They've, they've got all these amenities and they, they, they exist. They're allowed to exist. We're not going to let them fall off the proverbial ladder,

Gene: 1:51:50

No, I, I wanted to try and experiment, but I guess I haven't had the balls to actually do it, but I thought it was, I always thought it would be hilarious. Would be to stand on the corner of an intersection with a sign that says need, need help. Something like that, the, the usual kind of homeless guy has sign. But then have a Visa MasterCard sticker on the bottom. And say, I, I take credit cards. I wonder how many people would actually do that. They would be willing to stick their card through a, a slider, a little square slider of a homeless person taking credit cards.

Greg: 1:52:26

Yeah, no, I, I wouldn't be surprised if there would be some people who would do it,

Gene: 1:52:29

Mm-hmm.

Greg: 1:52:30

There, there, there, there probably would. There was this one guy and I found it really inventive

Gene: 1:52:34

especially in Austin where I'm at.

Greg: 1:52:36

Yeah, I, I didn't throw anything at the, at the guy, but he was wearing a sign that said throw your quarters at me, four tries, gets me a free taco.

Gene: 1:52:45

That's creative.

Greg: 1:52:46

Yeah. And I didn't actually throw quarters at him, But I did give him some money, I'm like, dude, if, if you have an inventive sign, I'll, I'll probably, I'll probably give

Gene: 1:52:56

Oh yeah. If you make me laugh, that's worth something. Right. But I've also given away food to homeless people that they give me a duty look for and then throw away, like I, I'm stopping at a, a Burger King or something and pick up some food, and then I'm stopped at a stoplight and I've got my little Burger King bag and I'm like, I don't really need to eat those fries, that's calories that I don't really need. So I just pull out little thing of fries. Here you go. Here's some fries, here's some free food. And boy, do you get a dirty look for that, because they're looking for cash,

Greg: 1:53:32

yeah, yeah. Because by and large, the, the homeless population in the United States, They're not hungry. They're not hungry. Because at least as it works here in Arizona, and I also noticed it worked the same way, pretty much in California. They could roll in to their local d e s office and they would just get a, a food stamp card, and then they just get it re-upped every month. And, and, you know, some of these food stamp cards will, will harbor like four or 500 bucks

Gene: 1:53:57

Yeah.

Greg: 1:53:58

and now fast food locations. Take E B T

Gene: 1:54:02

Oh, really? I didn't know that. I, I saw somebody on YouTube. They, they had a video of people using those cards to buy a whole bunch of distilled water, or not distilled, but basically, basically they're just like buying water and then they're dumping the water out on the outside of the parking lot and then bringing the plastic back in, or the, I don't know, glass, plastic, whatever it was to get the the refund back on. What, what do you call it? It's a deposit back,

Greg: 1:54:34

Oh yeah,

Gene: 1:54:35

right? For recycling shit.

Greg: 1:54:36

like a

Gene: 1:54:37

Be because they can't, yeah, because then, then they can use that, that's refunded as cash. So they can go buy drugs, but they obviously can't buy drugs with the food cards.

Greg: 1:54:50

Oh yeah. And then some people would hustle off their E B T stuff too, Cuz I, I remember like when I was living in sketchier parts of Phoenix and surrounded by folks, Because when I was renting in Phoenix, obviously being a felon, the apartments that I could afford necessarily weren't going to let me live there. And I found that stupid, but whatever. It's like, all right, man, you guys don't want my money. Screw it. So, I had to live in, in kind of like the, the hoodish areas, but it was, it was kind of cool because one apartment complex that I, I lived in off of I 17 and Thomas one of my neighbors was actually someti some guy to. So that was kind of cool, seeing him again. So we, we, we also kind of had each other's back too in the area cuz it was a sketchy

Gene: 1:55:29

mm-hmm. Yeah. Dude, I, I thought that the whole area was nice until I was staying in Scottsdale and I, I had my car window smashed in at night. I was like, what the hell, man, this is bullshit. This is supposed to not happen here.

Greg: 1:55:45

and yeah, no, up and down pretty, especially like in, in, along the I 17, Particularly where the I 17 and the 10 meat, that, that area's, if you go south of that, like if you go south on the I 17, you get into kind of like the, the, part of Phoenix where it's kind of like the metropolitan area. That place ain't bad, like that's where I went to the Turning Point US USA event. That's past December. And I stayed in a very nice hotel. It was a nice best Western. I loved their breakfast I really, no, I, I was, I get excited about stuff like that because every morning at that hotel, like I stayed there for a week. Every morning at that hotel they had a breakfast bar and it had biscuits and, and and sausage gravy. And then they had bacon and sausage eggs and they had cereal bagels, orange juice. And I remember like the first time having that over there when I was over there, I'm like, man, I hope they served this the next day. And one of the guys like, that was having breakfast around the same time. He goes, they serve it every day. I'm like, dude, This is amazing But yeah. Yeah, like north, more north on the I 10. Like once you get past it or on, on the I 17 Past the 10. Yeah. Sketchy. It's sketchy as hell.

Gene: 1:56:53

Mm-hmm. Yeah. And I, I've generally, if I've stayed in Phoenix, I stay right in downtown. But I was at an event thing for in Scottsdale, which, I, I thought would be even more safe, but it turned out not to be the case. And I still, I mean, I, I have no idea. They didn't nobody stole anything from my car. It's just my window broke.

Greg: 1:57:17

Yeah.

Gene: 1:57:18

it was, it was, so, I don't, I'm not sure exactly what, what happened there. Now, I happen to have dual pane laminated windows in my car, so it actually cracked the outside glass, but not the inside glass. So I had a, a broken window that didn't have any glass falling in, which was good, but still had to get it replaced. Had to pay somebody to come out and get that swapped out right away. So anyway. Well, that's interesting. Look I know we've been chatting for a while and I, I don't know how much time you had planned on scheduling for this, but I certainly appreciate you coming on and talking about your story. And I I know I'm certainly very interested about the prison bit, which I didn't wanna make the whole interview just tell us prison stories, man. But it's still interesting it, because it's a, it's a kind of a world that I haven't been in that that I, I recognize isn't portrayed accurately on shows like oranges and New Black or, whatever variety of

Greg: 1:58:18

a lot of stuff is embellished, you know,

Gene: 1:58:19

Yeah. It has to

Greg: 1:58:20

one thing we do that, that, that, that, it was always like a fun thing was April Fools Day. April Fools Day in prison. We'll, we we would crack jokes on each other

Gene: 1:58:29

really?

Greg: 1:58:30

hardcore. There was this one guy and he was like, my, he was my road dog. He was my ace deuce, you know what I mean? This guy London, His real name was Andrew Martin. and he was a singer in the eighties band. He was the lead singer of Andy Martin and Jet Black Machine, Which they were kind of like a rockabilly band from, from the eighties. and they and they weirdly had a large following in Japan. I don't know why, but you know, he, he, he, he sky from the, from the UK and he got hemmed up for meth here. And, and he, he got a, he got a raw deal cuz he was, he was on probation when he got arrested for meth. And so they just, they just gave him 10 years and it's Hey man, you screwed up your probation. He got caught with meth, you know, 10 years. But Arizona does not play around with methamphetamine. So I, I kind of get it. That being said like I I, I pranked him on a number of occasions like the, the first time cuz we were, we were on a yard together for a couple of years. First, first, first April Fools Day, I sewed his towel to his bed because I noticed his routine was every morning he'd get up, he put on his shower shoes and he would kind of zombie walk over to where the shower was and he would, yank his towel off the end of his bed. And it was so fucking funny watching him fight to get his towel off. Yeah. And, and so the following year I wanted

Gene: 1:59:45

Wait, You had access to to needle.

Greg: 1:59:49

They weren't like allowed on the yard, but you could get them,

Gene: 1:59:52

Oh, okay. So that's a, that's a contraband that you would have with sewing needles.

Greg: 1:59:56

Yeah, because there's a lot of things you can do with sewing needles. You can make pillows, you can

Gene: 2:00:00

Well, yeah. You could poke somebody's eye out,

Greg: 2:00:02

if, we, we, they, they sold us, disposable razors. Those things were more dangerous, those weren't contraband, Like disposable razors, you can get pens and pencils. So it's you know, a sewing

Gene: 2:00:13

a, a, a big pen and a razor, the safety razor, and you got a weapon right there.

Greg: 2:00:18

Yeah, yeah. Pretty much. Yeah.

Gene: 2:00:20

I took a course on of making, I know what I'm talking about.

Greg: 2:00:23

Well, like the, the, the most common pick that would be used is somebody would pry something off of the wreck yard fence, like pry one of the pieces of metal and then take it to the concrete inside the run and just kind of sharpen it

Gene: 2:00:36

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Greg: 2:00:38

That being said I went up the, the sewing game the following April Fools day, I got a hold of a pair of London's pants, you know, that he intended to wear the next day. And I j I sewed him into the shape of skinny pants, like skinny

Gene: 2:00:51

Jesus Christ

Greg: 2:00:53

So that way they really conform to his ass, thighs and ankles and watching, watching him put'em on, cuz you know it, it was just too much for him to deal with before going to chow in the morning. So seeing him walk in his little skintight pants, you know, and he comes in, he goes, He comes up to me, he goes, oh God. Gra you're a fucking, you're a fucking asshole. You know that Jesus Christ, and all, all the other woods are kind of laughing at him.

Gene: 2:01:22

That's hilarious.

Greg: 2:01:25

But no. Yeah,

Gene: 2:01:25

What, somebody do to you. What's, what's prank? Somebody pulling you

Greg: 2:01:29

Well, unfortunately, when, when I was doing that latter April Fool's Day prank, I, I inappropriately inspired somebody else to do one on me that wound up pissing off his people because it was, it was the wrong thing to do. It, it was a, a Chicano kid, this kid Moses. But like, he, he was a, he really liked, you know, talking to me and shooting the breeze with me and barring music, CDs for me, cuz I had like a bunch of punk and metal and alternative stuff. He wanted to play a prank on me. And number one, you're not supposed to prank outside your race. That's one

Gene: 2:02:01

Mm-hmm.

Greg: 2:02:02

The second thing he did is what? He took my alarm clock and he said it for two o'clock in the morning. And what happened was it wound up waking up, me and a couple of my neighbors, and we have a strict 10 to 10 rule no noise from 10:00 PM to to 10:00 And that's not something enforced by the institution. That's the inmate rule. You know, if you start making noise before 10 o'clock in the morning, you're likely to get slapped in the mouth and told to shut up. So it wound up waking up me and this guy Oscar, and, and I'd known Oscar for years. And I told him, I said, dude, I don't know what the fuck happened. I said, I didn't set my alarm for two o'clock in the morning and I didn't want any problems with Oscar. Cuz him and I, we had a good rapport. He was one of the heads of the Chicano and he was finishing up the last five years of a a murder rap that he had. But he was still, he still had a lot of pull and, and, and I told him, I said, I think Moses did this And then so he goes up to Moses a few hours later it's probably like eight, nine o'clock in the morning. And I just see them kind of talking, him talking on, on the bunk with, with Moses. And Moses is like, you know, nodding yes. So I'm guessing Moses is admitting to what he did. And then Oscar just, cracks him right in the right in the jaw, just boom. I, it, it was a punch so hard and so swift, it sounded like an open hand slap.

Gene: 2:03:20

Hmm,

Greg: 2:03:20

It was a close fist punch, but it sounded like a slap. And I'm like, man, I never heard a punch Sound like that.

Gene: 2:03:27

hmm. So, so this Moses guy heard it. So were you like next to the Chicanos.

Greg: 2:03:38

Th this was when I was still on a three yard at the time and was in between a couple of Chicano

Gene: 2:03:44

Got it. Got it. Because you were telling me earlier that kinda, I'll try to separate you out by race initially.

Greg: 2:03:49

Yeah. Yeah. Cubes are basically individual

Gene: 2:03:52

maybe you're a Chicano, I don't know.

Greg: 2:03:54

No.

Gene: 2:03:55

You don't look like it, but

Greg: 2:03:56

No, no. Uh uh. The cubes basically function as individual cells. They, you know, they're separated, like I said, by the waist high center blocks. Yeah. Cause I remember on one side it, it was Oscar and what was the guy's name on, on the other side of me? Chino. He was, he was a character. He was a funny guy. He was extremely racist. He was a Chicano and he absolutely hated black people.

Gene: 2:04:17

Uhhuh. Well,

Greg: 2:04:20

he was a

Gene: 2:04:20

yeah. Yeah. I guess that's, that's one place where kind of going to that primal kind of brain activity there's probably a lot less self filtering going on, I would imagine.

Greg: 2:04:36

I, I mean, if you're thinking like there's casual or aggressive racism hostilely thrown around. No un unless somebody's trying to, you know, start something. So I remember there was this one guy, it was the only guy, only black dude, that I called the n word in, in prison. And, It, it was because, I had an issue with him and he was running his mouth about me. He, he was like a middle-aged black guy. I think his name was s. and, he just was repeatedly disrespecting me. I heard that he referred to me as a bitch, and that's like a big no-no word. And so, I, I started calling him everything in the book telling him like, Hey man, come in the bathroom. We gotta settle this man. And he is man, I ain't trying to do that. I'm like, come here, punk, come here, bitch. And I'm, I'm, I'm calling him Larry Lame, calling him a faggot, and he's not coming. And I'm like, all right, I gotta say the word And so when I dropped that, There was a couple other black guys in the run, and they just told him at that point, they're like, you have to fight him now. Like, You're, you're not gonna talk your way outta this. No. You know,

Gene: 2:05:45

And

Greg: 2:05:45

Yeah.

Gene: 2:05:46

so you end up fighting this guy,

Greg: 2:05:48

huh?

Gene: 2:05:48

you end up fighting this guy.

Greg: 2:05:50

Oh yeah, absolutely. like

Gene: 2:05:52

did that affect your stay at all? I mean, what, what happens like when you do get into a fight? Because again, in TV shows it's oh, you just turned another five years. It's like they just throw out these extensions of sentences automatically. So what actually

Greg: 2:06:08

it just depends how bad it is. And it depends on the circumstances. Most of the times the cos don't give a shit. If it's something

Gene: 2:06:14

they making bets on which inmates gonna win or are they doing anything like that?

Greg: 2:06:18

well, number one, the reason why you take it to the bathroom is that the cos are less likely to.

Gene: 2:06:23

Mm-hmm.

Greg: 2:06:24

And also when a fight goes on, like outside of what happens like in TV shows and stuff like that, where like inmates are rallying around and yeah. You know, it looks like a screen scene from Street Fighter.

Gene: 2:06:35

yeah. Yeah.

Greg: 2:06:36

No all the inmates are completely quiet because they're trying to make it seem like nothing's happening. They're not looking at it. If somebody starts to look at it, there are people will go up to and be like, Hey man, quit looking. Quit drawing attention to that. Let'em handle their business. So probably 95% of the fights don't even register on the CO's attention, or if a co saw it, they don't give a shit because it, it's usually once, once hands are laid, it's a debt issue, you know?

Gene: 2:07:03

Mm-hmm. And were there any or many for that matter sort of taking care of your own kind of fights to where, you kind of mentioned that the, your, your Chicano buddy getting whacked when he did something wrong with your alarm clock. Were there other instances of that where the blacks had to take care of the blacks or were the whites had to beat up a white dude because

Greg: 2:07:25

yeah, yeah. It's, it's called putting somebody in check. And, and it usually happens to the newer inmates. I mean, sometimes, I don't necessarily getting it, I don't necessarily call it getting it put in check if somebody's getting hands put on'em for a debt issue or something, like dope debt, gambling debt or something like that. that's not getting checked, that's, that's hands laid, debt paid. That's something totally different. But yeah, usually, usually the, the younger inmates that come in and, they, they are a little walking out with their chest a little bit too high, so to speak, And stepping on toes or whatever, they'll, they'll get put in check and, and usually you get in, put in check is either a stern talking to letting'em know that if you do X, y, z again, you're gonna get beat up. Or in other cases it, it could be just somebody rolls up and, fucking cracks somebody in the face and says, don't do that again.

Gene: 2:08:12

Mm-hmm. Interesting. So we talked about the, the, the racial sort of composition breakdown, but I didn't ask you, I'm curious, like what was the breakdown of the, the non-kin head whites to the skinhead whites? Because the really hardcore you guys racist guys, you said?

Greg: 2:08:31

Yeah. Yeah. The skins like, they, they would be a very, very minimal presence presence on the yard. Like, I, I think the most I'd seen on any given yard was like, probably like eight or nine skins.

Gene: 2:08:47

And what is that as a percent?

Greg: 2:08:51

We're, we're talking out of a few hundred inmates, you know, on any given yard.

Gene: 2:08:55

Okay. So just a couple percent basically.

Greg: 2:08:58

Yeah. Yeah. Skins aren't very big, you know, and the skinhead stuff, that's, that's a lot of California politics that migrated over to the AZ systems. And, and, and skinheads, they, they've got such a weird thing going on. They have like internal factions that butt heads, cuz you've got the AZ skins that get irritated, I guess with the NLR people and stuff like that, it's like the, the Aryan Brotherhood just kind of relegates them to their own little tables in the chow hall and it's like, all right, there's the table for your heads and your people, chill out there.

Gene: 2:09:33

Any,

Greg: 2:09:34

the skin still answer to the ab

Gene: 2:09:36

okay. Any motorcycle clubs active inside, or are they just all kind of dispersed by race?

Greg: 2:09:44

Yeah, yeah. They, they, they, they disperse by race. And, and, and typically also, like the, a lot of the MC stuff you'll see that get assimilated into the AB culture. Because it's not uncommon to find the folks that are running the yard also are involved, are either, casual rider or maybe they're a part of mc. Cause I, I remember I remember being that seeing that on, on the arts where, people would be bike rider or associated with some kind of

Gene: 2:10:07

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Well, cool. Look, I could keep talking all day here, but I know we gotta wrap up at some point here. Is there anything that I didn't ask about that you think would be interesting for the listeners or viewers to see?

Greg: 2:10:24

Hard to say without knowing for sure, because e everybody is interested in something

Gene: 2:10:29

Yeah, I know there's gotta be people looking at your action figures going, holy shit, how much money has he got tied up in that stuff? You got a lot of stuff

Greg: 2:10:37

Yeah.

Gene: 2:10:38

and that's, that's just a small percentage of what you have. Right.

Greg: 2:10:41

Yeah.

Gene: 2:10:42

What we're seeing in the back, like you're an actual order collector type with a room or two full of these things.

Greg: 2:10:49

Yeah, I have,

Gene: 2:10:50

I don't wanna put words in your mouth, but

Greg: 2:10:52

yeah, no, Well, n no I have four bedrooms that are filled with toys, and then I've got my common areas filled with toys. The only

Gene: 2:10:59

pretty

Greg: 2:11:00

don't have toys are the bathrooms.

Gene: 2:11:02

Yeah, no, that's definitely hardcore. All right. Where can people get ahold of you or watch you read your stuff or anything else?

Greg: 2:11:10

Well, I, I mean, YouTube is gonna be where it's at if, if they want to, see like the actual video

Gene: 2:11:14

Mm-hmm.

Greg: 2:11:15

And that is the breakdown with Greg Hoyt. You can also follow me on Twitter. I'm a little bit active on there, just, I'll do like some snarky replies here and there, and I can be followed at Twitter at Greg Hoy, l e t as in my first name, last name, l e t as in law enforcement today. Cause that's, that's when I

Gene: 2:11:38

that's when you created it. Got it. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. And so probably you're gonna have more videos coming out on a variety of these topics. And what category do you kind of place your video channel in?

Greg: 2:11:51

You know, I, I keep it,

Gene: 2:11:52

or culture or tech or

Greg: 2:11:54

you know, yeah, I, I I label it as like a hodgepodge of news, pop culture, politics, so that way it kind of keeps it open field and lets me, whether I wanna make something evergreen or topical, I can do either or. But I have been described as a, a culture war, Player, so to speak. And I don't mind being characterized as that because yes, I do find my content kind of addresses some of the culture war stuff.

Gene: 2:12:21

Yeah. Very cool. Well, again, I appreciate you coming on and I'm sure people will come out and check out your videos directly. Thanks, Greg.

Greg: 2:12:30

Thank you for having me on Gene.

Gene: 2:12:31

You bet.