1265: Joe Loya | Confessions of a Bank Robber Part Two

23:51It's gluten-free. It has no artificial sweeteners, colors, or flavors. It's filling. It's easy. You guys know where my head is at right now. I just know it. And on days home, I use the Black Edition powder, which is great because it's customizable. I can keep it simple, add ice, whatever, and it's still a high-protein complete meal that fits my goals. Plus, it comes out to under$5 per meal. Get Heel's full high-protein starter kit online with our code JHS for 20 % off at Huel.com slash JHS. That's H-U-E-L dot com slash JHS. New customers only. Thank you to Huel for partnering and supporting our show.

24:23This episode is also sponsored by Shopify. If you've been sitting on a business idea for a while, I'm going to call you out lovingly. You don't need more planning. You need momentum. Don't be that guy that fails because they never launched. And January is where you got that fresh start energy to finally change the script. Don't let February show up with the same old maybe someday story. And the easiest way to make it real is to start with Shopify. Shopify gives you everything you need to sell online and in person, and millions of entrepreneurs have already made this leap from huge household names to first-time business owners just getting started.

24:51You can build your store fast with hundreds of beautiful templates you can customize to match your brand, and Shopify's built-in AI tools help you write product descriptions and headlines and even edit product photos, which removes a ton of the friction that keeps people stuck. Marketing is built into email and social campaigns to reach customers wherever they scroll, and as you grow, Shopify grows with you. More orders, new markets, all from the same dashboard. In 2026, stop waiting and start selling with Shopify. Sign up for your$1 per month trial and start selling today at shopify.com slash Jordan.

25:22Go to shopify.com slash Jordan. That's shopify.com slash Jordan. Hear your first. This new year with Shopify by your side. Don't forget about our six minute networking course. It is free. It is non-cringe. It is down to earth. It'll make you a better connector, a better colleague, a better friend, a better peer. It's all about relationship building, and six minutes a day is really all it takes. Many of the guests on the show subscribe and contribute to the course. Come on and join us. You'll be in smart company where you belong. The course is free. There's no shenanigans at sixminutenetworking.com.

25:53Now, back to Joe Loya. Prison sounded like chaos. I mean, what you wrote about or what you talked about in the podcast, you think like, oh, prison is boring or prison isn't like TV. It sure seemed like it was almost like TV, some of the stuff you described. the chaos that was going on. You mentioned that I think you either saw or at least heard a guy getting lit on fire in his cell. I mean, what the hell is that? What's that all about? Yeah, that's a crazy place. I'm watching a show right now called The Night Of. It's on HBO. It's about a guy who's innocent, but he gets pulled up into the system for a murder that he didn't commit.

26:29And he starts going through being a fish in prison. He gets confronted with all these things that he's totally unaware of, all the intrigues. What's a fish? First-termer, like first time in. He's just a little guy, and there's sharks, and there's fish. I see. He might as well call him a guppy, right? He just knew, like I was when I went in. I didn't know it was the what. Fortunately, I had some experience of doing time before. A couple of guys there knew who I was. They knew I had a little reputation of the person I was before because of violence I had committed and earned respect for that, so I can show up with a little something.

27:01Not only that, I happen to be fortunate because one of the most renowned neighborhoods in California prison system is the neighborhood where I was born in, Maravia in East LA. That's just by chance. I was born in like a legendary place in the lore of prison gangs and prison violence. So I'm able to say I'm from Maravia. Oh, who do you know? And I just tell them whatever. But I had some access to some resources that when I first went to Lompoc that other guys didn't have who just going for the first time. But this show that I'm talking about, I'm with my girlfriend. I'm realizing there's a lot of things that are going on that actually happen.

27:42They've accelerated it for the purpose of the show. But there's a lot of things you have to confront that are scary, that are dangerous. And if you're not savvy, they can come at you. And it was very wild. The fire one was, I worked in the sign factory, and in the sign factory, there's a place where all the flammable stuff is. And they would open this big door, and me and another guy from the order, we'd go inside, and they'd close and lock it up. And the only person allowed to come in was a guard and another inmate. They'd come with a cart, and they would give us a list of the paints and the acetone or whatever they needed.

28:20And we would give it to them, and we were locked in there. They'd lock us in again, and we just had to keep inventory of the stuff. And then when they came in, we would give them the stuff. But we would always smuggle stuff out. We were smugglers. We would take it out and we would sell it. He would smuggle out acetone. And acetone is what you could use. Put a spray bottle. You could set someone on fire with it, right? What happened one night, it was late at night. A guy was in the TV room. He gets out of the TV room and the guard says, okay, stand in front of your cell. And he has a spray bottle of acetone in it.

28:52He goes on the first floor. The guard goes to the third floor to start letting guys into their cells for the TV room. And most of the guys are in their cells going to sleep. This is 11 o 'clock at night and 12 o 'clock at night, whatever. And these guys, you're allowed to stay in the TV room on the weekend for two hours. And every hour, a guard comes there and says, hey, who wants to get out now? And then the next hour, okay, everyone get up. And it was one of those moves. It was late at night. And this Native American is sleeping in a cell. This guy who has the water bottle, he's a white guy.

29:21He goes to the cell and he starts squirting in the room, on the floor, on the guy's blanket. He starts squirting inside and then he lights it on fire. He goes to the next cell and he's doing the same thing, lighting it on fire as this guy's friend. Lighting it, lighting it on fire. But at this point, that guy is starting to hear this guy scream on fire in the first cell. So he gets up and he's able to kind of like put a pillow in it. So that guy doesn't have a chance to get him on fire. The only guy on fire is in the first cell and he's on fire. He has long hair and everything. Now, I'm hearing screaming.

29:52I go to my window, and I could see the unit right across a little patch of grass. And one cell is lit up on fire. And that's the guy who's screaming trying to put it out. It was terrible. And that wasn't the worst part. When the guards come, they all rush to that unit because the guard hits his panic button. All the guards come. They grab the guy who had lit it on fire. They don't know who he is. He's just standing out there because the guard had to come down to put him in a cell. They put him against the wall and they say, here, they come with fire extinguishers and they pull the guy out and he's just sitting there kind of, they put him out of fire and he's laying there and they're waiting for the nurses to come.

30:31And the guy who lit him on fire, who's sitting across the tier, just waiting in all the hubbub, he walks over there, he grabs a fire extinguisher right there and he starts beating the guy he just sat on fire. Wow. He started beating him, the guards tackling him. So the final indignity wasn't just the fire. It was that, you know, he got beat down with a fire extinguisher. He lived, but man. It's just these people are like animals in there, some of these people. Yeah. That's really like the brutality is just. We're animals out here too. But we're just, we have logic and we try to like hide all our animal instincts.

31:05But like polite society, like for me, I'm just like, wow, that level of brutality is actually insane. Yeah. You get in your own fight. You have almost like a spiritual experience in solitary confinement. Tell me about that. Yeah. So, you know, I was I was for the first half of it. I was a criminal. I was committing crimes. I was doing everything I could to, you know, to make money in there and doing all the hustles that are against the law. But I get pulled up. I get swept up in a homicide investigation on six other Mexican guys, five other Mexican guys. And they keep us there for two years before they say we didn't have anything to do with it.

31:36Because you're in prison for seven years at this point. Yeah. Yeah. So this is the middle of my term. Yeah, right in the middle of my term. And while I'm in there for sure, I'm doing everything I can to stay sane. I'm doing exercises. I'm doing concentration games. I'm trying to like, because you're locked in a cell the size of a parking stall for, you know, 24 hours a day, 23 hours some days. Oh, my God. You know, they let you out to go to walk in a bigger cell for a wreck five times a week and then three showers a week. So, you know, you're locked in there for a long time. I do a lot of reading.

32:04I do this stuff. But my mind slowly started to fragment. And I started hearing voices. I had a hallucination that there's a little bald boy in my cell. I cracked. I see this bald boy in my cell and I'm like, oh no, I've seen guys crack in solitary confinement and they do crazy things. And I was like, oh no, I can't tell the difference between reality and fantasy now. So I'm in that realm. There was a guy once who came out and he went in, Bobby, and when he came out, he put red pencil on his cheeks. He tucked his t-shirt in to make it look like a halter top. He rolled his boxes up to make them look like panties.

32:40And he came out, Sally. Oh my gosh. There was another guy just rubbed feces all over himself when he went crazy and just, and they had to try and get him out and nobody wanted to go in there to drag him out. People go crazy. They do crazy things in there. And, and, uh, I was thinking, Oh no, I'm on that spectrum. Like I know that this isn't cool. I just saw somebody that feels as real as anything I've, as if I, you know, in the visiting room, you know? And as I'm lying there thinking I'm a wreck within the day, I realized, oh, you know, when I was a kid, a seven-year-old bald kid, I knew when I was seven and he was, um, he drove his, rode his bike in the neighborhood and he, um, he had leukemia and when he's riding, we become friends and he said, Hey, can you come to my house?

33:24I got a little club in my garage. And I I asked my mom. She calls his mom, and we go over there. We're best friends now. It's just two blocks away. I ride my bike over there in his garage. The parents had set up a little clubhouse in the back, so we go in there, and he grabs his hair, and he takes it off, and he puts it on the thing. It's got all these loops of tape in there. I'm like, what's going on? He goes, oh, I'm sick. That's nothing. Because when he would ride his bike coming in the neighborhood, he had his hand on his head, and he was riding his bike, and the little hair was flapping up.

33:51Oh, yeah. So I knew there was something weird with his hair. You know, he had leukemia. And three or four months later, he died on the way to church. My dad told me my friend died. He's in heaven now riding his bike. And so I'm thinking, oh, I knew a bald kid. And my psyche pulled up this bald kid out of nowhere. I'm visited there. And it's so humbling, this experience of going mad, of having this hallucination. I know how to perform prison maleness. I know how to perform. Don't mess with me like I've done violence already. And now I have this homicide investigation that I survive. And when I come out, there's something that happens to you when you're investigated for a homicide and you don't get the case.

34:34Right. What men in prison think is, oh, my God, you beat a homicide. Right. You're a killer. Yeah. It's easier for them to think that because it's safer. You don't know if I killed someone. I may have, though. And so you don't want to bother me. And what that did is it allowed me distance from people because now I've been riding the last year in prison. trying to save myself. I'm writing, I'm thinking of stuff, I'm writing stories. The first one story I wrote that ended up in the memoir was about this bald kid, right? Yeah. And so I'm writing all these stories from my past and I need time in my cell to keep writing and investigating who I am.

35:07The great irony of my second half of doing time was I had to periodically really pretend like I was ready to stab someone or whatever and commit violence on people so that I had to project - you can get some peace and quiet. I will hurt you so that I can be in my cell becoming a more sensitive man, writing to investigate myself. You know, that's, that's, I'm having a spiritual awakening. Get away from me or I'll stab you in the face with a pen. I'm having a compassionate awakening. And if you disturb me, I will shiv you with a sharp toothbrush. Yeah, this is crazy. What was scarier than going to prison or having to take a cold, honest look at yourself?

35:45Cold, honest look. Because all the crimes I did and all the violence I did, And starting with my dad, 16, it was like, I'm wired for that. I'm made for that. I've already committed so much violence that I know I'm fearless. I've robbed 30, but I walked in there, you know, ready to die. I'm a fearless man. But there's a reason why I was doing this external stuff, because I didn't want to go inside and deal with the internal stuff. I was afraid of going in there. So what I realized when I started investigating myself was, man, this is hard. this is scary i was gonna have to change i was gonna have to confront all these griefs that are that are actually those are the animating force to do what i'm doing to live the way i'm living i need this rage to survive here to survive in the underworld i need the rage so all of a sudden i'm thinking about dismantling my rage and confronting my grief to take away the power of the rage and i'm like i'm gonna be nate well i'm like i might as well be like melting my armor because that's what I need.

36:46And the armor is what I need to survive in here. So it was scary. Like it was super scary. And then of course, you know, there's all the grief that comes up that I'd shut down and the conscience. I had a conscience now that was a baby conscience. And I was so distraught to think about all the harm that I had caused. I opened up a little bit of my conscience and everything was waiting to just, all the bad that I'd kind of pushed away. And there was a lot of bad and a lot of regret. It was a lot of shame. So it was heavy on me. It was super heavy. I wasn't sure how I was going to cope with it. So the writing was super helpful that way.

37:19Did you start to understand your father a little bit more, being in that position in solitary and started having that, I guess, awakening from the sound of it? Yeah. You know, it was this interesting thing where I was raised Protestant, Christian, evangelical. You know, they always tell you, you got to forgive people. I also got this little Buddhist tract in solitary. And I started doing this correspondence course with, you know, sort of Eastern ways of looking at the world. And what was interesting about that was that I had been forgiving my dad for years and it never took. In fact, when I came out of prison, there's a lot of people who've been forgiving their dads and they'd never, it doesn't stay.

37:54It's hard to do that. And I figured out, the reason it was hard for me was I was always thinking, I'm going to forgive my dad. And at the beginning of that is ego. It's me. And what it started sounding like in my ear was, I'm so magnanimous, which is already ego. I'm so magnanimous that I'm going to bestow something on this lower person so that I can elevate them so that we're now fine. We're good now. But in order to make that happen, I have to bestow forgiveness on him. And to me, that power dynamic does not feel, that didn't feel cool. I was like, no wonder it doesn't work. It always starts with I.

38:33And so I read about compassion in a way that blew my mind. Because what compassionate told me to do was, you don't forgive them. You accept them for who they are. And the reason they are who they are is because look at their childhood, right? If you look at my dad's childhood, his father brutalized them. He was so bad that sometimes he would make my dad sleep in the chicken coop outside. I know this because his brothers and sisters told me. He was raised in such a violent home that he watched his mother get brutalized all the time. And he had to process that and the grief of that. Right. So I looked at my dad and I started seeing that the guy who's in our home doing what he did, he wasn't a monster.

39:15Was he behaving monstrously? Yes. But he wasn't a monster. He was a little boy who had been beaten and beaten. And he was like a tree that you keep beating. It grows crooked. More importantly, it was like a little unlicked cub grown to grizzly size. He didn't get love. He got violence. What's he going to do? He's going to grow up and be this angry bear. And when I started looking at my dad's formation, I said, I don't need to forgive him. I just accept that he is who he is because this is what happened to him. And the biggest thing in me was I realized that we shared a grief that animated our violence as well.

39:52He was totally and pain by the death of my mother. It fractured him. And it destroyed me too. And so when I was able to look like, oh, our violence is underwritten in many ways by the death of my mother, the absence of my mother. And then that made solidarity between us. It's like, I found the hidden likeness. Before it was just, oh, you're a monster. And I was brutalized by you. Now it's like, no, we share the same grief. And more importantly, our anger is trying to disguise that wound. So my dad has a wound. I have the wound. We have all these wounds from our childhood. We're the same. And when I had compassion for him, there was no need to forgive him at all.

40:29And so when I tell people that, they say, have you forgiven me today? I'm like, no, never. I have compassion for him. And another way to have compassion, a compassionate way to look at it was he may have socked me. He may have choked me. He may have done all those things, BB with a bat, but I don't take it personal. And people are like, how can you not take it personal? It literally happened on your person. And I get it because I didn't understand it before either. When people would say that, I was like, it happened to your person. How do you not take it personally? And the way you don't take a person and the way that helped me move away from, oh my God, he did all this thing to me was that if you had lined up a hundred sons, they were all going to get beat because it wasn't about the sons.

41:10It was about what was in him. And he didn't know how to deal with stress. And he was always going to beat somebody. And then that way I was like, it's not about me. And so I don't look at it like you did this to me I look at it as you did this to yourself Your conscience now has to deal With what you did to your boys Your wife told you take care of my boys Before she died And the courts took us away Because you failed at taking care of your kids You have to live with that shame You have to live with that grant I let it go I have compassion for you It didn't happen to me I said this at a conference once Sun Valley Writers Conference and there's a famous writer there named Frank McCourt who wrote a book called Angela's Ashes.

41:50I don't know if you've ever heard of it or read it. One of the greatest best-selling memoirs of all time. And Frank McCourt came up to me afterwards and he said, you know, I've never been able to verbalize that because the book Angela's Ashes was how his dad was such a drunk and spending all the money and beating the kids and being his wife was that some of the kids died because they didn't have food. And his dad was terrible in that regard. But Frank said, I've been trying to articulate this, but you articulated it so well because I don't feel like I need to forgive my dad. And nobody understands that.

42:21He says, I really appreciate that. Behind him was a guy named Brayton Brayton Buck, who was a great poet from South Africa. He came from a big family. Brayton Bucks were prime ministers and generals and that kind of thing. But in the 60s, he became a radical. He ran with Mandela's crew, the African National Congress. And he had to leave the country because there was death threats. He snuck back a few years later to see his mother. He was snitched on, and they arrested him, and he did time with Nelson Mandela. Now he was free. He's a great poet, sensitive, sweet man. He comes up to me after I talk about how I didn't forgive my dad, and he was like, man, that's exactly how I feel about my guards.

43:01I don't need to forgive them. I have compassion for them. So I feel like this idea, if you've gone through really terrible abuse by people, So and one of the ways you can let go of this trauma of having been brutalized by authority is to realize it wasn't about you and find a way to move away from it, not with forgiveness, but with compassion for them. Like that's the way they were raised to see the world. And that's what was that was the system they were raised in, you know. And so were you able to apply that same realization to yourself, that compassion for yourself? It was easy to give it to my dad.

43:37It was really hard to give it to myself. That's a good question, Jordan. That's a great question. It was so much harder for me. And you know what? Sometimes I struggle with things. And I realize even at my age, 64, I've been out 29 years now. Sometimes it's still hard because of the regret and the shame that I've been wrestling with all these years. Sometimes in a moment of like real spiritual, emotional fatigue, it's hard for me to give myself compassion. But that was always going to be my work, right? It was always going to be my work. And it's what I strive for. When you got out of prison, were you ready to be around normal, good people?

44:10Was that something that you fit back into easily? I'm a preacher's son. Right. So I have social skills because of that. And then I was very smart. And so also I learned I had a lot of savvy having been in prison and being able to look at people and stuff. So I came out with confidence that I would be able to like graft myself onto the body politic, the host body of, you know, of citizenry. Yeah. I was scared that I might fail, but I wasn't afraid that I could connect with people again. I had had a correspondence with this writer named Rich Rodriguez for a couple of years. He's a great essayist.

44:44And he was like, I'll get you to work as a journalist. You're already a writer. You're a better writer than some people I know. And he gave me all this confidence. When he came out, I had a pretty soft landing because I got gigs writing pretty quickly. And I'm also a fortunate writer in that when I started writing, people would come to me and say, can you write on this topic? Can you write on that topic? And so I wanted the rare writers who I didn't have to pitch a lot. I didn't have to go and say, can I write for you? It's just people would come, hey, Joe, this happened. Can you write this? Joe, this happened.

45:10So I was fortunate when I came out to have that validation. I published within three months in the Examiner. Six months I was in the LA Weekly and then the LA Times op-ed page. So I was getting a lot of attention. That LA op-ed piece got me on 48 Hours. Oh, cool. Dan Rather, on bank robbery and stuff. Yeah, yeah. So that's how it happened for me. This is how people become the thing they hate, one rational choice at a time. I shall now shill mattresses and or vitamins. We'll be right back.

46:00No meal planning, no grocery run, no, we have food, but somehow we have nothing to eat kind of situation. These are restaurant-quality meals that come fresh, not frozen, made by legit chefs, Food Network people, James Beard Award winners, acclaimed restaurateurs, meals like sundae sauce rigatoni by Dustin Taylor and chicken korma by Gaurav Raj, lots of bold flavors, fresh ingredients, pick from options like protein forward, fiber maxing, mood boosting, and better for sleep so you can keep it healthy. Fiber maxing sounds like an explosive change to your diet. Anyway, they keep it interesting. They still make everyone happy without turning dinner into a nightly production.

46:34Plus, everything is fully cooked and heats up in as little as five minutes. So instead of spending your evening cooking and cleaning, you're actually eating together. Taste, comfort, and craftsmanship in every bite from the award-winning chefs behind CookUnity. Go to cookunity.com slash Jordan or enter code Jordan before checkout to get 50 % off your first order. That's 50 % off your first order by using code Jordan or going to cookunity.com slash Jordan. I've got homes.com as a sponsor for this episode. Homes.com knows when it comes to home shopping, it's never just about the house or the condo.

47:06It's about the homes. And what makes a home is more than just the house or property. It's the location. It's the neighborhood. If you've got kids, it's also schools, nearby parks, transportation options. That's why homes.com goes above and beyond to bring home shoppers the in-depth information they need to find the right home. It's so hard not to say home every single time. And when I say in-depth information, I'm talking deep. Each listing features comprehensive information about the neighborhood, complete with a video guide. They also have details about local schools with test scores, state rankings, student-teacher ratio.

47:36They even have an agent directory with the sales history of each agent. So when it comes to finding a home, not just a house, this is everything you need to know all in one place, homes.com. We've done your homework. If you like this episode of the show, I invite you to do what other smart and considerate listeners do, which is take a moment and support our amazing sponsors. those who make the show possible. Everything is searchable and clickable over on the website at jordanharbinger.com slash deals. If you can't remember the name of a sponsor, you can't find a code, you're not sure if that code ever existed, do email us jordan at jordanharbinger.com.

48:06We're happy to surface codes for you. It is that important that you support those who support the show. Now for the rest of my conversation with Joe Loya. You have a daughter, correct? Yeah. How did you tell her about your past? And I wonder how you tell other people. How do they normally react? For some reason, we got the impression, you know, kids hear things they know things. She'd already been in school. A lot of the parents in school knew that I was, you know, had been in prison or whatever. So I suspect that she was hearing things from other kids or something. But she got the impression that I knew something about banks because we started, we hung out all the time.

48:43You know, we were very close. And I was picking her up from taking her school, picking her up. And one day she was like, do you know anyone who's robbed armored cars? What's a bank robbery? And so I realized, okay, she's asking questions around the edge of what happened with me. And I didn't know when I was going to tell her. But I felt like I needed to introduce her to the concept of what happened. Now, I was prepared for this because ever since she was little, when there was a cartoon where some kid offended the group of people and he was shunned. And then they had to figure out how to get back to him and absorb him back in the group.

49:17I would always highlight those. I said, you see, sometimes people do bad things, but we have to be willing to let them come back in their little society. I was constantly hitting where those themes and they're in every show. There's episodes in every show, you know, a little kid show. And so I was preparing her for this for years before she got to seven. So she was two, right? I told her mom that I was going to tell her. I think it's time to tell her because she's asked three times this week about bank robberies. So we decided that one Saturday we were going to spend the day with her. Because once you spend a long time with a kid, you're doing things, they just feel safe.

49:50Their nervous system is so calm. And then we're like, hey, let's go get some fro-yo. You know, we go get some frozen yogurt and we bring it home and we're having a great time. We've been together for six hours, seven hours or something and said, hey, I got something to tell you. And she goes, what? And I said, I bring my book. And on the cover of my book, you know, the title of my memoir, The Man Who Outgrew His Prison Cell. Joloya.ltd. You can get it and I'll sign a copy of you. But yeah, it's the man who outgrew his prison cell. And I pull it out. And on the cover is this really the iconic photo of me walking out of a bank at the surveillance, FBI surveillance photo with a trench coat and a suit and a tie and all that stuff.

50:29And, you know, with my Ray-Ban sunglasses, it looks pretty badass. Anyway, I come to a show where I said, listen, a long time ago, your dad, when I was a young man, you know, I was very angry. I made a lot of mistakes. One of the mistakes I did is I robbed a lot of banks. And when I did, I went to prison. I changed my life and I came out. I'm a writer now. You see me always writing and the society is taking me back in because they saw that I changed my life. And that's why you and I get along. I'm a good father now. I'm a good person. And so I changed my life and I showed her the book. You see, I wrote this book and it's about how I changed my life.

51:02And her first question was, oh, did you have to pee in a bucket? And it turned out, I was like, and I told her, I was like, no, No, I wasn't in the Bastille. It wasn't an 18th century French prison. Right, right. That's what I said. Because I had seen the image she was talking about. There'd been this cartoon in Phineas and Ferb where some guy goes to prison, and when he gets locked in the cell, they give him a bucket that he has to do his business in, right? And to her, that's what she imagined prison was. And she asked one or two questions, and then she was like, can we go play? Yeah. And that was it.

51:35I just needed to introduce that concept. And knowing that, we've now begun a conversation about it. And over the years, she would ask, did you have a best friend? What a prison smell like? She would ask me questions that are really interesting to have that conversation. But that's what I told her. I'm afraid to ask, but I will anyway. What does prison smell like? That's not a bad question. Kids always have really good questions, actually. Often, I should say. Yeah, the answer is it smells myriad on any given day. You walk by one guy's cell, it smells like tuna. They just opened a can of tuna. You walk in another guy's cell, it smells like cigarettes.

52:04Another guy, the devil's lettuce. like you walk through it and you're just every cell has a different stench coming out of it right or also one guy he was this cuban guy he loved the smell of ben gay and he thought oh it's really strong scent so he would get this boiling water from the where you you get your boiling water for your coffee he would put it in a mop bucket and then he would put ben gay in there and so he would mop his floor with ben gay and so that that scent came out of the cell really strong yeah Like eucalyptus. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Something, whatever. So I told her it's just at any given time, it's just different smells.

52:39There's not like one smell. Yeah. Okay. You were going to tell me how other people react when you explain what you used to do. I mean, on a podcast, we, we ooh and ah and get the whole story, but what about the average person? You know, it depends when it comes up differently. People find out about it too, you know, through other people. The biggest response I get is like, you don't look like a violent person. You don't. Because I come out here and I don't let anyone read violence off me. I'm not trying to intimidate anyone. I don't perform that hyper male thing out here at all. You know, I still have aggression for me that I dialed from a 10 down to about a two or three.

53:12That's as low as I can go. And it's still sometimes a little intense for people. But mostly there's no real, and that's the response I get. People are like, wow, it's hard to see you. Like my girlfriend told me that just last night when we were talking about prison and stuff, she's like, man, it's hard to imagine you being that guy. Because now I'm kind of a big old sweet bear. So I'm a big guy and everything, but I'm kind of a nice guy. So most of the responses are like that. You ever watch heist movies or anything and think like, no. I love heist movies. In fact, I'm trying to put a podcast together where every week I talk about a different heist movie.

53:45There's hundreds of them. They come out all the time. Yeah. And I have opinions about them. So I want to do a podcast in which I break down a heist movie. I think that's a really fun idea. You know, you could take a scene and go, this would not work, or here's why, or this is a bad idea, there's a better way to do it, but it wouldn't look as good, so Hollywood chose this one. Let me hit a note on that real quick. In the podcast, what I would do is I would have guests who were in a heist movie, wrote a heist movie, directed a heist movie, you know, acted in a heist movie, like somebody, because I was in Baby Driver, so I could have anyone there.

54:15That's right. I could have Jamie Foxx on, I can have Jon Hamm on, you know, I could have people who I know who are in the business who've directed, written, whatever. So I feel like I'm in a unique place for that because I'm, you know, I've consulted in Hollywood for like a consultant and was in baby driver. So anyway, go on. Yeah, I think that would be fun. Let me know if I can help with anything like that. That sounds like a fun side gig, a little project. Yeah, right. The banks you robbed, they were all in LA, right? And I assume you keep your money in a bank now and not in a dirt pile in the back of your garage.

54:45Did you ever rob a branch of the bank that you now use as a customer? I didn't rob only in LA. I robbed as high as Ventura and all the way in San Diego. Okay, but like your area. Southern California. Yeah, I'm curious. Southern California, yes, yes. Because if you rob a Bank of America, are you a Bank of America customer now? That's exactly right. I gave Bank of America the blues, and I'm a great customer for Bank of America, and I like Bank of America. They've done me nothing but good, and so it's weird. I pulled this move once. I talked to this guard at my Bank of America when I was living in another city, And I went up to him and I started talking, man, you know, I see you here all the time.

55:21How do you like your jobs? Is it dangerous? Whatever. We got kind of like friendly. I said, like, how do you make sure that you're protecting everyone? He says, oh, and he gives up the game to me after a year or two. Right. I told him I was from East LA and he says, yeah, my mom moved me from East LA because she didn't want me getting into gang. So I came up here. And so we had the solidarity thing. He told me a lot of things about bankruptcy and stuff. And one day I said, I know, man. man, I was once in a vault when it got robbed. Technically true. Yep. And he was like, really? I was like, yeah, man, it was scary.

55:55And that line is, George Clooney says that line in the movie he did with Jennifer Lopez, Out of Sight. He leans into a banker and he says, hey, man, I was once in a vault when it was robbed. And we already seen him rob a bank and he was in the vault, right? So I use that line with this guy and I wonder if he ever figured it out. But yeah, my bank is cool. This is like when you told your dad, I swear on mom's grave, I was not in that bank. It's like, okay, well, he said he didn't rob the bank. Well, that's not what I said. What I said was I was not in the bank. Again, technically true. That's all I was admitting to.

56:27And what's interesting about that story that I didn't get to, courtists liked me. Special agent courtists liked me. Never met a bank robber like me. He told me so. We were driving to the court and he was in the back. He said, I never met anyone like you, Joe. Your friends are so nice. I understand what your dad did to you, but I've never, usually gangbangers are here, tattoos, drug addicts. He says, oh, you're really smart. You can be whatever you want. And then his partner said, I've never seen him weirded out about a case like with you. And I told him, hey, Curtis, too much analysis causes paralysis.

56:57So let it go. And he was like, that's exactly what I'm talking about. He says, I can use that with my boss, man. That was the kind of relationship we had. So when he called me on the phone, he says, you have a double, tell your lawyer about the double, but I'm not going to talk to you about how your car was found a mile away, overheated. We're not going to talk about that. So even he knew that I was very particular and specific about what I was admitting to, which is I wasn't technically, my feet never hit the tile of that bank. I wasn't ever on the other side of that door, but I'm not saying that it wasn't the getaway driver.

57:31Fortunately for me, the weird thing was that the truck that was following me, like I said, there was only one driver because they only saw my head. So there was a way in which my car may have been involved, but he couldn't prove. Anyway, bottom line is that he let that go. Do you think you'd be able to rob a bank in 2025 from a technology standpoint? Because now there's so many cameras and there's so much better, like they're 4K. Before, when you were doing it, it was like grainy shot, can't read the brand on your shirt, one angle, you know, the tape's all messed up because it's 20 years old. Now it's like 4K view, parking lot, every corner of the place.

58:06That's not the worst of it. That's actually the easiest thing to overcome. The worst of it is everybody has cameras now. So I could be walking out of bank and it's like, hey, look at that old man walking. I could have a disguise. They're like, look at that old man walking away. That is actually one of the most dangerous things is that you don't know who's taking photos of you or just video of you. It's out there everywhere, right? And also cameras are way more ubiquitous than they've ever been. They're everywhere outdoors. So you can get picked up a bunch of different ways and they could track you like, okay, he passed this camera going that way, and let's go this way.

58:39And we find another camera over here showing him going this way. You know, you can be tracked. So that's a challenging one. But also the biggest challenge is that I don't have the requisite rage anymore to go in there and rob. I was capable of doing a lot of things because I was driven by rage and the I don't care attitude, right? And I don't care about my life if I put it on the line. I care about my left now. And I have a sense of posterity. I'm an older man. I don't have the young rage that I have. So when I think about it, I don't think worry about cameras. I don't think about it. So I really think about, do I even have what it takes to muster up to do a 30 bank robbery?

59:15No. If I was desperate, I think I obviously have muscle memory and I could do something, but I don't feel like I'd get away with it. And also something would have to be dire. They're holding my family hostage, whatever, whatever, something like that. But I could do it, but I'm not sure that I would get away with that because, like I said, that's when the cameras and everything come into play. Sure. Even if I went back to crime for whatever reason, I would never think that bank robbery is the hustle. You ever walk or drive past a bank and go like, oh, yeah, I robbed that place before? Oh, all the time.

59:45When I was in LA, there's a lot of ghosts. In fact, I'm going to go visit a friend next week driving down. And she says, I live in Ventura. I've known her since high school. I robbed her bank. And she was like, man, I could have been to the bank when you were robbed that. I said, yes, you could have. So she told me she moved to Ventura and she said, I'm sure you didn't rob a bank in Ventura. And I said, you're wrong. I didn't rob a bank. I robbed a bank not far from you. So, yeah, I mean, I have in Orange County where my brother lives, I've passed banks that I robbed and I've been able to tell him, well, here's how I got away and whatever.

1:00:15But, yeah, I have. What's your relationship like with your father now? It's really close. You know, when I got out of prison, when I got out of prison, I went up to him and said, check this out, dad. I've done a lot of bad. You've done a lot of bad. why don't you let my bad cancel out yours and you let your bad cancel out mine? Let's just start fresh. I have all this compassion towards you. I want to be a new man. Let's start over. My brother and him were having problems and I wanted to model for my brother how I got over a lot of things to get to my dad in a really healthy way. And so my brother got on board and we've been working with my dad since, you know, 1996.

1:00:53And he was not doing well. And our love helped him get back on his feet and help him out. And all these years, we've been pretty tight. There was a couple of years after my book came out where he was kind of upset the way he was portrayed. But, you know, we worked through that. You know, I knew we were going to have a very long relationship. He's now 80. My brother and I love him. Every time I'm in LA, I see him. I'm in the Bay Area now. But my brother hangs out with him every Tuesday. He takes her for a bunch of errands and stuff. You know, we call him a couple of times a week. I talk to my brother almost every day.

1:01:24So we're a tight family now. You know, we don't have my mom, but we have each other. One of the ways in which we get along really well is my brother and I feel like my mother loved this man. My mother loved him. No getting around it. All my aunts on her side, everyone knows my mother loved him. And so to honor my mother, we carry on that love for my dad, hold the love she had for him and respect that love. And it makes it easier to approach him and deal with him with love. And so we just throw a lot of love at the relationship. And my dad's pretty articulate. And at this age, we can have a conversation with him.

1:02:01He's having memory loss now, and things are starting to happen with him in that regard. But he still has his faculties enough so he can remember things from the past, and we talk about a lot of things in the past. But about 15 years ago, I stopped talking about our past. I said, I don't want to talk about what happened anymore. You're my dad. And moving forward, because you would always talk about like, oh, I was a terrible dad. I was a terrible dad. He's beating himself up. So stop talking like that. I said, you're still my dad. You think you were a terrible dad because you stopped dadding at the minute I stabbed you, but you're still my dad.

1:02:32You can model an end game for me. Show me how I'm supposed to leave this world. I need you. You're still my dad, man be good show me he took to that he was like all right i'm still your dad and so what i would do is when i was with my daughter when she was born she would do something that was something she would copy me we had little things i played with stuff and i was copying my dad what he did to me when i was a kid and so she would do something i would call my dad hey man look at that thing you did for us it's now third generation man so i would constantly say lovely things about how he did a bunch of good things.

1:03:08I want to always highlight the good things and how they rippled through me and were rippling into my daughter. And that was helping him heal too, because he only had a sense of himself as being a terrible father from zero to 16. And I'm trying to let him know those spikes of bad behavior were small compared to all the good that you did for me and my brother. I'm an artist because of my dad. I have good facility with language. There's a lot of things that I appreciate in the world because of my ideas. And so I try to always remind him, dad, you did good, man. And my brother is super talented and super smart and super educated and an artist as well.

1:03:45So we feel like we got that from my dad and we always let him know you did us good, dad. You did. There were some moments in which it was traumatic, but overall you did things that hurt us, but you gave us so many tools and resources so that we could work through it. So it's just complicated. It's a paradox of life, you know. Joe Loya, thank you very much. It's a fascinating story, really. It's wonderful to be here, Jordan. I appreciate it. You asked a bunch of good questions, so kudos to you, man. Thank you. Think you need top secret clearance to catch war criminals? In this preview, Elliot Higgins shows how everyday citizens with nothing but Wi-Fi and curiosity are uncovering global crimes that governments tried to bury.

1:04:24Bellingcat does something called open source investigations. thanks to smartphone technology, social media, and the wealth of information we have online. Stuff like Google Maps giving you satellite imagery, ship tracking websites, plane tracking websites, all kinds of information that's accessible to you now. I started doing this in 2012 as a hobby. I just tried to figure out how can you prove if a video is filmed somewhere. And I realized that you could compare landmarks visible in the video with satellite imagery and do a kind of spot the difference fit. Now that's a technique known as geolocation, but back then it was just me playing adults spot the difference on social media platform.

1:05:00I think when we live in an era where the truth is constantly contested, especially on the internet, it's good to have something where you can not only point to the evidence, but the actual process you use to come to your conclusions and open it up for debate. Because there is a tendency for people just to read stuff that reinforces what they already believe. And that causes a lot of problems. If we're going to have a debate about something it should be on actual facts not just the opinions of a new newspaper columnist you've just read what we do is important it's not just about allowing people to see how working but giving them the ways to actually do it themselves and if we let the world just be run by people who want you to shut up then it's going to be a very dark place indeed for me it's really about taking open source investigation and guessing as many people as possible to use it yeah i'll just say, give it a go if you're interested, because that's what I did and I turned out quite well.

1:05:51To hear how Bellingcat is using open source sleuthing to expose war crimes and rewrite the rules of intelligence, check out episode 1192 of The Jordan Harbinger Show. When you hear stories like this, it's tempting to file them away as extremes. That guy, that life, that kind of person. But what stuck with me here is not the fedora or the money or even the bank robberies, it's how ordinary all the steps really were. One decision, then another. Fear the first time and less and less fear every time after that until the thing that once felt impossible starts to feel routine. This isn't a story about how to rob a bank.

1:06:28It's a story about how people normalize the unthinkable and how trauma, when it goes unexamined, doesn't disappear. It just finds new outlets. What happens after that is really what matters. The reckoning, the cost, and whether you're willing to take a cold, honest look at yourself when there's no adrenaline left to hide behind. Thank you all for listening. All Things Joe Loya will be on the website in the show notes. Advertisers, deals, discount codes, and ways to support the show, all at jordanharbinger.com slash deals. Please consider supporting those who support the show. I'd love to see you all sign up for the newsletter as well.

1:06:59I write this thing every week. It comes out on Wednesday. It's a two-minute read. This is not a bunch of stuff that's going on with me. It's a gem from the show, and that makes it a great companion to the show. jordanharbinger.com slash news is where you can find it. Don't forget about Six Minute Networking as well over at sixminutenetworking.com. I'm at Jordan Harbinger on both Twitter and Instagram. You can also connect with me on LinkedIn. In this show, it's created in association with Podcast One. My team is Jen Harbinger, Jace Sanderson, Robert Fogerty, Tata Sidlowskis, Ian Baird, and Gabriel Mizrahi.

1:07:29Remember, we rise by lifting others. The fee for the show is you share it with friends when you find something useful or interesting. In fact, the greatest compliment you can give us is to share the show with those you care about. If you know somebody who's interested in a good redemption tale, a crime tale, a bank robbery tale specifically, definitely share this episode with them. In the meantime, I hope you apply what you hear on the show so you can live what you learn. Sounds weird to say that during a bank robbery episode, doesn't it? I'm in the redemption stuff. So you can live what you learn, and we'll see you next time.