#1521 - Josh Dubin & Jason Flom

Joe Rogan (0:00)

Dude, Josh, Jason, thank you. Thanks for being here. Try to keep this sucker like a fist from your face.

Gentlemen, what's happening?

Josh Dubin (0:08)

Thanks for having us. Happy to be here.

Joe Rogan (0:10)

My pleasure, my pleasure.

Let's just start this off. Just tell everybody what you guys are here for and what you do.

Josh Dubin (0:15)

Okay, well, we do a lot of things. You do a lot of things. I do.

Joe Rogan (0:21)

Shout out to Andre Ward for introducing us.

Josh Dubin (0:23)

Oh yeah, yeah, absolutely. One of my best friends and actually personal heroes. So, Jason and I both work at The Innocence Project.

I'm the ambassador, the Innocence ambassador of The Innocence Project in New York.

We're here to get the word out about Wrongful Convictions. We have a podcast. Jason has had a long successful podcast called Wrongful Conviction with Jason Flom. I'm the host of a new spinoff of that called Wrongful Conviction Junk Science, which examines all of these disciplines of forensic sciences that have been proven to be total bullshit. Total junk is the name would suggest.

Joe Rogan (1:01)

Let's get to that.

I want to hear what those are. But Jason, can you just tell everybody what you're originally in the record business?

Jason Flom (1:09)

Yeah.

Thanks for bringing that up. I've been in the music business since I was 18 years old. So I've signed acts over the years.

Joe Rogan (1:14)

I said record business because I'm old.

Jason Flom (1:22)

It sounds nostalgic a little bit, right? We miss those vinyl discs and stuff, and they used to be able to clean your weed on and everything else on the album covers. But yeah, I've been in the music business since I was 18 So I've signed acts over the years, everybody from Stone Temple Pilots and Skid Row all the way, Tori Amos and Katy Perry and Kid Rock, and more recently, Greta Van Fleet and Lorde.

And it's been an amazing run at various times, I was chairman and CEO of Atlantic Records, Virgin Records, Capital Records, but my calling in life has been eliminating mandatory sentencing, decriminalizing drugs, basically getting people out of prison that don't belong there and reversing mass incarceration, which I believe to be the worst failed social policy disaster since slavery. And it's really just an extension of slavery. So I really appreciate you having us here, and I can't wait to tell you the story of how we first met.

Joe Rogan (2:10)

But I love that you're doing this. I just before before we even get started. This makes me excited when successful people go out of their way to do something like this where it's just good, you know, you're just trying to right wrongs.

And I couldn't agree with you more. I mean, the the war on drugs is one of the most disgusting and confusing aspects of our enlightened culture. It's just it's it's infuriating that we have a gigantic percentage of people that are in prison for nonviolent drug offenses, and then a lot of them are wrongly in prison.

Jason Flom (2:43)

There's that. And Joe, do you know how many people are still annually locked up for possession of marijuana in this country?

Joe Rogan (2:50)

How many?

Jason Flom (2:50)

Almost 700,000 last year. Like that's that's insane for possession of pot is legal. People are making tons of money on it.

Joe Rogan (2:58)

I mean, I have to tell you, you know, yeah, you don't have to tell me I'm a pothead. Yeah, it's it's outrageous. It doesn't make any sense. And it's the slowest battleship to turn, you know, in terms of the way our culture deals with it and handles it. We all we all know that it doesn't kill anybody. We all know that look, I got a fucking bottle of whiskey right here. This isn't illegal. How could I could drink this and die like this in my hand if I drank that I'd be dead, right? Or close to it.

Josh Dubin (3:22)

Yeah, you know, you know, what's crazy is that when you said thank you and you like when successful people do this, when you said that, I almost felt like I don't know the right way to articulate it. I never feel like I'm doing enough because there's so much bad shit happening to people.

And you know, I remember reading this book called Inside Rikers.

I forget the author's name, Jennifer Nguyen, but she did this study of the population of incarcerated people at Rikers Island and how such a large percentage of them were in there for petty drug crimes, and the recidivism was all about people that had drug and alcohol problems. It makes up over 90% of the population at Rikers Island. And she had a revolutionary idea, right? She said, what if we start a program and give them vocational training and put them in jobs? And the recidivism rate in her program called Fresh Start dropped to almost 0.3%. And it just shows you that the first episode of my podcast, there was a great quote, and I'm a sucker for quotes from the guy that I interviewed. He's an attorney at The Innocence Project named Chris Fabricani. He said that the justice system is an efficient eating and killing machine for poor people of color.