Tim Pearce: How a Documentary Halted Gang Violence in Watts ft. Mike Soenen & Cornelius Wills

Summary

Podcast Summary: Adam Carolla Show – "Tim Pearce: How a Documentary Halted Gang Violence in Watts" (July 22, 2026)

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Episode Overview

In this episode, Adam Carolla welcomes former LAPD gang unit officer Tim Pearce, ex-gang leader Cornelius Wills, and venture capitalist/producer Mike Sunan to discuss the groundbreaking documentary "Nothing to See Here: Watts." The episode dives deep into how an unusual, citizen-driven film project brought together rival gangs, local law enforcement, and community members to halt violence in one of LA’s most historically turbulent neighborhoods.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

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1. The Genesis of "Nothing to See Here: Watts"

• Mike Sunan (venture capitalist) was shocked after a South LA ride-along where the news ignored a deadly shooting he witnessed (02:47). This experience catalyzed the idea for a unique documentary: provide iPhones to Watts residents (gang members, police, victims, mothers) to self-document their lives.

  • "He goes, I wonder if I bought 20 iPhones and just passed it out... 'Go film your story.'... I didn't think it was going to work... but I was completely wrong." – Tim Pearce (03:44)

• Tim Pearce (retired LAPD) provided on-the-ground security, contacts, and credibility for Sunan’s project, ensuring safety and trust for both filmmaker and subjects.

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2. Economic and Social Divide in LA

• Carolla and guests discuss how LA neighborhoods with multimillion-dollar homes exist a few miles from areas rife with poverty and violence, citing Skid Row and Watts as stark examples (04:48).
  • "Death and poverty and destruction and despair... is as the crow flies just down the road, sometimes." – Adam Carolla (06:15)

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3. Life as an LAPD Gang Officer + Observations on Homelessness

• Pearce describes his early days patrolling Skid Row in the '90s, witnessing nightly crowds and chaos, most of it stemming from drug addiction and mental illness (07:08–08:33).

  • "At 3 o' clock in the morning, there'd be 300 people in the intersection. It looked like a casting call, a thriller." – Tim Pearce (07:30)

• Challenge to common political narratives:

  • Carolla and Pearce reject claims that LA’s homeless crisis is mainly “working poor” families, vehemently arguing it’s overwhelmingly about drug addiction and mental health (09:04–12:23).
    • "99% [of the homeless]—drug or mental issues." – Tim Pearce (12:00)
    • "I never saw that scenario. Ever." – Tim Pearce, on the mythical hardworking homeless mom (11:20)

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4. "Unintended Consequences" of Policy

• Decriminalization policies (e.g., prostitution, street crime) have led to more visible and organized lawlessness:

  • "You have fucking lost your city." – Adam Carolla, re: ATV/street takeovers (14:20)
  • "It does not pay for an officer to be proactive and doing above and beyond the job..." – Tim Pearce on declining proactive policing (18:11)

• Pearce recounts department policies making policing riskier (Bernard Parks "all complaints taken" order), leading to his wife/partner Christina being shot and paralyzed during duty (15:25–23:02).

  • Compelling, emotional account highlighting the human risks to officers.

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5. Systemic Crime and Justice Failures

• Discussion of career criminals and the justice system’s inability to keep them off the street.
  • "87-page rap sheet... In the early 80s, he murdered a guy over change." – Pearce on the man who shot his wife (23:04–24:45)
  • "It's a super small percentage of people creating all the crime..." – Adam Carolla (23:39)

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6. Insights on Policing, Use of Force, and Public Perception

• The disconnect between public/political perception and policing realities, especially regarding compliance during police encounters (28:33–37:34).
  • "If people would do a little more of that, there'd be a little less people getting shot." – Adam Carolla, on compliance (32:55)
  • "Every use of force I've ever been in... all you had to do was put your hands up and say, 'What do you need, officer?'" – Tim Pearce (33:18)

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7. Home Self-Protection & Gun Ownership

• Debate over best practices for civilian home defense: shotgun preferences, gun storage, safety, and the need for immediate access vs. safe storage (37:29–43:02).
  • "I taught my kids very young and consistently not to touch them... My mentality is... seconds to confront this guy..." – Tim Pearce (42:12)

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8. The Peace-Building Process & Documentary Impact

[Timestamps: 48:34–66:43]

The Filmmaking Experiment

• Sunan distributed 20 iPhones, after asking 200 people to participate. The resulting footage (“200 hours of the craziest stuff you’ve ever seen”) was edited only by consensus of participants—many of whom were direct rivals or victims across gang lines.
  • "I said, 'if you will be the film's directors...I will build you the infrastructure to make the film.'" – Mike Sunan (49:59)

From Screening to Peace Treaty

• The first screening brought together the leadership of Watts’ four biggest gangs—a group that had not gathered in 30 years and had cumulatively spent 200 years incarcerated (51:57).
• The film prompted honest admissions of collective loss and a rare, enforceable agreement:
  • No violence against women and children.
  • No retaliation; and, if violated, gangs would work with police to turn in offenders (52:14).
• Outcome: in the 12 months following the premiere, there were zero gang-related homicides in Watts, with a 90% drop overall.
  • "In the 12 months following the agreement, zero gang related homicides and a 90% drop overall." – Mike Sunan (53:14)

Community and Police Buy-in

• Many officers wanted the truth told, offering footage and support, even as department lawyers balked (61:21–62:47).
  • "We did this whole thing without permission... the officers were sliding me footage." – Tim Pearce (61:21)
• The film’s approach is being studied for replication in other cities (Harvard case study in progress), and premieres have drawn huge, peaceful audiences combining police, gang members, and community (66:29).

Notable Quotes:

• "As they reviewed the footage over the next year, empathy began to develop. No forgiveness... but a sense of empathy." – Mike Sunan (50:33)
• "Everybody cared more about their kids than what was going on... They were all willing to change behavior to do it." – Mike Sunan (52:14)
• "It was amazing... talking to people never would have talked to before. Such a feeling of community." – Tim Pearce (66:29)

Cornelius Wills’ Perspective (ex-Bounty Hunter Bloods)

• Wills discusses how early interventions and different mentorship could have altered his path; advocates for focusing on teens at "the transition age" (55:15).
• Discusses the old codes of gangs (no targeting women/children) and how social media has dissolved traditional structure and accountability (58:54–59:59).
  • "Used to be real strict. Like, if you see your op with his mom, kids... nothing. Now, none of that pays part." – Cornelius Wills (59:51)

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Notable Moments & Quotes (with Timestamps)

• "My mom put me in the gang when I was 8 because they offered daycare and protection while she goes to work." – Mike Sunan recalling a gang member's story (49:26)
• "The real picture of homelessness is bigger than the AIDS quilt and those are crazy junkies." – Adam Carolla (10:52)
• "No one does the right thing any of the time... we have to move forward with systems that don't rely on everyone doing the right thing." – Adam Carolla, on policy (91:44)

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Documentary and Future Aspirations

• "Nothing to See Here: Watts" is being shown in major LA venues and is being considered as a model to be franchised/adapted for other cities (64:09).
• The community ownership model: profits (if any) go back to filmmakers and the Watts community, not outside producers (64:45).

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Format & Tone

The episode is classic "Adam Carolla Show": irreverent, highly opinionated, but giving space for guests with lived expertise. Tim Pearce brings gritty, firsthand police insight; Mike Sunan is earnest and entrepreneurial; Cornelius Wills is frank, reflective, and focused on the next generation.

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Important Timestamps

• 02:47 – Origin of the documentary & ride along story
• 04:48 – Discussing LA’s economic divides
• 07:08 – Stories from patrolling Skid Row
• 12:00 – Breakdown of true homelessness factors
• 15:25 – How policing policy led to Tim’s wife’s shooting
• 23:04 – Profile of violent career criminals
• 28:33 – Discussion: policing, compliance, and public misunderstanding
• 37:29 – Home gun safety & self-defense talk
• 48:34 – Bringing in Mike Sunan and Cornelius Wills; documentary production
• 51:57 – First gang-private screening & peace agreement outcome
• 53:14 – Results: zero gang homicides, 90% drop in violence
• 62:47 – Police and city response to documentary
• 66:29 – Community-wide impact at screenings

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Final Thoughts

This episode encapsulates the power of grassroots, community-led initiatives to impact entrenched social problems. The "Nothing to See Here: Watts" documentary not only changed minds but altered realities at street level, creating a blueprint for community healing and crime reduction, with lessons that extend far beyond Los Angeles. The mix of lived experience from all sides—police, former gang, entrepreneur—offers a truly multi-dimensional view rarely seen in policy debates or media coverage.

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Plug:
Nothing to See Here: Watts premieres July 25th at Los Angeles Regal LA Live and July 24–30 at Santa Monica Laemmle. A must-see for anyone interested in real solutions to urban violence.

Transcript

[Adam Carolla]

Well, in this episode we got Tim Pierce, who's ex lapd, knows all the gangs, been there, done that, getting all the crazy stories and just let you know how bad it is and was here in Los Angeles. And we'll tell you about a really innovative doc as well. Got that. Rudy Pavic is doing the news and we'll do that right after this.

[Rudy Pavich]

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[Commercial Announcer]

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[Adam Carolla]

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[Tim Pierce]

Welcome to the real world.

[Commercial Announcer]

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[Adam Carolla]

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[Tim Pierce]

That is so effective on Pluto TV.

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[Tim Pierce]

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[Mike Sunan]

Go easy.

[Tim Pierce]

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[Adam Carolla]

Amazing offer, really. I hit 200 on the scratcher.

[Tim Pierce]

Did the scratcher come to your house

[Rudy Pavich]

and hand you a check?

[Adam Carolla]

No.

[Tim Pierce]

How many scratchers did you hit to get that? I hit a button on Carvana.com once. Okay, that's fair.

[Mike Sunan]

It's like the lottery, except you always win.

[Tim Pierce]

Not like the lottery at all, actually. Exactly. Inexplicably good offers worth bragging about.

[Mike Sunan]

Sell your car today on Carvana. Pickup fees may apply.

[Adam Carolla]

From Corolla One studios in Glendale, California, this is the Adam Carolla Show. Adam's guest today, former member of the LAPD gang unit, Tim Pierce. Non active member of the bounty hunter Bloods Cornelius Wills. And venture capitalist Mike Sunan. Plus the news with Rudy Pavich. And now, Adam Carolla. Yeah, get it on. Got to get it on. A choice but to get on. Mandate you get it on. Tim Pierce is back. Who's on a couple years ago. Got a lot of interesting stories with him. He's got a company. We'll get into that. But movie nothing to see here. It's a great documentary. Groundbreaking I would say very interesting. Lean into that mic, Tim, and tell us about this doc.

[Tim Pierce]

Nothing to see here. Watts. It's a direct story from the people living and working in Watts. And how it came about is Mike Sunan, who's a venture capitalist, lives down in Hermosa beach, decided he wanted to go on a ride along and talked to one of his friends. And that friend put him in contact with my old partner down in Watts at Southeast Division. Mike goes on this ride along and sees three people get shot, one guy get killed, and the news didn't cover it, and he was just shocked by that. And he talked to gang members and victims and detectives and gang officers and patrol, and a wide variety of people in that ride along. And he came back from it going like, wow, I never knew this existed 8 miles from my house. He lives on the strand in Hermosa. Polar opposite neighborhood, right?

[Adam Carolla]

Yes, the Strand in Hermosa. Very, very nice, expensive, well heeled living.

[Tim Pierce]

After that, he gets this idea. He's like, man, I want to learn more. And he goes, I wonder if I went out and bought 20 iPhones and I just passed it out to a variety of people that live and work in Watts and tell them, hey, go film your story. And. And I want to learn more. And he didn't have any plan. So the buddy that hooked him up with the ride along, I knew, and he called me up and he goes, hey, man, this guy's got this idea. It's kind of cool, but I'm worried about him. I go, yeah, he can't do that. He can't run around in Watts passing out phones and he's going to get smoked or robbed or something. I said, look, I'm retired, but let me. I'll take him down there, I'll run security for him, I'll introduce some people to him. I think it's a cool idea because even when I was working at lapd, I was always trying to educate my neighborhood. I lived back in Torrance and I would go home and say, guys, you have no idea what's going on. I just was at three homicides tonight, you know, and so I thought it was kind of a cool concept. I didn't think it was going to work and I thought we were going to lose all the phones, but I was completely wrong.

[Adam Carolla]

Yeah, it turned into quite a compelling dock where the people in the dock are filming themselves in the dock and. And all the loss that goes along with that. You know, L.A. is a very interesting place in terms of topography because I was Just having this discussion with someone yesterday, which is how brutally hot it can be in the San Fernando Valley. Setting records in, like, Reseda. Like about three years ago, it got up to like 116 in Reseda. You go over the hill and into Malibu, Santa Monica, which is, as the crow flies, it's eight miles, it's seven miles and it's 42 degrees cooler and totally pleasant. And you wouldn't know people were expiring in Reseda. You just got your tootsies in the sand. And it kind of reminds me of this and where that, you know, it's funny, where I used to notice it the most is when I used to ride a motorcycle. When you ride a motorcycle, you know what the ambient temp is all the time. And you'd be. I'd be driving through the valley, burning up, you know. And then you'd go up to Laurel Canyon and start cooling off and start going down the backside into the city. All of a sudden it got so much more pleasant. You don't really feel it in your car. But LA is full of places that are wildly affluent, more so than you would have in any of the Carolinas or anything, because homes will go for 18, 20, $30 million. And then literally, as the crow flies, death and poverty and destruction and despair right there. And it's kind of nuts. And it's almost like Skid Row. Like. Well, as long as Skid Row was Skid Row and remains Skid Row, because Skid Row's right by downtown LA and there's fashionable restaurants and sporting events and all that. And then just over there is a damnation alley. Just destruction and disease and despair. And as long as it kind of stays there, the residents don't know and don't really care. And it's not in another state. It's not even in another city, really. It's just down the road sometimes.

[Tim Pierce]

Yeah. As a new officer, I worked on Skid Row. A foot beat on the graveyard shift. The PM shift.

[Adam Carolla]

Foot beat, graveyard, Skid Row.

[Tim Pierce]

What year that was? 96.

[Adam Carolla]

What would graveyard constitute back then?

[Tim Pierce]

I think we started. I can't remember, it was like 6pm to 4am or something like that.

[Adam Carolla]

And just walk in Skid Row.

[Tim Pierce]

And it was wild. I would sit there, I would stand in corner six in San Julian, right in the middle, and at 3 o' clock in the morning, there'd be 300 people in the intersection. It looked like a casting call, a thriller, just people just walking around.

[Adam Carolla]

This is back then. Yeah, 96.

[Tim Pierce]

It was really bad LAPD put a ton of attention on it for about five years and it got the best I've ever seen it. And then it's climbed out of that and it's gotten horrible again. Absolutely horrible.

[Adam Carolla]

How much larger is skid Row now than it was? I don't mean population, I mean physical size. Is it grown in size?

[Tim Pierce]

I would guess that it's about really one, maybe half a square mile of just density. Right. Density homeless, but probably really stretches out to a square mile because you're going to see them all the way over to Pershing Square and, you know, meandering out. But really the density is down there around 6 in San Julian.

[Adam Carolla]

And so you. That was your beat at night?

[Rudy Pavich]

Yeah.

[Adam Carolla]

Could you do that in modern times on skid row?

[Tim Pierce]

Oh, sure, yeah. I was standing there in uniform and I would stand on the corner and it's like I remember seeing this perspective. Like they would just come and walk around me and give me a little space and it was like splitting the Red Sea, you know, and they'd be like, what's up, officer? How you doing? You know, And I was just had this front row view of this. What that was, it was mental illness and drug addiction, right?

[Commercial Announcer]

Yeah.

[Cornelius Wills]

Yeah.

[Adam Carolla]

Well, hold on. Gavin Newsom explained the real face of homelessness, the real picture of homelessness to me, sitting right where you're sitting, the great Gavin Newsom. When I told him it was mental illness and drug addiction, he corrected me and explained that the real picture was a mother who was divorced, who worked full time, but she only got minimum wage, who had a couple of kids and was because of the divorce, you know the rules. I've been divorced in California. I told my ex, hit the bricks, you get nothing.

[Cornelius Wills]

That's not.

[Adam Carolla]

Yeah, yeah, that's how it works. So he said that it was a mother of two, full time job, got divorced and is pushed out, homeless, has to sleep on the street with her kids. And I don't know how she holds down her full time job. I'll play it for you if you want to hear how batshit crazy Newsom is and how totally insane. But your experience is a dude on the street. My experience is just driving every inch of this highway in Los Angeles over 25, 30 years and never seeing this mythical mother of two who had a full time job and a divorce out on the street. But here's what he said. This notion of like the guy's a hard working, God fearing family member who lost his job and now had to take to the streets is total nutter. Bullshit. But what about the picture of real homelessness, which is a poor mom with two kids with a husband who took off and left her, who's sitting there struggling on that minimum wage job and

[Tim Pierce]

all of a sudden now is out

[Adam Carolla]

in the streets and sidewalks desperately trying to find some help, get her life back, can't get those kids into childhood.

[Rudy Pavich]

Do you think that's what happened to Jewel?

[Adam Carolla]

That's the tough thing? Yeah, that's a picture of family homelessness. No, that's a postage stamp. No, the real picture is bigger than the AIDS quilt and those are crazy junkies. Yeah, but no. So what? Yeah, but no. Yeah, but no. Yeah, but no. Yeah, but no. So I don't know. One of you is right.

[Tim Pierce]

I lived it. I spent more time.

[Adam Carolla]

Gavin Newsom is a fucking retard. He's a retarded person. I don't even know what his end game is with this shit. Why are you trying to talk me out of what the problem is?

[Tim Pierce]

I spent more hours on skid row than I did with my family in those days. And I never saw that scenario.

[Adam Carolla]

Nobody's ever seen it. But to be fair to Gavin Newsom, he's never seen it either. He's just lying, protecting some kind of constituency that I know not why, but it's. In your opinion, homelessness. If you were just to go, drug and mental issues, Combine them. Drug or. Drug and mental issues, you know, there's both. What percentage of the people who physically sleep outside at night, what percentage would that constitute?

[Tim Pierce]

99%.

[Adam Carolla]

Yeah. Not 87%.

[Tim Pierce]

No, no, no. And if we found a family like that out there, there's resources. And the officers working those beats would be identifying those people and getting them to the right places. I mean, they find themselves there on skid row with a family. I just don't. I never saw it.

[Adam Carolla]

Yeah. If you saw this mythical unicorn of a mother with a full time job and minimum wage and two kids sober, wearing her Taco Bell outfit, fresh off a shift, you would have found her and gotten her somewhere and some resources. Right.

[Tim Pierce]

There's four elements that I would see down there. I would see the mentally ill, the drug addicted, and then you would see the do gooders coming down, passing out food and clothes and all that kind of stuff. And I just didn't, you know, I just didn't see that side where it was like a normal person ends up there. Like they just.

[Adam Carolla]

Yeah, well, you didn't see it because the. It doesn't exist. So why would you see something I don't know. Did you see Charlize Theron down there? No.

[Tim Pierce]

No.

[Adam Carolla]

You want to know why? Doesn't exist. Never been there. All right, so what do you think? Just on a slightly separate subject, but I've been thinking about it. The whole decriminalization of the ladies of the night. And now that has ended up with tons of women, black women and Hispanic women just out on the street and they're pimps and a shit show. Like another one of their do Gooder policies that blew up in their face, I guess.

[Tim Pierce]

Yeah. You know, look, I retired in 2014, but I still go back and see my buddies. And one night last year, I was on riding around with one of my buddies, and we were on Figueroa, and we stopped to grab some tacos. And I'm just looking all the way down Figueroa. Just women out in the street and G strings and high heels and fishnet tops, like, just packed. And I was like, wow, there's always been a prostitution problem there, but it's just on steroids now. And then down the street comes 30 motorcycles and quads, in and out of traffic.

[Adam Carolla]

Oh, yeah. Street take. Yeah. Takeovers.

[Cornelius Wills]

Yeah.

[Tim Pierce]

And I was looking at this going, what the hell has happened? Like, chaos.

[Adam Carolla]

Yes, it's chaos. I will tell you. There are, like, signs. There are indicators. Like, you know, they'll do that thing where they'll go, like, are you an alcoholic? And then you go, do you find yourself drinking to make yourself more lively in social situations? Or do you. Have you drank before while, you know, day drinking? Are you doing day drinking? Like, there's a thing where you go, I think I'm an alcoholic now? Because this is more than a glass of wine at dinner. When you're a city and they do the quad motorcycle street takeover, you have fucking lost your city. I saw it in Chicago. I saw it in San Francisco. Because it's not about quads or dirt bikes. It's about people not fearing the law. And it means I, with impunity, will hop on a quad or an ATV and just go right up and down Main street, and there's not a goddamn thing you're gonna do about it.

[Commercial Announcer]

Or.

[Adam Carolla]

Which means you've lost control of your city.

[Tim Pierce]

Look, this has been a progression. Right back when Bernard Parks came in, he put in a complaint system at LAPD that all complaints will be taken, no matter what. I'm sure you heard of that. And it actually plays into why Christina got shot.

[Adam Carolla]

Your wife and partner.

[Tim Pierce]

Yeah. So she. I remember turning to her in roll call. Saying this policy is going to get an officer killed and it's going to squash all proactive policing. And it's been a downhill coast since then towards total lawlessness because it doesn't benefit an officer to go out and be proactive. It only hurts them, right?

[Adam Carolla]

No, look, it's the Ferguson effect. People stand out. Look, the number one trait that human beings have is sort of self survival. Like no matter what you say, you go, well, I love my kids or my wife or my buddies or whatever, that's fine and that's good. But what's kind of built into your DNA is sort of I gotta do what's best for me. Yeah. And you can get me to do good things or you can get me to do bad things. You just incentivize me. So if something like Covid comes around, people's number one thing is I don't want to be ostracized. I'm going to be made fun of. I don't want to be kicked out of it. I'll put this mask on, I don't give a shit. I, I don't care if it works or not. And I'll yell at someone who isn't wearing their mask because I need to be in a protected group and I can't be ostracized and I can't be shunned or pushed out. If you start saying to cops, look, everyone's got a camera, everyone's filming everything all the time. You get involved, shit happens out of context. They don't know the whole story before this incident. You arrive, there's film of you, it looks bad, your world is finished. Then cops will stop showing up because it doesn't mean they're good or bad. It just means the number one thing that kicks in, which is sort of self survival. Like, I am not going to insert myself in a situation that could create a vulnerability for me to lose my livelihood or worse.

[Tim Pierce]

And all cops are paid the same, right? It doesn't, you don't get paid more for being proactive.

[Adam Carolla]

Right.

[Tim Pierce]

You could be a complete slug and sit there and do nothing for 10 years. And you could be a gang officer going out there, jumping out of the car, getting, you know, jacking up gangsters and making things happen, getting weapons off the street. But you're going to, your complaints are going to stacking up and where there's smoke, there's fire. And now the department has to move you to protect your career.

[Adam Carolla]

Right?

[Tim Pierce]

And now, so who has the ceiling on what crime can be in the city? Right, the gangsters.

[Adam Carolla]

Right.

[Cornelius Wills]

Right.

[Tim Pierce]

Because they control it. They'll put a campaign out and they'll get you moved if you're effective. So that culture has been brewing for years.

[Adam Carolla]

Yes.

[Tim Pierce]

And it does not pay for an officer to be proactive and doing above and beyond the job.

[Adam Carolla]

Everything that the left pushes falls under the heading of unintended consequences. It sounds like a good idea to do this. We're gonna decriminalize prostitution because it's affecting women of color, and it always turns into a shit show. So every good, well intended idea turns to shit almost immediately, which means they should stop having ideas and we should stop listening to them. But the harrowing story of your wife and partner and the shootout and her subsequently being paralyzed and then you subsequently starting your company. Let's revisit that if we could, because I thought it was pretty compelling. Yeah.

[Tim Pierce]

So Christina and I, we got into the. We were in the same academy class. I didn't know her. She. We had 120 people in our class. She was in a different squad. She had a fantastic reputation. We go do probation, different divisions, and then we end up at Southwest Division together, get partnered in patrol. She was a phenomenal officer, I always say. She was top five of the department. Top five percent, male or female. Unique. And she was an amazing gang officer. So we end up in the crash unit together and then become best friends. And then eventually, after we were separated as partners, we started dating. We were like the last two to figure out we liked each other. And then so we get married, and our daughter is 16 months old. We're newly married. I'm working in Watts and Jordan Downs housing development. She's working in Southwest Division off King Boulevard, just west of USC, the Crenshaw district. And we worked the Rolling 30 Crips gang there together in the crash units. And she stayed in that area, so she knew everybody. She's driving one night down Denker, heading to the station. Denker and King sees a guy kind of duck behind a car like he's dumping something. Her and her partner key in on it. She jumps out. Hey, let me talk to you. Boom, he runs. What she doesn't know is he's just robbed the liquor store across the street from the station. The victims are running across the intersection to the front desk saying, yeah, we just got robbed. He just went northbound in Denker. The desk officer's picking up the radio to put it out to the whole division. At that same time. She's now chasing the guy, not knowing about the robbery.

[Adam Carolla]

It's an armed robbery.

[Tim Pierce]

Yeah. She doesn't know that.

[Cornelius Wills]

Right.

[Tim Pierce]

So as she's chasing him, she's watching his hands. The hands are what kill you. She's watching the hands. No gun in the hands. He runs up four steps to a porch, to a four plex, tries to get in a door. And when they don't run in anybody's house, and it gets super complicated once they break that door threshold. So she. She catches him at the door. She would never have grabbed him had she seen a gun in his hand. She would have stopped short. And she catches him and grabs him by the shoulders. Going to try to rip him to the ground, cuff him, figure out why he's running. I mean, she'd been in two foot pursuits earlier that night and caught him and let him go.

[Mike Sunan]

Really?

[Tim Pierce]

Oh, yeah. Gangsters too. Hardcore gangsters. This guy was a little bit older. So when she grabs him, he had pulled a pistol from his waistband, turned and spun and shoved it up under her armpit and shot her above the vest. That bullet hit her in the spinal cord. Lights off, she drops, paralyzed. He stands over and shoots her three more times, trying to execute her.

[Cornelius Wills]

Wow.

[Tim Pierce]

Her partner stops on the grass and is firing at him as he's firing at her on the ground. Joe Meyer. Luckily, Joe Meyer hits him in the shoulder, spins him around. The second round catches him in the back, goes through his aorta. He drops dead and dies. I'm in the projects. I hear the help call, not knowing it's her. Our schedules are so screwy, I didn't even realize she was still working. She was working that night. We're going to the help call. I get off at Coliseum. My sergeant calls me on my cell phone. And I realize now it's where I realize we're getting on King Boulevard to get there. I get there right when the paramedics get there. I run up the steps with thick, syrupy purple arterial blood coming out from under her back. Down four steps and a big, big pool on the sidewalk. And I took one look at her sheet. White, no blue in her eyes, completely locked and fixed. Total shock and unresponsive. And luckily, two of our SWAT officers had just been cross trained as medics. They graduated two days earlier from their medic school. The first LAPD officers to be cross trained as medics officially. Imagine that for them, right? They end up with a. With an officer, you know, critically wounded like that, and they're working on her. I get there right when the paramedics are putting their boxes down, taking their first assessment of her. Help her get on the board, talking to her. Ultimately, she's paralyzed. She survives. She was paralyzed from the chest down, right from here and now. That was 2006, right? That was a long time ago.

[Adam Carolla]

Who was the perp?

[Tim Pierce]

He had an. He had an 87 page rap sheet.

[Adam Carolla]

87 page rap sheet. Rap sheet. And he was going to execute her.

[Cornelius Wills]

Yep.

[Tim Pierce]

His.

[Adam Carolla]

Why did he need to do that? I mean, why not run once she dropped?

[Tim Pierce]

So he had never been out of jail more than three years. He could never finish a parole. He had multiple robberies. In fact, they had just cleared on that crime of shooting her. They cleared a whole bunch of robberies where he was fit the description and, you know, everything were fit.

[Adam Carolla]

So he was. He died right there.

[Tim Pierce]

Oh, yeah.

[Adam Carolla]

Oh, that's good. Yeah. But 87 page rap sheet, like, when are we gonna figure out that it's a super small percentage of people that are creating all the crime and misery?

[Tim Pierce]

In the early 80s, he murdered a guy over change at a gas station. He was asking the guy for money and the guy didn't have him change. He got pissed off and he shot him. Killed him in the car. Only did a couple years in prison for that. Was out. It was a time when there was super light sentencing. There was a time when he went in to rob a church and trying to rob the basket that they put their donations into. And the patrons all piled on him, including the priest, and they were fighting over his gun as he was shooting into the ceiling of the church.

[Adam Carolla]

Jesus. I know.

[Cornelius Wills]

Look,

[Adam Carolla]

I like the idea of rehabbing and rehabilitation, but some people need to be put down.

[Tim Pierce]

Even his family said he had zero redeemable qualities.

[Adam Carolla]

How old was he when he was.

[Tim Pierce]

He was like 52.

[Adam Carolla]

So just his whole life just costing the taxpayers billions.

[Tim Pierce]

And that was the bizarre thing. When they saw him, he was like a bass head, right? Like a rock smoker, you know, kind of on the streets kind of guy. That's what he looked like. And normally Christina and Joe would never stop a guy like that. They're looking for gangsters and guns and all that kind of stuff. But they both keyed in on his actions and said, hey, something's up. They felt it.

[Adam Carolla]

Right? Right.

[Tim Pierce]

Let's talk to him. And so she gets out and boom, he runs. And what's she supposed to do? That's her job, Right? Right. She's not paid to wave at people and say, hi, she's cha. She's there to root out crime.

[Adam Carolla]

What do you. I've been thinking a lot oh, let's see. I see videos of dudes fighting with female officers and getting the best of them.

[Mike Sunan]

Oh, yeah.

[Adam Carolla]

And I like the idea of a female officer and I like the idea of a female fireman, but I don't like the idea of someone who can't carry my fat ass out the window and down a ladder. I don't like that part. I like the idea of it, but I'm not sure about the two chicks. And I don't know if it was in Heathrow or London or something, getting knocked out, getting punched in the face. But dudes are bigger, they're stronger. Your wife or ex? Wife, I think ex. Yeah, ex wife seemed pretty capable. And there are women out there that way, but a lot of them I see are just getting thrown around and. Sorry, but that's kind of part of the job.

[Tim Pierce]

You know, to be fair, there's.

[Adam Carolla]

And there are dudes that aren't in great shape either.

[Tim Pierce]

Yeah. And women make amazing, amazing officers and amazing detectives because they put everything together.

[Adam Carolla]

Every serial killer in the last 30 years has been busted by a housewife. They don't have to be at the precinct, they're at their kitchen table, taken down.

[Tim Pierce]

But there's a reality to the strength. Christina was a jujitsu fighter, kickboxer. She had a mindset that was hardcore mindset, but she didn't try to act like a guy. Right. She knew her spot. She was super intelligent and she could read situations and she knew when to bring in help and how to gauge those situations until we had resources there that were needed. There's a lot of women on the job like that for sure. But the bottom line is there is no standard. Once you graduate the academy, there is nothing to force you to be in shape or to train martial arts or any of that kind of stuff.

[Adam Carolla]

Yeah, you know, I think like a pilot needs to get his eyes checked every four years or something like that. Yeah, you're gonna have to run a mile in under 10 minutes and wrestle a, you know, 180 pound guy using a little jiu jitsu or something like it. For your own safety, by the way. You don't want to sit there and get your ass kicked 100 out in the street. What is this clip we're looking at? Is that the Heathrow one? Oh, yeah. And the guy. It's like there's four, three women. There's three women trying to wrestle one dude. And the dude ain't going anywhere, but neither was I when I would wrestle with my sister. Then a dude comes in and just sort of slams him down to the ground again. Not trying to discriminate, but it's part of the job. Yeah.

[Cornelius Wills]

So

[Adam Carolla]

this then also, where are you at with. There's a lot of talk about ice and they shot Renee Goode, I think her name is in the car. And was he in front of the car? Could he have gotten out of there? A lot of dumb politicians who, like, shoot the tires out. They're the same ones who think you can, like, shoot the gun out of the gangbanger's hand. Why'd you have to hit him in the chest? Like, weird stuff. They watched him with too many cartoons or something.

[Tim Pierce]

They've never shot or they've never shot under stress.

[Adam Carolla]

Right, right.

[Tim Pierce]

I mean, even few cops get to shoot under stress in practice.

[Adam Carolla]

Right, Right.

[Tim Pierce]

So it's a whole different ball game. They don't understand.

[Adam Carolla]

No, I know. And shooting at the tires seems a lot more dangerous than shooting at the driver. But what is when you watch a film like that? Now, look, my feeling is like, I don't think I would have shot the person. On the other hand, you're getting a huge adrenaline dump and there's a car coming and whatever it's on.

[Tim Pierce]

I mean, there's responsibility on both sides, right?

[Cornelius Wills]

Yeah.

[Tim Pierce]

And that permission to. When I came on, there was a kind of a no go zone around a cop.

[Adam Carolla]

Yes.

[Tim Pierce]

And a cop could put hands on you and get you out of that area. That's all gone. Right. The no go zone is right here.

[Adam Carolla]

They're face to face, spitting, screaming at them and spitting on them. I don't know how they even maintain their ability not to punch the person in the face because they're literally getting in their grill and. Yeah. And by the way, that no go zone needs to be like a no fly zone at the airport. Like, sorry, you can't violate that space for your own good, by the way. You're gonna get shot. Someone's gonna get shot. But yes, the cop needs space around. Around them, and you cannot violate that personal space.

[Tim Pierce]

That's not enforced.

[Adam Carolla]

No, I know.

[Tim Pierce]

The cop will always lose that. That battle.

[Adam Carolla]

Right.

[Tim Pierce]

The administration can't. They can't defend him.

[Adam Carolla]

Right.

[Tim Pierce]

So it's a. It's going somewhere. Somewhere bad.

[Adam Carolla]

Yes.

[Tim Pierce]

You know, so, yeah, that was a really frustrating. Really frustrating to watch that on both sides. And, you know, we're. We are discouraged from shooting at moving vehicles and is. It's hard enough to shoot, you know, a stationary target. But that guy had been through, you know, some incidents before that where he was hurt.

[Adam Carolla]

Oh, right, right.

[Tim Pierce]

Remember he had been hit by a car earlier?

[Adam Carolla]

Yeah, I am. I sound like a broken record. But what I'm saying is, is don't look at a cop as a cop. Look at him as a guy with a gun.

[Mike Sunan]

Yeah.

[Adam Carolla]

And that guy's agitated. And if a guy had a gun, I wouldn't get in his face and start screaming insults about his wife. I would just tend to put my hands. I had a cop run up on me one time out of a bizarre context. And I was just walking my dog down the street in my neighborhood, like 10 years ago at night. It was like 8 o' clock at night. There wasn't anyone else around. That's a super quiet, nice neighborhood, safe neighborhood. Just walking my dog and cop car comes roaring up, it's coming up hot. Parks on my side of the street that I'm walking on. So he's parking, facing the wrong direction. He's in a hurry. Stops about 50, 60ft in front of me, jumps out of the car. Just one dude, no partner. Got a shotgun. Racks it while he's running at me, which I was like, wow, this seems bad. And all I did, he didn't say anything. He just was running at me, racked that shotgun. He was holding the shotgun and it was pointing my direction. All I did was stick my hands as far away from my body as I could get. I didn't go up. It was too much movement to go up. I went full crucifix. I just took my hand. I didn't drop the leash. I didn't do anything. I just put my hands as far away as I could possibly get from my pocket or my belt or anything. And I just stood there frozen, like I was on the cross. And this guy runs past me, and as he runs past me, he yells, get out of here. And something was going on in the house behind me, a possible burglary, and he was rolling on it. I just happened to be standing in between the house and the burglar. And the burglar. But my impulse was zero movement. I'd like to get my hands as far away from anything that could resemble a place to put a gun or a knife or anything. And I just froze.

[Mike Sunan]

Yeah.

[Adam Carolla]

And if people would do a little more of that, there'd be a little less people getting shot.

[Tim Pierce]

I don't know why that's not taught from the beginning. Right. As a public service announcement or whatever, it should be something consistent. Every single use of force I've ever been in at the end of it. When they're cuffed, I'm dusting them off or whatever. I'd say, man, all you had to do is put your hands up and say, what do you need, officer? And follow my instructions, and none of this would have happened.

[Adam Carolla]

I know.

[Tim Pierce]

And so it's just nuts. And then people will. I can't tell you how many times they don't know what the radio call is. Like you didn't know what the radio call was there it was a man trying to kill his wife in the house. Whatever. You had no clue. You're just walking by.

[Adam Carolla]

Yeah.

[Tim Pierce]

The cop has all those comments on his computer, and he's getting radio traffic as he's getting there. And he's getting wound up and ready to go to a life and death situation for him. And so he's pumped. That was the best thing you can do. It's the hands that kill you. That's how we look at people.

[Mike Sunan]

Right.

[Tim Pierce]

If they're hiding their hands going in their pockets, we don't know. So we want to see hands.

[Adam Carolla]

Yeah. And he was running with a shotgun pointed. He wasn't intentionally pointing it at me. He was just holding it away where I was between him and the target. And I didn't want to dive or shoulder roll. I didn't want to move. I'm like, I don't think this guy's here to shoot me. So I'm not going to react by flinching or turning or doing anything. I was just, I'm going to get my hands. I know it's supposed to be hands up. I just went hands out because I felt like it was faster.

[Tim Pierce]

That's all that you need. Right. I mean, I've had radio calls in Watts.

[Mike Sunan]

Right.

[Tim Pierce]

Male, black, white T shirt, black pants, about 20, 25 years old, on the corner of 106 in Wilmington. Possibly armed with a gun. Whatever the comments, the call, I come up and I see five, six guys that meet that. Right. And maybe one guy's two blocks from that because it took five minutes for that call for me to get there.

[Adam Carolla]

Right.

[Tim Pierce]

And I've got to use what all the information I got and make my best pick. And sometimes it's the wrong guy. But I have to come out with a gun because the comments of the call is that he's armed.

[Adam Carolla]

Right?

[Tim Pierce]

Right. So that's all I need is him to show me his hands and follow my instructions. I can pat him down, find out that it's not him. Yes, but they are indifferent to it because they don't know the Circumstances that I know. So they think they're just being targeted.

[Adam Carolla]

Yeah, it's confounding to me because. And you're right, the conversation needs to be had with all citizens, which is comply 100% in the moment. The moment will pass very quickly. You will get out of there with your life and nothing will probably happen to you if in fact you're not shooting a gun around. So just comply. The Internet's kind of crazy, but there'll be people in the car and more and more women, which is weird. And the cops like, get out of the car. I'm not going anywhere. Get out of the car. Come out. If you don't get out of the car, I will bust this window with my baton. I will drag you out of this car. And they go, I'm not going anywhere. And they're like, all right, I'm going to ask you one more time. And they go, I'm not getting out. And then they bust the window. And as soon as they bust the window, the person starts screaming, what's going on? And it's like you're told 31 times now there's a problem. And it's weird. I'm finding more and more women are getting into this position which it didn't seem to exist in the past. But the word by the politicians or the so called leaders needs to get out. Whether it's the leader in the black community or it's the people that are rallying, the anti ice people, which are not the black community that is the lily white community. Could you get the word out to do a little more compliance so your folks don't get killed, which you seem to say you care about, except for you never give them the message to that would save them.

[Tim Pierce]

Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's very, very frustrating as an officer. Extremely frustrating. I don't know why they don't do the public service announcement like that or it should be taught in school or something like that. Because it's just a volatile situation. Nobody wants, but it's real, it happens. And it usually happens in a flash. And a cop doesn't have to be right. He just has to be reasonable.

[Adam Carolla]

Right.

[Tim Pierce]

You know, and so we're coming up with the best information we have and we have to make the best call. It's not always perfect and it's not always pretty, but we need compliance to figure it out faster that that's not the right person so we can get to the right person.

[Adam Carolla]

Yeah. Let me ask you about my shotgun idea. I may have asked you before,

[Cornelius Wills]

but

[Adam Carolla]

home, I probably forgot. Home protection. Okay. I'm not a gun guy, but I figure a shotgun is pretty good for home protection because you don't have to be quite the marksman, I guess, and you get that rack sound. Sounds good. Now the problem, I think, that a lot of people think about when they think about arms for home protection is the problem is they go, well, you should put the gun in a safe, and then you should put the ammunition in a separate lockbox. And how the fuck does that help you at three in the morning when you hear the glass break in the kitchen? You know, you got to be able to get to your shit right? Now, I had this idea years ago, which is. And also another home protection problem is you don't really want to shoot the neighbor's kid who was drunk and actually, keys weren't working. So we start crawling in your window, thinking it was his house, and you snuff out the neighbor kids. You don't want to do that. A shotgun can hold them, you know, eight rounds. Let's say, what if you take the first round and you make it a blank, you get the chick, chick and the boom. And if that ain't enough, you can get to the next one in three tenths of a second. You can get to the next round fast with a shotgun. What do you think?

[Tim Pierce]

Not faster than he can shoot you.

[Adam Carolla]

So you don't like. You don't like my. My blank sound?

[Tim Pierce]

No, when I'm.

[Adam Carolla]

I'm not talking about you on the street. I'm talking about sort of home, home protection.

[Tim Pierce]

So what I tell people a lot of times, shotgun's a great, great option, right? For penetration of walls and such. But I think one of the most important things to have on your gun is a weapon light.

[Adam Carolla]

A light.

[Tim Pierce]

You need to be able to light that person up and make sure you're not shooting the neighbor, too. You need to understand what you're dealing with, because when it happens, look, after Christina was shot, we were very public about it, trying to find help for her. And everybody on earth knew exactly where I lived. All the gangsters and Watts knew where I lived. I had guns all over the. I'm not even a gun guy. I could care less about guns. As long as it shoots, it works, I'm happy. But I was so paranoid because I had guns all over the place.

[Cornelius Wills]

But

[Tim Pierce]

having that weapon light on there just helps you to identify what's going to happen is it's going to happen in seconds. You're going to hear something, and then you got seconds till that person walks down the hallway and meets you at your master bedroom door. Right. You need to be able to identify that guy.

[Adam Carolla]

Is the weapon light. It's turned on separately.

[Cornelius Wills]

Right.

[Tim Pierce]

You can, there's triggers that, where you're. When you're gripping the grip, you can squeeze the grip a little bit harder and automatically turn it on. So your trigger finger is free. You know, surefire. That's what we all use. And you know, a lot of people use. And then they also have a thumb trigger. If you don't have that little extra trigger, you can use your thumb and trigger it that way.

[Adam Carolla]

So light, whether it be a pistol or shotgun or rifle. And then what would be the preferred weapon for a homeowner to protect themselves and their family?

[Tim Pierce]

I have a shotgun, pistol grip shotgun and an Mi45, both with lights on them. So I have them in two different places, either one of those. But you know, my.45, I'm sure of my shot down a hallway, not through a wall where my kids are sleeping or that kind of thing.

[Adam Carolla]

And a place you can get them means not in a safe in the garage mine.

[Tim Pierce]

Not in a safe?

[Adam Carolla]

No. Well, I mean, you got it. It's kind of a weird conceit. It sort of reminds me of like, sounds stupid, but again, if you're going to have a gun for protection in your home and you put it in a safe and it's going to take you 15 minutes to access it, then why have a. That's not going to protect your home? It reminds me of if you ever look at a Q tip swab box, it'll say do not insert in your ear. And it's like, that's all this is for now. You have some sort of liability that says don't do it. But that's what I'm doing. And if I'm gonna have a shotgun to protect my home, I'm gonna have it somewhere where I can get to it. Now, it's not gonna be laying on top of the TV set, but it needs to be sort of stashed hooked under a table, kind of that kind of fair.

[Tim Pierce]

Yeah. I taught my kids very young and consistently not to touch them. I've taken them shooting all that kind of stuff. They fully understand it. And so that was never a problem. But when you're talking about having your gun in a safe and ammo somewhere, that is the ideal situation. That, oh, I hear a noise. Oh, I'm going to go get everything. I'm going to get all assembled and then I'm going to get the drop on this guy. Right. When does that happen? When does it ever go perfect?

[Adam Carolla]

No, it can't. It can't. Now they have those kind of pistol safe things where you can scan your hand or something, it'll pop open. I mean, technology has moved out forward a little bit. What do you think of those kind of things?

[Tim Pierce]

I've tried them all and I always revert back to my weapon in the exact same spot where I can grab it right away. I've, I. My mentality is I'm going to have seconds to confront this guy before he comes back.

[Cornelius Wills]

Right.

[Tim Pierce]

I look at it like they're coming in my house to harm me.

[Cornelius Wills]

Right.

[Tim Pierce]

Or my family and, and not just sneak around and steal, steal. Something like that's just not going to happen, right?

[Adam Carolla]

Yeah. I mean, it's possible that it happens, but the mentality is, I'm talking about, well, look, once the person crosses the threshold into your home, then all bets are off. And they have brought that about themselves. And I always tell people all the time, when people get shot doing dumb shit, I go, sometimes they'll go, okay, look, you're going to jump over the fence, get in your neighbor's yard and steal his barbecue. That's probably going to work 9 out of 10 times, but 1 out of 10 times you may get shot, and that's on you because you put yourself in that position. And once you put yourself in that position, we have no idea what can happen after that. So I think we have some other members here to bring in. We got Mike, who's the one who.

[Tim Pierce]

Mike? Yeah, Mike Sunan. He's a venture capitalist, lives in Hermosa beach. And he's the one who came up this video.

[Adam Carolla]

It's his baby. Yeah, the whole thing. And Cornelius Willis.

[Tim Pierce]

Yep.

[Adam Carolla]

Who's ex gang banger.

[Tim Pierce]

Yeah, he's a. He was a leader in the bounty hunter Bloods, which is out of Nickerson Gardens, which is the biggest housing development west of the Mississippi. It's in, you know, lower, lower corner of Watts. And that gang's been around 60 plus years. He was, you know, big dope dealer at the time for many years. And, you know, he started doing gang intervention and kind of.

[Adam Carolla]

Did you interact with him at all when you were a cop?

[Tim Pierce]

My partner, my old. One of my gang unit partners was responsible for Nickerson Gardens. Johnny Coughlin, Manny Moreno, that was. And I was responsible for Jordan Downs. And so I would go down there and assist them. I didn't know Cornelius personally. They know they have, you know, they've arrested him many times and. But he started doing gang intervention and then he got introduced to this movie project and took a phone and we actually, you know, that started. There was no trust on the table at all. And when this thing started and I've actually become friends with the guy, he's part of the solution now. And it's interesting. He's shown up over and over and over again and it's really quite weird, right? I mean, when we were shooting some of this documentary, I was down there and I had to get in his car and drive into the hood off duty. I'm retired. I got a little pistol on me. I don't know him that well, but I was helping with the film and we needed to get some shots in one of the parking lots. And I get in as Monte Carlo and we're driving into the hood and I'm like, I'm telling my that my self talk was like, what the are you doing, Tim? This is. Remember Training Day?

[Adam Carolla]

Yeah.

[Tim Pierce]

Ethan Hawke, when he gets thrown in the bathtub, he gets tricked by the gangsters.

[Adam Carolla]

Yeah.

[Tim Pierce]

That was going through. That was a script going through my head. I'm like, are you. You know, and none of my former partners knew I was there that day. But when I would go in that parking lot, as an officer, you could cut the tension with a knife. When I went in there with him, nobody even looked at me. Right. Because he's got juice in the neighborhood.

[Adam Carolla]

All right, we're gonna take a break, bring those guys in and we'll get their story right up the. O o o o'reilly Auto Parts. Yeah, o'reilly Auto Parts. They offer helpful service and the parts knowledge you need for all your maintenance and repairs. So when I'm stuck with a car problem, I always check with O'Reilly. They've got thousands of parts and accessories in stock, either in store or online. They'll test your battery for free, and if it needs to be replaced, they'll help you find the right one that fits. So whether you're a car aficionado or an auto novice, well, you'll find the professional parts people, O'Reilly Auto Parts are knowledgeable, helpful, and best of all, friendly. I'm always going there and I'm always fixing what I need to fix. And I got a big race coming up in about three weeks. You know, I'm spending a lot of time at O'Reilly. They're your one stop shop for all things auto. Do it yourself and you find what you need in store. Or online at O'Reilly. Right. Dawson. Stop by O'Reilly Auto Parts today or visit us@O'ReillyAuto.com Adam that's O'ReillyAuto.com Adam.

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[Adam Carolla]

Fantastic.

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[Tim Pierce]

Welcome to the real world.

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[Adam Carolla]

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And so much more. For Showtime's press. Nothing. They're free 24. 7.

[Tim Pierce]

That is so effective on Pluto TV.

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[Adam Carolla]

All right, so now we have the rest of the crew. Mike Sonan. Hope I'm saying that right.

[Mike Sunan]

It's close enough.

[Adam Carolla]

Cornelius Willis, both in here, both part of the project as well. We described Mike's role early on and that he live in a nice part of la, a very nice part. And couldn't believe what you were seeing going on just eight miles in the rear view from where you were living. And you did something about it.

[Mike Sunan]

Yeah, it was crazy. You know, we didn't start out trying to do something. We just started out trying to learn. But we do this ride along with the police. We see three people get shot, one guy dies. None of it's on the news. More profound for me was I was talking to a gang member. I said, you know, what made you join the gang? And he says, my mom put me in the gang when I was 8 because they offered daycare and protection while she goes to work.

[Cornelius Wills]

Wow.

[Mike Sunan]

And I was like, wow. Like, I am well read. I have access to resources. I've never heard this before. And I was just curious what else I didn't know. So I went out and I buy these 20 iPhones. And we had to ask 200 people. And I was just like, film your life. I mean, we had no ability to follow them around.

[Adam Carolla]

Right.

[Mike Sunan]

And I said, just film your life. And everyone's like, that was nice. Sounds interesting. It's never going to happen. They turn in 200 hours of the craziest footage you've ever seen.

[Adam Carolla]

Yeah, it's real compelling.

[Mike Sunan]

So I'm able. It takes about six more months and we get everybody in the same room. And I said, look, if you will be the film's directors, meaning you will make all the editing decisions, I will build you the infrastructure to make the film. And I thought 0% chance that they will ever come to an agreement. I had one rule. Everybody had to agree on the final cut. And I'm like, there is no chance this will happen. These people hated each other. You have a mother whose son was shot by one of the gangs. You have a kid shot seven times by the other gang in the room.

[Adam Carolla]

Right?

[Mike Sunan]

Okay. Like, no chance. You have Tim's wife paralyzed. Coming to the meetings. And as they reviewed the footage over the next year, a sense of empathy began to develop. No forgiveness. Nobody was forgiving anybody. But there was a sense of empathy that they understood how everybody came to be where they were in the ecosystem. And ultimately, after about a year and a half of work, they came to an agreement on what they thought the film should be. And then I thought, oh, wow, we're super screwed, right? I am not from the. I've never made a movie, didn't set out to make a movie, and I have no one to show this film to.

[Adam Carolla]

What's your background?

[Mike Sunan]

I was a venture capitalist who just, you know, you're always curious in that business. You're always trying to figure out what you don't know and how do you learn more. And you're always trying to figure out how to get to the truth as fast as you can.

[Adam Carolla]

Right, Right.

[Mike Sunan]

And I'm like, just hear the story from these guys. And what made it so crazy is we have no one to show the film to. And Cornelius, Tim and Tyrone, another one of the gang members said, what if we go show this to the gangs? And so, you know, we don't know anything about film premieres or anything, but our premiere, if you will, was in a gang neutral warehouse in Watts where these guys gathered up leadership of Watts, four largest gangs. A group that had not met in more than 30 years and had spent 200 years incarcerated between them.

[Cornelius Wills]

Wow.

[Mike Sunan]

They would not agree to a security pat down. There's no check. Everybody gathered in this warehouse to screen Crazy. To screen the film. It took two and a half hours to get everybody into the room because nobody trusted anybody.

[Adam Carolla]

Right.

[Mike Sunan]

When you get to the end of the screening, they come to the conclusion that, hey, everyone's losing, right? Cops are losing, gangs are losing, but most importantly, the kids are losing. And everybody in there cared more about their kids than they did about what was going on. And they were all willing to change behavior to do it. So out of that, they asked us to screen in the individual gang houses. And to give you some context, along the way, the concept of a peace agreement began to emerge based on two things. No retaliation against women or no violence against women or children. In that case, the gangs would work with the police to turn in their own, which had never happened before. And two, no retaliation. Now look, I was like, I've heard a hundred of these piece things. So like, right, we end the film, right? Like we're like, okay, great. They'd had 100 homicides in the three years that they had filmed. Tim would say 95% of that was gang related.

[Tim Pierce]

Yeah, easy.

[Mike Sunan]

In the 12 months following the agreement, zero gang related homicides and a 90% drop overall.

[Adam Carolla]

Wow. Quite a social experiment. And it's interesting and sort of revolutionary. I imagine you'd want to franchise. I mean, there are other places that could use this experiment as well. Cornelius, how did you get involved with this story?

[Cornelius Wills]

I got involved through Coughlin. Like they already said Tim worked Jordan Downs, Coughlin work Nickerson. So I knew him from growing up, him taking me to jail all the time and doing his job or whatever. So he introduced me to Mike and Mike gave me a phone and said record, like real simple. Like I just didn't.

[Adam Carolla]

How long have you been out of the gang scene and on the side of, you know, discussion and recovery and all that stuff?

[Cornelius Wills]

So my last term I was in jail. 2016. So 2016, since 2016 I made that change and I've been in intervention for like five years now.

[Adam Carolla]

How does one make a living doing intervention stuff?

[Cornelius Wills]

It's funded.

[Adam Carolla]

Oh, it's funded.

[Cornelius Wills]

Yeah, it's definitely funded.

[Adam Carolla]

Okay. And has this proved to be the most positive form of intervention thus far? This film project?

[Cornelius Wills]

Definitely. Besides the 92 peace treaty, definitely this the most. It's better than that because everybody from the community, we got the law enforcement involved this time. So that's like, that's big.

[Adam Carolla]

What do you think is a bigger overarching problem solving? I mean, where do we nip this problem in the bud? Like how do we stop having young men join gangs in general?

[Cornelius Wills]

I think you gotta get em in like at the age like right in transition, you know, so young, like 12, 13, 14 or whatever. Just gotta show em something different. Like they've been showing the wrong thing for so long that gotta show em something different and give them hope, you know what I'm saying? And everything like that.

[Adam Carolla]

It's a weird question, but nobody in LA can like afford a house. But this neighborhood, I mean there's projects, but it's also a lot of single family homes, right? Generational stuff, just grandparents lived there in the 40s and 50s kind of kind of stuff and just passed it on because I don't know anyone who can even afford a house out here anymore. I mean, those would be cheaper, but not by national standards. Even so, there's a lot of people that own a home there. And a lot of those homes were bought again by the grandparents in the 40s or something like that. Does anyone have any concept of like, hey, let's just sell this house and move to some place that's not this. Is there any concept? Because I remember when I was poor and I had to get an apartment, I was like, I would rather have a roommate in a one bedroom in a decent, safe neighborhood than move to a crappy neighborhood that was dangerous than I could afford to live alone. So I just took the roommate and we moved to North Hollywood. And it was better than living in the bad neighborhood and being able to afford it. Does that come up that people think that way?

[Mike Sunan]

Tim, I'll let you get to one thing that I observed was it's the largest concentration of public housing west of the Mississippi.

[Adam Carolla]

Oh, really?

[Mike Sunan]

Okay.

[Adam Carolla]

I didn't know there was that much in la.

[Mike Sunan]

Watts has four largest housing projects concentrated. And then that's all subsidized, right? So you have a component where these gangs were. In a sense, families are protection over each housing project. You have the four largest housing projects, right? That's where the four gangs are.

[Adam Carolla]

Right.

[Mike Sunan]

And you're subsidized into that place. And so there's nothing to sell. Right. The element is there. The single family housing wishes the problem would go away and many do move away. But that is kind of ground zero for why what they're talking about.

[Adam Carolla]

It's weird because I'm from LA and you always hear about public housing in Chicago or New York. You don't really hear about the LA being that vast as it is, but I guess it is.

[Mike Sunan]

It's been that way for years.

[Adam Carolla]

Is there any thoughts about that? I mean, because it just seems like it always turns into a shit show, the public housing. Like, does anyone want to get in, think about reform, revamp, retool something. Cornelius, were you in public housing or just protecting it?

[Commercial Announcer]

Oh, no.

[Cornelius Wills]

I was born and raised in public housing since the 80s. So I feel like why you don't hear it so much? Cause they call it the projects. It's like different phrasing. It's more like projects. So public housing, they use that on the East Coast. Like we call them the project. So that's probably my.

[Adam Carolla]

Yeah, I don't know. It's a weird non la. I don't know, it doesn't feel California. The projects you know, it feels always south side of Chicago Y but what was it like for you in the 80s and 90s versus 2000s? Did it change? Did it get more violent? Did it get different?

[Cornelius Wills]

Yeah, it got definitely different structure. You know, generations change. It's all bad though. But we had a little more structure growing up. Like we listened to our OGs and we never got out of line and stuff like that. So that's kind of like how the peace treaty and stuff was able to work then. And then you come into the millennium, you got this social media, it just changed everything. Like, you know, that's what really control and keep the games going. Like keep the in my community for sure in our city, like social media is keeping, keep the tension going like that.

[Adam Carolla]

So I mean the mafia would have a bunch of rules and they would sort of enforce the rules and it was still the mafia and it was still organized crime, but it was sort of contained. It sort of contained itself, you know, it policed itself sort of. And gangs used to be that way, but not so much anymore.

[Cornelius Wills]

Yeah, it used to be real struck, like, like part of the peace thing. Like women and children off limits no matter what. Like, you know.

[Adam Carolla]

Right.

[Cornelius Wills]

If you see a, if you see your op, your op, which, which is the, the gang that you in into it with, if you see him, if they're with his mom, kids or anything, you don't, you're not supposed to do nothing. You supposed to just catch them next time, you know. Right. So none of that's, none of that pays part.

[Adam Carolla]

Yeah, a very compelling part of the film is when they had the shoes of everybody out there that had been murdered in gang violence. And there were lots of like tiny toddler like bronzem sized shoes laid out of all the victims and that. I don't know. That's very sad. I don't know if you ever see a kid's coffin. It's really sad. It's like a really sad tableau. So. And then those rules just fell by the wayside at some point.

[Cornelius Wills]

Yeah.

[Adam Carolla]

And now this. Have you gotten the police department interested in this concept? Okay, I'll forget about the police department. You got Karen Bass, the mayor, the LA City council, or anybody who could be a part of this that was on the more sort of managerial side.

[Tim Pierce]

Well, first of all, we did this whole thing without permission.

[Adam Carolla]

Right.

[Tim Pierce]

Because it would never have been, it would never have said yes.

[Adam Carolla]

Right.

[Tim Pierce]

We had some flim flammy kind of verbal permission, but nobody could pin it down and we went with it anyways. And surprisingly, a lot of the officers were sliding me, you know, footage and things like that. They wanted this, the truth to come out. And that's one thing I love about this movie is how do you know about Watts? From the news or media or movies. Right.

[Adam Carolla]

I went to Watts Towers for a field trip when I was like, in the ninth. No, when I was like nine, we went to Watts Towers. I remember being a little disappointed, no offense, but I was like, I thought it was going to be bigger than this. But yeah, that's the only. As far as I can tell. Growing up in la, I knew there was a place called Watts Towers and that was about it.

[Tim Pierce]

And with this movie, you're getting it straight out of the horse's mouth. It's like I always say, it's a conduit of truth coming right down the middle and nobody can control that. And that's the beautiful thing about it. And the officers saw that opportunity. So a lot of people wanted to, wanted this to happen. There were plenty that didn't. But in the end, we knew we were doing something right and we didn't know where it was going to go. And it's not a permissible thing. So ultimately, once it was done and the gangsters came together and the peace was forming, then the department got involved and finally blessed it at the very end.

[Adam Carolla]

Right.

[Tim Pierce]

It's a win win situation.

[Mike Sunan]

One of my favorite stories I went with that was at the very, very end. You know, LAPD lawyers, you can imagine, they're just pissed. They're losing their minds, right?

[Adam Carolla]

Sure.

[Mike Sunan]

But nobody had been killed for six months.

[Adam Carolla]

Right.

[Mike Sunan]

And the gangs are chatting with LAPD and they say, look, we've been at peace for six months, but if you don't let our film come out, we're not sure we can guarantee we'll be able to stay at peace. And so the idea that the gangs were articulating to have their own crimes put in the film as an act of responsibility was something we never could have imagined. Never could have imagined.

[Adam Carolla]

So, you know, they got the Real Housewives of Manhattan and the Real Housewives of Beverly Hills, the Real Housewives in Minneapolis. You know, if this seems effective. And also, listen, as a guy, I make documentaries. You know, it's nice to get paid, too. I mean, it's nice to do a little commerce, to do some work, sell some tickets, get some people involved. And you're an entrepreneur. Are you thinking about, well, this might franchise. We should try this out, The Chicago version of this. I mean, this is the nothing to see here. Watts. But we're putting the word watts in there. So shouldn't there be a nothing to see here.

[Mike Sunan]

Chicago, we've had the incredible fortune of touring most of the country. We just got back from Detroit. We did the King center in Atlanta. We were at Harvard where they're documenting it. We would love to see other communities steal the concept and build on it. And Harvard's actually writing up a case study to. Of the playbook so other communities can do it. To be clear, the filmmakers own the film. Okay. And any money that would ever come in, although there's not any money today, but if there was ever any money, it goes to them and it goes into the community. Right. And we would love.

[Adam Carolla]

And the filmmakers are the people you gave the cameras to, Tim.

[Cornelius Wills]

The.

[Mike Sunan]

You know, and we basically set up a foundation so half would go to them and half goes back to the foundation that they decide how the money is spent in the community. And so, you know, if each city can both a self heal.

[Adam Carolla]

Right, right.

[Mike Sunan]

In a sense. And that has some economic benefit that they can then re pour into their community to keep the changes happening. God bless. That's the dream.

[Adam Carolla]

Well, I mean, it's really interesting. It's innovative and it does. It does give you some hope. And it also makes you realize that, you know, the mayor and the city council and all those people I trust these kind of good ideas and innovative ideas are never going to come out of their office. But it's great when entrepreneurs and citizens just have a good idea and execute it. And that's kind of. I think that's the path forward. Yes.

[Tim Pierce]

You know, it's crazy. The first big one we showed was at the Peacock theater in downtown La La Life. We packed it with 4,000 people. 250 cops. 10 gangs were represented there. A ton of the Watts community, a ton of community from around LA. And we had a choir of 40 kids from all four projects singing together at the end. And at the end, you know how when you pour out of that theater and it's that big quad out there, everybody was co mingling. Everybody had the same comment that they were talking to people they never would have talked to before. And it was such a feeling of community coming out of there. It was actually shocking, right, Wasn't it?

[Cornelius Wills]

Yeah, definitely. For me, it was amazing to everybody.

[Tim Pierce]

So Mike has A few other places can be shown, but it's impressive once you get to see it. It's extreme.

[Adam Carolla]

Yeah. You've never seen a doc like this. All right, let me just Give it a plug. Nothing to see her wants. It's going to be July 25th, Los Angeles, Regal, LA Live, and then 24th through 30th July, Santa Monica, Laemmle. Great seeing you guys. Great Godspeed. I would say it's a great idea for doing the Lord's work. We will take ourselves a quick break. Be back with Rudy and the news right after this. Shopify, you've heard it all before. Now is the best time to start your business. But it doesn't make it any less daunting. I've been there and the difference between me and the guys I used to work construction with is the fact that I took risks and they paid off. So if you're ready to get started, Shopify is here to help. Because Shopify handles the setup and checkout, you have more time to focus on growing your business. Let them handle that stuff. Shopify powers millions of businesses worldwide with household names like Mattel, Gymshark and small businesses as well. Just getting started and everything in between. With Shopify, nothing stands between your idea and a real business. So go make it one. It's Shopify, right, Dawson? If you're ready to stop putting off your business and start hearing, then you're ready for Shopify. Start your free [e-mail] Corolla today. You heard that right. Start your free trial [e-mail] Corolla. That's shopify.com Corolla. Podcasting isn't just about talking. It's about growing, engaging and monetizing. And that's where Podcast one Pro comes in. Whether you're an independent creator or a major brand, Podcast one Pro gives you the tools you need to take your podcast to the next level. We're talking about premium hosting, advanced analytics, dynamic ad integration, and expert distribution. All designed to maximize your reach and revenue. Plus, with access to Podcast One's industry leading network, you'll be connected to top tier advertisers and a massive audience. It's time to go pro and turn your passion into profit. Visit podcastonepro.com to get started today. Podcast One Pro. The power behind the podcast. It's time to check Adam's voicemail. Hey Adam, some hot surf fishing talk. My great grandfather actually did lose his life surf fishing and it was due to the waiters filling up and him not being able to get out. There is no lore of him ever catching anything though, so I think you're spot on there. Get it on. You can leave us a message at 8886-341744. But he died doing what he loved, which is being away from his wife, because I'm convinced it is the Mexican version of golf. Golf is expensive. You have to have a country club membership. You have to have clubs, you have to rent a cart, tee times, caddies. That's expensive. Surf fishing is free. And you can spend an equal amount of time away from your wife. I'll bet if they ever broke it down, they'd go, the average golf outing is 7 hours and 26 minutes and 11 seconds away from your wife. I'm not talking about going out of town. I mean like a Sunday golf. Going golfing with your buds on a Sunday. The average surf fishing length, that's exactly 7 hours, 26 minutes, 31 seconds.

[Rudy Pavich]

You know what we need to do? Start a business where we just show up with all the accoutrement that you need. We got the waiters, we got the pole, we got the bucket, we got this little chair. And we'll take a picture of you at the surf. And then you can give it to your wife and say, look what I did all day today. We'll change out the clothes, we'll bring a couple different changes, couple different shirts, and then you can show your wife what you did all day. But then you don't have to go sit out there like a dum dummy, just sitting there staring at the ocean. You can go do other things that you want to do instead of just having. You can get away from your wife and have evidence that you got away from your wife.

[Adam Carolla]

But we have to provide them with fish. Cause just eventually you have to catch something.

[Rudy Pavich]

Well, there's gonna be different package levels, obviously. Yes,

[Adam Carolla]

we got the swordfish, we got the flounder, sea bass. We can do that kind of stuff.

[Rudy Pavich]

And of course, women don't know fish. We could show up with a bunch of perch or walleye.

[Adam Carolla]

Let's just show up with some fresh water.

[Rudy Pavich]

They don't know.

[Adam Carolla]

Yeah, yeah. No, whitey don't know. Mexican ladies. Yeah, they're anglers.

[Rudy Pavich]

I'll tell you this, ace, the next time you come to Minnesota, if you ever see a group of monks walking out on a sheet of ice about to go ice fishing. Follow them, dudes. Really, they're the best ice fishermen on the planet.

[Adam Carolla]

Yeah, white women. They're not anglers. They're. They're angling for an argument all the time. But that's their only. That's their only.

[Rudy Pavich]

There was a dude back in the day named Fish Fishburne. You would have loved this guy.

[Adam Carolla]

Wow.

[Rudy Pavich]

And he had a TV show like Extreme Fishing, where he'd go out and he would throw on, you know, those cool. They're like waiters, but they got, like, the inner tube.

[Adam Carolla]

Yes.

[Commercial Announcer]

Yeah.

[Adam Carolla]

And they float in that thing.

[Rudy Pavich]

Floating. That thing. He'd go out there and he'd have, like, six poles going all at the same time. And he was just. But I don't know what happened to

[Adam Carolla]

that dude, I'm gonna say. And by the way, if anyone wants to know about ice fishing, it's nicely chronicled in grumpy old men 2. Or maybe the first one.

[Rudy Pavich]

Yeah. The second one is summertime fishing. That's the springtime.

[Mike Sunan]

Yeah.

[Adam Carolla]

Now, I don't want to besmirch the good name of the grandpa who died. Perished in waders after the waders flooded. I'm gonna say beer had something to do with this incident as well. That's not a purely. By the way, if you don't have a tall boy in your hand, I don't even know what you're doing. Surf fishing for six hours in waders. All right, what do you got in the news department, Rudy?

[Rudy Pavich]

Well, an older man at a recent Cubs game took issue with a younger fan choosing to remain seated during the national anthem. In a video shared to X that has gone viral, it shows the older man yelling, get up. To a younger man who was looking up at him during the national anthem.

[Adam Carolla]

Nice.

[Rudy Pavich]

Hits him.

[Adam Carolla]

Good for you.

[Rudy Pavich]

And then he stands up.

[Adam Carolla]

The ladies from the View would be disgusted at this Cubs fan.

[Rudy Pavich]

There's really not much to the rest of this video after that. The two guys that are sitting in front of this younger guy, they turn around, they shake his hand, they say, thank you for standing up.

[Adam Carolla]

Ah, I love that. Yeah. Yeah.

[Rudy Pavich]

Which, after I watch this, you're so. You know, we're not allowed to hit children anymore or use any sort of, like, corporal punishment, but, boy, does it get stuff done.

[Adam Carolla]

Oh, man. Super effective.

[Rudy Pavich]

Yeah.

[Adam Carolla]

Yeah. Well, look, I've said it a million times. My daughter, when she was, I don't know, three, she spit in the face of the nanny. Her nanny spit in her face, then the nanny smacked her, and then she never spit in anyone's face ever again.

[Rudy Pavich]

Ever again.

[Adam Carolla]

Which is good, because she showed early promise as a face spitter. But then soon as she felt that fucking sting of that Guatemalan chick hand across her face, she got the message real good. And as her dad, I'm thankful that she received that message. Yeah, I have no problems, and I got no Problems with that? I don't like when people beat their kids with weapons. You know what I mean? Although I was thinking about this the other day. There's a Andrew, for some reason, I'm on a couple of threads and text threads, and I'm one with Bill Simmons and Jimmy and a few other guys. And they sent me. Bill sent us all. Eric Estrada fighting with Danny Bonaduce. Back in the day. An episode of Chips where they had the karate throwdown in the street with Bonaduce throwing spinning heel kicks and Ponch and, you know, Erik Estrada thrown down

[Rudy Pavich]

in his cowboy boots.

[Adam Carolla]

I'm trying to think. He probably was wearing his Chuck Norris stretch jeans, though. This is good. All right, so this is young Duch. He's fighting it out back.

[Rudy Pavich]

Toughs.

[Adam Carolla]

Tough guys

[Tim Pierce]

when you need them.

[Mike Sunan]

Terrific.

[Adam Carolla]

I believe on the rest. All of you, drop your weapons, Turn around.

[Tim Pierce]

Billy, put your hands on your head.

[Adam Carolla]

Going after Duch. Ah, yeah.

[Rudy Pavich]

With the sidekick.

[Adam Carolla]

That's not a lot of defensive skills. Yeah. Oh, Estrada does a spinning helicopter heel kick.

[Rudy Pavich]

That was like a street fighter. Look at this. Oh, got him around the throat.

[Adam Carolla]

Now D is choking you out. Oh, he's got the nunchucks that look

[Rudy Pavich]

like a double ended dildo. I thought.

[Adam Carolla]

But you know that fighting in a Labowski sweater. I know. I love the super high over the head swing.

[Rudy Pavich]

Yeah.

[Mike Sunan]

Move.

[Adam Carolla]

Ah, the flute.

[Rudy Pavich]

Oh, yeah.

[Adam Carolla]

Ah.

[Commercial Announcer]

Ah.

[Adam Carolla]

The dudes with the flute.

[Rudy Pavich]

He's that skill with the nunchuck. Then he gets taken out by an old man's cane.

[Adam Carolla]

I. When you hold the pose.

[Rudy Pavich]

They got him right in the diaphragm.

[Adam Carolla]

Yeah. It's back when gang bangers were white dudes. And there were gang bangers back then. All right, but let me say this. Every biker now. It's what I was thinking about when they sent me this. Every biker movie I've ever seen, or gang movie or bar fight movie, at some point, guys had pool cues. Yeah. And they'd come out the pool cue, and it's like, I don't think a pool cue could harm anybody. I don't know why that was considered a super effective weapon of the 70s. And be like, oh, this guy's got a piece of balsa wood that's 41 inches long. That, by the way, screws together in the middle. So just busted half and somebody hit it on you.

[Tim Pierce]

Yeah.

[Adam Carolla]

I feel like I could take a. I could give you a pool cue and go, gimme your best shot. You can get me in the thigh, bust it over my shoulder. My head. It's gonna leave a mark, but it's not gonna stop me from fucking getting my hands on you.

[Rudy Pavich]

Yeah, it's like when mom breaks the wooden spoon across your ass and realizes, oh, I got nothing anymore.

[Adam Carolla]

If you're like, I'm fighting this guy, and he has a choice between weapons. And one is a baseball bat, and the other is brass knuckles, and the other is a knife. If it ever lands on pool cue, you're like, oh, my God, that's so awesome. By the way, I think a pool cue, you burn more calories trying to figure out what to do with it. You'd be better off throwing on the ground. Put your fucking hands up. Yeah, like, if you knew how to use your hands. Like, if you ran across Roy Jones Jr. You should hope he's holding a pool cue. Cause he's got to try to figure that out versus just throw it on the ground and just pummel the shit out of you with his hands.

[Rudy Pavich]

If somebody's got a pool cue, that means that you are in earshot of a actual pool table. Grab a cue ball and wrap it in your T shirt. And then swing that thing around like you're going full.

[Adam Carolla]

You know, a guy with a sock with nickels in it, I'd be more scared of than a pool cue. But for some reason, you could slap it on your hand.

[Rudy Pavich]

Yeah.

[Adam Carolla]

And go, all right. And you fought with that cane was less than a pool cue. Like, you could not do any damage to somebody with that. But also, the great use of the Japanese pan flute in there. Would you just insert that when people start doing karate? Karate, that's right.

[Rudy Pavich]

Yeah. The thing about guys my age in our 40s now is that when we were kids, we came up with the Ninja Turtles. And anytime we got around a pool cue, we went full Donatello on that ass. So we do have skills in the karate.

[Commercial Announcer]

Yeah.

[Adam Carolla]

Pool cue jabbed in the eye or anus is a thing, but I want

[Rudy Pavich]

to see that fight.

[Adam Carolla]

Busted. Just whack with a pool cue. This is gonna bust.

[Rudy Pavich]

Yeah.

[Adam Carolla]

It's not gonna cause any damage. Nah, man. And somebody figured it out. Cause we got away from pool cues. Oh. You know, should have asked Cornelius if, you know, out in the street, if he's ever run into a pool kill. I think it's more guys with guns and shit.

[Rudy Pavich]

Yeah.

[Adam Carolla]

Yeah.

[Rudy Pavich]

Absol.

[Adam Carolla]

All right.

[Rudy Pavich]

Yep. Well, a heroic family dog chased away a wild bear who charged at a young boy outside their Connecticut home. And then the pooch was awarded with a. With, like, a bravery medal. Did you see this video at all.

[Adam Carolla]

I see videos of dogs doing heroic things, but I just assume it's AI all the time. But this is real?

[Rudy Pavich]

Yep. So the husky. Yeah, the husky comes running in and clips the bear right in the ass. Bites him in the back.

[Adam Carolla]

Wow.

[Rudy Pavich]

Bear runs under. And the original video that you see, most people didn't. They didn't show this right away, but you just see the bear kind of running past the driveway. But when they showed this angle, it really. That bear was coming straight at that kid. Luckily, that dog was there.

[Adam Carolla]

Yeah.

[Rudy Pavich]

Cause weren't you just talking to somebody the other day about the difference between brown bears and black bears, where there's more attacks by brown bears? But. But if a black bear gets a hold of you, it's more than likely going to kill you, correct?

[Adam Carolla]

Yes. Yeah, I think it's that way. And I don't know if it's sheer numbers, you know, it's like the more blue sharks attack, but if a great white shark gets hold of you. But I don't know if that's just because there's ten times more blue sharks or how that works. But man, dogs are the best.

[Rudy Pavich]

Yeah.

[Adam Carolla]

And I love watching videos of dogs doing. You know, we call it selfless and heroic, but it's really just stupid shit. Like they're all ID and instinct. They don't really. It's not like we decide to do stuff and then it's heroic. Cause you decided to put yourself in harm's way. They're just reacting. But I love that.

[Rudy Pavich]

Well, I had an English bulldog. His name was Paul. He died a year ago. And that dog we got him because I was like, I was working from home after Covid and thought, I want a dog that's chill, that's nice, that's easy. That can still be a little bit rambunctious. And then it turned out he was just the laziest sack of shit. Never fetched a ball, never sat, never shook paws, never did anything cool. Just sat around and did nothing. So I imagine if a bear came piling in. Because your last two dogs have always been kind of. They were kind of, you know, like, protective a little bit, right?

[Adam Carolla]

No, no, no. But they had, they. They could. They could develop a motor. They didn't have any protection instincts. I never really put it to the test, but they, you know, Phil want to spend a lot of time in the pool if he could. He didn't bark, so he didn't have the protection instinct in that. He really literally didn't know I shouldn't say, didn't know how to bark. The only time you could ever get Phil wound up and show his teeth and growl and bark is if I shadow boxed in front of him. You could knock on the door, he'd just lay there. He wouldn't move. You could do whatever you wanted with Phil. I would walk him all over the neighborhood, and he'd see other dogs, and all he wanted to do was play with the dog. And it didn't matter how much the dog was growling or showing its teeth or how big or how angry it was that we had Great Danes that were behind this big fence. And they'd go. And Phil just. He just played with them the whole time. Never barked. Never barked at anyone. Never barked at a human being. If he came in my office and I shadow boxed in front of him, he would get fired up and go at it with me.

[Rudy Pavich]

So what you're saying is if Bonaduce came at you with a pool cue, Phil was just gonna go ahead and let the old douche get you right in the melon, huh?

[Adam Carolla]

Well, it depends, because if I started throwing combinations, then Phil might get fired. Fired up. And that's how he worked. He was always gentle, even when he was showing his teeth and growling. And he was always having a good. He was having a fun time.

[Rudy Pavich]

Yeah. Did you ever see the TV show Landman with Billy Bob Thornton?

[Adam Carolla]

No. I was too bothered by his AT&T campaign where his hat was brand spanking new. The old boots, the old jeans, the old truck, and then this brand new velvet hat that looked like the wardrobe guy just hit with one of those sticky rollers and then sat on his hat.

[Rudy Pavich]

Brand new right out of the box.

[Adam Carolla]

Bothered me.

[Rudy Pavich]

Still. The stickers and the tag hanging off

[Adam Carolla]

of it like this mini pearl.

[Rudy Pavich]

Yeah, yeah, there it is.

[Adam Carolla]

The first thing you do when a dude. When you're trying to do dude on the road kind of thing is you muss up that hat because that's his buddy.

[Mike Sunan]

Yeah.

[Adam Carolla]

That thing's been with him for 11 years. It gets thrown on the dashboard when he walks into the honky tonk. You know, brand new jet black hat.

[Rudy Pavich]

Yeah. I like the guys that would take the. They would fold it up and put it in their back pocket and pull it out, and the brim would be. It wouldn't be folded and creased. It would be perfect every time.

[Adam Carolla]

How. I don't. I've never felt the necessity to shove a ball cap into my back pocket. I don't get that part.

[Rudy Pavich]

It's where you keep your Hanky.

[Adam Carolla]

Yeah, I think it's a thing. I also feel the same way about the sunglasses on top of the ball cap. But anyway. All right, Landman, sorry.

[Rudy Pavich]

The reason why I brought it up is there's a storyline with his wife who volunteers at a nursing home, and she starts to feed alcohol to the patients, which turns out to be illegal. Well, now they've actually passed a law in Minnesota called the Grandparents Happy Hour. Governor Walz signed the Grandparents Happy Hour bill into law, which enables assisted living and nursing homes to legally serve their residents alcohol.

[Adam Carolla]

I'm all about that.

[Rudy Pavich]

Absolutely.

[Adam Carolla]

Well, look, you lost your driver's license seven years ago, so you're not jumping behind the wheel of anything.

[Rudy Pavich]

It should have been 15 years ago,

[Adam Carolla]

but, you know, then, yeah, you went full Paul Pelosi and finally wrestled that thing away from you. Then you are eating slop. And as anyone knows, eating slop sucks when you're sober, but it's better when you're drunk. Like, when you're drunk, that shitty institutional food is good. And if you're sober, it's fucking weird tasting. But when you get fucked up, that's when you do your fucked up slop eating. And it's fine. You know, it's where the ghetto dogs and everything tastes good out front of the stadium or after the bar club or whatever. So you got to eat shit food that's better with a buzz. You're not going to drive an automobile. So be it. Okay, what else you got to watch super shitty daytime tv. Better with a buzz. And then you have to interact with grouchy, smelly people. All better with a buzz.

[Rudy Pavich]

Yeah.

[Adam Carolla]

Everything better with a buzz.

[Rudy Pavich]

Yep.

[Adam Carolla]

And half you guys are moving around in a wheelchair, which is better than a buzz.

[Rudy Pavich]

Yeah. Yeah. Which in California you can get a DUI if you are buzzed up in that wheelchair. But the thing about it, like, you're so close to death. Anyways, my grandmother, before the last time we ever hung out, we snuck boozing. It was the holidays.

[Adam Carolla]

Oh, really?

[Rudy Pavich]

And the nurses, like, turned a blind eye and just went, she's got. Got what? Three weeks left. Enjoy your holidays. And we bruised it up. Everybody was drinking wine. It was a great time. Yeah, and they also get mouthy. They're already mouthy. But on top of it, you add a little bit of booze. Like, there was a group of ladies that came in and sang at my grandmother's home and one of the gals next to us when they were doing the champagne toast, because I do believe it was New Year's Eve. But it was like a five o' clock thing that they had going on. And the lady's family had shown up and she had a couple of small glasses of champagne and then loudly said, these gals must be great in bed because they sound like shit.

[Adam Carolla]

In the annals of my mean grandmother, I like to talk about my mean grandmother. I remember very clearly where I was when I was like 19. I was at her house. We were staying in the living room. And she goes, you know, these senior homes, there's like eight women for every one guy because they all outlive their husbands. And so these senior homes end up being these cat houses is filled with senior women and one dude for every 10 women. And these guys get their pick of the litter and they end up having lots of sex, senior sex in these homes. So it's just eight women, 10 women, and the one dude. And I go, well, at least I got that to look forward to. And she goes, you think you're gonna be that one dude? Meaning, hey, grandson, you'll be dead. She's literally telling me, you're gonna be the number of the guys who died before you get there. That's going to be somebody else. Not. You couldn't have laughed.

[Rudy Pavich]

No.

[Adam Carolla]

Couldn't have laughed and just nodded along. I made a joke and she wanted to sit down, explain to me that statistically I was gonna be in the ground before I was gonna be humping my way through a convalescent hump.

[Rudy Pavich]

Yeah, you'll be a bunch of ashes sitting on your wife's mantle while she's getting plowed by Roger.

[Adam Carolla]

Right? That's right. All right, what else you got?

[Rudy Pavich]

So Michigan Democrats says that it is discrimination to not accept Medicaid. His wife runs a doctor's office that does not accept Medicaid.

[Adam Carolla]

What?

[Mike Sunan]

Yeah.

[Rudy Pavich]

Crazy. What? Abdul Syed, the far left Muslim candidate for Senate in Michigan, the Mamdani of the Midwest, is the typical DSA style candidate. And by that we mean that he is a hypocrite.

[Adam Carolla]

All right, we got a clip. Abdul El Said is increasingly facing accusations of champagne socialism. And his tax returns are adding fuel to that fire. The filing shows El Said's household income for 2025 was over $686,000. That's nearly 10 times Michigan's median household income. And one reason the Medicare for All candidate is raking in cash and backlash is that his wife, a psychiatrist, does not accept Medicare or any other insurance plan at her practice. All right, so here's what we know everyone is going to do. What's best for them every day, all day, every time. So with that in mind, we have to move forward with different systems that don't rely on everyone doing the right thing. No one does the right thing any of the time. I don't care how much you fucking preach. Also, it's weird by this time, like, how much can you listen to somebody talk about redistributing wealth and fairness and families going to bed hungry and all the other horseshit they never stop talking about and have net worths into the. The millions and tens and hundreds of millions of dollars and owning multiple homes. Like, how long can you get a speech about the dangers of smoking from someone who's smoking before you go? Well, look, either cigarettes aren't dangerous or I'm not gonna listen to you, or both. But whatever the fuck, I'm not gonna vote for the smoker who's lecturing me on smoking while smoking. That's where we're at. And I have no idea why people are waiting for a different outcome when it's impossible. It doesn't exist. Bernie Sanders is a millionaire. This guy's a millionaire. Nancy Pelosi's hundreds of millions of dollars. It's not gonna happen. Go do your own fucking thing. I don't know what the fantasy is. I'm gonna elect this guy, then he's gonna go to Elon's house and get money, and then he's gonna bring it back to me. It's never gonna work. It's not gonna happen.

[Rudy Pavich]

Yeah, imagine that old infomercial or I guess the PSA about the kid on drugs. And he goes, where'd you get this stuff? I learned it by watching you. The dad. There's a moment where the dad really sinks in and he's, I am the cause of this problem where I think nowadays, if you go, well, why'd you rip off the government? Well, I learned it by watching you. They go, no, you didn't. And, well, I don't know, maybe look at your taxes. You just obviously made $72,000 more than what, the 1% of Michigan's. I don't want to say this. The 1% of Michigan puts you in a tax bracket where you made $72,000 more than what most people, the richest part of Michigan. And you have the audacity to tell everybody that they are the ones being racist when your wife. You guys aren't raking in the dough.

[Adam Carolla]

No.

[Rudy Pavich]

You're selling houses that have your name on it, but you're not gonna be able to give any sort of where this house was, how much you sold it for any location. Nothing. They just constantly keep. They throw. It's angry.

[Adam Carolla]

Wow.

[Rudy Pavich]

I'm getting angry about it. Well, I'm kind of. I'm getting angry about.

[Adam Carolla]

He makes 10 times what the average Michigander makes.

[Tim Pierce]

Yeah.

[Adam Carolla]

And by the way, I make more than 10 times what the average Michigander makes, which is fine. I just don't preach to everybody about what they need to give and how much they need to give and who they need to give it to. I just pay my fucking taxes and get along.

[Rudy Pavich]

Yeah.

[Adam Carolla]

So that's the. It's the preachy part. It is weird and sad that we have to revisit a bunch of retarded ideas that have never worked. And essentially, as a society, and also through. Through politics, but also through finance. So, I mean, here's what I'm saying. You take. Okay, here's what we're not doing. You take the aeronautical aviation, the subject of aviation safety, speed, what have you, right? And so the way it works is they go, well, we're gonna build this World War II Allison or Marine Merlin or Rolls Royce V12 engine, and we're gonna put it in this Spitfire and blah, blah, blah, and we're gonna carburet it. And they go, okay, good. And then they carburete it. And then at some point, they realize in steep dives, the carburetor doesn't feed the cylinders well because of the div or whatever it is, and the float bowl, whatever. The Germans build a Daimler Benz V12. They in fuel injection. The fuel injection means they can dive at full throttle and it never gurgles or bubbles or stops, right? Okay. At some point, the English go, I think the Germans got fuel injection. And so they're going hauling ass. And we're gurgling, bubbling. We gotta retrofit our Spitfires with fuel injection like the Germans did. And then they do it. But then it's not like the engineers. Kids, 30 years later, go, let's try those carbs out again.

[Cornelius Wills]

Now.

[Commercial Announcer]

They move.

[Adam Carolla]

They just move forward. They just fucking move forward. And there was an airplane that was in England. It was a passenger airplane. I don't know, it was a Comet or one of the earlier jets. The windows were square shaped, not round. And you look at a airplane, you go, yeah, all the windows are round. How come none of them are square? Square's actually bigger. You get more viewing space. But the corners got fatigued. The airframe of the corner made a weak point with metal fatigue. And guess what? No more fucking square windows on airplanes. Ten of those planes crashed. We learned, we moved on. We learned a lesson from them. But we can't do it with defund the police or socialism or anything. We can't do it. We just got to go. Let's try communism a 57th time. No, let's go back to carburetor the fucking airplanes and put the square windows in. People die. It doesn't work. It doesn't work. But we learned, and now we have super efficient, safe airplanes, but we've got to go back and crash a bunch of fucking airplanes. And then we'll go back to this again. And then some fucking douche who was in college at the time and doesn't know shit and never studied aeronautics is gonna then suggest because of equity and something, and then we'll go back and crash the planes again. Then we'll rebuild and we'll go forward again. Could you imagine if we just treated this society like commercial aviation? I mean, they had prop planes, they had canvas stretched over wooden bodies. Now you're laying in beautiful reclining first class. You're going 600 miles an hour. You got wifi, you can't even feel it when you take off and land. Oh, we didn't have pressurized cabins back then. We just keep going. We just keep going and we weed out the bad ideas and the ideas that'll kill us and we keep weeding them and we keep advancing and with the engines get smoother and they get more efficient and they get more thrust and everything gets safer. And now you go, wow, this is great. A brand new airplane that rolls off the assembly line, you know, Boeing 779 Dreamliner, something is a miraculous marvel compares to aviation, commercial aviation in the 40s, in the 50s or whatever, okay, dangerous, rickety, what have you. But then you go look at a city and you go, what was LA when that airplane in 1950 was rolling off the thing that DC whatever in LA? LA was clean, LA was nice, LA was safe. Now LA is a garbage pail full of shit because you're horrible ideas that got implemented and you wouldn't fucking let them go. You just had a new fresh crop of engineers show up every year and go, I got an idea about some square windows. And it's like, that doesn't work. Oh yeah, you're racist. I'm putting my square windows in. Imagine we just treat society that way. We just keep evolving. Instead of a new graduating class, a retarded, young, idealistic, fucking retard idiots who want to embrace Socialism or communism of all things. The most tested and tried failed form of governing on the planet. They decide now we're dusting this shit off. Aviation is so pure. It's all engineering. And nobody would implement anything that failed in the past. If it was a part, that part got fixed. If it was the design, the design got fixed.

[Rudy Pavich]

Pragmatism.

[Adam Carolla]

Yes. We were left alone. There were just dudes. English airplane is a Havilland Comet introduced in 52. World's first commercial jet airliner. Yeah. Featuring square windows which concentrated in the cabin pressure and metal fatigue and fatal in flight breakup. So guess what? Go down to Dawson, go down to LAX and I will give you $10,000. You can find me a commercial airplane with square windows.

[Commercial Announcer]

All right?

[Adam Carolla]

But you can go to fucking Seattle and find some bitch who's into socialism. And you can go to San Francisco and you can go to LA and you can go to Chicago, you can go find socialism everywhere. But you can't go to the airport and find a plane with a square window because it failed. It didn't work. It was dangerous and people lost their lives.

[Rudy Pavich]

And every time they have these rallies for communism, for socialism, there's always somebody who shows up who's like, hey, listen, I'm from Cuba, I'm from places that have had this before. And it goes tits up. And they go, you don't know what you're talking about, old man. He's like, okay, well, I didn't float here 92 miles on a Michelin for nothing.

[Adam Carolla]

You know what I'm gonna do?

[Rudy Pavich]

Listen to me.

[Adam Carolla]

Yes. I'm gonna go down to the next rally that has the Queers for Palestine. And they're gonna compete some 23 year old bitch with titty paint on who's all angry. And I'm gonna go, you know what, bitch?

[Cornelius Wills]

Bitch.

[Adam Carolla]

I'm for pilots for square windows. What do you think about that, bitch? And she's gonna go, oh my God, I've been burned so fucking badly.

[Commercial Announcer]

Whew.

[Adam Carolla]

I get that reference you talking about the Comet 52. Metal fatigue. Shit, fellas, he's right. He's right. The old man's right.

[Rudy Pavich]

Yep.

[Adam Carolla]

For pilots for square windows.

[Rudy Pavich]

Let's get the dye out of our hairs. Let's actually go put on clothes that fit.

[Adam Carolla]

Yeah, and thank God a lot of us came in from neighboring states. But we can return safely on the commercial aircraft with the round windows.

[Rudy Pavich]

That is correct.

[Adam Carolla]

All right, this Saturday, Huntington Beach, Sea legs. Fun place at the beach. Cool, fun outdoor venue. Then Torrance. I think Rudy's Coming out to that.

[Rudy Pavich]

I will be there.

[Adam Carolla]

Yeah, early shows sold out. Not because Rudy's gonna be there, but second show, still some tickets available. Also then July 30, Freehold, New Jersey, going to Uncle Vinny's, and then New York City, doing some shows at Rodney's over there. 31st, go to Adamcore.com for all the live shows. What do you got, Rudy?

[Rudy Pavich]

Well, I'll be with you on all those east coast dates. And then this weekend, find me opening for Jonathan Kite at Zany's and Rosemont, just outside of Chicago, Illinois.

[Adam Carolla]

So till next time, Adam Crawfordon Pierce and Mike Sonan and Cornelius Wills. Well, I thought it was make sure that him. Yeah, Wills, Wills and Rudy saying mahalo. Leave us a voicemail at 8. At 8-634-1744. And be sure and get tickets to see adam [e-mail].

[Commercial Announcer]

Hello, and welcome to Pluto Foe. If you know the name of the movie you'd like to see, just stream it for free on Pluto tv, where all your blockbuster favorites are landing all summer long. Catch Anchorman the Legend of Ron Burgundy.

[Adam Carolla]

Fantastic.

[Commercial Announcer]

The Matrix Trilogy.

[Tim Pierce]

Welcome to the real world, mean girls.

[Commercial Announcer]

Shut up, Titanic.

[Adam Carolla]

I'm the king of the world.

[Commercial Announcer]

And so much more. For Showtimes, press nothing. They're free 24. 7.

[Tim Pierce]

That is so fast.

[Commercial Announcer]

On Pluto TV. Stream now, pay never. Hello and welcome to Plutofo. If you know the name of the movie you'd like to see, just stream it for free on Pluto tv, where all your blockbuster favorites are landing all summer long. Catch Anchorman the Legend of Ron Burgundy.

[Rudy Pavich]

Fantastic.

[Commercial Announcer]

The Matrix Trilogy.

[Tim Pierce]

Welcome to the real world, Mean Girls.

[Commercial Announcer]

Shut up, Titanic.

[Adam Carolla]

I'm the king of the world.

[Commercial Announcer]

And so much more. For showtime's press nothing. They're free 24. 7.

[Tim Pierce]

That is so effective.

[Commercial Announcer]

On Pluto TV. Stream now. Pay never.