Life advice, a cop story and a prison story.
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To quote this piece: Eric, “Life advice, a cop story and a prison story,” We Them Media, filmed 2026-03-26, https://wethem.xyz/watch/learn-from-your-mistakes-and-pay-it-forward-denver. Each transcript line links to its second.
Eleven minutes walking a Denver street with Eric, part five of a run with him, most of it stories told with the camera keeping up. He opens on what he wants out of a day: “I like living my life and not having to worry about shit”. His brother and both sisters were much older and are gone, and four nephews are out there somewhere. “I got 4 nephews. I’m pretty sure they’re all kicking it somewhere.”
The advice the video is named for comes early, in pieces. “when you’re going through life and something significant happens in it, at least try to learn from it so you don’t make the same mistake”, then “try to see it always from the other person’s point of view”, then the part the title takes. Paying it forward, he says, is “the simplest and easiest thing, really”, just “being decent towards somebody else and helping them out”. He is watching the clock: “But I also gotta go ’cause that cop will come back.”
Asked about the police in Denver he goes straight to the worst one he has. Two weeks after “I just got done getting my toes cut off, amputated”, he was sitting with friends by a park on Colfax when a motorcycle cop “kicked me in the goddamn foot”. Four officers put him on the concrete, and “I started yelling, stop resisting! Stop resisting!” The punchline is his: “I’m not talking to you, you dumb sons of bitches. I’m talking to the concrete.”
A woman walks up offering a cigarette and a puff of what she calls lemon weed, and Eric makes it a small economics lesson. “barter is always the best bet”, he says, because “not everybody can always afford to pay, but some people find a way to make do”.
The last third is the night he first went to prison, on a road out towards Tulsa with two cases of Budweiser in the back seat. “there’s no way I’m not getting arrested”, he remembers thinking, and then he ran anyway. “I was sitting there listening to 102.3 and breaking the law, breaking the law.” He meant to claim the car was stolen. Instead “they pitted my ass”, it rolled “like 4 or 5 times”, and a patrolman came down the bank with a .357 Magnum telling him not to move. What he kept is a number: “I made it 78 miles in 32 minutes.” Asked for last words for the world he keeps them plain, “try to find the goodness in it. And think about the people that are in it”, then goes back to where he started and adds a line he credits to Steve McQueen.
