Announcer: Coming up on "The Whitney Reynolds Show"... We know Serena and Venus Williams as two tennis icons, and two women that have broken down boundaries, but behind all of that, other than all of that, they're just people.

You know, really real kind people.

And so it was great to get to talk to them and get to know that side of them.

"The Whitney Reynolds Show" is made possible by... Yates Protect: a minority-owned business focused on protecting communities and providing solutions to safety problems for public and private institutions including air purification, metal detectors, thermal detection, and more.

Safety is a right, not a privilege.

And by, O'Connor Law Firm.

When it comes to your injuries, we take it seriously.

Carrie McCormick, a real estate broker with @Properties.

With more than 20 years of experience, she understands the importance of the customer relationship during your real estate journey.

Theraderm, committed to developing skin products designed to restore and promote natural beauty.

Sciton, because results matter.

Additional funding provided by Mid-West Moving & Storage, Galileo, The Gumdrop by Delos Therapy, Happy to Meat You, Kevin Kelly with Jameson Sotheby's International Realty, Fresh Dental, Ella's Bubbles, Tutu School Chicago, Hi-Five Sports Camp, and these funders: Today we are talking radical optimism, people who are believing the best is yet to come, even when they were in their hardest moments.

[upbeat music playing] Whitney: Tyrone Muhammad spent around two decades in prison, and in the course of those years, the bars that once held him back somehow freed his past life of crime and the dark walls helped him discover light.

Since being released, he has helped form a group that calls it how it is.

In fact, it includes the name "Ex Cons" in the title.

He has seen the life turnaround firsthand and understands it can be achieved yet also avoided.

Welcome to the show.

Thank you for having me.

Ex Cons Community and Social Change.

Yes, ma'am.

That is something, because those are some words you don't always hear together.

So tell me, you're an ex con.

Yes, ma'am.

Is that weird to lead with when you meet people?

No, it's not.

When I was in prison and I decided that I wanted to do something to change the culture of mass incarceration, and I was trying to figure out what name, and that's as a result of observing the various types of inmates coming and going.

I say, you know, we have to do something about this.

I grew tired, and having a 20-year sentence, that means I've watched thousands of men come and go.

It is incumbent upon us as men who have been through the system to save and prevent the next generation from coming through here.

"Returning citizen" don't have the punch or the necessary attraction to me, because the men I represent don't feel like citizens of even their own community.

But this radical optimism idea, that's radical in itself, saying that we're going to come out and we're going to create so much change.

But then you also always see the good in people, even the gang members.

Yes.

How do you do that?

Society produced these men that are now prisoners.

So society has a responsibility at actually getting at the issues that cause these men to enter prison in the first place.

There's very few guys in prison that I met that I wouldn't say that they was good guys.

See, there's good in every people, every structure, and every issue.

We just have to find the good in it and figure out how to translate that into other individuals that will hopefully destroy systems that create evil and bad action.

I like what you're saying there, but do you think these people that potentially have done something bad need to have some type of reckoning with themselves before they can really change?

No doubt, but that's the difference between correction and reformation, against warehousing bodies and transforming thoughts and processes versus, we're going to isolate a man like me for 22, 21 years in a 9x12 cell with no reformation, no true interaction with the society and information and wisdom and guidance, just house them and then release them back into the public worse off than when they went in.

Well, and it's interesting because you're saying, you know, "I was isolated, I was doing all this," but even in the midst of that, you wrote a book.

Yes, ma'am.

You wrote a book to help people on the outside understand what's going on on the inside.

It was dark, it was a dark space, a dark place, and I said, "No human being should have to go through this, the level of depression, anxiety and grief that you feel."

I say, "You know what?

I'm going to make 'em wish they never locked me up."

So instantly, I started going to school, getting involved, being active in other's lives, and transforming the young men's ideas and thoughts while I sat in prison, because I saw that the prison officials, administrators didn't really care.

And the only thing you become is a number.

And I want the ex-con narrative to be punched in the face of legislators and corporate America to say, you know, "Ex is not just ex."

We're ex of everything negative that we ever did, and ex con, also ex represents a double entendre of "x" represent, in a mathematical equation, of unknown.

You should think, you know, if you got out of a scary situation, you might not want to get back near it, and you're throwing yourself in there saying, "I'm going to save lives."

It's unacceptable for society to only have graveyards and prisons for Black men and boys.

They can't even get bikes, but they can get a gun.

We have to take personal responsibility.

Although we're not putting the guns in the communities, we have to be more proactive in teaching and educating our young men that they don't have to have self-hate, they don't have to have touched the guns, and they don't have to handle their conflicts.

I don't think there's no child that I can't reach, but once I reach them, Whitney, there's no resources to keep them.

And even without that budget, you're still saying, "I'm believing in these folks.

I'm believing big things for them."

It's really a sad state of affairs when legislators don't call guys like me to the table.

They never call and say, "You know what, I need this person to be..." or persons like this type to be the actual liaison to the streets, to the cops, to corporations, to legislators, to say that, "If you craft a bill about prison, and you never been to prison, what makes you think that the bill that you craft is the right bill to serve and protect the taxpayer's dollars with results?"

Do you ever get worried that risking your life in the middle of all this could put an end to all the good you're doing?

I get death threats all the time.

At least once or twice a month.

But I think that because of this type of work, from history, anybody that ever done anything good often sacrifice their life, although you don't see it until after they're dead and gone.

There's no roses till after you're dead.

Then you can look at their work and their catalogue and say, "Hey, man, this is what we was getting, we missed it."

And even to this day, we probably have stopped over, in the last two years, 200 to 300 shootings.

-Wow.

-I can't do that without interacting with certain elements.

Whitney: Right.

But we have to-- there's no life insurance for what I do.

I don't receive city funding for what I do.

You're just doing it because you know it needs to be done.

Where it has to be done.

But even just stopping one shooting and helping change that life, you don't know... you like opened this unreached potential that could have gone either way.

So it could have been more shootings that came out of that-- I mean, that's the crazy thing is like just helping one life... Could save five, could save ten.

Yeah.

That's amazing.

Well, thank you so much for coming on.

Well, thank you for having me, and thank you for allowing us to get our message out.

And just like Tyrone, our next two guests didn't give up after loss and heartache, and because of that, fate had its way.

Hi, I'm Jodi.

I was married for nine years.

My husband was energetic, young, handsome, and my world.

He and I took our daughter, Alina, who was only 3 at the time, for a bike ride, and we fell, he fell.

We soon found out that he was diagnosed with three letters: ALS.

My wife was writing a book on ALS, which she was afflicted with at the time, and wanted to use that experience to help children better understand the disease, which is difficult to understand even on an adult level.

Jodi: Those three letters, ALS, turned out to be a terminal illness, and we knew that we didn't have a lot of time, so after we processed that as a young couple with a toddler, we started writing letters, love letters, for every milestone.

Whitney: Both Jodi and Warren's partners took to writing, one a book and one letters, trying to bring hope past the tragedy.

My wife was eternally optimistic, and I think that shows through in the way she wrote the book, in that there's something to be learned here and things will work out in the end.

Well, we knew Kevin was dying.

He wanted us to live on.

He wanted us to experience joy again.

And the last thing he said was, "Take care of my girls "and make sure that you enjoy life and find reasons to celebrate and to experience hope again."

Whitney: Radical optimism in legacy form, and for both Jodi and Warren, they were about to start living it.

So it had been about a year, and my mom sent me this article about a book, "What Did You Learn Today?"

And it was a book that gently explained ALS to children.

I had an 8-year-old at home who needed to learn more about ALS, so it was perfect for me.

I had no idea anything existed like it, and little did I know that this book would bring me to a whole other world and another family.

So I got a call to have a number of books delivered, and I decided it was a good business decision to deliver them in person instead of paying to have them mailed, and as it turned out, delivering them in person was probably one of the most momentous things that has ever happened to me.

So the book was delivered by this man.

He was cute.

And we wanted to meet again and again, and eventually we fell in love.

It was wonderful.

Just never even occurred to me that something so wonderful could be salvaged from such a miserable situation.

And as we progressed, there was no doubt in my mind that there were two matchmakers in heaven that were just having a grand old time putting us together.

After all that we've been through, I will always be "glass half full."

It's the only way to be.

Next up, we take a look at a movie where radical optimism created champions.

Let's take a look.

The movie "King Richard" is based on the real life rise of tennis legends Venus and Serena Williams, whose dad, from the beginning, believed his daughters were capable of anything.

Tell us, what did you learn in those moments from Will Smith on the set but then also as their dad in the movie?

You know, being there, I feel like one of the lessons I've learned was just be confident in who you are.

You know, that's one thing Mr. Richard was, you know, very adamant about, with his girls, you know, any time they were feeling down, he would tell them, "You are Venus Williams, you are Serena Williams."

And so that was one thing that I learned, be confident within yourself and just keep going.

Richard always told Venus and Serena like, "If we're going to do this, if we're going to play tennis, be humble, have fun."

And when you love something so much, it doesn't feel like a job or anything.

Something that Mr. Will and Richard have in common is definitely making sure that he brings up and lifts up others.

So that's something that I could see the similarities between the two.

And what was the pressure like playing two prominent sisters that are a powerhouse?

We know Serena and Venus Williams as two tennis icons, and two women that have broken down boundaries, but behind all of that, other than all of that, they're just people.

You know, really real kind people.

And so it was great to get to talk to them and get to know that side of them.

They showed up to set together one time, and they, like, completely surprised us.

We had no clue that they were coming.

I think we were both like, losing our minds.

-I was definitely... -We're freaking out.

I was like crying in the corner, I was a hot mess, but when we spoke with them, it was just fun.

When you found out that you were both getting these roles, what did it feel like?

-Amazing.

-Mm-hmm.

I think...

I mean, I was so excited.

Very excited.

We had both worked so hard to finally... to finally be able to like, relax and be like, ahh, all this hard work paid off.

It was just amazing.

Whitney: The story of Venus and Serena reminds us that greatness is possible, regardless of circumstances, through positivity and ambition.

Now we turn to a man who was once addicted to drugs and was optimistic about his own future and now is helping others in similar situations.

Welcome to the show.

Thanks, Whitney, it's great to be here.

You know, your story is one that, over the decades, has been evolving.

Talk about your lowest point in the addiction process.

The lowest point in my life was a period of time where I was using drugs every day.

Having seizures.

Constant search to maintain what I thought was a high at the time, but it was really just maintenance, so shooting heroin every day, smoking crack incessantly, in and out of jails and in and out of hospitals.

Yeah, it was pretty horrific.

It's crazy to think you had this huge life turnaround.

Matthew: Yeah.

What got you originally into drugs?

You know, I was growing up in a family.

Had a father who was a pharmaceutical salesman, would sell some of the pharmaceutical drugs that should have been going to pharmacists on the street, also owned a greenhouse where he grew marijuana.

I had a famous aunt who would have drug-using parties and I would have famous people come over to the house.

I saw them using drugs.

Had an uncle who was a Vietnam War veteran, who was also an IV heroin addict, so kind of growing up, it was... it was around me all the time, and so my assumption was, kind of, that that's what just people did, right?

Especially successful people, so... How early did you get into it?

I first started taking my father's pills when I was about nine years old.

I got into his stash, and, yeah.

Back then it was black beauties.

I didn't realize what I was taking.

I found out later they were black beauties, which is an amphetamine.

Wow.

But I remember taking them and just, even at nine or ten years old, not sleeping for days at a time.

And my mother would be, you know, yelling at me to go to sleep, you know.

Me and I my brother shared a bedroom at the time, and I'd be up playing with toys and things like that.

You know, the world today, we hear a lot about the opioid crisis and drug addiction and kind of how that's all gone through the roof, but you're saying this was going on when you were nine.

I was nine years old, yeah.

So do you think this is anything new that we're seeing, or had this been going on for quite some time?

This has been something that's been going on for years and years and years.

The Vietnam War, you know, people came back and were addicted to heroin.

But when it seemed to take more of a front stage, so to speak, when folks in... white folks in rural communities started dying from it.

Part of this is trying to understand more how we break the cycle, and you did break your cycle, but I want you to take us back to the night that everything came crashing down for you.

Yeah, it was December 8th of 2015.

I had plenty of heroin in the house and needed some crack to get me through to the next day, and so a friend of mine and myself jumped in my mother's car.

I had asked my fiancée at the time to take us and she had been going to self-help groups and got up the...

I guess the power or the guts to say no for the first time, which I was quite shocked by.

So I remember grabbing the keys and saying, "Well, if I get pulled over, the car will be over here.

Get me out of jail."

And so we went out to a suburb of Chicago called Ford Heights.

Bought some crack and ended up being arrested by the police.

As sick as I was, something told me that this was an opportunity that I didn't think I was going to get.

I thought I was going to die from something, a bullet, an overdose.

Everybody around me was dropping like flies, and I thought that would be my demise, yeah.

So you're saying, at this lowest moment, when you're arrested, something clicked for you.

I went to jail.

I remember my first court date they offered me drug court.

They said, "You know, he's a nonviolent offender.

"Been in and out for years and years and years with drug cases."

And said, "Maybe he would benefit from drug court."

And so I remember signing the paper, and I had been sober prior eight years before I had relapsed, and I went to an organization called Gateway Foundation, and it had worked for me before.

And so I remember sitting in the back of the courtroom talking to a probation officer, and I really didn't think that there was any chance that I was going to make it, but if I had any chance whatsoever, something told me that that chance would be going to Gateway.

Wow.

So I told them-- his name was Chris-- I said, "Chris, if you can get me in Gateway, I'll be your poster boy."

How do you keep up and say, "I'm never going back there"?

You know, I stay connected in my work.

I work for an organization called The Bail Project.

We provide bail assistance for people who are incarcerated in jails across the country and can't afford their bail, and I can help folks, right?

There's more to it than just bailing people out of jail.

It's connecting them to resources like Gateway, so that they can get the help they need and change the trajectory of their lives.

And so I have one foot in the success that is my career, but I always keep one foot very close to the front lines where people are still struggling and I can hear their stories and I can tell my story of redemption.

Yeah, and even to the point that you carry Narcan with you today.

-That's correct.

-And for our viewers that don't know, Narcan can actually potentially save a life?

It can.

It's an opioid reversal drug.

So in the event that somebody is experiencing an overdose from heroin, which you can pretty much tell.

They're unconscious, you know, barely breathing.

If you administer Narcan, you can do it via intramuscular injection or you can do it via a nasal spray.

Have you used it to save someone?

Two days ago, yeah.

In fact, I went from having lunch with a commissioner that day to winding up at a gas station getting gas on the West Side of Chicago where somebody was having an overdose out front.

Would you say that's part of the recovery for you?

It is, yeah.

It's about purpose today, for me.

I don't work a day in my life.

I'm excited to get up every day and do this work.

They say that "ism" in alcoholism stands for "incredibly short memory."

So... it's easy to forget, despite all the pain, and so in order to stay close to that, I keep in touch with people that are in recovery but also people who I'm trying to help to get into recovery.

Your life today is very different.

Tell us about where you are.

I bought a home about three years ago in Dyer, Indiana.

I was able to get custody of my daughter, after a three-year protracted court battle.

I remember the judge saying the day that he awarded me custody, he said, "Mr. McFarlane, I can count on one hand "the number of people who proved me wrong, and you're one of them."

[gasps] That's amazing.

And your fiancée is still the fiancée that you had during the addiction.

Matthew: There's been a lot that's been happening, obviously, but one day soon we'll end up tying the knot.

What's next for you?

The organization that I'm at, the Bail Project, my president and CEO put me in charge of a multi-million-dollar project.

We're ending Cash Bail in 2023 in Illinois and connect them to crucial services, like the ones that I got and saved my life at Gateway.

Amazing.

Thank you so much for coming on.

Thanks, Whitney, it's been great.

And there you have it, radical optimism, knowing that you can get through it.

That's what today's guests all believed.

Remember, your story matters.

"The Whitney Reynolds Show" is made possible by... Yates Protect: a minority-owned business focused on protecting communities and providing solutions to safety problems for public and private institutions including air purification, metal detectors, thermal detection, and more.

Safety is a right, not a privilege.

And by, O'Connor Law Firm.

When it comes to your injuries, we take it seriously.

Carrie McCormick, a real estate broker with @Properties.

With more than 20 years of experience, she understands the importance of the customer relationship during your real estate journey.

Theraderm, committed to developing skin products designed to restore and promote natural beauty.

Sciton, because results matter.

Additional funding provided by Mid-West Moving & Storage, Galileo, The Gumdrop by Delos Therapy, Happy to Meat You, Kevin Kelly with Jameson Sotheby's International Realty, Fresh Dental, Ella's Bubbles, Tutu School Chicago, Hi-Five Sports Camp, and these funders: Announcer: Go beyond the interview with Whitney Reynolds and her 52-week guide of inspiration.

The book goes deeper into the topics you see on "The Whitney Reynolds Show."

To get your copy for $12.95 plus shipping and handling, go to whitneyreynolds.com/store and use code PBS.

For more information on today's program, visit whitneyreynolds.com or follow us on social media on Twitter @whitneyreynolds and on Instagram @whitneyó_reynolds.

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