On this episode of The Joe Rogan Experience, I sit down with an old friend of mine and talk about his life growing up in a tough neighborhood in Detroit, Michigan. He shares his story of how he was introduced to the world of drugs and crime, and how he survived one of the most dangerous times in his life.
00:00:34.000So on the outside looking in, it really looked like a household where the kids should make it.
00:00:41.000But unfortunately, it's a very abusive household.
00:00:44.000And I ran away when I was about 13 years old.
00:00:48.000And at the time prior to that, you know, honor role scholarship student, dreams of being a doctor, artist.
00:00:55.000I wanted to be a doctor because I felt like that was an occupation where I felt like you can help people.
00:01:01.000And unfortunately, you know, when I ran away, I thought that I would basically just kind of get welcomed into the home of someone who would see this kid and be like, oh, you know, this kid just deserves loves or whatever.
00:01:13.000But I found myself on the east side of Detroit in an apartment with a gun to my head.
00:01:20.000And it was my introduction to the street culture.
00:01:58.000And despite that, I just continued to sell drugs.
00:02:01.000You know, it's one of the things when I think back to, you know, even that part of my life, you know, there's the glorification of like the hustler, right?
00:02:09.000It's like, you know, we're out here making money.
00:02:40.000You know, my parents, even though, you know, my dad made decent money, like we couldn't always get all the cereal because it was like all these kids.
00:02:47.000And then I bought like chocolate milk and strawberry milk.
00:02:50.000And then I went back to the crack house.
00:03:50.000So the gun violence was just, you know, it was so much a part of like the culture that I grew up in that I didn't think about what was happening inside of me after I got shot.
00:04:11.000And, you know, I remember my dad coming to the hospital.
00:04:14.000And at this point, I was the third of my brothers to be shot.
00:04:18.000And I'll never forget this look on my dad's face of like, it was almost a look of like defeat, you know, of like, how do I, how do I save my boys, you know?
00:04:35.000And so when I left the hospital, like nobody, like the doctor, the nurse, nobody just was like, hey, you're going to have all these feelings.
00:04:45.000And so I get back and I'm in the neighborhood and, you know, I'm angry because I really want to get revenge on this guy who shot me.
00:04:52.000Like that's the number one priority for me.
00:04:54.000It's like, you know, I got to get, I got to retaliate.
00:10:55.000It's like, you know, people are testing you.
00:10:57.000Can they fucking take your breakfast and lunch?
00:11:00.000So going in, I knew that that was just the reality of like, you know, anticipating like at some point I'm going to have to prove myself and I'm going to have to stand up for myself.
00:11:09.000And so I get into the county jail and I end up, the guy who I'm in the cell with, he's serving life, but he's back on appeal.
00:11:18.000And so he's, you know, he's kind of telling me all the kind of what to expect in jail.
00:11:23.000And, you know, this guy right here on the cell block, he likes to fight all the time or whatever.
00:11:27.000You know, I also grew up like in the city, right?
00:11:30.000So I'm, you know, I tell people this all the time.
00:11:32.000Like, you can, I don't, I don't do scare straight when I talk to kids about like not going to jail because to me it's not about it's not about being afraid.
00:11:40.000If you're from the hoods, you've probably had a fight or two.
00:11:45.000But I get in there and, you know, we get into our dust ups and, you know, eventually it's kind of like a hierarchy of like, you know, who's going to stand up for themselves.
00:16:38.000One, a lot of people who are in solitary confinement have pre-existing mental health challenges, meaning that they have diagnosed bipolar, schizophrenia.
00:17:13.000Like these guys would just have, I mean, the endurance to do that for hours to antagonize a person next to you.
00:17:21.000They would have is full-on shit wars, like where the, I call them weapons of ass destruction because these guys would like concoct ways to throw feces on each other.
00:17:34.000So if they get into a beef, like the way that they would go to war is they would literally, I mean, there's an ingenuity that happens in prison that's unlike anything that most people can comprehend.
00:17:51.000We can make, you know, tools out of anything.
00:17:54.000So these guys would literally figure out how to get feces into a toothpaste tube, which means that they would have to literally go in the toilet, pull this stuff out, stuff it into a thing, and then they would smuggle it out to like the cages, right?
00:18:08.000So five days we can go out to these cages.
00:18:12.000Just imagine a dog kennel, like a dog run, right?
00:18:14.000It was like kennel after kennel after kennel.
00:18:50.000I mean, this was like the equivalent of having a fucking AK-47.
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00:19:45.000You say something, I'm gonna store shit everywhere, right?
00:19:47.000Um, and so that's how they would wage war.
00:19:50.000And so that's what, that was the chaos of the environment.
00:19:53.000And then, like, you know, we get into it with the officers, guys would like flood the sail block.
00:19:58.000So they would put sheets in the toilet and just flush, flush, flush.
00:20:01.000And now the whole tier is just flooded.
00:20:04.000And so it's definitely a biohazard issue at minimum right your health and well-being is always being threatened by, you know, I mean, you get, I think we got three showers a week and the showers are like, they're just back to back.
00:20:20.000So you're not like, they're not cleaning them out in between showers.
00:20:24.000They take you down to the shower cage.
00:20:26.000You go in there and it's fucking snot on the wall and it's fucking, you know, somebody's shaving because they will give you like the little razor to shave.
00:20:34.000And then you got the guys who we call them cutters.
00:20:41.000And they would take, I mean, anything you could think of, they would take and just kind of carve up their skin, you know, swallow, like one guy swallowed batteries.
00:20:49.000So they stopped us from like even getting, at one point we can get like a little tape player.
00:20:54.000And a guy ended up swallowing the batteries.
00:22:00.000Because in order to talk, you got to lay on your floor and like scream under the door and try to hear a guy or you got to try to talk through like the electrical socket.
00:22:08.000So it's all these different things that I kind of knew going in.
00:22:12.000And so I set up for myself because I didn't want to, like, the only thing I feared about being in prison was losing my mind.
00:22:18.000I was never worried about my physical safety.
00:22:24.000You know, I grew up on the east side of Detroit.
00:22:26.000So I knew how to like take care of myself.
00:22:29.000Losing my mind was the one thing that I was like, that was, I was afraid of that because I saw guys who were like normal guys and five years in, they're not the same.
00:22:41.000And you see this like glossed over look in their eyes and it's the scariest shit ever to see somebody start to hallucinate, start to make up a life that you know is not true.
00:22:53.000And so I set my days up like I was at university.
00:22:58.000And I always say this, Joe, this is like super important.
00:24:29.000I would literally, my version of that was so dog-heared, but I would like literally just open it up.
00:24:34.000And any page was about, if you master your thinking, you can master your environment.
00:24:40.000And so it was like things like that would keep my brain just going forward.
00:24:45.000You know, obviously I would work out, you know, do push-ups and calisthenics and roll-up.
00:24:50.000I used to roll my mattress up and you tie a sheet, one sheet around it, and you put the other sheet through it, and you make your handle, and now you can do your curls.
00:24:58.000So I would do that, take that mattress, put it on my back, I would do squats.
00:25:02.000So I would run my routine in there and just running that routine is really what kept me like, you know, put one positive thought in front of the next, you know.
00:25:15.000And I mean, at that time, I still was like, you know, I wasn't like a model prisoner.
00:25:20.000You know, I don't want the listeners to be confused by that because it's a little different, right?
00:25:25.000It's somebody who follows the rules and just stays out of the way and get out of trouble.
00:26:52.000And at the time, I'm the line foreman.
00:26:53.000So I'm like, I make sure as we're serving child that, you know, if this thing is running out of like cutlets, I put the cutlets in the thing for them to continue serving.
00:27:29.000And sometimes they would send these guys from like the lower levels who, you know, they're getting in trouble at the lower levels and they would send them over there as punishment, you know.
00:27:38.000And usually when they come over there, they don't realize that this is a different, this is a different game.
00:29:16.000And this was another one of those moments of like, you know, I think in life, man, that sometimes we don't talk enough about how lucky we are.
00:29:31.000Me and this guy, we get into a confrontation.
00:29:39.000All I do is lift weights, work out, whatever.
00:29:43.000And I don't even realize the difference between a 27-year-old grown man's strength and the boy that walked into prison.
00:29:53.000And so when I punch this guy, I don't, in my mind, I'm not even thinking about like how destructive it is for a grown man to punch another person, another human being.
00:30:02.000I'm just like, we get into the thing, it escalates.
00:31:31.000And basically what happened is when I punched him, I broke his trachea.
00:31:35.000And so they had to perform emergency surgery on him literally in front of the cell block.
00:31:40.000And so I was sentenced to an additional two years and then what ended up being four and a half years in solitary confinement.
00:31:48.000And the only reason that man did not die that day is because his radio flew over.
00:31:56.000And, you know, it's one of those things where when I began to recalibrate my life and began to really transform my life and think about my life differently, it was another one of those things where I realized in that moment, I just let my anger dictate my actions.
00:32:16.000And no matter whether I thought he was right or wrong, I was so angry and so enraged that I just punched this guy indiscriminately and I literally could have killed this man.
00:32:25.000And I would have literally been serving the rest of my life in prison.
00:32:29.000And so when that happened, I remember they transferred me that same day.
00:32:37.000So I was at, that happened at a prison called Muskegon Correctional Facility.
00:32:40.000They transferred me to Oaks Correctional Facility.
00:32:44.000And the first month, man, I was there, the officers would just come and they would like talk so much shit, you know, like, we're going to fuck you up.
00:32:53.000And, you know, we're going to, you know, you're going to get yours.
00:32:56.000And, you know, it was the most vulnerable, you know, I felt because I knew that it happened in there.
00:33:05.000You know, I know that they can come in, they can just say, oh, he did this.
00:33:09.000And they can come in with the goon squad and pepper spray you and beat the shit out of you.
00:33:14.000And you're cuffed up and there's nothing you can really do.
00:33:18.000You know, so it was very tense for about a month or so.
00:33:24.000And then there were officers who was at the facility where it actually happened at, that transferred over.
00:33:30.000And they kind of knew me and they kind of knew that, you know, the experience with the officer wasn't just like I woke up and had a bad day.
00:33:40.000You know, they knew it was an escalation.
00:33:42.000And even though, you know, when I look at it, like I'm all about personal responsibility and accountability and like I had to eat that, you know, that I was wrong in terms of my reaction to the anger.
00:33:54.000There were things I probably could have did differently.
00:33:58.000But what they told me at that point was like, you're never going to get out of here.
00:34:02.000You know, you're never going to get out of here.
00:34:05.000And I remember the first time one of them said that to me, I was like, I was too naive to really, you know, believe it.
00:37:21.000It was always like, I'm going to do right so my dad doesn't have to come see me in jail or come bail me out or my friends don't have to come, you know, try to get me out of trouble.
00:43:22.000So, but it was like, it ended up, it ended up when he said it, you know, my ego, you know, it's like, you know who I am on the yard.
00:43:29.000Like, I'm a shot cart if I can have you done, right?
00:43:33.000And then I stepped back and I was like, no, he actually just gave me a go.
00:43:38.000Like, if I'm going to take writing serious, I need to set a goal for what do I want to happen with my work, you know?
00:43:47.000And then another guy, he agreed to read it.
00:43:50.000And now, so I'm in solitary, so it's not like I can just walk out of the cell and get a guy to book, right?
00:43:55.000So we would make these fish lines out of our underwear.
00:43:59.000So we take all of the string out of your underwear.
00:44:01.000You attach that to a toothface tube that you scrolls in all the toothpaste out of and stuff with paper.
00:44:07.000So you stuff it with toilet paper, wet toilet paper.
00:44:09.000Then once that dries, it has enough weight that you can slide it up and down the tier.
00:44:14.000And so then sometimes we would use our socks.
00:44:16.000Most of the time I use socks, but you just unravel that string and then you can slide it up under the door and then you can attach whatever to it.
00:44:27.000And so I attached the book to it, man, slid it under the door.
00:44:31.000And I don't hear for this guy like all day.
00:44:33.000So now I'm like nervous as shit because I'm like, it's my only copy.
00:46:45.000Like, so it was, it was the most, like, getting sentenced was like, my life is over.
00:46:52.000But not being able to actualize a dream based on a gift I was given, that was devastating.
00:47:02.000You know, and so I was going through this depression.
00:47:06.000And I did what I always would do, which was go back to those books.
00:47:09.000And, you know, I was getting heavy into philosophy, which was like the wildest thing is like, you know, growing up, you know, you hear philosophy, like, oh, that's super boring, you know.
00:47:19.000But I was getting into all this philosophy, man.
00:47:21.000And I remember going back to James Allen book, and it was really talking about this idea that you think into existence the life that you want.
00:47:32.000And if you focus your life on negative thoughts, you're going to only produce negative outcomes.
00:47:38.000And when I went back and I read my journals, I saw the pattern was super clear of like, I bought into this negative narrative, so me being in prison was not a shocker to me when I went back and read through my journal.
00:47:53.000And so I said to myself, if this is true, if this is absolutely true in the negative, then it has to be true in the positive.
00:48:01.000And I began to just refocus my energy on getting out of solitary.
00:48:07.000And I remember saying, if I'm going to get out of here, I need help.
00:48:14.000Like, they're not like the way it looks on paper, they're not just going to let me out, you know?
00:48:19.000And so I wrote this letter to the warden, and it was a super philosophical letter about the truth.
00:48:25.000And what I said to the warden was like, when I walked into prison, my statement was that I was not going to follow the rules and that I was hell-bent on destroying my life.
00:48:38.000And I'm like, if you look at my record, you would know that I've honored my word.
00:48:44.000Like at that point, I had probably maybe I think about 34 misconducts.
00:48:51.000And they ranged from everything, a dangerous contraband to assault on staff, assault on inmate, you name it.
00:48:58.000And I was like, so the thing you know more than anything else is I'm a man of my word.
00:49:04.000And what I'm telling you is that if you believe that to be true in the negative, I just need you to believe it to be true in the positive.
00:49:12.000And if you give me this opportunity to get out of solitary, I'm going to focus on two things.
00:49:17.000I'm going to mentor these other young guys, and I'm going to focus on becoming a writer.
00:49:23.000And I sent that letter to the warden, and the warden literally wrote me back.
00:49:28.000And he said, you know, despite my hesitation here, I believe you, and I'm going to advocate for you to get out.
00:49:38.000And so he began to advocate for me to get out, but he had to go through multiple series of like his supervisors because the assault was on the inmate.
00:49:46.000And so it took about another two years before I got out of solitary.
00:49:53.000And so it took literally another two years before I finally got out.
00:49:58.000But once I got out, I took those handwritten books and I typed them all up, you know, and I mentored those guys and I began to tutor the guys who they said couldn't read or wouldn't read.
00:50:11.000And I found that if I gave them books that was similar to their life, they would put in more effort.
00:50:18.000And so that's what I focused on, you know.
00:50:20.000And then I typed those books up and I was like, I started to send them.
00:50:46.000But I did get a couple of responses from like some like independent publishers and they was like, no, we're not interested right now, but thank you.
00:52:05.000Because basically what they did is they literally went and said, this is how much it costs for you to be in prison at every prison you've been in per day.
00:52:15.000And so higher security levels, it was about $150 something a day.
00:52:18.000Lower security levels, like $70 something a day.
00:52:21.000And it was like, by the time you get out of prison, it'll be about a million dollars.
00:52:25.000And so we want 90% of anything you earn off this book.
00:52:31.000They didn't realize I had like self-published.
00:52:34.000And I was like, you know, the thing that struck me about that when I went through the actual hearing with the judge was I was like, man, you know, I wrote this powerful letter to her.
00:52:47.000And I was just like, look, I'm coming home with a conviction.
00:53:18.000You know, I'm trying to give myself a chance.
00:53:20.000Like, I don't want to go back to the streets.
00:53:22.000I want to be able to contribute to society, but I know society is not going to give me an opportunity.
00:53:29.000So I'm creating an opportunity for myself, you know?
00:53:32.000And so I went through the court case and this is how they ended up not getting any money, right?
00:53:40.000So I backdated a contract to myself saying that I would only accept 15% of the proceeds, I mean 10% of the proceeds once the company recouped its production costs.
00:53:52.000So they went from suing me for 90% of $15 per book to only being able to sue me for 90% of $1.50 per book because I backdated this contract.
00:54:02.000I used to work in a law library, so I was like, you know, I know contractual law is binding.
00:54:07.000And the lawsuit was only binding as long as I was incarcerated.
00:54:12.000And so I just made sure that I didn't make any money, you know, until I got out.
00:54:17.000But the letter that I wrote to the judge, like, it was important to say that, is that, listen, at that time, you know, it's 15 years ago.
00:57:10.000Because if your parent dies and you inherit their insurance money, that same law applies where they can take 90% of that to cover the cost of your incarceration.
00:57:24.000But it's discriminate in terms of how they apply it and when they apply it.
00:57:28.000And that's where the hate came in because how it got initiated was the person in the mailroom was like, oh, how dare this guy write a book?
00:57:37.000And then I'm going to send this to the attorney general and they're going to sue you.
00:57:56.000So on that last one, man, one, I just, I didn't, I didn't believe I was getting out.
00:58:01.000You know, after a while, you started to kind of, you know, start to play with your mind.
00:58:06.000You know, you see these guys that got, you know, they've been in for 20 years, you know.
00:58:10.000But I remember like going, because you go up to these hearings, you get, and it feels like you're about to go, and then they come back in 30 days, and then like, oh, they won't let you out, right?
00:58:22.000When you had an assault on the officer, you got to go to the warden.
00:58:26.000And then the warden goes to like a regional director.
00:58:28.000And the regional director goes to like the main Director.
00:58:31.000And so each time I would make it like, oh, I got it to the warden, then the regional sets it down.
00:58:35.000I got it to the regional, then the head shuts it down.
00:58:38.000So it's like you're getting your hopes up and you don't know when it's going to end.
00:58:42.000You know, it's kind of like, you know, when I remember when the pandemic hit, a lot of my friends, you know, I have a lot of friends in different walks of life now.
00:58:54.000A lot of my friends reached out to me and was like, you know, how do we help people navigate these tough times, right?
00:59:01.000The isolating feeling of being in the pandemic.
00:59:04.000And what I told them, I was like, the hardest thing that we're all going to grapple with is uncertainty of not knowing when it's going to end.
00:59:13.000And that's exactly what happened, right?
00:59:15.000It's like, all right, everybody's going to go into lockdown.
00:59:18.000And then on April 30th, we're all free and clear.
00:59:22.000It's like, nope, we're going to stay until March.
00:59:24.000Nope, I think we should stay until June.
00:59:40.000And so when it finally happened, I remember telling the guys on the tier, I was like, if they ever let me out of here, I'm going to stroll out like George Jefferson.
00:59:52.000And so the wild thing was like that last year in solitary, so they have these guys come over to the cell block.
01:00:00.000They're like clean up, they pass out the food trays.
01:00:03.000So they usually come from the protection unit.
01:00:06.000The last year, they stopped letting them guys come in because it was just creating too much conflict because they was like, they got beef.
01:00:11.000Now you over here and guys are trying to get to them.
01:00:14.000So the guys who was coming over was from general population and these was like guys I knew, you know.
01:00:18.000So like the last year I was there, you know, they would come through, man, they would smuggle me candy bars.
01:00:23.000I hadn't had a candy bar in like three years, you know.
01:00:26.000And I remember, you know, one of my guys come over, he smuggles, I hear the broom hitting the door, and I look up and it's like two flattened down like Snickers that he's like probably put in his shoes.
01:01:43.000All the things I said I'm going to do, I'm going to get out and I'm going to do them.
01:01:46.000And it's going to be the first time that I'm going to stand on something that really aligns with that little boy that I always knew was there.
01:02:25.000At this time, they had transferred me to lower security levels.
01:02:28.000So you started to work your way down, which is its own craziness.
01:02:32.000Because at that point, I only did a hard time.
01:02:37.000And going down in security level is like crazy.
01:02:41.000Because now you're dealing with these guys that's coming straight off the streets.
01:02:44.000They're like, you know, you're dealing with, there's kind of a hierarchy in the streets.
01:02:49.000You know, there's a hierarchy of mindset in the streets.
01:02:52.000Like guys who are usually good at selling drugs, they're literally operating at a different intellectual frequency than guys that are like doing petty theft.
01:05:48.000Like it was almost like me explaining to her was making an excuse.
01:05:51.000You know, that was the way that she responded.
01:05:54.000And I was like, man, it was, it probably didn't even take a full 60 days before I had a decision back, you know, that I was being denied.
01:06:04.000That's got to be a horrible feeling to just be in a category where they don't take into account any of the circumstances, don't take into account any potential growth or this direction that you're trying to move your life into.
01:09:38.000I was lucky to be willing to go on a journey, but also to have the skill set to read and, you know, to read books of like, hey, it doesn't have to end like this.
01:09:49.000You know, you don't have to be pinpointed to one horrible moment in your life, you know, and there's the cumulative nature of the things that led up to that moment.
01:10:06.000There's like all these causal factors that lead to us becoming who we are in whatever capacity.
01:10:14.000But that's the tough stuff we don't like to grapple with because it's not efficient.
01:10:19.000You know, it's not easy to figure out.
01:10:23.000I mean, the facts of it is like, it's not easy, right?
01:10:25.000It's not easy to be like, okay, this person killed somebody, so we should give him a second chance.
01:10:32.000But there are tons of us who have gotten out and who have done the work before we got out and that we're contributing in a way that most people who've never went in probably contribute.
01:10:45.000And like, those stories should be lifted up.
01:10:53.000Like, I think there's the appreciation, for me, it's the appreciation of freedom.
01:10:59.000But it was also falling in love with the beauty of my mind.
01:11:04.000Like, you can't, you can't, like, you can't underestimate that value of really understanding, like, as a human being, that you can contribute to the world in positive or negative.
01:11:18.000And that you can live your life in such a way that it honors what it really means to be human, to be complex, to be able to discover something new about yourself every day.
01:11:33.000Like, that's what, like, for me, freedom is that.
01:11:37.000Freedom is like, you know, the book that I've recently written is called How to Be Free.
01:11:42.000And you know what really inspired me to write that book is I've met so many people out here in society who's never been in a prison cell who are psychologically, emotionally, immensely incarcerated.
01:11:56.000And they're incarcerated by heartbreak.
01:12:00.000They're incarcerated by shame, grief, anger.
01:12:05.000I mean, I've met people who have it all.
01:12:21.000And so there is that appreciation post-incarceration that, you know, you just, I mean, 15 years later, I still revel in moments like a kid.
01:12:33.000You know, like I'm like, I'm like a kid, man.
01:14:10.000So I was working on a project called the Atonement Project, where we were using technology and art to facilitate restorative justice conversations.
01:14:18.000It's super hard to talk about hard things, you know, when it comes to violence and it comes to people who have been victims of violence.
01:14:27.000And I felt like art and technology provided a vehicle to kind of bridge that gap, you know.
01:14:57.000I was like, man, he just keep bumping up against it.
01:14:59.000It was so obvious to me, like, what the problem was.
01:15:02.000Like, if you just move this over, like, a quarter of an inch is probably going to work the way that you envision it, you know.
01:15:08.000And I remember saying that to him and just seeing him, like, it was almost like a light bulb just fired off in his head.
01:15:15.000And I was just like, man, that was wild because this is a smart kid.
01:15:19.000You know, this kid is brilliant, right?
01:15:21.000And so I said, I want to do a prison hack here.
01:15:26.000And I want to challenge these students and faculty to solve some problems based on the problems we had to solve in prison.
01:15:33.000And so they said, yeah, you should do it.
01:15:36.000And so I literally told them all the things that I wanted.
01:15:39.000And I came up with five design challenges.
01:15:42.000And one of them was you got to design a tattoo gun out of a tape player motor, a good tire string, and an ink pen.
01:15:49.000You have to make what we call a stinger, which is like kind of like so you have a hot pot, right?
01:15:54.000So in prison, in order to, like, heat up our noodles, we had to, you know, especially if you're in the old prisons, excuse me, if you're in the old prisons, there's no microwaves.
01:16:06.000So you have to figure out how to heat them up.
01:16:08.000And so we would make what's called a stinger, which we would take an extension cord, cut that up, and then you attach like nail clippers to it.
01:17:45.000that one the nerd in me wanted to really understand the science of like okay why does this scientifically work you know and then the second part was that if they would have accomplished this with these meager little tool set they would have been applauded And people would have said, you know, that was brilliant and that you're a genius and that you're incredibly intelligent because you were able to take these little scrappy things and make something out of them.
01:18:09.000And the reason I wanted them to validate that is because I believe inherently that there are people in prison who possess ingenuity, innovative abilities, intelligence, all these things, and we throw people away.
01:20:16.000You know, we're lazy because if we can just slap a title on you and just categorically say like everybody's, you know, you convicted of a murder, you're a murderer, and that's everybody.
01:20:57.000Like that doesn't, that never goes away.
01:20:59.000You know, like that, that understanding of what damage I've caused to this family is something that never goes away.
01:21:09.000And then there's the societal consequences that, you know, at this stage in my life, they're not the same as they was the first day I walked out.
01:21:20.000But they remind me of exactly what society thinks of me when I deal with them, you know.
01:21:28.000And I think that we should be able to earn the trust of society back.
01:21:33.000You know, I think you got to put the work in.
01:21:35.000You know, I don't think that anybody should just be handed a free card.
01:21:40.000But I think you should be given an opportunity to prove yourself, you know, that you can contribute and that you want to contribute.
01:21:48.000And I can tell you, like the guys that I deal with, man, there's so many of these guys that can contribute if we just stop throwing people away.
01:21:56.000Yeah, the system is just set up to punish.
01:21:59.000They're set up to just lock people up so they're off the streets and so that other people don't have to deal with them.
01:22:04.000But they are, like you said, they are going to get out, most of them.
01:22:09.000And they're not going to be rehabilitated.
01:22:49.000You know, and they're not happy because their job forces them to have to have a persona of toughness.
01:23:02.000You know, you have to, the way that it was originally designed is you have to have a wall up between your humanity and the people that you're tasked with policing.
01:23:12.000And that makes it tough because you have to come into this world for most of the time, 60 hours a week.
01:23:20.000Most of those people have to make overtime in order to, you know, provide for their families.
01:23:25.000And you got to wear a mask for 60 days out of the week.
01:23:29.000And then you got to come in and you got to see people at their worst more than just the moment to arrest them, right?
01:23:35.000Like a police officer on the street, they're arresting a lot of times people at their worst moment, then they pass them off.
01:23:42.000Correctional officer, you walk into this environment every day.
01:23:46.000You have to deal with somebody who is in a cycle of their worst moment.
01:23:52.000And the violence, the chaos, the smell, the lack of tools and resources where you have to untangle the chaos.
01:24:25.000It's the interesting thing about how at one point I didn't have empathy for corrections officers.
01:24:31.000Like you're holding me in prison, not realizing I'm really the one that's responsible for me being there but over time man I remember I started to get empathy in the craziest of ways man you know this officer came to do a strip search and I refused the strip search I was you know I was in that rebellious state and I just remember like thinking to myself after that like man this is his job you got to come and look at somebody's ass you know his fat asses
01:25:09.000Like you got to go in the visiting room and you see this guy out here with his kid and his family and when he leaves there, you have to strip search this person.
01:25:19.000So you have to put this armor up between your own humanity and that's your, for 40 hours a week, you're looking at asses.
01:25:39.000But, you know, I think that's where we got it wrong.
01:25:43.000We've kind of created this kind of idea that it's us against them and the reality is not because they're spending a lot of time in that environment.
01:28:05.000And like even now, like I keep money on my phone for my friends who are incarcerated to call me, you know?
01:28:13.000And I just like, I'll put, you know, a few hundred on there and then it's like, you know, every time you call, you can tell how much money is gone because they're like, oh, you got $150 left.
01:28:23.000And it's just like, geez, like man, you know?
01:28:26.000and I'm a lot of instances, I'm their only connection to their family and their kids.
01:28:30.000Do you know the Freeway Ricky Ross story?
01:28:53.000But he learned how to read in prison and then became a lawyer and realized that they wrongfully convicted him under the three strikes rule.
01:29:08.000That's one of the things that I would love to see change is like, there is no accountability for prosecutors when they overcharge people or wrongfully charged.
01:29:51.000Like, right now in this country, there's probably about 150 million people who have someone incarcerated or who have had someone incarcerated.
01:30:01.000it's no longer you know when i was coming up you know i came up and during the height of the the war on crime or the war on drugs right so i come up through that era i came up selling drugs when crack first exploded in our communities and you know the prison population went from i think you know the couple of hundred thousand to two million and which is wild right in a short amount of time how old are you i am 50 i'm 53.
01:30:28.000Okay, I'm a little older than you, but I remember when all that happened.
01:30:32.000I remember all of a sudden crack was on the street.
01:30:46.000Not our own government for real, for real, but people in our government that are cowboys and renegades and people who are criminals who realize they can get away with this.
01:30:59.000yeah yeah and in ricky's case they were using it to fund a war yeah the controversy crazy right crazy i remember hearing about that in the news yeah when I was a kid, going, What?
01:31:56.000You know, my dad was in the Air Force.
01:31:58.000You know, I used to go to the Air Force base and, you know, all of his friends were in the Air Force.
01:32:03.000And, you know, you grow up and on my neighborhood block, there was, you know, this woman used to be a police officer and the firefighters and the doctors.
01:32:11.000And so you grow up seeing this ideal of what you think is good and bad.
01:32:17.000And then you see this explosion of these drugs.
01:32:20.000Like that same neighborhood, you know, I wrote this story a while ago called The Trees No Longer Give Fruit.
01:32:29.000And what I was writing about is that I grew up on a block where every backyard there was some type of fruit tree, pear tree, peach tree, apple tree.
01:32:39.000And then crap came and it killed my neighborhood.
01:32:43.000And these manicured lawns and these houses where there were two families, I mean, two parent families and, you know, professionals and, you know, and you felt like a community, this drug came in and it was literally like a bomb had been detonated.
01:32:58.000And so that early narrative of like inner city kids as the, what did they call them, super predators?
01:34:31.000See, the thing about Detroit, most people don't know that Detroit, up until they started moving jobs overseas, Detroit was the third wealthiest city in the world.
01:34:48.000To think that inside of a lifetime, Detroit goes from being one of the wealthiest cities in the world to one of the poorest cities in America.
01:35:31.000No, it was unbelievable to think that it would happen on our watch.
01:35:35.000You know, I remember when I came home, I was so optimistic coming out of prison.
01:35:39.000I mean, you got to imagine like, you know, walking out everything.
01:35:43.000It's just like, oh, it's going to be exciting.
01:35:45.000You think that life really has advanced and people have moved on.
01:35:48.000And I remember just going through some of the neighborhoods and I was like, you know, these were beautiful blocks and these beautiful homes.
01:35:56.000And I would go through some of the neighborhoods and there's one house left on the block.
01:36:00.000And it's like the other house that are still in different, you know, states of disrepair were falling apart.
01:36:07.000And it was like the most heartbreaking thing to think about there's kids that this is the block that they go down to go to school.
01:36:15.000And then this was the other thing that was mind-blowing because I went into the schools and I'm like, it's in worse conditions than the prison I just left.
01:36:21.000And like that talks about where people are investing to your point of like, we start investing into like keeping people in prison or putting people in prison versus like education facilities to keep people out of prison.
01:36:34.000So but also how do we have these same communities decade after decade after decade that are deeply impoverished and filled with crime?
01:37:24.000You know, like if you're trying to say like, hey, we've got to do something.
01:37:29.000I know We're investing so much money overseas.
01:37:33.000We invest so much money into these nonprofits overseas and all these different things.
01:37:38.000We're doing regime change and untold billions of dollars.
01:37:42.000We've got to invest in these cities and try to make less prisoners, less people incarcerated, less people that start off in a terrible position.
01:37:54.000But that's like an unpopular thing to try to run on, man.
01:37:57.000Because the people that are just trying to protect their money, you know, there's so many people in this country that think about people in prison, they don't even think of them as prisoners.
01:38:06.000They want them in prison because then they're not out in the street inconveniencing their life.
01:38:11.000They don't want to deal with, like, why?
01:38:13.000Why does someone, you think you're different?
01:38:31.000If you lived in a terrible environment and grew up in a terrible household and dealt with terrible pressures, you would be in there too, man.
01:39:12.000It's really interesting because like, you know, I don't do a lot in the world of politics outside of criminal justice.
01:39:23.000And what I've learned about this particular space with politics, it is the one space where in the last, I would say the last 15, 20 years, where there has been some common ground.
01:39:38.000And there's been a little bit more courage than I've ever seen in my lifetime.
01:39:44.000For years, people would not touch incarceration other than saying, let's be tough on crime.
01:39:50.000It took the work of a lot of incredible people, a lot of storytelling to start to shift it to where it's the one issue where you can get some type of bipartisan buy-in.
01:40:02.000And I think that the facts of it is just, to your point, where there are certain segments of society that we have not dealt with.
01:40:12.000Like the gun violence where I come from is something that most people can't even begin to imagine.
01:40:18.000Like in my family, in my family, like I mean, I mean like my, not my family of friends, but in my family, at a minimum, there's been eight or nine of us who have been shot.
01:40:29.000We don't talk about gun violence in an inner city and the cycle of it because the lack of treatment for gun-related trauma.
01:40:38.000I didn't know what PTSD was until I was already in prison.
01:40:43.000I didn't realize that the things that I felt at 17 years old when I got shot were actually real things.
01:40:49.000And I wasn't making an excuse for being paranoid and that I wasn't being irrational for thinking that I had to carry a gun to protect myself when both of my brothers had already been shot and many of my friends had been murdered through gun violence.
01:41:04.000So those choices as a kid, why they were illegal, they weren't necessarily irrational.
01:41:13.000And so we haven't done a good job at like being just honest, right?
01:41:18.000When I started to see the shift with criminal justice was when opioids began to penetrate the suburbs.
01:41:25.000When you started to see kids who normally can come into a neighborhood, buy some cocaine, go and party, and they're fine to go back to the suburbs, it was easy to just be like, oh, well, those black kids over there are selling cocaine and, you know, they should be arrested.
01:41:44.000When you start dealing with this higher level of opioid addiction that doesn't just stay in the hood, that it really carries over to the suburbs, then people started to be able to see their own kids and their grandkids.
01:41:55.000And now that you're seeing that it's over 30% of the prison population are white, you're starting to see people say, well, wait a minute, this isn't just a criminal orientation.
01:42:05.000There's a deeper problem in society, which is one, is drug addiction that we don't really deal with because there's so much shame attached to it.
01:42:14.000So I can tell you, like, sometimes I do these talks all over, but I'm speaking at corporations, like you name it.
01:42:22.000I cannot tell you how many parents that work incredible jobs in government, in state, in corporate, come up to me and pull me to the side and say, thank you for speaking your truth.
01:42:38.000I wish I can tell people what I'm going through in my family right now.
01:42:43.000I wish I can talk about why my husband has not been in the household because of his addiction.
01:43:12.000Like, you know, you think about the black comedians, right?
01:43:16.000We always talk about our trauma and our pain because that narrative has cultural value.
01:43:21.000You know, if we lean into, as much as we can lean into like the elements of us that's from the hood in the smart way, in a funny way, et cetera, we'll always get that laugh.
01:43:32.000We'll always get that, you know, that sense of like, oh yeah, y'all do have a different reality, right?
01:43:39.000Because that's the narrative and that narrative has endured from generation to generation.
01:43:43.000And I think now we're just getting to a space where, and I mean, and there's tons of work to do.
01:43:48.000Like to undo all the damage that's happened in the system is going to take us another 50 years.
01:43:54.000You know, we'll be lucky if we catch up to Germany or Norway or one of these more forward-thinking countries like in the next four or five decades.
01:44:17.000So, Scott does incredible work in criminal justice.
01:44:19.000He's one of, I always tell him he should get a Nobel Peace Prize.
01:44:24.000But Scott and I, we were over there with another group of people, and they were doing like a bunch of panels, and both of us basically got bored.
01:44:30.000We was like, we should go see if we can run around the prison, right?
01:44:34.000So we just kind of peeled off, and we're talking to the guys who are serving time.
01:44:45.000And I went into this one cell, and I remember just standing there, and I was by myself, and the warden came up, this woman, and she was like, are you okay?
01:44:55.000And I was like, yeah, I was just like caught in the thought.
01:44:58.000Like, I spent a lot of time in prison back in the States, and I spent four and a half years in a cell that's probably about half this size.
01:45:06.000And I was like, you know, I'm in solitary confinement.
01:45:19.000When she said, we would never do that to one of our citizens, it made me realize that in America, when you are convicted, your identity as a citizen is taken away.
01:45:54.000She's doing like, I mean, some of the most amazing work in the world.
01:45:58.000And we'll be traveling and she has TSA.
01:46:02.000And there's always this moment when we're traveling together, when we get there, and the TSA agent will be like, oh, ma'am, you can go on that line.
01:46:24.000But is there a dig at my dignity, you know, as a husband, as a father, every time we have to have that look and that exchange?
01:46:32.000And I have to think about as a taxpaying citizen that I pretty much pay more taxes than probably 99% of the country and that I don't have access to all the things that comes with being a taxpayer citizen and that I can actually use clear and move through effortlessly.
01:50:34.000And, you know, when I talk to people like yourself who obviously are very intelligent and have a lot to contribute, and you just imagine, like, that could have been me, man.
01:50:53.000And leaving these communities the way they are and not doing anything to try to fix them is, to me, it's the biggest failure of our government.
01:51:07.000Other than interventional war, interventionist foreign policy and starting wars that are unnecessary and costing lives, which is the worst thing we've ever done.
01:51:19.000And that's the next worst is that we don't do anything about it.
01:51:24.000Yeah, I think it goes back to what you was talking about earlier with talent.
01:51:27.000Like, how much talent are we leaving on the table?
01:51:31.000You know, like when I was just there in Role Light, and so I went to this juvenile program over there.
01:51:36.000And, you know, the reason I went is these kids, they're working in a music program.
01:51:43.000And they've like gone from like getting into all types of trouble to like now they're using art to like, you know, really shift how they think about life.
01:51:50.000And so I was like, well, I'm going to come over there and spend time with them because I've dabbled in working with.
01:51:56.000I ended up doing this spoken word, Peace with Nas, on one of his albums.
01:52:01.000And the kids, they were just fired up about how you can use writing in these other mediums, you know, and so they wanted to work with me on it.
01:52:08.000But the talent that is wasted in prison, you know, the ingenuity.
01:52:16.000Just think about the thing about being able to make a tattoo gun out of a piano wire or a guitar string and an engine from something else, some sort of a motor.
01:53:33.000Yeah, and that was the other part of the idea with MIT is like, how do we take people who don't have traditional kind of educational backgrounds and utilize their talent so that they can add value to society?
01:53:52.000You know, it's one of the things that I appreciate about Silicon Valley is that talent is really more important than your educational pedigree.
01:54:01.000And like if you're talented, they're trying to figure out how can you contribute in a way that is meaningful.
01:54:08.000And it's the same thing with like art.
01:54:10.000Well, it's because it's so competitive.
01:54:34.000And when I was there, it was so fascinating to being, especially a startup, just that startup energy of like, let's just break a bunch of things, let's fail, and let's fix it and let's figure it out and win.
01:54:48.000And I'm like, that's the streets, right?
01:54:51.000Like I tell people this, like I learned, like my business acumen comes from two worlds, from the streets and prison.
01:54:58.000And what I learned from the streets is marketing and promotion.
01:55:03.000I was one of the best at like figuring out how to get our product into other areas.
01:55:08.000There were a lot of skill sets that I didn't even recognize them until I was far removed from that world that, oh, this is just like entrepreneurial talent.
01:55:16.000You know, the ability to problem solve.
01:55:20.000I remember one of the houses we sold at a, they called them trap houses now back then.
01:55:47.000We're going to jail like very soon, right?
01:55:49.000And so I was like, I was sitting there looking at it and I was like, the reason it's a line because we got this armor rod gate as soon as you walk up.
01:55:59.000And I was like, well, what if we move the gate to between the kitchen and the basement and allow the traffic to snake down into the basement?
01:56:06.000Then we kind of keep our, you know, we can seal more low-key.
01:56:50.000That was part of my like my livelihood.
01:56:52.000In prison was loan sharking and then running these underground stores.
01:56:56.000And basically, I worked in the recreation center, which was like the hub so I had access to both sale blocks which means that I can circulate cash on the off days when this sale block gets money this week this one doesn't so I can loan money here pick up the next week and I would just circulate this cash so I was starting to generate this cash flow and then I began to really understand interest rates and like interest rates in prison are ridiculous like a hundred percent markup on everything um but but i also was able to convert
01:58:26.000And I'm like, that's, so that's how I really started the journey.
01:58:30.000And I mean, my first, first day out of prison, I sold my first book in the parole office parking lot.
01:58:36.000And so I took these skill sets from those two worlds and I just applied them to legitimate enterprise.
01:58:42.000And then as I began to kind of pick up, you know, notoriety through, through that and the storytelling, you know, I started speaking at companies and then I actually ended up joining the company that I used to speak at and who became a client of mine.
01:58:55.000They was trying to figure out their company culture.
01:58:57.000And, um, how did, what did, how'd that work out?
01:59:08.000So, so Mark's partner, Ben is a really good friend of mine.
01:59:11.000He's one of, one of my, my, he's, he's my, one of my best friends, but he's also like a great mentor and somebody who really, you know, we're always having these idea exchanges.
01:59:20.000But one time he invited me to his home for dinner with one of the founders of one of their portfolio companies and the founder and I, we hit it off.
01:59:28.000He's this tough, tough Israeli guy who's been through some stuff.
01:59:32.000So we would have these conversations about like grit and determination.
01:59:36.000And, and he had this company called trip actions at the time and they were going through, they were like a skyrocket.
01:59:44.000And then when the pandemic hit the thing, the first thing that suffered was, was travel, you know?
01:59:50.000And so I was, I had already been helping the company, like figure out like some like kind of more of their cultural values and, and the culture.
01:59:59.000And he asked me to join the company, you know, and I originally joined as the head of DEI cause he really wanted to figure out what was happening in the company, how to set people up for success.
02:00:09.000And one day I spoke at an event and the, the, the chief revenue officer was like, I need everybody on the sales team to be able to communicate like that effectively, you know?
02:00:21.000And so I took on my second role, which was head of sales and success culture.
02:00:25.000I got a chance to train one of the best sales teams in the world.
02:00:29.000Uh, this company went from like zero revenue to like, you know, it was nine, nine billion dollar valuation.
02:00:35.000How do you, how do you sort out a program like this?
02:00:38.000Like you had, you had never done this before?
02:00:41.000No, but I did it in prison with figuring out how to like run and operationalize the things I was doing in prison.
02:00:47.000So like, so how did they recognize you that this would transfer over to their corporation?
02:00:52.000I think just conversations like conversations, things I was doing.
02:00:55.000I was doing some of the stuff in nonprofit world too.
02:00:57.000So I, i led an organization in l A around nonprofits raised a ton of money was able to really kind of build out that culture and then Ben actually wrote this book called What You Do is Who You Are.
02:01:09.000And in a book, he talked about some of our conversations around culture.
02:01:13.000And it kind of gave them a framework to really understand how these lessons I learned in prison could really be applied in corporate.
02:01:21.000And, you know, we hear it all the time.
02:01:24.000If you can run a drug operation, you can run a corporate.
02:02:19.000Like you're not just telling them something because you don't want people getting into dust-ups on the yard, but you're telling them because you've actually lived that life.
02:02:26.000And all of that psychology from that world applies in any corporate setting.
02:02:31.000Any company you can imagine, all the things that people are going through, it's the same thing that's happening in prison.
02:02:38.000The only difference is, you know, your colleague might shank you with an email versus, you know what I'm saying?
02:02:50.000But the mindset of like what people are really after, you know, that is the same thing that you're dealing with in prison when you're talking about like the economy, right?
02:03:01.000So, you know, in there, I would find guys to invest in, you know, so if it's like you, you ride in, you from the neighborhood, your family's not taking care of you.
02:03:11.000I would say, okay, well, this little homie, he's on his sale block.
02:03:14.000I'm going to give you, you know, $30, $40.
02:03:31.000And he can ensure that you have all the things you need to succeed if he's a good CEO or she's a good CEO.
02:03:38.000But then you got to do the work, you know.
02:03:40.000And so, all those lessons I learned from in there, how to build community.
02:03:44.000One of the things that I would do because I was hustling on the sale block is I made sure that me and my crew, that we broke bread every day.
02:03:55.000Like we always would take our little ramen noodle cookups together and we would make sure that everybody that we said was like part of our family and crew.
02:04:03.000It didn't matter if they didn't have money.
02:04:05.000It didn't matter if they couldn't put a 10 cent noodle in.
02:04:08.000Just that ability for them to know that when we come to break bread, we're all on the same playing field.
02:04:36.000And, you know, and there was some little chaotic nature to it all, right?
02:04:41.000Because like our friendships didn't come easy in there.
02:04:43.000You know, the price of entry was probably like the craziest shit ever.
02:04:47.000Like my thing was like, when I welcome you into my world, it's based on these two things.
02:04:54.000Are you willing to do life or are you willing to give or lose your life?
02:04:58.000And if you're not willing to do life or take a life, then we can't be hanging out on the yard because the stakes are that high, right?
02:05:06.000It's the same thing in corporate where you're like, listen, we're fighting for something.
02:05:10.000In the startup, we're fighting for this outcome, you know, an acquisition, a merger, an IPO, whatever that thing is to change the world.
02:05:18.000Like, we got to be in the trenches together, you know, and if we break bread together, if we spend this time together, we realize we're fighting for that one thing, it's a game changer, you know?
02:05:29.000And so when I go into these companies, you know, I come in with that mindset of just like the honesty, the vulnerability.
02:05:36.000You know, the things that I'm even in the book that I'm talking about now is like vulnerability, when you hear that, a lot of people don't think that applies to being a CEO.
02:05:46.000But it's one of the greatest unlocks in your company culture is when you can get super transparent.
02:05:52.000And like I learned that from being around great, you know, Ariel, he's a great CEO, and he always got super real with us.
02:06:00.000And when he got super real, it didn't always feel good.
02:06:03.000But what it did is it allowed you to look at, okay, this is what we're really dealing with, you know, and you got to face that thing head on.
02:06:12.000And that's what applies in your real life.
02:07:05.000You know, and so that, all that stuff applies, you know, in corporate and business.
02:07:09.000And when I was writing about it, obviously I'm writing about it from a different perspective of like, you know, I had an experience, man, that was like what even sparked me to write the recent book was I dealt with something that was so high level complex that it landed me on the deepest level of gratitude.
02:07:29.000And it was my brother was murdered in July of 2021.
02:07:34.000And I was sitting in our family's living room and I'm watching my family mourn.
02:07:40.000And I was struck by this profound sense of guilt because I know I made somebody else's family feel like that.
02:07:53.000And so while I should have been grieving my brother and trying to unpack that, it was navigating this complex world.
02:08:00.000And what it led to was the toughest year of my life emotionally of trying to reconcile my brother's murder with who I had become as a kid.
02:08:13.000And what I landed on was that gratitude is one of the greatest keys to freedom.
02:08:20.000And is that if we can lean into being thankful for all of it, right?
02:08:25.000The challenges, the wins, the victories, all the things, that you can live a life that is so rich and abundant in fulfillment because you're always in that spirit of gratitude.
02:08:40.000And you're thankful for the moments you're in.
02:08:42.000And that, to me, when you're in a company setting and everything feels chaotic and you're like, you know, damn, I don't want to get up and go to work.
02:08:53.000If you can just pause for a minute and be like, man, I'm thankful that I get a chance to get up and go to work.
02:08:58.000And I'm thankful for these challenges.
02:09:00.000I'm thankful for the abundance that this brings into my life.
02:09:04.000And that, you know, it's hard sometimes for people to see it because they haven't lost anything.
02:09:09.000But when you've lost everything, you know, you're thankful for like, you know, my gratitude practices are, I wake up in the morning and I try to identify three things that I'm thankful for.
02:09:24.000And they can't be the super obvious things.
02:09:26.000They can't be like, you know, my wife and my kid and the house and the things.
02:09:31.000It's these small things, you know, things that I get excited about.
02:09:43.000You know, you know, I have a device that I can actually communicate with the world and idea, you know, that I have like in the moment that I have it.
02:10:02.000Like, you know, there was a time when I was in prison when, and I don't know what was happening in my family's life, you know, but I didn't have any money.
02:10:14.000And I couldn't even buy a bar of soap.
02:10:18.000And all I had was this state-issue soap.
02:10:20.000And it's a little small bar, about this big.
02:10:22.000It's probably about a quarter of an inch thick.
02:10:30.000And I just remember like this moment of like, man, I can't afford a bar of soap right now, you know?
02:10:42.000And in that same stretch, I was in solitary and I didn't have these shower shoes.
02:10:47.000So in prison, you get these little, you know, shower shoes that you buy for like $2 because you're going to take a shower in this, you know, this cesspool of all these random body fluids or whatever.
02:10:58.000And I tried to wear my regular shoes to the shower.
02:11:01.000And the officer was like, you can't wear those to the shower.
02:11:04.000I'm like, what do you want me to stand barefoot in that shower?
02:11:08.000And she was like, I don't care what you do, but you can't wear those.
02:11:11.000And like that feeling of like shame, you know?
02:11:41.000Like, be intentional about it, though.
02:11:43.000You know, because that's, to me, that's the ultimate freedom, man, is gratitude and to be thankful about, you know, even our complex country.
02:11:51.000Like, we live in a very complex country.
02:13:05.000It was only successful once it got off the air, ironically, in syndication it became, because it was a good show.
02:13:10.000But they were all sitting around and they were reading variety and variety magazine and the Hollywood Report.
02:13:18.000I would call them the devil's rag because you guys are like concentrating on all this shit that is making you compare yourself to other people.
02:13:26.000And you're all getting upset that we're not after friends.
02:14:02.000But for these people, like, there was never, you know, it's just a symptom of Hollywood itself because Hollywood is all about who's number one.
02:14:11.000It's not just about like you're making a great living doing something that's really fun.
02:14:58.000My friend Brian Cowan, he said, all you want is to be able to go to a restaurant and order anything you want and not worry about what the bill costs.
02:15:29.000And just not worrying about your bills is the, I remember I got a development deal, which for comedians, this is back in the day when everybody, they were trying to turn everybody into Jerry Seinfeld.
02:15:42.000They try to turn everybody into a sitcom, Roseanne.
02:15:45.000So everybody, they would come to comedians and they give you a development deal and they would give you like $100,000 or something like that.
02:15:52.000And then they would try to write a sitcom around you and develop a pilot.
02:15:59.000And the first time I got a development deal, I think I was 26.
02:16:07.000I guess I was 26, something like that.
02:16:10.000And, you know, my whole life I'd been paycheck to paycheck, always broke, you know, and for the last five years, just hustling as a comedian, trying to get by.
02:16:18.000I was just happy that I didn't have to have a regular job.
02:16:21.000I was just a comedian, but I was always broke.
02:16:23.000And then all of a sudden, I got, I think I got $150,000.
02:16:28.000And it was like this enormous Weight was lifted off my shoulders.
02:18:13.000No, I think that's the thing that I've really been struck by, you know, when I got out and talking to some of the, you know, the guys and women that I know who've been incarcerated, you know, I do think that we all operate out of that same injury of just, I mean, an energy of like just deep gratitude, you know, because you do really begin to understand what is value when you take it away, right?
02:18:36.000And like, it's that saying of like, you know, you can have a million problems until you get sick and then you only have one.
02:18:45.000And that's the thing about like losing freedom, right?
02:18:48.000And what I've been struck by is, you know, you talk about the people who looks like they have it all and they're not happy and they're not fulfilled.
02:18:57.000That's like being struck with that illness.
02:18:59.000Where it's like you got all the trappings of life right here at your disposal, but you're trapped into this idea that, you know, and sometimes it's not that it's not real stuff, right?
02:19:32.000And I think what happens is that, one, we just haven't created space to like talk about what that really is for us.
02:19:40.000You know, we just kind of deal with it on our own and then it trips people up because it can get heavy at times.
02:19:46.000You know, and if you get hit with a few things back to back, it can actually be overwhelming.
02:19:52.000But if you lean into some of these things that really centers you, you know, being present, like I'm super present in the moments of some time.
02:20:01.000It can be annoying to the people in my life because I'm just like, no, I actually changed my mind like literally this moment.
02:20:06.000And they're like, what are you talking about?
02:20:07.000We planned this whole thing for like, yeah, but I changed my mind because in this moment, this is where I really want to be.
02:20:14.000But it's a beautiful space to be, you know, like that.
02:20:17.000Yeah, that's what I learned in prison.
02:20:18.000So I tell people like, I was incarcerated before I ever stepped foot in a prison cell.
02:20:24.000I was free before I ever got out of solitary.
02:20:27.000And that, that freedom of mindfulness, that freedom of really understanding that the rest of my life is on me, you know, I didn't know if I was getting out of prison.
02:22:39.000Let's just send everybody to the Bing, at least for me.
02:22:43.000I don't advocate for that, but I think in your mind, I think when you were saying that you were in prison before you were ever in prison, there's a lot of people that just don't understand how to think, and that's something we don't teach people at a young age how to think.
02:22:56.000And I think it's a gigantic factor in where you Find yourself in life, and whether you find yourself living a happy, fulfilled life, or whether you find yourself one of those people that lives in quiet desperation, which is most people out there.
02:23:12.000I mean, they've been talking about this epidemic recently with males in general and just like how men are not satisfied with life, you know?
02:23:21.000And I'm like, part of it is like, I think, one, we have to be better.
02:23:27.000I think this is something women build community way better than men do because we're so competitive.
02:23:34.000And like, you, you, and we're not always willing to be vulnerable.
02:23:38.000But I can say, like, well, my, my friendships that I have with men, it starts at vulnerability.
02:23:44.000You know, it starts with like the depth of like, what does it mean to be vulnerable?
02:24:34.000And the truth is like, it's neither of those things.
02:24:37.000You know, those are narratives, but they're not.
02:24:39.000The narratives doesn't necessarily mean that they're true.
02:24:42.000You know, what is true is that we have not created space for honesty and transparency and vulnerability.
02:24:49.000And we haven't identified that as actually a strength.
02:24:53.000And so what I've found that's been amazing, man, is the men that I'm in relationships with as my brothers and my friends, that vulnerability piece is like has been the super unlock for us actually having enjoyable friendships, you know?
02:25:09.000And I think, you know, it's all the things that, you know, these things translate into your work experience.
02:25:15.000They translate into your relationship with your children.
02:25:18.000Like I get so inspired by like my friends, which I also think is important.
02:25:22.000It's like you should be inspired by the people you spend time with.
02:25:26.000Like that, that's invaluable, you know.
02:25:30.000And it doesn't mean that you don't deal with their heart, you know, the hard parts of their life.
02:25:35.000But if you're inspired by them and you're vulnerable with them, the hard parts of their life become beautiful.
02:27:25.000Like that journaling was like, you know, when I sat down and first started journaling, my one task to myself was, you have to be brutally honest.
02:27:38.000And you have to be, and it's not going to be pretty, but you got to be brutally honest.
02:27:43.000Only sit down and journal when you're ready to be brutally honest.
02:28:23.000I hadn't been out, you know, I think most of January, I probably hadn't been out.
02:28:27.000And so I go out to the cages and this one guy, he gets into it with the officers.
02:28:32.000You know, they're having a little verbal, you know, altercation.
02:28:36.000And the officers take it out on all of us.
02:28:38.000So we're only supposed to be out for an hour.
02:28:40.000So that hour, in my mind, already programmed for I'm going to go out, I'm going to walk, I'm going to do my walking for about 15, and I'm push-ups, you know, whatever, keep myself warm, et cetera.
02:30:17.000And, you know, even now, you know, I still have all my journals.
02:30:21.000They're actually on a pad similar to that, like that notepad.
02:30:23.000I still have all my journals from prison.
02:30:25.000And I can go and flip through the pages.
02:30:27.000And it's like, you know, one thing I didn't do enough of, I wish I would encourage people who journalists write the dates on everything because I didn't write all the time.
02:32:44.000What has led to that journaling led to me having powerful relationships with my parents because it taught me how to be vulnerable and it taught me how to talk to them without judging them and to really spend time with them and say, I remember my mother, we had a dust up, you know, because she was upset by something I had written.
02:33:09.000And she said to me, you know, you don't know what my life was like back then.
02:33:47.000You know, meanwhile, the other person is off living their life and they're not even thinking about that thing that you're harping over, you know.
02:33:54.000But I wouldn't have been able to get there without journaling.
02:33:56.000You know, I wouldn't have been able to get there without saying, I'm actually not angry today.
02:34:03.000You know, I used to have these moments where this is an extremely vulnerable thing to say, but it's important.
02:34:14.000Mail call in prison is one of the most emotionally charged times that you will ever serve.
02:34:23.000Because it's that moment of a day where everything gets quiet and everybody who's in the cell block is waiting to either get excited or get disappointed.
02:34:33.000And if you're lucky that someone thought about you and they've sent you a letter or they've sent you $20, you know, $30 or whatever.
02:34:44.000And it induces so much anxiety when you're waiting and you're waiting and you're waiting to hear from someone.
02:34:54.000And I just remember like writing in my journal, you know, I would go to these stretches, man, and I wouldn't hear from my family.
02:35:01.000You know, I would write these long letters and I wouldn't get a letter back.
02:35:07.000I was going through, you know, a time where I felt extremely vulnerable because of the assault on the officer and was worried about my actual well-being, you know, to the point where I started fasting like three days a month, I would like not eat anything.
02:35:23.000I would just drink water and I would just like eat cough drops that I could buy out of the commissary.
02:35:30.000That was the only thing that you can buy that was like digestible other than medicine when you're solitary.
02:35:35.000So you can't get noodles and all the things.
02:35:38.000And so we would buy cough drops and eat those like Jolly Ranchers.
02:35:41.000You know, that was like our little thing.
02:35:43.000And I just remember like writing and just being like, man, I just want to hear from somebody.
02:35:51.000You know, because these people, like, they can do anything to me.
02:35:56.000Like, I've hurt one of their colleagues, you know, and they were telling me, they would, you know, tell me, yo, we're going to come in and fuck you up or we're going to, you know.
02:36:04.000And when you're going through that, you know that there's things that they can do, like they can deprive you of food.
02:36:12.000I don't know if you've ever heard of this, but it's called a food loaf.
02:36:16.000And basically, what happens is, say they pass out the meal and you decide, I'm not going to give the milk carton back.
02:36:25.000Then they can put you on food loaf restriction.
02:36:28.000And so instead of getting a regular tray, they give you this loaf of everything that you would have had that day that's packed into this brick that they bake.
02:36:38.000And so just imagine them just grinding all your food up, you know, your mashed potatoes and chicken patty and stringed things, and then baking it into a little brick.
02:36:46.000And then being like, okay, that's your meal for the day.
02:36:49.000Now, that's what the meal is supposed to be, but what actually happens is they take all the leftover food from that week.
02:36:55.000We cook that with oatmeal and jell-o, so it actually stays together, and they bake it into these bricks.
02:37:02.000And they put it into the freezer, and then when somebody's on food loaf, they'll send over to the child hall.
02:37:08.000We got one on food loaf, and they'll take that brick out, warm it up in the oven, and then send it over to the cell block.
02:37:21.000It is the most gross thing, but it meets their minimum requirement of what they have to do in terms of nurturing.
02:37:29.000So in terms of nourishment, so what I would do is like three days, I would just fast and I would just drink water and I would, you know, use my cough drops.
02:37:37.000And I was doing that because I was preparing myself for if they just decided to make up a lie and be like, oh, he didn't give us back the card or he threw some food on us.
02:37:46.000And then I'm like, I'm physically conditioned to go without food and not suffer.
02:37:53.000And then I realized that when I started to do it, that it actually had these spiritual and these psychological effects that were like benefits I didn't know I needed or was looking for.
02:38:06.000But one, it really was the roots of helping me understand what it means to be resilient and what it means to be capable of overcoming a thing.
02:38:17.000And then it also just helped me self-regulate and know that I can be in control of how I feel about anything.
02:38:24.000And so the first time I did it, it felt, I felt like I was suffering.
02:38:28.000You know, I was like, oh, this is hard.
02:38:29.000This is, you know, this system is forcing me to have to, you know, figure out how to be tough and all the things.
02:38:35.000But by the time I started to do it, I started to feel like gratitude and I started to feel like dishonoring of myself, you know, that I'm willing to fight for myself, you know.
02:38:47.000But all of that came out of being, you know, raw in those journals and just being like, man, I didn't get any mail today.
02:39:16.000And so that journaling really helped me undo a lot of that damage.
02:39:22.000You know, it helped me to start to see myself as like, no, you actually are lovable.
02:39:26.000Like you are, you are worthy of good things happening to you.
02:39:30.000You know, there's a lot of bad things that happen to you, but those all weren't a reflection of your self-worth.
02:39:39.000And so when I got out, you know, it helped me have these deeper conversations with my parents and it really helped me understand like what true forgiveness is.
02:39:47.000You know, there was a time where I had forgave my mother, but it came with attachments.
02:39:52.000You know, I forgive you, but you got to be this now.
02:39:55.000You know, you got to be, you got to nurture me and you got to, you know, take me and, you know, hug me in your bosom like any other parent would do their child.
02:40:31.000We don't even have to like each other.
02:40:33.000But I'm not going to hold myself hostage to the pain of the past.
02:40:37.000Like, you know, that's when I think about, you know, grit and I think about sports.
02:40:42.000And, you know, I watch these athletes who compete.
02:40:46.000You know, they're putting their bodies on the line.
02:40:48.000And, you know, sometimes you can see a person have an injury and you're like, that person's career over because, you know, they don't have the mental toughness to like overcome that adversity, you know.
02:40:59.000And you'll see them quitting in a moment.
02:41:02.000And then you'll see the other ones that they'll have that injury.
02:41:05.000And you know, the moment they get out of hospital, they're like, they're working.
02:41:10.000They're willing to work themselves back to, you know, to whatever they need to do to compete again.
02:41:16.000You know, and like that, that's all of that is that vulnerability and ability to like accept a thing and then decide what you want to do with it.
02:41:25.000Well, I think those lessons that you get from athletes is one of the reasons why we love sports so much.
02:41:43.000I think a lot of people are going to get that out of this conversation too, from you.
02:41:48.000What you've gone through and who you are now is very admirable.
02:41:53.000It really, the way you express yourself, the way you can talk about these ideas and the way you're so vulnerable to just talk about what you went through.
02:42:21.000You know, I find that super fascinating that you can be doing anything you want to do in the world, but you remain super curious about life.
02:42:28.000And that's like such an admirable trait and one that I truly appreciate.