The Joe Rogan Experience - Joe Rogan Experience #2353 - Shaka Senghor

00:00:03.000 The Joe Rogan Experience.

00:00:05.000 Train by day, Joe Rogan podcast by night, all day.

00:00:09.000 All right.

00:00:13.000 What's up?

00:00:14.000 Pleasure to meet you.

00:00:15.000 Such a pleasure to be here.

00:00:16.000 Yeah, it's I heard your story.

00:00:20.000 Why don't you tell everybody your story?

00:00:21.000 Because the story is pretty wild.

00:00:24.000 Yeah, so I grew up in Detroit, working class neighborhood.

00:00:29.000 Dad was in the Air Force and worked for the state.

00:00:33.000 Mom was a homemaker. 0.99

00:00:34.000 So on the outside looking in, it really looked like a household where the kids should make it.

00:00:41.000 But unfortunately, it's a very abusive household.

00:00:44.000 And I ran away when I was about 13 years old.

00:00:48.000 And at the time prior to that, you know, honor role scholarship student, dreams of being a doctor, artist.

00:00:55.000 I wanted to be a doctor because I felt like that was an occupation where I felt like you can help people.

00:01:01.000 And 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.

00:01:13.000 But I found myself on the east side of Detroit in an apartment with a gun to my head.

00:01:20.000 And it was my introduction to the street culture.

00:01:23.000 I was being robbed.

00:01:24.000 And I was being robbed by this guy who later we would learn his name was Tiny.

00:01:30.000 Even though he was like big, fat, probably about six feet tall.

00:01:34.000 And him and his partner, Lily, robbed me at gunpoint, took my drugs, took the money.

00:01:39.000 And I think that was like one of those moments where the innocence of being a kid just was shattered.

00:01:47.000 You know, it's like, you know, now I'm in this world where my life is in danger.

00:01:51.000 But I stayed in that culture.

00:01:53.000 My childhood friend was murdered.

00:01:55.000 I was beat nearly to death.

00:01:58.000 And despite that, I just continued to sell drugs.

00:02:01.000 You 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?

00:02:09.000 It's like, you know, we're out here making money.

00:02:11.000 We're doing things.

00:02:13.000 But the reality is it's a kid navigating a very dangerous adult world at the time that crack is just penetrating the community.

00:02:22.000 And one of the things that always go back to this image of the first time I made a lot of money.

00:02:27.000 And I just had this wad of cash.

00:02:29.000 Like it's just like all singles, $5 bills, $10 bills.

00:02:32.000 And I went to the store on the corner and I bought all the cereal that I can think of.

00:02:38.000 Like all the cereal that I could not.

00:02:40.000 You 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.

00:02:47.000 And then I bought like chocolate milk and strawberry milk.

00:02:50.000 And then I went back to the crack house.

00:02:51.000 Wow.

00:02:52.000 And you were like, what, 13?

00:02:54.000 Literally like 13 years old.

00:02:55.000 And so, you know, I stayed in that culture.

00:02:59.000 And then when I was like 17 years old, I was standing on March 8th.

00:03:03.000 I'll never forget that day.

00:03:04.000 I was standing on the corner.

00:03:06.000 And I got into like a minor conflict.

00:03:09.000 And then I got shot multiple times.

00:03:13.000 And that was probably the most serious turning point in my life.

00:03:18.000 After I got shot, they called Ambulance and the Amalance never came.

00:03:23.000 At this time, I'm on the west side of Detroit.

00:03:25.000 And I'm just sitting on the porch bleeding.

00:03:28.000 And my friend, he was like, look, I'm going to have to take you to the hospital because the ambulance is just not going to come.

00:03:35.000 And I remember getting in the car and he's just like, you know, breathe.

00:03:39.000 Like, you got to take these deep breaths.

00:03:41.000 You know, this is how you're going to navigate the pain.

00:03:43.000 And the reason he was able to do that, he had got shot the year prior.

00:03:47.000 You know, so it's just like he got shot.

00:03:49.000 His friend got killed.

00:03:50.000 So 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.

00:04:02.000 And so I get to the hospital.

00:04:04.000 They take two of the bullets out of my leg and they leave one bullet in.

00:04:08.000 And basically, they patch me up.

00:04:11.000 And, you know, I remember my dad coming to the hospital.

00:04:14.000 And at this point, I was the third of my brothers to be shot.

00:04:18.000 And 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?

00:04:35.000 And 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.

00:04:45.000 And 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.

00:04:52.000 Like that's the number one priority for me.

00:04:54.000 It's like, you know, I got to get, I got to retaliate.

00:04:58.000 And then I'm standing outside.

00:05:00.000 This is probably like day two.

00:05:02.000 So I'm like literally in the neighborhood crutches, patched up bullet wounds.

00:05:02.000 I had crutches.

00:05:06.000 I'm standing on the corner.

00:05:08.000 And I remember a car coming down the street.

00:05:12.000 And like my body almost seized up.

00:05:16.000 And I was like, why am I feeling this kind of like anxiety?

00:05:21.000 Now it's anxiety back then.

00:05:23.000 There was no name for it.

00:05:25.000 But I couldn't tell my friends that I really was afraid of standing outside and being exposed.

00:05:30.000 Yeah.

00:05:30.000 Wow.

00:05:31.000 And so that was 17 years old.

00:05:33.000 And so what happened after that was I began to tell myself this story that if I found myself in conflict again, I would shoot first.

00:05:47.000 And I began to literally carry a gun every day.

00:05:50.000 It wasn't the first time I had carried a gun, but like I began to carry a gun like every day.

00:05:54.000 Like it didn't matter what I was doing.

00:05:55.000 Using the bathroom, gun is on the sink.

00:05:59.000 Going to sleep at night, gun is up under the pillow.

00:06:01.000 Probably wasn't the smartest place to sleep with a gun.

00:06:05.000 But that was the nature of how I felt, you know, what I was dealing with.

00:06:10.000 And so I started to tell myself this narrative.

00:06:12.000 And about 16 months or so later, maybe 14 months, I was DJing a party.

00:06:19.000 And, you know, I love music.

00:06:21.000 You know, I come from Detroit.

00:06:22.000 It's one of the greatest music cities, you know, in the world.

00:06:26.000 And so I'm DJing this party and shots ring out.

00:06:30.000 People are running, scrambling, you know, getting away.

00:06:34.000 And, you know, the people whose party I was DJing, they come to the back.

00:06:37.000 They're like, somebody got shot in the front.

00:06:39.000 So we got to shut everything down.

00:06:41.000 So we shut the party down.

00:06:45.000 We were on like super heightened alert.

00:06:47.000 You know, we're getting, making sure everybody, we got headcount for like our crew.

00:06:51.000 And, you know, it's me and my girlfriend, and we're going back to my home.

00:06:57.000 And I remember us walking, we had walked around to the party.

00:07:00.000 We were walking back and this truck pulls up.

00:07:03.000 And this, you know, this car full of guys.

00:07:05.000 And so, you know, Ed's, I got a pistol on me.

00:07:07.000 So I'm like, you know, what's happening?

00:07:09.000 And he was like, oh, no, we just, you know, so I know that Derek was the guy who shot the guy in front of the house.

00:07:13.000 So now we got at least some idea of who, what the shooting is was.

00:07:17.000 We get back around.

00:07:19.000 And when they get on our block, car's coming up the street.

00:07:22.000 And there's a guy inside the car.

00:07:25.000 And he's like, yo, you know, he calls me over.

00:07:27.000 And I'm like, you know, what's happening?

00:07:29.000 He's like, yo, I want to make a deal, blah, blah.

00:07:31.000 And he got two guys that I don't know.

00:07:34.000 And I'm like, no, I don't want to do the deal right now.

00:07:38.000 Like, there's a lot going on.

00:07:39.000 And, you know, so I'm a little amped up.

00:07:41.000 You know, it's a lot going on.

00:07:43.000 And so we get into this verbal altercation where he's like adamant about me selling some drugs to him.

00:07:49.000 I'm adamant about him like, you know, getting off the block.

00:07:52.000 And so that escalates into like a full-blown argument.

00:07:55.000 And one of the guys in the car with him, he joins into the argument.

00:07:58.000 So we're like all back and forth, back and forth.

00:08:02.000 And there's a moment where, you know, I turned to some moment I turned to walk away.

00:08:11.000 And I like literally took what, probably like one or two steps.

00:08:19.000 And I thought I heard one of them trying to get out of the car.

00:08:23.000 And I turned and fired four shots that tragically ends the man's life.

00:08:32.000 You know, it's one of those moments that I always think about that moment.

00:08:43.000 Like, what if I would have just took, like, a second step?

00:08:45.000 You know, what if I would have just, like...

00:08:51.000 But when I tragically ended this man's life, and it wasn't the first time I had been in a gun battle.

00:08:58.000 It wasn't the first time I had been in any of that, that lifestyle.

00:09:03.000 I felt it.

00:09:04.000 I felt like I did something that was like, you can't undo.

00:09:09.000 Like, I just, like, I felt it in my spirit.

00:09:11.000 Like, at 19 years old, I'm like one month into being 19.

00:09:16.000 And I was just like, I fucked up.

00:09:20.000 Like, I've done something that's not.

00:09:23.000 You can't repair that.

00:09:26.000 You can't come back and say, I'm sorry.

00:09:28.000 You can't come back and be like, you know, I made a mistake or whatever.

00:09:34.000 And so, you know, the car screeches off.

00:09:38.000 You know, people are running inside the house.

00:09:41.000 Everybody's just like, you know, what is happening?

00:09:45.000 I made everybody leave.

00:09:47.000 And then I was like, I got to go on a run to something.

00:09:53.000 I don't want to get arrested.

00:09:54.000 I don't want to be accountable.

00:09:57.000 But I was arrested probably a day or so later.

00:10:00.000 I was charged with open murder.

00:10:02.000 And I was eventually convicted of second-degree murder and sentenced to 17 to 40 years in prison at the age of 19.

00:10:10.000 Wow.

00:10:15.000 So take me through what it's like when you got convicted.

00:10:21.000 You know now you're going to jail.

00:10:25.000 What is this feeling like?

00:10:27.000 So when I got arrested, got charged, the first thing I went to the county jail, Wayne County Jail.

00:10:36.000 And going into the county jail, you are introduced to just this other world.

00:10:43.000 You know, I had heard about it, you know, growing up on the street, you hear about like, you don't want to go to the county jail.

00:10:47.000 It's the worst shit ever, right?

00:10:49.000 And so going into the county jail was like, you know, it's going into a war zone.

00:10:54.000 You know, it's fights every day.

00:10:55.000 It's like, you know, people are testing you.

00:10:57.000 Can they fucking take your breakfast and lunch? 0.99

00:11:00.000 So 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.

00:11:09.000 And 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.

00:11:18.000 And so he's, you know, he's kind of telling me all the kind of what to expect in jail.

00:11:23.000 And, you know, this guy right here on the cell block, he likes to fight all the time or whatever.

00:11:27.000 You know, I also grew up like in the city, right?

00:11:30.000 So I'm, you know, I tell people this all the time.

00:11:32.000 Like, 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.

00:11:40.000 If you're from the hoods, you've probably had a fight or two.

00:11:42.000 You know what I'm saying?

00:11:45.000 But 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.

00:11:54.000 And typically guys kind of back down.

00:11:57.000 But early on, I'm like, I don't want to be in jail.

00:11:59.000 I don't want to be in prison.

00:12:00.000 So I ended up trying to escape from the county jail.

00:12:05.000 And what happened was there was a guy on the cell block with me.

00:12:08.000 He was already sentenced.

00:12:09.000 He's about to go upstate and do a lot of time.

00:12:12.000 And one day he went to recreation and came back with like a long pole he had smuggled from the rooftop gym.

00:12:19.000 And his idea was that he would blunge in the officer, take the officer's uniform, and then let us out the cell and take us out.

00:12:26.000 And I'm like, dude, this has got to be the dumbest fucking idea ever.

00:12:31.000 We're not making it out of the cell block, right?

00:12:33.000 But I was like, well, if we take this pole and we bust the window out and bend the beam?

00:12:39.000 And so we plot over the next couple of weeks.

00:12:42.000 We like would take people's sheets. 1.00

00:12:45.000 Like we would bully people out of their sheets.

00:12:47.000 Like you can only have one sheet.

00:12:48.000 You're going to take the other one.

00:12:50.000 So we took all these sheets and we probably ended up with probably about 60 or 70 sheets.

00:12:56.000 And we can get out of ourselves.

00:12:57.000 So we would basically you tie the sheet up into a knot, slide the knot under the door and pull it up into the door jam.

00:13:05.000 And if you shake it and keep rocking it while you're pulling it up, it'll pop open.

00:13:09.000 And so we would just pop out and we'd be out on, like literally in the day room.

00:13:12.000 You know, this back you could smoke cigarettes in the building.

00:13:15.000 That's the only way we can get a light because the lighter was on the wall.

00:13:18.000 So we would do that all the time anyway.

00:13:20.000 So when it was time for us to do the escape plan, it was about five of us.

00:13:24.000 We all had agreed we're going to go for it.

00:13:27.000 And basically we pop the doors.

00:13:29.000 We're like busting out the glass in the window.

00:13:35.000 And we're starting to bend the beam.

00:13:37.000 What we didn't anticipate was that they actually do perimeter checks like around the jail.

00:13:42.000 You know, we're dumb kids.

00:13:44.000 We're not like thinking about this.

00:13:45.000 And so as we're bending it, next thing you know, there's a light flashing up to the window.

00:13:51.000 And you can hear like the lady on the radio like, what the fuck are y'all doing?

00:13:55.000 We're like, we're trying to get out.

00:13:57.000 So now we're like, we're busted.

00:13:58.000 So we just throw everything on the tier.

00:14:01.000 Everybody goes back, you know, in their cells.

00:14:03.000 And so it took them probably about a half hour before they even discovered which unit we were on that was trying to escape.

00:14:11.000 They came up there like gangbusters, like Lily, you know, it's 20, 30 depths.

00:14:15.000 They just came in snatching us out the cells, slamming us on the wall, you know.

00:14:20.000 And where they messed up is because they did that.

00:14:23.000 Now everybody has glass in their shoes.

00:14:26.000 And so they couldn't even differentiate between who had been out, who wasn't.

00:14:31.000 And so they, you know, they put us in solitary for that, charged us with attempting escape.

00:14:37.000 And during that time, I was actually getting sentenced.

00:14:40.000 And none of us would snitch and talk about, like, none of us would tell who it was.

00:14:44.000 So they really was just kind of going on what they thought.

00:14:48.000 So we served that little time in there, but I was getting sentenced.

00:14:52.000 And, you know, when I went in front of that judge, I just remember standing there and listening to them walk through that night.

00:15:01.000 You know, the prosecutors telling what happened that night.

00:15:04.000 And it was a one-dimensional telling of that story.

00:15:08.000 It was the, you know, it was the very factual, like, hey, this guy, you know, shot, killed this man.

00:15:14.000 It was no context to none of my life.

00:15:18.000 And when the judge sentenced me, you know, he said 15 to 40 years for the homicide and two years for the felony firearm.

00:15:30.000 At 19, I thought my life was over.

00:15:37.000 Like, I thought that was it.

00:15:39.000 Like, at 19, I couldn't even imagine, you know, 17 years down the line.

00:15:44.000 You know, at that age, I couldn't even imagine like two weeks down the line.

00:15:47.000 It felt like a lifetime.

00:15:49.000 So when he sentenced me, I was like, this is it, man.

00:15:55.000 Like, my life is over.

00:15:57.000 And so I started my prison sentence with the mindset that I was never getting out of prison.

00:16:06.000 How much time did you wind up doing?

00:16:08.000 I did a total of 19 years.

00:16:10.000 And out of that 19 years, I did seven of those years in solitary confinement.

00:16:20.000 What is that like?

00:16:21.000 It is the...

00:16:38.000 One, a lot of people who are in solitary confinement have pre-existing mental health challenges, meaning that they have diagnosed bipolar, schizophrenia.

00:16:52.000 And it's 23-hour lockdown.

00:16:54.000 23-hour lockdown, five days a week, 24-hour lockdown, the other two days a week.

00:17:00.000 And it is the most chaotic environment you can imagine.

00:17:06.000 The guys there, you know, to wage war with each other would just like the steel foot locker.

00:17:12.000 They would bang it for hours.

00:17:13.000 Like these guys would just have, I mean, the endurance to do that for hours to antagonize a person next to you.

00:17:21.000 They 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. 0.97

00:17:34.000 So 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.

00:17:49.000 We can make weapons out of anything.

00:17:51.000 We can make, you know, tools out of anything.

00:17:54.000 So 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?

00:18:08.000 So five days we can go out to these cages.

00:18:12.000 Just imagine a dog kennel, like a dog run, right?

00:18:14.000 It was like kennel after kennel after kennel.

00:18:16.000 So that's how they would take us out.

00:18:18.000 And you're in a cell.

00:18:20.000 They come and they handcuff you to these handcuffs attached to a leash.

00:18:25.000 And they walk you down the tier, take you out to this dog kennel, and they let you out.

00:18:29.000 And so they have to give you at least an hour of that a day.

00:18:33.000 And so these guys would come out and they would be, you know, beefing with their neighbor.

00:18:39.000 And now it's a full-on, they're just squirting shit on each other.

00:18:43.000 Like it's fucking insane.

00:18:45.000 And there was this one guy, man.

00:18:47.000 I remember this one guy.

00:18:48.000 He had a coloscomy bag.

00:18:50.000 I mean, this was like the equivalent of having a fucking AK-47.

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00:19:28.000 And man, we were like, cool.

00:19:29.000 So he would tell Me today is like, don't come out.

00:19:31.000 He would like send me a note over, like, don't come out the yard today.

00:19:34.000 I'm about to shoot this bitch up. 1.00

00:19:36.000 Like, dude, what are you talking about?

00:19:38.000 So, he would like go out there and whip the coloscomy bag off and just literally take the yard hostage.

00:19:43.000 Like, don't nobody say shit.

00:19:45.000 You say something, I'm gonna store shit everywhere, right?

00:19:47.000 Um, and so that's how they would wage war.

00:19:50.000 And so that's what, that was the chaos of the environment.

00:19:53.000 And then, like, you know, we get into it with the officers, guys would like flood the sail block.

00:19:58.000 So they would put sheets in the toilet and just flush, flush, flush.

00:20:01.000 And now the whole tier is just flooded.

00:20:04.000 And 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.

00:20:20.000 So you're not like, they're not cleaning them out in between showers.

00:20:23.000 So you're literally handcuffed.

00:20:24.000 They take you down to the shower cage.

00:20:26.000 You 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.

00:20:34.000 And then you got the guys who we call them cutters.

00:20:37.000 So these are guys who like self-maim.

00:20:41.000 And 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.

00:20:49.000 So they stopped us from like even getting, at one point we can get like a little tape player.

00:20:54.000 And a guy ended up swallowing the batteries.

00:20:56.000 So they banned all batteries.

00:20:58.000 So then we couldn't listen to music anymore.

00:21:00.000 And so it was just like complete chaos.

00:21:03.000 And, you know, it's one of the darkest places, you know, in the world.

00:21:10.000 And I've been in different solitary, you know, in prison.

00:21:13.000 Out of 19 years, I was transferred a total of 19 years to 11 different prisons.

00:21:18.000 And so I've done solitary in like a super old prison, more of the modern prison.

00:21:23.000 But the one I did the most time in, which was from 1999 to 2004, was called Oaks Correctional Facility.

00:21:33.000 It's one of the more modern prisons.

00:21:35.000 And so, you know, in the midst of that chaos, I decided like I got to, there was a couple of things.

00:21:42.000 So one, I had read this book about what's supposed to happen to your mind when you're in that environment.

00:21:48.000 And it talks about like how it will cause you to hallucinate.

00:21:52.000 It talks about how it will cause you to not feel like you have like any agency over your life.

00:21:57.000 It affects how you communicate.

00:22:00.000 Because 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.

00:22:08.000 So it's all these different things that I kind of knew going in.

00:22:12.000 And 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.

00:22:18.000 I was never worried about my physical safety.

00:22:22.000 You know, I grew up fighting.

00:22:23.000 I grew up with brothers.

00:22:24.000 You know, I grew up on the east side of Detroit.

00:22:26.000 So I knew how to like take care of myself.

00:22:29.000 Losing 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.

00:22:40.000 You know, they're not the same.

00:22:41.000 And 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.

00:22:53.000 And so I set my days up like I was at university.

00:22:58.000 And I always say this, Joe, this is like super important.

00:23:02.000 I was lucky.

00:23:04.000 And I was lucky because I was literate.

00:23:06.000 And like the average reading grade in prison is about third grade.

00:23:10.000 And I wouldn't be here with you right now if I didn't know how to read.

00:23:14.000 Like I would not be the person that I am today.

00:23:18.000 And so because I knew how to read, I was able to really structure my days like I was at a school.

00:23:24.000 You know, I would study philosophy in the morning.

00:23:27.000 I would study world history.

00:23:28.000 I would study African history.

00:23:29.000 And then I would just like read for pleasure.

00:23:32.000 But I was always like, you know, every day I'm figuring out, okay, how do I keep my mind moving forward?

00:23:38.000 And if you keep your mind moving forward, you can actually survive.

00:23:42.000 And it's, you know, it's no different than any other hard shit you got to go through.

00:23:45.000 But it's really like, can you keep your mind taking one more step?

00:23:50.000 And then there were some days where I was like, I don't, I don't like, yo, this shit is too much.

00:23:55.000 Like, I'm fill myself like physically, like I can't take one more day.

00:24:00.000 And in those days, I would just grab a book, man, of somebody who inspired me.

00:24:04.000 You know, sometime it would be Nelson Mandela.

00:24:07.000 He had been through like 27 years.

00:24:11.000 And I would just like open it up and like, let me just start reading something.

00:24:14.000 I would read the poem Invictus.

00:24:16.000 Like that poem always just kind of brought me back.

00:24:19.000 Like, you're the master of your own fate.

00:24:20.000 You know what I'm saying?

00:24:21.000 You're the captain of your soul.

00:24:22.000 So I would go back and read that.

00:24:24.000 There's a book called As a Man Thinkers by James Allen.

00:24:27.000 It's about 60-something pages.

00:24:29.000 I would literally, my version of that was so dog-heared, but I would like literally just open it up.

00:24:34.000 And any page was about, if you master your thinking, you can master your environment.

00:24:40.000 And so it was like things like that would keep my brain just going forward.

00:24:45.000 You know, obviously I would work out, you know, do push-ups and calisthenics and roll-up.

00:24:50.000 I 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.

00:24:58.000 So I would do that, take that mattress, put it on my back, I would do squats.

00:25:02.000 So 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.

00:25:15.000 And I mean, at that time, I still was like, you know, I wasn't like a model prisoner.

00:25:20.000 You know, I don't want the listeners to be confused by that because it's a little different, right?

00:25:25.000 It's somebody who follows the rules and just stays out of the way and get out of trouble.

00:25:30.000 Like, I was into bad shit in there.

00:25:34.000 You know, I was not, I didn't ever think I was getting out.

00:25:37.000 So I was like, I just got to run an environment.

00:25:40.000 You know, I got to be in control in this environment.

00:25:42.000 I got to, you know, make all the moves to have agency over my life in that environment.

00:25:49.000 And so initially, while I was in there, I was just, I was only focused on getting out so I can finish getting into shit.

00:25:58.000 So what initially sent you to Solitaire?

00:26:02.000 So, the first time I went to Solitaire was for an assault on a guy who was my neighbor.

00:26:11.000 And basically, I didn't have any money on my books at the time.

00:26:15.000 And, you know, story came around and I was like, I'm going to go take his shit.

00:26:20.000 And so I literally went to rob this guy.

00:26:23.000 And he happened to be coming in the cell at the time.

00:26:25.000 We got into like a fisticuffs.

00:26:27.000 And so they took me to solitary for that.

00:26:30.000 And I did about a year for that.

00:26:32.000 A year?

00:26:33.000 Yeah.

00:26:33.000 And then, because what happened was an officer got assaulted in the process.

00:26:37.000 He jumped on my back.

00:26:38.000 And I thought it was like his cellmate coming to help him.

00:26:41.000 And I kind of threw him off me.

00:26:43.000 And so that cost me about a year.

00:26:46.000 And then the second time, this was some crazy shit.

00:26:50.000 So I was at the Michigan Reformatory.

00:26:52.000 And at the time, I'm the line foreman.

00:26:53.000 So 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.

00:27:03.000 And we were all about efficiency.

00:27:04.000 Like, we want to move these guys through as fast as possible because the child hall is where all the shit goes down.

00:27:10.000 The stabbings go down.

00:27:12.000 It's crazy.

00:27:12.000 So we're trying to move guys out.

00:27:14.000 And this guy, man, he's just holding up the line.

00:27:17.000 And so what happened is that sometime they would send these guys over to the reformatory was like a higher security level.

00:27:24.000 It's the old, you know, it's the oldest prison in Michigan at the time.

00:27:27.000 It's called the Gladiator School.

00:27:29.000 And 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.

00:27:38.000 And usually when they come over there, they don't realize that this is a different, this is a different game.

00:27:42.000 You know what I mean?

00:27:43.000 Like the reformatory is real prison.

00:27:46.000 Those lower levels, it's like a fucking camp.

00:27:49.000 You're not dealing with, you know, you're dealing with real prison.

00:27:51.000 And so this guy comes over, he's holding up the line, and we're like, yo, like, what's, what's the holdup?

00:27:57.000 And so he starts to cuss our crew out.

00:27:59.000 You know, like, basically, y'all bitches acting like this. 1.00

00:28:02.000 Y'all fool.

00:28:03.000 Give me more potatoes.

00:28:04.000 Like, so it's like he's upset.

00:28:05.000 He's not, he don't feel like he's getting enough.

00:28:07.000 And so I'm just, I'm talking to the guy, and I'm like, yo, I'm like, I'm like, chill out.

00:28:11.000 Like, what's the situation here?

00:28:13.000 And he's like, they acting like this.

00:28:13.000 You know?

00:28:14.000 They're fool, blah, blah. 0.95

00:28:16.000 And I'm like, what you want?

00:28:18.000 He's like, you know, y'all give me some more.

00:28:19.000 So now he's being disrespectful.

00:28:21.000 So I was like, all right, I got it.

00:28:22.000 So I load him up on mashed potatoes, gravy, call him to the window, and I slap him with it.

00:28:28.000 And I was like, yo, don't come to the window disrespectful.

00:28:32.000 And so I then slapped him with this whole tray of potatoes and gravy.

00:28:36.000 And he takes off running these.

00:28:38.000 He like runs it to the officers, you know.

00:28:40.000 And so my supervisor, who was cool, and he was like, go to the back and like hide.

00:28:44.000 So he's trying to hide me.

00:28:45.000 I'm one of his better workers.

00:28:46.000 He don't want to lose me to this.

00:28:49.000 And so that led to me being in solitary for a year.

00:28:52.000 A year.

00:28:53.000 Another year.

00:28:54.000 For slapping the guy with mashed potatoes.

00:28:54.000 For hitting the game.

00:28:56.000 Yeah.

00:28:57.000 And so now I'm there for another year.

00:28:59.000 But the last incident, which was happening in 1999, me and this officer, we got into a conflict.

00:29:09.000 And the conflict escalated when he pushed me.

00:29:12.000 Like, literally, he wouldn't let me go to the bathroom.

00:29:14.000 He pushed me and then I beat him up.

00:29:16.000 And 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.

00:29:31.000 Me and this guy, we get into a confrontation.

00:29:34.000 It escalates.

00:29:36.000 At this time, like I'm 27.

00:29:39.000 All I do is lift weights, work out, whatever.

00:29:43.000 And I don't even realize the difference between a 27-year-old grown man's strength and the boy that walked into prison.

00:29:53.000 And 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.

00:30:02.000 I'm just like, we get into the thing, it escalates.

00:30:05.000 So I punch him.

00:30:06.000 And as soon as I punch him, I like go for the scoop, pick him up, and his leg gets caught under my arm.

00:30:13.000 So I slam him down.

00:30:14.000 His radio flies over the railing, lands on the floor.

00:30:21.000 Now, when this conflict happened, they're doing what's called emergency count.

00:30:26.000 So every month in prisons all across the country, emergency count, they blow us a siren.

00:30:32.000 And everybody, it doesn't matter what you're doing.

00:30:33.000 If you're working the kits, you got to drop what you're doing.

00:30:36.000 Everybody has to go back to the cell block.

00:30:38.000 And so what happens is, you know, they'll let people use the restroom, et cetera.

00:30:43.000 But that siren is gone.

00:30:45.000 And so when me and him are up there fighting, the siren is gone.

00:30:47.000 So the officer downstairs doesn't even know that this is happening upstairs.

00:30:51.000 The thing that saved his life and saved me from a life sentence was his radio flew over the gallery and landed.

00:30:59.000 And so a counselor coming in looks and sees the radio and was like, why is it the radio here?

00:31:06.000 Looks up and sees the confrontation happening.

00:31:09.000 And so he hits his button.

00:31:11.000 All the officers come over.

00:31:13.000 They dive on my back, separate us, take me to solitary.

00:31:17.000 So when they take me to solitary, I'm in here.

00:31:18.000 I'm raging.

00:31:20.000 I'm still in that energy.

00:31:23.000 And the guy next to me, he's banging on the wall.

00:31:26.000 He's like, yo, look down because I can see down to the cell block.

00:31:29.000 Now there's an ambulance out there.

00:31:31.000 And basically what happened is when I punched him, I broke his trachea.

00:31:35.000 And so they had to perform emergency surgery on him literally in front of the cell block.

00:31:40.000 And so I was sentenced to an additional two years and then what ended up being four and a half years in solitary confinement.

00:31:48.000 And the only reason that man did not die that day is because his radio flew over.

00:31:56.000 And, 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.

00:32:16.000 And 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.

00:32:25.000 And I would have literally been serving the rest of my life in prison.

00:32:29.000 And so when that happened, I remember they transferred me that same day.

00:32:36.000 They transferred me.

00:32:37.000 So I was at, that happened at a prison called Muskegon Correctional Facility.

00:32:40.000 They transferred me to Oaks Correctional Facility.

00:32:44.000 And 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.

00:32:53.000 And, you know, we're going to, you know, you're going to get yours.

00:32:56.000 And, you know, it was the most vulnerable, you know, I felt because I knew that it happened in there.

00:33:05.000 You know, I know that they can come in, they can just say, oh, he did this.

00:33:09.000 And they can come in with the goon squad and pepper spray you and beat the shit out of you.

00:33:14.000 And you're cuffed up and there's nothing you can really do.

00:33:18.000 You know, so it was very tense for about a month or so.

00:33:24.000 And then there were officers who was at the facility where it actually happened at, that transferred over.

00:33:30.000 And 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.

00:33:40.000 You know, they knew it was an escalation.

00:33:42.000 And 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.

00:33:54.000 There were things I probably could have did differently.

00:33:58.000 But what they told me at that point was like, you're never going to get out of here.

00:34:02.000 You know, you're never going to get out of here.

00:34:05.000 And 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.

00:34:13.000 You know, I was like, whatever.

00:34:14.000 You know, I'll do a year or two without here and they all let me go.

00:34:18.000 And then I started seeing guys around me who had been in solitary for 10 years.

00:34:24.000 A friend of mine, he's actually out now.

00:34:26.000 His name is Peter.

00:34:27.000 He works, I think he's like a clerk back in Michigan.

00:34:31.000 But he was my neighbor.

00:34:33.000 He was in solitary for 10 years.

00:34:35.000 There was a guy across from me that was like, this guy was one of the most fascinating people I've ever met.

00:34:40.000 He was a con man.

00:34:41.000 Like he was masterful at manipulating the officers.

00:34:44.000 But he was in for 20 years.

00:34:45.000 You know, he had solitary for 20 years.

00:34:50.000 And so when I started seeing that, I was like, man, I might never get out of here.

00:34:55.000 And the first two years, I was kind of resigning myself.

00:35:02.000 I remember writing my dad this letter.

00:35:09.000 I wrote my dad this letter and I just said, you should just go on with your life.

00:35:21.000 Because they're never going to let me out of here.

00:35:24.000 And my dad wrote me back and he said, you know, I can't even pretend to act like I understand the world that you're in.

00:35:35.000 But I will never leave your side.

00:35:39.000 And so that's how resigned I was to the idea that I was going to die in there.

00:35:48.000 And it wasn't until I was in about two years or so.

00:35:58.000 Maybe about a little over a year.

00:36:01.000 And basically, I started journaling.

00:36:06.000 And it was inspired by a letter I got from my son.

00:36:10.000 And my son told me that his mother had told him why I was in prison.

00:36:14.000 And he wrote this letter and he's like, my mother told me that you're in prison for murder.

00:36:20.000 And he said, dad, don't kill.

00:36:22.000 Jesus watches what you do.

00:36:25.000 And when I got that letter, like, you know, I wasn't religious, you know, I'm not religious, not spiritual.

00:36:37.000 But there was something about that that just like struck me like in the most heartbreaking ways.

00:36:42.000 It's like, I have a kid out here who I have let down and whose mother is telling him stories about me without context.

00:36:52.000 And I don't have a way to reach out to him and say, hey, son, here's all the shit that happened.

00:36:59.000 And so I was like, you know, I got to turn my life around.

00:37:03.000 And I can tell you, like, over the years, every time I got into some shit, I would just be like, all right, this is it.

00:37:12.000 You know, this is the last time.

00:37:15.000 It was always these moments of like, I'm going to do right this time.

00:37:20.000 But it was never about me.

00:37:21.000 It 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.

00:37:31.000 It was never a real thing.

00:37:34.000 And so when I started journaling, I started with this essential question of like, man, how did I end up here?

00:37:40.000 Because up to that point, I didn't think of myself as a bad person.

00:37:44.000 Like, I didn't think of myself as like angry.

00:37:47.000 I didn't think of myself as like, I didn't even think of myself as violent.

00:37:52.000 I thought that I had just gotten into some situations that people provoked me in.

00:38:00.000 And so I asked this question of like, man, how did you, how did you get here?

00:38:04.000 Like, you're the smart kid.

00:38:06.000 You know, you're the kid that want to be a doctor and an artist.

00:38:10.000 And how the hell did you get here?

00:38:13.000 And so I started going back and I started asking myself questions based on when was the first time you got arrested and what led to that?

00:38:24.000 You know, and then what happened the second time?

00:38:27.000 And when was the first time this thing happened and that thing happened and who was responsible?

00:38:32.000 And what I was able to do was I was able to go back and realize that I had all this trauma.

00:38:39.000 I had all these traumatic things that happened to me as a kid, but I also had caused a lot of hurt.

00:38:45.000 And I did a lot of things that really was like, no, actually, you probably are a bad person.

00:38:53.000 And so as I began to write and sort those things out, I realized I had never accomplished.

00:38:58.000 I never finished anything.

00:39:00.000 I started a bunch of things.

00:39:01.000 You know, I never finished high school.

00:39:03.000 I was like probably one of the smartest kids in the class.

00:39:07.000 Went to job corps, got kicked out before I finished that.

00:39:11.000 Was going to go to the military, never followed up to take the test.

00:39:14.000 So I was a consummate quitter.

00:39:16.000 You know, I started some stuff and would never finish.

00:39:19.000 And so I said, in my journal, I said, listen, if you're going to turn your life around, you have to finish one thing.

00:39:30.000 You have to challenge yourself to finish one thing.

00:39:33.000 And so I'm looking around the cell and I'm like, okay, what can I do?

00:39:36.000 I've done all the push-up challenges.

00:39:38.000 You know, you could do in solitary.

00:39:41.000 And I was like, you should write a book.

00:39:44.000 But you got to write the book in 30 days.

00:39:48.000 If you write this book in 30 days, you can change your life.

00:39:52.000 If you don't, you're going to die in prison.

00:39:59.000 And that was my charge to myself.

00:40:03.000 And I'll tell you, like, in solitary, there's no, like, you don't have a word processor, a typewriter.

00:40:11.000 You can't even have like a regular ink pen because, you know, they're scared you're going to like sink somebody or stick somebody.

00:40:18.000 They give you this little flimsy plastic pen.

00:40:21.000 And so I remember getting a pen.

00:40:23.000 I got like a little pad of paper.

00:40:26.000 I said to myself, like, it's no way possible you're going to write a book in 30 days with that pen.

00:40:34.000 It's just not possible.

00:40:36.000 And I remember saying to myself, this is what you always do.

00:40:41.000 You always make an excuse.

00:40:44.000 You always make a way to get out of being accountable.

00:40:48.000 What are you going to do?

00:40:49.000 Are you going to turn your life around or are you going to bullshit the rest of your life away?

00:40:55.000 And so I sat there for a while and I was like, what if I roll this pen up in some paper?

00:41:03.000 And I literally took some paper and I started to roll the pen up so it was firm enough and it was like the size of a regular pen.

00:41:10.000 And I wrote that first book in 30 days.

00:41:14.000 And I knew I would never go back to prison if I ever got out.

00:41:17.000 But at that point, I still didn't know if I was getting out.

00:41:21.000 So what did you write?

00:41:23.000 So the first book I wrote was a novel.

00:41:27.000 It was a fiction novel.

00:41:29.000 I love reading.

00:41:30.000 You know, I was really fortunate to really be able to escape through books.

00:41:37.000 So I was like, well, I want to try to write a book.

00:41:40.000 And I love these stories I was reading.

00:41:43.000 I was reading like Westerns, Louis Lemour, one of my favorite authors, Donald Gowan.

00:41:50.000 So he had all these street books like Dope Fiend and Black Gangster.

00:41:55.000 And it was like all this kind of underbelly, Iceberg, Slim, Pimp.

00:41:59.000 All these stories were stories I had read early on.

00:42:02.000 And these guys, they were like me.

00:42:04.000 Like Donald Goan served time in prison.

00:42:06.000 And so I'm like, well, if these guys can write a book, then what if I give it a try?

00:42:10.000 And so my first novel was literally about this girl who played street basketball.

00:42:18.000 Her dad was like a street basketball legend.

00:42:20.000 And so I wrote that book.

00:42:22.000 And I remember just like, I had never felt a greater sense of pride in myself than writing that book on a notepad.

00:42:34.000 And I still have the original books that I wrote in solitary confinement on notepads and on the back of paper.

00:42:42.000 I'll send you some pictures of it.

00:42:43.000 It'll blow your mind.

00:42:45.000 And I remember writing that book and I got out.

00:42:48.000 So I write the book.

00:42:50.000 This is some wild shit.

00:42:52.000 So after I write it, I'm like, well, a book really isn't a book until somebody reads it.

00:42:58.000 And so I clammed down on my floor and I'm like, yo, like, somebody want to read this book I just wrote?

00:43:06.000 And I remember this guy at the other end of the tier was like, don't nobody want to read that bullshit.

00:43:10.000 This ain't over.

00:43:14.000 So, so, Joe, here it is.

00:43:15.000 I'm like, I'm trying to like, I'm trying to turn my life around.

00:43:18.000 I'm like, now I got to thank this guy for disrespecting me.

00:43:20.000 You know what I'm saying?

00:43:22.000 So, 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.

00:43:29.000 Like, I'm a shot cart if I can have you done, right?

00:43:33.000 And then I stepped back and I was like, no, he actually just gave me a go.

00:43:38.000 Like, 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?

00:43:47.000 And then another guy, he agreed to read it.

00:43:50.000 And 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?

00:43:55.000 So we would make these fish lines out of our underwear.

00:43:59.000 So we take all of the string out of your underwear. 0.97

00:44:01.000 You attach that to a toothface tube that you scrolls in all the toothpaste out of and stuff with paper.

00:44:07.000 So you stuff it with toilet paper, wet toilet paper.

00:44:09.000 Then once that dries, it has enough weight that you can slide it up and down the tier.

00:44:14.000 And so then sometimes we would use our socks.

00:44:16.000 Most 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.

00:44:27.000 And so I attached the book to it, man, slid it under the door.

00:44:31.000 And I don't hear for this guy like all day.

00:44:33.000 So now I'm like nervous as shit because I'm like, it's my only copy.

00:44:36.000 You know what I'm saying?

00:44:37.000 I was like, I didn't get the guy my only copy and he ain't responding.

00:44:41.000 But then he came back to the door, man, and he was like, you know, that's one of the best books I've ever read.

00:44:48.000 And I was like, wow.

00:44:50.000 It blew my mind for like literally about five minutes.

00:44:53.000 And then I thought about it.

00:44:54.000 I was like, man, he in solitary confinement.

00:44:56.000 He over there bored his shit.

00:44:59.000 I could have sent him anything.

00:45:00.000 I could have sent him a recipe.

00:45:01.000 It's the best chicken soup recipe ever, right?

00:45:04.000 So, but I was like, okay, maybe if I send it out, you know, send it out to people.

00:45:09.000 And so I started sending my writing out to like, I have a brother.

00:45:12.000 He's my stepbrother.

00:45:14.000 And like out of all my siblings, he's the one of us that's like always played by the books.

00:45:18.000 You know, he went to school.

00:45:19.000 He went to college.

00:45:20.000 He was an engineer, like one of the big three.

00:45:23.000 And he just always done it by the books.

00:45:26.000 And I remember sending it to him.

00:45:27.000 And he had never wrote me in prison.

00:45:29.000 Like never wrote me in prison.

00:45:31.000 I sent him the book.

00:45:32.000 And I remember I still have his letter to this day.

00:45:35.000 And he wrote back and he said to me, this writing is better than most of the people I went to school with.

00:45:43.000 And I want to help you figure out, you know, a path forward.

00:45:48.000 And so just getting that affirmation for somebody who he wasn't in the streets, he wasn't in a prison cell block, though.

00:45:55.000 He had did it the right way.

00:45:57.000 Like, just that little boost, man, was like, okay, maybe I'm on to something, you know?

00:46:02.000 And so I wrote my second book right after that.

00:46:07.000 And I gave myself the same thing.

00:46:09.000 You got to finish it 30 to 60 days.

00:46:11.000 And then I started a third book, man.

00:46:13.000 And I went into the deepest bottle of depression that I had experienced in prison.

00:46:23.000 And it was because by the time I got to writing book three, I realized I had this incredible talent and that it had always been there.

00:46:32.000 And that I had let all the trauma, all the violence, all the street life overtake my life.

00:46:41.000 And I'm like, I'm in this environment.

00:46:43.000 I can't give birth to this dream.

00:46:45.000 Like, so it was, it was the most, like, getting sentenced was like, my life is over.

00:46:52.000 But not being able to actualize a dream based on a gift I was given, that was devastating.

00:47:02.000 You know, and so I was going through this depression.

00:47:06.000 And I did what I always would do, which was go back to those books.

00:47:09.000 And, 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.

00:47:19.000 But I was getting into all this philosophy, man.

00:47:21.000 And 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.

00:47:32.000 And if you focus your life on negative thoughts, you're going to only produce negative outcomes.

00:47:38.000 And 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.

00:47:53.000 And 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.

00:48:01.000 And I began to just refocus my energy on getting out of solitary.

00:48:07.000 And I remember saying, if I'm going to get out of here, I need help.

00:48:14.000 Like, they're not like the way it looks on paper, they're not just going to let me out, you know?

00:48:19.000 And so I wrote this letter to the warden, and it was a super philosophical letter about the truth.

00:48:25.000 And 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.

00:48:38.000 And I'm like, if you look at my record, you would know that I've honored my word.

00:48:44.000 Like at that point, I had probably maybe I think about 34 misconducts.

00:48:51.000 And they ranged from everything, a dangerous contraband to assault on staff, assault on inmate, you name it.

00:48:58.000 And I was like, so the thing you know more than anything else is I'm a man of my word.

00:49:04.000 And 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.

00:49:12.000 And if you give me this opportunity to get out of solitary, I'm going to focus on two things.

00:49:17.000 I'm going to mentor these other young guys, and I'm going to focus on becoming a writer.

00:49:23.000 And I sent that letter to the warden, and the warden literally wrote me back.

00:49:28.000 And he said, you know, despite my hesitation here, I believe you, and I'm going to advocate for you to get out.

00:49:38.000 And 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.

00:49:46.000 And so it took about another two years before I got out of solitary.

00:49:50.000 The assault was on an officer.

00:49:51.000 Yeah, on an officer, yeah, yeah.

00:49:52.000 Yeah, on an officer.

00:49:53.000 And so it took literally another two years before I finally got out.

00:49:58.000 But 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.

00:50:11.000 And I found that if I gave them books that was similar to their life, they would put in more effort.

00:50:18.000 And so that's what I focused on, you know.

00:50:20.000 And then I typed those books up and I was like, I started to send them.

00:50:24.000 I was sending stuff out.

00:50:26.000 I still got like copies of my query letters, man.

00:50:28.000 I was just sending stuff out in the dark.

00:50:30.000 Like I sent like Jay-Z was like the president of like Def Jam at one point.

00:50:35.000 I was like, oh, you should publish this book because you rap about this shit.

00:50:38.000 I already live here.

00:50:40.000 I sent it to him and I was just like, did he respond?

00:50:42.000 No, he never didn't.

00:50:44.000 I never got a response.

00:50:46.000 But 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.

00:50:53.000 And I just kept going at it.

00:50:55.000 And then I was like, you know what?

00:50:57.000 I'm responsible for my own dream, you know?

00:51:00.000 And so I took the money that my parents sent me and money I hustled on the yard.

00:51:06.000 I still had hustles.

00:51:07.000 They just weren't like illegal hustles.

00:51:09.000 So I wasn't doing like drug smuggling, but I would sell, you know, the merchandise on the yard for twice what it's worth.

00:51:16.000 And I just took that money, man.

00:51:18.000 I saved it up.

00:51:19.000 And I published my first book from prison in 2008.

00:51:24.000 How did you do that?

00:51:26.000 So I bought this book.

00:51:27.000 I ordered this book called A Self-Help Guide to Self-Publishing.

00:51:32.000 And I taught myself everything I needed to learn about publishing.

00:51:36.000 Like I knew how to get a copyright, an ISBN number.

00:51:39.000 I had a partner outside who believed in what I was doing.

00:51:43.000 And I basically would just be like, here's the steps I need you to take to, you know, execute this.

00:51:48.000 And found a graphic artist and a printer.

00:51:52.000 And yeah, and published the first book.

00:51:54.000 And then the prison sued me for the cost of my incarceration.

00:51:59.000 Wow.

00:52:00.000 Yeah.

00:52:01.000 They tallied it up to like a million dollars.

00:52:04.000 Yeah.

00:52:05.000 Because 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.

00:52:15.000 And so higher security levels, it was about $150 something a day.

00:52:18.000 Lower security levels, like $70 something a day.

00:52:21.000 And it was like, by the time you get out of prison, it'll be about a million dollars.

00:52:25.000 And so we want 90% of anything you earn off this book.

00:52:30.000 They thought I had got a book deal.

00:52:31.000 They didn't realize I had like self-published.

00:52:34.000 And 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.

00:52:47.000 And I was just like, look, I'm coming home with a conviction.

00:52:51.000 I got three felonies, right?

00:52:53.000 I'm convicted of second-degree murder, felony firearm, and it's assault on an officer.

00:52:59.000 And I'm like, if I put that on a resume, nobody's going to hire me when I get out.

00:53:06.000 And I'm like, fair, I get it.

00:53:09.000 Like, if I'm in a hiring position and I only saw that, probably not hiring that person either.

00:53:16.000 So I'm giving myself a chance.

00:53:18.000 You know, I'm trying to give myself a chance.

00:53:20.000 Like, I don't want to go back to the streets.

00:53:22.000 I want to be able to contribute to society, but I know society is not going to give me an opportunity.

00:53:29.000 So I'm creating an opportunity for myself, you know?

00:53:32.000 And so I went through the court case and this is how they ended up not getting any money, right?

00:53:40.000 So 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.

00:53:52.000 So 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.

00:54:02.000 I used to work in a law library, so I was like, you know, I know contractual law is binding.

00:54:07.000 And the lawsuit was only binding as long as I was incarcerated.

00:54:12.000 And so I just made sure that I didn't make any money, you know, until I got out.

00:54:17.000 But 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.

00:54:26.000 I've been out 15 years now.

00:54:27.000 At that time, nobody was like really talking about second chances if you have a violent crime.

00:54:35.000 You know, if you had a non-violent crime, there's a chance you can get a job and you get out.

00:54:39.000 And so I was realistic.

00:54:41.000 I'm like, yo, nobody's going to hire me.

00:54:42.000 So I got to figure out how to make it happen myself.

00:54:45.000 And so I went through that lawsuit and it was tough.

00:54:49.000 It was tough because I'm like, this is the first time I'm trying to do something legit.

00:54:53.000 Like, I'm, you know, I've sold drugs.

00:54:55.000 I've hustled on the yard.

00:54:56.000 I'm trying to move into like doing something with my life.

00:55:00.000 You know, I don't want to be, I don't want to be thugging it out forever.

00:55:02.000 I don't want to be, I don't want to be one of those people that go in and out of a prison system.

00:55:06.000 You know, I don't want to die here.

00:55:07.000 Like, I want to, and I want to actually add value.

00:55:10.000 Like, I know some things that I think is helpful in the community.

00:55:13.000 But if you take this away from me, then what do you expect me to do?

00:55:18.000 Right.

00:55:18.000 You know?

00:55:21.000 So they were under the impression that you had got some crazy big book deal.

00:55:26.000 Yeah.

00:55:26.000 And so they were just trying to stop it and try to fuck up your dream.

00:55:30.000 Yeah.

00:55:34.000 God.

00:55:36.000 I mean, I kind of almost can see it from their side if they hate you.

00:55:41.000 You know, like, fuck this dude.

00:55:42.000 What can we do to derail this?

00:55:45.000 Or, you know, if you're a corrections officer, you're not making a lot of money.

00:55:49.000 At all.

00:55:50.000 No.

00:55:50.000 And you're in there and then you think, is this motherfucker getting rich?

00:55:55.000 Right.

00:55:56.000 And then there's also jealousy of talent.

00:55:59.000 That's a real thing.

00:56:00.000 Absolutely.

00:56:01.000 When you find out a person has talent, and especially if you don't have any talent, talent is like, talent is a gift from God.

00:56:09.000 It's like you either have it or you don't.

00:56:11.000 You can develop some talent, but some people have talent.

00:56:16.000 There's something that some people, like there was a video we played the other day of Biggie rapping on the street when he was 17.

00:56:23.000 You ever seen that video?

00:56:24.000 Yeah.

00:56:25.000 I mean, you can't teach that.

00:56:27.000 You can't teach that kind of power.

00:56:29.000 At all.

00:56:29.000 At 17, that's a gift.

00:56:31.000 That's a gift.

00:56:32.000 You know, some people just have a gift.

00:56:34.000 And sometimes that gift comes from pain.

00:56:37.000 You know, sometimes that gift comes from a life of struggle and hardship.

00:56:41.000 And it just, the emotional turmoil builds something inside of you that comes out in your art.

00:56:48.000 And people hate people with gifts.

00:56:51.000 They really do.

00:56:52.000 Especially if they hate you already.

00:56:52.000 They really do.

00:56:55.000 Yeah, I wasn't their favorite, you know?

00:56:58.000 But the crazy thing is, like, that's how I originally took it.

00:57:03.000 And I think that was some of the impetus to them filing a lawsuit.

00:57:07.000 But the policy itself is wild.

00:57:10.000 Because 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.

00:57:23.000 That's fucked up.

00:57:24.000 But it's discriminate in terms of how they apply it and when they apply it.

00:57:28.000 And 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?

00:57:37.000 And then I'm going to send this to the attorney general and they're going to sue you.

00:57:40.000 So it was crazy, man.

00:57:42.000 Yeah.

00:57:43.000 What is it like the day you get out of solitary?

00:57:48.000 So you did it three times.

00:57:49.000 Yeah.

00:57:50.000 Two one-year stretches and then one more.

00:57:52.000 California, yeah, yeah.

00:57:56.000 So on that last one, man, one, I just, I didn't, I didn't believe I was getting out.

00:58:01.000 You know, after a while, you started to kind of, you know, start to play with your mind.

00:58:06.000 You know, you see these guys that got, you know, they've been in for 20 years, you know.

00:58:10.000 But 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?

00:58:19.000 Because you got to go.

00:58:20.000 So it goes like this.

00:58:22.000 When you had an assault on the officer, you got to go to the warden.

00:58:26.000 And then the warden goes to like a regional director.

00:58:28.000 And the regional director goes to like the main Director.

00:58:31.000 And so each time I would make it like, oh, I got it to the warden, then the regional sets it down.

00:58:35.000 I got it to the regional, then the head shuts it down.

00:58:38.000 So it's like you're getting your hopes up and you don't know when it's going to end.

00:58:42.000 You 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.

00:58:54.000 A lot of my friends reached out to me and was like, you know, how do we help people navigate these tough times, right?

00:59:01.000 The isolating feeling of being in the pandemic.

00:59:04.000 And 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.

00:59:13.000 And that's exactly what happened, right?

00:59:15.000 It's like, all right, everybody's going to go into lockdown.

00:59:18.000 And then on April 30th, we're all free and clear.

00:59:22.000 It's like, nope, we're going to stay until March.

00:59:24.000 Nope, I think we should stay until June.

00:59:27.000 Nope.

00:59:27.000 So we just, you started to lose that orientation because you can't put your feet on solid ground.

00:59:33.000 That's what it's like in solitaire.

00:59:35.000 You just don't know.

00:59:36.000 But way worse.

00:59:36.000 Yeah.

00:59:38.000 The extreme of that, right?

00:59:39.000 Yeah.

00:59:40.000 And 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.

00:59:52.000 And so the wild thing was like that last year in solitary, so they have these guys come over to the cell block.

01:00:00.000 They're like clean up, they pass out the food trays.

01:00:03.000 So they usually come from the protection unit.

01:00:06.000 The last year, they stopped letting them guys come in because it was just creating too much conflict because they was like, they got beef.

01:00:11.000 Now you over here and guys are trying to get to them.

01:00:13.000 So it's crazy.

01:00:14.000 So the guys who was coming over was from general population and these was like guys I knew, you know.

01:00:18.000 So like the last year I was there, you know, they would come through, man, they would smuggle me candy bars.

01:00:23.000 I hadn't had a candy bar in like three years, you know.

01:00:26.000 And 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.

01:00:38.000 I don't know where he put them at.

01:00:39.000 I didn't even ask questions.

01:00:40.000 I didn't want to ask questions.

01:00:42.000 And I remember like running them over cold water so they can solidify.

01:00:46.000 So when I tell you, it was like them Snickers was like the best ever.

01:00:51.000 I mean, the details of how I can taste that given that I had been gone from it.

01:00:56.000 So I told him guys, I was like, man, they let me out.

01:00:58.000 It's going to be like George Jefferson strolling out of here, you know?

01:01:01.000 And so that's literally how it was, man.

01:01:04.000 They popped that door.

01:01:06.000 I mean, I took my little bag of shit and my books and threw that thing.

01:01:10.000 And I'm George Jefferson strolling.

01:01:12.000 I'm like, I'm out.

01:01:12.000 I'm like, y'all have never seen me because I had really, you know, I looked at it like this.

01:01:18.000 I was like, you know, up to that point in my life, I had let myself down so many times.

01:01:25.000 You know, I had been beat down by life, the traumas, the fucking, all the things.

01:01:32.000 And it was the first time I felt like I was fighting for myself.

01:01:39.000 I felt like I was fighting for myself.

01:01:41.000 Like, I'm going to get out of here.

01:01:43.000 All the things I said I'm going to do, I'm going to get out and I'm going to do them.

01:01:46.000 And 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.

01:01:55.000 And I'm going to fight for this kid.

01:01:57.000 And so I was so, I was like, I'm moving on up, but I'm moving on up into like a higher purpose in my life.

01:02:05.000 And that's what I got out, man, and I went to work.

01:02:08.000 I'm like literally went to work.

01:02:09.000 I took those books, you know, I typed them up.

01:02:12.000 You know, I figured out, you know, how to publish a book.

01:02:15.000 You know, I started preparing for parole.

01:02:18.000 The year that I published the book, I went up for parole that same year, 2008.

01:02:24.000 And I was at a prison.

01:02:25.000 At this time, they had transferred me to lower security levels.

01:02:28.000 So you started to work your way down, which is its own craziness.

01:02:32.000 Because at that point, I only did a hard time.

01:02:37.000 And going down in security level is like crazy.

01:02:41.000 Because now you're dealing with these guys that's coming straight off the streets.

01:02:44.000 They're like, you know, you're dealing with, there's kind of a hierarchy in the streets.

01:02:49.000 You know, there's a hierarchy of mindset in the streets.

01:02:52.000 Like 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.

01:03:04.000 And so now you're in lower levels.

01:03:07.000 You're dealing with a lot of guys who really should probably be in an addiction environment versus actually prison.

01:03:15.000 You're dealing with your failure to pay child support, DUIs, low-level drug offenses, petty theft.

01:03:26.000 So you're dealing with a different mindset of guys who are really still, they're trying to heal.

01:03:31.000 They're just coming fresh off the streets. 0.93

01:03:34.000 And it's an open setting.

01:03:35.000 So I'm going from like being in a cell by myself to like now I'm in this like cubicle with these random guys.

01:03:44.000 But I was just preparing myself, man.

01:03:47.000 I was like, you know, I want to get out and I want to add value to society.

01:03:52.000 And so, you know, they had transferred me.

01:03:54.000 So now at this point, I'm way up.

01:03:56.000 I'm in northern Michigan over the Upper Peninsula.

01:03:59.000 So I'm about 12 hours from, you know, my hometown.

01:04:02.000 My dad comes up, my dad, my stepmom, my oldest son.

01:04:07.000 And, man, we go into this parole hearing.

01:04:10.000 It probably lasted, you know, maybe a minute.

01:04:14.000 You know, this lady, she was just like, why did you do what you do?

01:04:18.000 It was like a very hard line, just the facts, you know?

01:04:22.000 And I was just like, I'm not getting out, you know, like I knew it.

01:04:27.000 Like that hearing was so fast.

01:04:28.000 She didn't even, you know, listen to my dad.

01:04:30.000 It was just very curt.

01:04:32.000 And I was like, man, no, I'm not going home yet, you know?

01:04:38.000 And so how many years in was this?

01:04:40.000 So at that point, I had 17 years in.

01:04:43.000 And how much time do you have to wait before you can apply for parole again?

01:04:48.000 So technically it can be anywhere from 12 months to 24 months.

01:04:52.000 They give what's called a flop or a passover.

01:04:56.000 So they gave me a 12-monther.

01:04:59.000 And usually you go back within about 10 months of that to go back to the same process again.

01:05:05.000 And sometimes less when they're trying to deal with budget issues and kind of get guys out.

01:05:10.000 So I went back probably about eight, 10 months later.

01:05:13.000 What did she say to you when she denied you parole?

01:05:17.000 She didn't tell me she was denying me like in the in the hearing.

01:05:20.000 It was just the way that the hearing was handled where it was like she didn't ask, you know, what are your plans when you get out?

01:05:27.000 Who were you before that incident?

01:05:29.000 What led up to that incident?

01:05:31.000 Like it was just very, you know, basically you killed someone and that's it.

01:05:38.000 And I think when I was even trying to explain to her, I think she just kind of like shut it down.

01:05:45.000 She put you in a category.

01:05:46.000 Yeah.

01:05:47.000 She shut it down.

01:05:48.000 Like it was almost like me explaining to her was making an excuse.

01:05:51.000 You know, that was the way that she responded.

01:05:54.000 And 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.

01:06:04.000 That'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.

01:06:22.000 You're just in a category.

01:06:23.000 You're a murderer.

01:06:24.000 Yeah.

01:06:26.000 You know, that's the scariest part about, you know, our penal system overall.

01:06:26.000 Yeah.

01:06:31.000 There's no rehabilitation.

01:06:33.000 You have to do it.

01:06:33.000 Right.

01:06:34.000 Your story is so similar to many stories that I've heard.

01:06:38.000 Yeah.

01:06:39.000 You know, I've done a lot of podcasts with my friend Josh Dubin.

01:06:44.000 You know, Josh?

01:06:44.000 Yeah.

01:06:45.000 That's the lawyer guy, right?

01:06:46.000 Yeah.

01:06:47.000 He's a guy who used to work for the Innocence Project.

01:06:49.000 Now he works for the Ike Perlmutter Center for Legal Justice.

01:06:54.000 And it's mostly dealing with wrongfully incarcerated people.

01:06:58.000 Yeah.

01:06:59.000 And, you know, and some of them, the stories, you just, you hear it and it just kills you.

01:07:09.000 It breaks your heart.

01:07:10.000 And you just try to imagine what it's like to be that person.

01:07:13.000 Yeah.

01:07:14.000 Dealing with corrupt DAs, corrupt prosecutors, corrupt everything, corrupt cops.

01:07:22.000 And people just get railroaded because they need to hang a conviction on somebody.

01:07:26.000 Absolutely.

01:07:28.000 It's one of the scariest parts of the system.

01:07:30.000 So one of my best friends, his name is Calvin.

01:07:33.000 Calvin did 24 years for a crime he didn't commit.

01:07:37.000 And he's out now.

01:07:39.000 And he has one of the, man, he has one of the most incredibly positive spirits of anybody I've met, given what he's been through.

01:07:51.000 And the hardest part about any of this, you know, is exactly what you say.

01:07:56.000 It's like when you're labeled for the rest of your life, it hits you, you know, because it impacts your ability to contribute.

01:08:06.000 And what people don't know is like 90% of people incarcerated will get out at some point.

01:08:11.000 And we have to decide who do we want to be as a society.

01:08:14.000 Like, do we want to give people a second chance to prove themselves?

01:08:19.000 And like, I'm not a person who has a mindset of like, you just throw the doors open and let everybody out.

01:08:34.000 I know, again, that I was fortunate and I was lucky to be literate.

01:08:40.000 And I was lucky to have read books that led to me really putting in the hard, arduous work of reimagining a life for myself.

01:08:49.000 That's tough work.

01:08:51.000 That none of us gets out of there without our scars.

01:08:54.000 You know, there's things about me right now that I can directly pinpoint, oh, this is because of what I went through in solitary.

01:09:03.000 There are some things that I was able to take out of that environment and turn into a positive.

01:09:08.000 Like, you know, sometimes people will hear my story and they'd be like, oh, well, solitary actually worked out for you.

01:09:13.000 You know, like, I'm like, no, I'm like, there's a difference between solitary and solitude.

01:09:20.000 And like, solitude is something that I think that all of us should explore more broadly in our lives.

01:09:27.000 We all just need time to get away from even the most positive aspects of our life.

01:09:32.000 Sometimes you need to step back because it allows you to have even deeper gratitude.

01:09:37.000 But I really was just lucky, man.

01:09:38.000 I 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.

01:09:49.000 You 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.

01:10:00.000 It doesn't excuse you.

01:10:01.000 Like, I don't make excuses for the decision I made that night.

01:10:05.000 I just want to be clear about that.

01:10:06.000 There's like all these causal factors that lead to us becoming who we are in whatever capacity.

01:10:14.000 But that's the tough stuff we don't like to grapple with because it's not efficient.

01:10:19.000 You know, it's not easy to figure out.

01:10:23.000 I mean, the facts of it is like, it's not easy, right?

01:10:25.000 It's not easy to be like, okay, this person killed somebody, so we should give him a second chance.

01:10:32.000 But 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.

01:10:45.000 And like, those stories should be lifted up.

01:10:47.000 We should be contributing.

01:10:48.000 We probably have an appreciation of freedom that's just different from everybody else's.

01:10:52.000 Oh, absolutely.

01:10:53.000 Like, I think there's the appreciation, for me, it's the appreciation of freedom.

01:10:59.000 But it was also falling in love with the beauty of my mind.

01:11:04.000 Like, 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.

01:11:18.000 And 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.

01:11:33.000 Like, that's what, like, for me, freedom is that.

01:11:36.000 You know what I'm saying?

01:11:37.000 Freedom is like, you know, the book that I've recently written is called How to Be Free.

01:11:42.000 And 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.

01:11:56.000 And they're incarcerated by heartbreak.

01:12:00.000 They're incarcerated by shame, grief, anger.

01:12:05.000 I mean, I've met people who have it all.

01:12:07.000 They have the best job in the world.

01:12:10.000 They have more money than they will ever be able to spend.

01:12:13.000 And there's a thing from their life that does not allow them to be fulfilled.

01:12:19.000 You know what I mean?

01:12:21.000 And 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.

01:12:33.000 You know, like I'm like, I'm like a kid, man.

01:12:35.000 I'm like.

01:12:36.000 Yeah.

01:12:36.000 That's beautiful.

01:12:37.000 I'm curious about life.

01:12:38.000 We should all keep that kid.

01:12:38.000 You know.

01:12:41.000 Man.

01:12:42.000 Protect it, too.

01:12:43.000 Yeah.

01:12:44.000 You know.

01:12:44.000 And protect it.

01:12:44.000 Don't get hard.

01:12:45.000 Yeah.

01:12:46.000 I mean, life forces you to get hard in a certain way.

01:12:46.000 Yeah.

01:12:50.000 And I'm sure your life forced you to get hard in a way that most people can't comprehend.

01:12:55.000 But the fact that you can hang on to that, the childlike joy of things.

01:13:01.000 Yeah.

01:13:02.000 That's the curiosity.

01:13:04.000 You know, I'm like the biggest nerd.

01:13:05.000 I love it, man.

01:13:07.000 It's like, I already said to my son, I'm like, I'm the coolest nerds you'll ever meet.

01:13:11.000 You know what I'm saying?

01:13:12.000 Because there's a thing, like, you know, I got out, like two years after I was a fellow at MIT Media Lab.

01:13:20.000 You got to imagine, like, how wild that was, Joe.

01:13:22.000 Like, I'm going from, like, the barbarity of prison.

01:13:26.000 24 months.

01:13:27.000 Yeah.

01:13:27.000 And now I'm at, like, the most technologically advanced school in the world.

01:13:31.000 And I always say it was like Fred Flintstone going into an episode of The Jetsons.

01:13:36.000 Because it was like, when I got there, it was like robots were like, I mean, it was crazy.

01:13:42.000 Like, I mean, they had these cars that, like, parked themselves.

01:13:45.000 And I was just, my mind was blown, you know.

01:13:48.000 And I remember one time being there, and the director was like, he can tell I felt, like, out of place.

01:13:55.000 And he was like, don't worry about it.

01:13:59.000 You can contribute.

01:14:00.000 Like, you can contribute.

01:14:01.000 It doesn't matter where you come from.

01:14:03.000 You can contribute.

01:14:03.000 And I remember how that stuck with me of, like, man, I can contribute, you know.

01:14:09.000 What were you doing there?

01:14:10.000 So I was working on a project called the Atonement Project, where we were using technology and art to facilitate restorative justice conversations.

01:14:18.000 It'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.

01:14:27.000 And I felt like art and technology provided a vehicle to kind of bridge that gap, you know.

01:14:33.000 And I remember this one story.

01:14:35.000 This was, like, super funny.

01:14:36.000 So I'm there.

01:14:38.000 And one time I'm in one of the labs.

01:14:40.000 So they would do these demo days.

01:14:41.000 You can go around to all the labs and, like, watch all this crazy technology.

01:14:45.000 And there was this one kid, man.

01:14:47.000 He was working on something in the auto industry.

01:14:49.000 And he was trying to get this.

01:14:52.000 It was like one of those screens to kind of perform in a very particular way.

01:14:56.000 And I was just watching him.

01:14:57.000 I was like, man, he just keep bumping up against it.

01:14:59.000 It was so obvious to me, like, what the problem was.

01:15:02.000 Like, 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.

01:15:08.000 And I remember saying that to him and just seeing him, like, it was almost like a light bulb just fired off in his head.

01:15:15.000 And I was just like, man, that was wild because this is a smart kid.

01:15:19.000 You know, this kid is brilliant, right?

01:15:21.000 And so I said, I want to do a prison hack here.

01:15:26.000 And I want to challenge these students and faculty to solve some problems based on the problems we had to solve in prison.

01:15:33.000 And so they said, yeah, you should do it.

01:15:36.000 And so I literally told them all the things that I wanted.

01:15:39.000 And I came up with five design challenges.

01:15:42.000 And 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.

01:15:49.000 You have to make what we call a stinger, which is like kind of like so you have a hot pot, right?

01:15:54.000 So 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.

01:16:06.000 So you have to figure out how to heat them up.

01:16:08.000 And 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.

01:16:14.000 And you got to splice them.

01:16:16.000 And then you put it in the water and plug it up.

01:16:18.000 And then it heats the water up.

01:16:19.000 And so now you can make your noodles, your coffee.

01:16:21.000 You just put in the cord right into the water?

01:16:23.000 Yeah.

01:16:24.000 But if you do it, you got to put it in first before you plug it up.

01:16:27.000 Because if you, like, plug it up first.

01:16:29.000 Yeah.

01:16:30.000 If you plug it up first, then it blows the power out in the cell block.

01:16:34.000 Now you got a whole other problem.

01:16:37.000 And so we would, that's how we would heat up our noodles, our coffee, oatmeal, whatever.

01:16:41.000 And then I had them, if back in the day, we used to get these little radios.

01:16:46.000 They're not boom boxes, but they're like little G radios or something.

01:16:50.000 And they disable, you know, you from playing, you know, your tape player to them because there's no tape player attached.

01:16:57.000 So you have to figure out how to connect that to the big radio.

01:17:00.000 And then it plays from your tape player through the big speaker.

01:17:03.000 And then I had them make a lighter out of batteries and wire.

01:17:08.000 And then to make a fish line out of the same material I told you about earlier, the string out of the socks.

01:17:14.000 And so I gave them like three hours to complete these challenges.

01:17:17.000 And we're going for three hours.

01:17:20.000 They blew the power out at MIT Media Lab.

01:17:22.000 It's like the best.

01:17:25.000 It felt like an intellectual victory.

01:17:27.000 I was like, yes, these super smart kids, they blew the power.

01:17:31.000 And so we get to the three hours.

01:17:34.000 I mean, one of the kids burnt themselves.

01:17:35.000 I got videos like burnt themselves, like trying to get the lighter.

01:17:38.000 And they almost got the tape player.

01:17:40.000 I think if they had probably about three more hours, they had to figure all this stuff out.

01:17:43.000 But I had two goals with that.

01:17:45.000 that 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.

01:18:09.000 And 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.

01:18:23.000 We literally throw people away.

01:18:25.000 And I would have been one of those people that have been thrown away had I not had the ability to write.

01:18:30.000 And so, you know, it's those type of things where you think about these other prison systems.

01:18:35.000 Like I've visited prisons in, I've been to Germany's prisons, London, I've been to Ghana, and you see how different it could be.

01:18:48.000 You know, what we're capable of when you give people an opportunity.

01:18:53.000 I can tell you in my time, you know, of almost 20 years in prison, I've met some bad people.

01:19:05.000 I met some people who are scary people.

01:19:12.000 You know, I was in prison with a couple of different serial killers, serial rapists, but they are the extreme minority.

01:19:21.000 The extreme minority.

01:19:24.000 Most of the guys that I met that I served time with were trying to hustle their way to a life.

01:19:34.000 They come from high levels of, you know, parental abuse, sexual abuse, drug abuse.

01:19:43.000 I met a lot of people that had real psychological issues.

01:19:47.000 I don't know what the politically correct term is nowadays.

01:19:50.000 I feel like we got to always have a correct term.

01:19:53.000 But people who were really like screwed up.

01:19:58.000 It wasn't, I didn't meet a lot of inherently evil people, but I have met some evil people.

01:20:06.000 And you know it.

01:20:07.000 Like it's not even a doubt in your mind of what you're dealing with when you meet these people.

01:20:14.000 But we're lazy, man.

01:20:16.000 You 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.

01:20:26.000 It's not everybody's story.

01:20:28.000 All of us don't arrive there, you know, and it's, you know, the time that I did was the consequence of the choice I made.

01:20:38.000 And I accept that.

01:20:39.000 You know, I accept that.

01:20:40.000 I accept that that came with it.

01:20:41.000 I even accept now, you know, we're talking 34 years later.

01:20:46.000 There's penalties and consequences for that one moment in my life that I'll live with forever.

01:20:53.000 There's the personal reality, right?

01:20:57.000 Like that doesn't, that never goes away.

01:20:59.000 You know, like that, that understanding of what damage I've caused to this family is something that never goes away.

01:21:09.000 And 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.

01:21:20.000 But they remind me of exactly what society thinks of me when I deal with them, you know.

01:21:28.000 And I think that we should be able to earn the trust of society back.

01:21:33.000 You know, I think you got to put the work in.

01:21:35.000 You know, I don't think that anybody should just be handed a free card.

01:21:40.000 But I think you should be given an opportunity to prove yourself, you know, that you can contribute and that you want to contribute.

01:21:48.000 And 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.

01:21:56.000 Yeah, the system is just set up to punish.

01:21:59.000 They'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.

01:22:04.000 But they are, like you said, they are going to get out, most of them. 0.89

01:22:09.000 And they're not going to be rehabilitated.

01:22:11.000 And oftentimes they're hardened.

01:22:13.000 And it's oftentimes even worse.

01:22:15.000 And there's so little effort put into how to fix things.

01:22:15.000 Absolutely.

01:22:21.000 How do you make it better?

01:22:22.000 What do you do that you can help these people contribute and you can have them come out of jail actually a better person?

01:22:29.000 Yeah.

01:22:30.000 Which is possible.

01:22:31.000 Absolutely.

01:22:32.000 Yeah, and I think you have to look at the system holistically, right?

01:22:36.000 Because it's not even just the men and women serving time to suffer.

01:22:40.000 Like the officers who work there, it's a brutal job, man.

01:22:44.000 Yeah.

01:22:45.000 They suffer.

01:22:46.000 Like, they're not happy people.

01:22:48.000 Oh, no.

01:22:49.000 You know, and they're not happy because their job forces them to have to have a persona of toughness.

01:23:02.000 You 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.

01:23:12.000 And that makes it tough because you have to come into this world for most of the time, 60 hours a week.

01:23:20.000 Most of those people have to make overtime in order to, you know, provide for their families. 0.55

01:23:25.000 And you got to wear a mask for 60 days out of the week.

01:23:29.000 And then you got to come in and you got to see people at their worst more than just the moment to arrest them, right?

01:23:35.000 Like a police officer on the street, they're arresting a lot of times people at their worst moment, then they pass them off.

01:23:42.000 Correctional officer, you walk into this environment every day.

01:23:46.000 You have to deal with somebody who is in a cycle of their worst moment.

01:23:52.000 And the violence, the chaos, the smell, the lack of tools and resources where you have to untangle the chaos.

01:24:01.000 You have to untangle the violence.

01:24:02.000 You have to jump into the fray when a guy is butchering another guy.

01:24:07.000 And then you have to go home with that.

01:24:08.000 You know, you have to carry that home.

01:24:10.000 And it's the higher security levels, that's happening all the time.

01:24:14.000 Somebody's getting stabbed on the yard all the time.

01:24:16.000 Somebody's getting maimed and getting blungeon on a regular basis.

01:24:22.000 And then you have to deal with that.

01:24:25.000 It's the interesting thing about how at one point I didn't have empathy for corrections officers.

01:24:31.000 Like 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

01:24:31.000 They were the enemy.

01:25:02.000 skinny asses, hairy asses. 1.00

01:25:03.000 This is your job.

01:25:05.000 How can you be a happy person?

01:25:07.000 You can't be happy.

01:25:09.000 Like 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.

01:25:19.000 So 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.

01:25:30.000 That got to suck.

01:25:33.000 You know what I'm saying?

01:25:34.000 I'm like, dude, like of course you become an asshole.

01:25:37.000 Like how could you not, right?

01:25:39.000 But, you know, I think that's where we got it wrong.

01:25:43.000 We'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.

01:25:52.000 Yeah, they're in prison too.

01:25:53.000 They just can leave at night.

01:25:55.000 All day.

01:25:55.000 Yeah.

01:25:56.000 It's a different kind of prison because they're in control.

01:25:59.000 and they can quit.

01:26:02.000 But a lot of them, they're probably imprisoned by their bills too.

01:26:07.000 So they can't quit.

01:26:08.000 Absolutely.

01:26:08.000 And in a lot of the environments where these prisons are located, there's no other jobs.

01:26:15.000 No, that's the only industry.

01:26:16.000 Yeah.

01:26:17.000 That's the only industry.

01:26:18.000 The fact that prison is an industry is also insane.

01:26:22.000 The fact that privatized prisons are an industry.

01:26:25.000 when I found out that prison guard unions lobby to keep drug laws on the books, Yeah.

01:26:30.000 I remember that moment.

01:26:31.000 The moment I found that out, I was like, that is evil.

01:26:35.000 Yeah.

01:26:35.000 You're using people as like batteries to generate money.

01:26:39.000 Absolutely.

01:26:40.000 Absolutely.

01:26:41.000 And private prisons are, they want more people in there because that's how they make money. 0.97

01:26:47.000 Yeah.

01:26:48.000 It's like if you're a chicken farmer, you want more chickens.

01:26:50.000 You want chickens, right.

01:26:51.000 Right.

01:26:51.000 If you're a people farmer, you're essentially a people farmer.

01:26:51.000 Yeah.

01:26:55.000 Yeah.

01:26:55.000 Which is evil.

01:26:57.000 Absolutely.

01:26:58.000 And you think about like the cost of phone calls.

01:27:01.000 Like before I got out of prison, we had finally fought to get the phone calls down.

01:27:07.000 I mean, they were charging $15.

01:27:09.000 And how much do you make in prison?

01:27:11.000 Like my, the best paying job I had in prison was, I think when I worked in the law library, I made about $54 a month.

01:27:23.000 And every phone call is $15.

01:27:26.000 Holy shit.

01:27:26.000 $15.

01:27:28.000 And so most people in there make, you know, I worked in the kitchen.

01:27:32.000 I started off at 17, sitting out.

01:27:34.000 You got to work a week to make a phone call.

01:27:36.000 Yeah.

01:27:37.000 That's insane.

01:27:39.000 But that's if you got what's considered a good job, right?

01:27:42.000 Yeah.

01:27:42.000 But the average job, you're making 17 cents an hour in the kitchen.

01:27:46.000 Oh my God.

01:27:47.000 And the phone calls $15.

01:27:50.000 $15, right.

01:27:51.000 So you make, you know, so you can't talk to your family, you know?

01:27:56.000 And then we finally got it down to like about $3 15 minutes.

01:28:00.000 Still, if you make it 17 cents an hour.

01:28:02.000 Yeah.

01:28:03.000 Take you forever to make a phone call.

01:28:04.000 That's insane.

01:28:05.000 And like even now, like I keep money on my phone for my friends who are incarcerated to call me, you know?

01:28:13.000 And 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.

01:28:23.000 And it's just like, geez, like man, you know?

01:28:26.000 and I'm a lot of instances, I'm their only connection to their family and their kids.

01:28:30.000 Do you know the Freeway Ricky Ross story?

01:28:36.000 Oh yeah, absolutely.

01:28:38.000 Do you know Ricky?

01:28:39.000 Yeah, so we've met, I wouldn't say that we're like good friends, but we're cordial anytime we've seen each other.

01:28:44.000 But we've met, I want to say at least four or five times.

01:28:48.000 But yeah, wild story, man.

01:28:50.000 I love that dude.

01:28:51.000 Yeah.

01:28:51.000 I've had him on a few times.

01:28:53.000 But he learned how to read in prison and then became a lawyer and realized that they wrongfully convicted him under the three strikes rule.

01:28:53.000 Yeah.

01:29:01.000 Yeah.

01:29:02.000 And that's how he got out.

01:29:03.000 No, that happens so much to people though.

01:29:03.000 Yeah.

01:29:05.000 Yeah.

01:29:06.000 Like, they overcharge you.

01:29:08.000 That'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.

01:29:19.000 Right.

01:29:20.000 it's up to you who's being charged to figure it out into, which is crazy, right?

01:29:26.000 Like, the onus shouldn't be on a person.

01:29:27.000 Well, it's a crime.

01:29:28.000 It should be a crime.

01:29:28.000 Yeah.

01:29:29.000 Absolutely.

01:29:30.000 Absolutely.

01:29:31.000 Yeah.

01:29:32.000 Yeah, because that's like crazy to think that you can wrongfully charge a person or overcharge them.

01:29:37.000 But that's the thing is like, they don't think of you as a person anymore.

01:29:39.000 Yeah.

01:29:40.000 Once you're a convict, you're not a person anymore and they can do things to you that should be illegal.

01:29:44.000 Yeah.

01:29:45.000 It should be a crime, but they could get away with doing it.

01:29:47.000 And it impacts, like, everybody.

01:29:47.000 Yeah.

01:29:51.000 Like, right now in this country, there's probably about 150 million people who have someone incarcerated or who have had someone incarcerated.

01:30:01.000 it'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.

01:30:28.000 Okay, I'm a little older than you, but I remember when all that happened.

01:30:32.000 I remember all of a sudden crack was on the street.

01:30:35.000 Yeah.

01:30:35.000 How did this happen?

01:30:38.000 How did this happen?

01:30:38.000 Literally overnight.

01:30:39.000 And we find out through Freeway Ricky how it happened.

01:30:42.000 It was our own government.

01:30:43.000 Yeah, absolutely.

01:30:44.000 Which is fucking insane.

01:30:46.000 Crazy.

01:30:46.000 Not 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.

01:30:59.000 yeah 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?

01:31:12.000 Yeah, what happened?

01:31:14.000 But I didn't, at the time, I didn't know that it was being funded by selling drugs in Los Angeles.

01:31:21.000 I had no idea that was.

01:31:23.000 But I remember that it was in the news, and Oliver North was in the news.

01:31:28.000 And this was when Reagan was old.

01:31:30.000 So he's like, I can't recall.

01:31:32.000 He just said he didn't remember.

01:31:34.000 Right, right, right.

01:31:35.000 Yeah.

01:31:36.000 Convenient.

01:31:36.000 Yeah.

01:31:37.000 It was wild.

01:31:39.000 It's horrible to think because you, you know, as a boy, I remember thinking, well, the government's good, and they're looking out for you.

01:31:47.000 And they're the good people.

01:31:48.000 And the cops are the good people.

01:31:50.000 And all the prisoners are there because they're bad.

01:31:52.000 They're bad.

01:31:53.000 Yeah.

01:31:53.000 And so that's the narrative, right?

01:31:55.000 And like, I grew up the same way.

01:31:56.000 You know, my dad was in the Air Force.

01:31:58.000 You know, I used to go to the Air Force base and, you know, all of his friends were in the Air Force.

01:32:03.000 And, 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.

01:32:11.000 And so you grow up seeing this ideal of what you think is good and bad.

01:32:17.000 And then you see this explosion of these drugs.

01:32:20.000 Like that same neighborhood, you know, I wrote this story a while ago called The Trees No Longer Give Fruit.

01:32:27.000 It was about my neighborhood.

01:32:29.000 And 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.

01:32:39.000 And then crap came and it killed my neighborhood.

01:32:43.000 And 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.

01:32:58.000 And so that early narrative of like inner city kids as the, what did they call them, super predators?

01:33:07.000 That was the narrative back then.

01:33:09.000 Now Biden said that on TV.

01:33:12.000 Yeah, yeah, Clinton, Hillary Clinton, she was like super predators, right? 1.00

01:33:15.000 And I was in prison when that crime bill took college out.

01:33:20.000 I was averaging 4.0.

01:33:22.000 And they said that it took rehabilitation out of prison.

01:33:25.000 You know, I think it was 94 crime bill like Biden and Clinton passed.

01:33:29.000 And like, I remember like we went to school and the professor came in.

01:33:34.000 It was like, this is the last semester.

01:33:36.000 They were taking it out because of this crime bill.

01:33:39.000 And so when you look at who was villainized back then, who filled prison back then, the face of that was black males. 0.93

01:33:47.000 Like that was the dominant face of who you would think is in prison.

01:33:52.000 Now, 30 years later, that's changed.

01:33:54.000 It's changed with opioids.

01:33:55.000 It's changed with fentanyl.

01:33:57.000 It's changed with like poverty in these rural areas.

01:34:01.000 And now the prison population looks vastly different.

01:34:04.000 Like there's more.

01:34:05.000 I was just in the juvenile lockup last week.

01:34:08.000 I was in Rhode Island.

01:34:10.000 And like this room of these kids, like 10 kids in two different rooms.

01:34:14.000 And I mean, it looked like the United Nations of Diversity.

01:34:17.000 Like it was like literally like three white kids over here, a couple of Latin over here, black over here.

01:34:23.000 And I was like, shit, you know, and these are babies, right?

01:34:27.000 Isn't that crazy that that's also drugs?

01:34:29.000 Yeah, absolutely.

01:34:29.000 And it's also corporations.

01:34:31.000 See, 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.

01:34:43.000 Absolutely.

01:34:44.000 Absolutely.

01:34:44.000 In the world.

01:34:45.000 In the world.

01:34:46.000 Yeah.

01:34:46.000 In the world.

01:34:47.000 Which is crazy.

01:34:48.000 To 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.

01:34:48.000 Yeah.

01:34:58.000 Yeah.

01:34:59.000 It's crazy.

01:34:59.000 Yeah.

01:35:01.000 And just because they wanted to make some more money.

01:35:03.000 Yeah.

01:35:04.000 They didn't want to pay the union wages.

01:35:06.000 They didn't want these factory workers making a great living. 0.81

01:35:10.000 They wanted all the money.

01:35:12.000 They completely almost destroyed that cereal.

01:35:16.000 Like a bomb, just like crack.

01:35:17.000 Yeah.

01:35:18.000 Fortunately, it's a resilient city.

01:35:20.000 It's bouncing back.

01:35:21.000 Yeah.

01:35:22.000 It's bouncing back.

01:35:23.000 It's nice to know.

01:35:25.000 Yeah.

01:35:26.000 But fuck.

01:35:28.000 The fact that that can happen.

01:35:30.000 Yeah.

01:35:31.000 No, it was unbelievable to think that it would happen on our watch.

01:35:35.000 You know, I remember when I came home, I was so optimistic coming out of prison.

01:35:39.000 I mean, you got to imagine like, you know, walking out everything.

01:35:43.000 It's just like, oh, it's going to be exciting.

01:35:45.000 You think that life really has advanced and people have moved on.

01:35:48.000 And I remember just going through some of the neighborhoods and I was like, you know, these were beautiful blocks and these beautiful homes.

01:35:56.000 And I would go through some of the neighborhoods and there's one house left on the block.

01:36:00.000 And it's like the other house that are still in different, you know, states of disrepair were falling apart.

01:36:07.000 And 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.

01:36:15.000 And 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.

01:36:21.000 And 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.

01:36:34.000 So but also how do we have these same communities decade after decade after decade that are deeply impoverished and filled with crime?

01:36:34.000 Yeah.

01:36:44.000 Yeah.

01:36:45.000 And no, no, no course correction, nothing being done on a federal level to try to correct that.

01:36:55.000 It's just and I think there's a problem in this country.

01:36:59.000 I mean, it's a good problem in some ways that you have to get re-elected if you want to be president.

01:37:06.000 You have four years, you have four-year terms.

01:37:08.000 But because of that, they just think about getting elected.

01:37:13.000 And then once they're in, then they think about getting re-elected.

01:37:16.000 And the last thing you want to do is do anything controversial that might take 15, 20 years in order to reap the rewards of it.

01:37:23.000 Generational.

01:37:24.000 You know, like if you're trying to say like, hey, we've got to do something.

01:37:29.000 I know We're investing so much money overseas.

01:37:33.000 We invest so much money into these nonprofits overseas and all these different things.

01:37:38.000 We're doing regime change and untold billions of dollars.

01:37:42.000 We'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.

01:37:54.000 But that's like an unpopular thing to try to run on, man.

01:37:57.000 Because 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.

01:38:06.000 They want them in prison because then they're not out in the street inconveniencing their life.

01:38:11.000 They don't want to deal with, like, why?

01:38:13.000 Why does someone, you think you're different?

01:38:16.000 You're not different.

01:38:17.000 If you lived in that environment, you would be in there, man.

01:38:20.000 We're all the same exact fucking thing.

01:38:23.000 Absolutely.

01:38:24.000 We vary genetically, we vary biologically, but not that much.

01:38:29.000 Not that much, no.

01:38:30.000 Not that much.

01:38:31.000 If 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.

01:38:39.000 We would all be in there too.

01:38:40.000 And the callousness of people to look the other way is, you know, it's a blight on our society, that callousness.

01:38:49.000 We're supposed to be the most advanced society that's ever existed.

01:38:53.000 But yet we still, which is crazy, right?

01:38:56.000 The United States of America is supposed to be the most prosperous, advanced society on earth.

01:39:02.000 And we have the highest level of prisoners.

01:39:05.000 We have more people in prison in the United States than any other country by a long shot.

01:39:10.000 Absolutely.

01:39:11.000 Absolutely.

01:39:12.000 It's really interesting because like, you know, I don't do a lot in the world of politics outside of criminal justice.

01:39:23.000 And 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.

01:39:38.000 And there's been a little bit more courage than I've ever seen in my lifetime.

01:39:44.000 For years, people would not touch incarceration other than saying, let's be tough on crime.

01:39:50.000 It 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.

01:40:02.000 And 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.

01:40:12.000 Like the gun violence where I come from is something that most people can't even begin to imagine.

01:40:18.000 Like 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.

01:40:29.000 We don't talk about gun violence in an inner city and the cycle of it because the lack of treatment for gun-related trauma.

01:40:38.000 I didn't know what PTSD was until I was already in prison.

01:40:43.000 I didn't realize that the things that I felt at 17 years old when I got shot were actually real things.

01:40:49.000 And 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.

01:41:04.000 So those choices as a kid, why they were illegal, they weren't necessarily irrational.

01:41:13.000 And so we haven't done a good job at like being just honest, right?

01:41:18.000 When I started to see the shift with criminal justice was when opioids began to penetrate the suburbs.

01:41:25.000 When 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. 1.00

01:41:44.000 When 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.

01:41:55.000 And 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.

01:42:05.000 There'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.

01:42:14.000 So I can tell you, like, sometimes I do these talks all over, but I'm speaking at corporations, like you name it.

01:42:20.000 I've been at these spaces.

01:42:22.000 I 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.

01:42:38.000 I wish I can tell people what I'm going through in my family right now.

01:42:43.000 I wish I can talk about why my husband has not been in the household because of his addiction.

01:42:50.000 The shame attached to it.

01:42:52.000 You know, the shame, if it doesn't fit the narrative that you've been handed, the shame attached to it.

01:42:59.000 And even being a black male in America who comes from the hood, there's value to that narrative, right? 0.94

01:43:11.000 So leaning into that.

01:43:12.000 Like, you know, you think about the black comedians, right?

01:43:16.000 We always talk about our trauma and our pain because that narrative has cultural value.

01:43:21.000 You 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.

01:43:32.000 We'll always get that, you know, that sense of like, oh yeah, y'all do have a different reality, right?

01:43:39.000 Because that's the narrative and that narrative has endured from generation to generation.

01:43:43.000 And I think now we're just getting to a space where, and I mean, and there's tons of work to do.

01:43:48.000 Like to undo all the damage that's happened in the system is going to take us another 50 years.

01:43:54.000 You 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.

01:44:04.000 How do they handle things over there?

01:44:06.000 I'll tell you, it was two things that I was struck by when I was there.

01:44:12.000 At one point, I was with this guy named Scott Budnik.

01:44:15.000 He produced a hangover.

01:44:15.000 I think you may know Scott.

01:44:17.000 So, Scott does incredible work in criminal justice.

01:44:19.000 He's one of, I always tell him he should get a Nobel Peace Prize.

01:44:24.000 But 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.

01:44:30.000 We was like, we should go see if we can run around the prison, right?

01:44:34.000 So we just kind of peeled off, and we're talking to the guys who are serving time.

01:44:38.000 They're showing us their cells.

01:44:40.000 They don't even know I've been in prison, but they're, you know, they're excited to have visitors.

01:44:43.000 So they're like, you know.

01:44:45.000 And 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?

01:44:55.000 And I was like, yeah, I was just like caught in the thought.

01:44:58.000 Like, 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.

01:45:06.000 And I was like, you know, I'm in solitary confinement.

01:45:08.000 I was locked down for all this time.

01:45:09.000 And this woman visibly started to weep.

01:45:12.000 And she said to me, we would never do that to one of our citizens.

01:45:17.000 And that struck me.

01:45:19.000 When 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.

01:45:32.000 If you even had it.

01:45:33.000 You can't vote.

01:45:34.000 You can't vote.

01:45:35.000 You know, you can't travel freely to other places.

01:45:39.000 You know, there's still restrictions that I have.

01:45:42.000 And this is 15 years later.

01:45:44.000 And like, I can't, I can't, you know, and this is where it'll hit you, right?

01:45:47.000 So my wife and I and my son will travel.

01:45:50.000 And my wife, she's incredible.

01:45:52.000 She's a great leader in the world.

01:45:54.000 She's doing like, I mean, some of the most amazing work in the world.

01:45:58.000 And we'll be traveling and she has TSA.

01:46:02.000 And 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.

01:46:09.000 You got TSA pre-check.

01:46:12.000 And it's always like we always instantly look at each other.

01:46:15.000 She's like, no, I'm going to go with my husband.

01:46:18.000 And is it the biggest problem in the world for us to have?

01:46:22.000 Absolutely not.

01:46:24.000 But 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?

01:46:32.000 And 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.

01:46:50.000 You can use clear?

01:46:51.000 I can use clear.

01:46:52.000 But you can't use DSA free.

01:46:54.000 What the fuck is that?

01:46:56.000 It's crazy, right?

01:46:58.000 Things like insurance, like home insurance.

01:47:00.000 I bought a house in LA in 2019.

01:47:04.000 And I didn't realize that a felony can impede you from paying house insurance.

01:47:11.000 And it was after I already bought, which we know that's usually people's biggest investment, is their home.

01:47:17.000 Right.

01:47:18.000 What does me having a felony from 30 years ago have to do with my ability to pay insurance on a house I already bought?

01:47:26.000 You know, and so it's like that.

01:47:27.000 Insurance is such an evil scam.

01:47:29.000 Yeah, you know, especially in California.

01:47:31.000 It's brutal.

01:47:32.000 Oh, it's so evil.

01:47:33.000 It's so crazy.

01:47:35.000 I mean, California, there's a new fire.

01:47:38.000 I don't know if they put it out yet.

01:47:39.000 Laguna Beach, did they put that fire out, Jamie?

01:47:42.000 It was raging yesterday.

01:47:43.000 Oh, geez.

01:47:44.000 I didn't even hear that.

01:47:45.000 Yeah, I mean, you can't get fire insurance.

01:47:48.000 You know, I have friends who have houses now that they can't get insured for fire.

01:47:48.000 Yeah.

01:47:52.000 They're like, what the fuck do I do?

01:47:53.000 Yeah, what do I do?

01:47:54.000 And they can't get out.

01:47:56.000 They don't have enough money to get out.

01:47:57.000 And then it's hard to sell your house now if you're in an area.

01:48:00.000 Like, I have a friend who's trying to sell her house, but it's in an area that's too close to Laurel Canyon.

01:48:05.000 And Laurel Canyon burns.

01:48:06.000 And nobody wants to buy a house there.

01:48:08.000 It's like, what the fuck?

01:48:11.000 Here it is.

01:48:11.000 Brutal.

01:48:12.000 13-year-old boy arrested for brush fire that led to evacuations.

01:48:16.000 Fireworks.

01:48:18.000 Did they put it out?

01:48:20.000 So what are they going to do to him, though?

01:48:22.000 He's a kid.

01:48:23.000 That's what I'm saying.

01:48:24.000 He's a fucking kid.

01:48:26.000 I started a fire when I was a kid.

01:48:28.000 I started a big, big-ass fire.

01:48:30.000 I was doing fireworks.

01:48:31.000 Oh, fireworks?

01:48:32.000 Yeah.

01:48:32.000 I think I was...

01:48:42.000 I think it's supposed to be gentrified now.

01:48:44.000 Oh, wow.

01:48:45.000 So now that was, I was 13, right?

01:48:50.000 Yeah, I was 13.

01:48:52.000 So that was his age.

01:48:54.000 Yeah, and we were lighting firecrackers in this field.

01:49:00.000 And it started off just like this little fire.

01:49:04.000 And we're stepping on the fire.

01:49:05.000 And then the wind blew.

01:49:06.000 And we're like, oh, shit.

01:49:09.000 And then it just raged.

01:49:11.000 It raged through this field.

01:49:13.000 And we ran out into the street and just by fucking sheer luck found a cop.

01:49:19.000 And then we told the cop, the cop's like, get the fuck out of here.

01:49:23.000 Like, we told them what we did.

01:49:24.000 We were lying, firefighters, we're sorry.

01:49:27.000 And they wound up putting it out.

01:49:32.000 This said in a statement, he was not accepted to Orange County Juvenile Hall due to absence of injuries or immediate threat to buildings.

01:49:39.000 Okay.

01:49:41.000 They just said, you're a kid.

01:49:41.000 He's a kid.

01:49:42.000 You fucked up.

01:49:43.000 Yeah.

01:49:44.000 Well, that's good.

01:49:44.000 Yeah.

01:49:45.000 I mean, but we got out of there and then we came back like the next day and we saw all the shit we burnt.

01:49:51.000 It was like, oh my God.

01:49:52.000 It was like this huge area that was burnt.

01:49:55.000 Luckily, no one lost their life, but it was just sheer luck.

01:49:59.000 Yeah.

01:49:59.000 You know, it could have totally been next to someone's house.

01:50:02.000 Totally.

01:50:03.000 Yeah.

01:50:04.000 Propane tank, anything.

01:50:05.000 Anything blew up.

01:50:06.000 Yeah, anything.

01:50:06.000 You never know.

01:50:07.000 Or y'all could have actually got like seriously.

01:50:09.000 Yeah, we could have crazy.

01:50:10.000 Yeah.

01:50:10.000 I mean, it was just luck.

01:50:12.000 Dumb young kids. 0.79

01:50:13.000 You leave them alone.

01:50:15.000 The fact that any kid could go buy a lighter.

01:50:17.000 Yeah.

01:50:17.000 Some matches right there.

01:50:17.000 Yeah.

01:50:19.000 You buy a lighter.

01:50:20.000 And you can just light things on fire.

01:50:20.000 Yeah.

01:50:21.000 When you're a kid, that's what you want to do.

01:50:23.000 Yeah, you want to light things on fire.

01:50:24.000 Yeah.

01:50:25.000 Yeah.

01:50:26.000 There's a million times in my life I could have done something stupid and gone the wrong way.

01:50:31.000 And just by sheer luck, I didn't.

01:50:34.000 And, 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.

01:50:44.000 It could have been any of us.

01:50:46.000 That's the thing that people need to really get in their head.

01:50:50.000 It could be any of us.

01:50:51.000 Absolutely.

01:50:52.000 Any of us.

01:50:53.000 And 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.

01:51:07.000 Other than interventional war, interventionist foreign policy and starting wars that are unnecessary and costing lives, which is the worst thing we've ever done.

01:51:19.000 And that's the next worst is that we don't do anything about it.

01:51:24.000 Yeah, I think it goes back to what you was talking about earlier with talent.

01:51:27.000 Like, how much talent are we leaving on the table?

01:51:31.000 You know, like when I was just there in Role Light, and so I went to this juvenile program over there.

01:51:36.000 And, you know, the reason I went is these kids, they're working in a music program.

01:51:43.000 And 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.

01:51:50.000 And so I was like, well, I'm going to come over there and spend time with them because I've dabbled in working with.

01:51:56.000 I ended up doing this spoken word, Peace with Nas, on one of his albums.

01:52:01.000 And 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.

01:52:08.000 But the talent that is wasted in prison, you know, the ingenuity.

01:52:16.000 Just 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.

01:52:25.000 Tape player, yeah, yeah.

01:52:26.000 When you see some of the tattoos these guys make in jail, you're like, Jesus Christ, these are incredible tattoos.

01:52:31.000 I'm inked up.

01:52:32.000 All these prisoners.

01:52:34.000 I actually got in trouble for getting tattooed one time.

01:52:36.000 I got caught getting tattooed.

01:52:39.000 The tattoo artist wasn't good enough for getting rid of the gun.

01:52:42.000 So I think it was the last thing I got in trouble for in prison was getting a tattoo, which was crazy.

01:52:48.000 I was trying to get a cover-up right here.

01:52:50.000 Was that when you were already out of solitary?

01:52:52.000 Yeah, so I was out of solitary.

01:52:54.000 I was actually working my way down to like going home.

01:52:57.000 And I was just like, we're in lower level.

01:53:00.000 Let me have this guy slam this ink in, cover this up real quick.

01:53:04.000 And we literally got busted because he couldn't get rid of the gun fast enough.

01:53:07.000 And they actually took 90 days from me for that, though.

01:53:09.000 Wow.

01:53:10.000 Yeah, yeah.

01:53:11.000 So when you get a misconduct, they take days from you, you know?

01:53:14.000 And, you know, you think about some of this stuff, like you're taking 90 days from a person their own body.

01:53:22.000 Yeah.

01:53:23.000 For what?

01:53:24.000 Like, why are you, why is the excess of punishment?

01:53:26.000 But it goes.

01:53:28.000 Like, how many of those guys could get out of jail and be excellent tattooists?

01:53:31.000 Absolutely.

01:53:32.000 Absolutely.

01:53:33.000 Yeah, 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?

01:53:52.000 You know, it's one of the things that I appreciate about Silicon Valley is that talent is really more important than your educational pedigree.

01:54:01.000 And like if you're talented, they're trying to figure out how can you contribute in a way that is meaningful.

01:54:08.000 And it's the same thing with like art.

01:54:10.000 Well, it's because it's so competitive.

01:54:11.000 They just want to get ahead.

01:54:12.000 And oftentimes people that aren't educated are some of the most incredibly talented people.

01:54:17.000 They just have some weird thing about them that allows them to think differently.

01:54:21.000 They don't care you didn't get a degree.

01:54:23.000 Hire them quick.

01:54:23.000 Yeah.

01:54:25.000 Yeah, I worked in Silicon for three years.

01:54:28.000 And I invested there.

01:54:29.000 So I'm super happy about that.

01:54:32.000 But yeah, I worked in tech.

01:54:34.000 And 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.

01:54:48.000 And I'm like, that's the streets, right?

01:54:51.000 Like I tell people this, like I learned, like my business acumen comes from two worlds, from the streets and prison.

01:54:58.000 And what I learned from the streets is marketing and promotion.

01:55:03.000 I was one of the best at like figuring out how to get our product into other areas.

01:55:08.000 There 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.

01:55:16.000 You know, the ability to problem solve.

01:55:20.000 I remember one of the houses we sold at a, they called them trap houses now back then.

01:55:24.000 We called them crack houses.

01:55:26.000 We get this house.

01:55:27.000 It's in the middle of a nice neighborhood.

01:55:30.000 And this house is cranking.

01:55:32.000 It's making a lot of money because people over here still have money that's buying the drugs.

01:55:37.000 But we pull up one time and I'm like, it is a line down the street.

01:55:41.000 I'm like, we're definitely going to jail.

01:55:46.000 We're on a clear path.

01:55:47.000 We're going to jail like very soon, right?

01:55:49.000 And 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.

01:55:57.000 So you can't go past this gate.

01:55:59.000 And 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?

01:56:06.000 Then we kind of keep our, you know, we can seal more low-key.

01:56:09.000 Yeah, keep more low-key.

01:56:10.000 So it would be stuff like that that I was figuring out at like 13.

01:56:13.000 Then it's like smuggling drugs.

01:56:15.000 Like I would, I would hop on a Greyhound with like a family-sized bag of chips that I've ripped open, put drugs in, super glue back up.

01:56:23.000 I put like a Slurpee in one hand, and I just walk on like a little kid.

01:56:28.000 Meanwhile, I got like, you know, the half a brick of cocaine bag going down Ohio.

01:56:34.000 Like I'm hustling, right?

01:56:36.000 So I say to people, like I learned like the marketing and promotion distribution part there.

01:56:43.000 And then in prison, I learned operations.

01:56:48.000 Like how does cash flow work?

01:56:49.000 So I loan shark.

01:56:50.000 That was part of my like my livelihood.

01:56:52.000 In prison was loan sharking and then running these underground stores.

01:56:56.000 And 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

01:57:26.000 that cash, right?

01:57:27.000 So like, say you're on the gambling table, Joe, and you're like, you're down $100 and you don't got it right now.

01:57:33.000 And then I got it.

01:57:34.000 And then I can come to you and say, okay, I'll give you a hundred.

01:57:38.000 But then I need your girlfriend or your mother to send me 75 to my account because that's more valuable is the money I have in my account.

01:57:45.000 And so that was called a money transfer.

01:57:47.000 We would just transfer cash.

01:57:49.000 And so I learned these things.

01:57:52.000 And then when I got out, you know, I started off hustling books out of the trunk.

01:57:55.000 Like a lot of people, they talk about the out the trunk experiences.

01:57:59.000 It's kind of like fashionable and cool.

01:58:01.000 I seriously was like, Lily, I had a little Honda Civic and I would go all over Detroit, parks, strip clubs, you name it, bars.

01:58:09.000 I would literally set up sometime.

01:58:12.000 I set up a little booth inside the clubs.

01:58:15.000 A couple of my friends, they managed the strip club.

01:58:18.000 They'd be like, yo, come up to the club.

01:58:19.000 I'd be like, I'd come up there with books and I'm talking to the girls and they doing lap dance.

01:58:24.000 I'm selling books.

01:58:25.000 Wow.

01:58:25.000 Yeah.

01:58:26.000 And I'm like, that's, so that's how I really started the journey.

01:58:30.000 And I mean, my first, first day out of prison, I sold my first book in the parole office parking lot.

01:58:36.000 And so I took these skill sets from those two worlds and I just applied them to legitimate enterprise.

01:58:42.000 And 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.

01:58:55.000 They was trying to figure out their company culture.

01:58:57.000 And, um, how did, what did, how'd that work out?

01:59:01.000 Like what, what was that about?

01:59:02.000 So a really good friend of mine, uh, Ben Horowitz, you, you've had his partner, uh, Mark Andreessen on, on, on, uh, yeah.

01:59:02.000 Yeah.

01:59:08.000 So, so Mark's partner, Ben is a really good friend of mine.

01:59:11.000 He'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.

01:59:20.000 But 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.

01:59:28.000 He's this tough, tough Israeli guy who's been through some stuff.

01:59:32.000 So we would have these conversations about like grit and determination.

01:59:36.000 And, and he had this company called trip actions at the time and they were going through, they were like a skyrocket.

01:59:42.000 They were, this was hot.

01:59:43.000 It was going through a lot of things.

01:59:44.000 And then when the pandemic hit the thing, the first thing that suffered was, was travel, you know?

01:59:50.000 And 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.

01:59:59.000 And 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.

02:00:09.000 And 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?

02:00:21.000 And so I took on my second role, which was head of sales and success culture.

02:00:25.000 I got a chance to train one of the best sales teams in the world.

02:00:29.000 Uh, this company went from like zero revenue to like, you know, it was nine, nine billion dollar valuation.

02:00:35.000 How do you, how do you sort out a program like this?

02:00:38.000 Like you had, you had never done this before?

02:00:41.000 No, but I did it in prison with figuring out how to like run and operationalize the things I was doing in prison.

02:00:47.000 So like, so how did they recognize you that this would transfer over to their corporation?

02:00:47.000 Right.

02:00:52.000 I think just conversations like conversations, things I was doing.

02:00:55.000 I was doing some of the stuff in nonprofit world too.

02:00:57.000 So 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.

02:01:09.000 And in a book, he talked about some of our conversations around culture.

02:01:13.000 And it kind of gave them a framework to really understand how these lessons I learned in prison could really be applied in corporate.

02:01:21.000 And, you know, we hear it all the time.

02:01:24.000 If you can run a drug operation, you can run a corporate.

02:01:27.000 And I don't think it's that simple.

02:01:29.000 I think it sounds great when people say it.

02:01:31.000 Like Freeway Ricky Ross probably can run a corporation.

02:01:34.000 Not everybody who hustles in the street is Freeway Ricky Ross, right?

02:01:39.000 There is some skill sets to run an actual startup that you need to have a lot more experience, the people part of it.

02:01:47.000 Like, how do you really build relationships?

02:01:49.000 That's one of the things I was really good with in prison is like really knowing how to be diplomatic, knowing how to resolve conflict.

02:01:57.000 You know, a lot of times in prison, when violence escalate, it's because people are fighting for respect.

02:02:04.000 And if you can make sure that both parties walk away with their respect in place, you can become a real problem solver.

02:02:10.000 And that's like an inherent value in that environment.

02:02:13.000 Now, the caveat is that you also have to have a propensity for violence.

02:02:17.000 Like people have to respect.

02:02:19.000 Like 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.

02:02:26.000 And all of that psychology from that world applies in any corporate setting.

02:02:31.000 Any company you can imagine, all the things that people are going through, it's the same thing that's happening in prison.

02:02:38.000 The only difference is, you know, your colleague might shank you with an email versus, you know what I'm saying?

02:02:45.000 They might slide that email.

02:02:48.000 You know, that's the only difference.

02:02:50.000 But 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?

02:03:00.000 And how do you build?

02:03:01.000 So, 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.

02:03:11.000 I would say, okay, well, this little homie, he's on his sale block. 1.00

02:03:14.000 I'm going to give you, you know, $30, $40.

02:03:17.000 And then you got to flip that.

02:03:18.000 But you also got to be able to defend it.

02:03:20.000 You know what I'm saying?

02:03:21.000 Like, I can't come and fight your battle for you.

02:03:23.000 The same thing that happens in corporate, right?

02:03:25.000 You are assigned a responsibility.

02:03:27.000 The CEO can't bail you out of that.

02:03:29.000 He can Give you the opportunity.

02:03:31.000 And 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.

02:03:38.000 But then you got to do the work, you know.

02:03:40.000 And so, all those lessons I learned from in there, how to build community.

02:03:44.000 One 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.

02:03:55.000 Like 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.

02:04:03.000 It didn't matter if they didn't have money.

02:04:05.000 It didn't matter if they couldn't put a 10 cent noodle in.

02:04:08.000 Just that ability for them to know that when we come to break bread, we're all on the same playing field.

02:04:14.000 Like that was a game changer.

02:04:15.000 You know, we trained together every day.

02:04:17.000 You know, and when we would train, there was an accountability that we just commanded of each other.

02:04:23.000 It's like, if you say you're going to be on the yard, be on the yard.

02:04:26.000 You know, you're going to go for 10 laps today.

02:04:30.000 We're going to push you and drag you and help you get around.

02:04:33.000 And it built this closeness.

02:04:36.000 And, you know, and there was some little chaotic nature to it all, right?

02:04:41.000 Because like our friendships didn't come easy in there.

02:04:43.000 You know, the price of entry was probably like the craziest shit ever.

02:04:47.000 Like my thing was like, when I welcome you into my world, it's based on these two things.

02:04:54.000 Are you willing to do life or are you willing to give or lose your life?

02:04:58.000 And 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?

02:05:06.000 It's the same thing in corporate where you're like, listen, we're fighting for something.

02:05:10.000 In the startup, we're fighting for this outcome, you know, an acquisition, a merger, an IPO, whatever that thing is to change the world.

02:05:18.000 Like, 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?

02:05:29.000 And so when I go into these companies, you know, I come in with that mindset of just like the honesty, the vulnerability.

02:05:36.000 You 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.

02:05:46.000 But it's one of the greatest unlocks in your company culture is when you can get super transparent.

02:05:52.000 And like I learned that from being around great, you know, Ariel, he's a great CEO, and he always got super real with us.

02:06:00.000 And when he got super real, it didn't always feel good.

02:06:03.000 But 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.

02:06:12.000 And that's what applies in your real life.

02:06:14.000 That's the only thing that applies.

02:06:16.000 Being super real is it's everything.

02:06:18.000 Oh my God, it's the game changer.

02:06:19.000 As soon as you're bullshitting.

02:06:21.000 Yeah.

02:06:21.000 Like now, what is truth?

02:06:23.000 What's reality?

02:06:24.000 How do you succeed if you're not dealing in reality?

02:06:28.000 And that's where real grit comes from is the truth.

02:06:30.000 You know, like you can't have grit without having honesty.

02:06:35.000 Right.

02:06:36.000 You know what I mean?

02:06:36.000 Like it's, you know, we hear it in sport.

02:06:39.000 I'm a crazy sports fan.

02:06:40.000 I think the best stories about how you conquer life come from sports.

02:06:44.000 I agree.

02:06:45.000 And, you know, grit and resilience, the fundamental parts of that comes down to the truth.

02:06:51.000 Like you have to be, you have to, you know what's in you, right?

02:06:53.000 You know if you got that thing to push forward or if you don't.

02:06:58.000 And when guys quit, like it's because their truth is that they're not strong enough to keep going.

02:07:04.000 Right.

02:07:05.000 You know, and so that, all that stuff applies, you know, in corporate and business.

02:07:09.000 And 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.

02:07:29.000 And it was my brother was murdered in July of 2021.

02:07:34.000 And I was sitting in our family's living room and I'm watching my family mourn.

02:07:40.000 And I was struck by this profound sense of guilt because I know I made somebody else's family feel like that.

02:07:53.000 And so while I should have been grieving my brother and trying to unpack that, it was navigating this complex world.

02:08:00.000 And 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.

02:08:13.000 And what I landed on was that gratitude is one of the greatest keys to freedom.

02:08:20.000 And is that if we can lean into being thankful for all of it, right?

02:08:25.000 The 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.

02:08:40.000 And you're thankful for the moments you're in.

02:08:42.000 And 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.

02:08:53.000 If 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.

02:08:58.000 And I'm thankful for these challenges.

02:09:00.000 I'm thankful for the abundance that this brings into my life.

02:09:04.000 And that, you know, it's hard sometimes for people to see it because they haven't lost anything.

02:09:09.000 But 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.

02:09:24.000 And they can't be the super obvious things.

02:09:26.000 They can't be like, you know, my wife and my kid and the house and the things.

02:09:31.000 It's these small things, you know, things that I get excited about.

02:09:36.000 Like, I got cold orange juice today.

02:09:38.000 Like, how amazing is that?

02:09:40.000 You know what I mean?

02:09:41.000 Like that, that, that matters to me.

02:09:43.000 You 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.

02:09:54.000 Like that's gratitude.

02:09:56.000 You know, it's like, I got toothpaste today, you know, soap.

02:10:00.000 Soap is a big thing in my life.

02:10:02.000 Like, 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.

02:10:14.000 And I couldn't even buy a bar of soap.

02:10:18.000 And all I had was this state-issue soap.

02:10:20.000 And it's a little small bar, about this big.

02:10:22.000 It's probably about a quarter of an inch thick.

02:10:26.000 And it smells like pine saw.

02:10:30.000 And I just remember like this moment of like, man, I can't afford a bar of soap right now, you know?

02:10:42.000 And in that same stretch, I was in solitary and I didn't have these shower shoes.

02:10:47.000 So 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.

02:10:58.000 And I tried to wear my regular shoes to the shower.

02:11:01.000 And the officer was like, you can't wear those to the shower.

02:11:04.000 I'm like, what do you want me to stand barefoot in that shower?

02:11:08.000 And she was like, I don't care what you do, but you can't wear those.

02:11:11.000 And like that feeling of like shame, you know?

02:11:17.000 That like, I was a drug dealer.

02:11:19.000 You know, I hustled.

02:11:20.000 I took care of people.

02:11:22.000 I stood up for people.

02:11:24.000 And I don't have $2 shower shoes.

02:11:27.000 Like, that is what allows me to appreciate all the things.

02:11:32.000 You know?

02:11:32.000 And so what I say to people is like, find all the things in your life to be thankful for.

02:11:40.000 Find them.

02:11:41.000 Like, be intentional about it, though.

02:11:43.000 You 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.

02:11:51.000 Like, we live in a very complex country.

02:11:55.000 It's actually kind of dope, though.

02:11:57.000 You know, and I don't think we spend enough time, you know, talking about the things that we should be grateful for, just being here.

02:12:05.000 You know, I think all kids should be like part of education.

02:12:09.000 They should have to travel.

02:12:11.000 Especially if you're in this country.

02:12:13.000 I think you should have to travel to places that don't have all the trappings of possibilities.

02:12:19.000 And I just think that gratitude is a game changer.

02:12:23.000 I think so, too, because I think it's too easy to focus on negative, and negative begets more negative.

02:12:28.000 If you just find the things in your life that suck and dwell on those, your life's going to suck more.

02:12:34.000 It's just simple mathematics.

02:12:36.000 It's real.

02:12:36.000 I know people that are very successful that don't have gratitude.

02:12:40.000 Yeah.

02:12:41.000 It's crazy.

02:12:42.000 That's who I wrote the book for those people.

02:12:45.000 It's crazy.

02:12:46.000 I know so many people that are very successful but very unhappy.

02:12:49.000 I remember one time a story when I was on television.

02:12:54.000 I was on this TV show called News Radio, and we would get the ratings in.

02:13:00.000 And when we would get the ratings, we weren't doing that well.

02:13:03.000 It wasn't a very successful show.

02:13:05.000 It was only successful once it got off the air, ironically, in syndication it became, because it was a good show.

02:13:10.000 But they were all sitting around and they were reading variety and variety magazine and the Hollywood Report.

02:13:18.000 I 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.

02:13:26.000 And you're all getting upset that we're not after friends.

02:13:30.000 We're not after Seinfeld.

02:13:32.000 Last time I checked, I'm on television.

02:13:35.000 We're on television.

02:13:36.000 You know how few people get to be on a fucking sitcom?

02:13:38.000 And we're here pissing and moaning because we're not on the biggest sitcom.

02:13:43.000 That is so crazy.

02:13:44.000 Do you know how many people would trade lives with you?

02:13:48.000 I mean, I had a ton of terrible jobs doing construction, delivered newspapers.

02:13:54.000 I did everything.

02:13:55.000 Drove limos.

02:13:56.000 I did everything.

02:13:57.000 I'm on TV.

02:14:00.000 I'm happy as fuck.

02:14:02.000 But 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.

02:14:11.000 It's not just about like you're making a great living doing something that's really fun.

02:14:15.000 It's like, no, no, no.

02:14:16.000 Someone is out there being Tom Cruise.

02:14:19.000 Right.

02:14:20.000 How come I'm not Tom Cruise?

02:14:22.000 You know, this is bullshit.

02:14:23.000 Tom Cruise is Tom Cruise.

02:14:24.000 I'm not Tom Cruise.

02:14:25.000 And that's literally, and then they live miserable.

02:14:29.000 They're multi-millionaire, miserable people, which is the craziest thing.

02:14:34.000 A kid like me who grew up on food stamps was like, what is fucking wrong with you people?

02:14:38.000 This is crazy.

02:14:40.000 Like, you're living the dream.

02:14:43.000 You're in, maybe you don't have the number one dream, but guess what?

02:14:47.000 No one's paying attention to you, so you don't get scrutinized.

02:14:51.000 You can go to a restaurant.

02:14:52.000 You don't have fucking cameras in your face.

02:14:54.000 You're actually living a better dream.

02:14:56.000 My friend Brian said this to me once.

02:14:58.000 My 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.

02:15:07.000 Everything after that is bullshit.

02:15:09.000 I was like, that is like some of the best wisdom ever because it doesn't matter how big your house is.

02:15:14.000 It's just your fucking house, man.

02:15:16.000 You get used to all that shit.

02:15:18.000 There's some nice things that come with money.

02:15:18.000 Absolutely.

02:15:21.000 They're nice.

02:15:23.000 But freedom is nicer than all those things.

02:15:25.000 And everybody has that.

02:15:26.000 No, it's the ultimate wealth.

02:15:28.000 It's the ultimate wealth.

02:15:29.000 And 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.

02:15:42.000 They try to turn everybody into a sitcom, Roseanne. 1.00

02:15:45.000 So 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.

02:15:52.000 And then they would try to write a sitcom around you and develop a pilot.

02:15:57.000 This was like the game.

02:15:58.000 That was the hustle.

02:15:59.000 And the first time I got a development deal, I think I was 26.

02:16:07.000 I guess I was 26, something like that.

02:16:10.000 And, 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.

02:16:18.000 I was just happy that I didn't have to have a regular job.

02:16:21.000 I was just a comedian, but I was always broke.

02:16:23.000 And then all of a sudden, I got, I think I got $150,000.

02:16:28.000 And it was like this enormous Weight was lifted off my shoulders.

02:16:32.000 It was the craziest weight.

02:16:34.000 It was like physical weight.

02:16:36.000 I was like, now I don't have to worry about my bills.

02:16:39.000 Like, I was every month, it was like, can I pay rent?

02:16:42.000 Can I keep the lights on?

02:16:44.000 You know, can I afford gas to get to my gigs?

02:16:46.000 It was just like that.

02:16:47.000 I was like, barely getting no health insurance, no, nothing, nothing.

02:16:51.000 Just barely getting by.

02:16:52.000 But that physical weight, I'll never forget that.

02:16:55.000 I was like, that's the most important thing is to not worry about your bills.

02:16:58.000 Absolutely.

02:16:59.000 But then everybody's worried about what Bob's got a 22-foot boat.

02:17:02.000 I've got an 18-foot boat.

02:17:04.000 Like, Jesus Christ.

02:17:05.000 Our things don't really matter when it comes down to it.

02:17:07.000 Yeah, it's like that, there's an, I forget who said it, comparison is the thief of joy.

02:17:13.000 Is that Thoreau?

02:17:15.000 Thoreau is most men live lives of quiet desperation.

02:17:15.000 No.

02:17:18.000 That's my other favorite one.

02:17:19.000 I think it might have been Jefferson who said comparison is thief of joy.

02:17:19.000 Yeah, it's a great.

02:17:25.000 But it is.

02:17:26.000 It's like you can miss out on gratitude when it's right in front of your face.

02:17:31.000 You have so many things to be happy for.

02:17:33.000 But this weird world, this is why I also tell people, stay the fuck off social media, man.

02:17:33.000 Absolutely.

02:17:39.000 You'll have you depressed for sure.

02:17:40.000 Oh, it's compared.

02:17:42.000 Jonathan Haight wrote a book about what it's doing to young girls.

02:17:44.000 It's like they're comparing themselves constantly to everybody else.

02:17:48.000 And these girls are using filters and everybody's like, and then they're getting plastic surgery and changing this and changing that. 1.00

02:17:55.000 And look at all my shit.

02:17:56.000 Look at my bag.

02:17:57.000 Look at my jewelry.

02:17:58.000 Look at my car.

02:17:58.000 Look at my this.

02:17:59.000 Look at my that.

02:18:00.000 And it's just, everyone's constantly in this state of comparison.

02:18:04.000 And no one is happy just to be alive and healthy in America in a wild time of change.

02:18:12.000 Yeah.

02:18:13.000 No, 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?

02:18:36.000 And 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.

02:18:45.000 And that's the thing about like losing freedom, right?

02:18:48.000 And 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.

02:18:57.000 That's like being struck with that illness.

02:18:59.000 Where 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?

02:19:10.000 Like trauma is real.

02:19:12.000 Sure.

02:19:12.000 You know, shame is real.

02:19:14.000 You know, grief is something.

02:19:15.000 None of us are getting through this life without grief.

02:19:18.000 Like that's just factual.

02:19:19.000 Like if you live, you know, any considerable amount of time to where you're conscious, you're going to grieve at some point.

02:19:25.000 You know, somebody's going to die.

02:19:26.000 You're going to lose a job.

02:19:27.000 You're going to lose an opportunity.

02:19:28.000 You're loving.

02:19:29.000 No, it's all highs.

02:19:30.000 Nobody gets all highs.

02:19:31.000 Exactly.

02:19:32.000 And I think what happens is that, one, we just haven't created space to like talk about what that really is for us.

02:19:40.000 You know, we just kind of deal with it on our own and then it trips people up because it can get heavy at times.

02:19:46.000 You know, and if you get hit with a few things back to back, it can actually be overwhelming.

02:19:52.000 But 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.

02:20:01.000 It can be annoying to the people in my life because I'm just like, no, I actually changed my mind like literally this moment.

02:20:06.000 And they're like, what are you talking about?

02:20:07.000 We planned this whole thing for like, yeah, but I changed my mind because in this moment, this is where I really want to be.

02:20:14.000 But it's a beautiful space to be, you know, like that.

02:20:17.000 Yeah, that's what I learned in prison.

02:20:18.000 So I tell people like, I was incarcerated before I ever stepped foot in a prison cell.

02:20:24.000 I was free before I ever got out of solitary.

02:20:27.000 And 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.

02:20:38.000 Here's what I knew.

02:20:40.000 Whatever happens, my son is going to be able to look at me and say, you know what?

02:20:44.000 My dad went through all of these things, but here's who he became as a person.

02:20:50.000 That, you can't, it's not a box that can contain that.

02:20:53.000 You know, and it's not a gate that can keep you back from that.

02:20:58.000 Like, that's all the inside work.

02:20:59.000 That's the inside job.

02:21:01.000 And like, that's how I just try to live my life.

02:21:03.000 It's like, you know, it's, it's, you know, I see it and it's sad because it's to all the things you say.

02:21:09.000 It's like the competition with people highlight reel, right?

02:21:13.000 Like, you can't compete with somebody's highlight reel.

02:21:16.000 Exactly.

02:21:16.000 It would drive you crazy.

02:21:17.000 It's not even a real highlight.

02:21:19.000 A lot of lease cars out there.

02:21:20.000 Come on.

02:21:21.000 The lease car is.

02:21:23.000 I saw a car out here that I took.

02:21:25.000 I mean, I've had people be like, yo, can I take a picture in front of your car?

02:21:28.000 I do.

02:21:28.000 Yeah.

02:21:29.000 That's a lot.

02:21:30.000 You know what I'm saying?

02:21:31.000 So, you know, when you get behind it, you realize like, man, what do people really care about?

02:21:36.000 Where's the most joyous, like, the friendships you develop?

02:21:39.000 The people you spend time with.

02:21:41.000 Like, those things are invaluable, you know?

02:21:43.000 And that's not to say that people shouldn't aspire towards success.

02:21:46.000 Like, I'm like, listen, leave it all on the floor.

02:21:49.000 Whatever you're, whatever, whatever task you've been given in life, like, go out and execute it to the fullest capabilities possible.

02:21:56.000 Like, don't, don't undersell yourself.

02:21:59.000 Don't have do it.

02:22:00.000 Don't quit on yourself.

02:22:02.000 Push yourself to the limits.

02:22:02.000 Go for it.

02:22:04.000 But understand, you got to be present in the moments that you're living.

02:22:07.000 Otherwise, it's going to be squandered time.

02:22:09.000 And so that's how I just try to live my life, man.

02:22:11.000 I'm like, I'm enjoying it.

02:22:14.000 You know, I want to enjoy it.

02:22:16.000 I work hard.

02:22:17.000 You know, sometimes, you know, it's probably annoying to people around me that how hard I work, but I find joy in that.

02:22:24.000 You know, there's joy in the actual work.

02:22:26.000 You know, otherwise I wouldn't do it.

02:22:28.000 There's joy in most aspects of life that people miss out on because they just can't appreciate it because they haven't been in prison.

02:22:38.000 This is the thing about that.

02:22:39.000 Let's just send everybody to the Bing, at least for me.

02:22:43.000 I 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.

02:22:56.000 Absolutely.

02:22:56.000 And 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.

02:23:11.000 Yeah.

02:23:12.000 I 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?

02:23:21.000 And I'm like, part of it is like, I think, one, we have to be better.

02:23:27.000 I think this is something women build community way better than men do because we're so competitive. 1.00

02:23:34.000 And like, you, you, and we're not always willing to be vulnerable.

02:23:38.000 But I can say, like, well, my, my friendships that I have with men, it starts at vulnerability.

02:23:44.000 You know, it starts with like the depth of like, what does it mean to be vulnerable?

02:23:49.000 What are we struggling with today?

02:23:50.000 Right.

02:23:51.000 You know, how are you really, like, how are you really feeling today?

02:23:54.000 You know, how did that, how did you feel when that deal didn't go through or when you lost that money?

02:23:59.000 And like, you don't have to put the cape on and try to figure it all out in one day.

02:24:04.000 But my responsibility to you as your friend is to ensure that you have a space that we can come and get brutally honest.

02:24:10.000 You know, how are you navigating parenting?

02:24:13.000 Like, it's tough, right?

02:24:15.000 Relationships are tough.

02:24:16.000 You know, marriage, all these things that require, you know, a different muscle.

02:24:21.000 And like, it's almost like we talk about them in these very kind of extreme ways, right?

02:24:28.000 Either it's like extreme toxic masculinity or it's the feminization of males. 0.96

02:24:34.000 Right.

02:24:34.000 And the truth is like, it's neither of those things.

02:24:37.000 You know, those are narratives, but they're not.

02:24:39.000 The narratives doesn't necessarily mean that they're true.

02:24:42.000 You know, what is true is that we have not created space for honesty and transparency and vulnerability.

02:24:49.000 And we haven't identified that as actually a strength.

02:24:53.000 And 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?

02:25:09.000 And I think, you know, it's all the things that, you know, these things translate into your work experience.

02:25:15.000 They translate into your relationship with your children.

02:25:18.000 Like I get so inspired by like my friends, which I also think is important.

02:25:22.000 It's like you should be inspired by the people you spend time with.

02:25:26.000 Like that, that's invaluable, you know.

02:25:30.000 And it doesn't mean that you don't deal with their heart, you know, the hard parts of their life.

02:25:35.000 But if you're inspired by them and you're vulnerable with them, the hard parts of their life become beautiful.

02:25:41.000 You know what I mean?

02:25:42.000 Those are easier things to navigate because it becomes what the real meaning of honor is.

02:25:47.000 Yeah.

02:25:48.000 The thing about men being competitive with each other, that's a huge problem.

02:25:52.000 It's a huge problem.

02:25:54.000 Not enjoying your friend's success, not wanting them to succeed, secretly wanting them to fail.

02:26:01.000 You will never live a happy life if you're secretly wanting people to fail.

02:26:04.000 You will never live a happy life if you want to seek, if you seek joy in other people's failure.

02:26:11.000 You will never, you will never live a happy life.

02:26:13.000 That is not the way.

02:26:15.000 The way is if someone is doing really well and you feel jealousy, what is that?

02:26:22.000 What is that feeling?

02:26:23.000 That you're comparing yourself to them.

02:26:25.000 Well, you have two choices.

02:26:27.000 You can either be bitter and upset and negative, which does you no good, or you can be inspired.

02:26:34.000 So their success can be fuel that makes you work harder.

02:26:37.000 Absolutely.

02:26:37.000 And actually, you should thank them for that.

02:26:39.000 You should even thank people you don't like if you find their success to make you feel uncomfortable.

02:26:45.000 Like, oh, fuck that dude.

02:26:47.000 No, no, no, no, no, no.

02:26:48.000 That's not the way.

02:26:49.000 The way is, what is he doing?

02:26:52.000 Oh, he's working harder.

02:26:53.000 He's doing this.

02:26:53.000 He's figured out this.

02:26:54.000 He's more objective.

02:26:55.000 He's more analytical.

02:26:57.000 He's figured out a way to work harder.

02:26:59.000 Absolutely.

02:27:00.000 He's figured out a way to work smarter.

02:27:01.000 He's more honest with himself about stuff.

02:27:04.000 He writes things down.

02:27:06.000 He's got a chart on his wall where he figures out what he's doing wrong and how to correct it.

02:27:10.000 And he's doing that work and he's correcting it.

02:27:12.000 I'm not doing that.

02:27:13.000 That's why he's getting ahead and I'm not.

02:27:16.000 But you got to be vulnerable even with yourself.

02:27:19.000 Absolutely.

02:27:20.000 And that's the super unlock, right?

02:27:23.000 That's what I got out of journaling.

02:27:25.000 Like 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.

02:27:38.000 And you have to be, and it's not going to be pretty, but you got to be brutally honest.

02:27:43.000 Only sit down and journal when you're ready to be brutally honest.

02:27:46.000 And that was a game changer for me.

02:27:49.000 Like, I remember there was a guy, he was in a cell next to me, and we got into this minor conflict.

02:27:55.000 He owed me for some cigarettes that, you know, he got on credit.

02:27:58.000 He didn't pay it.

02:27:59.000 And when I wouldn't give him more on credit, he blew the power out of my cell.

02:28:02.000 So he stuck some shit in the fucking white socket, right?

02:28:05.000 And I'm over here.

02:28:06.000 I'm like, I'm already, because I had went to the yard that day to the cages, right?

02:28:11.000 So we go out.

02:28:13.000 And normally I don't really go out in the wintertime.

02:28:16.000 You know, this is solitary.

02:28:18.000 So I might go like a month, like during February, it's brutally cold in Michigan.

02:28:22.000 But I get up and I go out.

02:28:23.000 I hadn't been out, you know, I think most of January, I probably hadn't been out.

02:28:27.000 And so I go out to the cages and this one guy, he gets into it with the officers.

02:28:32.000 You know, they're having a little verbal, you know, altercation.

02:28:36.000 And the officers take it out on all of us.

02:28:38.000 So we're only supposed to be out for an hour.

02:28:40.000 So 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.

02:28:52.000 They left us out there.

02:28:53.000 It had to be for hour, 45, way beyond what we were supposed to be, right?

02:28:58.000 Just to keep you cold.

02:28:59.000 Yeah, just to keep us cold.

02:29:00.000 I mean, like, we're, and it's like, I mean, by the time I come in, I'm so cold.

02:29:04.000 I'm past the shivering point.

02:29:06.000 And so I'm pissed.

02:29:07.000 I'm, you know, I'm pissed.

02:29:08.000 And then the neighbor's like, yo, can I borrow some more cigarettes?

02:29:12.000 He ain't paid me back.

02:29:14.000 And I'm like, I cuss him out, man.

02:29:16.000 No, you ain't getting no more cigarettes.

02:29:18.000 Bzzz.

02:29:19.000 Powerful.

02:29:27.000 Joe, I'm over here steaming, bro.

02:29:29.000 I'm so, I'm like, literally, I'm like, I'm enraged, but I'm like, I'm super cold and like the power is out.

02:29:34.000 So, because the power is, I had like a little radio.

02:29:37.000 I can like block out some of the noise so I can read and write, you know?

02:29:41.000 And sometimes they'll come fix it in a couple hours, but sometime it can be days, you know.

02:29:45.000 And so, by the time I thought out, I'm like, I had just started this journaling journey, you know.

02:29:50.000 And I just started writing down.

02:29:51.000 I catch this motherfucker.

02:29:53.000 I'm going to thank him.

02:29:54.000 And, you know, I'm going, I'm furious, you know.

02:29:58.000 And I come back a couple of days later, because that's what I would do.

02:30:01.000 I would write, and then I would come back and read what I had written.

02:30:05.000 And I was like, this is the mind of a madman.

02:30:08.000 Like, this person, like, I would not want this to be a person that I live next door to.

02:30:13.000 So you got to get your shit together, you know?

02:30:15.000 And so I wrote through this process.

02:30:17.000 And, you know, even now, you know, I still have all my journals.

02:30:21.000 They're actually on a pad similar to that, like that notepad.

02:30:23.000 I still have all my journals from prison.

02:30:25.000 And I can go and flip through the pages.

02:30:27.000 And 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.

02:30:35.000 I didn't write the dates.

02:30:37.000 But I can go back, man, and I flip through.

02:30:40.000 And sometimes it's beautiful.

02:30:41.000 You know, sometimes it's these moments where I can see myself awakening, you know, and I see this desire to be a different person.

02:30:51.000 And I see just the honesty there, you know, of like, listen, I'm not there yet.

02:30:55.000 You know, I feel it.

02:30:57.000 You know, I'm afraid that, you know, what if I become nice?

02:31:01.000 Can I survive the yard now?

02:31:04.000 What does that mean, you know, to like not be angry?

02:31:08.000 Anger is a power in prison.

02:31:09.000 You know, it's a, it's a, nobody wants to mess with an angry person in prison or a crazy person.

02:31:14.000 So these things are, they have value, you know.

02:31:18.000 Who am I without my anger?

02:31:20.000 You know?

02:31:21.000 And so I can see this enlightenment in real time.

02:31:24.000 And I'm just like, man, you were, you were really a kid, you know?

02:31:28.000 It's like you're trying to figure this stuff out with no, you know, there's no therapist.

02:31:33.000 There's no, you know, you know, you don't have anybody to interpret.

02:31:38.000 You don't even have language for this.

02:31:39.000 You just know you're hurting.

02:31:41.000 And you know that that's the anger is really hurt.

02:31:44.000 You know, it's really disappointment.

02:31:46.000 It's all these things.

02:31:48.000 And that writing it down, like I highly encourage people to like really, it's one of the things that I attribute to my success today.

02:31:58.000 All the things that I want to manifest in my life, I have written down.

02:32:01.000 I've literally written them down.

02:32:03.000 I mean, now we got technology.

02:32:04.000 I'm constantly writing things down on my phone when I don't have access to pen and pad.

02:32:11.000 But there's something powerful about like handwriting, like just the meditative process of seeing one word after another.

02:32:21.000 But it starts with that.

02:32:22.000 You got to get real with yourself.

02:32:26.000 For me, it was so hard because early on, I blamed everybody.

02:32:34.000 I blamed my dad.

02:32:35.000 I blamed my mom.

02:32:37.000 Like, why would you hit me out of anger?

02:32:40.000 Blame my dad.

02:32:41.000 Why would you let her do that? 0.99

02:32:44.000 What 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.

02:33:09.000 And she said to me, you know, you don't know what my life was like back then.

02:33:14.000 And she said it multiple times.

02:33:16.000 And I just listened to her.

02:33:18.000 And I said to her, I was like, Ma, how would I understood your life when I was nine years old?

02:33:24.000 And it just stopped her, you know?

02:33:27.000 And it allowed us to actually talk about who she was and what she had went through.

02:33:32.000 And it allowed me to forgive her, you know, because that was a tough thing that I had to navigate was forgiveness.

02:33:38.000 And that's another thing that I found in life, man, is that people hang on to stuff.

02:33:45.000 You know, they let it torture them.

02:33:47.000 You 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.

02:33:54.000 But I wouldn't have been able to get there without journaling.

02:33:56.000 You know, I wouldn't have been able to get there without saying, I'm actually not angry today.

02:34:02.000 I'm hurt.

02:34:03.000 You know, I used to have these moments where this is an extremely vulnerable thing to say, but it's important.

02:34:14.000 Mail call in prison is one of the most emotionally charged times that you will ever serve.

02:34:23.000 Because 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.

02:34:33.000 And 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.

02:34:44.000 And it induces so much anxiety when you're waiting and you're waiting and you're waiting to hear from someone.

02:34:54.000 And 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.

02:35:01.000 You know, I would write these long letters and I wouldn't get a letter back.

02:35:07.000 I 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.

02:35:23.000 I would just drink water and I would just like eat cough drops that I could buy out of the commissary.

02:35:30.000 That was the only thing that you can buy that was like digestible other than medicine when you're solitary.

02:35:35.000 So you can't get noodles and all the things.

02:35:38.000 And so we would buy cough drops and eat those like Jolly Ranchers.

02:35:41.000 You know, that was like our little thing.

02:35:43.000 And I just remember like writing and just being like, man, I just want to hear from somebody.

02:35:51.000 You know, because these people, like, they can do anything to me.

02:35:56.000 Like, 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.

02:36:04.000 And when you're going through that, you know that there's things that they can do, like they can deprive you of food.

02:36:11.000 They have this concoction in there.

02:36:12.000 I don't know if you've ever heard of this, but it's called a food loaf.

02:36:16.000 And basically, what happens is, say they pass out the meal and you decide, I'm not going to give the milk carton back.

02:36:25.000 Then they can put you on food loaf restriction.

02:36:28.000 And 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.

02:36:38.000 And 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.

02:36:46.000 And then being like, okay, that's your meal for the day.

02:36:49.000 Now, that's what the meal is supposed to be, but what actually happens is they take all the leftover food from that week.

02:36:55.000 We cook that with oatmeal and jell-o, so it actually stays together, and they bake it into these bricks.

02:37:02.000 And they put it into the freezer, and then when somebody's on food loaf, they'll send over to the child hall.

02:37:08.000 We 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.

02:37:17.000 And you can't eat it.

02:37:19.000 It smells so atrocious.

02:37:21.000 It is the most gross thing, but it meets their minimum requirement of what they have to do in terms of nurturing.

02:37:29.000 So 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.

02:37:37.000 And 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.

02:37:46.000 And then I'm like, I'm physically conditioned to go without food and not suffer.

02:37:52.000 Right.

02:37:53.000 And 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.

02:38:06.000 But 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.

02:38:17.000 And then it also just helped me self-regulate and know that I can be in control of how I feel about anything.

02:38:24.000 And so the first time I did it, it felt, I felt like I was suffering.

02:38:28.000 You know, I was like, oh, this is hard.

02:38:29.000 This is, you know, this system is forcing me to have to, you know, figure out how to be tough and all the things.

02:38:35.000 But 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.

02:38:47.000 But 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.

02:38:55.000 That hurts.

02:38:56.000 It's sad.

02:38:56.000 You know what I mean?

02:38:57.000 I don't feel thought about.

02:39:00.000 I went 17 years without my mother coming to visit me.

02:39:04.000 And that psychologically had so much impact on how I saw myself of like your own mother won't come see you.

02:39:14.000 Like you're that bad of a person.

02:39:16.000 And so that journaling really helped me undo a lot of that damage.

02:39:22.000 You know, it helped me to start to see myself as like, no, you actually are lovable.

02:39:26.000 Like you are, you are worthy of good things happening to you.

02:39:30.000 You know, there's a lot of bad things that happen to you, but those all weren't a reflection of your self-worth.

02:39:39.000 And 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.

02:39:47.000 You know, there was a time where I had forgave my mother, but it came with attachments.

02:39:52.000 You know, I forgive you, but you got to be this now.

02:39:55.000 You 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.

02:40:04.000 And it was all contrived in my head.

02:40:07.000 You know, that wasn't forgiveness.

02:40:08.000 That was like this condition.

02:40:10.000 You know, and I see that in work.

02:40:10.000 Right.

02:40:12.000 I see it in life.

02:40:13.000 I see it in relationships and parenting is that we're always attaching a thing to the outcome as opposed to saying.

02:40:19.000 That's actual.

02:40:20.000 You know, as opposed to just saying, you know what?

02:40:20.000 Yeah.

02:40:24.000 I forgive you and that's it.

02:40:28.000 It has to be nothing else.

02:40:29.000 Like, you don't have to change.

02:40:31.000 We don't even have to like each other.

02:40:33.000 But I'm not going to hold myself hostage to the pain of the past.

02:40:37.000 Like, you know, that's when I think about, you know, grit and I think about sports.

02:40:42.000 And, you know, I watch these athletes who compete.

02:40:46.000 You know, they're putting their bodies on the line.

02:40:48.000 And, 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.

02:40:59.000 And you'll see them quitting in a moment.

02:41:02.000 And then you'll see the other ones that they'll have that injury. 0.62

02:41:05.000 And you know, the moment they get out of hospital, they're like, they're working.

02:41:09.000 You know, they're working.

02:41:10.000 They're willing to work themselves back to, you know, to whatever they need to do to compete again.

02:41:16.000 You 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.

02:41:25.000 Well, I think those lessons that you get from athletes is one of the reasons why we love sports so much.

02:41:30.000 Absolutely.

02:41:31.000 We see ourselves in these athletes and see their struggles and their triumphs.

02:41:37.000 And we say, oh, I think if I work hard, I can do that too.

02:41:40.000 Or I could do something similar in my own life.

02:41:42.000 Absolutely.

02:41:43.000 I think a lot of people are going to get that out of this conversation too, from you.

02:41:48.000 What you've gone through and who you are now is very admirable.

02:41:53.000 It 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.

02:42:03.000 It's an insane journey.

02:42:07.000 And I really appreciate you coming on here, man.

02:42:09.000 I appreciate you having me, man.

02:42:11.000 I'm such a big fan and just so much respect for the way that you, you know what I really respect out of you more than anything else?

02:42:19.000 It's your curiosity.

02:42:21.000 You 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.

02:42:28.000 And that's like such an admirable trait and one that I truly appreciate.

02:42:32.000 But I think we all have that.

02:42:34.000 I think it's just not nourished.

02:42:36.000 I think everyone's curious.

02:42:38.000 And I'm very curious about people, very curious about what makes a person who they are.

02:42:43.000 What did you go through?

02:42:45.000 How do you think?

02:42:47.000 How do you go through your day?

02:42:50.000 What is your thought process?

02:42:52.000 You can learn a lot from people, man.

02:42:53.000 I learned a lot from you.

02:42:55.000 Thank you very much.

02:42:56.000 My brother, thanks so much for having me there.

02:42:58.000 My pleasure.

02:42:59.000 My pleasure.

02:43:00.000 All right.

The Joe Rogan Experience - July 22, 2025

Joe Rogan Experience #2353 - Shaka Senghor

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