Part Two: Charged With Murder at 19, Sentenced to 40 years, and Came Out Freer Than Most People Will Ever Be — Shaka Senghor on Forgiveness, Shame, and Escaping the Prisons Nobody Talks About

You won’t believe the transformation behind this story. From a runaway teen escaping a traumatic home, to addiction to crack cocaine, being shot and living with PTSD, committing a murder that led to a potential 40-year prison sentence, and enduring 4.5 years in solitary confinement...this is the unbelievable life journey of Shaka Senghor. In this episode of Mayim Bialik's Breakdown in honor of Mental Health Awareness Month, the resilience expert and bestselling author of How to Be Free: A Proven Guide to Escaping Life’s Hidden Prisons shares the raw, unfiltered truth about the darkest moments of his life, and the mindset that helped him rebuild everything. What began in violence, addiction, and trauma ultimately led Shaka to become a global thought leader who now inspires executives, entrepreneurs, elite athletes, and audiences around the world. And the turning point? It happened inside a prison cell. Shaka Senghor breaks down: - Growing up in chaos & running away from home as a teenager - How drug culture & crack cocaine addiction nearly destroyed his life - The traumatic experience of being shot, and later discovering who pulled the trigger - PTSD & emotional trauma that followed - The night that changed everything: the murder that sent him to prison for up to 40 years - Support he wishes he had before prison - The desperate moment he tried to escape prison - The heartbreaking 4.5 years he spent in solitary confinement and other tragedies & injustices he witnessed behind bars - How literacy and journaling kept him sane - Wrestling with anger toward God & finding connection to a higher power through nature - How mentorship from older incarcerated men changed the trajectory of his life He also reveals the powerful mindset shift that transformed his life, including how he used the Law of Attraction to eventually get out of solitary confinement. One of the most powerful parts of this conversation is Shaka’s process of healing: - Learning to track the sources of physical & emotional trauma - Identifying emotional triggers - Releasing shame for things he wasn’t responsible for - Understanding how anger often grows from suppressed shame - Concept of “weaponizing the past” and how he learned to reconcile anger for what he did, and what was done to him We're also diving deep into forgiveness in ways you’ve likely never heard before. Shaka shares what it meant when the godmother of the man he killed forgave him, the life-changing moment when the person who shot him apologized, how that apology helped him forgive his mother for years of abuse, and why forgiveness isn’t weakness, but liberation. After finally being approved for parole, Shaka created a plan to rebuild his life from the ground up. That plan eventually led him to become a successful author and speaker, advocate for prison reform, and even develop a close friendship with Oprah Winfrey. Shaka also talks about the surreal experience of reentering society, including the technological shock of cell phones and computers, his lasting PTSD symptoms from prison, the impact incarceration has on families and loved ones (not just the inmate), and his advice for supporting someone returning home from prison. Even if you’ve never experienced incarceration, Shaka's story is more universal than you might think. He explains: - Why uncertainty is one of the hardest emotions humans face - How many of us live inside “hidden prisons” of fear, shame, & trauma - Why vulnerability, forgiveness, & resilience are the keys to breaking free - Why every human being deserves hope, love, joy, & success...no matter their past Shaka's mission is simple: Help people reclaim agency over what ails them and realize that freedom starts within. Shaka Senghor’s latest book, HOW TO BE FREE: A Proven Guide to Escaping Life’s Hidden Prisons: ⁠https://www.shakasenghor.com/how-to-be-free⁠ https://www.shakasenghor.com/how-to-be-free Follow us on Substack for Exclusive Bonus Content: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://bialikbreakdown.substack.com/⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ https://%E2%81%A0%E2%81%A0%E2%81%A0%E2%81%A0%E2%81%A0%E2%81%A0%E2%81%A0%E2%81%A0%E2%81%A0https://bialikbreakdown.substack.com/%E2%81%A0%E2%81%A0%E2%81%A0%E2%81%A0%E2%81%A0%E2%81%A0%E2%81%A0%E2%81%A0%E2%81%A0 ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠BialikBreakdown.com⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ https://www.bialikbreakdown.com/ ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠YouTube.com/mayimbialik⁠⁠⁠ https://www.youtube.com/mayimbialik%E2%81%A0 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices https://megaphone.fm/adchoices See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:04Mayim Bialik?

  Hi, I'm Iyam Vialik.

• 0:05Jonathan Cohen?

  And I'm Jonathan Cohen.

• 0:07Mayim Bialik?

  And welcome to part two of our conversation with Shaka Senghor. He's a globally recognized resilience expert, bestselling author, and a transformative thought leader. His journey took him from incarceration for 19 years, including seven years in solitary confinement, to a career where he empowers executives, entrepreneurs, athletes, and audiences around the world. We're discussing his book, How to Be Free: A Proven Guide to Escaping Life's Hidden Prisons. In part one of our conversation, we talked about the journey that he took for the first 19 years of his life and how that ended him up in prison with an almost 40-year sentence.

• 0:50Jonathan Cohen?

  In part two, we get to his personal transformation and what we all can learn about transforming the limits of our own lives. If you've ever imagined yourself trying to accomplish something other than what you're doing right now, he provides the hope, the inspiration, and the way forward.

• 1:09Mayim Bialik?

  We're also going to focus on forgiveness, anger, and the PTSD symptoms that have not left him since he got out of prison. Really, really important. Part two of our conversation. We can't wait for you to hear it. Here is part two of our conversation with Shaka Senghor. Break it down. Once you got out, you were able to begin a career as a writer, which ended up being, I mean, I think, better than your wildest dreams. This is your third book. So can you talk a little bit about how it all came to be that Oprah eventually read your book?

• 1:48Speaker 02

  It's the wildest story. So my journey as a writer has been the craziest winding road.

• 1:59Speaker 02

  You know, so I I I published this first book from prison. And, you know, the first thing I did when I walked out of out of the prison. And they took me to the parole office and soon as I got done talking to my parole officer, I sold my first book out the trunk in the parole office parking lot. And uh, and that was just like the greatest affirming thing of like. Cause I was telling this guy who was coming home, you know, you come home and they give you whatever cash you have in your account. They give it to you in cash. And this guy probably had like thirty five dollars and and I was like. I told him, I was like, yo, I get out, I'm selling books, blah, blah. And it's funny cause like every every year, you know, it pops up on Facebook and me and him have our little celebration because it's a photo of it. It's a photo of me selling him the book.

• 2:42Speaker 02

  And he just gave me like pretty much more than half of what he had to buy a book. And I was like, I don't have any change. And he was just like, keep the twenty, you know? And uh, and so I sold that book. And I got out and I was just like. I'm gonna go and sell books everywhere. And I I literally went everywhere, anywhere people were, parks, strip clubs. I was like, I ain't had no money to make it rain, but I got these books like, yo, you wanna buy a book? Uh, trade a book for a lap dance, I don't know, but it's uh, but I sold them. I mean, I went to churches, I went to parks. I would like to take a backpack and just like, I got ten books, I'm not coming back in until those books are sold. Um, and, you know, slowly but surely, people started getting kind of momentum.

• 3:25Speaker 02

  And, you know, and then I also had posted on like Facebook that, I posted on Facebook like three days after I'm home, I'm just like. If you got music that I can review, like, just send it to me. And cause I was just trying to get caught up on music, like in prison, they had stopped us from getting CDs and tapes had went extinct. So there was a gap of probably about eight years where I didn't have access to new music. Um, and a local newspaper saw the post and was like, hey, can you review music for our newspaper? So I'm like, okay, um, so I started doing these reviews. And then one day, they was like, can you like cover this story, one of our writers are down?

• 4:08Speaker 02

  I'm like, I told the editor, I'm like, I've never, I'm not a journalist, um, but I can try. And I'll go and I'll write this, I go to do this view movie, the movie wasn't that great.

• 4:18Mayim Bialik?

  What was the movie?

• 4:18Speaker 02

  It was, it was a movie about like this guy and God, it was like some type of gospel movie. It was, it was an independent movie, but it wasn't, it wasn't the most amazing. But the actor in it, he had an incredible story. And so I wrote about his life. He was like addicted to drugs and then he found theater and, and movies. And so I ended up writing, and the newspaper gets like more responses than it's ever got from like any story. And so they started asking me to just like cover like local stories. And I would go and talk to business owners and people and, you know, actors and comedians. And I would just like write these stories that became a big part of the newspaper. Uh, and simultaneously, I'm just hustling these books.

• 4:59Speaker 02

  And then I started, I would put together like these book signings, like, you know, 10 people would come out, five people would buy a book. And I started realizing when I would go volunteer speak at schools, you know, I would sell more books. And I started getting people to just book me to come speak. And my only agreement would be, can I bring like a hundred books? And I would like sell all of them after I got done talking. And, um, and so that, that, what happened, started to happen was that people would say to me, you don't seem like someone who's been in prison. Like the way that you speak, you don't talk like someone who's been in prison. And they meant it in the most, you know, loving way.

• 5:39Speaker 02

  But I'm like, I just left the greatest philosophers, the greatest legal minds, the greatest thinkers and strategists. And we were having profound conversations and these men are incredibly articulate. They're amazing and, and, you know, all the things. And that's when I decided to write my memoir called Writing My Wrongs. And so I, I write this book and now I'm going from like, I put my first book signing together around that book. And I remember, I remember going to the lady, I did it at the museum in this Charles H. Wright Museum in Detroit. And I remember going to talk to the lady about doing it there and she was like, what are you talking about? It's like, you're about to spend money to rent this place out? And she's like, people are not gonna come out like that for like, books.

• 6:23Speaker 02

  And I'm like, this is, this is the great thing about being naive. Is I think when you're naive about something, you're willing to try harder and, you know, and I was like, well, I'm, yeah. That doesn't sound like a lot of people to you, but I think I'm gonna get a lot of people to come out. And so I just got out in the streets, it was passing, I fly, I say, I got this book signing coming, come to the book signing, blah, blah. And like four hundred people show up. And I like literally sell four hundred books the first time I do a book signing at this, at this place. And I'm like, and it's self-published. And so I started getting booked more and more. I was booking myself. I was like my own speaking agent. And then one time I get invited to speak, I became a fellow at MIT Media Lab.

• 7:04Speaker 02

  And one of the advisors of the fellowship was like, hey, we want you to come speak at this event and you tour. And so I'm like, I'll come do it, whatever, right? So this is the craziest thing. So they invite me and then they send me this little booklet. And the booklet has who's gonna be at the event. So I'm going through it. I don't know none of these people, except for two people. One was Melody Hobson. And I knew who Melody Hobson was because I was reading Black Enterprise when I was in prison. And she used to write a column on finance. And there was, she was just so intriguing to me because she was this little sweet black lady who was like managing all this money. I had never heard of such a thing.

• 7:49Speaker 02

  And then the other person was George Lucas. And I'm like, well, I know, I know who George Lucas is. So I'm like, okay, if those two people in the room, this must be an incredible room. I go to the organizer and I said, hey, can I send you books to put in their swag bags? And she was like, sure. I didn't have any money at the time. I probably had about maybe three hundred dollars in my business account. And I'm sending a hundred books, which was like twenty-five dollars a piece. It's like twenty-five hundred dollars worth of books. And so I sent it and I go and do this talk. And I just remember like a moment in the talk and Melody was like sitting right, her and George sitting right in the front. I remember this moment like during the talk where Melody was just like tears and I was

• 8:33Speaker 02

  just like, man, I'm like, I felt like I was doing my thing, right? So they had a hospitality suite. I'm in a hospitality suite. This guy comes up to me, suit on, clean cut guy. He was like, this black guy, and he's like, uh, he's like, I got a bone to pick with you. And I'm like, oh, man, you know, I'm like, here we go. I'm thinking he's about to be like, you know, I'm tired of hearing these hood stories and blah, blah, why didn't you go to college? And he is like, man, he's like, uh, he was like, man, I'm supposed to be hanging out with my wife, but she won't come out the room. She's in there reading your book. So I was like, well, we should just have cocktails. We had a joke about having cocktails. His wife, turns out, used to be the president at Harpo. And she takes the book to Oprah after she reads it.

• 9:18Speaker 02

  This is like months later, she takes the book to Oprah. She gives Oprah the book. Oprah gets the book and was like, why would I read this book? This guy is on here, he got tattoos on and these like, the prison photos, like it's ridiculous. Like, why would I, why would I read this book? And, um, she, she literally said, Oprah said that she took the book and she kept moving it around her house because she doesn't throw books away. And then one day she was flying, uh, from Chicago to LA and she decided to take the book with her. Fifty pages in, she was like, I want to interview this guy.

• 9:52Mayim Bialik?

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• 10:37Mayim Bialik?

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• 11:23Speaker 02

  And so it's like all these just pivots, these, these moments. And I remember when they, they, they called me to, to go out. Originally I was supposed to go to Hawaii. Then they called back and was like, no, she wants you to come to California. And so the Hawaii trip was about three weeks out. And I'm like, okay, I can kind of give myself time to get my, my things together. And then when they changed, it was like the next week, they're like, you're going to, to Oprah's house. And, you know, I went the night before. I, uh, I don't know, I don't know if this is a cultural thing, but I know growing up, like the night before school, we would just like lay all our clothes out on the bed. And we're like, so that was me the day before Oprah's. Like I'm laying all my clothes out.

• 12:03Mayim Bialik?

  What'd you wear?

• 12:04Speaker 02

  I had some jeans, I had a polo shirt, I had some Ferragamo, some gray socks. I was like, the socks gotta be, be right. And, uh, and then I tried it all on. I was like, you know, I had to test it out, sit in the mirror like, oh, this is how it's gonna look. And then I went to her house and we were supposed to do an interview for like 45 minutes. We talked for three and a half hours straight.

• 12:29Jonathan Cohen?

  Wow.

• 12:30Speaker 02

  And she went on to say that not only was one of the best conversations in her career, it was one of the best conversations in her life. And then, like Oprah called me, this was crazy. She calls me, like I get back to Detroit and she was like, hey, it's, it's, oh, I just want to give you a call.

• 12:46Mayim Bialik?

  It's Oprah.

• 12:47Speaker 02

  And yeah, she's like, I want to give you my number because I want us to be friends. And I was like, I was like, in my mind, I'm like, okay, is this just a courtesy thing that happens after interviews? Like, you know, and uh.

• 13:01Mayim Bialik?

  Or am I Mr. Oprah?

• 13:03Speaker 02

  Right, right, right, right. Is this not my homie, right? And so, literally, she gave me her number and uh, and we've been rocking ever since.

• 13:11Mayim Bialik?

  Wow.

• 13:12Speaker 02

  And she is the, she's the sweetest. Like, I remember when me and my wife first started dating, I was like, listen, I was like, occasionally, I might get a very late night text.

• 13:22Mayim Bialik?

  It's Oprah.

• 13:23Speaker 02

  I'm like, but it'd be Oprah. It'd be like, you know, uh, and she was like, what are you talking about? I'm like, well, sometimes she's in different parts of the world, whereas morning there, we'll, you know, we'll have an exchange and uh.

• 13:33Mayim Bialik?

  That's your hall pass is a text from Oprah?

• 13:35Speaker 02

  Yeah, right. Yeah, texts from Oprah is like, I can, you gotta accept this one at three in the morning. Uh, and yeah, and we ended up just, we, we really developed a sweet friendship and, you know, anytime her and I are in the conversation, it's almost, it's always the most emotional uh thing and, and you know, she's truly one of the sweetest people. And yeah, and so I did that and.

• 13:57Mayim Bialik?

  I'm thinking of the guy on your cell block who said, this ain't Oprah.

• 14:00Speaker 02

  I had a petty moment when I was pulling up to the. I was like, I wonder where this guy is at. Like, I'm, I'm pulling up at Oprah's house and.

• 14:07Mayim Bialik?

  Wow.

• 14:08Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah.

• 14:09Jonathan Cohen?

  I have two questions about divine timing.

• 14:14Jonathan Cohen?

  The first is, really, I'm a little stuck on still the solitary confinement because of the inhumanity of it, right? Like, you see the moments, mostly in movies and TV shows, where a prisoner gets thrown into solitary and it's like this horrific, like, they know what's happening, right? And and most people who are listening like they can't go 10 minutes without checking their phone for a distraction. Right like and you're talking about years of not knowing of not having structure of also and being left with yourself like sitting that deeply with yourself. You you basically described the process of doing deep therapeutic work to examine yourself, to ask those questions. Why did I get here?

• 14:59Jonathan Cohen?

  Do you think you could have done that deep work in general pop not being in solitary?

• 15:06Speaker 02

  It's always one of those things that when I reflect on the the journey,

• 15:13Speaker 02

  that those questions arise for me, right? Like the what ifs or what would have been different, what could have been different? You know, there was some work I was doing in in general pop as far as like the reading, right? It's just like that I was always reading and and studying, but I think that that the willingness to go deeper, you know? I don't know if that would have been triggered anywhere other than where I was because I didn't have access to that information until I was there. So it's kind of like theoretically like, okay, what if I would have read that in in general pop? Would I had have had the same reaction? Not a time would have been different, right? The the concentrated focused, the ability to focus and uncertainty, which is very difficult.

• 15:57Speaker 02

  Like people think it will be an easy thing to do is just be like, oh, well, you're in solitary. You should be able to do it. Solitary is chaotic. It's way more chaotic than than general population because you're dealing with the highest levels of just like mental illness. And so the noise level, the the just abuse and the constant stimulation of officers coming and pepper spraying people and just brutalizing people and, you know, people just going to war. And I was in solitary in different type of prisons. I was in solitary in those type of prisons you see in the movies, the old school. It's, you know, it's a little small cell. You can stretch your arms out. I'm not the tallest guy, but I can literally touch both walls. So I've been in that version and then I've been in the more modern where it's just like the steel door.

• 16:42Speaker 02

  And so you can't even see outside of anything other than your window. So I don't, I don't know um whether it would have happened in a different way. I mean, I've met incredible guys who have figured it out without going through what I went through. Uh, because they had access to information that shifted how they think. And then they had some structure where, you know, now in some of these prisons, you get people who come in from the outside, they're running programs there. You know, when I first went to prison, you can go to college and then they took it away like probably about a year or so after I was in prison, you know. So, so it's one of those things where, I'll tell you this, um, you, you made a point about people and, and how they can't, you know. They can't sit with themselves. Right. We're constantly looking.

• 17:27Mayim Bialik?

  They can't do four and a half minutes alone.

• 17:28Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 17:30Speaker 02

  Yeah, so, so one of the things that inspired writing, you know, How to Be Free, was I saw that during the pandemic. Where some of the most accomplished, successful, wealthiest people in my network, dear friends and associates, were struggling with being alone. Um, and what they were really struggling with was uncertainty. Because they would say, okay, the pandemic is over this month. Nope, maybe it's over this month. Nope, uh, maybe we'll get back to it now, right? And that would, and so what happened is I, I saw some of my friends who were struggling here in LA, and they lived in apartments and condos and different things. And I, I, I had just bought a house like three or four months.

• 18:14Speaker 02

  I bought a house in December 19, like literally December 2019. And so I just said to my friends, like, hey, you can just come and work in the back. None of us knew what was happening, right? But it's enough space for people to spread out, you can come work in the backyard. And then I was like, I started talking to friends and I was like, oh, they need some tools. And so I wrote this piece on Medium about, here's the, I can't remember what the number was. Here's seven things I learned in solitary confinement that you can apply to what's happening right now in the pandemic. I write this thing, I literally wrote it for my friends. The thing goes viral. And then I literally get a call from Oprah, who's like, hey, so I heard you wrote this piece. And I might have sent it to her, she was like, I think you can help a lot of people.

• 18:58Speaker 02

  And so we should talk about it. And so we ended up doing a conversation around, here's how you use these tools, right? Journaling, meditation, mindfulness, exercise, like setting some structure so that you can have some control. And so to your point, it's really tough for, the uncertainty is probably the hardest part of solitary. It's not knowing when the thing is going to come to an end. And I've seen that with people, which is one of the things that inspired, you know, the overall book was like, I know how hard it is to navigate hard things. And I've done the hard work for you. And so I'm gonna provide you with a framework that actually helps you access different parts of who you are.

• 19:42Jonathan Cohen?

  I think a lot of people are still struggling with uncertainty. World events are uncertain, political divide is uncertain.

• 19:48Speaker 02

  Absolutely.

• 19:49Jonathan Cohen?

  Progression of technology is extremely uncertain in terms of how quickly a lot of industries are changing. There's a lot still that people can't anticipate.

• 19:59Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, and I mean, that's where I think the book is really gonna be super helpful in terms of like, oftentimes when things are turbulent and they're, you know, it feels like the world is literally coming apart at the seams, which is what I think we're all experiencing right now. There's these moments of like, we forget about what do we really have access to? You know, because if you just get stuck in a news cycle and then doom scrolling, you think that's the world, and that's a part of the world, but it's not all of the world. You know, if you come out, what if you come out and you have an experience with your neighbor? That helps you like mentally process like, okay, yes, the world is coming apart,

• 20:40Speaker 02

  but this part that I have agency over, I can't help me get through another day, right? Like I pulled up yesterday, I have neighbors. So there are these three little kids, two of them are twins, and they love me. They're like, it's the funniest thing, like when I pull up, if they're like out, they just come running like these little bitty kids and like the twins are like two or three, right? And like in that moment. You know, nothing that's happened externally matters. It's just that I get a chance to see these little kids and, and, you know, I bring them joy and they bring me joy. And it's like, that's real life, that's, that's the all the time life. Uh, these are big, big moments. I don't want to minimize like the moment we're in is a, is a big historical moment

• 21:24Speaker 02

  that we're gonna look back and figure out, what did we do wrong? What did we do right?

• 21:29Mayim Bialik?

  I could write a book about that.

• 21:30Speaker 02

  So, no, we're gonna need a lot of, lot of, lot of books written about these, these moments, right? But then it's also in the adversarial moments where the best of what it means to be human tends to show up and we can access that, you know?

• 21:45Mayim Bialik?

  Well, and I think that's, you know, and I wanna sort of get to how to be free. You know, I, I mean, first of all, the, the book is organized in, in a very, I like how your brain works. It's organized very logically. So you have, you know, I don't want to call them like the seven deadly sins, but you basically take the hardest emotions, grief, anger, shame, right? And you, you drill down.

• 22:08Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 22:08Mayim Bialik?

  You drill down on each of these, kind of what it looked like in your life, what it looks like for everybody's life. And then what are the ways to literally kind of work through it? And you, you, you offer, you know, writing prompts and exercises. But you then sort of flip the tables and you say, what about vulnerability? Forgiveness, resilience? What are the things that it takes to build up the muscles that allow you to experience hope, love, joy, success, right? All these things.

• 22:38Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 22:39Mayim Bialik?

  And I, I will say, you know, one of the things that I felt on page one is I felt incredibly guilty. Because here I am like, oh, my kid won't do what I want them to. Or I can't, you know, remember to like work out when I'm supposed to. Or like, I don't want to go to therapy. You know, all these kind of like first world problems. And, and I wonder if you can help us understand how you write something knowing that people are not experiencing the level of...

• 23:13Mayim Bialik?

  Complexity, pain, like that you were forced to go through, right? Because of a decision on one day, right?

• 23:21Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 23:21Mayim Bialik?

  How do you frame that? Because you know what I mean. I'm like, I have grief too, but I'm thinking, it's nothing like what you're talking about, right? How do you sort of frame that? Where's the balance of where your experience is universal? And you do achieve that?

• 23:37Speaker 02

  That's a, that's a great question. And it's one that I actually love to entertain for a variety of reasons. Is that we live in this world where now, a lot of times, we can't even accept ourselves if it does not, if it's not attached to the severity of pain that somebody else suffered. And it's one of the reasons that I wrote the book. Like, not all grief is created equal, right? But in most families, we're all gonna grieve at some point. And it doesn't minimize your grief because somebody else's is a little bit more extreme. And that's important to really understand, because that's why the subtitle was The Hidden Prisons. And it's hidden because a lot of times, we are either in denial because our experience isn't as bad as somebody else's.

• 24:22Mayim Bialik?

  Mm-hmm.

• 24:23Speaker 02

  So we'll tuck ours to the side and hyper-focus on something that exists outside of us. And meanwhile, this thing that we've, we've stuffed down is wreaking havoc in our lives. And so what I wanted to do is really, you know, I've, I've done a lot of the hard work for sure. But at the same time, it's all relative to a person. And how do you experience it? And these tools are universal tools to help you. Because grief is not just even a, a life loss. Sometimes it's a love loss. Sometimes it's a friendship, it's an opportunity, it's a moment. You know, if you're a parent, you're gonna grieve at some point when your, when your kids fly the nest. You'll be happy about a lot of things, but there's other parts where you're like, man, did I get this right?

• 25:07Speaker 02

  Did I send this kid out into the world? I miss those sessions of just hugs, right? And it's not a severe grief, but if you can unpack it in a healthy way. It leads to greater opportunities to be really connected. And so what I wanted to do with the book is even in the structure, let's handle the tough things up top, right? Now, the metaphor is that is that I actually patterned it after how I served time. I started my time in the hardest way possible. But I started to work my way down through it. And I started to just get lighter and hopeful. And things started to look up. And, you know, I described like this, I have a letter from my dad. And I remember he wrote that, you know, son, while this is a dark, dark time you in, there's light at the end of the tunnel.

• 25:53Speaker 02

  And I remember thinking to myself, well, not all tunnels are created equal.

• 25:58Speaker 02

  You know, if you're looking at a quarter mile tunnel, you can probably see that light at the end. But if it's a 10 mile tunnel, you can't see that light. So what you need between that 10 mile tunnel and you is just these little slivers of light, just to give you a little bit of a path forward. And so the way that I structured the book was like, there's these little slivers of light that you'll see yourself in. The same, the same chapter was so profound to me because I had read,

• 26:29Speaker 02

  Brene Brown, and she was just talking about, you know, tell the storyteller story. And I'm like, now I'm tired of telling the story. Story is a hard story to tell. But I realized that agency over the things that elves us is really what she was saying. It's like, if you, if you can say it, you can own it and then you take away the power of it to be operating in the background.

• 26:51Mayim Bialik?

  If you can name it, you can tame it.

• 26:52Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah. And if you think about like a lot of the things, like we, we live in this, this society is so weird now where it's like, you know, and I, and I do like, just to be clear, the world is not fair. Like, this is not a fair world. Some people are going to be, you know, six, five, you know, just based on genetics and become amazing basketball players, right? And somebody who's an amazing basketball player that's four or five probably will not get that same opportunity. It's just life, is what it is. And like, we're not comfortable saying things are not fair anymore. We're not comfortable saying that, hey, I, I was lucky to be literate.

• 27:36Speaker 02

  Like, I'm telling you, I would not be here if I wasn't literate. I was literate before I went to prison. I was lucky. That was my luck. That was, and that luck changed my complete life outlook. And so what happens is that the society has got us into a space where we're like, "Well, I can't talk about my shame because it's not as great as this person's shame." And it's like, no, that's your hidden prison. You deserve to get out of that too. Like, you literally deserve to get out of that too. And, and that's where we can create, purity is like, we're all deserving of the best of what it means to be human. And we had to create pathways for us to access that. And that's one of the reasons I wrote the book, because I wanted people to know, look, we're all

• 28:18Speaker 02

  in our own iteration of these hidden prisons. And some of them are hard, some of them are very hard. Some of them are not hard, but they have very, I mean, there's well-intended prisons. Like, you know, you, you break up with, with, with a lover and you're like, you know, "Wasn't meant to be in a relationship, but we'll remain best friends." And occasionally we'll hook up if we happen to be in the same space. But meanwhile, you're like, "I want to get married and I want to have kids, I want to have a family." But you're anchored to this old thing that you won't cut the ties because you're not having the arguments, you're not having the dustups, and it's cool and it just works. But then it's like, are you getting to what you really want? If you're holding on to something that's just a fill-in. And so that's one of the things about the book.

• 29:03Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's a hidden prison.

• 29:04Mayim Bialik?

  Yeah, you have a list, actually. The helicopter parent who never lets go. The lover-turned-friend who stays out of comfort rather than love. The CEO who wears a mask of toughness because vulnerability feels like weakness. The privileged child whose comfort breeds complacency. And, and you also talk about, you call them kind of the more personal prisons. Comparing our lives to celebrities and influencers. Carrying the pain of a marred childhood like an invisible weight. Toxic relationships we cling to out of fear or habit. And the cultural mindset of entitlement. And I really, I, um, I, I do think it's, the, the lessons and sort of the, the tools are, are there and so incredibly, um, universal.

• 29:48Mayim Bialik?

  There's something about forgiveness that you talk about. And this chapter, you know, it encompasses forgiveness for your mother, and that kind of runs throughout the book. Forgiving yourself for what happened. But I have to tell you, and you fell off my chair. You found out who shot you when you were 17. Tell us about how you found out, how old you were, where you were, and what you learned from that.

• 30:19Speaker 02

  Yes, I got shot March 8th, 1990. And, you know, when the shooting happened, it was literally a matter of 20, 30 seconds. You know, me and this guy, we got into an argument. He literally pulled up in the car. We had never met before. So our first meeting was this quick argument. And I'm thinking, old school, he'll get out the car. We'll have, you know, we'll have a fight. And he pulled out a pistol and shot me multiple times.

• 30:44Mayim Bialik?

  Where were you shot?

• 30:44Speaker 02

  I shot twice in the leg and once in the foot. And then he just peels off and I never see this guy again. I mean, like, after I get out of the hospital, you know, I'm in a retaliatory kind of space of mind. Like, I'm gonna find this guy and, you know, never could find this guy. One of the things that I didn't realize until later in life was the hardest part about that is I never really saw his face. So he's kind of like this ghost that just kind of sat in the back of my life. And about to turn 50. I think it was 2022, somewhere in there.

• 31:18Mayim Bialik?

  So you never knew the whole time you're in prison?

• 31:20Speaker 02

  The whole time.

• 31:21Mayim Bialik?

  Never knew?

• 31:22Speaker 02

  Never knew, never knew the guy, never knew his name, never knew his face. And Lydia, a friend of mine, he texts me. He was like, yo, um, he was like, I got this letter. And I was like, what are you talking about? And he was like, he was like, he was like, do you know this woman named Angie? And I was like, yeah, he's like, her boyfriend like wrote to her ex, you know, baby's daddy or whatever wrote you this letter. He wants me to give it to you. And I'm like, I'm like, what? And he's like, it's the guy who shot you. And I was like, yo, I was like, send it to me like right now. I'm like, don't even wait to send it to me in the mail. Just like, send me a, like, I want, you know, send me the screenshots. And so he sends me the letter. And I'm reading this letter and this guy is like, he was,

• 32:07Speaker 02

  he's in prison. He's serving life in prison now for murder. He's, uh, and so a couple of things happened. One,

• 32:19Speaker 02

  It triggered like an old feeling of like revenge. And like, that's one of the things that I, I think is so important for people to understand is like, old things will come back, you know? In the, in the design of the book, there's a little door at the chapters. And the door is because sometime you go in and out of these things, right? And so it triggered that seventeen year old boy who wanted revenge. And I'm like, oh, you're in prison. I'm, I'm, I'm well respected and I can just, you know, put a couple of dollars on somebody's books and have you taken care of really quickly. And, um, but I'm reading the letter and it's the wildest thing. So this guy was on the phone in the, in the cell block.

• 33:01Speaker 02

  Another guy is walking past him and he has my book. And he's talking about, they're talking about what books they're reading. He's like, oh, I just got finished reading this book. It's right in my wrongs. And he's like, let me read it. And he's literally reading the book and there's a story of me talking about when I got shot.

• 33:20Mayim Bialik?

  Oh, my story.

• 33:22Speaker 02

  And he literally reels live, he's the shooter. And so he writes me this.

• 33:27Mayim Bialik?

  So he had never known that he was part of your story?

• 33:30Speaker 02

  Never known, never known. He writes me this letter and he was like, I'm the one who shot you and I feel responsible for how your life turned out. Because I believe if, if I wouldn't have shot you, you probably would not have went on to shoot somebody else. And I remember this moment of like, this is what, what I, so we talked earlier about God and, and, and spirit. And I always tell people, you know, when you're on this journey to live a different life, you gotta be prepared for how it's going to show up in your life. Like your, your principles, the things that you say you believe are going to get tested.

• 34:12Speaker 02

  So for all those years, up until I got that letter, I had been saying that people should not be held hostage to their worst moment. And that forgiveness is for you and not for the person.

• 34:29Speaker 02

  And the universe was like, ta-da, here you go. How about now? Yeah, see what you believe now, let's test this out, right? And I was like, and I sat with, I was actually in my garage, my garage office, and, you know, and I just sat with it, and I was, I remember sitting there, and I was like, okay. Okay, so I'm gonna write this guy a letter. And I'm gonna say, you know, thank you for, you know, this, this letter you wrote, and apologize, you know? I started writing, and I just balled it up, and I was like, I was like, that's not what I believe forgiveness is. Like, I don't, I don't owe him a letter.

• 35:06Speaker 02

  But I can accept his forgiveness, because it's really for me to let go. And so I went and I looked him up, I just wanted to see his face, see what he looked like, so I can close that part of the chapter, and I was like, oh, that's the gift, he just gave me the gift, I could see him. But what it did is it inspired me to write my mom this letter about really seeing and understanding her. Because she had started to open up to me about all the things in her life that led to her becoming the woman that she was. And, you know, it's this powerful thing that happens, like, when you're an adult parent. And you start to look back, and you think about how old your parents were when they had you.

• 35:51Speaker 02

  My mama had her first child when she was 16.

• 35:57Speaker 02

  There's no way that that woman who had been abused, she had been sexually abused as a kid, she had been beat, like, there was no way she could be any other kind of parent than the parent that she was. And I just wrote her this letter, and just told her, I was like, you know, I

• 36:15Speaker 02

  I'm happy that I'm in the space in my life where I can forgive her. And that I can be present with her, and that she gets a chance to see, you know, this version of who I am as a man, you know? But that's the, the power of, of the forgiveness was like, you know, it's really for me, you know? And, and like, and my instinct was to write that letter to him. And I was like, wait a minute, that's like, it almost felt performative, it's almost like, oh, that's a nice thing to do is to write this guy a letter and just say thank you. And I was like, no, I don't, I don't owe him that. You haven't written a letter. Yeah, no, I haven't. Do you think you will? I don't know, I mean, every now and then I, I think about it. Let's write it together.

• 36:56Speaker 02

  Every now and then I think about it because I think about what the impact would have on the other men in the cell block. And so that's the part where sometime I'm like, maybe I'll write that letter one day. Oh. Yeah, because I'm thinking maybe some young guy will say, you know, oh, man, maybe I should apologize to the person.

• 37:18Jonathan Cohen?

  You had a moment that I think people should better understand. You got a letter from the relatives of the man that you shot. Can you tell us a little bit about that?

• 37:28Speaker 02

  Yeah, about about five years into my sentence, I get a letter from this mysterious woman named Nancy. And, you know, one of the things that happened in prison is like people like randomly would just write people who are incarcerated to start pen pals and some of them are like love interest and all type of things. But you get a lot of people who are, you know, whether they're coming from, you know, spiritual space, sometime they're coming from college students. I get this letter. I had never saw the name, didn't know who this woman was. And I opened the letter and the letter starts to lay out who David, the man whose life

• 38:08Speaker 02

  I'm responsible for taking, who he was, you know, the father, the son, the friend. And Nancy said that she was his godmother. And she said to me like, despite this devastation you've caused, I forgive you. And not only do I forgive you, I love you because that's what God would do. And, you know, I wish that would have been, you know, one of those moments that you see in movies where it's kind of like that come to Jesus moment and you're like, all right, life is forever changed. But at that time, I was like so deep into my own hurt that I couldn't even comprehend the power of this gift that she had just given me.

• 38:50Speaker 02

  And so initially, I wanted to just ball the letter up and throw it away. I wanted it all to go away. You know, when you're, when you're a broken kid and a broken human being, you want the hard things to go away. You know, you don't want to deal with the discomfort of not knowing what to do emotionally. But something was like, don't throw that letter away. And so I would just read the letter, week after week, just read the letter and try to feel like.

• 39:21Speaker 02

  A change, try to feel like what forgiveness felt like, you know? And it wasn't until years later, when I began to start to forgive myself. Uh, when I was journaling and really writing through hard things where I'm like,

• 39:38Speaker 02

  oh, here's the truth, like, these are, yes, you did very bad things, poor decisions. Um, but here's all of who you are, here's the whole of it. And that letter was integral to self-acceptance and all of it. Cause like, we corresponded, we went back and forth for years, you know? Just talking about, I remember her asking me about the night and I gave her a very, very generic, you know, kind of rendering of that night. Like, here's just the boom boom facts of the thing, like, here, just beat by beat, this is what it is. And she was like, no, who were you? You know, who was that nineteen-year-old kid with a gun in his hand? Like, who was that person? What led you down that path?

• 40:22Speaker 02

  And like, she wanted to get to know this deeper part of me. And that was like, it was not comfortable, cause I was like, who was I? You know? Um, because at that point, I'm, all I feel is like I'm a bad kid, I'm a bad person. I did this horrendous thing and I've caused all this harm and devastation. And so it took years of like peeling back those layers of like, okay, yes, you did a bad thing. And here's the circumstance that set you up to become a person who can do a bad thing.

• 40:50Jonathan Cohen?

  That kid in that moment, who is experiencing a flood of emotion, who, who were they at an emotional level?

• 41:00Speaker 02

  Yeah, at a, at a, at a very molecular level emotionally, it's a highly traumatized kid that had had, I mean, the levels of trauma I've experienced in my life is like, almost impossible to comprehend. And like, even as a writer, I've never written all of them, you know? Cause some of them, I mean, in this book, I talk about a very key thing that happened that I hadn't written about, that I hadn't even talked about with my parents until I was about fifty years old. And I just called my dad and I was like, do you know that a neighbor that you all trusted us to be in the care of attempted to molest me? And like, I suffocated that feeling and that thought and that betrayal

• 41:44Speaker 02

  for years and I acted out of that, you know, like I remember burglarizing his house just to kind of like say to him like, that was wrong what you tried to do. And I got in trouble for it and my parents, they didn't do their due diligence to really try to understand.

• 42:00Mayim Bialik?

  Well, your dad said he had a feeling that there was something more behind that burglary. But he couldn't put his finger on it. And also, especially at that time in our culture, we didn't talk about this stuff at all. Men didn't talk about it and especially in the black community, right? This is a very, like, there's an extra set of stigma surrounding this guy. I mean, it's really, and you talk about the significance of vulnerability. And in particular for men, that you said, that is your strength. Your strength is being emotionally available to feel and to act on the understanding you have of your emotional state. That's enormous.

• 42:41Speaker 02

  Yeah, to me, I think it's one of the greatest mental unlocks in the world. It's like when we can lean into the things that, you know, make us wholly human, you know, like love, joy, compassion, empathy, vulnerability and recognize that that takes strength to like be vulnerable, you know? And it was scary like to write these tough things. Like, these are like tough things to like talk about as a man and like, you know, because what happens in those moments when you're feeling that level of vulnerability is like, can I protect myself? You know, do I have agency? And I, you know, I always attribute like my ability to maneuver out of that situation because that's literally, as a kid, that's what it was. I had to maneuver out of those situations.

• 43:26Speaker 02

  I attribute that to just having older siblings who, you know, they, you just kind of the trickle down effect of like, they've learned how to navigate things and they, you know, you just, they just teach that as you go on. But not all kids have that. Not all kids have that safety net.

• 43:42Jonathan Cohen?

  I want to explore something that feels almost unfair, but you talk about the fact that people have very different backgrounds, very different experiences, but there's a through line. And why it feels unfair to talk about is because. The emotions that were running through you based on the intensity of your your whole life and and all the trauma that you had gone experienced led you to do something that most people don't have the experience of, right? You you had in that moment, you you took an action that you couldn't take back. The similarity, not on the same scale, is that a lot of people have actions that they regret, right? Like, they lose it. And and the similarity is in that moment, you lost it, you lost control, and I assume

• 44:27Jonathan Cohen?

  acted, the emotions acted through you versus you acting.

• 44:31Speaker 02

  Yeah, absolutely.

• 44:33Jonathan Cohen?

  And other people can relate by either they've said something they can't take back or they break something or

• 44:40Mayim Bialik?

  They've cheated on someone or they've hurt someone.

• 44:42Jonathan Cohen?

  They've hit someone or they've they've ran their car aggressively and and caused an accident like I've had my own experience. I remember an accident, car accident that I was in, I was pulling out of a driveway and I was so frustrated in my life. My emotions were driving that car, I wasn't. And I didn't look right away. And I was just like, wanted to get out and I got sideswiped and thank God my son wasn't in the car, but the car was totaled. So we know that emotions unchecked

• 45:09Speaker 02

  Absolutely.

• 45:10Jonathan Cohen?

  can take us and in a split second change our lives. Do you ever think about the core of that emotion? And like, are are you monitoring it? You know, you've changed and or become a totally different person, but is there ever a thought of like, oh, I have to track when the emotion bubbles to a point, right? Because I think we can all relate to like after my car accident and I was like, I gotta make sure that I'm never act like I gotta, I gotta, you know, keep the monitor on and have a red alert if I get to that place of of heightened emotion so that it doesn't drive me.

• 45:43Speaker 02

  So great question. You know, one of the, one of the things, there's a, the chapter I write is on anger. I was terrified of becoming angry. Because the last time I became angry, it led to me being in solitary confinement for, you know, four plus years, plus the time out, the anger that led to me being in, in, in prison. And so for years, nothing, I would let nothing bother me. Nothing's gonna get me to that point of anger. It's dangerous. Yeah, because I'm like, I don't know who I am if I get there. So I gotta be able to be even keel, balanced. I gotta practice hyper vigilance around, okay, I feel something escalating.

• 46:26Speaker 02

  What do I do here? Mindfulness, meditation, you know, what are the, what are the tools in the toolbox? Um, and it's great to have the tools, but I was also being dishonest because I was putting a cap on it. And I was telling myself this bullshit story of like, I'm not upset about that. I'm not gonna let that get me upset. I'm not gonna let that get me out there because I was really afraid of what would happen. And then what ended up happening when I actually embraced the anger was, one, my brother was killed in July twenty twenty one. I remember being angry about that, you know, but I had some tools of like, how do I remedy that, right?

• 47:07Speaker 02

  In October twenty twenty one, we had this beautiful, beautiful puppy named Indy that we took to a trainer. The first time going off with this trainer. And largely because he was a big American bully and we tried to do the kind of other, you know, intermediate trainers. He was this big, big loaf of a bully and like, if you're not a a real dog person, he's intimidating. So I wanted him to be with somebody who really understands working dogs, knows what to do. We take him to this trainer. And within a day, our puppy is dead.

• 47:43Speaker 02

  And the trainer said we drop him off, I want to say on a Sunday, because I was traveling and we needed him to be housed somewhere. Um, drop him off on a Sunday, Monday evening, he's dead. They called me to the vet and I get there and you know, the trainer is just like telling me this story and instantaneously, I know it's some bullshit. And basically what his first version of the story was that he was walking Indy and somebody was walking past and Indy tried to bite him. And I'm like, I know this is just not true. One, you're stereotyping the dog. Because you think because he's a bully that this is a, you know, what, what he would do.

• 48:27Speaker 02

  But he doesn't understand that an American bully is way different from a pit bull. But also, we have a very pedestrian neighborhood. Indy walks with my kid, who he outweighs. Kids walk up and pull his ears and rub on him and touch him and, you know, you know how it is, you're walking a dog and, and especially if it's a beautiful dog. People are like, hey, they just go in for the, for the rub, right? So you can't tell me that this is the story. Then the second story was that he was walking him and he tried to bite him. And he slipped out of his, uh, um. Collar. Collar.

• 49:06Speaker 02

  And I'm like, dude, the dog's head is this big. So he definitely did not, and I've seen how you train. This is why I took him to you. Like you, you're a working dog trainer, so you got a choke collar on him. I know what, I know the, the things, right? And so the story is he slips out, runs out, gets hit.

• 49:23Speaker 02

  What we, I didn't know this, the, the truth, I'll tell you about what we found out after we sued him because he didn't anticipate that I would sue him. Um, so he tells me the story and I'm going home and it's heartbreaking. I'm like, this is my son's first puppy and I gotta explain to him, you know, what happened. And so, you know, he's nine at the time and I, I tell him the next morning. He just lets out this wail, you know, and calls out the puppy's name and I'm, I'm broke. I'm dead. I'm like, it's hard broken. I'm hugging him. It's gonna be all right. We're gonna be fine. Next morning, I'm scrolling, aimlessly scrolling,

• 50:08Speaker 02

  and the dog trainer's page comes up.

• 50:12Speaker 02

  And he's literally with his daughter, and they have a beautiful, I think it's a Melanie's, one of those beautiful hype, hyper shepherd type dogs. And I'm just watching this baby play with this puppy, and she's so happy and she's so joyful. And that enrages me.

• 50:33Speaker 02

  And so I tell my wife, who was my girlfriend at the time, I'm like, I'm gonna get in my truck, and I'm gonna go around here and run his dog over so he can see what that feels like as a dad. And like, just saying those words was like,

• 50:48Speaker 02

  first, this is the most absurd thought to have, but it's also a genuine thought that I had. And just being able to talk it out of like, you know, I'm never gonna go and cause harm to an animal, let alone something that's gonna hurt the feelings of another kid. But that was real anger. And the real anger was that, as a father, you see the joy that your child has, and you can lie to me as a father and say that this is what happened to the dog, instead of just being a man and telling me the truth. And so that angered me to the point where I was just like, you know, I verbalized what I thought was like a angry response. And, and, and after that,

• 51:33Speaker 02

  it was the most liberating thing to say, okay, it's okay, you can have an angry thought. It's not irrational. Like, you're an adult. Like, other adults get hurt and harmed and upset by injustice. That's really what that was, injustice. And so, once I got through that part of it, I was like, okay, now, um, now how do I handle anger when it comes up? You know, and sometimes it's not, it's not the, the best way that I would, you know, I'm still growing as a human being. Like, I could fly off the handle like anybody else. Somebody cuts me off in traffic, like, what are you doing? You know, which is a very thing that you deal with a lot in, in LA. But I'm not about to go chase somebody down

• 52:17Speaker 02

  and get into a fisticuff, so I'm just gonna... Due to the, the, the, the, the universal gesture of like, what was that? You know what I'm saying? Um, but there's power in it, you know, there's power in, in recognizing when we are upset. And to channel it in a healthy way versus letting that energy lead. Like in, in, in, you know, you storm out the house, you rush off into traffic and you, you know, you cause unintended harm. Cause a lot of times unintended harm comes as a result of unchecked anger. Um, but the real thing is to, to get beneath the surface of like, if you're angry all the time, that's different. Then you're angry because injustice occurred.

• 52:59Speaker 02

  Um, and really getting beneath the surface of what is that thing that unsettles you? Uh, and when I was angry all the time, it was really getting beneath the surface. And I realized it's because I had this suppressed shame. And I had these suppressed betrayals that I didn't have language for when I was a kid. And so I stuffed them down and I acted out of that, you know? And once I went on this adult healing journey, I started to realize that perpetual anger is typically there is something that lives beneath that. And for me, it was shame. And even in prison, the first part of my incarceration, the first eight years or so, like I was angry. You know, I didn't have language to make sense of how my life ended up here.

• 53:45Speaker 02

  You know, I didn't have the tools at hand to separate what I was responsible for versus what had happened to me. But once I started to build those tools and I started to be able to create a framework, I was like, oh, here's the harm that I've caused, here's the things I'm absolutely responsible for. Here's the things that I have to atone for. These are the things that happened to me that had nothing to do with me. You know, that perverted man who attempted to molest me, that was his own perversion that he has to reconcile if, you know, if he can. I can't own that, you know, the, the, the beatings for my mother. That was her journey that led her down that path. Like, I wasn't born some bad kid.

• 54:30Speaker 02

  Like, I wasn't born some kid that should just be hit and, you know, out of anger. And so being able to just separate those things was powerful. And then, you know, I was able to get to the truth of what, you know, was beneath my anger. I was angry at myself. You know, I'm a smart kid. How am I in here? You know? I'm the kid that breaks up fight. How am I in here for shooting somebody? Um, you know, so it was like all these things of like, man, when I get out, I'm gonna have this forever label, you know? And how do you, how do you become somebody else? Um, and I mean, it's, it's been times like, that's been weaponized, you know? My past has been weaponized and, and, you know, and, and it's like,

• 55:16Speaker 02

  if you don't heal from the shame of it, then you're like back in the, the, the anger stage, you know? And so it's really understanding the things that exist beneath it. Uh, and by the way, I'm jealous that you were on Jeopardy.

• 55:30Speaker 02

  I just realized that's what that was.

• 55:31Mayim Bialik?

  Oh, that's right.

• 55:32Speaker 02

  Like, my, my other fa- that's my other favorite.

• 55:34Mayim Bialik?

  That's right.

• 55:34Speaker 02

  Nerdy thing to do.

• 55:35Mayim Bialik?

  Um, kind of a lighter question. Um, you're a couple of years older than me.

• 55:41Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 55:41Mayim Bialik?

  So you went to, you went into prison basically when I was, you know, graduating high school.

• 55:47Speaker 02

  Wow.

• 55:48Mayim Bialik?

  You know, right about then. So we're, you know, around the same, same age. And I'm thinking of what happened, you know, culturally in that 20 years. And I'm curious, like, when we were in high school, there was no cell phones.

• 56:03Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 56:03Mayim Bialik?

  You know, like, it was a very different world.

• 56:07Mayim Bialik?

  What was it like coming out? What was like the biggest shock? I mean, computers, cell phones, like, what was that like?

• 56:16Speaker 02

  I describe it as like Fred Flintstone walking into an episode of The Jetsons. That's really what it was like. It's like, I'm coming out of this cave-like world into like, all this technology. And like, there were moments for sure where, you know, I remember, I didn't know the difference between a Word document and the internet. And I would freak out every time I had to save a document because all I had heard in prison was about computers getting viruses. And I'm like, I don't want to get a computer virus. Like, you know, so I would like, I had all this anxiety. I had a ton of anxiety around any place I had to go. And like a million and one questions, like, okay, what do I park? What is it like? What do I got to be there? Who's going to meet me?

• 57:00Speaker 02

  You know, it was like on and on and on. There was a, my, my depth perception was like way skewed.

• 57:08Mayim Bialik?

  Wow.

• 57:09Speaker 02

  Like, I couldn't, like, it was hard to determine how far away a thing was. But I'd only been around, you know, a prison yard, walking in circles. I mean, the pace at which people drove was like.

• 57:22Mayim Bialik?

  Driving totally changed from that in those years.

• 57:25Speaker 02

  I think when I went in, it was like 55 was the limit.

• 57:28Mayim Bialik?

  It came out.

• 57:28Speaker 02

  It was like people at 70, which means in Detroit, 70 means 90 is normal. And so that was crazy. I remember when I first was driving, so in Detroit, you can drive across the bridge to Canada. And, you know, I didn't have, I had like a 99 Civic that was on loan, a Honda Civic. And so I only had like these paper directions. And I'm like driving, I'm trying to get somewhere. And I almost go to this last stop. Like, if you, if you go one exit, you're going to Canada. And you can't like just turn around. And I freaked out because I'm like, I'm going to get stopped.

• 58:05Mayim Bialik?

  Right.

• 58:05Speaker 02

  I can't leave the country and then I'm going back to prison because they're going to be like, you're trying to go over. So I'm like, I'm white knuckling it. I'm like, I gotta get off here. But it was, it was wild. I mean, like, I remember one night, me and my cousin, we had went out. We went to like a bar.

• 58:21Mayim Bialik?

  Oh, drinking totally changed. Weed changed?

• 58:23Speaker 02

  Oh, everything changed. Literally, everything changed. And we're like living in a bar. And all of a sudden, it's just like a lot of people coming in at once. And I had a real panic attack. And I was like, I was like, I started sweating. I was getting dizzy. I was just like, okay, I gotta, I gotta go. I gotta go. And I remember like going and I walked like two doors down. You know, called my cousin. I'm like, yo, I'm outside. And he like, you know, he's like, what's going on? Like, he's like, all this party is popping. I'm like, my dude, I can't. It's too many people, you know? And so it's all these things that like, you know, I tell people when their loved ones are coming home, the, the, the party is great. Everybody, you know, when they're coming home, partying, all the things. But it's like, there are real things that, like, you don't go through that.

• 59:04Speaker 02

  And I have scars. I have scars that, you know, when I first came home, I would have like these intense night sweats.

• 59:13Speaker 02

  I didn't have a lot of dreams about being back inside. I've definitely had them over the years.

• 59:19Speaker 02

  But it's just, everything was new, you know, getting used to just like

• 59:26Speaker 02

  all the aspects of life, you know, and the technology was like, I'm so because I'm like a really nerdy, like I loved it. I was like, I remember the first time like I, I did a Skype call. Like, I, I think I was probably on the screen looking so stupid because I was, I think I was just like smiling the whole time like, yo, this what the Jetsons used to do. Like, in my mind, it's like, it's really happening. And, and I remember the first time I got in the car that like, like talked. It like freaked me. It startled me. I was like, who, who, like, who else is in here with me? But I'm like, I mean, as a kid watching Knight Rider and Kit, the car, like talk, I'm like, oh, this is the most, and now it's like so normal.

• 1:00:04Mayim Bialik?

  I always feel like David Hasselhoff, so that makes sense.

• 1:00:07Jonathan Cohen?

  How was the experience of quiet? Because there's a level of quiet that you didn't have access to for years.

• 1:00:14Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's really, it's really interesting. The, um, the first time I woke up in a house alone. Like, that was hearing birds chirp. Like, in most of the prisons I was in, like, there's no birds around, um, because there's no trees. And, um, I almost remember like the first of a lot of things, like just being around plants. The first time, I, I think the first time I rubbed a puppy.

• 1:00:45Speaker 02

  It had to have been over twenty years, you know? And I was like, oh, like this little squirmin' thing is like a real puppy. So it's like all these things and just like being under the shade of a tree. And that first time I was, I was home and it was like I was up early. And um, it was just like the morning, the birds are just like chirping. And I just remember like I was sitting in the kitchen like drinking orange juice like, orange juice was really good too, by the way. It's like, it's definitely not good for you, but it was great. Um, but just hearing those birds chirping was just like, man, this is like, I'm really out.

• 1:01:25Speaker 02

  You know, and so it's like all these very nuanced uh, things that you experience like a hyper way. You know what I mean? I've been out now fifteen years.

• 1:01:35Mayim Bialik?

  Yeah, tell us what your life is like now.

• 1:01:36Speaker 02

  That's incredible.

• 1:01:37Mayim Bialik?

  You have another son, yeah.

• 1:01:38Speaker 02

  It's like surreal.

• 1:01:39Mayim Bialik?

  Like your wedding was in People Magazine?

• 1:01:42Speaker 02

  Yeah, that was wild. It's like, that was the craziest thing ever, right?

• 1:01:45Mayim Bialik?

  It's really pretty though.

• 1:01:45Speaker 02

  Uh, yeah. Yeah, my wife did an incredible job like designing it. Um, yeah, no, I mean, life now is, is, you know, it's still surreal. You know, I'm, I'm, I'm, I think more than anything that I have such a higher, you know, appreciation for the details of life. Um, you know, my life is big in a lot of ways. I do a lot of incredible stuff, but it's really the details of life that I get the most excited about. You know, I'm, I'm still, you know, when I come home off the road, you know, I'm watering the plants and like I'm, I'm, that, that excites me, that brings me joy. There's a bookstore that I go to, um, in my neighborhood, it's called SciShow Books. It's like a used bookstore, but it's like complete chaos when you walk inside.

• 1:02:30Speaker 02

  And uh, it's the kind of bookstore where if you see a black guy walking in, you're like, oh, this is the start of a horror movie. Cause it feels like that's how, how a horror movie should start. This is walking to this mysterious place that lures you in, you're never to be seen again. But I find so much joy in just going in there and, and, and reading through old books and, and searching those books out. And just being fully present with my life, you know? Um, nature is, is a big. Thing that that brings me joy, you know, I'll never forget what it's like to be instilled in concrete and and now to be able to be out in in the midst of like, you know, all these things. So that part of life is great. I love being a dad. It's it's it's my favorite,

• 1:03:13Speaker 02

  you know, thing in the world is just to to really be a dad to an incredible kid.

• 1:03:20Speaker 02

  And travel, you know, I travel all over the world, you know, I mentor, I work with kids. Uh, just recently in Detroit, they opened the Shaka Senghor Literary Lounge, which is like, it is the, it's still surreal. I haven't fully processed it.

• 1:03:34Mayim Bialik?

  Yeah, congratulations.

• 1:03:35Speaker 02

  Thank you. But when I was there, you know, just seeing kids hold my books, it's like that's the dream. That was the dream. I wrote that down and one day, these kids will read my books and the coolest thing is that part of the design of the lounge is my original writings from prison. And like that, I remember just being in there and and the first time and talking. And it was like these kids sitting there's like a little cubby where my writing is on the wall and this bookshelves and these kids are just sitting there. And um, and just looking at them babies and just like, man, they'll find meaning in words and and they'll, you know, love the art and the craft of

• 1:04:18Speaker 02

  of writing and telling stories, you know, which is one of, the thing is technology advanced. If there was anything that I'm, you know, know that I want to be super intentional about is to make sure that kids still write. Um, and they still tell their own stories and they still find, you know, joy and imagination. Um, and so having a lounge, you know, like that is just incredible. And so.

• 1:04:42Mayim Bialik?

  You know, there's, there's so much, obviously, every chapter has exercises, kind of ways to drill down and kind of, you know, get to those really deep layers of all of these different chapters. Um, but I wonder, you know, I think a lot of people, when we think about incarceration and if you've seen the thirteenth, I think that's a really good place for a lot of people to start.

• 1:05:02Speaker 02

  Absolutely.

• 1:05:03Mayim Bialik?

  But I I wonder, you know, I think a lot of people feel uncomfortable around it because it is such an enormous problem and it's so systemic. And it feels like there's nothing that can be done. And I think a lot of people want to shut it away. Um, you have really great resources here for sort of the books that helped you, you know, make your own transformation. But um, do you? Do you recommend any resources for people who do want to get involved with being helpful, whether it's donating books, or education, or funds? Or do you have other suggestions of how we as a society can start to think differently about what it means when people are imprisoned and treated this way? And what it does to society at large?

• 1:05:47Speaker 02

  Yeah, no, tons of thoughts there. You know, first of all, shout out to Ava DuVernay in The Thirteenth. I mean, that film is the most comprehensive film on really understanding the roots and the history and the culture of prison, you know, the prison industrial complex as it's known. You know, it's rooted in the Thirteenth Amendment, which is where that title gets its name. I actually was in that film, which was, you know, just an incredible honor to be able to talk about, you know, these big ideas. There's a new film out that is, I think, one of the most important films of our times, called The Alabama Solution. It's a tough watch. It is a tough watch.

• 1:06:32Speaker 02

  What I've told people in my life is like, you can read my words and you can hear my story. And, but this film is a visual representation of the things that I talk about. And these men basically made this film with smuggled cell phones. They literally put their life at risk. And we're not even certain how their life's going to turn out, because they're always throwing them in solitary confinement. And Alabama has a history of the highest level of brutality to people incarcerated. So I think people should watch that and sit in the discomfort of that film. You know, Michelle Alexander wrote The New Jim Crow, which is an incredible book.

• 1:07:15Speaker 02

  You know, Bryan Stevenson's Just Mercy is incredible book, and his TED Talk is phenomenal. There are some organizations that are doing incredible work. I used to lead an organization here in L.A. called Anti-Racism Coalition, or better known as A R C., which was founded by Scott Buttnick. It's one of my favorite orgs to support, donate to. I'm also a board member of Prison Creative Arts Project out of the University of Michigan. That is one of my favorite, favorite orgs for the joy set in my life. Because what that, that organization does is it uses art as a restorative vehicle for people, both inside and outside.

• 1:07:56Speaker 02

  And they host the largest art exhibition in the world of prison-based art. So they do that every spring at the University of Michigan campus. Incredible work. And in, in terms of, yeah, so I think those are great reads. I think those are great starting points. Obviously, the classic Malcolm X's autobiography. I just think everybody should read that in general. I think it's the, it's the kind of foundational piece of like, what a transformed life looks like. My early body of work, Right in My Wrongs, is, you know, I think it's the, the most proximate people will get to a, a story of someone who's guilty of a violent crime. A lot of times, we try to separate, you know, crime categories, violent versus non-violent. But the reality is over ninety percent of people incarcerated

• 1:08:41Speaker 02

  will come home. We get a choice in how they come home. Are we contributing to them coming home healthy and whole? I will say this, the work that we've done, you know, different orgs I've been a part of for the last fifteen years has dramatically changed the idea around what's possible for prison reform in America. The Commissioner in Maine, he's doing incredible work. Commissioner Liberty, he's just out the box with it. Like, he, I mean, he's, these men and women are doing organic farming and make sure that the health nutritional needs are met in a prison in a sustainable way. I mean, there's somebody in Maine who works in Silicon Valley

• 1:09:24Speaker 02

  as an engineer from a prison cell. Because he recognized that being a contributing member to the society is one of the most important things we can do for anybody. Uh, there's a parallel between unemployment and high incarceration rates as it is with education, uh, and literacy. Uh, so they're, they're doing out the box work. They just opened up an incredible center in, uh, San Quentin, which is a model for what happens when you actually put the resources into not just housing people. Uh, when I got, when I got sued, they itemized how much it cost to house me at different prison. And that's how they got to that number of like almost a million dollars for the lawsuit. And you think about what

• 1:10:07Speaker 02

  we're paying for as a, a society and are we getting our, our, our, our eye on investment, right? So just think about this. If 70% of people get out of prison, go back, that's a very high failure rate. If you were invested in the stock market, you would be like, let me get my money out of there fast. This does not look good on the books, right? But we continue to invest in that way. And

• 1:10:33Jonathan Cohen?

  Well, it speaks to the incentive structure. Wha- wha- what is actually the goal here?

• 1:10:38Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:10:39Jonathan Cohen?

  Is it to run private prisons or is it to help society?

• 1:10:42Speaker 02

  Yeah, privatized prisons are a big industry. It's a big, big industry. I mean, at one point I was paying $15 for a 15-minute call. You know, so you think about these, these corporations that are benefiting, uh, from people being incarcerated.

• 1:11:00Mayim Bialik?

  Well, and also the labor that is, I mean, a lot of people don't want to know about that, but the amount of labor that is actually, we're using prisoners to provide labor at, what was it, 17 cents an hour or something?

• 1:11:10Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, I started, yeah, I was working 17 cents an hour in the, in the school, I mean, in, uh, in the kitchen. And then at one point I was just like, I'm only doing jobs that help people. Cause that was the only way I could wrap my mind around, like, I'm not, you know, I remember they tried to put me on a yard crawl. I was like, I'm not, I'm not going out there. I'm not, I'm not picking down the lions for like 17 cents an hour. And so I've always just tried to keep jobs in like either tutoring, working in the law library, or working in recreation, cause I can directly help people and do things that I would do without any, any pay. And I think my highest paid job was Working in the law library and I've got like fifty-four dollars a month.

• 1:11:50Speaker 02

  And that, that job that I had is the equivalent of like a paralegal. Um, and so you think about fifty-four dollars a month uh versus for, for, you know, doing that level of work to help people. Um, which is really difficult in there because like you're dealing with, you know, literacy rates as well. But those are some of the resources. Um, yeah, this, you know, people can follow me and, and I'm always happy to point them to it. I do, I think everybody should visit a prison. You know, I think that's important because you, you know, you think about like, we're paying for this. And so I think that people in society should like go, I've taken people into prison all the time.

• 1:12:31Speaker 02

  Um, I actually go to prisons across the world. I was just in a prison in Saint Martin like two weeks ago. I've been in prison in Ghana, Germany, London. Uh, Germany definitely does it way different. You know, there was a thing that I learned over there that blew my mind is that they think of their people who are incarcerated as still citizens. And like, so they don't, they, they're, there was a moment, I was in a cell, so we went with this contingent to Germany and it was a lot of people from corrections and it was kind of like that seminary type thing. And uh, me and, me and Scott, who I talked about earlier, we got bored and we're like, you know, we should like sneak out and go like run around the prison.

• 1:13:15Speaker 02

  And so we did, we was just like bouncing around and, and there was, the cell was open and so I went in the cell and I was just like, I was having a moment to myself of like, man, it's crazy that I did this much time in like a space like this. And the warden came in and she was like, she was like, are you okay? And I was like, yeah, I was like, I was just thinking about, you know, I did a lot of time in solitary confinement, like seven years. And the warden started to weep. And she said, "We would never do that to one of our citizens." And I even, when they first invited me to go to Germany, I was like, "Why would I, why would I go to Germany or Germany prison? Like, do you not know the history of Germany? Like, that, that seemed like these people would have it all wrong. Like, they, you know what I'm saying? Like, this is what I thought."

• 1:14:00Speaker 02

  And then I was like, "Okay, well, let me go and be curious, and let me drop judgment." And I got over there, and it was mind blowing, like, the idea of, like, restoration.

• 1:14:12Speaker 02

  How do you make sure that people are reintegrated into society in a real way? And that they don't lose touch with society? So, as part of their constitution, they have to be able to have access to their families. They have to be able to work in community. And I'm like, "If you, you think about what we're doing to people is we're, we're cutting you off from essentially, what is the most important thing? Is a social group.

• 1:14:38Speaker 02

  You know, if you even think about people as you get older, what do they say? "We need more than anything to prevent dementia outside of, like, all these counters is just human interaction, a social circle, things that you can do with other people." And we're saying, "No, we're gonna send you as far away from that as possible."

• 1:14:56Mayim Bialik?

  And then wonder why you come out angrier than when we put you in there?

• 1:15:00Speaker 02

  And antisocial, and you don't, you know, and, and so...

• 1:15:03Mayim Bialik?

  Unable to function.

• 1:15:04Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah. And I mean, you know, it's not to compare people to animals, but, you know, if you think about what happens when you put a, a dog in a cage for a long time, and like, as soon as you let them out, they're going, "Ah!" They, they, like, you know, they're turned up because that energy is not meant to be contained. Like, the energy is meant to be fluid, and whatever type of capacity it shows up in is meant to move and to occupy different spaces. And so, the brutality of our system is such that it, it, it really is undermining real rehabilitation. And it's, it creates a real threat to society. Like, that's one of the things I'm, I'm, you know, when I, when I, when I did How to be Free, even though this is not, this is not, I just want to be clear,

• 1:15:49Speaker 02

  it's not a prison book, right? Part of my life experiences, obviously, are integrated in it. But when I released the book, I gave it away to prisons, to like, thirteen hundred prisons and jails on a platform called Edovo because I know that the hard work has to take place while you're in there. In order to adjust to life out here, you need to have tools and you need to have a framework. And they're not going to give it to you. So I feel like, OK, if I can give it to close to a million people, then that's what I should be doing. And then I started my prison tour, actually on Rikers Island. So I kicked the prison tour off with my brothers and sisters in there. And it's, I never thought I would go back in prison.

• 1:16:34Speaker 02

  But I

• 1:16:41Speaker 02

  I had the best fellowship when I go inside. You know, those are my people in there, you know? And it doesn't matter what state I'm in, what country. There's just a kindred spirit that we have when I go in. And, you know, so I'm honored to be able to go in and show love. And I'm happy to take y'all in if y'all ever want to go. I'll definitely take y'all on the trip.

• 1:16:59Mayim Bialik?

  The book is How to Be Free: A Proven Guide to Escaping Life's Hidden Prisons. Shaka, thank you so much for being here. We really, you're a miracle. I mean, it's a really miraculous journey that you've been on, and we're so grateful that you shared it with us. So thank you.

• 1:17:14Speaker 02

  I'm truly honored and thank y'all for having me. This has been such a cool way to spend time. And especially, you know, you think about the things we're talking about in the world today. And hopefully this book helps a lot of people.

• 1:17:24Mayim Bialik?

  Absolutely. Thank you so much.

• 1:17:26Speaker 02

  Thanks so much for having me.

• 1:17:31Mayim Bialik?

  One of the things we didn't get to talk to Shaka about was some of his writing on resilience, greatness, our need for perfectionism. And he says greatness is about persistence, not perfection. And obviously, it's not, it's not a complicated concept. But when you think about it in terms of the work that he's done, I mean, the success that he has achieved.

• 1:18:01Jonathan Cohen?

  Selling books out of your backpack. It's just like, we all, we all want someone to do the work for us, right? Like, we want the publisher and we want the book contract and we want the advance and we want them to handle the marketing campaign. And like, he's just like, I'm gonna make this happen.

• 1:18:17Mayim Bialik?

  His blueprint for success is own your shit. S is for success. H is for hustle. I is for intelligence and T is for talent. Own your shit, he says. And I also just, this notion that

• 1:18:34Mayim Bialik?

  We can learn something from someone who is in a literal prison to understand the prisons that we hold ourselves in and that it's not about comparing suffering. It's not about an Olympics of suffering. It's that anger is anger and it will eat you up, whether you're angry about the post person getting your mail wrong or about being wronged in a deeper, more devastating way. Anger is anger. Forgiveness is available for everyone. It's just, it's really, it's a beautiful book and I'm so, so glad we got to speak with him.

• 1:19:05Jonathan Cohen?

  Unbelievable story and an unbelievable man.

• 1:19:07Mayim Bialik?

  Please make sure to join us over on Substack and yeah, check out Shaka's books. Really just so inspirational and like I said, it's just miraculous. And yeah, we're so glad that we got to have this conversation from our breakdown to the one we hope you never have. We'll see you next time.