SPENCER: Shaka, welcome.

SHAKA: Thank you so much for having me, Spence. I'm super excited to be here.

SPENCER: Yeah, great to have you here. Could you tell us a little bit about the events that led you to end up in prison for 19 years?

SHAKA: Yeah, when I think back on the time I spent in prison, a total of 19 years, seven of those years were in solitary. I always have to go back to that moment and the moments prior to that. I grew up in the city of Detroit in a working-class, kind of middle-class neighborhood. My dad was in the Air Force and also worked for the state. My mom was a homemaker, and unfortunately, we were dealing with a tough household environment with abuse and things like that. I ran away when I was about 13 or 14 years old. I was kind of seduced into the drug trade. Within the first few months of being in that culture, my childhood friend was murdered. I was robbed at gunpoint. I was beaten nearly to death, and sadly, I continued in that culture because, like many kids, I just didn't know how to get out. When I was about 17 years old, I got shot multiple times standing on the corner of my block on the west side of Detroit at that time. I was processed through the hospital; they took two bullets out and left one bullet in. I still have that bullet to this day. I didn't really understand as a kid back then what was happening inside of me. No doctor, nurse, psychologist, or therapist offered any understanding of the mental and psychological experience I just had. I started to make up a narrative that before I allowed someone to cause me harm again and if I found myself in conflict, I would shoot first. About 16 months later, I got into a conflict around two o'clock in the morning over a drug transaction I refused to make. When that argument escalated, I turned to walk into the house, and in a moment of poor decision, I turned around and fired multiple shots that tragically caused the man's death. I was subsequently arrested, charged with open murder, and sentenced to 17 to 40 years in prison. I ended up remaining there for 19 years, and seven of those years, as I mentioned, were in solitary confinement.

SPENCER: That's obviously an incredibly tragic story for everyone involved. But I imagine it's not too atypical of a story, that a lot of violence actually is kind of similar to that where it's a young man, someone acts impulsively. Would you agree with that?

SHAKA: I think the complexity of violence, specifically inner-city violence and violence associated with young boys, is such that we've tried to simplify it. What I've learned over time, spending a lot of time with young men who were convicted of violent crimes in that environment, is that there are so many different causal factors and origin stories as to how a person devolves into being violent toward other people. I think inherently, boys are just destructive. If you watch boys play, they're throwing things, breaking things. Even our sports are controlled violence. I'm a big sports fan, but football is one of the most violent sports. Basketball is very physical, boxing, MMA, you name it. We enjoy that. There's an emotional payoff there. When I think about young men, specifically, who are acting out violently in the community, I think there are some deeper things that we just don't often talk about because it isn't simple.

SPENCER: What are some of the factors you think aren't discussed enough?

SHAKA: I think some of the factors that aren't discussed enough are childhood trauma. In recent times, there's been a lot of talk about adverse childhood experiences, also known as ACEs, and environmental PTSD. I grew up in a tough city. I grew up in Detroit. Within my family, most people can't even comprehend this, but just in my family alone, I think there are about 10 of us who have been shot. The other part is that narrative plays a key factor in why some of these things haven't been addressed, especially in the inner city. There's no world that I can imagine where, if the same outcomes were happening in the surrounding suburbs where I grew up, we wouldn't see that as a public crisis. That would be a threat to everything we say we stand for as a country. We just would never allow that. But because it typically happens to black and brown boys, that kind of narrative gets ignored, and the causal factors get ignored. Then we just jump from event to punishment, as opposed to understanding what is happening. Maybe we can actually prevent some of these things.

SPENCER: Your point about childhood trauma is really interesting. Does that suggest that you think fear is often involved in these cases of violence, where they're being triggered through fear that has risen through trauma?

SHAKA: I do think fear plays a role. I think anger, I think sadness, all things that we don't often associate mostly with males. I remember after I got shot, the next time I stood on the corner of my block, I was overwhelmed with this feeling of fear. A car was driving down the street, and I felt my body seize up. Back then, at 17 years old, I didn't even know the word anxiety, I didn't know the word PTSD. I remember feeling embarrassed; I couldn't tell my friends that I didn't feel comfortable doing something we did all the time. We stood around on the corner talking about sports, talking about basketball, talking about cars, talking about girls, and I was no longer comfortable. Fear played a big role. But with that fear, there was also sadness and shame. I was ashamed that I had these feelings. I was sad that I didn't feel normal in my neighborhood anymore. I think that plays a role in a lot of violence. At least the people I've spoken with over the years, juveniles, whether it's young women or young men in prisons, I talked to men and women, and you start to get down to the root causes. There are so many similarities, and sometimes there are people who are violent in how they engage with others who never go to prison, and they still have those same roots.

SPENCER: It's probably hard to remember, but if you think back to that moment when you pulled the trigger, do you think it was fear driving you or anger, or what do you think was going through your head?

SHAKA: I think it was a mixture of both. I was afraid that something could physically happen to me. Prior to that incident, just a half an hour earlier, I was DJing a party, and somebody got shot outside the party, so there was already a heightened awareness happening. Then it was just the anger of talking to this guy who I had sold drugs to before, and I didn't want to do this transaction. He was pushing, I was pushing back. So now we're arguing, escalating. There are a variety of things, but what I always come back to is that's the explanation, which is different from an excuse. I don't make any excuse for that decision I made that night. It's a horrible decision. It's one of the things that I live with. Even though my sentence is long over, it's a sentence that you serve for a lifetime when you take someone's life. It's not something I take lightly. It's one of the reasons I do a lot of the work that I do inside juveniles and in inner cities. I never want a kid to live the rest of their life carrying the weight of having caused this level of harm to a family, to a community. I always think about what was the root there because that's the only way you can prevent these things from happening, is if you actually understand why they happen. For me, it was really going back and asking, "What was I really feeling?" There was anger, there was fear. Those things are real; they don't excuse the decision-making, but they are an important part of the decision-making. I don't think we talk enough about that, which is why I started writing about these issues and talking about them and even seeing how they apply in the world of business, which can be just as volatile as the streets I grew up in.

SPENCER: This brings up an interesting kind of dichotomy that people sometimes talk about, which is, on the one hand, people are responsible for their choices. Nobody made them commit a crime. On the other hand, there are structural forces that we know are extremely linked to these kinds of actions, whether it's growing up in a dangerous neighborhood or having certain friend circles where these kinds of things happen. How do you think about that kind of trade-off?

SHAKA: Yeah, I think of the trade-off as being completely dishonest, as a society. We tend to allow explanations in places that are familiar to us, that we're connected to, and we tend to dismiss those same explanations when they're connected to somebody we don't have an emotional connection to. The reality is, it's all those things right there. There are personal decisions and accountability, which I always start with first. Even as a kid, I still had to be responsible for my actions, and it's one of the things I teach my son now: accountability across everything that you do is something important to embrace early on. If you're accountable in your life decisions, you'll think about them a lot differently. I just think if we want to get better, we have to get better at being honest. Honesty requires us to pause and really reflect on the whole picture and not just a snapshot.

SPENCER: So what is society not being honest about?

SHAKA: I think when it comes to issues of inner-city violence and criminal justice, we aren't being honest that we bought into a narrative around labeling specifically Black males as criminally oriented, almost as a default button, without taking into consideration all the environmental factors. I think that narrative is shifting now. When I look at the prison population, it looks very different than when I went in. I was just in a juvenile facility last week in Rhode Island, and I promise you that the young men could have been a juvenile representation of the United Nations. It was so diverse in terms of who was sitting in those seats. There were young white boys, young brown boys, and young Black boys. Then I went into the girls' unit. There were only three young ladies. Two of them were in detention, so they couldn't come out. I was talking to one young white girl. Now we're looking at these issues that permeate areas outside of the inner city. We're looking at opioid addiction that is pervasive in the suburbs, and fentanyl, and these high arrest rates. That really is an American issue. It's not just an African American issue; it's an American issue. I don't think we've been honest about that for decades. The default has been, if we criminalize one community, we don't have to deal with it. But then when it starts to impact more communities, it's like, "Oh, wait a minute, we have to change some things." You're just seeing a narrative shift, but it's super slow compared to how fast it shifted to the negative.

SHAKA: One thing I think about, and this is a really difficult question, but if you look across society and you say, "What do people blame violence on?" They'll point to a lot of different structural things, and they'll point to a lot of different things about individuals, etc. I think everyone admits that this is multifactorial. There's no one thing that is the cause of violence. Some people focus more on poverty, others more on drugs. Some people focus on how violence begets violence. If you live in a violent area, you might be more likely to commit violence to defend yourself, but also just because that's what you know. Some people blame it on a culture that might fetishize violence. You hear about role models talking about violence, also law enforcement. If you had to sort of divvy up how much of the problem is coming from different forces, these that I mentioned, but also other ones, how would you kind of divvy up? What are your top three that you think, if we could make a difference in those top three things, that would really improve the situation?

SHAKA: I would say the number one thing I would start with is the violent trauma that kids experience. When I was in prison, I used to lead a group called Houses of Healing, where I facilitated a program around uprooting some of the emotional anchors that were holding us back. What I found was consistent across the board with the men in the room; most of them, if not all, had high levels of early childhood violence. Being slapped, kicked, punched by a parent, an adult, a sibling, being bullied, being sexually abused, introduced to sex at a very early age, sexual trauma, those things are high-level factors. Second to that are environmental factors. Most of us knew someone who had been shot before we were 13 years old. That's mind-blowing to think about. I can go to my son's school now and ask the kids if any of their peers have been shot, and I'm sure not one of them would raise their hands, because they're growing up in a very different environment. If I go to a school in Detroit, Chicago, South Central LA, the Bronx, St. Louis, and ask the same question, almost all the hands go up.

SPENCER: So just to press on that a little bit. Knowing someone who's been shot must be incredibly upsetting for a child. How do you see that as causing violence? Is it that they feel they have to defend themselves? Is it that they could have role models among people who are violent or some other effect?

SHAKA: I think it induces fear and this idea that you have to protect yourself. I think this is where the country has got it wrong; we don't spend time with people who have committed acts of violence, who can comprehensively and intellectually explain their life without it being excused away as them making an excuse. I iterate over and over, I'm not making an excuse; I made that decision. What I'm saying is that the orientation within the culture I came from was such that the reaction to fear was to carry a gun and to be in protective mode, and being in protective mode with a gun leads to being reactionary. I've seen that play out over and over again. If you think about the reverse of it, when I began to change my life, I reversed the narratives. I started thinking, "Okay, if my negative narrative led me down this path, what happens if I create a positive narrative?" If we want a kid to aspire toward success, one of the things we talk about is putting them in an environment where success is the norm, finding them a mentor, making sure that environmentally and socially, they're in an environment that begets success. It's no different with violence and crime. If you put kids in that environment, it doesn't mean that all of them are going to commit crime or become violent. Some of them may have the reverse reaction; they don't want to be that person. You can put those same kids in a successful environment, but it doesn't mean everybody's going to be a CEO. There is some personal agency there, and we have to take account for that, but it has to be a fuller, holistic story.

SPENCER: So the first thing you pointed to is trauma, especially trauma around violence. The second is environmental violence that can beget violence. What's the third, if you had to pick one more factor you think is critical?

SHAKA: I think poverty definitely plays a role in terms of esteem and how you feel about yourself. Do you feel you're worthy of different life outcomes? I think that plays an incredibly important role. If you just look at statistical data of who ends up in prison, poverty is as high up on the chart as lack of education, which I would almost put on par with poverty.

SPENCER: And what about the role of the police? You talked about how you knew so many people had been shot, and earlier, I think you said that night someone had been shot. What was the role of police? Do people call the police? Did the police do anything? Were they arresting people?

SHAKA: Inner-city policing is some of the most complex work imaginable. There's the desire of a community to be safe. There's this urgency of the community to be safe. There's an element in the community that believes in no snitching, and somehow those things have been conflated to people believing that the entire community doesn't desire safety. The community also desires respect and a desire to be protected and respected in a way that honors their humanity as any other community. When I was growing up during that era, police were sort of a response with the exception of high levels of gun violence. You wanted to get the police to come and address that somebody broke into your house. You just said, "Hey, somebody's over here with a gun," and they were there. But if you just said, "Somebody's stealing," they weren't showing up for that. I think for a long time, at least in Detroit, there was an antagonistic relationship that developed. It didn't start like that when I was a kid. When I was first growing up, police came through the neighborhood. They were heroes. They would stop and talk to us, probably give us candy and let us pull the siren, etc. But then something happened during the crack cocaine era that was just different. There was an implosion in our community, and you started to see officers that weren't from the community, which I think is part of the problem. If you don't come from the inner city that you're tasked with policing, all you have is the narrative. I would tell people this, right? They're from Detroit. I would have people always say to me, "Oh my god, this is such a tough city." It is a city of grit because it's a hardworking, blue-collar city. But then I would take people to Detroit, and they didn't want to leave. They were like, "Man, this is one of the warmest, funnest places." You meet a person in the store, and you feel like you've known them all your life because it's just the warmth of Midwestern culture. But if you only have a narrative that we're bad and you don't come from that community, you're going to come in with anger, paranoia, and you're going to be closed off because you're probably afraid. If I wasn't from Detroit, I would be afraid to go there. Honestly, I would be like, "Oh yeah, I'm probably not going there." But being from there, I'm like, "Oh, this is one of the funnest places to experience life." Part of it is we don't spend time making sure that there is a connection to people who serve the community, and that serving the community goes beyond arresting people in the community. It means actually connecting with people in a real way. The officers that do it really well, and I know some of them, are those officers that really connect with the people in the community. Even with the policing narrative, I don't think all police are bad. In fact, I know that to be completely far from the truth. I think the system of policing is terrible, which is different from the individual. A lot of times we don't separate those two. I think there are so many factors that play in fostering violence when you can ignore the small things, or you're coming in with the idea that these people's life outcomes aren't going to be good anyway, so why don't I only come when it's to pick up the bodies and arrest people, versus, "Hey, can I use my professionalism to come in and create real conversations?"

SPENCER: I think that many people assume that those living in poorer, more violent neighborhoods would want fewer police, but what I understand looking at surveys is that often people in those neighborhoods don't want fewer police. They want police to behave differently. Would you say that that's true as well?

SHAKA: Absolutely. I think that's the thing that I've seen in Detroit. When you have police that behave differently, the community welcomes that. They are excited to have someone come in who is really thinking about the holistic well-being of the community. They are not only showing up when something is wrong, but they can actually show up and spend time with the kids in the community and talk about what policing actually means beyond just capturing the bad guy. Different behaviors produce different outcomes for everybody involved.

SPENCER: Going back to your personal story, could you tell us about when you first arrived in prison? What was that experience like, that first day being in prison, and what was it like in prison?

SHAKA: People ask me that question a lot: what is prison like? It's a perpetual nightmare. It is all the things that you can imagine, that you've heard about that are wrong. That is what prison is. The violence is real, but it's also a complex system because it has many different security levels. When I started off, I was at a high security level. I was in close custody, and it's a very violent environment. I went to a prison called the Michigan Reformatory, also known as the Gladiator School, where stabbings, bludgeonings, and fights were happening literally every day. It's a depressed environment where people have given up on life and don't think they're ever getting out of prison. I walked into that with the same feelings. I was a kid. I walked in angry and bitter. It's one of those things that I wouldn't wish on anybody. I would never want anyone to suffer in that way. I was fortunate. I met some incredible mentors in that environment, men who were serving life sentences. They guided me to books and challenged me. It was brutal. It's the most heartbreaking thing to squander your life and to wake up every day knowing that you've thrown it all away, and that you're stuck, trapped in this volatile, hopeless, dark, and desperate environment. If you're going to scratch your way out of it, you have to find some hope and light. I was fortunate to do that.

SPENCER: When you first arrived, did you have to join a group in order to feel safe? That's something that I've heard about.

SHAKA: No, every prison system is different. I live in California now, and I've spent time doing reentry work with California prisons. It's a very different culture. It's very divided along racial lines, gang lines, in a way that's so stark that it's almost unbelievable. You walk into the prison yard, and there's clearly whites over here, southern Mexicans over here, northern Mexicans over here, blacks over here. It's very, very stark. Michigan was different; it was more oriented around your city and then your neighborhood. People have different religious beliefs, but the overall orientation in Michigan was more about geography. If you're from Detroit, Detroit guys tend to connect quicker. If you're from Flint, Michigan, or Saginaw, those guys tend to jail together. From there, it kind of spins out into common interests and things of that nature, but it wasn't a matter of choosing. It's almost like I went to prison. I had friends who were in prison. I have friends from different neighborhoods. It's more about looking for your friends who you haven't seen in a couple of years because they've been serving time, but it varies all over the country. A lot of people don't realize about America is we have over 50 different prison systems. Every state is different, and the federal prison system is different from all the state prison systems. Some are more focused on rehabilitation; some are more focused on punishment. It's drastically different. It's incredible to see the differences. I've been in a lot of prisons across the country.

SPENCER: When you were early on there, what was your typical day like?

SHAKA: Early on, I went to school. I had already had a GED when I went in, so I went to college.

SPENCER: You were able to do that in prison?

SHAKA: Yeah, before they took the Pell grants out. Around '94, the Clinton administration passed the crime bill, and it stripped out all of the college education. I was averaging a 4.0 in college. I worked in different spaces. In the prison, I worked in the kitchen, I worked in recreation.

SPENCER: Is that mandatory, or do you opt into it? Do you get paid for that?

SHAKA: No, work is mandatory. A lot of people don't realize that the 13th Amendment, which abolished slavery, created a loophole to reintroduce a new form of slavery, which is known as our prison system. If you go to prison, you can be forced to work for free, and there's nothing constitutionally you can do to fight that battle because the 13th Amendment allows for cheap or free labor. Everyone who goes to prison has to work, unless you're incapable of working.

SPENCER: It's a bizarre system. And who benefits from that work? Does the prison benefit?

SHAKA: The prison benefits. The private companies that use cheap prison labor, they benefit.

SPENCER: So, the prison will actually contract out with companies that are then using prison labor, which is essentially unpaid labor.

SHAKA: Yeah, or super cheap labor. Instead of paying a worker in society minimum wage or working wage, they would pay people in prison $1 a day, if that, depending on what the company was. That's one of the reasons there was such an explosion in our prison population, because it's cheap and free labor. The privatization of prisons is really unbelievable when you think about what happened with the explosion of the prison population, where we went from at one point 100,000 to maybe 200,000 to over 2 million people in prison. We have more people in prison than almost all of the countries combined. This is a statistic that a lot of people aren't aware of: about 150 [million] Americans have someone they know, love, or were close to who have been or are in prison. That's how pervasive our judicial system is. No one is untouched by this reality at this point.

SPENCER: Yeah, it's shocking. How did you end up getting into solitary? What is solitary really like? People hear about solitary confinement.

SHAKA: Solitary confinement is a 23-hour lockdown, and what I would assume is probably about the size of most of your viewers' bathrooms, and I would say not even a full bathroom, but more like their powder room. Imagine being in there for 23 hours a day, five days a week, and 24 hours a day the other two days. That's where you get your food delivered to. That's your world for every day.

SPENCER: During those extra one hour a day, what are you doing then?

SHAKA: So they take you out to these recreation cages, which is the equivalent of a dog kennel. Just imagine a dog kennel run where there are eight cages on one side, eight on another, and instead of dogs, there are humans. They take you out, they handcuff you. The handcuffs are attached to a dog leash, and they walk you out and put you in these kennels for an hour a day, five days a week, because that's the minimum requirement. The rest of the time, you're in the most chaotic environment imaginable. The level of mental health challenges that people are suffering from and the psychological damage that that environment causes exacerbates issues for those already dealing with them. It's extremely loud. People are beating on their cell doors, slamming their foot lockers shut, flooding the tier, and some inmates throwing feces on each other.

SPENCER: So you're separated from them, but you can all kind of hear each other.

SHAKA: You can hear each other. You're behind a steel door, and in most modern prisons, you're behind a steel door. But we would communicate by laying on the floor, talking under the door or talking through the crack of the door. Sometimes we would pop our electrical sockets out, and then you could talk to the person downstairs or next door to you. We figured out how to communicate because the most human thing is to be social, and we figured out how to make connections in that environment. But you know how I ended up there? I was there on three different occasions. One time, for about a year and a half for a fight. The second time, I threw some mashed potatoes on this guy who was being disrespectful; I stopped him with a tray of mashed potatoes.

SPENCER: To clarify that, so you had a year in solitary for hitting a guy with a tray,

SHAKA: Yeah, they labeled that as an assault.

SPENCER: Was he injured or was he fine?

SHAKA: I think his ego was probably injured more than physically. He didn't sustain any excessive damage. He was being super disrespectful, and I responded to his disrespect with the rules of the yard at the time. At that stage in my incarceration, I was in this bitter, angry, volatile, confrontational stage, where anything was a reason to get into a dust-up. That hurt as a broken teenager who was disgusted with his life outcomes, who didn't want to be responsible or accountable. The last time I was in solitary, it was for an assault on an officer, which led to me being there for four and a half years. I made a decision rooted in the realization that I didn't know if I was ever getting out of prison, and I didn't know if I was even getting out of solitary confinement. The man across the hall from me had been in solitary for 20 years. My neighbor had been in solitary for 10 years, and there were other guys in the cell block I didn't know who had been in for solitary for anywhere from a few years to nearly two decades. I got to a place where I didn't want to die with my only legacy being that I was this violent kid who ended up in prison. That was it. I thought of myself so differently until I started journaling. I thought things just happened to me. This was my bad luck. This just happened to me. But in that environment, I started doing some deep soul work, and it changed my life.

SPENCER: The incident that got you into prison in the first place. How did you view that in your early years in prison?

SHAKA: In my early years, I was still angry that the man I initially got into an argument with had brought two other men with him to my house. I was angry that he continued to pursue the drug deal, even though I was adamant that I didn't want to make the deal. For years, my orientation was around being angry at him and blaming him for the cause of his friend's death, as opposed to accepting responsibility for the decisions I made that night. That is also why I lived in that cloud of anger, because the anger was a defense mechanism against the truth. Ironically, I found in corporate America that oftentimes the idea of being a tough leader or being an angry leader known for anger and all these outbursts is really the same kind of mask that we wear to hide from the things that exist beneath that. When I was in solitary, I started with this essential question, based on reading philosophy. It was based on reading Plato's Republic, and I came across the Apology and Socrates' statement that the unexamined life isn't worth living. Initially, I didn't even understand what he was talking about. Philosophy was not my first native language; it was something I learned to appreciate over time. I kept coming back to that, "What does that mean?" When it finally struck me, what it meant was that I had not really examined my life. I started with this essential question of, "How did I go from this honor roll scholarship kid with dreams of being a doctor and an artist to serving my most promising years in prison?" That led to me starting to journal and really unearth all the things that had happened to me. It also forced me to be accountable for the harms I had caused and for the devastation and the hurt of that night in particular. One of the most liberating things was that accountability freed me up to actually say, "That was all me. It didn't matter what that person did. I still had the power to walk away. I didn't take that; I didn't choose that power. I chose something different, and I have to be as responsible and accountable for that." If I can learn to be responsible and accountable, I can make a difference in the world so that other young men growing up like me don't have to make that degree of a poor decision to where they have to suffer for the rest of their life with that hanging over their head.

SPENCER: It sounds like your emotions of anger, for example, were self-protective in a way of not preventing you from taking responsibility. But I wonder, once you started to take responsibility, did you experience a lot of self-loathing? What was that like?

SHAKA: Yeah. The anger was a protective shield. For years after prison, I ran from even being angry. I was too afraid to be angry because when I had been angry before, it led to bad outcomes. As I began to peel back those layers, there was a lot of shame. I was really ashamed of the fact that I had caused so much harm. I was ashamed that my life outcomes had led to me being in the most wretched of places. I went through this grieving process of knowing that I had given up agency over my own life. There was some self-loathing there. As I began to peel back those layers, one of the things I did, which I talk about in my new book, How to Be Free, is what I call active journaling, where I had to be intentional with how I started journaling. My agreement with myself was to: only sit down and pick up a pen and paper when I was ready to be completely honest. This was going to hurt. It was going to make me feel ashamed. It was going to cause me to be angry again. But I could only get to the other side if I was willing to be truthful and honest. That active approach to journaling was so raw; the stories I had to unearth, the things I had to write about. The other part of that is that I had to go back and read it every few days. When I would go back and read it, sometimes it felt like reading the thoughts of a mad person because I would journal when I was angry, when I was disappointed, when I was happy. I was all over the place. I would go back and read it and think, you went through five different stages of development in one day. I attribute it to the success and freedom I have today and to the work that I'm blessed to be able to do in the world.

SPENCER: Obviously, when someone does something that causes a lot of harm, people feel that the person should feel shame for some amount of time, but eventually, I think most people would say they want the person to move past that. What do you think is the right way to think about that? What is the right relationship to have a mistake like that?

SHAKA: I think the right relationship to have for the individual is to recognize that not everybody's going to agree with you, taking responsibility for your life, taking ownership, putting in the work to turn it around. You're still going to have your detractors. You're still going to have people that say, "I don't know if I trust this guy." There are going to be people that say, "I don't think this person has been punished long enough and they should suffer more." There are people that say, "I don't think this person is deserving of success," and all those things are okay. You just have to be okay with people having a different opinion than you have about yourself. What I would say is, as a social construct, that over 90% of people will get out of prison at some point, and then we have to decide, are we letting them back into the tribe or not? I recently put in for a pardon, and I was doing an interview. I was in conversation with Oprah Winfrey, and she asked me why, at this stage of my life, a pardon was so important, and what would that mean to me? I had to think long and hard about it because I had avoided putting it in for so long. I realized that there was part of me that yearns to be part of the tribe of citizenship, and that I was tired of when I need to do something, and the felony comes up, and I have to write that in. I have to explain to people what that is, despite the fact that I've been out of prison for 15 years and have accomplished more in 15 years than most people would probably accomplish in multiple lifetimes. I still have to go back to my worst moment over and over to satiate this kind of thirst for repetitive punishment that we have as a society. What I think is that the person has to reconcile that within themselves, that there's always going to be someone who does not agree with you moving on with your life. I've had it happen with lovers. I've been in the midst of an argument, "You're nothing but a murderer, and you'll never amount to anything other than that." I've had it in workspaces, where people have used that against me when it comes to how they decide a thing. Those are things I just have to deal with as a human being. I have to patch myself up, and I don't sit back feeling sorry for myself. I definitely have empathy and compassion for my experience. But I've learned that letting go of shame, which is, again, one of the things I write about, is so liberating. It happens, you have to think about it, I worked in corporate. I was in a company called Navan for three years, and I worked with the sales team. I worked across with the executives. The seat I was in was the C-suite. I was probably one of the only people to go from a cell block to a C-suite position, and I can't tell you how many times in meetings, somebody would say, "You really killed it," and what that instantaneously would trigger inside of me. They don't know what that word means to me, and so you're always reconciling these things. Watching the local news, you see someone loved one who's been murdered almost every day, if you watch the news, and it's heartbreaking because it triggers that thing of, "Man," and then having gone through it myself, navigating grief and guilt when my own brother was murdered. Literally yesterday was the anniversary of his murder, July 9, 2021, and trying to grieve while feeling guilty that I made somebody's family feel like my family was feeling, and having to reconcile those feelings and then go back to work when my bereavement leave was up. These are things that we're constantly reconciling.

SPENCER: One kind of mindset that I think of as being helpful with regard to mistakes is thinking, "How do I become this sort of person that wouldn't make this mistake again?" That can give you a way to then give yourself permission to forgive yourself because you say, "I am not the person who would do that anymore." In that same scenario, I would not do that now, and I'm wondering, how do you think about self-forgiveness?

SHAKA: Yeah, I think, for me, it's a little bit different because I don't see what I did as a mistake. I see it as a poor decision that I made in the midst of hurt, heartbreak, paranoia, PTSD, and as I began to heal those parts of me, I knew there was no world in which I would make that same decision again. I do think that it is important to reconcile, "Am I the person that in the midst of an argument would take someone's life?" I know that the answer to that is absolutely no, and I think that's true for a lot of people who have been in my situation. People who have committed serious, violent crimes have the lowest recidivism rates of anybody. They're least likely to reoffend and definitely least likely to reoffend in such a serious way. I knew that was something that I would not do again. But I had to recognize that I didn't make a mistake; I made a poor decision because that distinction, for me, was really important.

SPENCER: How do you define that distinction? What's the difference to you?

SHAKA: The distinction is that, to me, a mistake is that I accidentally bumped into somebody, or I tripped and fell and the gun went off. The decision was that I pulled the trigger in the midst of anger, fear, and paranoia, knowing that there are some serious outcomes that happen as a result of shooting at somebody or shooting someone, and so that was a poor decision that I made.

SPENCER: So how do you get to that point of self-forgiveness? Because it sounds like for you, it's not enough to just no longer be the person that would make that decision, that there's some other component of getting to the point where you can forgive yourself.

SHAKA: Yeah, self-forgiveness is a real journey. It's probably one of the hardest journeys that any of us will ever go on. I've seen it with people who have had to reconcile harm they've caused in the workplace and where they beat up on themselves over and over again because we replay that narrative in our minds. I had to decide that I had to disrupt this tape at some point. I had to push the stop button. I can't just keep pushing the pause button. I had to push the stop button. That required me to affirm the things that I was actually doing right. So affirmation is a big part of that healing journey. It really required me to step up in a way, to say, "Hey, you're not your worst moment. You've had so many incredibly meaningful, impactful moments." That's stuff that I'm constantly doing. It doesn't just happen overnight. It's just part of the lifelong journey.

SPENCER: So it sounds like part of it is not letting that moment define your whole life, and being able to acknowledge the good things you're doing and have done.

SHAKA: Absolutely, and it's really being accountable for that moment, because you can do a whole bunch of things that are good, but you also have to be accountable for that moment.

SPENCER: Going back to your experience in solitary confinement, people describe it as sort of a hell. You don't have access to other people. There's nothing to do. You're just kind of sitting alone. Many people feel that not only is it cruel, but that it's maybe psychologically damaging to the people there, and by the time they're released, they may be far worse off than when they entered. Could you just tell us about your experience with the psychological effects of being there?

SHAKA: There's a book I read that I think helped me survive solitary confinement called Cages of Steel. In the book, there's a psychiatrist who talks about the damage caused by isolating people. That damage is such that it disrupts how you normally communicate. To talk to people in solitary, you have to lay on the floor and holler under the cell door, and now you're hollering across 30 other guys trying to do the same thing. It desensitizes you to human touch because you haven't been touched by another human being. It plays with your mind; you start to hallucinate when you're in an environment where you can't put your feet on solid ground. I tell people now, especially having gone through this pandemic, when I had so many people reaching out to me who were struggling with feeling isolated in their own homes, imagine that times a thousand. That sense of being isolated and those feelings are so destabilizing. It makes you question your own well-being. When you're dealing with so many people around you who are losing it, you start to ask yourself, "Am I the one that's actually crazy because I'm not losing it?" There were just tons of things that I had to reconcile all the time. Journaling helped me do that. Being literate, I was reading at a third-grade level in prison. I was fortunate just to be literate so I could read books. Whenever I felt myself slipping, I would just pick up a random book, open a page. Usually, it was about someone who had overcome adversity, like Nelson Mandela or Malcolm X. I would pick up these kinds of books that would help me get through that moment. Once I got through the moment, I knew I would be fine. But it was tough. It was a constant work of reconciling that.

SPENCER: I believe it was in one of your interviews that you talked about learning to reframe your prison cell, to think about it differently. Can you describe that?

SHAKA: Yeah, I went from letting it be a torture chamber to turning it into my own university. Every day I would structure my days as if I was at the University of Michigan or Harvard or Howard or Morehouse or one of these colleges. I would study a different subject every hour. I would study philosophy, world history, psychology, language, and I would read the dictionary for an hour and study the etymology of words. Having that structure helped me maximize my time and utilize it productively. Once I began writing, I would still have that same approach, where I would study during the day and then write all throughout the evening. Once they cut the power off, I would just stand by my door and that little sliver of light that would come through, I would just use that to write by.

SPENCER: That is truly inspiring, being in such an incredibly difficult situation and still finding a way to structure your life and make it something positive, right?

SHAKA: Yeah, and I think it's one of the things that is so interesting to me. My hometown football team, the Detroit Lions, has a slogan that's all about grit. You see that word in so many different business settings where people are talking about grit and resilience. I think those things are really important, but a lot of times, I don't think people really understand what that really means. What does it really require of a person, beyond just a catchy slogan on a t-shirt or a coffee mug or in an all-hands meeting or a sales meeting? What I realized for me is that, one, I think we're all resilient as human beings. I think that's inherently encoded in our DNA. I don't think we're always conscious of it, which is the difference between somebody who seems really resilient and somebody who seems weak. When you're conscious of it, how you get to grit, resilience, and fortitude is really about being vulnerable. That ability to be vulnerable with yourself, to say, "Listen, I don't know. I'm uncertain. I don't feel my best today," allows you to actually figure out how to get to your best. It allows you to figure out how to know the things that you don't know. For me, in that environment, I made a choice. Solitary is meant to break you. It's meant to destroy you. There's nothing in that environment that's designed to help you. I hit the literacy lottery. I was literate, and so that didn't allow me to sit and wallow in self-pity. It challenged me to get real with myself, and when I got real with myself, I had a decision. There's a rap line that's one of my favorites, where Jay-Z says, "I ran past the fork in the road and went straight." It's in reference to the Robert Frost poem, which I love and hate. I love it because I think it's brilliantly written, but I hate it because it offers only two solutions. For me, there's always this third option of creating your reality. That vulnerability was realizing I don't know anybody who went down this path that I'm about to go down. I don't know too many people who have been in solitary and had the audacity to dream big. I don't know too many people who have been in an environment designed to destroy them and then found enlightenment. So I'm going to have to carve a new path by being completely vulnerable and honest with myself. One of the things I learned in that journey was that I had never completed anything, and I knew in that moment that if I was going to turn my life around, I had to finish at least one thing. I could only have gotten there if I was willing to be real with myself. I think that's what grit is. Grit is vulnerability turned to action. I see it all the time in corporate settings when I've worked with companies on their culture or with sales teams on how to overcome objections. A lot of people aren't willing to get real with themselves because they just want the outcome. You join a sales team, and the company has a great product. You're like, "Okay, I just want to join this team and ride the rocket." But if you want to become great at sales, you have to become great at knowing what you don't know, and that requires a level of vulnerability that may say, "You know what, I'm not the best storyteller, so maybe I'm not the best salesperson yet, but if I can develop these skills, I can become one of the best in the world." That's what grit and resilience start with: vulnerability.

SPENCER: Most people won't defend solitary confinement. They think it's terrible. But those that do defend it will say, "Well, what are you supposed to do if someone's violent in prison? You've got to protect the other prisoners from them. If someone's committing crimes in prison, you've got to stop them." What do you think should happen instead of solitary?

SHAKA: I think anytime there's an act of violence, obviously you have to separate people. You have to isolate them from the incident. Typically, if it's a conflict, it's usually between two people; it's not usually between the person and the overall prison system. So I do think separation is important, but what I think about is prevention before punishment. How are we treating people when they first come to prison? I believe that as a society, if we're going to incarcerate people from the moment that they're arrested, we should be figuring out what tools they need to readjust to being able to play nicely with the rest of society, and if you're doing that, you'll find that you don't have a need for solitary confinement. But let's say, since we do have it, what should we be doing? We should be doing that exact thing; if we're going to put people in isolation, we should ensure that they have the tools to readjust, as opposed to punishing them indefinitely. We shouldn't be stuffing people into these environments where it's going to make them worse. Humans aren't dogs. But if you think about this, any dog trainer would tell you, if you want to leave your dog at home, you can't leave your dog in a cage all day and then let the dog out and walk out of the house. Because what you're going to come back to is a dog that has completely destroyed your couch, eaten up the walls, the trash, you name it, they're going to tear it up because there's an anxiety that is induced by being held in captivity. What you do as a dog owner is take your dog out, walk them, spend time in nature, let them play, and let them disperse that energy in a healthy way. Then you can leave them at home. You can't stuff a human in a cage in an environment that is barbaric, dehumanizing, and inhumane, and then decide that after five years, they're probably able to play nicely, like nothing changed with me between year one and year four and a half. Nothing changed with me that the system did right. My environment was the same, all the chaos, so they didn't even know if I was going to get out and play nicely. The only person who knew that was me because I had done all the internal work. So what I would say is that we have to put structures in place to ensure that when we're isolating people, we're not isolating them from the problem. We're not isolating them from their humanity, and that we're making sure that they have the tools to recalibrate. They have the counseling, the support, the mentoring, whatever we need to do to make sure that they're able to engage with other people. We should be doing it. Then here's a fact about prison solitary confinement that people don't know: most of the people who are in solitary aren't there because they've committed violent acts toward others. They're there for other ridiculous rule-breaking that, oftentimes, is associated with their psychological orientation. If somebody's a schizophrenic, the likelihood of them following all the rules of prison is minimal to none. So you put them in solitary for something that they really need treatment for, not further isolation.

SPENCER: Because the prison treats it like a punishment; you break the rules, this is the consequence.

SHAKA: Absolutely.

SPENCER: Obviously, you've come an incredible way since you were a young man. Do you think that everyone has the potential, or are some people actually irredeemable? You hear about serial killers who just kill people in cold blood and seem to enjoy inflicting suffering, or people that have such a twisted ideology that it seems like they are always going to hurt people if they're let free. Do you believe that there are people who are irredeemable, and how do you think we should deal with them in society?

SHAKA: I get asked this question a lot, and I think part of it is that we have to separate people who are psychologically damaged and need psychological help. I actually served time with a serial killer.

SPENCER: Really?

SHAKA: Yeah, this guy named John Norman. He's in Michigan. I think he was accused of killing eight people, eight young ladies. I remember meeting this guy, and he worked in a law library at the time, or he spent a lot of time in the law library. He is a brilliant legal mind, and he also clearly was a psychopath. Do I think he's redeemable? I think that there's a structure you can put in place that doesn't give him access to kill again, and he also still had things about him that were valuable to people in that environment. Do I think he should be just let out of prison to play freely among people in society? No, because I think there's a psychological issue that I don't think is just a crime. I think there's a difference between hustling to provide for yourself and having a pathology around killing other people. I think that's a psychological issue. What we've done is intertwine the two and try to use them as one argument, and that's just not true. I was in prison with Dr. Kevorkian, and I remember thinking to myself, "Why is this guy in a prison cell block?" I understood what they charged him with assisted suicide, but the prison system didn't seem like the right place for somebody like him. It's those types of things where I think there are no easy answers. I'm not a psychologist. I just do notice that I have social awareness to know that most of the people I've met in prison are redeemable, and the others are people who have psychological problems that are beyond my level of expertise. I don't think that the majority of people are inherently evil. I have met people who are inherently evil, and it's clear that there's a psychological disconnect there that has nothing to do with criminal orientation that we should be thinking about differently.

SPENCER: It sounds like you think that actually a minority of people who commit violent crimes are of that psychological profile; most of them could actually be reformed.

SHAKA: Absolutely.

SPENCER: One thing you talk about in your work is masculinity. How do you think that feeds into violent crime and issues in our society?

SHAKA: I think a couple of things. I think one, we've over-indexed on the idea that all testosterone-driven behavior is somehow toxic, and it's literally what I talked about early on. I talked about sports. I think I'm a gentle parent. My son comes up to me and he loves to cuddle, and he loves to have hugs, and he also loves UFC, because I like to see people battling and figuring out their inner toughness. I think this idea that everything rooted in violence is a reaction to masculinity or a distortion of masculinity is wrong. There are women I know who have been and are as violent as men, and it has nothing to do with them being masculine. It has to do with them being hurt, traumatized, and defensive. I think as a culture, human beings are really violent. You watch kids that play; they're hitting each other when they don't get that toy. That's a real thing. Our entertainment, if you look at the entertainment we enjoy as a culture — sports — sports are extremely violent. I don't think we have an appreciation for how violent it is for a person to run full speed and smack into another person. I don't think people understand how skillfully violent boxing or MMA is and how people enjoy that. That's just the facts. Then you look at the movies we watch, the action movies, extremely violent; horror movies, extremely violent; gangster movies, you name it, we love it. I think it's the lack of control over violence that we have a problem with. I don't think that's just a masculine thing; I think it's a human thing. The solution is to ensure that people have safety growing up, and that whenever they encounter unsafety, we create spaces for those things to be addressed in a real way. A lot of this stuff happens; most of the guys that I served time with, they all did time in juvenile, they all did time in these broken school systems. There's a correlation where all these things actually work together.

SPENCER: One of the more interesting ideas that Freud talked about is the idea of sublimation, where you take some impulse that can be dangerous or harmful and redirect it into something that's socially acceptable and beneficial. There's a view that violence is inherently bad, and then there's another view that says many humans have an inherent violent impulse. If they're harming a stranger, that's obviously terrible. But if they're doing it for sport under controlled conditions, safely, and everyone's enjoying it, it's not only fine, it's actually a positive sublimation of that violent impulse. Maybe that's what you're getting at?

SHAKA: Yeah. You think about the gladiators in a Coliseum, where they were tasked with going to war and waging war. It's what our boxing rings are. That's what the octagon is for MMA. That's what our football fields are, rugby, you name it, there is that energetic output. Even sports that don't seem like they have a violent component to them, you think about the force required to hit a tennis ball 100 miles per hour; that's a serious energetic output. I do think it's that thing of what's not controlled that causes harm. But we also have to be honest as a society in terms of the things we find enjoyable about it.

SPENCER: It reminds me of cats, because most play with cats is essentially them trying to murder something. Except that they're trying to murder the toy or the laser pointer. Nobody would say, "It's bad to play with cats." No, that is what evolution makes cats enjoy. Speaking of cats, my cat just literally jumped up on the table. That's what evolution makes cats enjoy. I think there's something similar with humans. Many of us have a violent impulse, and that is just part of our nature. How do we use that impulse in ways that are healthy and good, rather than harmful? Before we wrap up, the last thing I want to ask you about is reintegration. You were there for 19 years. They're like, "Okay, you're free now." I imagine that it must be incredibly strange and shocking to come back to the regular world.

SHAKA: Coming back to society, it's June 22, 2010, specifically, one day after my 38th birthday, I was released. It was a mixture of emotions. I came out super excited; I was literally a kid. I was so naive about life on this side. I didn't realize until later I had arrested development; I stopped developing socially, probably from the moment I was arrested. I was 38 biologically, but I was more like in my early 20s when I first got out, in terms of my orientation to the world. Technology had advanced beyond what was imaginable. I grew up with Fred Flintstone and The Jetsons, and it was like Fred Flintstone had been transported into an episode of The Jetsons when I got out.

SPENCER: Because you came out to a world of internet and smartphones, which had not existed.

SHAKA: Yeah, they didn't exist before I went in. Even now, the car technology is incredible. I remember as a kid watching Knight Rider and David Hasselhoff talking to his car, KITT. That was a big thing; wow, this car can talk to him. Now all cars can talk to you. It's fascinating to think about coming out and having to make that adjustment. It's one of the things I talk about because it is overwhelming. I can't tell you how many people I noticed got out of prison and reached out to me, struggling to just operate their phones. They're overwhelmed. I always tell them, "Listen, if you have a niece, a nephew, a godchild, a grandchild, let them be your mentor. They'll help you." It's scary to think that as an adult, you're coming out to this new world, and nobody's thinking that your life stopped for however long you were gone. The things we take for granted, we gradually grow with these things, whereas someone coming out is just dropped into this new world. You're dropped into AI now, and you've been gone for 20 years when none of this stuff existed. That was tough, but I think I came home with so much optimism that I even saw the challenges as opportunities to learn, and I found joy in most of them. There were definitely times I felt overwhelmed, grossly insecure, and like I was so far behind everybody else. That was scary to think about. I didn't have the opportunity to work for 20 years and retire, but I had a game plan. I had planned my life. I knew I wanted to come home and be an entrepreneur. I knew I wanted to be successful as an author. So I got out and hustled books out of the trunk of my car. I sold books everywhere I found people. I just kept doing that. I did a lot of social impact work, which I knew was going to be super important for me, mentoring young people in my community. All the things I knew were important to me, I was determined to do. I did all this with no budget. I went to schools and volunteered to talk to the kids. Sometimes I wasn't even supposed to be let in the schools because I have a felony, but the principals and deans saw value in what I did. It's been a fascinating journey. Fifteen years later, I've accomplished so much in this time. I've had so many experiences. It literally is the stuff that movies are made of, but it's been an incredible journey.

SPENCER: Yeah, it is hard to even fathom coming out into the world and you haven't talked, you haven't seen your friends in 20 years, and you haven't interacted with technology, and now you have to get a job, and you're a felon, so you have to report that, right? People can find that out.

SHAKA: Yeah, you have to report your felony in so many ways, things that people wouldn't even think about. Any application you fill out asks if you've ever been convicted of a crime. You're always reminded of your worst moment. You're always reminded that you're different from everybody else. You're "other" in society. Coming home, developing friendships is different. When I came home, I knew I didn't want to be friends with my old friends. Not in the traditional sense; I would still be friendly toward them, but that wasn't the social circle I wanted to spend time with. You have to build that, and then you have to learn how to be in a relationship with people. You go to prison, you've been through trauma, you've been through stuff that people can't imagine, and it takes time to adjust. Dating, all that stuff was really tough, coming home and just figuring out who you are as a human being. Those are things that we don't really think about when it comes to people getting out. We're like, "Oh, we just want our loved one home." Yes, but they're also going to be a different human being than the one that left, and you have to be prepared for that adjustment. They have to be prepared, too. I don't think we do a good job of preparing people for life after prison.

SPENCER: Yeah, it seems like people are being set up to fail, and the probability that they end up dealing drugs or something like that is high, because what kind of job are they going to do? How are they going to reintegrate on their own? It just sounds like such a difficult thing to do without help reintegrating. I imagine many people fail to do it, and it ends badly.

SHAKA: It's super tough. There are some organizations that do incredible work, and these are organizations that should be modeled by every state and city that has a high population of imprisoned people, organizations like Anti-Recidivism Coalition, Homeboy Industries, Amity Foundation. These organizations are really helping people reintegrate because they start while people are inside, preparing them for life, and then they support them when they get out, so that they have a safe pathway from prison to employment. With that work, we've been able to get people jobs. In Hollywood, we've been able to get people jobs in construction. I don't know if people saw the big fires that happened here in California; some of those firefighters on the front line were people who were incarcerated, and we created a pathway for them to become full firefighters when their sentence is done. There's a lot of great work happening. It's not all doom and gloom, but sadly, it is the minority, and we just need to make that the majority.

SPENCER: We talked about a lot of topics today. What would you like to leave the listener with? What would you want them to remember from this conversation?

SHAKA: What I would love to leave the listeners with is this big idea of freedom. What I've learned over 15 years post-prison is that a lot of people who have never stepped foot into a prison system, into the back of a police car, are imprisoned by what I call hidden prisons that stand in the way of them living the life they desire, the fulfillment, the joy, the happiness, the success. What that looks like is people are imprisoned by these hidden prisons, such as grief, shame, anger, the inability to forgive, things that really stand in the way of them living the most optimal life. There is a way out of that, and I invite them to go on this journey to discovering the most magical parts of their experience, the greatest parts of their potential, and to access that through these practical steps that I've taken in my life that have taken me from the dregs of society, the pits of solitary confinement, all the way up to being a successful author, a producer, an investor, an entrepreneur, and an executive in technology. I know if I have done it, many people can do it; they just need the keys to open up the doors to those hidden prisons, and they'll find them in my work and in my writing, the stories that I tell.

SPENCER: Anyone interested in learning more about that can check out Shaka's new book, How to Be Free. Shaka, thank you so much for coming on. This is a fascinating conversation.

SHAKA: Yeah, thank you so much for having me.