Shaka Senghor: Detroit-born author, criminal-justice reform advocate, and former corporate culture leader who served 19 years for second-degree murder, including 7 in solitary confinement. He taught himself to write in prison, became an MIT Media Lab fellow, and authored the bestselling memoir 'Writing My Wrongs' and 'How to Be Free.'
What this episode covers
Senghor walks Rogan through his life: running away from an abusive Detroit home at 13, being pulled into the crack trade, getting shot at 17, and at 19 killing a man and being sentenced to 17-40 years. He describes the brutal reality of solitary confinement, including feces-throwing 'wars,' food-loaf punishment, and the constant threat of losing his mind, and how literacy and books like 'As a Man Thinketh' and the poem 'Invictus' kept him sane. A letter from his young son sparked a journaling practice and the discipline to write a book in 30 days, which led to self-publishing from prison and a lawsuit by the state for the cost of his incarceration. The back half is a wide-ranging conversation on the failures of the U.S. penal system, the privatized-prison industry, the crack and opioid epidemics, and how the survival skills of the streets and prison translated into running sales and culture for a startup that reached a multibillion-dollar valuation. They close on gratitude, vulnerability, male friendship, and freedom as a state of mind.
Recommended on this episode
Invictus
William Ernest Henley
“I would read the poem Invictus. Like that poem always just kind of brought me back like you're the master of your own fate.”— Shaka Senghor
As a Man Thinketh
James Allen
“There's a book called As a Man Thinketh by James Allen... any page was about if you master your thinking, you can master your environment.”— Shaka Senghor
Dopefiend
Donald Goines
“one of my favorite authors, uh Donald Goines. So he had these all these street books like Dope Fiend and you know uh Black Gangster”— Shaka Senghor
Black Gangster
Donald Goines
“one of my favorite authors, uh Donald Goines. So he had these all these street books like Dope Fiend and you know uh Black Gangster”— Shaka Senghor
Louis L'Amour westerns
Louis L'Amour
“I was reading like westerns, Lewis Lamore, um my favorite one of my favorite authors”— Shaka Senghor
The guest's own work
How to Be Free
Shaka Senghor
“the book that I've recently written is called How to be free. And you know what really inspired me to write that book is I've met so many people”— Shaka Senghor
Also referenced (named, not recommended)
Pimp: The Story of My Life
Iceberg Slim
“Iceberg Slim Pimp all these stories were stories I had read early on and these guys they were like me”— Shaka Senghor
What You Do Is Who You Are
Ben Horowitz
“Ben actually wrote this book called What You Do is Who You Are. And in the book, he talked about some of our conversations around culture.”— Shaka Senghor
The Anxious Generation
Jonathan Haidt
“This is Jonathan Hate wrote a book about what it's doing to young girls. It's like they're comparing themselves constantly to everybody else.”— Joe Rogan
Big reveals from this episode
- Recounts the moment at 19, one month into being 19, that he fired four shots and ended a man's life, the turning point that sent him to prison.
- Admits he tried to escape from county jail with a smuggled pole and 60-70 stolen sheets before a perimeter check busted the plan.
- Confesses he was sent to solitary for a year for slapping an inmate in the chow line with a tray of mashed potatoes and gravy.
- Says he broke a corrections officer's trachea and only the officer's radio flying over the railing saved the man's life and Senghor from a life sentence.
- Charges himself to write a book in 30 days using a flimsy pen rolled in paper, telling himself: do it or 'die in prison.'
- Reveals the state sued him for roughly a million dollars, the cost of his incarceration, after he self-published; he backdated a contract to himself to legally defeat the claim.
- Describes going straight from the 'barbarity of prison' to a fellowship at the MIT Media Lab two years after release, like 'Fred Flintstone going into an episode of the Jetsons.'
- Explains how a Ben Horowitz dinner led him into tech, eventually helping run sales and culture at travel startup TripActions/Navan as it scaled toward a multibillion-dollar valuation.
- Reveals his brother was murdered in July 2021, and watching his family grieve forced him to reckon with the family he had caused to grieve decades earlier.
Worth remembering
- Senghor did 19 years total, 7 of them in solitary, and was transferred to 11 different prisons.
- He says the average reading level in prison is about third grade, and credits being literate with saving his life.
- Inmates in solitary passed books and notes by making 'fish lines' from unraveled sock and underwear string weighted with toothpaste tubes.
- At MIT he ran a 'prison hack' challenging students to build a tattoo gun and a water heater from scraps; they blew out the Media Lab's power.
- His best-paying prison job paid about $54 a month while phone calls once cost $15 each; kitchen work started at 17 cents an hour.
- He notes the U.S. prison population exploded from a couple hundred thousand to about 2 million during the war on drugs.
- Recalls the 1994 crime bill removing college education from prisons while he was averaging a 4.0 GPA inside.
- Points out Detroit went from the third-wealthiest city in the world to one of America's poorest within a lifetime after jobs moved overseas.
- A European prison warden wept and told him 'we would never do that to one of our citizens' on hearing he'd spent years in solitary.
- Describes 'food loaf,' a brick of a week's ground-up leftovers baked together and served as punishment for minor infractions.