Joe Rogan Experience #2353 - Shaka Senghor

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.

• 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.
  00:08:19
• Admits he tried to escape from county jail with a smuggled pole and 60-70 stolen sheets before a perimeter check busted the plan.
  00:11:56
• 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.
  00:28:21
• 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.
  00:29:55
• Charges himself to write a book in 30 days using a flimsy pen rolled in paper, telling himself: do it or 'die in prison.'
  00:39:26
• 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.
  00:51:22
• 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.'
  01:13:12
• 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.
  01:59:24
• 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.
  02:07:12

• Senghor did 19 years total, 7 of them in solitary, and was transferred to 11 different prisons.
  00:16:05
• He says the average reading level in prison is about third grade, and credits being literate with saving his life.
  00:22:43
• Inmates in solitary passed books and notes by making 'fish lines' from unraveled sock and underwear string weighted with toothpaste tubes.
  00:43:33
• 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.
  01:15:17
• 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.
  01:27:10
• He notes the U.S. prison population exploded from a couple hundred thousand to about 2 million during the war on drugs.
  01:30:18
• Recalls the 1994 crime bill removing college education from prisons while he was averaging a 4.0 GPA inside.
  01:33:25
• 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.
  01:34:27
• 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.
  01:45:20
• Describes 'food loaf,' a brick of a week's ground-up leftovers baked together and served as punishment for minor infractions.
  02:35:50

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