Daymond John | Breaking Cycles: Entrepreneurship as a Path to Freedom

We don't want to go out and sell drugs or hurt people. Nobody wants, nobody says, I want to do that today. But if you don't have people around you who had the proper resources or faith, you know, if you're a kid today, growing up and you can't get broadband or any kind of things like that, you know, in your community, well, what are you going to have? You're going to have limited access to information that you need. So you're going to. Your view and scope of the world is going to be extremely small.

Welcome to the Radical responsibility podcast. I'm Dr. Fleet Mahler and I'm excited to guide you on a journey of authentic transformation. In each episode, I'll bring you insights from leading experts to explore trauma recovery, mindfulness practices, positive psychology, and innovative breakthroughs in health, wellness and life optimization. This is a space for real conversations that inspire meaningful change, helping you find alignment with the person you were always meant to be. Let's get started.

What if the key to transformation wasn't luck or connections, but something already within you? In this episode, I sit down with Shark Tank star and FUBU founder Daymond John. A true master of resilience and reinvention, he built a six billion dollar brand from just $40. Proving that success isn't about where you start. It's about mindset, adaptability, and action. We explore how entrepreneurship can be a game changer for those facing incarceration, breaking cycles of limitation through financial literacy, resourcefulness and preparation. Through my work with the Path of Freedom prison program, I've seen firsthand how shifting your mindset can change your future. And Damon, he's invested in over 30 brands, helping entrepreneurs turn ideas into thriving businesses. If you're ready to break barriers and build something lasting, this episode's for you. So stay tuned. You don't want to miss it. Hi, welcome to this special edition of the Path of Freedom program from Prison Mindfulness Institute with renowned entrepreneur the People Shark, Daymond John. Welcome, Damon.

Thank you, man. Thanks for having me.

So great to have you here. My name is Fleet Maul, the founder of Prison Mindfulness Institute and a former prisoner myself. And I've really been looking forward to this conversation with you, Damon. You're really my go to business mentor and one of my entrepreneurial heroes. So really excited to be able to bring you to all the incarcerated folks that are out there looking to turn their lives around that we that we're able to touch through our programming. So to begin with, Damon, I wonder if you could talk a little bit about what life was like for you growing up in Queens before you got started as an entrepreneur?

Well, I, growing up in Queens, lower to middle income family, growing up in the streets of Hollis, only child, parents got divorced, dad left at 10 years old. But I still had much more than many people have in this country. And definitely in the. I had a house, I had a bed to sleep in. I had a caring mother, I had a community who would beat my ass if I embarrassed my mother in the streets. But just like everybody else in this country and in the world, my community got ripped apart in 86, 85, 86, because of a very cheap drug called crack. But however the entrepreneurs in my neighborhood became, they were drug dealers. And being an African American, we were always told by even the people that were paid to protect us that we were going to be dead or in jail by 21. So they set these goals for us that we would listen to as children. We would end up executing that. I didn't see any people of my with my color skin on TV making any money unless they had a superpower such as Muhammad Ali or Kareem Abdul Jabbar. So. And then, you know, at any given time, you know, driving down the street or do it or walking or anything else like that, I could be arrested for something that I didn't do or probably, you know, shot by somebody in my community. So it was. But that was all we knew growing up. We didn't have access to social media and the Internet to see other people doing other things. So like anything else, we aspire to be the people that we saw the most. The drug dealers. There are plenty heroes in my community, but you didn't see them. They were going to work at five o' clock in the morning. They were taking care of their kids. They were further trying to educate themselves. And unlike social media, we just didn't see those images. And the images that we did see because our black people never control the media, was the images that were not governed by our own. So we would see a lot of more negative things than anything. So. But at the same time, I come from a very rare place in the world. Hollis Queens. It's square five miles. They have every rapper that came out of there from the past and present. I don't know, it's something in the water. Hollis Plains is a place in the United States where the most African American households were actually owned by. So I would walk outside and I would see Run the MC Salt N Pepper, LL Cool J, the Fat Boy, Lost Boys, Intro, Onyx Used to cut my hair. Ja rule, 50 cents, I don't know. Waka block. His mother lived two doors down the block for me, and she also found a girl named Nicki Minaj. And we would just see everybody and we saw that people were doing something that they loved and actually making money. They were entertainers. Wait a minute. I don't have to wash my back. I don't have to sell drugs. I can actually do something I love and make money. So we all aspire to do that because you become what you think about most of the time. And if I saw not only LL Cool J, but I knew his bodyguard and I knew somebody who was doing audio for him and somebody who was carrying his bags and somebody who was doing this, well, I could be one of those. So I sort of apply that thought process to my. I'm a very rational thinker. I realized that the guys that I knew that was selling drugs and ideas of what they would do if they were making a certain amount of money over the course of 10 years. Well, five of the. Even if they were making $100,000 a year, five of those years, I broke it down all day on social media. Five of those years, they would be incarcerated. So that's not a million dollars out of the 500,000 that they have left now. Well, how many are going to spend on attorneys fees and various other things and moving and disruption of your home and various other things? Oh, shit. I might as well work at McDonald's and not have to work watch my back. So rational way of thinking, you know, I have so many friends. You know, the movie Belly was written about my friends, the one that DMX played that role, the guy that DMX played, my best friend that grew up with me, and I knew each other since the first grade. He just came home after 27 years of incarceration, something he didn't do. I was with him the night that they said that he murdered somebody. Another friend of mine came home recently out of eight years because of the Innocence Project of a 15 year sentence of something he didn't do. He spent eight years in. And I know three other people like that. What I'm going to be saying to other people on here is not nothing new. So that's the community that I came from. And still when people come home, I put, is it the first? Because if it's the first, I got somebody coming home today. Somebody came home yesterday. I know this community all too well. I grew up. But, you know, I grew up in Queens. So you either worked at JFK or LaGuardia or you were either working or visiting or living on Rikers C74. A lot of my friends stay in there. So I know this community extremely, extremely well. I've gone through many, many prisons and I've spoken and. And there is.

Well, I can't think of anybody better to have this conversation with. So what inspired you to go into entrepreneurship and where'd you kind of develop the confidence that you could do that?

Well, because entrepreneurship in the community that I came up with is nothing new. You know, we've been bartering and trading since the beginning of the time. We just never had a way to. We never legalized it or formalized it in bartering and trading, anything. You know, if you live in the African American community now, and I'm not only saying African American because, you know, it's a money thing, it's not necessarily a color thing, because I know many people who live in communities that are not African American, who have the same play as we have, but grew up in African American community. Somebody's a store owner, somebody's selling T shirts, somebody selling food. It was always an idea. And my. I'm half Trinidadian, and as a West Indian, you know, we sold everything. Now, when I would go to summers to Trinidad, I would see the tourists, they would go on the rum cruises, and my friends and I, we would just dive off the docks as they threw coins into the water so they can see how good we just went, you know. And then after that, I would go and I would go and climb trees with a little rope and I'd take down the coconuts. Right. So we just always thought of ways, you know, ways to supply, you know, the means for ourselves. That's just what it is. Growing up in any kind of like, Caribbean or immigrant community, we're hard workers by nature. We don't want to go out and sell drugs or hurt people. Nobody wants. Nobody says, I want to do that today. But if you don't have people around you who had the proper resources or faith, you know, if you're a kid today growing up and you can't get broadband or any kind of things like that, you know, in your community, well, what are you going to have? You're going to have limited access to information that you need. So you're going to. Your view and scope of the world is going to be extremely small. If they're cutting arts and sports programs and people are not aware that if you don't get to a reading level by three years old, well, Then you're more likely you will fall behind for the rest of your life. Or if today, if you don't send a child to a pre K or start them off earlier, they're more likely to go from cribs to corrections and cribs to colleges. Well, then you don't know any better.

So tell us the story about making a $40 investment and out of that, creating FUBU, which I understand stands for us by us. Is that correct?

Yep. FUBU for us by us. But a lot of people thought that the for us buy us is about a color. No, it's about a culture. It's about the people who love hip hop. You know, who was the first hashtag of kind of clothing and in the hip hop community? What happened was when this music was coming around, it was a certain way we wanted to dress that emulate the music. Right. And be very functional in dressing. Right. A lot of us had. We wanted to wear a certain color. So we wanted to wear either red or whatever your breakdance crew was. So that. That's the design you went for. Right. We want to wear baggier clothes. Right. But we want to wear certain type of boots, like Timbaland. But the designers were taking our money, saying, we don't like you. I don't want you to buy my clothes. Like anything else in any business, they didn't have empathy for the community. If I was wearing a pair of 36 jeans and you were Ralph Lauren and you made a pair and you said, well, you wear a 32, get the hell. Why would you wear a 36? Well, could be various different things. It could be I'm a breakdancer, I want the pants loose. It could be I don't have enough money. It was handed down by my older brother. It could be I only have $75, and I don't know if I'll ever have it again. So I bought a pair of pants that I'll grow into. It could be you can't have belts or strings on your pants when you're incarcerated. So my uncle came home and I kept seeing the pants sagging off his ass. And he is the most impressive person I know in my life, and I'm trying to emulate him because I don't know, I want baggy pants. But they didn't have understanding of our community. Maybe I bought a Timberland not because it was the best boot in the world. I don't care about mountain climbing, hiking, or construction. I care that the Timberland has a certain suede on it that can hold a dye three separate times. I could buy one pair of Timberland, put taps on the bottom of it, and dye it three separate times. And now the one pair of Timberland I have looks like I have four pair of Timberland. Well, they didn't respect or have value, bro. So what did we. What did I do? I stood on The Corner in 1989, Good Friday, and I made a couple of halves. The before that I had seen in a De La Soul video about two weeks earlier. I knew that Easter was coming up, so I knew that, you know, people go shopping on that Friday, and I sold $80 worth of these hats in one hour. And I said, that's it. I found something that I made with my own hands. It was just as passionate as a drug or something else because it was just a different white substance. It was cotton, and I was able to sell it. And I said to myself, I'm never going to work with anybody ever again for the rest of my life. Starting that day. I worked at Red Lobster for five years after that. That's a whole nother story.

So then what I read, you learned to sew from your mother, and then you somehow figured out how to do a ball cap.

No, no, no. You know, everything happens to us for various reasons. I did learn how to sew from my mother, but she didn't show me that day. You know how I learned so from my mother, going back to hip hop? Well, you know how if the pants are bag, you know how women, when they have a gap in the back of the pants, they put the darts in the back. So I learned how to start it right because I didn't have enough money to go to the tailor. If I have a red pair of pants, a red pair of leaves, well, if I iron them all the time, that crease is never going to stay right there, and I'm going to have a whole bunch of white lines in it. Well, what do I got to do? I'm going to go and stick a straight line right down the front of it, and I'm going to put a permanent crease in the line. Well, if I'm doing windmilled or riding a bike, I don't want my legs to be caught in the chain or the the bag to hit. So I'm going to taper the bot. I started to learn that. I learned that when I was 10 years old. Those small skills of learning at 10 would be the skills that I would use at 20 when I was standing on that corner selling those hats. Because I learned how to sew a.

Straight line and then you leverage that. I understand as you got into that and said, I can make stuff and make money selling it. You leverage some of that, your connections in that community to deliver what the hip hop community was looking for. And probably got support. I think it got some support from LL and some others.

No, I was always a logical thinker. I did get support from LL and others, but I had the money. I had no money to buy 50 shirts that I wanted to sell or I wanted to give away as a promotion. So you know what? I didn't buy the 50 shirts and give them to the cool rappers like LL. I realized that LL would barely wear it or wear it once. I went to the guys that only wore 5x and 6x, because I knew one thing about that, that these gentlemen only had Rochester big and tall to go to with a white shirt or a black T shirt or if they had to pay hundreds of dollars to make something custom. Now all of a sudden I give them something that's fashionable, that fits them quality, and they don't wear it one time. They wear it eight times a month. And guess where those guys were standing. Those big guys were standing in the front of red ropes at clubs. They were the bodyguards for the rappers. And definitely nobody was fucking with them on the streets. So then all of a sudden the rapper says to them, well, where are you getting all this stuff? They go, oh, that little guy over there, Damon said, well, get me one. And they go, you ain't up my money. No, he gives you one and you don't wear it. I'm not getting another shirt. Hence you better wear it. It's just me just sitting there thinking, don't get me wrong, I'm not a genius. It wasn't like these things came to me overnight, but I would ponder in a long periods of time and just keep analyzing things and breaking them down and saying, somebody's done this before. Everybody had money, everybody had contacts. That's bullshit.

So at some point you started to emerge and actually had to learn how to run a business and probably relate to other kind of big business that start to scale f. And what was your learning path of really becoming a business person and an entrepreneur that could not just, you know, sell stuff on a street corner, but really create a business and scale it and get involved in that kind of enterprise level with the marketplace?

My learning process was going to smarter people and always asking questions and knowing and walking the room vulnerable and knowing that I didn't know anything. Until I started making money. And then I fucked everything up because I thought I knew everything at that point. And then I went back again, some hard thinking, and said, you're about to. You're about to screw this whole thing up, you know, just because you made the money, look how fast you lost it. You better start doing something right now and humbling yourself and asking questions. And when I started asking my accountants or other wealthy people who didn't need me, or not even wealthy people who may have worked in a community, but they were an accountant, but just because they didn't show flashy things, it didn't mean they didn't have any money. They just decided not to have a Mercedes because that money they were putting in the sidebar Mercedes, they put them into some level of a stock. And I started just asking questions. And when I started asking questions, you had to beat the people off of me who wanted to help. Because once you start asking somebody for help of something that they know how to do, they want to help you.

So I wonder if you could talk a little bit about how entrepreneurship could be a pathway for formerly incarcerated folks. And if you actually know any, you know, a lot of people that are getting out, you still know people that are getting out from the community you grew up in. Do you have some stories, you know, some that got out of prison and have been successful in an entrepreneurial way?

Yeah, I mean, my friend Katt, who came out, like I said, he had 15 years of a sentence what he didn't do. And you let him on eight years he came out, and first time I've seen this, he listened to me. He got about $4 million after 10 years. Now, what happened was, and a lot of people would know here that he went back to the community and he was kind of working for me. But the local cops were instructed to arrest him again so that, you know, they can say this wasn't a mistake, right? So he didn't keep it real and stay home. He got his ass. He moved from House Queens to Atlanta. He gets this $4 million. He comes over to me and says, hey, man, I got $4 million. What should I do with it? I said, well, first of all, this is when I was starting to even learn financial intelligence. Even better. I said, I'm gonna take you over my partners, you know, they're Jewish and they happen to have a really, you know, great portfolio. And I said, I remember saying this to him, you're not going to listen. You're going to go spend this. You're going to think that it's going to be really easy to do and to keep. But just listen to them about where to put certain amount of money. And then you take this and you go find something that you like and find something you don't like. So what don't you like? He said, I don't like being around people. I don't trust anybody anymore. I want to go raise a family. I want to stay home. All right, so you got to find something you could do staying home. And he left. I ain't talked to him for three years. This guy goes and he buys the smallest little house he could buy in Atlanta, buys a little piece of shit car. He invests in learning TD Ameritrade online trading and day trading. The guy has $20 million now, and he sits at home and he candlesticks and day trades all day long. And he's been home now 15 years. And I never seen something like that happen, even with people who would have freedom all their life and ran into money. So, you know, I see it a lot of times. It's just I don't have the, you know, I'm not skilled enough to tell anybody what they've been through here. Give them all. Sit back here in my chair and give them this all holier than that almighty advice is so easy. It's not easy, but you have to just put a lot of hard thinking to it and you have to say, what did I learn while I was in the system or not in the system? What do I see this missing? What do I need to do? What are my obstacles? How can I do this with zero money? And how can I, during those hard times when I got to keep the lights on and everything is tempting me and I want to either collapse in the way I'm thinking because I go, we weren't. I don't have a superpower, and I never have a shot like that in life. And nobody in my family has ever done that, or they're going to laugh at me. How do I put those egotistical things aside and say, no, let me look at all the people that have done it. Let me look at all the immigrants that came over here. They don't have a dime in their pocket and they have. But yet even a successful life like this, they have an amazing, just everyday life. How can I do that? Because the temptation is there. You're going to have so many people coming in and out and say, hey, I found a new way to do this, a new way to do that. It's not as bad. Oh, you learn from these first mistakes. Oh, you're going to do this and that. We all know you just got to fuck up once and you're done.

That's right. A lot of guys do have entrepreneurial instincts. A lot of them are involved in selling brilliant and. Absolutely. And when you're doing time, when you're inside, you get a kind of different look at the world. You're kind of outside the world, looking back at it. And you may. You may see things that other people who are in the world aren't seeing, things that are missing, things that could be done differently, needs that other people aren't seeing. And I think if you have that consciousness, you know, there, you could really have a leg up when you get out. And I'm curious, you know, what you think about how people could really train themselves. I mean, some other people are honest. They may still be looking at 5, 10, 15, 20, even 25 years or something like that. I. I really feel bad about folks that are looking at even more time than that. But what can they be doing while they're in to train themselves to develop the mindset and train themselves that when they do get out, they can exercise those opportunities that maybe they see.

You know, it's very hard for me to have a conversation, and I don't want to oversimplify what these men and women are dealing with. First of all, it starts with your mind. So I find that the most people make bad decision. I'm not even talking about to the level of incarceration. There are a lot of people here who are talking who haven't done it. There are a lot of people who were growing up and they were in a very odd situation. There were people who did do it. You know, the mind is the only thing that is yours, and you're the only one who controls that. And I always say there's two things that you can control in life, right? The lens that you look at something through and the action you take. The first thing is the ego. For those who are incarcerated, they already know once you're gone, people generally forget about you. Now, of course, your wife and. Or your family often is doing the time with you, your parents and whatever the case is. But you're gone, right? Nobody else. Very few people are checking for you. Why the fuck you care about what they think when you're on the street or what they're thinking about you in that system when you leave. So first of all, once you get that out of the way, and many people do now, you're starting with a clean slate. I'm not trying to impress anybody. I'm not trying to show them this is who I was. I don't care that you think I'm a dinosaur. Now that I've been away this period of time, watch me get to work. And then you try to find ways that you can provide overvalue for people. I noticed that a lot of people, when they come home, of course, what is the first thing you want? A job. They go, yo, man, okay, well, you don't want me in these things. Give me a job. And of course it's challenging, but giving a person a job who doesn't know the job they want is almost like me saying to you, hey, please let me sell you something. Tell me what. What do you start to specialize in? And nobody. And even if they don't want to give you a job, how can you do something for free to show them that you're worth it? Well, give me a shot at this. Let me go back and do this. And if I do this, are you interested? You know, but the reality is going to set in, and the need for hunger and the need to feed your family or sleep in a warm bed is a real need. So how do you balance that? I can't necessarily give you the answer because that's why you're here, to give me the answer on the programs, the products, the things that are out there, you know, I will. You can talk to Ted. And if you have a program, those people are coming home. We can give them Damon on demand for 30 days. And that is a $8,000 cost. It's a digital course. You usually have to put your credit card in for it. Please. So just talk to Ted, because nobody's going to have credit cards. So the reason why, you know, digital marketing, right? You put your credit card and after 30 days, you know, we got to register you, whatever, but we got to find a way to give it to people for 30 days. I'm not giving them to them any longer because I've seen people get it forever and then they never open it. 30 days is over. That's your problem. After that, you don't want to do it. So at least we have that right.

Well, that's an incredibly generous offer. You know, and you're absolutely right. You know, when I got out, I got it in my head that I wanted to be a business consultant and coach because I started reading about while I was in prison, the coaches could do business coaching and life coaching by phone from anywhere in the world, and they have all this flexibility and fluidity and so forth. And I decided I want to do that. And so I got out and I did free consulting and free coaching for nine months before I got my first paying client and finally got my first client, negotiated a $5,000 a month retainer, and I was off and running, never looked back. So now, at 70, I decided to start my own business. And that's how I got involved in Rise Nation. I'm building a business even greater. I've had a good business practice for over 20 years, a good income as a consultant and a coach. But now I'm creating a business that could really create a lot of abundance for a lot of people based on, you know, kind of following your model. So that's a very generous offer on your part, and it'd be great if guys could access that. In 30 days is perfect, because if people don't make use of it in 30 days, they're not going to do it. So I'm wondering, you know, how you feel about. I know you're committed to empowering entrepreneurship among communities of color. You're very active in that regard. And how might that help really bring about societal transformation in this country and the change we really need? I mean, you could say we've come a long way, but we've got an awful long way to go in terms of overcoming racism and overcoming injustices and all the barriers that people face in this country. So how might, you know, embracing entrepreneurship, any one of us getting involved in that, and then maybe sharing our success with others, be a way, a more collective way of transformation? Possibly for communities of color in this.

Country, it all starts with financial intelligence, as, you know, with, you know, teaching our kids these things. The basics and the fundamentals of why we have these challenges is education, the lack of education, of financial intelligence. I just came back from Costa Rica, and they were like, we got rid of the army. What do you mean, got rid of the army? They were like, the government decided to not double, but quadruple down on education. Hence, we have domestic violence. You know, we have certain other things, but we got rid of the need for an army. So we're talking to people who are currently, you know, they are in a very unfortunate situation. And the way to change this is to try to find and catch the next who this person was when they were five or when they were six. You know, I just wanted to give away books in Chicago. And I got to tell you, you know, I went to these high schools, and we all. We Obviously know what's going on in Chicago. The kids in the school, they were so beautiful. They were 4, 5, 6, 7. They were screaming, joy singing. Whatever happened had happened. And when they were now 16 years old, these kids were scared and they were angry. These kids had little hope. These kids, they felt demonized and they felt that nobody cared for them. Something had happened in between that time or not Something many systemic things that happened during that time. The way to reduce these things. I'm not a politician, but I can tell you it's education and financial intelligence and the financial, the lack of financial intelligence is not a black thing, it's a nationwide thing. Because we're going off of an 80 year school system, an 80 year old school system where we were taught to build ships such as shop and we taught to be great employees. But if we don't have financial intelligence, which is very simple, at the end of the day it's really basic. If we don't have it and it's installed, this is not talking about being an accountant and all that other shit. This is talking about understanding what it is when you get $3 in the household. Here is the best thing. Here's the, here's how to get $3. 3 million, $3 trillion. The first dollar always goes for what you have to pay for your food, medicine, living. The second dollar is an investment. You take that and you put it into, and I love to tell people, you put it into if you don't want to be an. Think entrepreneurially, working your day job and putting money into the stock market. And the third dollar goes for what you would like to have but don't have to have. What happens? After a while, bucket number two flows into three and one. What do we do? Naturally, I'm guilty of the same thing. I used to go and I go and do number three first because I worked hard for it, never got to number two. And I paid 18% on credit cards for number one. I thought that the banks were, they were the government, they held my money or they worked for, they were the government. So you know what I was doing? I was going right next door to check cash in place, paying 3% or 4% to get my check cash, another for money orders and everything else. I was paying 8 to 10% at the end of the year for a service that the bank did for free. You know, If I had $28 when I came home, you know, in my bank account. Well, if $28 in my bank account at the end of the year, they would give me 2% on that. So I don't even know what that is. What is 2% of $20 50? If seven years ago you put $28 on Shopify, it went to 1900, you think we're going to just give up iPhones, they own 75% of the United States.

Right.

This is financial intelligence at the most basic form, right? But when we were all growing up, we saw people with the big ticker tape running across and these people in suits and all that kind of shit and we were like, man, that's not us. We can't do that now. You can just open up a Robinhood account, a TD Amer, and do it right there. And so we have to teach these children this type of stuff with Play money and of course get them in schools earlier. We're not even talking about the systemic issues and the privatization of facilities where the more that the cops arrest and fill, the more a company, that a public company gets paid and then they give our young men and women what, $0.07, $0.20 an hour to make things. So I mean, that's just modern day slavery. At the end of the day, we're not even getting to that.

Yeah, there's huge injustices in the system and as an organization we try to advocate around this, but our primary goal is to get to the folks inside and give them inspiration, give them hope and give them a way to self regulate and learn the skills of how to manage themselves and then how to change their mindset and create a new life for themselves and each one of us. I think we all want to work to have a more just world, but we're in whatever world we're in at the moment. It's up to us, you know what's going to happen to us. And I think your message is so empowering.

They need to see more people like you, Fleet, because we become what we want to think about, what we think about most of the time. And they need to see more people like you who have more in common and you have apart from what America thinks we have apart. And they need to see you being successful in telling this to people. That's what needs to happen. Really?

Well, that's one of the reasons I get myself out there is with my story, is not to pat myself on the back, but that it could be an inspiration to some others. Because I came out of prison in 1999 with a really serious record, a so called kingpin statute conviction and broke. I actually owed $300,000 to the government and to the IRS. And you know, I've had a great life ever since I got out, but I spent 14 years on the inside working on my mindset every day. That's basically what it was. So I wanted to ask you a question, Damon, about Shark Tank. I don't want to take up too much of your time. We're just about near the end here. But when you're, you know, thinking about doing deals with people on Shark Tank, and I know there's got to be some alignment with your business acumen, your skills, where you could leverage something. But apart from that, what are you looking at when you're looking in the eyes of those folks? What are you looking at before you're going to partner with somebody?

Do I trust them? And where the trust is going to come across is that that they told me the story and they told me about their failures just as much as their success. So I believe that, first of all, they're clear about their failures. Second of all, that they failed and they had the resilience to overcome it, or they had the fortitude to want to overcome it, that they're going to still work just as hard, and I'm going to have a partner that is not going to come to me with 10 problem, but they're going to come to me with 10 solutions, and that we can apply that to their business, my business, and then we can have. We can sit in a room and we can have a discussion and come up with new, innovative ways to solve these problems. If not, like I always say, I just send my money over the market. Elon Musk doesn't call me and ask me to fix a car or just make money or lose money.

Yes, it sounds like you're looking for that vulnerability and the authenticity, you know, the energy, the spirit, the work ethic to go after it. But also, you're looking for somebody who's real and willing to be vulnerable and acknowledge their failures. So you're looking for that.

Yeah, and they're also going to be saying it to me. They're going to say, hey, you know what I want them to be able to say if I fail, we can provide them what I want to say. Damon tried. I mean, I always tell people, if I was so damn good, FUBU wouldn't be fubu. FUBU would be called Nike, you know, and that we're human, too, and so that we have a way of communicating, that we respect each other.

So, Damon, if there's any kind of final message you'd like to share with our audience out there in the Jails and prisons. The folks are going to be watching this all over the country now.

Very hard for me to share anything because, again, it's so challenging in the situation they're in. And some of these people made a split decision, or they were just down the wrong path, or they made the only decision they thought was even possible. And every one of us in my community are one step away from, you know, having the same unfortunate situation from where I grew up. So they got to sit there and ponder over the things I've said, but they got more. They got way more things to think about because it's easy for me to sit here and say it. It was really easy for me sitting here saying they're living a whole nother life that, you know, it is challenging. It really is challenging. And they got all the other pressures that come with the world, right. Miley most likely going to go into a little community where they got to figure things out. They have to make up lost time. You know, they had to make a lost time with themselves personally, with their loved ones, with technology, with education. It's hard. And that's why it's been set up like that. That.

Yeah. I think that's why, for me, it's so important that we use the time while we're in just to really work on ourselves, educate ourselves, turn ourselves, because they're going to open that door. They might give you 20 bucks for a. But they might not. Or in a lot of places, you're going to step right out into neighborhoods full of drug dealers and crime, and there you are. You got to survive.

And if you don't, parole officer watching you, by the way, the parole officer now has technology to know where you're at at all time because of the cell phone. Right. You want to make it back into, whatever, your mother's life, your lady's life, your husband's life, whatever the case, you're trying to keep your nose clean. No way's hiring you. And the drug dealers are saying, yo, I got this. You want to make some quick money? What do you do?

Yeah, yeah. It's a very. It's a very tough situation indeed.

So.

But, you know, there are possibilities, and I think you'd probably agree that the barriers to getting into business, the barriers to entrepreneurship, are lower than they've ever been.

It is so easy right now. I can't tell you how easy it is right now. If you got $20 and go buy three goddamn balloons and stand outside the mall where the traffic is right before they get into the mall with those Mickey Mouse colorful balloons and sell three damn balloons for fucking $10 a piece. Now you got $30 and keep standing there. I don't care is go to Costco and buy 24 bottles of water and you know a 24 pack that cost you $12 and you sell them for a dollar a piece cold water when everybody's sitting in their car trying to get somewhere. I'm telling you now, it's super easy, but people are trying to think too big. Start there. Boom boom boom. Like me. $40 and a bunch of hats.

Damon, thank you so much and really appreciate it. I know you're a busy guy, so thank you so much for your time today and for being on this special edition of our Path of Freedom program from Prison Mindfulness Institute. Can't thank you enough.

I appreciate it. Thank you. Thanks Blake.

Thank you for joining me on the radical Responsibility podcast. Remember, real change happens to when we commit to our growth, face our challenges with compassion, and stay open to transformation. If you found this episode helpful, I encourage you to subscribe and help us spread the message of healing and personal empowerment. Stay grounded, stay present and stay true to you. Take care.

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