AI transcript
0:00:18 I’m Guy Kawasaki, happy 2024, welcome to Remarkable People, we’re on a mission to make you remarkable.
0:00:25 Today we have the privilege of hosting Halim Flowers, he’s a man whose life journey is
0:00:34 nothing short of a testament to resilience and transformation. In 1997, at the age of 16,
0:00:41 Halim was charged as an adult in the District of Columbia and convicted under the accomplice
0:00:48 liability doctrine of felony murder. He was sentenced to a staggering 40 years to life
0:00:56 imprisonment. His turbulent childhood, documented in the Emmy award-winning Thug Life in D.C.,
0:01:03 exposed the harsh realities of growing up within the walls of the D.C. Department of Corrections
0:01:10 during the crack era. During his incarceration, Halim discovered a profound love for literature
0:01:16 and the arts, and he transitioned learning entrepreneurship from the streets at the age
0:01:24 of 12, that is, dealing drugs. Halim channeled that ambition into self-enterprise and published
0:01:33 11 books across various genres. Released in 2019 after serving 22 years and two months,
0:01:39 Halim has since collaborated with Kim Kardashian on the Justice Project, performed spoken word
0:01:46 with Kanye West, and earned fellowships from the Halcyon Arts Lab and Echoing Green. His
0:01:53 story, captured in the memoir, Making of a Menace, Contrition of a Man, is a poignant
0:02:00 narrative of transformation and offers insights into the devastating and inspiring journey
0:02:07 that he has led. During our interview, I jokingly asked him to make a painting about my book,
0:02:13 Remarkable, and lo and behold the next day he told me he did it. A picture of Halim and
0:02:20 the painting is in the book. Actually, there are two pictures of the painting, if you count
0:02:26 the one on the dust jacket, which is in color, which truly shows you what it looks like.
0:02:35 I’m Guy Kawasaki, this is Remarkable People, and now here is the truly Remarkable Halim
0:02:48 Flowers. Our house has two paintings of Jean-Michel Basquat, of Jean-Michel Basquat, not by Jean-Michel
0:02:57 Basquat, and I read that he was an inspiration and paved the way for you. For me, my life
0:03:07 has definitely been impacted by Sean Carter, Jay-Z, and had it not been for my deep listening
0:03:13 to Jay-Z, his music, I’m not gonna say I wouldn’t have never been introduced to Basquat because
0:03:22 he’s so popular now, but when I was in prison and my access to the world was limited, it
0:03:29 was through listening to Jay-Z that I was introduced to Basquat, and then my habit of
0:03:36 reading the Wall Street Journal every day introduced me to not Jean-Michel Basquat work, just a
0:03:42 brief description about his life, and it encouraged me to want to see his work because
0:03:51 he looked like me, and I never thought that the fine art world found anyone who looked
0:04:00 like him to be Remarkable and celebrated, so that was what piqued my interest, and then
0:04:06 just seeing having the opportunity to come out of prison, to see his work in person,
0:04:13 and learning that both of us shared backgrounds as poets who started painting. His work always
0:04:20 spoke to me not because he was popular, it was just because the words that he used and
0:04:26 the way his imagery was just so raw and authentic, and it wasn’t like curated and edited as we
0:04:31 just spoke about earlier, it was just authentic. More not his life, but his work, because his
0:04:36 life was a tragedy, and his life was an inspiration to me, the only thing that was inspirational
0:04:42 to me about his life was his work ethic, the pace at which he worked and him having the
0:04:49 audacity to be in a space that normally would not include people who look like him. I am
0:04:56 an entrepreneur and I am the business, but I’m just confident in who I am in a humble
0:05:02 way, whereas I don’t, I’ve never felt the need to be like, you know, like I needed to
0:05:08 be like edited or I’m just, I just want people to know me, and I’m not afraid for people
0:05:15 to know all of me, the parts they enjoy and love, and the parts they may not. And for
0:05:20 me it’s just like being committed to growth and understanding that the biggest room in
0:05:25 the world is a room for improvement. So I think that’s very harmful today that we live
0:05:32 in this Photoshop edited world, it doesn’t give people grace to make things that people
0:05:37 interpret to be mistakes, but that are well-intentioned. We’re not talking about like going out and
0:05:42 harming someone, but people can say something and people trance on them, and they don’t
0:05:49 give them grace to grow, and it just keeps people just rigid and tight. So for me, I’m
0:05:56 just, I’m thankful to be an artist that people enjoy my art, I’ll just show up authentic.
0:06:02 Maybe my mind is making a connection that doesn’t exist. Do you pronounce your organization
0:06:15 Seito or Sato? Sato. Sato sounds like Japanese. Is Sato, is that inspired by Samo, S-A-M-O?
0:06:24 No, Sato was actually a publishing company that I started in prison in 2005, far before
0:06:30 I learned about Jean-Michel Basquiat and Samo, and Sato is an acronym that stands for
0:06:36 struggle against the odds. So when I started the publishing company, I had two life sentences.
0:06:45 I was like maybe 24 years of age, I was incarcerated, and I had so much to say, and I didn’t have
0:06:51 a lot of avenues to say it. I didn’t have access to social media or the internet, but
0:06:57 I knew that I had a story that I felt was remarkable and that it needed to be heard
0:07:05 outside of me just filing an appellate litigation to the appeal courts in my case to redress
0:07:11 the legal travesty that I was experiencing as a juvenile lifer. So for me, I knew that
0:07:16 it would be a struggle against the odds to get noticed in the publishing world, so just
0:07:22 me having the audacity with no experience in the literary world to start my own publishing
0:07:28 company and to believe that I had something to say that people with value was a struggle
0:07:34 against the odds, but I made it. Sure. If there’s a story in our 200 episodes of someone
0:07:41 who struggled and succeeded against the odds, Halim, you are near the top, I assure you.
0:07:49 And just one last thing about Jean-Michel, just in case you decide to paint a skull,
0:07:55 just let me know in advance so I can buy it. Okay. I would definitely do, I will, because
0:08:05 I just revisited a new descent in a staircase, which was originally done by Marcel Duchamp.
0:08:11 So I’d like to take a repurposed Francis Bacon hair series, so I will repurpose the
0:08:19 skull for you and just for you. I only do one and I’ll never do it again because I think
0:08:28 what happens by me being socially constructed as black, people negatively critique me for
0:08:36 honoring Basquiat. So if I repurpose a famous Picasso painting versus a famous Basquiat
0:08:43 painting, I will be more celebrated for the Picasso than the Basquiat, because people
0:08:48 in there for a night understand and think that I’m copying him, but that’s not even
0:08:53 there to me. For me, I just paint what I feel, but I’m just explaining to you what I’ve
0:08:59 experienced in my three year journey in this fine art world.
0:09:06 You returned to the steam several times about the impact of your father not really having
0:09:13 a big presence when you were a kid. And we’ve interviewed several people who said the exact
0:09:21 same thing. Can you just talk about what it means to grow up in DC without a father figure?
0:09:29 For me, I definitely want to clarify that because my dad was married to my mom and I had my
0:09:38 dad in my home until he got addicted to crack cocaine. And so my formidable years of one
0:09:46 through six, I had my dad day for day. My dad, the things that make me successful and
0:09:53 I believe in life today were things that my dad instilled in me, exercise, education,
0:10:00 discipline, things that he didn’t have. And now that I’m looking at him now as he’s 65
0:10:07 and I’m 43, I realized that he saw all the weaknesses in himself and he strengthened himself
0:10:14 through me. But when I lost him to the addiction, he was no longer himself. And then eventually
0:10:19 he moved away to the West Coast to try to get himself together. And he moved from DC
0:10:24 to Las Vegas. And by the time that he had came back, I was doing life in prison at the
0:10:33 age of 16, but not having him in my life from the ages of seven to 12. It really damaged
0:10:38 me because I was able to keep up the structure that he gave me as far as the spirituality
0:10:44 and the amateur boxing and the exercising and the schooling until I was 11. But once
0:10:50 I turned 12 and went to middle school, the peer influence was, it was so dominant on
0:10:56 my psyche. And I wanted to be accepted by my peers so much and not having my dad in
0:11:02 the home to counterbalance that because by him being absent, my mom had to work and go
0:11:08 to school after work so she can increase her ability to earn more to take care of my little
0:11:15 brother. And she wasn’t there. And then he wasn’t there at all. I leaned more to the
0:11:22 teenager guys in the streets and that created a vacuum that sucked me into the human waste
0:11:27 disposal of the school to prison pipeline to the prison industrial complex.
0:11:33 What is your advice? I know you wrote a book like this. What is your advice to kids who
0:11:41 don’t have fathers or don’t have father figures? I just spoke at a school earlier today and
0:11:48 I told them that if they didn’t remember anything that I said that they had value, that life
0:11:56 had value, their presence had value. And because they looked at me as if I was somebody famous
0:12:02 or something. And I told them I’m no different than you, that you have to find value in yourself
0:12:08 and not in things. It’s hard to understand at this time because who wants to be different
0:12:13 when you’re a teenager? Who wants to stand out? Who doesn’t want to be trendy in the
0:12:21 age of social media where so much is driven by filtered images and what’s popular and
0:12:28 trending at the time. But the value is in yourself. And if you celebrate me, understand
0:12:35 that I’ve only been able to be what you consider to be a success or remarkable just through
0:12:40 leaning into my authentic self and not editing in myself and not photoshopping myself, but
0:12:47 just speaking what I feel, painting what I feel and doing it all from a loving intention.
0:12:53 And that’s my advice I would give to any child or adult that your genuine self, as Mr.
0:13:00 Roger said, you’ll find just the way you are and your genuine self has value. And you have
0:13:06 to understand the value of yourself before you start looking at celebrating people in
0:13:11 this modern time where everything is driven by net worth. And understanding that net worth
0:13:16 is just somebody’s opinion about things that somebody created to be assets, whether it’s
0:13:22 paintings or real estate or whatever. But if you don’t properly value yourself, you will
0:13:30 always find yourself chasing the approval of others. And you will be a slave to the appraisal
0:13:37 that others give to the value of yourself, not even your things yourself. And I think
0:13:43 that’s the worst prison to ever be in in the world when your authentic self is incarcerated
0:13:50 because you choose to suffocate it just to be approved by the opinions of your peers.
0:13:57 Maybe we could back up a little and listen, I know you must be sick of explaining this,
0:14:03 just like I’m sick of explaining what it was like to work for Steve Jobs. But can you just
0:14:12 briefly explain how it came to be that at 16, you were sentenced to two 40 year terms
0:14:18 for a murder. And then your friend who actually did the murder, his case was dismissed, but
0:14:22 your case continued on. Could you just review that for us?
0:14:30 Yeah, and in the United States of America, we have some of the most unique laws in relation
0:14:36 to like conspiracy and accomplished liability doctrine, as it’s known in the legal jargon
0:14:44 world. And in America under the felony murder law, as it stands today in the District of
0:14:51 Columbia, thank God, California recently changed their law. If you are found, if you are present
0:14:57 during the commission of a felony that leads to a murder, whether you had the intent to
0:15:03 harm or not, long as you committed a felony and a murder happened in furtherance of a
0:15:09 felony, then you are just as guilty as the principle, whether you had an attempt to
0:15:17 harm or not. In my case, I wasn’t even present when the murder happened. But my the person
0:15:22 who was charged as being the actual principal in the shooting, he couldn’t come testify
0:15:28 about that, because they would charge him. And he was charged. And of course, he don’t
0:15:35 want to admit to something. And I told without my side of the truth, but I my refusal to
0:15:43 implicate him in my story or in my alibi caused the government to come down hard on me because
0:15:49 they wanted me to implicate him in my thing in life back then, even as a 16 year old child
0:15:55 and as a 43 year old adult today, I do not believe in wheezing and out of consequences
0:16:02 for one’s decisions, just to save oneself. I chose to at the age of 11, I took my pre
0:16:08 SATs, and I was taking courses at Howard University when I was 11. When I was 12, I chose to
0:16:15 sell drugs and stop going to school. So once I made that decision through being affiliated
0:16:22 with people who I chose to hang with, I put myself in a position to be accused of things
0:16:29 like that. And I’m not the type of individual that when it comes time to be held accountable
0:16:35 for your decisions, that I’m just going to implicate someone else just to get off. So
0:16:41 for me, I told the truth about my part and what happened in the incident. Yeah, I was
0:16:47 a part of a robbery that happened before the shooting that I did myself. I did that myself
0:16:54 and I left. Somebody else came back afterwards and shot the guy. I didn’t tell anybody to
0:17:00 do it and I wasn’t present when it was done. But one of the witnesses said that I wasn’t
0:17:06 there and one said that I was. And it was my word against theirs. I went to trial and
0:17:12 I was willing to appeal my case, no matter how long it took me, even if I would have
0:17:17 died in prison at the age of 90 years old, I would have stood by what I did and what
0:17:21 I should have been held accountable for. And for my case to not even be charged with being
0:17:28 a shooter and to have the government after they convicted me as an aided and a better
0:17:34 to just dismiss the case against the shooter. It just shows how they value my life and how
0:17:40 they value my presence. And even to this day, everyone who was released under the law that
0:17:45 I was released under, all of them have been taken off a probation. I’m the only one that’s
0:17:52 still on probation. And the judge and the prosecutors told me that no matter, it doesn’t
0:17:58 matter that I’ve done art for the Queen of England and done all the community work I’ve
0:18:03 done through my creativity and my presence in the community. They said I’m still a minister
0:18:09 society and that I had to complete my full five years of probation, irregardless of what
0:18:14 has been done for everybody else that’s been released except me. I don’t know what it is.
0:18:20 I don’t know why it happens that way with me. I believe in the law of attraction and
0:18:27 I believe that things happen for a reason and I don’t express any bitterness or any
0:18:33 anger. I just accept what is and no matter what happens, whether I agree with it or not,
0:18:38 I have to maintain a love and attention and a positive attitude no matter what because
0:18:44 anything else is just going to lead to a bitterness that’s going to eat me alive as a cancer when
0:19:06 I don’t want any toxicity in my emotional ecosystem.
0:19:10 Just so the people listening to this understand what you’re talking about, we’re talking
0:19:17 about a 22 year old sentence. I mean, you were in prison for 22 years because you chose
0:19:24 to take this path. So I don’t know how you can’t be bitter about it and all that. That’s
0:19:30 a remarkable thing too. Now, just so people understand, so you got out because there’s
0:19:36 this thing called the incarceration reduction amendment act, which basically says if you
0:19:42 were incarcerated when you were young and you served, I don’t know, 15 years that at
0:19:48 the discretion of somebody, they could let you out. And is that accurate? That’s how
0:19:49 you got out?
0:19:56 Yeah, the law was a large part of the law being passed was because of me. I don’t want
0:20:04 to say it from an egotistical perspective, but I had been researching the issue for 13
0:20:10 years before the law was passed. And I had been in communication with individuals within
0:20:17 the DC City Council activists and nonprofit organizations about introducing this legislation
0:20:24 based upon neuroscientific information about the lack of development of the prefrontal cortex
0:20:31 in young boys. And in some recent US Supreme Court cases in relation to that information
0:20:37 in relation to the Eighth Amendment protection against cruel and unusual punishment in relation
0:20:42 to the children under the age of 18. But it wasn’t like I don’t want people to listen
0:20:49 to feel like the law passed like no, this was something that I fought for over a decade.
0:20:55 And we were able to get it passed. And this DC City Council and the local organizations
0:21:03 that were involved in the legislative enactment, they use me as a postal child. And I think
0:21:09 that’s why the government wants me to still be on probation because it’s industries that
0:21:17 profit off of people staying in prison. And it’s industries that suffer when people are
0:21:22 released in prison that were planned to be in prison for the remainder of their lives.
0:21:27 And whoever, whatever interest those people being in prison, of course, they wouldn’t
0:21:31 like somebody like me. I understand that because I’m against the economic interest. I don’t
0:21:36 take it personal. But that was the law that was passed. And it was definitely something
0:21:42 that I fought for personally in research for over a decade. And then through the grace
0:21:47 of the universe, things were able to get changed in my favor.
0:21:56 Under that same law, apparently about 60 other people were released. Do you know if none
0:22:01 of them went back to prison, they all turned their lives around? What has been the result
0:22:06 of those 60 people? Not all of them became world famous artists like you, obviously.
0:22:14 A one or two percent recidivism rate. I know maybe because now the law has been expanded
0:22:19 instead of the 18 has been extended to the age of 25 known as the Second Amendment Act.
0:22:25 And we were able to get that passed once, once we got released. But out of the 60 guys,
0:22:30 I know maybe two. I know personally that went back. But now hundreds of people have been
0:22:36 released. And it hasn’t been any sensationalized crime that’s been committed by someone who
0:22:41 was released, something where the government can take it and be like, see, we shouldn’t
0:22:46 have let them out. But more than all of us are like business owners, homeowners, grassroots
0:22:54 activists, Murray, dads, we children now we starting to get guts, dad buys and we got
0:22:59 our passports and we we see in the world. And like you say, people may not be artists,
0:23:04 but some people are doing community violence interruption work to really disrupt some of
0:23:10 this gun violence. Like I lost one of my close brothers, one of my close friends, Saturday.
0:23:15 He was shot 41 times. He came and picked me up from the airport, dropped me off in two
0:23:21 hours late. He was shot 41 times. So we have a problems with gun violence in America and
0:23:27 this I don’t want people just to see successes like someone who’s come home and my case might
0:23:32 be like more like an outlier where you able to do these things. But there’s other people
0:23:37 who just do things that don’t receive media attention. But I find them to be successful
0:23:43 because we have a gun violence pandemic in America that’s far exceeded what it was when
0:23:50 I was a child when it was just relegated to people in the inner city now was cutting across
0:23:57 all social economic stratifications. You already touched on this because we did a law change
0:24:06 from 18 to 25. And you talked about the pre-cortal caught pre frontal cortex. If you can take
0:24:14 yourself back, you saw Bootsy and you saw a chip die. So you know, if you see your friends
0:24:21 die like that and your father is addicted to crack, what goes through your mind? You thought
0:24:26 I’ll be the exception. I can be the successful dealer. I’ll never get caught. I’ll never
0:24:32 get shot. Or do you even did you even think like that? What the hell am I doing? My friends
0:24:38 are getting killed. I think it’s I don’t say I think I know when you live in a when you’re
0:24:44 born in a situation and raised in a situation where you see people just being murdered as
0:24:51 children, you want to escape it. And for me, even at a young age, I understood my mom doesn’t
0:24:57 have the money to move. I have to do what I have to do now. Yeah, I’m gifted and tired
0:25:05 and I’m taking collegiate courses at 11. But I might not make it to college. And at that
0:25:11 time, I didn’t have friends like I do now who are venture capitalists, private equity
0:25:17 has fun people to tell them like, look, hey, put together idea, put it in a pitch deck
0:25:22 format, come on out here to Silicon Valley, put it together, get some startup capital
0:25:28 series, a series, B series, C series, I didn’t have those type of people in my community.
0:25:33 And they don’t exist in the community now. But you talking about the time we didn’t even
0:25:38 have the internet back then. All I saw was drug dealers. I would have sold cookies if
0:25:44 cookies was profitable. I would have sold anything because I can sell and I enjoy sales
0:25:49 mischief. And I never really wanted to work a job. But if I could have worked a job at
0:25:53 the age of 12, they could have if I could have worked for Steve Jobs, I would have worked
0:25:58 for Steve Jobs and I would have worked harder than anybody smarter than anybody. And I damn
0:26:03 there probably wouldn’t end up side by side with Steve Jobs. Once I had the opportunity
0:26:09 to thrive, but I just didn’t have the opportunity. So my frame of reference was limited to mothers
0:26:17 like my mom who was struggling with wage labor and drug dealers who were thriving economically,
0:26:23 you know, and they had all the remnants of it. And my undeveloped, undeveloped brain
0:26:30 couldn’t foresee all of the negative consequences that came with selling drugs, even though
0:26:38 I lost my dad to it and so many other people, but that desire to make it to get some money
0:26:44 to get out of that neighborhood, that level of desperation, it supersedes any reasoning
0:26:50 or rational thinking. I’m just desperate and I’m only working with what I have as a 12
0:26:56 year old. So how can the cycle be broken? I recently had an opportunity to listen to
0:27:03 an interview by Van Jones. And he was speaking about how he went to an event in Sun Valley,
0:27:08 Idaho, and a lady who’s considered the mayor of Sun Valley introducing the Jeff Bezos.
0:27:14 And through that introduction, Jeff Bezos gave him $100 million to invest in this rough
0:27:22 and mass incarceration of the African American social economic ailments that have been perpetuated
0:27:28 intergenerational in our communities. But even Van Jones admitted that all his life he’s
0:27:34 been an employee. He knows nothing about finance, investing, entrepreneurship. And I think to
0:27:39 break that cycle, you got to give people like me a hundred million. You got to give people
0:27:44 who know how to make something out of nothing to be able to invest that back. I don’t need
0:27:51 none of the money. But it’s people like me who have made it the JZs and the other people
0:27:55 who come from nothing, who couldn’t shoot a basketball and stuff like that, but could
0:28:01 tell a story, whether it’s through their music or through their art. And then they extended
0:28:06 the fashion and then it goes all the way up to now their venture capitalists, right?
0:28:10 And they’re investing. So I think it’s people like myself who are going to need that type
0:28:15 of investment. People getting $500,000 grants. I can’t. That’s not going to help me to go
0:28:22 into these communities and have the infrastructure and the resources that I need to teach these
0:28:29 young people about financial literacy, to teach them about M1, M2, M3, for they could
0:28:35 understand the whole comprehensive nature of the money supply and to supplement the
0:28:40 like they’re of in their homes and in their traditional schooling. The only thing that’s
0:28:47 going to break that is real radical, deep investment in the people who come from those
0:28:54 spaces, who’ve been able to come out of those spaces and to thrive globally. And the people
0:29:00 who have been able to do that, they have to be provided with the resources, but they can’t
0:29:05 use it for themselves. They have to really fully invest in like giving that back and
0:29:13 to develop in financial, economic literacy and wellness, which is important too, in
0:29:17 these communities. I was talking to the kids today. None of them knew the difference between
0:29:22 the savings account and the checking account, a stock and a bond, debt and equity, a floating
0:29:27 rate and a fixed rate mortgage, right? These are things that every child should know as
0:29:35 well as wellness, stillness, mindfulness, non-judgment, unconditional love, grace, empathy. It’s just
0:29:42 people who, it’s been a nonprofit industrial complex that has been set up in our communities
0:29:47 for people to make a living of correcting problems in our communities, who don’t come
0:29:53 from our communities, don’t know what it takes to get out of those communities. And I really
0:29:59 feel like now it’s just an industry for people to make money to keep people in need of nonprofits
0:30:06 and not for them to transcend the need of needing charity in nonprofits. And that’s
0:30:10 my thing. I’m going to do what I’m doing now. I’m going to use all of the weapons and mass
0:30:15 construction that I have. I do it through art, fashion, music, poetry, spoken word,
0:30:22 books, speaking engagements, paintings, photography. And now eventually I’ll attract the resources
0:30:29 that I need to start to set up infrastructure where people could come and learn what they
0:30:33 need to be whole human beings and to become remarkable.
0:30:41 Before I forget, you may find this a little odd. And I’m telling you this only because
0:30:49 I don’t want people to have even the tiniest sliver of evidence that you didn’t get something,
0:30:57 okay? So this is, I’m trying to be a good person, not be an asshole, okay? But about
0:31:05 five minutes ago, you said something about coming to Silicon Valley. And it’s really
0:31:11 Silicon Valley. So I don’t want people to say, see, he doesn’t know what he’s talking
0:31:17 about. He called it Silicon Bod. And you know what? I’ll tell you a similar story. Lots
0:31:23 of people, they come to me and they said, oh, you know, I was really close friends with
0:31:30 Steve Jobs. Right. And I’m thinking to myself, if you call him Steve Jobs, you weren’t his
0:31:38 close friend because it’s jobs, not jobs. Right. So I’m just telling you that we could record
0:31:43 that little sentence over or you could just say, that’s who I am. Yeah, for me, I want
0:31:51 to let it rip because it’s like, for me, it’s like, when you read “Thinking Grow Rich,”
0:31:54 it was even “Thinking Grow Rich,” it was one of those books in the polling hill row.
0:32:01 It might have been a 21st century edition, but it’s a story about Henry Ford was called
0:32:09 to trial one time. I can’t remember for what it was. But the prosecutor had learned that
0:32:13 he wasn’t really like scholastic. So when they called him on the stand, they start asking
0:32:18 him to spell all of these words. And he got to the point, he was like, I don’t have to
0:32:24 know how to spell that, sir. I have people that I pay that can spell that for me. Right.
0:32:29 So the thing is, because recently I’ve been partnering with Silicon Valley Bank. Right.
0:32:35 And I’ve been reciting this poem about there were no angel investors in the hood rather
0:32:41 than equity was kept private as well as the placements. Right. So the thing is, the whole
0:32:47 experience of people who have been socially constructed as black in America has been a
0:32:55 repurposing of the American dream. We wasn’t given literally you had on establishments,
0:33:01 whites only or whites in color. Like, so we just wasn’t given access. It wasn’t that
0:33:07 we don’t know how to pronounce certain things or we don’t access certain things because
0:33:15 of ignorance in the sense of negligence. We just wasn’t given opportunity to even have
0:33:23 entrance to the door. Generations of that you stop even to not even transfer information
0:33:30 about the door because it don’t matter. It’s like whites only or colors into this way.
0:33:35 So for me, it’s like, my whole art, my whole life has been, it’s been about taking the
0:33:41 Silicon Valley’s and making the Silicon Valley, you know, because I wasn’t given it. So I
0:33:46 had to take it how it sound, how it looked to me. And I had to repurpose it. But if you
0:33:53 asked me about money, the difference between M1, M2, M3, Adam Smith, Well for the Nations,
0:34:01 John Mater Keans, irrational exuberance with Ben Bernanke. Like I know what I know, but
0:34:06 it’s like, you know, my whole life and my whole legacy of people who’ve been socially
0:34:12 constructed as me, it’s been a story of taking what we’ve been, the little we’ve been given
0:34:17 and repurposing and making it our own. And whether it’s Charlie Parker with Bebop, Chuck
0:34:23 Burry with Rock was always us taking what we’re given and making it our own. And that’s
0:34:29 how you get two kids in the Bronx with a turntable and a microphone and you get hip hop, which
0:34:34 is a multi-billion dollar industry infiltrating fashion and all the more industry and wine
0:34:40 and liquor and champagne and movies. And so that’s just what we do.
0:34:44 Okay. I hope you didn’t take that as an insult. That was it.
0:34:51 And I think from this point on, I probably will say Silicon Valley. I’m from the South,
0:34:56 so we talk different anyway. I have a vernacular. We have a unique vernacular in DC because we’re
0:35:04 in between the deep South and the prestigious North. DC is very unique space.
0:35:13 Your path is so remarkable. And I want to know how you got to this point where you use
0:35:21 the word contrition, because that’s a heavy concept. You’re basically falling on your
0:35:27 sword if you will. So how did you make this transition to contrition?
0:35:36 For me, I love to study the etymology of words. So con trite, con means with and the trite
0:35:46 or the trition part, it means to rub or to abrasive rubbing. So how it became used in
0:35:56 the way of penitence is that one constantly applies that pressure of acknowledging the
0:36:03 harmful decisions that they have made to themselves and others. And out of that acknowledgement,
0:36:10 it’s not a shame that one wears like the scarlet letter that marks them in a way that they
0:36:19 feel devalued. But it’s an acknowledgement of the poor decision in a way that shows through
0:36:24 the improvement of the decisions that you make now, that not only improve the quality
0:36:30 of your life, but how that improvement of the quality of your decisions in your life
0:36:38 has a ripple effect to impacting others in a loving way. So for me, I realized like when
0:36:45 I was 16, me choosing not to, because they told me that if I tell them that my friend
0:36:52 did the shooting, that they would release me, right? So it was never about me being a minister
0:36:58 society, because if I was the minister that they made me out to be, why would you release
0:37:04 me back into the community? Right. Just because I cooperated, right? Right. So even at that
0:37:10 time, I had enough integrity to accept the accountability for my affiliations for something
0:37:19 that wasn’t even true, right? But when I wrote the book at the age of 33, 34, making up a
0:37:26 minute’s contrition of a man, I, my frame of reference had expanded, my commander, the
0:37:35 English lexicon had expanded. And I had more words to describe my experience, who I was
0:37:41 in the past, what I was feeling and experiencing at the present moment, and what I would become
0:37:48 now, which is almost 10 years later now in the future. And I just felt contrite. I felt
0:37:54 very contrite. And meaning that I understood the decisions that I made, I showed through
0:38:01 my behavior, that I was capable of making better decisions, and that I knew that in
0:38:06 the future that I would be doing things with that contrition, that not only would impact
0:38:11 my life in a positive way, but millions of people globally.
0:38:17 Halim, I got to tell you, we’ve had about 200 episodes. And that last explanation you
0:38:24 gave is one of the most powerful passages we’ve ever had in four years.
0:38:32 I had a lot of time to think about it. 22 years is a long time to put together a remark.
0:38:39 You want to explain how the hell you come out of 22 years of that with such eloquence
0:38:46 and intelligence and thank God for the law libraries and people along the way who saw
0:38:54 something in you. Why you, Halim? Why are you here and you’re not dead or in prison?
0:38:55 Why you?
0:39:00 I remember I was speaking to one of the children at the school earlier today, and he told me,
0:39:06 he said, “You’re extremely lucky to be home.” He said, “A lot of people never get to come
0:39:12 home. And when they come home, they never get to experience what you are experiencing.”
0:39:18 And I told him, I said, “I read a book by an author named Deepak Chopra. And the book
0:39:24 explains like there’s no such thing as luck or coincidence. And luck is only or coincidence
0:39:31 is when preparation meets opportunity. So I let him know that when other people came
0:39:37 to prison at my age and they received the sentences they gave up, so they were conditioned
0:39:43 to fighting and killing each other in the streets and fighting and killing each other
0:39:48 in prison. But when they came to the fight to save their own lives, they were scared
0:39:52 to death to step in the library because the law library will remind them every day that
0:40:00 they were a lifer and what they were up against. And for me, I had enough, even as a child
0:40:07 under that traumatic, with that traumatic judgment hanging over my head, I had enough
0:40:13 love for myself and for my mom to fight for myself. My mom was the one who worked at the
0:40:18 Library of Congress, who provided me with all the literature that I needed, who helped
0:40:22 me to get my writings copy written when I wanted to stop my publishing company, who
0:40:28 got me the subscriptions to the Wall Street Journal, the Kippitzer Report, the Burns Dictionaries,
0:40:33 the Finance and Accounting in Real Estate. And I just couldn’t give up on myself and
0:40:38 I couldn’t give up on my mom because I knew my mother raised me to be something more than
0:40:45 just a convict in prison. Why me? Because it’s not luck or coincidence. I never stopped
0:40:53 fighting for me. And was it difficult to learn Latin to learn the law? Yes. No one wants
0:41:01 to sit up in the law library and in the cell and read the Blacks Law Dictionary at night
0:41:06 to understand what a red means or habeas corpus or all these different Latin terms.
0:41:12 But it was that love for myself and it was, it’s something that burns inside of me. I
0:41:17 don’t know the word to describe it in the English lexicon, but it’s just something in
0:41:25 me that burns and it won’t allow me to give up. Even to this day, I still have it and
0:41:31 I don’t know what it is, but I understand it’s a it factor that people have and no matter
0:41:36 whether it is somebody that you put in the concentration camp or somebody that you put
0:41:42 in the prison doing a part time like Nelson Mandela or the concentration camp when I read
0:41:48 about man search for meaning about Victor Franco. As you start to read these historical
0:41:55 references, it’s a theme. That’s a silver lining that connects Victor Franco and Nelson
0:42:01 Mandela. And when you learn yourself enough, you understand that you have it. And it’s
0:42:08 just a matter of you nourishing it and learning how to use it in a loving way. Up next on
0:42:36 Remarkable People.
0:42:41 Come a little more remarkable with each episode of Remarkable People. It’s found on Apple
0:42:48 Podcast or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. Welcome back to Remarkable People with
0:42:55 Guy Kawasaki. Many of the people we’ve had on the podcast are authors. And in fact, that’s
0:43:03 often the catalyzing factor that makes them want to come on the podcast. You don’t just
0:43:08 call up Neil deGrasse Tyson and say, “Hey, you got an hour. Can we just interview you?”
0:43:13 He had a reason. He had a book coming out. But I have never read a book from any of the
0:43:20 people we interviewed that you cite just now, Deepak Chopra, Napoleon Hill, Victor
0:43:27 Franco, Nelson Mandela. You’re like a walking Wikipedia. My goodness. As I was reading and
0:43:34 doing research about you, an obvious conclusion would be, you’re an example of how the prison
0:43:39 system is a failure. But I could make the case that you’re an example of how the prison
0:43:47 system is a success because they had a library. They had a law library. There were these various
0:43:53 people who helped you all the time and the story of the one person who was giving you
0:44:00 extra food that was reserved for diabetics and all that kind of stuff. In a sense, parts
0:44:06 of the system did work for you. So with hindsight, what’s your analysis? I mean, is it just that
0:44:14 you’re a freaking five standard deviations outlier or that anybody can do this?
0:44:20 Definitely think that because I wrote a book called Be Great Wherever You Are. And if we
0:44:27 looked at the prison system as an industry, it would be failing because it’s not producing
0:44:36 enough of results that I’m receiving. So seven out of 10 people become recidivists within
0:44:41 one to three years of being released from prison. And we have the most people incarcerated
0:44:47 in the world. So if it’s genuinely a public safety issue and you look at the high rates
0:44:52 of drug overdose, and gun violence, and mass shootings that we have in America, and even
0:44:57 though we have the most people in the world incarcerated, it’s not enough to deter people
0:45:05 from engaging and abusing drugs that ultimately takes their life or resolving their internal
0:45:12 and external conflicts through gun violence. For me, I do feel like I’m an outlier in the
0:45:19 sense that only because I was uniquely situated because when you read the book that outlives
0:45:26 the success, Malcolm Gladwell, you see how Steve Jobs, who wasn’t even born in the West
0:45:31 Coast, right? He was born to a mom in Philadelphia. He was a Catholic who had a baby by a Syrian
0:45:36 Muslim. But due to the shame of being out of wedlock, they put him up for adoption.
0:45:43 And then he ended up right where he needed to be to meet Bill, his guy. Why isn’t it,
0:45:50 if I’m pronouncing his last name right? When Bill Gates was in college, he was at that
0:45:56 right space where he could access those computers for free at the time. You know, it’s just
0:46:01 like, so out of all the people that was incarcerated, I just happened to have a mom who worked at
0:46:07 the Library of Congress. And when you talk about someone who took their pre-SATs at the
0:46:12 age of 11, we’re not talking about someone that’s intellectually challenged. So if you
0:46:19 give them access to the biggest library in the world and nothing but time to think, right?
0:46:27 But now we have one who goes there and his mom is underemployed. His reading comprehension
0:46:34 skills have been challenged. We don’t have the metrics, we don’t have the infrastructure
0:46:41 in place in our presence to help the non-outliers who are challenged academically. Because if
0:46:46 you challenge academically, you can’t really articulate yourself like this. So I’m able
0:46:52 to meet nurses in correctional office because I know how to articulate myself. And they
0:46:58 can see, oh, he’s different. Let me help him. But why she wasn’t helping the others? Why
0:47:02 was I the one getting the food? Why was I the one getting the books? And it’s just not
0:47:10 a prison problem. It’s a human condition that we have. We create hierarchies. And we decide
0:47:16 who is more deserving than others to get our resources. And for me is that I don’t want
0:47:21 to be remarkable. I don’t want to be exceptional. I don’t want people to make me the exceptional
0:47:28 remarkable person, the outlier. Not saying that I may not have gifts. But I want it to
0:47:33 be, I want to live to see a day where it’s normal to see people come out of our prison
0:47:39 system and to do better than me. It’s normal where it’s like expected. We don’t no longer
0:47:46 have the prejudgment that they convicts. And we’re so like, when people come out of Harvard,
0:47:52 we are the Mac. Oh, Harvard Stanford Business School. It’s a no brainer. How could you fail?
0:47:59 So I just want us to have those same infrastructures in place to catch people who have the highest
0:48:05 probabilities in entering the prison system or coming out of the prison system, to have
0:48:11 infrastructures in place to catch them, to prevent them from going in. Or when they
0:48:18 go in, it’s situated in a way in which though we expect to have the most positive outcomes
0:48:24 and infrastructure in place once they get out to support that expectation that we have.
0:48:30 And that’s just one of my many goals. But we don’t have that in place. I am an outlier.
0:48:34 We don’t have we don’t have we don’t have nothing in place for people that can’t afford
0:48:39 the Wall Street Journal. They can’t call and like, Hey, give me I want the Burns finance
0:48:44 dictionary. I want the Burns real estate dictionary. I want the Burns accountant dictionary.
0:48:52 I want Robert Kiyosaki thinking grow rich. If you don’t have those type of resources,
0:48:55 you don’t get that type of information, even if it’s in a law library, if you don’t even
0:49:03 know what to look for, or you don’t have the ability to read and comprehend at that level.
0:49:09 I have to say that as I was reading your book, there was a part of me that said, you
0:49:14 know, the greatest flattery for you guy, because Madison and I just finished a book called
0:49:23 Think Remarkable as a pun on Think Different, the Apple ad campaign. And someday in one
0:49:30 of your books, if you mentioned Think Remarkable by Guy Kawasaki and Madison Nizomer as a book
0:49:37 that you should read, my life will be complete. My life truly to be mentioned in the same
0:49:44 breath as Victor Frankel and Napoleon Hill and Deepak Chopra and Malcolm Gladwell. That
0:49:45 would be it.
0:49:49 Let me share a story with you briefly. When I was in prison, I used to read also the
0:49:55 entrepreneur and fast company magazines. Yeah. And I read an article about a book that was
0:50:00 coming out, The Psychology of Success by Professor Carl Dweck at Stanford University.
0:50:03 Oh, we’re buddies. We’re buddies.
0:50:09 So I wrote her a letter, so I’m in jail. This is who I was. This is who I am now. I got
0:50:13 a publishing company. I want to send you my books and I’ll let me know why I could purchase
0:50:21 your book. And she wrote me back and she sent me an autograph copy of her book. And Saturday
0:50:29 I did an interview with a lady who’s doing a new addendum to the psychology of success.
0:50:36 And Professor Dweck wanted to add my story as to somebody who personally benefited from
0:50:42 reading her her great book. So I definitely when I if I ever do write a book again, and
0:50:47 eventually I will once I get the right relationship with the right publishers, because I think
0:50:53 this part of my story from 10 years ago, where you left off with the book you read, it’s
0:51:00 a whole new chapter that needs to be told. And when I read your book, I definitely implemented
0:51:04 it in an organic way though, in an organic way.
0:51:09 I hope it passes your test. That’s a high bar. How’s your mother? Everything good with
0:51:10 her?
0:51:16 Everything good. She enjoying being a grandmother. She retired from the Library of Congress.
0:51:17 Yeah.
0:51:24 And I had my daughter three years ago. My daughter looks just like my mom. Yeah. And
0:51:30 she just I pay her mortgages now. And her car notes. And she just enjoying being a grand
0:51:37 mom. And I just see such joy in her when she has my daughter around her. And I guess I’m
0:51:43 just like a, I don’t guess I’m like a stepchild now. I don’t even get a kiss anymore. It’s
0:51:48 just, but I just enjoyed seeing her take the backseat. She took care of a lot of people
0:51:55 while I was gone. And it’s an honor for me to take care of my mother. It’s an honor.
0:51:58 That’s the greatest joy in my life to take care of my mom.
0:52:04 There’s something very beautiful about having a mom who worked at the Library of Congress
0:52:10 and her son has written 11 books in prison. That is a beautiful story.
0:52:17 That’s a beautiful story. Last question is, of all people, you truly understand the answer
0:52:25 to this question, which is your best advice about how to actualize your goals.
0:52:31 I think it ties into the title of the podcast. Remark. I think like people hear remarkable
0:52:40 and they like, they understand like the celebratory or, but it’s remark. Right. And when I think
0:52:49 about somebody that’s remark, remarkable, it’s like, they have left their mark on the world
0:52:56 over and over and over. They’re constantly read, right. So when you set a goal, you have
0:53:06 to revisit it every day, internally and externally. And when you speak to someone like myself,
0:53:13 it’s very rare. Do you get the opportunity to encounter someone who worked on a goal
0:53:21 for 22 years? Right. Everybody, you up against the most powerful government in the world.
0:53:27 When you look at your indictment is United States of America versus Harlem flowers and
0:53:32 the people that work in the prison, they remind you, you’re a lifer. You’re a lifer. So when
0:53:39 they will have mock job fairs and resume writing, job interview skills, I couldn’t take the
0:53:43 class. I’m like, why not? You’re a lifer. This is, these classes are only for people
0:53:48 that’s 18 months within their release day. And I’m telling them, like, look, it’s going
0:53:55 to come a day where I’m going to get released. And I want you to remember that you denied
0:54:00 me the opportunity prepared because it’s not about me. I’m gonna prepare myself. But the
0:54:06 other people who similarly situated like me, you were so invested in reminding them that
0:54:13 they were lifers that if you would have just had the dignity to prepare them, even if they
0:54:20 never got the opportunity will have the hope, right? And to feel a part of the human family
0:54:28 and not just a lifer. So for me, it’s like a remarkable individual is someone who has
0:54:38 committed to an outcome. And in spite of the odds or the circumstances, they revisit that
0:54:44 goal. Every moment that they can, even if it’s not physically doing something, they’re
0:54:48 thinking about it, they’re envisioning it. Some people put up vision board, some people
0:54:56 do words of affirmation, some people do transcendental meditation. But it’s just an outcome that’s
0:55:02 not yet in the three dimensional space that I want to experience it. But just because it’s
0:55:08 not in the three dimensional world of space and time, it doesn’t mean it’s not real. And
0:55:13 that’s what Pablo Picasso said, the imagination is just as real as what you experience in
0:55:18 the so-called real three dimensional time space human experience. So for me, is once
0:55:23 you have that desire outcome, especially if you’re in a desperate situation like I was,
0:55:33 you have to daily remark yourself, your psych to not only to believe that you can do it,
0:55:39 but you have to feel worthy of it. Because if you don’t feel worthy of it, when you even
0:55:45 achieve it, you won’t feel the joy in the process that it took to get it. And then you
0:55:51 get it and then it becomes empty. Because it’s now I have it and I’m looking at my peers
0:55:57 that come with it and I don’t feel worthy. No, I feel worthy. I feel worthy of everything
0:56:03 that I’ve achieved and that I will achieve. And I think that’s the true definition of
0:56:09 a remarkable individual is that they have a desire outcome for themselves and others.
0:56:15 And they have the audacity to love themselves enough to constantly remark, re-put that mark
0:56:21 on their sight, on their heart, on their soul, on their tongue, on their limbs to work towards
0:56:41 something that most people can’t see. That’s remarkable.
0:56:48 What you’re about to hear is a recording made in a Hyundai Santa Fe SUV as we’re driving
0:56:56 around Santa Cruz. Nate, to his credit, heard how the conversation was going and thought
0:57:03 it was important and interesting. So he turned on his recorder on his iPhone. I included
0:57:10 it because I think it offers a lot of insight into Halim and what it’s like to re-enter
0:57:19 society after 22 years of incarceration. Again, this is recorded in a car as it’s rolling
0:57:28 along, not in a studio, but I think you’ll understand why I included it. Thank you, Nate,
0:57:44 for recording it. That was a very good insight for you to do this.
0:57:48 So much of my life was just about getting the things that I knew that I needed in life
0:57:50 and the things that I wanted in life. And now it’s like reaching it. Now I don’t value
0:57:53 that. Like, I understand, like, you got to pay your mortgage and your car notes and stuff
0:57:59 like that. But what I value most is this. I get money to do this, to meet people in
0:58:07 new spaces and good people and share my perspective, my story, my vision for the future, listen
0:58:14 to other people’s to learn and understand and just keep doing this. So, like, you create
0:58:18 tribes everywhere you go. So, like, me looking at this, telling my wife, like, damn, okay,
0:58:23 they got the main house, they got the bond, because my wife want to farm. And then I want
0:58:29 something on the water. So, I’m noticing, like, all of my collectors got the same situation.
0:58:33 You know what I’m saying? Like, that’s how they move. They got the house, the main house,
0:58:38 the joints by the water. And I already have it, but it’s like, I want to upgrade it just
0:58:44 a little bit more, but it’s not a pressing need. You know what I’m saying? So, but really,
0:58:50 this is what I value now, just like me and people expanding my tribe, my family, and
0:58:54 just getting to spend time with people that I enjoy the most. That’s all I could really
0:59:00 ask for in life. Yeah, like, to be able to spend time with people that I really enjoy.
0:59:11 Expanding my family. And it’s an honor. So, it’s a blessing to travel and meet people
0:59:19 to love and be loved. It’s a blessing. It’s a blessing. I look forward to seeing you on
0:59:31 your journey, as you develop into your craft, not just your artistry, but your content creation,
0:59:38 your maturity, and having a family of your own. This is going to always tell young guys,
0:59:43 like, man, I always want to talk to you the day after you have your child or maybe a few
0:59:49 hours. It’s a different look in a person. It’s a different type of relationship to life
0:59:56 when you really have a life that’s dependent on you. You can get pep talks to be responsible,
1:00:02 but when you literally have a life that’s dependent on you, it’s if then you mature to
1:00:09 the age where you’re kind of like, why am I at now, but you have to start taking care
1:00:11 of your grandparents and your parents. Because your parents are retiring, your grandparents
1:00:17 have been retiring, and now you like that prime of your life at 40 and you kind of like
1:00:22 how to start taking care of your parents and your children. And if your grandparents are
1:00:29 alive, it’s a hell of a responsibility. And people looking at you for answers, they’re
1:00:34 looking for you for leadership. And you see in them, my dad ain’t sharp as he used to
1:00:40 be. He ain’t as strong as he used to be. He need me, even if he don’t want to admit it.
1:00:46 He need me in being able to step up and to show your children how it was done and then
1:00:53 they see it. And then you bury your grandparents and then you take care of your parents and
1:00:57 you transition them out and then you become the grandparent and your kids take care of
1:01:06 you. It’s a beautiful, man, it’s nothing more beautiful than aging. I couldn’t recognize
1:01:12 it until I began to age. Once I began to age, cause I’m like in the middle. When you 40,
1:01:17 you kind of like in the middle, you still had that last remnant of your youth and vigor.
1:01:21 And you, but you got a little gray coming in and it’s like you right in between your
1:01:28 grandparents and your children and your parents. And it was just so interesting. I always just
1:01:35 wanted to be a man. Like I’ve always just wanted to be, I wanted to buy my mom a house.
1:01:40 I wanted to take care of my family that always was a thing with me. And then seeing like
1:01:47 how my family just like forgot about me when I was in prison. It just changed my dynamic
1:01:52 of family. You know, family is just not the people that I was born into through blood
1:01:58 relations. And that’s why I say everywhere I go, I build my family. My family is my
1:02:06 people that share my same sentiments and core values. And it don’t matter their race, their
1:02:11 religion, their sensuality. We just know each other when we meet each other. And we know
1:02:16 each other like we’ve known each other because we had before we came into this three dimensional
1:02:23 experience that we call life. We were just energy. We knew each other. We know each
1:02:30 other. And as you mature and have your experience and travel the world, it’ll be cool if we
1:02:37 needed just to see you grow and do your thing. Live your life. Just grow. Because I never
1:02:42 got a chance to see like people grow. Yeah. Me and in that life. So when I went to prison
1:02:49 when I was 16, my cousins that were like three, four, I wasn’t out here to see them become
1:02:55 teenagers and adults. So I’ve only been out here for five years now. I’ve only really
1:03:01 been in society for 20 years. I’m 43. Yeah. You know what I’m saying? Yeah. I’ve been
1:03:05 out for four years, one or five and I was out for 16 years. You’ve only been out for four
1:03:15 years. Yeah. March or be the fifth year. Damn. I’m actually 20 going on 21. That’s the side
1:03:26 of the years. Damn. And so I’m getting the opportunity to see people grow in real life.
1:03:34 So that’s our show with Halim Flowers. He created a painting for me based on my book
1:03:43 Think Remarkable and then one night he and Nate were working late into the evening and
1:03:52 he created six paintings of the six, this series of six, four have nothing to do with
1:04:01 my family, but two were made for my family. One for Nate and one for Noemi, my daughter.
1:04:08 My daughter had been surfing at Mavericks while Halim was here. So it has a Mavericks
1:04:16 theme. I hope you found this episode interesting and motivating and it’ll help you become
1:04:26 remarkable like Halim. He has undergone such a transition. It is truly remarkable. I would
1:04:35 like to thank Amy Vernetti. Amy Vernetti introduced me to Halim. Amy Vernetti and I worked together
1:04:44 on several companies. She is a great basketball player and a great recruiter. If you ever
1:04:51 really want to recruit, look for Amy Vernetti. And of course, I want to thank the remarkable
1:04:59 people team. That would be Jeff C. and Shannon Hernandez, remarkable sound engineers. And
1:05:07 then there’s Tessa Neismar, who prepares me and checks the transcripts and Madison Neismar,
1:05:13 producer of this podcast and co-author of Think Remarkable. And finally, there’s Luis
1:05:21 Magana, Alexis Nishimura and Fallon Yates. That’s the remarkable people team. Our goal
1:05:29 is to make you remarkable in 2024. Speaking of which, one of the ways that you can accelerate
1:05:37 your quest to be remarkable is to read our book, Think Remarkable. Nine paths to transform
1:05:44 your life and make a difference. It’s coming out in March. If you want to learn more, go
1:05:53 to, of course, thinkremarkable.com. Check it out, please. I promise you, it’ll help
1:06:05 you make a difference. Until next time, Mahalo and Aloha.
0:00:25 Today we have the privilege of hosting Halim Flowers, he’s a man whose life journey is
0:00:34 nothing short of a testament to resilience and transformation. In 1997, at the age of 16,
0:00:41 Halim was charged as an adult in the District of Columbia and convicted under the accomplice
0:00:48 liability doctrine of felony murder. He was sentenced to a staggering 40 years to life
0:00:56 imprisonment. His turbulent childhood, documented in the Emmy award-winning Thug Life in D.C.,
0:01:03 exposed the harsh realities of growing up within the walls of the D.C. Department of Corrections
0:01:10 during the crack era. During his incarceration, Halim discovered a profound love for literature
0:01:16 and the arts, and he transitioned learning entrepreneurship from the streets at the age
0:01:24 of 12, that is, dealing drugs. Halim channeled that ambition into self-enterprise and published
0:01:33 11 books across various genres. Released in 2019 after serving 22 years and two months,
0:01:39 Halim has since collaborated with Kim Kardashian on the Justice Project, performed spoken word
0:01:46 with Kanye West, and earned fellowships from the Halcyon Arts Lab and Echoing Green. His
0:01:53 story, captured in the memoir, Making of a Menace, Contrition of a Man, is a poignant
0:02:00 narrative of transformation and offers insights into the devastating and inspiring journey
0:02:07 that he has led. During our interview, I jokingly asked him to make a painting about my book,
0:02:13 Remarkable, and lo and behold the next day he told me he did it. A picture of Halim and
0:02:20 the painting is in the book. Actually, there are two pictures of the painting, if you count
0:02:26 the one on the dust jacket, which is in color, which truly shows you what it looks like.
0:02:35 I’m Guy Kawasaki, this is Remarkable People, and now here is the truly Remarkable Halim
0:02:48 Flowers. Our house has two paintings of Jean-Michel Basquat, of Jean-Michel Basquat, not by Jean-Michel
0:02:57 Basquat, and I read that he was an inspiration and paved the way for you. For me, my life
0:03:07 has definitely been impacted by Sean Carter, Jay-Z, and had it not been for my deep listening
0:03:13 to Jay-Z, his music, I’m not gonna say I wouldn’t have never been introduced to Basquat because
0:03:22 he’s so popular now, but when I was in prison and my access to the world was limited, it
0:03:29 was through listening to Jay-Z that I was introduced to Basquat, and then my habit of
0:03:36 reading the Wall Street Journal every day introduced me to not Jean-Michel Basquat work, just a
0:03:42 brief description about his life, and it encouraged me to want to see his work because
0:03:51 he looked like me, and I never thought that the fine art world found anyone who looked
0:04:00 like him to be Remarkable and celebrated, so that was what piqued my interest, and then
0:04:06 just seeing having the opportunity to come out of prison, to see his work in person,
0:04:13 and learning that both of us shared backgrounds as poets who started painting. His work always
0:04:20 spoke to me not because he was popular, it was just because the words that he used and
0:04:26 the way his imagery was just so raw and authentic, and it wasn’t like curated and edited as we
0:04:31 just spoke about earlier, it was just authentic. More not his life, but his work, because his
0:04:36 life was a tragedy, and his life was an inspiration to me, the only thing that was inspirational
0:04:42 to me about his life was his work ethic, the pace at which he worked and him having the
0:04:49 audacity to be in a space that normally would not include people who look like him. I am
0:04:56 an entrepreneur and I am the business, but I’m just confident in who I am in a humble
0:05:02 way, whereas I don’t, I’ve never felt the need to be like, you know, like I needed to
0:05:08 be like edited or I’m just, I just want people to know me, and I’m not afraid for people
0:05:15 to know all of me, the parts they enjoy and love, and the parts they may not. And for
0:05:20 me it’s just like being committed to growth and understanding that the biggest room in
0:05:25 the world is a room for improvement. So I think that’s very harmful today that we live
0:05:32 in this Photoshop edited world, it doesn’t give people grace to make things that people
0:05:37 interpret to be mistakes, but that are well-intentioned. We’re not talking about like going out and
0:05:42 harming someone, but people can say something and people trance on them, and they don’t
0:05:49 give them grace to grow, and it just keeps people just rigid and tight. So for me, I’m
0:05:56 just, I’m thankful to be an artist that people enjoy my art, I’ll just show up authentic.
0:06:02 Maybe my mind is making a connection that doesn’t exist. Do you pronounce your organization
0:06:15 Seito or Sato? Sato. Sato sounds like Japanese. Is Sato, is that inspired by Samo, S-A-M-O?
0:06:24 No, Sato was actually a publishing company that I started in prison in 2005, far before
0:06:30 I learned about Jean-Michel Basquiat and Samo, and Sato is an acronym that stands for
0:06:36 struggle against the odds. So when I started the publishing company, I had two life sentences.
0:06:45 I was like maybe 24 years of age, I was incarcerated, and I had so much to say, and I didn’t have
0:06:51 a lot of avenues to say it. I didn’t have access to social media or the internet, but
0:06:57 I knew that I had a story that I felt was remarkable and that it needed to be heard
0:07:05 outside of me just filing an appellate litigation to the appeal courts in my case to redress
0:07:11 the legal travesty that I was experiencing as a juvenile lifer. So for me, I knew that
0:07:16 it would be a struggle against the odds to get noticed in the publishing world, so just
0:07:22 me having the audacity with no experience in the literary world to start my own publishing
0:07:28 company and to believe that I had something to say that people with value was a struggle
0:07:34 against the odds, but I made it. Sure. If there’s a story in our 200 episodes of someone
0:07:41 who struggled and succeeded against the odds, Halim, you are near the top, I assure you.
0:07:49 And just one last thing about Jean-Michel, just in case you decide to paint a skull,
0:07:55 just let me know in advance so I can buy it. Okay. I would definitely do, I will, because
0:08:05 I just revisited a new descent in a staircase, which was originally done by Marcel Duchamp.
0:08:11 So I’d like to take a repurposed Francis Bacon hair series, so I will repurpose the
0:08:19 skull for you and just for you. I only do one and I’ll never do it again because I think
0:08:28 what happens by me being socially constructed as black, people negatively critique me for
0:08:36 honoring Basquiat. So if I repurpose a famous Picasso painting versus a famous Basquiat
0:08:43 painting, I will be more celebrated for the Picasso than the Basquiat, because people
0:08:48 in there for a night understand and think that I’m copying him, but that’s not even
0:08:53 there to me. For me, I just paint what I feel, but I’m just explaining to you what I’ve
0:08:59 experienced in my three year journey in this fine art world.
0:09:06 You returned to the steam several times about the impact of your father not really having
0:09:13 a big presence when you were a kid. And we’ve interviewed several people who said the exact
0:09:21 same thing. Can you just talk about what it means to grow up in DC without a father figure?
0:09:29 For me, I definitely want to clarify that because my dad was married to my mom and I had my
0:09:38 dad in my home until he got addicted to crack cocaine. And so my formidable years of one
0:09:46 through six, I had my dad day for day. My dad, the things that make me successful and
0:09:53 I believe in life today were things that my dad instilled in me, exercise, education,
0:10:00 discipline, things that he didn’t have. And now that I’m looking at him now as he’s 65
0:10:07 and I’m 43, I realized that he saw all the weaknesses in himself and he strengthened himself
0:10:14 through me. But when I lost him to the addiction, he was no longer himself. And then eventually
0:10:19 he moved away to the West Coast to try to get himself together. And he moved from DC
0:10:24 to Las Vegas. And by the time that he had came back, I was doing life in prison at the
0:10:33 age of 16, but not having him in my life from the ages of seven to 12. It really damaged
0:10:38 me because I was able to keep up the structure that he gave me as far as the spirituality
0:10:44 and the amateur boxing and the exercising and the schooling until I was 11. But once
0:10:50 I turned 12 and went to middle school, the peer influence was, it was so dominant on
0:10:56 my psyche. And I wanted to be accepted by my peers so much and not having my dad in
0:11:02 the home to counterbalance that because by him being absent, my mom had to work and go
0:11:08 to school after work so she can increase her ability to earn more to take care of my little
0:11:15 brother. And she wasn’t there. And then he wasn’t there at all. I leaned more to the
0:11:22 teenager guys in the streets and that created a vacuum that sucked me into the human waste
0:11:27 disposal of the school to prison pipeline to the prison industrial complex.
0:11:33 What is your advice? I know you wrote a book like this. What is your advice to kids who
0:11:41 don’t have fathers or don’t have father figures? I just spoke at a school earlier today and
0:11:48 I told them that if they didn’t remember anything that I said that they had value, that life
0:11:56 had value, their presence had value. And because they looked at me as if I was somebody famous
0:12:02 or something. And I told them I’m no different than you, that you have to find value in yourself
0:12:08 and not in things. It’s hard to understand at this time because who wants to be different
0:12:13 when you’re a teenager? Who wants to stand out? Who doesn’t want to be trendy in the
0:12:21 age of social media where so much is driven by filtered images and what’s popular and
0:12:28 trending at the time. But the value is in yourself. And if you celebrate me, understand
0:12:35 that I’ve only been able to be what you consider to be a success or remarkable just through
0:12:40 leaning into my authentic self and not editing in myself and not photoshopping myself, but
0:12:47 just speaking what I feel, painting what I feel and doing it all from a loving intention.
0:12:53 And that’s my advice I would give to any child or adult that your genuine self, as Mr.
0:13:00 Roger said, you’ll find just the way you are and your genuine self has value. And you have
0:13:06 to understand the value of yourself before you start looking at celebrating people in
0:13:11 this modern time where everything is driven by net worth. And understanding that net worth
0:13:16 is just somebody’s opinion about things that somebody created to be assets, whether it’s
0:13:22 paintings or real estate or whatever. But if you don’t properly value yourself, you will
0:13:30 always find yourself chasing the approval of others. And you will be a slave to the appraisal
0:13:37 that others give to the value of yourself, not even your things yourself. And I think
0:13:43 that’s the worst prison to ever be in in the world when your authentic self is incarcerated
0:13:50 because you choose to suffocate it just to be approved by the opinions of your peers.
0:13:57 Maybe we could back up a little and listen, I know you must be sick of explaining this,
0:14:03 just like I’m sick of explaining what it was like to work for Steve Jobs. But can you just
0:14:12 briefly explain how it came to be that at 16, you were sentenced to two 40 year terms
0:14:18 for a murder. And then your friend who actually did the murder, his case was dismissed, but
0:14:22 your case continued on. Could you just review that for us?
0:14:30 Yeah, and in the United States of America, we have some of the most unique laws in relation
0:14:36 to like conspiracy and accomplished liability doctrine, as it’s known in the legal jargon
0:14:44 world. And in America under the felony murder law, as it stands today in the District of
0:14:51 Columbia, thank God, California recently changed their law. If you are found, if you are present
0:14:57 during the commission of a felony that leads to a murder, whether you had the intent to
0:15:03 harm or not, long as you committed a felony and a murder happened in furtherance of a
0:15:09 felony, then you are just as guilty as the principle, whether you had an attempt to
0:15:17 harm or not. In my case, I wasn’t even present when the murder happened. But my the person
0:15:22 who was charged as being the actual principal in the shooting, he couldn’t come testify
0:15:28 about that, because they would charge him. And he was charged. And of course, he don’t
0:15:35 want to admit to something. And I told without my side of the truth, but I my refusal to
0:15:43 implicate him in my story or in my alibi caused the government to come down hard on me because
0:15:49 they wanted me to implicate him in my thing in life back then, even as a 16 year old child
0:15:55 and as a 43 year old adult today, I do not believe in wheezing and out of consequences
0:16:02 for one’s decisions, just to save oneself. I chose to at the age of 11, I took my pre
0:16:08 SATs, and I was taking courses at Howard University when I was 11. When I was 12, I chose to
0:16:15 sell drugs and stop going to school. So once I made that decision through being affiliated
0:16:22 with people who I chose to hang with, I put myself in a position to be accused of things
0:16:29 like that. And I’m not the type of individual that when it comes time to be held accountable
0:16:35 for your decisions, that I’m just going to implicate someone else just to get off. So
0:16:41 for me, I told the truth about my part and what happened in the incident. Yeah, I was
0:16:47 a part of a robbery that happened before the shooting that I did myself. I did that myself
0:16:54 and I left. Somebody else came back afterwards and shot the guy. I didn’t tell anybody to
0:17:00 do it and I wasn’t present when it was done. But one of the witnesses said that I wasn’t
0:17:06 there and one said that I was. And it was my word against theirs. I went to trial and
0:17:12 I was willing to appeal my case, no matter how long it took me, even if I would have
0:17:17 died in prison at the age of 90 years old, I would have stood by what I did and what
0:17:21 I should have been held accountable for. And for my case to not even be charged with being
0:17:28 a shooter and to have the government after they convicted me as an aided and a better
0:17:34 to just dismiss the case against the shooter. It just shows how they value my life and how
0:17:40 they value my presence. And even to this day, everyone who was released under the law that
0:17:45 I was released under, all of them have been taken off a probation. I’m the only one that’s
0:17:52 still on probation. And the judge and the prosecutors told me that no matter, it doesn’t
0:17:58 matter that I’ve done art for the Queen of England and done all the community work I’ve
0:18:03 done through my creativity and my presence in the community. They said I’m still a minister
0:18:09 society and that I had to complete my full five years of probation, irregardless of what
0:18:14 has been done for everybody else that’s been released except me. I don’t know what it is.
0:18:20 I don’t know why it happens that way with me. I believe in the law of attraction and
0:18:27 I believe that things happen for a reason and I don’t express any bitterness or any
0:18:33 anger. I just accept what is and no matter what happens, whether I agree with it or not,
0:18:38 I have to maintain a love and attention and a positive attitude no matter what because
0:18:44 anything else is just going to lead to a bitterness that’s going to eat me alive as a cancer when
0:19:06 I don’t want any toxicity in my emotional ecosystem.
0:19:10 Just so the people listening to this understand what you’re talking about, we’re talking
0:19:17 about a 22 year old sentence. I mean, you were in prison for 22 years because you chose
0:19:24 to take this path. So I don’t know how you can’t be bitter about it and all that. That’s
0:19:30 a remarkable thing too. Now, just so people understand, so you got out because there’s
0:19:36 this thing called the incarceration reduction amendment act, which basically says if you
0:19:42 were incarcerated when you were young and you served, I don’t know, 15 years that at
0:19:48 the discretion of somebody, they could let you out. And is that accurate? That’s how
0:19:49 you got out?
0:19:56 Yeah, the law was a large part of the law being passed was because of me. I don’t want
0:20:04 to say it from an egotistical perspective, but I had been researching the issue for 13
0:20:10 years before the law was passed. And I had been in communication with individuals within
0:20:17 the DC City Council activists and nonprofit organizations about introducing this legislation
0:20:24 based upon neuroscientific information about the lack of development of the prefrontal cortex
0:20:31 in young boys. And in some recent US Supreme Court cases in relation to that information
0:20:37 in relation to the Eighth Amendment protection against cruel and unusual punishment in relation
0:20:42 to the children under the age of 18. But it wasn’t like I don’t want people to listen
0:20:49 to feel like the law passed like no, this was something that I fought for over a decade.
0:20:55 And we were able to get it passed. And this DC City Council and the local organizations
0:21:03 that were involved in the legislative enactment, they use me as a postal child. And I think
0:21:09 that’s why the government wants me to still be on probation because it’s industries that
0:21:17 profit off of people staying in prison. And it’s industries that suffer when people are
0:21:22 released in prison that were planned to be in prison for the remainder of their lives.
0:21:27 And whoever, whatever interest those people being in prison, of course, they wouldn’t
0:21:31 like somebody like me. I understand that because I’m against the economic interest. I don’t
0:21:36 take it personal. But that was the law that was passed. And it was definitely something
0:21:42 that I fought for personally in research for over a decade. And then through the grace
0:21:47 of the universe, things were able to get changed in my favor.
0:21:56 Under that same law, apparently about 60 other people were released. Do you know if none
0:22:01 of them went back to prison, they all turned their lives around? What has been the result
0:22:06 of those 60 people? Not all of them became world famous artists like you, obviously.
0:22:14 A one or two percent recidivism rate. I know maybe because now the law has been expanded
0:22:19 instead of the 18 has been extended to the age of 25 known as the Second Amendment Act.
0:22:25 And we were able to get that passed once, once we got released. But out of the 60 guys,
0:22:30 I know maybe two. I know personally that went back. But now hundreds of people have been
0:22:36 released. And it hasn’t been any sensationalized crime that’s been committed by someone who
0:22:41 was released, something where the government can take it and be like, see, we shouldn’t
0:22:46 have let them out. But more than all of us are like business owners, homeowners, grassroots
0:22:54 activists, Murray, dads, we children now we starting to get guts, dad buys and we got
0:22:59 our passports and we we see in the world. And like you say, people may not be artists,
0:23:04 but some people are doing community violence interruption work to really disrupt some of
0:23:10 this gun violence. Like I lost one of my close brothers, one of my close friends, Saturday.
0:23:15 He was shot 41 times. He came and picked me up from the airport, dropped me off in two
0:23:21 hours late. He was shot 41 times. So we have a problems with gun violence in America and
0:23:27 this I don’t want people just to see successes like someone who’s come home and my case might
0:23:32 be like more like an outlier where you able to do these things. But there’s other people
0:23:37 who just do things that don’t receive media attention. But I find them to be successful
0:23:43 because we have a gun violence pandemic in America that’s far exceeded what it was when
0:23:50 I was a child when it was just relegated to people in the inner city now was cutting across
0:23:57 all social economic stratifications. You already touched on this because we did a law change
0:24:06 from 18 to 25. And you talked about the pre-cortal caught pre frontal cortex. If you can take
0:24:14 yourself back, you saw Bootsy and you saw a chip die. So you know, if you see your friends
0:24:21 die like that and your father is addicted to crack, what goes through your mind? You thought
0:24:26 I’ll be the exception. I can be the successful dealer. I’ll never get caught. I’ll never
0:24:32 get shot. Or do you even did you even think like that? What the hell am I doing? My friends
0:24:38 are getting killed. I think it’s I don’t say I think I know when you live in a when you’re
0:24:44 born in a situation and raised in a situation where you see people just being murdered as
0:24:51 children, you want to escape it. And for me, even at a young age, I understood my mom doesn’t
0:24:57 have the money to move. I have to do what I have to do now. Yeah, I’m gifted and tired
0:25:05 and I’m taking collegiate courses at 11. But I might not make it to college. And at that
0:25:11 time, I didn’t have friends like I do now who are venture capitalists, private equity
0:25:17 has fun people to tell them like, look, hey, put together idea, put it in a pitch deck
0:25:22 format, come on out here to Silicon Valley, put it together, get some startup capital
0:25:28 series, a series, B series, C series, I didn’t have those type of people in my community.
0:25:33 And they don’t exist in the community now. But you talking about the time we didn’t even
0:25:38 have the internet back then. All I saw was drug dealers. I would have sold cookies if
0:25:44 cookies was profitable. I would have sold anything because I can sell and I enjoy sales
0:25:49 mischief. And I never really wanted to work a job. But if I could have worked a job at
0:25:53 the age of 12, they could have if I could have worked for Steve Jobs, I would have worked
0:25:58 for Steve Jobs and I would have worked harder than anybody smarter than anybody. And I damn
0:26:03 there probably wouldn’t end up side by side with Steve Jobs. Once I had the opportunity
0:26:09 to thrive, but I just didn’t have the opportunity. So my frame of reference was limited to mothers
0:26:17 like my mom who was struggling with wage labor and drug dealers who were thriving economically,
0:26:23 you know, and they had all the remnants of it. And my undeveloped, undeveloped brain
0:26:30 couldn’t foresee all of the negative consequences that came with selling drugs, even though
0:26:38 I lost my dad to it and so many other people, but that desire to make it to get some money
0:26:44 to get out of that neighborhood, that level of desperation, it supersedes any reasoning
0:26:50 or rational thinking. I’m just desperate and I’m only working with what I have as a 12
0:26:56 year old. So how can the cycle be broken? I recently had an opportunity to listen to
0:27:03 an interview by Van Jones. And he was speaking about how he went to an event in Sun Valley,
0:27:08 Idaho, and a lady who’s considered the mayor of Sun Valley introducing the Jeff Bezos.
0:27:14 And through that introduction, Jeff Bezos gave him $100 million to invest in this rough
0:27:22 and mass incarceration of the African American social economic ailments that have been perpetuated
0:27:28 intergenerational in our communities. But even Van Jones admitted that all his life he’s
0:27:34 been an employee. He knows nothing about finance, investing, entrepreneurship. And I think to
0:27:39 break that cycle, you got to give people like me a hundred million. You got to give people
0:27:44 who know how to make something out of nothing to be able to invest that back. I don’t need
0:27:51 none of the money. But it’s people like me who have made it the JZs and the other people
0:27:55 who come from nothing, who couldn’t shoot a basketball and stuff like that, but could
0:28:01 tell a story, whether it’s through their music or through their art. And then they extended
0:28:06 the fashion and then it goes all the way up to now their venture capitalists, right?
0:28:10 And they’re investing. So I think it’s people like myself who are going to need that type
0:28:15 of investment. People getting $500,000 grants. I can’t. That’s not going to help me to go
0:28:22 into these communities and have the infrastructure and the resources that I need to teach these
0:28:29 young people about financial literacy, to teach them about M1, M2, M3, for they could
0:28:35 understand the whole comprehensive nature of the money supply and to supplement the
0:28:40 like they’re of in their homes and in their traditional schooling. The only thing that’s
0:28:47 going to break that is real radical, deep investment in the people who come from those
0:28:54 spaces, who’ve been able to come out of those spaces and to thrive globally. And the people
0:29:00 who have been able to do that, they have to be provided with the resources, but they can’t
0:29:05 use it for themselves. They have to really fully invest in like giving that back and
0:29:13 to develop in financial, economic literacy and wellness, which is important too, in
0:29:17 these communities. I was talking to the kids today. None of them knew the difference between
0:29:22 the savings account and the checking account, a stock and a bond, debt and equity, a floating
0:29:27 rate and a fixed rate mortgage, right? These are things that every child should know as
0:29:35 well as wellness, stillness, mindfulness, non-judgment, unconditional love, grace, empathy. It’s just
0:29:42 people who, it’s been a nonprofit industrial complex that has been set up in our communities
0:29:47 for people to make a living of correcting problems in our communities, who don’t come
0:29:53 from our communities, don’t know what it takes to get out of those communities. And I really
0:29:59 feel like now it’s just an industry for people to make money to keep people in need of nonprofits
0:30:06 and not for them to transcend the need of needing charity in nonprofits. And that’s
0:30:10 my thing. I’m going to do what I’m doing now. I’m going to use all of the weapons and mass
0:30:15 construction that I have. I do it through art, fashion, music, poetry, spoken word,
0:30:22 books, speaking engagements, paintings, photography. And now eventually I’ll attract the resources
0:30:29 that I need to start to set up infrastructure where people could come and learn what they
0:30:33 need to be whole human beings and to become remarkable.
0:30:41 Before I forget, you may find this a little odd. And I’m telling you this only because
0:30:49 I don’t want people to have even the tiniest sliver of evidence that you didn’t get something,
0:30:57 okay? So this is, I’m trying to be a good person, not be an asshole, okay? But about
0:31:05 five minutes ago, you said something about coming to Silicon Valley. And it’s really
0:31:11 Silicon Valley. So I don’t want people to say, see, he doesn’t know what he’s talking
0:31:17 about. He called it Silicon Bod. And you know what? I’ll tell you a similar story. Lots
0:31:23 of people, they come to me and they said, oh, you know, I was really close friends with
0:31:30 Steve Jobs. Right. And I’m thinking to myself, if you call him Steve Jobs, you weren’t his
0:31:38 close friend because it’s jobs, not jobs. Right. So I’m just telling you that we could record
0:31:43 that little sentence over or you could just say, that’s who I am. Yeah, for me, I want
0:31:51 to let it rip because it’s like, for me, it’s like, when you read “Thinking Grow Rich,”
0:31:54 it was even “Thinking Grow Rich,” it was one of those books in the polling hill row.
0:32:01 It might have been a 21st century edition, but it’s a story about Henry Ford was called
0:32:09 to trial one time. I can’t remember for what it was. But the prosecutor had learned that
0:32:13 he wasn’t really like scholastic. So when they called him on the stand, they start asking
0:32:18 him to spell all of these words. And he got to the point, he was like, I don’t have to
0:32:24 know how to spell that, sir. I have people that I pay that can spell that for me. Right.
0:32:29 So the thing is, because recently I’ve been partnering with Silicon Valley Bank. Right.
0:32:35 And I’ve been reciting this poem about there were no angel investors in the hood rather
0:32:41 than equity was kept private as well as the placements. Right. So the thing is, the whole
0:32:47 experience of people who have been socially constructed as black in America has been a
0:32:55 repurposing of the American dream. We wasn’t given literally you had on establishments,
0:33:01 whites only or whites in color. Like, so we just wasn’t given access. It wasn’t that
0:33:07 we don’t know how to pronounce certain things or we don’t access certain things because
0:33:15 of ignorance in the sense of negligence. We just wasn’t given opportunity to even have
0:33:23 entrance to the door. Generations of that you stop even to not even transfer information
0:33:30 about the door because it don’t matter. It’s like whites only or colors into this way.
0:33:35 So for me, it’s like, my whole art, my whole life has been, it’s been about taking the
0:33:41 Silicon Valley’s and making the Silicon Valley, you know, because I wasn’t given it. So I
0:33:46 had to take it how it sound, how it looked to me. And I had to repurpose it. But if you
0:33:53 asked me about money, the difference between M1, M2, M3, Adam Smith, Well for the Nations,
0:34:01 John Mater Keans, irrational exuberance with Ben Bernanke. Like I know what I know, but
0:34:06 it’s like, you know, my whole life and my whole legacy of people who’ve been socially
0:34:12 constructed as me, it’s been a story of taking what we’ve been, the little we’ve been given
0:34:17 and repurposing and making it our own. And whether it’s Charlie Parker with Bebop, Chuck
0:34:23 Burry with Rock was always us taking what we’re given and making it our own. And that’s
0:34:29 how you get two kids in the Bronx with a turntable and a microphone and you get hip hop, which
0:34:34 is a multi-billion dollar industry infiltrating fashion and all the more industry and wine
0:34:40 and liquor and champagne and movies. And so that’s just what we do.
0:34:44 Okay. I hope you didn’t take that as an insult. That was it.
0:34:51 And I think from this point on, I probably will say Silicon Valley. I’m from the South,
0:34:56 so we talk different anyway. I have a vernacular. We have a unique vernacular in DC because we’re
0:35:04 in between the deep South and the prestigious North. DC is very unique space.
0:35:13 Your path is so remarkable. And I want to know how you got to this point where you use
0:35:21 the word contrition, because that’s a heavy concept. You’re basically falling on your
0:35:27 sword if you will. So how did you make this transition to contrition?
0:35:36 For me, I love to study the etymology of words. So con trite, con means with and the trite
0:35:46 or the trition part, it means to rub or to abrasive rubbing. So how it became used in
0:35:56 the way of penitence is that one constantly applies that pressure of acknowledging the
0:36:03 harmful decisions that they have made to themselves and others. And out of that acknowledgement,
0:36:10 it’s not a shame that one wears like the scarlet letter that marks them in a way that they
0:36:19 feel devalued. But it’s an acknowledgement of the poor decision in a way that shows through
0:36:24 the improvement of the decisions that you make now, that not only improve the quality
0:36:30 of your life, but how that improvement of the quality of your decisions in your life
0:36:38 has a ripple effect to impacting others in a loving way. So for me, I realized like when
0:36:45 I was 16, me choosing not to, because they told me that if I tell them that my friend
0:36:52 did the shooting, that they would release me, right? So it was never about me being a minister
0:36:58 society, because if I was the minister that they made me out to be, why would you release
0:37:04 me back into the community? Right. Just because I cooperated, right? Right. So even at that
0:37:10 time, I had enough integrity to accept the accountability for my affiliations for something
0:37:19 that wasn’t even true, right? But when I wrote the book at the age of 33, 34, making up a
0:37:26 minute’s contrition of a man, I, my frame of reference had expanded, my commander, the
0:37:35 English lexicon had expanded. And I had more words to describe my experience, who I was
0:37:41 in the past, what I was feeling and experiencing at the present moment, and what I would become
0:37:48 now, which is almost 10 years later now in the future. And I just felt contrite. I felt
0:37:54 very contrite. And meaning that I understood the decisions that I made, I showed through
0:38:01 my behavior, that I was capable of making better decisions, and that I knew that in
0:38:06 the future that I would be doing things with that contrition, that not only would impact
0:38:11 my life in a positive way, but millions of people globally.
0:38:17 Halim, I got to tell you, we’ve had about 200 episodes. And that last explanation you
0:38:24 gave is one of the most powerful passages we’ve ever had in four years.
0:38:32 I had a lot of time to think about it. 22 years is a long time to put together a remark.
0:38:39 You want to explain how the hell you come out of 22 years of that with such eloquence
0:38:46 and intelligence and thank God for the law libraries and people along the way who saw
0:38:54 something in you. Why you, Halim? Why are you here and you’re not dead or in prison?
0:38:55 Why you?
0:39:00 I remember I was speaking to one of the children at the school earlier today, and he told me,
0:39:06 he said, “You’re extremely lucky to be home.” He said, “A lot of people never get to come
0:39:12 home. And when they come home, they never get to experience what you are experiencing.”
0:39:18 And I told him, I said, “I read a book by an author named Deepak Chopra. And the book
0:39:24 explains like there’s no such thing as luck or coincidence. And luck is only or coincidence
0:39:31 is when preparation meets opportunity. So I let him know that when other people came
0:39:37 to prison at my age and they received the sentences they gave up, so they were conditioned
0:39:43 to fighting and killing each other in the streets and fighting and killing each other
0:39:48 in prison. But when they came to the fight to save their own lives, they were scared
0:39:52 to death to step in the library because the law library will remind them every day that
0:40:00 they were a lifer and what they were up against. And for me, I had enough, even as a child
0:40:07 under that traumatic, with that traumatic judgment hanging over my head, I had enough
0:40:13 love for myself and for my mom to fight for myself. My mom was the one who worked at the
0:40:18 Library of Congress, who provided me with all the literature that I needed, who helped
0:40:22 me to get my writings copy written when I wanted to stop my publishing company, who
0:40:28 got me the subscriptions to the Wall Street Journal, the Kippitzer Report, the Burns Dictionaries,
0:40:33 the Finance and Accounting in Real Estate. And I just couldn’t give up on myself and
0:40:38 I couldn’t give up on my mom because I knew my mother raised me to be something more than
0:40:45 just a convict in prison. Why me? Because it’s not luck or coincidence. I never stopped
0:40:53 fighting for me. And was it difficult to learn Latin to learn the law? Yes. No one wants
0:41:01 to sit up in the law library and in the cell and read the Blacks Law Dictionary at night
0:41:06 to understand what a red means or habeas corpus or all these different Latin terms.
0:41:12 But it was that love for myself and it was, it’s something that burns inside of me. I
0:41:17 don’t know the word to describe it in the English lexicon, but it’s just something in
0:41:25 me that burns and it won’t allow me to give up. Even to this day, I still have it and
0:41:31 I don’t know what it is, but I understand it’s a it factor that people have and no matter
0:41:36 whether it is somebody that you put in the concentration camp or somebody that you put
0:41:42 in the prison doing a part time like Nelson Mandela or the concentration camp when I read
0:41:48 about man search for meaning about Victor Franco. As you start to read these historical
0:41:55 references, it’s a theme. That’s a silver lining that connects Victor Franco and Nelson
0:42:01 Mandela. And when you learn yourself enough, you understand that you have it. And it’s
0:42:08 just a matter of you nourishing it and learning how to use it in a loving way. Up next on
0:42:36 Remarkable People.
0:42:41 Come a little more remarkable with each episode of Remarkable People. It’s found on Apple
0:42:48 Podcast or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. Welcome back to Remarkable People with
0:42:55 Guy Kawasaki. Many of the people we’ve had on the podcast are authors. And in fact, that’s
0:43:03 often the catalyzing factor that makes them want to come on the podcast. You don’t just
0:43:08 call up Neil deGrasse Tyson and say, “Hey, you got an hour. Can we just interview you?”
0:43:13 He had a reason. He had a book coming out. But I have never read a book from any of the
0:43:20 people we interviewed that you cite just now, Deepak Chopra, Napoleon Hill, Victor
0:43:27 Franco, Nelson Mandela. You’re like a walking Wikipedia. My goodness. As I was reading and
0:43:34 doing research about you, an obvious conclusion would be, you’re an example of how the prison
0:43:39 system is a failure. But I could make the case that you’re an example of how the prison
0:43:47 system is a success because they had a library. They had a law library. There were these various
0:43:53 people who helped you all the time and the story of the one person who was giving you
0:44:00 extra food that was reserved for diabetics and all that kind of stuff. In a sense, parts
0:44:06 of the system did work for you. So with hindsight, what’s your analysis? I mean, is it just that
0:44:14 you’re a freaking five standard deviations outlier or that anybody can do this?
0:44:20 Definitely think that because I wrote a book called Be Great Wherever You Are. And if we
0:44:27 looked at the prison system as an industry, it would be failing because it’s not producing
0:44:36 enough of results that I’m receiving. So seven out of 10 people become recidivists within
0:44:41 one to three years of being released from prison. And we have the most people incarcerated
0:44:47 in the world. So if it’s genuinely a public safety issue and you look at the high rates
0:44:52 of drug overdose, and gun violence, and mass shootings that we have in America, and even
0:44:57 though we have the most people in the world incarcerated, it’s not enough to deter people
0:45:05 from engaging and abusing drugs that ultimately takes their life or resolving their internal
0:45:12 and external conflicts through gun violence. For me, I do feel like I’m an outlier in the
0:45:19 sense that only because I was uniquely situated because when you read the book that outlives
0:45:26 the success, Malcolm Gladwell, you see how Steve Jobs, who wasn’t even born in the West
0:45:31 Coast, right? He was born to a mom in Philadelphia. He was a Catholic who had a baby by a Syrian
0:45:36 Muslim. But due to the shame of being out of wedlock, they put him up for adoption.
0:45:43 And then he ended up right where he needed to be to meet Bill, his guy. Why isn’t it,
0:45:50 if I’m pronouncing his last name right? When Bill Gates was in college, he was at that
0:45:56 right space where he could access those computers for free at the time. You know, it’s just
0:46:01 like, so out of all the people that was incarcerated, I just happened to have a mom who worked at
0:46:07 the Library of Congress. And when you talk about someone who took their pre-SATs at the
0:46:12 age of 11, we’re not talking about someone that’s intellectually challenged. So if you
0:46:19 give them access to the biggest library in the world and nothing but time to think, right?
0:46:27 But now we have one who goes there and his mom is underemployed. His reading comprehension
0:46:34 skills have been challenged. We don’t have the metrics, we don’t have the infrastructure
0:46:41 in place in our presence to help the non-outliers who are challenged academically. Because if
0:46:46 you challenge academically, you can’t really articulate yourself like this. So I’m able
0:46:52 to meet nurses in correctional office because I know how to articulate myself. And they
0:46:58 can see, oh, he’s different. Let me help him. But why she wasn’t helping the others? Why
0:47:02 was I the one getting the food? Why was I the one getting the books? And it’s just not
0:47:10 a prison problem. It’s a human condition that we have. We create hierarchies. And we decide
0:47:16 who is more deserving than others to get our resources. And for me is that I don’t want
0:47:21 to be remarkable. I don’t want to be exceptional. I don’t want people to make me the exceptional
0:47:28 remarkable person, the outlier. Not saying that I may not have gifts. But I want it to
0:47:33 be, I want to live to see a day where it’s normal to see people come out of our prison
0:47:39 system and to do better than me. It’s normal where it’s like expected. We don’t no longer
0:47:46 have the prejudgment that they convicts. And we’re so like, when people come out of Harvard,
0:47:52 we are the Mac. Oh, Harvard Stanford Business School. It’s a no brainer. How could you fail?
0:47:59 So I just want us to have those same infrastructures in place to catch people who have the highest
0:48:05 probabilities in entering the prison system or coming out of the prison system, to have
0:48:11 infrastructures in place to catch them, to prevent them from going in. Or when they
0:48:18 go in, it’s situated in a way in which though we expect to have the most positive outcomes
0:48:24 and infrastructure in place once they get out to support that expectation that we have.
0:48:30 And that’s just one of my many goals. But we don’t have that in place. I am an outlier.
0:48:34 We don’t have we don’t have we don’t have nothing in place for people that can’t afford
0:48:39 the Wall Street Journal. They can’t call and like, Hey, give me I want the Burns finance
0:48:44 dictionary. I want the Burns real estate dictionary. I want the Burns accountant dictionary.
0:48:52 I want Robert Kiyosaki thinking grow rich. If you don’t have those type of resources,
0:48:55 you don’t get that type of information, even if it’s in a law library, if you don’t even
0:49:03 know what to look for, or you don’t have the ability to read and comprehend at that level.
0:49:09 I have to say that as I was reading your book, there was a part of me that said, you
0:49:14 know, the greatest flattery for you guy, because Madison and I just finished a book called
0:49:23 Think Remarkable as a pun on Think Different, the Apple ad campaign. And someday in one
0:49:30 of your books, if you mentioned Think Remarkable by Guy Kawasaki and Madison Nizomer as a book
0:49:37 that you should read, my life will be complete. My life truly to be mentioned in the same
0:49:44 breath as Victor Frankel and Napoleon Hill and Deepak Chopra and Malcolm Gladwell. That
0:49:45 would be it.
0:49:49 Let me share a story with you briefly. When I was in prison, I used to read also the
0:49:55 entrepreneur and fast company magazines. Yeah. And I read an article about a book that was
0:50:00 coming out, The Psychology of Success by Professor Carl Dweck at Stanford University.
0:50:03 Oh, we’re buddies. We’re buddies.
0:50:09 So I wrote her a letter, so I’m in jail. This is who I was. This is who I am now. I got
0:50:13 a publishing company. I want to send you my books and I’ll let me know why I could purchase
0:50:21 your book. And she wrote me back and she sent me an autograph copy of her book. And Saturday
0:50:29 I did an interview with a lady who’s doing a new addendum to the psychology of success.
0:50:36 And Professor Dweck wanted to add my story as to somebody who personally benefited from
0:50:42 reading her her great book. So I definitely when I if I ever do write a book again, and
0:50:47 eventually I will once I get the right relationship with the right publishers, because I think
0:50:53 this part of my story from 10 years ago, where you left off with the book you read, it’s
0:51:00 a whole new chapter that needs to be told. And when I read your book, I definitely implemented
0:51:04 it in an organic way though, in an organic way.
0:51:09 I hope it passes your test. That’s a high bar. How’s your mother? Everything good with
0:51:10 her?
0:51:16 Everything good. She enjoying being a grandmother. She retired from the Library of Congress.
0:51:17 Yeah.
0:51:24 And I had my daughter three years ago. My daughter looks just like my mom. Yeah. And
0:51:30 she just I pay her mortgages now. And her car notes. And she just enjoying being a grand
0:51:37 mom. And I just see such joy in her when she has my daughter around her. And I guess I’m
0:51:43 just like a, I don’t guess I’m like a stepchild now. I don’t even get a kiss anymore. It’s
0:51:48 just, but I just enjoyed seeing her take the backseat. She took care of a lot of people
0:51:55 while I was gone. And it’s an honor for me to take care of my mother. It’s an honor.
0:51:58 That’s the greatest joy in my life to take care of my mom.
0:52:04 There’s something very beautiful about having a mom who worked at the Library of Congress
0:52:10 and her son has written 11 books in prison. That is a beautiful story.
0:52:17 That’s a beautiful story. Last question is, of all people, you truly understand the answer
0:52:25 to this question, which is your best advice about how to actualize your goals.
0:52:31 I think it ties into the title of the podcast. Remark. I think like people hear remarkable
0:52:40 and they like, they understand like the celebratory or, but it’s remark. Right. And when I think
0:52:49 about somebody that’s remark, remarkable, it’s like, they have left their mark on the world
0:52:56 over and over and over. They’re constantly read, right. So when you set a goal, you have
0:53:06 to revisit it every day, internally and externally. And when you speak to someone like myself,
0:53:13 it’s very rare. Do you get the opportunity to encounter someone who worked on a goal
0:53:21 for 22 years? Right. Everybody, you up against the most powerful government in the world.
0:53:27 When you look at your indictment is United States of America versus Harlem flowers and
0:53:32 the people that work in the prison, they remind you, you’re a lifer. You’re a lifer. So when
0:53:39 they will have mock job fairs and resume writing, job interview skills, I couldn’t take the
0:53:43 class. I’m like, why not? You’re a lifer. This is, these classes are only for people
0:53:48 that’s 18 months within their release day. And I’m telling them, like, look, it’s going
0:53:55 to come a day where I’m going to get released. And I want you to remember that you denied
0:54:00 me the opportunity prepared because it’s not about me. I’m gonna prepare myself. But the
0:54:06 other people who similarly situated like me, you were so invested in reminding them that
0:54:13 they were lifers that if you would have just had the dignity to prepare them, even if they
0:54:20 never got the opportunity will have the hope, right? And to feel a part of the human family
0:54:28 and not just a lifer. So for me, it’s like a remarkable individual is someone who has
0:54:38 committed to an outcome. And in spite of the odds or the circumstances, they revisit that
0:54:44 goal. Every moment that they can, even if it’s not physically doing something, they’re
0:54:48 thinking about it, they’re envisioning it. Some people put up vision board, some people
0:54:56 do words of affirmation, some people do transcendental meditation. But it’s just an outcome that’s
0:55:02 not yet in the three dimensional space that I want to experience it. But just because it’s
0:55:08 not in the three dimensional world of space and time, it doesn’t mean it’s not real. And
0:55:13 that’s what Pablo Picasso said, the imagination is just as real as what you experience in
0:55:18 the so-called real three dimensional time space human experience. So for me, is once
0:55:23 you have that desire outcome, especially if you’re in a desperate situation like I was,
0:55:33 you have to daily remark yourself, your psych to not only to believe that you can do it,
0:55:39 but you have to feel worthy of it. Because if you don’t feel worthy of it, when you even
0:55:45 achieve it, you won’t feel the joy in the process that it took to get it. And then you
0:55:51 get it and then it becomes empty. Because it’s now I have it and I’m looking at my peers
0:55:57 that come with it and I don’t feel worthy. No, I feel worthy. I feel worthy of everything
0:56:03 that I’ve achieved and that I will achieve. And I think that’s the true definition of
0:56:09 a remarkable individual is that they have a desire outcome for themselves and others.
0:56:15 And they have the audacity to love themselves enough to constantly remark, re-put that mark
0:56:21 on their sight, on their heart, on their soul, on their tongue, on their limbs to work towards
0:56:41 something that most people can’t see. That’s remarkable.
0:56:48 What you’re about to hear is a recording made in a Hyundai Santa Fe SUV as we’re driving
0:56:56 around Santa Cruz. Nate, to his credit, heard how the conversation was going and thought
0:57:03 it was important and interesting. So he turned on his recorder on his iPhone. I included
0:57:10 it because I think it offers a lot of insight into Halim and what it’s like to re-enter
0:57:19 society after 22 years of incarceration. Again, this is recorded in a car as it’s rolling
0:57:28 along, not in a studio, but I think you’ll understand why I included it. Thank you, Nate,
0:57:44 for recording it. That was a very good insight for you to do this.
0:57:48 So much of my life was just about getting the things that I knew that I needed in life
0:57:50 and the things that I wanted in life. And now it’s like reaching it. Now I don’t value
0:57:53 that. Like, I understand, like, you got to pay your mortgage and your car notes and stuff
0:57:59 like that. But what I value most is this. I get money to do this, to meet people in
0:58:07 new spaces and good people and share my perspective, my story, my vision for the future, listen
0:58:14 to other people’s to learn and understand and just keep doing this. So, like, you create
0:58:18 tribes everywhere you go. So, like, me looking at this, telling my wife, like, damn, okay,
0:58:23 they got the main house, they got the bond, because my wife want to farm. And then I want
0:58:29 something on the water. So, I’m noticing, like, all of my collectors got the same situation.
0:58:33 You know what I’m saying? Like, that’s how they move. They got the house, the main house,
0:58:38 the joints by the water. And I already have it, but it’s like, I want to upgrade it just
0:58:44 a little bit more, but it’s not a pressing need. You know what I’m saying? So, but really,
0:58:50 this is what I value now, just like me and people expanding my tribe, my family, and
0:58:54 just getting to spend time with people that I enjoy the most. That’s all I could really
0:59:00 ask for in life. Yeah, like, to be able to spend time with people that I really enjoy.
0:59:11 Expanding my family. And it’s an honor. So, it’s a blessing to travel and meet people
0:59:19 to love and be loved. It’s a blessing. It’s a blessing. I look forward to seeing you on
0:59:31 your journey, as you develop into your craft, not just your artistry, but your content creation,
0:59:38 your maturity, and having a family of your own. This is going to always tell young guys,
0:59:43 like, man, I always want to talk to you the day after you have your child or maybe a few
0:59:49 hours. It’s a different look in a person. It’s a different type of relationship to life
0:59:56 when you really have a life that’s dependent on you. You can get pep talks to be responsible,
1:00:02 but when you literally have a life that’s dependent on you, it’s if then you mature to
1:00:09 the age where you’re kind of like, why am I at now, but you have to start taking care
1:00:11 of your grandparents and your parents. Because your parents are retiring, your grandparents
1:00:17 have been retiring, and now you like that prime of your life at 40 and you kind of like
1:00:22 how to start taking care of your parents and your children. And if your grandparents are
1:00:29 alive, it’s a hell of a responsibility. And people looking at you for answers, they’re
1:00:34 looking for you for leadership. And you see in them, my dad ain’t sharp as he used to
1:00:40 be. He ain’t as strong as he used to be. He need me, even if he don’t want to admit it.
1:00:46 He need me in being able to step up and to show your children how it was done and then
1:00:53 they see it. And then you bury your grandparents and then you take care of your parents and
1:00:57 you transition them out and then you become the grandparent and your kids take care of
1:01:06 you. It’s a beautiful, man, it’s nothing more beautiful than aging. I couldn’t recognize
1:01:12 it until I began to age. Once I began to age, cause I’m like in the middle. When you 40,
1:01:17 you kind of like in the middle, you still had that last remnant of your youth and vigor.
1:01:21 And you, but you got a little gray coming in and it’s like you right in between your
1:01:28 grandparents and your children and your parents. And it was just so interesting. I always just
1:01:35 wanted to be a man. Like I’ve always just wanted to be, I wanted to buy my mom a house.
1:01:40 I wanted to take care of my family that always was a thing with me. And then seeing like
1:01:47 how my family just like forgot about me when I was in prison. It just changed my dynamic
1:01:52 of family. You know, family is just not the people that I was born into through blood
1:01:58 relations. And that’s why I say everywhere I go, I build my family. My family is my
1:02:06 people that share my same sentiments and core values. And it don’t matter their race, their
1:02:11 religion, their sensuality. We just know each other when we meet each other. And we know
1:02:16 each other like we’ve known each other because we had before we came into this three dimensional
1:02:23 experience that we call life. We were just energy. We knew each other. We know each
1:02:30 other. And as you mature and have your experience and travel the world, it’ll be cool if we
1:02:37 needed just to see you grow and do your thing. Live your life. Just grow. Because I never
1:02:42 got a chance to see like people grow. Yeah. Me and in that life. So when I went to prison
1:02:49 when I was 16, my cousins that were like three, four, I wasn’t out here to see them become
1:02:55 teenagers and adults. So I’ve only been out here for five years now. I’ve only really
1:03:01 been in society for 20 years. I’m 43. Yeah. You know what I’m saying? Yeah. I’ve been
1:03:05 out for four years, one or five and I was out for 16 years. You’ve only been out for four
1:03:15 years. Yeah. March or be the fifth year. Damn. I’m actually 20 going on 21. That’s the side
1:03:26 of the years. Damn. And so I’m getting the opportunity to see people grow in real life.
1:03:34 So that’s our show with Halim Flowers. He created a painting for me based on my book
1:03:43 Think Remarkable and then one night he and Nate were working late into the evening and
1:03:52 he created six paintings of the six, this series of six, four have nothing to do with
1:04:01 my family, but two were made for my family. One for Nate and one for Noemi, my daughter.
1:04:08 My daughter had been surfing at Mavericks while Halim was here. So it has a Mavericks
1:04:16 theme. I hope you found this episode interesting and motivating and it’ll help you become
1:04:26 remarkable like Halim. He has undergone such a transition. It is truly remarkable. I would
1:04:35 like to thank Amy Vernetti. Amy Vernetti introduced me to Halim. Amy Vernetti and I worked together
1:04:44 on several companies. She is a great basketball player and a great recruiter. If you ever
1:04:51 really want to recruit, look for Amy Vernetti. And of course, I want to thank the remarkable
1:04:59 people team. That would be Jeff C. and Shannon Hernandez, remarkable sound engineers. And
1:05:07 then there’s Tessa Neismar, who prepares me and checks the transcripts and Madison Neismar,
1:05:13 producer of this podcast and co-author of Think Remarkable. And finally, there’s Luis
1:05:21 Magana, Alexis Nishimura and Fallon Yates. That’s the remarkable people team. Our goal
1:05:29 is to make you remarkable in 2024. Speaking of which, one of the ways that you can accelerate
1:05:37 your quest to be remarkable is to read our book, Think Remarkable. Nine paths to transform
1:05:44 your life and make a difference. It’s coming out in March. If you want to learn more, go
1:05:53 to, of course, thinkremarkable.com. Check it out, please. I promise you, it’ll help
1:06:05 you make a difference. Until next time, Mahalo and Aloha.
In this empowering episode, host Guy Kawasaki has a far-reaching dialogue with artist and reform advocate Halim Flowers. Together they delve into Halim’s journey of transforming his life while incarcerated, pushing for systemic change, and using creativity as a force for good after his release. Tune in for an uplifting story of resilience that will inspire you to turn obstacles into opportunities.
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Guy Kawasaki is on a mission to make you remarkable. His Remarkable People podcast features interviews with remarkable people such as Jane Goodall, Marc Benioff, Woz, Kristi Yamaguchi, and Bob Cialdini. Every episode will make you more remarkable.
With his decades of experience in Silicon Valley as a Venture Capitalist and advisor to the top entrepreneurs in the world, Guy’s questions come from a place of curiosity and passion for technology, start-ups, entrepreneurship, and marketing. If you love society and culture, documentaries, and business podcasts, take a second to follow Remarkable People.
Listeners of the Remarkable People podcast will learn from some of the most successful people in the world with practical tips and inspiring stories that will help you be more remarkable.
Episodes of Remarkable People organized by topic: https://bit.ly/rptopology
Listen to Remarkable People here: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/guy-kawasakis-remarkable-people/id1483081827
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