Oprah & Shaka Senghor on How to Escape Life’s Hidden Prisons

The Oprah Podcast

Harpo

Society & Culture

4.2 • 1.5K Ratings

🗓️ 26 August 2025

⏱️ 54 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Shaka Senghor, a resilience expert, motivational speaker, and bestselling author of Writing My Wrongs, has inspired audiences worldwide with his journey from incarceration to transformation. Shaka joins Oprah to discuss his new book, How to Be Free. Full of hard-earned life lessons and practical tools, How to Be Free is a must read for anyone looking to manifest freedom in their own lives. Oprah and Shaka will also be joined by Shaka’s good friend Ben Horowitz, the cofounder of the venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz and author of two books: What You Do Is Who You Are and The Hard Thing About Hard Things. Oprah and Shaka will also be taking Zoom calls from people at a crossroads in their own lives. BUY THE BOOKS! How to Be Free: A Proven Guide to Escaping Life's Hidden Prisons by Shaka Senghor, published by Authors Equity, is available wherever books are sold. https://www.shakasenghor.com/ What You Do Is Who You Are and The Hard Thing About Hard Things by Ben Horowitz, published by Harper Business, are available wherever books are sold. https://a16z.com/books/what-you-do-is-who-you-are/ https://a16z.com/books/the-hard-thing-about-hard-things/ Subscribe: ⁠https://www.youtube.com/@Oprah?sub_confirmation=1⁠ Follow Oprah Winfrey on Social: ⁠https://www.instagram.com/oprahpodcast/ https://www.instagram.com/oprah/ https://www.facebook.com/oprahwinfrey/ Listen to the full podcast: https://open.spotify.com/show/0tEVrfNp92a7lbjDe6GMLI https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-oprah-podcast/id1782960381 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hey there, everybody. I am so glad to meet up with you here on the Oprah podcast. And it is always my
0:06.9	great hope that the conversations that you see here or listen to here can serve to open or expand the
0:15.0	aperture of your life. And on this episode, I really hope we do that because we're exploring this question,
0:22.1	what does it mean to be truly free?
0:28.5	What would that look like?
0:31.0	And more importantly, what would it feel like inside yourself for you? And consider asking yourself, what is holding you back
0:41.4	from pure freedom? I'm here with best-selling author, Shaka Sankor. Welcome back to the tea house.
0:50.0	I'm so excited to be here and thanks so much for having me. Ten years. Ten years.
0:55.2	Our ten year anniversary.
0:55.8	It's incredible.
0:56.6	Yeah.
1:01.7	Let me tell everyone listening and watching that Shaka and I first met here 10 years ago,
1:08.6	and as we were saying coming in, a lot of living has happened with both of us since then.
1:15.0	Yeah. When I first met Shaka Sankor, it had been about six years since he got out of prison after serving 19 years, many of them in solitary confinement, for killing a young man
1:20.7	when Shaka himself was just 19. It is one of my most memorable interviews ever.
1:26.6	We talked about his trouble life that led to that fateful day.
1:30.7	You just had an aha there?
1:32.7	Yeah.
1:33.1	Yeah.
1:34.7	What Shaka has achieved in this decade since that conversation is truly extraordinary.
1:41.1	His book, Writing My Wrongs, became a New York Times bestseller. He landed and left a
1:47.1	high-powered corporate job, started his own business, even collaborated with the rapper Nas on a hit
	...

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