 BJ was one of many fellow inmates who had big plans for the future. He had a vision. When he got out, he was going to leave the dope game for good and fly straight. And he was actually working on merging his two passions into one vision. He'd spent $10,000 to buy a website that exclusively featured women having sex on top of or inside of luxury sports cars. All he needed to do was supply the women. And he'd already gotten his 19-year-old son on the outside and named him Vice President for Talent Development and charged him with overseeing auditions. It was my first week in federal prison. And I was learning quickly that it wasn't what you see on TV. In fact, it was teeming with smart, ambitious men whose business instincts were in many cases as sharp as those of the CEOs who had wind and dined me six months earlier when I was a rising star in the Missouri Senate. Now, 95% of the guys that I was locked up with had been drug dealers on the outside. But when they talked about what they did, they talked about it in a different jargon, but the business concepts that they talked about weren't unlike those that you'd learn in a first-year MBA class at Wharton. Promotional incentives you never charge a first-time user. Focus grouping new product launches. If you get a new batch in from a new supplier you've never used before, always get some long-time crackhead to test it out. Territorial expansion. One of your rivals gets chalked. You get your dope boys out on the corner before the body's cold. But they didn't spend a lot of time reliving the glory days. So the most part, everybody who's trying to survive, it's a lot harder than you might think. Contrary to what most people think, people don't pay, taxpayers don't pay for your life when you're in prison. You've got to pay for your own life. You've got to pay for your soap, your deodorant, toothbrush, toothpaste, all of it. And it's hard for a couple of reasons. First, everything's marked up 30% to 50% from what you'd pay in the street. And second, you don't make a lot of money. I unloaded trucks. That was my full-time job unloading trucks at a food warehouse for $5.25, not an hour, but per month. So how do you survive? We learn to hustle. With all kinds of hustles. There's legal hustles. You charge another inmate. You pay everything in stamps. Those are the currency. You charge another inmate to clean his cell. There's sort of illegal hustles, like you run a barbershop out of your cell. There's pretty illegal hustles. You run a tattoo parlor out of your own cell. And there's very illegal hustles, which you smuggle in or you get smuggled in drugs, pornography, cell phones. And just as in the outer world, there's a risk-reward trade-off. So the riskier the enterprise, the more profitable it can potentially be. You want a cigarette in prison? $3 to $5. You want an old-fashioned cell phone that you flip open and is about as big as your head? $300. You want a dirty magazine? Well, depends on the measurements of the woman and what she's doing. But based on the recurring revenue stream that's available, if you laminate the pages and rent it out by the hour, it can be as much as $1,000. So as you can probably tell, one of the defining aspects of prison life is ingenuity. Whether it was concocting delicious meals from stolen scraps from the warehouse, sculpting people's hair with toenail clippers, or constructing debt weights from boulders in laundry bags tied on to tree limbs, prisoners learn how to make and do with less. And many of them want to take this ingenuity that they've learned to the outside and start restaurants, barbershops, personal training businesses. But there's nothing like no training, nothing to prepare them for that, no rehabilitation at all in prison. No one to help them write a business plan, figure out a way to translate the business concepts they intuitively grasp into legal enterprises, no access to the internet even. And then when they come out, most states don't even have a law prohibiting employers from discriminating against people with a background. So none of us should be surprised that two out of three ex-offenders re-offend within five years. Look, I lied to the feds. I lost a year of my life from it. But when I came out, I vowed that I was going to do whatever I could to make sure that guys like the ones I was locked up with didn't have to waste any more of their life than they already had. So I hope that you'll think about helping in some way. The best thing we can do is figure out ways to nurture the entrepreneurial spirit and the tremendous untapped potential in our prisons. Because if we don't, they're not going to learn any new skills that's going to help them, and they'll be right back. All they'll learn on the inside is new hustles. Thank you.