Businesses have come and gone at Homeboy Industries. We have had starts and stops, but anything worth doing is worth failing at. We started Homeboy Plumbing. That didn't go so well. Who knew? People didn't want gang members in their homes. I just didn't see that coming.

I know now that gang warfare is not the Middle East or Northern Ireland. There is violence in gang violence, but there is no conflict. It is not 'about something.' It is the language of the despondent and traumatized.

My job isn't to fix or rescue or to save. It's to accompany, see people, listen to them.

We are among the handful of countries that has difficulty distinguishing juveniles from adults where crime is concerned. We are convinced that if a child commits an adult crime, that kid is magically transformed into an adult. Consequently, we try juveniles as adults.

We're trying to evolve a lot away from YouTube because YouTube is awesome - they have a huge audience, and we started there - but then you're at the mercy of their algorithms a lot, too. They can change anything, and it's really up to them, and you can't say anything about it.

When I was growing up, all my cousins had high-top fades. I thought it would be cool to see how long I could grow a high-top.

It's always hard to deal with injuries mentally, but I like to think about it as a new beginning. I can't change what happened, so the focus needs to go toward healing and coming back stronger than before.

The role of leadership is to transform the complex situation into small pieces and prioritize them.