From Prison to Purpose: Damon West's Recovery Journey

Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Everybody. It's Cena McFarlane. Welcome to the Cenar Show. Our
guest today is Jamon Wes. He's a best selling author.
He's a motivational speaker. And I'm talking Alabama, I'm talking Clemson,
I'm talking Georgia. I'm talking to you baby, and he's
gonna join us. Say. He's also a junkie, he's a mathematict.

(00:22):
He's the next con he was sentenced to sixty five
years in prison, and he's gonna tell us how he
turned it around. Thanks for being with us today.

Speaker 2 (00:30):
I got to buy enough cocaine to give me to
DC and A you all right. I fell in love
with that drug.

Speaker 3 (00:34):
It's the most evil, most destructive, most addictive drug ever
created by man.

Speaker 2 (00:39):
Smoked it one time and there I am. I'm instantly hook.
Taking a stand and doing the right thing means you're
gonna stand alone.

Speaker 1 (00:45):
That's right.

Speaker 3 (00:45):
It's always okay to stand alone as long as you're
standing on the right side of history.

Speaker 2 (00:54):
Welcome brother, you know man, thanks a lot for doing this.

Speaker 3 (00:56):
Brother. I cannot believe we got this all worked out
today and you got I mean in studio, brother, this
is incredible.

Speaker 1 (01:01):
God's time is perfect.

Speaker 2 (01:02):
You know that said, man, right, you can't argue with that.

Speaker 1 (01:05):
We can't argue with that. So listen, you have a
compelling story you and I know addictions progressive, and I've
done a lot of research on you, and i want
to talk about something you may or may not have
talked about. So you grew up in Texas.

Speaker 3 (01:21):
Great parents, great parents, two parent home parents were married
for fifty five years.

Speaker 1 (01:25):
Man, right, good stuff going on?

Speaker 2 (01:27):
Oh Man?

Speaker 3 (01:27):
Yeah, I mean the American dream, middle class guy growing up,
great education, great athlete. I mean, you know, you know,
God blessed me with a canon for a right home.
I know back in Texas we got that little thing
your listeners might have heard about called.

Speaker 2 (01:40):
High school football.

Speaker 1 (01:40):
Yeah, I've heard about that.

Speaker 2 (01:41):
Friday Night Lights, brother, Friday Night Lights. Grew up in
the middle of it.

Speaker 1 (01:45):
You were there. But let me back up a little bit,
because I think it started here. If I'm remember the story,
you know you had something.

Speaker 2 (01:50):
Happened to you.

Speaker 1 (01:51):
You're nine years old? Yes, can we start there?

Speaker 2 (01:53):
Is that?

Speaker 1 (01:53):
Cool?

Speaker 2 (01:53):
That's a great place to start.

Speaker 1 (01:54):
Let's just start there.

Speaker 2 (01:55):
There were three of us. I got an older brother
and younger brother. Me.

Speaker 3 (01:59):
Parents worked all the time, we're latchkey kids. They call
them latch keys back in the eighties. Man, So we're
latch key kids. But my parents had hired a babysitter.
She's like eighteen years old. And this babysitter and I
start messing around sexually and she, obviously, she initiates it
the first time, and it becomes something that goes on
for It goes over for about six months, and I
let my parents know about it.

Speaker 2 (02:20):
But I want to say this.

Speaker 3 (02:21):
You know, the molestation thing that happened to me when
I was nine years old, there's a lot more serious
cases of that that I hear out there from other
people who are molested and it really messes them up
in bad, bad ways.

Speaker 2 (02:35):
It messed me up, But I'm gonna tell you how I.

Speaker 3 (02:37):
Think it messed me up. And this is years looking
back on it in the rearview mirror. At nine years old,
I was introduced to a lot of adult behavior, sexual
adult behaviors. Imagine like there's a big giant door and
you're a kid, and you can never go through that door.
It's padlocked, it's got ten or twelve little key locks
on it.

Speaker 2 (02:54):
Kids can't get into the door. The door's even too
high for a kid to touch.

Speaker 3 (02:58):
But if an adult goes up and opens that door
for you and let you in that door on the
other side of the door as all these other doors,
and those doors are just flung open because adults can
do anything they.

Speaker 2 (03:07):
Want, they don't need permission to do it. One of
those doors is drinking.

Speaker 3 (03:11):
One of those doors is doing drugs, one of them
smoking cigarettes, one of them is having sex as a
young person. So at nine years old, I got opened
up to this door and got to the other side
of the door where a lot of other adult behaviors are.
I like the adult behavior aspect of it. I got
introduced to an adult behavior of sexual activity at nine
years old, and I liked it.

Speaker 2 (03:33):
And that's the thing.

Speaker 3 (03:33):
As a little boy, it's a female babysitter. So it
didn't mess me up in the sense that it was
traumatic for me. But what it did is it opened
me up to adult behaviors at a very young age,
too young to process what's going on, and it affected
every relationship I had for the rest of my life
because everything at that point was literally about sex, and
it was about me.

Speaker 2 (03:54):
Relationships were all about me.

Speaker 3 (03:56):
It wasn't until we're gonna get to the story later
on in life and I finally make it to a
twelve step program recovery that I was able to have
a normal worship in life. This event at nine years
old changed all that.

Speaker 1 (04:06):
Yeah, so what listeners don't know is this is the
first time we're actually meeting.

Speaker 2 (04:10):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (04:10):
Right, But we should give a shout out to John
Zacharies for putting this together.

Speaker 2 (04:14):
John is the man, right, Thank you, Jason, We love you.

Speaker 1 (04:17):
Yeah. The reason why I bring this up because you
nailed that. Because what you don't know about me is
I was kidnapped at twelve and used for child pornography
and tortured.

Speaker 2 (04:25):
Wow, I didn't know that.

Speaker 1 (04:26):
So I know about being hyper sexualized at a very
young age. Yes, So I just want to know you're
you're talking to another trauma survivor. Yeah, okay, and I
get it, and the world changes and everything became sexualized,
all my feelings and everything. But what I noticed about
you is that's when you started drinking.

Speaker 2 (04:42):
Yes, I was ten.

Speaker 3 (04:44):
The first time I had a sip of alcohol. I
get into my dad's beer one time in the fridge,
you know, when I was ten years old. I remember
it because I didn't just have a sip. I had
as many as I could. I was thrown up that
night very first time. Then I realized I liked the
way the alcohol I felt my system. So there's one
of those doors that I'm in now at ten years old,
I'm drinking my dad's beer in the fridge. My mom

(05:06):
smoked cigarettes, but she smoked these god awful merit cigarettes back.

Speaker 2 (05:09):
In the eighties.

Speaker 3 (05:10):
Right later on in life, when I become a smoker,
I smoked the marble lights in the box, smoked the
good stuff, right, But.

Speaker 2 (05:16):
My mom smoked cigarettes.

Speaker 3 (05:17):
So I started stealing my mom's cigarettes, and I started
like going to the store and getting my own cigarettes.
By the time I'm twelve, I've smoked my first joint.
You know, I've got a lot of adult behaviors going
on that I don't have any other friends.

Speaker 2 (05:29):
I can talk to about this. By the way, it's
me doing this by myself.

Speaker 1 (05:32):
So you were hiding it from everybody. Sure there's a
you wered awsoin athlete, you were training hard back then.

Speaker 3 (05:37):
The interesting thing that happens too when I'm nine, ten,
eleven years old, nine and ten, I'm still at this
stage running this awkward, awkward athlete. I'm the last pick
for everything I don't have. I don't have anything I
know about for my athletic ability. But I get a hold.
This coach gets a hold of me. His name is
John Bass. I never get Coach Bass. When I'm eleven
years old, he sees something to me that no other

(05:58):
coach saw. He's my baseball coach. It's like, you have
the best eyeand coordination of anybody I've ever seen. If
you'll let me work with you and you'll do what
I say, I can make you a great athlete. So
that year I won the battings out of most home runs,
I mean, I'm most RBIs. I'm knocking out the park.
He puts a baseball in my hand. I can find
out I can throw a baseball with the right mechanics.
And then I get a football on my hand. When
I'm twelve years old, Now I can throw a football.

Speaker 2 (06:20):
Man. Now I'm going to be the quarterback. And this
is Texas Man, in Texas, this is Texas Brother.

Speaker 1 (06:25):
Friday night lights, Friday night lights, Man, it is nothing better.

Speaker 2 (06:28):
Right.

Speaker 3 (06:28):
Toxicating. You talk about intoxicating, that is intoxicating. Growing up
on the Friday night lights, and I was demand by
the time I was a sophomore in high school. By
the time I'm in the tenth grade, I'm the starting
quarterback for a five A school. Five A was the
biggest division we had in Texas back in the nineties.
I'm the man fifteen years old, I'm taking my first
snap in varsity football and I'm the three year starting

(06:50):
quarterback for a five day school. You couldn't tell me
anything back then. My head was this big man. I
was so full of my ego and my pride and
look at me. But I worked hard at what I
did too. I was a great athlete. But here's what
I wanted to get to. I became a great athlete
during this time.

Speaker 2 (07:06):
But I was still drinking, smoking, smoking weed and I acted.

Speaker 1 (07:10):
Were you acting out sexually?

Speaker 2 (07:11):
Then? Oh yeah, what was that.

Speaker 1 (07:12):
Looking like for you?

Speaker 2 (07:13):
Good question.

Speaker 3 (07:14):
Twelve years old was the first time I ever had intercourse. Now,
the babysitter and I did a lot of things, but
we never had intercourse. But at twelve and I could
tell it was February of nineteen eighty eight. I remember
when happened, but I had sex for the first time.
The girl was fourteen years old. I was twelve years old,
so it wasn't anything like the babysitter type deal. But
I was so driven and I was so hyper focused

(07:35):
on sex, man, more than my other friends were too.

Speaker 2 (07:39):
At that age, that's all I wanted to do.

Speaker 3 (07:41):
So and it's hard to find sexual activity at twelve
years old, you know, kind of stumbled into it that
one time. It would be another year before I did
it again. But man, after that, I was.

Speaker 2 (07:50):
Out the gate.

Speaker 3 (07:51):
And once you got to high school, you know, there
were ways to find girls and stuff like that. I mean,
I was very sexually active at a very young age.

Speaker 1 (08:00):
You're juggling that, you're playing ball, and you're starting to
use more and more, right.

Speaker 2 (08:03):
More and more. Yeah, I mean, I'll be back on
it now.

Speaker 3 (08:06):
Knowing about alcoholism, like I know that I was an
alcoholic back then because I would think about drinking. That's
how you know, really that you got a problem. If
you think about it, you obsessed about it. Because I've
learned in the program Recovery that we are kind of
a three part process. We have a thought that becomes
an obsession and it becomes something physical. Even back then,

(08:27):
on Mondays in school, I'm thinking about the weekend that
I can't wait for.

Speaker 2 (08:30):
We'll play a game. After the game, I'm gonna get
drunk Saturday night. We're on the border of Louisiana.

Speaker 3 (08:35):
Saturday night, we would all go to Louisiana, because in
Louisiana you should have to have a passport to go
to Louisiana. It's like another country, right, I mean, like
we're going fifteen minutes across the border. If you could
put bread on the counter, you could put beer on
the counter Louisiana. And so I would be fantasizing about
drinking Friday night, drinking Saturday night, you know, sobering up
on Sunday, getting ready for the week on Monday.

Speaker 2 (08:56):
I don't know what kind of an athlete.

Speaker 3 (08:58):
I could have been like if I'd had it all together,
and I wasn't in my addiction even back then.

Speaker 1 (09:02):
And none of the coaches, none of your parents, none
of your buddies has said, hey, big d you got
to slow it down. Man.

Speaker 3 (09:08):
Oh man, my head coach, yeah, he got onto me
one time. But you're the starting quarterback. Man, you're the guy,
and they don't have another guy behind me. That's even
close to what I'm doing right.

Speaker 1 (09:15):
They just want you to fucking win.

Speaker 3 (09:17):
Yeah, it's it man, Like my and my head coach,
I got in trouble in Louisiana one weekend and the
cops got called. All kinds of a bunch of us
went over there, we got in trouble. Coach almost brings
me into the the meeting on Monday morning and he
chews me out about, you know, making good choices, doing
you know, being a leader and not going out there
and going drinking. And he says, you know, if I

(09:38):
ever catch you doing it again, I'll call your dad.
It wasn't I would kick you off the team. I'm
gonna call your.

Speaker 2 (09:44):
Dad, right. And I'm like, oh man, my dad's just
gonna chew me out too.

Speaker 3 (09:47):
I mean I'm not I'm the quarterback man, and I'm
the guy that's gonna lead us to these wins and
these victories. And man, you know how it is with sports,
you know, I mean, it's winning is everything. Sometimes it
becomes too much, and it got in the way, A
gotten the way with my perception of what the reality
was of a person in life, and it gotten away
with the coaches being able to discipline me because I

(10:09):
kind of knew I had the power back then.

Speaker 1 (10:11):
On that note, we're in a different world now. You
work with a lot of athletes, a lot from every level,
high school, college. What you need to tell a coach
when their athletes are getting in trouble? What's your recommendation
for them?

Speaker 3 (10:26):
Now?

Speaker 2 (10:26):
You got to meet them where they are. Yeah, you
got to meet them where they are.

Speaker 3 (10:29):
Man, where you live in a different world, as you know.
I mean, it's just these phones they have in their pocket.
They're like little bombs.

Speaker 1 (10:34):
You know.

Speaker 3 (10:35):
If I would have had a phone in my pocket
with pornography and everything else on it, man, I don't
know that could have focused on football and all other stuff, right,
I mean I would have gone down the rabbit hole
and that kind of stuff. But you got to meet
them where they are. And I've had Kirby Smart at Georgia.
He's allowed me to take players that have had disciplinary
problems with marijuana, fell in drug test. He's allowed me

(10:56):
to take them into recovery meetings in Athens and also
bring him into Texas so I can show them what
the reality is the choices would look like, Oh so
fu oh yeah, get I've got I've got to do
that with a couple of Georgia athletes.

Speaker 2 (11:07):
One was the basketball player, one was a football player.

Speaker 1 (11:09):
So tell me about your senior season then, and then
let's walk our way into your fresh RoCE.

Speaker 2 (11:13):
So look, man, going going into my my junior year.
I have the most incredible year.

Speaker 3 (11:17):
I got these two great receivers Man Pierce Pek Gross,
Joey Muton. These guys can fly.

Speaker 2 (11:21):
I light it up. I'm putting numbers up.

Speaker 3 (11:23):
My dad was a sports writer for fifty years, famous
sports writer two in Texas. In fact, in nineteen seventy one,
he was the first sports writer in Southeast Texas to
put black athletes on the front page of sports pages
seventy one first something ever happened. I mean, man, people
would break my dad's windows out for that. It would
slit his tires. They would send hate mail to my
dad growing up. And I had good parents, man, I'm
telling you my parents. When I was a little boy

(11:45):
growing up and I could read, comprehend reading, my dad
got all the hate mail one day and set me
down on the couch and made me read the hate mail,
every nasty negative word that people will say about my
father and my mother.

Speaker 2 (11:55):
Because my dad puts a black guy on the cover
sports page.

Speaker 1 (11:57):
That's interesting. Why did he put that gentleman on the cover?

Speaker 3 (12:00):
Because he was the best athlete there was. He was
the best running back in America, a parade All American.
The publisher of the paper that was there was a
new guy and he ended up being my godfather later
on in life when I was born.

Speaker 2 (12:11):
His name was Bill Maddox. So the publisher the paper
comes in to the sports office in Port Arthur and
he had just worked in Lyndon Johnson's administration and he
was there for the Civil Rights you know, the Civil
Rights Act, Voting Rights Act, And in nineteen seventy one
they were doing force integration, like all this stuff they
were trying to do to get schools integrated in the South.
It wasn't working.

Speaker 3 (12:31):
Now they're going to force integration in seventy one. So
Bill Madis goes into the sports office and says, hey,
we're about to put this guy, Joe Washington Junior, on
the cover of sports page.

Speaker 2 (12:40):
He's the best running back in America.

Speaker 3 (12:42):
But they say a black athlete can't be on the
cover of sports page in Port Arthur, Texas. And the publisher,
Bill Maddicks that the rules changed, and the guy that
was the sports editor at the time said, I refused
to do it.

Speaker 2 (12:52):
He said, well, you're fired. My dad sitting the desk
next to him, who looks at my dad, Bob, what
do you want to do? My Dad's like, hey, I'm in.

Speaker 3 (12:58):
My dad's a twenty six year old young guy from
Missouri and he didn't grow up in the South, right.
He came down to the South to go to school
at a More university in Beaumont. Wow, And he told
me stories about Man, he's just I couldn't believe what
I saw when I got here. Man, how everything was
segregated and stuff like that, and everybody's mindset was like that.
So Bill said, hey, look, this guy's going to deserve
the front page. And when he does deserve the front page,

(13:18):
we're gonna give it to him. But if you do this,
just know that what you know that's white in your
life is going to change fast. And he said it
may just be your family and my family and the
boat paddling together, but we're gonna get through this.

Speaker 2 (13:29):
We're gonna do the right thing. We got to lead.

Speaker 3 (13:32):
And so first week at the football season, Joe puts
up a big game, gets on the front gets on
the front page the football magazine section, and that was it.
That's when the hate mail started coming INOW. But my
dad told me, he said, damon. He told me why
I was reading the letters. He gave it real clear.
He said, I want you to see what it looks
like to take a stand and do the right thing. Wow,
because he said, sometimes, Damon, taking a stand and doing

(13:54):
the right thing means you're going to stand alone. But
he said, it's always okay to stand alone as long
as you're standing on the right side. History man tremendous
influence for my father.

Speaker 2 (14:02):
Wow.

Speaker 1 (14:03):
So powerful man.

Speaker 2 (14:04):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (14:04):
So he was a well known, very good sports writer.
But he knew how the game was played. So after
my junior season when I lighted up. My dad's about
six two. I got an older brother that's sixty three.
My mom's like five to seven. I'm five to ten.
Nobody wanted short quarterbacks back then. It's the early nineties,
you know, nobody wanted short quarterbacks back then. So my
dad said, look, we're gonna lie because I think you're

(14:26):
gonna grow right. We're gonna say you're like six one
or six two, you're about one seventy five. Because I
had a canna for an arm, I could throw the
ball seventy yards, you know. But he's telling me, he said,
you've got to get these people's attention, and you can't
tell them you're five to ten. So we started sending
my junior year highlight reel up VHS tape. Remember those
VHS taps. We send those out to all these colleges,
and everybody's calling man Florida, Florida State, Miami, Ucla, Georgia.

(14:51):
This is the early nineties Florida schools, right, this is
Steve Spurrier is writing handwritten letters to me. So this
is where I think I'm going. My mind is focused.
I'm playing time college football and I've got.

Speaker 2 (15:01):
The arm to do it. But I'm just a short guy.

Speaker 3 (15:03):
No one knows it yet. Until the spring of my
junior year. Right when we finished spring ball up going
into the senior year, Terry Donahue comes from UCLA to
come see Damon Westow, who he's going to recruit to
be his next quarterback. And I'm out there warming up
with one of the black guy and I'm so standing.
I'm warming up with him and I see Donahue get
out of the car. Man, I know it's him, and

(15:24):
he comes up to my head coach, and I see
them talking. Their hands are moving up like this, and
he gets in his car and he leaves. I pulled
Coach oins aside afterwards, said, man, what happened? He said, well, listen, man,
He said, Terry Donahue came here and he said, I
want to see West and I pointed to him over there,
said he's warming up. He said, I thought Wes was
a white kid. He said, well, yeah he is. He's
a white kid warming up the black kid. He said, well,
that white kid's a midget. He said, how tall is he?

(15:46):
He said, Man, I had to tell him you're five
to ten, but I think you're going to grow.

Speaker 2 (15:50):
He said.

Speaker 3 (15:50):
I'm not here to see what someone's think they're gonna do.
He said, I got to move on to the next
guy because.

Speaker 2 (15:54):
He's too hot.

Speaker 3 (15:55):
Yeah, but Terry Donahue didn't go quietly. Terry Donahue left
and told everybody that this damon West guy, that's a
boot ship that's ready as one of the best quarterbacks
in Texas right now.

Speaker 1 (16:04):
He was pissed through, went all the way out there.

Speaker 2 (16:05):
Oh yeah, and he let everybody know.

Speaker 3 (16:08):
There was a guy named Max Mfinger that had this
magazine called blue Ship Illustrated sum and boot Ship Illustrated.

Speaker 2 (16:13):
I mean I was in there.

Speaker 3 (16:14):
It was a blue Chip, but it got out that
I was only five foot ten so going into my
senior year, which should have been incredible because I'm being
highly recruited and the decision to go play ball somewhere
should have been wrapped up before that.

Speaker 2 (16:26):
Man, now it's up in the air.

Speaker 1 (16:28):
I walk me through that. That must say. Man, you
got such a great memory. It's amazing you see them
doing that. Yeah, you know something's not right because he
gets it. That hit yourself a steam.

Speaker 2 (16:39):
Oh man, right right in the gut.

Speaker 1 (16:41):
Man, I mean it is all the bravado, all the stuff.
It just fucking went out the door. Right Yeah.

Speaker 3 (16:46):
Well, I don't know, Like when I'm watching it, I
got a bad gut feeling something's wrong because he didn't
stick around, right, I mean, what's the chance that he said, oh,
this is great.

Speaker 2 (16:54):
I saw a warm up. He's gonna be our next quarterback. Right.

Speaker 3 (16:56):
It was the first time when the coach told me
what would happen with Terry Donnie you. It was the
first time that there was a seat of doubt planet
in this whole plan.

Speaker 2 (17:05):
Man, I was.

Speaker 3 (17:06):
I got up every morning at five thirty or six
o'clock in the morning to go run and lift weights,
watch game film. I had a tire swing in the
field across the street from my house. I had a
bag of footballs. I was doing stuff no one else
was doing because I wanted to play division on college
football so bad. I worked so hard at being a
quarterback that whenever that happened, it was the first time

(17:26):
there was a seat of doubt that this whole plan
may not work, you know. And it was really the
first vulnerable moment I've had in my whole time, like
growing up.

Speaker 2 (17:36):
That was the first time I felt vulnerable.

Speaker 1 (17:38):
And did you tell anybody you were scared? I'm just checking.

Speaker 2 (17:42):
I just kept inside, right, I kept it inside. Yeah, No,
I kept it inside.

Speaker 3 (17:45):
I mean because you know, my dad and I talked
about it, but it was more like along the lines
cuss and Terry Donahue, I can't believe he did that,
you know, kind of like the addic behavior. We'll just
blame somebody else blame. It was easier to blame Terry Donahue.
And look, I don't blame Donahue for what he did.
I would have handled it differently. But yeah, it was

(18:05):
the first time I felt vulnerable. And then coming in
my senior season, when the letters started drawing up, the
recruiting letters started drawing up, the offers weren't there, felt
very vulnerable. I ended up signing to play ball at
the University of North Texas. It's a Division One team
in Denton, Texas, the Mean Green Eagles. So I ended
up signing a football scholarship to play ball at the
University of North Texas, which was nowhere on my radar

(18:27):
the year before I would have answered a letter from
the university.

Speaker 2 (18:30):
I thought it was too good for that.

Speaker 3 (18:31):
Right, But now this is where I'm going to go
play Division one college football. And see you Now, I
got a chip on my shoulder, brother, I mean, and
the chip on your shoulder can be a good thing
to play with sometimes, I mean, especially if you're a quarterback.
You need a little bit of an edge to play
that position. But man, it was too It was too
big of a chip to carry around, way too big
of a chip. And it didn't take me long when
I got to college to become the starting quarterback for

(18:53):
the Division one team my red shirt sophomore year. You know,
I'm twenty years old. Second game of the season, I'm
named the starter. We're playing Arizona State in sun Noville Stadium. Yeah,
Jake Plumbers a quarterback. Pat Tillman's on that team number
that year. Yeah, they were great, but they beat his
fifty two to seven. I threw a touchdown on that
right in Tilman's face. Man Ti was an incredible competitor

(19:15):
for all of y'all listening to Pat Tillman. Just an
interesting guy in the logs of history, about a selfless
human being. He played college football at Arizona State, goes
on to play for the Arizona Cardinals in the NFL.
Then whenever we go to war in Afghanistan for the
terrorist attacks in two thousand and one, he literally walks
away from the NFL and goes and becomes an army
ranger because he wants to fight for his country and

(19:36):
he believes that's what's right. And sadly enough, he's killed
by friendly fire within the first two years of being
in Afghanistan. But an incredible guy and one of the
best competitors've ever played against.

Speaker 2 (19:47):
He was vicious on the field, nice guy after the game.

Speaker 3 (19:49):
Kind of thing, Jack one Hyde kind of deal because
he was nuts on the field. But that first game
against Arizona State, we lost fifty two to seven. But man,
now those dreams are coming true. I'm on the field
on the starting quarterback for Division one team the next week,
which is September twenty first, nineteen ninety six. I'll never
forget this date. It's a Saturday afternoon in College Station, Texas.

(20:10):
We're playing Texas A and them and Man, so you know, man,
this is man. We little boy growing up in Texas
and plays football doesn't even want to play for the.

Speaker 2 (20:16):
Aggies or against these guys, right, brother, and man, there
I am.

Speaker 3 (20:20):
I'm laxing it up and we get the ball first
against the Aggies and I'm driving my team down the
field against the Aggies. Third play of the game, I
go down, career and an injury. Never played college football again.

Speaker 1 (20:31):
I get hurt.

Speaker 3 (20:32):
I separated my shoulder on Kyle Field that day. That
was the last player I ever played in college football.
Now now I'm at the fork in the road in life. Man,
I've got knocked down you know, you know what a
fork in the road looks. You get knocked down hard,
you get back up, dust yourself off. But you got
a choice to make. And my choice at that fork
in the road is heavily influenced by the choices I've
been making all my life, very selfish. What's gonna make

(20:54):
me feel good at the time. You know, I've got
bad belief systems too, by the way. I mean, you know,
my belief systems from ten to twelve years old said
it's okay to drink a little beer, it's okay to
smoke a little pot.

Speaker 2 (21:04):
What do these adults know?

Speaker 3 (21:05):
Anyway, Right now I get into this four kin road
in life and football is gone. My identity was gone
to gone. Brother, It's ripped away from me, my identity.
I don't have a backup plan. And that's when I
got into hardcore drugs. Now it's cocaine.

Speaker 2 (21:19):
I'm partying with pills.

Speaker 1 (21:21):
From the time the injury a month, then two months in,
or right away. You start hitting it.

Speaker 2 (21:26):
A week away, A week away, A week away.

Speaker 3 (21:28):
Man, the next week after the A and M game,
that's the game that I'm not playing. I was supposed
to be the starter for right, and now I'm out
at a party drinking and I do cocaine.

Speaker 1 (21:39):
St time you did coke?

Speaker 2 (21:40):
Yeah, first time I did coke. It was twenty years old.

Speaker 1 (21:42):
Wow.

Speaker 2 (21:43):
So I did coke. Fell in love with cocaine. Oh,
I mean, I fell in love with that drug.

Speaker 3 (21:47):
And then I would get into ecstasy, shrooms, stuff like that, pills,
you know, hydra, coke.

Speaker 2 (21:52):
I did a lot.

Speaker 3 (21:53):
I got another injury. I was getting my I was
starting to get my job back. In the spring of
ninety seven, I came back. I rehab myself.

Speaker 2 (22:00):
I was coming back. I getting the rotation.

Speaker 3 (22:03):
And then in the summer of nineteen ninety seven, I
severed my achilles tendon and that was really it. It
was over, man, you could I couldn't come back from that.
And once that achilles was severed, there was so much
pain involved. The hydro codone got prescribed to me, the
Vika in ees, the kind of Viking you need two
prescriptions for.

Speaker 2 (22:23):
Man.

Speaker 3 (22:24):
But now I'm eating that stuff like candy. I'm drinking
all the time, I'm snorting, I'm getting bloated. I mean,
you see pictures of me from back then, I'm just
this fat and I've been an athlete all my life.

Speaker 2 (22:34):
You know, I've been you know, chills, a little body,
like a god, and now all that's gone. I don't
even recognize myself in.

Speaker 1 (22:40):
The missing to get that for the first time you
started giving up on yourself. Yeah, first time you started
giving I don't give a fuck.

Speaker 3 (22:46):
Oh yeah, so bad that I had this self pity
thing going on. And we know where self pity comes from,
where it leads to right. And I've got this self
pity thing going on, and I just, I mean, I'm.

Speaker 2 (22:56):
A miserable person to be around. I don't know who I.

Speaker 3 (22:59):
Am and more, and I couldn't find anything else to
pour myself into like I did football.

Speaker 2 (23:05):
Football was my life. It was my entire identity.

Speaker 3 (23:07):
In fact, I would venture to say that until I
got into a twelve step program recovery and I started
working on myself and becoming this coffee bean, which we'll
talk about later, will That was the only time in
life I ever focused on myself like I did when
I football. I started working out on myself when I
got into prison, the same way I worked out on
my position in football, only now I'm working on myself

(23:29):
to become a better human being, A better servant leader,
a better person that can live out those four spiritual printers,
the unselfish, the honest, the pure, the loving. You know,
but that was going to be a long way away, brother,
Oh yeah, nowhere near that. I was at the fork
in the road. I took a lot of wrong turns, brother,
and I was functional, though it's an addict. I mean,
I graduated college. Now, I had a low GPA. I

(23:51):
think I had like a one point eighty nine GPA
to graduate. I got out of there on fumes with
my bachelor's degree in nineteen ninety nine from North Texas.
I get a job next, I'm working in the United
States Congress.

Speaker 1 (24:01):
And why how did you go from that? How did that?
That was a I want to hear how'd you land there?

Speaker 2 (24:05):
Man?

Speaker 3 (24:06):
I just I've always been fascinated with politics, and I
thought I would be the governor of Texas one day.
I thought that was going to be the path of
life that I took, and I started like seeing what
it would take to get a job in DC. My
older brother used to work in Congress, so he gave
me some people's numbers to talk to. I didn't have
a job lined up, but I knew I needed to

(24:27):
leave Dallas because at this point I graduated ninety nine.
It's just a fueled party of cocaine and GHB. Man,
I'm partying my balls off at this point.

Speaker 2 (24:37):
Man, it's good.

Speaker 3 (24:38):
I mean, it's dangerous in the year two thousand, in
the year two thousand for me. So I know I
need to leave, and I load up the U haul.
One day I called my older brother in Austin. He's
in a job he doesn't really like. I said, hey, man,
you want to move to DC. I've got the money,
I'll fund it. Come up there and move with me.
You don't like being in Austin.

Speaker 2 (24:56):
So I go pick up my older brother. We moved
to Washington.

Speaker 3 (24:58):
How do you have money lawsuit on the apartment complex
where I cut my achilles in half?

Speaker 2 (25:03):
Good question, Yeah, good question. Yeah.

Speaker 3 (25:06):
So when I cut my achilles in half in ninety seven,
I was in the shower at my girlfriend's apartment in
the tower rack, and the shower broke and the piece
of the porcelain from the tower rack sliced my achilles.

Speaker 2 (25:16):
In half when it hit the side of the top.

Speaker 3 (25:17):
And so there was a lawsuit associated with that, and
I had a settlement, and I think I had like
twelve thousand dollars of the settlement and I was spending
that on blow. In fact, I'll tell you this before
I go and get the U haul and decide I'm
going to go. I'm I'm a coca addict, right, I
got to buy enough cocaine to get me to DC

(25:38):
and a U haul.

Speaker 2 (25:38):
Right, so I get a quarter chuilo of cocaine. I
got a lot of cocaine.

Speaker 3 (25:43):
And you know, there goes somewhere your money, your your
STASHU is getting smaller. And I realized when I bought
that courd quilo, which I stuffed in a box of
tide and put it in the box. I mean, the
back of the U hall is full of all my
stuff in life, all the possessions in my life. And
there's a box of tide, laundry detergent back there that's
got a quarticulo cocaine in it. Man, And that's like

(26:03):
the thing I guard, you know how it is we
guard that. That's I know exactly where that is at
all times. Every hotel I stopped at, I crawl in
the back, I get my box a tied.

Speaker 2 (26:11):
I'm coming out.

Speaker 3 (26:12):
But when I bought that quarticulo cocaine. I knew I
had to get out of there because the rest of
that money was gonna be gone if I stuck around.
So I got in the U haul, I drove down
to Austin, picked up my brother stuff. He said, I'll
meet you there in a couple of weeks. Let me
tie some things up down here in Austin, and I
drove to Washington, d C. On a cocaine and GHB bender.
Driving down the road took a couple more days than

(26:35):
it should have to get there.

Speaker 2 (26:36):
You know, it's crazy when I look back at it now,
see no, man, I just can't believe. I can't. Well,
I made it in one piece to d C.

Speaker 3 (26:43):
But when I got to d C, I had a
friend there, and so I started living at his place,
rented a room from him at the place he had,
and my brother came to live there too. But I
got a job working for Jean Green, Congressman Jean Green
from Houston, Texas, a Democrat from Houston and doing job
doing a job as a staff assistant and now Texas congressman.

(27:04):
At the time, they wanted to hire people from their
home state. You know, it gets a good flavor for me.
Texans are really proud from out their state.

Speaker 2 (27:10):
I'm sure you noticed this before.

Speaker 3 (27:12):
You If you're ever in a room with a bunch
of Texans, you notice the loudest people in the room. Right,
We are very loud. We're very proud. So when I
go apply for these jobs, I've got this good pedigree.
Man on the surface, I look like a pretty good
hire college quarterback in the state of Texas Division one football,
got his bachelor's degree, charming, good looking guy.

Speaker 2 (27:31):
I get an entry level job.

Speaker 3 (27:33):
And I say it's Congress as a staff assistant, and
I work my way up to a legislative assistant.

Speaker 1 (27:37):
Wow. Yeah, So after that, I left Congress right after
and you're still getting high the whole time.

Speaker 2 (27:44):
No, I doesn't.

Speaker 3 (27:44):
When I got to d C, all I'm doing is drinking. Now,
no more I could. I didn't have a cocaine connection.
You really in DC around two thousand and two thousand
and one, two thousand and two, it was the kind
of place you would get ostracized.

Speaker 1 (27:57):
It's proud, you're not.

Speaker 2 (27:57):
Yeah, yeah, it's not. Now.

Speaker 3 (27:59):
Drinking was encouraged, but the cocaine stuff like that. You
could smoke some weed I smoked a little weed when
I was there, but the drinking was encouraged. Everybody drank
after hours in DC. What I noticed that you see
the Republicans the Democrats fighting all day on the house floor.
Then after hours they're all hanging out at Capital Lounge,
at one of the other Capital bars. They're all having

(28:19):
beers and shots together.

Speaker 2 (28:21):
But during that time, how are you twenty five and
two thousand, so twenty.

Speaker 1 (28:26):
Six, twenty six, and were you acting out sexually during
that time? So that was still that was still a
big part of your addiction then.

Speaker 2 (28:35):
Every yeah, every bit of part it. Yeah, it was.

Speaker 3 (28:38):
It would be a big part of my addiction until
the swat team got me in two thousand and eight.

Speaker 2 (28:42):
Got it.

Speaker 3 (28:42):
It's just that's one thing, like you know, see, you
know that was the thing with the molestation. It opened
me up to that behavior and everything. Every relationship to
me was about sex, about sex for me, not even
sex for anybody else. Right, So two thousand and one,
I leave the United States Congress and I go work
for a fundraising firm in DC and eventually I start

(29:05):
working for a guy running for president of United States
named Dick Geppart.

Speaker 2 (29:08):
He was a minority leader from Missouri in the US House.

Speaker 3 (29:13):
And when Dick drops out of the race in two
thousand and three, two thousand and four, he drops out
of the race for president, I moved back to Dallas
because I'm you know, I'm gonna be a stockbroker now,
and I'm gonna work for one of the biggest wall
street banks in the world, Ubs United Bank in Switzerland.
And it's at that job as a stockbroker in two
thousand and four that my life and the lives of

(29:33):
so many other innocent people are forever going to be changed.
Let me take you back to that day in two
thousand and four. So I'm passed out of sleep at work.
This other broker comes in.

Speaker 2 (29:42):
He sees me sleep, and he wakes me up. He's
visibly shaking, Damen, wake up. You can't sleep on this job.
The markets are open. You're messing with people's money. They'll
fire you if they catch you sleep in here. He said,
come on down the parking garage. I got something that'll
pick you up. So, man Sino, I follow this guy
in the parking garage. I think we're gonna do some blow, right.
I'm into blow. That was I'm in the blow. I'm
back in Dallas.

Speaker 3 (30:01):
Now I'm doing blow again. You know, I found my connects,
so I think we're gonna do some blow. We'll get
into his car. He hands me this glass pipe and
this crystal rocks in it. I've never seen a glass
pipe before. Man, the only thing I can associate with
a glass pipe is white trash.

Speaker 2 (30:17):
That's what I asked him, Man, is what is that?
He said, it's meth, crystal meth.

Speaker 3 (30:21):
And I was like, man, get that white trash stuff
away from me. He's like, Man, you don't even know
what you're talking about. Man, You're just you're repeating something
you've seen on TV. He said, this stuff is way
better than that cocaine that you do all the time.
You touch this stuff, you'll never want to do cocaine again.
But that sounded enticing to me because cocaine was a
hard drug to do, you know, you got to keep
doing it. It wasn't good for the sex stuff for me,
it wasn't good for my wallet, so I don't even

(30:44):
give it to me. So I smoked meth for the
first time, and it was like touching a live wires.
You know, I'm instantly hooked.

Speaker 2 (30:50):
In love, instant man in love. I fell in love
with that drug.

Speaker 3 (30:54):
It's the most evil, most destructive, most addictive drug ever
created by man. Smoked it one time and there I am.
I'm instantly hooked, and I started giving everything away for
that drug. Because that's what addicts do, right, We give
things away. We give up our goals to meet our behaviors.
That's what it says in the Big Book.

Speaker 2 (31:11):
And I've found that in life.

Speaker 3 (31:14):
When people hear the word addict, they think about drugs
or alcohol. But the truth is, you know, you can
be addicted to anything, food, money, clothing, shopping, sex, gambling, whatever,
the Internet, Instagram, pornography. Addicts give up their goals to
meet their behaviors. Driven people, focus people, successful people, non
addicted people. They give up bad behaviors to meet their goals.

(31:36):
But us addicts don't do that. We just give things away.
You can't steal from it. I found out also, you
can't steal from an addict. We'll give it to you,
We'll give it away.

Speaker 2 (31:44):
Job was first car savings account, apartment my family. In
eighteen months, I go from working on.

Speaker 3 (31:53):
Wall Street to living on the streets of Dallas. I'm homeless,
I'm living in dope hoalases. I've slept apart mentioned see No,
I've flipped in abandoned buildings. I slept in a lot
of cars at first.

Speaker 2 (32:03):
Too, just to keep a roof over me.

Speaker 1 (32:04):
Here, where's everybody at during that time? You must have
just pushed everybody away because you had a lot of friends,
you have family. People loved you.

Speaker 2 (32:11):
Man, that's a great question.

Speaker 3 (32:12):
So my family is in Port Arthur, Texas, six hours
away from where I am in Dallas, Texas.

Speaker 2 (32:17):
They know something's wrong with me when I lose my
job at ubs.

Speaker 1 (32:22):
Got fired?

Speaker 2 (32:22):
Got fired?

Speaker 3 (32:23):
Yeah, I got fired about six weeks after I hit
the meth for the first time.

Speaker 2 (32:28):
I was studying for my Series seven.

Speaker 3 (32:29):
During that time, in my series sixty three, my broker
licenses and I couldn't pass the test. I thought meth
was a wonder drug at first too. I'm up for
three or four days. This is great, I getting all
this stuff done. You know, no, it is, but ended
up being the worst thing because what goes up comes down.
And so they bring me the office after I failed
to Series seven and said you failed and you're fired.

Speaker 2 (32:51):
You gotta leave.

Speaker 1 (32:52):
Oh wow. And the first time you ever been fired.

Speaker 2 (32:54):
Now, I've been fired from a couple others.

Speaker 3 (32:56):
Well, I mean like smaller jobs in college, working at
a golf course or something like that.

Speaker 1 (32:59):
You know.

Speaker 3 (33:00):
But I can also say that substance abuse played a
role in all that stuff. And you know, the golf
course thing. When I got fired, I was drinking, you know,
at the job. So all this car, all the cart
guys were drinking. So but when I got fired that
day from UBS in two thousand and four, I was like, okay,
and they had a box, had all my stuff, box
stuff for me. They gave me a box. They escort

(33:22):
me out. I get my car and I called my
dealer up, a meth dealer, and I'm like, hey, what's
going on, man?

Speaker 2 (33:29):
What are you doing?

Speaker 1 (33:30):
Man?

Speaker 3 (33:30):
Just o we're here doing my thing. I said, cool,
it's cool. If I stopped by, I said, I got
off of work early today.

Speaker 2 (33:37):
That's what I told him.

Speaker 3 (33:38):
I got off work early today. I didn't tell him
I got fired. In my mind, I'm out of work
when we let get some more dope. It didn't even
phase me that I got fired. I got off work early.
I was off work for good. I never had another
job again until I got out of prison. Later on
in life, never had a real job again. But when
I lost my job at Ubs, my parents knew something
was wrong, but they didn't know what it was. And
I lived six hours away, and time they would have

(34:00):
called me, I lie to them.

Speaker 2 (34:01):
You know it is, you lie to them. Everything's great,
Oh it's great.

Speaker 1 (34:04):
Yeah, I just got promoted today.

Speaker 2 (34:06):
What are you doing for work? Working a software company?

Speaker 1 (34:08):
Now? Really?

Speaker 2 (34:08):
What he else sells software? You know? It's like at
one point I told was working for a limousine company. Me.

Speaker 3 (34:13):
It's like, you know, stuff that they couldn't track down
to find out. This is before the internet was really big. Yeah,
they're not googling anything in two thousand and five. So yeah,
that's what That's how I kept them in bay. They
knew something was wrong. Here's when it really like hit
the fan. We're talking about recovery today. So I wrote
a book called The Change Agent, and in this book
called It's My memoir, the autobiography. In this book, I

(34:36):
tell stories about my life and my addiction, and it
has to do a lot with my family too. There's
a story I tell in there about my grandmother and uh,
it's a very graphic story because in two thousand and five,
Hurricane Rita destroyed my parents' house one of those hurricanes.

Speaker 2 (34:53):
It is so uh.

Speaker 3 (34:55):
My grandmother, my dad's mother, who's like eighty eight years old,
lives with my parents at the time their house was destroyed.
My dad gets in the car with this eighty eight
year old mother, drives her to Dallas and this is
hurricane evacuation, so it takes thirty hours to do what
should be a five hour drive. Shows up in Dallas.
He said, hey, I need you to take care of
your grandma. We don't have a house anymore. We're gonna

(35:18):
sort this out. We don't have a place for her.
Can she stay with you? At this point in my
life's you know I mean? And he gave me a
call and told me he was coming, so it's not
like I didn't know, but I had to get everything
cleaned up. I've lost so much control of my life
at this point. I've got cartel guys that live in
my apartment and cut up their dope because I'm so
indebted to them and the meth that I'm smoking. I

(35:38):
don't have a job right This is in November of
two thousand and five. I've been out of work for
almost eighteen months at this point.

Speaker 2 (35:45):
Wow.

Speaker 3 (35:46):
And so the cartel guys have come over to my apartment.
I live in Uptown Dallas. Uptown's one of the nicest
parts of Dallas. They'll love and operate down in my place.
And they're giving me free dope.

Speaker 2 (35:56):
No free dope. So they tell him, tell my grandma's coming.

Speaker 3 (35:58):
And to their credit, the cartel guys, they understand a
lot of Hispanic families, understand the dynamic of family. They
got multigenerational homes. They understood your grandma's coming here. We're
gonna be respectful. They put their guns away, they clean
up all the Yeah, I mean, they're all packing. And
so when my grandmother, my dad draws my grandmother off
these cartel guys, everybody's gone. Just my roommate and I

(36:20):
who's he's he's on meth too. It's all apartments all.

Speaker 2 (36:24):
Quindelle looks good. He looks around.

Speaker 3 (36:25):
He's like, all right, this is great. You're gonna take
care of the grandma. Here's her credit card, So anything
you need for her, just put her on the credit
card and we'll take care of the bills at home.
See now, man for the next six weeks. My grandmother
lives in my bedroom.

Speaker 2 (36:39):
I moved out. I lived on the couch. She lives
in my bedroom.

Speaker 3 (36:42):
I don't know how to take care of her. I
bring her three meals a day inside of her room.
It's like a prison cell basically for her. I don't
bathe her.

Speaker 2 (36:48):
She's not bathing herself.

Speaker 3 (36:49):
I realize this. You know, you can't ignore the smell.
And I keep telling her see to take a bath.

Speaker 2 (36:55):
I call my mom. My Mom's like, you gotta bathe.
I don't do it. It's you know, I can't.

Speaker 3 (36:59):
I can't take care of myself. At this point, I
completely neglected my eighty eight year old grandmother for six weeks.

Speaker 2 (37:06):
I fed her with that credit card.

Speaker 3 (37:09):
The cartel guys got that credit card, took their family shopping,
you know, it took them to you know, I think
what really would open My parents understood something was wrong
Burlington coat factory. There was a bill for like fifteen
hundred dollars in Burlington coat factory. They're like, why why
are you taking grandma to fifteen hundred dollars worth of
Berlin the coach.

Speaker 2 (37:26):
I don't get that.

Speaker 3 (37:26):
But the cartel guys took that credit card and used
it all up. I mean, every resource was available to
me to take care of my grandma, and I completely
felt the biggest.

Speaker 2 (37:35):
Failure in my life. That's my family.

Speaker 3 (37:37):
You know, when the book The Change Agent, when I
was writing it, the publishers understood why I wanted to
have that story in there. My agent understood why I
want to have the story in there. But I still
had to talk to my dad about it. And I
guess his mom, you know, and she was dead already
at this point. But I went to my dad to say, listen,
I want to put the story a by Grandma in there.
It's like, tell me why you want to do it,
he said.

Speaker 2 (37:57):
I told him.

Speaker 3 (37:58):
I said, I want people to fully understand how bad
the disease of addiction is. That a human being will
neglect their blood, their family to the extent that I
neglect to my grandmother. I want them to see how
bad it got, and I want them to see what
I put everybody through. And I said, if I don't
have that picture in there, I don't think they've really understand,
do you know? See know that people get in touch

(38:18):
with me all the time about that book, and they'll
tell me that scene right there.

Speaker 2 (38:22):
Maybe understand why my brother.

Speaker 3 (38:23):
Oh, sister, beautiful man, whoever it was in my family
did what they did. And I finally forgave them because
I saw in your book what the addicts do.

Speaker 1 (38:32):
So, but how did you write that with your grandmother?
I'm just curious, did you write what? Did you make
a minster in your own special way? Have you forgiven
yourself for that?

Speaker 2 (38:41):
Absolutely? Absolutely?

Speaker 1 (38:42):
How did you do that though?

Speaker 2 (38:44):
For my grandmother? So I've made a lot of living
and amends and in recovery. You know how it works.

Speaker 3 (38:50):
The eighth step is where you make the list of
all the people you've harmed. The ninth step is where
you become you start making the amends. It says, except
where to do so it will cause them or you harm.
And so they had this little caveat the ninth step.
It's called a living Amen's my sponsor tells me about
it when I get out of prison. Living a mends
means you make the you go out and do good
deeds for people, and you expect nothing in return. And

(39:11):
so in my situation, we're gonna get into the crime stuff.
But I've got a lot of victims of my crimes
that I've committed a lot. I was a serial burglar,
I was the uptown burglar. I was the head of
an organized crime ring. I went down as the mastermint
of a Rico crew. Right, I've got a lot of
victims out there, but I cannot apologize to my victims.
In the state of Texas, it is a felony to
apologize to the victim of your crimes. They'll send you

(39:33):
back to prisons. You know, if you attempt to make
an apology, whether it's in person, in a podcast, anywhere
it is that you attempt to make an apology, that
apology is a felony conviction.

Speaker 2 (39:44):
You go right back to prison.

Speaker 3 (39:45):
So I can't apologize to the people that I've done
all this stuff too, because I think to do so
what it calls me harm Right, it's a caveat. So
in place of that, my sponsor is like, you just
got to go make living amends and you may be
doing this the rest of your life. And so put
my grandmother in the living in a men's list because
she died in two thousand and eight when I was
in Dallas County and Joe.

Speaker 1 (40:04):
So there's a big difference between an amends and an apology.
I'm sorry. Is the addicts anthem and amens? Is I
fucked up? There's no, Yeah, but there's no the reason
why I fucked up. And you're not a great guy
for paying somebody back the money that you stole from them. Yeah, yeah, right.

(40:26):
I always like to remind people that because you know,
addicts are so fucking selfish they want to put on Facebook.
They made men's to everybody. It's not the right way
to do it. No, okay. And for our love addict brothers,
you know we talk do a lot of love addiction.
Make sure the amens is clean in that you're not fishing.

Speaker 2 (40:43):
Yeah, you got close with the period at the end.

Speaker 1 (40:46):
Yeah, you know, I'm sorry for you know, stalking you
and doing all that. But you know, what are you
doing Friday night? Yeah you get that, right, brother, Yeah,
I got Let's just be clean. Anyways, that's a beautiful story, man,
and I get it.

Speaker 3 (41:01):
But I want to say something else about amends because
you know, if this can help anybody, and it's what
my sponsor told me. The purpose of the amends, the
main purpose, the primary purpose is for the person you've harmed.
It's to help free them from what you've done to them.
You're just a secondary reason to free yourself. You want
to free yourself from that too, because you don't want

(41:21):
to build a resembment against you so much that you
put in again. So the amends is good for everybody.
But here's what he told me about amends. He said,
every time you make an amends, just realize that no
one has to accept your amends.

Speaker 1 (41:34):
That's right.

Speaker 3 (41:35):
There's no requirements. Right, that's not even part of it.
You've got to make the amends. You've got to be
sincere about it. It doesn't have a calm. There's no
commas in amends. There's a period I fucked up, you know,
and that's it, and they don't have to accept it.
And I had some people when I made my ninth
step when I got out of prison, you were a
sorry son of a bitch. Then you're a sorry son
of a bitch now, And I'm like, all right, thanks.

Speaker 1 (41:56):
Right, you know, right, you don't argue your case. Yeah,
some people might go that's great to really appreciate it,
but fuck off. Yeah you're a fucking loser. I don't
want to ever see again. Yeah, it's okay, you gotta
say thank you.

Speaker 2 (42:06):
Move on. Yeah, thank you. Yeah. Keep your side of
the street clean.

Speaker 1 (42:09):
Keep your side of the street clean.

Speaker 2 (42:11):
All right.

Speaker 1 (42:12):
Now, let's talk about kind of the run of runs.
The knock on the door man, actually was it? Actually
a knock?

Speaker 2 (42:20):
Was it?

Speaker 3 (42:20):
Well before we get there. So we've got eighteen months
that I'm you know, hooked in the stuff. I'm homeless
at this point, and I started becoming a criminal. But
it's a petty criminal.

Speaker 2 (42:30):
At first.

Speaker 3 (42:31):
It's it's shoplift team, breaking into cars, breaking in the
storage units. Then I start breaking into people's houses. And
this is a serious crime because when I broke into
people's homes, I didn't just steal their property. I stole
their sense of security. I stole something from them. I
can't give them back. I can't fix that for them.
I can't apologize to them. You know, they live with
that for the rest of their lives. But after three

(42:52):
years of committy property crimes against the people of Dallas,
the Dallas Swat Team on July thirty, two thousand and
night puts an end to the Updoate burgeries. July thirty,
two thousand and eight, I'm sitting on this little radial
couch and this little Rundown apartment that are living in Dallas.
Sitting next to me in the couch that day is
my meth dealer. His name is Tex, and I'm telling
texts man, drop the meth off, get out of here

(43:14):
and go.

Speaker 2 (43:14):
The cops are closed in me. The end is near.
Ten days before this, this guy that I was doing
all these burglaries with in Dallas, Dustin. Dustin was my
partner in crime. He's my right hand man.

Speaker 3 (43:25):
Dustin knew everything about an organization, everything about how it worked.
There were about twelve methematics in the organized crime ring.
You know, young and old, male and female, black and white,
everything between, because drugs and addiction don't discriminate, right, No,
But Dustin, the main guy is in custody the Dallas
Police Department. So they got my partner in crime in custody.

Speaker 2 (43:45):
I know it's a matter of time.

Speaker 3 (43:46):
Before they have me in custody. Because the truth about
crime is everybody talks. You may get to see a
high profile case play out yet in America this year,
depending on what the Supreme Court decides, you may get
to see that high profile case play out. And if
you see that case play out, you're gonna to see
that every single person in.

Speaker 2 (44:02):
That conspiracy talked to the special prosecutor. Everybody talks. Man,
it's the human nature. And just as I passed the
pipe back to text, the window on my right blows
out and shatters, and tumbling across that living room floor
is a little canister going end over end. It's smoking
on one side. See, you know, I know what's going on. Man.

Speaker 3 (44:21):
I've seen this movie, brother, and I'm trying to get
out of there as fasts i can, but it's too late. Boom,
the flash bang grenade blews up in my face. Right,
white light, loud noise bowls me back on the couch.
And when I came to, when I can see it
here again, there's a cop standing over me in full
swat riot gear, his boodos on my chest, the barrel
of assault rifles digging in my eye socket, his fingers
over that trigger, and he's screaming at the.

Speaker 2 (44:42):
Top of his lungs. Don't move, don't move. And I
look up at this barrel and I'm like, man, don't worry,
don't worry.

Speaker 3 (44:48):
Right, So one of these Swat team guys comes in
the living room and he screams out out loud we
got him. We got the Uptown Burglar. That's the name
I'll live with for the rest of my life. You know,
I do want to say something else about that event.
I look back on that event the SWAT team raid
through a different lens.

Speaker 2 (45:09):
Now.

Speaker 3 (45:09):
You know one of the things I got When I
go around speaking, I talk about the finding the opportunity
of adversity. I believe that in every situation of adversity
there's an opportunity there somewhere. You know, you can find
some opportunity in any adversity. You just got to dig
for it. Sometimes a lot of times you gotta dig
for it. I look back at July thirty, two thousand
and eight. That's not just a day I was arrested.
That was the day I was rescued.

Speaker 2 (45:31):
I got pulled of a situation in life I couldn't
get myself out of.

Speaker 3 (45:34):
You know, the angels in my story don't have wings.
My angels had assault rifles and shields and helmets. My
angels came through the windows. They busted my door off
the hinges to pull me out of the world.

Speaker 2 (45:47):
I was in Dallas. What saved my life that day?

Speaker 3 (45:50):
And I'm saying this for a very clear reason that
a SWAT team raid is rare. Most people will never
experience that, but you will experience the SWAT teams of
life in one way another. A divorce, they're a bankruptcy,
They're a failed marriage. They're someone dying. They're your kid
getting hurt, your pet dying. These are the swat teams
of life that are coming for us. But we have

(46:11):
to be able to look for what the opportunity is
in the university when the SWAT team comes.

Speaker 1 (46:15):
But that didn't happen overnight. These were my angels that
took me. Hey, I'm getting taken away, and these are
my angels, and through the lens of it, like, man,
you walk.

Speaker 2 (46:26):
Me through that.

Speaker 1 (46:26):
Man, because I've been in that fucking van, I know
what that's like. Okay, and you're still fucking high. You
can't get high.

Speaker 3 (46:33):
Oh that's all I care about. When I get to
Dallas County Jail, they booked me in. The bond is
first of all, said at a quarter of a million dollars.

Speaker 2 (46:41):
Criminals are stupid. You know, we're stupid people when we're criminals.
I'm in Dallas count of jail.

Speaker 3 (46:46):
My dope is all out there somewhere in the streets, right,
I want to get out of jail and get high.

Speaker 2 (46:51):
And first of all, I don't want to be in
jail period. I'm on the phone.

Speaker 3 (46:55):
I know they're listening to calls. They tell you before
I recall, they're listening to them. I'm calling everybody from
the dope or that those money man, Hey, you owe
me money from this job, bring it up here, man,
get me out of here. I got to raise twenty
five thousand dollars. I'm like Jerry Lewis, holding a telethon
over here in the county jail with this phone that
they're recording, and every single person I'm calling, guess what
the cops are doing.

Speaker 2 (47:13):
They're going to picking them up, picking them up one.
I'm leading them. The biggest witness against me at my
trial was me. Yeah, that testified against me. I didn't
take the stand either, right, I testified those tapes.

Speaker 1 (47:25):
Just crazy meth junkie, crazy out.

Speaker 2 (47:27):
Of my mind. I'm calling everybody up in the dope world.

Speaker 3 (47:31):
And I get hit one night in Dallas County Jail
and I'm I'm asking people that are coming in an intake,
these cartel guys that I know from the streets, are
coming in.

Speaker 2 (47:39):
I mean, you got any dope?

Speaker 3 (47:39):
Can you get any dope in here? Guys are trying
to get me dope in Dallas County jail doesn't work.
I couldn't get any but in one night, within the
within the first month I'm in there, and one night
I get hit with like fifteen indictments.

Speaker 2 (47:53):
My bond was a quarter of million for that organized
crime charge.

Speaker 3 (47:55):
I get hit with like fifteen more indictments and each
one has a bond attached to it. Twenty four hours,
my bond goes from a quarter of a million dollars
to one point four million dollars off I had the biggest.

Speaker 2 (48:05):
Bond in Dallas. There's nine thousand people in Dallas County jails.
You know, it's one biggest jails in America.

Speaker 3 (48:11):
No one else, not murderers, not child molestor not rapists,
had a bond that high. And my crimes are property crimes.
You know, no one was ever home during these burgeries.
Made sure that no one got hurt, and the weapons
were used, no one was physically armed. These are property
crimes around drugs. But I've been burglarizing one of the
nicest places in Dallas for the last two to three years.

(48:33):
I've made the cops look bad all this stuff. Oh yeah, man,
I'm dropping there and make an example of you. I'm
dropping off stolen evidence in the hood. Man, I'm dropping
off in the barrio. Man stolen cars from the burglary.
First of all, I know that no one's home. One
of the first burglaries I did as I've broke into
a US post office, stole an mailman uniform, a mailman bag,
a mail Manhattan. Now I'm a ghost. I can walk

(48:53):
around all kinds of places dressed as a mailman.

Speaker 1 (48:55):
I love that these.

Speaker 3 (48:57):
Condo buildings that you to get, these condo buildings in uptown. Man,
I sit out of my vehicle and watch and wait
till the real mailman left. If you deliver the mail,
I put on my little hat, get my bag on,
and walk out there and walk. Now you got people
opening the security gate. We come on, mister mailman. They're
opening the gate for me. I'm going to the mail room.
The mail rooms and some of these places they are kiosk.
They have a key that opens the door. The mailman

(49:19):
has the key that opens the door. And inside that
room there's a bunch of boxes in there.

Speaker 2 (49:22):
It's a mailroom. On the outside, you got your box.
You're one little key, your key to your one little box.
You know, you get open your.

Speaker 3 (49:28):
Little post office box kiosk, four walls on it. If
I can get inside that room, which I could, I
could pick any.

Speaker 2 (49:35):
Kind of lock.

Speaker 3 (49:36):
Right, it's up a slave. Slaves are good. I would
pick that lock. Dressed as a mailman, go in there.
I get no suspicion because I'm the mailman going to
the mail room.

Speaker 2 (49:44):
Right. And inside that room, you got stacks of mail
in some of these boxes. No one's home.

Speaker 3 (49:49):
Your mail can't be piled up like that in your home.
Some of them had notes out of town from this
state to this date. Hold our mail, I know exactly
when you're coming home. Now, I'd put a list of
like four of those places together. It got sophisticated enough.
At one point I had a white box moving truck.
I had like no twelve dope fiends and dicky overalls,
one of them with a clipboard. We got dollies. We're

(50:10):
knocking out four condos in one weekend. Man, people are
getting the gates for us.

Speaker 2 (50:14):
Man.

Speaker 3 (50:14):
Wow, But that was the addiction, right, So here's the
other things. You know, I'm addicted to meth, but I'm
also addicted to the burgeries, right, the thrill, the sensation.
I'm getting high off of this stuff. When I start
planning these burgers out, I get the same endwarphin. You know,
it's flowing through me. I've become the mastermind of.

Speaker 2 (50:36):
This organized crime.

Speaker 3 (50:38):
It's all about math. Look, I don't have anything in
my name when the cops come get me. On July thirty,
two thousand and eight, I got a bunch of stolen
property at another apartment called the safe House, about two
million dollars worth of stolen stuff.

Speaker 2 (50:50):
Didn't even move, it just stacked up in there.

Speaker 1 (50:52):
Oh wow, Oh yeah.

Speaker 3 (50:54):
I would move enough dope every day to have enough
dope to smoke, that's it, and to give out to
some of the you know, the women around me, the
dope worlds and stuff like that.

Speaker 1 (51:02):
And how long were you held in jail in Dallas?

Speaker 3 (51:05):
So they arrest me that day. They jacked my bond
at one point four million. I'm not getting out. I
know that Dallas wants to take me to trial really bad,
because when they set your bond that high, they're telling you,
we want to make an example out of you.

Speaker 2 (51:17):
We don't want you to go anywhere. They got me
into a courtroom for my trial in ten months. That's
the rocket docket. Brother.

Speaker 3 (51:24):
If they can get you into a courtroom in ten
months for a big, complex organized crime case, a RICO case, man,
they are ready to get you. And man, I got
to that courtroom May eighteenth, two thousand and nine. I'm
standing in front of a jury that day. It's the
sixth and final day of my trial. It's a long trial, too, man,

(51:44):
for crimes where no one got hurt. These are property
crimes around meth. The evidence is overwhelming in my guilt.
And RICO works like this. RICO is racketeering influenced, corrupt organization.
The target of a RICO case is the mastermind they
got at the top. Rico laws are the law of parties,
and if you can prove that the guy at the
top is involved with what's going on with all the

(52:05):
other people, you can take all the crimes that everybody
else committed and he can go to trial for everybody's crimes.

Speaker 2 (52:11):
That's how RICO works.

Speaker 3 (52:13):
I'm at this trial for six days, and of course
I see some burglaries that I was on a lot
of burgers.

Speaker 2 (52:17):
I was on.

Speaker 3 (52:18):
I also see some burgeraries I didn't know anything about.
But I'm staying a trial for him because it's an
organized crime. It's a law of parties. I'm doing the
time for everybody in this trial.

Speaker 2 (52:27):
At the end of that long six day trial, the
jury went to deliberate for ten minutes.

Speaker 1 (52:33):
Ten minutes, brother, not a good sign, no man.

Speaker 2 (52:37):
I don't know how much loan order you watch, but
if a jury's gone for ten minutes, it means they
smoked you.

Speaker 3 (52:41):
They bring me back in the courtroom. I had two
paid attorneys. My parents got me two attorneys for this.
I didn't have quarter point attorneys.

Speaker 2 (52:47):
You know.

Speaker 3 (52:48):
I thought it, at worst I would get twenty years.
They bring me back to the courtroom, and the judge
reached the sentence. OL loud, damon, Joseph West.

Speaker 2 (52:57):
You are here by a sentence to sixty five years
in the Texas Department criminal just sixty five sixty five.
It's life.

Speaker 3 (53:04):
Sixty sixty is a life sentence in Texas. Anything sixty
and above is just window dressing for juries. Sixty five
ninety nine. The word life, it all means sixty because
you have to be seventeen to go to an adult prison,
and sixty and seventeen is a natural lifeman of a
human being.

Speaker 1 (53:20):
And how old are you at this time when you
got since thirty three years old? Thirty three years old?
And were you getting dope in the prison? No, so
you're stone cold sober now.

Speaker 3 (53:29):
Stone Colt July thirty, two thousand and eight. That's my
sobriety date. Now, it's not my recovery date.

Speaker 1 (53:33):
I understand that. Yeah, we'll get to that. Yeah, you
get hit with that fucking news. You look over at
your parents.

Speaker 3 (53:39):
Oh man, my first my mother gassed aloud, you know,
the sound only a mother can make when she hears
her son get a life in prison. This is my
first funny conviction either. See, you know I'm a white,
middle class guy. I got two paid attorneys.

Speaker 2 (53:52):
Man, this isn't supposed to happen to me, right, not
in the America that I know that happens to other people, right.

Speaker 1 (53:58):
No, man, you're that guy criminal. Yeah, oh yeah, you're
a stone called criminal.

Speaker 2 (54:03):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (54:03):
But in my mind I still had this uh looking
down on other people, saying like, oh I'm not like
the rusty guys.

Speaker 1 (54:09):
You're still delusion a little bit at that time.

Speaker 2 (54:11):
Yeah, I'm delusion at that point. I'm not where I
need to be.

Speaker 3 (54:13):
But I'm telling you, when I got sentenced to life
in prison, that day, that was the day that I
knew something got jarred loose inside of me. And that
was the day I knew that something changed, something had
to change, and that something was me right. But I
did not know how I would make that change.

Speaker 2 (54:27):
I didn't know I did. I call that the rock
bottom moment.

Speaker 1 (54:29):
The thing man that you know, I can just see
it in you, the thing that was interesting about you.
Even though you're doing these crazy things and robbing people,
you still had a little bit of your rightness that
was given to your parents, and you went rob people
when they were at home.

Speaker 2 (54:42):
Yeah, I mean I I knew what I was doing
was wrong, you know, I knew it. Man.

Speaker 3 (54:47):
I'm an addict though what I want when I wanted,
you know, but I didn't want to hurt anybody.

Speaker 2 (54:51):
I didn't want to have that on me and I
didn't want to do it to them.

Speaker 3 (54:55):
I didn't want to walk into someone's place when they're
there and one of us gets hurt, or one of
us gets killed, or both of us do you know,
so I went through great pains to make sure no
one was not pains.

Speaker 2 (55:06):
That's not the right turn. But I made sure that
no one was ever home.

Speaker 3 (55:09):
You know, you look for you know, you're above the
first floor of a condo building and see restaurant flyers
stuck in someone's door, or newspaper stacked up, or boxes
of mail. No one's home. They don't have a back door.
The back door goes to a balcony that's twenty thirty
feet in the air.

Speaker 2 (55:21):
Right. So that's some of the ways we found that
people weren't home.

Speaker 3 (55:24):
We had reverse people viewers that would change the lens
up on a door and you look in and make
sure no one's home. You knock on the door a
couple of times, see if you see any movement. You know,
you don't know when they're coming home on that. But
the mail room stuff was easy, man, I mean that
was the stuff. You know that no one's going to
be home for a little while.

Speaker 1 (55:39):
Walk me through this. Then boom, so they're going away.

Speaker 3 (55:43):
Brother sixty five years a job, sen us out loud.
They're on you fast, just like the movies. Man, they're
handcuffed me. They'd get me out of the court room.
I lock eyes my mom on the way out.

Speaker 2 (55:52):
I'm my mom. I'm sorry. I'm sorry.

Speaker 3 (55:54):
They whisked me out of there. They put me this
little side rooms got a bulletproof glass.

Speaker 2 (55:57):
They told me to wait.

Speaker 3 (55:58):
A few minutes later, my mom and my dad are
escorted on the other side of the glass. They're giving
my parents one last visit before go to prison. So
my mom does all the talking and she's like, baby, debts,
debts in life demand to be paid, and you just
got hit with one hell of a bill from the
state of Texas. But you did the things they said
you did, so you have to go and pay the
debt to society. She said, that's the Texas debt. You

(56:18):
owe you o Textas that debt, but you owe your
fight in the eye debt too, because we gave you
all the opportunities, love and support to be anything in life,
and this is how you repaid us. So here's the
debt you're gonna pay to us when you go to prison.
You will not get in one of these white hay groups,
one of these Arian Brotherhood type of gangs, because you're
scared because you're the minority in there. It's not gonna work.
You're never raised to be a racist. You're not gonna
start that now. She said, you will not get any

(56:40):
tattoos while you're inside that prison. So she says, no gangs,
no tattoos, you come back as the man that we raised,
or don't come back at all. I mean, I don't
know I'm gonna do this, man, but she reminds me,
this is.

Speaker 2 (56:55):
The debt you owe us.

Speaker 1 (56:56):
That's so powerful.

Speaker 3 (56:57):
Yeah, they bring me back to my pod, and now
I was kind of yeall, I got two on before
the prison bus comes to get me, you know, And
I'm asking every guy in county, he has been to
prison before, how am I gonna survive?

Speaker 2 (57:04):
What am I going to do? And every guy I'm
talking to, black, White, Asian, Hispanic, they're all saying the
same thing.

Speaker 3 (57:10):
You have to get to a gang. Everybody's telling me that.
They're telling me, I'm going to the worst part of
prison there is where the lifers live.

Speaker 2 (57:16):
I'm a lifer.

Speaker 3 (57:17):
They separate lifers out from everybody else. Lifers live with
other lifers, most dangerous.

Speaker 2 (57:21):
Part of prisons, hopeless part of prison. Right.

Speaker 3 (57:24):
There was this one guy though, that was so different,
This older black man named Mohammed. Mohammed's a career criminal man.
He's been an out of prison's entire life.

Speaker 2 (57:31):
But he's the most.

Speaker 3 (57:32):
Positive guy I've ever met in my life. He had
a smile on his face everywhere he went, and every
day he'd come up and check on me. So one
morning he comes up, He's got a couple of coffee
his hands and a smile on his face. He said, West,
I've been watching how you're dealing with his knuckleheads, and
these dummies talk about you got to get to a gang.
He said, don't list these fools. Let me tell you
what prison is really going to be like. So he
told me the first thing you need to understand about prison.

(57:54):
Prison is all about race. Race runs the whole institution.

Speaker 2 (57:58):
This is a black man telling me this. He said.

Speaker 3 (58:00):
The inmates wanted to be about race. When you walk
in the door, the white gangs get the first dips
on you. The Arian Brotherhood, the Arian Circle, the White Knights,
the Woods, he names all the white gangs.

Speaker 2 (58:08):
You fight them all. You survive that.

Speaker 3 (58:10):
Now you're fighting the black gangs, the crips, the blood
it's a gangster disciples. You survive that, you'll earn the
right to walk alone. He said, the strongest man in
prison always walks alone. He told me the truth about fightings,
you know. He said, you don't have to win all
your fights, but you do have to fight all your fights.
Some days you win, some days you lose. He saw
that it was losing me there at that point. He said, Wes,

(58:32):
let me break it down for you a different way.
He said, I want you to imagine prison as a
pot of boying water. He said, anything we put in
this pot of bloying water will be changed by the
heat and the pressure inside this pot. I'm gonna put
three things in this pot of boar and water and
watch how they change. A carrot, an egg, and a
coffee bean. So here's where I first heard the story
than coffee beans.

Speaker 2 (58:52):
The summer of two thousand and nine, and Dallas County
is laying it down. Yeah, man, he's laying it down.
So he walks me through it.

Speaker 3 (58:58):
The carrot goes in hard to the boy and water,
but become soft by the boiling water. The egg goes
in with that soft liquid inside, but the hard the
water turns that soft liquid inside hard. Your heart becomes
harder when you're the hard boiled egg, right, but he said,
the coffee bean the same pot of boiling water, changes
the pot of boiling water into a pot of coffee.
He said, it's the only thing that changes the water

(59:19):
because the coffee bean.

Speaker 2 (59:20):
Is the change agent. He said, the smallest of the
three things. Small like you. You can do this, he said.

Speaker 3 (59:26):
If you want to come back at someone of your
parents recognize you, gotta be like that coffee bean. In fact,
the last words you ever said, he's bonding out of
Dallas County Joe, I'm getting ready to be picked up
by the prison bus to go server life sentence.

Speaker 2 (59:37):
Four words from me in the way out the door,
he said, West be.

Speaker 1 (59:41):
A coffee bean that's stuck with you. That hit you,
and it hit me.

Speaker 3 (59:44):
It hit me because now I could understand that I
got three choices and the choice is mine. It put
the power back inside me. Right now, I've got a
little power.

Speaker 2 (59:52):
Over this thing. An addict.

Speaker 3 (59:54):
We have this idea, this idea of power. We think
we control a these other things we don't. We really
don't control a few things. But it reminded me that
those things were within my power. If I could keep
the power inside me, I wouldn't survive prison. I could
thrive inside that prison. And I know this for a
fact that it works because I took the coffee bean
message to the.

Speaker 2 (01:00:12):
Biggest part of war and one. There is a level
five super max prison in the state of Texas. Man
I walk in that first day.

Speaker 3 (01:00:19):
Within twenty minutes, I was going to fight with the
guy at the Arian Brotherhood beats me from one side
of the dayroom to the other. But I showed up
and I fought and I lost. That's what fighting looked
like for me for the first two months. I probably
got in three dozen fights the first two months, and
I lost seventy five percent of those fights. But I
won all the fights because I showed up to the fight,
because he told me, don't worry about the ones and losses,

(01:00:39):
just show up and fight. So two months of constant fighting,
the violence was finally over. The threat to my physical
safety was gone. At two months into prison, I was
finally accepted in there and I didn't have to fight anymore.

Speaker 2 (01:00:52):
And now I had to start working on myself. I
just start trying to become that coffee bean and it
was hard.

Speaker 1 (01:00:56):
You know, you want to get high in prison.

Speaker 3 (01:00:59):
No, the wind was knocked out of me. I'm gonna
tell you something about that too, when you get to prison.
So all the guys in prison had cell phones back then,
smuggling in the cell phones. About the guards right when
you walk in that first day. If you're a white guy,
they tell you you go over there, there's a white
guy with the phone. They google you, they go you
to what you're in there for. Oh, you know, we
got a burglar here. Or if you're a sex defender,

(01:01:20):
we got a sect. We got to show him over here.

Speaker 2 (01:01:21):
You know, whatever it is, they google you read your
name out loud.

Speaker 3 (01:01:25):
Everybody knows what your crime is because they put you
through Google. That's the technology in twenty ten. When I go,
when I when I report to the styles unit.

Speaker 2 (01:01:32):
And so.

Speaker 3 (01:01:34):
The second day I'm in prison, this guy comes and
bangs on my cell door. I'm in my cell man,
and I thought he's coming to fight me. He comes
to the door, he goes, wes, I got what you want, man,
And he shows me a bunch of crystal meth in
his hand. I'm like, man, I look at this meth.
I'm like, man, I'm good man, I'm done with that stuff.
He goes man, come on, man, I read all the
articles about you.

Speaker 2 (01:01:55):
I know this is what you want.

Speaker 3 (01:01:56):
This is your drug of choice, has terminology and everything, right,
I said, Man, I'm good man, he said, I'll be
back the minute you get in there.

Speaker 2 (01:02:04):
They know what your drug is.

Speaker 1 (01:02:05):
They're coming at you with it, man, And you weren't
tempted at all. It was gone from you. But you
had not been to meetings. You didn't have some right.

Speaker 2 (01:02:12):
No, but that story's coming, right, I know it is.

Speaker 1 (01:02:14):
Buddy's though, Why all of a sudden what happened? Though?
Something had to happen, though, Yeah, I told you scared.

Speaker 2 (01:02:19):
Get getting sentenced a life in prison knock something loose
inside me?

Speaker 3 (01:02:22):
Right? And now I'm serving this life since I've got
a lot of fear about this life. I don't know
if I'm ever going to go home again. I know
I'm up for parole in about seven years, but I
don't think I can make that first parole at this
point in prison. It's not even something I want to
mess with in life. I'm trying to survive. I want
survival mode and I want to get better. So I

(01:02:44):
start working on myself, you know, I start, I start
going before I go to the meetings. So I'm working
on myself, becoming a coffee and I start getting back
into shape, reading a lot, reading my Bible. Well, I
could quote your scripture and verse back then, and I
knew all that book front and back. Twenty eleven, I'm
in prison, Man, I've gotta sell mate from Louisiana and

(01:03:06):
he's a big time cocaine dealer in prison. Man, this
guy gets hid in his own shit every night. Man,
every night he's snorting rails. We had to clean and
sell in the prison. But I promise you he cleaned
it up with a toothbrush every night. Man, you do
not want to do a bunch of blow in a
ten by twelve. Brother, There's just nowhere to go.

Speaker 2 (01:03:20):
But one night, it's in twenty eleven, I'm laying in
my bunk, I read my Bible and.

Speaker 3 (01:03:26):
He's bouncing around doing blow tweaking out and I look
over and see this little tray that he has a
cocaine on.

Speaker 2 (01:03:32):
And see you.

Speaker 3 (01:03:33):
Now, I thought to myself, Man, I used to love
doing cocaine. I might do a little bit of cocaine tonight.
And I'm like, man, what is wrong with you? Damon
you destroyed your family, got all these victims, You destroyed
your life. You're serving life in prison, and now you're
thinking about doing this idiot's cocaine.

Speaker 2 (01:03:49):
And I'm reading my Bible. My Bible's laying on my chest.

Speaker 3 (01:03:51):
When I look at the cocaine, I realize I'm gonna
need something more than that Bible.

Speaker 2 (01:03:55):
That Bible's not gonna do it for me. I'm about
to lose it all. So I put in a permissions.
It's called an I sixty in Texas prison. I sixty
is a primissive slip to go take a class. I'm
dropping my slip to go to AA because I heard
these guys talking about their AA meeting. I get my slip,
tells me that the night before it's like a hall pass.
It's called a Alayan.

Speaker 3 (01:04:16):
Malayan says, report to the chapel for AA and NA
at seven thirty am.

Speaker 2 (01:04:21):
Now you know how his addicts thing.

Speaker 3 (01:04:23):
Man, we got these crazy thoughts, like all right, man,
I know that eighty percent of the people in prison
have substitute issues. Right, there's three thousand people in this prison.
That's twenty four hundred people that are about to be
at this meeting tomorrow.

Speaker 2 (01:04:34):
This AA meeting is going to be packed. We'll probably
need to have on a record. It'll be like a
Rolling Stones concert by the time we get there, right,
they'll need to bring guards. They're gonna bust guards in
from another unit. I'm fantasized with all that. How big
this meeting is gonna be.

Speaker 1 (01:04:46):
Man.

Speaker 2 (01:04:46):
I went to the Chapel of Hope the next morning
to my first an inn A meeting. There were fifty
guys of the twenty four hundred that needed to be there,
fifty showed up for a meeting to get the answers
to life and about why they think the way they do.
And I knew I was in the right room. I
finally found that.

Speaker 1 (01:05:04):
You felt like you're home. I was home too. I
was home, beautiful.

Speaker 2 (01:05:07):
I was home, you know.

Speaker 3 (01:05:09):
And we start the meeting. Is off that beautiful prayer,
that serenity prayer. God grant me the serenity to accept
the things I cannot change, the courage to change the
things I can, the wisdom of the difference.

Speaker 2 (01:05:18):
The guy that brings a meeting in from the free work,
we'll call him Rape protect his anonymity.

Speaker 3 (01:05:22):
Ray says, let's diagree in the serenity prayer. He has
a chalkboard behind him. He draws a line from one
side of the chalkboard the other. He said, that line
is God's line. Damon, he said, it's bigger than the
Chalkboard's infinitely long. You can't fathom the side of this line.

Speaker 2 (01:05:34):
He said. The first part of the prayer, God grant
me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change.
He said.

Speaker 3 (01:05:39):
The things you can't change your own God's line. And
every time you try to touch them on God's line,
you hurt yourself and you hurt the people because you're
not God and God doesn't need your help doing his job.
Stay off of God's line. You got your own line.
He goes in and races a little inch out of
God's line on the chalkboard. He holds his fingers up
an inch apart for the entire room to see. He said,
if God's line is infinitely long, there's your line.

Speaker 2 (01:06:00):
You got one inch.

Speaker 3 (01:06:02):
He said that little one inch line was called humility,
he said, because when we are humble, we are now
the right size.

Speaker 2 (01:06:07):
To help other people. He says, it's the second part
of the prayer, the courage to change the things I
can He said, the things you can change or in
your little one inch humble line, and there's four things
God gives you every day to work on it. These
are the four things you control in your life. What
you think, what you.

Speaker 3 (01:06:22):
Say, what you feel, and what you do. Boom, what
you think, what you say, what you feel, when you
he said. If it's not one of those four things,
you have zero control over it.

Speaker 2 (01:06:33):
He said. The biggest problem for us.

Speaker 3 (01:06:34):
Adding is we don't know that last line of the
prayer is the wisdom to know the difference between that
big line and that little bitty line. I can't tell
you how many times a day in this life right
now in twenty twenty four wh're recording this that I
come up to a decision and I say, that's not
on my line, God, walk away, It's not on my line.

(01:06:55):
So that's one of the first things I learned in
the program recovery. I learned that the first step, the
first step of the twelve steps, had two parts to it.
You know that you admitted you were powerless and that
your life had become unmanageable. I can't tell you how
many guys I would come in there after these meetings.
I'm on fire after a meeting on Wednesday morning, I'm
talking to these guys that I know their addicts are
doing drugs and drinking in the pod.

Speaker 2 (01:07:17):
Man, come to this meeting with me.

Speaker 3 (01:07:18):
Man, you know what I'm telling them about the steps
and the guy's like, oh, man, I admitted, Man, I'm
powerless over it.

Speaker 2 (01:07:23):
But my life's not unmanageable. Dude. You're wearing a white
prison uniform.

Speaker 3 (01:07:26):
Man, someone's gonna tell you when to eat, when the shit,
when you go to the store, when you do anything
that's the height of unmanageability. You have turned over your
life for someone else to manage because you're an inmate
in a prison.

Speaker 2 (01:07:38):
But we can't see that when we're in our addiction.
We can't see that.

Speaker 3 (01:07:42):
And so I started working this program of recovery, and
it really gave me the tools I needed to live life,
not just the understanding of the addiction, which I got
that from it too.

Speaker 2 (01:07:53):
We came across these four spiritual.

Speaker 3 (01:07:55):
Principles, you know, unselfish, honest, pure and loving, fish honest,
purer and lovely. I can plug every decision I want
to make in the life into that matrix. No, and
if the things I want to do in life are
not unselfish, honest, pure and loving. Then they're on the
other side of the spectrum over there, selfish, self seeking,
self want, self desire, self delusion, when you believe your

(01:08:16):
own crap. Right, that's where you live in your addiction.
On the other side of the board, your.

Speaker 1 (01:08:22):
Mom and your dad, I know you visited you one
hundred and fifty times in prison work. Yeah, yeah, God
bless her.

Speaker 2 (01:08:29):
I'm building mama house right now, man, are you.

Speaker 3 (01:08:31):
My dad died last year, stage four colon cancer. But
he got to see me turn it all around. No
regrets there, but he asked me to take care of
my mom, and I would anyway. So I'm gonna build her.
I'm building her a house on my property right now.
And it's so good to be able to do that.

Speaker 2 (01:08:43):
Now. We take care of our family, don't don't take
care of Yeah, yeah, man, so we can do it.

Speaker 1 (01:08:48):
That's what we do now.

Speaker 2 (01:08:49):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (01:08:49):
So, But to answer your question, I got into recovery
in July twenty eleven.

Speaker 2 (01:08:54):
Okay, I started living in recovery.

Speaker 1 (01:08:56):
Let's go forward to prole hearing.

Speaker 2 (01:08:58):
What year we at twenty fifteen?

Speaker 1 (01:09:00):
You served how many years at that point?

Speaker 2 (01:09:02):
Seven? Years, three months, right, What do you think is
going to happen that day? I don't think.

Speaker 3 (01:09:06):
Well, I know him for parole, but I don't think
I can make paroles, you know, not my first time
my life. No one makes that first parole in life.
I'm working in the chapel that day. I'm a chapel clerk.
The chaplain comes in. Chaplin vaunts, he said, West Securities here, man,
they're looking for you. The parole boar's here to see you.
Security is going to take you to parole right now.
And I'm man, I'm so nervous because I mean, I
want to make paroles so bad. You know what it is, man,

(01:09:27):
You want this so bad. You want to get out
of prison. So go to the parole off So the
lady calls me in from parole. She says, have a seat.
She's got my criminal file in front of her. It's
about this stick I'm in. For everybody listening, I'm holding
my fingers about an inch and a half apart. It's
your jacket. Everything about you's in your jacket. Your a
whole life story, every arrest, every felony. And she's flipping
through the pages of my jacket for about twenty seconds.

Speaker 2 (01:09:47):
You know.

Speaker 3 (01:09:47):
She slams a file shut, she pushes away from her.
She said, mister West, I came here today to ask
you one question for your parole here, one question.

Speaker 2 (01:09:56):
Test.

Speaker 3 (01:09:56):
The answer to my question decides whether or not you
go home, you stay in prison. But the answer to
my question is not not file about the guy I'm
read about it who committed those crimes in Dallas all
those years ago. She said, we don't see a lot
of Dame and West come through our system. To be
honest with you, because you had it all. You had
every advantage, every privilege, and every opportunity over everybody's entire life.
She said, you are the definition of a privileged person
in America. But she blew through your privilege. She became

(01:10:17):
a drug addict, a criminal, a thief. A jury in
Dallas gave you life in prison for the thing you did.
But instead of you're letting you're letting your license define you.
You changed yourself inside this prison. But she said, we
got our attention is you didn't just change yourself, you.

Speaker 2 (01:10:30):
Changed the entire prison. One man changes his whole prison.

Speaker 3 (01:10:33):
So my question for you is this, mister West, if
you could be remembered for being anything in life, anything
at all.

Speaker 2 (01:10:40):
She said, tell me what that would be, but give
it to me in just one word. Go see. No,
I knew the answer that question. I've been living that
answer because I've been living in recovery all those years.
The answer I gave her was the answer of useful,
the same thing Ray said you can be when you
live on your little humble line and can be useful again.

Speaker 3 (01:10:57):
Yes, and that's what I told her. I said, I
could be you useful. That's what I want to be
as useful. I can be useful in this prison. I
could be used fun in the free world. Finding more
coffee means November sixteen, twenty fifteen. So no, I walk
out a Texas prison, right, but I'm not a freeman
because you're not looking at a freeman in front of you.
I got a little more time went on. I'm on
parole to the year two thousand and seventy three.

Speaker 1 (01:11:18):
Did you have to report to travel here? Yeah, that's right.

Speaker 2 (01:11:20):
Do you get a travel for a minute?

Speaker 1 (01:11:22):
You getsion?

Speaker 2 (01:11:22):
How did you give permission to come?

Speaker 1 (01:11:23):
That's right? You give here doing God's work? Yeah, Lea's
here doing God's work.

Speaker 2 (01:11:28):
Parole knows I'm here man, but parole loves me.

Speaker 3 (01:11:30):
I mean, look, man, two years I was out of parole,
they came up to me in a parole meeting and said,
you don't have to go to a meetings anymore because
you said to bring a slip inn right though my
parole off sure at the time, said well you don't
have to you have to bring his slips anymore.

Speaker 2 (01:11:44):
You have to go to ad anymore. I was like, look,
if I stopped going to my meetings, right, I'm gonna
go back to prison. That's right. She said, well you
understand that.

Speaker 3 (01:11:50):
She said, I would advise you, mister West, keep working
your program. Don't worry about Texas program working.

Speaker 1 (01:11:55):
Oh god, I love that.

Speaker 2 (01:11:56):
Yeah, she said, keep working your program, and I do.
I got agree.

Speaker 3 (01:12:00):
The first day I get out of prison, right, my
parents are there to have picked me up. They bring
me home that first night I hit my first meeting. Right,
Ray is that is his home group. I go to
prison right in the town where I'm gonna live. Right,
The prison's right there in Beaumont, Texas. That's where the
Styles Unit is. I would tell Ray whenever he brings
the meeting to the Styles Unit all the time. Hey, Ray,
when I get out of prison and I find your

(01:12:20):
home group, your homegrow's going to be my home group.
You're gonna be my sponsor one day. And Ray would
kind of laugh it off. Man, he brings the AA
meeting to a maximum security prison. He gets lied to
more than the police get lied to.

Speaker 2 (01:12:30):
Right.

Speaker 3 (01:12:31):
But that first day, November sixteen, twenty fifteen, I walk
out of prison, it's Monday.

Speaker 2 (01:12:37):
I hit my first meeting. I raised home group.

Speaker 3 (01:12:39):
They keep it simple group, and I walk in the
door and raise like, man, you made it, Damon. I
was like, yeah, man, and I need that sponsor. Ray,
I don't want to go back. He said, I'll be
your sponsor under a certain a couple of conditions. One
is that you'll go to any leans to stay sober.
Another one is if you ever ever thought of drinking
or doing drugs, you call me first.

Speaker 2 (01:12:58):
I do it. So we start working this sponsor sponsor meeting.

Speaker 3 (01:13:01):
About a month out of prison. He comes into the
sponsor meeting with me. He looks at me because I'm
worried about your Damon. I think you're about to go
back to prison. That got my attention. I just got
out of prison a month ago. I said, what do
you mean? He said, well, you're stuck inside yourself. No
one has ever been stuck inside theirself. Is working in
a program recovery, you're not working your program.

Speaker 2 (01:13:19):
I'm do them my meetings. I'm here meeting you right now.

Speaker 3 (01:13:21):
He said, you know what I mean. You're stuck inside yourself.
You're so mad, you're upset. I said, I knew he's
talking about. I wanted to go share my story. No
one will let me in at first.

Speaker 2 (01:13:29):
You know, I'm an x con. No school is going
to let me in, you know. And that's so I
told him. I said, no one wants me.

Speaker 3 (01:13:34):
I'm an x con. What am I supposed to do?
He said, no, you're really in trouble now. Self pity's
kicking in. He said, you're really in trouble, damon. He said,
you need to find a service work project. That's the
only way you're gonna stay sober and you're gonna stay
out of prison. He said, go to an old folks
He's an old guy. He's not PC. He said, go
to an old folks home. Go to the front desk.
Ask him for a list of people who never get
visitors They're going to give you a list a mile long,

(01:13:55):
he said.

Speaker 2 (01:13:56):
They don't care about your feeling.

Speaker 3 (01:13:57):
You know the kind of filming the word Go spend
your weekend this weekend visiting with people that never get visitors.
Come back on Monday and tell me about your life.
He said, you'd promise you go to any leans to
say sober.

Speaker 2 (01:14:08):
So I did it, man.

Speaker 3 (01:14:09):
I went and spent a weekend and I visited with
people that weekend that had had a visitor in ten years.

Speaker 2 (01:14:14):
Wow, ten years, brother, yea makes me.

Speaker 3 (01:14:17):
I mean, it makes a cheer up talk about just
because I mean, hell, I know what it's like to
live in the institution. Brother, I know these people lived
in a different kind of prison. I just spent Saturday
and Sunday just listening to people just talk and talk
and talk because no one's there to listen to them.

Speaker 2 (01:14:30):
And that became.

Speaker 3 (01:14:30):
That was the service work project I did for months
before any of the speaking stuff started, before I became
one of the most in demand speakers in America. I
spent my weekends in nursing homes, visiting old people whose
families are forgotten. Thirteen months out of prison. The other stipulation,
he said, to be my sponsor.

Speaker 2 (01:14:47):
Happens.

Speaker 3 (01:14:47):
I'm at a Christmas party with my friend and his
wife thirteen months on December twenty sixteen.

Speaker 2 (01:14:53):
My friend's wife is drinking this glass of wine. So
you know, the glass of wine smells good. Brother, I
can smell the grapes in this thing. Can tell you
probably where they were crushed. Right. I'm like, I'm gonna
have a glass of wine. Hell yeah. And the minute
of the thought comes in, I'm like, whoa wait a second,
And I remember what Ray said, if you ever have
a thought, call me. So I told my friend and

(01:15:15):
his wife I got to go. I get to my car.

Speaker 3 (01:15:17):
I don't even start my car. I'm shaking a little bit.
A call Ray up, Hey, raised something terrible just happened.
I told him I was at a party.

Speaker 2 (01:15:23):
What happened? He laughed at me. I said, what are
you laughing at? Man?

Speaker 3 (01:15:25):
Almost took a drink of wine. He said, you're an
alcoholic and addict. Damon, You're gonna have.

Speaker 2 (01:15:29):
These thoughts the rest of your life. He said, your
brain has a thing called you for a recall. You
for a recall when we want to remember the good
stuff in life. He said, did you ever have some
good times when were out there drinking, doing drugs. He said,
I sure did.

Speaker 3 (01:15:40):
He said, yeah, I had some good times. He said, yeah,
but you had more bad times. And but your brain,
you're far enough from prison now you're forgetting about the
bad times. And that's when he told me about you know,
we have a three part thought process.

Speaker 2 (01:15:51):
We have a thought that.

Speaker 3 (01:15:52):
If it will become an obsession, if you leave it
in there long enough to have become ab session will
become something physical will put in he said, So you
use your first in the program recovery, which is to
call somebody congratulations.

Speaker 2 (01:16:03):
He said.

Speaker 3 (01:16:03):
The second tool we're going to use tonight is called
playing the tape out all the way to the end.
So he said, I want you to imagine you're back
at that party and you're having that glass of wine.
He said, you drinking the wine? All right, I'm drinking
the wine. He said, good, dad, did you drinking wine?
What did you drink in the world?

Speaker 2 (01:16:16):
What was your drink?

Speaker 1 (01:16:17):
I was like bourbon.

Speaker 2 (01:16:18):
I was a bourbon guy. He said, well, good, drink
your drink your bourbon. Why are you drinking wine? If
you like bourbon, drink bourbon? All right, I'm drinking bourbon.

Speaker 3 (01:16:25):
He said, let's do some drugs. Now, what drugs you
did you do when you're drinking bourbon? I was like cocaine,
because cocaine and bourbon, you know, go together.

Speaker 1 (01:16:31):
Really what they do, sir?

Speaker 2 (01:16:32):
And he said, yes they do. That's what he said
to me too. He said, yes they do. He said,
but Damon, I remember your story. Your story wasn't about cocaine.
What was that drug that did you in? What was
your drug? A choice? And he snapping his fingers. I
said meth. He said, that's right, you were a methad.

Speaker 3 (01:16:49):
He said, So what I want you to do now
is I want you to smoke some of that myth
that you like so much, because that's what the wine,
the bourbon, and the cocaine is really telling you. You
want to smoke meth tonight at that Christmas party. Damon,
you're not trying to drink glass of mine. You want
the good stuff.

Speaker 2 (01:17:01):
You want meth. So smoke your meth. You're smoking it? Yeah,
all right, I'm smoking it. He said. Good. He said,
how's parole going for you? I said, damn, I don't
even think about parole. He said, what addicts do think about?

Speaker 3 (01:17:13):
That?

Speaker 2 (01:17:13):
In addiction.

Speaker 3 (01:17:13):
We don't think about our kids, our families, our jobs,
or we give our things away. That's when he told me,
we give up our goals to meet our behaviors. He said,
what a parole. Tell you what happened if you violated
your parole. I got to go back to prison and
finish my life sentence.

Speaker 2 (01:17:27):
That's what they told me. You go back to the
rest of your life. You don't get a third chance.
You got your second.

Speaker 1 (01:17:30):
You're done.

Speaker 3 (01:17:31):
He said, So where are you now? I said, I'm
on that prison bus. Man, I'm chained up to another
human beings. That's how they transport. They chained you up
to another human I said. I I destroyed my family's
life and destroyed my life again. I'm going back for.

Speaker 2 (01:17:42):
The rest of my life.

Speaker 3 (01:17:43):
He goes, yeah, yeah, man, Yeah you are, He said.
I remember those bus rides, man, they're long. He said,
you're gonna be starving by the time you get to prison.
He said, I want you to imagine yourself getting into prison.
Go into your cell, put your mattress down, put your
bags down, hurry down to.

Speaker 2 (01:17:55):
The chow haul.

Speaker 3 (01:17:56):
Get that last meal of the day. He said, what
was the worst meal? They ever served in prison. I
mean see, you know, without hesitation, I could tell him
pork noodle cast role. Oh fuck, I don't even know
what's in this stuff. Man, there was a piggy.

Speaker 1 (01:18:07):
Nobody does.

Speaker 2 (01:18:07):
I found a pigure one time in mine? Yeah, Harry,
pigger with a yellow tag in it. Man.

Speaker 3 (01:18:11):
So he said, go to the chow ho get you
a big bowl of port nout to cast role. Sit
down at that metal table and wash that food down
with that glass of wine.

Speaker 2 (01:18:20):
You're a meant to have to night mm hm, because
that's where that glass of wine is going to take
you back to the Chowhat important new cast role? Right,
He's like, you got it? I said, yeah, I got it.
He said good. He said, go to the party. Go
back to the party, have a good time with your friends.
Anytime you have a thought, you need me, call me,
and he hung up on me. That's the program at work, man,
make the call, made the call, make the call, But

(01:18:41):
you got to put into work. You want to put it?

Speaker 1 (01:18:43):
Who got four minutes? Brother? Oh man, this let's just
go through it. You went back to school. Let's just
talk about the great things, yeah, including me in this
gal being a dad. Let's just go yeah, just list them.
Let's all the great ship you're doing.

Speaker 2 (01:18:54):
So, man, I go back to school. I get a
master's degree in criminal justice. You do. I become a
professor at the University of Houston.

Speaker 1 (01:19:00):
I guess you do.

Speaker 3 (01:19:00):
I teach a class called Prisons in America, motherfucker, the
only professor on earth to teach a prison's class who
lived in prison. I became a husband and a stepfather.
Got married in twenty nineteen to a woman in Kendorra Merrow.
My little step daughter's name Clara. I started a foundation
called the bea Coffee Being Foundation, and I've got a
bunch of money raised. We raised money for kids who
have incarcerated parents, provide extracurricular scholarships for them because children

(01:19:22):
who have incarcerated parents are more like a go to prison.
The parole board, the same parole board that owns me
to twenty seventy three, they reached out to me and
asked me to create a curriculum for the Texas prison
system and teach men and women how to think like
me they're in prison. I've got a class I graduate
every four months called the Change Agent Prison Curriculum.

Speaker 2 (01:19:38):
Yes, and maybe one of the coolest things is that
I found Mohammed. He was dead.

Speaker 3 (01:19:43):
He dive and opied overdose in twenty seventeen in Dallas, Texas.
The man who told me the story of the Coffee
mean So I went to find his family. Found his family,
great family, and every year I put ten thousand dollars
into a trust for a scholarship. It's called his real
name is James lenn Baker. The second It's called the
James Lende Baker the Second be a Coffee Bean Scholarship.
And every year the family picks the winter, one little

(01:20:04):
boy or one little girl in South Dallas gets a
better chance at life through an education. Because these two
guys met up in Dallas County Joe on two thousand
and nine. So I got this incredible life. I've gone
on to become a speaker. My stories took off. The
Coffee Bean became a best selling book in twenty nineteen,
right before the world became a pot of boling water
in twenty twenty, the entire world was looking for the
message to get them through it. They show up with

(01:20:25):
the Coffee Bean, and my life took off. From this
vertical in client I become an entrepreneur. I become a
family man, but I stay sober every day. I still
go to two or three meetings of weeks. You know,
I got two apps on my phone that'll tell me
where the meetings are in every city.

Speaker 2 (01:20:38):
I'm in touching the code. Everything I put in front
of my recovery, I'll lose. I know this.

Speaker 3 (01:20:44):
Anything I put in front of my recovery, I lose.
So my recovery comes first. My wife knows that. My
stepdaughter knows.

Speaker 2 (01:20:49):
I had to leave the other night.

Speaker 3 (01:20:51):
I was at home for a couple of days but
had to go to a meeting at seven o'clock because
I got to get my meeting in.

Speaker 2 (01:20:55):
My stepdaughter knows, you got to get my meeting in.
So everybody in my.

Speaker 3 (01:20:58):
Family knows that, and there's supportive of that. But I'm
telling you this, man, it's a one day at a
time type deal. One day every day, I get up
and I have this prayer that I've been praying since
I got into recovery in twenty eleven. I say, God,
put in front of me what you need me to
do today for you, and let me recognize that when
I see it, because I don't want to miss whatever

(01:21:19):
that is bohm.

Speaker 2 (01:21:20):
Amen, brother, thank you.

Speaker 1 (01:21:22):
Where can people find you?

Speaker 3 (01:21:23):
Man, Damonwest dot org d A m O n wst
at dot org at Damon West seven on Instagram and Twitter.
If you want me to speak, find me on my website,
Damonwest dot org. Books are available anywhere books are sold.

Speaker 1 (01:21:36):
Thank you, brother, God bless you. Thank you for making time.

Speaker 2 (01:21:38):
Brother, thanks thanks for making good great man.

Speaker 1 (01:21:41):
It's good stuff, all right you bye, Thank you. The
Sino Show is a production of iHeart Podcasts, hosted by
me Cena McFarlane, produced by pod People and twenty eighth
av Our. Lead producer is Keith carlak Our Executive producer
is Lindsey Hoffman. Marketing lead is Ashley Weaver. Thank you

(01:22:01):
so much for listening. We'll see you next week.

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