What Serving 7 Years in Prison Taught Damon West About Communication

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On today's episode, I have one of the wildest comeback stories you'll probably ever hear.

And me personally, one of the best examples of how the next conversation truly can change everything about your life.

I want you to hear this story because it's just so cool.

And he's also a Southeast Texas boy like me is Damon West.

Damon, how you doing, man?

Jefferson, I'm good, man.

It's good to finally meet you.

It's weird that we're meeting like this.

We were neighbors, but we've never met each other this in person, right?

I know.

So Damon, Damon is from a town that's probably, what, 20 minutes away?

Yeah.

Roundabout.

You know, I was...

Niederland, right?

Yeah, I'm in Niederland.

Actually, I was in your part of the world this past weekend.

My wife having a big lawn landscaping project in the biggest nursery in our area is the town where you are.

Yeah, over in Sillspeak.

There's signs everywhere.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Oh, yeah.

We're trying to do it right.

Everything is Southeast Texas.

So if you hear my accent come out a little bit more, that's because I'm talking to Damon.

And

this is how we communicate.

Brother's good to hear from you, Damon.

I know, I know.

Everybody's going to go, that's what he really sounds like.

That's exactly right.

Damon, one of the reasons I want y'all to hear from Damon, aside from him just being such a cool guy, is that he has one of the best stories I truly think you'll ever hear.

It's a path of redemption.

It's a path of

how you communicate can truly change your life.

So, Damon, I want to start with the question

right now, and then I want to talk about your story, is because I'm curious how this has changed in your life.

Damon, as you exist right now, Damon West, how do you daily, how do you talk to your self?

This is a great question, Jefferson.

So, and I talk to this about people when I'm speaking.

I don't listen to myself much anymore.

And this is a technique I picked up when I was in prison because I found out that the voice in my head sometimes was fear talking to me.

And it's very hard sometimes to distinguish what's saying.

You know, is it fear?

Is it anger?

What's going on inside your head?

But I know that if I talk to myself, the voice that I'm hearing on the outside is the voice I want to project out there.

And when I talk to myself, which is often, I'm telling myself things like, no, you can do this.

You will do this.

You've done big things before.

One of the things I really try to do, Jefferson, when I talk to myself is I remind myself of the times that I succeeded.

And I think this is very important in life.

We have to remind ourselves of the times when we've had success, the times that we won.

And that way we can tell ourselves, you know, I've done hard things so I could do hard things again.

It's one of the lessons I talk about.

You ever seen the movie Shaw Shank Redemption?

I have.

I have seen the movie.

It's a great movie.

It's one of the best movies ever.

But the last scene of the movie is, you know, Andy Dufran is, you know, he's escaped prison.

He's on the beach in Mexico working on his boat.

The town in Mexico that he's in is Zi Huataneo, Mexico.

And the reason why this Zuataneo place is important, because Andy visualized himself and he talked to himself while he was in prison about the town of Zihuataneo.

He was going to be there one day.

And so what I'd like to remind people is that the hardest prison to do time in is the prison of your mind.

Jefferson, I meet more people out here in the free world that are locked up than I ever did when I served time in a rural prison because more people are in prison by their thoughts, their things, and their prejudices than by steel bars and barbed wire and concrete combined.

So I want to make sure I tee this up the right way.

What I hear you saying is, you know what, I don't know if I listen to myself, at least those negative thoughts.

I focus on the things where I know I've had success in the past.

So for our listeners right now,

I want you in a nutshell to tell them this incredible story

starting from this guy in Southeast Texas, the road that has led you here, my friend.

Yeah, I think the best place to start this story is

May 18th, 2009.

On May 18th, 2009, Jefferson, I'm standing in front of a jury in Dallas.

And the jury, these 12 men and women, this jury of my peers, they just set through a six-day criminal trial.

And I'm on trial for my life at this point.

And the crime that I'm standing on trial for, Jefferson, is engaging organized criminal activity.

It's a RICO case in the city of Dallas.

I was the lead person of this whole organized crime ring.

I was the lead meth addict.

It was a bunch of other meth addicts breaking into people's homes to steal for drugs.

None of the crimes were aggravated, meaning no one was ever home, so no one got physically hurt.

But when I broke into people's homes, Jefferson, I didn't just steal their property.

I stole their sense of security.

And that's something I can't replace and I can't give back.

So the jury hears the story of Damon West, this guy that grew up in Southeast Texas, grew up in a little town called Port Arthur,

Great family, great athletic background, you know, in Texas sports is everything.

I grew up into the Friday Night Lights, went on to be a Division I starting quarterback at the University of North Texas, got hurt, and then got into drugs at that point whenever I after I got hurt in college.

But I had some really good jobs.

I was a very functional addict.

I worked in Congress in D.C.

I worked for a guy running for president.

Then I worked on Wall Street in 2004 in Dallas.

And that was the time that I was introduced to meth for the first time in 2004.

And then it spanned from 2004 to 2008.

I went from living on Wall Street, working on Wall Street to living on the streets of Dallas.

And whenever I was living on the streets, I became a drug addict.

I became a criminal.

I broke into people's homes.

And Dallas SWAT finally took me down in 2008.

And so the jury, after a six-day criminal trial, listening to all the evidence, and the evidence was overwhelming.

I was guilty of everything they said, Jefferson.

The jury listened.

And that's one of the biggest things, communication.

They listened to the evidence well and they came back after a 10-minute recess i mean deliberations were 10 minutes jefferson you're a lawyer man you know what that means

yeah i know what that if when they uh anybody listening the jury when they've made a decision typically there's some kind of bell or a ding and if they ding really quickly

That's when you know it's a landslide for somebody.

Oh, yeah.

And if you're the criminal defendant standing there on a first-degree felony and when the jury came back so quickly, you know, Jefferson, you'll like this as a lawyer.

I had two lawyers at my trial.

I didn't have a court-appointed attorney.

My parents cashed in their retirement to get me two paid attorneys.

And one of my lawyers, a woman named Karen Lambert, she looked at me.

She said, brace yourself.

This is going to be bad.

And I'm like, how bad, Karen?

She said, well, you were gone for that brief 10 minutes.

The jury sent a note into the judge from the jury room.

They asked if they could give you life without parole.

And I mean, I was stunned, Jefferson.

I mean, these are property crimes, man.

No one was ever hurt.

And I was like, what did the judge say?

She said, well, no, you can't give him life without parole, but you can give him life.

And that is exactly what the jury did, Jefferson.

They gave me a 65-year sentence for engaged in organized crime.

And in Texas, 65 years is life.

Anything over 60 is considered life in Texas.

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And then 33 when I got sentenced to life in prison.

And right after the trial is over, my mom and my dad get a real brief visit with me behind the glass.

But my mom makes me make this promise that I won't get into one of these Aryan Brotherhood type gangs, that I won't get any tattoos.

She said, you come back as the man that we raised or don't come back at all.

And I don't know how I'm going to do this, Jefferson, but I run into this old guy in Dallas County Jail, this old guy named Muhammad.

And it's right before the prison bus comes to pick me up to serve my sentence.

And he told me this story.

He said, I want you to imagine prison as a pot of boiling water and he said you're going to have three choices how to respond in this pot of boiling water you can be like a carrot that goes in hard but becomes softened by the water you can be like an egg that goes in with the soft inside but becomes hardened once in the water or you can be like a coffee bean that changes the pot of boiling water into a pot of coffee he said the coffee bean's the change agent he said it's the only thing that changes the water The powers inside the coffee bean to change the water around the coffee bean.

And the last words he said to me as the prison bus was getting ready to come get me, he said, be a coffee bean.

And Jefferson, that's what I had to do.

I had to figure out how to become that coffee bean inside of one of the toughest environments possible, a Texas level five maximum security prison.

And prison was a baptism by fire.

It was the hardest thing I've ever been through.

The first two months was violence because that's what prison's about, about violence.

Now, the Mohammed, he was there, talk to you at county jail right before you actually go to prison.

Yeah, this is a Dallas County jail.

He was in there on a parole violation.

I didn't know much about the guy, and it's not an environment where you ask a lot of questions.

He said he was in there on a parole violation and he actually leaves.

He actually leaves county jail before the prison bus comes to get me.

So

and he's a prisoner too.

I mean, yeah, he's in county jail too.

He's in county jail too.

So it's just a brief encounter with people in life.

But you know, Jefferson, there's a real big story.

There's a real big lesson there, and it's that you have to be receptive to all the messengers in life.

You have to be willing to listen to the people around you because you never know what the messenger's message is.

And the messengers don't always look like us.

They don't come from the same background as us.

They don't have the shared experiences, but that's where the power in the message is.

And so I listened to Muhammad's message.

I went to prison, transformed myself inside that prison.

I became that coffee bean.

And one of the things I had to do, Jefferson, that's germane to the conversation we're going to have today, is I had to become the best communicator possible in a world where people weren't always used to communicating like I grew up because I was I stood out in prison.

You know, there weren't a lot of people with a background like mine, a pedigree, if you will, of being college educated, college quarterback, worked on Wall Street.

These are not what you find in a state prison, maybe federal prison system, but state prison, it's the streets, man.

But one of the things I did when I was in prison is I looked around and I was observant.

People have asked me before, if you could have one superpower, what would it be?

And I tell them all the time to be able to listen with clarity.

Because when you can listen to what people are telling you, then people feel like they've been heard.

And everybody wants to feel like like they've been heard, Jefferson.

And once someone feels like they've been heard, they feel like they're part of something bigger than them.

And they feel like they're part of a team.

And when you can create this team atmosphere around you, anything is possible because we're all moving in the same direction with the same motion.

So when I was in prison, I looked around and I'm watching these guys and I learned about this thing called servant leadership.

Servant leadership is helping other people reach their goals, helping to raise other people to a different station in life.

So one of the things I did when I was in there,

I started a a reading class.

I taught guys how to read and write.

I started educating men around me, getting them ready for the GED test.

So if they ever get out of prison, they'd be a better husband or better father one day.

I taught guys the importance of having a healthy community.

And I believe healthy communities, Jefferson, are when we all come together, we put our talents on the table.

We say, this is what I can do.

If anybody can use this talent, let me know.

And eventually guys were all working in the same direction.

And in 2015, I came up for my first parole review.

Now, for everybody listening, parole is pretty much the only way out of prison.

It's a chance to get out.

It doesn't mean you're free, but it means you're free to go from the confines of a prison and you report to a parole officer out in the free world where everybody else lives.

At this point in time, how long had you been in prison?

Seven years and three months when I came up for my first parole.

And the reason why, and people always want to know this, if you had a life sentence, why did you get to come up for parole so early?

And it's because Texas has two different classifications of crimes.

They have aggravated crimes where someone is physically hurt, and they have non-aggravated where there is no physical victim.

And that's the class that mine in, I was in the latter, the non-aggravated class of crimes.

And those offenders come up for prison for parole earlier because they're not violent criminals.

And so in 2015, the parole board comes to visit me from Huntsville.

And,

you know, the lady from parole called me in.

She had my file in front of her.

It was about an inch thick, and it's everything about you.

It's your whole life, every arrest, every felony.

And, you know, she was flipping through the pages of that file for about 20 seconds, Jefferson.

She slammed the file shut.

She pushed it away.

She said, Mr.

West, we don't see a lot of people like you come through the system.

She said, you had it all.

I can imagine.

Yeah, yeah.

She said, you had every advantage, every privilege, and every opportunity over everybody else your entire life.

She said, but you blew through all of those privileges.

You became a drug addict.

You became a criminal.

You became a thief.

A jury in Dallas gave you life in prison for the things you did.

But instead of letting that license define you,

you changed yourself inside this prison, Mr.

West.

And she said, there's no doubt about the change you made to yourself.

So congratulations on that.

She said, but what got our attention, the reason why we're here today is you didn't just change yourself inside this prison.

You changed the entire prison around you.

One man changed an entire prison.

So she says, I have one question for you today.

that determines whether or not you go home or you stay in prison.

And your life literally depends on your answer.

She said, if you could be remembered for being anything in life, anything at all, she said, tell me what that would be, but give it to me in just one word.

Go.

You know, Jefferson, I didn't have to think a lot about that answer.

I'd been living that answer the whole time I was in prison.

And my answer to her that day was useful.

I said, I just want to be useful.

Because, you know, Jefferson, I think every human being wants to feel useful.

We all want to have value in life.

And that's one of the things I learned by being a good listener is I listened to how people told me in prison that they want to be useful again.

And that's what I told this lady that day.

I said, I just want to be useful, and I can be useful inside this prison, or I could be useful in the free world.

And on November 16th, 2015, seven years, three months, and 18 days after I've started serving my sentence, I walked out of a Texas Maximum Security Prison.

Now,

I'm not a free man at this point in the story in 2015 because I've got a little more.

Yeah, you're still on parole, right?

I'm on parole parole until 2073, so I got a little more time.

Just a little bit more time.

As of this recording, Jefferson, I'm 49 years old.

I got 48 more years left, so I crossed the halfway mark, man.

I'm halfway there, brother.

There you go.

That's awesome.

Now,

the sentence you have was 65 years, right?

Yes, it was.

Yeah, and

that is the whole basis I know of your upcoming book, which I'm very excited about,

which is six dimes and a nickel, right?

Do I have the slang right there?

Yeah, you would do really well in prison, but do it from the side you're doing from

the lawyer.

No, you're a good member.

Six dimes and a nickel is prison slang for 65 years.

Every 10 years is a dime.

Every five years is a nickel.

And it was actually Muhammad that first said that to me the day I got back from my trial.

And I was just exhausted after six days of trial.

And he was like, man, brother, I saw that they gave you six dimes and a nickel.

And

once I got out of prison, I thought that was a pretty cool term.

But man, when you're in prison, six times a nickel is not pretty at all, brother.

Yeah.

Oh, yeah.

Now,

you travel all over the world, I know, right now,

speaking and spreading this mission and the whole moral of the coffee bean.

You're known in the speaking circles.

Anyone listening, you probably have heard Damon's whole message of being the coffee bean, meaning be the change agent that changes the water, that spreads, and how you communicate and live your life.

That's going to change the people and community around you.

Correct.

And you have become, I've watched you in the last three years become a coffee bean because before you were concerned, well, well, but I mean, I'm watching these videos from this lawyer that lives down the street from me in this car, and I'm watching it ramp up.

But you're changing the world.

You're using the power inside you to change the world around you.

And so many of us out there are coffee beans.

And,

but this, the story and the mesh of the coffee bean, it really took off.

But, but, you know, Jefferson, when I first got out of prison, there weren't a lot of places for me to share that story.

And I mean, I found out really quickly, you can't just go knock on the door of a high school and say, I just got out of prison.

I want to talk to your kids.

Yeah,

just got out of prison.

Still have a lot of years of parole.

Can you let me in?

No, it's not your kids.

But so when I first got out of prison, I was living in my parents' spare bedroom in their house in Port Naches, Texas.

And I lived there for two years in their spare bedroom.

And in that spare bedroom, there was a mirror in there.

It just happened to be there when I moved in, a little vanity mirror my mom had in there.

So every night for two years, Jefferson, I practice my presentation in front of that mirror.

I get in my reps.

Here's another thing, another lesson to take away.

I believe that anything you want to be good at in life, you've got to practice that in life, right?

There's no such thing as an overnight success.

I would wager that the videos that you shoot from your car, they're not all first takes, are they?

Not all of them.

Yeah.

Yeah, because

you have to practice that.

Sometimes you need a rep or two to get better at it.

And that's what I was doing, Jefferson, for two years, just practicing in front of that mirror, getting myself ready for the right opportunity.

And I believe the right opportunity would be the world of college football because I played Division I college quarterback.

But the problem was it was 20 years so I took my last snap.

The coaches don't know me and I don't know them.

So the date is January 11th, 2017.

I've been out of prison 14 months at this point.

I work at the Provost Humphrey Law Firm in Beaumont, Texas, right down the road from you, man.

And I'm a paralegal at a law, one of the most prestigious firms in our area.

And

I get a phone call from a friend in Houston.

He works in the Houston media.

Houston is 90 miles from where we live.

And he says, man, get to Houston right now.

It's the Bear Bryant Coach of the Year Award.

They're going to name the best college football coach in America.

He said, the eight best coaches in the country are in this room right now.

I've got an extra press pass.

I'll sneak you in.

So Jefferson, I drive the 90 miles from Beaumont to Houston.

He sneaks me in the back door, Toyota Center, and I go into this room, and there's eight coaches in the room.

It's big-time coaches, USC, Wisconsin, Penn State, PJ Fletch.

And I shake these coaches' hands.

I give them my pitch, and every one of them shoots me down.

In one hour, I got seven no's from eight coaches in the room.

That's a no every eight minutes, brother.

I'm standing in the corner of Toyota Center.

I'm licking my wounds.

I'm feeling sorry for myself.

And the voice in my head, to go back to your first question, the voice in my head is screaming at me, go home.

The voice in my head says, you don't belong in this room.

The voice in my head head calls me an imposter.

And I bet everybody listening to this podcast right now knows the imposter voice.

We've all felt it before.

But that's when past experience kicked in and I started talking to myself that night in the corner, 10 feet from the door, pumping myself back up.

And I reminded myself of the times that I won.

Damon, you survived prison.

This is not as bad as prison.

Prison was way worse than this.

You've won before.

You're going to survive tonight.

The last coach is going to tell you no, and then you go home.

So I stalked Dabo Sweeney around the room, the guy that that just beat, he just beat Alabama two nights before for the national championship, the head coach of Clemson.

And I get in front of Dabbo and I give him my pitch and it falls flat.

He's just, he looks terrified to see me.

He's like, hey, you got a card on you.

So I gave him my card.

He took off.

Looked like a no, felt like a no.

Went home that night, slept like a baby because I left it all on the field.

One of the biggest takeaways I've ever gotten from playing sports in life, Jefferson, give it all you got.

Muhammad, Muhammad told me a little something, something a little similar whenever I was getting ready to go to prison.

He He said, you don't have to win all your fights, but you do have to fight all your fights.

And so that night, I fought my fights and went home, slept like a baby.

Four months later, the guy from Clemson gets in touch with me, the operations director, says, hey, man, Coach Sweeney Mitchell, award show in Houston.

He'd love to have you come talk to the team.

Do you have August 1st open?

I'm like, I got every first open.

Got every day open.

And all I'm doing is talk to Amir at that point, Jefferson.

But

so August 2017, I speak to Clemson for the first time.

Dabbo's blown away.

He gets on the phone and calls every coach in America.

So now Nick Sabin calls, Kirby Smart, Lincoln Riley, Chip Kelly, and Link Kiven.

They're all calling me.

Dabo becomes that advocate for me out there.

Dabbo introduces me to a guy named John Gordon.

And John Gordon is one of the biggest motivational speakers authors in America, the Energy Bus guy.

And John and I write a book in 2019 called The Coffee Bean.

And that book took the entire planet by storm.

What you're going through right now with your worldwide book tour and all that, the Coffee bean did to some degree, not as big as what you're doing it, but the coffee bean took off around the world.

The reason why too, Jefferson, is because the message came at the right time.

Because in the year 2020, the world became a pot of boiling water.

The book had a global publishing deal, so it was in every language in the world.

And the whole world becomes a pot of boiling water.

And the whole world was searched for the right message.

And that's when so many people discovered the coffee bean guy and the coffee bean message.

And my life took off on a rocket ship after that, brother.

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Like you, I have a very busy, chaotic work schedule sometimes.

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I love that story.

It's such a crazy man.

Oh, my goodness.

Yeah, it's like

0.001 of the likelihood of how everything has turned out for you.

And you're using it for good and for light and for positive.

And that's why I wanted to make sure that my listeners heard this story.

There's a quote that I've heard you say before, and I caught themes of it at the beginning of this talk.

And it's this

talk to yourself, don't listen to yourself.

Tell me a little bit more about that.

Yeah, so

to get in depth to this thing, first of all, you've got to, the voice inside your head, there's so many things that we feed ourselves.

It's all about what you feed yourself to, Jefferson.

These things are related.

And I don't mean like food.

I'm talking about what are you consuming?

Like what you're listening to?

Yeah, what do you listen to?

What do you watch?

Yeah, what are you bringing on?

What kind of tv shows do you watch what kind of tv do you watch and what kind of news do you digest are you watching something that calls itself news but it's people screaming at each other telling you fear people around you that's not news that's negative entertainment you gotta you gotta turn that stuff off and i don't care if it comes to the left or the right you've got to turn that stuff off because you are what you eat it's not just about food it's about what you feed your brain up there and and i believe that we look like on the outside what we feed ourselves on the inside food and information.

And so whenever I'm talking to myself, I'm regurgitating some of the stuff that I've picked up out there on social media that was valuable, stuff like you talk about in conversations, stuff that other people talk about that has value.

But that's one of the things.

You have to be very guarded about what you let in because what you let in, you know, that's the most personal space in the world.

And if you allow any person in there rent-free to just jump inside your head, it can create a lot of problems because their voice can be the voice of fear and doubt inside your head.

Here's the thing, Jefferson.

I know that in my life, that just from my example alone, that if I could transform my world inside of a maximum security prison, then you can do it out here in this life.

But the thing about it is, like I said before, I meet more people out here in the free world that are locked up than I ever did when I was in prison.

And that locked up I'm talking about is mentally.

Tell yourself positive things.

Don't ever tell yourself negative thoughts.

I don't believe negative thoughts are natural, Jefferson.

I think it's not natural to be down in yourself and dog yourself out.

That's something that's,

it comes from something in the past.

When I got into prison, I started working a 12-step program of recovery called AA.

And in this 12-step program of recovery, you have these different steps.

The fourth step is where you lay out all the things that hold you back in life, your fears, your resentments, your doubts.

You put them all on paper and you find out why these things are causing you this grief in life, why they're holding so much space inside your head?

And you work a thing called a personal inventory.

Personal inventories are important, Jefferson.

That's where we try to figure out what role we play in the problems we have.

Because here's what I believe: every problem in my life, I play a role in that problem somewhere.

And when I work through a personal inventory, I'm trying to figure out the role that I play.

Because if I can find out the role that I play in that problem, that's the only thing I could change.

That's the only thing I can fix.

And that's the only thing I can control.

I like the

we, the talk to yourself, don't listen to yourself.

I see the value in that because, yes,

everybody listening can relate to imposter syndrome.

And how you listen to yourself can be, it can be positive, it can be negative, but typically by default, you know, I know that I'm my worst critic with anything that I do.

And that's the way with anybody we we like to criticize ourselves on the subjective

or we only listen to the thoughts that make the most sense to us and we want to say the things that we think are going to be the most effective or be the most hurtful or whatever it is but this talk to yourself idea I really like.

And so when you say talk to yourself,

what you share is think of the past times where success has come into your life

and speak that into yourself pour that into yourself rather than you know I the question I ask people a lot is who are you listening to whose voice are you listening to are you only listening to yourself to hear what sounds good are you only listening to the the negative thoughts do you find that

When it comes to communication,

for example,

when you were in prison or when you're talking talking to the parole board, how did you find

communication to be the driving factor into where you are now?

So that conversation with the parole board is

a textbook example about listening to the person in front of you because I'm listening for cues from her.

I'm going into the most important interview of my life.

And I know that the person across from me has sat through thousands of these interviews before.

How am I going to stand out?

And what I'm listening for is for cues from her as to what I'm going to say next.

Because I know all the stuff I want to say, but I can't just go up there and throw up everything in front of this lady because I want her to listen to what I'm saying too.

It's a two-way street.

One of the questions she asked me

in this question, in this interview,

She asked me this question.

It's a poison pill question that parole can ask you.

And it's the one that guys, I had asked a bunch of guys that had been in front of parole before, you know, about with the parole interview process.

And they're like, dude, if she asks you this one question, you're dead in the water.

And she asked it, Jefferson.

She said, do you think you got too much time?

Now, here's why this is such a poison pill, Jefferson, because...

Oh, do you think you got too much time?

In other words, to the jury, give you too much time for the crime.

Yeah, do you think you got too much time for the crime that you did?

Or do you think you got the right amount of time for what you did?

And so here's why it's a poison pill, Jefferson.

I'm listening.

And because

before I get to the answer, I want to talk about this other thing, too, about getting in your reps and practicing.

That can also mean like thinking about the conversation you're going to have, visualizing yourself in this conversation.

Do you ever do that, Jefferson?

Do you ever visualize yourself before you're going to go in front of a jury or before you're going to have an important conversation?

Oh, of course.

Yeah, you visualize.

Yeah, yeah.

You have to have a goal.

You have to have, where am I going with this?

You can't just,

for the important stuff,

it's really hard to just wing it because your expectations aren't set properly.

Right.

And so when you do this, I hear what you're saying right there.

But specifically, do you ever start thinking about contingency questions to different answers that you're going to get when you're doing this practice process in front of a jury?

Do you think about, hey, if they answer this way, if the defendant answers this way or the person on the stand, I'll ask this question, right?

you have a almost

man.

Yeah.

So that's what I was able to do because I was willing to prepare and ask a lot of questions beforehand.

I was willing to put the time in before this big, important interview.

And when she asked the question, I had the answer ready to go.

So did you get too much time, Mr.

West?

And I told her the only thing I could figure out to answer, Jefferson, was to just be straight up with her.

I said, ma'am, I don't feel like there's a good answer I can give you.

And here's why, because I feel that there's peril if I say, I got too much time, then you'll say, I haven't accepted responsibility for the crimes that I've committed, which I clearly have.

And I've worked on myself inside this prison to become a better man.

But if I tell you I got the right amount of time, then you could tell me, well, sit here in prison and serve some more of that time because guys with your kind of time don't make their first parole.

And so

my answer to her was, I don't feel like there's a good answer for me.

And here's the reasons why.

And she actually surprised me with her response answer.

She said, well, I'll answer the question for you, Mr.

West.

You got too much time.

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When I got out of prison, I went back to school at Lamar University, right by where we live.

I went and got a master's degree in criminal justice.

I wanted people to take me more serious than the guy that just got out of prison.

So I went and got a master's degree, and I became a professor at the University of Houston downtown, teaching a class called Prisons in America.

Became the only professor.

Is that right?

Yeah, I became the only professor on the planet to teach a prisons class at university.

Been to prison.

Yeah.

It's like, you know, we had a textbook.

Seven years of prison.

Yeah, we had a textbook, but I was the textbook in this class.

I mean, I was the, you know, like, ask me about this, and I can answer the question for you.

But I found out, Jefferson, and I want to bounce this off of you.

I've been itching to ask you this.

I think juries, whenever they give out a lot of time like they gave me, they do it for one or two reasons or both.

I think they're really angry at the person across from them or they're really scared of the person across from them.

Or they could be both.

And I think the jury was really angry at me because the guy you're talking to today, Jefferson,

this is not the guy that I was back then.

I mean, I was a really cockney, arrogant college quarterback.

I was the stereotypical jock.

I mean, just a guy, I didn't listen to anybody back then.

The only voice I wanted to hear was mine coming out of my mouth.

I was very much centered on myself.

But prison separated me from a lot of things in life.

But one of the main things it separated me from was my ego.

And that ego separation was something that a guy like me needed.

I got knocked down to the ground as hard as you could.

And the self-talk, there's no way I get to where I am without positive self-talk inside that prison.

It's the most negative environment there is.

And everything about you is to reinforce more negativity.

And by design, prison is a punishment, but it's all the extra stuff

for sure, right?

The self-talk is so important.

It was critical in there for me to have positive self-talk.

And I,

listen, Jefferson, I would separate myself from the other people in that prison and I didn't want to be around the negativity.

I would stay in my cell and read books.

Again, feeding yourself the right stuff.

Books were important to me in prison.

Two things I learned about books in there.

I never saw a guy reading a book, get into a fight, and I never saw a fight over a book.

Books were Satan.

They were good.

Yeah, what about a fight using a book?

I've seen a fight using a book.

That's a little different.

Well, I want to make sure.

Speaking of of books, you have one coming out soon.

I'm really excited to read it, Damon.

It's The Six Dimes in a Nickel.

Why don't you tell us real quick,

what are you hoping to do with this book?

Yes.

All right.

Thanks for asking, Jefferson.

So

this book is my life's work.

Six Dimes in a Nickel, as you know, is prison slang for 65 years.

And it's what basically this book is all the life lessons I've learned from my life sentence because I'm still serving my life sentence, by the way.

I'm on parole the rest of my life.

so I'm continuously serving that life sentence.

I'm a storyteller, Jefferson, and I believe human beings have always learned from storytellers, right?

We've learned lessons, morals, principles.

We've been entertained by storytellers for millennia.

So I believe people learn best from stories.

So what I've done with this book is every chapter is a principle I live my life by.

The body of the chapter is a story behind it.

And at the end of every chapter is a reflection piece of how you can apply this principle in your life too.

The book starts off with a question, and it's a question I first heard from James Clear.

The question is this, if someone took control of your life tomorrow, what's the first thing they would change?

It was a very thought-provoking question when I read this a couple years ago, because I put myself in a position, Jefferson, in life where someone did take control of my life.

The Texas Department of Criminal Justice did take control of Damon Weiss's life.

And the trick to this question is if you can answer the question, then the question becomes, why have you not already made the change?

If you know the change you have to to make, why have you not already made the change?

And the reason why I believe we're reluctant to change is because change is scary.

Change is difficult.

Change takes us out.

Or we don't want to.

Yeah, we can,

yeah, we don't want to, or it takes us outside of our comfort zone.

But that's a good place to navigate towards, Jefferson.

You're outside your comfort zone because that's where growth takes place.

Growth takes place outside of our comfort zones.

The whole book is about these principles and how you apply them in your life.

Like, you know, one of the principles is is stay in your lane you know i learned in prison the importance of staying in your lane stay in your lane means you know find your path and work on your path don't try to do someone else's path find what you're good at and go and do that at full speed because i believe that when we get off of our path what's meant for us we first of all we're distracted from the main goal in our life and it takes us longer to get where we want to go or sometimes we get off the path and we never find our way back but when you find your path you've got to explore that.

And in my life, in that book, you know, Stay in Your Lane, a couple of years ago, Jefferson, so many people were reaching out to me in this world of coaching.

And I'm putting my fingers up in these quotation marks because there's so many frauds and phonies that I've found on, you see them on social media in this world of coaching, man.

Yeah, there's a lot of life coaches.

A lot of God, man, a lot of life coaches.

It's exhausting.

So I'm having a conversation in the store in the book.

Which is nothing wrong with it.

There's nothing wrong with it, for sure.

There's good ones out there.

There's certainly, yeah, like anything, there are like attorneys, like

anybody.

There are people that are

real and truly affect change.

And there are people who are in it for selfish reasons and aren't teaching things that are uplifting.

Yeah, and there's, like I said, there's good ones out there.

There's people that are principled and moral.

And I believe everybody needs a coach.

I believe everybody does need a mentor of some kind.

Absolutely.

I've had my share of them.

One of my main coaches in life is my sponsor sponsor in AA, man.

I talk to this guy every week, man.

He knows everything about me, and he's a very good coach.

And you're still doing it.

I mean, that's what I want to emphasize.

You're still on parole.

You're still doing all the things, checking every box, and you'll continue to check every box

for the rest of your life.

Yeah.

Well, here's the deal.

Do it or die, because if I don't do these things differently than everybody else that's come before me, I'm on parole the rest of my life, Jeff.

I see my PO in Beaumont every month.

I pee in a cup.

If I fail a drug test, I go back to prison.

One drug test is all it takes for me.

But

I have these rules I live by.

One of them is that my recovery is not optional, man.

It's important.

I have to keep going to my meetings.

I go to two or three meetings a week.

I've got an app on my phone that tells me where the meetings are on the road.

I just type in the zip code wherever I am.

But there's other things I do, Jefferson, that other people don't do because they're not up against the same.

Everybody's path is different, right?

I'm never alone in a situation with a woman that's not my wife.

And it's not like I'm worried about being tempted.

It's that I don't want to put myself in a situation where I need the benefit of the doubt because I can't go into a courtroom again, Jefferson.

I can't go take the stand in a case.

I mean, the most junior prosecutor of the world would go up to the, and the first question would be, Mr.

West, you know, tell us, you know, let's hear from the guy that would say anything to not go back to prison.

First question.

Now that Jerry thinks you're a liar.

So

exactly.

I have to avoid a courtroom at all costs, Jefferson.

So this is

being a good communicator also means

knowing where you can and cannot go.

Where is a good place?

I mean, we all have our different levels of danger for us.

And my danger just happens to be the fact that I don't get another second chance.

I already got my second chance in life.

But here's what I've also found, though, Jefferson, is that when we adopt this mindset of serving other people, helping other people reach their goals, and this is where the good coaches come in.

When we adopt that mindset of helping other other people, it doesn't just help the person, it helps us become a better person too.

And I think service work is a big key to anything you want to be good at in life.

You got to learn how to serve other people.

And that was one of the biggest things I learned when I was in prison that by my service to these other guys around me, they became more receptive to a conversation with me.

And it opens people up to who you really are on the inside and not just what they see on the outside.

I love that, Damon.

I think this message, anybody who's listening can relate to the idea and certainly knows people in their life who have been knocked down to level zero.

And they're not sure how to either get back up or get back where they are or what they're going to do with their life.

And what I've learned through our conversation is, one, when you can at all times use your communication for good, to be the coffee, being the change agent, you're going to change that pot of boiling water.

Two, you want to talk to yourself, don't just listen to yourself, because usually it's our own voice that is the root and seed of the negative, the negative mindset, the negative talk.

And three, I love what you just said right there.

When you can begin a relationship with service, when you can begin a conversation with service, and that service might be, let me ask questions.

That service might be, let me shower you with compliments.

And genuinely, or whatever it is, you're going to serve that person.

And that is how you're going to initiate conversation.

That's going to lead to much better communication because it's going to open them up in conversation, Damon.

I think this has just been an awesome time, an awesome talk, brother.

And to share the audience in Southeast Texas,

that ain't never a bad thing, my man.

And I would add a fourth thing to the three you just named off, which you're a great consider of those things.

It's the one thing I told every single man I ever encountered in prison.

It's the same thing I tell every single person that comes to me now in this life.

It's four words that are so powerful, Jefferson.

This is like for everyone trying to communicate up there.

These four words are the four words that you usually hear in life from a teacher, a coach, maybe a parent told you this.

But it's the same four words.

One of my favorite teachers reached out to me when I was in prison, wrote me a letter, and this teacher was the one that planted the seed for everything going on now.

And he was telling me, he said, you should share your story with people when you get out.

You should start planning now and while you're in prison to share your story because I believe when you turn it around, he told me when you turn it around, you're going to bring other people hope.

And he had these four words in this letter.

And because these four words were in this letter, I carry that letter with me everywhere in prison.

The letter is worn out now.

It's like you can barely read it.

Those four words, I believe in you.

There's something magical that happens, Jefferson, when we hear that coming from someone else, man.

Not just us telling us,

you know, you believe in yourself, but when someone else tells you they believe in you, man, something magical happens today.

And I would run around that prison.

It's crazy, Jefferson.

I go into prisons a lot now.

I go into a prison somewhere in America every month.

I voluntarily walk in because I believe that's one of the reasons I got out was to go back.

And I hear these guys repeating that to each other in those prisons now in Texas.

They're telling each other, I believe in you.

And that changes a person on the inside, Jefferson.

Yeah, absolutely.

Man, that's amazing work, Damon.

Thank you for the mission that you're on and continuing to spread positivity and light, man.

I think you're just doing awesome stuff.

I loved having you on today.

Six dimes in a nickel.

All the life lessons you need.

If you want to be a change agent for good and

positive things in your life.

Damon, thanks for coming on, man.

Awesome, Jeff.

Thanks a lot for having me, man.

Thanks a lot.

Yeah, brother.

Thank you.