Stanley Andrisse: From Prison Cells to PhD

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0:49I'm Guy Kawasaki, and this is Remarkable People. We are, as you've heard, on a mission to make you remarkable. Helping me today is Stanley Andrees. He has one of the most powerful stories in our podcast. He overcame incredible odds to transform from an incarcerated teenager to a scientist and author. Stanley grew up in Ferguson, Missouri and got into trouble at a young age. By his early 20s, he had amassed multiple felony convictions and was sentenced to 10 years for drug trafficking. The prosecutor claimed he was beyond reform. While in prison, Stanley discovered a passion for science. He studied diabetes through phone calls and letters with a mentor.

1:39After his release, Stanley earned a Ph.D. and MBA and became an endocrinologist at Howard University College of Medicine and the Georgetown Medical Center. As a professor, his groundbreaking work is about insulin resistance pathways. As an author of a book called From Prison Cell to PhD, he shares his story to inspire systemic change. I'm Guy Kawasaki. This is Remarkable People. And now, here is the remarkable Stanley Andrees. Being on the straight path of study and hard work, How is that ever going to compete with the seemingly easy, exciting life of dealing? How are kids supposed to pick the hard path, the slow path, the less lucrative path?

2:34You start out right with some heavy hitter questions there. That's a tough one. I answer that with another question. Why do the dominant caste individuals see that path as a attractive, doable, achievable path? So I think the question is, why is there certain groups of people in our society that society creates this imagery that it is not an attractive path for them? I think science is quite exhilarating. I think the things that I do and the new ideas that I come up with in the field of science and endocrinology is quite exciting and exhilarating, actually. But how do I get a 14-year-old, 15-year-old to see that?

3:28But maybe actually we are not that good at getting a 14, 15-year-old, no matter what side of the tracks they come from, to see science or accounting or writing books as something exciting. It's just something that happens over time. So I would challenge that question with maybe that's not the real thing that we need to be doing. Maybe at that age, it's okay for someone to not yet see a path like science as something that is fun or exciting. It's just part of being a 14, 15-year-old teenage mind. Yeah, but as your case has proven out, it takes an act of God to get off that path, right? You're lucky.

4:16Your sentence went from 70 to 30. But how often does that happen? Yeah, it often doesn't happen for people that look like me. But it does often happen for other people that don't look like me. And I explain that in my book, in that there was a couple of individuals that were just as deep as me. They got caught up, but they didn't look like me. And society, the judge said, we're going to give you another shot at this because I think eventually you will see that there's a better path for you in this world. But they didn't see that for me. You know, that wasn't the way that the judge saw it originally.

4:56And I should say, really, the prosecutor more than the judge even. Well, that prosecutor said to you, you're never going to change, right? Yeah. Yeah. I think the prosecutor essentially was pushing for 20 years to life in prison because she felt that I had no hope for changing. Or she stated that whether she felt that I argue that all the time, that I really don't think that she truly felt or believed that. She said it because the system encouraged her and incentivized her to give harsher sentences to people that looked like me and to people that came from the places, North St. Louis. I was from a primarily black area in North St.

5:39Louis, and I got caught up in this predominantly white area. And she was incentivized to sentence people like me for longer periods of time. And when I say incentivized, she was a young prosecutor that eventually moved up the ladder into being a judge. And a judge is an elected position that has to really, you know, the system is set up where the judges that make the decisions on things like law and order and should be fair. it's a political position. They really make their decisions based on what their people want them to make their decisions, right? So in order to stay in office, they have to please the community that they're in, in that particular community.

6:26There was a lot of white flight going on into this particular area out of St. Louis City. There was then a trail of more affluent Black people that are able to move into this particular area. And the white individuals were not very happy about that. One way to keep Black people out is whenever a Black person got caught up in that area, let's make sure we let them know that if they come out here and do any type of thing, we're going to basically, the life sentence became the modern day noose. That was how they started hanging Black people instead of just putting them out in the streets. Thousands upon thousands, tens of thousands of people, Black individuals began getting life sentences in these 30, 40, 50, 160.

7:14Like why would you give someone three life sentences? Even if you die and somehow get reincarnated, we're going to lock you back up. And then if you happen to get reincarnated again, we will lock you back up. You You have three life sentences. You will never see daylight. How does that make sense? There's lots of things I read in your book that made no sense to me. And I'm going to try to hit on them. When you look back, and I don't know any other word but blame. When you look back, who or what do you blame for you turning to dealing drugs? There's a chapter in my book. And the book is called From Prison Sales to PhD.

7:59It's never too late to do good. It's never too late to do good is this phrase that my father used to tell me. Hopefully I will get into talking a little bit about that. But sure. Interestingly, I'm on a Facebook friend who was the second biggest dealer. He was my first or second big time dealer. But the first one, he was connected with the Mexican cartel. He was just moving crazy amounts of drugs for an 18 year old. He was just a teenager and he was older than me. I think I was 16 or something at the time. And we're still connected. He ended up doing some prison time as well. He's turned his life around.

8:39And he just posted on social media and was just sharing like how he's so happy that he's a changed person now. And then he had other people commenting. And this girl commented. And I'm looking at, I don't know this girl. But then I looked at her picture and I checked her out. She had a husband and beautiful children. It looked to be living a pretty nice life. And my friend, on the other hand, has led a very challenging life. and he was in prison and all, as I just mentioned, and he was this big time drug dealer, cartel connected as just a teenager. He told this girl that she was the reason, she asked in like fifth grade, she was a cute girl.

9:20She asked him if he could get some weed and he got his first little bag of weed to try to please her. And that was this first sell that he ever made. And then he ended up a couple of years later becoming this big time cartel connected. But I share that just to say how simple it actually can be. It wasn't like these are bad people. I actually opened the first lines of my book is contrary to popular belief, drug dealers are regular everyday people. Then I opened the book up with talking about this family event that I was at, where just like him that I just explained, we are humans that want love and care about those things.

10:03So how I got involved was really just a combination of things, but very similar to that situation. I started selling drugs just to smoke a little bit with my friends. And then one day I was just sitting with some friends that were obviously not on the right side of making good decisions, but they presented this person who was unable to get the opportunity presented itself. Somebody lost their drug dealer and they needed a new drug dealer. And I was really just smoking a little bit, but I was like, my guy, I think, could get that amount of weed. I was like, I think I could solve that problem there.

10:47That seems, you know, I'm just going to help this other friend solve this problem by getting a little bit more weed. And then the next thing I know, I'm selling pounds of, you know, I'm getting 10 pounds of weed every other day. And then all of a sudden I'm getting 100 pounds of weed every other month. And then all of a sudden I'm getting 300 pounds of weed. And now everyone that I know carries guns and everybody's selling pills and cocaine. And it just happened.

11:33you know you you often hear both users but in general people are saying quote unquote it's just weed so from both the users and the dealers perspective what's your opinion of this concept like ah no big deal it's just weed it's not the really hard stuff so that's obviously very interesting now that a large part of a portion of our country has legalized weed and to some extent weed is less of a dangerous drug than say alcohol for instance And so there's that side of the argument. And it's not just weed, though. So first, selling weed is very different than if you're making that level. The amount of money and the amount of drugs that I was selling, it just was dangerous.

12:35So it definitely wasn't just weed because it was money. It was the amounts of money that people would kill for, literally. So there's no way that you can say that it's just weed if it's that type of level of dealing. But at the lower level, I would caution against people thinking that it's just weed because it's, you know, the old saying of the gateway drug. But if you're dealing, it can lead to bigger things. But in terms of its use and the danger of its use, I do think that it is not as dangerous of a substance as alcohol is. and alcohol is more widely used. And you never hear of someone drinking alcohol and becoming an alcohol dealer.

13:22You could make the case if it's, quote, just weed and it's less harmful than alcohol and weed is controlled by the government and all that, then it's okay. But it doesn't sound okay. Well, it's the illegal aspect that wasn't okay. Right. Because I think 10, 15 years down the road, we will move to where it is like alcohol. And when you remove the black market aspect, when you do the research and dive into it, I think researchers have, you know, many places, the opioid epidemic has drawn a lot of medical research into the field of substance use. and they've moved to the place where they actually open up.

14:07I can't think of the name of them, but they're facilities that people can come to and use like heroin and use drugs and they can use it safely though. And it's the black market aspect of things that makes weed and anything that you're doing illegally so dangerous is because people will make sure that you don't bring it out of the black market. Because if you bring it to the police, you could get me in a lot of trouble. So now I have to do nefarious things to make sure that it stays in the dark. But if we bring it to the light and we remove the stigma of it, we remove a lot of the danger. By the way, we're going to spend a fair amount of time on weed and prison and crime, but ultimately we're going to get to your book, okay?

14:55Because that's the real purpose of this but for people to understand how great the book is they gotta understand where you're coming from as you were starting dealing did your parents or adults or other people warn you off and why didn't you listen why man did you think you're going to be the the person who got away with it when surely you understood most people either got killed or imprisoned what What was in your mind that said, no, I'm going to be the guy that threads the needle, so to speak? In multiple different instances within the book, I use the phrase, we were teenagers. And to emphasize this idea that we know now that the human brain is not fully developed until a person reaches the age of 25, roughly.

15:48And the part of the brain that's not fully developed is the ability to see long-term consequences. I often equate it to, you know, I have a beautiful five-year-old daughter and an amazing soon-to-be two-year-old son. And when I had my daughter, I had, there's an app for everything. So like I had this app that told us every week the new development stages. And I just wanted to be on top of everything of raising this tiny human. And one week came up and it said that a baby just waves their arms around sometimes. And there's a there's a point in their development where eventually they realize that these things that are waving in front of their face is actually attached to their body.

16:34and it's actually them and they're actually amazed at it. So you can see this point in the baby's development that they're so amazed at seeing their hands, like they're tripping or something. And when you think about how powerful the brain is, the brain literally was at a place that this thing that was attached to them, they could not realize that this thing that was attached to them was attached to them. The brain is this powerful thing. When it hasn't developed something yet, it's really just not there. All of a sudden, they can tell that this thing waving in front of them is their hand. When we say the part of the brain that understands consequences isn't there yet.

17:13So it's literally like it's not there. I couldn't see it. We were teenagers. That goes back to your question and my response on the first question that you asked is that the thing about it is all teenagers are making poor decisions. It's just that certain people get punished more harshly for the poor decisions they make. And certain people, eventually, the society says that you can become this, but then society says you can't become this for certain others. For me, as I was writing the book, there was a chapter where one of the drug dealers that I was dealing with, this very dangerous guy happens to be the same guy that I was just telling you about.

17:53I was going to pick up some drugs from him, about 25 pounds from him. And he has hundreds usually. And I walk up to his house and it looked like somebody had broken in. And this is a person that I know had just purchased. He literally a couple of days earlier, he was showing off his AK-47. He was like, I just bought this for$20 ,000 and was shooting it off and was crazy. And I see that somebody broke into his house and I snuck into this like very dangerous person's house. when it looked like some crazy stuff was going on in the house. And yet my brain told me like, hey, this looks real crazy. Let's get a little crazier, though.

18:37Let's go inside and find out what's going on. Like, why? I look back and I'm like, what are you thinking? I'm driving it and I'm thinking, this couldn't be. What? Why would you go in there? And I just don't know. I don't know. My brain was at this place where it just didn't see that far. I was good at math and I was science. I didn't all of a sudden just become smart. I was smart back then too. But for some reason, I walked into this very dangerous situation. I walked into a lot of dangerous situations. And the only thing that really made sense is that I was this teenager that one, as a teenager, the brain is prone to not seeing long-term consequences and thus making poor decisions because they don't see those long-term consequences.

19:28And then I was conditioned by society to think that I should be reacting and doing things in a certain way and making certain types of decisions. Wow. I want to switch a little bit to prison because there's a lot of wisdom in your book about prison. First question is, how does one physically survive in prison? And the next question is, I'm going to ask you, how do you mentally survive? Okay, so that's common. So physically, like, how do you know who to trust? How do you pick your alliances? How do you not get killed? I think the way you survive prison is actually a mental, psychological game. You survive the physical aspects by understanding the way to mentally and psychologically survive.

20:27Because physically, you know, physical harm can be brought your way if your psychological and mental state is not in balance. So if your psychological and mental state are in a place of somewhat balance or at least consciousness, less physical harm will come your way. But the thing about prison is that you've just been told that you've just gone through a sentencing process that basically says you have a mental problem. That's why we have to outcast you from society. You're thinking like you walked into this drug dealer's house that you know was just shoot off AKs. Your thinking is effed up. So you've already been told that your mental is effed up.

21:16You have a psychological problem. Then you walk in and a bunch of other people have been told they have psychological mental problems. And the truth is that a large percent of people do indeed have neurodivergence where they have different types of mental health issues before they even stepped foot into prison. But then it's just exponentiated through the process of being sentenced and going through incarceration. And then you're not able to be a real human and express normal human emotions in prison. For me, for instance, maybe we're going to talk about this in a little bit, but I ended up losing my father to his battle with type 2 diabetes.

22:02And he went through a challenging situation. And losing someone and having someone be sick, you can easily want to shed emotions, crying or being depressed or being angry and yelling. Crying could literally bring physical harm to you. If you didn't check this regular human emotion, it could literally bring you physical harm. Yelling, screaming, another aspect of potentially going through the motions of grief could literally bring you harm. So it was really about understanding how to get your psychological self and mental health in a place of balance that helped you survive prison. But the thing that so many people that I witnessed had significant challenges surviving prison was because their psychological and mental health was not in balance, which when we think about it, why aren't we doing more to help people?

23:00We know all the things that lead to prison. We know the process, but yet the way the prison system is, the people that act out, they just further get punished. They get put in the hole and segregated where their mental health becomes even worse. They get put in the hole for, you know, it's crazy. It's literally crazy the amount of time they put people in a tiny box. How could somebody think that's going to help the situation out? It only pours fuel on the flame for this person who is already volatile. It's crazy. So what are you saying in terms of advice? If you want to survive prison, you've got to get your mental and psychological states in balance.

23:45But what does that mean? When you're alone at night in the cell, what are you thinking about? Are you thinking about getting out? Are you thinking about revenge? What should you be thinking about? I personally poured myself into books. So first, even before I eventually started pouring myself into learning, I read my first scientific article on diabetes while I was incarcerated. Then I started reading a whole bunch more. And that is, of course, the field that I'm in now. But even before that epiphany came, I would just read and read and read. And literally reading just took you away from physically having to be present in some of the prison BS.

24:29You literally just weren't out in the yard. You're reading. And then I was an avid journaler. So there was no psychologist or anybody helping me through this. I happened to be a journaler ever since I was in high school. And so I would journal my emotions and what I saw that day. And it would help me. I didn't know that I was helping myself process the trauma that was going on around me. And it gave me this avenue to, one, process the trauma and things that were going on around me. But then, two, to take me away from it because it was literally taking time away from being in that environment. And then there's the physical health aspect, which a lot of people do in prison, because that's one of the main things to do is get big and buff.

25:15But that does help your mind as well to be in this state of physical fitness. But then I think there needs to be this aspect of some people will say it's putting it into into God's hands. For me, I realized that I didn't want other people telling me how I should live my life or how I should react to something. And what that meant for me was like I have been offered to join a number of gangs. And for me, I saw it as I would rather keep my integrity to do what is right and potentially have harm come to me because I was doing the right thing than to not have maybe harm come to me. But knowing in my soul that I'm not doing what my soul wants to do.

26:12And so when I got to just letting my soul be itself, regardless of what the outside world would think of me, and that's a challenging place to get to in prison. A lot of your book deals with the struggle of inform or not inform. So with hindsight, what's your analysis of cost benefit analysis of being an informer? So you mean an informant to the police? Yeah. So as I got to this place of really letting my soul make my decisions, and that is this integrity. And I personally believe that deep down inside a person's soul really understands this concept of doing good. Whether their actions and behaviors that matriculate out into the world is something completely different.

27:09The world in prison will tell you that there's a lot of sociopathic people that just are very harmful, unrepairable people. But that number is the way society portrays it. From my understanding of both research and just my personal experience, society's perceptions is completely wrong. The percentage of people in prison that are sociopathic, even people that have committed murder, the percentage of those individuals is very slim in terms of unrepairable and their soul being bad. But when I was out on the streets and I still believe that loyalty is one of the top qualities that I possess. And so like now I just don't make promises in the ways that I used to make promises.

28:03But if I make a promise to you, I personally think that to me, my soul tells me that the right thing to do is to keep my promise to you. And if I'm not going to keep my promise to you, then I should not make the promise to you. In terms of informants, in the streets, the people that I was hustling with, we were married to each other. We said our vows and we said that we became married to each other. We promised to each other that we wouldn't go to the police and do this. So to me, what I would do now is not make that promise. I would say, you know, maybe I could hustle with you, but I can't make this promise that I'm going to give up my mom and like my loved ones for you.

28:51But that's the promise that I made. I basically said, I'm hustling with you. I will give up my life. I will lose my family to keep this promise. The problem I made was making that promise. I don't think that once the promise is made, personally, I think that you've made it and you shouldn't break it. Up next on Remarkable People. There was a couple of things that were just hurtful. I don't, you know, even beyond just a decision, it was that idea of promising. So for me, I had told this coach my situation. And I think it hurt him as well that he was like, I know you're a good guy. I know you so well.

29:31And he was like, I promise you, everything will be okay. And unfortunately, that was a promise that was outside of his ability to keep.

29:45If you find our show valuable, please do us a favor and subscribe, rate, and review it. Even better, forward it to a friend. A big mahalo to you for doing this. Welcome back to Remarkable People with Guy Kawasaki. I didn't quite understand in your book how your sentence got reduced and you had this opportunity to get a PhD. Can you just explain how did Stanley achieve that? I think you're asking two questions there. One is the sentencing aspect of things. And then two, how did I get a PhD, which has both literal and, of course, figuratively behind that. So one, I often like to inform folks that they need to read the book to get the deeper appreciation for that.

30:48But really, the sentencing aspect was literally an act of God almost. I have never been given a true reasoning behind why that was changed. And for the PhD aspect of things, when I go and talk, I refer back to a portion of my life when I was 19 years old. And I was in Dallas, Texas, and I was picking up 100 pounds of dope. and I walk into this hotel room and I walk in and my friend is the person who greets me and he's excited to see me. And he's like saying, Hey, you know, what's up? And happens to be a Mexican individual. So he's speaking in Spanish. And then I look over deeper into the room and I see an individual with the sawed off shotgun and his finger on the trigger and the barrel is pointed directly at me.