Latest / GenX Adulting Podcast / Episode 53 - GenX Speaks Series: Greg Nordone - Co-Founder Greyson Technologies

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Episode 53 - GenX Speaks Series: Greg Nordone - Co-Founder Greyson Technologies · GenX Adulting Podcast

• 0:00
  [Music]Welcome to GenX Adulting and today we have Greg with us. Welcome Greg. Thank you.Thank you for having me. We're thrilled to have you. Our first question is alwayswhat year were you born? 76. Okay so you're GenX. Yeah and you're like, you'renot young GenX but you're getting there. YeahI think so. You're edging towards the end butyou're still hardcore in that generation.
• 0:35
  Yeah I would say so. I think I felt alittle bit on that like I connect with you know yeah certain side of the GenX.So I think 76 is legit. Yeah of course. Yeah yeah yeah I think that's like theycan still your childhood was probably still very GenX childhood. Yeah I think so.So where were you born? Miami, Florida. Okay and were your parents from there? Mydad is from Miami, Florida. Yeah okay. I'm second generation native. Okay so.Very rare. Yeah you're like a real Floridian, areal guy from Miami. So what about his parents?Where did they come from?
• 1:11
  New York. Okay. Andthen my great grandfather I believe is from Italy.Okay. That's the connection.
• 1:19
  So your dad'sItalian? Italian. 100? Yeah dad's 100. Okay. Yeah.And so they came over from Italy. Yeah. And thenthey were in New York, his parents, and then camedown to Miami. Do you know why they came down toMiami? I guess his work. I think work. But otherthan that I don't really know a lot. My grandfatherpassed a couple months before I was born. Do you knowwhat your grandfather did that would have broughthim down here? I think it was like steel and I thinkit was like steel and stuff like that. Okay. Yeah.And then your mom where's she from? My mom's fromShort Hills, New Jersey.
• 1:51
  Okay. I know wherethat is. The mall. The mall.
• 1:54
  New Jersey Sloppy Joe,Melbourne Deli. Yeah. Everyone knows theMelbourne Deli. So good. Yeah.
• 2:00
  When we lived there theShort Hills was like the fancy mall we'd goto sometimes. So okay so she's from New Jersey.How did they meet? They met in Columbia.Columbia in school. Okay so they both went to Columbia?Okay and so they're college sweethearts? Yeah Iguess that's yeah I guess they are. Yeah it waslike it was my dad's segment. I went toCornell. Okay. And bright guy but then got kicked outuh like in his freshman year. I guess hedidn't study or apply himself very much. He playedfootball. Played like uh like little they had twotypes of football like under 160 pounds or somethinglike that. No kidding. Yeah and then um andthen he came back home and uh yeah and then back toColumbia. So he so he left Cornell because hewasn't focusing and and locking in basicallyand then he came back to Miami but he was stillable to get into Columbia.
• 2:56
  Well so yeah that'simpressive. Yeah smart girl.
• 2:58
  I know but my dadwas real bright. Yeah no kidding.
• 3:02
  My mom's realbright too actually. I think my mom's smarterthan my dad. What did they get their degrees in?My mom's a dental hygienist.
• 3:08
  Okay. She wentfrom there to Penn. Okay. And finished and got herdental hygienist there too.
• 3:13
  Yeah and then my dadum yeah I think my dad is was general business andthen he uh and then he actually spent a littletime at FSU too and then taught himself how tobe a CPA and and became an accountant then hatedit and became a life insurance assessment. Oh nokidding. Yeah okay. Is that funny? Yeah it isfunny. I hated it. Like just yeah just couldn't stand theboringness of it. Yeah. So they met at Columbiabut then your mom went to Penn and he went to FSUbut they stayed together?
• 3:44
  Yes well so this iswhere it's blurry for me and like okay this is funnybecause I should know these things but I alwaysmy dad passed when I was 25 so I don't think I wasI don't think I cared. That's not theright word but I guess you know it just wasn'tas relevant to me as it is now. Yeah. And it'sfunny thinking about this I was like I shouldprobably talk to my mom and really map that outmore clearly. That's interesting because I thinkyeah I was trying to figure it out. Okay but theyobviously stayed together even going to separateschools. Yes. They did long distance. Yes. Andthen he ended up back in Miami and then when shegraduated Penn she probably met him down there Iwould think right. She's gonna be so mad at me. Iokay so if I really think the actual way Iworked was he goes Cornell back here military. Oh yes.So he was a Marine. Okay. Yeah because like theywere a hardcore family so like if he got kickedout he actually went to a boy's boardingschool in high school too. So my dad like my like meheavy ADD very spazzy. Okay.
• 4:47
  They sent him toboarding school for high school place calledMiddlesex in Massachusetts.
• 4:53
  Okay. And so thenthis is where it gets fuzzy Cornell back homemilitary I think FSU then Columbia because I thinkin Columbia they met got married and came here somy mom actually could be Penn Columbia. Okay thatmakes more sense. That might make more sense. Okay.Here she's gonna be so mad.
• 5:14
  Yeah okay so themilitary how long was he in the military? Fouryears. Did he serve? Yeah he did languages and hewas in San Diego. Languages meaning? Translating.For what languages? That's a great question.Never got into it. Okay. Never talked about it. Butprobably like I would think Italian right? Iwas most actually my dad was really good Spanish.Okay. And he did just a lot of translationstuff but would never really never really got intowhat he did. And he was wearing Californiayou said? Yeah. That is really interesting. Whatyears would that have been do you think? No clue.But that would have been like if you were born in76 that would have been the 60s. For sure. YeahVietnam. He served during Vietnam but never served.He never went over there.
• 6:06
  Okay so he servedduring Vietnam but it was in California translating.Probably like semi-intel stuff. Yeah and gotreally lucky you know to not have to. It is sointeresting. Wow for four that is reallyinteresting. Okay and then he went to Colombiayour mom probably went to Penn that makessense and then to Colombia. Yeah.
• 6:25
  And then did theyget married before they graduate?
• 6:29
  Do you know?No. No they got married down here. Okay so thenthey got married up there but they moved downhere. Okay so they get married up there they moved downto Miami. And was his parents still here inMiami when they moved? In Miami Shores. Okay and thenher parents though were still in Jersey right?You're other set of grandparents?
• 6:47
  Yes yes stillin Short Hills. They had that home until mygrandmother passed. Okay and were their uncles,cousins, aunts? Yes she has two brothers. Okay.One two younger. She's the oldest and then she had aJimmy and Doug. My dad is the youngest of four total. One older lived here in Boca.Um older brother then older sister then olderbrother then him. So he's the baby. He's the baby.And then were there aunts and uncles and cousinsthat uh for you that you grew up around in Miami?You know um it's funny uh Michael Tony hisfamily was probably the closest we were probablyclosest to them because uh that's on my dad'sside because um it felt like Boca to Miami Shores wasyou know like 100 miles away right? Like back then it felt like oh my goodnesswhere are we going? Why are we in a car for this long?Um but we would get together but you know the theage difference between my you know the oldest andthe youngest and that family was significant. Rightright that makes sense. But I'm close I'm close toUncle Tony's daughters now.
• 7:56
  That's cool. Yeah thatit's they're great. That's cool.
• 7:59
  They're so great.So your parents are married um your dad yousaid was an accountant for a while. Yeah KPMGand Pete Morwick like before all that happenedand then was like this is terrible and became like aat that at that point life insurance and then afinancial planner. Okay and your mom was a dentalhygienist. I was a dental hygienist for awhile until she was like I don't love this at all.Which is right this is really interesting. Andthen or and then they uh and then she at nightstudied to become uh like a librarian or teacherand then she ended up being the media specialistfor uh Killian High School.
• 8:34
  Okay. And then umand then schools up in uh the Pasco County area.Nice. Cool. Um now when were you are you the doyou have siblings? Yeah I have an older brotherand a younger brother. Okay so there's three boys.Yeah. Um did they start their family pretty quicklyafter moving down here? That's an excellent question. No I I don't I think it wasfour or five years before okay or my olderbrother was born. That's kind of unusual for back then.Yeah. You know that's. I think I think my mom waslike 30 when I was born which makes Morgan like 20or 27 and a 27 and a half ish. Okay so sheworked for a while and before she yeah had you guys umonce she you know had your older brother do youknow if she was a stay-at-home mom for a while?She worked. So she worked.
• 9:27
  Yeah. Well so did youguys um so she worked when you guys were littleelementary school middle school all of that did you guys go to daycare?Yeah and yeah there was a a couple of um acouple like church church like schools and things likethat that we would go to.
• 9:48
  Okay. In the localarea um I remember you know it's all reallyfuzzy candidly it's kind of weird um becausethey uh so I was eight and they got divorced.My dad really struggled as as an as an accountanthe was kind of like I didn't want to do this anymoreand he knew he didn't want to do it but hereally struggled to like leave that and go be umgo be a financial planner or life insurance guyand I think that wrecked his ego. The struggle.Okay. The inability to provide the struggle andthen I think like and I look back and I think thatthat resulted it might as sweetheart of a guy butbut I think that ended up like he was like toughinto the family unit or at least with my mom likeyou know what I mean like there's a conflict therebut I think that conflict was like because he washaving struggles dealing with his change. He waskind of in limbo. Yeah and there were nounsettled. It's not like you talked about things back thenI would assume. No help. Yeah there was no oneto consult with. Oh well no mental health was abad word you know talk totally.
• 10:55
  None of that hecould have had some depression going on. Totallyand he's a you know big ADD guy you know meyeah all three of us are ADD, ADHD if you will it'sworking you know and and yeah there's not a lotof help there was a lot of ritalin take it. Yeah nono one what was he on meds for his ADD? Idon't think so. I feel like that was prettypretty. Yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeahyeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeahyeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeahhe's kind of he's kind of stuck and that'llcome out in different ways and and before he couldmake his shift you know it sounds like there wasa breakdown within the marriage you know and thatmakes sense and again because there now you cantalk about all these things so easily but backthen and I think also he was Italian right youprobably need to be the man and not talk aboutyour feelings and all that so that probably allwent into play so because it's unusual too backthen during the 70s women were women did workobviously and I know that but it really wasn'tprevalent it was just starting in the 70s and soto have your mom be working then wasn't necessaryusual my mom did end up working because she wasa single mom and I think that was more normal butto have a woman married and still be working fulltime that wasn't totally the norm she had a toughshe had a tough mom an independent mom as wellso even though uh in New Jersey my uh grandfatherwas the town dentist the short-hills dentistand um James Conklin and uh and it was interestingbecause she was I think a flight attendant mygrandma right but but like anyway it was justlike she was a worker versus not stay at homefor per se right yeah and uh and my mom going tocollege and and two good colleges and andthose things like yeah like uh yeah that was alwayspushed like my mom's tough cookie man so thatthat really started with your grandmother thenyeah you think that and she was that example andI would love to know where your grandmother gotit from because it started somewhere you knowand it wasn't the norm it wasn't so somewhere alongthe line your grandmother made that decisionright did there did your was your grandmother firstgeneration here or were her parents becauseI think you said your dad's family was firstgeneration right no my dad's uh my dad's let'ssay my dad's grandfather was first generation sohis father was born here in the states okay yeahthey were they were tougher I think I think thatside of the family was tougher uh my mom's mom mygrandma was Swedish yeah I don't know it's a it'suh it could be that it could be that too yeahI think that's really hard working people yeahexactly yeah it could be that too no I thinkthat's really fascinating okay so um when youwere in elementary school so that's when thedivorce happened yeah I was eight you were eightso that's like what third grade I think that'sthird grade third grade third grade third gradeso your older brother would have been how old10 to 10 and a half and then your younger brotherwhat kindergarten okay so that's there's threein elementary school yeah and now they're going toget divorced which again was still not verycommon back then at all that would have been what likeyou were born 76 that's the early 80s it was juststarting that whole divorce thing um do you havememories from that period or um anything thatstands out during the divorce or how it affectedyour family sure there you know a couple offights we observed that we didn't you know weren'tgreat they actually the way they told us was realtough um they were in the middle of a really bigfight we had this uh cool house in Miami Shoresit was funny I you know it's funny they boughtthis house three months before I was born andsold it and I moved out after I graduated high schoolso I lived in the same home for all 18 yearsthat's really awesome that's that's cool yeahso it was funny I was listening to a song on theway here it was about uh you know going back toyour old home you're not allowed to go in butyou know but um and I remember we had this playroomdownstairs and the kitchen was upstairs thebedrooms in the playroom were downstairs thekitchen living room and all the living spacewas upstairs and they had this big fight in theirbedroom and they came out into the playroom andthey're like boys we're getting divorced but itwas just violent I remember it being violent soit was after me yelling yeah their their energyeverything they were coming right off offight and they told you guys and was that a shockyeah for all you guys yeah for sure and then umso you your mom and the three of you got to stayin the house I assume since you yeah and thenyour dad moved out yeah and then uh was it thetype of custody situation where you'd see yourdad like every other weekend yeah like TuesdaysTuesdays Tuesdays and then on the weekends okayand then we would it was interesting because hewould take one of us oh interesting uncertainlike so my dad and I would uh like you know it was myWednesday and we or Thursdays Thursdaybecause cheers we would sit and watch cheers oh okayI remember I remember you had thisapartment this this apartment behind Wendy's at likenear downtown that's all being it's allbeautiful condos now right but um yeah and we would sitthere and it was great like it was sketch gettingit like walking up to it and um and then we wouldsit there and we watch cheers and we watchgrowing pains and like we like you know I justkind of those were the fond memories you know whatan interesting way to approach that I mean that isreally cool actually so the week was it theweekday he would do one-on-one and then theweekends take all three of you yeah that's sosmart because it allowed him to stay really havethat quality time with each of you and createthat bond yeah in a way and then you still hadthat time together but also what a differenceyou're coming from this wonderful home with yourmom and then going to this differentenvironment in your dad's apartment so that it's like twodifferent worlds yeah so I think my dad wasstruggling to figure it out and I think my momwas always like you can have whatever you wantdays wise and um it was hard for him yeah you knowa lot of our a lot of our time spent togetherwas like let's just go to the mall yeah he didn'treally know how to spend time with us yeah youknow I've got a lot of shirts that you know thatyou like making them all yeah right like a littlechoccy right remember that like the little puffyyelsey things they would just iron on right infront of you yeah a guy had one that said el gatobecause my dad used to call me el gato he like runaround and called himself el gato so that's what hehe he had one like that and uh and then um hehe loved the sail and he had the sailboat andum he had this line the line was only admiralsor assholes sit in uh the stairwell which is whywhere i stood all the time which is why iheard that so one christmas i get a shirt ironed onwhatever called said admiral that's awesome yeahso that's like a core memory that's core memoryyeah do you still have the shirts i don't idon't have that one i've got a few from growing upactually um i have his polo okay so probablythe one thing i have yeah yeah that's cool i cantotally picture what you're saying like ican picture them all and i can the amni mall indowntown miami which is i don't think it's stillthere but but yeah so that's what you guys aroundand it was like clockwork you'd go there and eatplay it was almost like you weren't even you knowi mean it was we overwhelmed him yeah you justdidn't know what to do three boys three boys allspazzy as heck yeah yeah you know yeah so didyou get to the point where you look forward to thatlike all right i'm going to see dad we're goingto the mall and i'm getting a shirt i liked the uhone-on-ones yeah just to be with him yeah yeah100 you know what's cool though is like i played alot of sports he showed up at every game that'swhat i was gonna ask you that was my next questionhe was present it just i think the parentingpart was hard for him yeah yeah our relationshipsbecame unbelievable and he was my best friend assoon as we could have a beer together yeah yeahthat makes everything change everything changedlike when i went to college it was too bad rightlike you listened to those yeah cat stevens typesongs yes and then he passed away when you were25 so you were just just just finding yourgroove with him yeah yeah no that's so in elementaryschool you mentioned sports um in elementaryschool did you do sports through elementaryschool middle school that time yeah so it's fairto say that uh so we love sports like all threeof us really played but um i spent more of my timeat the fields and uh those guys like i i have let'ssay the father figures in my life were coachesalong the way and i really believe that thoseeach one of them played roles in my lifein different ways maybe not all of them buti could name certain coaches along the waythat just had a massive impact on my lifethat's cool what's right i would live it i wouldlive at the field house miami shores is a reallycool town that way was it baseball uh baseballup until the day it turned into soccer soccerinto the day you know so it was uh as ago it goesuh football soccer baseball okay and that was likeyour year like to the day it stopped you startthe next one yeah and i mean and i did overlapslike one team was finishing and i would i wouldgo to another i would do two practices a day okaytwo different sports as they overlapped so youcompletely immerse yourself into immersed now uhthat obviously was for a love of sports was italso do you think like you said you had fatherfigures there do you think it was a way ofcoping i think so yeah remember my grandfather wasn'tthere either yeah my grandfather had passed beforeso i never got to meet him yeah uh so there reallywasn't a father figure my dad was there verypresent but um yeah i think it was i think it'scoaches were you able to have um more intimateconversations with your coaches and you were withyour dad meaning sharing emotions feelings any ofthat nope so it's just more they were solid malefigures yeah in your life and people you could lookup to and leaders yeah for you yeah i'm not shy totell someone what's going on in my head or youknow share with folks so i always reached i wasalways kind of like reach out and whether it beschool or sports or whatever always found myselfaround good adults that yeah you know just kindof said hey i'll i'll help you out and then howabout with your teammates did was it like withall of your teams was it like a family almost yeahyeah so big parties and you know all the sameguys i'm still very close to so many of them nowvery close so so two of my like two of my bestfriends i've known since i was eight and nineyears old that's awesome were your were yoursports where you kind of in football you had thesame guys then you go to soccer and you havethe same guys then you go to baseball very muchseason after season yeah that's how wyomingshores is yeah yeah it was it's the best town now it'sbest town to grow up in was this right wouldyou say this is the equivalent of like a wreckyeah oh yeah and then did you do any travel wastravel thing there at that time um we did sometravel there were a couple of players that justkind of decided to focus those guys got put ona unique they would go to other town like godown to kendall and play with some better teamssoccer and those guys really escalated thoseguys played in college they're really good umi did more high school okay that's where i my myjourney got more athletic well i think for thoseof us growing up though travel wasn't like how itis now it wasn't it was like you said it was thosefew kids and now it's almost it's reversed it isit you know it still takes money no matter whatlike even back then a couple of my friends thatgot really good at soccer like their parents wereable to afford them having some private lessonson the side yeah yeah i actually i remember thiswindow where i had a chance to play i'm like atweener birthday and so a couple of my friends wereon the older side a couple of my friends on theyounger side so i had a choice like do you wantto play with the twelves or the thirteenths iremember that being a really hard choice andgoing all right i'll play with the twelves becausei had a few more friends even though i could playwith the thirteenths if i would have gone tothe thirteenths it my level would have escalatedbecause they had a better coach and they had abetter everything and they really all when's yourbirthday feb feb right okay is there well i know that they always are changing thethe birthdays and they're always restructuring iwas a tweener too but it was august for so i couldi did the same thing yeah yeah so inelementary middle school was it mainly sports were youinvolved in anything any other extracurriculars like clubs in elementary and elementary middleelementary middle theater always my theaterokay okay so when did you get involved in theaterum fairly young i think my mom took me to go seephantom of the opera i love phantom of the operafell in love um love it brian's even beenreally in broadway it's the very first one i've seenyeah i saw it down in miami did i've seenokay so this is a funny story um for one of ouranniversaries we went and saw phantom of the operaon broadway i i drug him to uh or dragged whateverit is to phantom of the opera yeah maybe i drugandre so we want we go through the you know thefirst half or whatever and then there's theintermission right so we get the intermissionstarts where the lights go on and he gets up toleave and i'm like like leave for good and i saidno it's just intermission and very loudly inhis very deep voice goes you mean there's more andit echoed through the whole place people turnand it turned around and looked at us that wasthe only time i did that with him really buthe did see all of phantom of the opera i can'tbelieve you don't remember i i do now that yousay that yeah i remember i you yeah i think youblocked it out yeah i wasn't hooked no youweren't as hooked as i was no so you saw phantom of theopera my mom had me in that stuff wellactually it was funny because i remember i mean i wasplaying football either seventh eighth grade iremember going from football practice to it andi thought i was going to fall asleep like i wasfighting it so that was fighting and then i waslike yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah it's soamazing i had been doing some simple church like theaterbefore that okay whatever okay it wasn'tuntil um until i got in high school that i gotreally immersed in it okay so what an interestingexistence for you oh yeah because you're athleticand the jock quote unquote captain of the footballteam okay okay okay yeah small school don't get mewrong okay okay so you get to high school andyou're doing high school sports and high schooltheater both of those things require a lot ofcommitment on top of academics yep did you work toono okay so that summers yes hardcore in thesummers but my you know my dad kind of had thatstatement that it was always like you'reeither going to be in school like you're going to dothese extracurriculars or you're going to workthose are your choices yeah well those extracurricularsespecially doing theater and academics wouldtake up and academics and athletics would take upeverything if you want to even try to get somesleep in there somewhere it was crazy so that'smy question though is i don't know how it was setup but i would have pictured theater practice andathletic practice would have been around thesame time after school it was complex and i had someamazing teachers and coaches that worked withme that's amazing that is awesome yeah so becausewas theater year-round practicing no it was moreum in some respects but it was more play-based toookay so like the real work in theater for me atleast was at the play you could take it as a classand so i would do that but then but then alsolike when we're in a play it required a lot ofattention so what did you lean into in theaterlike were you singing were you dancing were youyou know uh in high school it was all straightplays okay i can't sing okay um although there'sa funny story about that but but i can't soanyway i did all straight plays i really enjoyed ituh i had a great teacher named sandy louis whowas just absolutely spectacular woman and um andshe was great like so i'd spent so much timeeven my senior year she created a class for meand called directing and i just got to direct herso i would go to the middle school class and theni got to direct him in a school play it was justspecial it was really cool experience growing upthat's awesome around those types of teachersand they they they hooked me up so so what kindof plays do you remember what plays you did wedid mash jekyll and hide am i mixing that one upyeah that one um man mash was probably one ofmy favorites that's cool that's one of brian'sfavorite shows is it yeah well doing the play wascool yeah um and just a lot of like one x and andshoebox stuff very cool and that was mainly highschool yeah um okay and then you were the captainof the football team the soccer team so itsounds like you were a leader on the athletic sidewere you also a leader in the theater sidetoo you know i uh i don't think so um i wascourageous enough to hop into whatever theywanted to hop into but but i wasn't really aleader per se there were some people that justyou could tell loved it i love it yeah but likethere's some people i have a feeling there youprobably had some leadership qualities becauseof crossing over from sports right and you werethe captain of those teams then you had to beensomewhat of a novelty in some ways in thatwe've got this athlete coming over to theater that'snot totally common so you probably had anatural leadership maybe not i don't know prescribed iguess yeah i mean i've had some teachers callit that like at this school i mean there was a aguidance counselor who who had said like therewere a couple things she was like you're just anatural born leader yeah remember that and itstayed with me you know core memory um because iyou know it was weird i i was in i was in like alot of the honors classes so i would spend a lotof time with really techie nerdy guys which isgreat you know and i could i could get along withthose guys i'm fairly gregarious i can get alongwith a lot of different people and um so i wouldhang out with them but then i'd go to footballpractice and hang out with all my jock buddiesand then i or i'd go to theater and hang out withall the theater people and i i i just think that'sthe way i guess for me that was easy because iwas like this is great you just yeah who caresthey're all different but it doesn't matteryeah and each one of them has something special andfun and enjoyable and i loved my jock friendsfor who they were yeah and i love the theaterpeople for who they were and just great friendson all sides of it but back then and i think youi don't know about now if it's that way and idon't know if it was like this at your school it wasn'tmine it was very clicky yeah and there weregroups and um it definitely would have taken a specialperson to float the way you did and be acceptedand not ostracized by one of the groups or judgei i think yes and i found myself able to breakthrough that piece of it but i think the deeprelationships were a little bit more on thesports side okay you know like where so those peoplelike oh yeah like you know he's cool come on inhe's fine but then there's a gate do you know whati mean yes so there's a big gate like there'sthe wall okay and no one's allowed in but you crossthrough the wall yeah that's okay yeah then there'sanother private room and i wasn't invited into theprivate room right i also made a choice in highschool um i think because of this guidance counseloryou know driving me in this in this which was wecreated uh an organization called leaders educatingabout drugs lead so i ran that in high schoolwhich is hysterically ironic because i got it oncei got out of high school it's like what are thesethings right well what moment besides the leadershipbeing inspired by the leadership aspect of itwhat drew you to focus on drugs i think that was uhyou know i think school kind of guided thatmore than i was like i'm gonna be this guy i i justthink i was uh making teachers happy okay youknow what i mean i really do i think that's coretoo it was like hey i love this teacher heythey think this is great okay okay i'll do that andthat kept me out of a couple circles right rightnow of course of course people who are still likehey man he's cool yes except we're gonna closethe door now right like the narc is here and itwasn't an arc like i was like listen i don'tcare if you do it like i really wasn't but you knowwasn't like i don't care if you do it like i'mcool it's not my thing yeah um but i didn't careif you did it however it was really designedlike the the whole premise of the thing was just toeducate better yeah about there are dangers rightand it wasn't this like full-on nancy rayon likeyeah it was more just about education which ithink you know when you go to a small private schooluh drug dealers are smart right they'rebusinessmen they they know where the money is so you actuallyhave i think a lot of it comes to the smallerprivate schools more so than the best drugs arein all private schools if you're good atbusiness you go to where the highest paying customerswe didn't establish that so you were in a smallprivate high school yeah small private high schoolwas your elementary and middle schools private as well no so i went to public school for elementaryno so i went to public school for elementary okay and then catholic schoolfor for for three years okay and then i jumped tothe private school for like seven through twelveand you said you got a scholarship yeah like thePresbyterian church helped out and then there waslike some scholarship money my mom couldn'tafford to send me that so i we we were able tofind money through the church and through theschool what was the motivation of wanting to goto that school mom did mom's like let's getyou the best school we can get no just me whatwhat do you why are you why just you do you knowum you know i don't uh i don't have a clear answeron it i just think that uh i was i think my momknew that i i would excel you were the overachieverout of the three yeah maybe that's the way to sayit were you a people please but my younger brotherit got more it got tricky so Miami Shore's gotredistrict and then like what happens your choiceswere Miami Shore's elementary was great whateveri rode my bike school that's like the majority ofmy life right like yeah ride my bike school stopat grandma's nana's on the way home have a cookieyou know like do do do my homework like it wasyeah it was amazing like when you really thinkabout it yeah it's super nice my buddy who livedsix streets down would pick me up in his and hisprelude prelude i was like late every time he'slike dude you're killing me he's still one of mybest buds like these you know it's so beautifulit's like i know so many people from this townwho are all still really close in fact mywife's from the town oh okay yeah and i know friendswhose wives are from this town okay so i guessokay miami shore's has that cool vibe to it that'scool yeah really growing up in miami shoresthere's like a facebook page what are its whatare the demographics of miami shores is itis it cuban atallian for the most part it wasi mean primarily irish catholic a lot of irishcatholic um i think joe robbie i don't know thisbut like joe robbie lived in miami shores okayand then he helped build when he was buildingjohlrabi like a lot of the construction guys fromthe town yeah okay and so and he owned the dolphinsokay yeah and so anyway yeah irish catholicthere some italian but but definitely the catholicchurch was strong like like the catholic churchin miami shore is pretty strong church so you saidthough a redistrict for your little brother oh andso and so what happened was like my choice was thisnew magnet program school and it was tough likeit was it was a rough place to go so i think thatif you really look at it like my mom's like okaylet's send him to the catholic church let's seethen my parents got divorced my dad was catholicmy mom was presbyterian yeah so it's really funnywhen the divorce happened i would go to presbyterian church on sunday with my momand then get in my bike drive to the catholicchurch and put an envelope with money into thegiving box to prove i was there to tithe yeahthat was to tithe yes but to prove i was therelike i was really like yeah yeah it wasn'tyeah yeah so and it was really funny like thatwas my sunday were you were you covering for thewhole family the tithing yeah yeah yeah yeah uhbecause my older brother went there too okay andthen he went to north miami high so he ended upgoing to the local high school oh wait i think iknow what you're saying so you guys were going toschool at the time at catholic school yeah thatwas oh yeah so we part of the way our kids went tocatholic school and yeah you have to prove youwere there hell yeah i see what you're saying so youoh at church you mean it yeah yeah you cannotgo to church yeah yeah so one way or anotheryou were there you're gonna purchase as long as there's money in that envelopeand it's on time you're golden you're good so youwould go to church so you went to you were raisedpresbyterian it sounds like yeah so i always jokei went from religion by fear to religion by serviceoh my gosh that's a terrible thing to say that'shilarious so and that was that pretty much everysunday yeah so you would do that and then get onyour bike and go take care of the catholic churchyeah you're oh that's so interesting okay butyou also got a lot of good catholic uh valuesat school of course right you had class yeah yeahand i was so i was i was baptized catholic i wasconfirmed presbyterian interesting interestingokay so you went through the whole um your firstcommunion catholic yes okay so you were baptizedcatholic first communion catholic then reconciliationprobably during school time that's aroundthe same yeah you would have if you were firstcommunion you went through reconciliationconfession your first confession yeah firstconfession yeah yeah there's our dogs everyonethat was um four six yeah well i see for our kidsfirst communion was second grade um andand reconciliation was i think first grade orthird grade so yeah okay so you did thefirst three sacraments of catholicism baptism yesreconciliation communion but but then for confirmation you didn't finish it out youwent with presbyterian and i didn't even know theydid confirmation either that's what i was thinkingyeah that's news to me so what are you becauseyou could it's like it's just a dual citizenshipi guess the way the way what am i i believe ingod yeah i pray yeah i'm not a great church goeryeah so you have dual citizenship into churchesin religion yeah in religion you can you kind ofdabbled in both i i think that's sofascinating okay so um you said you were high you're highcheaper it's obvious you were high cheaper umwere you also a people pleaser would you say yeahand would you say um you walked on eggshells nookay so you were a people pleaser high achieverbut you you weren't nervous about being likethat if that makes sense you weren't walkingon eggshells making sure kind of kind of tryingto read the adults before you act to kind of yeahevery now and again every now and again iwould get careful my so like my mom like five of mymom's good friends worked at the school okay mydad dated the dean of students like it every nowand it's like one of my like my best friendmike he'll do this whole time we would be in schooland when my dad was dating the dean of studentshe'd be like joe yeah we can do anything like heliterally he took advantage of this idea that wewalked on water because he was like a fourth sonto my dad and he took advantage of the walk onwater not that we i mean we're we're good kidslike we didn't really break that many rules sobroke simple rules right you know like nothingkid shit kid shit yeah and uh and there were youknow in Miami stores there were other kids doingworship so you know it's easy to stay off theradar well and you weren't partying no and likeeven my my you're so funny like my mom used tohave this rule in high school she would be likeum you're allowed to go out but you gotta wake meup when you come home so i know that you were inthe house before before uh curfew and so iwould go out and then i'd come home late army crawlinto her bedroom set the clock back no waytotally wake her up she'd look at the clockgot it and then army crawl out and then armycrawl back in and reset the clock to the right timewas this a digital or like yeah digital oh yeahokay so red ones yeah the red ones it was the brownthe brown right you know talking about the wordthat's exactly what it was that is so gen x ohi remember that so much i used to do that sooften that's brilliant yeah that really that ilove that that's genius did she know that beforeyou said it on this podcast she'll see it when i'vetold yes okay i think i've told her at uh like athanksgiving dinner or something we've had somefun fun stories of glasses of wine yeah i loveit okay so high school so you're busy you're busyyou're achieving you're doing all the thingsgreat for me okay your world though is it sounds likeit's pretty small there right you're doing allthis stuff but it's a small world you're living insuper interesting brian because you know youyou're in miami yeah i had friends going down to southbeach this and that but my like my i was more of ahome and i don't know if you'd call it a home bodybut like i stayed in the shores yeah shores issafe to me right i think but i married my wifefrom the area like i i do believe that one homething i've thought about this like because youmeet someone who's been in like six homes intheir journey and they've got weird connection issuesright like they don't you know like there'ssomething fragile dude like i have a friendwho's had so many homes yes it just was what itwas right and they struggle to connect whereasme i'm like this this is perfect in fact myneighborhood my wife and i were looking for theplace we wanted to live the neighborhood we foundis like everyone walks their dog everyone is likein there riding their bike everybody waves toeach other it's a small little microcosm of miamishores and that's like it's so hard to come byin yes in this area of the country south floridawell it's the reason we picked the neighborhoodwe're in yeah um people are walking i'm not goingto say the name of the neighborhood on onthe podcast but um this neighborhood we're inis the closest you can get to 1950s living asfar as walk the neighborhood any time of the dayit's very it's very much that northeast vibeif that northeast small town vibe sure sure soit is hard to find down here so it soundslike you grew up in a small town in miami yeahabsolutely which is awesome in a single housein a single house very small town and even thoughthough there was the chaos of a divorce and youwent through that typical like divorce kid andthere's shit that went with that you know butyou you had the stability of your town your homeyour coaches your teachers yeah youractivities and it sounds like that helped balance outthe trauma that you also would have gone throughwith the divorce because no matter what no matterhow good things are that's still a traumaticevent for i'm a child of divorce i know i'm talkingabout um i'm just out of like three or fourdivorces i think um so it's it's wonderful youhad that anchor yeah of the functionality togo with the dysfunction that would have justnaturally resulted from divorce yeah my brothers weren't as active and i thinkit was harder on them yeah no that makes senseyou know and by the way that might have just beenthat might have just been the way i dealt is isurround myself in groups yeah you know and umbecause i've either developed that over time youknow like i team sports is to me one of the mostwonderful things you can do to your your kids liketeam sports is great you know you learn so much bythe way acting is team sports absolutely it'sincredible yeah i mean if you've ever sat in agreen room or gone to the practices and theamount of support practice trial and error things likethat that you need in teams in acting is incredibleand trust trust trust is huge real trust yeah yeahit's funny i talked about that today with my teamyeah use that reference yeah acting yeah becausein acting you're also being very vulnerable and soit's different than the kind of trust on a sportsteam because that's trust too yeah but it'svery different so it sounds like you were insulatedwith these activities i would say that rightthat's why i always felt like hey bokeh we'retone feels like it's 200 miles away yeah i meani didn't do the south beach thing yeah that muchi really didn't look people like oh did you go tothis and this and i'm like i guess i'm kind of adork i didn't go to that many of those thingsand well and you were living a fairly responsiblelife for a teenager even though you were doing thearmy crawl and change in the clock but you weren'tout there partying and yeah the real trouble i gotinto was like we egged a car you know turns out itwas an undercover cop guard yeah he showed up atthat like that kind of stuff and so you know weare fair share of oopses but yeah but mom neverreally i don't think mom ever worried yeah yeahthat's amazing that's amazing you know so i'mgetting towards mid end of high school did youwere you already thinking about college andwhere you wanted to go uh not where i wanted to gotoo much but i was definitely thinking aboutcollege um it was kind of like i qualified forthe florida undergraduate scholars program ithink is what it was called at the time um sostate schools were always an option i applied totulane was the only other school i don't even knowwhy really i've never never really thought likehow did tulane end up in my list but at my schoolthey had you know pretty good a really goodactually not a pretty good a really good uhcollege guidance counselor who helped you throughthings and maybe that's where we ended up with itum and then i got a couple of uh a coupleletters more than anything else of like interest forcollege football but i was just super burnt outokay it's so weird playing being able to play allthree sports which is like the good and the badis like it's like i was pretty good at all of thembecause i didn't focus i wasn't great at any ofthem okay okay and so i loved soccer but you areeither born with gifts in your feet or you'renot right it's just as that way and i was and i waspretty darn good but you know not necessarilylike that next level because you have to play itagainst people that are just different yeahso football was what i was best at and um and ioften think like what would happen if i would havegone to a small school in north carolina on a on afootball scholarship but ultimately i couldn'tafford tulane that was not a there's no happeningand it was like had four or five good friends allgoing to florida and said sign me up when i havea question on this when today kids playing sportshave they they have to specialize down here and itdrives me crazy because they don't they can't dothe three sports they can to a certain point butthen the travel team set in right the kids whospecialize come back and just wreck everybodyyou know and wreck was it like that when youwere growing up was it was it specialized were youforced to pick something earlier it doesn'tsound like it it sounds like you could play butlike three sports i mean here's reality like eventhough uh even though i didn't specialize it wasstill you have top 10 of my team yeah so therewas there was happy they were just yeah i'm justjust like so they were just happy to have me rightyeah good eye hand coordination fast yeah you knowthose types of things and and in football i lovehitting people it was like reckless i i won't usethe nickname because it'll be you know whateverbut like i had a nickname like it started when iwas like seven years old and stuck with me andlike it was just because i was a reckless you knowwhat position did you play in football i playeduh sort of uh running back a receiver you knowand then but i love playing more like safety andlinebacker i was gonna say i could picture you asa safety just coming up and popping someone justmowing like i called like we had uh me and thisother guy called to stick him and pick him youknow and he would go get interceptions i wouldjust wreck people that's hilarious so i i don'tknow why but like growing up playing football mywhole life i had some great coaches um like theyjust said this is how you hit people and this isand and and they said and it's safer to do itthat way and that's all i needed to know so for me iwas always about applying the force yeah youknow yeah like the one time i did it under 85swe had some coaches and i hit this guy on theside there's a whole place lit up and i was likethat's all that that was the only affirmation ineeded and ever since then it just you know itwas simple to me like that that was the easy likelet's just go hit people this is great and i feltprotected i got pads on yeah yeah yeah and youknow it's crazy not one injury that's amazing noteven a concussion well i don't know about thatyou know what i mean we don't talk about thatso i had my uh one game i got hit in the back andthen hit across the helmet and my jaw dislocatedlike this and i'm like i come to the sidelinesand you know you're you're in small school we onlyhad like 25 kids on the team i went i played iplayed receiver or you know receiver or or orrunning back except when the quarterback gothurt then i played quarterback i played full-timedefense i kicked hunted returned kicksreturned punts so never once left the field never onceand so i get hit and i come to the sideline likeoh my god and hurting and they're like what heresit down and there was this doctor came down offthe the bench and he's like let me look at it hejust ran right back into place smacked me onmy ass and i went right back out there hilarioushilarious my mom and i went like the nextcouple days like mom this i'm not really it's not alltogether you know but that was it man like youknow did you ever go to a doctor and have it yeahyeah that seems okay my mom was like jen is forgod's sakes my grandfather was a dentist that's awesomethat is so gen x2 no one cared yeah like dad getback out there are you kidding now they call anambulance or something back then we had thesmelling salts too yeah the concussion you'relike i'm back in i can't see straight yeah ohi'm good yeah i'm good yeah yeah so okay for sureand i like you know i played against some guysthat played on sundays yeah and they were justbigger yeah so you could throw your body atsomeone and exert force until physics winsyeah and i ran into a knee once that just waslike where am i yeah right now so there's definitelyi was gonna say that sounds like you bringcells that are no longer they call it you you wouldring your i got my bell but i got your bell yeahnow now they it's a whole thing like it's totallydifferent so our son does travel across and evenplaying for the school you have to sign all thesethings and he has to watch a video about it'stotally well they do preseason tests they do allof it did you know about that that wholeprotocol for concussion no oh yeah you do a test in thebeginning you answer questions and then if youthink you've got concuss they you have to answerthe same questions and if your answers deviate orthe timing's off too much that right it's prettygood actually it's smart yeah it's smart likei like that process no no it's good driven yeah100 yeah that's what that's what appeals tome right this is my data driven stuff makes meright yeah okay so um as far as college thoughi assume because your grandmother and your momwere so progressive in that thought processcollege was was discussed in your home it wasassumed you were going to college okay so that'scool so um and you had a great guidance counselorwhich is unusual even for that time so that'sawesome yeah um but so you ended up going to ufyeah and uh did you did your brother andlittle brother go to college too uh older brother noum he actually came up to that area and went to umwhat is the community college santa fae communityand then be and that was studying to be afirefighter that didn't work out and then um my younger brotherno umhis journey was just a little different yeah hehas since you know he says in in saint pea went tosaint pea college and got a degree but it was likeway it wasn't like high school and then big breakokay so out of the three you were the traditionalgraduate from high school four years in and out bye byei wondered you know it just got me thinking isthe age and when your parents got divorced yourolder brother was a little bit older yeah littledifferent experience yeah and you got you and yougot the younger one a little bit little differentyeah you think that played in totally yeah i thinkabout that but i so my younger brother had aweird weird thing because my mom was like i don't wantto send him to that school we were talking aboutshe sent him to palm beach to live with my auntand uncle her aunt and uncle actually so thatwas kind of like my brother's or our great aunt anduncle okay they took care of him for like twoyears and he went to school up there two threeyears and then like poor guy man just thejourney was tough he's so resilient he's like he's justgot this beautiful way about him you know likeit never he's like yeah but um and then she movedlike out of the house out of the house and he'sa like for his sophomore year he's got to move tolike middle of nowhere north tampa like countryfighting it wow fighting it you know and like thatwas i think that was hard really hard you talkabout like not fitting in at all it's differentover there totally right and they areimmediately like harsh yeah harsh and pick on and all thisand like you know anything that he would dothat would have been let's say a cool kind ofmannerism or whatever here was just crushedthere he ended up like two years there andand and then coming back to my dad but likei'm coming to back stay with my dad but i'm likeseparated from all this because you were incollege right i'm in college yeah and the weirdpart is you don't have a home to go home to yeahi don't know what's so i'm gonna i'm going to likenewport richie oh true true middle of nowherewest florida when did she sell it was it yourfreshman year she sold the the literally packthe car pack the the house drive to the new homewhich is because she got a job at this schoolsystem unload the home love you college okaywhat a transition for you so right so i know whereto come home to but also my dad had a one bedroomyeah so it's not like my dad there's like onebedroom apartment was like like two twin bedswell what's so interesting about that timingis you you had a couple things going on becausegraduated from high school is a big deal andthen getting ready did you do um that thing that'sflorida kids do where you go the summer sessionno okay no so you had your summer to kind of enjoywork being miami shores but knowing that you'regoing to be moving so you're having a transitionof leaving your childhood home your childhoodfriends everything you've known so those aretwo big things you're leaving and you're going tocollege yeah um and then go to the new place andthen continue on to gainsville it's a lot goingon there yeah that's a lot and yeah my mom wantsto come home and visit you're like there'snothing well yeah because a lot of times also that firstthanksgiving a freshman year when you come homeyou get together with all your friends it's allabout your friends when you first come home yeahdidn't know a soul so that was a blow for you andthen your little brother's going through his ownthing and i'm sure your older brother was goingthrough his own thing um do you think that havingbecause also that stability that you had insulatedyourself with to help you cope witheverything you've been going through with the divorcethat was gone now so now you have this newexperience at uf would you say that you thencreated a whole installation there withfriends and yeah totally i mean i mean it's crazy butthree of my closest friends at uf were from myhigh school that's awesome yeah so that kind ofcame with you yeah totally it kind of came withyou that comfort came with you so did you livewith them in the dorms um i lived with not myfirst semester my second semester i lived with oneof them in the dorms oh so you changed dormsmid-year no i did i literally moved next doorme and my roommate okay we need to work it alongit was okay i mean we ended up being fraternitybrothers but we still didn't get along that wellright it wasn't a fun living situation yeah youcan be friends with someone but not be able tolive with them that's totally you don't know itat the time you don't well you don't right so youmoved in with someone you didn't know first semesternext door to my two three buds from high schoolwho who who did a threesome in there and then hadit like a loft put in and like did some reallycool thing and then two of them were like heyone of them's dad was like hey i bought you ahouse you go there and so they're like later andmy one buddy's like i can't afford you know topay rent or anything yeah so he's like you want tomove in with me and so they had this decked outyeah it was great that's amazing they could leavei know and that was a fun other half of thefirst year i'm sure we had a great me and me and mybuddy we had a great time i'm sure and the factthey could leave though because i think at fsuyou have you have to live maybe not anymorethere used to be well we went to college you didyou had to live i think it was one semester yeahyeah i think that was the right you had to at leastdo something like that okay so you're at uf andsecond semester's looking good yeah it's enjoyableyeah yeah um and then during the holidays you'dgo home to this new town yeah summers yeah andholidays for the new town i made one friend thatlived generally but it was still like 40 minutedrive from my mom's it was it was and then thesummers who were you saying gainesville in thesummer stay in gainesville if you my first myfreshman year summer i came down and i live withmy dad and he's like tiny apartment in themiddle of nowhere uh and that was funny you knowum and we'd play racquetball that was likewhat we would we like we'd go to the racquetballcourse we'd play a lot of racquetball um and theni'd go hang out with a bunch of buddies we'd playpoker you know three or four nights a week goout occasionally but no one really had any moneyyeah you know so you're kind of working scrapingtogether what have you but you know we all camefrom working class families that that you knowthere wasn't extra so you didn't work throughhigh school because of the extracurricularsum right what was your first job a summer jobbeing a camp counselor was my first job and thatwas in miami shores yeah for the church okay andthen when you came back down that summer and livedwith your dad did you work then yes so i got a jobat the hospital uh in admissions what's funny ismy senior year is the funny job the most interestingjob i think it was just before my senioryear okay so i didn't share this part is reallyinteresting so my mom being a dental hygienist hadrealized that she could excuse me um when she wasa teacher she still was a dental hygienist andshe realized she could in the summers go to juneaualaska and get paid a ransom yeah to be adentist to be a dental hygienist so she left her boyshow old were you guys uh maybe 18 16 and thenshe took the youngest so your little brotheralso went to alaska yeah for a summer yeahsee the best where did you where did you staythat can we have at our house she left us in thehouse way through parties at 16 and 18 year oldlike your your sophomore your sophomore i thinkit was junior and senior okay if i if i try topiece together remember how we said i can't yeahyeah everything makes it gets me mad but 16 yeah16 would be like beginning in junior year februarydid you stop your anti-drug crusade at that pointto have the parties well let's put it this way umi was educating yes but and being educated but istill really i still did not smoke until i gotto college yeah not once till i got to college andi was surrounded by people who are like yeahtotally and my brother liked to throw the partiesback then half the kids from miami shores wentto one high school the other went to the otherhigh school there were fights or fights in mylawn my one of my best friends his dad came over he'slike oh right around like my dad i'd get like itwas my dad was supposed to watch us but my dad's20 minutes up you know down the road or 25you know it was hysterical so what palace whathave my buddy calls it the palace you're alwaysgot a palace yeah who wouldn't want to hang outthere it wasn't like that scene you see um 16candles the movie yeah where they have the partyat the house you know i'm talking about therewere there didn't go that bad like it was controlledbut there were a couple that were like you'relike there's a lot of people we had this really cooldeck off the off the second floor with a littlelike what was supposed to be a storage shed whichi'm sure became like the smoker shed which isreally breaks my heart because like if there'sone place i'd like to have smoked it wouldhave been there you know like everyone else didright um but you know it was it was a great partyhouse and um and yeah so so here's this was funnyso i started dating this girl like my senioryear and we're in high school still right right yeahyeah so this is like i guess this is junior tosenior and i'm getting this girl my mom comes homefrom this is like a little core memory and mymom comes home and she's over wait it was comingback from alaska yeah yes my mom comes home fromyeah yeah it wasn't a surprise okay okay i justfor the last month and a half two months shewas over in my house in my room are you kiddingat that age to have an empty bedroom it's like adream yeah no it's like a dream and you're likeare you out of your mind lady yeah right wellfor for my mom yeah totally sure i think she reallyi think she trusted i would do the right thing andi did morgan i have no idea but like me it was likewhy wouldn't she though you were like thisamazing high achieving kid you know it didn'tbreak a lot of rules and all that yeah likeyeah she didn't know about the army crawl thenyeah yeah she did not pre-army which stillwasn't like all i was doing was going out hanging outwith buds you know i wasn't really doing a ton ofbad stuff right there was no reason to not trustyou and supposedly your dad was going to watchyou quote unquote correct he's there for emergenciesright yeah um but i'll never forget this becausethe girl's over hanging out and i get this likegregory oh what is happening right and i gowhat's up mom what's going on she's like you will nothave guests the female persuasion in myhouse and i was like oh so now there's rules okaysorry like uh you know like i always wantedmy mom the way i looked at is my mom at ittough yeah you know she's a single momboth my brothers struggled in school um and soshe worked tirelessly yeah to she's like she'sshe's doing the dunnel hygienist thing to makeenough money to make ends meet my dad atthe time still struggling right right um andshe's got to work so hard with both of themevery day on their homework yeah they're bothexperimenting with ritalin you know like theschool you know the you know i mean like there'sa lot going on right you know and she's justsurviving you know she's she's and i guess ii don't know like i felt like i had to help heryou know i and i wasn't helping it was just likebecause i don't really think i helped i justwasn't ever going to be a burden no you took thatrole right and typically that happens especiallyin those situations one of the kids is going totake the compliant role yeah the people pleasingrole and um the helping role and that you took ityeah and that's what i need help for the homeworkhomework on my own everything was like it was justno but you know i always say this um sometimesthe compliant kids are the ones you need to watchbecause um everyone assumes they're fine anda lot of times they aren't and then um there'sthings that don't get dealt with for the compliantkid that the compliant kid as they get older faceand deal with but um they the the compliant kidis burying shit to be compliant and so um i alwaystell people check on your compliant kids becausethose are the ones sometimes that are in the mostdanger mental health wise wow so and i'm not sayingthat was your situation no it's interesting becauseit's right well once mom goes to alaska it'sparty time yeah exactly exactly but it makessense you know what's funny is is like i didn'tnecessarily want to throw parties i just wanted tohave little get together yeah my brother wanted tothrow parties yeah you know what i mean i was justkind of like we can do anything we want yeahcome hang out here yeah but you know i just wasn'treally into drugs barely into drinking i i meani mean i was a total idiot drinking wise i'd belike yeah shot shot shot yeah throw up yeah likehow cool is that yeah and then i'm laying on theground like you're cool and then i'm wrecked forthe entire next day so like i wasn't i wasn't verycool that right you know i just couldn't handle myalcohol i didn't know how to just my dad would belike dude it's not a race you idiot you know he'slike what are we doing right and it was like rightto the cliff fall off so it's so anyway i was justmellow but for you it was also access to have girlsor girl over totally so that was probably thebiggest highlight of that whole song i mean surethe the little bit of exposure to the drinking orwhatever the people around but 100 for a teenageboy who has a consistent girlfriend like havingaccess to a bed is like yes that's it right thereso um that's funny though but you know listen youwent to church every sunday i'm not surprised shecame and when she wasn't there that was not whenshe was in alaska but when she showed up that wasprobably on her mind like you're going againstsome things there what's interesting just justthe sidebars you you were more of the compliantpeople pleaser for your mom but once it soundslike when you were in school and sports you didn'thave to play that role so it's more at the home itfelt seems like interesting i in because at theschool my mom was dialed in there was still somenot gonna be disruptive yeah yeah right no hewas like there was like a senior prank i'm likei don't need to be part of that yeah i think hewas still doing that very much yeah yeah and highachieving captain and and doing all the thingsand yeah no i think that went into school toooh man i had some coaches that you know yeah thatlike because they played that father figure rolelike all i wanted to do is make make themhappy and proud and this yeah and that and you knowwhat like and then when it comes full circle sothere's there's one coach defensive coach in myhigh school and he and i got to know each otherreally well and um unfortunately recently passedand um man we would sit there because i wasa senior i kind of knew like i was cerebralenough that i understood how the game was goingso i'm like why don't we do this why don't we doso so we would sit and talk about it right andhe'd be like why is that guy wuss like i don't knowwhat do you want me to do there's a bunch ofprivate school kids like you know what i meanbecause he drives a Porsche to school like whatare we gonna do like you want me to hit him i'llhit him but it's gonna cry and walk off the fieldand we would laugh about it we'd have a great timeum and then you know he gave a speech youknow like sort of the awards banquet and andthese things i remember and you know it itimpacted me he goes if you gave me 11 playersa if you gave him you gave me 11 players thatwere one we're all like one i would take himand and then he also said uh you know hegoes it's not the size of the line and the fightsize of the fight and um yeah i mean that youknow just just people believing in me like someonebelieving in me meant a lot yeah especiallyin high school yeah no it makes sense yeah umhow did you um balancenavigating that path through high school in aprivate school where there was probably a lotof wealth yeah a lot of wealth um by the wayit might give might have given me some driveokay to kind of prove yourself no like holyshit you want live like this you want thatpossible okay yeah okay so were you everviewed like did you ever deal with any stigma surethe broke kid scholarship kid yes yeah there wasuh once i remember and it i don't think it had todo with scholarship kid but it kind of did inthat um you know you had a lot of kids who hadmaids and nannies and all that my mom went throughthis phase she's like you boys will now do your ownlaundry it was one of those we had like she hadshe was cool about like certain rules but likeif she did the laundry you had to fold it andwe didn't fold it she's like now you do your ownlaundry well what you learn as a kid is thatif you leave your laundry wet for a long time itstinks yeah and i went through a phase where myclothes reeked and i remember like the abuse itook i mean i had hand-me-downs yeah you knowall that stuff and so i definitely took some abusebut there were you know there were also someother kids in the school that didn't have money tooand and you know and it was it was okay but bythe way i also had some great friends who had moneyyeah and i just learned to get along with themright you know but i went to you know went tosleepovers on indian creek which is where tombrady and jeff bezos and all those guys livenow right and you're like okay so this isinteresting this is a level like you sometimesand i really do believe this i think some people are limited by what they seein fact like you know it's like your imaginationcan't create it even if you see it on instagramwhatever like in social like you can't seeif you if you but if you've gone into a homethat looks that beautiful you can go how do iget this yeah right now i was always going to do itethically and this that the next but it wasalways like how do i get the house on the hill yeah andyou see it right you're like wow okay so i need towork hard it's the exposure yeah and it was alwayslike once i hit a limit in anything i was doingi was like well what's next like how do i so i dothink it it added some drive it rooted into itrooted yeah yeah i wanted it if you will yeahso there were pros and cons that you dealt withsome totally for totally being the quote unquotepoor kid or scholarship kid but it also gaveyou that drive and and stayed with you the rest ofyour life probably so it helps to be the captainof the football team well yeah that's that too youknow like i'm not complaining like i had bigfriends like you want to mess with me i meanthat's a really big friends are going to beatyou up and then at the same time at a small schoollike that you're a captain football team and youhelp the team be do great people want to be yourfriend right so yeah you had a lot ofbalance yeah a lot of different worlds very blesseddo you ever do different worlds besides now yeahin different ways um most of it is just kind oflike man i'm like i'm pretty lucky yeah you knowmore than anything else just kind of blessed likei was pretty blessed to be able to do some ofthat without realizing that had i not had thosethings how hard it could have been at that parti maybe it's making me think more about right nowbut you know but like i was a decent athlete ithink the thing is is there's plenty of peopleare decent athletes but they don't work hardthe just think about it like when when you go fromfootball practice to soccer practice tohomework to theater you know and rinse repeat and oh bythe way you gotta you know you can't go messaround at break because you got to go do this like i wasi was overworked but i had no but it also saidlike you know if you want all these things likeby the way like the more it's funny the harderyou work the more opportunities present themselvesthat's a blessing and a curse because then all ofa sudden you're like and i still have that blessingand curse now because it's this um conflictbetween your values wanting something and itlike let's say like you want to volunteer butit costs you time away from your family and thatthat conflict is messes with me as i've gottenolder you know because yeah you want to do thesethings but like but like having a child secondtime around yeah i don't want to miss those yearslike i miss them with you first you see thetrade-off and yes and it creates that conflictthat conflict what do i what are my values ina sense yeah are they you know like making it'slike just choices you know like funny thing isin high school it never felt like there was anegative choice it was just do this do this dothis by the way because i it kept me from partyingand because i wasn't partying i didn't feel likei didn't have fomo on that side of the house yeahyeah um because i was busy yes and and and insome ways also like we had discussed probablyalso your way of coping with sure what had beengoing on so you've you've been busy you've beendoing you've been you've had this childhood andall this this installation this this little smalltown in miami your mom sells the house you're nowat uf you had kind of always had adults around youhelping form who you are yeah now you're on yourown in college in a town there's no your mom's notworking at the school she doesn't know no none ofyour mom's friends are working at uf yeah um you'reyou're kind of free maybe for the first timeno eyes are on you it's just your experience umhow did that experience compare to where you camefrom big man on campus yeah big big fish small bigfish small pond to little fish enormous pond was alot um joint fraternity helped um gave me a senseof that you know group i mean having acouple friends from my high school and it's reallyfunny like my so if you go to go to floridaand it's rush week so you're just kind of walkingaround and my roommate happened to know this dudeand he comes over and they're like hey let's smokeright and i smoked once maybe like okay likei was yes to everything at that point rightuh not everything that's stupid statement so wesmoke this dude becomes my best friend in all ofcollege like we lived together we joined the samefraternity and he was like my guy right so we'd bewe became like the best of friends so it's reallyfunny that happened like day one you know that'sawesome yeah and um and i do truly like beingaround people like i just like people i have thisfriend now he's like he looked at me one dayhe's like you like people yeah he's like you don'the's like no i don't like being around people atall never even like it's so funny to hear someoneverbalize it right that's me okay right butwhat's funny is brian is because i like being aroundpeople i'm very good with introverts yeah yeahright because they're like i can pick i make iteasy on you yeah hang out with me yeah yeah yeahand right like because you know some people can dolike it's just adapting very much so to mysurroundings so i you know so so it was umit wasn't as hard as you think for me i wentto school i drank a little bit partied too muchmissed a bunch of classes lost my scholarshipthat pissed my parents off yeah yeah but guess whatresponse that was was now you're gonna take aloan out your name okay back then alone was a littleeasier it was like here's an interest-free loanyou don't start paying back until after you graduateyeah okay so started paying for schools andbooks and stuff like that when did that happenuh freshman year okay so was that second semesterwhen you got with your friend i gotta see i gottasee in theater appreciation and lost myscholarship oh no this is hysterical theater because i didn'tgo and i didn't know there was theaterappreciation for god's sake i love this yes and and it was an800 person class which is the worst thing inthe world because no one cares and then there'seight plus notes so you kind of read the notesand the guy basically made it tricky on peoplehe kind of made it very much this i get my classas a joke but i'll put easter eggs in showing upi hate that you didn't show up yeah you werescrewed in this class basically in attendanceclass it's all was yeah i made the mistake alsolike i i signed up for like english at 8 am ohbut i didn't know any better yeah that's theinteresting thing but the interesting thingabout all of this was because i had neverreally needed my mom to help or my dad to help no onehelped me pick classes no like we didn't gothrough that like she was like you good i'm like i'm goodbut it wasn't making wise decisions suchas an 8 am class in college or freshman yearenglish yeah i'm gonna make that a lot so yeahone night to drop that way you know like so iwent through that process um and yeah i mean ipaid for it by paying it back you know with interestand the modern modern way of uh lending moneyto students and then ripping them off in themeanest interest rates you can that makes tons ofsense to me um so i paid it all back and all thatbut that was the you know that was the trade-offthat was the consequence there's this whole debatearound should you go to college or not and i'mstill there but i think what you're describingis part of that experience in college it's notall academic it's learning don't schedule a classat eight that'll help you later in life do youever have 8 am meetings today yeah right i try notyeah you try not to you know unless it's yeahyeah brian here's interesting um i went back tomy school and to talk to seniors and the number one thing i talked to them about isuh is invest in relationships when you'recollege you know business world or professional worldit's a lot about who you know always right butopening doors you know who you know opens doorsi i don't necessarily think that who i know hashelped me like massively there's there's peoplei do know where like that's worked out but likemy message to the kids was like you're not therenecessarily to to really learn and apply thebook smarts you'll learn some there's some thingsi've learned that you know however myfavorite classes had nothing to do with my majorbut i had said to the kids i was like lookfirst and foremost get outside of your conferenceand i wish i would have done that so thisthat's the negative of like being this people personlike to be surrounded people i didn't i don'tlike going to a bar by myself whereas you knowpeople like i go to a bar by myself all day longthat's not comfortable for me which is weird and iused to when i lived in boca remember gatsby'swas right down the street and i would be like heyi couldn't go there by myself and uh andso um and so i didn't break out of my circleand and i was challenging them i said you know ifyou break out of your circle and you get outsideyou're gonna meet people from all walks oflife and these will open massive trees for youright tributaries of crazy relationships younever knew that i wish i did more and so that's what iencourage them to do because that's where i thinkyou know college has that that opportunity reallylike a massive opportunity for them to do thatand then the other thing is like man your bestopportunity to explore topics you've never thoughtto explore and i don't think you don't like we'relike hey i'll do theater appreciation and golfto get my credits because everything was aboutsort of achieving your credits to get tograduate and i was four in four out and i really wishi wouldn't have been by the way i don't thinki coached my daughter as well as i could havethrough her college journey which is funnybecause i know this i really don't think ipushed her as hard i got her out of her comfortzone for sure she went way out of out of floridabut not necessarily the way i'm talking which isinteresting so so oh go ahead well the questioni so you went back to your you spoke to seniorsat your high school it's a very interesting thingbecause i know you're you are a giving personand you're you do volunteer you do some things likethat how did they receive that did they so ireally was so grateful for being invited uh it was likei was three years into my company myentrepreneurial journey and got invited back and it was a reallyneat experience it was all seniors we had somegosillionaires house on fisher island i thinkthe guy invented the barcode literally rightsomeone invented that right yeah oh by the waythis was a lesson for me i got to talking tohim for 30 minutes and realized i know exactly whyyou invented the barcode there was no way youwere going to survive in corporate america thatwasn't an option and he and i reflected on that tothe students i go you know everyone wants to be anentrepreneur everyone wants to own a company andblah blah blah yeah the reality is is i'm not imean i was college the workforce big corporate ijust my journey into entrepreneurship is differentthan a lot of other people but there aresome people who do it out of desperation becausethere's nothing else and that's a really coredriver right no other options or i've done aself-assessment and i can't live in that worldand that opens really cool things talk about gettingout of your comfort zone hundred percent yeahright and that's you know it's funny getting outof your comfort zone is like i feel like i'm arisk taker but i don't feel like i'm a risk takerit's so because of this circle of comfort thatthat we've talked about building yeah you knowand and when you were college and we talked abouthow a lot of that fell away but you still had someof it because you had friends there and thenyou created with your fraternity so it sounds likeyou kind of approached college a little bitsimilarly in than high school you were drivenyou had an end goal maybe you focused on the endis more than the process of getting there it waslike i'm graduate like i got four yearsgraduate this is what i need to do and as you're sayinginstead of getting out of your comfort zone havingsome different life experiences what during thosefour years not be so goal focused on what you're supposed to be doing yeah you knowi've often reflected that had i decided to golike i was burnt out of sports right i had saidthat and um but i love football love it andshould i have even explored that's going to a smallschool right like staying the same path i'dprobably be coaching football right now in somerespect i may still in my older days in likehigh school and what have you but um but if i wouldapply the same level of passion drive andintelligence to that you know i would haveyou know done it in a in a high level and sosometimes i've you know i keep asking myself likeyou don't always have to do the straight linemy life's been very straight line i think anywaysuntil it gets disrupted and a lot of actuallymy risks have been forced upon me yeah but it'syeah yeah yeah and when did but when did that so you graduate from collegedid you then do the next kind of safechoice like as far as what was your first yeah somy first job was a buddy of mine got me aninterview okay in atlanta my best bud who oneof my best buds who um who picked me up every dayfrom school his older brother who had come down tocollege and blah blah blah and like we becamefriends and we're great friends now he got me ajob okay uh ended up being more of a mentor andhe gets me his job at this company he just leftand and uh i go on this interview and one of theguys i'm interviewing with gets up in the middlestarts stretching like literally it's the weirdestit's my first job interview ever right so awesomewait the guy that is interviewing you two guys are interviewing me the friendwho got me the job is in the or got me theinterview was in the uh excuse me my bestfriend's brother's buddy who who made the connectionhe's in the room but he starts doing all this weirdshit and he works for them and he works for themlike the other right so the other guy goes and theother guy's like so i do this whole interview ithink i did okay yeah they say no my buddy callsthem up yeah you you're gonna be idiots like don'tyou do this and they end up hiring me oh wow yeahcalls them like yeah you guys are idiots it'slike a training ground of inside sales reps rightokay top of my class blah blah blah first to getpromoted let's put it this way i i like if someonebets on me i'm gonna do a lot to make sure yeahand by the way this has driven me this is how ithink i've been like if even at the clientlevel if the client says i'll go with these guys i'mgoing to give the small guy a chance i will doeverything in my power to make sure that they'rerewarded for that decision you know so did greatthere but straight arrow like first interview ata college got the job went to that place how longdid you work there uh yeah all in all is about fivefour five years five years that's a long timewell yeah so so inside sales and then i got promotedto and i moved to louisville kentucky so youlived in atlanta was in atlanta for two years roughlyand then went to louisville went to louisvilleokay and uh and did two years there and um that'swhere my girlfriend and i got pregnant okay soyou're working there um you have your own placeyeah and you had your own place in atlanta rightno i had a roommate okay so that was great likeatlanta was great bunch of young professionalsokay a couple guys i ended up meeting a guy whoi knew at florida but didn't know really well andsomeone said hey that guy's looking you're lookingwant you guys to be roommates we're besties nowit's amazing that's awesome yeah that's awesomei love this dude and um and he's he's strangei'm strange it's great and we're having the time ofour lives we're both doing these stupid jobswe're making he's making fun of what i'm doing he'smaking fun of what he's doing we're bothjust trying to figure it out go out barely spendevery and i made three or four friends who i amreally close with that's great that's great andthen and then my buddy's older brother is nowone of my best buds and because now four-yeardifferences and four-five-year difference isnothing yeah yeah yeah and so yeah the friendships imade atlanta are i mean i i'm very blessed likei i have a great circle of just super cool peopleyeah yeah and then when you get to kentucky sothat's your first time ever living on your ownoh yeah and how old were you 23 so that'scool yeah getting your own place right kentucky'sinteresting luval's interesting right like at onepoint i joke like um i go out to a bar i'm one ofthe only guys that doesn't have his name on itsure why did they have their name on this shirtlike you know like you're like a uniform ohlike uh yeah like your name kec like a uniform likewait you got like a blue collar job versus awhite collar which isn't even fair but it waslike mentally i'm young and i'm stupid it's notokay by the way luval is an amazing way it's oneof our favorites we've been there um weloved it we loved it loved it okay big small towngreat whiskey scene great bar scene greatmusic scene great music scene is fantastic they hadlike sunday concerts they are catholic churchesa new carnival every sun like summers in luva areamazing winners who cold were you in downtowni lived in uh the st matthews area i'm not kindof a little suburbia okay the downtown wasn'tas as good as it is now yeah right it wasn't asand it's still kind of a small down show now it'sa little dodgy yeah it's a little dodgy but it'slike a small downtown but by the way like imet a guy there who is a lifelong friend nowyeah he's amazing i'm not surprised it's it'sjust kind of my journey yeah it's kind of my journeyso you're living in your own place for the firsttime that's a big move um and your work you workyou got this promotion you're working and youmeet this woman uh my girlfriend from high schooloh so had you guys been dating this whole timeno no wait is this the one that the mom your momyelled about no okay that was the hooterswaitress oh nothing special about that at allpart of myself but yeah you know my kids aregonna listen to this one um yeah so uh so when did youstart dating her in high school uh sophomore yearshe was a year younger than i was so i guess i wasa junior she was a sophomore you guys were likeoff and on through high school well she ended upmoving back to columbia the country oh so likethey okay her family moved back there and that'sand then we reconnected in kentucky of allplaces we were connected remotely okay and so theneven in atlanta so we reconnected remotely andthen we started doing the remote day it was alwayslong distance okay she would fly she was fromcolumbia no she was living in miami working soshe when she graduated college she moved tomiami and started working okay and then we were doingthe long distance thing for a while and then uhwe were talking about marriage so it wasn't likewe weren't talking about it and so did she moveto kentucky to live with you moved to kentucky butshe like moved in we're like i said well whydon't you move like she's like i want to be closer soshe moves with some roommates or gets an apartmentwith some roommates but that doesn't work so she'sin my house oh okay 24 seven okay when you'reyoung you know yeah so so you had your own placebut no yeah so i had my kind of my own place forlike a year and then she's and then you had yourgirlfriend there correct okay and she's workingthere too i assume in yes kentucky okay yes andso uh you guys are dating we're dating andyou're talking about marriage yeah we're like hey andmaybe yeah in a ring i would like okay that kindof stuff yeah um more like that i'm still 23 rightright 24 um and then she gets pregnant okay andyou know so i'm i immediately say well it's thisguy gotta do the right thing let's went to thegot the justice of the peace come to my house andmy mom flew up my dad was like should i and youknow like that's no big deal don't worry about itwe'll connect so then um so then he so it'slike no it's my mom's there and and we do a littlebaby altar in my apartment if you will and and uhjustice to the peace comes he's you know like anordained minister and he does that um and so weget married what about her family were they therefamily was in columbia we had him like on likeuh like uh what was it at the time aim or icq yeahsomething like that yeah it's crazy likesomething you know to get it um yeah and it's me my momum her uh my uncle because my uncle lived inLouisville okay and then my my my cousin and thosewere like our witnesses and we did a little cutelittle thing and you know had some wine whateverit was nice um and then a couple weeks laterwe went down to or uh orlando and did the parksand uh um we did the parks and so everyone likea couple my buddies came my dad came and everyonegot to spend time with her and get to know orwhatever yeah she spent some time with my dad mydad was like yeah yeah that's great like he'slike i'm not feeling great but everything's goodum and uh and my dad my dad died 30 days laterso how old were you i was uh 24 and she was stilland she was still pregnant how did he passaway heart attack so my grandfather died at 58a couple months before i was born of a heart attackuh and and so he my dad died of heart attack at 58a couple months before my daughter was born yourdaughter was born yeah wow so it was in the familyyeah hereditary for sure young though very and he was in miamiyeah my uh my little uh i'm at i'm at a work thingand i get a phone call uh from a police officer andhe was in the shower and he um they had a tardeck in the shower and my poor little brotherwoke up was he living with him he wasliving with him and he woke up like when it isjust kind of moseying around yeah yeah yeah yeahyour poor brother just to add on to all the other shit you were talking about yeahand which is amazing because he's he just justhis heart so big you know he's just such a goodyou know he just kind of floats through lifewith this like you would think he'd be likerr rr rr no no he's not he's doesn't he doesn'tlike walk around with this dark cloud woe is mevibe at all i'm always like dude not not onlywas your dad young you were young yeah very youngand about to become a father yeah yeah so that'sa whole other thing um that was uh so that thathad to been like a grenade for your familyjust massive we were gonna move from Louisville toAtlanta we changed our minds when we said let'sgo move down to South Florida which i think my wifenever wanted to be in my wife yeah my wife neverwanted to be in Atlanta anyway right so she usedthat as an opportunity or we say let's get toMiami uh so that's August first September 11thhappens oh jeez uh we set September we move ichanged jobs same company same company wonderfulwonderful manager was important man in my lifeum because they worked with you right becauseeverything going on they kind of set all that upfor you that job in Miami they weren't okay yeahthey weren't that one man was good i was gonnasay you got one guy he had a role he's like youcan come here i got i was leaving the companyby the way like i was interviewing for a roleat a different company because i was like i'mgonna move on okay big corporate 250,000 personcompany you know so he had a role i knew theguy he's like hey i got a role in for a lot of youcan come down here that's great so we i gottamove we buy a house change jobs my daughter's bornall within six months and you're 24 turn 25 2525 i guess that was 25 and your mom's not therebecause she's living and mom was super like she'strying to do right but but all the familiar stuffyes there's no familiar there's nothingit's just such a contrast from when you leftgraduated high school and this life you hadhad and then you come back yeah and it's likenothing is we move out to the middle ofnowhere suburbia west west west Broward countyand your dad's not there so you're having tolive down here in south florida without yourfather for the first time that's a whole newnormal was your little brother still here nohe was in tampa um but you had the uncle right andthe cousins yeah who lived in boca but too far awaywell it it almost i mean now you've got your newwife and the daughter's born the baby the baby'sborn you've got a new job you're back to afamiliar geographical area but it's completelydifferent that's what i yeah that's what i meanit's almost like twelved like i don't know anyoneyeah so so well and she's still we haven'teven gotten to the birth of your daughter soshe's still pregnant you've started this new jobyou've bought a house um i mean i bought that houseand she was born and then she was born and nowyour father yeah so how did becoming a fatherchange your life you know i take it veryseriously but then it was i took it as it wasresponsibility you know um and i think mywife was struggling with a little postpartumthat's my diagnosis no one else's um so it wasreally tough it was really tough i was openinga territory that had been um neglected for avery long time and if anyone's tried to builda business from start it's it's really hard it'sa ton of knows well actually we didn't even touchon that huge expectations professionally nowright now i gotta earn you gotta earn and you'reyou're building a territory starting it fromscratch or fixing a neglected one yeah and it'sit's the type you know back then sales jobswere low base yeah you make your money and you'revariable now there's now they've you know newworld of yeah you know there's more balance to itwhich is different and um so it's really hardi had a good manager he was he was cool dudehe had a lot of pressure on you because nowyou're a father and a husband father and i we could wecouldn't make the ends and like and it was funnybecause i inherited just a little you know a littlemoney from my dad from life insurance the ironyof my father being a financial planner but it'syou know the cobblers children have no shoeskind of thing yeah his world by the way i wasthe i was the executor of the will because therewas no executive the will so that everyone's likeyou're the guy who's organized i'm like i'mnot organized you're the high achiever correct soit's not always fun to be the high achiever anduh and for some reason in our family we like tosay please be the high achiever and then judgeyou as you do it yeah lovely and that happenedto my dad when my mom when my grandma passedtoo he was judged as he did as he did it which isfunny yeah um i think that happens heavy as thecrown they say right yeah um yeah and i rememberso distinctively walking the dog once becauseour when the marriage was hard it wasn't workingit was just you know unfortunately it was justnothing but stress yeah all along the way andthere wasn't a ton of support and i rememberlooking at the sky like just like dude where areyou yeah not god dad dad yeah where like i needyou now you know yeah and you're dealing with alot there you're dealing with not having a fatherat 25 which no one expects yeah hello like neverin your wildest dreams he was so excited to be agranddad like he was out all over the moon righthe was gonna have granddaughter yeah three boysright and just to go back right you would finallyonce you're hit an old enough age to drinkyou know hang out that's when your relationshipreally started so you 30 days it was a reallycool window was it only that long it was onlythat long to talk about what was gonna bepossible yeah 30 days what a tease man what a terriblejoke geez so and our last one of our last i'mpretty sure our last conversation was he wastelling me i should buy life insurance and i godad i don't want to talk about death right nowyeah i like dude yeah i'll figure it out but idon't want to deal with this now he's like youneed to do this you know my dad i was always sortof he's not trying to sell me anything he's likethis is responsible what's something happensto you you know yeah yeah yeah i remember buyinglife insurance like right after he passed becausei was like i need it you know yeah so i it's it'ssuch a cruel joke right you're giving a windowinto what could be and then it's snatched from youand you're so young and at the same time andyou're still a child you're still your father'schild at that time we're always our parentschild so you're your father's child and you lose himbut now you're someone's father and have tobe that to that child and also a husband it's athat is an insane tornado of everything um whatwould you say your biggest coping mechanism wasduring that time uh that's funny i mean you knowwork was part of it you know it because i had nochoice i mean i mean i guess ultimately idon't ever run from a fight that's never been me sounfortunately that leads you to deal withthings later yeah right so just push it down denialmaybe that's a little nice gen x or just pushthose feelings down you're not allowed to have thoseoh yeah um so there was a lot of that uh buddy of mine got me involved in asoftball team is just a way to take my mind offof it um yeah i was i i i don't know that i copedyeah as much as i just dealt avoided avoidedyeah just just operated right like i put blinders onand said you know execute you know like youcan't not make ends meet uh i think it got real thenthen there was a divorce so how long were youguys together like 18 months it almost uh wasdestined to not to fail because so much itstarted with just so much yeah and anyone ina normal situation would struggle but you guyswere so young and even though you'd been talkingabout marriage it kind of was happened so quicklythere wasn't a lot of preparation wasn't naturalper se correct for it it was reaction to rightand then but it's almost a it's a testament toyou being a good person too though you're tryingto do the right thing and doing the right thingisn't always easy and then you get more curveballsthrown at you and it's like this is really not easyunder such extenuating circumstances i mean it'sand and even though you know your mom was therebeing supportive she's not living close to youso it's not like she's the grandma that could justcome over and help you know what i mean youdidn't you guys didn't have that even that personthat comes hey i'll take the baby you guys takea break yes i think i've learned a little bit ofthat my mom's really good at dealing with thesituation without emotion just just operatinglike she when my dad passed like even though imean to give you an idea of like you know theythey really loved each other they just had areally tough time and they and they got divorcedbut like like we did thanks we did a justbefore he had the year before he passed we all didthanksgiving and christmas together they werestill friends yeah like yeah you know they therewas a respect that got developed redeveloped overtime and and that was really beautiful to see umand when my dad passed like she was really arock for the three of us like she she moved it butand she talked to me about how like then it camecrashing down on her yeah my dad's passing didn'tcome crashing down on me until like really liketo deal with it it was funny like one honestlyit was years later and my buddies about my buddyuh had to write a eulogy for his grandma's passingand he goes you know can i see yours because i ispoke at my dad's and i like got three sentencesinto it um ran out the house for about an hourand just basically sat on a outside the back ofmy house crying for it finally hit yeah i justcouldn't could not cry how long from the timeyour dad had passed to that four years maybeokay so you had buried and buried it yeah avoidedand was in and were in denial you don't i'vereflected on a lot of the harder things thathave happened in my life and i and i i feel likei feel like god does that to certain people whocan handle it so that they can help others throughit and and like even when my parents got divorcedbuddy of mine was going through it i was there tohelp him through it like hey dude you know and itwas tough not long after my dad passed a coupleyears later you know one of my good buds his dadpassed heart attack and like you know to bethere for him yeah you know that makes me feel reallygood you know yeah um you're giving back from yourown experience and your own agony what's the pointof it if you're finding yeah you're findingmeaning behind it yeah i think that helps me healright which is which is and that comes fromyour beliefs from your two places to believereligious right you got double right hey that'sgood yeah but that faith gives you that helps youfind that meaning you know and um i actually thinkthat's a beautiful thing um and i'm not surprisedthat it took you that i think i don't know if menin general do that but i think all men i've knownwho've gone through a significant loss likethat avoid dealing with it for a very long timeand the men i'm talking about are gen xtwo age and so i think that also goes back togen x boys not being given space to understandidentify their emotions express them and thenthey grow up to be these men who still don't havethat emotional development are you looking at meto them because you're included in this um but ithink then when life hits uh they don't necessarilyhave the tools to even start processing andum yeah because i think the younger generationthe men and the younger generations are way morefluent in being able to identify not in generalin general um even to just identify what you'refeeling identify it and give it a word so um thati think that's very typical for our generationthe way you coped with it but then you were able tofind good in it and how you gave back toothers and not everyone can do that so that's verycommendable that you found that silver liningthere so you you guys divorce after 18 monthsdo you stay living close to each other shemoved back to bogota columbia with the baby yes thatwas a tough decision at first you know so i wasso young and stupid um i was like well she's agirl she needs to be with her mom there wasprobably some selfishness there you know what idon't think it was selfish there was some fearthere yeah i don't think i can do this reallydidn't i'm like i don't like if it was a boy iprobably would have been like all right you knowsmack him in the head let's figure it out asa girl i was scared i didn't know did you saynot even 18 months old yeah and uh at first it wasokay because at first it was great she would spendmonths at a time with each of us so she'd be incolumbia for a month fly back to me with a monthbut with a nanny oh okay from columbia okayyeah and i would have her for months at a time thatsounds pretty ideal it was amazing it was likewhat so my buddy my buddy teased me all the time he'slike dude nor don't it's fake parenting but likehe teased me all the time like fake parenting brolike yeah well but but yeah that that wasgreat where it really sucked is when school savedbecause then it went from i had her all the timeand and our relationship was really great in thosefirst like zero to five zero to six likereally good with your daughter yeah really great andthen when she started going to school it waslike um it was like all of a sudden it reallywent down not downhill that's not the right wordit just separated you know it became harder to doi would fly to columbia to be with her you knowand i would you know like you didn't even havea weekend so i would go months without her and itwas there was no face time there's no any of thatlike you know like what what six seven or eightyear old wants to talk on the phone yeah how areyou good how was school good yeah so was it umlike would she come spend summers with you yesand then like every other christmas all thatyeah so that's and a lot of times especially thechristmas i mean it takes a while just to getcaught up and get comfortable with each otheragain so i'm sure in the summers you had that timebut christmas is probably right as you guys foundyour groove she's going back to columbia yeah youknow they were tricky times i i tried to make itto columbia a couple times a year so does shehave dual citizenship that's cool yeah is shefluent spanish in english that's awesome that'sawesome so did that go on for her from kindergartento time she was 18 was she doing that no becauseum things that happened in her world in her mom'sworld and we had made the decision it wasbetter for her my now wife and i were had made thedecision we were dating for a while we made thedecision let's move in together and at the sametime we decided to move in together um her momhad some stuff going on that was like it'd bebetter if she was with you how old was she 12okay so middle school so you guys got a girl right asshe was going into middle school so and i feelbad for i mean like yeah everything she knew she waslike she was living in one city her mom's likewe're moving to a new city they moved to that newcity and immediately is like hey this isn'tworking out you need to go with your dad andso she just got ripped from everything sheknew and you know i i know that was hard nowthe amazing thing is she got brought into a verystable situation except her dad's a lunatic andyells and screams a lot did not handle havingtwo middle school slash high schoolers and thatlike i did not hand but now you're no were youalso newly married we were at the time not evenengaged we just said let's move in together andsee if this works middle school is hard for almostevery girl and i think for a lot of boys under anycircumstance i always say it sucks it's the worstit's the worst let alone what your daughterwas walking into being in america now permanentlybeing with her father and his girlfriend now andum and also a place that speaks only english likeshe was coming from even though she knows it it'ssuch a culture big culture difference big culturedifference so i can't even imagine yeah what shewent through i mean i really and also what you guyswere going through because you're not onlyhelping guide who through middle school shitbut also cultural stuff too well yeah sothey parent different yeah than we parentthere's a nanny there there was a grandma theremy daughter knew how to get a yes some way shape orform my wife is really black and white she comesfrom a very strong multi-general multi-generationalmilitary background so that's another anothershock oh yeah well by the way like i feel youknow that i also feel really bad for my oldestwho you know my oldest was it was just her and hermom yeah you know like not that her dad wasn'taround but it was it was her yeah i was gonnaask you that so you said you had two middleschoolers there's no high school in a middle schooler rightyeah it roughly works out to high school she'sabout four years older so that your wife now hadher a child correct that's what i'm referringto okay so i just call her my oldest yes yeahno she's my oldest she's amazing so youroldest is there and had been her and her mom her momand her mom has to make this choice like heywe're gonna move in with dummy yeah this guyjust ignore his temper in this weird manner ignorehis temper which on the move-in day you know likesouth florida movers or maybe it's everywhere butthey like close the door and they're like you oweus more money yeah and i do not handlesomeone shaking me down well yeah at all and i'mand we're they're pros losing and by the waythose those two there's no up and down thereis as even killed as there is and i am likei won't kill everyone in this fucking worldlucy did and they're just like what'shappening right heard you're all like what have you gotshe's like life was great it was just me andmom like i had her all to myself now i gotta shareher and i'm like oh funny story not only do youhave to share her here comes a wrecking ball yeahand i don't mean that the wrong way i come inlike i mean like the song like just yes yes yeslatin yes right yes big personality highlyemotional what the hell just happened to meright but the way i deal with it is ah and likeby the way every time she used to come home my wifewasn't living with me right and so she's used toi get to sleep in dasbeth oh kind of things tooright so like it's all really wonky so theyboth like your oldest doesn't get as much time withher mom and now your your daughter who'scome from corvia doesn't get to sleep in dasbethso that's being adventure that's another tornadoyeah i don't even know i think i'm wrong i thinkit's like 10 and 14 you know what i mean or 11it's a thing like right okay so but that's hardbut it's all that does tough one being rippedaway from her mom and like but but like but likethe relationship there is is a little bit morecheerleader best friend yeah my wife is a littlebit more like the boss right like my like theseare the rules pick up after you're still like verylike by the way the most supporting and lovingperson in the world and her daughters are blessedto have her because they they know it but that'sthe boss right you know what i'm saying it's justsuch a difference and there are rules yeah she hadno rules to all rules right right right that's howthis one is nicole runs the tight ships here theone goes from no rules to all rules and this andmy oldest goes from like peace love andhappiness to mad chaos yeah so my poor girls so they canhave anything they want what do you guys need howcan dad help okay so to go back a little bit thoughum after your your divorce yeah um did you stayliving there no no i sold that house okay and gotmy finances restabilized i'd been losing you knowlike it was in all this debt well i tell you thescariest debt is the scariest thing to me it'snever yeah and um but you learn that like youcome out of it you know like yeah you knownothing's finite yeah i needed to learn thati was like i'm never getting out of this debt ittakes me 50 just to buy lunch yeah yeah you knowhow am i ever going to do it and then you justlearn that you believe in yourself and it worksout but um we work hard but um yeah i moved toclose to downtown and had a little fun so you gotyour own place got my own place got a part nowwere you experiencing the downtown miami thatyou didn't experience that's at fort lauterdalebut yes little bit a little bit had a little funyeah i had some fun actually and then and thenlike a year later i moved up to here so up to bocaup to boca yeah so were you in the same companyduring all this time when you moved to downtownno i uh well i moved to downtown and and then i uhi jumped from like atnt to nortel all sales thoughsales okay yeah good with people uh to norteland then that was like it was tough it was likea sinking ship and then realize it and then i gotrecruited to go over to cisco okay and that thisis my sort of stupid brain i think it's like ohmy territory is gonna be you know boca north soi should move that way like it matters right butlike that's what i felt you know i feel like i hadto be in market um i get hired my boss quits oneweek later that was awesome i didn't even have alaptop and literally my boss quits and literallywhoever replaces him's like what are you bringingin this week i'm gonna get on a laptop i don'teven know what you're talking about right i guessit was it was culture shock for me like uh whatare you you know yeah um but screw it man you knowjust put my backpack on and went to it and uhimmediately started earning that's when i met jdokay so how long did you work for cisco sixyears and doing sales yeah and so you were there at adecent time then right because if nortel they gotrid of nortel a lot of a lot of the big voice bushyeah a lot of big voice push uh the voiceyeah voice was big the pics the pics was you knowthe pics was there you know like a couple keysblew up at that time but it was hard man likemy first experience there was uh it was big teammeeting that's how i met jd big team meeting anduh and like i'm sitting there talking like theyintroduced me and i'm you know blah blah blah anddifferent things or tell us a little bit aboutnortel and this and that jd's like come here youngyoung pup so so like you're talking about like aneight layer in like eight desk deep type thing andhandsome is in the back corner like as cool as theother side of the pillow right like real cool backthere and he grabs me and he's like come to thehotel pick me up literally and he's like i'm gonnaput you under my wing like he right from theregrabbed me and put me under his wing jd did jd didyeah and uh you know that was a blessingblessing that's who he is yeah yeah everything so it's athat's for our listeners we have an episode withjd we highly suggest you go listen to jd's episodeso in that sense jd was a mentor for you but your roles not that they've completelyreversed but you guys are tight now you guys arefriends yeah totally um yeah like i said but mymy my wife fell so so in love with jd she's likethat man is all love and she she said do you mindif i ask him to marry us and and so she reachedout to him and said i'd like you know like you to beare efficient and uh she's amazing that waylike she's done it five times uh she's married fiveyou know five different people and um and thathas been passed forward so jd now is married i thinkthree couples and his son and two others so yourwife has married like five people yeah and thennow jd was right yeah since she's done it shewas like all you have to do is become a justice tothe peace and and you can that's wonderful isn'tit it is it really is to be there for that momentuh for people's are beginning their lifetogether yeah through all these years of um i mean evenstarting in atlanta all the way through untiljd took you under his wing um and you're thisyoung salesman in the corporate world yeah so thisculture shock was interesting because we all go todinner okay this is like oh yeah you know youknow it was torture we all go to dinner and thisbecause we're out we're like bossless and thiswoman comes down and we all go to this reallybig dinner we're drinking a ton of wine and shegoes yay and she stands up on the table and sayswine commits and this was so funny i love thisshe goes she would point at someone he'd be likeeight hundred thousand and they're like you fivehundred thousand you seven hundred thousand andeveryone's going around and she's literallywriting it down and they get to me and meanwhilelike i'm there on the job like two weeks i'mlike i don't know two hundred they're like boo loserwhat is happening right now right yeah yousculpture shock for me i was like i don't thinkit was a great first experience most peoplewhen they go to work for a company like thattheir first experience is like you go tocorporate you get the ha ha the ra ra john chambers highfives you you know all these things i listened tojd's podcast he was like this is the greatest placein the world i didn't get that experience okayi went straight into you suck because you didn'tsay a big enough because you didn't take big youknow big enough number and um i think that is whyi wasn't there more than six years yeah and whyi ended up in the journey i wanted because i waslike that's not this isn't who i am differentmarkets too though right because jd was up in newyork and it the financials are there and allthat but not when i met him when i met him he wascovering south florida a part of south floridacall your Naples all that you know what i meanbut yes like his journey his indoctrination wasthere think about it he spent all that time withjohn chambers he had given me time with um apowerful yeah pretty remarkable guy totally yeahyeah could you imagine being in the room yeahyeah like i just want to hear what he says yeahthat's how you talk to people there's an awardright and i think that's what jd went throughup there that's what i mean his experience isway different he talks about a situation like thatum well jd coaches me on that too like he'llsay that was a john chambers moment that's coollike if i say if i do something that is aboutmotivating the team about providing directionhe'll reach out to me and he's like you'vegrown that's awesome and his affirmation means a lotthat's awesome he's uh he's shared that hishis uh his admiration or acknowledgement of yourprofessional and personal growth and maybe i'mtalking out of school here but he's like i'll tellyou greg he's really just grown or matured orwhatever it is so he's a huge fan oh definitelydefinitely through all those years um and you hadso many different experiences it sounds like withdifferent companies different positions but youwere still pretty young yeah doing all this umis there something you wish you would have donedifferently during those years or if you could goback is there a different way you would haveapproached things professionally i mean if i weredoing anything different it would have been not goto atlanta from college it would have been to go toa bigger market that would have been more and bemore technical or something i mean i don't i onlypath of least resistance like ultimately a friendgot me an interview that's how i got into tech iam not a pure computer technical guy i fell inlove with it because i find it super interestingand even when i went to work at this company igrabbed this this guy who's now a great friendand i go hey man he is this wonderful surfer dudethe atlanta surfer and um he uh i go can you showme what the hell this is and he walked me intothe data center he's like this is what this is thisis what this is like thank you and then i was likeoh cool like this actually i understand its poweri really do i understand what it does and it doesif you really think about it like we live in theoperations of it world and operations i had acio i respect a lot said said the other day it wasjust kind of loosely saying it he's like it'sthe engine and if the engine doesn't work nothingworks because it's not sexy but it's the engineand um i think people overlook that so i reallyfell in love with that i'm like so this is coolthat we can do this and that enables this personwho's here to work and be safe be secure and like i just find it interesting umbut i've had something like dude if you went into new york and in big financethis could have been your journey or that could have been your journey somaybe just not taking the easiest path of youknow like i said i think my world is like i'vestayed an easy path until something else disrupts it but from that other disruptioncomes new growth so maybe that's just theuniverse like okay cool dude you're gonna go this wayuntil i knock you off your rocker becausethat's what you need for your growth were you able tokeep a growth mindset through all those yearsworking in corporate or do you think it affectedyeah no so in corporate i remember i've i'vegot a boss who's uh who's a great dude i rememberseeing down with him i go when do you think hekind of couldn't answer the question we kind ofsort of had this great philosophical um conversation that led us to a good a greatrelationship now and we get to work togetherstill but it was just kind of like man like wework at this frenetic pace that you put us through8 000 tps reports what did you do for me yesterdayyou know blah blah blah blah like when do yousit back and go oh how do i get better and i and ithink and then uh these these two guys who ownthis company they were recruiting me to leavecisco and join them and they sat me down andthey go what are you doing at cisco your personalityisn't built for that you're like you you shouldbe on the partner side this that the next there'sit was a sales pitch a little bit they're tryingto recruit me but it's great because it made me goyou're right and then i left okay so that was thecatalyst to get you a bit of the catalyst it wasa bit of the uh i was like i don't want to workhere anymore but the real that was the that wasthe potential side the negative side was backthen in corporate america's model is they shuffle theaccounts a lot right brian oh yeah and i had donea project with a a guy in palm beach and it was anit was like the large one of the largest itprojects his company has ever done and you knowi looked at it i go this man is trusting methat this will work because that's the realityi mean there were no one there's no one else inthis particular in many cases i am often the onlyperson that needs to be in the room and i waslike this is how this is going to work and thisthat and the next and blah blah blah and hetrusted me that that i would make sure it worksand that happened at the end of cisco's fiscalyear and two weeks later they're like not youraccount anymore go here and i'm like no they'relike excuse me i'm like no they're like no thisperson's gonna manage it i mean she could get allthe credit if you want but i'm not leaving that manand that's when i was like this isn't for meyeah i'm the type of person when the work startsafter the order that's who i am and i just hadto say i had to honor that like i i have to beon that side of the house i can't be on the sideof the house where you close the deal and you moveit's not you're not the transactional type it'snot a relationship you're a relationship and i wantto do right by people there's everything is alevel of trust and and what what we often missin my industry is that most sellers don'trealize how much work it is after you sell somethingyou don't take the time to understand whatbrian has to do after he places and how hard that isand how if it doesn't work together if it doesn'twork well like that's when the work really beginsand by the way i like work yeah i want to bethere that's where the value is yeah right that'swhere the real value is and so i love that iappreciate it more and um and that's when ikind of started to look so just before i ask mynext question i'm curious it it sounds i'm notsure when i think the answer to this is going tobe but have you ever had imposter syndrome oh yeahi thought you were going to say no all the timebecause because everything you've talked from fromcaptain of soccer captain of football doing theplay everything you've done you just tackle itwell and it made me think and i know we've talkedabout some of that was maybe coping and all thatbut it made i thought you were going to sayno i really did think you're going to say no ii answered it wrong i said all the time i meanall the time now okay so what i mean by that is okayso yeah i'll explain so it's funny because wheni left cisco um it was the it was a path someoneoffered me something someone came to me and theywere a small company and they said hey we'll giveyou x percent of my business to come and join mei was like holy shit this is great you know yeahso you were going to be part owner of a businessbasically correct of a partner um and i was likei want to take that yeah you know and and uh andso i do it and i leave and then i go i go back toone of my cisco buddies who uh who's in channelsand he goes to me he goes i don't get it he goesyou guys this many employees you do about this muchin revenue how do you make any money and i was likeoh shit i didn't ask that question i just tookthe job yeah i never asked the guy how you doingand he said he was a good man his wife was an nbaso i was like we gotta be great yeah she's an nbathat turns out she was a scientist who also got annba oh did that's that question greg is sometimesvery much like oh cool go looks great that's theconfidence like i'll figure it out when i get thereand that was really my decision i was like ifi screw this up i'll go back to cisco or likecompanies will hire me back i'm pretty good atwhat i'm pretty good at this selling thing at thatpoint i had established i knew i i knew how to doit you had a safety and then you begin to compareyourself to others you're like okay like i we'vebeen in a room together this person and i personallyi can do this job with some of the best soi'm good and that gave me confidence to maketake risks and i was reading this book calledright risk about a it was written by the guy whojumped off of a uh a high dive into a like threwa ring of fire into a pool and it was just aboutcalculating calculated risk so i'm like i can dothis this is not that risky um and so i got thereuh and the market crashed like two weeks laterso what uh was that uh 2008 yeah yeah yeah liketwo weeks later okay shit and all tech spendingkind of dried up everything dried up you know andit was like oh yeah yeah and my buddy had justsaid yeah how do you guys make any money rightyeah and oh by the way like and i went frommaking a lot of money to no money now my dadhad left cisco like he would love cisco but my dadhad always instilled in me a great deal of savingeven had mentors who would say if you can't liveon your base you know you're spending too much rightin sales and um so i'd saved a lot and i you knowi had a 401k from the day i started at work eventhough i barely made any money because dad forshoved that down my throat yeah and so at onepoint i was like 31 years old and said tomyself like i have a 401k in a retirement none of myfriends do so so i've got a head start i couldstop putting money into those things so i'm fairlyanalytical and mathematical guys i was likeoh wait a minute i'm doing a little i knew howcompounding worked and i'm like i'm gonna beokay but that scared me like market crash howyou guys gonna make any money like that was areal you are an idiot and so i literally tookalmost no money in salary so that we could keepemployees for several months i'm like all rightdon't pay me because i talked to the guy and he'slike yeah well we got some problems uh we're gonnai'm like don't pay me put it like in arrears andmake sure these guys are all paid because we haveto keep the talent you know and what what did youdo what was the company is that same thing i do nowwhat which is what i got let's call it acisco reseller partner okay a company that bringssolutions to company to companies like hospitalsand schools and enterprises okay and we will sellthem the product we'll design the solution forthem we'll sell them the product we'll help themin the implementation in areas that theyneed okay and then we may manage it for them sothe full suite of services so that's what youwere doing when you took yeah you became a partneryou're gonna come be my vp of sales okayokay with no sales guys okay working for a superyou know now that we understand how autismworks and as for like a very on that side of thespectrum brilliant engineer but like right not a people right right umand uh how long did you go where you weren'ttaking a salary about three and a half monthsi was like dude i need something and then and then i that i sold some shitand revenue came in yeah and you know and umand you know he had some weird practices and i waslike that's not gonna work man you know he waslike no they have to pay us first before we dothem like that's not gonna work i'm like i'mcalling on big boys yeah like you don't go tobig boys and say yeah this is how this works yougive me the money then i buy it they're like nextall the big boys back then were going from i'llpay you in 30 days to can i pay you in 120 dayslike everybody's stretching yeah everyonestretches were tough days and so it's like well let's gobuild a relationship with a creditor like or thedistributor like you just figure it out yeah youknow and so everything started to get betterbut he and i had conflicts you know tough engineerliterally just didn't understand the way itall works and would get in my stuff and and andone time he's like i just watched you get out negotiated you're terrible like dudestop listening to my phone call what arewe doing here yeah you know what i mean yeahjust didn't understand there was no trustnone they're not i don't think you trusted anyoneright right zero trust yeah um you know cometo find out i didn't know this he was adoptedcome to find out that the reason thecompany was in his wife's name is because he hadfiled for bankruptcy twice already so we don't have any credit um and um yeah so uhhe's a pilot and we fly to a couple differentprojects and he's telling me all these differentthings and i'm getting to know him and i'mtrying to work through it but we're bumping heads likeshit what am i going to do about this and umanyway you know we're working it out but i'm notreally ready to leave or anything i'm like i justgotta figure this out uh and uh and he's like heylet's i had landed uh tiger direct at the timeand he's like he's like let's go to chicago checkout one of the warehouses and from there we'llfly to colorado we'll go skiing want to do thatand we'll work on the relationship and mywife had an my girlfriend now wife had an eventand she was like this really awesome eventthat you know her company was sponsoring this bigcharity event she's like i'm like like i can'tdude i really didn't want to yeah i didn't wantto because it was like i don't want to sit on aplane with you and you know and so he took oneof our other engineers they flew to chicago didthe job and then um and then they were supposed tofly out the next day but he wanted to get therehe's like let's fly at the night so we could skiin the morning um and they decided to leave atlike 11 p.m uh they left and at a thousand feetdidn't check in and he lost an engine and no hedied both of them both of them died yeah oh my goodnesswow so now i get a phone call like five in themorning um from his uncle who was working for usand he's like we lost him and uh also that's aexperience for you because that's a near-deathexperience yeah totally someone was looking overmy dad was yeah that's a whole thing no questionwow no question i mean i've done a bunch ofstupid shit that like oh i was like almostdied right there well that's that's gen xyeah yeah yeah boy i did like you know like hey ishouldn't have i shouldn't have uh jumped off ofthat you know how did i do that uh how did i diveoff of that platform 60 feet and not break myback you know someone's looking out for me everynow and again i'm sorry but maybe maybe i shouldmake better decisions but um it was the bike ridesto tithe it was the tithing it was the tithingit was the commitment but no but honestly that'sliterally a near-death experience there's noquestion no question i should have been on thatplace yeah so what happens or and sometimes ii think had i been there i'd have been like nowe're going to dinner we've had a long day i'mnot getting on this you know let's just go todinner and relax like dude we can have just asgood a time here you know do you torment yourselfwith that kind of shit i was just about to sayhave you flipped that that coin in your head a lotno longer uh but sure for a while for a longwhile yeah yeah yeah so um are you now in chargeof like after that happened then were you incharge everyone's looking at me what do we dohigh achiever again why don't we do i'm like fixit fudge yeah what do we do like i don't know youknow i don't know what to do we we buried twopeople we attended two funerals and i remembergoing to lunch after the second funeral andliterally one person said so okay greg what's nextlike someone wanted to know because like arewe gonna get paid and i part of me was likebut the truth is i had no like just like aglimmer of ill will for the question it was more like iwas like i was i was a little upset because i hadto answer it yeah but not i didn't disrespect theguy for asking i'm like you got to take care ofyour family of course you want to know where yournext paycheck's coming you like working here youjust don't want to and um so we we held it togetheruh his his his wife was in chargehis father comes out of retirement middle uhmiddle management american express and he's likeuh i'll take over you can do what and i have noat this point like 32 years old i don't know aboutlegal i don't like i'm just like what do i do andyou know we're talking about the guy with the onefinger type and click yeah click click he's hehas been retired for a while you know i'll take overand you know the one thing i know how to dois pick up the phone move the business forwardexecute on what we've promised so it's justreally hard work for a little while and thenuh and then i asked them if i could buy ithow long between the the um plane crash and youbuying the company i didn't buy the company ohokay i asked them yes oh okay because they madeit clear they were going to sell it so i saidwell if you're going to sell it i'd like to buy iti know everything about it i think i can make a fair offerand uh five six months to answer your questionokay um but they they they were the ones justlike we're gonna sell um and unfortunately abusiness broker got involved and promised theworld and set a price that i was unwilling topay but because i knew the financials i'm likethe financials i'm like i'm sorry sir dad it'snot worth that um and uh and i felt bad because youknow they'd come to me with some like weird i likeokay but you can only buy 75 but you can't do thisyou're like all these kind of wonky rules and itwas a first time for them you know and i felt badfor his wife because she's grieving i'm like youneed it like you have two kids like you guys needto go deal like i've been through some of thislike you need to go deal and they didn't you knowthey they were like nope heads down and they'relike cool you should go grieve and uh and and ithink they had they had a lot of trust in thefather to to do things but yeah it wasn't like hesomeone had put a bug in his ear and what hethought it could be worth and i was like i'mnot gonna pay that in there like i think youneed to leave wow so they brought in a brokerto come value the business the broker overvaluedit and you were like and then they started playinggames yeah i don't even think the broker did areal valuation yeah i think the broker took somebad some relatively miscellaneous data yeah andlike we knew like we knew how the books workedreally well like i know how the books work i knew how the books work soand then they asked you to leave they asked me toleave and and unfortunately said and i don't seeyour name on any of this paperwork so your namewas number two anything greg did a lot of this on ahandshake i don't know why i refer to myself inthe third person that sounds stupid but the yeah ijust i did this on handshakes because you werealso yeah by the way there's only a couple like i waseven in like a really like a year into thisjourney with this guy so we just like hey let'swe'll get to it we'll get to it we'll get to itit wasn't it wasn't that i was foolish and saidoh i'll just handshake this we just got to workyeah yeah and um and we were working and you knowand like okay like we could do this and yeahyou know we'll go settle it down that was a stupidthing to do uh in retrospect but but you wereyoung honestly honestly it worked out a lot of31 year olds dealing with this like it's crazybut it worked out because the entanglement foryou was far less you could probably walk away i'msure we're gonna get there in two minutes but youcould just you could leave and not have anystrings attached correct yeah yeah so only guilt onlyonly if you have if you're willing to take that onguilt because i'm honestly i'm looking at a singlemom yeah with who's dealing with a lot andand i just was like man this is so hard on herwhat happened to the company they sold it uh youknow they they they really wanted to keep the namewhich i understand the pride piece you know butthey so they sold it to this these guys who hada small company down in miami uh and it crateredin less than a year oh that's horrible i mean iwas the engine they just didn't recognize theyyou know yeah they didn't recognize it yeah andi was like you know the the reality is is in asmall business especially a startup like thati was sales guy project manager servicedelivery leader like the only thing i didn't do is theactual engineering yeah you know but i still putthe people in positions to be like hey you needto go here this guy needs this you need this wellthat's that disruption you talked about with andthen would trigger or ignite or spark thegrowth mindset so you had this disruption you leavecisco you leave that linear path yeah and thentalk about the exact opposite path like it's allover it's like it's like a scribble page of thepath but i'm sure it challenged you you were superuncomfortable you had to get creative you knowyou had to get scrappy and and then you go throughthis whole emotional thing with this near-deathexperience and then this guilt and this wife withthis uh mom with these two kids so what a what anexperience and you're still so young in your lifegoing through all that but during this time youalso met your current wife right yeah so we hadstarted dating so how did you meet her oh okay soum uh well the way it works is that uh we connectedon facebook and it happens to be that hername and my mom's name are the same oh wowso i've been at a piss complex clearly and umand uh so uh so at the time my mom had joined thissingles sailing club cool exciting right likei was like great mom great way to meet peoplesailing singles was she still over on the westcoast yes yes um and um so that's cool yeah i'mlike good for you mom and at the same time mywife had started a clothing company oh cool theclothing company was called real naughty spelledr-e-e-l-n-a-u-t-i okay which i think is brilliantyeah by the way like yeah i still think there'spossibility there like yeah she's like a fizzledand i'm like man that name is so money anyway umhopefully trying to give it to our oldest like heycan you run with this i hope i assume you own thedomain yeah i think we can i think we own that weown the trademark i yeah i think she owns thedomain no she owns the domain because we stillgets an email there good so get an email beforewe put this right so i get an email hey everybodyi'm getting off facebook you can find me at thisemail to which i reply mom what the hell is thisorganization you joined but that that i can'tbelieve this this is terrible blah blah blahto which i get a reply not your mother that isquite an first impression yeah i mean we so hereso it's funny like we're from the same hometownour parents worked together oh my gosh we hooked upand the part she loves more than anything elseyeah is that she's shown our daughters and ourdaughters she has a yearbook and there i amwith a big circle around me and the word assholewait when did you guys hook up i mean we kissedher so you know back in eighth grade or you knowwhat i mean we're actually let me rephrasei tried and she shot me down i'm sorry honeyso was she at the public school with you or theprivate school um the cath the catholic schoolokay so you knew her but then weren't incontact with her not really yeah until you thought shewas your mom on facebook uh yeah until i got thatemail yeah and then i go i'm so sorry okay okay cani buy you a glass of wine say okay you know ohthat was your so that was like let me take you out letme take it for glass one i'm so sorry i think ihad and i had known that's awesome i think i hadknown that she had had a child as well wait wereyou guys facebook friends because of knowing eachother back in middle school i mean back then likefacebook was just starting like you just connectedokay it was just like you know one degree ofseparation okay so when you still have a bigsame circle of friends okay so when you respondedback she knew who you were you weren't just thisguy okay okay so you take her out and like i saidour parents work together like we know each otherright okay see there's so you were you werevetted yeah i was vetted when you asked her outso why i often tell i tell the version i tellmy daughters is that your mom's been chasing methe whole time yeah all right so we're clearwait did you ever get an answer why she wroteasshole next to your picture you know what it'sso funny we all just laugh about it and i probablygo well the answer is because i was so but iwonder what triggered her to do that becauseyou know that's a great question and i willgo ask her that this evening you did somethingbecause a girl doesn't just do that randomly youthere's that's a result of something you did somethingdon't stir the pot here we they got a good thinggoing here thank you uh that's wonderful i'm goingto chase okay so the girls are gonna love this soyou so you guys go out and was that it from thatglass wine and and we kind of just startedtalking and realized like similar journeys i was soimpressed with like you know she was 21 but shehad her daughter she had her daughter and she justrolled up her sleeves and said i got this didshe marry the father no okay she just made itshe tried to make it work but she also made adecision she's like this isn't the guy for meyeah she was so courageous she was like i'll dothis on my own was she in college at the time nohad she been like no like okay her journey wasdifferent she didn't go straight to college she'sa little she like at one point she'd likebounced around and traveled and went to fish shows niceshe's a she's a hippie i call her a rich hippienow but she's a hippie you know what i mean shewears the she wears the fancy clothes but theystill look hippie-ish yeah isn't that great rightyou know we're dead hosts right yeah totally likeshe would love to say no more i understand but youknow what i mean but now the clothes are nicerand they're softer and they fit better and yeahthat's fucking awesome she like used to make herown clothes like while she was on the road nicethat's awesome she like sinus high school shelike left like she's like i gotta i gotta i gottado me yeah and so i had just so much respect itreminded me of my mom she's like that tough likei'm gonna figure this out i just had such somuch respect for that and so that endeared me to herand then we just got to know each other and wehad just these really interesting things in commentslike she's a thespian our love for theater isthe same like one of our like our second or thirddate i think she took me to a hurricanes footballgame nice nice yeah and like and her is so funnyyou're like went to this game she's got thisfriend who's like who are you i don't like youlike always protect your vioza i don't like youwho are you what are you trying to do with my friendand i'm like you're crazy and she's like and andthen it was so funny you tailgate and everybodygets tuned up is so funny because her brotheris really protective like he's several yearsyounger than her but like is tough marinestuff and we get hammered and he and his buddy aretrying to kick my ass like not like trying butlike like male wrestle me yeah and they and they'reso drunk they're running at me and i'm like ohlike a bull fight whoa they would fall on the groundit was like this is hysterical you know like itwas just and it was it was fun it was and it wasit was family you know it was like it wasit's always for jody it's always about familyand um i love that about it she she brought thatlike that absolutely to your world and it made merealize i didn't even know that like i didn'tknow what i what it is like what i wanted but like tome family is so important she comes from anamazing family not that mine isn't but likethey're big strong you know they've got theirown issues for sure everyone does but like bigstrong family and care very much about that likeold irish catholic you know well she accepted yourdaughter too she did as her own she did very muchso it's really cool and and and and inspired me toto be the same so she knew you had adaughter too oh yeah you guys yeah it was first datewas the first date was the whole thing like heywhat is the whole thing with parenting yada yadaso how long did you guys date before you got engagedi get this answer wrong you know so much troubleum can i just say a couple years sure okay greatsure sure and you guys did you live togetherbefore yeah so we did like we did like a yearof dating and then a year living together um ialways say people should live together beforethey get married but that year of livingtogether was with her daughter very tumultuous and thenyour daughter yeah yeah so if you could getthrough that you can handle marriage yeah the two of youlike that was a great test yeah it was like ifwe can do this and we still you know it's so funnyis we still had a lot of fun because thegirls were old enough we could leave so our datingexperience was fun because we were livingtogether we were living in east fort lauderdale we rentedthis home in east fort lauderdale and so she andi would go out for date night a lot and we'd havefun and like i'd come home and scare the kidsi'd like this skull mask and i would like i'd callthe girls like hey we're gonna be about 30 minutesyou guys good and then i would immediately man yeahyeah it's great i got halloween's big manso was there school in east fort lauderdalethey went to heritage okay yeah okay and that'swhy we ended up we ended up moving it's like whenwe then we were like okay well this doesn't workfor us yeah so we moved west to plantation becausejody's like i just don't want my daughterdriving on i 95 like i don't want to have to drive allthe way out to plant and then when she's oldenough to drive i don't want her on 595 all thetime like she's always she puts the girls firstalways like there's it's never you're not even itis not even a discussion the girls the girls firstalways she puts everyone sometimes i wish she wasmore selfish i'm like be more selfish you'reallowed to you know you always put everyone elsein front of your own needs but that's who she isand um so yeah we moved to plantation and then wefinally bought our home that we were inplantation for about 10 years okay yeah and what did she dofor living during those years she's inmarketing she worked for a construction company and rantheir marketing okay group yeah and then wheneverything kind of fell apart with that companyand you left um she was there she was theresupporting you you had that and it makes me feellike that's the first time because you've hada lot of those moments where things have justyeah and it's the first time you had a partnerthere to a rock supporting you so that that that'sreally nice you can do this yeah that you hadthat you had that um like if you don't i got youyou know were you guys married yet or just stayedso you weren't were you guys living together whenall that happened okay and then um yeah a lot ofsteps together you had that so much going on andthen living together and then the two girls soa lot of you guys went through a lot even beforegetting married you know it's interesting iremember you said that she's comes from thismilitary family and is very black and white butyet that's such a contrast to a fish head yeahbut you know if you meld them it's a greatcombination if you meld that sure that thosetwo aspects of a personality it's very balanced yeah you know yeah she's uh umum yeah because like as an example duringcovid you she said she's like let's just take offand we drove she was like let's go to maineand we just let's grab the girls let's grabnot the girls because the other two were in collegeand she's like screw it we'll if you don't have tobe anywhere let's just go up there and we stayedin a family their family home in maine for likealmost two months trying to drink covid wasgreat that's awesome yeah super and it was her idealike let's just go yeah and so she's got that youknow that sort of peace love happiness adventurevibe about her yeah sometimes um when thingsare in order and organized and have a system itactually creates the space to be spontaneousand adventurous yeah because everything's kind oftaken care of so now you can bounce off thatstrong foundation and go have some fun yeah sothat's why it's a nice little balance so umwhere'd you guys get married uh island marauda nice yeahand uh then had you taken in your next stepprofessionally before you guys got marriedor were you still in limbo no no i um before i ithink i had yeah no so so i had started the companythe company you own today yeah so what is sohow long from the time you stopped at that othercompany to you starting your new company how muchtime 30 days okay so you went for it all right forit so did you kind of already know there's a mallagain okay there's a mall again okay you know whata mall again is no in golf you hit a bad shot okayand you just put another one down and hit a secondone okay okay forget about that one i was waitingfor him to kind of maybe explain that i'm glad yousaid something we take a few of them don't wei never take them when i'm golfing yes becauseyou're very good yes he he can tell when i don'tknow something but usually i asked but i thoughthe was going to explain okay okay yeah so soi quickly said i can do this okay um and if idon't i don't and um we went i went and gotyou know i have a business partner he and iworked on together i said let's go with thefinancing worked out so so we can make a transactionum and let's find a couple very key very important people two really amazing dudesum who are brilliant and i loved you knowloved every minute working with those guysand um yeah we brought them on and said startand we got one account we got a second accountwhat's the name of your company graysontechnologies okay and that was what like 15 years ago 15 anda half yeah it's been that long yeah wow thankyou thank you that's amazing it really is amazingi mean you think about it like if youthink about how what brought you to that pointbut i'm still wondering where's the impostersyndrome because it doesn't sound like there'sany imposter syndrome when i'm by myself you know thereyou know i i want you know we live in anindustry of very big boys billion-dollar companiesmulti-billion dollar companies you see growthall around you whether it be real fake linkedin orwhat you know you you see it all around youand so every now and again you know i go am iyou know can you know am i good enough yeahi'll ask myself and then i'm on boards and i'll sitin boards with some really big time folks thatgives me the occasional imposter so i'm like doi know shit or you know but but you know what'sfunny is i go through some of it and then i alsospend some time with some big hitters and yougo they don't know what they're doing eitheri mean we do but we also don't and i was ithought you guys would get a kick out of thisi uh was texting a buddy of mine i was a part ofan organization that brings entrepreneurs togetherand then within that you get into these smallcircles it's called entrepreneur's organizationand you get into this forum and my forum matesyou you get really close to these guys and uhand i've gotten super close with my foreignmates and um i was texting one of them who isnow one of he's like my brother and um he's mylittle bro and um i text him like oh man you everhave one of those days where you just want tokill everybody you know and we're joking rightyou're just like everything like every personin your path you just want to have it's justit's agitated confrontation he goes liketuesday's i go it's very funny i go tuesday'stend to be tougher um and we were joking andhe goes and then you know he i'll read it to youbecause it was just it was just so right youknow and i and i man it's so accurate and he goes umhe wrote uh i'm sorry for the delay no you'refine he goes because i said to him like man andyou know you're having one of these things andand you're you're working on your planning ittends to pop up when you're working on yourplanning because when you're working on yourplanning you do start to talk about your awardswhat do you want to fix right when you want towhen you say what do you want to fix you're admitting that these things are wrongand and it's really funny because i i thinkeveryone thinks that ceo's and entrepreneurslike have it figured out and i we don't right andsome we have some things figured out i mean we'renot you know making it up but but like you wantto fix your words and i go and i go yeah man andand i'm like and i said oh my god yeah thisplanning and he's really like how the fuck isthis still a problem and he replies and then igo with how did i let it get this way which isfollowed by why do i fucking suck which isfollowed by i hate myself which is followedby a long joint and a long walk and it'sinteresting because i think what people don'trealize sorry i think what people don't realizeis especially entrepreneurs and business ownersyou do blame yourself you're like i'm responsiblefor everything no matter what and so if someone'sfailing it's my fault it's ultimately alwaysmy fault that's what the captain of the team issupposed to think about right it's like i'm responsible for everyone's successand they're accountable to what they need to do ibelieve that like hey your professionals go be itbut the reality is is you know i always first sayto myself like did i fail them am i not coachingthem right am i not holding them accountable ami not doing this mike shashevsky talks about thisa lot in his book where one of his coaches wouldcome up to him and say something to the effect oflike hey coach that player he just doesn't have itand he'll be like did you coach him yeah i coachedhim where did you coach him how did you coach himwhat was going on in his life when you coached themand it made me think like oh that's interesting in thatto connect to someone there's a lot more going onand and oftentimes we say well i told them what todo and they didn't get it and that's theirfault bullshit i don't believe that at all because ireally feel like you have to understand wheresomeone's at in the journey because like if you'rea good coach you're gonna figure out a way to crackthat nut in some way shape or form if you're a goodcoach you're going to improve that person insome way shape or form and you may not get what youwant ultimately and and of course there's alwaysthat like someone may not want it someone may notget it someone may not have passion for it sothere's reasons why someone may not work outbut i think we often um we often don't reflector don't not a lot of people think about it thatway but i do think a lot of entrepreneurs thinkthe way me and my my friend do where it's likeyou blame yourself if you're not connected ifyou're not getting the best out of people it'salmost like you guys take imposter syndromeand then lead it to that leads to self-awareawareness which leads to accountability you guys use it as a positive toolto then look inward on yourselves and how can youdo better for the people that work for you or forwhat you're responsible for but it doesn'tderail you it doesn't stop you it doesn't ummake you question yourself so much you loseconfidence and you give up it actually motivatesyou to do better not at first it didn't so when jd says i've grownthe the truth is at first it's very lonely sothat person that i'm referring to who wrote that texthe and i are 15 years into our journeys eachright i remember when he and i talked about joiningthis forum and i told him about my businesshe's like damn can i come work for you and now hekills me in his business um but for severalyears there uh there was a window where i gotyou're lonely there's no one you can like whenthings aren't going well there's no one you canreally talk to that's why you have theseorganizations you know that's why they existreally and so um you know people often talk abouthow lonely it is at the top and um you know what ii did not have strong emotional intelligenceand did not have great awareness and i had a crazyteenage daughter's in the house and there's alot going on right and and i saw and there and idefinitely had a period where i didn't handle itwell and i was disruptive and it stalled us and itrubbed people wrong way and i candidly i i ihurt a good relationship in my life because of thatright because my the poor way i handled thingslike one of my best friends who became a friendinstead of one of my best friends just becauseof the way i treated him and uh and i had to learnfrom that and and it's therapy like i'm a bigfan big fan of just any type of therapy i'vemet with four or five different kinds atdifferent times in my life just because i feel like that'slike therapy's a really cool way to justvent without judgment and i think that's justtherapeutic in and of itself yes okay but i idefinitely met someone along the way who's likelet's let's break down your personality so istarted doing personality tests and like youunderstand like this is your fight orflight and that's why you're acting this way andfor me when someone started showing me the waythe puzzle was put together it made it very easyfor me to go cool i don't have to do that againand i started thinking and reading a little bitabout stoicism and and really just kind oftrying to be less emotional more thoughtfulabout the things i do now i'm still an italian crazy man who will be passionatesometimes a little a little impatient and every now and again you know yeah but umbut you know the loneliness is you know like thewhy do i suck i hate myself like that's a glimmerlike you know that what that used to be longand hurtful and you know like when you're hurtyou have a fight response right or fight or flightresponse like for me my response was like i'm gonnai'm gonna be combative many people get distantand and then their businesses will fail becausethey run away from them they'll just ignore themplot their head in their sand so so you know ittook me a while to learn how to be better atdealing with it but you know when i get into adark place about anything going on i just remindmyself that like i am so lucky to have this stressso many people would trade me to be like i'd love to know what that looks likeit sucks yeah but they'd love to know whatit looks like you know to have the journeyand to learn from it and so i've been you knowit helps me snap out of my dark place to remindmyself it's pretty cool that's such a greatperspective to think about when you're reallyunder stress because as a result of somethingthat you're working hard on that so many peoplewould love to have this kind of stress that'ssuch a great perspective that is such a greatperspective and i mean the growth the growthyou've gone through when you do have those momentsand like you said it's almost like a snapshotnow it's it doesn't take you down where for a superlong length of time but are those moments alsopositive for you because it shows you how faryou've come yeah um yeah those are pretty neat uhlike i i've shared something so i uh had a momenttoday this is a really neat thing for me so mydaughter's helping the business out a little bitfrom a recruiting perspective it's herbackground while she's doing her MBA and um but she getsinvited to company events if you will we had abig all hands today and i i try to you know tell theteam how we did what we're working on and andreally try to connect the dots on some motivationand she called me right after she's literallytearing up she's like that that's one of thecoolest that you know like she's like shegot to see dad at work now i i don't know if myemployees thought it was as cool but for her tosee it for the first time you know that was reallynice that's awesome yeah it was really coolexperiences and so yeah yeah like i don't howdo you else to introduce the kids to work rightthat's not always the easiest thing i think uhsometimes i think we often think what we dois boring yeah right like try to tell the storyabout building networks yeah yeah right that'scool yeah let me show you my whiteboard yeah youunderstand this packet yeah like no so umthat's funny right so so um yeah and so that that's agreat moment yeah and and that those are thelittle things that that that help um also likei've seen some people leave the organizationand grow and be better that you know not always iseveryone going to recognize the skills they'vedeveloped you know like they may i don't need thecredit but like when i see someone else besuccessful i think that i've taught them someof that and like that's what i really hope forthe people around me that they're all growing insome way shape or form that's the hardestthing and what's really hard is like i want to growbigger so that i have more responsibility to offerpeople so whenever i'm not growing as fast as i wantpart of it's like you know i want to be able tooffer more yeah to the team so they can continueto grow right and there's like only somesometimes there's limitations in that because like revenueis revenue and if you can't just give over a wholebunch of people a bunch of jobs if there's no moneyaround and you know that kind of stuff and uh andso sometimes they have to leave to go find theirother journey but i i hope i hope that over time uhthe people that have been through the organizationhave grown um and will use something that theylearned yeah in some way shape or form in anotherplace i'm sure their experience that um yourcompany has been pivotal to hope the trajectoryof their life there's no question about it and ithink your intent with your company is so authenticand um and positive that you're wanting to growit so you can give more to the people that thatwork for you that's your intent i mean that'sjust such a that there's i'm not surprised you'resuccessful and that you've lasted this longbecause of the authenticity and because of yourintent so many companies so many ceos you can'tnecessarily say that about so i think that says alot for for where you are i have a questionthough how does this tie back to imposter syndromeyeah so i think the imposter syndrome is is is when we're not growingyou know like do you think that's a you'vegrown your business you've i know people that you'vedeveloped people i've seen them go from youknow i've seen their growth right um i think you'vemade a lot of people a lot of money i thinkyou've developed or deployed some some really killersolutions right so you you for all intents andpurposes you've made it and you continue to makeit you continue to involve evolve i just wonderif that's an expectation you're putting on yourselfto not necessarily accept that you've done somereally cool shit that's a thousand like it it thelike uh why my wife talks about like you're notfair to yourself you're you're you're uh what's thatwhat's your own worst enemy not your own worstenemy but your harshest critic harshest critic yeahi had a friend a friend of hers really touched meone time i was really having a tough tough toughtough go of it for several months and and shitsome friends in from london and uh and it's herbest friend and they live in london and herhusband is this is really surreal you'd love thisdude he's a quick oh it's really important youknow you're one of those and i'm like okay yousound really smart right like but he isbrilliant but he's brilliant and he's gone through somelife experiences and what's really funny is i'mlike you guys go down to the keys i'll meet youthere i got you to do blah blah blah and i'mlike rush rush rush rush rush rush rush rush rushand i drive down and i leave the suitcasesat the house hour and a half two hour driveand i'm like i'm just gonna turn around i'lljust deal with it i'm gonna drive two hours and twohours you know eight to ten oh my man nighteryou know i'm just gonna deal with it and i remembertalking to me and mark's like be kind to yourselfmate he's like you're not being kind to yourselfyou got a lot going on and he's giving me thiswhole thing and i was like i've i've kept thata lot anytime i'm being really hard and i get alot of people that know me really well or no i i ikick my own butt a lot so i maybe i'm calling itimposter syndrome but but you know sometimes youwonder if you know like yeah like you know youlike people like you're an entrepreneur i'm like istarted one business you know what i mean like ididn't i had a desperation because this guy passedyeah but again you're 15 years in yeah yeahso yeah like you got taking stock in that yeahyou just got to do it sometimes because we area harshest critic but also i always say like toremind myself treat yourself give do ontoyourself the advice you would give to your best friendso what would i say if if i was my best friendwhat would i how would i treat myself and whatadvice would i give myself i need to follow ineed to treat myself as good as i would treat my bestfriend right that's hard yeah because we give toour friends and to our family and then turn don'teven think about ourselves no we never thinkabout ourselves no i mean i get mad at my wife becausei'm like you don't think about yourself like shecould look literally reverse it exactly like inmany respects yeah absolutely which is funnyabout my buddy's text back to me because yeahit's just so raw and honest right yeah and theni'm like practice when i'm like practice and theni go smoke a joint take a walk and i'm like yeshe's right though he's right he's right i justgo through the emotional ladder like bang bangbang bang and then you take a moment and sometimesby the way walking we talked about that like yeahwow it's huge wish i would have wish i would haverealized that was amazing i know it worked outbut walking i'll for me it's blinkest like i listeni do i do those little micro learning yeah andit even helped me today like i i listened to thisthing called the science of leadership and ijust kind of went through it i was like oh that'sreally interesting and and uh it i pivoted alarge part of my presentation today based on what ilearned on my walk at 6 30 in the morning yeahno walking's insane i i think we mentioned it inalmost every episode somehow walking comes upit's such a gift so um so you sent two off to collegeyeah and that happened a few years apart rightthey're four years apart yeah so you get one offanother one through high school another one offto college yeah so then we're are you empty nesterswere you empty nesters or never after yes we have a10-year-old okay so we skipped that part yeah i knowbetween there there's another yeah yeah so then soso let's let's so you guys get married you've gotyour middle school your high school you'rehumming along right we've recently like a year later ayear later well a year and a half later so we wedecided we looked at each other we're like shouldwe have a kid like i don't know like life'spretty good and we're gonna be empty nesters in likethree or four years and should we should we notor it's like should we should we not should weshould we not in my head i'm like why don't weget married if i'm not gonna have a job rightand so we're like all right let's practicelet's practice it turns out we're both very fertilepeople because like a day later she's like a brideright um that's a good problem right it is a goodproblem we're very blessed and uh and you knowpressley was born healthy happy absolutely unifiedat the time the girls weren't that close buthaving a sister that they share oh yeah oh mylittle and she is she's just the most perfectblend of the two of us you know she is as sweetand nice as the like anyone it's just so sweetand nice absolute kook hysterical and the kidsat school rip her apart because they all want tospend time so like she's the best yeah and um andit and we have just been like and and by the waylike when the girls were young and pressley wasyoung we had built in babysitters so actually thefirst like yeah three four five years of uh jodyand i were he was a great parent yeah we went outon dates all the time right now they both went toschool not as easy now but how it's expensivei gotta buy i get any babysitters are expensivethey are they are what a racket what howwonderful though honestly because i always say because wehave a we have a bonus baby so and our oldestand him are 13 years apart and our um daughter andhim are 10 years apart um but i always say ididn't know our family wasn't complete until we had himand then our family's complete but for you guyswhat a beautiful unifying experience like you saidfor the girls and um i'm sure pressley's themost parented child out of the whole family becauseall of you the other people are like what yeahit's like your favorite yeah well don't tell anyoneyeah so um we get into that too have they umbecause are they both out of college now yesone's in uh one's engaged oh congratulationsyeah the oldest is engaged so exciting and uhsuper dude that's awesome dude that's awesome umso happy the other one is in madrid wow and withanother super dude nice doing a master'sprogram oh that's awesome so and she's thriving and sowe are pinchers we're we're so blessed right nownow where does your older one live uh north carolinaokay and so how often do you guys all it getswe um we try to do once a year all all five of usum not as often the short answer is not as oftenas we want yeah and with the middle moving to umto madrid that's going to make things supercomplicated although in november we're goingto see her oh exciting yeah she just got therea couple months ago so we'll go there and we'regoing to meet the boyfriend's family is hefrom there yeah so he was an exchange student atindiana university where she went and that'show they met senior year and so they fell in lovethen they did a little long distance stuff solast christmas we all went to uh we've got ahome in the north carolina mountains we all wentto north carolina mountains and we hung out and uhit was amazing that's like it was amazing it wasuh the oldest and her fiance that's where he askedher oh on the deck of the home so you guyswere there right there yeah it's like hallmarkit's really sweet it really was that's awesomeit's really was he was so nervous you know he waslike this like burning the pot burning in mypocket did he ask permission he did oh and i saidyou asked the wrong person because he asked me heasked me anyway he's like greg i want to do thisand i was like what and i told jody and thensomewhat jody's like he's supposed to ask meand i go you're absolutely right yeah so thathe i called him i'm like yo dude he's like you'reright so he fixed that um wonderful and they umand then we had a big family like they did a bigfamily reunion like 25 of us or so recently inmaine and they asked me to uh officiate the weddingoh uh cool wonderful it would be yourfirst one yeah i gotta go do some stuff don't ii didn't think about that i mean call gd when uhit's they don't have a date june july next yearor something they they haven't landed on theexact same date you have some time i do to pulltogether so that's lovely yeah it's really greatso i mean it's just so you but you guys are alsoactively parenting a 10 year old i know we'regonna be we we joke we'll be grandparents andhave like a teenager yeah but then theteenager will have a baby to hang when she sees her sointeresting i wonder how this is gonna go likewhen my wife's oldest has the first grandchildlike i'm like i keep saying to myself likeam i ever gonna like jody's gonna be on a planegone thank you they're going to be there rightso it's gonna be really interesting on how thisall works yeah um press and i like our relationshipis amazing like we do we do a lot of cool stufftogether so we're you know yeah it's it's gonnabe great like i i mean it'll be a blessing we'llfigure it out but you will but yeah we're tryingto do like a vacation individually with each kidand then we try to do one everyone that kind ofgoes back to how your dad approached thingswith you and your brothers i guess so yeah yeah ididn't think about that that's really neat kindof a full circle moment yeah that's totally i nevertogether yeah that's really cool so ispressley involved in esports or yeah so uh both umshe's not the best athlete in that like it justdoesn't the eye hand coordination all those thingsdon't come in supernaturally she tries so hardlike she's she's better runner straight swimmergot her in golf just some running uh we'reworking on some volleyball but she does love to singand uh she was she was in the school play andshe keeps is in the choir now and she's working onthat so she really loves that's a little bit of atheater bug to her yeah which is really cool yeahyeah maybe you'll be running lines with her in acouple yeah totally like let me tell you what wedrive every time we're in the car she's likecan we put on kids bop radio and she just can shesings every song to place like everyone just feltthem out yeah that's awesome that's awesome welli think that's amazing honestly um i did want toask you for the younger generation for the gen z'sthat are just getting out of college or in theirmid-20s and are just beginning this journey andtrying to figure things out um what's a piece ofadvice you'd give them i mean i one i i think thatum you know i i think that there's you haveto realize that real life is not about instantgratification and they live in a world whereyou know social media is is instant dopamine dripsright but the really important things takeforever they take a long time but they they matter moreand and those are relationships and real relationships and like i mean i amthe most blessed person on relationships like mycircle of friends is is incredible and and when iput them together like it's like our wedding wasmagic it was two and a three days of just straightlove like everybody and so i i don't think theyhave as deep relationships as they could and iwish they would invest more in deep goodrelationships because that's that's real andyou know and i think they have to understandlike especially in my in my sales world i see thesethings really the gamification of the wholething to you know like these companies are smartand they're hiring these younger people andthey're just like running them like this andpeople have no idea they don't take time tounderstand what someone else's life is like wasreally like right like job to do transaction moveon like they don't necessarily know what the otherperson on the other side of that transaction hasto deal with and professionally i think the peoplethat will invest in that and understanding thatare going to be more successful than their peersbecause that's what will last and not onlythat it'll make them better professionally becausethey'll be more they'll like it's way easier towork with a person if you understand what they'redoing and you can you know they're not going tovolunteer it yes you have to you have to reallydig in authenticity it sounds like being trulyauthentic and but but like really like you haveto yes but i mean i think that some people thinkthey're authentic because like you ask them aboutthemselves and they're very open but to meit's like you have to actually think about likereally about the other what what is the otherperson going through you really have to stopthinking about yourself and be like what does thismean to someone else and uh and i think they haveto trust that that works you know i don't thinkthey trust that that works because it's not instantbut you know if you really care about what someone else is going througheventually like it does come back in space and imy life journey has been a lot of of that rewardyou know the doing the right thing ultimatelycoming back eventually um over time and and youknow pinch me because i'm very blessed but but ialso did the right thing and and worked you knowworked my tail off and went through somelumps together when do you think because i totallyagree with you i and i i feel like i do that morenow than i've ever done that before where i do tryto put myself in someone else's mindset to thinkabout it what did they do so from the time theywoke up time did they go you know that almost getto that level um you need some level of emotionalintelligence to get there right yeah so is that'sgot to be a newer concept for you don't you thinkas opposed to when you first started obviouslyi i wish you know i wish someone taught me thatyeah a long time ago do you do you thinkit's teachable or it's just self-learned throughexperience so i think it's teachable but whetheror not you're ready i think it about i think ithas to do with whether or not you're ready toreceive it yeah so i think it's teachable becauseby the way it was taught to me but i happened tobe in a position in which if i didn't start learningabout it i was in real trouble yeah um and soi was ready to receive it and you know the theperson i work with on that she always she's likedamn i love working with you because like i cangive you a concept and you just bite it like igot this and it's really funny right you knowyou get a little older and so many of us want totalk about like well my childhood was really hardand that's why the truth of the matter is is youknow at some point you go all right my childhoodwas hard it that triggers this part in me buti don't have to do that that's a choice yes youknow we all want to blame something we're reallyquick to blame why i am the way i am but we neverremember that acting away or it's a choice everyday we are filled with choices you know and so ithink that is what we try to coach people onis like you're still making a choice um and i'vei've coached like each one of my team you know itry to spend as much time as i can with individualsthat's hard to get to everyone right um itinteresting one of our clients the cio postedsomething the other day about uh being on a youknow uh a pilot being really upset with all oflike yelling screaming at the people on thecarrier be like my my plane wasn't ready the wayi wanted to and the admiral or the captain of theship made him work with each of those individualsand when you see what they have to go throughin the trenches it makes you a better leaderyou can really understand what they're goingthrough and and i make i can can do better atthat in spades even though i still try to do alot of it like to really understand what they'regoing through um i don't think i don't think alot of people do that yeah and i think that's big umbut also uh you know a friend of mine who's very successful he has this sayingbecause people are like oh man i wish ihad what you have they take it take all of ittake my whole journey take the really like youknow take the really hard stuff you can't haveall the good stuff you got to take all of it ithink that's a really interesting perspectiveyeah yes so many people they just want the goodand they don't understand what it takes to get herethat ties back to when you were talking about theyounger generation and that dopamine hit and thatinstant gratification yeah and understandingthat there's a journey that got to that rewardthere's there there's like they say you just seethe tip of the iceberg right it's that old clichedown there's so much you're not seeing but itsounds to me like just to sum up what you'retalking about a lot of it's empathy puttingyourself in your in your client's shoes yeahand integrity integrity and empathy thecombination of those two things making the right decisionsdoing the right thing but then applying empathyyou know those those two together yeah i thinkthat's a loss a lost skill right now customerempathy yeah yeah oh god i think it's it's it'sunfortunate i've run into peopleprofessionally that have zero zero i was like i was in aconversation the other day where somemanufacturer's representative came over to my rep and they'relike hey can we get you know you think thecustomer could sign this contract this monthand my reps like now i don't think so but you know the decision maker's travelingoh well can't someone else sign it yeah nodecision maker's traveling well do you think we cancontact them like no they're on vacation ineurope we'll be like well listen i i told my boss i'dbring it in this month so like can't we maybeyou can we just get someone else to do it like canyou push and you call can you call his boss rightdude like are you what the hell's going on righti and i it took everything i had not to belike you need to get the hell out of here pal likewe're not working with you ever again i was soupset it made me so mad because i'm like dude likedo you not understand like you know like you wantto just break all the rules no empathy man that'sjust stupid well yeah it was in part stupidit's young stupid and there's some bad coachingunfortunate there's there are companies thatreward that right brian maybe they're just notthey're just not you know we're just not one ofthose do you think though that's that's inherentto the compensation plan of most companies inthe industry now is it just gone i don't thinkit's come i think it's the measurement aswell yeah i think it's hard to say it's just thecompensation i think it has a lot to do with themeasurement like okay so think about it you're anup and coming technology company you've been givena ton of money by private equity well they want toreturn for that money and what they want you todo is deploy that money to grow yeah it's the onlyway the only reason they're giving you themoney is they want to see you grow so then they hiregrowth oriented folks and if you hire the wrongones like you can hire some great there are greatleaders out there who know how to be like heythis is high value let's position it as high valuewe can go in here's where you position itthere are other people who you know got the job andthey're a little over their skis yeah you knowi was over my skis younger i'm a little more ontop of them now but um that they're overtheir skis and and so they're just like whiplashlike by any means necessary and that does thatwill exist by the way i don't think that's new ithink there's always been companies that yeahyeah exist only by whiplash yeah and they look forpeople that you know will work within thatmodel right um but you know you imagine thati left a little bit because i didn't likethat model where all that mattered was this onethat's just never going to be like i was neverokay with that you know yeah and that ties backto your intent and um you play the long gamewith your clients that's what i was going to sayyou're the reason you've been doing this for sowell for so long and growing and doing well isyou're playing the long game it's much differentthan next month or this month 100 yeah yeah butit's more rewarding it's an investment itis it is we tell our reps when they join uswe go umown your own business so you own a business we want you to invest in that businessthis is how that investment pays off and i think my most successful people have umgrabbed onto that and they really they that iswho they are culturally they're long-term people andexcuse me the more we can find long-term peoplethat think like that they're like you know thatwant to grow and build like they're going to besuccessful that makes sense that's such a greatapproach you know it's interesting you got it whati've realized is is you interview all these peopleand you're looking for you know they show yousuccess like look at my wt look at my w2 look atthis but what you have to realize is like the wayin which they are successful has to align with theway you want to be successful that's really hardactually yeah yeah and we've we've you know we'vefailed plenty of times well especially in thesales fairs especially in tech right becausethey're smart people but they've got to fit inand it's the big trick is to building the rightteams so they become high performing teams butthey're also content or happy or or get alongand they're and there's some sense of rewardbecause it's easy to find smart people but tohave smart people meld together yeah it's toughyeah it's the real trick it's like the gold minewhen you when you it's almost like you're uh umthe maestro what's that for a symphony the conductorthe conductor and when you when your symphonysymphony all comes together it's like a gold minefor you in every way not just the payback for thecompany yeah i think it's a good gold mine for theemployees honestly like they're when they'reyou know and and when i let it get off and i say ibecause like when it gets off the tracks it'smy responsibility right um you know you could seethat you're like oh we're not nearly as alignedit's not the right word but like it's not as smoothit's interesting that you it feels like youi could see where you could get into a funkoh yeah and then so how do you deal with thatand how do you deal with it now say compared to 10years ago uh the way i dealt with it today sinceit's top of mind is i tried to share a lot todayabout a little bit of what it takes in theform of courage for each person to do their jobthat you know the sales rep has to have courage to risk the relationship they haveokay which is very fragile always right it'slike think about how gold that relationship isand then and then that person's going totrust my rep when my rep says we can do this yeahright because i i really coach more on servicesthan anything else like as long as we think servicesthe rest of the all the product stuff happensyou know what i mean because that's what i meanbecause that's where the value is product iseasy but it it is and there are plenty of companiesthat just do product and there are somepeople that only value product yeah 100 right yeahpurchasing people often only value theythink of it as a skew but yeah you know so anywaycoaching them uh it was like look the sales rephas the courage that the rest of us are going todo the job they promised them that we would dothe solution architects have to have courage thattheir estimate is accurate that they've heardthe customer they understand the needs and theyunderstand what this what this job is going tolook like and they get it from both sides boththe customer and internally because if i sayit's 100 hours and it ends up 200 everybody's madso they have to have a lot of courage to takethat risk and then i go in the delivery team has tohave courage right because you know we'regoing into the firefight and sometimes implementingstuff that is relatively new to market youknow it's like not all the playbook's been writtenalready you know that's a real thing liketechnology hits the street someone's got toinstall it the first time and we have this laband they do like they can practice as much as youwant but you still have to show up on game timeand i talked a little bit about my acting and allthat but i said you know i talked about thatcourage you know this fear right here like thatthat thing in your gut that's a great thingbutterflies represent that you care that's whatbutterflies really you have butterflies becauseyou want to do great so you're nervous and andwe talked a little bit about like you knowwe really want to do great everybody's and sowhat i was trying to talk about today and i don't know if i landed it was just thatyou know really high performing teams areaccountable to each other and the reason they'reaccountable to each other is that you trust thatthat person's going to be able to do their job andthat they're aligned that you're trying to doyours well and they're trying to do yours welland we're all aligned and what we're trying todo is create a really awesome customer experienceand if we're all aligned on that we have thattrust then the courage becomes easier becauseonce you have that trust that we're all swimmingin and looking out for the same thing the courageis easy and then everyone else can do that andeveryone can do their job with greater couragethat's where growth comes from and that was kindof the message today that's a great message youknow it's a great mess you're the captain of ateam again no it's i it's where i belong you knowit's really it is you know it it i am rewardedevery day like i that's where i do love to be thecaptain of the team yeah i have no i have noproblem i was uh i played goalkeeper you knowlike i my mom hated this really funny becausemy mom said to me all the time it's like i reallyworry i don't want you to be the goalkeeper thepitcher or the quarterback remember talking aboutthis and i'm like why she's like because if youfail like if you guys lose it's all your faulti was like i can handle that i was like i i guesskind of felt like yeah but i also can be the heroyeah you know yeah and it's good i like beingthe hero yeah you know it's worth the risk to youit is to be the hero and but it sucks when yousee you know as an like as a ceo and entrepreneurlike there's definitely failures like you justyou don't get them all right you know what i meanyeah but one of your greatest talents andyou've you've alluded to this is your reallyyour skill at relationship building and it'si just listened to you apply it again what bytalking to your team you you create arelationship not just with your clients but with your teamwith each one of them you're doing that andagain playing the long game putting the investment into your people is i think one probably one ofthe main reasons you're so successful and it's thatrelationship talent you have to connect withpeople it's really it's it's it's been fascinating tolisten to your story and see it present itselfin almost every aspect of your life so so here's alesson i didn't learn until the downside ofrelationship building was that i cared so muchabout the people because like you know we'vetalked a little bit about like these lifelongrelationships that i have and so at work iwasn't as clear because i was worried about hurtingfeelings downside because i i work with certainpeople i've worked with some people for over 15years you know in your sometimes you can'tdeliver oh not that you can't but like i screwed updelivering bad news and or just call itconstructive criticism and one guy taught me somethingyou know but he said i'd rather you just tell me i'm doing a bad joband unfortunately it was the tail end of ourrelationship and i love this guy who's he'ssuperb uh he was superb um but he needed changeright but i failed him because i wasn't directenough about where he was messing up earlier inour relationship like i should have been directlike that's not acceptable you're better thanthat this isn't working instead i was like hey do youthink we could maybe try to i don't know how youfeeling all this and i let our relationship get inthe way of clearly communicating and what ilearned was to show respect to the relationship was tocommunicate clearly with him and that again oopsyou know like all right write that one down in thejournal that's great advice though andhave boundaries yeah like you know many peopleespecially professionally would prefer you knownon-emotional very important but clear like thisisn't working right some people won't respond wellto it unfortunately because it still hurts to hearthat you're not doing something right such a toughtough dynamic man when you're managing people andand uh over time personal relationshipsevolve and you do care you do you do care andthat's a tough one yeah that's a tough onethat's fine you're like you're like hey i know thatyou're working 12-hour days killingyourself for us yeah but you're doing it wrong yeahand because you're doing it wrong it's resultingin 12-hour days yeah and i the thing that brokemy heart about that whole thing is like i feellike it came off i think i i think he feels likei don't didn't appreciate all the blood sweat andtears and like like if i could tell i mean i havetold like the appreciation for the blood sweat and tears unbelievable what he gavebut that hit its limit so we had to reinvent andget better at the way we do things because i didn'twant them working 12 hours like i really don'twant i want you home in front of your kids andi want you at the ball game and i give all myeveryone of my you know on my team knows likemake that window for your family because thoseare finite moments like i i want to argue i thinkthat's our culture it in some respects othercultures are like i don't care about all thatlike just go drive when no mine is like make sureyou have that time but get your job done yeah atdifferent hours but make sure you put thatpriority in your life and it was killing me to watch howhard that guy was working and then you could seeit impact his relationships with others becauseyou know when you're pushed to the limit andsomeone is like just created more work for youyou snap sooner or later it's a work it's a workand i knew it i knew it i knew and i just didn'tcommunicate clearly that we need to fix thisearlier in this sounds like he was burning outa little bit yeah and by the way like there was apoint where i was burning out and i wasn't therefor him either to give him the coaching and bythe way he said i'll pick up the baton and hedeserves a lot of credit for that you knowyeah um it's hard sometimes to tell people to worksmarter and not harder yeah that's a tough onewell because how do you communicate that withoutit coming across the wrong way that's justthat's tough because everybody's different yeah yeah idon't know you will want to write a book on itbecause it's hard yeah it's really hard i thinkalso we have to show what do you mean i i thinkthey i think what i learned was i wish i would havesaid okay either i'm gonna do it or you'regonna do it but we're gonna go find outside help ofsomeone who has done it because he i knew it waswrong i didn't necessarily know how to do it righti knew what was right but i didn't know how tosay like this is how we're gonna fix this is howwe're gonna fix this how we're gonna fix it rightand so what's funny is after it broke down i hadto go out for external help to come fix what wasbroken and i'm like shit man why didn't i just gofind that external help first and coach him andsay let me go find that and and i wish i would havepushed harder and been clearer because sometimestoo you bring in outside help and they're like ohyou're judging me or you know that's the landmineright right massively am i and so i also realizedthat i i have to be massively clear about thewhy but you know it's funny right like i'm a solverso i'm solving yeah and then i've solved andi'm like look i found this guy to fix this problemand they're like what problem yeah and so it's one of the hardest things brian ishow long that journey has to be you want it tobe a one-hour conversation like this this this yougot it cool we're ready to go but it has to belike hey meeting one this is this is what we'reseeing and this is the result hey meeting two ithink we need to get better here here here heymeeting three would it be valuable if we could findan outsider to help us hey meeting four okay let'sinterview a few of these guys okay meeting fiveyou know like it's a journey to do it right thatlevel of patience is hard it almost in our inour frenetic pace solved right now world yeah it'ssuper hard to slow down yeah but that is wherethe real magic i think that's what the betterleaders have figured out well i think it alsoalmost sounds like if someone's not positionedfor success that's almost where that may bestarted i don't know the background on this onebut if they're not positioned and set up forsuccess then it just it's hard and you almosthave to cut cut it out stop it sooner andreposition that by the way like you know there issuccess on this part of the journey and thenit and then we hit something and we have to readinvent what success looks like well no and that'sreally hard you're like wait a minute you told meto be a welder i'm the best welder in theworld now you're telling me welding isn't importantyeah yeah i think that's that's tough rightlike you just told me to do this for the last fiveeight years yeah and you thanked me along theway yeah and you paid me well and you celebrated itnow you're telling me i'm doing it wrong yeahi'm like that's not what i mean i don't mean wrongbut it does come off as wrong right you knowit's a fascinating thing because i think you wouldagree with this one of the things i tell my folksi'm a people manager too and i'm constantly sayingwe have to reinvent ourselves you have toreinvent yourself maybe you have done this to your pointyou've been welding for the last five years it'stime to become a plumber you can still weld butyou need to now become a plumber and now you needto become an electrician because the market shiftedthe especially with ai right technology'smoving fast you've got to be able to pivot and andcontinue to reinvent yourself if you embrace itit's fun so carly dweck you know carly dweck iscarly dweck i don't think that's her name dweckis her lesson a growth mindset she writes this bookgrowth mindset you talked about it earlier growthmindset yeah massively powerful massively powerfulthing that we all need to think more about becausethe idea of a sort of a static mindset right likethis is who i am versus i'm always learningi'm always on a journey that helped me a lot likelistening to this there was a master i subscribedto masterclass there was a masterclass i was likeoh look steve young this is how simple my brainis football player i like go right still in theandrothal he's a smart dude smart dude right yeahand he tells the story about how he's at byu and hehe's he's like oh wait a minute i'm like one ofthe best quarterbacks in the country and i get tobyu and i'm number five on the depth star likewhat the hell and and he could have stayed thereand said you know this is who i am blah blahblah but he he goes to see steve not mcmahonyeah mcmahon and he and he sees something aboutthe way he throws right and he looks at it andhe's like oh man so he goes for the next yearall i did was change and work on the way i threw tocreate more zip and once i created that i wentfrom five to one and it was just all about likelife being a massive journey always learning growyou know always this growth mindset that to me ithink is how do we instill that in people as earlyas possible yeah right very true you're ready forfailure yeah right and not scared of it no notscared it's part of the journey it is it's allfailure is a gift it's part of the learning it'show you gauge success yeah you know and also it'sa motivator and you learn like you just said ithink so many of us uh gen xers that are in ourmidlife um are really starting to lean into growthmindset because as we're going to this next stagewe're not going quietly we want to continue totackle life and get uncomfortable and grow andchange and i so wish somebody would have talkedto me about growth mindset when i was 25 yeah and ithink it's it'd be such a gift to pass on to theyounger generation and help them understand youcan get so much more out of life with that mindsetit's not even optional at this point though thereare none of those traditional jobs and rolesthey're growing up in a growth mindset i thinkbecause technology moves fast but in order forkids today to to survive not even thrive but justsurvive you have to continue to adapt i feellike the world's changed enough since when we wereyounger there's no there's no i'm gonna go get ajob at the ford plant or i'm gonna become an IBMrep for 30 years and retire like we grew up iremember growing up like oh go get a job at IBMi i don't think that exists anymore maybe itdoes maybe it doesn't i don't know but there's stillpeople that are in regular jobs like i thinkthey're regular jobs they don't last is they'renot gonna last as well yeah but i mean that'swhat i mean yeah but just what i'm saying isyou're gonna grow at some point because it's gonnaget disrupted yeah but i mean there's people thatget a job and it can be even a job is like um uha server right and they can get kind of stuck intothis is who i am this is what i'm doing but ifyou have that growth mindset right earlier then youreally could expand and see where could i go inmy life you know so it isn't just the technicalworld you know there's a whole other world outthere too of it's and it's personally too in yourpersonal life like that's how um marriages canget maybe that's what i'm trying to describe is youneed to have that growth mindset in yourmarriage and your relationship with your children likeconstantly be challenging yourself and how youthink of things and expanding and expanding you'retouching on where i'm where i'm probablyimplying is in order to be have any contentness orsatisfaction you have to continue to evolve andyou have to continue or else you will get stuckin a rut yes so it's not optional isn't itgreat to have that wisdom that we have now yes yeahbecause i never think you're like you're bothright you know brian all right brian saying likelike survival might depend on it yeah in somerespects you're saying that right yeah rightfinancial well-being depends on you yeah but youknow that now we knew it we knew it the three ofus knew it whether we knew it or not we none ofus ever settled not in every aspect of our livesi wouldn't say you know i and so it's it'ssomething i think that needs to be at frontof mind though and and i'm just saying if gen zcan get that in their heads sooner than we didthey're going to be way ahead of us not everyonelikes learning because the only version of learningthey know is traditional learning yeah and thatdidn't work for them and so then what happens isthey write off learning because they only youknow like you know like i don't like zucchinibut the truth is my wife can bake it a certainway or fry it and i'm like oh that's pretty goodi could eat that but if i've only had it broiledyou know and it was every time i'm like i'm notso i think that's where we're what we arestruggling with a little bit as a culture andwe went we're going with so full circle is collegeimportant yeah is that we're very standard in theway we teach still my daughter right now istalking about this program in madrid that shesigned up for and she was choosing which ofthese nba programs she wanted and she chose this onei pushed her early to try to adopt some chat gptin her life you know and um and she i'm like lookat this and what if we did this on a prompt andit really fortunately for me like she bit hard andshe used it in a recruiting world and like allher other peers were like how did you get allthat information for it fast and she's likedon't know you know not like you're supposed to sharesweetheart you know she's like yeah i know butthey're not being that nice so i was like coolit's like i can handle that so anyway we werejoking about it but she she chose this programthat is being that was created this this collegeif you will and madrid that was created by likethe former head of google in latin america andthe in in spain excuse me and the former head oflike sales force okay and they created thistechnical digital first sort of curriculumand her roommate is at the traditional nbaprogram book lecture book lecture read testthis is practice okay here's the scenario okaythis is the company we're running okay how arewe going to do this and she is just likethriving she wasn't great at traditional learning yeahit just wasn't and she's bright reallybright girl but not great at traditional learningand and my my oldest not great at traditionallearning at all but really kind of like has thisnatural leadership pied piper thing where shemakes good street decisions all the time she'scool as the other side of the pillow everyonewants to be around her and so i'm like i'm trying toshe's my new challenge i'm like let's talkabout how chat gpt works let's talk about howai in general works and how it can augment allthis education that you needed that you didn'tget but you're not going to remember becauselike you traditional learning didn't work for youbut it's at your fingertips right and andhey by the way if you don't want to read it allit'll talk to you it'll it'll feed it to youhowever you want to be fed and i'm really tryingto get both of them to have a positiverelationship with ai because if they don't i do believe thatsomeone else will learn to use it to acceleratethemselves faster but you do have to have a wantto learn and i want to get better and i wantto improve and and that is that growth mindsetyeah and i and i do think and i don't think weteach it no no i don't think we teach it i don'teven i don't think we like really talk aboutit until you're later in your professional lifeand and actually i'm going to take that awaylike i'm going to actually just start talking aboutthat phrase with my kids yeah even my 10 yearold you know like every little failure is likewhat did we learn today yes right tell mesomething that like i'm gonna really change the way i toldyou like what went really bad today yeah it'sthe worst part of your day okay cool what did youlearn from that yeah because that's what it isright yeah you know the journey it's like what doesthe journey teach you um that's so true youknow and now we can augment that journey so fastwhat's interesting that our youngest had some kids over a couple weeks agoand i was talking to this kid it was justfascinating honestly he's probably 14 15 yearsold and we were just shooting the shit aboutfootball or something and we had a questionquestion came up he got on his phone topped onchat gbt i think it was and was like blah blahand he's like oh yeah that's the answer and it happened like four times it's likethis kid's he's kind of dialed in they use itthough especially that age they use it well theproblem is the formal education kind of whereyou're going in some ways they're not embracingit they're still saying you need to read thebook and you need to test and we did it as a parentand i'm technically interested and savvy ouryoungest had to write a paper he's like letme just do it in chat gbt and i was we werelike no no you can't the teachers don't want you toyeah but it was so he throughout the topic andhe's over there struggling to write it and i'mlike write me hop on chat gbt write me a youknow a standard uh what is it four paragraphpaper on the following topic with these two mainpoints 30 seconds 10 to five seconds later rightit's done he's over there brighten away but i dothink you're spot on that they don't need to learnit all traditionally at all because it's rightthere it's easily askable yeah you don't writeit's google on steroids it's like when we weregoing to school and they said you're not goingto have a calculator in your pocket and we allhave a calculator in our you know i mean or youknow telling us there's a balance here no thereis a balance there's a balance for sure but i thinkthat there has to be an evolution it's like whydid we do square dancing why do we play the recorderit's like there's so many things that we didthat we don't even apply now and i think it'd beit'd be good if they could look ahead and startimplementing some of this stuff instead of wastingtime agreed brian said something and if you removeone word it's a totally different answer so you saidthey don't need to learn traditionally orthey they uh you didn't say they don't need theirlike they're not being taught to learn they don'tneed to learn traditionally and i and i think theproblem is is but they need to learn yes absolutelythe problem with chat gpt is it gives you an answerright yeah yeah you didn't do any thinking yes yeahright yeah you prompted you maybe that's some of itbut you're gonna believe what it says yesbecause you haven't been taught how to learnwe did the recorder a little bit to learn howwhat how music works yes right so i don't need itbut i learned how to learn in that process soi'm i mean it's all learning it's the learning oh ithink i think that's the scariest part yeah gptin education for me it is that it's too easy forthe student to get the answer they don't have tothink and if like if critical thinking goes awayyeah that's scary because we book you like likethe amount of even if hallucinations get betterand the answers get closer and blah blah blahlike you still have to think critically about whatyou're solving for or you'll be misled and iwould like it's gonna give you the answer it's beingtold to give you yeah right and i and i dothink that like you know whether it's learning whatprompt engineering is but i think the brain doesneed to develop a skill for learning learning thelearning to exercise learning the learning how tolearn yeah there has to be a way to build these twosince we're dissecting it i would amend ittoo you do have to learn and you do have to havecritical skill critical thinking skills highlyhighly important what i mean by not having tolearn i don't know if you have to learneverything little nook and cranny about world history nothat's a bad example because i think history iscritical but there's certain things you just don'tneed to know and it because if you it's easyto just get it and it's easy to have it at yourfingertips but but you do have to be able toconnect dots yeah and you have to have thatcritical thinking you have to be able to learnhow to take this bit of information and think andmatch it up with this and then make decisionsyeah right but i don't know if you have to learnevery little thing that you're taught in schooljust because that's how it's always been you couldargue school's too long yeah right like theysqueeze a lot in they do yeah they could replacea lot of traditional like to your point likeit it's a really tough time maybe the curriculumchanges exactly that's where i'm going likehey could you imagine if an eight-hour dayis replaced with four hours of we've figured out what we think we want you to learnand four hours of practical critical thinkingyeah yeah lab yeah i mean like yeah like let'sput it this way you never learned science justby reading science right yeah at least for memy greatest growth always came in practicingscience yeah in the physics lab yeah it's likeone of my favorite classes because i get closeto it i'm looking at shit in water yeah totallyconnects the dots the best right and sowhat a wonderful opportunity to spend less timewith eyes on a book and more time inpractice i would really hope our education systemgets in front of that a little bit right or thecurriculum changes a little bit where you're likeokay cool it's let's embrace that we can get thisanswer quickly out of ai and this is how we wouldget it let's teach you how to get it yeah howevernow let's go into a lab and make this make it giveyou a practical scenario in which you you goebb and flow into ai for yeah for the solutionwhatever that may be right because the problemis is traditional education is read test yeahread test paper well test and paper are easywell read memorize read memorize not necessarilylearn memorize right regurgitate yeah test 100right right on paper and so i can regurgitate easiernow i could do all my homework yeah soregurgitation it doesn't prove that i've learned yeah yeahthat's the interesting thing right like atthe end of the day the test and the paperare proof proof that you did the work and bydoing the work i hoped you learned right butdoing the work has become easy yeah here's anexample so now what are you actually now what areyou actually trying to how do you judge yeahtraditionally that's how we judge whether ornot someone was learning yeah right like wehave to rethink whether or not someone got ityeah how do you know someone got it yeah yeahyeah how many times have you faced the challengein your business and you're over there youryour engineers are doing things and you justhop on chat gpt and it's like hey chat bt saysdo this why aren't you doing that you know andbecause it's quick right it's quick and it's atyour fingertips it's dangerous they're like ohcome on dude shut up you know leave us alonebut that's the reality of the new dynamic for nowfor sure for now for sure i'm trying toencourage them it's funny do you do you make it a mandatedo you encourage it do you give it a reward likei i try to lead by example like i'm using like heylet me tell you what it what it taught me let metell you how to apply it um you know it's funnyright you just never have enough time for all thegood ideas you have i think it's a very real thingbut um i try to encourage like hey is it likehey what if we tried to use chat gpt to uh maketo get us 80 of the way there like hey there's notenough time in a day got it i'm really asking a lotof people but if we could you know save you have30 of your day how much of a reward is that andand and so someone posed this to me uh ci was iwas meeting with and he goes you know we figured outalready theoretically how to use chat use ai tosave 30 of your day 40 of your day because youput all these processes in and you're good thequestion is what do you do with the 40 percentbecause what we don't know is does my employeeplay video games with the 40 percent or do theyuse the 40 percent to do other things that'sa challenge for you as a business owner to sayi just freed up your you now have 60 percentof your time or 40 percent of your time backwhat are you gonna do what are you gonna do andyou've got a figure yeah track it per se and icould but i'm not you know like isn't that crazylike what are you gonna do with your other 40 percentso have you gotten into agentic ai at all uhwe don't have any agentic ai running internallyto solve problems it's really funny because it'sone of those pet projects where i'm like i need togo find a guy like brian who could go execute ityeah like i don't have those guys right so i don'thave i don't have a big it department have youhave you looked into like have you seen microsoft'swhole concept of the frontier organization nono i have not got it check out oh my god it's notit's it's talking about using agentic ai to nowso today the the the the most common thing is i'mgonna go to chat gbt i'm gonna write a prompt andi'm gonna get an answer correct um the next versionwhich they're kind of pushing and it's reallyfascinating is to now start to embed agents intoyour team oh so then now make most of your teamagents now it's and you know that scares peopleit's right you know it's like well shit i'mgonna be out of a job and and the whole selling pointis no you're gonna get time back to do otherthings now we go back two minutes what do youfill your time with so it's really fascinatingif all your job is is to provide information whenpeople ask it then yes that job is going awaylike i can get information without you yeah i meanlook you know i think just this my fear on thatside is like there's a lot of lawyers and accountantsand what have you that that are only five yearsout of the job force with a lot of debt going ohshit yeah okay that that part of thegeneration scares me like those are our kids right yeahwe're like they did all this study and they didall this and they they took jobs that might beeasily replaceable i have seen i haven't seen itas articulated as the microsoft front end the wayyou described it but i've seen already inaction like hey i created this like where i went intomicrosoft i forgot to the studio and they'relike make me a bot that does this this and this andco-pilot studio yeah co-pilot i've seen that inaction i think that's powerful and then check outthis part so uh we live in a zero trust worldright oh yeah brian and i are geeking it out soso how do you know who that bot is i'lltell you and that bot has access to what all myhr data so could i just ask that bot to give mehey can you give me uh brian barker salary pleaseyeah you know what you know what i mean likehow do you secure the identity how do you identifyand secure this new agentic AI world which is areal heck of a problem because like it's reallyeasy now in this zero trust world to say i knowbrian is and i'm an mfam to death and i'll alwaystell me who he is because that's the way butif he's a bot yeah uh oh how do i give that bota personality it's fascinating i work with aguy who's super smart and he's always been like idon't like to use elevated privileges i trustmyself but now i'm developing bots and i've gotgod-like powers across our ecosystem i gottafigure this out yeah and so he's it's kind oftouching on what you're saying it's and there isthat nefarious part of the agents because they dolearn that's the whole frontier concept they learnnow they start making decisions yeah imagine likehey i i've learned i ran into a roadblock couldyou help me get around this roadblock sure i'llhelp you get around this roadblock but that thatthat that you're like i'll tell you every now andagain every now and again you do have to go umthis terminator thing that that yeah no this matrixthing that's that's a possibility i'll tell youone of the most powerful things that i've comeacross so far is the whole vibe coding right soyou go into vs code vs code you can choose whetheryou want to use clod chat gbt co-pilot and you saywrite me a script that does this write me a scriptthat does that so where i've used this i'm not acoder by trade i'm i'm a noodler but you can seemy raspberry pi's there um now i've got it downwhen we upload a youtube video i in i can go andpress one button i used to have to go weupload the video i create a web page and do all thisshit right takes me a half an hour to an hour nowi press the button it's done in 30 seconds i gotmy web page updated my episode page updatedit's all pushed out and it's it's flawless and i'mliterally i bet it it takes me longer to login than it does for it to run the whole scriptand update it all well it's amazing he's veryexcited well that he should be but now can youimagine this like we just had this wonderfulconversation yet we could throw uh a large youcould write a book you could sit there andbe like i'm gonna write this whole story yeahand i'm gonna send that over to google's lmand say make this a podcast it's happening and iti've watched like i literally most content no notmost i've literally done it and you're like oh mygod like i've taken a training thing and i'mlike you know what like as this example i'd like toknow more about what office depot is doing in xy and z public documents yeah put it into googleand i'm like hey do this to me for a podcast andi'll be driving it back hey did you guys hear aboutwhat office depot is doing oh man yeah totallywell tell me more about okay so like it's reallycool and it just sounds so yeah well authenticand you're like oh and by the way i enjoyed learningit that way while i was driving yeah versushaving to read this boring document yeah aboutcorporate blah blah blah and i was like uh-ohthere's a couple uh-oh moments you know the otherthe other thing my older son's looking intois developing agents to make say you've got athousand bucks you want to just play in the marketdevelop an agent that you say hey go and go basedon this criteria whether it's earnings pershare whatever right the multiple go and buy thesestocks i want you to be semi-aggressive here'sa thousand bucks go grow it and now and that'swhat's trading is becoming right that's beengoing on for a while hundred percent yeah i mean i getno anybody across my desk that are incredibledoing you know wanting that wanting to do thatat i think not wanting doing that at yes scalescale hundred percent yeah i think with all ofthis though what's also going to happen is realis going to become a hot commodity and real organicexperiences and old school stuff i think peopleare it's going to go so far one way that peopleare going to crave no technology and crave justface-to-face human contact because ai is goingto take over everything that everyone's goingto lose trust and what am i what i'm listening tois this real or is this ai what i'm watching isthis real or is this ai what i'm being told isthat a real person or ai and i think that thelack of trust is going to leave people to search outmore of a human interaction agree 100 yeah ithink ultimately if you just look at generallythe generation after the generation always wantsto yeah do different yeah right like yeah oh youguys ruin the internet and oh you guys ruinit like so i think that the the gen z terriblegen z they're they're the ones in their 20s okayyeah i think that you know they're they're so insocial and all that yeah that my 10 year oldthat generation's gonna fight it in a weird waybecause they're yeah like ah the old people doit this way so we're gonna do something differentyeah right and that you always sort of haveto fight the generation above you you're alwaysgonna do something different you do and i thinkthat's gonna happen how it happens i have no ideai don't know because we've never had technologylike this before to mess around with but i thinkthat it'll become something that um humans wantto protect i think humans will want to protectthe human experience yeah and i think thattechnology is going to start to feel more likea threat than um an aid at some point in certainsituations so and before i ask my last question doyou have any more questions i do it'ssemi-nebulas but what what does leadership mean to youyou know i i thinkwhen i think of leadership i think ofgetting others to achieve more than they thought they could achieveby bringing them together by not bringing thatdoesn't doesn't necessarily need to be broughttogether getting others to achieve more thanthan what they think their limits are that'sthat's what what the way i define it um you know andand i think that it's important that empathy and care find their way into thatbecause i do think leadership does the bestleadership is going to come from a good placeyou know umthat's how i look yeah i and admittedly it's aquestion i don't like to answer myself becauseit could change dated not day to day but you knowwhat i'm saying i do you want to choose your wordscarefully as a true leader that you are so youwant to choose your words carefully because it'sit's a tough question it's a big question itis it's a it means different things to differentpeople and it means different things atdifferent times and at different situations so i thinkthat's a great answer this format helped mewith that a little bit in that connecting back tocoaching directing being in an organizationwhatever it may be i think a lot of that isyou know a willingness to say i want somethingwe all want something there's something out therewe i'll take the lead and create safety forothers so so they can get there right and umand push because occasionally it's pushand occasionally it's courage to be in frontand occasionally it's the courage to be in theback and so to your point i i do think it changesdaily yeah and and it's you know maybe the bestanswer is it's doing what is needed at the timeit is needed yeah to help others grow maybe that'show i would rewrite it that's great that's a greatthat's a great way to sum it up i thinkcourage is heavily involved yeah courage is heavilyinvolved to be a leader yeah and like you saidobviously to lead but to have the courage andself-awareness and humility to know when not toyeah and to let your people go and let let givethem their opportunity and creating that spaceso it's a great answer i have one last commentthen you can ask yours um just going back to the whole imposter syndrome concepti don't think you need to feel it i i thinkyou should be proud of what you've accomplishedi've known you for i don't know how long 10 12years something like that i i'm proud of whatyou've done i'm proud of what i've seen youaccomplish and i think you can be and should beso i don't think you you can probably giveyourself some grace i guess if you will don'tdon't take your foot off the pedal because ithink it's what makes you successful but i you know ii don't think you need to feel like an imposter iappreciate that that makes sense it does it doesthis has been wildly beneficial to me oh goodyeah because i don't talk like you know sort ofthis yeah about these topics and subjects anddon't dive into the past as often as you knowi might but um sometimes it it you knowevery now and again there's just a little bit ofreminder out there you're entitled to that yeahthat's because you give it to everyone else you'reentitled to that space too to honor yourself inyour journey and to take appreciation and stockof it you're entitled to it just as muchas everyone else in your life that you loveso my last question is where do you see yourself in five yearsfive years is tricky uh because it's blur it's blurry because the you knowand i think about this a decent amount umi don't have a finite date for the businessi could still be leading the business i could have moved on to something elseum the business could be part of somethingbigger and i have a role within that biggereventually i think these the reason five yearsis tough is because i look at it a little bit moreas like as pressley gets closer to graduatingso as she goes off to college theoretically umum i i think that there will be a little bit more freedomum i'm either gonna have the right people in place that give me that freedomat the business uh or we will have joinedsomeone else and and you know i there willbe leaders running it in some way shape orform whether they're whether they're runningit in its current form or in another form umi love to work i love to think i love to giveadvice which is hysterical i see myself inconsulting in some respect um or coaching highschool football you know yeah i got a bunch ofbuddies they're like you're an idiot if you don'tdo some high school football coach and uh andand i and it's really funny a lot of people likeyou're the boss you have any you know you can makethe time or you can do this you can do that i'm likenow i don't really look at it that way like i ifeel like i'm the leader and i'm gonna show youthat i'm gonna work just as hard as you guysand um and so my my life has a frenetic pace todaybut yeah as pressley gets older i'llprobably have grandkids in two different countriesand and you know i'm gonna need someflexibility at some point to make sure i keep this familytogether you know and that that matters to me yeah matters to me a lot um my wife'sgrandmother gammer had a license plate it was like23 and all and she was just like you talk about thematriarch okay she's the wife of a four stargeneral wow and she just has a matriarch vibe andand and i tell jodi all the time i'm like igotta make you gamer because then then you think likethe legacy of the unit stays yes and and shereally like that's a big thing for her you knowshe wants that she wants she wants to be gamer andi'm like we can make that happen because then i cansleep well at night knowing generations of ourfamily will stay together like that's yeah that'sthe desire you're passing that on i'm trying toyeah you're passing that i think that's the thirdor fourth time you've talked about coachinghigh school football yeah i know it's kind of funnyright i think that's something that you gotta benear it i gotta do something you're manifesting ityeah and and i i think i gotta be young youngpeople need as much help as they can get yeahfor sure and coaching high school football isnot coach it's not about coaching high school rightit's about sitting on the side it's aboutdeveloping a young man or you know and you knowthat because you had that experience so it'smade me who i am so i need to coming full circleyou should start with like a flag football teamyoung little kids i've already coached actuallyi coached uh my niece's uh soccer team here inboca was one of the most wonderful experiencesjust watching those girls we won a championshipwas it was it team boca travel wasn't the travelit was okay optimist one saber yeah i won themccormack cup or whatever that was yeah whateverthat's the tom something yeah yeah yeah i can'tremember the exact name but her team won it onceand then she had a shirt or something my mymy cousin's husband got me involved he's like ineed help yeah and then he ended up like youjust coach it and like yeah we nina and i was sowonderful that's awesome forever with uh with myoldest nathan and i'm like i gotta stop so him andmy uh dylan and nathan both coach they boththey coach uh a basketball yeah we're great we'rewe've always been doing that but well i thinkthat's a great vision and i can't wait to hearfrom brian as the years go on where you are andwhat you're doing and when you become a grandpaare you gonna be called grandpa have you decidedi have not i choose not to have that conversationin any way shape or form i turned 50 uh nextyear and that's a big one that's a big one wowi still think i'm 35 so we all it's all downhillwe won't use that word grandpa i am cool dad wellyeah i mean i i don't think jen i think gen xhas made being a grandparent the coolest ever sobecause we all are just living our lives reallyare as cool as we are but we just happen to begrandparents so that's how it goes butgreg thank you so much for sharing your storyand your wisdom and your advice um i know there'sso many listeners that this is going to resonatewith and they've learned things from you i meansome of the knowledge you've imparted is um justinvaluable so thank you for all of that and againfor being so open and trusting us with your storywe've really enjoyed it you're welcome but thankyou guys this has been absolutely fantastic i'mso glad brian asked me to do it yeah yeah verycool it's been great yes hell yeah yeah yeah andagain i'm just watching your journey and how itall has tied together and led you to where you areit's a puzzle that just makes perfect sense andi know the next five ten years are gonna go thatway for you even if there's ups and downs it'sall gonna fit so i'm i'm excited i'm excited toand i know you two are gonna stay in touchyes sure relationship building here totally thisrelationship is solid well we've had yeah he'slike i said 75 percent bs about random things25 work yeah like i said when you come to townand i hear he's going to lunch i'm like good iget like three or four hours of myself well iwill say this like he doesn't go to lunch so the factthat he goes to lunch with me makes me feel prettyyeah yeah let me tell you something he doesn't goto lunch so yeah i don't like no i don't likepeople i have a very very short list yes and you'reon it you and jd are on it absolutely he saysno to everything so but again thank you so muchand for our listeners um we welcome anycomments or questions and um i do want to just say yourcompany one more time sure it's grace andtechnologies grace and technology in floridaoffices all throughout the state so anyone'sinterested in gracie gracin technology as wellyes yes that's how we've known each otherfor so long very satisfied uh i guess customerevolved into friendship and and they kill iti hate to put you out there too much because idon't want it to you know by the way he's not alone in that statement they're likei don't really want to give you a referralbecause i don't want to not have you when i need you andthat's not how it works trust me you gotta yougotta just trust that listen and it isn't howit works because i've seen you guys grow i've seenyou guys scale i've seen you guys just kill it soyeah everyone needs they you know it's ebbsand flows like there are times of the year or ofmulti-years where you're like i just kind of don'tneed what you have right now because your journeydoesn't need it at that time you're technicalyour company's technical journey and so that's what'scool like someone joked like if we do our jobsreally really well you don't need us that muchthat's the reality yeah if we're really goodand we do what we're supposed to do you'll keep usaround but you don't always need us and that'sour kind of i do i do think when you were talkingabout the courage to you know go out and sellthe courage to deliver i would you know i meanyou guys are a trusted advisor to to myself andmy teams and it's and it's just huge and i thinkit's a huge thing in the marketplace so you'renot just bullshitting here you're you know you'rewalking the walk i guess right and it's it's ait's a great thing you've built it's it's coolit's authentic so that's authentic it is it isso again grace and technologies i'll say one moretime but that's it and um as always listenersif you have any comments or questions for brianand i please feel free to leave them and we will see you next time bye