This is a journey with Guy Morris, a former Fortune 100 business leader with a past you won't believe. He is opening up about his life story. He reveals the tale of a 13-year-old boy who fled home and became homeless. He battled mental health issues, addiction, and living on the streets. The story shifts from a painful journey of homelessness to a life of purpose, demonstrating the power of resilience and the importance of never giving up, no matter the odds.
Guy Morris has had a distinguished career spanning 36 years as a leader in the software, high-tech, and global energy sectors. In addition to his professional achievements, he has pursued many other interests. Guy has written songs for Disney Records, written screenplays for Sojourn Entertainment, holds a patent for his inventions, and is a licensed Coast Guard charter captain and a certified PADI diver and adventurer. Today, he is an accomplished author and publisher of intelligent, well-researched thrillers.
Guy's life proves you can rise from the rubble and create a legacy. Through conversations, we follow Guy's remarkable transition from a struggling student to an ace scholar, uncovering his keen interest in the sciences and the philosophy of the Renaissance. Alongside these personal revelations, he shares the excitement of his daring journey into writing a historical novel that unravels a centuries-old mystery involving a real-life pirate and a lost city.
Prepare for an episode packed with resilience, discovery, and inspiration.
To learn more about all his fascinating THRILLERS books: https://www.guymorrisbooks.com/
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Ordinary people, extraordinary experiences - Real voices, real moments - Human connection through stories - Live true storytelling podcast - Confessions - First person emotional narratives - Unscripted Life Stories.
Thank you for listening - Hasta Pronto!
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Daniela SM (00:08):
Hi, I'm Daniela.
Welcome to my podcast, becauseeveryone has a story, the place
to give ordinary people, stories, the chance to be shared and
preserved.
Our stories become the languageof connections.
Let's enjoy it, connect andrelate because everyone has a
story.
Welcome my guest, guy Morris, aRenaissance man, former Fortune
(00:37):
100 business leader and anauthor with many other talents.
He shares his story of runningaway from home at the age of 13
and becoming homeless.
He struggles with mental healthissues, addictions and living
on the streets, but his journeydidn't end there.
In fact, it is just thebeginning of a fascinating tale
(01:01):
of perseverance andself-discovery.
Eventually, he found his fate,became a father and transitioned
from a struggling student to anoutstanding scholar and then a
leader.
He discovered his passion forscience and the philosophy of
the Renaissance and hepersevered through difficult
(01:21):
times to find his purpose inlife.
Guy's story is a testament tothe power of resilience,
emphasizing the importance ofnever giving up and taking care
of your mental health Veryimportant.
Let's enjoy Guy's story.
Welcome, guy, to the show.
Friendship, matthew, a beer.
(01:42):
And so, guy, you said when wemet that you usually don't share
much about yourself.
You just talk about specifictopics, and you are a writer of
many books now and have been inmany podcasts.
I appreciate that you decidedto share your story here.
Why is it wrong?
Guy Morris (01:58):
It's not an easy decision for me.
I do some learning to somewhatget out of my way, as I
explained to you at one pointthat I've been in business
Fortune 100 business leadershippositions for close to 40 years
before I retired, and in thosekind of positions the last thing
you do as a leader is talkabout yourself.
(02:19):
You talk about the company.
You talk about the team, thegreat team you have.
You talk about the greatproducts you have.
You talk about your greatcustomers.
You talk about things that youcan get other people to identify
with, to help them feelenthusiastic and motivate it to
basically be working up scenehours that nobody would ever
work unless they're feeling thatit's really worthwhile.
(02:40):
And there's also an element asa leader that you don't want to
show weakness.
If you knew that the leader ofyour company had dealt with
mental illness, if he had dealtwith depression, if he had dealt
addictions, if he had dealtwith any sort of those kind of
traumas in your life, you startto question their ability to
make rational judgments.
(03:00):
You start to infer that thosethings are affecting their
ability to do their job whetherit is or not, and I was a highly
functional, dysfunctionalperson.
I could be brilliant in theoffice and I could be a complete
wreck at home, but you don'twant to let that out, and so
I've spent 40 years keeping mostof my internal struggles as
(03:21):
internal, as a secret insidemyself and maybe with my
counselor or one or two friends,and that was the absolute limit
I could go.
So learning to share my storywith others.
I'm new at it and I'm stilluncomfortable with it, but I'm
learning to try and get out ofmy own way, because I've heard
that other people find value inthat story.
Daniela SM (03:43):
That's interesting what you're saying.
I mean, maybe in your timespeople were more into don't be
yourself.
Pretend that everything is okaywhen it's not, but don't you
think that now things havechanged, that morbid ability
actually makes you more likablewithin limits, right In the
context of a Fortune 100position.
Guy Morris (04:05):
I still think it's extremely dangerous to be that
transparent about yourweaknesses and struggles.
I think to be likable in thatscenario and I was like.
I had lunch a few weeks agowith somebody I hired into
Microsoft probably close to 20years ago and she actually
lasted longer at Microsoft thanI did.
(04:27):
But she often mentions to otherpeople that I was one of her
favorite bosses and I ran thebest team she ever worked on.
And it's because people willlike you if you're honest.
They'll like you if you haveshow integrity.
They'll like you if you're kind.
They'll like you if you treatthem with respect and listen to
hear them out, where problemsaren't something that you yell
(04:50):
at them about, but problems arethings that you join with them
to solve, because all businesseshave problems, all jobs have
problems.
If you start beating people overthe head because something went
wrong, you're never going toget anywhere because they're
going to second guess themselvesthe last time.
But if they know that you'regoing to have their back, if, as
a team, you know that ifsomething goes wrong, that
(05:11):
you're going to take the bulletsfor the team, those are the
things that you do to get wellliked and well respected.
Telling everyone that got totake time off to go to rehab
isn't one of the things thatwill make you like, as I said,
in that kind of environment,which is a real hyper
competitive environment, I can'ttell you how many times that I
took a job because nobody elsethought that they could be
(05:33):
successful at that job, and whenI made it to success, I
couldn't tell you how many timeseverybody wanted to have my job
.
In those situations I think eventoday that corporate mentality
still holds.
I think in other fields of youknow, obviously, like in the
entertainment field, peoplealmost expect entertainers to be
(05:55):
dysfunctional.
So it's not that big a dealthere for them to be that even a
little bit transparent.
And even there you'll see thata lot of celebrities will deal
with these things in silenceuntil it comes out and then
where they have to deal with it,I think, while there are some a
general level of increase insensitivity to the issues that
(06:17):
are affecting many people in thenation, such as addictions,
mental illness, childhood trauma, ptsd which is when I grew up,
nobody ever talked PTSD Even so,I still think that for those
who have a professional career,that's a very sensitive and
dangerous topic to broachoutside of the corporate context
(06:37):
.
Daniela SM (06:38):
Interesting.
Thank you for sharing that, Guy.
When does your story start?
Guy Morris (06:42):
Well for me?
I like to.
I think I, at least in my ownmind.
I tell people that my own storystarted as a 13 year old
homeless runaway and I was.
I worked alongside migrantworkers to eat, I slept under
bridges and behind back seats ofcars and open doorways or
hallways for apartments, anyplace I could find that was dry
and warm, until I wouldtypically be kicked out.
(07:04):
And I did that for severalmonths until I had an
opportunity to go home, brieflyenough, where it was safe enough
for me to get a GED at 15.
And then I basically at 15, Ipacked a little tiny duffel bag
which is all I really of,everything I really own that was
worth anything, and I had aguitar that was in a cardboard
box and I had it taped up with ahandle and I hitchhiked to
(07:27):
Tucson, arizona, where I'mtrying to come, and that was the
beginning of what I call myjourney.
Daniela SM (07:32):
You have siblings.
Do you left your siblings inyour mom and your dad?
Guy Morris (07:35):
My oldest brother had already moved out several
years before that.
He moved out at 16 and a coupleyears later joined the Navy.
He was gone already and also heleft because of a lot of the
same abuse and going on myyounger brother.
I did feel for a very long time.
I felt a lot of guilt that Ileft my younger brother in that
environment.
It didn't turn out too bad forhim because a year later I spent
(07:58):
most of my life wanting to golive with my dad instead of my
mom and was always told no.
But I think after I left Isuspected that my mom just got
tired of trying and shebasically sent my younger
brother to live with my dad,even though my dad had his own
issues.
It wasn't the same as the homethat we were in.
So, yeah, there was some guiltinvolved initially in doing that
(08:21):
, but for me it was a survival.
You know on the airplanes wherethey say, put oxygen on
yourself first before you takecare of somebody else, I
couldn't help him anymore untilI got to a better place.
Daniela SM (08:31):
So you were 15 and you left.
Guy Morris (08:33):
I was 15 when I finally left.
I turned 16, living on my own,worked any job I could get
parking cars, digging ditches, Iworked at a steel manufacturing
company, I worked for an Amishcontractor and I did all the
dirty work.
I drove trucks and deliveredproduce in the middle of the
night to hotels and restaurants.
(08:53):
I pretty much did anything Ihad to do and most of them were
fairly low paying, you knowdead-end jobs, until I got a
chance to go to college.
Daniela SM (09:01):
And at the meantime that you were working these jobs
, you were sleeping on thestreet.
Guy Morris (09:05):
No, after I left at 15 with a GED, I was in a
commune for about three or fourmonths and then I got a job
outside the commune and got aroommate.
I basically rented a room in atrailer from another guy who I
was working with parking cars.
At that point I was off thestreet, I was making enough
(09:25):
money that I could, you know,rent a room and then, until I
could basically rent my ownplace they weren't glamorous,
they were pretty seedy places insome pretty bad parts of town,
but they were mine and I didn'thave any furniture.
But I had, I had, I was.
I wasn't in an environmentwhere I could be beaten or
(09:47):
humiliated or threatened, and sothat was was a transition.
You know, from then on, I wasbasically I paid for myself.
I had my own places, my owncars.
I never took money from anybody, except on one occasion, which
was to go to school.
You know, and to a great extentI've been on my own since I was
13.
Because even when I was home fora year to get my GED, I worked.
(10:10):
We were poor.
If I wanted to buy clothes, Ihad to work.
If I wanted to buy schoollunches, I had to work.
If I wanted to go someplacewith friends, I had to.
I had to pay for it myself.
Even for that short period oftime when I was home, I was
still very much independent andself-sufficient.
And I learned that on thestreet that even though I was
young and I couldn't go rent anyplace, there was no way I could
(10:32):
rent something and no one wasgoing to rent a 13, to a
13-year-old kid because thatwould bring legal consequences
for them.
So I slept wherever I had tosleep and then I worked in order
to eat.
Migrant worker jobs are verytypical.
You know, you get up at fouro'clock in the morning, you can
stand by a particular streetcorner by five o'clock and
(10:52):
they'll typically send someflatbed trucks to pick up as
many workers as you can get onthe truck soon.
So you had to jump on the truckfast to get your spot.
They take you remotelysomeplace out in the middle of
the Southern California ranchland.
You'd be dropped off at a ranchand they wouldn't come pick you
up, basically until you weredone, which was oftentimes 11
(11:13):
o'clock midnight.
So we would work from earlymorning to late at night and
then we'd go home and basicallycatch a couple hours of sleep
and have to do it again.
Obviously very, very difficultwork from a physical perspective
and an emotional perspective,but at the same time it taught
me a level of self-reliance andperseverance and the willingness
to basically engage in hardwork and not be afraid.
(11:35):
So for that I'm grateful, forthat.
Daniela SM (11:38):
Were any moments that you could have gone the
wrong way drugs, alcohol,delinquency Well, I definitely
had drug problems for a longtime and alcohol problems.
Guy Morris (11:48):
I was drinking it by age 11 because of my home
environment.
It was clean for a few yearsafter I became a Christian at
one point.
I didn't know I had PTSD for mychildhood but I had what's
called complex PTSD and I wouldstruggle with the symptoms of it
for decades until it wasfinally diagnosed to my fifth.
You know it's like when adoctor is trying to solve, cure
(12:08):
something, but they're notreally sure what's wrong.
It's a lot of hit and miss,it's a lot of guesswork and that
was kind of.
I went to 12 step programs.
I had counselors who arelargely worthless in terms of
solving the real issues.
There was a couple of years, afew years, where I read nothing
but self-help books to try andunderstand what was going on.
When I reached my late 20s,early 30s, I knew that my
(12:29):
alcoholism and my drug addictionand my other addictions were
undermining my success, mysuccesses in other realms, and
so I had to again.
I could never go to my boss andsay, hey, I've got to take some
time off to deal with thisperson on the show.
That would have been the end ofmy career.
I had to deal with it on my own.
When I went from homeless togoing to college.
I saw it as my chance to changemy stars.
(12:52):
I saw it as my one and onlyopportunity to not let my past
define my future and to that ifI could learn new skills and
that was not just job skills butinterpersonal skills and
relationship skills and all thethings that normal kids learn in
a healthy environment If Icould learn some of those things
, I could change the trajectoryof my life with a fear that I
(13:16):
was going to end up like mymother.
Those were all definite issues.
I definitely had to strugglewith every single one of them
Multiple times.
I would be successful, then Iwould fail, then I'd have to get
up and start again.
I had the restart, reboot kindof problem that a lot of people
have, where it's easier just togive up at times than to keep
(13:36):
struggling with those internalissues that are painful and
difficult and crippling at times.
But it was the giving up thatone person told me says failure
is not when you fail.
Failure is only when you giveup.
I somehow found the courage toget up and keep trying, even
when I failed on multipleoccasions.
(13:57):
It was always a bit of abilityto say, okay, well, tomorrow's a
new day, we'll start again.
Daniela SM (14:02):
Wow, wonderful that you have the persistence and
that strength, mindset strength.
Guy Morris (14:07):
I don't normally know that I can take credit for
it.
I know that I had no otheroptions and I had been.
It wasn't like I had to say,well, I can failure, maybe I'll
end up as a homeless person.
It's like, well, I'd alreadybeen homeless and I knew that it
didn't matter what it took.
I couldn't go back to where Iwas.
(14:27):
I only had the option to goforward or to basically stall
and rot where I was.
I never felt courageous formost of my life.
I felt desperate.
I felt determined.
I felt that I had no otherviable choices other than to
forge on.
Daniela SM (14:44):
But you did as you said.
You either move forward or youstay there, and you actually
chose the moving forward.
Yeah, Maybe you didn't know.
You were courageous, you weresurviving, but you chose
something to get out of whereyou were.
Guy Morris (14:57):
I knew I could give up, but if I gave up, I would
become.
There's no time where youbasically stay static.
If you give up in that kind ofsituation, you fall backwards,
and falling backwards was thepain that I had already
experienced, pain that I didn'twant to experience anymore, and
so, for me, I felt like I had tomove forward.
Daniela SM (15:17):
And I had a son.
Guy Morris (15:18):
He was getting to the age where he was starting to
notice that dad had issues, andso I felt like it was the only
thing.
The best thing I could do forhim was not to tell him do as I
say, not as I do, but to changewhat I do and to change my style
, to basically show him thateven a man with problems can you
(15:40):
can't change who you are untilyou face who you are, and I had
to do that, even if not even formyself.
I also had him to think about.
Daniela SM (15:48):
So, going back, you decided to go to college.
What is it that you studied?
Guy Morris (15:52):
At first I didn't know.
I was told to go to collegeactually in prayer one day, and
that was a really radical, weirdday.
I was working a really long 12,14 hour day, six days a week,
was exhausted all the time.
It was a very physical job.
We were going to prayer becauseat the time a good quote,
unquote good Christian husbanddidn't make his wife work.
So I wanted to send her to workjust long enough so I could
(16:16):
quit my job, long enough toactually go interview for
another job, because I couldn'tgo interview when I would you
know, I'd get off work at eightor nine o'clock at night and so
I couldn't even interview foranother job until I quit my job.
But I couldn't afford to justquit.
So we were praying and I feltprobably one of the only two,
maybe three times my entire life.
I really felt that I was beingspoken to outside of any context
(16:38):
of anything I can imagine.
I felt that I was supposed togo to school.
I even got told I was supposedto get up right that minute,
call the university, ask for anapplication.
I was going to go to school.
Now this was incredible.
My first thought was what?
I'm functionally illiterate?
I didn't finish high school, Ididn't take SAT scores.
School is for rich kids whowork hard and got good grades.
(17:00):
I said there's no way I'm goingto get accepted.
And so when I had to declare mymajor in my application, I did
a point and I looked down and Isaid what does an electrical
engineer do?
I actually picked electricalengineering, even though I was
28 units short of the minimumrequirements to get in the
program.
They let me in.
Daniela SM (17:20):
Wow.
Guy Morris (17:22):
Now, when they let me in, my first thought was holy
cow, they'll let anybody in.
I thought school was for smartpeople.
I said I'm as dumb as they come.
I said it just shows, the goesto show they'll let anybody in.
But I think it was some kind ofmiracle.
The very next day and I actually, when I got my acceptance
letter through the trash becausethey still didn't have any
money, I still had to go to workI still didn't have to solve
the basic problem.
Until the very next day, I gota letter from my father-in-law,
(17:44):
who was very concerned that Icouldn't provide for his
daughter the way that shedeserved and that he wanted to
encourage me to improve myself.
If I were willing to work tosupport our needs, he would be
willing to pay for my tuitionand books.
I hadn't told anybody that Ihad put in the application to
the university because I thoughtit would just be an
embarrassment when they told meno or when they said yes and I
(18:07):
said well, gee, they said yes,but I clearly can't go anyway.
So I never told anybody Okay,let's do this not even my
dearest friend.
And so this was a real bigshock to me and it was a sign to
me that that was what I wassupposed to do.
While I struggled for the firstfew years trying to figure out
what I was supposed to study andactually passing classes, I was
(18:28):
probably sleeping, maybe anaverage of four hours a night.
I'd work in the evenings.
I'd go to school during the day.
I'd come home, fix dinner, do acouple hours of study before
I'd go to work.
It was a cycle six, seven daysa week and I was constantly
exhausted.
Daniela SM (18:44):
You were married and have kids.
Guy Morris (18:45):
By that point I had gotten married, I was 19, and my
wife got pregnant right away,neither of which were really
necessarily planned, and so Iwas a little bit overwhelmed at
the time.
And she was not only that, itwas, she was anorexic.
So she was, she was really ill.
We had to put her in thehospital twice during all this
(19:05):
time because she had gotten downto like 78 pounds or something.
That was really scary, and so,yeah, there was a lot of
stresses, but ultimately Igraduated with multiple degrees.
I was at the top of the Dean'sList, I got a full scholarship
to go to grad school in Arizonaand then I separately I got
accepted into the Harvard MBAprogram.
(19:26):
Harvard was too expensive forme.
I couldn't figure out how I'dborrow or get that much money.
Just being accepted was a greathonor.
I had multiple degrees.
One of them was economics, andI had to build a macroeconomic
model to graduate.
My model was innovative in thatbecause I based it on a theory
that I had developed that wasunproven.
(19:48):
That model outperformed theFederal Reserve, outperformed
all the major banks in thenation, outperformed every other
university in the nation.
Basically, I blew everybodyaway by a wide margin.
I was one tenth of one percentoff the the actual numbers.
That caught the attention ofeverybody and so that got me
into grad school.
And grad school got me my firstjob at IBM and from there I had
(20:10):
amazing jobs, amazing career,because I had listened to a
prompting in prayer that made nosense at all Guy, you're gonna
go to school.
It's like right.
I was so affected by my youththat that the local church, my
nickname, was punk because of myscraggly clothes and my, my
sarcastic anti-establishmentattitude, my long hair and just
(20:34):
the underlying aftermath ofgrowing up on the streets.
To say that punk had to go tocollege was like no, no,
something's wrong with this.
But it turned out that, eventhough I had been told my entire
life that I was unbelievablydumb, that I was unbelievably
stupid, that I was worthless,that I was all of these things
which I heard every single daygrowing up, I had a certain type
(20:58):
of it was almost autistic.
If you put me in a room full ofpeople, I'm socially autistic.
I can't.
I don't know.
I'm a quiet, I isolate.
I've gotten better over theyears with training and
experience, but certainly atthat time I couldn't barely
function in a social environment.
But if you gave me a complexmodel or complex problem to
(21:23):
solve, I somehow figured out away to solve it.
So that skill led me through acareer of constantly being the
leading edge guy, innovating newtechnologies in the business,
and because I had come from ascenario where I had to risk
everything in order to moveforward.
Unlike most of the people thatI worked with, who came from
(21:43):
very well-established families,they were good middle class,
upper middle class families.
They didn't want to take risks,they just wanted that slow,
steady career and they had thecharisma.
They were on the football team,they were the football captain,
so it was always about theschmooze for them.
I had a reputation for being theguy who would take the job that
nobody else wanted, becauseeverybody else had failed at it
(22:06):
or nobody else could figure outhow that would possibly succeed.
I was told more than once thatokay, guy, we're going to give
you this job.
You're going to get to createyour own team, you'll get to
write your own job description,but if you fail, that'll
probably be the end of yourcareer.
Are you sure you want this job?
Once I was successful, then ofcourse, everybody wanted my job.
That started that trend in mywhole career of being the guy
(22:29):
willing to take risks.
I think to some extent therewas a part of me that still felt
out of place, that still feltlike I didn't belong, that still
felt like I had to prove myself.
I didn't have the familyschmooze and the family
connections to just get awaywith the easy path.
I had to take the hard path inorder to stand out from
everybody else.
Daniela SM (22:49):
Well, also back in your mind.
You probably had all thosewords that were said to you when
you were little.
I'm curious about how you gotsome to good grades.
What is it that it made youlike when you're working really
hard, it was easy for you.
What was in school that it madeyou shine that way?
Guy Morris (23:06):
Well, as I said, for the first couple of years I
struggled just to pass.
And then something happened.
It was my reading skills.
Something finally clicked mystudy skills.
I don't really know exactlywhat it was, but I went from
getting Cs and Ds to getting Bsand as to getting.
By the time I was done it wasbasically straight A's.
One was I started findingfields that I could really
(23:27):
identify with and had a knackfor finance, economics, business
administration, computers,electrical engineering.
The level of math that startedjust was way above my level when
I started, Because I had theability to kind of see an
argument that the professor wasmaking and then sit down and say
no, wait a minute, let me askyou a question what about this
(23:49):
and how this works?
Oftentimes, apparently, therewere pretty good questions, but
I'd asked so many.
I actually had one of theprofessors the dean of the
college, who was one of myprofessors a few weeks into the
class my first class with him.
He says I know what type youare.
You're the type that wants tohave so many things going on in
your head.
You just have to ask.
You get three questions perclass.
(24:09):
So if you use up your threequestions, that's it.
You can't ask any morequestions until the next class
where you have to make anappointment with me.
So he would constantly hold meto that.
So I would raise up my hand andhe says sure this is, you've
already got two.
You sure you want to use upyour number three?
You want to wait for me to endthe class first and then ask
your third, or you want tobasically blow it now, and he
(24:31):
would challenge me.
It was that ability to kind oflook at the things and say wait
a minute, this doesn't makesense.
What about this, what aboutthat?
How does this fit?
How does that fit?
And I was constantly workingout.
Well, I know that I didn't doit intentionally.
At that point, though, by thetime I got to my last part of
college, I had gone fromstruggling just to survive to
(24:52):
motivated and excited about theprocess of learning.
To me, I was unlocking thesecrets of the universe.
I was learning how the realworld works, how the world
economy works, how politics work.
I was actually, rather thanbeing one of those dumb guys
that sits in front of theirtelevision and believes whatever
the television host will tellthem, I was becoming the guy
(25:15):
that said oh no, that's a bunchof bologna, that's really false
theory, that's never been proven.
The real truth is this and thatthat was a really fascinating
transition for me.
That was also the time when Istarted learning to love to read
.
I had never read novels beforebecause I was functionally
illiterate, and so I waslearning to read the classics
and that was exciting me to getall of these philosophies and
(25:38):
all of this education and thehistory and the economics and
the current events and thesciences.
I flourished in that and Ibecame inspired by stories of
men of the Renaissance and menof the Renaissance.
What inspired me about them wasthat men of the Renaissance
were expected to be not just anartist but religious, familiar
(25:59):
with religion, familiar withpolitics and trade, business,
familiar with engineering andsciences and architecture, and
so they were expected to be.
If you were men of theRenaissance, you were a man who
could do a good job at lots ofthings, and you might have this
one or two field where you stoodout above the others.
Most of the time, we know themfrom their art.
(26:20):
But there were men of theRenaissance who were incredible
architects, who were incrediblebusinessmen, who were incredible
cartographers, who basicallystarted saying, no, this is what
the world really looks like.
It was such a revolutionaryperiod across a number of fields
.
I found myself attracted tobeing like that, to want it to
be a man of the Renaissance, amodern man of the Renaissance,
(26:41):
where I wanted to study thesciences and some of my friends
were astrophysicists.
On our off times, when Icouldn't study economics anymore
, We'd have coffee and he'd tellme about black holes and any
quantum technologies and all ofthese other things that just
were, honestly, some of it wasover my head, but it was still
fascinating, and so that began awhole lifetime of not wanting
(27:04):
to waste any time beingentertained when I could be
spending that time growing andlearning and expanding myself,
and so it wasn't something thatI wanted to do, it was something
that I changed into being, andI just accepted that part of
that being as something good.
Daniela SM (27:23):
How interesting.
The man of the Renaissance.
Thank you for sharing that.
And, guy, how is it that youbecame a Christian?
Guy Morris (27:29):
When I was at home briefly, from being homeless to
running away again.
I'm not a tall man, I'm afairly short guy, and when I was
young I was skinny as a rail.
So I was a little skinny,toothpick nerd kid that didn't
have any social skills andeverything else, and so I was a
magnet for bullies.
They were like, if I'm going topick on anybody, it's going to
(27:49):
be that little limp over there.
But on the streets I hadlearned to defend myself and so
oftentimes, if somebody were tocome and pick on me, there was
at least two or three times whenI would fight back and do
something like break their noseI would get suspended from
school because I defended myselfin an overly vigorous way.
I had been suspended fromschool, just bought myself a new
(28:13):
shirt and new pair of pants.
Both of them had blood stainsall over them.
I was walking home from school.
What we used to call at thetime, what I used to call Jesus
freak guy basically long hairkind of hippie kind of guy
basically saw me going home toschool from school in the middle
of the day.
He was on the other side of thestreet.
He backed up and came around meand started catching up with me
(28:33):
from behind Now on the street.
That was not something that youfelt comfortable with.
You'd never want somebodybehind you gaining on you in an
intentional way.
I didn't know what he hadplanned.
I didn't know what he wanted.
Even if it was just a talk, Iwasn't in the mood.
He caught up with me and myfirst response was to turn him
around, grab his shirt, pullback my fist and said you better
(28:54):
be important or I'm going topunch you in the face Instead of
arguing with me or fightingback.
He lowered his head and hestarted praying and that just
caught me off guard andsomething happened in me.
I can't explain it.
Everything in my life at thatpoint was going to crap Every
relationship, every familymember, everything I tried.
I just there was a spark in methat said I need it to change
(29:17):
something in my life, and atthat point there was a
willingness to say well, thismight be it.
And I was sitting this I wantsitting on the street gutter.
It's a dirty street gutter inChino, california.
I was ruining my backside of mypants, but that would didn't
matter, because the front'salready ruined blood stains.
Never gone to church, except fora short period of time in New
Jersey when my stepdad, who wasItalian Catholic, forced me to
(29:42):
go to catechism.
He was actually part of themafia, so New Jersey, and so he
was getting pressured by theother mafia that his new wife
with and her bastard childrenbasically her unsaved heathen
children had to go to catechismto become good Catholics.
And good Catholic meant thatyou'd go rob a train during the
day and go to confession Once amonth, and you were okay.
(30:03):
While I was in catechism, oneof these bullies that seemed to
gravitate towards me poured acold drink down my back.
At that point I he'd beentormenting me for months.
I'd had enough.
I picked up my folding chair, Ifolded it and I slapped them
across the face and I got kickedout of catechism.
Other than that, I'd never beento church.
This was a radical decision forme, and again I had a history of
(30:26):
making really risky choices,because I just needed to know
that I needed to move forwardsomehow and I was willing to
take the chance.
He gave me his Bible.
I started reading what I couldread.
I couldn't.
There's a lot I couldn't read.
He told me not to start in thebeginning but to start the
Gospels.
That helped.
A few weeks after that, Ihitchhiked to a church on the
(30:49):
coast called Calvary Chapel atthe time.
And then what?
That was why, when I was 15,when I left home, I hitchhiked
and joined a commune it's aChristian commune Even though I
was only at the commune forabout three months because I had
so many social disorders.
I felt being in a group ofpeople, sleeping with a group of
people.
I couldn't ever feel safearound a group, around others,
(31:09):
and so I was like ants crawlingon my skin.
So after about three months Igot a job and moved out, but I
kept in contact with thosepeople and they became many of
my closest friends.
Daniela SM (31:19):
So you will say that it really really helped you to
have gotten there.
Guy Morris (31:23):
Oh yeah, learning this, spiritual truths that had
been true for 4,000 years.
People say did you grow up inthe church?
I said no, I grew up in bars.
Church was a choice to get outof bars.
I would listen and again likelisten with a very critical ear.
So I would sometimes hearHypocracies, I would sometimes
hear other things, but I wouldhear enough truth and enough
(31:43):
things about myself that said,well, I want to change that part
about myself.
Here's a template on how to dothat, or here's a example of
what I should be.
It helped me get through areasof forgiveness.
It helped me to get pastbitterness.
It helped me to establish somelevel of hope that life can
change, not just because I wasgonna do it, but because if I
(32:04):
could believe that somehow therewas a higher being that cared
for me, that would make adifference.
And when I had the schoolexperience basically this prayer
saying you're gonna go toschool and then getting actually
getting admitted and you haveto know that when I made that
phone call it was a month beforeschool was gonna start that
semester.
So another reason why there wasabsolutely no way they were
gonna let me in and schoolthey'd already gotten their
(32:25):
roster of students for thatsemester, how and why they let
me in, given all the units I wasdeficient and no SAT scores and
nothing else so close to thesemester start.
I still to this day have noidea how that happened, but it
did and that gave a foundationfor me in a lot of ways to my
faith, because it wasn'tsomething wasn't me just getting
up in the middle of the nightto go to work and work hard.
(32:48):
It wasn't just dumb luck, itwas something beyond dumb luck
that got me there.
It fed my faith.
But it was that faith thatreally kind of held me together
at times when I wanted to giveup to say, well, I really I
can't.
Daniela SM (33:02):
For that, among the other reasons, so you were
taking care of your spiritualpower.
Intellectually you were growing.
And then what?
You decided to also growmuscles, and nobody picked on
you anymore.
Guy Morris (33:13):
Yeah, actually, when I was, and when I got out of
school and I got the gym becauseI was really kind of skinny and
muscleless but I was alwayssort of a skinny, scrawny guy.
I'm a little bit pudgy now Iused to say that I'm not strong
and tough.
But if you're gonna botherpunching at me and you know
you're gonna really kind ofthreaten me with violence.
I was just a vicious littlebadger.
(33:36):
Like I said, I wouldn't just,you know, hold up my fist and
say, go ahead and try and punchme.
I would throw dirt in theirface, I'd kick them, I'd put my
belt around their neck, I wouldshove a folded up chair into
their face.
I held one guy over a chainlink fence by by his neck.
There was a one rule that myolder brother taught me.
My older brother was a boxer.
He says you're pretty little,so if you hit once, you're gonna
(33:58):
have to hit really hard, orthey're gonna want to hit back.
So and you have to give them areason not to want to mess with
you anymore.
Until they get that reason,you're just gonna antagonize
them.
I learned that if I was gonnafight back, I had to fight back
with a level of intensity thatthey almost never expected, if I
wanted to keep them fromtormenting me on a daily basis.
(34:20):
To be honest, I hated that partof myself.
I hated that part of my youth.
I'm a really gentle, peacefulguy.
Anybody who knows will knowthat I'm nonviolent.
I will never own a gun becauseof gun violence in my home.
When I was a kid, while I was onthe street, that was one of the
things I had to learn, whichwas, if I was going to survive,
I could not be passive.
(34:41):
I never started a fight.
I never picked on anybody.
I never called names or tauntedanybody.
My mother has the ability, hada sharp tongue so much that she
could make a sailor cry.
I inherited her ability toinsult people in a very rapid
way, and, and so most of thetime, these bullies were
unintellectual enough to knowwhat I just said.
Yeah, it wasn't something I wasproud of, but it was something
(35:05):
I had to learn to do and then,as soon as I could get to a
point in my life when I neverhad to worry about ever raising
my hand to anybody ever again,that was a good day.
I never glorified the abilityto fight.
It was something you had to doto survive, and beyond that
there was no use for it all.
Daniela SM (35:23):
Yeah, survival, that's true.
That's true.
They went through a lot, and sowhat happened after you finish
University?
People noticed you and thenwell.
Guy Morris (35:32):
It started a 36 year career in 4 to 100 companies.
I worked with VPs.
I worked with CXOs.
I worked with leadingtech-deadge technologies.
I introduced computers into theorganization computer modeling,
the internet, artificialintelligence, cloud computing.
I was always working onsomething new and Finding the
way of how to implement it intoan organization that could make
(35:55):
make sense and make money.
I got really good at that.
I became a thought leader.
I was constantly in and VP andCXOs offices.
I rode corporate jets when Itraveled.
They kept me at the best hotelsand best restaurants, and so it
was really good career.
I did some startups, some ofthem successful, others Flaming
failures.
It wasn't until my 50s when Ileft Microsoft and start.
(36:19):
I started a company in my late50s where Probably was.
It was also at the crash of2009 2010.
So it was the wrong time tostart a company.
It failed.
At that point I had beendiagnosed with PTSD, so there
was a part of me that wanted toget out of my high-pressure jobs
which were not helping my PTSD.
(36:40):
I didn't realize that I was,that all that stress was Adding
to the the problems ofaddictions and other things.
When I once I realized and itcame to accept what the PTSD was
.
And then it wasn't something Icould just fix in a few weeks,
that I needed to make somelifestyle changes and that was
started.
That started the path to me andwhere decided to go to early
(37:01):
retirement.
And so, once I had enough moneyto retire and we bought a house
out here in the Puget Sound, Idecided to retire.
But my mind still is very, veryactive.
Becoming an author was a way forme to continue to it was what I
call my third act career andcontinue to be intellectually
stimulated, because all of mybooks require deep research.
(37:23):
I have boxes and stacks ofpaper research so I typically
spend anywhere from two to up toten years in research on a book
.
That intellectual stimulationof learning something new and
connecting the dots and findingthose really unique, rarely
heard of truths that becomereally cool premises for a book
keeps me stimulated.
(37:43):
Learning how to be a greatauthor Now, most of my career
I've been writing, but if youwrote an executive more than a
single page, he wasn't going toread it.
So most of my career was how tocondense down to the shortest
possible bullet points and onepager and if I had to write a
proposal or a policy statement.
If that went over 30 pages itwas too long, and so I learned
(38:05):
to write things very conciselyabout things, but not
necessarily dealing withcharacters and motivations and
emotions and thoughts andstories and lots.
And so learning how totransition into a great novelist
was also again, it was.
It was a great Renaissance manlearning experience for me, and
so I actually hired.
(38:27):
I wrote my first book.
It took me 10 years to finishthe research, never four or five
years to write the book, inpart because I had been working
all those years.
But when I finished it I hireda top-notch professional
developmental editor.
They used to work for SimonSchuster, now she works for
Amazon and I said okay, I wantyou to hire you to go through
this.
Consider this book mymasterclass.
(38:48):
I think there's a great storyhere, but I'm not sure that I'm
a great author.
So I need you to rip it up,tear it apart and then give me a
plan of how to stitch myselfback together in a Frankenstein
kind of way.
God bless her.
She did exactly what I asked for.
She gave me 44 pages of notes,hand type written notes of
(39:09):
things I needed to either learnor change or do differently and
classes I need to take and booksI needed to read and problems I
was doing consistently and mymajor weaknesses.
And then marked up just aboutevery page of the manuscript
with examples and then how touse and what to change.
And after reading that my firstthought was, oh Lord, I suck.
But it took me about a week toget over the I suck.
(39:33):
You know, kind of feeling sorryfor myself, thinking well,
maybe this isn't something Ishould be doing.
I thought, well, you know, I'vesucked before at things and I
only got better by workingharder at it.
So let's, let's just take itone page at a time.
Start with page one, let'sstart with whatever I'm supposed
to do.
And I spent a year goingthrough everything she asked for
me to do, rewriting it aboutanother year after that to
(39:56):
actually have a finished product.
That book, which is called theCurse of Cortez, was listed
booktrip, which is BarnesNoble's consumer reader
community, was listed booktrip'sfavorite 25 books of 2021.
They called it Indiana Jonesmeets DaVinci Code.
Another reviewer said this bookis perfection.
It was compared to Dan Brown,iris Johansson.
(40:17):
One book reviewer said this isIndiana Jones.
I think Indiana Jones meetsDaVinci Code.
Amazing reviews.
All because I was willing againto basically take the risk of
writing and then take the riskof having somebody rip me up and
tear me apart, so I couldfigure out how to do it better.
Daniela SM (40:33):
And work hard.
I work hard yeah, theinteresting part is that, yes,
you, you came from doingsomething completely different.
You're managing people, solvingproblems, writing in short,
concise ways, and now you decideI'm gonna write a book in heavy
research.
You said 10 years, 10 years.
How do you think that you weregonna be a writer?
What came to mind that you said, oh, I'm gonna be a writer.
Guy Morris (40:56):
Well, I wasn't sure I was going to be at first.
I was a songwriter for manyyears.
Daniela SM (41:00):
Oh, I swear.
Guy Morris (41:02):
I wrote songs through Disney.
I recorded my own albums.
I wrote worship songs.
I was a worship theater.
But when my son was like 11,maybe 12 years old, I was a
single parent, didn't have a lotof money to basically go out
and have a social life I would,so I'd be at home a lot at night
and I'm not much of a TVwatcher.
But I did have computers and Idid have tools.
And so I wrote my son.
(41:23):
I used to take him to thelibrary every single week.
He'd get two free books andthen by Wednesday he'd be done
with them and want more, want togo back again.
Well, I couldn't take him backfor a couple days.
So I got this idea that well,I'll write my son a book.
Isn't that a cool thing.
I'll write my.
He likes typical 12 year oldboy.
He liked pirates and treasureand lost civilizations and
anything with ghosts, you know.
(41:43):
So I thought, well, I'll writehim a short story.
It'll be something thathopefully brings us closer
together.
And so, as I was writing thebook I would read, I kind of
waited until I was done, butthen I kind of read him a little
bit every night.
He loved the story.
He gave it to his cousins.
They all loved it and so Istarted to write a sequel to
that story.
But the research on that sequelI wanted it based on something
(42:04):
true in history.
The research into what was truein history got me researching
to understand that, themysteries behind that, so much
that it took me, by the time Iwas done researching, he was
grown and had a career.
He didn't need a kid's novelanymore so I started evolving it
more into an adult novel.
You know it took me on and off,you know, to kind of get it
started and finished.
(42:25):
But it was amazing story.
The historical premise was thatin 1672 the real Henry Morgan
took 36 ships, 2,000 men, toraid the city of Panama.
A long story short.
It was the richest city in thenew world.
I'll go into the details.
He ultimately lost the half ofhis men in the raid, brought
back 30 tons of plunder worth abillion billion and a half
dollars and 600 slaves.
(42:46):
But when he reached his fleethe cheated all of his men and
disappeared with everything onthree ships that were never seen
again.
But Morgan survived andultimately was made lieutenant
governor of Jamaica with thegarrison soldiers.
But when he had the power andthe money and the people to go
back for his billion dollarplunder.
Instead he went into thishaunted drunken debauchery and
burnt his logbooks, so the worldwould never know why he was
(43:08):
abandoning a billion dollarplunder.
Three years after he died, thewhole city of Port Real,
including his grave, sinks intothe ocean.
The locals said they had beencursed by Morgan.
I was fascinated with that storyand I wanted to solve two
problems.
One was maybe I would neversolve it exactly, but I wanted
to have a plausible scenario ofwhat happened to 30 tons of
(43:29):
stuff, three ships and 500 souls.
Somebody had had to have foundsomething by now was my theory,
and in fact I discovered.
In my research.
I discovered a guy who did.
A guy named FA Mitchell Hedges,who in 1911 was digging on this
one island for several years,claimed at first he had found
Atlantis, which was another clueas to how to keep digging,
before he disappeared withroughly 250 million dollars into
(43:51):
today's dollars of gold.
But when he asked about how hefound the gold he, like Morgan,
refused to talk about it and wastraumatized by it, could never
talk about it again.
So the second question becamemore profound what was it about?
Where this gold was hidden,where all this treasure was
hidden.
There was silver, there wasinks, there was silks, there was
tusks, there was Chinese bronzestatues and Ming dynasty vases,
(44:14):
there was jewelry, there wasgems, there was all kinds of
things that were in the treasure.
What would cause both of thesemen to be traumatized so much
that they would never go back tothe rest of it, never talking
about it.
That took me into the historyof the island, where I believed
that this took place.
That connected me to aninquisition massacre.
That massacre ended a 2000 yearpilgrimage before anybody asked
(44:35):
what the pilgrimage was for,that pilgrimage tied to the 5000
year Mayan calendar and theMayan creation myth.
It was an amazing journey thatI took of connecting the dots of
what would go on, and one ofthe things that was a clue was
that Morgan was hypersuperstitious so, which led to
all of these other Mayanprophecies and inquisition
massacres and all these otherthings.
(44:56):
So it was a really interestingjourney and it was such an
incredible story that spannedover thousands of years that I
had to write this kind of DanBrown style novel where the
characters who basically goingthrough their own ordeal, would
discover the elements of thestory and start putting the
pieces together, and so it wasreally a great experience for me
(45:17):
.
I remember working on researchto like middle of the night, two
or three o'clock in the morning, discovering things and waking
my wife up saying, oh wow, youwon't believe what I just
discovered.
And her response is uh-huh,uh-huh, tell me tomorrow, don't
wake me up.
You know, but it was years ofme just going through trying to
figure out all of the, how allthese pieces fit together.
That was the first book.
(45:38):
The second book, the second twobooks were based on artificial
intelligence and cyber espionage, and I mentioned earlier that I
had worked on early stages ofartificial intelligence, before
it was even called artificialintelligence, and so I was
constantly researching the theindustry, and I stumbled across
an Associated Press article thatsaid all it said was a really
(45:59):
short little two paragraph thingthat said that a program had
escaped Lawrence Livermore labsat Sandia and if I knew
something to contact thisprofessor or that FBI agent.
Well, that lab is an NSA spylab.
So in my mind I'm thinking aspy program has escaped the NSA
and I don't know how to find it.
I thought that's a cool story,I said my first thought was it's
(46:22):
got to be a typo, maybeAssociated Press goofed up.
They were supposed to say itwas stolen or got lost or didn't
work, but they said it was.
They had escaped, which impliedan intent and implied some
intelligence applied, theability to move itself and the
ability to race its trails.
So people couldn't figure outwhere to go on, and so I
actually spent a year workingout how does a spy program
(46:45):
escape the NSA?
What did they design it toreally do that?
It needed that really niftystealth capability.
They sent two FBI agents to mydoor.
Apparently I had nailed it downto the functionality.
They were not happy at all thatI had figured out something
that they thought was top secret.
But I was like, yes, I did it.
Yeah, yeah, I did it.
Now just just say it, guys, Idid it, I nailed this, and they
(47:07):
wouldn't say this is not funny.
Mr Morris said oh no, you guysare wrong.
This is hilarious.
My wife came home during themiddle of the interview.
She pulls me aside.
She says there's two FBI agentsin my dining room and I know
it's not a social call.
What did you do that experienceof realizing what the
government was doing with theseadvanced technologies and got me
(47:29):
really researching how AI wasapplied to all of these other
areas of national security,national defense, weapons
development, cybersecurity andhackers what China was doing in
Russia.
It started me researching thewhole field in a deep enough way
, not just how the AI was goingto apply to my certain business
(47:52):
problem, but it started meresearching the field on a
broader basis and that becamethe foundation for my book swarm
and the last dark that soundsdefinitely so interesting.
Daniela SM (48:03):
Thank you for sharing.
So you research a lot, but thenof course you put what
percentage of fiction?
Guy Morris (48:09):
Well, it's a mix.
So oftentimes so, for example,in the espionage books, if I
mentioned an espionageorganization or technology or
something that you could do orsomething that they might have
already done, all of the,there's a level of fact.
But then I layer on top of thatcharacters and plots.
(48:30):
So I try to make up.
So I'm not calling out at reallife person.
I'll make up a character, eventhough it might be Loosely based
on a real life person.
That's where I basically bringit into fiction.
What I like to say is all thefoundations of the story in
terms of the back story, theworld, everything else is
largely I'll say 90% factual.
(48:51):
So, in curse of Cortez, all ofthe back history, all of the
back archeology, the mythology,all of the sciences and geology
that went into that book Allfactual.
The only thing that's fictionalare most, most of the
characters and plots.
And even then some of thecharacters were based on people
I knew or had discovered in myresearch in the region to
(49:13):
discover what went on.
One of them was a cartel thugwho had threatened to kill me,
so I put him in the story as oneof the bad guys While I was
away in a dive trip.
Use.
It is really fugitive.
He was wanted by Interpol,wanted by the FBI.
He was doing dirty work for thestate of car telling cancun.
He broke into my condo when Iwas gone and when I confronted
(49:33):
him he threatened to kill me bymaster.
Well, street kid guy.
At that point I was a Microsoftexecutive.
So he saw this little wimpy,you know kind of white guy that
would probably go through thenormal legal routes and spend
three years and fifty, sixtythousand dollars trying to get
him out of my condo.
In the meantime he'd have afree place to stay.
(49:54):
My street guy came up and I amit was all know you don't, and
so I told him he didn't have thehones to mess with me.
I was the meanest little gringohe's ever gonna meet.
He had two days to get my condoor all help with the price and
he would regret ever knowing.
So after I messed with him incancun, cost everything I had, I
put him in the book so I couldmess with him again.
(50:14):
I got my two for.
Another character was a seaplane pilot named Chico.
In my book is a hilariouscharacter.
He's based on a real guy.
Everybody loves the characterChico.
When I first met Chico.
It was on a sea plane dive to aremote location to go diving.
And when I walked out of theterminal and I saw his him
(50:36):
standing next to the dock, nextto this plane, my first thought
was oh god, this is how I diefrom.
I won't tell anybody anythingmore about Chico, cuz I want
people read the books anddiscover for themselves why I
thought that.
But um, it was, but yeah.
So the characters in the plotsare largely fictional.
Most of the factual foundationsthe history, archeology, events
(50:58):
, technology, the science, thereligion, politics are all
Wonderful.
Daniela SM (51:02):
Yes, until you are definitely a problem solver kind
of guy.
Yeah, I am grateful that youshow your story.
I definitely will read all yourbooks.
They sound fast.
Tell me in a short way what isnext for you.
So you're right, you say you'reon another book working on a
book.
Guy Morris (51:19):
I hope to keep writing until I can.
I can't anymore Because if Idon't, my wife thinks that I
should be spending my time doinghousework and yard work.
So yes, I'm gonna keep writing.
Sorry, honey, I'm busy.
I gotta work on the next book.
But I've also formed a offergroup.
(51:40):
All we do all summer, long frombeginning of May to the early
in October, is will go to Events, festivals, fairs all around
the Seattle area, and we're busyevery single weekend basically
selling and signing books.
That keeps me pretty busy inthe summer to organize the team
and organize the events and toget us all out there.
(52:00):
But that's a really been agreat channel for me.
I sell more books in thatchannel than any others and I
get the highest profit.
It won't make me a new yorktimes bestseller but it pays for
the next book I'm working onwith PR consultant.
Because of my expertise inartificial intelligence, pr
consultant believes that I couldbe a good television expert
(52:20):
guest so I'm working with her tobasically get that set up.
So I'm hoping my 2024 I'll geton a few television spots as
well, mainly just to talk aboutwhere is going with.
Some of the real dangers are.
Why are you?
Why do guys like Elon Musk,stephen Hawking, bill Gates talk
about the dangers of AI Morethan they talk about the
(52:40):
potential?
And I have the answer.
So it's a great way to continueto expand my own expertise.
And then also that expertisegets filtered into the books,
but also can get filtered intopodcasts once in a while, as
well as television spots yes,excellent, and now you believe
that you're a smart person.
(53:01):
Now I've accepted the fact thatI'm smarter than average, and
that was only after taking IQ Qtests four times to double check
the results.
I've been called brilliant andgenius many times in my life.
I am in the one top one percentagain.
I tell people that that's.
If you're asking aboutrelationships.
(53:21):
Don't come to me for advice.
I'm asking about a topic, andit happens to be one that I'm
from deeply familiar with.
I can have a Intelligent,meaningful, rational
conversation with even the bestexperts in the field.
I'm hyper aware of the factthat IQ intelligence and
(53:44):
emotional intelligence arecompletely different things, and
being intelligent is not theend of the world.
Being a good person, being,being a healthy person, being a
kind person, being a lovingperson those are the things that
really matter, and I'm stillworking on many of those.
Daniela SM (54:02):
Wonderful.
Thank you so much, guy.
I really enjoy.
Your story was fascinating.
I don't think it was enoughtime.
Guy Morris (54:10):
I have a lot of little side trail through my
stories.
I could use up a few hours, butagain, I didn't never really
thought about my story muchuntil Just the last year when I
started doing more podcasts andpeople want to know more about
my background and up until thatpoint was what was only
important is what I knew, what Iknew how to do and what my
(54:32):
track record is getting it done,and beyond that people didn't
really care.
What is what I could do andthat's what I focus on here.
Daniela SM (54:40):
I always think that behind everything there is
always something way moreinteresting, and there you
proven so, thank you.
Guy Morris (54:47):
Danielle, thank you so much, it's been a pleasure.
Daniela SM (54:49):
I hope you enjoyed it.
Today's episode I am Danielaand you were listening to,
because everyone has a story.
Please take five seconds rightnow and think of somebody in
your life, to me and you, whatyou just heard, someone that has
a story to share and preserve.
When you think of that person,shoot them a text with the link
of this podcast.
(55:09):
This would allow the ordinarymagic to go further.
Join me next time for anotherstory conversation.
Thank you for listening.
Thank you so much for watchingand see you soon.
Hi, I'm Daniela.
Welcome to my podcast, becauseeveryone has a story, the place
to give ordinary people, stories, the chance to be shared and
preserved.
Our stories become the languageof connections.
Let's enjoy it, connect andrelate because everyone has a
story.
Welcome my guest, guy Morris, aRenaissance man, former Fortune
(00:37):
100 business leader and anauthor with many other talents.
He shares his story of runningaway from home at the age of 13
and becoming homeless.
He struggles with mental healthissues, addictions and living
on the streets, but his journeydidn't end there.
In fact, it is just thebeginning of a fascinating tale
(01:01):
of perseverance andself-discovery.
Eventually, he found his fate,became a father and transitioned
from a struggling student to anoutstanding scholar and then a
leader.
He discovered his passion forscience and the philosophy of
the Renaissance and hepersevered through difficult
(01:21):
times to find his purpose inlife.
Guy's story is a testament tothe power of resilience,
emphasizing the importance ofnever giving up and taking care
of your mental health Veryimportant.
Let's enjoy Guy's story.
Welcome, guy, to the show.
Friendship, matthew, a beer.
(01:42):
And so, guy, you said when wemet that you usually don't share
much about yourself.
You just talk about specifictopics, and you are a writer of
many books now and have been inmany podcasts.
I appreciate that you decidedto share your story here.
Why is it wrong?
Guy Morris (01:58):
It's not an easy decision for me.
I do some learning to somewhatget out of my way, as I
explained to you at one pointthat I've been in business
Fortune 100 business leadershippositions for close to 40 years
before I retired, and in thosekind of positions the last thing
you do as a leader is talkabout yourself.
(02:19):
You talk about the company.
You talk about the team, thegreat team you have.
You talk about the greatproducts you have.
You talk about your greatcustomers.
You talk about things that youcan get other people to identify
with, to help them feelenthusiastic and motivate it to
basically be working up scenehours that nobody would ever
work unless they're feeling thatit's really worthwhile.
(02:40):
And there's also an element asa leader that you don't want to
show weakness.
If you knew that the leader ofyour company had dealt with
mental illness, if he had dealtwith depression, if he had dealt
addictions, if he had dealtwith any sort of those kind of
traumas in your life, you startto question their ability to
make rational judgments.
(03:00):
You start to infer that thosethings are affecting their
ability to do their job whetherit is or not, and I was a highly
functional, dysfunctionalperson.
I could be brilliant in theoffice and I could be a complete
wreck at home, but you don'twant to let that out, and so
I've spent 40 years keeping mostof my internal struggles as
(03:21):
internal, as a secret insidemyself and maybe with my
counselor or one or two friends,and that was the absolute limit
I could go.
So learning to share my storywith others.
I'm new at it and I'm stilluncomfortable with it, but I'm
learning to try and get out ofmy own way, because I've heard
that other people find value inthat story.
Daniela SM (03:43):
That's interesting what you're saying.
I mean, maybe in your timespeople were more into don't be
yourself.
Pretend that everything is okaywhen it's not, but don't you
think that now things havechanged, that morbid ability
actually makes you more likablewithin limits, right In the
context of a Fortune 100position.
Guy Morris (04:05):
I still think it's extremely dangerous to be that
transparent about yourweaknesses and struggles.
I think to be likable in thatscenario and I was like.
I had lunch a few weeks agowith somebody I hired into
Microsoft probably close to 20years ago and she actually
lasted longer at Microsoft thanI did.
(04:27):
But she often mentions to otherpeople that I was one of her
favorite bosses and I ran thebest team she ever worked on.
And it's because people willlike you if you're honest.
They'll like you if you haveshow integrity.
They'll like you if you're kind.
They'll like you if you treatthem with respect and listen to
hear them out, where problemsaren't something that you yell
(04:50):
at them about, but problems arethings that you join with them
to solve, because all businesseshave problems, all jobs have
problems.
If you start beating people overthe head because something went
wrong, you're never going toget anywhere because they're
going to second guess themselvesthe last time.
But if they know that you'regoing to have their back, if, as
a team, you know that ifsomething goes wrong, that
(05:11):
you're going to take the bulletsfor the team, those are the
things that you do to get wellliked and well respected.
Telling everyone that got totake time off to go to rehab
isn't one of the things thatwill make you like, as I said,
in that kind of environment,which is a real hyper
competitive environment, I can'ttell you how many times that I
took a job because nobody elsethought that they could be
(05:33):
successful at that job, and whenI made it to success, I
couldn't tell you how many timeseverybody wanted to have my job
.
In those situations I think eventoday that corporate mentality
still holds.
I think in other fields of youknow, obviously, like in the
entertainment field, peoplealmost expect entertainers to be
(05:55):
dysfunctional.
So it's not that big a dealthere for them to be that even a
little bit transparent.
And even there you'll see thata lot of celebrities will deal
with these things in silenceuntil it comes out and then
where they have to deal with it,I think, while there are some a
general level of increase insensitivity to the issues that
(06:17):
are affecting many people in thenation, such as addictions,
mental illness, childhood trauma, ptsd which is when I grew up,
nobody ever talked PTSD Even so,I still think that for those
who have a professional career,that's a very sensitive and
dangerous topic to broachoutside of the corporate context
(06:37):
.
Daniela SM (06:38):
Interesting.
Thank you for sharing that, Guy.
When does your story start?
Guy Morris (06:42):
Well for me?
I like to.
I think I, at least in my ownmind.
I tell people that my own storystarted as a 13 year old
homeless runaway and I was.
I worked alongside migrantworkers to eat, I slept under
bridges and behind back seats ofcars and open doorways or
hallways for apartments, anyplace I could find that was dry
and warm, until I wouldtypically be kicked out.
(07:04):
And I did that for severalmonths until I had an
opportunity to go home, brieflyenough, where it was safe enough
for me to get a GED at 15.
And then I basically at 15, Ipacked a little tiny duffel bag
which is all I really of,everything I really own that was
worth anything, and I had aguitar that was in a cardboard
box and I had it taped up with ahandle and I hitchhiked to
(07:27):
Tucson, arizona, where I'mtrying to come, and that was the
beginning of what I call myjourney.
Daniela SM (07:32):
You have siblings.
Do you left your siblings inyour mom and your dad?
Guy Morris (07:35):
My oldest brother had already moved out several
years before that.
He moved out at 16 and a coupleyears later joined the Navy.
He was gone already and also heleft because of a lot of the
same abuse and going on myyounger brother.
I did feel for a very long time.
I felt a lot of guilt that Ileft my younger brother in that
environment.
It didn't turn out too bad forhim because a year later I spent
(07:58):
most of my life wanting to golive with my dad instead of my
mom and was always told no.
But I think after I left Isuspected that my mom just got
tired of trying and shebasically sent my younger
brother to live with my dad,even though my dad had his own
issues.
It wasn't the same as the homethat we were in.
So, yeah, there was some guiltinvolved initially in doing that
(08:21):
, but for me it was a survival.
You know on the airplanes wherethey say, put oxygen on
yourself first before you takecare of somebody else, I
couldn't help him anymore untilI got to a better place.
Daniela SM (08:31):
So you were 15 and you left.
Guy Morris (08:33):
I was 15 when I finally left.
I turned 16, living on my own,worked any job I could get
parking cars, digging ditches, Iworked at a steel manufacturing
company, I worked for an Amishcontractor and I did all the
dirty work.
I drove trucks and deliveredproduce in the middle of the
night to hotels and restaurants.
(08:53):
I pretty much did anything Ihad to do and most of them were
fairly low paying, you knowdead-end jobs, until I got a
chance to go to college.
Daniela SM (09:01):
And at the meantime that you were working these jobs
, you were sleeping on thestreet.
Guy Morris (09:05):
No, after I left at 15 with a GED, I was in a
commune for about three or fourmonths and then I got a job
outside the commune and got aroommate.
I basically rented a room in atrailer from another guy who I
was working with parking cars.
At that point I was off thestreet, I was making enough
(09:25):
money that I could, you know,rent a room and then, until I
could basically rent my ownplace they weren't glamorous,
they were pretty seedy places insome pretty bad parts of town,
but they were mine and I didn'thave any furniture.
But I had, I had, I was.
I wasn't in an environmentwhere I could be beaten or
(09:47):
humiliated or threatened, and sothat was was a transition.
You know, from then on, I wasbasically I paid for myself.
I had my own places, my owncars.
I never took money from anybody, except on one occasion, which
was to go to school.
You know, and to a great extentI've been on my own since I was
13.
Because even when I was home fora year to get my GED, I worked.
(10:10):
We were poor.
If I wanted to buy clothes, Ihad to work.
If I wanted to buy schoollunches, I had to work.
If I wanted to go someplacewith friends, I had to.
I had to pay for it myself.
Even for that short period oftime when I was home, I was
still very much independent andself-sufficient.
And I learned that on thestreet that even though I was
young and I couldn't go rent anyplace, there was no way I could
(10:32):
rent something and no one wasgoing to rent a 13, to a
13-year-old kid because thatwould bring legal consequences
for them.
So I slept wherever I had tosleep and then I worked in order
to eat.
Migrant worker jobs are verytypical.
You know, you get up at fouro'clock in the morning, you can
stand by a particular streetcorner by five o'clock and
(10:52):
they'll typically send someflatbed trucks to pick up as
many workers as you can get onthe truck soon.
So you had to jump on the truckfast to get your spot.
They take you remotelysomeplace out in the middle of
the Southern California ranchland.
You'd be dropped off at a ranchand they wouldn't come pick you
up, basically until you weredone, which was oftentimes 11
(11:13):
o'clock midnight.
So we would work from earlymorning to late at night and
then we'd go home and basicallycatch a couple hours of sleep
and have to do it again.
Obviously very, very difficultwork from a physical perspective
and an emotional perspective,but at the same time it taught
me a level of self-reliance andperseverance and the willingness
to basically engage in hardwork and not be afraid.
(11:35):
So for that I'm grateful, forthat.
Daniela SM (11:38):
Were any moments that you could have gone the
wrong way drugs, alcohol,delinquency Well, I definitely
had drug problems for a longtime and alcohol problems.
Guy Morris (11:48):
I was drinking it by age 11 because of my home
environment.
It was clean for a few yearsafter I became a Christian at
one point.
I didn't know I had PTSD for mychildhood but I had what's
called complex PTSD and I wouldstruggle with the symptoms of it
for decades until it wasfinally diagnosed to my fifth.
You know it's like when adoctor is trying to solve, cure
(12:08):
something, but they're notreally sure what's wrong.
It's a lot of hit and miss,it's a lot of guesswork and that
was kind of.
I went to 12 step programs.
I had counselors who arelargely worthless in terms of
solving the real issues.
There was a couple of years, afew years, where I read nothing
but self-help books to try andunderstand what was going on.
When I reached my late 20s,early 30s, I knew that my
(12:29):
alcoholism and my drug addictionand my other addictions were
undermining my success, mysuccesses in other realms, and
so I had to again.
I could never go to my boss andsay, hey, I've got to take some
time off to deal with thisperson on the show.
That would have been the end ofmy career.
I had to deal with it on my own.
When I went from homeless togoing to college.
I saw it as my chance to changemy stars.
(12:52):
I saw it as my one and onlyopportunity to not let my past
define my future and to that ifI could learn new skills and
that was not just job skills butinterpersonal skills and
relationship skills and all thethings that normal kids learn in
a healthy environment If Icould learn some of those things
, I could change the trajectoryof my life with a fear that I
(13:16):
was going to end up like mymother.
Those were all definite issues.
I definitely had to strugglewith every single one of them
Multiple times.
I would be successful, then Iwould fail, then I'd have to get
up and start again.
I had the restart, reboot kindof problem that a lot of people
have, where it's easier just togive up at times than to keep
(13:36):
struggling with those internalissues that are painful and
difficult and crippling at times.
But it was the giving up thatone person told me says failure
is not when you fail.
Failure is only when you giveup.
I somehow found the courage toget up and keep trying, even
when I failed on multipleoccasions.
(13:57):
It was always a bit of abilityto say, okay, well, tomorrow's a
new day, we'll start again.
Daniela SM (14:02):
Wow, wonderful that you have the persistence and
that strength, mindset strength.
Guy Morris (14:07):
I don't normally know that I can take credit for
it.
I know that I had no otheroptions and I had been.
It wasn't like I had to say,well, I can failure, maybe I'll
end up as a homeless person.
It's like, well, I'd alreadybeen homeless and I knew that it
didn't matter what it took.
I couldn't go back to where Iwas.
(14:27):
I only had the option to goforward or to basically stall
and rot where I was.
I never felt courageous formost of my life.
I felt desperate.
I felt determined.
I felt that I had no otherviable choices other than to
forge on.
Daniela SM (14:44):
But you did as you said.
You either move forward or youstay there, and you actually
chose the moving forward.
Yeah, Maybe you didn't know.
You were courageous, you weresurviving, but you chose
something to get out of whereyou were.
Guy Morris (14:57):
I knew I could give up, but if I gave up, I would
become.
There's no time where youbasically stay static.
If you give up in that kind ofsituation, you fall backwards,
and falling backwards was thepain that I had already
experienced, pain that I didn'twant to experience anymore, and
so, for me, I felt like I had tomove forward.
Daniela SM (15:17):
And I had a son.
Guy Morris (15:18):
He was getting to the age where he was starting to
notice that dad had issues, andso I felt like it was the only
thing.
The best thing I could do forhim was not to tell him do as I
say, not as I do, but to changewhat I do and to change my style
, to basically show him thateven a man with problems can you
(15:40):
can't change who you are untilyou face who you are, and I had
to do that, even if not even formyself.
I also had him to think about.
Daniela SM (15:48):
So, going back, you decided to go to college.
What is it that you studied?
Guy Morris (15:52):
At first I didn't know.
I was told to go to collegeactually in prayer one day, and
that was a really radical, weirdday.
I was working a really long 12,14 hour day, six days a week,
was exhausted all the time.
It was a very physical job.
We were going to prayer becauseat the time a good quote,
unquote good Christian husbanddidn't make his wife work.
So I wanted to send her to workjust long enough so I could
(16:16):
quit my job, long enough toactually go interview for
another job, because I couldn'tgo interview when I would you
know, I'd get off work at eightor nine o'clock at night and so
I couldn't even interview foranother job until I quit my job.
But I couldn't afford to justquit.
So we were praying and I feltprobably one of the only two,
maybe three times my entire life.
I really felt that I was beingspoken to outside of any context
(16:38):
of anything I can imagine.
I felt that I was supposed togo to school.
I even got told I was supposedto get up right that minute,
call the university, ask for anapplication.
I was going to go to school.
Now this was incredible.
My first thought was what?
I'm functionally illiterate?
I didn't finish high school, Ididn't take SAT scores.
School is for rich kids whowork hard and got good grades.
(17:00):
I said there's no way I'm goingto get accepted.
And so when I had to declare mymajor in my application, I did
a point and I looked down and Isaid what does an electrical
engineer do?
I actually picked electricalengineering, even though I was
28 units short of the minimumrequirements to get in the
program.
They let me in.
Daniela SM (17:20):
Wow.
Guy Morris (17:22):
Now, when they let me in, my first thought was holy
cow, they'll let anybody in.
I thought school was for smartpeople.
I said I'm as dumb as they come.
I said it just shows, the goesto show they'll let anybody in.
But I think it was some kind ofmiracle.
The very next day and I actually, when I got my acceptance
letter through the trash becausethey still didn't have any
money, I still had to go to workI still didn't have to solve
the basic problem.
Until the very next day, I gota letter from my father-in-law,
(17:44):
who was very concerned that Icouldn't provide for his
daughter the way that shedeserved and that he wanted to
encourage me to improve myself.
If I were willing to work tosupport our needs, he would be
willing to pay for my tuitionand books.
I hadn't told anybody that Ihad put in the application to
the university because I thoughtit would just be an
embarrassment when they told meno or when they said yes and I
(18:07):
said well, gee, they said yes,but I clearly can't go anyway.
So I never told anybody Okay,let's do this not even my
dearest friend.
And so this was a real bigshock to me and it was a sign to
me that that was what I wassupposed to do.
While I struggled for the firstfew years trying to figure out
what I was supposed to study andactually passing classes, I was
(18:28):
probably sleeping, maybe anaverage of four hours a night.
I'd work in the evenings.
I'd go to school during the day.
I'd come home, fix dinner, do acouple hours of study before
I'd go to work.
It was a cycle six, seven daysa week and I was constantly
exhausted.
Daniela SM (18:44):
You were married and have kids.
Guy Morris (18:45):
By that point I had gotten married, I was 19, and my
wife got pregnant right away,neither of which were really
necessarily planned, and so Iwas a little bit overwhelmed at
the time.
And she was not only that, itwas, she was anorexic.
So she was, she was really ill.
We had to put her in thehospital twice during all this
(19:05):
time because she had gotten downto like 78 pounds or something.
That was really scary, and so,yeah, there was a lot of
stresses, but ultimately Igraduated with multiple degrees.
I was at the top of the Dean'sList, I got a full scholarship
to go to grad school in Arizonaand then I separately I got
accepted into the Harvard MBAprogram.
(19:26):
Harvard was too expensive forme.
I couldn't figure out how I'dborrow or get that much money.
Just being accepted was a greathonor.
I had multiple degrees.
One of them was economics, andI had to build a macroeconomic
model to graduate.
My model was innovative in thatbecause I based it on a theory
that I had developed that wasunproven.
(19:48):
That model outperformed theFederal Reserve, outperformed
all the major banks in thenation, outperformed every other
university in the nation.
Basically, I blew everybodyaway by a wide margin.
I was one tenth of one percentoff the the actual numbers.
That caught the attention ofeverybody and so that got me
into grad school.
And grad school got me my firstjob at IBM and from there I had
(20:10):
amazing jobs, amazing career,because I had listened to a
prompting in prayer that made nosense at all Guy, you're gonna
go to school.
It's like right.
I was so affected by my youththat that the local church, my
nickname, was punk because of myscraggly clothes and my, my
sarcastic anti-establishmentattitude, my long hair and just
(20:34):
the underlying aftermath ofgrowing up on the streets.
To say that punk had to go tocollege was like no, no,
something's wrong with this.
But it turned out that, eventhough I had been told my entire
life that I was unbelievablydumb, that I was unbelievably
stupid, that I was worthless,that I was all of these things
which I heard every single daygrowing up, I had a certain type
(20:58):
of it was almost autistic.
If you put me in a room full ofpeople, I'm socially autistic.
I can't.
I don't know.
I'm a quiet, I isolate.
I've gotten better over theyears with training and
experience, but certainly atthat time I couldn't barely
function in a social environment.
But if you gave me a complexmodel or complex problem to
(21:23):
solve, I somehow figured out away to solve it.
So that skill led me through acareer of constantly being the
leading edge guy, innovating newtechnologies in the business,
and because I had come from ascenario where I had to risk
everything in order to moveforward.
Unlike most of the people thatI worked with, who came from
(21:43):
very well-established families,they were good middle class,
upper middle class families.
They didn't want to take risks,they just wanted that slow,
steady career and they had thecharisma.
They were on the football team,they were the football captain,
so it was always about theschmooze for them.
I had a reputation for being theguy who would take the job that
nobody else wanted, becauseeverybody else had failed at it
(22:06):
or nobody else could figure outhow that would possibly succeed.
I was told more than once thatokay, guy, we're going to give
you this job.
You're going to get to createyour own team, you'll get to
write your own job description,but if you fail, that'll
probably be the end of yourcareer.
Are you sure you want this job?
Once I was successful, then ofcourse, everybody wanted my job.
That started that trend in mywhole career of being the guy
(22:29):
willing to take risks.
I think to some extent therewas a part of me that still felt
out of place, that still feltlike I didn't belong, that still
felt like I had to prove myself.
I didn't have the familyschmooze and the family
connections to just get awaywith the easy path.
I had to take the hard path inorder to stand out from
everybody else.
Daniela SM (22:49):
Well, also back in your mind.
You probably had all thosewords that were said to you when
you were little.
I'm curious about how you gotsome to good grades.
What is it that it made youlike when you're working really
hard, it was easy for you.
What was in school that it madeyou shine that way?
Guy Morris (23:06):
Well, as I said, for the first couple of years I
struggled just to pass.
And then something happened.
It was my reading skills.
Something finally clicked mystudy skills.
I don't really know exactlywhat it was, but I went from
getting Cs and Ds to getting Bsand as to getting.
By the time I was done it wasbasically straight A's.
One was I started findingfields that I could really
(23:27):
identify with and had a knackfor finance, economics, business
administration, computers,electrical engineering.
The level of math that startedjust was way above my level when
I started, Because I had theability to kind of see an
argument that the professor wasmaking and then sit down and say
no, wait a minute, let me askyou a question what about this
(23:49):
and how this works?
Oftentimes, apparently, therewere pretty good questions, but
I'd asked so many.
I actually had one of theprofessors the dean of the
college, who was one of myprofessors a few weeks into the
class my first class with him.
He says I know what type youare.
You're the type that wants tohave so many things going on in
your head.
You just have to ask.
You get three questions perclass.
(24:09):
So if you use up your threequestions, that's it.
You can't ask any morequestions until the next class
where you have to make anappointment with me.
So he would constantly hold meto that.
So I would raise up my hand andhe says sure this is, you've
already got two.
You sure you want to use upyour number three?
You want to wait for me to endthe class first and then ask
your third, or you want tobasically blow it now, and he
(24:31):
would challenge me.
It was that ability to kind oflook at the things and say wait
a minute, this doesn't makesense.
What about this, what aboutthat?
How does this fit?
How does that fit?
And I was constantly workingout.
Well, I know that I didn't doit intentionally.
At that point, though, by thetime I got to my last part of
college, I had gone fromstruggling just to survive to
(24:52):
motivated and excited about theprocess of learning.
To me, I was unlocking thesecrets of the universe.
I was learning how the realworld works, how the world
economy works, how politics work.
I was actually, rather thanbeing one of those dumb guys
that sits in front of theirtelevision and believes whatever
the television host will tellthem, I was becoming the guy
(25:15):
that said oh no, that's a bunchof bologna, that's really false
theory, that's never been proven.
The real truth is this and thatthat was a really fascinating
transition for me.
That was also the time when Istarted learning to love to read
.
I had never read novels beforebecause I was functionally
illiterate, and so I waslearning to read the classics
and that was exciting me to getall of these philosophies and
(25:38):
all of this education and thehistory and the economics and
the current events and thesciences.
I flourished in that and Ibecame inspired by stories of
men of the Renaissance and menof the Renaissance.
What inspired me about them wasthat men of the Renaissance
were expected to be not just anartist but religious, familiar
(25:59):
with religion, familiar withpolitics and trade, business,
familiar with engineering andsciences and architecture, and
so they were expected to be.
If you were men of theRenaissance, you were a man who
could do a good job at lots ofthings, and you might have this
one or two field where you stoodout above the others.
Most of the time, we know themfrom their art.
(26:20):
But there were men of theRenaissance who were incredible
architects, who were incrediblebusinessmen, who were incredible
cartographers, who basicallystarted saying, no, this is what
the world really looks like.
It was such a revolutionaryperiod across a number of fields
.
I found myself attracted tobeing like that, to want it to
be a man of the Renaissance, amodern man of the Renaissance,
(26:41):
where I wanted to study thesciences and some of my friends
were astrophysicists.
On our off times, when Icouldn't study economics anymore
, We'd have coffee and he'd tellme about black holes and any
quantum technologies and all ofthese other things that just
were, honestly, some of it wasover my head, but it was still
fascinating, and so that began awhole lifetime of not wanting
(27:04):
to waste any time beingentertained when I could be
spending that time growing andlearning and expanding myself,
and so it wasn't something thatI wanted to do, it was something
that I changed into being, andI just accepted that part of
that being as something good.
Daniela SM (27:23):
How interesting.
The man of the Renaissance.
Thank you for sharing that.
And, guy, how is it that youbecame a Christian?
Guy Morris (27:29):
When I was at home briefly, from being homeless to
running away again.
I'm not a tall man, I'm afairly short guy, and when I was
young I was skinny as a rail.
So I was a little skinny,toothpick nerd kid that didn't
have any social skills andeverything else, and so I was a
magnet for bullies.
They were like, if I'm going topick on anybody, it's going to
(27:49):
be that little limp over there.
But on the streets I hadlearned to defend myself and so
oftentimes, if somebody were tocome and pick on me, there was
at least two or three times whenI would fight back and do
something like break their noseI would get suspended from
school because I defended myselfin an overly vigorous way.
I had been suspended fromschool, just bought myself a new
(28:13):
shirt and new pair of pants.
Both of them had blood stainsall over them.
I was walking home from school.
What we used to call at thetime, what I used to call Jesus
freak guy basically long hairkind of hippie kind of guy
basically saw me going home toschool from school in the middle
of the day.
He was on the other side of thestreet.
He backed up and came around meand started catching up with me
(28:33):
from behind Now on the street.
That was not something that youfelt comfortable with.
You'd never want somebodybehind you gaining on you in an
intentional way.
I didn't know what he hadplanned.
I didn't know what he wanted.
Even if it was just a talk, Iwasn't in the mood.
He caught up with me and myfirst response was to turn him
around, grab his shirt, pullback my fist and said you better
(28:54):
be important or I'm going topunch you in the face Instead of
arguing with me or fightingback.
He lowered his head and hestarted praying and that just
caught me off guard andsomething happened in me.
I can't explain it.
Everything in my life at thatpoint was going to crap Every
relationship, every familymember, everything I tried.
I just there was a spark in methat said I need it to change
(29:17):
something in my life, and atthat point there was a
willingness to say well, thismight be it.
And I was sitting this I wantsitting on the street gutter.
It's a dirty street gutter inChino, california.
I was ruining my backside of mypants, but that would didn't
matter, because the front'salready ruined blood stains.
Never gone to church, except fora short period of time in New
Jersey when my stepdad, who wasItalian Catholic, forced me to
(29:42):
go to catechism.
He was actually part of themafia, so New Jersey, and so he
was getting pressured by theother mafia that his new wife
with and her bastard childrenbasically her unsaved heathen
children had to go to catechismto become good Catholics.
And good Catholic meant thatyou'd go rob a train during the
day and go to confession Once amonth, and you were okay.
(30:03):
While I was in catechism, oneof these bullies that seemed to
gravitate towards me poured acold drink down my back.
At that point I he'd beentormenting me for months.
I'd had enough.
I picked up my folding chair, Ifolded it and I slapped them
across the face and I got kickedout of catechism.
Other than that, I'd never beento church.
This was a radical decision forme, and again I had a history of
(30:26):
making really risky choices,because I just needed to know
that I needed to move forwardsomehow and I was willing to
take the chance.
He gave me his Bible.
I started reading what I couldread.
I couldn't.
There's a lot I couldn't read.
He told me not to start in thebeginning but to start the
Gospels.
That helped.
A few weeks after that, Ihitchhiked to a church on the
(30:49):
coast called Calvary Chapel atthe time.
And then what?
That was why, when I was 15,when I left home, I hitchhiked
and joined a commune it's aChristian commune Even though I
was only at the commune forabout three months because I had
so many social disorders.
I felt being in a group ofpeople, sleeping with a group of
people.
I couldn't ever feel safearound a group, around others,
(31:09):
and so I was like ants crawlingon my skin.
So after about three months Igot a job and moved out, but I
kept in contact with thosepeople and they became many of
my closest friends.
Daniela SM (31:19):
So you will say that it really really helped you to
have gotten there.
Guy Morris (31:23):
Oh yeah, learning this, spiritual truths that had
been true for 4,000 years.
People say did you grow up inthe church?
I said no, I grew up in bars.
Church was a choice to get outof bars.
I would listen and again likelisten with a very critical ear.
So I would sometimes hearHypocracies, I would sometimes
hear other things, but I wouldhear enough truth and enough
(31:43):
things about myself that said,well, I want to change that part
about myself.
Here's a template on how to dothat, or here's a example of
what I should be.
It helped me get through areasof forgiveness.
It helped me to get pastbitterness.
It helped me to establish somelevel of hope that life can
change, not just because I wasgonna do it, but because if I
(32:04):
could believe that somehow therewas a higher being that cared
for me, that would make adifference.
And when I had the schoolexperience basically this prayer
saying you're gonna go toschool and then getting actually
getting admitted and you haveto know that when I made that
phone call it was a month beforeschool was gonna start that
semester.
So another reason why there wasabsolutely no way they were
gonna let me in and schoolthey'd already gotten their
(32:25):
roster of students for thatsemester, how and why they let
me in, given all the units I wasdeficient and no SAT scores and
nothing else so close to thesemester start.
I still to this day have noidea how that happened, but it
did and that gave a foundationfor me in a lot of ways to my
faith, because it wasn'tsomething wasn't me just getting
up in the middle of the nightto go to work and work hard.
(32:48):
It wasn't just dumb luck, itwas something beyond dumb luck
that got me there.
It fed my faith.
But it was that faith thatreally kind of held me together
at times when I wanted to giveup to say, well, I really I
can't.
Daniela SM (33:02):
For that, among the other reasons, so you were
taking care of your spiritualpower.
Intellectually you were growing.
And then what?
You decided to also growmuscles, and nobody picked on
you anymore.
Guy Morris (33:13):
Yeah, actually, when I was, and when I got out of
school and I got the gym becauseI was really kind of skinny and
muscleless but I was alwayssort of a skinny, scrawny guy.
I'm a little bit pudgy now Iused to say that I'm not strong
and tough.
But if you're gonna botherpunching at me and you know
you're gonna really kind ofthreaten me with violence.
I was just a vicious littlebadger.
(33:36):
Like I said, I wouldn't just,you know, hold up my fist and
say, go ahead and try and punchme.
I would throw dirt in theirface, I'd kick them, I'd put my
belt around their neck, I wouldshove a folded up chair into
their face.
I held one guy over a chainlink fence by by his neck.
There was a one rule that myolder brother taught me.
My older brother was a boxer.
He says you're pretty little,so if you hit once, you're gonna
(33:58):
have to hit really hard, orthey're gonna want to hit back.
So and you have to give them areason not to want to mess with
you anymore.
Until they get that reason,you're just gonna antagonize
them.
I learned that if I was gonnafight back, I had to fight back
with a level of intensity thatthey almost never expected, if I
wanted to keep them fromtormenting me on a daily basis.
(34:20):
To be honest, I hated that partof myself.
I hated that part of my youth.
I'm a really gentle, peacefulguy.
Anybody who knows will knowthat I'm nonviolent.
I will never own a gun becauseof gun violence in my home.
When I was a kid, while I was onthe street, that was one of the
things I had to learn, whichwas, if I was going to survive,
I could not be passive.
(34:41):
I never started a fight.
I never picked on anybody.
I never called names or tauntedanybody.
My mother has the ability, hada sharp tongue so much that she
could make a sailor cry.
I inherited her ability toinsult people in a very rapid
way, and, and so most of thetime, these bullies were
unintellectual enough to knowwhat I just said.
Yeah, it wasn't something I wasproud of, but it was something
(35:05):
I had to learn to do and then,as soon as I could get to a
point in my life when I neverhad to worry about ever raising
my hand to anybody ever again,that was a good day.
I never glorified the abilityto fight.
It was something you had to doto survive, and beyond that
there was no use for it all.
Daniela SM (35:23):
Yeah, survival, that's true.
That's true.
They went through a lot, and sowhat happened after you finish
University?
People noticed you and thenwell.
Guy Morris (35:32):
It started a 36 year career in 4 to 100 companies.
I worked with VPs.
I worked with CXOs.
I worked with leadingtech-deadge technologies.
I introduced computers into theorganization computer modeling,
the internet, artificialintelligence, cloud computing.
I was always working onsomething new and Finding the
way of how to implement it intoan organization that could make
(35:55):
make sense and make money.
I got really good at that.
I became a thought leader.
I was constantly in and VP andCXOs offices.
I rode corporate jets when Itraveled.
They kept me at the best hotelsand best restaurants, and so it
was really good career.
I did some startups, some ofthem successful, others Flaming
failures.
It wasn't until my 50s when Ileft Microsoft and start.
(36:19):
I started a company in my late50s where Probably was.
It was also at the crash of2009 2010.
So it was the wrong time tostart a company.
It failed.
At that point I had beendiagnosed with PTSD, so there
was a part of me that wanted toget out of my high-pressure jobs
which were not helping my PTSD.
(36:40):
I didn't realize that I was,that all that stress was Adding
to the the problems ofaddictions and other things.
When I once I realized and itcame to accept what the PTSD was
.
And then it wasn't something Icould just fix in a few weeks,
that I needed to make somelifestyle changes and that was
started.
That started the path to me andwhere decided to go to early
(37:01):
retirement.
And so, once I had enough moneyto retire and we bought a house
out here in the Puget Sound, Idecided to retire.
But my mind still is very, veryactive.
Becoming an author was a way forme to continue to it was what I
call my third act career andcontinue to be intellectually
stimulated, because all of mybooks require deep research.
(37:23):
I have boxes and stacks ofpaper research so I typically
spend anywhere from two to up toten years in research on a book
.
That intellectual stimulationof learning something new and
connecting the dots and findingthose really unique, rarely
heard of truths that becomereally cool premises for a book
keeps me stimulated.
(37:43):
Learning how to be a greatauthor Now, most of my career
I've been writing, but if youwrote an executive more than a
single page, he wasn't going toread it.
So most of my career was how tocondense down to the shortest
possible bullet points and onepager and if I had to write a
proposal or a policy statement.
If that went over 30 pages itwas too long, and so I learned
(38:05):
to write things very conciselyabout things, but not
necessarily dealing withcharacters and motivations and
emotions and thoughts andstories and lots.
And so learning how totransition into a great novelist
was also again, it was.
It was a great Renaissance manlearning experience for me, and
so I actually hired.
(38:27):
I wrote my first book.
It took me 10 years to finishthe research, never four or five
years to write the book, inpart because I had been working
all those years.
But when I finished it I hireda top-notch professional
developmental editor.
They used to work for SimonSchuster, now she works for
Amazon and I said okay, I wantyou to hire you to go through
this.
Consider this book mymasterclass.
(38:48):
I think there's a great storyhere, but I'm not sure that I'm
a great author.
So I need you to rip it up,tear it apart and then give me a
plan of how to stitch myselfback together in a Frankenstein
kind of way.
God bless her.
She did exactly what I asked for.
She gave me 44 pages of notes,hand type written notes of
(39:09):
things I needed to either learnor change or do differently and
classes I need to take and booksI needed to read and problems I
was doing consistently and mymajor weaknesses.
And then marked up just aboutevery page of the manuscript
with examples and then how touse and what to change.
And after reading that my firstthought was, oh Lord, I suck.
But it took me about a week toget over the I suck.
(39:33):
You know, kind of feeling sorryfor myself, thinking well,
maybe this isn't something Ishould be doing.
I thought, well, you know, I'vesucked before at things and I
only got better by workingharder at it.
So let's, let's just take itone page at a time.
Start with page one, let'sstart with whatever I'm supposed
to do.
And I spent a year goingthrough everything she asked for
me to do, rewriting it aboutanother year after that to
(39:56):
actually have a finished product.
That book, which is called theCurse of Cortez, was listed
booktrip, which is BarnesNoble's consumer reader
community, was listed booktrip'sfavorite 25 books of 2021.
They called it Indiana Jonesmeets DaVinci Code.
Another reviewer said this bookis perfection.
It was compared to Dan Brown,iris Johansson.
(40:17):
One book reviewer said this isIndiana Jones.
I think Indiana Jones meetsDaVinci Code.
Amazing reviews.
All because I was willing againto basically take the risk of
writing and then take the riskof having somebody rip me up and
tear me apart, so I couldfigure out how to do it better.
Daniela SM (40:33):
And work hard.
I work hard yeah, theinteresting part is that, yes,
you, you came from doingsomething completely different.
You're managing people, solvingproblems, writing in short,
concise ways, and now you decideI'm gonna write a book in heavy
research.
You said 10 years, 10 years.
How do you think that you weregonna be a writer?
What came to mind that you said, oh, I'm gonna be a writer.
Guy Morris (40:56):
Well, I wasn't sure I was going to be at first.
I was a songwriter for manyyears.
Daniela SM (41:00):
Oh, I swear.
Guy Morris (41:02):
I wrote songs through Disney.
I recorded my own albums.
I wrote worship songs.
I was a worship theater.
But when my son was like 11,maybe 12 years old, I was a
single parent, didn't have a lotof money to basically go out
and have a social life I would,so I'd be at home a lot at night
and I'm not much of a TVwatcher.
But I did have computers and Idid have tools.
And so I wrote my son.
(41:23):
I used to take him to thelibrary every single week.
He'd get two free books andthen by Wednesday he'd be done
with them and want more, want togo back again.
Well, I couldn't take him backfor a couple days.
So I got this idea that well,I'll write my son a book.
Isn't that a cool thing.
I'll write my.
He likes typical 12 year oldboy.
He liked pirates and treasureand lost civilizations and
anything with ghosts, you know.
(41:43):
So I thought, well, I'll writehim a short story.
It'll be something thathopefully brings us closer
together.
And so, as I was writing thebook I would read, I kind of
waited until I was done, butthen I kind of read him a little
bit every night.
He loved the story.
He gave it to his cousins.
They all loved it and so Istarted to write a sequel to
that story.
But the research on that sequelI wanted it based on something
(42:04):
true in history.
The research into what was truein history got me researching
to understand that, themysteries behind that, so much
that it took me, by the time Iwas done researching, he was
grown and had a career.
He didn't need a kid's novelanymore so I started evolving it
more into an adult novel.
You know it took me on and off,you know, to kind of get it
started and finished.
(42:25):
But it was amazing story.
The historical premise was thatin 1672 the real Henry Morgan
took 36 ships, 2,000 men, toraid the city of Panama.
A long story short.
It was the richest city in thenew world.
I'll go into the details.
He ultimately lost the half ofhis men in the raid, brought
back 30 tons of plunder worth abillion billion and a half
dollars and 600 slaves.
(42:46):
But when he reached his fleethe cheated all of his men and
disappeared with everything onthree ships that were never seen
again.
But Morgan survived andultimately was made lieutenant
governor of Jamaica with thegarrison soldiers.
But when he had the power andthe money and the people to go
back for his billion dollarplunder.
Instead he went into thishaunted drunken debauchery and
burnt his logbooks, so the worldwould never know why he was
(43:08):
abandoning a billion dollarplunder.
Three years after he died, thewhole city of Port Real,
including his grave, sinks intothe ocean.
The locals said they had beencursed by Morgan.
I was fascinated with that storyand I wanted to solve two
problems.
One was maybe I would neversolve it exactly, but I wanted
to have a plausible scenario ofwhat happened to 30 tons of
(43:29):
stuff, three ships and 500 souls.
Somebody had had to have foundsomething by now was my theory,
and in fact I discovered.
In my research.
I discovered a guy who did.
A guy named FA Mitchell Hedges,who in 1911 was digging on this
one island for several years,claimed at first he had found
Atlantis, which was another clueas to how to keep digging,
before he disappeared withroughly 250 million dollars into
(43:51):
today's dollars of gold.
But when he asked about how hefound the gold he, like Morgan,
refused to talk about it and wastraumatized by it, could never
talk about it again.
So the second question becamemore profound what was it about?
Where this gold was hidden,where all this treasure was
hidden.
There was silver, there wasinks, there was silks, there was
tusks, there was Chinese bronzestatues and Ming dynasty vases,
(44:14):
there was jewelry, there wasgems, there was all kinds of
things that were in the treasure.
What would cause both of thesemen to be traumatized so much
that they would never go back tothe rest of it, never talking
about it.
That took me into the historyof the island, where I believed
that this took place.
That connected me to aninquisition massacre.
That massacre ended a 2000 yearpilgrimage before anybody asked
(44:35):
what the pilgrimage was for,that pilgrimage tied to the 5000
year Mayan calendar and theMayan creation myth.
It was an amazing journey thatI took of connecting the dots of
what would go on, and one ofthe things that was a clue was
that Morgan was hypersuperstitious so, which led to
all of these other Mayanprophecies and inquisition
massacres and all these otherthings.
(44:56):
So it was a really interestingjourney and it was such an
incredible story that spannedover thousands of years that I
had to write this kind of DanBrown style novel where the
characters who basically goingthrough their own ordeal, would
discover the elements of thestory and start putting the
pieces together, and so it wasreally a great experience for me
(45:17):
.
I remember working on researchto like middle of the night, two
or three o'clock in the morning, discovering things and waking
my wife up saying, oh wow, youwon't believe what I just
discovered.
And her response is uh-huh,uh-huh, tell me tomorrow, don't
wake me up.
You know, but it was years ofme just going through trying to
figure out all of the, how allthese pieces fit together.
That was the first book.
(45:38):
The second book, the second twobooks were based on artificial
intelligence and cyber espionage, and I mentioned earlier that I
had worked on early stages ofartificial intelligence, before
it was even called artificialintelligence, and so I was
constantly researching the theindustry, and I stumbled across
an Associated Press article thatsaid all it said was a really
(45:59):
short little two paragraph thingthat said that a program had
escaped Lawrence Livermore labsat Sandia and if I knew
something to contact thisprofessor or that FBI agent.
Well, that lab is an NSA spylab.
So in my mind I'm thinking aspy program has escaped the NSA
and I don't know how to find it.
I thought that's a cool story,I said my first thought was it's
(46:22):
got to be a typo, maybeAssociated Press goofed up.
They were supposed to say itwas stolen or got lost or didn't
work, but they said it was.
They had escaped, which impliedan intent and implied some
intelligence applied, theability to move itself and the
ability to race its trails.
So people couldn't figure outwhere to go on, and so I
actually spent a year workingout how does a spy program
(46:45):
escape the NSA?
What did they design it toreally do that?
It needed that really niftystealth capability.
They sent two FBI agents to mydoor.
Apparently I had nailed it downto the functionality.
They were not happy at all thatI had figured out something
that they thought was top secret.
But I was like, yes, I did it.
Yeah, yeah, I did it.
Now just just say it, guys, Idid it, I nailed this, and they
(47:07):
wouldn't say this is not funny.
Mr Morris said oh no, you guysare wrong.
This is hilarious.
My wife came home during themiddle of the interview.
She pulls me aside.
She says there's two FBI agentsin my dining room and I know
it's not a social call.
What did you do that experienceof realizing what the
government was doing with theseadvanced technologies and got me
(47:29):
really researching how AI wasapplied to all of these other
areas of national security,national defense, weapons
development, cybersecurity andhackers what China was doing in
Russia.
It started me researching thewhole field in a deep enough way
, not just how the AI was goingto apply to my certain business
(47:52):
problem, but it started meresearching the field on a
broader basis and that becamethe foundation for my book swarm
and the last dark that soundsdefinitely so interesting.
Daniela SM (48:03):
Thank you for sharing.
So you research a lot, but thenof course you put what
percentage of fiction?
Guy Morris (48:09):
Well, it's a mix.
So oftentimes so, for example,in the espionage books, if I
mentioned an espionageorganization or technology or
something that you could do orsomething that they might have
already done, all of the,there's a level of fact.
But then I layer on top of thatcharacters and plots.
(48:30):
So I try to make up.
So I'm not calling out at reallife person.
I'll make up a character, eventhough it might be Loosely based
on a real life person.
That's where I basically bringit into fiction.
What I like to say is all thefoundations of the story in
terms of the back story, theworld, everything else is
largely I'll say 90% factual.
(48:51):
So, in curse of Cortez, all ofthe back history, all of the
back archeology, the mythology,all of the sciences and geology
that went into that book Allfactual.
The only thing that's fictionalare most, most of the
characters and plots.
And even then some of thecharacters were based on people
I knew or had discovered in myresearch in the region to
(49:13):
discover what went on.
One of them was a cartel thugwho had threatened to kill me,
so I put him in the story as oneof the bad guys While I was
away in a dive trip.
Use.
It is really fugitive.
He was wanted by Interpol,wanted by the FBI.
He was doing dirty work for thestate of car telling cancun.
He broke into my condo when Iwas gone and when I confronted
(49:33):
him he threatened to kill me bymaster.
Well, street kid guy.
At that point I was a Microsoftexecutive.
So he saw this little wimpy,you know kind of white guy that
would probably go through thenormal legal routes and spend
three years and fifty, sixtythousand dollars trying to get
him out of my condo.
In the meantime he'd have afree place to stay.
(49:54):
My street guy came up and I amit was all know you don't, and
so I told him he didn't have thehones to mess with me.
I was the meanest little gringohe's ever gonna meet.
He had two days to get my condoor all help with the price and
he would regret ever knowing.
So after I messed with him incancun, cost everything I had, I
put him in the book so I couldmess with him again.
(50:14):
I got my two for.
Another character was a seaplane pilot named Chico.
In my book is a hilariouscharacter.
He's based on a real guy.
Everybody loves the characterChico.
When I first met Chico.
It was on a sea plane dive to aremote location to go diving.
And when I walked out of theterminal and I saw his him
(50:36):
standing next to the dock, nextto this plane, my first thought
was oh god, this is how I diefrom.
I won't tell anybody anythingmore about Chico, cuz I want
people read the books anddiscover for themselves why I
thought that.
But um, it was, but yeah.
So the characters in the plotsare largely fictional.
Most of the factual foundationsthe history, archeology, events
(50:58):
, technology, the science, thereligion, politics are all
Wonderful.
Daniela SM (51:02):
Yes, until you are definitely a problem solver kind
of guy.
Yeah, I am grateful that youshow your story.
I definitely will read all yourbooks.
They sound fast.
Tell me in a short way what isnext for you.
So you're right, you say you'reon another book working on a
book.
Guy Morris (51:19):
I hope to keep writing until I can.
I can't anymore Because if Idon't, my wife thinks that I
should be spending my time doinghousework and yard work.
So yes, I'm gonna keep writing.
Sorry, honey, I'm busy.
I gotta work on the next book.
But I've also formed a offergroup.
(51:40):
All we do all summer, long frombeginning of May to the early
in October, is will go to Events, festivals, fairs all around
the Seattle area, and we're busyevery single weekend basically
selling and signing books.
That keeps me pretty busy inthe summer to organize the team
and organize the events and toget us all out there.
(52:00):
But that's a really been agreat channel for me.
I sell more books in thatchannel than any others and I
get the highest profit.
It won't make me a new yorktimes bestseller but it pays for
the next book I'm working onwith PR consultant.
Because of my expertise inartificial intelligence, pr
consultant believes that I couldbe a good television expert
(52:20):
guest so I'm working with her tobasically get that set up.
So I'm hoping my 2024 I'll geton a few television spots as
well, mainly just to talk aboutwhere is going with.
Some of the real dangers are.
Why are you?
Why do guys like Elon Musk,stephen Hawking, bill Gates talk
about the dangers of AI Morethan they talk about the
(52:40):
potential?
And I have the answer.
So it's a great way to continueto expand my own expertise.
And then also that expertisegets filtered into the books,
but also can get filtered intopodcasts once in a while, as
well as television spots yes,excellent, and now you believe
that you're a smart person.
(53:01):
Now I've accepted the fact thatI'm smarter than average, and
that was only after taking IQ Qtests four times to double check
the results.
I've been called brilliant andgenius many times in my life.
I am in the one top one percentagain.
I tell people that that's.
If you're asking aboutrelationships.
(53:21):
Don't come to me for advice.
I'm asking about a topic, andit happens to be one that I'm
from deeply familiar with.
I can have a Intelligent,meaningful, rational
conversation with even the bestexperts in the field.
I'm hyper aware of the factthat IQ intelligence and
(53:44):
emotional intelligence arecompletely different things, and
being intelligent is not theend of the world.
Being a good person, being,being a healthy person, being a
kind person, being a lovingperson those are the things that
really matter, and I'm stillworking on many of those.
Daniela SM (54:02):
Wonderful.
Thank you so much, guy.
I really enjoy.
Your story was fascinating.
I don't think it was enoughtime.
Guy Morris (54:10):
I have a lot of little side trail through my
stories.
I could use up a few hours, butagain, I didn't never really
thought about my story muchuntil Just the last year when I
started doing more podcasts andpeople want to know more about
my background and up until thatpoint was what was only
important is what I knew, what Iknew how to do and what my
(54:32):
track record is getting it done,and beyond that people didn't
really care.
What is what I could do andthat's what I focus on here.
Daniela SM (54:40):
I always think that behind everything there is
always something way moreinteresting, and there you
proven so, thank you.
Guy Morris (54:47):
Danielle, thank you so much, it's been a pleasure.
Daniela SM (54:49):
I hope you enjoyed it.
Today's episode I am Danielaand you were listening to,
because everyone has a story.
Please take five seconds rightnow and think of somebody in
your life, to me and you, whatyou just heard, someone that has
a story to share and preserve.
When you think of that person,shoot them a text with the link
of this podcast.
(55:09):
This would allow the ordinarymagic to go further.
Join me next time for anotherstory conversation.
Thank you for listening.
Thank you so much for watchingand see you soon.
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