He had a heart attack at age 30

Kenny Hyder had so much going for him, and then he suffered a massive heart attack that left him with more questions than answers.

[00:00:16.685] – TAMAR:
Hey everyone, I am so excited. This is Episode 50. This is the final episode of 2020. You’re bringing out the year. This is my friend Kenny Hyder. Thank you so much for bringing out the year. How’s it going? How are you doing?

[00:00:33.065] – Kenny Hyder:
I’m glad this is finally over and not that the annual calendar changes anything, but hopefully looking up into next year.

[00:00:42.545] – TAMAR:
So the Jewish calendar, there’s this whole thing of how things would be better when that happens. The lunar year in like September. And you’re right [laugh], we’re not really sure. But I think there’s stuff starting to look a little bit better. I would like to think so. Hopefully the calendar year, it is more than symbolism here,

[00:01:02.915] – Kenny Hyder:
Right. Fingers crossed.

[00:01:04.485] – TAMAR:
Yeah. So thank you so much for joining. Talk to me. Where you from and what’s what’s going on in your world?

[00:01:13.565] – Kenny Hyder:
So I’m from San Diego originally and I currently live in downtown Los Angeles. I’ve been here for about six years. Previous to that, I spent eleven years in Santa Barbara, which is a beautiful place, but it’s also very small. So it’s good to be in a real city. It comes to a point where you want to be around adults and Santa Barbara is kind of a college town, so I hit a critical mass and I had to get out of there at one point. But yeah, I [am a] SoCal native. I understand a lot of people, actually, a lot of my friends are kind of naysayers on California, which I understand. But my family’s here and it was 84 degrees yesterday, so I’m just laughing at everyone opening their doors to foots full of snow. No, exactly.

[00:01:59.015] – TAMAR:
It’s funny. I had a dentist appointment this morning. Thank God I can talk now. But one of the things that they kept texting me. “Can you come? Can you come? Can you come?” And they wanted it a lot more than twenty four hours in advance. And I said, well I don’t know if my driveway is [walkable, if] I’m going to slip when I walk outside. You know, you don’t have those challenges.

[00:02:18.305] – Kenny Hyder:
No.

[00:02:20.645] – TAMAR:
So tell me a little bit that about where you are career wise, what you do and if you have a story. You know, Kenny and I know each other a long time. We’ve actually met in the search engine space. I’m jumping the gun here, but I don’t know this this stuff about you. I’m coming here. It’s interesting. I know some marketing guys, Nick Ayers. I did something a few weeks ago with him and he’s like, “I’m a musician who became a marketer.” And I’m like, oh, I didn’t know that, so it’s going to be interesting to kind of learn a little bit about your story and where you’ve come from and where you are today in that context.

[00:03:02.645] – Kenny Hyder:
Yeah, absolutely. In high school I was a pretty nerdy kid. My schedule was always full AP classes and all that sort of stuff. I had high expectations of myself for a college career and that sort of thing. At one point, I was thinking I would go to college and study pure math and do a real nerdy route. But then I remember very distinctly actually one time sitting down with my parents and talking about college options. I was sending out applications. And my dad looks at me and he goes, “So how are you going to pay for college?” And I was like, “Oh, what?” And he’s like, “You could take out a loan or do this kind of stuff.” And I was like, “oh, I hadn’t thought of that.” At the time, being, seventeen, eighteen, thinking about taking out a loan, which I’d never done in my life, for more money that I never thought of, didn’t seem like a viable option. So to my parents’ detriment, decided, “oh well, I guess I’m not going to go to college.” They were like, well, “you have to go to college,” I was like, “well, I don’t have the money and I don’t wanna take out a loan and you guys aren’t going to pay for it, so you can’t make me.”

[00:04:16.205] – Kenny Hyder:
So I ended up, just out of high school, I got a job doing constr