What do you consider like say your vision of what you're trying to accomplish?
So I have kind of two tracks and they are completely separate. I'm an investor, I'm a
CEO of a healthcare company. I've built companies, sold companies over the years. I've worked with
large companies, kind of where I learned a lot of it. I was a portfolio manager for UBS for eight
years at one point after I got out of the seals. And that's kind of the professional work track.
And right now I'm working with this healthcare company and growing it for the next couple years.
Okay. The personal track, I'm a writer, I'm an author. I published nine novels.
Wow. As I'm sitting here, I'm four chapters away from my 10th novel,
First Draft. So that'll probably come out next year. And I've got three business books. So all
the proceeds of my novels are donated to the Seal Veterans Foundation, which was my intent for the
very first novel. I had no idea I was going to write nine others. But once I put that out there,
I couldn't really take it back. So all the proceeds from that, from all my fiction stuff go to that,
which there's a special part of their fund that has to do with finding money for veterans that
are suffering from PTSD or traumatic brain injury. But because of when they served or when they got
out, if it was before the military, you know, acknowledge those concerns, acknowledge them as
actual, you know, problems, physical problems, they missed it. There's a gap. So if you were
in the military from like 2009 on, you're covered. It's in your records. It's a part of your
disability, et cetera. But if you were in before that, you're out of luck. So that's what my money
goes to a program that helps find consultants that know the VA system and get these people into
doctors, get all the stuff identified and tied to their service disabled, whatever the event was.
All the business books, I just, I use them to help leverage my professional speaking and my
consulting, which, so the consulting speaking and writing the business books is kind of the three
legs of the stool on my personal business side. And then I've got my work side. So my vision is
to get out of the work side and just do, and do the writing and the consulting and the speaking
as a full time gig. Cause I enjoy it. Yeah. I really, really enjoy it.
Exactly. Gotcha. Sounds great. I mean, obviously you have to have some sort of a, you know, you
have to have some sort of a steady income. I'm sure that that's what you basically do with your,
with your business. But at the same time, you're saying, you know what, if this other thing works
out great and this is something I like, you know, you obviously, you feel passionate about it.
That's where you really want to go. I mean, strangely enough, you would look at me,
I'm actually, obviously I got my, my actual business is I'm an IT consultant and you know,
it, it puts bread on the table. I enjoy it. I'm not just saying I don't, but you know, my,
I'm helping out with first class business because I got to Jackson Callum, who's my, who's a,
he's a personal friend of mine. And he said, Hey, you know, I can really use your help. I can really
use your expertise, your, you know, your background in consulting and, and things like that. And we
really would like to have you on board. So I was like, well, I'll do what I can. And I've been
working for the past couple of months and been kind of getting into this new thing of, you know,
having these podcasts and stuff like that. I mean, I'm a chemical engineer and I basically just kind
of, you know, sit down on a computer and just sit there, tap away. And that's about all I do.
So this is really, but I love, you know, getting to know people and, and, and hearing the background
stuff like that. But it's really interesting to hear what you're saying there. Appreciate that.
Yeah. So that's, that's really my personal vision is to segue away from a regular job
environment and focus entirely on those three other aspects that I really enjoy doing.
Absolutely. So if you could, let's see, just look at, probably like I said, there's no banner.
So what other, what could people learn from you from what you've done and just what, you know,
what, what could you convey to them through, I'm sure you're speaking inside and stuff like that.
What is this something you could provide to others so they can learn from you and, and gain that,
you know, that, that vision or, or even just the motivation to do certain things.
Well, so I wrote a book called Be Visionary. So it kind of codifies my thoughts.
There you go.
Second business book that kind of codifies my thoughts about
that it's okay to dream. It's okay to, to kind of wildly, you know, with a sense of awe and wonder
contemplate the future out to a horizon. That's, you know, at least two years out and not just
professionally, but also personally look at it. Sometimes they're intertwined. Sometimes they're
not. And that particular book, the essay kind of runs you through the first couple of chapters.
It's okay to dream. It's okay. It's okay. It's not weird to do it. It's not weird to come up with
ideas, even if the ideas won't, you know, won't fly or they don't pass the smell test. That's
okay. What's really not okay is not coming up with any ideas. It was just sitting there
and just conforming to what's going on and, and in bottling up those impulses, right? Now
from a mechanical standpoint, if you're the leader of an organization
and you don't have a strategy, like a good comparison is the United States versus China.
So China's got this, this, uh, this road strategy, this, you know, it's, it's like a 50, 60 year
strategy and everything they do economically, militarily, socially, fiscally, um, is, is focused
and is aligned. It's coherent to that strategy and they're very patient because you should be when
you're, you know, performing a strategic process. The United States, we kind of hop around
administration to administration and almost to the point now where, you know, it's, I don't know if
you ever watched, there's an old movie, um, where Clint Eastwood was a, a D I, not a D I, a, uh,
a Sergeant in the Marine Corps. It was like the invasion of Grenada. Okay. And, and he takes over
a recon platoon and every time he gets in there, they're all a bunch of slobs. And so he says,
we're going to run every morning and you better be, you know, in a green t-shirt or you, you
better be in uniform. And so he goes, well, it's a uniform, whatever I'm wearing. And so he says,
well, it's a uniform, whatever I'm wearing. So they show up and because he's wearing a black shirt
with a Marine Corps emblem and they're all in green shirts, he takes him on a terrible run.
And he goes the next day, you better be in the right uniform. So every single day they're wrong
until about the third or fourth day, they show up with every issued color t-shirt and whatever he's
wearing, they put it on and then he's right. Because he, he's trying to teach them to adapt,
improvise and overcome because they're recon guys and they're all up by themselves. They don't have
a whole lot of help. It's just, it's a, it's a vehicle. Right. And so that's what I try to
convey in the book that it's okay to, you know, try different paths, but think big and think kind of
long view, because there's more than enough people out there running around thinking short view and
thinking rear view mirror kind of about life. Yeah. Or reactionary. Yeah. Yeah. And then the
third book be different is all about creativity and innovation. It's about the brain, how it's
designed. Matter of fact, five minutes ago, I finished working on an article that's going to
come out with two other guys. One's a brain scientist and another guy's a, just a super brain.
We're doing a series of articles about kind of, I'm more the applied brain power element to the,
to the series. And then the other two ones are actual brain scientist, PhD guy, and the other
guys, just a real smart, smart guy about the way the human mind works in general. So the three of
us, we get just enough soft and hard information in there that it's compelling. But the third book
is about kind of the same thing. It starts out with it's, it's okay to be creative and innovative,
but guess what? You get a pass if you're an adult and you don't feel that way because
all these studies have shown that it could strip the way for me or, or pound it out of you by
institutions. And, you know, and I asked, you know, rhetorical questions. And when was the last time
somebody really encouraged you to come up with a crazy idea and raise your hand, you know,
it's the exact opposite. You know, you want to be a big league ball player, you want to be,
you know, lead singer in a rock band, whatever it is you want to be, you can almost point to that
time where you uttered it and you were shut down by your family, your friends, everybody. That's
stupid. And, and so what happens is over time you get conditioned. And so the first couple of
chapters explain that conditioning, you know, you're, you're, you're taught to go with the flow,
to comply, and you get into school and school teaches you history. There's nothing about the
future in school. I don't care what category you want to pick. They're talking about future medicine,
they're talking about everything we know about medicine up till today. They're talking about,
they're talking about future buildings. They're talking about here's all the physics and engineering
related to buildings of today. So we're all coming out steeped in history, but not really taught how
to critically think of how to create and develop the future. That's why there's so few people that
stand out because they're the lone voice. And if they have any talent, they make a breakthrough.
Right. But you can teach that to anybody. And the point of that third book is that it's not a
biological issue. It's not like, I was going to say, what is it when, what boys, I just forgot the
phrase, puberty. It's not like puberty. You don't, you don't get to eight years old and suddenly
there's a chemical change in your body and you can no longer dream or think, think, think about things.
I no longer question everything. It's something that's, that's pounded out of you. So it's, it's a,
it's a learnable skill. It's biologically in place. As long as you don't have any kind of Alzheimer's
or any other kind of dementia or anything that's inhibiting your biology, you can be 70 years old
and taught how to do this. But the first thing you have to do is you have to kind of shred all
this baggage. And, and that resonates in my speeches. And I mean, I've given a lot of speeches on that
third book. It's in presale right now. It's coming out towards the end of this year. And I work with
best robotics, I'm on their board, which is all about teaching kids and doing these big competitive
things with building robots. And the kids do that without any guidance, without any teaching. They
basically started building robots. Thank you for being here today. I'm really happy that you
tuned into Vision Pros Live. I'm looking forward to seeing your reactions as these episodes
continue to move forward. This is going to get more and more fun. We'll have more and more
engagement as well. We'll invite people to participate in the show. And thank you for
giving us your time and attention. Have an excellent time building out your vision and
becoming a Vision Pro yourself.