The Shark Mentality: How Ben Gilliland Built 6 Careers Without Ever Looking Back

Everything I'm going to teach you, every advice that I'm going to give you, first you have to do is you have to live your life total fearlessly. You're going to mess up. You're going to make mistakes. Great. Get smarter on it. Do it again. Don't ever get off the horse. You have to live fearlessly because in doing that, you will push through all of those boundaries and all those barriers that you think are going to hold you back, and they don't really. They're all in your head.

Welcome to Big Hitters. I'm Larry Weidel, and this show is for people who are done playing small. Each week we break down what it actually takes to win at a high level— the decisions, the discipline, the adjustments that separate those who almost do it from those who do it. No theory, no fluff, just straight talk from someone who spent 50 years building winners. If you're serious about momentum, you're in the right place. Let's get into it. Good afternoon, everybody. We're having fun today talking with Ben Gilliland. And Ben is— I'm on one side of the country down here in Palm Beach, and he's on the other side of the country in San Francisco attending a conference, as I understand it.

Is that right, Ben? That is absolutely right, Larry. We're down here for the climate conference.

The climate conference. And so the thing is, Ben, we really need a 6-hour interview here to just even touch on the things that Ben has experienced with and has learned. What I love about Ben is he's had a varied career. He's done a lot of different things. And what happens is you learn about winning in all of these things. All these different careers, and you can bring those back into everything else you do the rest of your life. It's a great thing about winning. As Ben and I were talking earlier, it's like we're agreed on one thing so far, and that is the world needs more winners, folks. And we need you to do big things because you're probably smarter than both of us. The world needs you to expand, get these ideas to pop out of your head, and do things that only you could figure out how to do. So But there's principles, and Ben is a master of these things. I don't know Ben that well, but I do know you don't get to where Ben is in life unless you've used your time wisely. We got 24 hours in the day, and somehow if you're making good decisions with those 24 hours, you move up in life, and Ben has certainly done that. So I'm going to let you get into it. You said you've had how many different careers?

I've had 5 careers.

I'm working on my 6th Let's roll our way through those things and the lessons you've learned on that, because right now where you are is at a conference. As like, you know, you, one thing about Ben is like, as you prove yourself more and more responsible and you get bigger jobs in life, you know, you get bigger things.

You get that experience and you build on that foundation. Yeah.

And you can go out there and impact bigger and bigger groups of people. And what Ben was telling me before we're headed on this thing is he's in a conference About, you know, in the, I don't know, would you say the insurance or the liability or the— what world is this?

We actually span across with that project, which is Future Proof. That one spans across 5 industries. It actually deals with homeowners themselves, their insurance companies, the real estate market, and mortgage finance on top of all of that to try to get a handle on this insurance, crisis that people are all getting canceled and priced out of the market with.

You guys would be very interested to know Ben is coming at it from the angle of how can people protect their home, their properties.

Nobody's going to come to the rescue anymore.

No one's going to come to the rescue. And so he's involved in this thing so he could impact things for you and kind of get information that he could put in your hands and allow you to put yourself in the best possible situation. What are all of those? What were all those disasters you said you get involved in?

The system that we're developing with AI actually crosses the 7 deadly disasters. So we're covering tornadoes, hurricanes, wildfires, drought, heat, all types of different things that basically can destroy your house. Which has become particularly relevant in the sense that most of these houses are 60 years old on average, and the weather is getting worse regardless as to what you want to attribute it to. You just look at what's happened in the last 20 years and they're getting more frequent, they're getting more severe. I mean, the example I give people all the time is, would you ever thought that you would've had a hurricane in Asheville, North Carolina, 550 miles inland?

And these things can happen fast. We've had a farm Up in North Carolina. And I remember like 30 years ago, it was like, I guess, 1 minute or less than a minute, this tornado blew through.

I've been in 2 tornadoes, Larry, and 3 hurricanes. So I've got personal experience. I've crawled up in a fireplace when one of the tornadoes came through, and the next morning I was still there. And the houses 3 doors down were nothing but broom-clean slabs, and all of the house was in the trees 3/4 of a mile away in a cotton field.

I think you'll find this, Joel, because I'm sure you could write the book too, but I've said that me or somebody needs to write the book for young people coming up, entering. They're naive, you know, and they're getting out their first job, going to get in a company.

School doesn't teach you how to get out there and hustle.

But what it also doesn't teach you is the monsters that are out there, the Bernie Madoffs, you know, and they're all nice and agreeable and friendly and everything. You know, the devil is handsome and beautiful, you know, and well-dressed, you know, and very friendly. And so they don't know, they don't like the word, just the word narcissist. But so the deal is that, you know, it just, not to scare them, but I was going to write a book like Monsters You Will Meet in the Business World, you know, and it's just like, don't be afraid of them, but just know they're out there whether you're aware of it or not.

Yeah.

But the same thing is when you buy a house, I was thinking the parallel, when you buy a house, One thing they don't tell you as you're walking out of the closing is, now you know there's 7 disasters.

You can have any of the 7. Yeah, we spent a lot of time looking at this. We spent 7 years looking at how you harden a house to be able to make it resilient to these disasters. And then 3 years ago is when the insurance crisis really hit the front page of the newspapers. So we tried to go in and say, okay, how can we solve this problem? How can we dissect it down to its, you know, its little pieces and then build it back up again better? And that's kind of where we've gotten at. And of course, AI's come into the picture now.

Yeah. And at the root of this, folks, is the idea, the intent, the decision that, you know, things can go wrong. It could happen to me. I'm not special. If it happens to other people, it could happen to me.

You're blowing our horn here, Larry, because we're always talking about, One of the things that the challenges that we've got is that everybody— 2 things in America. First of all, everybody's got so much background noise and so much stuff going on already that one more problem just kind of is another log on the fire. But then the other side of it is that this isn't going to happen to me. That's going to happen to Tom down the street. That's going to happen to Mary in the next county. But I'm going to go ahead and push all my chips into the middle of the table, And bet that it won't be me. And you're doing that with your biggest asset.

Absolutely. And so the idea is that, you know, this— the awareness that it can happen to you and what Ben is doing is giving you tools and information that you can use to stack the odds in your favor of not being wiped out.

That's exactly right. We're trying to level the playing field there with the insurance companies too. One of the things we were really concerned about is that with this system, which is powerful, you know, that we're not handing a hammer that's already bigger than the hammer that the insurance company holds over you already. And so what we do is we give the same information to the homeowner that the insurance company's got. And so now it's a little bit fairer fight.

That's fantastic. And like, just so people like me will, will know, these conferences happen all the time and we're oblivious when We're oblivious to these things. Who will be at this conference? What kind of things are you going to talk about?

This particular one that I'm at right now, and I'm actually on the road for the next 3 weeks. So this one that we're having today, or this week rather, is all of the foundations and the grants and the investors that all put money behind new energy projects and climate remediation and all types of stuff. are all gathered in San Francisco to basically figure out ways to improve people's risk, not just in the United States, but globally, which what we're building is a global system. You can take and cookie cutter it to the UK or the EU or any number of different places. It's the same stuff, just different houses. So it has that very, very broad infrastructure appeal. And like I said, you know, we're trying to educate people on the front end that we have a problem. And then don't give people the problem again. Everybody's been listening to, oh, 1.5 Celsius, it's the apocalypse. Great. I'll go out in the yard and have another beer. Okay. I can't fix the apocalypse. In this case, we're giving you a tool that you can say, oh, well, I'll scan my house. Oh, it tells me whether I've got a risk. Oh, I don't have one. Great, gimme another beer, you know, and, or, or else it's one, ooh, I got a problem. And then it tells you how to fix it. So it's a solution, not just another problem.

But you were telling me that in 17 states, there's 37 million homes at risk right now, a total value of $22 trillion.

That's right. That's the numbers.

How did you wind up at this point?

I started my first company when I was 15 years old. I had kids that would go get the colored spotlights out of the architectural buildings, like the banana split store. I would pay a dollar apiece for them. I put them in these little boxes and rented them to the local bands, and they would go out and they would basically, you know, play their songs and with foot switches, and it'd be red, blue, and green, you know, as far as that was concerned. And through a whole set of fortuitous circumstances, The local union guy said, well, hey, if you've got some real equipment, we can let you rent it to these bands that are coming through. So that, over a course of 12 years, turned into where I was designing lighting and special effects for probably 150 different major rock bands and soul bands and everybody, and traveling on the road, which of course has all sorts of stories associated with that. But I wound up in Los Angeles when I sold the company, and a friend of mine called me up and he said, hey, you need to come up here to Silicon Valley, which it wasn't called that in the '80s. We're building this thing called the personal computer, and it's really crazy. So I basically wound up there because of course we were always looking for ways to automate our shows because we'd have 10 guys with with 10 fingers pushing 100 buttons to make things work when you go to these really elaborate productions. Driving around with a friend of mine up there and looking, everything was in people's garages. So you would go in, and this is the era of entrepreneurs. So you go in and Danny's like going, he's got his card table set up and he's got his little gizmo there and he's going, now it's going to do this, it's going to do this, it's going to be great. Anyway though, and my friend was truly a visionary. And he'd start stroking his beard, and we could determine whether or not what he was seeing was going to be something someday or whether it wasn't. Anyway, though, we wound up putting up the money for the spelling checker, and we also wound up putting up the money for the first multimedia. Likewise, we built systems for the government that would record on optical discs for the first time, which The optical discs, of course, at that time were the same size as a regular record, you know, to have photographs and documents and things of that nature. But then, so that was my second career. Third career, I found out that you don't really have to have a product.

Hang on a second. Let me, let me, uh, let me be rude and say, uh, you somehow figured out how to survive, how to take care of your, you know, the being on the road is a grinder. I mean, it's an out-of-body experience. You're going to— it's almost like going to war. And, uh, you know, everything is in turmoil. You know, go to another town, set it up, get on stage. I, I know a little bit about it because my brother was with, uh, Tom Petty's right-hand man for 40 years. Oh, okay.

One of my favorite artists.

So I would have a little bit of a backstage exposure to that. But you think that every, you know, every— there's gonna be similarities. The way it works out is every place there's something new. It's like every day there's different issues, whatever.

Well, it gives you a challenge too in the sense that to build something that has to be taken apart in an evening, moved 200 miles and put back together and do that 200 times, you have to really know how to build stuff right. People would ask me when I got into doing general contracting, down in South Florida and back up in Tennessee, they said, well, we understand you used to build all sorts of strange stuff. And I said, yeah, we built fire-breathing dragons and a little bit of everything, really. I think whatever the band could dream up and the record company would pay for was kind of what the rule was. So anyway, though, you figure out ways to have to build stuff that's tougher. You know, and I would be asked, they would say, well, do you think that you can handle this? I said, oh yeah, that's screw this down to the floor once and it's never going to move again. You know, it's a piece of cake by comparison. I think at one point I had 40 trucks, tractor-trailers on the road with 7 shows.

And the other thing that people don't realize is you can't take your entire crew with you. You're hiring a lot of local people, or at least a handful of local laborers And you don't know what they know and how good they're going to be. So it's really good in terms of when you're in a company, you got to be able to delegate, you got to be able to supervise, you got to be able to keep things simple so you can get new people on board and get them operational right off the bat. There's a lot of skills you develop in doing that that you probably didn't even realize you were developing.

I really attribute most of my career to problem solving because all the projects that have come my way, I've never worked for anybody but me. And it's always been people who find me. I don't advertise it. And they're saying, hey, we've got a problem here. You know, is this something that you think you could help us with? So you wind up coming up with a methodology of how you look at it, how you take it apart, and then you put it back together. Very same thing as when you're doing with a roadshow. You know, you're taking it apart, you're putting it together multiple times, and each time you refine the process a little bit more. So when you wind up, by the time you've done your 50th project or whatever it is, it becomes kind of a machine. You kind of go, okay, I've identified it, I'm taking it apart. This is the pieces. Now, do I have something I can fix? Is there enough here to fix? I've had to come back and tell people, I did a project for one recording artist that they wanted to sell him a special effect that was a hologram. This is a hologram back in the '80s. Anyway though, and they wanted to charge him a million bucks, which was a lot of money in the '80s. And he was supposed to look like he would leave his own body and go over to a twin Steinway piano and play a duet with himself.

Wow.

He's a very spiritual guy. Okay? So he thought this was a great idea, you know, from that standpoint. So I got hired to basically determine, can you do it?

You know?

And so after 10, 12 weeks, you know, I come back in and I'm saying, yes, you can create the hologram. You can. Yes, you can make it go over and look like it's near the piano, but it's only going to be 9 inches tall. So you're going to have a little problem with the audience in the first row's got a great view. Everybody else sucks. The guy trying to sell the effect was like, I know where you parked your car. You know, I was sitting across the table when I had to announce that piece of information.

Starting up companies is a lot, lot very similar to being, you know, in that kind of world, helter-skelter, everything's different every day. There's a lot of similarities, you know, when you went in and got involved in these companies. So you probably, you know, you probably felt right at home, but Let's talk about that just for a second, like how you look at things. I've always thought, Ben, it's the way we start early in life doing things, how we evaluate things, how we sort things out, what are priorities to us, how we go about it. You can refine that over your life. And a lot of times, once that pattern is kind of set in your mind, you pretty much have the are going to try and use some kind of approach like that subconsciously the rest of your life. And so how do you— you see that with athletes, you know, they might have a certain fault they develop early in their career, and that's always in there. You know, they're always working to make sure they don't fall back into it. You know, golfers or skiers or things like that. But when you go and when you get in a situation, what are you looking for where you can say, okay, what are the big issues, the big pieces, the small pieces? How do they work the processes? How do you evaluate?

Well, my grandfather was a very successful mechanical contractor, and he wanted me to follow in his footsteps. He was kind of disappointed I was making more money doing road shows than I was going to make working for him. But he used to take me into his shop on Saturday. I was like 9, 10 years old. He's teaching me how to weld. He's teaching me how to read blueprints. He's saying, now, that vat over there is full of acid. It'll eat your hand off. Don't touch it. Got that one down real quick. But what he taught me was a reductionist methodology, which is where you take the big picture and start breaking it down into its smaller parts. He was an inventor. He had like 100 patents. So one of the things that he was really good at is saying, what's this problem? How do I break this problem down? Because the profit is in the solution. Not the problem. And what people hire you to do, whether you work for a guy at a furniture factory or you work for a lawyer or whoever it is, people are hiring you to do a job, and that's going to require you to be a problem solver. And so the sooner you can learn how to solve problems, that will profit you very, very well because most people are not very good at it. So if you really hone that skill of solving problems, doing the research— I used to know a librarian in this one town that we worked out of, and when I was working on a project for one of these bands or one of these computer things, I was spending all this time in the libraries. We didn't have Google then.

Google's great.

Boy, it saved me a lot of trouble. She knew my name. I would bring her coffee in the morning. I mean, I was living in this library. Because it took the hard work of the problem solving. First is to figure out what it is, why is it happening, and now to try to break it down into pieces to where you can understand what's not working with something else. And that's carried through all of my career. What I'm doing right now with this AI, it's just a very high-tech version of problem solving. What this system is, is just to solve a problem of how do I make your house safer for the people who live in it, and how do I get your insurance down?

What are the issues? What are the facts? What's the imperative? What are we trying to do here? Why is it not working? What are our limitations? Type things. By the way, if you're still listening right now, you're different. You don't just consume content, you're actively looking for an edge, and that's who I built the Big Hitter Community for. Not people chasing motivation, people chasing momentum. Not theory, proximity. Proximity to operators who are actually in the arena making real decisions and winning at a high level. Inside Big Hitter, you get conversations we don't have on the podcast, direct access to people who build what you're trying to build in a room that holds you to a higher standard every single week. This isn't a hype group. It's not networking for the sake of networking. It's where serious people go to sharpen their thinking and compress their timeline. If you're done just listening and you're ready to be in the room where it actually happens, head to joinbighitters.com or click the link in the show notes. The right room changes everything. I'll see you inside.

That and learn how to write. This is a big thing. I have people come to work for me, they cannot write a complete sentence. It makes me crazy, uh, because how do you communicate with most people? We're still on keyboards, okay? Everything at some point gets reduced to writing. Even these people selling these AI programs now that'll give you a transcript after you hang up the, the call, the video call, and it generates basically a complete written script of what it is. And the scripts, of course, are pretty flawless. But in this particular case, if you can't communicate with people, and writing requires you to think clearly too. I know when I'm working on something, and I'm a writer just by nature, my mother was an English school teacher. And so she held my feet to the fire and said, you will learn how to spell or you'll never leave this dining room. It was just, okay, okay, I get the picture. But I think probably reduction is to look at things, to think outside the box. Don't think that just because your school training may have said that this part goes with this part, that there's nothing new in the world. Everything is a reduction. Everything is a replication of somebody else's work. And you're just applying it differently and you write it down.

It's like the solutions are out there, folks. And even Picasso said everything is inspired by something else. And so, you know, they won't get into all of that, but I mean, as far as music, art, technology, this, that, and the other, and the stories you and I could tell each other about that. But it's a matter of connecting the dots. And if you'll take time to sit down, like, what is the issue? You know, what did they try before? What is missing? What's similar to this? And you start to try, but you don't give up because you, like you said, you know, on the hologram example, you said, you know, I came back in a few weeks and told, you know, it could be done, but it wasn't like the— you didn't come back like the first afternoon.

Oh no. I was talking to people at University of Chicago physics lab, Optical engineers, all sorts of different people that it would take to do that and say, can you do it? Nope. Can you do this? Yep. And it's a process of elimination. I'm really good at puzzles. I like puzzles. And so for me, the more complicated the project's problem is, the more it gets my juices going. And I'd say one of the things that I know, I mentor different levels of up-and-coming executive people on a very selective basis, but one of the things that I'm always trying to convey to them, and that is that there are multiple solutions to any problem that you have, be they personnel, be they product, be they market. What you have to do is Open up your range. And from the standpoint of saying, oh, well, hey, they just did this over here selling these Doritos. We could apply this over here to these cosmetic products. Okay. And to cross-pollinate, and that gets you a long way, especially when you have— we're living in an era of specialization. Everything is getting sliced and diced thinner and thinner and thinner. Well, now who are the people who are the most valuable in those times? The generalists, the people who have broad range across broad fields, who can pick and choose from the 52 cards in the deck how they want to build their hand.

Yeah, it allows you to use the card analysis. You know, you're not just staying with one suit of cards. You know, you're over on the creative side or you're over on the technical side or whatever, you know, You don't have to have an infinite number of variables. I like, what are there, like 4? I forget the name. Like, you know. Yeah. Well, there's 4 suits, but also like even DNA, there's not 100 million elements to DNA. There's like, what, 3 or 4 in there? It's the combinations of things that where the uniqueness comes in. Let's go to your 3rd one now. Let's just see how you How you evolved now into your third career?

My third career was basically doing structured finance on big-ticket items in England. It was— How did you get into that now? Actually, it was totally by accident. There was a guy that I had met in California. He moved over there. He said, you know, he basically kind of recruited me into it. And so as a result of that, you know, I worked with him for a while. And then I basically kind of developed my own stable of clients and kind of what my job was is, you know, these deals that syndicate, you know, $1.5 billion worth of oil drilling equipment or stuff like that. It's got every, you know, you have syndications of multiple banks, you've got sovereign wealth funds, you have the shipyards that are going to build them, you have the unions, you have the governments. You've got this consortium of banks, you've got private wealth. And in my case, I focused in on managing the private wealth that was going to be involved in these different projects, which put me on the road again on having to go and basically see all these different people that were in my portfolio once or twice a year. So I was going to Australia, Germany, Dubai, Hong Kong, America. I used to have to go to New York quite a bit. Yeah. And then there was other people in this group that they dealt with the banks and they syndicated Bank of Royal Bank of Canada and Barclays and all the other part. But it, you know, takes, it took a lot of different moving parts. And when these deals were signed, the documents, when they were bound, would be 4 or 5 feet long. You know, it would take days. You know, nowadays you do a billion-dollar deal on DocuSign. Oh, sure. No problem. Okay. Back then, you actually had to have blue ink, so people would be flying in to sign documents or they'd be couriered out for signatures, whatever the case was. So they would take a couple of years for some of these things to actually all come together because of the number of moving parts. But again, it was a puzzle. It was how do you put all these pieces together in new and novel ways In order to succeed. And it was, you know, then to succeed was when it closed, or in the case when the tour, you know, was done is when it wrapped. Or if it was the case with the computer stuff, it's like when we, you know, sold the software onto a bigger company, or we, you know, because we, the spelling thing, we wound up licensing to Microsoft and everybody on earth. But the thing about dealing with private wealth, Is it's very, it's very person to person. It can be very stressful because some of the people that you deal with did not make that money themselves. And consequently, that's all they have. Now, a lot of them have quite a bit of it, but they also become very concerned that they could lose it. And, you know, I made a joke about a guy that I had down in Australia. And he was a cattle farmer, big cattle farmer. He sold his beef to McDonald's. And so we used to laugh that when he would get, you know, kind of queasy at times for whatever the reasons were, you know, he may have a couple of $3 million wrapped up in a deal. He had $500 million. But anyway, he would get to where we would kind of joke at the office and say, well, you know, if George ever loses his money, he'll have to go to work at the drive-through window at McDonald's, you know, and he'd have to be like, can I supersize that for you, sir? You know, which of course we told the joke to George as well, but, you know, he didn't appreciate it quite as much as we did, but he never lost any money. So there you go. But anyway, so the stress on that is what in 2000 is when I had to pull the plug and I took 3 years off, bought a sailboat, moved to Key West back when it was still the little Hemingway town, you know, and it was a different place than it is now. I was there during the transition.

Describe the stress of being in that.

Travel. You can't have a life. You're, if you're 150 days on the, you know, out of town, it's kind of like, at that time I had, I was divorced. And you can't have a relationship. You know, people want to be there with you. It's kind of like, you know, hey, there's going to be this concert or this show or whatever it is next Friday night. You know, why don't we, you know, we'll go out and have dinner and, you know, and you're looking for a relationship to mature. Anyway though, you say, no, I can't do that. I'm going to be in Hong Kong. And they're going to, you're going to be out of town again? Anyway though, if you go through that 3 or 4 times, you know, and you kind of go, you know, this is getting old. You don't have a personal life. I lived in hotels. I had stuff in storage. My ex-wife called me. I was at dinner with a young lady and she was like on the phone and I said, I gotta take this call, which of course in a restaurant to have a flip phone and take that out was already a cardinal sin. But anyway, so I figured it was an emergency. I had to take it. So anyway, she's saying, my car's broke down. And I'm going, okay, what happened? Well, I forgot to put oil in it. So in other words, engine shot. Is that about right? Yeah, it is. She says, can you help me? And I said, well, what do you want? And I've always made good money, so I'm very generous. She would say, well, I'd like to go ahead and get another car. I found a car I like. So I said, well, what is it? She says, it's a Sebring convertible. I'm kind of going, this is a little bit more than what I would call transportation. But anyway though, so after talking to her for a couple minutes, I'm going, okay, go down, get the coordinates. I'll wire the money to the bank, from the bank tomorrow to the dealership and get your car. Anyway, so I hang up and this young lady's on the other side of the table and she says, That's your ex-wife, right? I said, yeah, yeah, it was. And she said, well, you just bought her a car. And I was going, yeah, well, she needed a car. Anyway, she's going, will you marry me and then divorce me? I was going, no, I won't. But in the meantime, have another glass of champagne. Anyway though, so yeah, it just, you burn out, you know, it's kind of like, you know, you just, Yeah, I don't know any other way to put it. And that's really the only time I've ever burned out. But I wound up in Key West. I went down there and I worked with Mel Fisher for 3 years salvaging treasure. You know, this came off the Atocha. It's a widow's mite, which has a significance with my late wife in the sense that she was very Christian. And she was going, well, you know, these all came up out of the water. And she said, so there's a matching pair of these is what it was. Anyway, though, but she said, well, you know what the widow's mite is? And being the pagan that I am, probably not anymore. I've gotten much better. But she said, yeah, remember what the story of the widow goes to the temple and she gave 2 mites into the donation box and that was all she had. Now, this is one of those red letter stories from the New Testament. You know, and everything. So anyway though, so that wound— that's the story of this. And, you know, and we had, you know, coins and silver bars and all sorts of stuff. Have a lot of emeralds. We pulled up pounds of Muzo Colombian emeralds that were all in the sand. We vacuumed them up off the bottom of the ocean that went along with us. But this one thing, and, you know, everything, every project that you do or people you work with or career, I think you get a major takeaway. From each one of these careers. The, from the rock and roll era was don't do drugs. Very bad. Not good for you. Computer programmers think they're rock stars. And say, because I got away from rock stars and all of a sudden I'm around computer programmers. So the takeaway there is computer programmers are rock stars. With the money business, and that is, is that money does not buy you happiness. And 80% of the people that I probably knew were on Xanax. Or whatever the drug of preference was for that era. And in the case of Mel, treasure is only worth what the person who's willing to pay for it. And that's the reason why museums all have a gift shop that you have to go through to get out of the building, because that's what pays the bills. Because I took a bunch of emeralds to New York, And I had some big, I mean, like, you know, 20-carat, 30-carat emeralds. Anyway, this little guy's looking at it and he's saying, I'll give you $50. And I'm going, what? This has got a certificate. It's off of the Atocha. It's like treasure. It's historical. And he says, $50. So I'm going, okay. So anyway, so there was a lesson in life as far as that's concerned. But I wrote 3 books while I was down there. You know, of which I never published any of them because they were science fiction. And a friend of mine in New York who's a writer said, nobody's ever going to publish this. It's too dark. Because I was getting all of this negativism out of my system. And so it was a purge. And she said, you changed the names on these people. I said, yeah, to protect the guilty. Absolutely. She said, otherwise, you know, there'd probably be a contract out on me or something, right? If I all of a sudden start Disclosing all of these stories. But anyway though, I did have every conspiracy theory that existed during that time that I wove into the books because I figured if you're going to deal with money and power and sci-fi and AI and all this stuff—

You're in Key West spending your days with Mel Fisher.

Yeah. Well, it was kind of interesting how he recruited me because this is where I tried to retire. Lasted 8 weeks. Okay. You know, so I'm sitting down at the Half Shell Raw Bar drinking beers at 3 o'clock in the afternoon and talking to my bartender, which of course, you know, there's 2 people in life that you should never alienate. One is your bartender, the other one is your bondsman. Both of those people you want to hold close, close to you anyway, because he's your father confessor. He knows your secrets. Anyway though, so I'm going, you know, I'm going to have to find something to do here. You know, I was getting really antsy, and he was going, you know, well, I don't know. You know, anyway, this guy around the corner is going, I'll give you something to do. I said, I'm Mel Fisher. I usually like to go salvage treasure. And he had this real pirate spirit to him. You know, yarr, matey, let's go. Anyway, so glad I signed on to it. It was a great thing. Then, of course, you know, I met my late wife. And she was an Olympic equestrian. And so she had a horse farm up near Nashville, between Nashville and Memphis. And so I went up there and we were married for 26 years and I had to find something to do up there. So I got certified to do historical restorations and got a general contractor's license.

How do you get certified to do historical restoration?

There's training programs that you go through. that has you in terms of how you take things apart, trying to find the same materials. I used to have a— just a— they would tear stuff down and I would go salvage through the wood because I was going, well, I don't know if I'm ever going to need a piece of 150-year-old oak, but I might. So anyway, I had a storage place on her farm that was just full of doors and windows. And all this architectural salvage stuff. And I wound up having to do some of it sometime. I had to make some banisters on a staircase one time, and we had turning equipment.

You don't have a background as a carpenter or anything like that. How did, you know, did that seem to be particularly lucrative or just something fun to figure out?

No, it was, my father was an attorney by trade, but he was the great American sportsman craftsman. And he, uh, he made jewelry. He fished, he hunted, he did electronics, he made jewelry. And he was one of these people that if he got into doing that, he would go out and buy every tool and everything you would need to know how to do it. And us kids, he would bring us into the shop and teach us. And then of course I had my grandfather, the mechanical guy. He's teaching me how to weld and read blueprints. None of this I expected to ever, but it was a foundation that, you know, it's kind of like everything that you do is an accumulation of skills and you're going to carry those forward as you go through life and as you go through whatever your trades are. But, you know, I've changed lanes several times now. I had the blessing of that foundation between my father and stuff like that, but No, I used to turn table legs on his lathes that he had out in his shop. You know, he used to say, now this saw over here, I strongly recommend that you don't use it. In fact, I've put a lock on the plug so you can't do it. And I was going, well, why? He said, that's the most dangerous tool in my shop is a table saw. He said that will grab a piece of wood and it will basically throw it in your face. and cut your fingers off at the same time. So I was kind of going, okay, got it. Table saw, stay away. Got that memo. Not a problem. But, you know, I had already done the computer stuff and stuff, so I did a lot of design work on the computers for a lot of these different jobs. I had a retail facility in the mall for a while that was retail design space for kitchens and bathrooms. which we just did upscale work, had 5 designers, probably 15 jobs going at once at that time. And so, you know, and that was what I was doing while my horse, my horse, my dog was doing horse shows.

You seem to have the tendency to, when you get into something, to want to do it big. You know, you can't go diving for a whole lot of treasures all at once, but you got up there and you got in a situation It was your natural thing. It was like all of a sudden you got all these designers, you got a place at the mall, you got this. What, where do you think that comes from? That's a natural— I know what motivates me in that direction. What motivated you, would you say?

Well, for a long time I was motivated just by the money because the money in the entertainment business was really good. I mean, you know, I had a an apartment that was on the top floor of a building, you know, and nice furniture and all sorts of stuff. And I was like 22 years old. So I was doing, I was living large for my age in that sense. And that just kind of carried forward. The computer business did really well. You know, it's in that case, it's kind of, you know, you spelunk around, see what people are doing. See whether or not it's something people are going to want. And, you know, I've always been kind of a natural marketing person. I look at things differently. I taught some sales training courses with a friend of mine for a while to small companies that I could not understand how the people who work for them, their salesmen, could not ask for the business. They could not present a closing question. And I went through a whole series of different stuff. I had one job that I had to do that I got hired to lay a bunch of 55-year-old men off in a textile mill that were all getting ready to claim their pensions and retire. And the owner didn't have the cojones to take these men into the office and say, I'm going to let you go. So he hired me to basically do it. So it was, I was kind of like, I did a lot of ninja work for a while because while I was doing the, the really chasing the money, which was up pretty much till 2000, the money was really the sole motivator. Now, once I kind of got out of, away from it, because I told my future wife, I said, I'm really unhappy with what I'm having to do here. It's, It at times feels very immoral, and it's just, you know, it's not something that you would brag about to your kids. Okay. Oh yeah, I just fired 50 guys. Anyway though, so anyway, she said, well, why don't you quit? And I was going, quit? What? I can quit? Anyway though, and even at that, it took a year before I quit. But anyway though, so I was doing that for a while and then she had lived in Hawaii, which is where my home is now. In '83, she got chased off the island when the volcano blew. And so she went back to riding horses professionally. And of course she had her whole carnival of dually trucks and trailers and grooms and horses and All that stuff and going to horse shows for 6 weeks at a time. So, you know, I was going one way, she was going another way. It's really kind of amazing that we were able to get together at all on the whole thing.

Why are you so fascinated at this stage of your life? Why are you so fascinated with this industry? And where do you think, you know, what you're doing now, how big it can get? Because I know you got it in your mind. to take this thing and go big time with it?

First of all, it's a public benefit corporation, which is a for-profit company. It has shareholders, and you're responsible to make a good profit for your shareholders, but it also has a mission that's in your charter that you basically have to stay within the guidelines of doing good things for people. In this particular case, we fulfill both of those. My late wife had an idea for a nonprofit. This is how this whole thing started, was from her idea to help the people in Hawaii build affordable homes that will take the hit from the weather.

They had a big thing in Maui.

Oh, it hit my house. I had to file an insurance claim and I hate doing that. You can know why. I'll find out why next March, just how bad I'm going to hate it when a policy comes up for renewal. But no, we had— my house is built on a shelf carved into the side of an active volcano, and it's— my house is fire resistant for an hour. Now, if I get a direct hit with lava, I'm cooked. But that's not going to work. But it handles 150-mile-an-hour wind. You know, it's seismic, high seismic rating. And all of that's what the nonprofit developed, which is how the AI came into it, was to educate people. that there's other ways to, particularly contractors, to build stuff. Because the stuff we've got out here now is 60 years old on average. We haven't really changed much of anything since the 1950s. The biggest improvement, if you want to call that, in construction is drywall.

Really?

Yeah, pretty much it. We've made the lumber smaller and now we've got lighter— we don't have to use plaster and chicken wire on the walls. But that's kind of the big thing I would run into how, because I do a lot of climate remediation design work now as a GC in Hawaii. And we just did a 12-unit condo that was built 50 years ago that was only, I had, it was on posts and beams and it was sit, each one of these buildings was just sitting on concrete blocks. It wasn't even attached to the ground, you know, as far as, and it's like 3 feet above sea level. Which, that's not going to last much longer either. But anyway though, yeah, the size of the project we think right now, if we are able to get it all funded and we're out part of this trip and several more, is we have to raise about $20 to $25 million in order to get the first phase of it into the contractor's network to where people can go and actually get a solution. We've already built the front end of it. It's called Magic Window, and it's an app that you can download from the stores that you can type in your address and it'll tell you what all your risks are. It's free. Won't charge you a dime for it. And if you want to know now some of the solutions that go with it, because the cost to run the program with the AI is such that if you want the detailed 20, 30, 40-page report of everything you can do, It's like $25. So it's, you know, it's not going to, you know, not going to break you. But anyway, the real markets for it are, of course, the insurance industry, also the construction industry, real estate. It has a lot of value to a lot of people. So we're kind of tagging it right now that 5 years out, it could conservatively be worth $1.5 billion. It could be worth more than that. It just really, you know, I know this is a horrible thing to say, but it depends on how many storms we have and how much disaster, because every time there's a disaster, our phone rings.

Let me ask you this. It's kind of abrupt in the sense that I'd love to keep going, but we'll keep going on after the break here. But we've got to break the public portion of this interview off now. And so for people who stayed with us the whole time and that are fascinated by what you've been able to accomplish, what would you tell people? Because you've had a long life. I mean, you've been in successful life and it seems like bigger and bigger opportunities keep occurring and it's like you're never going to run out of opportunities. But what would you say that you've done right that you could pass on to people who want to be able to? Because what we haven't— we haven't got into all of the nightmares that you've had along the way, which we all have. What would you say you have done right to keep your legs underneath you and keep your eyes looking forward, your attitude up, your energy level up, And be able to continue to move forward because through moving around the world, different kinds of jobs, different kind of industries, but to always be looking for the opportunity and, you know, bigger and better things. What do you think you've done right that you would pass on? Kind of a final word.

And the people that I mentor, the first thing that I tell them is that everything I'm going to teach you, every advice that I'm going to give you, First you have to do is you have to live your life totally fearlessly. Total fearlessly. You're going to mess up. You're going to make mistakes. Great. Get smarter on it. Do it again. Don't ever get off the horse. You have to live fearlessly because in doing that, you will push through all of those boundaries and all those barriers that you think are going to hold you back, and they don't really, that they're all in your head. And when you're fearless, you just keep moving forward. I'm in Hawaii, that we have spirit animals, which different animals represent different things. My spirit animal is the shark. And the thing about the shark is it only goes in one direction, forwards. And if it stops swimming, It drowns. I'll never stop.

Is there a story behind that or at a point in your life where you got to the point? Because I can tell this is what you tell yourself when people are trying to back you to the wall. So what got you to the point to where this is like an imperative for you?

I think that the first thing that I realized with it was I was a very shy kid and I was scared of girls and I was scared to go talk to girls. And so when all of a sudden now I'm out and the rock star's on stage and shaking his booty and everything and I'm backstage, you know, and there's, oh, you know, oh, I just want to meet the star, you know, I got over it as far as that was concerned. I realized that It was all in my head that there's really nothing to prevent you from doing what it is that you can dream and to be able to, even though your dream may not come true immediately, maybe not ever, but to be able to hold onto whatever that is. The second piece of advice that I would throw out there before we move forward here is this, and I tell this to entrepreneurs. Because yeah, you have to live your life fearlessly and you have to be strong in the sense of problem solve and move forward. But another thing is never fall in love with your business. Keep it at arm's length because you're going to have to make hard decisions that are going to be a problem. And if you love your business, then you're going to make the wrong calls a lot more because you're going, oh, I can't let Bobby go. Bobby's just been with the company for 5 years and, you know, he's a nice guy and he's always fun at the picnic, you know, and stuff that goes along with it. Yeah, but Bobby is screwing up. Bobby needs to go. Okay, Bobby, you know, and those are hard calls. You gotta be willing to, if you're fearless and you're trying to push forward, you gotta make the hard calls sometimes. You know, this is one of the lessons that came out of the laying off the guys at the textile plant. Was the fact that, you know, the guy who owned the place, family business, everybody known each other 25 years and stuff like that, he didn't have the, the chutzpah to go out there and do what was really his job. Because I got asked more than once, why, you know, why isn't Jim coming down here to tell me this? Well, Jim just wants you to know that, you know, he really respects all of the effort that you've put forth and for the team. And Harriet down the hallway has your severance package and you'll be walked to the gate. Goodbye.

It's hard for an entrepreneur because you get this idea. It's your idea, your baby, you're this, that, and the other and everything. And at some point you've got to say this thing, you know, it's just like any child or whatever. It's got to stand on its own and it's either worth it.

And if it can't, then you have to cut your losses.

Cut your losses.

You don't get to do it with your family, but you can't do it with your business.

Absolutely. Absolutely. Thanks so much. This has been great, and I wish you the best in that.

Thank you. I appreciate that.

And those of y'all that have enjoyed the conversation and wanted, uh, want more conversation like this, come see us at joinbighitters.com. That's it for this episode. If this resonated with you, do me a favor, share it with someone who's ready to level up. Winners find winners, and the right conversation at the right time can change everything. Want to go deeper? Join us inside the Big Hitter Community at joinbighitters.com. That's where the real work happens. And if you haven't already, subscribe so you don't miss the next one. Remember that you're either growing or dying, and there's no standing still. Keep winning, and I'll see you next week.