Bill Moses’ Epic Journey with Kevita and Flying Embers | Big Leap EP#64

I was the most unlikely person that ever thought I would go to Wall Street. I had a lot of fear in trying to compete in that realm. A major league for me, setting me up for my secular success. Having a daily practice and trying to get to the daily practice is part of the secret. Right. You don't take some time to center in first thing in the morning, whatever it might be. It's hard. We were just really convinced that it was the end of the day. We stopped shipping. We had the buy off the shelf. We were in a 91 1. So many of my board members were saying, time to fold the cards. You can't do anymore. We hung in there.

We.

We pitched our tent. We didn't fold it. And we got great product back to the Margaret lines and we sold for PepsiCo, you know, just north of 230 million. And. And with very little money invested, really. It's one thing to have an idea, it's another thing to have relationships and a network.

Wow. I think you're going to really love this episode because we get into some things that every entrepreneur needs to know. Our guest today is a lifelong entrepreneur, Bill Moses, who's a dear friend of mine and a person in whose enterprises I invest. And so he's got more bandwidth than anybody else I know, and he's going to tell us about his big leaps. And I really can't wait for you to hear about that.

Yeah. And in this episode, a couple of the big takeaways that I have that were really fun is you're going to learn what Bill's genius zone is. True genius is, and it is a really, really amazing skill. And if he can, if anyone can spend most of their time in this space, great things are going to happen. But you're also going to learn what Bill's ideas are for creating alignment, building trust, and aligning values and drive. And it's nothing that is obvious. So, Bill, how about you?

What are you.

What's your big idea that you want to share before we get this episode going?

Yeah, the bigger. The big idea, I think, is that you could never expect the unexpected, but you could vision it and you could make it a reality with a lot of hard work and undaunting conviction. So I think that's really what comes to me right now.

Fantastic. Well, you'll get that. You'll also hear about what Bill's daily practices that keeps him sharp and also a little strategy, a gadget that he has that gives him more energy and keeps him at the top of his game all that and a lot more in this episode of the Big Leap.

Hi, everybody. Welcome to our Big Leap podcast. I'm really excited about this one today. Mike and I have been looking forward to our guest being on for the last few months. Mike, how are you doing?

I'm doing great. Just came back from a wonderful trip to Portugal with Vivian. Spent 10 days in absolute paradise. It's nice to be back, but what a civilized place. Really great. Some of the best wine, some of the best food I've had in years.

Wow. And you came back still fitting into your same suits and everything.

You lose weight when you're there. That's the best part is, is you're walking so much. There's so many nice things to explore between Lisbon and Lagos, and also Porto. And then we spent some time in the east part of the country, too. It was breathtaking, breathtaking.

Fantastic. Well, I want to bring in our guest today, and his name is Bill Moses, and I've known Bill for a long time, and I'll tell you how, once we get into it a little bit. But, Bill, welcome.

Thank you. Great to be here. Gay and Mike.

Yeah. One of the reasons we've been looking forward to this is I've told Mike on many occasions that you would be kind of our dream guest in a way because of the amount of bandwidth you cover. And our podcast is all about, what are the big leaps that got you here? What are the big leaps you're looking forward to taking? What are the big leaps you're afraid to take? Those kinds of. Those big moves. Most of our listeners and viewers are entrepreneurs of various kinds of. And so I want to steer the conversation in that direction because I know you've got a background in finance as well as entrepreneurship. So. So let me just bounce a big question off you first. How did you.

What was your first big leap that gave you a glimmer of what you would become? Do you remember?

Yeah, I mean, I do. You know, I was at school at the University of Virginia, and I was working towards satisfying my language requirement, and someone said to me, you know, the best way to master a language is to live overseas. So my big leap, my first big leap was coming growing up from a blue collar town in Youngstown, Ohio, being born in Homestead, Pennsylvania.

Going to Youngstown, making it as the first in my family of five kids to go to college, to get into uva, and then all of a sudden think about going up. The first in the family to go overseas ever was a big league, a big fear. And I will say that making the decision and going was a leap, but my experience there was the ultimate leap, I believe so. Yeah.

Yeah. And so.

How.

What kind of person did you become as a result of that, that you weren't before?

Yeah, no, I. You know, I. I didn't. I didn't understand that other cultures really had different core values than where I grew up. And the core value of community, the core value of, you know, the patisserie, the handmade, local, parochial sort of establishment that I experienced in Ex d' en Provence, France. The level of.

Real human interaction that really focused, again, on craft, I think was really what hit me. Coming from a McDonald's high school backdrop in Midwest. Going to a place where everything had a high level of touch and thoughtfulness really was a shift for me. It made me realize there is a quality to life and that otherwise I never really saw.

And how old were you again when that was taking place?

I think I was a junior in college, so 17, 21. I would say about 21 years old.

Yeah. And.

What was your big leap that got you into thinking about business, finance, those kinds of things? How did that move go?

Well, it's really interesting, I think, taking that experience in France and living with a garage winemaker and sampling wine as part of the dejeuner, part of the everyday experience, and that craftiness put in the back of my brain that some. I loved the idea of fermentation.

And so I was mystified by it. So that was there. So when I went back to uva, finished up my last year, graduated, I. I really had no direction. I ended up following my high school sweetheart to New York City, lived on top of McSorley Zohas on East 7th street in a flat with her. And I was. Thought I'd, you know, thought I would maybe get into theater, the arts. Looked around for a job, couldn't get one. But what really struck me was something that my father said to me, which was, why don't you go work on Wall street and learn the money game? Because once you understand how to capitalize businesses and do capital formation and business formation, you could really maybe do what you want, because you have that way in. And so I was the most unlikely person that ever thought I would go to Wall street, like coming out of France and the cultivation of cheeses and fermentation and everything that was tactile to something that's cerebral. Anyway, long story short, I ended up doing interviews and getting a job at a big company called Bear Stearns and entering that, having the. I had A lot of fear in trying to compete in that realm where I came from. But getting there, starting there, getting their training program was a major league for me, setting me up for my secular success today.

Now, here's the point. I want to drop in some biographical information that regards both of us. When I first moved to Ojai, which was about 20 years ago now, what year did you move to our little town here?

1894.

Yeah, well, you were one of the people I first heard about because you live in a beautiful estate up the hill from our house here. And people would frequently ask me, have you been up to Casa Barranca? And I would keep saying, no, but it sounds like I ought to. So eventually I wended my way up to meeting you. And then we became friends and kind of, I think, originally bonded over the subject of wine, which I was much more into then than I am now, Oddly enough. I've kind of lost my taste. I could still work up a paste for a $300 bottle, but I've lost my taste for anything south of that. So I. But that was the first thing I remember where we connected over. Now, how in the world did you get.

How did Wall street come to an end and winery and other things like that begin? And then I want to come back and add another layer to that in a minute.

Yeah, great question.

Well, so New York, Wall street.

Being able to afford wine, thinking about how do I get from this concrete jungle to a place that I experienced in France. And anyway, I made a pit stop in China in 1989, was there during the Tiananmen Square incident, doing a joint venture with the Chinese Academy of Sciences to create some new technology, the first airline reservation system in the prc. So I ended up doing a deal, doing a business deal, thanks to my Wall street experience that at 32, 33, got me out of New York through an exit, through a success, financial success, to buy the Pratt house, to buy Casa Branca and go there, end up there. And all of a sudden I had an opportunity to say, I want to. I want to relive, I want to recreate the life I experienced in college. So I planned a little vineyard, started to open, you know, built the winery out of this old 100 year old, 120 year old water cistern and began to plot my way through what I'm doing and how to do that and learn to ferment. So that was really the next big leap for me, was to leave what was really rewarding to me financially but wasn't rewarding to me. You know, inside of me, you know, I really wanted to get tactile and I really wanted to touch. I really wanted to bring a. Make a product and share it and. And have people experience something that was bigger than a dollar or their bank account. So I think that was really what drove me to make.

Sort of winery, the first organic winery in California and begin that path.

Interesting. And I was just thinking metaphorically of the whole subject of fermentation that has such a transformational.

Thing built into it.

Right. Well, I mean, you know, sure. I mean, there is. There is. I think many have said there is nothing more. There is nothing more illuminating in life than the magic and mysticism and science of fermentation. It really is quite an amazing microbiological, you know, sort of transformational experience. So it is very. It is very symbolic of what. What I wanted to do with my life and what I wanted to do and what. What I wanted to represent was happening in the global world. And so, you know, alcohol is something that could be a. Could be a good medicine or could be a good poison. And trying to toggle that line has always been part of another leap that's been defining for me, starting with Kavita.

Non alcoholic ferment.

Yes. Well, let's. Let's take another step into your bio here. What year was it that you invited me and Katie up to taste the first edition of Kavita up in your kitchen?

That's great. Yeah, that was great. So that was. That was in 2008, I believe was 2008 is when we were making it where we had in the kitchen. I had you come up, and at that time I started to open up my place for yoga retreats, meditation retreats, you know, and what I was trying to do was go through my own personal transformation of going from this Wall Street Young Turk to someone that was holistically changed. Right. Not only making something, but embodying that same transformational experience. And. Yeah, so we had a yoga retreat, and I remember having the buyer for Whole Foods up there that was on a yoga retreat, and I was tasting her, and I had the product there and I had you up, and people were saying, wow, this water kefir and this kombucha, not out kombucha was, wow, it's really good and different and what's it all about and what's it do for you and, you know, et cetera. So, yeah, that was. That was the beginning.

Yeah. So Bill invited me and Katie and a couple of other people up, and we met the brewer of this Substance, whose name, believe it or not, is Chakra Earth Song. And I thought, okay, this is kind of weird. Now I'm going up to this guy's kitchen and we're drinking this substance made from Chakra Earth Song. But once we tasted it, we said, wow, you know, it's. It's. The original Kavita is a little bit different from kombucha and has a different flavor to it, which we really liked a lot. And at the time, I hadn't even heard of kombucha or anything like that much, but now it's become a big phenomenon. So anyway, our decision was based partly on, you know, the, the product. But I never invest money in stuff. I always invest money in people. And so I'd been looking for a long time to figure something Bill and I could do together. And so I was very happy to become one of the first investors in Cavita. And we had a great ride. Bill, through his genius, Wall street genius, took us from those little bubbly.

Glasses in the kitchen there to selling the company for north of $200 million to Pepsi. That's all public record, by the way. It's. So I'm not telling any tales out of school, but to me, taking something from 0 to 60 or 0 to. To a thousand, like that was one of the most impressive things I've ever been able to see kind of from the inside. And so I wanted to.

Have Bill tell a little bit more about how do you go, what are the big leaps that go about taking something from the kitchen to something that Pepsi buys for a couple hundred million bucks?

Right? Yeah, no, sure. I mean, I think that many leaps in that journey, I think the first was finding the right partner. Right. You know, I mean, connecting with Chakra and what she had done in her kitchen with regard to the water kefir was really critical. And of course my wife Eliza introduced us. And trying to get someone of my ilk to match with someone like her was, was. It was a real journey and a real learning. And we found a way to partner. We found a way to really complement each other. And I guess, I guess in looking at that journey, the first thing that we had to sort of get over is how do we scale something that is so handcrafted? And we had to really innovate to learn how to make a fermented non pasteurized product stay of high quality and high consistency when you ship it across the country. Well, in doing so, we had a couple of challenges. And one of the challenges that was a probably the. Excuse me, the biggest leap in my Cavita journey was when we came back with some lab testing. We found out that we had E. Coli on our product. And I had some ex. Odwalla folks that were. Robert Adams, who came in and was our head of sales, became the third co founder. And we were just really convinced that it was the end of the day. We stopped shipping. We had to buy off the shelf. We were in a 911. So many of my board members were saying, time to fold the cards. We can't do anymore. This is crazy. Well, I took the ferment up, I took the. These crystals, these. These kefir water. Kefir crystals up to my winery. They were in a commercial facility down in. Down in. Down in Ventura. And what I did was really great story. I. I started to cycle them, ferment them, do all sorts of things to them. And we went through. We had committed to three cycles of trying to clean them and wash them and ozone, put ozone in them, put, you know, hydrogen peroxide, do everything we could to clean them up. And we went through the first, the second, the third, and on the third time, this was it. I get a call from Jeff Pfeiffer and Chakra. They're on the phone. They're like, bill, we got the lab results back after I said, we've got to do this one more time. And they said, e Coli, E Coli, E Coli. Every one of them was E Coli. And I just went.

And they go, oh, wait a second, no, those are last week's reports. Clean, clean, clean. And anyway, we had a moment where literally now you talk about situational irony. We really ended up with a, With. With getting the product, getting it cleaned. We hung in there, we. We pitched our tent, we didn't fold it. And we. Anyway, we got great product back to the marketplace. So that was. That was a real scare and a real challenge to continue.

So I have a bottle in my refrigerator right now. I had two bottles until today, and I drank one of them. So I still love the actual product itself. And in the spirit of transparency, I also want to say that I'm an investor in Bill's new enterprise that I wanted him to tell us about. And my only complaint so far is he wouldn't take as much money as I wanted to give him.

Well, you know, I gotta say, like, you know, and really, I think really one of the. One of the special moments in any entrepreneur's life is finding their angels. Like finding an angel is. Is not something that happens naturally. It really requires an act of God, an act of, you know. You know, it's that. It's that transformational moment. So. So you, gay and a handful of others that somehow, through some way, I found to back Kavita early on that give me the capital to try it is also a miracle in and of itself. So it's not just the idea, it's not just the execution, it's the angels, those angel investors that hopefully that great entrepreneurs find that can back them.

Well, I'm very grateful that you found me the angel.

Thank you. Thank you. Yeah.

Good. And when you survey the whole thing, going back through your whole life, can you think of any other big leaps that you took that. That we could learn from?

Well, you know, I think. Yeah, well, you know, big leaps.

You know, nothing comes to mind. There were many leaps I made. But I think really moving to Ojai, California, was a big leap. Getting out of New York City and finding a. Finding a place where transformation really happens. And, you know, few of us confined ourselves to special places, but I was really lucky and, you know, to land there as well.

So, yeah, I felt very blessed by that, too, being able to live in a transformational environment. I don't know if you know this, listeners and viewers, but our little town here has been a spiritual location for hundreds of years, going back to the Native Americans that lived in this area originally. And many of the spiritual organizations of maybe 100, 150 years ago bought land here, like the Krishnamurti Organization and Alice Bailey organization and some other big ones like that. So people have felt a pull here, which is also why the real estate prices are through the.

There is also. Thanks. Yeah, I mean, there's also one other leap that I think we had.

In the Cavita story.

And that is that we were. We really held ourselves odd as the anti kombucha. Like that kombucha stuff, it's sour. Nobody's going to go for it. We're the softer lactobacillus ferment that isn't, you know, quite as harsh. And. But what we saw was that, you know, to our surprise, the kombucha category was just on fire, on its way to be a billion dollar category. So midstream through our company, I looked at everybody and I said, let's do a kombucha. And they're like. They thought it was sacrilegious. They were like, what do you mean, a kombucha? Like, we're. We're the opposite. We're trying to. Anyway, long story short, we found a way I, you know, I worked to innovate with, with, with our team to come up with a kombucha and we then had the kombucha and the, and the water kefir and anyway, that was really interesting pivoting, being supple enough to know what you're saying you're not. Yeah, you can always become, you know.

That'S a huge leap when you go from being the anti to pro. It's. I don't know if either one of you play the game of go.

Sure, yeah, that's a go move, you know, to encircle and embrace your competitor.

Right, right. So that was, that was really, it was really opportunistic and really required a lot of selling of the board and everybody that we're going to go, go where we have claimed to be, you know, to be an opponent.

So anyway, I could hardly believe that when I first heard, heard it was happening. But I'm glad you did because that gave us more SKUs to put on the shelf.

Give us more. And then we did the apple cider vinegar line. We had three lines and we sold for PepsiCo, you know, just north of 230 million and, and with very little money invested. So we all, we all did, we all, we all reaped the rewards of that success.

Now it's great. So I've got a, a couple stories for you, Bill, or questions for you. One of them is now something that often happens to founders who have a big exit is keeping the momentum and going. So I often say there's one of three things happen to most founders. One of them is they find a way to self destruct because they're uncomfortable with their new success. So they, their subconscious takes over and they have a big loss or they get themselves in bad moral trouble or they languish and never seem to get their legs underneath them again. Which somewhere I read, I can't find the report, but it was from like Harvard Business Review or one of those big mags that essentially said founders over the age of 50 who don't reinvent and restart within 18 months have a less than 5% chance of ever having success again. Major success again. So with that interesting, what is it that keeps the fire going after a big exit and has kept you in the game versus just going away and living happily ever after or just not self destructing? What would you say attributes to that?

Yeah, that's a great story. And I think that'll lead to my final leap that I'm not sure I've made yet. But yeah, I mean, coming out of that success, so many said, I don't need to work again. I need to just enjoy family.

And be. But I could. So, I don't know, I felt a desperate fire and urge to leverage what I had, the knowledge, the success to other things. And I initially wanted to just be a private equity guy. I was hired by big private equity firm out of. Out of Santa Monica. And I headed up their CPG department. It's making seven figures, and they were looking to deploy all this money across all these brands. And I got to tell you, it was. It was exactly what I wasn't. It wasn't for me. I didn't want to work in that matrix. I didn't want. Where it was all about how much more can we extract from them. And so I, after about eight months, I left that. And I then, you know, gravitated to a couple of the brands that I knew that needed some expertise, leadership, money. And, you know, there were three or four brands that I helped.

Put together and took the founder and nurtured them and got it to a plate, got four different brands to a place where I'm on the board and an advisor, and they were. They were off and running. But I was still, like, uncomfortable. I still felt like a fish out of water because, you know, it's not mine and there's only so much I could do. And so then that's when I, I started Fermented Sciences. And I just said, you know, I've got to do something that's mine, I own, and I want to innovate something new and different in different categories. So, you know, nay, Fermented Sciences, which is the current company and business that I, That I sit on top of and, and with products that we're. That we're in market with right now. So it was just about knowing that I needed to stay relevant, knowing that for some reason. And I'm also a bit of a workaholic. I think, like. Like there's something about my deep aspiration of being in a state of deep transcendental meditation and really like, connecting with the greater power all the time. But for some reason, I couldn't really go there, you know, like I envisioned someday I would. And so my, My left brain overtook my middle eye and my right brain and ended up becoming, you know, continuing to do what I do, what I'm doing. Maybe not.

Yeah, I like to think that you've. I like to think instead of thinking of you as a workaholic, I like to think of you As a person who's tapped a deep energy source and is putting that out in all sorts of different ways. And I mentioned earlier, one of the things I most respect about you is your bandwidth. You know, to be able to turn out a great wine, you know, run a winery plus all of these other things, plus run a yoga studio and keep up with your estate. That, that's awesome to me, I've kind of gone the other way in my life, so I've gradually trimmed down to where I only own one house now, and I only have one car now, and I've kind of gone the other direction. 25 years ago we had all sorts of more stuff than we do now. And so to me, you've somehow managed though, in spite of bite of all this or in light of all this busyness you have going on, you seem to be able to. When I see you anyway, you're, you're maintaining your center. I think that's quite awesome thing. And I really appreciate that about you.

Yeah. You know, having a daily practice and trying to get to the daily practice is part of the secret. Right. You don't take some time to center in. First thing in the morning, whatever it might be. For me, I go down to the yoga studio and I have my own practice, my routine. It's hard. The other thing that's really helped me out I've been able to afford is I take a nap every day in my hyperbaric chamber here in the office. And I gotta tell you, there's something about pure oxygen, sleep and pressure that seemed to like really, really reset me midday. So not everybody is blessed or can afford such conveniences. But it's really, it's really been my secret.

Yeah, that's. We, we had one for a little while. My wife used it, she had an injury and.

We have to revisit getting one. I huge advocate. All right, here's, here's the next one. It's kind of a two parter, which would be now that you've, you know, found your thing and been able to sit inside it, the first part of the question is if you had to spend.

95% of your time or even more in your superpower, your unique ability, what would you say that is right now? How is it honed and refined over time? And how clear are you on what that is?

Yeah, that's great. I mean, I think, yeah, you know, that's a really great question. And a lot comes up for me, I think my, my superpower is connecting ideas with people.

Really. It's One thing to have an idea, it's another thing to have relationships and a network. But really ameliorating the right person with the right idea, like really curating and matching and mixing to create.

A team or to facilitate an idea or an action, I think is my superpower. And that requires heart, because you have to have a heart connection, I think, with these people to get them to believe in you and buy into you. And then you have to have the right, I guess, creative process and the right logical, I don't know. But I think that's it. Without going into what it is underlying that that makes that so. I think that's it.

I love that.

Yeah. The way we define genius around here is that the sweet spot is when you're doing something you love to do that also empowers or enlightens or gives support to other people.

Genius has that component of serving other people as well. So, yeah, I guess genius is another word for superpower. And so part of your genius bill is being able to connect ideas and people and flesh that out a little bit, feel your way into.

What other aspects of your genius.

Well, I think seeing having insights on.

A trend yet.

A trend yet to occur, like really looking at what's happening in the world or with consumers, I guess, in some consumer packaged goods, that gives me a view into what could be and what potential there is. So I think that insight on what consumer behavior.

Is occurring that could translate into a new product that would serve them, that could be a trend in the future.

So I think that's being able to see stuff that isn't there yet.

I guess that's what. That's one way.

Yeah. Yeah. What I had here is it's tapping into the ethereal of possibility, potential trends, what will become the mainstream. And I love that. That definitely. That's deep. So here's the part two question. So right now, I assume that you are spending a ton of that time in your genius zone of connecting ideas and people. What would you say is your biggest personal or professional challenge or your upper limit challenge inside of that space? Like if you feel into that, what is a challenge, a problem or a danger that you routinely find yourself bumping into that you haven't either yet solved or you're missing a right who to to help you fix it?

Well, I think that historically I have.

I. Given that I'm currently running a company, I got to be really judicious in what I say because some may read some things into it. Look, I think, look, when, when you're building A leadership team. And you're refining and curating that leadership team. I think getting, getting.

Getting alignment and building trust is something that is a work in progress for me.

Too often I will reach in and do it because I, because I think I know it or I've done it. And sometimes I think as it relates to, you know, every, every entrepreneur sort of has this, has the, has this, There's a little bit of, there's a little bit of survival that they, they experience. Like I got, you know, you, you have time and money is against you and you're in survival mode to some extent. Not where, where you just. And so you move. Entrepreneurs move with, with a passion and with a quickness and speed of light that is required to win. You can't be a dinosaur sitting back waiting for things to happen. And I know that oftentimes building great leadership teams, sometimes you bring in great leaders that have been. But the energy and the quickness and the ability to move might not be what might be required in a young developing company and a, and developing a culture. So as opposed to maybe me.

Empowering, training, aligning, I might find myself reaching through them, beneath them to do what needs to get done. Creating I think sometimes some trust issues. So that is probably been my ongoing learning on how to create alignment and trust without disruption and yet still keep a sense of urgency and a sense of drive that we don't have time to waste.

Got it. Yeah. While you were saying that that's exactly what I wrote down was this creating a common sense of urgency and values, alignment and drive. So it's interesting to listen. So something else showed up for me while you were going through that which is I think at the core of every great brand and of every great leader is first of all being really clear on.

Your non negotiable values. Right. It's the mindset that's required on a fundamental level called the operating system of the organization or the, the identity.

And when you think about like an Elon Musk, who he himself is quickly becoming a trillion dollar brand, whether you love him or hate him, most of the time when he opens up his M.O. the stock price moves mostly up. Okay, but even Steve Jobs, the soul of Steve Jobs is still part of Apple even though he's been dead for 10 years. And Steve Cook is about as charismatic as is a dead fish, in my opinion. But the, the identity lives on. Whereas when you look at a brand like AT&T or Verizon or whatever your cable company provider is, if I said, do you even care about them. And do you even know who the CEO is? And for most people they're like, I have no clue and I don't care. They're meat to me, less than meat. So with that what.

But what showed up and I'm curious what your, your perspective is, is when you create alignment, what you want to do is create an epic journey, a hero's journey that your organization can get on and feel like they're fighting a common enemy. And you've got a.

You know, the Yoda or the Gandalf or whoever the, the leader is is there for everyone as their common friend. And I'm curious if how much time you spend on the epic journey or crafting that story.

Yeah.

Wow, that's really great. You know, it's funny, we have a company senior leadership retreat coming up later this week which is. This is the guts of it. Like right. Yeah. The epic journey. There is a. I have an overview that, that when, when the, the ship, the mother ship is moving that it is. I have a view in that it is going to hit.

Storm clouds. It is going to have and the crew is going to be shaken to its core. As to whether this thing's going to crash or burn. We're going to get incredible. And in the, in the history of the brands I've been involved with, I've watched going from total elation to overconfidence of a clear visibility and trajectory to clear skies and we're going to the other side to all of a sudden being hit with a lightning storm and you're nose diving from 38,000ft and the oxygen masks are popping out because you don't know what to do. You're grasping for air. And the one thing I think that I so having that overview that, that journey to wherever, to that promised land or wherever that vision is you're going to go is going to be full of that. And this piece of two things that I think are three things that brings this leadership team and concept all together is I just interviewed a guy who was with one of the largest craft brewers in America and he's very high level guy there and he. And he's thinking about coming to this little brand and one of the things I said to him is that there's three things that we. You really need to have. You need to have no fear. You really need to really know that you could, you could withstand the journey. And the other two pieces of the core value that I want to bring in is that there's got to be total transparency and the total permission to debate so that you're clear, you're open, you're open, and you're safe to debate whatever might come up in a. So that we could all align and make sure we have all hands on the right instrumentation or.

All hands and all things pointed in the right direction. So.

So anyway, I don't know if I answered your question around the overview of the journey, knowing what we're going to go through and what it takes when the people in the cockpit, the people that are driving the ship, what they need to do and employ in order for us to withstand the vicissitudes of one ride that few can endure. So.

Yeah, you have to go in being willing to be surprised. And yeah, Eric Erickson, a great developmental psychologist at Harvard, once said that every breath you take after the age of 50 is a choice between creativity or stagnation. Creativity or stagnation.

Right. That's a.

You've been taking some good breaths for a long time, Bill. We're going to be wrapping up here in a moment, but I want to appreciate you so much for sharing your wisdom. And we may want to. Once feedback from this session comes in, we may want to request another go around because I know a lot of people are going to have questions and comments and thoughts of what we've been talking about. Really stimulating.

Well, thank you, Mike. Thank you, Gay, for the opportunity to share a little bit of my little. My experience.

Oh, that's great. Do you have an ask for our audience or somewhere you want to send them to to stay in touch with you, learn more, or follow your journey, your epic journey?

Well, I mean, I probably, my, my LinkedIn account, you know, it's probably where most of my stuff gets expressed. So it's just, you know, Bill Moses or Fermented Sciences Bill Moses. I'm, I'm on LinkedIn and.

I post a lot of things that I think are relevant to what we're talking about today.

Great.

I'll make sure that's in the show notes so we'll definitely get everyone in there. And I've followed you, so this is fantastic. Gay, do you have any.

Last thoughts before we wrap this one up?

Yes. One thing that people like Bill Moses can inspire us with is dedication and being able to get back up out of the ditch when you've been thrown at it and get back up again when you've ended up in the ditch again. And just keep your eyes focused on the goal and keep the team mobilized with you. And good stuff, Bill. And my big takeaway I would say from this session is that. Yeah, it is that. That ability to come back from being. Having the crap knocked out of you and get back on it again. Because that. That sort of thing, every business thing I've ever been in had a moment when it could have all fallen apart. And being able to negotiate through those places is how you get to be a guy like Bill.

Yeah.

No, it's fantastic. Well, we can officially wrap this episode up. So first of all, if you've enjoyed it, make sure you leave a comment on Apple or on itunes or send us some feedback on all of our. Any of our social channels or just go over to bigleappodcast.com and you can message Gay and I directly. But we'd love to hear your feedback on this episode with Bill Moses. And there are links to Bill's LinkedIn and his business website in the show notes. So with that, this is another episode of the Big Leap. Thanks for listening. Thanks for watching. We'll see you in the next one.

Sam.