A Renaissance Man From Street Life to Success - The Inspiring Journey of a Former Fortune 100 Leader - Guy Morris : 111

This is a journey with Guy Morris, a former Fortune 100 business leader with a past you won't believe. He is opening up about his life story. He reveals the tale of a 13-year-old boy who fled home and became homeless. He battled mental health issues, addiction, and living on the streets. The story shifts from a painful journey of homelessness to a life of purpose, demonstrating the power of resilience and the importance of never giving up, no matter the odds.

Guy Morris has had a distinguished career spanning 36 years as a leader in the software, high-tech, and global energy sectors. In addition to his professional achievements, he has pursued many other interests. Guy has written songs for Disney Records, written screenplays for Sojourn Entertainment, holds a patent for his inventions, and is a licensed Coast Guard charter captain and a certified PADI diver and adventurer. Today, he is an accomplished author and publisher of intelligent, well-researched thrillers.

Guy's life proves you can rise from the rubble and create a legacy. Through conversations, we follow Guy's remarkable transition from a struggling student to an ace scholar, uncovering his keen interest in the sciences and the philosophy of the Renaissance. Alongside these personal revelations, he shares the excitement of his daring journey into writing a historical novel that unravels a centuries-old mystery involving a real-life pirate and a lost city.

Prepare for an episode packed with resilience, discovery, and inspiration.

To learn more about all his fascinating THRILLERS books: https://www.guymorrisbooks.com/

Transcript

Daniela SM: 0:08

Hi, I'm Daniela. Welcome to my podcast, because everyone has a story, the place to give ordinary people, stories, the chance to be shared and preserved. Our stories become the language of connections. Let's enjoy it, connect and relate because everyone has a story. Welcome my guest, guy Morris, a Renaissance man, former Fortune 100 business leader and an author with many other talents.

Daniela SM: 0:42

He shares his story of running away from home at the age of 13 and becoming homeless. He struggles with mental health issues, addictions and living on the streets, but his journey didn't end there. In fact, it is just the beginning of a fascinating tale of perseverance and self-discovery. Eventually, he found his fate, became a father and transitioned from a struggling student to an outstanding scholar and then a leader. He discovered his passion for science and the philosophy of the Renaissance and he persevered through difficult times to find his purpose in life. Guy's story is a testament to the power of resilience, emphasizing the importance of never giving up and taking care of your mental health Very important. Let's enjoy Guy's story. Welcome, guy, to the show. Friendship, matthew, a beer. And so, guy, you said when we met that you usually don't share much about yourself. You just talk about specific topics, and you are a writer of many books now and have been in many podcasts. I appreciate that you decided to share your story here. Why is it wrong?

Guy Morris: 1:58

It's not an easy decision for me.

Guy Morris: 2:00

I do some learning to somewhat get out of my way, as I explained to you at one point that I've been in business Fortune 100 business leadership positions for close to 40 years before I retired, and in those kind of positions the last thing you do as a leader is talk about yourself.

Guy Morris: 2:19

You talk about the company. You talk about the team, the great team you have. You talk about the great products you have. You talk about your great customers. You talk about things that you can get other people to identify with, to help them feel enthusiastic and motivate it to basically be working up scene hours that nobody would ever work unless they're feeling that it's really worthwhile. And there's also an element as a leader that you don't want to show weakness. If you knew that the leader of your company had dealt with mental illness, if he had dealt with depression, if he had dealt addictions, if he had dealt with any sort of those kind of traumas in your life, you start to question their ability to make rational judgments. You start to infer that those things are affecting their ability to do their job whether it is or not, and I was a highly functional, dysfunctional person.

Guy Morris: 3:10

I could be brilliant in the office and I could be a complete wreck at home, but you don't want to let that out, and so I've spent 40 years keeping most of my internal struggles as internal, as a secret inside myself and maybe with my counselor or one or two friends, and that was the absolute limit I could go. So learning to share my story with others. I'm new at it and I'm still uncomfortable with it, but I'm learning to try and get out of my own way, because I've heard that other people find value in that story.

Daniela SM: 3:43

That's interesting what you're saying. I mean, maybe in your times people were more into don't be yourself. Pretend that everything is okay when it's not, but don't you think that now things have changed, that morbid ability actually makes you more likable within limits, right In the context of a Fortune 100 position.

Guy Morris: 4:05

I still think it's extremely dangerous to be that transparent about your weaknesses and struggles. I think to be likable in that scenario and I was like. I had lunch a few weeks ago with somebody I hired into Microsoft probably close to 20 years ago and she actually lasted longer at Microsoft than I did. But she often mentions to other people that I was one of her favorite bosses and I ran the best team she ever worked on. And it's because people will like you if you're honest. They'll like you if you have show integrity. They'll like you if you're kind. They'll like you if you treat them with respect and listen to hear them out, where problems aren't something that you yell at them about, but problems are things that you join with them to solve, because all businesses have problems, all jobs have problems.

Guy Morris: 4:58

If you start beating people over the head because something went wrong, you're never going to get anywhere because they're going to second guess themselves the last time.

Guy Morris: 5:05

But if they know that you're going to have their back, if, as a team, you know that if something goes wrong, that you're going to take the bullets for the team, those are the things that you do to get well liked and well respected.

Guy Morris: 5:17

Telling everyone that got to take time off to go to rehab isn't one of the things that will make you like, as I said, in that kind of environment, which is a real hyper competitive environment, I can't tell you how many times that I took a job because nobody else thought that they could be successful at that job, and when I made it to success, I couldn't tell you how many times everybody wanted to have my job.

Guy Morris: 5:42

In those situations I think even today that corporate mentality still holds. I think in other fields of you know, obviously, like in the entertainment field, people almost expect entertainers to be dysfunctional. So it's not that big a deal there for them to be that even a little bit transparent. And even there you'll see that a lot of celebrities will deal with these things in silence until it comes out and then where they have to deal with it, I think, while there are some a general level of increase in sensitivity to the issues that are affecting many people in the nation, such as addictions, mental illness, childhood trauma, ptsd which is when I grew up, nobody ever talked PTSD Even so, I still think that for those who have a professional career, that's a very sensitive and dangerous topic to broach outside of the corporate context.

Daniela SM: 6:38

Interesting. Thank you for sharing that, Guy. When does your story start?

Guy Morris: 6:42

Well for me? I like to. I think I, at least in my own mind. I tell people that my own story started as a 13 year old homeless runaway and I was. I worked alongside migrant workers to eat, I slept under bridges and behind back seats of cars and open doorways or hallways for apartments, any place I could find that was dry and warm, until I would typically be kicked out. And I did that for several months until I had an opportunity to go home, briefly enough, where it was safe enough for me to get a GED at 15. And then I basically at 15, I packed a little tiny duffel bag which is all I really of, everything I really own that was worth anything, and I had a guitar that was in a cardboard box and I had it taped up with a handle and I hitchhiked to Tucson, arizona, where I'm trying to come, and that was the beginning of what I call my journey.

Daniela SM: 7:32

You have siblings. Do you left your siblings in your mom and your dad?

Guy Morris: 7:35

My oldest brother had already moved out several years before that. He moved out at 16 and a couple years later joined the Navy. He was gone already and also he left because of a lot of the same abuse and going on my younger brother. I did feel for a very long time.

Guy Morris: 7:51

I felt a lot of guilt that I left my younger brother in that environment. It didn't turn out too bad for him because a year later I spent most of my life wanting to go live with my dad instead of my mom and was always told no. But I think after I left I suspected that my mom just got tired of trying and she basically sent my younger brother to live with my dad, even though my dad had his own issues. It wasn't the same as the home that we were in. So, yeah, there was some guilt involved initially in doing that, but for me it was a survival. You know on the airplanes where they say, put oxygen on yourself first before you take care of somebody else, I couldn't help him anymore until I got to a better place.

Daniela SM: 8:31

So you were 15 and you left.

Guy Morris: 8:33

I was 15 when I finally left. I turned 16, living on my own, worked any job I could get parking cars, digging ditches, I worked at a steel manufacturing company, I worked for an Amish contractor and I did all the dirty work. I drove trucks and delivered produce in the middle of the night to hotels and restaurants. I pretty much did anything I had to do and most of them were fairly low paying, you know dead-end jobs, until I got a chance to go to college.

Daniela SM: 9:01

And at the meantime that you were working these jobs, you were sleeping on the street.

Guy Morris: 9:05

No, after I left at 15 with a GED, I was in a commune for about three or four months and then I got a job outside the commune and got a roommate. I basically rented a room in a trailer from another guy who I was working with parking cars. At that point I was off the street, I was making enough money that I could, you know, rent a room and then, until I could basically rent my own place they weren't glamorous, they were pretty seedy places in some pretty bad parts of town, but they were mine and I didn't have any furniture. But I had, I had, I was. I wasn't in an environment where I could be beaten or humiliated or threatened, and so that was was a transition. You know, from then on, I was basically I paid for myself. I had my own places, my own cars. I never took money from anybody, except on one occasion, which was to go to school. You know, and to a great extent I've been on my own since I was 13.

Guy Morris: 10:07

Because even when I was home for a year to get my GED, I worked. We were poor. If I wanted to buy clothes, I had to work. If I wanted to buy school lunches, I had to work. If I wanted to go someplace with friends, I had to. I had to pay for it myself.

Guy Morris: 10:21

Even for that short period of time when I was home, I was still very much independent and self-sufficient. And I learned that on the street that even though I was young and I couldn't go rent any place, there was no way I could rent something and no one was going to rent a 13, to a 13-year-old kid because that would bring legal consequences for them. So I slept wherever I had to sleep and then I worked in order to eat. Migrant worker jobs are very typical. You know, you get up at four o'clock in the morning, you can stand by a particular street corner by five o'clock and they'll typically send some flatbed trucks to pick up as many workers as you can get on the truck soon. So you had to jump on the truck fast to get your spot. They take you remotely someplace out in the middle of the Southern California ranch land.

Guy Morris: 11:07

You'd be dropped off at a ranch and they wouldn't come pick you up, basically until you were done, which was oftentimes 11 o'clock midnight. So we would work from early morning to late at night and then we'd go home and basically catch a couple hours of sleep and have to do it again. Obviously very, very difficult work from a physical perspective and an emotional perspective, but at the same time it taught me a level of self-reliance and perseverance and the willingness to basically engage in hard work and not be afraid. So for that I'm grateful, for that.

Daniela SM: 11:38

Were any moments that you could have gone the wrong way drugs, alcohol, delinquency Well, I definitely had drug problems for a long time and alcohol problems.

Guy Morris: 11:48

I was drinking it by age 11 because of my home environment. It was clean for a few years after I became a Christian at one point. I didn't know I had PTSD for my childhood but I had what's called complex PTSD and I would struggle with the symptoms of it for decades until it was finally diagnosed to my fifth. You know it's like when a doctor is trying to solve, cure something, but they're not really sure what's wrong. It's a lot of hit and miss, it's a lot of guesswork and that was kind of. I went to 12 step programs. I had counselors who are largely worthless in terms of solving the real issues. There was a couple of years, a few years, where I read nothing but self-help books to try and understand what was going on.

Guy Morris: 12:26

When I reached my late 20s, early 30s, I knew that my alcoholism and my drug addiction and my other addictions were undermining my success, my successes in other realms, and so I had to again. I could never go to my boss and say, hey, I've got to take some time off to deal with this person on the show. That would have been the end of my career. I had to deal with it on my own. When I went from homeless to going to college. I saw it as my chance to change my stars. I saw it as my one and only opportunity to not let my past define my future and to that if I could learn new skills and that was not just job skills but interpersonal skills and relationship skills and all the things that normal kids learn in a healthy environment If I could learn some of those things, I could change the trajectory of my life with a fear that I was going to end up like my mother.

Guy Morris: 13:17

Those were all definite issues. I definitely had to struggle with every single one of them Multiple times. I would be successful, then I would fail, then I'd have to get up and start again. I had the restart, reboot kind of problem that a lot of people have, where it's easier just to give up at times than to keep struggling with those internal issues that are painful and difficult and crippling at times. But it was the giving up that one person told me says failure is not when you fail. Failure is only when you give up. I somehow found the courage to get up and keep trying, even when I failed on multiple occasions. It was always a bit of ability to say, okay, well, tomorrow's a new day, we'll start again.

Daniela SM: 14:02

Wow, wonderful that you have the persistence and that strength, mindset strength.

Guy Morris: 14:07

I don't normally know that I can take credit for it. I know that I had no other options and I had been. It wasn't like I had to say, well, I can failure, maybe I'll end up as a homeless person. It's like, well, I'd already been homeless and I knew that it didn't matter what it took. I couldn't go back to where I was. I only had the option to go forward or to basically stall and rot where I was. I never felt courageous for most of my life. I felt desperate. I felt determined. I felt that I had no other viable choices other than to forge on.

Daniela SM: 14:44

But you did as you said. You either move forward or you stay there, and you actually chose the moving forward. Yeah, Maybe you didn't know. You were courageous, you were surviving, but you chose something to get out of where you were.

Guy Morris: 14:57

I knew I could give up, but if I gave up, I would become. There's no time where you basically stay static. If you give up in that kind of situation, you fall backwards, and falling backwards was the pain that I had already experienced, pain that I didn't want to experience anymore, and so, for me, I felt like I had to move forward.

Daniela SM: 15:17

And I had a son.

Guy Morris: 15:18

He was getting to the age where he was starting to notice that dad had issues, and so I felt like it was the only thing. The best thing I could do for him was not to tell him do as I say, not as I do, but to change what I do and to change my style, to basically show him that even a man with problems can you can't change who you are until you face who you are, and I had to do that, even if not even for myself. I also had him to think about.

Daniela SM: 15:48

So, going back, you decided to go to college. What is it that you studied?

Guy Morris: 15:52

At first I didn't know. I was told to go to college actually in prayer one day, and that was a really radical, weird day. I was working a really long 12, 14 hour day, six days a week, was exhausted all the time. It was a very physical job. We were going to prayer because at the time a good quote, unquote good Christian husband didn't make his wife work. So I wanted to send her to work just long enough so I could quit my job, long enough to actually go interview for another job, because I couldn't go interview when I would you know, I'd get off work at eight or nine o'clock at night and so I couldn't even interview for another job until I quit my job. But I couldn't afford to just quit. So we were praying and I felt probably one of the only two, maybe three times my entire life. I really felt that I was being spoken to outside of any context of anything I can imagine. I felt that I was supposed to go to school. I even got told I was supposed to get up right that minute, call the university, ask for an application. I was going to go to school.

Guy Morris: 16:48

Now this was incredible. My first thought was what? I'm functionally illiterate? I didn't finish high school, I didn't take SAT scores. School is for rich kids who work hard and got good grades. I said there's no way I'm going to get accepted. And so when I had to declare my major in my application, I did a point and I looked down and I said what does an electrical engineer do? I actually picked electrical engineering, even though I was 28 units short of the minimum requirements to get in the program. They let me in.

Daniela SM: 17:20

Wow.

Guy Morris: 17:22

Now, when they let me in, my first thought was holy cow, they'll let anybody in. I thought school was for smart people. I said I'm as dumb as they come. I said it just shows, the goes to show they'll let anybody in. But I think it was some kind of miracle.

Guy Morris: 17:33

The very next day and I actually, when I got my acceptance letter through the trash because they still didn't have any money, I still had to go to work I still didn't have to solve the basic problem. Until the very next day, I got a letter from my father-in-law, who was very concerned that I couldn't provide for his daughter the way that she deserved and that he wanted to encourage me to improve myself. If I were willing to work to support our needs, he would be willing to pay for my tuition and books. I hadn't told anybody that I had put in the application to the university because I thought it would just be an embarrassment when they told me no or when they said yes and I said well, gee, they said yes, but I clearly can't go anyway. So I never told anybody Okay, let's do this not even my dearest friend. And so this was a real big shock to me and it was a sign to me that that was what I was supposed to do.

Guy Morris: 18:19

While I struggled for the first few years trying to figure out what I was supposed to study and actually passing classes, I was probably sleeping, maybe an average of four hours a night. I'd work in the evenings. I'd go to school during the day. I'd come home, fix dinner, do a couple hours of study before I'd go to work. It was a cycle six, seven days a week and I was constantly exhausted.

Daniela SM: 18:44

You were married and have kids.

Guy Morris: 18:45

By that point I had gotten married, I was 19, and my wife got pregnant right away, neither of which were really necessarily planned, and so I was a little bit overwhelmed at the time. And she was not only that, it was, she was anorexic. So she was, she was really ill. We had to put her in the hospital twice during all this time because she had gotten down to like 78 pounds or something. That was really scary, and so, yeah, there was a lot of stresses, but ultimately I graduated with multiple degrees.

Guy Morris: 19:17

I was at the top of the Dean's List, I got a full scholarship to go to grad school in Arizona and then I separately I got accepted into the Harvard MBA program. Harvard was too expensive for me. I couldn't figure out how I'd borrow or get that much money. Just being accepted was a great honor. I had multiple degrees. One of them was economics, and I had to build a macroeconomic model to graduate. My model was innovative in that because I based it on a theory that I had developed that was unproven. That model outperformed the Federal Reserve, outperformed all the major banks in the nation, outperformed every other university in the nation. Basically, I blew everybody away by a wide margin. I was one tenth of one percent off the the actual numbers. That caught the attention of everybody and so that got me into grad school. And grad school got me my first job at IBM and from there I had amazing jobs, amazing career, because I had listened to a prompting in prayer that made no sense at all Guy, you're gonna go to school. It's like right.

Guy Morris: 20:19

I was so affected by my youth that that the local church, my nickname, was punk because of my scraggly clothes and my, my sarcastic anti-establishment attitude, my long hair and just the underlying aftermath of growing up on the streets. To say that punk had to go to college was like no, no, something's wrong with this. But it turned out that, even though I had been told my entire life that I was unbelievably dumb, that I was unbelievably stupid, that I was worthless, that I was all of these things which I heard every single day growing up, I had a certain type of it was almost autistic. If you put me in a room full of people, I'm socially autistic. I can't. I don't know. I'm a quiet, I isolate.

Guy Morris: 21:09

I've gotten better over the years with training and experience, but certainly at that time I couldn't barely function in a social environment. But if you gave me a complex model or complex problem to solve, I somehow figured out a way to solve it. So that skill led me through a career of constantly being the leading edge guy, innovating new technologies in the business, and because I had come from a scenario where I had to risk everything in order to move forward. Unlike most of the people that I worked with, who came from very well-established families, they were good middle class, upper middle class families. They didn't want to take risks, they just wanted that slow, steady career and they had the charisma. They were on the football team, they were the football captain, so it was always about the schmooze for them.

Guy Morris: 22:00

I had a reputation for being the guy who would take the job that nobody else wanted, because everybody else had failed at it or nobody else could figure out how that would possibly succeed. I was told more than once that okay, guy, we're going to give you this job. You're going to get to create your own team, you'll get to write your own job description, but if you fail, that'll probably be the end of your career. Are you sure you want this job? Once I was successful, then of course, everybody wanted my job. That started that trend in my whole career of being the guy willing to take risks. I think to some extent there was a part of me that still felt out of place, that still felt like I didn't belong, that still felt like I had to prove myself. I didn't have the family schmooze and the family connections to just get away with the easy path. I had to take the hard path in order to stand out from everybody else.

Daniela SM: 22:49

Well, also back in your mind. You probably had all those words that were said to you when you were little. I'm curious about how you got some to good grades. What is it that it made you like when you're working really hard, it was easy for you. What was in school that it made you shine that way?

Guy Morris: 23:06

Well, as I said, for the first couple of years I struggled just to pass. And then something happened. It was my reading skills. Something finally clicked my study skills. I don't really know exactly what it was, but I went from getting Cs and Ds to getting Bs and as to getting. By the time I was done it was basically straight A's. One was I started finding fields that I could really identify with and had a knack for finance, economics, business administration, computers, electrical engineering. The level of math that started just was way above my level when I started, Because I had the ability to kind of see an argument that the professor was making and then sit down and say no, wait a minute, let me ask you a question what about this and how this works?

Guy Morris: 23:51

Oftentimes, apparently, there were pretty good questions, but I'd asked so many. I actually had one of the professors the dean of the college, who was one of my professors a few weeks into the class my first class with him. He says I know what type you are. You're the type that wants to have so many things going on in your head. You just have to ask. You get three questions per class. So if you use up your three questions, that's it. You can't ask any more questions until the next class where you have to make an appointment with me. So he would constantly hold me to that. So I would raise up my hand and he says sure this is, you've already got two. You sure you want to use up your number three? You want to wait for me to end the class first and then ask your third, or you want to basically blow it now, and he would challenge me. It was that ability to kind of look at the things and say wait a minute, this doesn't make sense. What about this, what about that? How does this fit? How does that fit? And I was constantly working out. Well, I know that I didn't do it intentionally.

Guy Morris: 24:45

At that point, though, by the time I got to my last part of college, I had gone from struggling just to survive to motivated and excited about the process of learning. To me, I was unlocking the secrets of the universe. I was learning how the real world works, how the world economy works, how politics work. I was actually, rather than being one of those dumb guys that sits in front of their television and believes whatever the television host will tell them, I was becoming the guy that said oh no, that's a bunch of bologna, that's really false theory, that's never been proven. The real truth is this and that that was a really fascinating transition for me.

Guy Morris: 25:24

That was also the time when I started learning to love to read. I had never read novels before because I was functionally illiterate, and so I was learning to read the classics and that was exciting me to get all of these philosophies and all of this education and the history and the economics and the current events and the sciences. I flourished in that and I became inspired by stories of men of the Renaissance and men of the Renaissance. What inspired me about them was that men of the Renaissance were expected to be not just an artist but religious, familiar with religion, familiar with politics and trade, business, familiar with engineering and sciences and architecture, and so they were expected to be.

Guy Morris: 26:08

If you were men of the Renaissance, you were a man who could do a good job at lots of things, and you might have this one or two field where you stood out above the others.

Guy Morris: 26:18

Most of the time, we know them from their art. But there were men of the Renaissance who were incredible architects, who were incredible businessmen, who were incredible cartographers, who basically started saying, no, this is what the world really looks like. It was such a revolutionary period across a number of fields. I found myself attracted to being like that, to want it to be a man of the Renaissance, a modern man of the Renaissance, where I wanted to study the sciences and some of my friends were astrophysicists. On our off times, when I couldn't study economics anymore, We'd have coffee and he'd tell me about black holes and any quantum technologies and all of these other things that just were, honestly, some of it was over my head, but it was still fascinating, and so that began a whole lifetime of not wanting to waste any time being entertained when I could be spending that time growing and learning and expanding myself, and so it wasn't something that I wanted to do, it was something that I changed into being, and I just accepted that part of that being as something good.

Daniela SM: 27:23

How interesting. The man of the Renaissance. Thank you for sharing that. And, guy, how is it that you became a Christian?

Guy Morris: 27:29

When I was at home briefly, from being homeless to running away again. I'm not a tall man, I'm a fairly short guy, and when I was young I was skinny as a rail. So I was a little skinny, toothpick nerd kid that didn't have any social skills and everything else, and so I was a magnet for bullies. They were like, if I'm going to pick on anybody, it's going to be that little limp over there. But on the streets I had learned to defend myself and so oftentimes, if somebody were to come and pick on me, there was at least two or three times when I would fight back and do something like break their nose I would get suspended from school because I defended myself in an overly vigorous way. I had been suspended from school, just bought myself a new shirt and new pair of pants. Both of them had blood stains all over them.

Guy Morris: 28:17

I was walking home from school. What we used to call at the time, what I used to call Jesus freak guy basically long hair kind of hippie kind of guy basically saw me going home to school from school in the middle of the day. He was on the other side of the street. He backed up and came around me and started catching up with me from behind Now on the street. That was not something that you felt comfortable with. You'd never want somebody behind you gaining on you in an intentional way. I didn't know what he had planned. I didn't know what he wanted. Even if it was just a talk, I wasn't in the mood. He caught up with me and my first response was to turn him around, grab his shirt, pull back my fist and said you better be important or I'm going to punch you in the face Instead of arguing with me or fighting back. He lowered his head and he started praying and that just caught me off guard and something happened in me. I can't explain it. Everything in my life at that point was going to crap Every relationship, every family member, everything I tried. I just there was a spark in me that said I need it to change something in my life, and at that point there was a willingness to say well, this might be it. And I was sitting this I want sitting on the street gutter. It's a dirty street gutter in Chino, california. I was ruining my backside of my pants, but that would didn't matter, because the front's already ruined blood stains.

Guy Morris: 29:33

Never gone to church, except for a short period of time in New Jersey when my stepdad, who was Italian Catholic, forced me to go to catechism. He was actually part of the mafia, so New Jersey, and so he was getting pressured by the other mafia that his new wife with and her bastard children basically her unsaved heathen children had to go to catechism to become good Catholics. And good Catholic meant that you'd go rob a train during the day and go to confession Once a month, and you were okay. While I was in catechism, one of these bullies that seemed to gravitate towards me poured a cold drink down my back. At that point I he'd been tormenting me for months. I'd had enough. I picked up my folding chair, I folded it and I slapped them across the face and I got kicked out of catechism. Other than that, I'd never been to church.

Guy Morris: 30:21

This was a radical decision for me, and again I had a history of making really risky choices, because I just needed to know that I needed to move forward somehow and I was willing to take the chance. He gave me his Bible. I started reading what I could read. I couldn't. There's a lot I couldn't read. He told me not to start in the beginning but to start the Gospels. That helped. A few weeks after that, I hitchhiked to a church on the coast called Calvary Chapel at the time. And then what? That was why, when I was 15, when I left home, I hitchhiked and joined a commune it's a Christian commune Even though I was only at the commune for about three months because I had so many social disorders. I felt being in a group of people, sleeping with a group of people. I couldn't ever feel safe around a group, around others, and so I was like ants crawling on my skin. So after about three months I got a job and moved out, but I kept in contact with those people and they became many of my closest friends.

Daniela SM: 31:19

So you will say that it really really helped you to have gotten there.

Guy Morris: 31:23

Oh yeah, learning this, spiritual truths that had been true for 4,000 years. People say did you grow up in the church? I said no, I grew up in bars. Church was a choice to get out of bars. I would listen and again like listen with a very critical ear. So I would sometimes hear Hypocracies, I would sometimes hear other things, but I would hear enough truth and enough things about myself that said, well, I want to change that part about myself. Here's a template on how to do that, or here's a example of what I should be.

Guy Morris: 31:51

It helped me get through areas of forgiveness.

Guy Morris: 31:53

It helped me to get past bitterness.

Guy Morris: 31:56

It helped me to establish some level of hope that life can change, not just because I was gonna do it, but because if I could believe that somehow there was a higher being that cared for me, that would make a difference.

Guy Morris: 32:09

And when I had the school experience basically this prayer saying you're gonna go to school and then getting actually getting admitted and you have to know that when I made that phone call it was a month before school was gonna start that semester. So another reason why there was absolutely no way they were gonna let me in and school they'd already gotten their roster of students for that semester, how and why they let me in, given all the units I was deficient and no SAT scores and nothing else so close to the semester start. I still to this day have no idea how that happened, but it did and that gave a foundation for me in a lot of ways to my faith, because it wasn't something wasn't me just getting up in the middle of the night to go to work and work hard. It wasn't just dumb luck, it was something beyond dumb luck that got me there. It fed my faith. But it was that faith that really kind of held me together at times when I wanted to give up to say, well, I really I can't.

Daniela SM: 33:02

For that, among the other reasons, so you were taking care of your spiritual power. Intellectually you were growing. And then what? You decided to also grow muscles, and nobody picked on you anymore.

Guy Morris: 33:13

Yeah, actually, when I was, and when I got out of school and I got the gym because I was really kind of skinny and muscleless but I was always sort of a skinny, scrawny guy. I'm a little bit pudgy now I used to say that I'm not strong and tough. But if you're gonna bother punching at me and you know you're gonna really kind of threaten me with violence. I was just a vicious little badger. Like I said, I wouldn't just, you know, hold up my fist and say, go ahead and try and punch me. I would throw dirt in their face, I'd kick them, I'd put my belt around their neck, I would shove a folded up chair into their face. I held one guy over a chain link fence by by his neck.

Guy Morris: 33:52

There was a one rule that my older brother taught me. My older brother was a boxer. He says you're pretty little, so if you hit once, you're gonna have to hit really hard, or they're gonna want to hit back. So and you have to give them a reason not to want to mess with you anymore. Until they get that reason, you're just gonna antagonize them. I learned that if I was gonna fight back, I had to fight back with a level of intensity that they almost never expected, if I wanted to keep them from tormenting me on a daily basis. To be honest, I hated that part of myself. I hated that part of my youth. I'm a really gentle, peaceful guy. Anybody who knows will know that I'm nonviolent. I will never own a gun because of gun violence in my home.

Guy Morris: 34:32

When I was a kid, while I was on the street, that was one of the things I had to learn, which was, if I was going to survive, I could not be passive. I never started a fight. I never picked on anybody. I never called names or taunted anybody. My mother has the ability, had a sharp tongue so much that she could make a sailor cry. I inherited her ability to insult people in a very rapid way, and, and so most of the time, these bullies were unintellectual enough to know what I just said. Yeah, it wasn't something I was proud of, but it was something I had to learn to do and then, as soon as I could get to a point in my life when I never had to worry about ever raising my hand to anybody ever again, that was a good day. I never glorified the ability to fight. It was something you had to do to survive, and beyond that there was no use for it all.

Daniela SM: 35:23

Yeah, survival, that's true. That's true. They went through a lot, and so what happened after you finish University? People noticed you and then well.

Guy Morris: 35:32

It started a 36 year career in 4 to 100 companies. I worked with VPs. I worked with CXOs. I worked with leading tech-deadge technologies. I introduced computers into the organization computer modeling, the internet, artificial intelligence, cloud computing. I was always working on something new and Finding the way of how to implement it into an organization that could make make sense and make money. I got really good at that. I became a thought leader. I was constantly in and VP and CXOs offices. I rode corporate jets when I traveled. They kept me at the best hotels and best restaurants, and so it was really good career. I did some startups, some of them successful, others Flaming failures. It wasn't until my 50s when I left Microsoft and start.

Guy Morris: 36:19

I started a company in my late 50s where Probably was. It was also at the crash of 2009 2010. So it was the wrong time to start a company. It failed.

Guy Morris: 36:29

At that point I had been diagnosed with PTSD, so there was a part of me that wanted to get out of my high-pressure jobs which were not helping my PTSD. I didn't realize that I was, that all that stress was Adding to the the problems of addictions and other things. When I once I realized and it came to accept what the PTSD was. And then it wasn't something I could just fix in a few weeks, that I needed to make some lifestyle changes and that was started. That started the path to me and where decided to go to early retirement. And so, once I had enough money to retire and we bought a house out here in the Puget Sound, I decided to retire. But my mind still is very, very active.

Guy Morris: 37:11

Becoming an author was a way for me to continue to it was what I call my third act career and continue to be intellectually stimulated, because all of my books require deep research. I have boxes and stacks of paper research so I typically spend anywhere from two to up to ten years in research on a book. That intellectual stimulation of learning something new and connecting the dots and finding those really unique, rarely heard of truths that become really cool premises for a book keeps me stimulated. Learning how to be a great author Now, most of my career I've been writing, but if you wrote an executive more than a single page, he wasn't going to read it. So most of my career was how to condense down to the shortest possible bullet points and one pager and if I had to write a proposal or a policy statement. If that went over 30 pages it was too long, and so I learned to write things very concisely about things, but not necessarily dealing with characters and motivations and emotions and thoughts and stories and lots. And so learning how to transition into a great novelist was also again, it was. It was a great Renaissance man learning experience for me, and so I actually hired.

Guy Morris: 38:27

I wrote my first book. It took me 10 years to finish the research, never four or five years to write the book, in part because I had been working all those years. But when I finished it I hired a top-notch professional developmental editor. They used to work for Simon Schuster, now she works for Amazon and I said okay, I want you to hire you to go through this. Consider this book my masterclass. I think there's a great story here, but I'm not sure that I'm a great author. So I need you to rip it up, tear it apart and then give me a plan of how to stitch myself back together in a Frankenstein kind of way. God bless her.

Guy Morris: 39:03

She did exactly what I asked for. She gave me 44 pages of notes, hand type written notes of things I needed to either learn or change or do differently and classes I need to take and books I needed to read and problems I was doing consistently and my major weaknesses. And then marked up just about every page of the manuscript with examples and then how to use and what to change. And after reading that my first thought was, oh Lord, I suck. But it took me about a week to get over the I suck. You know, kind of feeling sorry for myself, thinking well, maybe this isn't something I should be doing. I thought, well, you know, I've sucked before at things and I only got better by working harder at it. So let's, let's just take it one page at a time. Start with page one, let's start with whatever I'm supposed to do. And I spent a year going through everything she asked for me to do, rewriting it about another year after that to actually have a finished product.

Guy Morris: 39:58

That book, which is called the Curse of Cortez, was listed booktrip, which is Barnes Noble's consumer reader community, was listed booktrip's favorite 25 books of 2021. They called it Indiana Jones meets DaVinci Code. Another reviewer said this book is perfection. It was compared to Dan Brown, iris Johansson. One book reviewer said this is Indiana Jones. I think Indiana Jones meets DaVinci Code. Amazing reviews. All because I was willing again to basically take the risk of writing and then take the risk of having somebody rip me up and tear me apart, so I could figure out how to do it better.

Daniela SM: 40:33

And work hard. I work hard yeah, the interesting part is that, yes, you, you came from doing something completely different. You're managing people, solving problems, writing in short, concise ways, and now you decide I'm gonna write a book in heavy research. You said 10 years, 10 years. How do you think that you were gonna be a writer? What came to mind that you said, oh, I'm gonna be a writer.

Guy Morris: 40:56

Well, I wasn't sure I was going to be at first. I was a songwriter for many years.

Daniela SM: 41:00

Oh, I swear.

Guy Morris: 41:02

I wrote songs through Disney. I recorded my own albums. I wrote worship songs. I was a worship theater.

Guy Morris: 41:07

But when my son was like 11, maybe 12 years old, I was a single parent, didn't have a lot of money to basically go out and have a social life I would, so I'd be at home a lot at night and I'm not much of a TV watcher. But I did have computers and I did have tools. And so I wrote my son. I used to take him to the library every single week. He'd get two free books and then by Wednesday he'd be done with them and want more, want to go back again. Well, I couldn't take him back for a couple days. So I got this idea that well, I'll write my son a book. Isn't that a cool thing. I'll write my. He likes typical 12 year old boy. He liked pirates and treasure and lost civilizations and anything with ghosts, you know. So I thought, well, I'll write him a short story. It'll be something that hopefully brings us closer together. And so, as I was writing the book I would read, I kind of waited until I was done, but then I kind of read him a little bit every night. He loved the story. He gave it to his cousins. They all loved it and so I started to write a sequel to that story. But the research on that sequel I wanted it based on something true in history. The research into what was true in history got me researching to understand that, the mysteries behind that, so much that it took me, by the time I was done researching, he was grown and had a career. He didn't need a kid's novel anymore so I started evolving it more into an adult novel. You know it took me on and off, you know, to kind of get it started and finished. But it was amazing story.

Guy Morris: 42:27

The historical premise was that in 1672 the real Henry Morgan took 36 ships, 2,000 men, to raid the city of Panama. A long story short. It was the richest city in the new world. I'll go into the details. He ultimately lost the half of his men in the raid, brought back 30 tons of plunder worth a billion billion and a half dollars and 600 slaves. But when he reached his fleet he cheated all of his men and disappeared with everything on three ships that were never seen again. But Morgan survived and ultimately was made lieutenant governor of Jamaica with the garrison soldiers. But when he had the power and the money and the people to go back for his billion dollar plunder. Instead he went into this haunted drunken debauchery and burnt his logbooks, so the world would never know why he was abandoning a billion dollar plunder. Three years after he died, the whole city of Port Real, including his grave, sinks into the ocean. The locals said they had been cursed by Morgan.

Guy Morris: 43:18

I was fascinated with that story and I wanted to solve two problems. One was maybe I would never solve it exactly, but I wanted to have a plausible scenario of what happened to 30 tons of stuff, three ships and 500 souls. Somebody had had to have found something by now was my theory, and in fact I discovered. In my research. I discovered a guy who did.

Guy Morris: 43:38

A guy named FA Mitchell Hedges, who in 1911 was digging on this one island for several years, claimed at first he had found Atlantis, which was another clue as to how to keep digging, before he disappeared with roughly 250 million dollars into today's dollars of gold. But when he asked about how he found the gold he, like Morgan, refused to talk about it and was traumatized by it, could never talk about it again. So the second question became more profound what was it about? Where this gold was hidden, where all this treasure was hidden. There was silver, there was inks, there was silks, there was tusks, there was Chinese bronze statues and Ming dynasty vases, there was jewelry, there was gems, there was all kinds of things that were in the treasure. What would cause both of these men to be traumatized so much that they would never go back to the rest of it, never talking about it. That took me into the history of the island, where I believed that this took place. That connected me to an inquisition massacre. That massacre ended a 2000 year pilgrimage before anybody asked what the pilgrimage was for, that pilgrimage tied to the 5000 year Mayan calendar and the Mayan creation myth. It was an amazing journey that I took of connecting the dots of what would go on, and one of the things that was a clue was that Morgan was hyper superstitious so, which led to all of these other Mayan prophecies and inquisition massacres and all these other things. So it was a really interesting journey and it was such an incredible story that spanned over thousands of years that I had to write this kind of Dan Brown style novel where the characters who basically going through their own ordeal, would discover the elements of the story and start putting the pieces together, and so it was really a great experience for me.

Guy Morris: 45:17

I remember working on research to like middle of the night, two or three o'clock in the morning, discovering things and waking my wife up saying, oh wow, you won't believe what I just discovered. And her response is uh-huh, uh-huh, tell me tomorrow, don't wake me up. You know, but it was years of me just going through trying to figure out all of the, how all these pieces fit together. That was the first book.

Guy Morris: 45:38

The second book, the second two books were based on artificial intelligence and cyber espionage, and I mentioned earlier that I had worked on early stages of artificial intelligence, before it was even called artificial intelligence, and so I was constantly researching the the industry, and I stumbled across an Associated Press article that said all it said was a really short little two paragraph thing that said that a program had escaped Lawrence Livermore labs at Sandia and if I knew something to contact this professor or that FBI agent. Well, that lab is an NSA spy lab. So in my mind I'm thinking a spy program has escaped the NSA and I don't know how to find it. I thought that's a cool story, I said my first thought was it's got to be a typo, maybe Associated Press goofed up. They were supposed to say it was stolen or got lost or didn't work, but they said it was. They had escaped, which implied an intent and implied some intelligence applied, the ability to move itself and the ability to race its trails.

Guy Morris: 46:38

So people couldn't figure out where to go on, and so I actually spent a year working out how does a spy program escape the NSA? What did they design it to really do that? It needed that really nifty stealth capability. They sent two FBI agents to my door. Apparently I had nailed it down to the functionality. They were not happy at all that I had figured out something that they thought was top secret.

Guy Morris: 47:01

But I was like, yes, I did it. Yeah, yeah, I did it. Now just just say it, guys, I did it, I nailed this, and they wouldn't say this is not funny. Mr Morris said oh no, you guys are wrong. This is hilarious. My wife came home during the middle of the interview. She pulls me aside. She says there's two FBI agents in my dining room and I know it's not a social call. What did you do that experience of realizing what the government was doing with these advanced technologies and got me really researching how AI was applied to all of these other areas of national security, national defense, weapons development, cybersecurity and hackers what China was doing in Russia. It started me researching the whole field in a deep enough way, not just how the AI was going to apply to my certain business problem, but it started me researching the field on a broader basis and that became the foundation for my book swarm and the last dark that sounds definitely so interesting.

Daniela SM: 48:03

Thank you for sharing. So you research a lot, but then of course you put what percentage of fiction?

Guy Morris: 48:09

Well, it's a mix. So oftentimes so, for example, in the espionage books, if I mentioned an espionage organization or technology or something that you could do or something that they might have already done, all of the, there's a level of fact. But then I layer on top of that characters and plots. So I try to make up. So I'm not calling out at real life person. I'll make up a character, even though it might be Loosely based on a real life person. That's where I basically bring it into fiction. What I like to say is all the foundations of the story in terms of the back story, the world, everything else is largely I'll say 90% factual. So, in curse of Cortez, all of the back history, all of the back archeology, the mythology, all of the sciences and geology that went into that book All factual. The only thing that's fictional are most, most of the characters and plots. And even then some of the characters were based on people I knew or had discovered in my research in the region to discover what went on. One of them was a cartel thug who had threatened to kill me, so I put him in the story as one of the bad guys While I was away in a dive trip. Use. It is really fugitive. He was wanted by Interpol, wanted by the FBI. He was doing dirty work for the state of car telling cancun. He broke into my condo when I was gone and when I confronted him he threatened to kill me by master. Well, street kid guy. At that point I was a Microsoft executive. So he saw this little wimpy, you know kind of white guy that would probably go through the normal legal routes and spend three years and fifty, sixty thousand dollars trying to get him out of my condo. In the meantime he'd have a free place to stay. My street guy came up and I am it was all know you don't, and so I told him he didn't have the hones to mess with me. I was the meanest little gringo he's ever gonna meet. He had two days to get my condo or all help with the price and he would regret ever knowing. So after I messed with him in cancun, cost everything I had, I put him in the book so I could mess with him again. I got my two for.

Guy Morris: 50:19

Another character was a sea plane pilot named Chico. In my book is a hilarious character. He's based on a real guy. Everybody loves the character Chico. When I first met Chico. It was on a sea plane dive to a remote location to go diving. And when I walked out of the terminal and I saw his him standing next to the dock, next to this plane, my first thought was oh god, this is how I die from. I won't tell anybody anything more about Chico, cuz I want people read the books and discover for themselves why I thought that. But um, it was, but yeah. So the characters in the plots are largely fictional. Most of the factual foundations the history, archeology, events, technology, the science, the religion, politics are all Wonderful.

Daniela SM: 51:02

Yes, until you are definitely a problem solver kind of guy. Yeah, I am grateful that you show your story. I definitely will read all your books. They sound fast. Tell me in a short way what is next for you. So you're right, you say you're on another book working on a book.

Guy Morris: 51:19

I hope to keep writing until I can. I can't anymore Because if I don't, my wife thinks that I should be spending my time doing housework and yard work. So yes, I'm gonna keep writing. Sorry, honey, I'm busy. I gotta work on the next book.

Guy Morris: 51:38

But I've also formed a offer group. All we do all summer, long from beginning of May to the early in October, is will go to Events, festivals, fairs all around the Seattle area, and we're busy every single weekend basically selling and signing books. That keeps me pretty busy in the summer to organize the team and organize the events and to get us all out there. But that's a really been a great channel for me. I sell more books in that channel than any others and I get the highest profit. It won't make me a new york times bestseller but it pays for the next book I'm working on with PR consultant.

Guy Morris: 52:14

Because of my expertise in artificial intelligence, pr consultant believes that I could be a good television expert guest so I'm working with her to basically get that set up. So I'm hoping my 2024 I'll get on a few television spots as well, mainly just to talk about where is going with. Some of the real dangers are. Why are you? Why do guys like Elon Musk, stephen Hawking, bill Gates talk about the dangers of AI More than they talk about the potential? And I have the answer. So it's a great way to continue to expand my own expertise. And then also that expertise gets filtered into the books, but also can get filtered into podcasts once in a while, as well as television spots yes, excellent, and now you believe that you're a smart person.

Guy Morris: 53:01

Now I've accepted the fact that I'm smarter than average, and that was only after taking IQ Q tests four times to double check the results. I've been called brilliant and genius many times in my life. I am in the one top one percent again. I tell people that that's. If you're asking about relationships. Don't come to me for advice. I'm asking about a topic, and it happens to be one that I'm from deeply familiar with. I can have a Intelligent, meaningful, rational conversation with even the best experts in the field. I'm hyper aware of the fact that IQ intelligence and emotional intelligence are completely different things, and being intelligent is not the end of the world. Being a good person, being, being a healthy person, being a kind person, being a loving person those are the things that really matter, and I'm still working on many of those.

Daniela SM: 54:02

Wonderful. Thank you so much, guy. I really enjoy. Your story was fascinating. I don't think it was enough time.

Guy Morris: 54:10

I have a lot of little side trail through my stories. I could use up a few hours, but again, I didn't never really thought about my story much until Just the last year when I started doing more podcasts and people want to know more about my background and up until that point was what was only important is what I knew, what I knew how to do and what my track record is getting it done, and beyond that people didn't really care. What is what I could do and that's what I focus on here.

Daniela SM: 54:40

I always think that behind everything there is always something way more interesting, and there you proven so, thank you.

Guy Morris: 54:47

Danielle, thank you so much, it's been a pleasure.

Daniela SM: 54:49

I hope you enjoyed it. Today's episode I am Daniela and you were listening to, because everyone has a story. Please take five seconds right now and think of somebody in your life, to me and you, what you just heard, someone that has a story to share and preserve. When you think of that person, shoot them a text with the link of this podcast. This would allow the ordinary magic to go further. Join me next time for another story conversation. Thank you for listening. Thank you so much for watching and see you soon.