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Up Your Average is the “no nonsense” podcast made for interesting people who think differently. Learn to navigate your life with unconventional wisdom by tuning in to Keith Tyner and Doug Shrieve every week.
The way to start a collection of really good stories is to just pray and just say, God, I need your help here. Can you give me an idea? Can you give me a connection? Can you give me an insight? And that the these collections of great stories don't happen without something extra miraculous involved.
Caleb:Welcome to the Up Your Average podcast where Keith and Doug give no nonsense advice to level up your life. So buckle up and listen closely to Up Your Average.
Keith:Good morning, Doug.
Doug:Hey. Good morning.
Keith:The sun's shining bright over my old Phoenix home.
Doug:That's right. That looks like a pretty good place to be.
Keith:This is Press Coffee, and they're they're I don't know if you can read this. It says there's no such thing as bad press.
Doug:I've heard that before. Yeah. I've I've heard that before. Matter of fact, in one of our president's books, I think he stresses that he believes that, that there's no such thing as bad press. Pretty funny.
Keith:Yeah. Funny. So man, I came up with this topic for today, and I almost couldn't sleep last night. I was thinking about it so much, and I couldn't even narrow down. So what I concluded is this may have to be five sessions, like just the magnitude of this topic in my thoughts is overwhelming.
Keith:So the idea is this, is that we collect unexplainable stories, and I want to tell our friends, the first time I said this to anybody, there were four of us in the Gimbal office one morning before anybody showed up. It was you, me, our friend Phil, and our friend Ryan was in there. Okay. And you had left your house late at night the night before and had a whole story happen. I don't know if you want to repeat that story, if you're comfortable telling our friends that story, what happened the night before.
Doug:Well, okay. So which story are we talking about?
Keith:You drove up to Angola or someplace like that, at 09:00 at night or something stupid.
Doug:Yeah. One of my friends, a good friend, lives in Texas, and his mom was on her last hours, and so I got to drive up to Angola area, and I think I was the last person to pray with her.
Keith:Yeah, but you had that idea. You went in and told Caroline that 09:00 at night or something that this idea hit you. It's really Had you ever done anything like that before where you just in the middle of the night just left like that?
Doug:Yeah, I have. You build up enough of these events or adventures and you listen to the prompts a little easier, and then it's really helpful to have a teammate, a wingman, who says, Yeah, honey, go for it. I love that. I'll see you when you get back.
Keith:Yeah. So anyway, you were telling us, it was early in the Gimbal, you were telling us about that story when our friend Ryan came in, and Ryan then tried to kind of integrate him into the conversation. I said, Hey, Ryan, Phil, Doug, and I collect unexplainable stories, and you might get a kick out of the story. So you told him that story, and then Ryan was telling us about the Hadley piggy bank that his daughter Maddie had, and Maddie had that week learned how was an old school piggy bank where you had to crack it open generally to get the money out of it. It didn't have a little plug on the bottom.
Keith:And so Maddie was sitting in her car seat and shaking the bank and telling her dad, Hey, daddy, I figured out how to get all the money out of there. He's in the financial services industry. He goes, Honey, we're actually trying to go the other direction. We're trying to
Doug:get the money
Keith:in there. Then the next morning, our friend Phil sends me this cartoon. I don't know if you can see this, Doug. So this would have happened eight The conversation would have been eightsixteen twenty three, I think, and so I don't even know what Bizarro is this comic, and I had told Ryan that day. I said, Hey, Ryan, you tell Maddie that Uncle Keith, if she wants to know how to get the money out of there, he can do it with a butter knife like nobody else, which Ryan didn't even know what that meant because he was of a generation that didn't even have piggy banks and didn't know how to break into them.
Keith:Then this cartoon shows up, says, If I can't remove the coins via a butter knife, we may have to consider more aggressive surgery. The pig doctor is telling the piggy bank, and that was in the Indianapolis Star the very next day. Don't even know who I reads a newspaper anymore, do you? But Phil and his wife do that, and Phil reads the cartoons, and so he sent it to me the next day. So I sent that to Ryan, and I go, Hey, Ryan, I think you have your own unexplainable story with us.
Keith:And then I'm in Phoenix, and I've had so many crazy things happen out here. In 2,009, I was struggling with some business decisions, and I had a trip out here for about, I think I was supposed to be out here for four days, and I discovered in short term that I was going to have to cut it short to like thirty six to forty eight hours, and some amazing things happened. But the first thing that happened was I got picked up by a limo driver. Snooty does that sound?
Doug:Well, I mean, especially back in the day, if you were riding in a limo, that's pretty cool.
Keith:And this guy was as kind as you could imagine, and so he was offering feedback to us. And so when I was chatting with him on the way to the hotel, he just started volunteering, How do you sort photographs? I was cleaning out my parents' stuff, and in the olden day, you didn't keep them on your phone. You had boxes of these things. So he explained to me unsolicited how to sort through photographs, which essentially was what I was doing.
Keith:It was information I needed that nobody really knew I needed, but he was telling me how to sort through photographs. And so I put that in my journal as a really cool thing, but I wanted to also share a photograph, which is an unexplainable story that I just found sorting through some last week, and this one cracks me up because How do you like this photo? Can you see this one?
Doug:One of the- He's got a couple of these.
Keith:Yeah. One of the things the limo driver said, he said, Do not keep any photos that don't have humans in them. Just get rid of the photos with humans.
Doug:That's a good Because a
Keith:lot of times people would take pictures of a herd of buffalo or something like that, which nobody cares. Nobody wants see your vacation picture of the herd of buffaloes because you can go online, but he said, And do not keep any pictures of humans you don't know, because my mom's friends or my dad's friends aren't really my friends. If I don't know who they are, there's no reason to pass those on to my kids. But last week on Thanksgiving Day, I found this photo. What do you think about this photo?
Doug:What's going on here? What's your mom doing?
Keith:I can't tell. Would you say that's 20 feet away from that bear?
Doug:I mean, but didn't you send me another one like this recently?
Keith:Yeah, these are both of the same pile of photos. I found this one, the unexplainable story here is that I exist, like how she didn't get mauled and eaten by a bear, and my dad too, because this was probably taken in the late '50s where they didn't have zoom lenses, right? So they were both culpable in this situation. Where was this? I'm sure it was Yellowstone.
Keith:I would bet- Crazy. So I bring up the trip in 2009 where the limo driver taught me something I needed to know unexplainably, and that picture was just one of the funny ones I found along the way. I've got a number of these things I wanted to throw out there and just kind of talk about and see what happens, but part of chasing unexplainable stories and literally recording them, I think is where life becomes more interesting than you can imagine. The theory behind this is I believe you only have three sources of thoughts, and I won't go into great detail on this conversation with them, but in one Corinthians two sixteen, it says, Believers in Christ have the mind of Christ, and so I believe the origin of my thoughts are just from godly thoughts. Those are the natural origin of my thoughts.
Keith:Then I believe your senses can create thoughts. I'm looking at coffee all over the place in front of me, and I hadn't thought about coffee until I saw that up there. Then there's this internal sound system that isn't us that can give you a lot of distracting thoughts, anxiety, greed, fear, all kinds of things can come from those. But the mind of Christ, if something's not ungodly and if it's outrageous, I think both of us will chase after that, don't you?
Doug:Oh yeah, yeah. And I've had it chase after me. I was thinking about that as I was prepping for today. Was thinking of the things that I've done that have been very adventurous and seemingly whimsical, great stuff. Even better are the things that have happened to me, that someone has pursued me, and I've always appreciated those things where someone came to my rescue.
Keith:I literally had to walk fifteen minutes this morning to this coffee shop in the dark. It was dark when I walked in here, and somebody who wanted time with me just happened to call at that moment while I was walking. I'm like, Dude, you could never have picked a better time. I'm alone, nobody's here, and I've got time to give to you. So some people wouldn't see that as a big deal.
Keith:I just see it as perfect timing. It was the exact time when I was free and available to have the conversation uninterrupted with him.
Doug:Yeah, there's very few times in people's lives today where you have quiet. I'm
Keith:going
Doug:to have some quiet today. I could choose to listen to podcasts. I'm driving out to Washington DC, and I probably will. I'll probably have something on the car radio, but to have some quiet allows a person to think and reflect reflect on, Hey, when were these unbelievable collections of stories? When have I run across stuff like this?
Doug:Or when was I able to participate in great adventures? But without quiet, you can't really come up with this stuff.
Keith:I think it's critical that once you have them, you start writing them down and reflecting on how unexplainable they are, like how cool it is that they happened. So what prompted it this week to have this conversation is I've been mentoring this young guy whose role is that of a headhunter or a job placement thing, and Caleb and I were heading to an appointment with a client and his wife, and we were heading south on Keystone, and the conversation was, What does that young guy do for a living? I started explaining to him, He is a headhunter, and I thought, Well, Caleb wouldn't know what that is if I don't explain it to him. I explained it to him, and when that happened, all of a sudden my thoughts was, Oh, yeah. One of my college friends who owns a headhunting business wanted to do business with us, and I hadn't reached back out to him, and that was probably ninety to one hundred days ago when I spoke with him.
Keith:This friend lives in Indianapolis, but I probably only see him every two or three years. I don't see him much. So I said to Caleb, we were about 106 in Keystone at this point. I said, Hey, Caleb, do you mind if I just leave him a quick message, let him know I was thinking about him, and we can circle back around? So I leave him a voicemail, and we go pick up the client.
Keith:The client's not moving very well. Some people go to lunch at 11:30 or twelve or 12:30. We're not on that kind of schedule. We're at a random time, and then it's becoming apparent that the client is not doing well. Like, We may not be able to even do this lunch.
Keith:Once we got to the restaurant, we might have been in the restaurant for fifteen minutes at the most, maybe twenty, So we were getting him situated. He was pretty immobile, we were getting him situated, and he just wasn't doing well. So I had the prompting to just tell his wife, Let's just I'll go tell the waitress, Let's get this packed up to go, right? Instead of forcing this thing. So even that is one of those unexplainable stories.
Keith:How do I have the wisdom to know? Let's bring this thing to closure and do it. Inside that fifteen minutes, I went to the restroom, and as I was coming back out of the restroom, instead of just kind of watching my feet, I looked up at the people around me sitting in the back room back there, and one of those people was the guy I left a message for. Crazy. Yeah.
Keith:There's probably a million plus people in Indianapolis. Anybody could be eating anywhere. You could just say, Oh, that's a coincidence, but I learned long ago there's no such thing as coincidences. I see those things as like divine appointments and just amazing things.
Doug:Social media is pretty fast on connecting people, but not that fast.
Keith:No. You should have seen his face because he saw my call come in and he hit the do not answer thing. Then he sees me showing.
Doug:That's awesome. Do you
Keith:have any stories that come to mind?
Doug:Yeah. The one that comes top of mind was I was in a rough situation. I had a one ton 2007 GMC van that we It's probably my favorite vehicle we've ever owned. I love that van. We've toured across The United States in it, and we were coming down a pass just outside of Jackson Hole, Wyoming with a 28 foot Airstream trailer behind us, and our transmission started to give out.
Doug:I have a rule, it's don't mess with my vacation. I will lose my mind. My family loves to make fun of me. I will completely lose my mind to keep a vacation going. So here we are in Jackson Hole and our transmission is toast.
Doug:I go around to all these car shops in Jackson Hole, and nobody is willing to help. It's like fourth of July weekend or something like that, and finally a guy says, Hey, you gotta try these people in Rapid City. No, no, no. Oh man, not Rapid City. I can't remember the name of the town.
Doug:It's in Idaho somewhere. Okay, yeah, yeah, yeah. I know what you're talking about. Anyway, I called the guy and he says, Yeah, see if you can limp the truck or limp the van here. So I did.
Doug:I drove like three hours to get there, and they just so happened to have my exact transmission of a 2007 GMC 3,500 transmission. I mean, I was about ready to go buy a brand new Ford f three fifty pickup truck just to keep the vacation going. And so, It was one of those events where I think the way to start a collection of really good stories is to just pray and just say, God, I need your help here. Can you
Doug:give me an idea? Can you give me a connection? Can you give me an insight?
Doug:These collections of great stories don't happen without something extra miraculous involved.
Keith:Absolutely.
Doug:It has to be that way, and normally I it's out of
Keith:was talking to this young man this morning, and I told him in the late '80s, I didn't really have this belief that this God that my parents had told me about was real. I said there were two problems that I had to, as a young man, navigate through on my own. One was the contradictions I'd heard about him, and the second is that I'd never seen any power. I'd never heard anything like what you're talking about, and since then, I've seen more than I can. I didn't record as many of them as I should have over the years, but I was thinking of one that happened six years ago.
Keith:This month, you and I flew to Santa Monica, and we were in a room with Are they called market wizards? Is that what they're calling it? The best of the best investors? Yeah. Yeah.
Keith:There was several of the best investors of our lifetime were in that room, and one of them we didn't know- Including you. And you. We're back at you. One of them, the family brought him in to say goodbye to all the investors, right? That might've been the reason they did the whole thing was for But one of the speakers was talking about investor psychology, right?
Keith:He was the guru on investor psychology, and one of the most traumatic investor psychology stories, if you study history, was Jesse Livermore. Jesse Livermore was one of the greatest investors of all time, and he took his own life. So this guy that was at this expensive training session was talking about investor psychology, and then he tells this personal story that I couldn't even believe my ears.
Doug:I couldn't believe my ears.
Keith:I have never seen or heard anything in a professional setting so ridiculous is what he said. So he's teaching you how to have the proper investor psychology, and then he tells this. It's almost like he's stripped naked on stage, right? Yeah. He tells this story about how he lost all his money and his family by not executing the psychology that he was talking about.
Keith:That's I remember people around me were laughing like they thought it was funny. I was traumatized. I thought I had to go almost throw up. I felt so bad for this guy. But the unexplainable story was William O'Neil was the one that His organization hosted this, and his protege had not been at any of those for probably twenty years, I don't think, and he was there on stage that day, and you got to talk to him as we were leaving California, and I just remember what you told him and what he said to you.
Doug:Man, I don't even What did I tell him?
Keith:Do you remember that?
Doug:I remember being there, but
Keith:I don't remember saying anything were out there in the atrium. You said to him, his name was David Ryan, and you said to him, Hey, David, I think the whole point that you were here was for that guy.
Doug:Oh yeah, yeah, that's true.
Keith:And he said, I think the same thing.
Doug:For that memory, Keith. I forgot that one. Yeah, that's
Keith:I mean, that's one of those unexplainable stories that you and I Some people, they'd be all jazzed because they could be in the room with a pro basketball player or something like that, but we were in a room full of the best investors of all time, and we got to see that divine event happen that's kind of unexplainable. You can watch that event. We could probably link the YouTube video of that guy telling that story because it's on YouTube now.
Doug:Well, reason why Keith mentions that is David Ryan is a guy where if you ask him, Hey, what are the best business books that are out there? He would tell you about William O'Neil's canned slim book, How to Make Money in Stocks, and he'd probably tell you about Jesse Livermore, the stories of Jesse Livermore, but he'd also tell you the Bible, and so that's why it was a big deal for David Ryan to be there with this guy.
Keith:Yeah, that's very cool. Tell me this, Doug. I remember one day this late spring, early summer, you came into Gimbal and said, I've had this idea I'm supposed to go to New York. Do you want to tell our friends that story?
Doug:Yeah, I mean, that was kind of one of those crazy things where I wanted to go watch the pacers. I've always said I wanna see the pacers win a championship before I die. And, yeah, you Cubs fans, you've gotten to see a a world series and all that stuff, but I wanna I wanna see a a NBA championship before I die. And so I thought, I'm gonna fly out and and cheer on the Pacers versus the Knicks. And it turns out I made a couple new friends while in the airport.
Doug:This guy's a social media influencer, and I think the whole reason I was on that plane or even went out to New York was to help guide him from Newark Airport to Madison Square Garden.
Keith:And when I think Go ahead, Doug. I interrupted you. I'm sorry.
Doug:Yeah, Keith, one that involved you that I did think of, again, this was a rescue Doug situation, but I was in your big RV. You let me borrow your big RV and we were out in Purgatory, Colorado. I had a bike rack on the back and I got stuck. The bike rack and the trailer mount got stuck on a rock and I could not move your twin axle, huge RV. We're there for like three hours trying to figure this out.
Doug:And this guy comes up with his family, it's Father's Day weekend, and he says, Hey, I drove my family up here because I wanted to show them the ski runs that I logged as a younger man. He had this big Dodge diesel truck, and he was going to pull us out. But then he says to me, Hey, have you ever thought about just disconnecting your bike rack? I'd never thought of that. So we disconnected the bike rack and then drove right off.
Doug:So I say that because when you're in a jam, and that jam could be real serious, it could be something real serious, but don't sleep on the voice that comes to you or shows up just out of nowhere, because that could be a story in your collection. And you might be reminded of it, just like Keith reminded me of David Ryan. Might forget. So having somebody remind you, that's pretty great.
Keith:Yeah. Well, I've got 08/01/1991. I don't know if you know what that date was, Doug, or not.
Doug:I do not. I do not know what that was. August 1, Well, '19 did '90 mean in Gulf War? Nope. Okay.
Doug:Tell me about it.
Keith:08/01/1991 would have been the predecessor birth date of Gimbal Financial. Wow. No stop. Okay. Yeah, that's when ISU Security started, August 1990 the second, nineteen ninety one, I was getting married.
Keith:Had zero salary, not much. All I had was a little marketing from the former association I had. Didn't have any income, and I'm getting ready to become a husband. And man, it was intense because I didn't know if my former employer was going to come after me. I didn't know what was going to happen, and I was an average at best salesperson, right?
Keith:And so every day I'm just waking up going, Oh man, I don't know where to I don't even know if I'm going have a paycheck here thirty days. And I'm getting married in like ninety days or so. So that was August 1. 09/26/1991, you can Google this, The New York Times released a story that I think the first time ever, this company called Ameritech offered an early retirement offer to their employees. Ameritech was the former local phone company in Indianapolis, and I happened to be associated with the phone company Credit Union.
Keith:What is that? About forty five days later from when we started that thing, and I could not meet with There were so much people that came to meet with me. Many of our legacy clients came from that article that day, 09/26/1991, and you could say, Oh, whatever. Or you could just be honest and say, Man, how humbling is that? That's a pretty amazing story.
Doug:I love that, Keith. I love that because when you go to events and you hear someone telling their success story, rarely do you hear what really was the catalyst, and I love that for you. I love that for me because I'm part of that too.
Keith:I would
Doug:encourage How many clients do you think we still have today
Keith:I from bet it's at least 50.
Doug:Oh, easy. 6050%? Yeah.
Keith:I mean, they gave us so many referrals, but from that initial wave, bet there's still 50 of them from that initial wave. That's wonderful. Yeah. Yeah. And I would encourage people, don't know what Jensen Yang, is that his name?
Keith:Jensen, the CEO of NVIDIA. I just discovered how honest that cat is, but he was on the Joe Rogan interview recently, and he told the story of how they still exist, and it's Yeah. As
Doug:Maybe I'll listen to that one.
Keith:You should, because they should not even exist. It's such an honest story. Most companies, I think, have that same story, right? Something happened. And if you have the humility to recognize that, big things will happen.
Keith:Have you got time for one more before we close it out?
Doug:Big things happen. Let's go.
Keith:So I told you the two things that I didn't really trust about this God that I'd been told about, the contradictions about who He was and the lack of power, and I've been pursuing some stuff because of a tragedy that intersected my life in 1988, but now I'm a year later. It's May '2, and I'm sitting at my desk over at the credit union headquarters, and a guy that I had mentored called and he said, Hey, Keith, I met this guy down here in Western Kentucky whose ministry has revolutionized my thoughts about who God is. This guy was an excitable former lawnmower salesman, and I'm a salesman by trade, and so I'm like, I let salesman calm down before I jump into a third. So he calls me and says that, and I just made a mental note and put it in my hip pocket and said, Okay, dude. I was going to check back with him in a year.
Keith:Very next day, a less excitable, more logical person calls me and says the exact same thing. Neither guy knew each other. One lived in Evansville, one lived in Cadiz, Kentucky. And so I thought, Well, I don't believe in coincidences. So I call this guy, and his name was Bob Warren, a former professional basketball player, and I get his voicemail, and I say, Hey, Bob.
Keith:My name is Keith Tyner. I don't believe in coincidences. Can you call me and tell me why I'm calling you? And Bob ended up being a great influence and mentor to me for twenty plus years, and he helped answer those two issues for me that really revolutionized my life. And to suggest that that just happened and that there aren't these unexplainable stories would really diminish the value of my life, I think.
Keith:And so I think everybody has these stories, I think today is the day to start looking for them. Today is the day to start enjoying them. No matter how big or how small they are, I think today's the day.
Doug:Wow. And no matter what your history looks like, you might be a young guy or an old guy, but you have these unbelievable stories ahead of you.
Keith:I think this conversation could go on for two or three hours myself, and I smile when I think about them because they're just amazing. Why don't you go make something happen out in Washington, DC today?
Doug:I'm going to. Yeah, I'm really looking forward to it. You make it happen in AZ, and, thanks to all the people at Gimbal making it happen at the fort today. We appreciate them.
Keith:Alright. Y'all have a great day, and we hope to see y'all soon.
Doug:See you, Keith. Bye, guys.
Keith:Bye bye.