Story Samurai

In this engaging conversation, Jo Giese shares her life experiences and insights on resilience, joy, and the importance of making the best of difficult situations. Through personal anecdotes, she illustrates how challenges can lead to growth and deeper connections with family. The discussion emphasizes the significance of grit, determination, and the choices we make in shaping our happiness.
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What is Story Samurai ?

Explore your curiosity - Interesting people with fascinating stories.

Life consists of three things:
-The stories we tell others
-The stories others tell us
-The stories we tell ourselves.

Speaker 1:

Jo, welcome aboard to the show. Thank you so much for joining us today.

Speaker 2:

It's a pleasure to be here. I just returned from a hike and got back in time to do it. So here we are.

Speaker 1:

Wonderful. Oh my god. Remind me to tell you the story about my son and his dirty hiking boots. I love the fact that you showed your dirty hiking boots. I have a wonderful story about that.

Speaker 2:

No. Wait. Wait. That's the wrong word. These aren't these aren't dirty.

Speaker 2:

They're used.

Speaker 1:

Thank, oh my god, you're ruining my story. Okay, the audience will have to wait for this because we are on the same line exactly, but I want to start by this, okay. So I absolutely adore it when authors send me their books. The danger of it is that I actually read them. So I'm gonna, first of all, I'll start by doing this, by holding up the book.

Speaker 2:

Okay.

Speaker 1:

And I'll say, there we go. And I'll say, I can't take this out, but I'll show it in this I'll take it out. I'll take this out and I'll just show our audience how delighted I was by the handwritten I'm gonna lose my place because I'm using it as a placeholder. By the delightful handwritten note that you sent me that I'm so grateful for. So I just wanted to mention that.

Speaker 1:

But let's jump to it. Babe had a lifetime of making the best of it, especially during what might have seemed like the worst of it. So that's your first sentence for, I wanna call it chapter five, but you call it lesson five. Why are your chapters called lessons? And and and tell us more about making the best of it and the worst of it.

Speaker 2:

The summer that my father had a company in Seattle, and he got a job repairing turbines on one of the big dams on Canyon Ferry in Montana. And God, it's amazing I couldn't even forget this. And I was only about, well really 12 at the time and where the work was going on was there was no place to live. There was no place to rent. It's amazing to think of it now.

Speaker 2:

But there was only place my mother could find was a shack. And I am talking total shack. I mean, shack. There was something resembling that could be a bedroom. And there were five of us there, my mother, father, my brother, my sister and myself.

Speaker 2:

Somehow my mother scrubbed that shack while she was scrubbing it. One of the neighbors from up the dirt road, it was all dirt roads, came down and he was really admiring how she made it sparkle and everything. And he asked if she would come up and do his shack. And she just looked at him and said, no, I know I'm not gonna do that. But, but the point of the story really is that there we are out in the middle of nowhere in a shack up a dirt road.

Speaker 2:

And, and there was Chaparral around and snake. And nowadays, and maybe back then too, my father was only there for a summer. Most wives, families, they would stay at home in their nice house and maybe they would breeze over for a weekend or something. But that wasn't my mom's style. My mom and my dad were nuts about each other.

Speaker 2:

And if he was gonna be there working out side of Helena, Montana for a summer, well, she was gonna be there too. And she was gonna make the best of it. And so when my current husband, when we were introduced and he said he had a place in Montana, god, he's a really nice guy, attractive. And I just went, no. Not Montana.

Speaker 2:

Not again. No. No. I already did that once. But his place was very different.

Speaker 2:

His place, he goes there to go fly fishing. His place his place was also up a dirt road halfway up a mountain. I mean, this is Montana.

Speaker 1:

Yeah.

Speaker 2:

But it was not a shack, and I didn't have to scrub it till it sparkles.

Speaker 1:

But, I mean, the the I love the lesson there. Is there something that you think that today's generation or maybe we need to relearn?

Speaker 2:

We had COVID. We all of us had. None of us had lived through anything like COVID before, and we certainly had to make the best of it during that. And that wasn't easy at all. I mean, just think of, the news today that that Mexican ship that crashes in to the Brooklyn Bridge and the whole the mast and everything come off.

Speaker 2:

And you think what, how are those guys gonna make the best of it? There were over two people died and there were over 200 people on board this ship. How are they gonna make the best of it? And flights seem to be so precarious now, so delayed. A friend who lost her house in the Malibu fires, She and her husband just gave themselves a treat and went to Costa Rica.

Speaker 2:

On the way back when they were trying to fly back from Costa Rica, they got a message. The airline got there's tornadoes in the area they were flying back to in Ohio. And so they had a seven hour delay. Now how do you make the best of that? They were delayed in Orlando.

Speaker 2:

It turned out she has some cousin she hasn't seen much in Orlando. Orlando, she called them up and they were able to have a dinner together out of the blue. Now that is making the best of a really miserable seven hour delay. But you know, all the people, because I live in Southern California, our house did not burn in this recent fire, but so many of my friends, their houses did burn. And how do you make the best of that?

Speaker 2:

You are changed forever by that. Absolutely forever. That's tough to go on and to go on in, you know, with a smile in your soul.

Speaker 1:

It's incredibly hard. Would you agree that the difference between people who can find the silver lining in in any cloud and the people kind of get defeated. It's not how you make the best of a situation, but maybe it's more of a personality trait.

Speaker 2:

I'm not sure. What I was thinking about in terms of this is my next book, the one You'll Never Walk Alone, A Hiker's Memoir of Adventure Tragedy and Defying the Odds. I have no left Achilles. I had a freak accident. The doctor totally botched the surgery.

Speaker 2:

Although of course he says I left the ice on too long. I mean, come on, give me a break. And so the real question is a physical therapist I was working with once said to me, you'll have to accept that you'll be compromised for the rest of your life. I thought she and I were friends. And when she said that I thought, no, I'm never speaking to her again because she was dashing my hope.

Speaker 2:

I think what is it? I could have succumbed then to what she said, okay, I give up. But what is the difference? This is sort of the question you ask. Right.

Speaker 2:

Is what is the difference between people who succumb to like a grim diagnosis? Okay, I have no left Achilles. I'm not going to be able to walk. And people people said to me, so are you going to be an ex walker and ex hiker? And I thought, no way.

Speaker 2:

That is my personality. I mean, I hike to waterfalls all over the world and I love it. And okay, so I interviewed this one guy. I saw a little thing. This was letters to the editor in the New York Times.

Speaker 2:

And he wrote that, that he had usually he used to ride his bike 50 miles a day. And then he had an accident. He lost his Achilles in a surgery too. In his case, his doctor was lost his hospital privileges. That should have happened to my doctor, but it didn't.

Speaker 2:

But what happened is he succumbed to his grim diagnosis. He had somewhat similar situation that I had. He lost his Achilles, but he succumbed to it. And why was that? When I was talking to him, I said he had a couple surgeries.

Speaker 2:

I had eight and but I didn't give up. Why did he give up? He I never knew him personally. Was just talking to him in Florida. And was it that he had a different personality type, which was your question or he had the resources to keep seeing doctors.

Speaker 2:

I mean, restorative therapists that I eventually ended up with, he said, you must, you have, you're going to be the CEO of your team here of your recovery team. You must see a medical acupuncturist. You must see a podiatrist. I mean, he didn't, he didn't give me, you know, you could do this or not. He said, this is your team and this is who you're gonna see.

Speaker 2:

And a soft tissue massage therapist to keep working on all the scar tissue down there from all the surgeries. So I don't know a it is a personality thing. My my father was an inventor. He dropped out of school in the sixth grade. He, I think, faced with something like I was faced with.

Speaker 2:

He wouldn't have given up either. I never thought of that before that my father and I shared that in common.

Speaker 1:

You know, my my son, he got a black belt in Taekwondo, and he's he's 13. He got it a couple years ago. He was studied for five, six years. And at the end of every single class, they have this mantra and it's written on the wall in in big black and red letters and they all say it together, winners never quit, quitters never win.

Speaker 2:

And I love that.

Speaker 1:

To me, the karate, sure there's a physical aspect to it, there's, work hard aspect to it, is beyond the sports, it's achieving a hard goal, and I told him, look, you can't quit until you get the black belt, and then when he got the black belt I asked him, do you want to keep doing this? And he was like, so he stopped, but he achieved the goal, right, and to me the most important aspect of that is not the hard work, it's not the achievement, it's that mantra and what I hear in you, what I hear in you about your father is that mantra. It's that grit, that true grit of I'm going to get through this and I'm going to be better for it and this is not going to keep me down. I think that's beautiful, and I think it's a message that if every person on Earth could take to heart, not just hear, but take to heart, I think we'll all be better off for it. So I deeply appreciate you you sharing that story.

Speaker 1:

This one is I think it's really similar, but I think it's such an important message. And I and I gotta say, reading your book is and I've gotten a lot of books from a lot of authors, and I do not give this level of compliment every time. I'm telling you, this is this is this is real. This is from the heart, and I will tell every single person who is listening, go get this book. It's called Never Sit If You Can Dance.

Speaker 1:

And this is lesson number nine or chapter nine. And it's it's the the lesson is people don't like to be around depressed people. So I mean and what I would add on to this, and you can tell the story if you want, but what I would add to this, and I wanna know if you agree, is that it feels to me that most people are creating their own version of hell. It doesn't seem to me that happiness is a thing that happens to you. It almost seems to be a choice.

Speaker 2:

I guess most of my life, I've been pretty joyful, except when I was in my first bad marriage and that was just not a joyful time. I was new to New York City. I'd been introduced to a film director. I'd never even met a film director before. And boy did that turn out not to be joyful.

Speaker 2:

But since then, I think I do opt for joy. One way I get more joy in my life is I walk with my Achilles situation. I'm not even supposed to be able to walk, but I try to get in at least a minimum of 5,000 steps a day. And people think they're walking for their bodies, whatever. They're really walking for their head, walking to change their head while they're out there walking.

Speaker 2:

And so it's, it's, it's part of the recipe for joyfulness. If I, if I'm at my office here and I'm getting a little cranky about something, I'll just, put on my walking shoes or or my red boots and go out and take a walk, and it changes my mind. It changes my mind around.

Speaker 1:

What's your happiest, hiking moment that you can remember?

Speaker 2:

Oh, God. There have been so many. So many. One of the best in terms of just just god awful fabulous. We were in New Zealand and the place might we had gone there because my husband likes to fly fish.

Speaker 2:

We'd gone to a fly fishing lodge. We're staying at the fly fishing lodge. They only had four rooms and we were talking a pretty modest place, but they did have their own helicopter.

Speaker 1:

Oh, wow.

Speaker 2:

And and so I talked to the lodge and I said, okay, while my husband's fly fishing, I don't fish. Can you get me a guide to go hiking and the helicopter can drop us off somewhere? And they got me this wonderful guide and the helicopter's right there at our lodge. Only later did I realize after we'd come back from New Zealand that that particular little helicopter, the Robbie 44, is actually lethal. It has had so many civilian crashes.

Speaker 1:

Oh, wow.

Speaker 2:

But at that point, I didn't know that. And I was just delighted to be up there in the air flying over these valleys and into and the helicopter landed us in the most remote place. And it was we got we got out and, you know, the the rotors are whacking overhead. And he says he'll be back for us in, I don't know, was it six hours? And we are really in the middle of nowhere and there's no people around.

Speaker 2:

And New Zealand, in Montana, you have to watch out for bears. You can be on a hiking trail and literally you can come around a corner and you can be pretty much eye to eye with a bear. But there we were out out in the middle of nowhere. And since I like to hike to waterfalls, we hiked first through this really swampy wetland. I just said it's a wetland with bad breath.

Speaker 2:

I mean, was so, it really smelled awful. And of course, when you're up in the helicopter, you can't go, oh, go, don't land there. That's gonna smell terrible. But we landed there and we mucked around, hiked for about an hour to get to the first waterfall. It wasn't much of a waterfall, not much to write home about.

Speaker 2:

It had a narrow top. It was gushing down. But and so my guide said to me, she said, just wait, there's another one. Now, this wasn't an area she'd hiked in. I don't know how she even knew there was another one.

Speaker 2:

We went through a creek bed and the creek bed was filled with sharp, like granite shards that could literally poke up in the middle. I mean, they could really poke up in the middle of your boots. Were and we hiked for about four hours through that, that creek bed. But, and that, you know, that in the book, say, you know, people say you, you pay to do this, you know, they should pay you. But it was so amazing to be in that valley.

Speaker 2:

And I also collect these lucky stones. They're just regular stones, but they have a total white line around them. And I can tell you how that line is created. And I got a lot of those there, those lucky stones. I gave sun to my guide.

Speaker 2:

We got them, brought them back. But then when we get to this come around another bend and we get to this waterfall that really is my guide labeled it on the spot spectacular. And it was, it deserved that name. It was fabulous. And she unbeknownst to me had also brought us along a picnic.

Speaker 2:

She brought her husband was a fish exporter from New Zealand. So she had fish there. It was something like it wasn't lobster. It was something like lobster. I can't remember now.

Speaker 2:

And it was just like anytime you eat out on a hike in the middle of nowhere, well that was really in the middle of nowhere. The food tastes just fabulous. It tastes like it's dipped in champagne. It's so good. And then the other extraordinary thing about this, we had hiked very strenuously and vigorously for about five hours to finally end up at this waterfall.

Speaker 2:

And the best thing about that is that we didn't have to hike back. The helicopter was gonna come pick us up right So we could, you know, we could take our boots off, we could just rest. We could eat all this gorgeous food she brought. And it was one of the most memorable days in nature ever because you didn't have the predators. You didn't have the bears.

Speaker 2:

They don't have snakes and poisonous snakes in New Zealand. I don't think they have any snakes in New Zealand. And there weren't any people there. There are a lot of hiking trails I've been to in New Zealand where, you know, they've got toilets and they've got signs telling you with arrows pointing, you go this way. There was none of that.

Speaker 2:

It was just you and nature and being out there and having this spectacular waterfall all to ourselves. I mean, was really, really memorable. But then of course I also hiked around Iguazu Falls in that's on the little tippy point where Argentina and Brazil join. And Iguazu was really on my list because Iguazu is the longest waterfall in the world. It's a mile and a half across the top.

Speaker 2:

And it was extraordinary. But can I just tell you a little story about Iguazu? Absolutely. Okay. So we took, we like to take the grandkids on adventures.

Speaker 2:

And we took one of the grandkids with us to on that trip. And we stayed in a hotel in the middle of the jungle there in the middle of this park was a jungle. If you got, because we were staying there and we were within walking distance to this extraordinary waterfall. You can go there and I went there with the my grandson and my husband and we went there first thing in the morning, like, you know, the the light is coming in. There was even a rainbow over the waterfall.

Speaker 1:

Oh, wow.

Speaker 2:

And I took the picture of my grandson with the rainbow on his head, and it was extraordinary. And then what happened? At 09:00, the park opened. I mean, we got to go in early because we were just staying right across in the jungle right at this hotel. And at 09:00, these school buses started coming in and dumping off tourists, a lot of local tourists from Argentina and Brazil.

Speaker 2:

Tourists nonetheless, they couldn't drive their cars in. They had to take in the school buses in. And all of a sudden this place that we had really, really enjoyed, there were just three of us and some workers from the hotel, they're just sweeping up or something. It was madness. There were people like six, seven, eight deep, all holding up their cameras, taking selfies of themselves with the waterfall.

Speaker 2:

And our grandson said, this is not a guazoo. This is a zoo. And he was right. It was it was total madness. They should have they should have limited it.

Speaker 2:

But but that it was also memorable.

Speaker 1:

We were, we were in Bali, hiking to all these waterfalls, a lot of waterfalls in Bali. And there's these very famous Instagram spots, and there are lines Right. Where you can wait hours to get the famous Instagram spot. And I took one look at that and I throw up in my mouth and I'm like, nope, I don't need that picture. No.

Speaker 1:

And then when we were in Iceland, we figured out this massive trick. So Iceland is incredibly to the north, which means that in the summer it's basically broad daylight at 11PM, right? So everybody's either asleep or having dinner or about to go to bed. We figured out since it's broad daylight, mean it's not such a secret, but we figured out that the best time to go spend at the beach or have a walk on the beach is 10:11PM. Because they are completely completely vacant.

Speaker 1:

Nobody on the beach. You have this whole beach to yourself, beautiful view, the these fjords and oceans and sometimes black sand, sometimes ice, these huge ice kind of blocks on the beach, absolutely beautiful. These glaciers, broken glaciers, and nobody on the beach. So once we figured this out, we were like every day, 10PM, we were going for hikes on the beach basically in Iceland. There's a magic about it when it's just you and there's no other noises, no cameras clicking and no people talking.

Speaker 1:

So I I I deeply, deeply appreciate that story. What was the effect on the the grandchildren when they kind of go on these these experiences with you? How do you see that it changed them, if if at all?

Speaker 2:

Well, that's an interesting question. We actually did take one of the grandsons to Iceland. You know, over the years I've had an infertility problem. I was not able to have my own children and I thought one of the biggest blessings in my marriage is that my husband had six grandchildren. And we've taken them on individual adventures.

Speaker 2:

And sometimes I've asked them what do they remember most from that adventure? And sometimes I don't think they it takes a while for them to figure out. I think like in Iceland at one point we ate ferment. Well, I didn't, but my husband and our grandson ate some fermented shark. And did you ever have fermented shark?

Speaker 1:

Is this ludefisk? Is that what it is?

Speaker 2:

I don't know, but it it it's so stinky that you could smell it from a block away. And I I can't help but think that that that is a is a memory that he that he would retain from that, that they both. And then I think they just spit it out. I had been looking, it was the time of the year where they, one of the Icelandic specialties, I don't know if you had this in Iceland, is sheep's head. And I wanted to try a whole sheep's head.

Speaker 2:

And it was like really our, almost our last day there. And I found a place where I could get this whole sheep's head. And I don't know if that grossed out Finn, the grandson to watch his grandmother there, you know, digging into the sheep's head, But, you know, you don't get to eat a sheep's head that often.

Speaker 1:

Yeah. I love the fact that you chose these quote unquote horror stories. The, you know, the the story that my wife and I retell most often is we were on our our honeymoon and we were in Italy, and we we come we roll into this little city, this little town, and we kind of go to the local tourist information. And he says, supreme breakfast. It means the breakfast is amazing and he's like, the rooms are okay.

Speaker 1:

So we're like, okay, it's a great breakfast. The rooms are okay. So we came into this with no great expectations, but we took him at his word. So we go to to this hotel. The bed is completely full of bugs, like bugs everywhere.

Speaker 1:

There's stuff in the sheets. I come and sit down on the toilet and it's rocking like it's falling out. It's coming out of its place and then in the morning this we were like okay supremely breakfast right? And then the breakfast is like a cracker and a little bit of Nutella and a thing and so it's like this horror story of a bed like bed and room and breakfast like everything was absolutely horrible. On your honeymoon?

Speaker 1:

Yes, this was our honeymoon. But it's a beautiful town and there's like the river going through the middle of the town. And every time we retell that horror story with so much joy And I promise you, you know, at the time it was uncomfortable, but but it's like one of our best memories in many ways. And I I promise you that your your grandchildren are retelling the the story of how grandma ate a a sheep's head. They'll be telling that for a lifetime, so I deeply appreciate it.

Speaker 1:

Think that in many ways bonds are built and reinforced through, you know, these shared experiences and sometimes actually shared negative experience maybe build stronger bonds, right. It's that shared commiseration or shared difficulty or shared challenge that you overcome together, right. The eight mile hike that you that you're about to die, but you you or at least you felt that way, but you still made it through. So I think there's a I think a sense of strength in those difficulties overcome as a team.

Speaker 2:

Sometimes I'll tell you one story that I've talked about a shared difficulty. This is this happened at our place in Bozeman, Montana. And my husband and I had just gone out for an early morning walk and then we were having lunch. We weren't gone from the house that long, but the next day I was kind of cleaning out the refrigerator a little bit. Hadn't on the kitchen counter.

Speaker 2:

I had left some cheese and some crackers and what else was there? Oh, thin crisps. And I had cranked over. I I'm kind of new to this Bozeman thing now. Right?

Speaker 2:

And I cracked when we were going out, I cracked open the kitchen window a little bit. I just left it open like about three inches to let some fresh air in. And by the time we came home, I have my arms from the garage door to the kitchen. It's probably about 30 feet, let's say. And my arms are filled with stuff from the grocery store and those slippery plastic bags.

Speaker 2:

So if I'm just watching all this, I don't want the stuff to fall out and break. And when I get within about eight feet of the kitchen and I finally look up and there is a black bear staring at me. The bear has his butt to the kitchen counter, so he is full up staring at me. And whenever anybody asks how big the bear was, you give the typical Montana answer. A bear in your house is as big as a skyscraper.

Speaker 2:

And so my husband said that I, he was further behind me in the hallway. He said that I yelled out bear And there was a laundry room right next to the kitchen. And I scooted in there. And I closed these little doors that little, what do you call those kind of pocket doors? They're not, you know, this this is no big deal.

Speaker 2:

I mean, they're not gonna protect you from anything. And I'm in there. I have my cell phone and I'm dialing 911. And I was so upset that I forgot that our cell phones didn't work up there.

Speaker 1:

No, my daughter.

Speaker 2:

You know? And so then I realized, okay, that's not gonna work. And there was one window in the laundry room. It was up high and it was just a tiny little window. I mean, you can't get out that window.

Speaker 2:

Even if you broke the glass, you're not getting out of it. We didn't have any guns in the house unlike most people in Montana. But if we'd had a gun in the house, you think we're gonna store it in the laundry room? No. You're supposed to keep it somewhere under you're safe.

Speaker 2:

And so anyway, my husband yelled that he's gonna go, I don't know, to the front door and let the bear out or something. And then I thought, you know, that doesn't sound like a good idea. And so then he comes back in and he says, come, come out to the garage and we will go and get help. And, but that was one of the scariest moments of my entire life. I mean, totally scary moment when I had to open those doors.

Speaker 2:

And what if I'm eye to eye with the bear again?

Speaker 1:

My Lord.

Speaker 2:

You know, I mean, I was really petrified, but I knew I couldn't stay in there either because the bear could just one slap at And that then the two of us are in this tiny little laundry room. No. So I very slowly, I pulled those doors open. I didn't see the bear and I ran for my life, literally for my life out to the garage. We get in the car and as my husband is backing up, the front of our house there has a front door and on the left hand side of the front door is where my husband has a study and he had a big square window there that looks out on the driveway and everything.

Speaker 2:

The bear had crawled up and was standing up in that window like this watching us leave. And my husband said, the bear is saying, look who's in charge now. Yeah. That that was really scary, but also and totally memorable. I mean, it's something you'll you know?

Speaker 2:

And then when we got down to the bottom of our mountain, we were able to call for help. I was able to call 911. They sent over some bear wardens. And the first thing they said to us, are you armed? They were.

Speaker 2:

We weren't. And and then they walked around the house, and they got the bear out first. They opened well, the guys that were down at the firehouse at the bottom of the mountain came back up all in their pickup trucks and opened all the doors and windows and shooed the bear out. But then the bear warden said, gave me, there were two of them, a man and a woman, and the woman gave me her cell phone number. And she said, here call me back when the bear returns.

Speaker 2:

My husband who had never had a bear in the house was going like, he was dismissive like, I've never had a bear here before. I'm not the bear. No, the bear is not coming back. And, but I kept that cell number close And that night as I'm cooking dinner, the front door has two glass panels on both sides. And the bear was there standing up like ringing the doorbell.

Speaker 2:

And the bear warden said, the bear will come back because he got some food here. Just a little bit of food on that kitchen counter. He will So be while the bear warden was still, you know, I still have the bear in my vision. I and I'm I'm I call the bear warden. She answers the phone immediately.

Speaker 2:

She does not put me on hold. No music at a time like that. And she says, will send someone out to capture the bear and move him a 100 miles away to a different territory so he won't But, be you know, that's that's a dangerous, potentially really dangerous story. But we we got out of it alive, and we live differently in that house now. We don't crank open windows for let fresh air in.

Speaker 1:

Air and fresh bears.

Speaker 2:

Right. Right.

Speaker 1:

Joe, believe it or not, we are way over time. This has been so delightful. I I appreciate you. We have one last question. It's the only question that's scripted on this show.

Speaker 1:

Okay. And it's a difficult one because it's personal.

Speaker 2:

Okay.

Speaker 1:

If you had to go back to 20 year old Joe, what would you advise her?

Speaker 2:

The 20 year old, what would I advise her? Keep on doing what you're doing. When I when I was 20, I I was at the University of Texas in Austin. There were what? 40,000 people on campus.

Speaker 2:

And I was one of eight people, eight student leaders selected to represent the university in Chile, Santiago at a student leader conference. And so I must have been doing something right then. I mean, I brought my Singer sewing machine with me to campus so that I could make my own clothes. I didn't have the money just to go out and buy, you know, fancy stuff. But I obviously was doing something right at 20 and that, you know, I mean to be selective for such an honor, I'd never had a passport before.

Speaker 2:

I'd never flown out of the country. In my family, the big deal was we'd all get in the car. My father's through to Baker and take a car trip. But so to be singled out like that at 20, I I think I was doing something right.

Speaker 1:

Joe, thank you so much for coming on the show today. I appreciate you.

Speaker 2:

Well, I I love that, Ari, that you say I appreciate you. I appreciate what you're doing too. These conversations are fun. Now I'm gonna go get a glass of wine.

Speaker 1:

You've earned it. Thank you so much, Joe.

Speaker 2:

Thank you.