The Story Of My Dad - The Conversation We Would All Love To Have With Our Father

Full transcript: The Story Of My Dad on London Real

3:00 Brian Rose: This is London Real. I am Brian Rose, my guest today. Let me ask you a question. How would you like to sit down with your father for two hours and talk about anything you wanted, things from your childhood, things from your teenage years, ask him questions about his life and the decisions he made? I know you would.

3:29 And after many years of asking, my father agreed to sit down with me and have a conversation. It was an amazing time where I got to ask him about his childhood. He was born in a hospital made of adobe bricks. He grew up on a farm working really hard. He moved to California and studied at Caltech and became an electrical engineer and went on to live his life.

3:51 And I got to ask him a lot of hard questions that I was never able to really speak to him about, including when he divorced my mom when I was seven years old. My dad gave me a real big dose of masculine energy on this episode. he was really himself. Again, this is not something he wanted to do. He’s a very private person, but I really appreciate him coming on camera and talking about all things about his life and my childhood and raising me as a son and the way he looks at the world.

4:19 And so I hope you enjoy this very personal conversation with my dad. We are here at my dad’s house where I spent the last couple years in my high school in Delmore, California to talk about things. So thanks for being on the show.

4:38 Brian's Dad: Glad to be here.

4:39 Brian Rose: We did this same thing about nine years ago before London really even existed, before I had any idea I was gonna do the show.

4:49 We were at Chateau Marmol in Los Angeles and we had just gone to a Caltech tour and we did like an hour back and forth. Do you remember that?

4:59 Brian's Dad: Yes, I remember that, surprisingly.

5:02 Brian Rose: How was that?

5:03 Brian's Dad: That was good.

5:04 I think most people were interested in hearing about Feynman.

5:07 Brian Rose: Oh, is that what they were asking you?

5:09 Brian's Dad: Much more so than about me.

5:10 Brian Rose: I don’t know about that. But we had a great walk around Caltech and then we had a good chat and talked about you and your childhood and going to Caltech and it was pretty good.

5:19 Yeah. That was fun. And before that, people don’t know that you also starred in the smash hit motion picture, The Supremacy, the martial arts film where you played the villain.

5:32 Brian's Dad: That’s correct.

5:34 Brian Rose: And I played the hero, and you got better reviews than me.

5:38 I was wondering if you could start off where it all began. Can you tell us when you were born and where you were born?

5:46 Brian's Dad: Exactly when. I was 1942. Okay.

5:48 I love you, roughly.

5:50 Brian Rose: Okay. And where?

5:51 Brian's Dad: In Florence, Arizona. All right.

5:54 Brian Rose: And what was that like? What do you remember when you first met us?

5:58 Brian's Dad: Absolutely nothing. I can tell you a little bit about the hospital. So the hospital was made of adobe.

6:04 Brian Rose: What’s adobe?

6:06 Brian's Dad: It was adobe. Adobe is mud, bricks. People still use them. Your other grandpa’s house was made of adobe, by Benedict.

6:19 And so really –

6:20 Brian Rose: So you bake dirt and a mixture of strong dirt and a sun until it’s hard and you build bricks out of it and you pull the house.

6:28 Brian's Dad: So this hospital was made out of adobe, very popular in the southwest. materials, clay, straw, and water.

6:35 Brian Rose: Wow. So basics.

6:36 Brian's Dad: Basics.

6:37 Brian Rose: Okay. And what was Florence, Arizona like?

6:40 Brian's Dad: Well, Florence was once the capital of Arizona, but only for a short amount of time. And it was also the county seat for the county that I grew up in, and it also housed the state prison.

6:53 And my grandfather, grandfather Knight, was one of the trustees’ guards there. He was one of the persons that looked after the work crews. So he worked as a guard at that prison for some of the time after he retired from being a cowboy.

7:08 Brian Rose: Okay. And can you tell me a bit about Grandfather Knight?

7:11 Brian's Dad: Yeah, he was born in England. He was born in Cornwall. And he came to the country as an orphan, I think when he was nine. Came to Central Arizona and he got a job as a cowboy on a ranch, now a famous ranch in Arizona. It’s a historic site there, called the Revas Ranch, where he and his wife, my grandmother, basically live out by themselves in the hills around Phoenix, east of Phoenix, for a good little while.

7:46 Brian Rose: How do you get from England to Arizona boat?

7:50 Brian's Dad: Okay, didn’t you to the east coast the reason you did that is his his Father had already come to the US and was living in that area and He was the mayor of one of the towns near Phoenix for a while around 1900 And so that was a reasonable place his two sisters may have been there I think they were looking after him. You can read about this in your grandma’s books, which details you managed to get all that in print.

8:23 So you’re going to get that story pretty straight if you read those.

8:29 Brian Rose: Okay, because your mom, my grandmother, she wrote four books.

8:34 Brian's Dad: She wrote four books, each tracing the individual parents that they had.

8:39 Brian Rose: So the four grandparents that you had. Okay.

8:43 Brian's Dad: And nights. Roses and nights and and then the subsets of those, the husbands and wives before they were roses and nights, so there were several others.

8:53 Brian Rose: Okay, all right. Four families. Okay, and what did your parents do for a living?

8:59 Brian's Dad: Farmers, in fact, your grandparents were, your other grandparents, the Rosebud grandparents were farmers also, so their long long history of farming. Right. Through the south of the USA, and had come west and had come perhaps even further west, may have done some time in Washington, and they came during the Depression and they came in the Dust Bowl refugees time in their Beverly Hills, Beverly Hills car with their belongings on the back and ended up in Arizona, and there were quite a few relatives that ended up there.

9:35 Brian Rose: And so your your dad came from Oklahoma?

9:38 Brian's Dad: It was he was born in Oklahoma Oklahoma, okay, and then came west and so he he came west with him. I think when he was like nine

9:47 Brian Rose: Okay. All right, and that was hard times when the Dust Bowl happened.

9:52 Brian's Dad: Yeah. Yeah You know these people had no had nothing just both they had for them. They were they were They were sharecroppers before, so that’s the way it worked.

10:04 They couldn’t afford land, but they could afford to farm, and they could afford to tend the crops and to share them with the landowners. And when they got to Arizona, they did more of that. They would perform manual labor on the farms. They would little by little rent a piece of it or share crop it, and eventually they came to own quite a bit and own their own farms.

10:29 Brian Rose: What were your first memories as a kid?

10:32 Brian's Dad: I think I can remember from about two, which was the first house that my mom and dad lived in in Coolidge, Arizona. That’s where they lived when I was born, so I was born in Florence, but lived in Coolidge. I remember that house, and it’s still there. It was – I’m thinking the rent was something like $10 or $15 a month. They had scraped for that, and it was a very small house, and they did that while my dad farmed, and mom, their grandmother, worked as a stenographer in the court in the influence.

11:17 They managed to get along at that point. That’s the first things I can kind of recollect, is just being in that house and that when your father’s a farmer, you don’t see him. He’s not there when you’re there. You’re a kid, you’re sleeping, you’re not there when he’s there. He’s there.

11:39 He leaves in the morning at four and he comes home at night at eight or ten, seven days a week. So, you’re influenced by your mother for a good little while, and I’d say that continued on until I was in college even, because the farm is a 24-7 endeavor.

12:00 Brian Rose: Right, so every day.

12:02 Brian's Dad: If you can find a time when the animals don’t need tending and the crops don’t need looking after, and nothing’s in a crisis, you can sneak in a vacation. that’s how we did it. You sneaked in a vacation, if possible.

12:20 Brian Rose: And what was your mom like? How would you describe her?

12:24 Brian's Dad: I’d say, well first of all, she lived a very long time, so she was a different throughout her entire life. There was a lot of change in the way she was, and you really can’t react to that early on when you’re really a small kid. I’d say that she was, all of the people, the relatives, because of this situation that they were in were tough. I would say tough. You didn’t have much. You had to put up with what happened. You didn’t control much. You didn’t have anybody to help you, kept relatives. There were no services available, no nannies. There were no help.

13:08 It was all – you did it or it didn’t get done. There were a lot of hazards and hardships. We moved from there not long after, I’m guessing, when I was five. I sat on my grandfather’s knee, Carpo Rose, in an old Studebaker truck with everything in it from the house as we moved from Coolidge, a small house there in a town, out onto what you would call today a cabin on the farm near Stanfield. There was nothing out there.

13:45 There was no electricity. I think there was some gas, but no electricity. There was nobody around. It had two rooms and a kitchen-living room combination, and it was just a little square box right in the middle of the dirt. And that was the first place I lived on the farm.

14:04 And at that point, we had maybe my brother, Tom, might have been a baby. I mean, I wasn’t, I don’t think, born yet at that point, but could have just been born. So there was my mom with three little kids, and there were rattlesnakes everywhere, and dust, and the men were always gone during the day, and they were working all around the area. There was no services. There were a lot of things that water was erratic.

14:29 Everything was hard. There was no hustling into town to get stuff. There was a good little ways from stuff.

14:35 Brian Rose: Did it feel like a hard childhood, or did it just feel more like it?

14:39 Brian's Dad: No, no, it didn’t feel like a hard childhood at all.

14:42 I would have to say that that would be true of all the cases. I didn’t have a hard childhood. There was no kickback or blowback or fallback on that. They were busy and hardworking and we felt, you know, we were eating and we were tempted and we looked after and things, we had made our own activities. There was nobody, we didn’t have preschool or anything like that, there were no playgrounds, but there was stuff to do.

15:11 They would go outside and play in the mud. Weisenberg.

15:16 Brian Rose: When did you start helping on the farm? How old were you? Bock.

15:22 Brian's Dad: We moved from there back into Casa Grande, a nearby town, and my dad bought a house there, and that was the first actual real house we had in town, and it was a relatively nice place. It’s actually still there today as well. It was – that’s where I first went to school. We did that, so we start first grade, go to school. We didn’t work on the farm.

15:48 He was gone again, down to dusk. This was probably until – probably not until fourth or fifth grade, did we actually have him around much, because we lived in town for three or four or five years. We actually moved back out onto the ranch when I was in the sixth grade, fifth grade, going on sixth grade. At that point, he built a house, another house, a nice house, a brand new house on the property that he actually farmed. So we saw him a lot then.

16:20 We all lived there, and every day he would come in, and he would come in for lunch, and before he was too far away to come home for lunch, it just wouldn’t happen. So in that case, we were able to go to work on the farm, and we did. We had things to do, and we had opportunities to play around the farm areas. There was some land, there was desert land around it, and there were crops, there was always something going on. And we ultimately had livestock as well, so we inherited the jobs of tending to livestock.

16:54 Brian Rose: Which meant what?

16:55 Brian's Dad: Feeding the calves. Getting up early, feeding the cattle and messing with the horses and finding them when they got out, and other tasks you would do on the weekend, looking after the small animals, selling them, taking them to the slaughterhouse, deworming them, everything you could imagine doing, cleaning out their pens, transporting food, hay, grain, whatever we did to get food for him. Hurting him around the property, building fences, corrals, stacking hay, general.

17:32 This was all not part of the main farm. The farm was not that job. That was on the side. The animals were part of a side kind of a farm. They were not the primary product.

17:43 Brian Rose: Okay, and how would you describe your father? What was he like, and what kind of guy was he?

17:51 Brian's Dad: He was independent. He was very active, and he put a lot of time. He didn’t finish college, but he thought a lot about what he was doing, and he asked a lot of people, and he learned a lot, so he was always near the forefront of the farming technology and the best practices, And he was always on top of the personnel, he was very good with the people.

18:19 Most of the people were Native Americans, Native Americans and Mexicans, and sometimes transients that came through, but there were a variety of unskilled labor that he had. They dealt with on a daily basis, and he was very good. They thought he was a really good leader.

18:42 Brian Rose: What was his management style?

18:44 Brian's Dad: with the person, teach them what he wanted, make it very clear how he wanted it done, check on him often.

18:53 There was always watching, there was no way for a little thing to get by, and there was no barking, there was no real punishment that went with that. The penalty was just not doing it right, and the expectation was that you would. that held for all the staff. There was a tendency for them to – and this is very old and primitive – and the tendency was it would be paid on Friday night or Saturday morning. All of that money would be spent by Sunday, maybe usually by Saturday night.

19:35 So all the labor on the farm was paid on Saturday morning and had it all spent by Saturday night at the local stores. And they either, the women carried the groceries home on their heads, and maybe they caught a ride in the back of a pickup if there was one, and all the other guys went to jail for drinking and being rowdy. So they would go to jail and round it up so he sobered up. And then my dad would go get them out of jail the next morning and give them a ride back to the ranch.

20:12 Brian Rose: Every week?

20:13 Brian's Dad: Pretty much every week. At least my perception. It was pretty often. It was pretty much a routine. Wow.

20:21 Brian Rose: But no barking. I never saw grandpa yell or racist.

20:24 Brian's Dad: No, I don’t. That wasn’t a style. He wasn’t a style. He would expect you to get it right and if you did it wrong he would go out and explain again what you were doing wrong and what his standard was, and one of the very common things we would do when we were really young, we got to operate heavy equipment when we were young, so I would be driving the pickup truck down the farm road while he walked to check the irrigation system, and I would be – he would put it in first gear and idle the engine, and all my job was to not let it get off of the ditch, get into the ditch, it was to keep it on the road, and he would just walk along the side of it, and then he would come over and jump on it the last minute and then take over. I was doing that when I was like 9 or 10. I was actually driving and shifting the pickup trucks and other stuff when I was 11. I had my first auto accident when I was 11.

21:17 I peeled the chrome off of the performance of his car, my other car, my dad’s car, so I scraped that off. I didn’t get hardly a word, except, yeah, boy, that’s really bad driving, kid.

21:31 Brian Rose: So, it was really about empowering people.

21:34 Brian's Dad: I think so. I think he let the rope really far out for you.

21:39 And he expected you to be able to do stuff because he was able to do that’s what his dad did to him. He was always doing stuff. He was farming on his own account when he was 18, you know, on the hook for the for the ramp and equipment and that’s why he worked online. he presumed that that’s just what you do.

21:58 Brian Rose: Okay, and he led by example he worked harder than anybody else.

22:02 Brian's Dad: Yeah, absolutely. There’s never any chance where where he would be sitting and not being involved in what’s going on. He’d be showing people where he’d be hit. If there were shovels being used, he’d have one. So yes, it was definitely by example and there was no there was no blowback on mistakes, even fairly big ones.

22:22 Brian Rose: Okay, oh because I got to see him as a farmer when I was a kid because we would go you would go to the go to Colorado Colorado yeah we move later on something else so I would see him always watching the weather he was constantly watching the weather and getting up early and go out we’d go out and check potatoes and check barley and just I just got a sense so so the farm is living things and they don’t tend themselves and if you want if you’re You’re going to grow a plant, you can’t have a brown thumb.

22:54 Brian's Dad: You have to know, because typically the crops are annual. So you have a year, and then you get to catch the crop at the end. And if you screw up during the year, you don’t catch the crop. So you have to be careful every single day. So he would get up in the morning, he would go and look at every single thing going on, and he would see that it wasn’t going wrong.

23:15 If the water was leaking, or if somebody had failed to do something, or if a piece of equipment was broken or maintained, or if somebody didn’t show up to work, all those things had to be dealt with every day. And then he would have to also tend to the banking and the marketing of the crops. He also spent a lot of time with the other farmers in the area because they all had kind of a group contribution to what worked and what didn’t. They all had their own ideas because they were doing a long time.

23:43 So he kept a very close social touch. There was always a social aspect. So I would go with him in the morning when I was working in the summer, I would be driving a tractor or something, and he’d come out, and he’d say, let’s go get a Popsicle. And we would get in the truck, take a break, and we would drive, let’s go four miles, to the little teeny diner-cafe kind of place in the whole wall, and then there would be a whole row of farmers just chatting it up about what’s going on.

24:13 And if you needed a new tractor driver, somebody say, hey, I got a guy that’s looking for work. So they’d swap. It’s like a big swap meet. And they do that pretty much every day. I remember going to breakfast with him at like, again, 4.30 in the morning or something, when I could get out of bed, because I was always resisting it as a city boy.

24:31 But there was always a lot of chat going on with the other farmers.

24:35 Brian Rose: Like that sounded like a big part of the job, because that’s information.

24:39 Brian's Dad: And that’s about anything that might be happening. Any part of the news, it didn’t read the newspaper, the radios didn’t have that kind of information. They would know what happened, what froze last night, you know, if there was a freeze that came early, if the water was dry or if there was a new regulation that somebody had heard about, or if the road was washed out, you name it.

25:01 They would all know about that stuff, and they’d share that.

25:07 Brian Rose: And when did you start being more involved in the farm and doing it more as a full-time job?

25:17 Brian's Dad: He gave us a job, and I had my first Social Security card in 1956, maybe, 14 years old. So we had a job at 14. We were paid 50 cents an hour, and we worked 10-hour days, six days a week in the summer.

25:37 And during the school year, we worked after school an hour, two or three, however much the daylight was there, and we also worked weekends through the summer. And we would pretty much save all that money. And we didn’t get to do the fancy jobs. We got to do the 50-cent an hour jobs. The tractor drivers would get an 80 cents an hour, or a buck an hour.

26:03 So the guys that were driving the more expensive equipment, where there was more stake, were more professional, they got paid more. And so we end up with $30, $40 a week. I don’t know if we worked hard. $60, $60, $70 a week would be typical, we might get paid $30 to $40 bucks. And that would probably go in the bank.

26:24 And so we’d go to the bank with him, he went to the bank pretty often, and he had a technique for dealing with the banks. We’re used to dealing with farmers, and the farmers are different as a bank customer. The farmers are borrowers, so they need to borrow the whole crop all year long, and then they pay it off on one big bang at the end of the year. So he would always go in, and in order to get the best rates and to show his need, he always would change into old and dirty or pants. He would have more holes in them.

26:58 He would. He would. He was banking pants.

27:01 Brian Rose: It’s quite a job. I mean, you got to work every angle.

27:04 Brian's Dad: Yeah, that was, yeah. You had to have really good banking relationships because if you had a failure, the bank had to say, that’s fine. We’ll just carry over your loan until next year. Right. But they had to believe in you.

27:15 They had to, if you were, if you were going to do that three or four or five years in a row, then now they’re thinking you’re pretty dumb as a farmer, you’re not going to do that anymore. Right.

27:22 Brian Rose: And that could make or break you.

27:23 Brian's Dad: Well, yeah. If you, that’s how you got out of farming.

27:25 You basically, and we had relatives who got out of farming that way. They started farming because they married into the family or they were relatives and so they would go and work for their in-laws and they would learn a little bit about it and then they’d try a little rental or a little something, maybe get a little piece of land with their own to try it and if they weren’t very good at it, pretty soon they’d be working back at the feed and seed store or at the lumber yard and they wouldn’t be a farmer anymore.

27:48 Brian Rose: Okay, because they couldn’t do…

27:49 Brian's Dad: They just didn’t get it right often enough.

27:51 Brian Rose: Well, how could you? I mean, there’s so many things. You’ve got to manage a team, you’ve got to be good with numbers on the edge of technology, good banking relationships work every day and like you said, one problem could potentially ruin the crop.

28:03 Brian's Dad: Yeah, you have to jump on anything that might be heading downhill.

28:06 Brian Rose: Okay, all right.

28:07 Brian's Dad: So that’s the way it worked and we fit into that because as we got more competent operating equipment and understanding we would be allowed to work around the big engines, we’d be allowed to work on the more expensive equipment, we’d be allowed to plow through the fields where a single slip up would take out a whole acre of crop or more if you just screw it up you’d plow it up with your tractor so we had to maintain a tolerance of probably two or three inches on the tractor going down the row and and another thing you could tell kind of that would be characteristic is he required all of this rows to be arrow straight laser straight and he showed everybody how to do it and and there isn’t anybody they can’t learn how to do that to start out with a blank field that’s totally flat and go down the first pass and get them dead straight and turn around and come back again and get them dead straight again and have them all be parallel for the whole field.

28:59 Brian Rose: It seems very hard to do without lasers.

29:02 Brian's Dad: Yes it is. It was actually surprisingly easy and the trick was to find a mountain far far away so you had a vanishing point that would go to and you simply stared at it and didn’t even think about the tractor just made sure you kept going toward that place and you look down. So you didn’t You didn’t do it like this, especially, because that produced this.

29:21 So as long as you did that, you would simply just go there. And when you turned around, you’d look for another one that was pretty much lined up with what you’d already done, another mountain on the other direction, and you drove back against that mountain, and you didn’t really pay attention to the other roads. You didn’t try to stay, you know, an eighth of an inch away from the last one you did. It’s not possible. Right.

29:38 And they had to be straight, because you need the irrigation right, and everything else. Well, they just looked like you were sloppy. Okay. And if you didn’t care about that, you may not care about getting the seed in the road properly or harvesting it properly. So A to Z was always to the top standard.

29:56 Brian Rose: Now, as you become a teenager, you can see that grandpa is becoming more successful. He’s creating capital.

30:04 Brian's Dad: Yeah, he’s generating capital, he’s improving the quality and the output of the farm, the productivity of the farm is going up. I’d say from the time I was born to the time I went off to school, he improved the productivity on cotton of about anywhere between eight and ten times. 10 times as much cotton.

30:25 And the same amount of, well, in the same amount of land, it was actually less land.

30:30 Brian Rose: That’s incredible.

30:31 Brian's Dad: Because he was allowed by the government to plant less and less cotton because there was a surplus and there was too much cotton and so the government said, don’t plant. In fact, we’ll pay you not to plant and then they said, none of that but we’ll will also make you not plant. So we’ll try to keep the supply intact by having it properly balanced and subsidized, but we just don’t want all you can grow because that’s too much.

30:55 So that meant that he used less and less land and we ended up building other crops to take their place because there was land that wasn’t needed for cotton. But I can remember the cotton when he was growing it was this high. I’d say a foot, two feet, a vest, and had and like three or four little pops of cotton on their bowls. And when I was working on it last year, it was taller than my head on a tractor. It was eight, nine feet tall.

31:22 And it was a bush, you know, to stick around and it had, you know, cotton all over it. And that was better fertilizer, better pesticides, better energy. Yeah, water is better control. The land was rotated, the crops were rotated. The land was allowed to rest in between crops.

31:39 And other crops were planted in between regenerated the soil, pest controls, fertilizers, genetics on the cotton plants, more efficient harvesting machines, mechanization, all of that stuff, all of the stuff that you did helped the plants produce better. They were healthier, they were more, they just flourished more. Big and bushy and full of cotton.

32:06 Brian Rose: I just had a memory when we were down seeing Grandma before she died maybe about 7, 8 years ago maybe, or 10 years ago, she drove me by I think that first farm that you talked about and she showed it to me in Stanfield I guess and she said Grandpa pulled up tree stumps for two years before we could plant here.

32:30 Brian's Dad: Something like that. It was worse than that actually. It was desert. He went out in the desert, Arizona, and you’d see mesquites and cactus, rocks, washes and stuff. He bought raw land when we lived in Coolidge, and he took him two years.

32:45 A river ran through it, it flooded every year. But in order to do that, he bought a caterpillar tractor, and they went out there along with some hired people, one or two of his buddies, and they pulled the stumps out, bulldozed them, burned them, leveled the land to some degree, put in drilled wells. So that land was created from scratch, from desert. Desert. Desert.

33:08 So, and then it gradually was improved to a point where the, and you can always tell that when you drove across his farms that there were no weeds, there were no, nothing growing where it shouldn’t be growing. So nobody was stealing the water, the fertilizer, nobody was, you know, screwing with the plants that were part of the crop. Okay. So you could drive across there and you could just go from one farm to the next and see the difference. That was just clean.

33:31 Brian Rose: And the other farms weren’t?

33:33 Brian's Dad: They would mess up a little bit. I spent a good deal of time making weeds go away, with tractors and with burners and with poison and oils and stuff to get rid of the stuff that was competing with your crops. Because that takes away all the things you’re paying for. So you could easily see the difference, and the farmers got better and better and better, which is effectively what the farmer does.

33:57 He starts with, this line was he bought for 25 bucks an acre and sold it for a thousand at the end. And a thousand today is nothing, you can barely buy land for a thousand dollars anywhere today. But at that point, at the time he sold it, which was in 1963, it had increased 40 times.

34:19 Brian Rose: And now as my grandpa, your dad, got richer, did it change him and did it change you guys as a family?

34:27 Brian's Dad: No, not really, although it wasn’t a big spender, but I’ll give you an example.

34:33 When we started working after a year or two, Tom and I had saved up some money in our bank accounts from working for $35 a week, and we had a couple of grand. So he proposed that we form a partnership and do some business farming speculation. So the first thing we did was buy 20 calves from an auction in Phoenix and hauled them out there, and we were going to let them eat the weeds from the ditch banks, and we weren’t going to feed them anything. And we doubled our money, we sold them for four grand later, and we took that and bought forty.

35:08 We were buying for a hundred bucks a piece, and sold them for two hundred bucks, and so we doubled our money again, and we were cooking along, and then we decided that we would by some registered Angus and pedigreed animals. We ended up buying them from dad’s uncle, Louis, because he had a herd and he was getting rid of it. So he split the herd and my uncle Calvin bought half and we bought half. But the three of us bought that with our savings. So we spent, I don’t know what it was, it might have been a pretty good little song.

35:42 He cut us a deal because he wanted to get rid of them. But we bought 14, we had a bull and some cows and a few miscellaneous heifers and little ones. So we had about 10 or 15 registered anguses. We sold those on a regular basis and made, pretty soon we had 25 or 50 grand. So we’re doing about 50 grand in the pot after a couple, two or three years just by.

36:06 And we learned how to raise them and show them. We took them to Tom and I both showed Angus Bulls in the shows. the fair, dragging them around. Their earlings are pretty big, but they’re basically teenage cows. And so we had to do that in order to get people to pay more for their children, for their calves.

36:31 And we also ate one every year, so that was just skimmed off into our freezer. So we had a lot of steak. So one of the things we were good with is we ate well. We barbecued T-bone steaks pretty much every weekend or every other weekend, and it was all you could eat. I’ve personally eaten three of them.

36:52 That’s my best. Three T-bone steaks. We made an inch and a half or inch and a quarter of T-bones about the size of your plate. And so this is one of the things that was famous, that people would come around and we’d go to the store and buy, I don’t know, 15 or 20 of them from, and there were relatives that ran the store as well, but they didn’t cut a big deal, but they were there and these steaks would be barbecued and consumed instantly by the crowd. So, yeah, there was a little splurging.

37:21 And then he gradually started buying some more, investing in more equipment and reinvesting in the farm. So, he did land leveling, water reclamation projects, did different kinds of wells that would produce better water for the thing, you know, more reliable, cheaper. and equipment like cotton picking machines, things that you needed to automate with. So he reinvested in the farm. So from that point of view, most of the appreciation and all the crops income was surplus was used for that.

37:58 And so…

37:59 Brian Rose: So why didn’t you stay doing that? Because you were good at it. Why aren’t you a farmer?

38:04 Brian's Dad: I will tell you the story of my cousin, Sid Palmer, who started to do that after he got out of school. He went back to his dad’s farm up near Peligian, and he told me he was sitting out there one day after, at the end of his second or third summer in the heat, driving on the tractor, and he said, I’m not going to do this the rest of my life.

38:27 This is going nowhere. And I had already figured that out, and I was also doing well in school, and all the The school people encouraged me to go to college, and that was not agricultural school. So that was going to be science or technology. So that, I’d already made it my mind by the time I was in high school that I was not going to be a farmer. Okay.

38:53 After working on the farm that – It wasn’t the bad part of the farm. It was that it just didn’t maintain – I couldn’t see doing that intellectually for the rest of my life.

39:01 Brian Rose: Okay. And talk about what you were doing in high school. You started getting interested in electronics?

39:06 Brian's Dad: Yeah, I was interested in electronics way before that, because I had two uncles that were into it. One was in charge of the Goodyear Blimp Project at Goodyear for many years, and the other one worked in the aerospace industry in California. They would come driving over land from Ohio and other places to visit the farm, because the farm to them was a very strange thing out west, sort of like cowboy land. They were from the city in the east, so they would come driving in their old cars a week or two to drive across country and come, and then they would just look at everything as what the strange stuff is going on here.

39:43 But they would also answer questions like, how does a magnet work? And I remember, I asked my uncle, I’m dying for a magnet. I want to know, I’m going to have a magnet. And there was no place to buy them and no place to get them. He said, oh, that’s easy.

39:59 Have you got an old bolt? I said, yeah. I went down to the garage and dragged out an old, like, half-inch bolt about that long. He said, here, watch this. And he pointed it to the North Pole and whacked the end with a hammer.

40:10 Then he proceeded to pick up filings all over the ground. All you have to do is rearrange the internal molecules with that blow while it’s lined up with an external field to make that ion become magnetic. And this looked like magic. It was magic. And so I ended up taking apart all the old, I scrounged all the old TV sets so I could There were some TVs, there wasn’t very much, but electronic pieces, I would just take them apart to get the parts out of them, just because I didn’t have any source of parts to even fiddle around with, make a radio or something.

40:41 So we were able to do that on the farm. We had a shop, some new shop tools. We overhauled our own tractors, so we had a lot of mechanic stuff going on, a lot of grease and oil went down. We had old cars around and machinery, so we would do projects with them, try to get I’m running again, that’s with them, jalopies. This is all before we had licenses.

41:05 So we were able to exercise a lot of opportunities to learn on our own. Nobody said, hey, you can’t do that.

41:12 Brian Rose: And your parents were really supportive of you going to do something else?

41:18 Brian's Dad: Yeah, they were.

41:19 Brian Rose: That’s a bit rare.

41:20 Didn’t a lot of parents want the sons to carry on?

41:23 Brian's Dad: I think most of the farming parents wanted their kids to take over the family business. And I’d have to say I would expect that my dad was a little disappointed that we didn’t do that. Tom did a little bit of it.

41:34 Brian Rose: Your brother, yeah.

41:35 Brian's Dad: Yeah, and he actually did it in Colorado. So that was a little bit, that kind of worked. But that wasn’t, he even didn’t want to do that either. Okay. After a while.

41:43 Brian Rose: And your dad kept going.

41:46 Brian's Dad: Yeah, after he was 77.

41:48 Brian Rose: Wow, farmed until he was 77. 18 to 77.

41:52 Brian's Dad: It was in his blood, it was the only thing he knew.

41:57 He loved it. He never was unhappy about it, it was a thing that he really wanted to do, and he said that over and over again. Best thing ever. Okay. Well, that’s good.

42:07 Brian Rose: Yeah. And so, you were also president of your class in high school.

42:13 Brian's Dad: Classes, yeah. All of them. All of them.

42:16 Brian Rose: Yeah. Okay. How did that happen?

42:18 Brian's Dad: As an accident, I think. Well, in the high school, I went to a school in Stanfield, which was a separate grade school I went through eight, and there was no high school.

42:30 So when I got out of the eighth grade, I ended up going back to Casa Grande. Now, I’d already been to grade school there some early on, one through four, let’s say five. So I knew a lot of people, and we had a lot of friends there. So it wasn’t that – but it was a way bigger place. I think the whole school was almost a thousand kids.

42:47 And the first week or two in the freshman year, we had an assembly of all the freshmen, They were going to elect class officers, and I just sat there because I didn’t know anything. And I got nominated and I won.

43:02 Brian Rose: And then you won again and won again. So you must have done something.

43:07 Brian's Dad: Well, I don’t know.

43:08 Something happened. But it was another waking thing that said, you need to step up here. So that was a big step in being willing to reach out and try to stand in front of people. And to try to understand what they needed and why they needed to follow you. I don’t know, it’s just interesting.

43:34 Brian Rose: Okay. So you kind of enjoyed that, learning that? Yeah. Okay. Which is kind of the opposite of what you’d expect a science geek.

43:42 Brian's Dad: Yeah, exactly. Well, no, a tech geek and a farm kid, you know, blessed to be able to work farm kids.

43:48 Brian Rose: Okay. So you had kind of a lot of broad things going on. Yeah.

43:51 Interested in tech, class president, and then you also could work all day on a farm without complaining

43:58 Brian's Dad: yeah it was it was it was clean do and then to our high school there was plenty to do so I was I was literally driving I would go home we rode the bus for the first two years a real clunky bus for like you used to do here for like an hour each way and so when I put teams and they would stay late so you’d be home late on the bus get them going the next morning early and then then I started to get into clubs and they have a lot of extra So I was driving back into town, since I had a license, I was going back to town virtually every night of the week for extra curricular meetings. So there were just tons of those. I can’t even remember all of them, but the science clubs, the other public service clubs, parts of the student body management, just a whole long list of stuff.

44:53 So I would spend probably every night of the week driving another fifteen, twenty minutes, half an hour in the evening after school to go back and then come back home again.

45:03 Brian Rose: You liked learning.

45:05 Brian's Dad: Yeah, oh absolutely. And then it was also, there was a lot of the people at the school were, the teachers were way above average for a small country. I think it was a big deal.

45:15 Brian Rose: Okay. So you had top notch teachers that,

45:18 Brian's Dad: who knows, I think they, I believe they got there because the principal was a special guy who made it that way. He just wasn’t there for the ride. He actually worked hard to recruit people to make it happen. So we had people who expected to do good work.

45:36 Brian Rose: Was your mom a part of you being such a good student or being interested in this stuff or is this just a genetic thing?

45:45 Brian's Dad: No, I don’t know. It was all basically about the idea that when you do stuff and do well out it, you feel good, and you’re not comfortable with sloppy work, you’re not comfortable with idle time. Everybody was encouraging, I won the county spelling bee in the eighth grade, and I came in something third or eighth or tenth or whatever in the seventh grade, and I did that because Because my grandmother, Grandma Knight, my mom’s mom, grilled me with words for a year.

46:18 She would come in and hang out with us, and she would practice me spelling. I would spell this, spell this, spell this, you know, book of all that stuff, all the complex words. So that was really helpful in all the English classes and all that stuff, and plus the spelling bee. I just knew lots of words. I knew what they meant.

46:34 I knew how to spell them. And that was eighth grade, and I ended up at the state spelling bee, which I did not win. I screwed up on a word I could have gotten.

46:44 Brian Rose: College. What were you thinking as far as where you were going to go? Were you always going to go?

46:50 Brian's Dad: No, I had no idea where I was going to go. We had two great universities in Arizona, but they were not technical necessarily. And both my uncles, graduating from them, and two of my cousins were engineers and I went to University of Arizona and MP.

47:04 Brian Rose: Was education important for your family?

47:06 Brian's Dad: It was a future thing, it was important for the kids to get it, but the parents, no, they didn’t, none of them, none of them.

47:13 My dad’s mom and dad were lucky to be past the third grade, barely could write. Their kids got through high school and a year of college, and their kids, which is us, got through college and then some. So the expectations you see generation by generation rising, they need for you to keep button gear.

47:31 Brian Rose: Right. I’m working on it. I’m going to be lagging. Right. And so how did you decide on where you went to school?

47:38 Brian's Dad: Actually, it was decided pretty much for me. The science teacher at school, and I was also a guidance counselor. We took a lot of tests, aptitude tests, you know, the usual things, but we’re pretty new for those days. And from that they concluded that I was going to, and I agreed to be in a career in science of some sort. And he said, well, you know, have you heard of MIT and Caltech? I said, well, I’ve heard of MIT, but I’d never heard of Caltech. And so he said, well, you might think about those places. And he went and sculled off all the books and everything, and he kind of guided through the application process. And so I submitted those two applications, and I was interviewed by their people in the field that came to Arizona. You know, ex-alumni or deans or somebody came out and gave you the personal interview as well as your test We took all the SATs and everything else to get, and I got exceptions both, and came west instead of east.

48:35 Brian Rose: Did you visit east?

48:36 Brian's Dad: No, I didn’t.

48:37 Brian Rose: Okay, ever consider it?

48:39 Brian's Dad: No, there was not a big thing to visit. I don’t think hardly anybody visited anywhere.

48:44 Brian Rose: Okay, so you had the pamphlet and you kind of just chose?

48:47 Brian's Dad: You just did it. There’s a very random kind of a thing, there’s no real… It wasn’t done like today where you go there and you shake everybody down, and you see how you’re liking to look at the social situation. Neither of these places were known for their social stuff.

49:03 Brian Rose: Right, but those were the two top technical universities in the world.

49:07 Brian's Dad: Those were the top technicals at the time, and Stanford was coming along, but really wasn’t running at that point.

49:12 Brian Rose: So that’s a big deal, and they couldn’t have been cheap to go to.

49:16 Brian's Dad: It cost three grand. Okay.

49:17 And the other thing that Dad agreed to, was really serious about, was education. So he promptly said he would pay all the education expenses however long he wanted to spend. me just reported checking it was done. So those are the kind of things he thought were good use of his wealth and money. We had lots of new cars because it was a way to support the local economy so it could support you. All of his friends in the Masonic Lodge and other places were car dealers and TV salesmen and the guy at the lumber yard, the guy at the equipment place, so you bought from them, and they helped you with deals, and the community scratched each other’s backs.

50:03 So we had lots of new cars. We had different, I’d got to drive a lot of different kind of cars.

50:09 Brian Rose: It’s funny, I had Gabby, my stepdaughter, she’s at private school, boarding school, and she sees the bill every now and then, and she’s like, I feel bad at how much you spend on that. And I just blurted out, I said, the Rose family always invests in education.

50:24 Brian's Dad: Absolutely.

50:25 Brian Rose: But no one ever taught me that.

50:28 Brian's Dad: No. Didn’t have to. Yeah, it’s just, yeah. So that happened.

50:33 And so I got, to give you a rough idea, well, when I won the spelling contest, I just said, you know, you just need to win it. You’re gonna win it. So a week after that, we were sitting at breakfast dad doesn’t do much carrying on, but he drug out a package, and he handed it to me. Watch. In appreciation of achievement.

51:02 Brian Rose: Did you say anything about it?

51:04 Brian's Dad: He dropped a bundle on that, and I had it stolen from our house in Alamego. That was one of the items that the burglars got some time later, way not long ago, when we lived over there. But he did other things like that, too. When I came back from school on this first year, a lot of the guys were getting cars and were living off campus.

51:29 So he said, well, I think maybe you need a car. And I said, I’d like an Ed My on this foreign sports car. And he said, nope, let’s go get an American car. So he bought me a Corvette, three grand. Not a lot at the time, but he wouldn’t have nothing else.

51:50 There was no way to convince him to get me the car that I wanted. He said, come on, let’s go talk to the dealers. So he wanted American, but it was a nice car. It was a nice car. It was a used car, but it was a nice car.

52:00 It was a 61.

52:01 Brian Rose: So with grandpa showing his love and affection, that’s the way he did it.

52:05 Brian's Dad: Well, I’d say it’s really hard to say whether that’s affection or if that’s, I don’t know what that is actually, but that’s the way he, and he continued to do that. He did that for my brother and sister. He did that over and over again.

52:18 Everybody deserved something at certain stages of their life, and so when I decided I was going to live off campus at Caltech, he bought a mobile home, a trailer for me to live in because he listened to all the rants and everything else, and he concluded that for 30 bucks a month, he’d buy a trailer and park it there and then provide it rent free. So he would save money getting me through school.

52:44 Brian Rose: Were you the only guy at Caltech in a trailer?

52:47 Brian's Dad: Yeah, I think so.

52:48 I had a roommate, my buddy who was my roommate in the first year, but he stayed with me the second year. The two of us lived in the trailer. And then when we got married, your mom and I, he gave us the trailer as a gift.

53:02 Brian Rose: And you got a Corvette in the trailer. Yeah.

53:05 Brian's Dad: Well, that was that. And then the various other things happened like that. But it was not lavish, and it was appropriate, and there were milestones met, so to speak. So I think that from that point of view, he was not overly generous, but he didn’t give you money to waste. You had to earn what you want.

53:29 You could earn as much as you want. There was plenty of work. And so we get a raise, and we get a little better. We finally got up to a buck an hour, I think. And then, one other thing that’s really important is he decided that Tom and I needed to start a business in addition to having the cattle and stuff.

53:48 We were driving tractors and we were putting weeds, herbicides on the cotton crops with fairly toxic material and fairly risky, would actually kill the crop if you were not very careful with the dosing. And he said, okay, when you’re done with doing my crop, you can do some of my neighbor’s crops with the equipment. I’ll let you use the equipment for free, and you can go over there and charge them what I have to pay for this, which was $2 an acre. So he called around, and he found we were suddenly booked.

54:24 And Tom and I would work in the summer, we would work 24-7, we’d work not 24-7, at least 15-7, running these machines up and down the rows with the chemical in it, and we were booked up for a couple, two or three years, and at that point we were making, I don’t know, 100 bucks a day, maybe more. We were doing a lot of acres, and we had very little – the farmer provided the chemical, and dad provided the machinery, which was already depreciated, and the gas, which was not a lot. And we did the labor and collected the return. So we did that. And ultimately that enabled me to pay a lot of the other expenses I had at school and save up some money.

55:12 Brian Rose: Okay. So would he ever say you did a good job?

55:15 Brian's Dad: No, I don’t think so. It was just like, you know, what else would you do? What kind of job would you do?

55:22 Brian Rose: And was it important that you represent the family and, you know, your behavior?

55:28 Brian's Dad: I don’t think so, I don’t think so. It never came out as his vision for you. It was to give you the chance to encourage you to do the best, make sure that you didn’t pick bad paths, you got a little guidance to make sure that you knew which was the best choices and you still got to pick them. You know when you screwed up, I screwed up from time to time.

55:53 Brian Rose: Did you ever screw up big?

55:55 Brian's Dad: I don’t know what you called big. I never killed anybody.

55:59 Brian Rose: Did he ever get mad at you?

56:01 Brian's Dad: Oh, I’m sure, I’m sure.

56:03 Nothing really comes to mind. You can’t get into too much trouble. I mean, you can if people don’t give you work to do and give you meaningful work. If you look at the goofballs that I had, my classmates, they wrecked their dad’s car. They were drunk and they didn’t show up at school.

56:22 They didn’t have a job. They’re just goofing off, just hanging out. Just keeping busy. would just just just give you something useful to do and keep you busy and give you the reward that you’ve earned.

56:33 Brian Rose: Yeah. So you you know you build your own self-worth little by little. Yeah grandpa was real generous with us too like money and birthdays.

56:41 Brian's Dad: Oh yeah no doubt about that. And presents.

56:43 Brian Rose: He really spoiled us right?

56:45 Brian's Dad: Yeah he did he was he was when he had it he and he didn’t have it to begin with but once he started doing good at it he made sure that everybody was taken care of. Some of the family wealth was paid forward.

57:01 Brian Rose: You mentioned you got married at college, right?

57:05 Brian's Dad: Yeah, I was after my sophomore year.

57:08 Brian Rose: Okay, but you met my mom in high school?

57:11 Brian's Dad: Yeah.

57:11 Brian Rose: Okay. And you guys kind of went out just a bit in high school and then later?

57:15 Brian's Dad: Well, probably at all. As a matter of fact, the first time we ever went out was on prom night.

57:20 Okay. around mine. But because she was on the student council all the year, she was also a class officer, we had a lot of time together. I mean, she was part of the gang that I hung out with. And there were a lot of people that were part of that group of achievers in school. They worked hard for the grades, they involved themselves in the social activities, and they were people I knew all through high school.

57:51 Brian Rose: Okay, and you stayed in touch even though she stayed in Arizona and you went to California?

57:57 Brian's Dad: Yeah, there was a plan then. There was a plan to get married and she was going to go to school in Arizona because there was no other place to be and we didn’t know where that was going to work. Her plan was to get into Occidental and to get there she had to get really good grades at U of A and she did. So that got her into Occidental, which was right next to Caltech. Okay. So we could live in the trailer.

58:24 Brian Rose: So you’re married in the trailer and what was Caltech like for you?

58:29 Brian's Dad: It was a dose of really cold water. Really really different and really really hard and socially didn’t help. I mean literally there was a bunch of people like me there.

58:40 Brian Rose: What do you mean like you there?

58:42 Brian's Dad: Well, there were no women, there was no real serious social or people who were, I may have mentioned it in the last one, there was a mathematician that didn’t come out of his closet in his room for the first semester. He was like 14. He stayed in his closet. He got into Caltech at 14, he stayed in his closet the whole year. And he checked out with the first year’s math, he was in second or third year’s math.

59:06 Brian Rose: So he might have run into a couple of guys like that at MIT. Because he wasn’t social.

59:10 Brian's Dad: Not at all, he was afraid of everything. And there were a lot of guys like that there. No, there was a mix between that at that spectrum and then other people who probably didn’t belong there that were bad choice.

59:21 There were fish out of water at that thing. A lot of people like that switched over to humanities and became history majors.

59:30 Brian Rose: At Caltech?

59:30 Brian's Dad: Yeah, and economics and history, a lot. Some people couldn’t take it at all and checked out after the first year or earlier.

59:39 We didn’t lose too many, they were people who just said, this isn’t for me.

59:44 Brian Rose: And you had a tough first year.

59:47 Brian's Dad: Oh, yeah, I didn’t know the demands on scholastic activity. And we’re just, you know what, they were like at MIT. They were the same.

59:56 But I was not used to it. I didn’t have any AP classes, didn’t have any preparation for that coming from the blue docks.

1:00:02 Brian Rose: You were whizzing through high school.

1:00:04 Brian's Dad: Yeah, high school. I never actually did any homework out of school.

1:00:08 It was all done in the last half of the class while the teacher was talking. Yeah, okay. While she was teaching, I was finishing it.

1:00:17 Brian Rose: And how did you make it through?

1:00:19 Brian's Dad: I just didn’t quit.

1:00:20 Brian Rose: I think I asked you this last time, like, yeah, did you not quit?

1:00:25 Brian's Dad: Yeah, I just, well, I don’t know if the answer to that last time, I mean, it’s like the same as the final. You just, you didn’t quit because you’re not done. So, there’s no quit option, there’s no box for you to say, okay quit, I checked that one.

1:00:42 Brian Rose: So you can’t quit on the farm?

1:00:44 Brian's Dad: No, you can’t quit, the cows want to eat, stuff has to be done, there’s no quit.

1:00:49 Brian Rose: Okay, but you got like a D in calculus.

1:00:52 Brian's Dad: Yeah, but later that year I got an A plus in quantum physics in freshman year where everybody flunked, everybody flunked that class and did it over. So I don’t know how that happens, it’s a freaking miracle, but I got every single question on the final right, and so it said, hey, you know, you might be able to do this. Right.

1:01:12 Brian Rose: So you learned how to learn. You learned what level of work you had to do. You learned how to get it done in the environment was there, which was, you know, there was a lot of classes who expected you to get it done, you know, get all done.

1:01:31 Brian's Dad: So you just adapted, and you got over the idea that maybe you were at the bottom of the class, and nobody there really cared as long as you’d quit, because we didn’t have pass-fail when I was there. But shortly after I left, they had pass-fail, but they had real grades, and yet you might have a midterm and the out of 30 points you might get a class average of 6. And nobody bad an eye. Keep working, keep trucking and doing fine. Show up and find out what you did wrong, keep going.

1:02:10 Brian Rose: And fast forward to senior year, how did you kind of leave that place? Where were you at that point? What was going on?

1:02:18 Brian's Dad: We had been married for a couple of years and lived in the trailer. I had some good friends at school that we had also, like Gary and Sally Kleiner and others, and I had pretty much declared that I would go for another year.

1:02:34 I definitely would not be getting a Ph.D., although a bunch of my friends thought they would and they did, but I just decided I would go one more year. There was so much generalization in these undergraduate classes that I hadn’t really got a mouthful of the stuff I was really interested in, which was electronics and things like that. So I needed some more coursework and it was almost guaranteed admission, in fact it was guaranteed admission for the master’s degree, it was only one more year.

1:03:07 And then I ended up getting a scholarship to pay for it, although if I didn’t get that that I probably still would have gone, because Dad probably would have paid for it. And I probably could have paid for it out of the summer earnings, so I think I may have paid for a bunch of that stuff anyway, just out of the work we did in the summers.

1:03:24 Brian Rose: Did you work summers back at the farm? Every year?

1:03:26 Brian's Dad: No, every year.

1:03:27 Brian Rose: Every year? Wow, that must have been quite a contrast.

1:03:31 Brian's Dad: Yeah, go out and eat dirt and sweat in the heat. But I went to Portland to Tectronics and spent a summer there with the guy was trying to recruit me. He was the vice president of engineering of Tektronics, and he was a Caltech graduate. And so he came down and talked to professors, and he rounded up all the people who might fit in up there and gave him summer internships and jobs.

1:03:55 And Gloria and I, Betty and I, moved up there to actually live with him in his house. His wife had gone to her relatives for the summer, and he invited us to stay with him. And he went off for the summer also, so we ended up living in the VP of Engineering’s house for the summer. It was a good chunk of it, and working at Tektronics. And then the following year after I graduated with a master’s, that was between senior and master’s year, I told them I didn’t want to go up there.

1:04:19 There’s not a happy camper.

1:04:21 Brian Rose: You didn’t like it up there?

1:04:23 Brian's Dad: No, no. I didn’t want to work there doing that stuff. It was not – I remember the whole aerospace industry in Southern California with all kinds of goodies. And so I wanted work for a smaller company.

1:04:38 Brian Rose: And you got an offer at a small company in Newport Beach and that?

1:04:43 Brian's Dad: Yeah I got a couple of offers everywhere I interviewed I got an offer. We were getting good offers then from from compared to the industry and the other other schools so it was getting good offers. Good offers are a lot lower than you might think these days but so I had I chose the one in Newport Beach because they did a really good job of recruiting, really good job of making me feel like I could be somebody important there very soon, and they paid top dollar, and they had stock day one.

1:05:19 Brian Rose: Nice. Good choice. That’s pretty good. Was there five years? Okay, and now it’s starting a family too?

1:05:26 Brian's Dad: No, not yet. Okay, came a few years later. Yeah, so work there for a while, actually you can do the math. I I graduated in 66, and Eric was born in 69.

1:05:37 So we bought our first house in between. We moved our trailer down to Newport Beach, and we had an interview there, that was a strange thing, the little old lady and little old man that ran the trailer park, the one who knew all about us, and they especially wanted to find some way to verify that we weren’t Jewish. Because our names sounded Jewish, and they thought we were, and they didn’t really want to do that. And they weren’t really allowed to do anything about it, but they didn’t want it to happen.

1:06:09 So we managed to convince them that we weren’t. And also, we were probably the youngest people there, so they didn’t want to have any rowdy kids with parties and stuff going on. So they didn’t really want to give us a spot, and we didn’t have any other spots. That was the spot, because there were not very many open spots. And so we talked them into letting us move our trailer into that spot for a year.

1:06:29 During which time we got acquainted with the area and decided that things were going to work and that we would buy a house. Crazy. People won’t do that today. But then a house was a reasonable thing to think about. When you go to school, you know, move out from the trailer.

1:06:49 Brian Rose: You were cheap enough to buy.

1:06:51 Brian's Dad: Well, we got lucky. We found a repo, which had no down payment at all and had a first mortgage payment of $120 a month and a second mortgage on it of $30 or $40. And we could afford all that. And it was a nice big house. And it was a quick drive to work. So we sold the trailer and had money left over to buy furniture. Bing were in the house.

1:07:16 And boom.

1:07:17 Brian Rose: And then you have your first son.

1:07:19 Brian's Dad: Well then Betty worked as a teacher for another couple of years. So we accumulated some capital. And at the point where kind of the plan was for it to quit and start a family.

1:07:33 And so that took place, and boy, we needed another car. We had a Corvette. So at that point, there might be a shed of tear here. The Corvette had to go. The two-seater.

1:07:46 The two-seater had to go. There was no way that the three people are going to be in the two-seater. So the Corvette was sold. And we bought a beetle. The Beatles actually came right then at that point, just before Eric was born.

1:07:59 Brian Rose: I remember the Beatles. You gave it to him when he was 16. When he got 16, you got the Beatles. You got the Beatles.

1:08:04 Brian's Dad: He may never forgive me for that.

1:08:06 Brian Rose: You got the Beatles. You got the Mustang. Yeah. All right, so you have Eric, and two years later you have me.

1:08:15 Brian's Dad: Yeah, so we need another car.

1:08:17 We have a bigger car yet, because the Beatles didn’t cut it. So we ended up getting the GTO.

1:08:22 Brian Rose: That’s a cool car.

1:08:24 Brian's Dad: It was cool.

1:08:24 Brian Rose: How come I didn’t get the GTO?

1:08:26 Brian's Dad: Sixty-eight GTO was really cool, actually that was before Eric. So the reason we got the GTO was because we needed a bigger car, and I was driving the Beetle to commute, and so the overlap was right. We did get the sixty-eight, so that would have to be before Eric, who got it in anticipation. So the Beetle wasn’t for that, it was because the Corvette wasn’t functional enough at that point, couldn’t carry anything in it, and it was time to move on. Okay.

1:08:55 Brian Rose: All right. And then you had me, and you moved down to San Diego.

1:09:00 Brian's Dad: That was a good little while later, because actually I was at this company for five years, and then I was invited to join a startup, and it was across town up near Pomona, and And I drove up there in the beetle for a year, seven days a week, working 16, 18-hour days. Markoff

1:09:21 Brian Rose: Was that normal back then? Hartman

1:09:24 Brian's Dad: No, but it was for a start-up, and the guy had been in business before, and it was a new business, he had a government contract.

1:09:34 He recruited me, he made me a vice president, gave me thirty percent of his company, and added thirty percent to my salary. One reason he did that is because he had been using guys, my old professors from Caltech were his consultants while he was building these electronic businesses that he did. So I got a really good recommendation from the old professors because they were his consultants and he kept looking for other people from there and liked that.

1:10:04 And I was pretty well done with this company. It was fine. I had gone way up the ladder. I had started a new division, was VP of that. I ran R&D, ran advanced R&D, ran a bunch more stuff, and this was in the first four or five years out of school.

1:10:21 Brian Rose: So plenty to do. Are you feeling good about yourself?

1:10:25 Brian's Dad: Well, yeah, at that point it was okay, this is still good, I got it, you know, I’m done with this company, this is exciting, I’m a player, and I just didn’t – at the end of the year I decided it was not worth the effort, not worth the hassle and the trouble. It was a lot of long hours. It was a lot of setbacks, built some really amazing stuff in a year, learned how to work much harder than I’d ever worked before, way harder than Celtic, way harder than a farm. This was really a lot of hard work.

1:11:05 Brian Rose: How did you do that, work that hard?

1:11:08 Brian's Dad: I worked hard because the guy that I worked for was 50, and he said, I’m too old to give up and I’ll never give up, and he’d already done the harder stuff before. He worked harder than I did, harder, by far. So he was a good role model. Okay.

1:11:27 Brian Rose: And you walked away from the equity when you left?

1:11:30 Brian's Dad: Yeah. Okay. That was the game, that was the rule. Okay.

1:11:33 If you leave you have to give it back. But it was a great experience. And it was eventually being a big company, it was sold for a lot of money, and I consulted for them for a long time, and the guy went on to be a fairly big, and Gory ended up consulting for that company, and his successor companies as well, up in Orange County. So it was sold to another big aerospace company, way late, later. Okay.

1:11:58 Brian Rose: So now you get this opportunity in San Diego.

1:12:00 Brian's Dad: Yeah, so then, so I went home, I quit one day, and I just said, I’m done. He said, What are you going to do? I said, I’m going home. I did. I went home and sat on the couch.

1:12:09 So this is also not a very common thing that people do. I’ve done this a few times. Having done this, I now know what goes through people’s head. I had people do it at West Health. And so I was in a really good position to explain to the Human Resources Department, What’s going on with these people?

1:12:26 Why are they willing to go home and sit on the couch with no job at all compared to come in to work here? What are we doing wrong here?” And they had no clue, you know, what’s going on.

1:12:35 Brian Rose: I never saw that. What is the answer?

1:12:37 Brian's Dad: You’re just not motivating them.

1:12:39 They’re not important here. They have no feeling of belonging, they have no feeling of productivity, they don’t know where they’re going, they don’t have any leadership, nobody to make it an interesting day. And for me it was just too much work. I didn’t think I could do that another year. So I went home.

1:13:01 Brian Rose: I saw you do this when you right before you started Alsion maybe.

1:13:06 Brian's Dad: Yeah. No, I did that. I did that then too

1:13:08 Brian Rose: Yeah, and it was at the El Amigo I remember you sitting and watching you and you were reading Think and Grow Rich.

1:13:16 Brian's Dad: I don’t know. I read Think and Grow Rich when I was in high school

1:13:21 Brian Rose: Really?

1:13:22 Brian's Dad: Yes. Changed everything. That’s what I was doing. That’s why I was not gonna be a farmer I don’t know where I got that book. I got two or three. I think my grandmother may have given them to me

1:13:35 Brian Rose: What did you learn from that book?

1:13:37 Brian's Dad: Everything think and grow rich. No, no, it’s about the potential that you create within yourself.

1:13:44 And the five or six things that are in there are a roadmap, much like your accelerator courses and the other things you do today. You get off your butt and do some things. These things will lead you somewhere if you start thinking that way. If you start thinking that’s what I’m going to do, first of all. You quit thinking, I don’t know what I’m going to do, and you start thinking, I’m going to do something, I’m going to do that now, and I’m going to follow that with some more of something. It’s a process of both motivation and an explanation of, you know, put one foot in front of the other, take the first step, the things you try to get people to do to get off their butts to sign up with you. It was essentially the motivation for me to do that, because there was nothing else like it. There’s no other way to do that. I would have never had that experience from any other place if it wasn’t from that book. And I read it again. You watch me read it again.

1:14:36 Brian Rose: Yeah, just to refresh. Just to refresh. Just to reset your mindset. Wow.

1:14:41 Brian's Dad: There was to get back in that same mindset of thinking about a new vector that you’re going to pursue. And what you learn is you can’t do that while you’re in the old vector.

1:14:53 Your brain is busy doing what you’re doing and thinking like you’re thinking. And I give counsel to all my young engineers and younger people that I have on my staff and I work with, you need to make time for your life to think about where you’re going and what you’re doing. I tell them you’re the CEO of your life, of your career. And you can be that today. You could actually be the CEO today.

1:15:17 All you gotta do to go down is file with the state, your company name, and you put your title down as CEO. And I said today, instead of wishing for it, you could be it. So don’t even ask me that again until you’ve done that. You don’t wanna be the guy working in the back room, be the CEO. You can do that today.

1:15:36 It’ll cost you hardly anything. So you do that by putting yourself into the framework that you wanna actually be in. And so I read that while I was resting up for buying the tractor.

1:15:49 Brian Rose: Okay, I think I probably read that when I was in high school. Wow, and so San Diego, why come here?

1:15:56 Brian's Dad: Two guys, one guy came and got me. He came up and he said, I’ve asked everybody around, I need somebody to do this, that year name came up 50 times, I’m gonna make you an offer you can’t refuse. So do some stocking, it might be 25% raise in salary, you can be the VP of engineering. I’m gonna show it to you how sharp of a company we are, we’re growing, we’re doing good, we’ve started up, we’re now we’re this big, we’re making good stuff, We need somebody to come, they got one of the founders, the two other founders didn’t like what he was doing, wasn’t performing well, he would go in his office and compute all day and nobody was supervising the engineers and nobody was getting the products out on time and they wanted somebody to kick some butt and make it, and it was the weak link in their company.

1:16:40 And I was impressed at these guys, what they’d already done. They’d already figured out what their market was, they already figured out niche, they already had really good products, they already grew it up on a shoestring and owned all of it. There was no outside investors and it was doubling every year, and I liked the marketing guy. The marketing guy was very slightly older than me. He started this company, he was 23, and he had an ego the size of who knows what. But the bottom line is you couldn’t stop him from finding out where money was to be made and what you needed to do and how you needed to make it work. So as a business model he was the creator of that whole idea.

1:17:20 Brian Rose: These are like the early seeds of the dot-com tech startups, right?

1:17:24 Brian's Dad: This was the first time that civil-cell estate devices were now being put into actual products as opposed to the old discrete parts that were made up with vacuum tubes and stuff. This is where you had lots of leverage from the semi-conductor industry to do magic.

1:17:40 Brian Rose: Right, and you’re 28, 29?

1:17:42 Brian's Dad: Yeah, that’s something I’ve seen.

1:17:44 Brian Rose: Were you sitting on top of the world?

1:17:46 Brian's Dad: No, I was working my butt off.

1:17:48 Brian Rose: I know, but you have a big reputation.

1:17:50 Everybody wants you. You get all these offers that must feel good.

1:17:54 Brian's Dad: The offer was good, but you know, it was a move. We had, you know, little kids. We had five, six years of roots in Orange County, and San Diego was kind of the backwoods of everything at the time. It was nothing going on in a sleepy town, but it was the birth of the instrumentation industry, of all instrumentation industries, with the exception of Fivula Packer, so Tektronics, and Morgan. Down here was all the high-precision electronics, all the digital high-precision electronics was done and founded down here. And so some of the people in my first company were from San Diego and had done it here as well.

1:18:30 So those are guys I know today. One of them lives up in Solonon Beach. He’s 90. And I worked for – he was my first boss. He’s right down the street. But they all came from here and that industry so it was a it was a welcome relief after the other ordeal so that was kind of like for the first time me going I’ll take it a little easier path but it but and and it was easier because the one in the middle was really really on our deal it was kind of like the Navy SEAL training right it’s a year’s worth of SEAL training okay but that showed you you could do it it just raised my game okay all right it just didn’t it just it We just took the tolerance for solving problems left and right, inevitably just never letting anything stand in your way because that’s what the guy was working for, never letting anything stand in his way.

1:19:19 Brian Rose: Okay. That’s powerful. And the company here was Doric?

1:19:23 Brian's Dad: Doric. Okay.

1:19:24 Brian Rose: All right. And so you move into Cali Laticia. I’m two years old.

1:19:27 Brian's Dad: So I know we move into an apartment and we’re over there in the apartment all jammed up there while we decided where we’re going to live. So every day, we moved down like in November, October, November, and I got in the beetle.

1:19:39 I drove down from there for a couple days, and every day that was down here at lunch I got out and drove in a point of the compass in San Diego. I went all the way east, all the way south, all the way north, I went everywhere looking for neighborhoods. We had some friends that lived down here. They helped by pointing things out to us, so I looked in all those, searched the whole freaking county for a place to live. And one day I drove up from P.B. up north, and the hill was bald, there were no houses there at all, and all there were pads.

1:20:09 And I drove up in there, and there was a sales office, and nothing but pads. And I stood up on there, and I looked out, and I said, hmm. Because you could see the whole bay. I could see the whole bay, because you’re already in Mexico, and the price was approximately, well, we made enough money on the first house for the down payment, so it was affordable. And I was making a lot more money at Doric, And so that we still save money and So and if we had to wait for it to be built So we did in the apartments for six months or so waiting for it with Rugrats around You know tearing the house up

1:20:50 Brian Rose: And then you move in right before my second birthday.

1:20:54 Brian's Dad: Yeah, I think so.

1:20:55 Brian Rose: Okay All right. And what was what was I like? What was?

1:20:59 Brian's Dad: You’re a pretty good kid A few events. They tend to be a little obstinate. I would say, when you’re a kid, you don’t want to do that. They tend to try stuff and not heed the warning. So you’ve taken a few falls. But other than that, put it right in. Very nice. Good kid.

1:21:22 Brian Rose: Okay. Did you like being a father?

1:21:25 Brian's Dad: Yeah, it was okay. I didn’t work very much. People don’t realize that the mothers do most of the work.

1:21:34 My dad, I never saw him. He worked all day long elsewhere. That’s what dads do. And so today there’s a whole other thing that there’s got to be some sort of equality and stuff.

1:21:43 Brian Rose: You don’t believe that.

1:21:44 Brian's Dad: No, it clearly doesn’t have to be because it’s worked before without it. But because of the way the society’s evolved, there is much more of that to happen. need the two incomes. Therefore, they have less time to have more kids. They have less kids.

1:21:58 Colleges cost more money, so you’ve got to invest in the one and not the five. I’ve talked to you many times about how many kids your grandparents had and their grandparents. They’re just two hands’ worth.

1:22:13 Brian Rose: How many?

1:22:14 Brian's Dad: Yeah, so my grandma Rose was one of eleven and one died or two died, So, I think that was the case there, and they were spread across so much time that I actually went to high school with my grandmother’s son, and then I went to high school also with my dad’s sister.

1:22:34 Brian Rose: Like your dad’s sister, because they had so many kids.

1:22:38 Brian's Dad: They had so many kids, and I also went to high school with my mom’s sister’s son, who was in there with me as well. So these generations strung out. They started earlier, and they went on longer, so by the time they were 30, they had 10-year-old kids and 12-year-old kids. And then their older kids were 20, and they were already getting married and having their kids.

1:23:02 So they all end up in high school together.

1:23:04 Brian Rose: Yeah. I remember you coming home when I was a kid, and it was just a big deal when you came home. But you were coming home at night, 7 or 8 at night.

1:23:11 Brian's Dad: Yeah, maybe just adding a little bit of time and then off to bed.

1:23:14 Right. Yeah. Maybe a little dinner. Right. when you have a serious career going on and you really can’t get around that because your time is already sold. It’s already part of your income stream and it gives you the rest of the things that you need. It gives you your education, it gives you kids opportunities, it gives you a place to live, it gives you your outings and vacations and everything else.

1:23:40 If that flow isn’t there and you don’t get it, if you don’t go get it, if you don’t go and put time in it.

1:23:46 Brian Rose: Right, and that’s what you were brought up or growing up.

1:23:50 Brian's Dad: That’s just the same thing. I was not like it was I didn’t feel negligent or derelict

1:23:55 Brian Rose: Is that changing now do you think or yeah, yeah people are You know making shame on all over people that don’t take paternity even justified.

1:24:03 Brian's Dad: I don’t know. Okay I don’t know. It’s a it’s a different world. So the world will have to figure it out. Okay. Okay, it works for me

1:24:11 Brian Rose: Right. No, because I mean I work a lot too.

1:24:13 Brian's Dad: Yeah, I know. That’s why I’m telling you this.

1:24:16 Brian Rose: Why?

1:24:16 Brian's Dad: Because you get to avoid feeling guilty about doing that. You also have to, you can’t be a good leader for anybody, your work or your home or anybody else, unless you yourself are taking good care of yourself. You have to be strong, you have to be thoughtful, you have to You have plenty ahead and you have to have a lot of energy left over for the people. And you can’t give it all to one thing in one space, it just spreads too thin.

1:24:46 Brian Rose: Did you have energy left over for kids?

1:24:49 Brian's Dad: After you guys went to bed, I was on the floor studying until 10 or 11. Doing stuff for work, yeah. Understanding new stuff. You can’t ever shortcut that part.

1:25:01 Brian Rose: Right, and weekends you were working some.

1:25:04 Brian's Dad: Some days I would go into work, but most of the time I would have an appointment to go do outings, because they were organized, you know, I organized a lot of stuff, so we’d do organized things. But in the nights, I would stay up late and do work and learn. So it’s the thing that needs to be sustained. It’s the only thing where I could say today that my Caltech degree expired long ago, the stuff I knew then, with very few exceptions, is stuff that isn’t important to me today.

1:25:42 That’s stuff I’ve learned recently that’s important today. So nothing you’ve learned is probably worth more than five or ten years of value. You have to learn more stuff. There’s changes everywhere. You have to either keep up or you retire.

1:26:00 It’s a problem.

1:26:01 Brian Rose: Your kids turned out to be pretty smart. Was that genetic?

1:26:06 Brian's Dad: I don’t know Are they smart I think they’re pretty smart compared to you and I think they’re all pretty smart, but

1:26:15 Brian Rose: Don’t the mom you said she’d she’d sit in her breakfast when I was taking care of over there and she’d say did your mom

1:26:25 Brian's Dad: Yeah, she’d say was I a good mother? I Said heck no. Look at the result

1:26:30 Brian Rose: That was your joke.

1:26:32 Brian's Dad: Yeah, that was my joke. There’s nothing you can tell your mother about that. If you butter her up, she’s already, why is it that? She already knows. And she already has, by judging, she’s already watched your whole life.

1:26:44 So she’s judging in her framework whether you are worth the effort. And nobody will be able to predict that. You can’t predict from a kid in grade school they’ll go on what they’ll do. So you have to just let them, you have to get them all wound up and wind them up and see what happens. So I think that by the time you’re in grade school, even your mother’s influence is by far, I give it 90% of the impact that you have in the way you go about things, because you spend all day long with her up until maybe even longer.

1:27:23 But the important formative parts where you’re learning to speak and verbalize, and you’re learning behaviors, you’re learning a guidance, morals, what’s good behavior, what’s bad behavior. You’re all doing that when your mother’s the thing that slaps you left, slaps you right and makes the model. And helps you sort out the external models you get when you first go to school. You go and your first grade teacher says, we don’t do that here. Well, I get to do it at home, well, not here.

1:27:48 So you get a new, a new. Right.

1:27:50 Brian Rose: And so what’s the father’s role then? fund it. Is that it?

1:27:55 Brian's Dad: No. Roll. Roll. Just watch and learn. Watch and learn. That’s the way you learn anyway. By watching. The way kids learn is they watch. The way the apes learn is they watch. This is how they learn. They watch your lips move, learn to move their lips so they can talk. They watch and learn. Okay. You don’t teach so much as you produce learning opportunities.

1:28:20 Brian Rose: What do you think I learned from you.

1:28:23 Brian's Dad: That’s a good question, I should ask you that. And you probably don’t even know, and you probably are wrong, and you’re probably a stuff that you didn’t think about.

1:28:33 Brian Rose: I mean, I learned about hard work, I learned about treating people fairly.

1:28:37 Brian's Dad: But I never actually made it a point to make that point.

1:28:41 Brian Rose: No, I just watched you.

1:28:42 Brian's Dad: And you went to school, and you learned to be somebody, and to do that you had to work harder than them, or do something. You had to put your energy into it and I think you got recognition for that, but not necessarily like the tooth fairy kind of rewards. We didn’t put dollars under your pillow every time you had a good day. So you’ve got to also learn your own reward system. That’s what sustains you when other people aren’t in charge of it.

1:29:14 And that’s where you want to be. You don’t want to have other people in charge of your reward system, so you can just quit whenever you want to.

1:29:22 Brian Rose: So you were never trying to be active as a parent, as in do this and don’t do that.

1:29:27 Brian's Dad: Well, your mom and I put effort into learning our trade as a parent. So we read books, there were a lot of fancy theories going on about that time, and some have been discredited, but they seem to work okay.

1:29:39 One of the things we liked a lot was the idea of natural consequences, that we weren’t there to make sure that nothing happened to you. happening to you are where you learn something. You learn in that instant where something happens, a mistake, a success, an enlightenment, a discovery, any of those things are learning moments and much better than anything else because they happen just at the right time and they have the emotional impact that goes with it.

1:30:05 Rote learning by repetition and drilling and explaining doesn’t affect the deep emotional neuron formation that makes it important to know that and makes it lock in. So you get that from making a mistake. On the long list you can recall, if you made it, you said, well, those were dumb things I did.

1:30:25 Brian Rose: And that’s like on the farm, I mean, that’s how you went on the farm, when you grew up big.

1:30:31 Brian's Dad: Yeah, so we had places where we could have been hurt badly.

1:30:35 Luckily, safety was another thing that I was really serious about. You didn’t get, you had to learn your machinery, you had to maintain it, you had to check it, you had to operate it properly. You couldn’t do wacky things on your tractors and with sharp instruments or with heavy things or things that could hurt you badly. And so there was a whole safety thing. It’s not like being over cautious, just respect the danger.

1:30:58 So it’s about doing that with your parenting, you know. You let the kid stand over near the shark tank and put his finger in the water, you know. What the heck? It’s one finger. So the more relaxed non-helicopter parenting generation, like let the kids go do stuff.

1:31:14 Not everybody did that. Some people would say that’s fair, or neglect, or disinterest, but I think there’s really a good method to it. There’s no reason. I see today 9 and 10 12-year-olds driving bulldozers in the farm country, not the city. I’m saying they can’t do squat.

1:31:31 Brian Rose: Right. Right. And I used to come home, ride the bus alone, come home, let myself in. Yes. I mean, things that would be unheard of.

1:31:39 Brian's Dad: Stuff that would be unheard of in typical city living, there would be no problem on the farm. all the time. We’d be left alone. I stayed on the farm one time for probably two weeks while dad and the rest of the family were over here. And I was probably, again, in high school.

1:31:53 Brian Rose: Okay. Running it.

1:31:54 Brian's Dad: Yeah. I was self-signed. I had to do whatever I had to do. I had to go to the store. I’ve driven unlicensed on the back roads to get food and time and get to parts and stuff.

1:32:07 So, you just do what you did. Nobody actually thought that was wrong. Let the kids be, you put them to work. Let them give them a pitchfork, hope they don’t stab each other. So father has simple responsibilities, focus on work.

1:32:25 It’s definitely, I think this is just my opinion, that it’s important that they be somebody in their family’s eyes, that they do represent a role, and that is the role that’s going to be the role. That’s going to be the guiding part of it if even if you’re not there all day long, right?

1:32:42 Brian Rose: Okay, and one of the things you can see is that you’re not sitting on the couch watching the football game and drinking beer all day You’re out doing stuff Making things happen for you and your family and for the world around you, right? So I’m watching you not on The sofa watching football. I never saw you do that. You’re all you’re working.

1:33:02 Brian's Dad: We’re building something We’re hooking something fixing something going somewhere learning something, reading books. I used to go to the library in San Diego and check out literally 20 or 30 books to read for the next week. The library was just like the internet for me today. The internet is like that for me today.

1:33:20 There’s just like a library full of books I just click on.

1:33:23 Brian Rose: And so if you’re just you to the best of you, that’s probably the best way to parent.

1:33:28 Brian's Dad: That might be the way you would say that. I don’t know if it’s the best way. Okay.

1:33:32 They were entitled to their own way. Yeah. You’re right. You’re right. They want to do it some other way, and I think it’s wrong.

1:33:41 Well, if they ask, I’ll say something, but if they don’t ask, just do it. Do it your way. Do it your way. It works out.

1:33:49 Brian Rose: So when I was seven, you ended up moving to a different place.

1:33:53 Yes. And so that was obviously something that just kind of shaped everything, because also I would later come live with you when I was later in high school. That was probably strange for everybody as well.

1:34:04 Brian's Dad: Yeah, that’s always a strange thing But but it happens a lot and if you don’t figure out How to do it if you see it People used to not live very long and so not a lot of that happened There was been there and in the country nothing much happens a lot of hanky-panky going on But there’s no there’s there’s there’s the drama stops at age something other because people die younger and and and Divorce that never really happened That much before.

1:34:29 It didn’t happen that much before. And you can look at the rates. It is a happening thing, and it’s a happening thing because of urbanization, it’s a happening thing because people living longer, people are getting their kids out of the house, like my buddy Paul, who just bought the ranch up there, the last thing that happened when his daughter went left out of high school, his wife said, I’m out of here, I’m done with this outfit. That’s right. The kids are gone, I’m gone, I know you’re sitting around doing your thing, I’m doing my thing, let’s just, you know, I want to go have some fun now. I want to go be me before I was being a mom. Okay, so it opens up for people whose kids are gone, and some of them aren’t. A lot of our friends still have kids living at home, and they still are not self-sufficient, and a lot of them are in trouble. I know one of my tell-tale buddies is both of his kids have been in rehab, and these are people who are well educated, he paid him for a lot of education and they have high powered jobs as lawyers and so on, still have problems.

1:35:35 You can’t predict where it will happen, but it boils down to the fact that once they’re out of your house, then you have a lot of years left to invest in, to do something, and that might be together and that might not. And remember, if you’re willing to quit your job, I always use Kaiser Sosay, I that was the model. You have to be willing to do something, whatever has to be done to break the impasse. And when he shot his family, remember, the guy was threatening to shoot his family, he says, bam bam bam, now what are you doing? Now threaten me.

1:36:13 So what’s that analogy for? That’s an analogy for don’t letting other people blackmail you and hold you to something when you need to do something else. It’s an analogy for Quitting your job if it’s not the right job is an analogy for walking out of things You don’t shouldn’t be in because an analogy for saying no.

1:36:32 Brian Rose: Okay. All right.

1:36:33 Brian's Dad: There’s no power there

1:36:34 Brian Rose: What do you remember about that time leaving?

1:36:37 Brian's Dad: No all kinds of things. I I Don’t think about that anymore.

1:36:41 Brian Rose: Okay, and for us it was all it’s very complicated.

1:36:44 Brian's Dad: Yeah, extremely, right?

1:36:45 It’s very complicated took it took it was as much work as working for the crazy guy and in Pomona that many hours It wasn’t so much the hours, it was just so many complications and complicated things going on. So many different dynamics to manage. It was a lot of hard work, a lot of stress on everybody.

1:37:05 Brian Rose: Yeah, it was. It was something I always come back to.

1:37:09 That time always comes back to me, and I’m always thinking about it, but the more I think about it, I’m also kind of thankful for that time too.

1:37:18 Brian's Dad: there’s always something in your history that you can look back on and get a message from, get a reading for. It is a part of who you are and you can’t get away from it. What you don’t wanna do is let any one of those things, it’s the aggregate that matters, you don’t wanna let any one of them just find who you are.

1:37:37 Either the good or the bad or the questionable or the, I don’t know, they’re just stuff that adds up into a frame of mind, into a style, if you like, into a way of living and a way of continuing to live.

1:37:53 Brian Rose: And it kind of changed the trajectory, well, because everyone’s life went and did different things.

1:38:01 Brian's Dad: Yeah, well, you see that it changed basically everybody involved. They had another possibility that took off that was theirs, that was not predetermined. So you look at the farming families in Arizona And they were pretty predetermined.

1:38:20 The daughters would marry the sons of the neighboring farmers, and the sons would take over the farming business. And they would then be part of the city’s culture and part of the city’s economy until that happened again. And so I had a lot of classmates in high school that did that. And so for us, we all just went on our own different adventures.

1:38:45 Brian Rose: So you had forced freedom, if you want to call it that, forced options, got a few options that you didn’t select, something selected for you.

1:38:55 Brian's Dad: Right. Happens all day, every day anyway. Yeah. Right. It just happened that day.

1:39:01 It just happened that way, in this case.

1:39:03 Brian Rose: Yeah. I guess, as you said, I learned by watching. So I guess I was watching and just assuming, and then I was like, oh, okay, I can’t assume that certain things are gonna be there forever. I think that’s what it taught me.

1:39:15 Brian's Dad: Well, I thought you could be surprised by life and that no matter how much of a framework you build in your head about how things are, are gonna be, you really can’t see very far in the future. Yeah. You really can’t see very far. Today, I don’t see very far in the future. Right.

1:39:31 There are too many ways that the future could play out.

1:39:35 Brian Rose: Yeah, I think it showed me though, I think temporarily that I had to be careful about putting too much of my own emotional interest in other people. I think for me, I was kind of, it was a learning experience. So if you lean on really hard on something and it falls away, then you’re very much more careful next to it. You just, you learn that there isn’t a complete safety net really anywhere.

1:40:02 Yeah, and I think that’s what I learned. I think Eric and Andrea, different things, different ages, different personalities. They have different different views of all yeah, and I think only in the last 10 years for me I’ve started to kind of try to reverse that and pull people in my life even though again like you said I might they might fall. Mm-hmm having them there still makes me much more complete. Absolutely feel full And I think it also Contributed later to you and me having a different relationship because I would definitely definitely, you know Everyone I mean and I talked to mom yesterday and you know, she evens, you know she she ended up having a completely different trajectory

1:40:45 Brian's Dad: absolutely so it’s nothing like we planned right and everyone just kind of became more of them became that’s my point they had an opportunity to call their own life right as opposed to pretending as opposed to try to co-opted or do it as a committee or do it according to a script or do it like your parents did it I’d like all All the things I did did not sit well with Grandpa and Grandma Rose, I’m sure, to the end.

1:41:10 Brian Rose: To the end. To the end. Still.

1:41:12 Brian's Dad: Oh, to the end, yeah. They were still wondering what the hell.

1:41:15 Brian Rose: Does that bother you?

1:41:17 Brian's Dad: It did, but it didn’t have a big impact because I was owning me, I was owning myself. You had to make the best decision for you. I understand there are shortcomings, and a lot of thereby mom would go into a doctor’s office and say, look at that Chinaman over there, or she’d say, and she had all kinds of racial things she would say out in public, in a stage voice, I’d say, shut up, you know. She didn’t have any inhibitions, didn’t have any political correctness about her at all.

1:41:51 She had whatever she was, she had already formed years ago in terms of how people are and how to judge them. She was very judgmental, and she had to judge herself and her life pretty harshly. And so I didn’t want that, I didn’t need that. I didn’t want to insult her, I didn’t want to make her mad, I didn’t want to actually make her unhappy, but I didn’t want it to, I didn’t want it to change anything about what I was doing.

1:42:16 Brian Rose: But what you were doing, yeah.

1:42:18 I’m sure that went through your head before it happened, but ultimately you had to be you.

1:42:24 Brian's Dad: Yeah, that’s right. I’d already done it enough, I was not afraid of it. I’m afraid of what? I’m afraid of taking a left turn.

1:42:32 We had an expression. When I used to, we were over there taking care of Mom, we’d go out and take her out to dinner with Mary and we’d come and others, and we’d go out to eat. So we went out and we went out to eat Chinese food. And I think Gloria was there, too. And we went out and we looked up on the internet to find out where to go, and we went way down to that place and did a bunch of places.

1:42:48 We finally arrived at this place, and we ate there, and it was just terrible. And it was Madam Wong’s, and we all got to laughing because we said we took a Wong turn. And so one of the things I learned, and everybody knew what we meant, when you take a Wong turn, it’s just a pun, but it really means you shouldn’t have done that. You deviated from your plan, you should have walked out of the restaurant, you shouldn’t have worded off the menu, it was a crap place.

1:43:11 And you just called it the Wong turn, move on.

1:43:14 Brian Rose: So that’s the way you look at it. I’d look at it as a Wong turn. Sometimes you take a Wong turn. And so I remember you leaving the house and then I remember us cooking together like we made hamburgers and pancakes and There’s a lot of cooking going on Yeah And I feel like I don’t feel like I spend as much time with you until after the divorce Then I felt like I spent more time.

1:43:36 Brian's Dad: Well, you did because you came and lived here, right?

1:43:39 Brian Rose: But didn’t happen there can and They came over but it was always it wasn’t long enough to really I mean

1:43:45 Brian's Dad: And we were able, for a couple days, to kind of get a different vibe going, that different way of doing things that we did, and for some of the holidays, and some of the trips, ski trips and other things that were there that interrupted that. But you can’t really, you were essentially trying to live two lives in the most difficult part of your life, through three teenage years. We had to have two different parents, two different styles of homes, parenting.

1:44:12 And it’s not possible, really. It’s kind of a challenge.

1:44:17 Brian Rose: Yeah, yeah. And then what was it like when I came to move with you?

1:44:22 Brian's Dad: It was fun.

1:44:23 Brian Rose: Not exactly what you and Gloria bargained for.

1:44:26 Brian's Dad: It was a challenge. It wasn’t well, but we just tucked it up. It was a good thing to do. It was a responsibility and a need.

1:44:34 And it was important to us. Because we wanted you to do well and not land in no place, you know, to do well. And so that means stepping up to, you know, whatever the need was.

1:44:49 Brian Rose: Yeah, I needed to get it. I wasn’t doing so well with Mom.

1:44:54 Brian's Dad: No, definitely not.

1:44:56 Brian Rose: I was about to head with her.

1:44:58 Brian's Dad: I know there was about to be a war. It was a war. It was a war.

1:45:01 Brian Rose: Yeah, and if it wasn’t for you guys, I don’t know where I would have gone. I guess I would have just gone back and gone into war or something.

1:45:07 Brian's Dad: It might have been a war, but so be it. It’s just one of the steps that, you know, bumps it kind of long.

1:45:14 Brian Rose: Yeah, so I came here, and then I went back to Moms, and then I came back for those last couple of years. And yeah, what do you think of the way I turned out?

1:45:25 Brian's Dad: I just, like Mom, I say, hey, that’s what I got for all that work.

1:45:29 I think you guys all did well at our time. doing well. And my idea is that I’d like to see you all do well on your own terms and surprise me. And while I’m not surprised that you’re working hard and doing well, I will be surprised at what your choices are. And there’s a bunch more left. Obviously, I can look at the choices I made since I was your age. And there’s rafts of them. I’ve more jobs and started more wacky things and think differently and learned a lot more.

1:46:10 And so looking at the amount of years you have as you get old, if you don’t stop living and you don’t stop learning, it’s like, I tell my buddies, I’ve got a lot of buddies now that are younger than me that are 60s, 60s in their 60s. I can do the young boys. But we have a lot of chats about what they’re going to do when they retire because that’s about retirement age. We talk about what they’re doing with their, what they’re trying to do because their kids are out of the house and now their wives are retiring and now what are you going to do? There’s a lot of challenges for people at that age.

1:46:40 And I still laugh at them because they do use me as a role model still, even at that age. And I’m laughing at them saying, look, I’m not slowing down. You’re not going to catch me. And I’m still working as hard as I was way back then. And so I’m 10 years ahead of you, and you’ll never make that up.

1:47:04 Brian Rose: That’s what you tell them.

1:47:06 Brian's Dad: That’s what I tell them. I do that because they need to know that this is not the time to let up the gas, to think that they’re over with, that they can’t take a long term, they can’t do something different, they’ll have to. Because when your kids are out of the house and you’re left with you and your wife staring at each other, you soon find lots of things to fight about, and to disagree about, and you don’t really have any, you really can neglect this whole idea of continued momentum in your life. So I told the dentist gal the other day that I wasn’t going to fix this tooth because I wasn’t feeling very good and I might die and I want to die with a brand new tooth. I told her I was going to charge my funeral on a credit card. So I’m not inclined to have a big amount of cash sitting around because there’s a lot to do. And so this is just kind of the vibe that I try to give to people that I run into every day that this is it’s not the time to be an old man or an old person.

1:48:01 You have however many years you’ve got and you have no idea, and you need to just keep on keeping on to whatever you can manage.

1:48:10 Brian Rose: And you want my decisions to surprise you?

1:48:13 Brian's Dad: No, I don’t think you can not surprise me. I don’t think it’s possible that you will not surprise me.

1:48:21 Brian Rose: Why?

1:48:21 Brian's Dad: We’ll see.

1:48:22 Brian Rose: You know, when I go into this-

1:48:24 Brian's Dad: If you’re gonna die in London, no. It’ll go somewhere else. It could be somewhere else, I don’t know.

1:48:30 Brian Rose: You know, when I do these ayahuasca ceremonies and I’ve been talking about it for like seven years, well, first of all, what do you think about those things?

1:48:40 Brian's Dad: It surprised me. It did. That’s all. Which is the right thing. That’s fine.

1:48:48 Brian Rose: You know, and as I said, I always go back to, well, I used to go back to the divorce day when I was seven, but now I’m just, I’m trying now to not do that anymore and just to like not have that define me and that.

1:49:04 Brian's Dad: That’s 40 years ago. I know. Time to shove a little over your shoulder. Time to move on.

1:49:10 Well, 40 years is funny. So something, you should be doing stuff every day that lets there be like an eraser, somebody following you around with an eraser. Nobody wants to live with their past forever. And that can happen. Other people can make you live it.

1:49:33 But you’d like your memory not to be that good. You know, kind of fade a little bit and you’d like your past deeds not to be forever defining you. So we watch a show called Bull, which has been off from another show called NCIS, which has been on a long time, Cory’s favorite. And the guy that went and spun off into a trial specialist, a jury specialist, and he’s a psychologist who helps people go and meet the juries and figure out how to pick the jurors, how to present the cases so that the case will be won.

1:50:09 And he’s in New York, he charged a lot of money. He’s an interesting character, and it’s based on Phil McGraw, Dr. Phil. So one of the cases was about the internet and something that was done on the internet, a piece of evidence that was on the internet that was haunting somebody and forcing him to be put away for murder probably. And in fact it was even him at one point, he had actually flunked out of law school or been disbarred somewhere and so here he was trying to live down his own past while he was helping the defendant make a case for the fact that the events of the internet that he had logged and recorded were not to be used against them in today’s court. So the whole picture is a representation that Hollywood put on this of the thing I just said, don’t let your past linger forever. You know, you are certainly a piece of who you used to be, but that should be like exponentially weighted tail or something like that, a moving average of some sort where eventually it doesn’t matter anymore.

1:51:10 Brian Rose: Yeah. I mean, so many people though that have been living a past event, I guess I’m one of them to say. That’s why we’re having this conversation.

1:51:18 Brian's Dad: So if you live in any major event in the past that’s more than 10 years old, you should rethink that. Tell you something you should do.

1:51:26 Just rethink it. Either do something to diminish it even a little bit, because if it’s exponential, every year you knock off 10%, pretty soon it’s gone. If you say, it doesn’t matter, I remember that, but now I don’t even remember that well even, and I don’t even want to remember. It’s not affecting me today. It’s not going to affect what I do today.

1:51:43 I’m not going to think about it at night. I’m not gonna describe it to anybody. I’m done. Yeah, so at some point you you’re race your own past Or you let it go away so that you can you’re gonna evolve

1:51:59 Brian Rose: Well said pops Give yourself a shot Yeah, not the future I just want to say thanks dad for being my dad Love you very much.

1:52:09 Brian's Dad: It’s really pretty easy

1:52:10 Brian Rose: You say that but you know, I know yeah, you did a lot of

1:52:15 Brian's Dad: Because a lot of the work in the past has already been erased, it’s already been done, and it paid off.

1:52:23 I’m not very grateful about anything that went into getting you where you are today.

1:52:30 Brian Rose: And so I think I feel the same way as well. But you’re not?

1:52:34 Brian's Dad: Oh, you mean you feel good about it? We both feel good about where you’ve gone and what you’ve done.

1:52:42 But I’m not to the point where I can say, okay, he’s good. We’re done here. You still have work to do.

1:52:49 Brian Rose: You still have parenting to do as well?

1:52:51 Brian's Dad: Here’s the other thing that I forgot to say, and I should get it on the print here somewhere.

1:52:57 And that is, if you have kids, they’re your problem. Because you know why. You’re my problem. I busted my butt. Now you’ve got to bust yours.

1:53:08 Brian Rose: So that means that grandpa’s not raising him.

1:53:11 Brian's Dad: You’re not raising my kids. We’re not raising the kids

1:53:14 Brian Rose: and you have any advice on my boys

1:53:16 Brian's Dad: Yeah, you got to take whatever they give you and work on them I mean whatever they bring to you is something you got to deal with So if they if they if they create a problem Don’t ignore the problems just keep working them. There’s something you can do for everything anything that happens You just have to go.

1:53:33 Brian Rose: Do you think 40 years from now? They’re gonna have the same conversation.

1:53:37 Brian's Dad: Well, you’d hope so And ask me about things I did you hope to get all the equipment and everything and everything all going good And they think that it might be worth their time to do this If not, it’s not what there’d be different different kids

1:53:51 Brian Rose: Damon and Kaden don’t get any ideas. Yeah, we’re not doing this in 40 years. Yeah Well, all right. Thank you dad for sitting down and doing this and again, I think I said all the work Look at all this. I know but um, no, thanks for everything you did. I mean, you know you you just I always say about you and and Grandpa and Grandma, you just led by example.

1:54:11 No one ever told me you work hard, no one ever said you’d be honest, no one ever said you talk bad about someone else. There’s just-

1:54:19 Brian's Dad: You didn’t go to lectures and learn how to be who you are. Also, your great-grandfathers were very similar in that regard too. One was the cowboy and one was the farmer, Dr. Grandpa Rose, and he worked every day of his life by example and he never ever you to anybody badly and he always attempted and he never you know was never was greedy always he always found a way to make sure his family was because they didn’t have anything they had literally they had to eat very sparsely stuff they grew in their own gardens for a lot of their time so he was used to making do with what they had and everybody you know everybody getting a good result from it so today you got a lot more complication in your life you got a lot more things that can go wrong you got a lot of anticipated people’s entitlements that have to deal with. I got peer pressures that are way different than they used to be. There was peer pressure in the farm and in the farming areas as opposed to the urban areas but it’s a different kind. But I got to get on this session at least one other thing that my dad told me. This is as I was working on the farm I was riding around in the pickup with him my senior year of high school on my way to Caltech and I was going away in a week or two and he said there’s a whole bunch of people

1:55:38 Who are going to be doing all kinds of stuff and he said you don’t have to do it. So I didn’t. He didn’t. No. I said no.

1:55:57 That was all nonsense. That’s all we had to say. You don’t have to do it.

1:56:03 Brian Rose: So he didn’t say, don’t do this, don’t do that, watch out for this, watch out for that, be careful here, be careful that, none of that. So I thought that was about the summary of the way he was sending you off.

1:56:19 Brian's Dad: And it helped you a lot.

1:56:20 Brian Rose: Yeah. Just kind of saying no. It just gave me the comfort to say no.

1:56:24 Brian's Dad: Right, right.

1:56:25 The backing, the support to say no. Or as you could have been derailed. You could do anything could happen.

1:56:34 Brian Rose: Yeah. Just say no.

1:56:35 It’s good parenting.

1:56:36 Brian's Dad: Yeah. Grandpa. Who knows? Just grandpa.

1:56:39 Brian Rose: Your grandpa. Great grandpa.

1:56:41 Brian's Dad: Yeah, great grandpa. Getting old. Yeah.

1:56:43 Brian Rose: So good. Are we done?

1:56:45 Brian's Dad: Yeah.

1:56:46 Brian Rose: Thanks dad. Yeah.

1:56:48 Brian's Dad: Good. You happy?

1:56:56 Brian Rose: Yeah, I’m happy. Give me a hug. Thanks pops.