EP 126: Transforming Personal Trauma into Complex and Likable Characters: Guy Morris

Diana WinklerDomestic Violence Leave a Comment

Guy Morris has led an extraordinary life. After escaping an abusive childhood at age 13 to become a homeless runaway, Guy worked alongside migrant workers before he earned three degrees by age 27, including acceptance to Harvard and scholarship award from University of Arizona for his innovations in building a macro-economic that out-performed the Federal Reserve. His career led him to international oil company Occidental Petroleum where he pioneered adoption  of early-stage AI systems and supported business deals worth billions. He can also speak to leadership roles at IBM, Oracle, and Microsoft, as well as start-ups he either founded or joined.
A talented musician and composer, Guy has recorded multiple CDs and wrote songs published by Disney Records. His adventures led him from receiving cartel death threats in Latin America to shark diving in Moorea – from board room politics impacting early climate change studies to living on a 50-foot sailing yacht with a charter captain’s license. Every one of his stories and characters pull from a rich life of diverse experience along with deep, deep research.  Every story is based on true events, history, technologies, or personal experience. For example, both SWARM and The Last Ark feature the true story of a program that escaped NSA spy labs and confirmed by an FBI visit to his home.
Guy strives to write books that thrill, educate, and inspire thoughtful dialogue on genuine issues facing humanity.

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Guy Morris

[00:00:00] Welcome to the Wounds of the Faithful Podcast. Brought to you by DSW Ministries. Your host is singer songwriter, speaker and domestic violence advocate, Diana Winkler. She is passionate about helping survivors in the church heal from domestic violence and abuse and trauma. This podcast is not a substitute for professional counseling or qualified medical help.

[00:00:26] Now here is Diana.

[00:00:30] Hello and welcome to the Wounds of Faithful Podcast. Thanks for joining me today. I hope you guys who were here last week enjoyed my guest, Paeter Frandsen. He was a lot of fun to talk to on the show. A little bit of a break on, some dark topics. he Is a very interesting guy.

[00:00:58] And we [00:01:00] were just geeks all over the place talking about movies and TV and culture and video games, but we did talk about some spiritual abuse and being on full-time staff at a church. And so hopefully you connect with him if you are into any kind of gaming or tv, movies, pop culture in a Christian perspective. So this week

[00:01:26] we’re going to be talking to Guy Morris today and his survivor story and his journey towards wholeness and what he’s doing today. He has a fascinating story and

[00:01:40] he has like an eclectic background and so I’m very interested in hearing what he has to say. Let me read a little bit about his biography for you.

[00:01:52] Guy Morris has led an extraordinary life. After escaping an abusive childhood at age [00:02:00] 13 to become a homeless runaway, Guy worked alongside migrant workers before he earned three degrees by age 27, including acceptance to Harvard and Scholarship Award from University of Arizona for his innovations in building a macroeconomic that outperformed the Federal Reserve.

[00:02:26] His career led him to international oil company accidental petroleum. Pioneered adoption of early stage AI systems and supported business deals worth millions. You can also speak to leadership roles at IBM, Oracle, and Microsoft as well as startups he either founded or joined. A talented musician and composer guy has recorded multiple CDs and wrote songs published by Disney records.[00:03:00] [00:03:00] His adventures led him from receiving cartel death threats in Latin America to shark diving in moreh from boardroom politics impacting early climate change studies to living on a 50 foot sailing yacht with a charter captain’s license. Every one of his stories and characters pull from a rich life of diverse experience,

[00:03:30] along with deep research. Every story is based on true events, history, technologies, or personal experience. For example, both Swarm and the last Arc feature the true story of a program that escaped N S A Spy labs and confirmed by an F B I visit to his home, Guy strives to write books that thrill, [00:04:00] educate and inspire thoughtful dialogue on genuine issues facing humanity.

[00:04:07] So as you can see, he is a fascinating individual. And so I hope that you enjoy this interview with Guy Morris.

[00:04:16] Diana: All right. Please welcome Guy Morris to the show. Thanks for being with me tonight.

[00:04:24] Guy: That’s a pleasure. Thank you for having me. I was so fascinated by your story when you reached out to me to be on the show. You’ve had an interesting life, and we were talking beforehand that you’ve done many different kinds of things.

[00:04:38] Yes, I have, and I feel very blessed by it. I, it wasn’t that I expected that in life, it was more of a consistent pursuit of trying to explore and expand and grow as an individual and grow my life experiences and realize that we only get one life. It’s relatively short. My mother died when she was very [00:05:00] young.

[00:05:00] And so I think that gave me a motivation to live as much life as I possibly could. And I didn’t wanna live with boundaries. And so I tried to focus on how do I was, could constantly expand my own. And that involved sometimes taking extreme risks. Sometimes just being willing to apply myself and work really hard to achieve something that.

[00:05:23] I just found interesting. And so yeah, it’s everywhere from , from Cartel Death Threats in Mexico to diving with sharks in Tahiti to corporate jets and recording studios and web episode series and inventions. And it’s been an interesting life, and I think that’s one of the reasons I write books.

[00:05:42] Diana: We’re gonna hear a bunch of different stuff today as we hear your story. So kinda set the scene for us here about, how you were raised and what kind of childhood did you have.

[00:05:54] Guy: I try not to go into my childhood too much, but it was it was fairly, it was consistently [00:06:00] traumatic to the point where I’ve It wasn’t until my late fifties that I was diagnosed with complex post-traumatic stress because of that childhood, and for the most part, I, once I left home and I started off as a homeless runaway at age 13 and I was escaping an extremely violent situation where my, I was threatened to be killed by my stepfather and just years of abuse. When I finally did go back to college years later, I, and I got my transcripts. I realized I had gone to 16 different schools before I dropped out in the 10th grade, and I couldn’t remember three quarters of and so I had, it was most of my childhood for many years was clouded in a fog of amnesia where my brain just refused to remember.

[00:06:43] And, but, so there was abuse of pretty much every kind. and I was leaving home at 13. Running away at 13 was actually, I had left home once when I was four. Again, when I was six. And then it wouldn’t be until I was 13. I left home again, and I left home finally the last time at age [00:07:00] 15. So, a lot of my childhood was trying to escape the reality of my life.

[00:07:06] And when I left home at 15 I knew in my head, even when I was 13, I knew that I was taking a huge risk. I was young, I had been told repeatedly that I was dumb and worthless and all of those things. And so, but I figured that if I was going to fail, if I, that nothing could be worse than what I was living in.

[00:07:27] And that if I was going to fail, I was gonna fail in my own terms. And so, when I was 13 I ate, I was able to survive by going right alongside migrant workers to work. So basically I would get up at 4:00 AM. At 5:00 AM I’d be out waiting for the trucks then with other migrant workers, and we’d be loaded their trucks and shipped out to ranches.

[00:07:47] We would work until roughly midnight or 1:00 AM and then sent home and getting a few hours sleep before we could get up and had to go do it again. And I did that for a while and at least it was tough. It was [00:08:00] very hard work. But I was able to survive and I was able to it got me over the hump that saying even though I was young, I could survive.

[00:08:08] And so that I think taught me a level of self-preservation and self-reliance that I think. in, in retrospect, carried me through many other ordeals and challenges in life. So when I was 15, I finally left home. I got a G E D and in part I got a G E D because of all the work credits. In California at the time, that if you had certain work credits, you could qualify for school credits to get a G E D.

[00:08:34] And so even though I was functionally illiterate, I was able to get a G E D and leave home after barely completing the 10th grade, and I was missing most of the ninth grade. And, but I hitchhiked Arizona and there was a Christian commune in Arizona that I joined and that began a lot of my spiritual roots and foundations.

[00:08:53] And a few years later, I had already, by age 19, I was already married and with a toddler. When [00:09:00] it took an act of obedience for me out of a word that I received in prayer for me to go back to college, along with a few other miracles of how to pay for it that I never would’ve expected. Now, going back to college, it was never on my plans.

[00:09:15] I thought I was gonna be a musician. I wanted to be a rock n roller. I came from the whole Crosby Stills and Nash era. It’s all about if you had a guitar you could hit, had something to say, and if you could sing well, you could make it. And I always envisioned that would be my life.

[00:09:31] And so college was a little bit of a a twist for me thinking college is for smart people. And the fact that I even got admitted when I had no SAT scores, barely finished high school, had to get my first wife’s help just to finish the application. And when they accepted me, I first thought was, holy cow, I thought college was for smart people

[00:09:52] that worked really hard. I said, they’ll take anybody . But it was pretty rough. The first few years I barely survived it. I was averaging maybe four hours [00:10:00] sleep a night. I, because I still had to work part-time, I was taking 24 units of college credits. I was married to a wife who had anorexia and a toddler who was very demanding.

[00:10:10] And so I was constantly working on something. I barely had any rest. And it took, and I was failing the first few years I was really struggling to get passing grades. And, but somewhere along the line something clicked. I don’t, can’t tell you exactly what it was. But something clicked and I started getting it and I started reading faster and I started absorbing more.

[00:10:32] And I really became fascinated by the men of the Renaissance. And what fascinated me most about them is that they were educated in politics, in business, in science and the arts and in religion. They and everyone was saying, you gotta choose a specialty. And the men of the Renaissance were basically men who were versed in everything.

[00:10:56] And I said, that’s what I wanna be. I wanna be one of those type [00:11:00] of people that maybe I’m not a specialist in the science, but I know enough about it that I can articulate and I can understand and I can converse and so that really laid a foundation for a good part of my life was being diverse.

[00:11:15] Diana: I have to swing back to you hitchhiked to Arizona.

[00:11:18] You know I’m in Arizona, right? Where in Arizona? Yeah, I’m in Phoenix and I’m like, looking at that, I’m like, who hitches Arizona in their right mind?

[00:11:28] Guy: And it was, yeah. It wasn’t in, in retrospect. I, it was one of those moments where I thought, okay, this is how I die. I was 15.

[00:11:35] It was the middle of summer or early summer, so obviously it was a hundred plus 105 plus degrees out in the desert. One of the rides I had dropped me off in the middle of the desert before between San Bernardino and Yuma. Yikes. And so I was, and I got stuck there for several hours. They dropped me off at this really remote lo, the off ramp.

[00:11:57] And so I’m on the on-ramp where like one car per [00:12:00] hour is coming on the on-ramp. And so I finally actually started walking down the freeway, which you’re not supposed to do, trying to get a ride that way cuz nobody was gonna come on the on-ramp from that particularly remote location and thought for sure I had run outta water.

[00:12:14] I was really dehydrated, I was sweating like crazy. I thought for sure that I would be coyote food by nightfall. And fortunately I got one guy who basically picked me up toward the, towards sunset and took me all the way to Tucson, which is where I was going . So, that, that was, and that was bad.

[00:12:30] They arrived at the commun unit 3:00 AM and they basically, somebody bleary-eyed, open. I answered the door and basically said, and I told ’em what I wanted. They said, yeah, there’s a couch. We’ll talk to you in the morning . So that was the beginning of my adult, my adulthood.

[00:12:43] Diana: We’re all wondering what a, what kind of commune unit was, because we are, we’re all thinking about the seventies hippie

[00:12:50] kumbaya kind of place. What was that like?

[00:12:53] Guy: It was sort of a seventies hippie kind of commune. It was associated with a a non-denominational church. And the church [00:13:00] I thought was actually, I still look back and think it was one of the better of the churches that I’d ever been to, in part because they had a, rather than a pastor, they had a pastorate staff.

[00:13:10] So there were basically five pastors. And one of them came from a Lutheran background. One of them came from an assembly of God. One of them came from a Baptist, one of them had been I can’t remember. It was one of the clergy. And so it was a really broad. Spectrum of ideologies and egos and personalities.

[00:13:30] And some of them were very charismatic. Some of them were really into teaching. Some of them had been, had grown up on the mission field. The head pastor had basically was a son of a missionary, so he grew up in Mexico and Latin America in very poor towns his entire life. And so it, it really taught me that, and at one point in time, one of the pastors, I don’t exactly know what happened, but something had happened where he felt that he had to step down for several months to [00:14:00] basically,

[00:14:00] realign his priorities to the Lord and other pastors took over. And it taught me the ability to be humble, the ability to really face the things that you’re doing wrong and rather than deny them, rather than cover them up, to address them. And so it was a really healthy environment for me at the time.

[00:14:19] Now, at the time now, I’m a 15 year old kid who basically grew up in the street. I had no good clothes. All my clothes were hand-me-downs. Everything I owned was a hand-me-down except for a little tiny Spanish guitar that I had purchased in a box in Tijuana. And my nickname for the first couple of years at the church when people didn’t really know who I was, the punk.

[00:14:42] So I was called punk and I didn’t mind it. I guess I identified with it. So it was, some of the guys that were there were long-haired hippies, some of them, it was a fluid environment. I was only there for about three or four months. My sense of independence, I wanted to go out and get my own job.

[00:14:58] I wanted to be able to provide for [00:15:00] myself. I wasn’t comfortable in a social environment because I had always been isolated. And so it was really hard for me to really become im meshed in that group? Yeah. And that was part of my post-traumatic stress. The inability to trust anybody, to inability to feel comfortable in any situation.

[00:15:19] I was always on edge. I had frequent nightmares. My nightmares, I’d wake up and that would bother others. I had a hard ti, I had chronic hyper anxiety over the least little thing. I had chronic depression. I had gotten over addictions and had that tendency. And so I never felt comfortable really opening up at the time to any of them.

[00:15:41] And so while it was a good foundation from a teaching perspective, I wasn’t ready to really enmesh with a group at that level. And so, as I said, three or four months later, I was able to find job and and, but continue to go to the church and serve ministry there. [00:16:00] So I worked on the Worship Ministries being a musician, and then I also worked in the street Ministries.

[00:16:06] Reaching out to others who were like me.

[00:16:09] Diana: So tell us about when did you actually like meet Christ on a personal level? When did your faith become real for you?

[00:16:18] Guy: I had it, it didn’t really start becoming real until I’d started. I had hitchhiked the commune and because I didn’t really had never gone to church other than a couple of times in Newark, New Jersey when my stepfather forced me to go to catechism because he had married my mom.

[00:16:35] My mom had divorced my dad. He had taken us to Newark, New Jersey. We lived in a ethnic Italian row house downtown. He was, his family was basically mobsters and they were very violent. And so because they disparaged my mom as a heathen, I don’t wanna use the kind of words that they used, but immoral Woman they said that the only way that they would [00:17:00] accept us into the family was that if she had her kids basically go to Catholic Catechism now, which was ironic because nobody in the whole family ever went to church. But somehow being confirmed as a Catholic, meant somehow I, I don’t know exactly what it meant.

[00:17:15] Ironically though as it was in many of the tough neighborhoods I grew up in, I was short and thin and I would be bullied. And so the bullies in New Jersey for a long time, I, because I had come from, we had moved from Honolulu to Newark. I wore flip flops for the summer because that’s all we had is shoes.

[00:17:33] And I did I didn’t go outside in the wintertime cause I didn’t really have good shoes for a couple months, for several, for a while. And so, I would typically, my first few months there was, somebody meeting me in the morning, punching me in the face, say, okay, gimme your money, flip flops.

[00:17:47] And so when I went to catechism, the guy that tormented me the most decided that it would be a fun joke if he poured an ice cold drink down my back. Something [00:18:00] in me, snapped. And I’m not proud of it, but maybe it was the right time. I had enough, I had been picked on and punched and kicked and burned and whipped and beaten with boards and thrown through windows.

[00:18:14] And I, to the point where I remember a time when I had to hide inside the crawlspace underneath our house for days because I was afraid of being beaten. And something snapped. I picked up my chair, I slammed it into his face. We wound up both getting kicked out of catechism and the fight went outside where I basically had his neck over a chain rail trying to choke him before somebody pulled me off.

[00:18:41] Now the good news was, we were both bloody. He had landed a few pretty good punches. I had landed a few myself. He never picked on me again. I bet. Rather than me having to cross the street when he was coming down the street, he would start crossing the street. Because at that point I had decided that the only way for me to survive survivors to be [00:19:00] vicious. And that was my survival boat for several other, for another the next few years, was to be the small kid where yes, I was small, but don’t cross me because I won’t hold back.

[00:19:11] And so I didn’t go to ever really go to church because of that. So, to answer your question, it wasn’t until I was 15, I had gotten kicked outta school for fighting again. I didn’t start it. I never started it, but it was a gang that basically tried to decide that I was there target of choice for the day.

[00:19:32] And so I was suspended from school for fighting. I had blood on my shirts, blood on my pants. I was walking home and I could, I knew this, what we called at the time of Jesus Freak, and he was coming down the other side of the street. I was going home in the middle of the day. He decided to cross up and come behind me.

[00:19:52] And when he got close, I turned around and told him to leave me alone. That whatever he wanted, I wasn’t interested. And he started talking about the Lord [00:20:00] and I wasn’t really in the mood. I didn’t really understand what he was talking about. He got closer. I grabbed him by the shirt. I went to punch him and he laid his hand on my shoulder and started praying

[00:20:10] in tongues. Oh, that’s a surprise. It was a total surprise. I was like, what? But something happened at that point in my heart. I had been he started then talking to me and just asked and, We sat down and it was a dirty street gutter in Chino, California. We sat down in the street gutter right there and there, and spent an hour him basically ministering to me.

[00:20:37] And that’s how I accepted Christ. Now, when I went home and I told my mother this story her first response was to slap me thinking that I was just trying to use this as a way of getting outta trouble again. But he gave me a Bible. I didn’t know any church in town. I would hitchhike on Sunday.

[00:20:57] I would get up really early in the morning. I would hitchhike [00:21:00] four hours to go to Costa Mesa to go to the church, the Calvary Chapel Church, when it was still in the tent. . And I wouldn’t get home till late. But because I had already been homeless at the time and I’d already run away, my mom would rarely ever say anything.

[00:21:12] And it was a few months after that I got my GED and then decided to, I’d heard about this commune in Tucson and that was what compelled me to hitchhike my way to the commune, was to start over, start a new life. And so that became my, that was when I started actually studying the word, when I started actually getting good teaching, when I started understanding what worship was about and what ministry was about and started seeing other people who were actually living Christ like lives and realizing how different it was from everything I had ever known.

[00:21:43] Growing up people said did you grow up in the church? I said, no, I grew up in bars. And which was the truth, I spent more time on the weekends in bars than I spent doing anything else. And so it was a transformational time for me. So when I got an opportunity to go back to school, I was terrified.

[00:21:59] I was [00:22:00] terrified that I was too dumb, that I was that wasn’t, I was just gonna make a fool of myself. But I knew that was what I had been told to do in prayer. And somehow I had faith in that. I obeyed that call and by the time I finished college, I was at the top of the dean’s list. I had built a macroeconomic model that had outperformed the Federal Reserve in pretty much every bank in university, in the nation.

[00:22:28] I had given a job at IBM given a scholarship to go to grad school. And I was accepted into Harvard and all of this was just, I was just overwhelmed. With all of this because I just wanted to have a decent job that was better than working at 7-Eleven. . And so yeah, it, that began a transformation.

[00:22:49] Now I was still struggling silently because that I found that most people who had even the younger kids at that point who were running away from [00:23:00] bad homes, what they would call a bad home would’ve been a dream life for me. Oh, wow. When I would give little tiny glimpses as to what I could remember my childhood being like, and even though I had for, I had tried to push away a lot of it, I, you can see that look in someone’s eyes when you realize that they’re just having a hard time relating.

[00:23:22] that they just can’t even comprehend what that must have been like. And so it was hard for them to really understand my chronic nightmares, my chronic depress, all of the issues that I was going through. And so I basically suffered all of that in silence for decades. And then when you’re going to, when you’re working for a company like IBM, Burrows Al Petroleum, Oracle, when you’re working with Fortune 100 companies and you’re working daily with vice presidents and CXOs and genius levels, and people who had lived a privileged life and who grew up on ski resorts and who went, they family took vacations in Europe and I realized that I was just never like any of [00:24:00] them.

[00:24:00] I had never, I never could relate to their way of thinking. I never could drink the Kool-Aid privilege. And and so I continued to basically work my fanny off during the day and then basically deal with my issues by myself at night. And that became a pattern in my life. Now, once I had left college and started working, I was working so hard that my marriage fell apart and I didn’t know how to handle that.

[00:24:28] I lost the custody of my daughter, which was a heartbreak for me. And I started, I became an addict again. went back to my addictions and I still suffered. And I went, tried to go to therapists and counseling, but honestly, none of them really knew what to do. They they all dealt with band-aid level symptoms and never really could understand what was going on underneath.

[00:24:48] And as I said, it wouldn’t be until my fifties when I actually discovered and was diagnosed with post-traumatic stress. And part of how that happened was about my older brother, who [00:25:00] was eight years older than I was and left when he was 16. So I was maybe only eight years old and left because he couldn’t stand the abuse.

[00:25:07] He went to live with our grandparents. He had gone, he would, in the Navy, he had suffered post-traumatic stress, which he thought was from his time in the Navy. And he, a few months before he passed away he called me up and said, asked me if I could remember certain things from our childhood. And I couldn’t.

[00:25:22] He said, did you, do you ever remember mom saying she loved us? I said, I don’t remember any of that. I remember being told I was a dumb shit, excuse my language. And he was expressing how the doctors had basically decided that his p post-traumatic stress had nothing to do with his time in the Navy.

[00:25:36] It all had to do with his childhood, and asked me if I were dealing with the same things. And I didn’t know. So that led to that diagnosis, which was great because it finally made sense. It connected the pieces that I couldn’t connect any other way other than the think there was something wrong with me.

[00:25:53] It gave me a lens for understanding where I had been wounded, how I had been wounded, how [00:26:00] that basically had impacted my brain and my psychology and my personality, and started giving me practical tools of how to deal with it. But for in spite of most of my career and I had done some amazing things, you had alluded to it earlier, I had, I wrote songs for Disney.

[00:26:17] I wrote screenplays for a small production company. I produced a, an award-winning web episode series based on my discovery of a program that had escaped the Lawrence Livermore Laboratories at Sandia, which was an NSA spy lab. And when I figured out how a program could escape NSA and what it was designed to do, two FBI agents showed up at my door.

[00:26:38] I earned a Coast Guard Charter Captain’s license. I went diving with sharks. Because of my position in corporate in my job, I was able to fly corporate jets and go to, five star hotels and restaurants. I was living a good life, and so my depression and my anxieties and some of these other things just didn’t seem to make sense for me until I understood [00:27:00] what post-traumatic stress was and how I had been impacted.

[00:27:03] Diana: Now, all the audience they heard Disney and I can’t let you go any further until you tell us about writing songs for Disney. My husband and I are musicians and you recorded multiple music projects and you’re a songwriter?

[00:27:17] Guy: Songwriter which as I said, what I thought that was gonna be my career when I was younger.

[00:27:22] And so wouldn’t say I was a great musician, but I was pretty good. Self-taught. I played guitar, little bit, piano, bass, congos, drums very versatile. And a friend of mine came to me and knew as a songwriter, and he wanted to propose a project to Nickelodeon so that, so to basically for Nickelodeon to create sort of an M T V type of channel, but for kids now, there wasn’t quite enough music in the children’s music business really to really make that viable.

[00:27:50] But nonetheless, he asked me if I would write some songs for him to go demo to Nickelodeon. And so I did. I wrote some songs. He loved all the songs. We went into the studio, we [00:28:00] recorded them in this. Marathon, 18 hours studio session. And his pitch to Nickelodeon failed. He didn’t go anywhere.

[00:28:09] I forgot all about it. Several months later, I got a phone call from Disney Records. And now, honestly, at the time I thought it was a prank . is Harold, whatever. I can’t remember his last name, Harold, something rather from Disney Records. I thought, what? I said, no, is this Jack? Is this John?

[00:28:25] Anthony? This has gotta be Anthony. And he says no, this is Harold. I’m from Disney Records. He says, I got your tape. I said, I never sent you a tape. He says, I never sent tape out to anybody. I wrote for my own, for me, writing was therapy. It was my ability to kind of get these things that are in my heart and my head that I’ve had hard to articulate to other people and write about them.

[00:28:48] And and so I knew I’d never sent a tape to anybody, and he says no, I’ve got these songs. And he listed all the songs and I recognized them. I said, oh, Jack sent you that tape. . So they asked me, and now [00:29:00] Disney records ha you, most people know them from the movies, right?

[00:29:03] So they’re, and usually they’ll get like the Elton Johns to write their movie themes and stuff like that. But if you go to the Disney theme parks. And if you go to Disney stores at the time, and I’m sure they still do this, they sold, made a lot of money by selling a toy. You’d get a little mermaid toy. And they’d sell you

[00:29:24] at the time it was a little cassette that went with the toy that had little non movie low cost, without all the high end royalty sort of, music on it. Right. New songs about the mermaid. And so they would have projects, scary songs, project the Dinosaurs Project, little Mermaid Project, little Ladden project.

[00:29:42] I can’t remember. There was like five or six different projects and they would call you up typically on a Wednesday or something along those lines and said, Hey guy, this is Harold. We have a new project. Wanna know if you wanna submit some songs on it? Yeah, the songs are due next Tuesday. have essentially a [00:30:00] week to write three to five songs.

[00:30:03] Record at least a basic recording of them and submit them. So I did that for a couple of years. I was asked to submit on several projects until I had a real job at the time and I was raising my son aboard a 50 foot sailing cutter. And so at one point in time they loved one of my songs except for one line.

[00:30:24] They wanted me to rewrite one line that was all. One line. I said, no problem. What’s your problem with the line? And they told me, I said can redo that. They said we’re gonna send somebody down to work with you on this. I said, I really, I don’t need any help. I can do this myself.

[00:30:37] So a couple hours later a woman shows up at my boat and I had already rewritten. And she said, I love that. I said, great, let’s submit this. And I submitted it and they accepted it. But when they accepted it, they had decided the woman that they sent down was the producer’s girlfriend and she got half of my royalties.

[00:30:58] What? [00:31:00] Yeah. So that was the point where I said, guys, I’m not interested in doing this. Nope, I don’t play this game. I don’t, I’m not, this is not something I need in order for my own ego. I don’t need it for my identity. It was extra money for my son to go to college, but if you’re gonna cheat me, then that’s not gonna be worthwhile.

[00:31:21] And so I, I quit working for him at that point.

[00:31:22] Diana: I would do the same thing. I wouldn’t have put up with that.

[00:31:26] Guy: So a lot of times people who worked with Disney, kind of, they had a reputation of some people called a mouse witch. Someone called Mickey Meiser. Oh, . It was the working, if you’re a celebrity, it, you get one level deal.

[00:31:39] If you’re not, then it’s like most of the other, the rest of the entertainment business, which is you can be very, you can be taken advantage of a lot. having been taken advantage of my entire childhood, I had zero tolerance for it as an adult. But it was an interesting experience. It was great to kind of work on the songs and they would send you a theme sheet, is what they would call it.

[00:31:59] [00:32:00] So this character, these are the types of things that the character’s about. These are the kinds of things the character would say, this character’s got this type of personality and you were, you basically had a theme sheet to basically write to that character. So it was an interesting experience.

[00:32:14] It was interesting for me to know that I could go through the process, a more structured process for songwriting where I could produce five songs in a few days and have them be relatively good, pretty good enough to get sold to Disney. So it was a great experience, but certainly not one I felt that I wanted to turn into a second career.

[00:32:38] Diana: That’s a good segway into, the other part of your music is you are a worship leader for 12 years. So what happened? You were part of a church, another church?

[00:32:50] Guy: When I was living, at the time I was in California, I was living on my boat in Marina Delray.

[00:32:55] And there was a period of time where I didn’t go to church at all. I was it was during my addictions. I [00:33:00] felt like I, I just didn’t belong anymore. I was struggling with a little bit with my faith. I was trying to raise my son. I was broke, I was bitter over my breakup of my marriage. And, but I finally started going back to church and got involved in the worship team there.

[00:33:14] And the worship leader left. I wound up becoming the new, one of the new leaders, and it was in Venice Beach, California, which if you’ve ever been to Venice Beach, it’s how do I describe Venice Beach? It’s like hippie meets punk, meets new age meets, muscle Beach meets, the, one of the most eclectic, weirdest places on the entire planet.

[00:33:36] Certainly in America. And we were a block off the beach. We were a little tiny church building that had been built in the 1920s complete with like the little steeple and everything else. Typical old building wooden building, and we had no air conditioning, so we had to have the windows open

[00:33:52] in order to, on Sundays, cuz it was always hot and on the beach. And you would get people walking by the windows and [00:34:00] basically looking in the windows at what was going on. Hey, what’s going on in there? And we would frequently, the back row or two of the church would often be, or people standing in the back would be people in their bathing suits and sarongs who had just wandered in.

[00:34:15] So it was a very interesting place to lead worship. It was great in, in the, it was probably one of my favorite places to lead because we had people who had one guy was a piano player who used to work with Michael McDonald. One guy used to sing with Motown. We had country, we had r and b, we had jazz one guy while studied under a classical guitar under Andre Segovia, which was one of the

[00:34:39] best known classical guitar teachers of the sixties and seventies. Ooh. And so we had amazingly talented musicians, but we had rejected everything that had to do with what you typically see in a lot of worship bands, which especially now, sort of a homogenized kind of sound that they’ve kind of developed [00:35:00] that.

[00:35:00] And so everyone was original, everyone was unique, everybody sounded different, and we wanted that. We didn’t want anybody to fit into the mall. We wanted their worship to be unique to who they were as an individual, and that we would, as a body re adjust to that. It was one of the most fulfilling and rewarding and dynamic and incredible worship experiences I’ve had in any church.

[00:35:27] any church. Not only because of the diversity of talent, but because we really refused to make anybody fit into a style or a mold. And so yeah, it was terrific. And I’m still, I think some of my closest friendships are still people that were part of that, that, that group.

[00:35:49] Diana: Now, it wasn’t all roses and butterflies, I’m sure. I think you put that there were some scriptural errors and some racism and [00:36:00] pride being repackaged as conservative views.

[00:36:04] Guy: The pastor at the time was I would call antagonistically conservative. Yet at the same time I quit going. I basically resigned when the pastor cheated on his wife, left his wife and three kids and to marry a woman in the church that he was having an affair with. And yet he felt that he still deserved to be the pastor because he made the church.

[00:36:27] And I, again, I didn’t really have a lot of tolerance for that. So had he confessed, had he repented, had he at least admitted that he made a mistake and he needed to correct this I would’ve been more lenient. But his

[00:36:42] inability to really show any humility at all or any Christian characteristics at all. Basically was a sign for me to go. It was time for me to go. So yeah, so that was difficult and it was a hurt because some of my closest relationships were there and I maintained the relationships, [00:37:00] but not with the church.

[00:37:01] . So that was difficult for me. But it was necessary for me to realize that my walk had nothing to do with the community or the church or the denomination or the pastor or anybody else. That God called each of his disciples individually. Yes. And that were each called individually now.

[00:37:29] in scriptures we’re taught that in the last day there’s gonna be a lot of churches, there’s seven messages to the seven churches. And that all, but two of them basically had things that they were wrong, that were wrong about, that needed to change and repent of. And so, I realized that at this point in time, I was strong enough and knew enough of the word that I realized I didn’t need somebody necessarily to teach me as much as I, wanted someone who could show a good example.

[00:37:57] I wanted somebody who could show how to overcome, [00:38:00] who could show how to Be humble and be more Christ-like. And if it was just about growing the church or it was just about the church brand or the church identity, or the church against the Democrats or anything like that, I didn’t need any of that.

[00:38:15] I just needed something that was truer. And so it was a good time for me to basically stand on my own. And as a result, as it turned out, I was, a couple of years later, I would get a job here in Seattle. So I would leave Marina Delray and have to reestablish myself anyway. So it was a good stepping stone for me to not feel like I couldn’t walk without this community.

[00:38:41] And so that was, it actually turned out to be good in the long run. It was painful in the hardened time. But I came out of it well. But yeah and we have to each kind of, I think really kind of take that idea that our walk we’re called as an, as a individual disciple, not as a group.

[00:38:56] Our salvation doesn’t come from who we’re associated with. Our salvation [00:39:00] comes from our own individual walk of faith. . And that was an important step for me. And now by that point, I was going through a lot of, when I first joined, I was in 12 step programs and I was really hurting and I was really feeling low about myself.

[00:39:15] And I had gotten past some of those addiction issues and was living healthy at that point. And so I, I felt that I was okay on my own. So yeah it was, but I, again, I didn’t want, just as, I didn’t want my childhood, the wounds of my childhood to define who I would be in the future.

[00:39:35] I didn’t want this experience to define me in the future as well. And I it took time, but it, I was able to get over it.

[00:39:42] Diana: You said so many profound things and I’ve been a part of some rotten churches that, we had to leave as well and came upon that same revelation that, my relationship with God is not dependent on the, the church that I’m going to or the congregation.

[00:39:58] And I think a lot of [00:40:00] people can relate to what you said that, I can’t really trust churches anymore because I’ve been burned by them so badly. And yeah, I, it took a long time for my husband and I to find a healthy church that we could be individuals. We could be part of a community, but we are individuals with we can make our own decisions and we have the priesthood of the believer where we can make yeah.

[00:40:23] Guy: And choices A church that was trying to basically conflate their politics with their scriptures. Yeah. And that was another thing that really, I tolerated it for a while, but I think at the end of the day, I think that was one of the other things that, along with the infidelity and, and was like, okay, this is just not acceptable anymore.

[00:40:42] Diana: I totally agree. Now, I wanted to give you a chance to talk about your. , your books that you’re writing, and you mentioned that your books reflect all of your, the stories throughout your life and the trauma you’ve been through and, tell us more about that.

[00:40:59] Guy: I [00:41:00] retired in 2018 after 36 years of Fortune 100 Stress, and I had I have a very dysfunctional relationship with leisure.

[00:41:09] I just am not the kind of person who can sit around and relax and read too many books. If I read one book, I’ll blow through it in a couple days and then I’m ready to do something productive. I don’t watch a lot of television. I have to be productive. I feel like life is short. I was.

[00:41:25] Took me from being a illiterate, homeless punk to giving me this tremendous life. And I felt like I have a responsibility to figure out what am I supposed to do with whatever life I have left? And so writing was a joy. I had started writing when my son was 12. Or 11 or 12. I wrote some short stories for him, and I always, the stories that always really sparked for me were stories that were based on some level of reality and truth.

[00:41:54] Hemingway, Mark Twain, Toy story books that really evolved out of real life [00:42:00] experiences. And so I started looking at my life experiences from the experiences I had in Mexico, researching ancient Mayan ruins and mythology and their 5,000 year calendar and getting cartel death threats to diving in with sharks to discovering this program that had escaped the NSA that the, that brought the FBI to my home.

[00:42:24] And so I wanted to write I love thrillers and so that was my mode. But I wanted, every book is basically is deeply rooted and on. Deep research, real life technologies, real life history, events, politics, religion, prophecy. But I don’t, because I’m dealing with a thriller, one of the things that for me was important didn’t want the typical character to be your Tom Clancy novel, where it’s a Navy seal, who’s super patriotic, bleeds red, white, and blue, and can kill you to 15 ways before breakfast, sir.

[00:42:58] So every [00:43:00] one of my main characters is flawed. They’re traumatized from their childhood or from other experiences they’re dealing with that in some way or fashion or form trying to overcome that as they’re overcoming the other hurdles that I throw at them in the book. And so the the plots are fictional.

[00:43:13] The characters are fictional, but everything underneath is real. And so I have two books. The Swarm and the Last Arc are based are espionage, artificial intelligence, political prophecy books. The character the program that escaped the NSA labs in at Sandia, which brought the F B I to my home.

[00:43:30] Now, as it turns out that in 2016, CN N reported that Russia had hacked the CIA cyber toolkit and that cyber toolkit was eventually every one of the functions I had determined belonged to this program that had escaped, including what we now call the deep fake video technology, which is probably one of the reasons why the FBI was very freaked out.

[00:43:50] Now I thought the whole episode when the FBI showed up was hilarious. It basically for me, it’s like, yes, I nailed it. my wife was my poor wife. Totally off her rockers. [00:44:00] Why are two FBI agents sitting in my dining room? What did you do? Oh, and who are you really? And so that, I thought it was hilarious.

[00:44:08] They didn’t depreciate my humor. So, But it turns out I had nailed it. So the, and the two, 2016 story confirmed it. So that program is a character in the book now, and that program has decoded in time prophecy. So I deal with real issues now. One of the last arc deals with the arc of the covenant that has been in Ethiopia.

[00:44:29] Left Israel with Solomon’s son 2,600 years ago, was in on Elephant Island in Egypt for several hundred years until the Romans chased him away. Then it was in Ethiopia, in synagogues for hundreds of years before they Templars came through in the, through Crusades and moved it into Christian churches.

[00:44:47] But in January, 2020 1, 750 men, women, and children were massacred when a militia stormed the city of Axon. Stormed the St. Mary’s of Zion Church, where this arc has been [00:45:00] kept for 900 years and stole the arc of the covenant and sold it on the black market. That’s a true story.

[00:45:06] Diana: I watched a programme about that very thing.

[00:45:09] Guy: Yeah. A lot of people knew that the arc existed, but very few people knew that it, it’s recently been stolen. Stolen on the black part. . So my book Speculates who had the power of the money and the desire to own that arc and why? And it ties it to a second real story. Now, in the 1960s, there was a copper scroll found outside Qumran different than all of the other scrolls of the Dead Sea Scrolls found outside Qumran.

[00:45:33] It was hidden behind a mud wall as opposed to in jars where the other scrolls were. It took the years for the archeologists to unravel this very brittle copper scroll, clean it up and read it. And the scroll hat was a treasure map. It had 64 locations where pre Babylonian priests had hidden tens of tons, billions and millions of dollars of gold, silver, and temple vessels before the Babylonian innovation.

[00:45:57] And in the 64th location was a [00:46:00] second second copper scroll that describes where Jeremiah hid the arc of testimony made by Moses. . Now, this is a story that’s also replicated in the Book of Maccabees, the second book of Maccabees. And so there’s a historical basis for this what, how this scroll came in into existence.

[00:46:19] And the scroll was supposedly written by Barack, which was Jeremiah scribe and five other temple priests. For 50 years, people have been trying to look all over Jerusalem to find these locations and failed miserably. And everyone Jerusalem’s been destroyed and rebuilt too many times for any of these places to ever to exist.

[00:46:38] And so everyone gave up. About six, seven years ago, an American named Jim Barfield decoded all 64 locations underneath the ruins of Qumran. And so he was able to go to the Israeli Sanhedrin, convince them that he was onto something. They were able to go to the Israeli in antiquities and archeology group [00:47:00] and have them come out, convince them to go out and do metal scans.

[00:47:04] They confirmed non metals under, he basically showed them all the locations underneath Qumran that lined up with the 64 clues, and they found non Ferris metals under every single one of them, but they only dug down a couple feet and then basically said that the theory was false and there was nothing there.

[00:47:22] And they tried to kill the rumors that were flying around Israel, Jerusalem at the time. The reason why they had to do that was because Qumran is part of the Palestinian West Bank. Yep. By law, Israel is not allowed to dig anything up on Palestinian land. And if they did, it would go into a military Tribune warehouse and be basically lost for decades without them being able to get to it.

[00:47:49] So that was also at the same time that Israel started talking about a single state solution because only under a single state solution where they actually took [00:48:00] ownership of the Palestinian West Bank would allow them to actually dig under Kuron, get the treasures, and basically go after the last the arc.

[00:48:08] So that’s part of the premise of my book, the Last Arc.

[00:48:12] Diana: That sounds very interesting and I like the research that’s gone behind it.

[00:48:17] Guy: And then the third book, the Curse of Cortez, that one was one that took me well over a decade to research. It started with when I was as a sequel to the one of the short stories I’d written for my son.

[00:48:28] Now, 12 years old boy Pirates, lost treasures, lost civilizations, ghosts. You combine any combination of those four things and you gotta hit it . I wanted to base the next version of the story on something real. So I was looking, researching true loss treasures true basically stories of the colonial period and the age of piracy to try and find something that I could bake into the book and I landed

[00:48:53] a fascinating story. In 1672, Henry Morgan took 36 ships, 2000 men, to raid the city [00:49:00] of Panama because it was by far the richest city in the new world for a number of reasons, including, it was where all of the gold from Inca Empire went up. And basically it was warehouse before it was put on ships.

[00:49:10] It was where all the silver and gold from Mexico was stored, gems and other things, and spices from Columbia. And most importantly, all they had opened up the orients. So all of the spices, silks bronze statues, Ming vases. Tusks ivory tusks and things when they orient, were basically stored in Panama.

[00:49:30] Long story short, when Morgan got, he lost half of his men in this venture, when he got back to his fleet on the Caribbean side of the imus, he cheated every one of his men. He gave them each a few hundred pieces of gold each, which was a pitance to what he had. 30. He brought back 30 tons and 600 slaves, and he disappeared with almost the entire treasurer.

[00:49:51] Three quarters of the slaves on three ships. None of it ever seen again. But Morgan survived and showed up in Port Royal Jamaica four months later, [00:50:00] where he was arrested immediately by the British because he broke a peace treaty. He thought was Spain when he did this raid. He was sent to London. In London, they thought he was a hero.

[00:50:09] Oh, so they night him, sir Henry Morgan. They send him back to Jamaica as Lieutenant governor with the garrison of soldiers to get rid of piracy. Instead of going after any pirates, except one man named Johns Seriles, who was the captain of the cag way who had cheated Morgan on the trip to Panama. So he he basically helped and he never went after his plunder.

[00:50:30] He never went after the billion dollars. He’d already killed a thousand people to get, thousands of people to get. So, but instead he went into this haunted, drunken, depressed debauchery and then burned his logbook. So the world would never know what happened. Three years after he died, the whole city of Port Royal sinks into the ocean, including Morgan’s grave at the time, many of the locals had said they had been cursed by Morgan.

[00:50:53] All of that’s a hundred percent true. It fascinated me for two reasons. [00:51:00] I wanted to solve two problems. What happened to this 30 tons, three ships and 500 souls? Thinking that it’s really harder to lose that much stuff without somebody finding something. And in fact, I discovered the person who did find something and that goes in the book.

[00:51:15] And two, I wanted to know what happened to Morgan. What traumatized him? What terrified him? What changed him so profoundly that he would give up a billion dollar plunder that he had really killed thousands of people to get. That was his goal for years to get. And what made him so wooed about it that he had to hide it from the world.

[00:51:36] And so I spent years trying to figure this puzzle out and ultimately, I won’t go through all of the details cuz it’s in the book, but I tied it to an inquisition a discovery of a guy named Fa Mitchell Hedges in 1911, who claimed at the time he had found Atlantis before he disappeared with like 250, 270 million.

[00:51:56] Today’s dollar gold. I tied it to an a pilgrimage [00:52:00] that was to this particular island for two, a 2000 year pilgrimage to this island that ended with an inquisition massacre on the island. I tied that pilgrimage to the 5,000 year Mayan calendar and the Mayan calendar tied to the Mayan creation myth.

[00:52:15] The, my creation myth tied is a description of what happened after the younger driest asteroid. So this was an amazing journey for me over a near period of years. And this journey took, I had, I went down and did diving. There’s roads that basically went to this island used to be 13,000 years ago, was above land, was basically a mountain volcan volcano mountain chain on dry wetland 13,000 years ago before the younger driest basically flooded it.

[00:52:45] And so that explained the pilgrimage and explained a number of other things. And so there was roads cut in the coral. I went diving in sixties. They found, discovered roads that went straight out from miles towards this island through from the coastline. And so it took me [00:53:00] years to really research this.

[00:53:02] And I was so astounded by all the things I discovered that I had to write. A really incredible modern day story to basically pull all of these things together. And it won book trips. Favorite 25 books of 2021. They called it Indiana Jones Meets DaVinci Code . It’s got humor, it’s got romance, it’s got adventure, it’s got paranormal, it’s got experiences from my own life baked into it, including the cartel thug who threatened to kill me.

[00:53:30] He becomes one of the characters a , really hilarious seaplane pilot named Chico that I met in some of my adventures down there, became one of the characters. My, my wife became one of the characters. So it’s this incredible great fun action adventure story that’s deeply rooted in mythology, history, geology, and and and all of these experiences.

[00:53:53] Diana: So, did your son like the book that you wrote?

[00:53:56] Guy: My son is now just getting around to reading the books might . [00:54:00] He loved the short stories. He’s now decided that he’s finally gonna get a get read The Curse of Cortez because it was dedicated to him.

[00:54:08] Yeah. But so far he’s read about a third of it and he loves it. But yeah, my wife’s read them all. She’s not the, my target audience. She likes different types of books, so I figured if she will like it, then I’ve done a good job.

[00:54:21] Diana: I love to read. I got this huge stack of books that I’m trying to get to.

[00:54:26] I’ve been so busy.

[00:54:28] Guy: the same way. I have about 20 books on my back shelf here. Most of them research, but others I really want to read. And I’m so busy on other things. I can barely have the time anymore. But yeah. So yeah, so I, I try to really have. compelling books. Now, if you write a thriller, there’s two things that you really want in a thriller.

[00:54:45] One is you want a plausible scenario. You want something that’s believable, that your mind can say, oh, wow, that could really happen. Maybe if maybe to me or to somebody I know, but that could really happen. And the other thing you want to be able to do as a thriller is to say, okay, [00:55:00] here’s the situation.

[00:55:01] Now let’s explore what could go wrong, and then try and make that worse. Now, growing up, I was really familiar with things that could go wrong. And so I feel like I fell into this naturally to say, I had an intuitive sense of how to take in a situation and see how things could really go badly from that situation.

[00:55:20] So it’s been a really, and then writing characters who are traumatized and getting over their own traumas and finding hope and finding humor in their situation and moving past their trauma to a healthier place. That’s really been helpful. That’s really been therapeutic for me. Not to speak to my childhood directly in a confessional kind of way, but to take those experiences and bake them into other characters where they could basically work through those things.

[00:55:52] . And so, the ability to take the research and the reality and the techniques of writing a good thriller and [00:56:00] combining that with. Characters who are realistic and approachable and believable and traumatized, like many of us are traumatized and wounded and work through that is really been a good formula for me.

[00:56:13] Diana: We’ve been all over the map today on topics a little bit . It’s been really fun. Fun interviewed and even hearing about your traumatic beginnings it sounds like you’re really doing something positive with what you went through. That’s inspiring. If you could, you have any advice for somebody that has related to your personal story today, and what advice would you give them if they are going through these types of situations?

[00:56:48] Guy: We could spend a whole hour just on that. Yeah, I bet I’ll condense it to say a couple of things.

[00:56:54] No one else will invest in you. The way you can invest in yourself [00:57:00] and you invest in yourself by facing those things honestly and courageously and with perseverance. Find someone who can help you work through ’em. And if you can’t find someone, work through them the best you can on your own.

[00:57:14] Write journals, do prayer. Read the word, read self-help as you can, but don’t give up on the idea that you can be healthy again. Don’t let your past define what you wanna be, who you wanna be in your. They can be radically different. Just because you were somebody in your past doesn’t mean that has to be who you are in your future.

[00:57:36] You can, we all can change. It’s takes hard work, takes perseverance. It takes a certain, a level of faith to believe that you can change. And and it takes a level of hope that to believe that you can change. And that really ties back to your level of faith. . But don’t give up. Don’t give up on it.

[00:57:55] I suffered. Even going through therapies and 12 steps and [00:58:00] other things. I suffered through my P T S D for decades until it was finally diagnosed. And I’ve been under therapy for over a decade with that. And while I still, I’ll always be someone who has post-traumatic stress, I’ve learned how to manage it and under and understand my triggers and to rearrange, to change my life in the ways that I can reduce those things and find a higher level of peace and contentment in my life and sense of purpose.

[00:58:27] And I was a illiterate, super poor, super battered homeless kid, a addicted drug addicted homeless kid. If I can do it believe that anybody else can. And it’s a question of not giving. , it’s a question of believing. Believing that you want your future self to be worthwhile. Believing that future is worthwhile and fighting for it, working towards it, believing it can happen and not [00:59:00] stopping until you’ve achieved that, whatever level of contentment you feel like you deserve.

[00:59:06] And it meant sometimes disassociating with cer certain relationships. It meant being highly selective in terms of the deep relationships I did wanna be involved in. My first wife was a nightmare for me because it fed into all of my issues. My second wife has been an angel and we’ve been married for 30 years.

[00:59:28] And I was single for 10 years in. . And so I worked through loneliness and I worked through bad self-esteem, and I worked through feeling like a loser and feeling like I was fatally flawed. And, but I didn’t stop trying. And I think that’s the most important thing is to invest in yourself, invest in your health, invest in your future, and it will mean painful, sometimes courageous [01:00:00] times, dealing with those wounds of the past.

[01:00:03] But I found that burying them and ignoring them only made them worse. It wasn’t until I was I found the courage to actually face them, find someone who I could face them with and deal with them that I was able to start moving past those nightmares. And I can’t imagine. I can’t imagine what my life would still be like.

[01:00:26] The problem is, I can’t imagine, I can easily imagine what my life would be like if I hadn’t done it. I never could imagine what my life would be like back then, what it would be like now having gone through it. So it was harder for me to imagine the future because it was too, I was too easily caught up in the past.

[01:00:43] But I couldn’t, I would never replace and for years I blamed God. I blamed God that I had gone through those things. And why did I have to go th through those things? And there are so many other Christians who lived wonderful childhood lives, and what was [01:01:00] wrong with me that I had to go through it.

[01:01:03] In retrospect now, and I’m in my sixties now, I realize that a lot of my strength. A lot of my character, my ability to be as successful as I’ve been in life and still be humbled, ties directly back to those traumas in those beginning and the struggle I had to go through. If God had made it easy for me. And I pray for many times, God, I don’t know what’s wrong with me, God, but just heal it.

[01:01:27] I even had one Christian counselor try to cast demons outta me. It was, it, trying to find the help itself can be a challenge. And there were times I would give up but I never. Want it to allow that to be my permanent state. And so it’s okay if you’re, if you get weary, it’s okay if you get tired, it’s okay if you feel hopeless.

[01:01:48] As long as you don’t let that be your permanent state, it’s, there’s always gonna be a time to get up to believe and to invest in your own mental and emotional health because there is [01:02:00] a future out there that you meant to live. If only you’re willing to go find it.

[01:02:04] Diana: That’s such good advice and thank you for saying those things and I know a lot of people could relate to what you were saying.

[01:02:14] I wanna give you opportunity to tell them where we can find your very fascinating books, and how to get in touch with you.

[01:02:23] Guy: It’s real easy. Go to guy moores books.com. There’s links to each of the books. There’s profiles of the books, there’s buy links, there’s highlights from them.

[01:02:32] All the amazing reviews I’ve gotten, as well as links to those reviews. If you wanna sign copy of the book, you can do that on the site. All my podcast and media there. I have fact versus fiction. I have image libraries of the actual locations. I have videos, so there’s lots of content on the site to enjoy.

[01:02:49] And it’s it’s, helping people to really rediscover the things that I’ve discovered and why I write them.

[01:02:55] Diana: You’re welcome to come back on the show anytime cuz you probably have more [01:03:00] interesting things that you’re doing with your life as time goes on and more books to write.

[01:03:05] Guy: And I’ve barely scratched the surface, right?

[01:03:08] Diana: So , definitely keep in touch and God bless .

[01:03:12] Guy: Thank you Diana. It’s a pleasure to be with you. Thank you for having me.

[01:03:15] Thank you for listening to the Wounds of the Faithful Podcast. If this episode has been helpful to you, please hit the subscribe button and tell a friend. You could connect with us at DSW Ministries dot org where you’ll find our blog, along with our Facebook, Twitter, and our YouTube channel Lakes. Hope to see you next week.

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