#11: 50 Years in Silicon Valley; Surviving Vietnam, and How to Stay Married
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Welcome back to Divot, a community for people trying to make their mark on the world. Where each week I'm interviewing some of the best minds in business, sports, tech, and entertainment to learn how they've made their mark. Go to divot.org, see all the episodes to suggest speakers or products we should look at or any other feedback you have. If you've missed any episodes, you can find them on X or Spotify or YouTube or Apple Podcasts. Divot. This episode is brought to you by Salesforce.

In today's interview, we're in Palo Alto. We're going to hang out with somebody you may not have heard of, but definitely has made a big mark. Greg Osborne is a retired real estate developer. He's helped some of the biggest companies like Google, Next Computers, Sun Microsystems, Intuit, and Activision to get their start.

He's a Vietnam veteran. He's an alumni of the Stanford basketball team. He's had over 20 surgeries. He's like part android and could probably still do more push-ups than any of us. Greg's one of the most interesting and enjoyable people I've ever met and I'm really excited for you to meet him too. Well, it's full of a lot of different stuff. It's a blacksmith shop. I have a lathe over there that turns wooden bowls.

I've got an oxyacetylene torch and a lot of propane. So if a plane ever hit this garage, it'd be a problem. It'd be a problem in Palo Alto. When I learned blacksmithing, it was always on coal forges. But if somebody in Palo Alto sniffed coal burning, they're like...

It's got to be toxic. That's got to be not good. I got to call the city. And in 10 minutes, there'd be some official out here saying, what are you doing? You know, we can't do that here. So it's propane. How much time do you think you've spent in here over the years? When did you move to this house? We bought this house in 1979. Okay. That is 40 years.

Six years ago, we'd been in the same house. It was a one-story house, but we added the second story. Okay. Yeah, which anywhere else in the country you would never do. You just sell that one and buy a two-story house. But here, it was worth adding the second story. Yeah. Yeah. And what? Were you in here, you feel like you're in here every week for 46 years? I mean, you're spending, have you spent a lot of full days in here? Well, not full days. We had five kids. Yeah. And the boys are all makers. Yeah.

And so we were out here in the garage making stuff a lot. All the camping gears in here. When the kids were really small, once a month, I would take them Friday after school and we'd go camping. I know every campground within an hour's drive of Palo Alto, every single one. And they had color-coded little duffel bags and a toothbrush was color-coded to the duffel bag.

And so all they had to do was just put their clothes for overnight in there and their toothbrush and we were out of here. I built this box. I told you I was kind of a maker guy. So I had a 4 by 8 sheet of plywood, cut it in half, so a four foot square. And I made this box that we could go camping in. And when you set it up like this,

the top would fold down and that would be the table. And then it was designed so, you know, the drawer organizers for like spoons and forks and knives. I had these little shelves so you could slide the drawer organizer in there and another shelf with spices and you could turn the box upside down and backwards and shake it and nothing would get disorganized. And so we had all the little pro trade bottles, everything. So all I had to do is throw that in the van, put the kids in there and we'd leave Friday after school.

Candice would probably go to sleep about 5 o'clock and sleep until 10 the next morning. And we would come back Saturday night and just, it was so fun. Why did you do that? It was so fun to go camping. Yeah. It was just fun. And I took, I used to take popsicle sticks and tongue depressors and a lot of glue and Estes rockets and fishing stuff. And we would just go out and if the kids spilled,

I mean, we're camping, right? So we'd go camping and, you know, throw rocks and stay up and have campfires and make stuff and cook stuff. And we had this tent. I still have a piece of it somewhere. It was called Hillary, and it was canvas that had been impregnated with this stuff. It was 10 feet by 13 feet thick.

and it had like 50 poles. Didn't just you could no no no no no and it just inflates. That's today's wussy camping people. Let me have two poles in 30 seconds it pops up and there's your tent. No and so we engraved on each one you know a side pole number one and two and three and we'd go there and it weighed it probably weighed 50 pounds so it was always car camping.

And we'd set up the tent and it was 10 by 13. You could stand up in it. And finally, after probably five or six years ago when we were having grandkids, I mean, the zipper was broken. And so I went to throw it away, but I cut the word Hillary out of the side of it. That was the name of the tent was Hillary. And so- I remember I've camped with you and your grandkids. And what I remember, first of all, it is, it's like,

It's like one of these like tents that you host events in it's this huge mega, you know tent and We we put our tent right next to yours and my this is what I remember from campus you my son who at the time was probably like two and a half and As soon as like it gets quiet, like I try to like get in in the tent early as my kids before everybody else So it's like, you know, calm down. It's calm down a little bit, but I didn't and he starts freaking out and

He doesn't even speak English at this point, right? Like he's really young and he's screaming for something and screaming. And I like his mom's up there. There's no cell reception. I can't like get it on audio, try to get the translator to figure out what this is. And he's after 30 minutes of screaming, saying the same thing. I finally understand that he's saying he wants a peanut butter sandwich, which we had. And I hand it to him and

just shoves that thing in his face, sleeps with it. It's all over everything the next morning, but at least he was quiet. And then we came out of the tent the next morning and I remember you just, you look at him and you go, oh, Asher, were you here last night? It was like, I just, it seems like the camping, I don't know, you, I mean, that seems like a really incredible thing to do with your kids. Like, I bet they

I don't know, do they talk about it? Are they glad that they did it? Do they joke about it? Is it positive? Is it negative? If our kids were sitting around like a little campfire, we have a big brazier and every once in a while when it's okay to have an outdoor fire in Palo Alto, we just fire it up and put the Elijah water on it. You know what that is, don't you?

You know this Old Testament story? Well, I know who Elijah is. Okay, he came down, he burned up all this stuff. Yeah, I know the story. We got Elijah out of just, it's just, you know, charcoal lighter. So you just soak all the wood down and throw in a match and you got a fire. Is that how he did that? I don't think Elijah did it that way. He had a different connection, but I mean...

- If my kids were talking about it, they would tell a hundred stories. They would just, I mean, rain, shine, whatever. Estes rockets, I mean, you're in the middle of nowhere and you shoot a rocket 500 feet in the air and a parachute comes out and then kids all run and find it and do another one. - Just building stuff. When you think about making stuff, you're a builder, you're a maker. How do you think about, why do you build stuff? Why do you make stuff?

Well, some of the things I do because I want to fix something. Yeah. Like that pan right there. Did I show you that? Hand me that to me. That's it. Yeah. So this is just a Staub pan. It's called the all-everything pan. But the sides are curved. Okay. And when I had a wooden spatula, when you scrape the side, you know, like this, there's a gap because the...

the edge of the wooden spatula is flat. Flat, yeah. And so when it touches here and here, you can't scrape the food out. Yeah. And I thought, well, that's not right. I mean, you know, make wooden spatulas for 100 years the same way. So I said, I'm going to make a different spatula. So I turned this up like this, and I got a big light, and I shined it on it, and a piece of paper, I traced the curve of this. And then I took a wooden spatula...

like this, and I made this curve. That's the left. And then I made one like that for the right. So you have two spatulas, and when you scrape that, there's no food left. It all comes to a little pile right here. And so that's how you make stuff. I mean, and... It's kind of obvious now that you explain it, but I mean, why not just buy... I mean... They don't sell curved spatulas that match the...

My favorite pan. Yeah. So if you're doing stir fry, I mean, you're, you're going to either get a, you know, like a latex or a rubber spatula and scrape all over and waste all that time. Or you can have. Perfect. Solving problems. I, I buy a lot of them and people come in. If I make them stuff, they say, oh man, where'd you get that? And I said, I made it. Then I'll make you one in five minutes. So I come out and cut them one and they go home with it.

You can go home with one today. I'd like one. Yeah. Or two. I'd like the pair. Yeah. No, you got to have a left and a right. Yeah. Which is why wouldn't Sur La Table, I can't say that probably, but or Williams-Sonoma. Yeah. Go to their wooden spatula people in somewhere offshore and say, hey, I'd like a left one and a right one curved to this pan.

And now you buy two instead of one. I assume it's because you locked down the intellectual property on it or something, being somebody from Palo Alto. Yeah, right. Yeah. Not too intellectual. And I do the same thing with, you know, welding. I have a...

plasma cutter, arc welder, a MIG welder. MIG is an acronym, metal inert gas, it has argon tank there and oxy-acetylene torch. And so I make stuff that I need and then I blacksmith and I make stuff and turn bowls. So if I get bored of blacksmithing,

Then I turned wooden bowls. But the great thing about blacksmithing and wooden, I used to make furniture when we were young, we couldn't buy. You know, when you're a student 50 years ago, you have cement blocks. A lot of students are doing that today. Cement blocks. And then you got this and you, and I said, I can do better than that. So, but if you make something out of wood. Yeah. Now you got to finish it. You got to sand it. You got to paint it. So, you know, you're like, I'd rather make it than paint it.

although we used to have a paint booth in here i'd hang plastic all over and we'd spray paint the furniture and stuff but that was a pain when you make something in the forge when it comes out have this little container of stuff that's got boiled unseed oil beeswax uh bruce floor wax probably don't even make it anymore it's a little concoction you just paint it on wipe it off and it's good forever in a wooden bowl

When you turn the bowl and you sand it all down, then you just put on certain kinds of wax, looks perfect in an hour. No finishing, no painting, no nothing. So the fun is in the making. So you got to be a maker. That's the fun part. I think you're right. I mean, the times where I feel most energized is when I'm creating stuff or building stuff. And for me, it's software, but... It's the hand, eye... Designing. Building stuff.

You know, I once, a friend of ours, I think you know John Stevens, was a cardiac heart surgeon for years, but he had to put in about 12 hours a day to keep up his skills. And then he just, for his family, he just stopped that and went to do business stuff. I had lunch with him and I said, what is your most fun thing? He said, oh,

the heart surgery because it was my hands and my eye and he had to think longitudinally. So if I suture this little thing, it's going to form a scar and then the scar is going to shrink and it's going to pull this tendon. And as it pulls this tendon, then this thing's going to drop down. So I have to think over time as this heals. And he loved working with his hands. I did the same thing. When you're blacksmithing,

There's a sequence. So if you curve this and you need to pound here, this is in the way. So you say, okay, first I have to pound this. Then I bend this. Then I do that. And then I do this. But then as you're sleeping at night, you say, okay, I've got to make this thing in the morning. Then it come up and you think, I can do that a little differently. If I do this backwards and inside out, then it'll

And so your mind is going and then your hands and it's, people don't make thing anymore. They just buy it. If it wears out, they just throw it away. Yeah. What do you do when you get those ideas in the middle of the night? Do you come down here or do you? No, no, no. I have a sketch pad. Do you? Okay. Yeah. It's too cold. Yeah. It's kind of chilly out here. It's so chilly. How did you, how did you end up here? You, you, where did you grow up? Oh, Indiana. Uh, I had two older sisters came here to Stanford and then

I came out in '66 to, I went to Culver Military Academy, which was in this little teeny town. What is that? Is that like a, is it, what is that? It's a prep school. Prep school, okay. But back in the day, it was a big deal. Yeah. It still is. It still is a very prestigious secondary school. We used to play Cranbrook, which is where Mitt Romney went to high school. Fancy schools. We loved playing Cranbrook because they were,

they were easily dominated. They were not on the same, from the same part of town. No. And actually at Culver, you know, now we're going to fast forward all these years later. There was a guy named Tom Siebel that did Siebel systems and all this. And so I'd gotten a real estate business and I was having lunch with him prior to leasing him this building. He was in a little 10,000 square feet and I had a,

55,000 foot building I wanted to rent and they were looking for space. So we're having lunch. Yeah, I said, well, Tom, where'd you go to high school? And he said, oh, I really, you know, it's in the Midwest. I said, well, where'd you go to high school? He said, well, I actually went to Shattuck Military Academy. And I said, oh, that's in Deerfield, Wisconsin. He said, how'd you know that? And I said, well,

In my high school's trophy case, we had these deflated footballs. It said, 1907, CMA 66, Shattuck 0. And he said, oh. I said, I went to Culver Military Academy. Back in the day, but I started high school in 1962. And Culver Military Academy was

was like a mini West Point. I mean, we marched to, we had uniforms, we had ROTC, it was, but academics and sports was what it was, and competition was what it was all about. I started in 1962. And so that's 17 years after World War II. So all the faculty, they're all World War II students.

veterans. They had been through the war and they said, "Hey, we're going to train the next generation of military leaders at this school." It was really incredible. But I remember before I even graduated from high school, in November, they always had a gold star ceremony. And that was where we would all march and stand in formation and they would read the names of the Culver graduates that died in World War I.

World War II and Korea. And then I remember the names of guys I knew that had died in Vietnam already. I wasn't even out of high school. So when I graduated from high school in 1966 and came out here to Stanford to play basketball and go to school, I already knew guys that were already- It already died. That already died in Vietnam. I hadn't even finished high school. There were guys I knew that were two years older. Wow. Yeah. Wow. I mean, it was a whole different deal.

You had to register for the draft when you were 18 and they're drafting people to go to war. What was that like? I mean, are you talking about it with your family and your parents? Is it like something you would try not to think about? Is it something you would think about? No, no, no. It was just part of life. It was just like- Well, hey, my dad was born in 1915. He went to Northwestern University and started as a freshman in 1933.

He went three years to Northwestern, and that was during the Depression. And his fraternity brothers, he was living in a fraternity house, SAE house at Northwestern. I think that's where their headquarters was or something. And all these guys that had graduated were just hanging around the fraternity house. They didn't have jobs. He decided...

I'm going to go to West Point. So my dad got an appointment to go to West Point. He started West Point in 1936, in the fall of 36, and he graduated in the class of 1940. When he was in World War II. He was definitely in World War II. He was a bomber pilot. He was a lieutenant colonel after three years. So growing up, I mean, duty, honor, country, that was...

That was what we were all about. I had two older sisters, but your grades were really important. Sports were important. And my dad once said to me, if you want to play sports in college, you better play football. You'll never make it in basketball. Why do you say that? Because there was like 60 guys on the football team and there's 15 on the basketball team. Yeah. So I played basketball four years at Stanford just to- How did you get on the basketball team there? At Stanford? Yeah.

Is that where you came out? Were you, were they, I mean, was this pre-recruiting? Is it like you show up and try out or? Well, I had, I had two older sisters went to Stanford and going to Culver Military Academy, I was kind of done with the, uh, it was all male at that time. Yeah. There was a few faculty co-ed daughters, uh, that went to Culver, but my dad took me to West Point. We drove out to, uh, Air Force Academy, but I wasn't having the, I needed a co-ed experience. Yeah.

So I came out to Stanford and in those days they had a freshman team and a varsity team. And so they had an announcement in the Stanford Daily that there was tryouts. And I thought, "I'm gonna go watch that." And the first day I just watched from the stands and I thought, "These guys aren't that good. So I'm gonna go out." So I made the freshman team, played my freshman year, had a great experience. And then

That my freshman year, there were two seniors on the varsity, which means the whole freshman team is going to be sophomores and there's going to be two spots on the traveling team. You always traveled with 15, probably had 20 on the roster, but traveled with, no traveled, I'm sorry, with 12, not 15. Five forwards, five guards and two centers. It's 12. And so I made the traveling team myself. You did. What were you, what position?

I was with the little people. Guard? Yeah. Shooting? Point? Well, in those days... Everything? Yeah, everything. But... So those were the...

Lew Alcindor Kareem Abdul-Jabbar. Yeah, he was there in the, what, late 60s. Yeah. He was a year older. He was a year older. So he graduated in 69. I graduated in 70. They won the national championship all... Yeah, John Wooden. Johnny Wooden, South Bend Central High School coach, which is 30 miles from my hometown. And that would have been like towards the end of his...

No, no, no, no. Bill Walton, all those guys. Well, that was the next five years, but he'd already coached. I mean, he's probably, he'd already coached for 20 years, right? Or something. I mean, was he what he's known as now? Well, his first national championship was in 1964. Okay. That was Gail Goodrich and all those guys. So they won the national championship in 1966. They had no seniors on the team.

So in 1967, the entire national championship UCLA team- Was back. Was back. They played the freshmen, which had Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, then Lou Alcindor, Sidney Wicks, Curtis Rowe, and the freshmen beat the varsity by 20. Wow. Wow.

Poly Pavilion pre-season packed. The freshmen beat the varsity that won the national championship the year before by 20 points. They were just unbelievable. You played those guys? Yeah. We played them. Yeah. How'd that go? Not as well as... I mean, he's... I mean, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar is like what? Seven,

Foot seven, yeah, seven three maybe. Yeah. And you're playing at what, six two or something? Well, I'm six two, yeah. But our center was like six seven. Yeah. You know, it's interesting. No NIL back then, right? You weren't getting... I thought, I mean, when we were on the road, we'd get a $20 bill. That's for lunch and breakfast. We always had a training table for dinner. Yeah.

And, you know, in those days you could get a hamburger meal for, you know, $4. I thought, man, I got like $10 left over. I mean, like, it's like $10 left over in my pocket. It's unbelievable. So it was just, it was just, uh, it was so fun. It was so fun. I just, I just really, really, really, I love practicing. I love the whole thing about it. Uh,

But there's a price to pay later on when your body's falling apart and everything's kind of broken up and messed up. But it was really an amazing time of year. It was the Pac-8, not the Pac-12, which is now gone. Pac-8 was Washington, Washington State, Oregon, Oregon State, Cal, Stanford, UCLA, USC. That was the eight teams. But I loved it. I loved it. You don't play basketball anymore? No. No.

No, no, I don't. There was a funny interview with Michael Jordan. This is a couple of years ago. And they said, Michael, could you beat the NBA championship team? And he said, I mean, your Bulls team, you know, your championship Bulls team.

He said, it'd really be close, but I think we'd win. I said, why do you think it would be close? He said, well, we're all 60. It's like, yeah, but even at 60. Do you feel that? I mean, do you feel that way? Do you still feel at times like, like I'm the 20 year old person or? No. I mean, not at all. No, no. I stopped playing basketball when I, uh,

I started playing tennis because I, if I couldn't play at the level that I wanted to, then it's not like what I want to do. And it's hard. I mean, basketball is like, I don't know. I felt like every time, every time I played basketball, I would get injured or something. You know, it was, it's, it's, it's rough. It's rough on your ankles and knees and you, you would know way more than I would.

How many surgeries do you think you've had at this point? And on what? You're like part android, right? You're like part human, part machine. Way more than part. Like what? Where is the metal in you? Just the metal? I don't know. Okay, we'll start from the top of my head. Okay.

Broke my nose a bunch of times. So before I could graduate from Stanford, I could only breathe out of one side of my nose. That doesn't sound normal. So I said, hey, you got to fix this before I get out of here. So I had rhinoplasty. Okay. Then I got a fractured cheekbone, six spiral fractures of my skull, and a blowout fracture under this eye. And so I had surgery to fix all that. And then 30 years later, I had a detached retina in the same eye. So they put a piece of plastic around it and another piece of plastic behind it.

Then left shoulder's been replaced, so it's a steel shoulder. Then I had a lot of knee operations, but both knees have been replaced twice. Both hips have been replaced. Steel plate in my left elbow with big screws in it and stuff like that. Cancer surgery from Vietnam, from Agent Orange. So got cancer from that.

And then no surgery, but I did in a chainsaw accident. Well, a logging accident. I broke four ribs and three vertebrae. That's all good. I swim three days a week. You should probably stay in the house more. I mean, it sounds like you're kind of a little bit, I mean, is it a coordination issue or is it, what is the, how are all these things happening?

They're all mechanical except for the cancer thing. Well, yeah. I'm not talking about that. I'm not, you know. You mean how did these happen? Well, how are you getting, yeah. I mean, it seems kind of unlucky. No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. Is this normal? Is this what I should be preparing for? No, no, no, no. But, well, the real problem with the knees was you've heard of cortisone, right? Yeah.

cortisone shots. If you have tennis elbow, tail on the shoulder or something like that, a doctor might give you a cortisone shot, maybe one or two in a year. Okay. You with me? Every Thursday, my knees would have fluid in them. They would drain the fluid out. This is while you're playing basketball or something? This is at Stanford. Every Thursday, they would drain the fluid out with a big syringe. They put the syringe in under your kneecap

suck the fluid out, unscrew the syringe, and then screw in another little one and shoot in Novocaine and Cortisone every Thursday. We always played on Friday and Saturday night. Friday and Saturday night, you're like, this is magic, man. I mean, this is unbelievable. Healed. Healed. It's like perfect. And then Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday, you know, by Thursday, you're like, man, I mean, this is stiff and, you know,

So, that dissolves cartilage. But that was my junior year and my senior year. And so, by the time I finished, there was like, you know, a few years later, it's just bone on bone. And so, they get replaced and stuff like that. Are you upset about that? No. They didn't know. They didn't know. They did it. It worked. Yeah. I think there's... What are these... I mean, American people, they've been interviewed, hey, if you could go to Mars and be famous, but you would never come home...

what percentage of people would say, "I'm in." Like 30%. People interviewed about the Olympics. If you could be an Olympic champion and you knew that 10 years after the Olympics you couldn't walk, would you do it? Most people say, "Yeah, sure. I mean, that sounds cool." I did it because I love basketball. I mean, it was just fun. It was so fun. I mean, I've seen you go through a lot of different

surgeries and ailments and all these things. I've never really heard you complain much about it, actually. I can't really recall you. Right now, I'm swimming 7,500 yards a week. Three days a week, I swim. Can I ask how old you are? 76. Okay. I'm 42.

You know, more runway. It's not really fair to ask someone their age if you won't share your own age. So that's why I said that. Okay. So 76? Yeah. I lift weights three days a week and ride the Peloton three days a week and swim three days a week. And, uh, but I mean, how could you dunk a basketball? Yeah.

still on my list. It's a lot of fun. Let me tell you, there's something about having a 36 inch vert and you can go down two hands in the front, two hands in the back, left, right, whatever you want to do. Is that Greg Osborne at Stanford? Oh yeah. Oh yeah. Oh yeah. Yep. It, uh, but you pay a price and you pay a price and, and, uh, but it's, it's a lot of fun. I loved playing basketball. I love practicing. I didn't get, I didn't,

You know, I didn't start, depending on, you know, but I mostly played defense. And they have a press guard. I feel like you're like the really aggressive rebounder, guard the best, offensive guy, like frustrate them, smile in their face, shake their hand, and just frustrate them into the ground kind of player. If you knew if you're playing UCLA...

And you're pretty sure you're going to lose. In the late 60s. No. And you're pretty sure you're going to lose. What you want them to know is they were in a good fight. Yeah. And as a matter of fact, they have a press guide each year that the basketball department puts out. And they have a little profile of each student or each student athlete, each player. And I've got it in my, I've got a big scrapbook in there somewhere. And one year Delmar said,

If there's a dust-up in practice, Osborne's usually in the middle of it. And that's kind of true. I didn't, you know. He also said, it was kind of interesting. You know what chucks are, don't you? Converse All-Stars. I said to some kid the other day, I said, hey, you're wearing chucks. He said, what do you mean? I said, well, Converse All-Stars. He said, why do you call them chucks? I said, well, look on the label on the outside with the blue star.

Says Chuck Taylor, all-stars, right? Chuck. You're the original sneakerhead. Yeah, well, Chuck Taylor was a Stanford guy, right? I heard of that. Yeah, yeah. So anyway, Stanford used to have Converse was the shoe supplier. And then partway through my sophomore year, they switched this German outfit called Adidas.

And they were really bad. The soles would come off, but they finally got it right. When did you realize you were going to be going to Vietnam? Well, like I told you, I went to Culver Military Academy, and I had upperclassmen, guys that were older than me that had already been killed. So the draft was in full bloom. And those days, it wasn't a volunteer army. That happened in the 70s. But in the 60s,

everybody's getting ready to go to war. So when I went to Stanford, in those days they had an ROTC program, either a two-year or four-year program. And I got in the four-year program, but I didn't have to go my first two years because I already had a bunch of military training in high school.

And I actually ended up being the head of the whole ROTC detachment at Stanford, the student head of it. We had a colonel that was a regular army guy that was a professor of military science and all that. But I was a student guy, which was kind of interesting. I was in the two-year program and I went to basic training in Fort Lewis, Washington, officer's basic training. There was maybe 1,500 guys there. Yeah.

And the very first formation when we're there, all these potential officers, the general comes out and he has a pair of matched .45 caliber pistols in this glass case. And he says, the number one graduate from this officer's basic training session will get this set of pistols. And you can have your choice of any type.

branch of service in the Army. So there's infantry, armor, artillery, air defense, those are the combat arms. And then you've got transportation and the General Corps, Supply Corps, all kinds of different. I thought, well, that's kind of a cool thing to win those Pestles. That'd be great. So I decided to... To go get it. I said, I'm going to try real hard. Yeah.

And you had tests all the time, written tests, physical tests, peer review, evaluations by your drill instructor, everything. At the end of the cycle, there were four of us that had perfect scores. I was one of the four. I was pretty excited about that. I ran a... So did you get... We had to run a mile. But he still only picked one winner. Yeah. We had to run a mile in combat boots. And I ran a...

a 440 mile in Conbrat Booth. I was number two guy. And the guy I lost to was a miler at University of Oregon. He was an NCAA miler runner. Was it in some ways like almost like life or death of like picking where you get to go or not? Well, yeah, it's pretty important. Yeah. Right. So anyway, there were four of us had these scores and where they're going to interview us.

And one of the guys' father was a general in the Army on active duty. And so this board of officers that were there, a couple of majors and a general and, you know, some other glitterati in there. And we were going to appear before the board and individually, just one at a time. So I got up there and saluted him and all this stuff. And the guy says, well, so Osborne, you want to make the Army your career?

I said, no, sir, I have a two-year active duty commitment and an eight-year total commitment, six years in the Army Reserve, and that's what I'm going to do. So that kind of took his chances away. Yeah, I came in number two, and I got a little teeny medal like this. So they gave me this medal. But I was in the top. I was going to get my choice of duty. I mean, assignment, you know.

And so I got back to Stanford and the professor of military science said, well, what branch of service do you want to get into? And I said, well, I'd like to go in the Judge Advocate General Corps. That's the lawyers. You don't have to be a lawyer, but I thought that's pretty good. So I put in for that and came back infantry. Now the Vietnam War is like raging. Ted Offensive was 68. By the time I graduate, there's already...

30,000 guys have been killed there. We're talking 100 a week, 100 a week, year in and year out for 10 years. So comes back infantry. And I said, well, you know, I was guaranteed my choice of branch. They said, well, submit it again. So I submitted it again. Comes back artillery. I mean, armor, which is another combat, like tanks. I'm like, this isn't really working.

So I put in for the quartermaster corps, which is, you know, supplies and running convoys and stuff. And that's what I was- They finally gave me that. They gave me that. Yeah. So then I went to officer's basic training in Fort Lee, Virginia, 350 officers in this basic training, officer's basic training course. Guy gets up and he says, the number one guy here is

is going to get his choice of duty station anywhere in the world, anywhere in the world. We will guarantee that's where we're going to assign you. What did I say? That sounds pretty good. So I tried real hard. Number one guy in my class. So I said to a major model, he said, well, Osborne, where do you want to go? I said, I'd like to be assigned to Presidio in San Francisco. He said, great. You just have to sign up for one more year of active duty. I said, wait a minute.

That's not what you said. That's not what you said. You said the number one guy gets a choice to do the station. I want to go to the San Francisco Presidio. He said, well, I'll send you there. Just sign up for another year. His job was to get the guys to extend. So I told all my other classmates, I said, this guy is out to. Yeah, he's cheating. He's not telling the truth. Yeah. So we end up, I get a little medal for being the number one guy. Yeah.

Which doesn't mean anything. Still have those medals? No, I don't even know. So then I was at Fort Lewis, Washington, and other guys that were in my quartermaster corps class, they're starting to get their orders to Vietnam. Mine aren't coming through. I was married to Candace. We'd been married a year, almost a year. I said, honey, I might not have to go. I don't know what's going on. About two months after guys got, then I get my orders to Vietnam. I compare them. I was the first guy in my class to

to get orders to Vietnam because Major Model was really unhappy that I told the other guys in my class that he was telling, not telling the truth. So I got assigned to Vietnam before anybody else did just because that's what he could do. So we went to Vietnam. Were you scared? Did you expect to come back? That's a good question. We'd been married a year and I had to go away for a year. But we didn't want to start a family because I didn't want to have a

Can this be a widow with a infant? Yeah. So I don't think scared's the right word. I was never scared. Even when I was there, I was never scared. I don't think I've ever been scared. What? How come you've never been scared? I think scared is like, I don't think I'm going to make this. I went to, after high school, I went to the Colorado Outward Bound School. I'd never been in the mountains. And I did a 150-foot rappel. First time ever, it's like 150.

15 stories building down and you're going off the side of a cliff and I was a little dicey But I don't think I was scared. I think I was just concerned. Yeah, so you're concerned going to Vietnam Yeah, I was concerned I was concerned but it's you know If you ask somebody about their experience in war and in Vietnam or something like that it's like looking through a keyhole at life and

All you know is your little teeny experience. Ken Burns did this great series on Vietnam. It's a 10-part, two hours per part series. And we watched it, Candice and I watched it. And it was good. It was really good. But at the end of each two-hour segment episode, they would say the number of GIs had been killed up to that time. The episode in 1968, there was already 30,000 guys killed. I said, honey, we got 25,000 to go.

I mean, when you look at Iraq, Afghanistan, you might remember in Afghanistan there was that Chinook helicopter that got shot down with all the special forces guys. Like 30 guys died in one incident. And it's like, oh my gosh, Vietnam was 55,000 in 10 years. That's 5,000 a year divided by 50 weeks in a year. It's like 100 a week, every week, week in and week out for 10 years. Wow.

There's been more GIs died by suicide, like three times as many died by suicide as were killed during the war. These are veterans. And these are confirmed suicides, like a note or somebody said, "I'm gonna go kill myself." These aren't, "Hey, this guy was driving a car 120 miles an hour and hit a tree." That doesn't count. Or drug overdoses, doesn't count.

So there's a lot of... There's a lot more. There's a lot of research that says it's a lot more. So the impact was really big. You went to World War II, the average age of a GI was 26. Vietnam, 19. Big difference. Drug of choice, World War II, alcohol. Drug of choice in Vietnam, heroin. You know, it was different. But I did some good things over there. I did some good things. So...

Yeah. Are you grateful for that? I mean, are you grateful for that experience or would you- Yeah. Yeah. No, I am. I am. I did my job. I did a good job. One of the things I did was we had about 225 men in my unit, which was way in the middle of nowhere. When you go to Vietnam, you land at Tan Son Ude Air Force Base, big air base, paved streets, traffic lights, officer's club. It's like everybody's in khakis, you know, like, hey,

It's not bad. You go from there to Cameron Bay, everybody's in combat fatigues and a lot of rifles and like, oh, you know, this is a little different. And you keep going into the heart of darkness until you land in a helicopter in the middle of nowhere in a compound about the size of, you know, like a high school campus. And there you are. And you're like, whoa, it's real serious. Yeah. And, uh,

It sounds terrifying, but you weren't scared. Well, no, but- You don't have, I mean, do you have much information? Are you getting letters from home? Are you hearing anything? Are you getting the news? Are you- You get the stars and stripes. And I would get, they had things called an aerogram. It was a one page onion skin that you would write. No phones. I had one phone call with Candace the whole time. Wow. And it was like a minute.

There's like 200 GIs in line waiting for the phone. And so you got one minute, you say, "Hey, honey, how you doing? I love you. I miss you, this, that, and goodbye," and then next. But you had this one sheet of paper and you could write on it and then you would fold it and the sheet of paper became the envelope. And when I would get letters from Candice, I quickly...she would number them.

Because sometimes you get six at a time Maybe you wouldn't hear it get a letter for three or four weeks and then you get a stack of them and we learned very quickly that if she wrote on them then I could read them in sequence as opposed to you know this I was really worried about this, you know, I felt really sick or whatever Oh, I'm better, but I read the better when I didn't hear it anyway, but one of the things I did was about

60% of the unit hadn't even graduated from high school so I knew that if you were a Vietnam veteran and Went back and got out of the army and you didn't even have a high school diploma. You are really behind the eight ball So I got accredited through Candace to administer the GED test So I got the guys in my unit and I said look if you pass this test and

You have a graduate equivalent degree, a GED degree. And so when you go to an employer and they say, have you finished high school? You can say, yeah, I've got a high school diploma. So all these tests came over. They're all Scantron tests, you know, number two pencil. It's supposed to be a two-hour test. It took us about a week. And so we'd get in the mess hall and I'd pass out the test and say, okay, guys, here we go.

"Hey LT, you know, I'm on question seven." I said, "Oh good." You know, he said, "I think the answer is C. What do you think?" I said, "Well, it's your test. There might be a better answer." LT, I was just gonna change it. I was just thinking of changing it right now. What do you think? I'm thinking maybe it's B. And I'd say, "Well,

That's a pretty good answer. I go with B. It just permeated through everybody. I just heard it would give back. 100%. Everybody passed their GED test. How many people was it? Probably only 30. That's incredible. Yeah, but it changed those people's lives. Maybe. I don't know. Anyway, yeah. Let me ask you about Candice. How long have you been married? 54 years. It's unbelievable. How did you do that?

Been married 54 years. Yeah. She came to this little town of 800 people in Culver, Indiana, the summer of 68. If you were in high school, you could go there and go to the Naval Academy, learn how to fly planes or whatever, and take academic classes. Yeah. And they decided to go co-ed and start in the summer. So they hired college women to be counselors in the dormitory. My older sister, Lucy...

Came back to Culver to be a counselor. And Candace, and she was my sister Lucy's roommate. I was working on the farm, you know, 630 to 430. And then I played basketball every night and worked out and everything. And Lucy said, oh, my roommate's really cute. You should take her. I said, Lucy, I don't have time for that. I'm really busy. But I finally said, okay, I'll take her out. It was unbelievable. I had never imagined.

ever in my whole life. Which app? So did you, it wasn't through an app? It wasn't through an app? A nap? No, it wasn't through an app. So we went to dinner and we saw the movie The Odd Couple with Jack Lemmon and Walter Matthau. And at family dinner the next day, my parents, my grandmother was living, they said, well, and Lucy was home for a Sunday dinner. And they said, well, how was your date last night? I said, you know, I'm going to marry Candace. That fast?

That's what I, yeah. Yeah, you knew. I knew. You knew immediately, yeah. It was so unbelievable. And it's been that way absolutely ever since. It's just been just, you know, she, later as our kids, when Sam was in the eighth grade, she went back to grad school, got her master's in family therapy and was a therapist for 20 years. And I joke and I said, she's had one client for like,

54 years. He's coming around. She's kind of working on it. But it's just been, it's been nourishing, exhilarating, fantastic. Been hard? I'm sorry? Has it been hard? Hard? Yeah. No. I mean, relationships are hard, right? Not this one? Not this one. We've never- Well, why is that? Well, first of all, we've never had a crossword, ever. Never gotten an argument? Never, never. And it's not because-

We're just, you know, milk toast or rollover or whatever. No, it's why would you, if there's one person on earth that you don't want to disappoint and that you don't want to upset or make angry, if there's one person, I mean, that's the one, that's the one. All the rest of them are like, hey, your boss or whatever. I mean, whatever. You've had other arguments with other people, just not your wife. Oh, yes, I have. Yes, yes. Yeah.

you know, what don't you understand? You know, I mean, I've been in the real estate business for 40 years and negotiated probably a thousand leases more, probably leases with big companies and attorneys and, and lawsuits and everything. And, and, uh, yeah. But you wouldn't bring that, you wouldn't bring that home. You wouldn't bring that. No, no, I never traveled. Our kids all went to Palo Alto high school. You didn't travel on purpose. Like you, you deliberately tried. I didn't need to. I didn't need to. I, you know, when I first worked at Syntex out of

out of the business school, but then I went to work with my partners and I was able to get up from my desk and 3:30 in the afternoon, go watch a waterfall or a soccer game or basketball and then go right back to work. It was fantastic. I never commuted to 10 minutes to get the office. You never argued about money or about kids or? No. No. Nothing. Money is easy. How is that? You know, people have asked us, you know, what about budgeting? I said, let me tell you the secret to budgeting. It's like an hourglass.

As long as you're putting in sand in the top faster than it's going out in the bottom, you're okay. The minute it goes out faster than you're putting it in, you got to fix that right now. You can't say, oh, you know, let's do this. I'm not going to pay this bill this month. It will do with a credit card and I'll wait until next month. No. As soon as the sand in the hourglass, the money goes out faster than it's coming in, you got a big problem. You got to fix it right now.

We always, you know, we bought used cars and stuff like that. You made your own furniture. Made our own furniture. Took the kids camping. The first time we ever went to a resort, I think our youngest was a senior in high school. We went to Puerto Vallarta. We didn't like it, but it was, that's the first time we'd ever gone. You went on like a real vacation. Yeah, I mean, we were there and we, you know.

That's why I haven't had big dinners and stuff like that. I mean, it's very different now, right? You feel like there's this, the things you see online and the people you see and the things you see, and it just this feeling of like, oh, like they, like, I've got to go do that. I've got like, we need that. And, and then you do it and actually it doesn't really matter. You didn't need it, but there's this kind of pull. I read this, I read this thing about, uh,

Raising kids, they said that one of the biggest, I guess, inputs to kids is if they had chores. Yeah. Our kids always had chores. Like what? Well, we had green rugs in the second floor and we had the boys' section and the girls' section. We vacuumed every day, every morning before school. And then I had to teach them because, you know, Peter, and you could see in the carpet, you know, where the...

He had the star approach, which means you sit in the middle of the room and just turn around like this. And then when you're done, there's this pattern looks like a star. I said, no, no, Peter, come here. You go up and back and then you scoot over and up and back and scoot over. That's how you vacuum. Oh, yes. Okay. And then there's the cleaning the bathroom on the weekend. All five kids sit around the toilet. Okay, we're all going to put our hands in the toilet bowl. Oh, yes. I said, look.

Look, the water in the tank is clean. It's all clean. We're going to put our hands in there. Everybody's like, oh, man, I can't believe I'm doing this. I said, is anybody going to throw up? Are you sick or anything? No. Take the Comet and a sponge, put the Comet around, you scrunch it, you flush it a few times, wipe off the seat, go to the sink, wash your hands. So we all did that. Is anybody going to throw up? Anybody sick? Anybody got a fever? That's how you wash the toilet. Okay. You know, who should wash the toilet? Mom or me or one of you?

I mean, you choose. Who should, who, you know, not me. I said, that doesn't work. So the kids had to, then the boys, you know, when they, when they were, when Nathan was 14, you can't get a job when you're 14. I bought a power washer. It was a 10, no, 11 horse Honda engine on this big spray. It weighed about a hundred pounds and high pressure washing 3000 PSI, clean bricks and everything. That machine was,

probably earned $100,000 'cause it went through my three boys and then it went through a friend's, all their boys and another friend, I finally gave it away. But I mean, Nathan made, you know, maybe $5,000 his first summer as a 14 year old. Yeah. Just spray washing all day long. I mean, it's a big thing now where just like giving, making sure kids

uh sort of have hard things to do that there's you know that life is is so much easier today than it's ever been and kids need something to you know they need things to help them learn help them learn how to work and learn how to do it right the poison spray i said okay

And we started here. I said, okay, look. See where you hit the dirt with the high-pressure spray? It sprayed the dirt all over here. Yeah. Looks like, looks terrible. So, you know, you put a piece of plywood right there when you're next to the dirt. Goes against it. How's that look? I guess it's better. Yeah, okay. And see where you made the marks? You got to erase them. I mean, so you have to teach them. You have to teach them how to do it. But then once they know, because, you know, if somebody doesn't perform,

it's due to two things, either a lack of motivation or a lack of training. Because if somebody is motivated and they're trained, they're going to do a good job. Yeah. If they're trained but they're unmotivated, they're not going to do a good job. If they're motivated but they don't know what, but they're not trained, they're not going to do a good job. So if they're trained and motivated, they do a good job. It's easy. It's pretty simple. At 76, what brings you the most joy?

- Now, like what do you, like? - You mean other than just? - Other than anything, like anything. Like where do you find the most joy in your life at this point? - Just being with kids and grandkids and being with Candace and family. - Yeah. - You know, family, serving, doing things for others. You know, it was interesting. I was thinking back to this motivation thing. So when I was in Vietnam, I had a bunch of different responsibilities in this little unit.

And we had about 30 trucks. Maybe four of them worked. And the others were deadlined. It means they didn't even work. They were for one reason or another. And this was when Captain Craver was still there and he got frustrated. So he assigned me to the motor pool. I was out in our supply yard and there's this 55-gallon drum of high-gloss jet black paint. You with me? 55-gallon drum.

Now, when I was growing up back in Indiana, what farmers did over the winter was they painted their tractors. That's what you do. I mean, there's two feet of snow out there. You can't do anything. What are you going to do all day if you're a farmer? You're going to paint your tractor. You're going to get all ready for spring planting and plowing and all that. So I knew how to use a spray gun. I'd paint it a lot. So I got the guys in the motor pool and I said, we're going to paint these trucks. So the lieutenant, we don't give a darn about these trucks.

probably a different language, we don't really care about these trucks. I said, well, we're going to paint them, but the only paint we got is high-gloss jet black. They're like, Lieutenant, you can't paint an Army truck high-gloss jet black. I said, yeah, what are they going to do, send us to Vietnam? We're here, right? So we steam cleaned the trucks. We painted them high-gloss jet black. Our only protection in the

In the big days of the war, there might be 150 trucks in a convoy. Helicopters hovering overhead. Every fifth truck's a gun truck, which means it has an armored personnel carrier carriage welded to the back of the five-ton truck with quad 50s or, you know, mini guns or whatever. Big armament. When I was there, we'd have five trucks in the convoy. No protection. No nothing.

It was the wild west. It would be like driving from here to Monterey in the middle of enemy territory. And our only protection was speed. So we took the governors off. So in an army truck, if you push the gas all the way to the floor, it's going to go 45 miles an hour, period. Because it's got a governor that makes sure the engine won't go faster than that. Take those off. We painted them high gloss jet black.

Then we had some guys that knew calligraphy and I said we're going to put the name of the mechanic and the driver on the door. All of a sudden like man this is awesome. They had pinstripes on the white around the wheels. They were gorgeous because we wanted people in the Quinean Bindin province to know that if you saw those black trucks coming you better make way because we're not slowing down. When you go through a village

If you slowed down, I mean, really slow, the South Vietnamese would jump on the trucks and start throwing whatever's in the back, whatever supplies, they're just throwing it off. Sure. If you stopped, it's over. Now there's a crowd of 100 people in front and back. You can't even move. And all your stuff's gone. All your stuff's gone, whatever it was. Even as you're driving through, there'll be guys on motorcycles and the guy in the back would jump onto the side of the truck

with bolt cutters, and they would cut the battery cables on a, it's not under the hood, they're on the side, and throw the batteries off on the ground so they could have like a power supply. They have lights at night. I mean, it was, so you had to really think about that. So all of a sudden, after about a month and a half, every truck ran. It was, they were beautiful, high gloss, jet black.

And they were fast. That's awesome. And everybody was motivated. These guys were like, man, if we were going to run a convoy, somebody would do, I am driving. You are not driving my truck. And the mechanics are like, this is my truck. I used to ask him, you know, you'd have to inspect. I'd say, is this a truck? Because a two and a half ton truck has two wheels in the front and two sets of dualies in the back. So eight tires. I said, are these tires good? He said, these are good.

I tick the inside tire, not the outside, but the inside tire. If it was soft, I'd say, wait a minute, that tire's flat. I can't run. You know, army truck, if a tire goes flat, you got seven more tires

But if that one's flat and this one's flat, now we've got a problem. I thought you told me that. Sorry. I mean, I feel like that's kind of the recurring theme of your whole life. You're always fixing stuff. Because I know having lived by you for 15 years, it's like if somebody needs something, like you're the guy. You sort of drop anything. I remember a huge branch. It was like a tree fell. It's this massive eucalyptus tree fell on my...

Yard one time, you know almost hit my kids and you I think I just told you about it said hey Do you have something I can use the next day? I know like you're in the yard and it was like done It was like taken care of and I mean I know like there's probably a hundred people that could tell that same story and I once had a I got a compliment once one neighbor Jim Fox he's been Scoutmaster and everything and he had taken his family to Utah and they're

They had an old Suburban that somebody had given them. And it broke down, I think, in Winnemucca. And they couldn't get a part. And they had to spend two days. Yeah. And because he was supposed to be. I said, Jim, what happened? He said, well, my truck broke down. The Suburban broke down. I said, why didn't you call me? I would have come get you. I said, why didn't you call me? He said, I knew if I called you, you would come. And I didn't want you to do that. So I didn't call you. But I would have. I mean, we'd drive to you, drive to Winnemucca and back. That's not a big deal.

How far is Winnamucka? Probably seven hours. That's a big deal to most people. Who is the human being or human beings that you most admire? Oh, I'd say Candace for sure. Your wife? Oh, 100%. I mean, Derek, people just love to spend time with her. Yeah. I mean, she's closed her counseling practice, but people call, come back, they want to tune up, they want to visit her. She's unbelievable. Unbelievable.

A lot of people think she's not, you know, that she's kind of, not passive, but really gentle. But inside? She's fierce. Spring steel. Not fierce, but spring steel. If it's a matter of principle, she's not going to compromise on that. She's not going to budge an inch. What's the hardest thing you've ever dealt with in your life? Being away from her for that year. It's interesting. You know, there's some things I really love to do.

When we first got married, I got, I was qualified to fly helicopters. Yeah. And I was all set to go to flight. They call it rotary wing school because the helicopter is really a big wing. It's not like a propeller. And she said, oh, honey, please, please, please don't do that. Because the, those guys really, I think it's like 1800 helicopters. I mean, it's really a little iffy. Yeah. And she said, please, please don't do that. So I said, okay.

Okay, I won't do that. Now you fast forward during COVID when I had this logging accident. She said, you know, you just can't do many more chainsaw work. She said, every time you went to the Santa Cruz Mountains for the last 40 years, I've just been scared to death. Every time. And I never said anything, but I just, I said, okay, I won't do that anymore. Is there anything else? She said, well, you know, I've done the Alcatraz swim from

from Alcatraz to San Francisco. How many times have you done that? Probably eight or nine. I don't know. Anyway, she said, well, when you do the Alcatraz swim, I'm just so nervous. It's really safe. I mean, they've never had, I don't think they had, maybe a guy got them. There's no shark attacks. Although they do, they do call it the shark fest. Oh, it's like a mile and a half swim in open water. I mean, it's two miles. Yeah. I mean, no, it's not, you're saying it's safe, but. You should YouTube

There's a YouTube video of shark attack at Alcatraz. It's made by this like 10-year-old kid. And there's a seal swimming right off Alcatraz. His class had gone to Alcatraz Island to walk around. And this kid is filming the seal. All of a sudden, this great white. There's blood everywhere. Blood everywhere. And all these kids are screaming, oh, no.

And you hear this kid say, this is the coolest thing I've ever seen. It's a great video. This is the coolest thing I've ever seen. But so she said, I said, okay, I don't need to swim Alcatraz anything. So that's, so no helicopter, no chainsaw, no Alcatraz. Is there anything else? She said, when you ride the loop, the Alpine loop on your bike, it's about a

25 or 30 mile bike ride. I used to do it all. I've probably put 6,000 miles on my bike. She said, it's really makes me nervous because people get hit. I said, okay, let's just get a Peloton. Yeah. But I do have an e-bike that I ride in the Baylands, but you're not going to hit by a car. There's no cars in the Bayland. Yeah. So I said, honey, I could live a happy, fulfilled life without those things. So that was easy. Easy to get. Avoid the conflict. Not worth the conflict.

Wouldn't even be there was no conflict because I'm not conflicted. I'm like, you know, it's easy How do you how do you measure your life? I don't know that I measure it a lot of people I mean business has been I did a lot of business in real estate I met I'll tell you a couple of things I learned I used to go my parents would go to Florida for six months actually five months and 29 days because if you're there six months and

You have to pay Florida taxes. It's all calculated. It's just amazing. It's absolutely amazing. If you go to Tequesta, Florida on the 30th of April, the interstate going north is like a football game got out. It's back. Delta 88s, Lincolns, Cadillacs, you know, big cars, Pennsylvania, New York, Indiana, Wisconsin, Ohio, license plates, Illinois.

One of the husband or wife is driving, the other one's like sleeping. They've got all their hats and everything in the back. So I used to go to Florida and drive my parents to Indiana. And then in the fall, I'd fly to Indiana and drive them back. Just, you know, take three days. So my dad, when I was in Florida, he would say, he always went to dinner about five o'clock, blue plate special, eight at five o'clock. He'd say, see that guy over there? He was the head of United States Steel.

And I'd look over and there'd be a guy in a plaid pants. He's kind of like this. And he's got a napkin under here and he's kind of drooling all over. He was the president of the United States SEAL. So, oh, wow. See that guy over there? He was the chairman of Boeing aircraft. He's over there like, you know, all these famous big, big time industrial people. They're in their 80s. They're just jacked over. They're just messed up. And they're just like, oh, he's the chairman of Boeing.

You know, Goldman Sachs, wow. And he's sitting there at 5 o'clock in the afternoon drooling on his napkin. And he's going to be dead in two or three or five years. And then what? It doesn't mean anything. It doesn't, you know, that's not what it's about. So I learned that pretty early on that there was that other phrase. I don't know who said it, but the whale only gets harpooned when he spouts. So...

Not a good idea to spout, you know? So what is your greatest accomplishment or whatever you ask me? Raising my family. But I mean, I've made leases with, you know, two guys out of Stanford. One was named Bryn and the other one's Paige. The first lease was Google, eBay. Met with those guys like, what do you do? Well, we have an online auction.

I don't know what's that. I mean, it's like a camera on a guy say, "I hear 23, 23. Do I hear 25, 25? Do I hear 30, 30, 30? I got a bid for 30. Do I hear 30?" I said, "That kind of oxygen?" They said, "No, no, no. You don't understand." I said, "No, I don't understand." I made a first lease with a guy named Scott McNeely, Sun Micro, SUN, Stanford University Network. We ended up leasing them 700,000 feet. Then we

It was interesting. I had all these buildings. They had about nine or 11 buildings. They're all staggered in the leases. I want a 10-year extension. They said, "We're not going to do that." I said, "Really? We want a 10-year lease extension." They said, "No, we need more flexibility. We're not going to do that." I said, "Well, you should check." This was with the real estate guys. "Check with the president and the CEO and the board just to make sure." Call me back and they said,

We're not going to extend. I said, okay. In the meantime, I had rented on University Avenue, there was an ice cream store named Swenson's. Upstairs, it was a little teeny office. And there were some guys there and their company was named Intuit. And I put them in a little 20,000 foot building in Menlo Park. This is all we ever need. 20,000 feet. We're so happy. Intuit. Intuit. Now they needed more space. So I showed them the space down in Shoreline.

where Sun Micro was. I said, "You could take this building and step right through." I leased them to 700,000 feet. About, I signed this lease for 120,000 feet, 42,000, another 40, you know, all stepped in. Yeah. Sun Micro calls me about 20 days or 30 days after I signed the lease. They said, "Hey, we've changed our mind. We want to stay." I said, "I'm sorry, it's gone." "What do you mean?" I said, "It's gone. I leased all your space. It's gone."

No, then they built out on Marsh Road. The Facebook campus. Now it is. Yeah, but it was their campus originally. They needed flexibility. They were in 42,000-foot buildings. They built 120,000-foot floor plates. I nicknamed it San Quentin. Sun Quentin. When Sun moved out there, I nicknamed it Sun Quentin. It got in the newspapers. Like, hey, Sun moved into this campus. It's nicknamed Sun Quentin. I thought, yeah, you know.

And then they leased it to Facebook. It was vacant for a couple of years. I mean, it's just, you know, I go back to Fairchild Semiconductor and National Semiconductor and Lockheed Missiles in Space, all these guys, Hewlett-Packard, you know, all of them. Yeah, it all was started, all those guys were started here. All those companies were started here. There used to be, there's a bookstore in Middle Park called Kepler's. They used to, in the 70s,

they would have a kind of a poster that was a genealogy of Silicon Valley. And they would have, you know, Robert Noyce and Shockley and all the guys that invented all this stuff and like eight companies. And then the next year there would be

16 companies. In the next year, there'd be 40. And they had all the names and all these different people and syntax and all the biological pharmaceutical companies, everything. It was all right here. Activision. I did it- Did you work with them? Yeah. I leased Activision 120,000 feet. It was crazy. They raised... This is 83, 4, 5. They raised $100 million. Three years later, it's gone.

They owed me, I think they owed me like $100,000. I met with them, I said, "Look, you owe me this money? "Hey, we can't, we'll give you stock." "What, what do you mean you give me stock?" "Well, we'll give you this stock, "we'll give you these shares in stock, "and this is what it's trading in." - Basically equivalent to what they owed you, they gave you in stock. - Yeah, yeah. - I put it in a-- - It's worthless. - Well, I put it in a filing cabinet, I just thought. About 10 years later, I see an article about some game thing that is Activision.

I said, "What?" And they had morphed into some other outfit. I don't even know. Stayed alive. Yeah. And so I look up and they're trading OTC. I dribbled the stock out like every three or four weeks, 5,000 shares at a time. We got all our money back. Everything was good. And Activision- That's still around. It's still around. Yeah.

Apple computer next you work with next computers. Yeah after Steve Jobs got fired and they brought in Scully He moved in a little 10,000 foot building. I had I met Steve and the Kong Steve Actually, I talked to the real estate guy and I said and I like to meet Steve Jobs He said excuse me. It's not his name. I said, oh he said no, it's Steven Jobs. I said, oh Okay, he's like an art to preneur. I

And he said, "No, he's not an entrepreneur. He's an industrialist." I said, "You mean like Carnegie and Mellon and those guys?" "Yes, that's what he is." I said, "Okay, you know, okay with you." I mean- - Did you meet her? - I did. - Yeah. - I did. We once, years later, I had this big office complex in San Mateo and we had this car that was in the parking lot. It was really a nice car. It was a Porsche. I don't know what number, it's like a $100,000 car. Been there for like four weeks.

had leaves on it, you know, dirt on the windshield and stuff. I said, I mean, I got to, so I ran the plates on it through a friend in the police department in San Mateo. They said, oh, that's registered to Mr. Steve Jobs. I said, okay. By this time, he said Pixar, it did Pixar or something. I call over there, hey, you know, can I talk to Mr. Jobs or his secretary? Secretary comes along. I said, you know, I introduced myself and I said, we've got a car here.

that's been here in our parking lot for four weeks. And I think it belongs to Steve Jobs. And she said, oh, oh, oh, okay. Hey, we'll send somebody over and get it. You know, he couldn't find it. He

He must have met with somebody in your building and then taken a cab to the airport. And we said, no, where it was. He didn't know where it was. He couldn't remember where it was. I said, OK, well, we got it. It's here. We got it. It's OK. Come by. We'll give him his car back. You know, whatever. I mean, just really interesting people. But yes, I mean, there's something special about this spot. There's something unique in the world about this place.

50-mile stretch between San Francisco and San Jose. It's unbelievable. You know, if you go back, I mean, it was all apricot orchards and fruit orchards. Yeah. You know, in period in Arriaga, I mean, so during the gold rush, there was a lot of Chinese labor that came and worked in the gold mines, 1849, 48, you know, the 49ers, the 50s, stuff like that.

And then that finished. Yeah. Well, then Abraham Lincoln decides to build the Continental Railroad. And, you know, Charlie Crocker and, you know, those guys, Stanford, Mr. Stanford, the big four. And so it was the Chinese labor that dug the railroad through the Sierras, through the mountains. Well, after that,

they had money and they would just buy all these little properties and Dick Peary would figure out, I mean the title companies couldn't figure out who owned what. But he'd go down and talk to everybody and so they started

Connecting dots and turning this like these orchards. Into tilt up buildings. Silicon Valley explodes. And, you know, if you weren't stupid, you know, you could make money. You did Google's first lease. Yeah. Their first, the first office that Google had. Yeah. Where was that? Was it Shoreline? 21,000 square feet. Kind of similar to where the HQ is generally. Well, no. Yeah. Yeah.

I remember when I leased a building to Scott McNeely, a 42,000-foot building, he called me a month later and he said, "Great, your building sucks. It's terrible. It's just horrible." And I said, "Well, let me come down there." I walked in and it's all open offices, shoulder to shoulder, and everybody's got a computer.

In the back of the computer, there's a hole about like this. There's a fan in that. And it's blowing hot air out. I said, Scott, you've got 100 people here and everyone's got a hairdryer. Of course it's hot in here. I mean, this is built for, you know, standard parking's 4 per 1,000. On a 22,000-foot floor, that's 88 people. You've got 150 people in here, shoulder to shoulder, and everyone's running a hairdryer. Of course it's hot. We can put it in more air conditioning, but you're going to have to pay for it, you know.

Yeah, they went from like zero to 100 million, I think, in like the first three years, something like that. It was just growing like crazy, like crazy. We just built buildings for them and put them in there. And yeah, I mean, it was just... But Stanford Research Park, I mean, we took over a vacant property that shockingly literally baked the first chips in ovens.

Thank goodness it wasn't on the National Historic Registry or something. But, you know, he later on won the Nobel Prize, all that. Then he kind of went off, got into eugenics and vitamin C or something. I don't know, whatever. He kind of went beyond his expertise, shall we say. Yeah. But, wow. I mean...

It was incredible to be around those people at that time and to be part of that and just to be here in the Valley during that time, which was like kind of the wild, wild west of tech. I did at least with AltaVista search engines, which was a subsidiary, I think, of DECC.

Digital Equipment Corporation. Like what do you guys do? Well, we search engine. We're like, what are you looking for? I don't even know what a search engine is. Well, you can do this, that. And then Google came along and Alta Vista. I mean Xerox PARC in the Stanford Research Park. Originally it was called the Stanford Industrial PARC, but that's kind of a, the word industrial doesn't have the right cache. Then it became the Stanford Research Park. Xerox PARC invented the mouse.

touchscreen TV, I mean touchscreen computer, all that stuff. They never monetized it. American business is really good at scaling up. It's not that good at coming up with the first thing. That's why around here, these people that are inventive and they're like, you know, they just got the juice flowing. And then once they get it, then a bigger fish can say, okay,

I can make 100,000 of those. Really, you know, I can make a million of them. I remember when video games first came out, they're like, okay, we're going to launch this product and the sales in the first four days are going to be like 180 million or $380 million. From zero. Yeah. Like the first three days. And then the movie industry is like, wait a minute, these guys are making a game and it's worth like three blockbuster movies in a week. Yeah.

Well, thanks for having us in your amazing garage. I feel like there's a lot of special garages in Silicon Valley. This is probably not one people were aware of, but there's been a lot of special things happening made in here. Nobody's aware of this. When I was a little boy, my grandfather had a garage. He didn't make stuff in it, but his garage was full of all this stuff. And I remember going in and I'd say, oh, here's a piece of, oh, don't.

That person that piece of wire. That's what I hold the throttle open on the lawnmower. Okay, there'd be a stick over there Oh, that's how I that's what I use. I use that stick to hold open the lid to the ice chest, you know Can over there. Oh, no, that's that's the can I used to hunt night crawlers before we go fishing Everything in the garage had its own little deal its own little purpose its own little thing. I

And that's, you know, growing up on the farm, I mean, that's where I learned to weld and do all this stuff. And, I mean, I was making deliveries with 18 tons of wheat, you know, when I was 16 years old, drive to Illinois or Southern Indiana or whatever. Never thought twice about it. Never thought twice about it. So it's, but I'm not tired.

I'm 76, but. We worked out today, so. I did. I lifted, I did today and. And you swam? Tomorrow. You swim tomorrow. Swim tomorrow. Yeah. Yeah. Awesome. Well, thanks for having us. We still be my friend, even after this time. We're always going to be friends, but hopefully you'll still be friends with me after this. You know, when we go to lunch, what's the rule? Well, you always pay. Why? Until when?

Well, until I make it. No, until all your kids are done with college. Okay, when do you get to pay? Well, I love going to lunch with you. That's one of my favorite things to do over the last 10 years. We go to lunch every couple of months, and yeah, I've learned so much from it. So hopefully some of the people that watch this get some of the things that I've learned over the last 10 years. They'll pull that out. You're kind. You're kind.

- But you gotta let me pay. - No, no, not until everybody's out of school. Then that's about another, see if while I'm 90. - Then I can pay. That's when I'll be ready to pay.

What would you like? I'll have some polenta. That's about all I can chew because I don't have any. The guy drooling. That's you. The guy drooling. Yeah. Boeing chairman. That's me. That's right. I'm going to keep swimming though. Got to keep working out. Got to keep going. Just because. Just because. That's what, you know, life is really, really good. Amazing. Amazing. Anyway, thanks my brother. Good to be together. Thank you. On next week's episode.

If you expose yourself to negativity, that also brings negative or bad performance. It starts creating negative thoughts in your own head. So think if you're in a team and you have individuals that are saying negative things out loud. What that does is it starts infecting other team members. They start having negative thoughts. And if they start saying negative things out loud, it creates this downward spiral.