The Chris Voss Show - The Chris Voss Show Podcast – One-Legged Mongoose: Secrets, Legacies, and Coming of Age in 1950s New York by Marc J Straus

Episode Date: August 31, 2021

One-Legged Mongoose: Secrets, Legacies, and Coming of Age in 1950s New York by Marc J Straus It's June 1953 and ten-year-old Marc Straus is in his mother's car, getting sick from her cigarette smoke on his way to a Hebrew lesson. He and his younger brother, Stephen, are transferring from public school to a Yeshiva and Marc needs tutoring. His parents haven't said why they're transferring-the family isn't religious. All Marc knows is he'll have to protect his brother. Stephen's a delicate kid other kids pick on. Marc's a street fighter who knows how to wall off pain. So begins One-Legged Mongoose, Marc Straus's vivid, compelling, you-are-there memoir of two years in the life of a precocious, scrappy Jewish kid carrying a dark secret as he embarks on the journey to young manhood in 1950s New York. When school starts, Marc begins commuting four hours daily to a different world, where kids are smart like him and fight with words instead of fists and a caring principal takes the troubled truant under his wing. On Sundays, Marc works at his dad's textile store, learning from his immigrant father about honor and hard work. At home he faces his volatile mother. Sidelined too often by illness and injuries, Marc starts rethinking his risk-taking way of life. A voracious reader, he looks to books for insights-What would Santiago do?-and comes to accept that he's not invulnerable. Life will wound him, but the rest is up to him.

You wanted the best. You've got the best podcast, the hottest podcast in the world. The Chris Voss Show, the preeminent podcast with guests so smart you may experience serious brain bleed. Get ready, get ready, strap yourself in. Keep your hands, arms and legs inside the vehicle at all times. Because you're about to go on a monster education roller coaster with your brain. Now, here's your host, Chris Voss. Hi, folks. Chris Voss here from thechrisvossshow.com. The Chris Voss Show.com.

Hey, we're coming to you with another great podcast. We certainly appreciate you guys, as always, tuning in. You guys are like a family to us, except you don't judge us. That's why we love you the most. And of course, remember the Chris Voss Show loves you back that way. We love you as family. We just don't judge you like family. That should be like a shirt. Maybe I should sell those on the merchandising site. Anyway guys, welcome to the show. To see the video version, just go to youtube.com forward slash Chris Voss, hit that bell notification button. Go to goodreads.com for chest chris voss see everything we're reading and reviewing over there and my new book you can

also go to all the groups on facebook linkedin twitter instagram tiktok everywhere those crazy kids are playing nowadays the chris voss show has accounts and or chris voss does and you can go see them over there as well so we're excited to announce my new book is coming out. It's called Beacons of Leadership, Inspiring Lessons of Success in Business and Innovation. It's going to be coming out on October 5th, 2021. And I'm really excited for you to get a chance to read this book. It's filled with a multitude of my insightful stories, lessons, my life, and experiences in leadership and character.

I give you some of the secrets from my CEO Entrepreneur Toolbox that I use to scale my business success, innovate, and build a multitude of companies. I've been a CEO for, what is it, like 33, 35 years now. We talk about leadership, the importance of leadership, how to become a great leader, and how anyone can become a great leader as well. So you can pre-order the book right now wherever fine books are sold, but the best thing to do on getting a pre-order deal is to go to beaconsofleadership.com. That's beaconsofleadership.com.

On there you can find several packages you can take advantage of in ordering the book. And for the same price of what you can get it from someplace else like Amazon, you can get all sorts of extra goodies that we've taken and given away. Different collectors, limited edition, custom-made numbered book plates that are going to be autographed by me. There's all sorts of other goodies that you can get when you buy the book from beaconsofleadership.com. So be sure to go there, check it out, or order the book wherever fine books are sold. Today we have an amazing author on the show.

He is the author of the brand new book that will be coming out September 14th. It's so new, it hasn't even come out yet. That's how new it is. But the beautiful thing is you can pre-order this book right now and be able to get a hold of it and be the first on your block or your reader's club to read it. The book is called One-Legged Mongoose, Secrets, Legacies, and Coming of Age in the 1950s New York. It'll be out September 14th again on 2021. And you want to check that baby out. It's by the author Mark Strauss.

He is a poet, writer, medical oncologist, and art collector who lives with his wife, Livia, in Chappaqua, I'm not sure I ever say that, Chappaqua, New York. The author of numerous scientific papers and articles on contemporary art, and has published four poetry collections, including Not God, Stage Off Broadway. His poems and stories have appeared in Plowshares, Kenyon Review, and many other literary journals. Welcome to the show. How are you doing, Mark? Thank you. Thanks? Thank you. Thanks.

Thank you. And did I get your last name pronounced correctly? Strauss, correct. Strauss, there we go. Just always good to be sure, isn't it? So welcome to the show. Give us your plugs so people can find you on the interwebs. The title, One-Legged Mongoose, I luckily have the only book probably ever with that title.

So you can go on Amazon and look it up that way or Mark Strauss, M-A-R-C-S-T-R-U-S. Yeah. Let me start. Actually, I'm going to interject this question. Why did you choose that title? Or do you want to tell us what motivated you to write the book? Or maybe those two can encompass one another. The title-legged mongoose comes it's the title of a chapter that comes about three quarters of the way into the book and the title refers this book

is narrated by the kid i was in 1953-55 and it takes place when I just turned 10 years old and it ends right after I turned 12. But when I was 11, my mother had this awful idea that suddenly I should join the Boy Scouts because I was going to school over six days a week, commuting four hours a day for school. And how was I going to go to Boy Scouts? But I had to go. And in order to get this tenderfoot badge, you had to go on a camping weekend. So we went to this freezing park out on Long Island. And after we pitched tents and had dinner, the scout leader tells us that no one was permitted in the park for the last few years because there was a one-legged mongoose,

half man, half mongoose, who had killed a number of people over the years. But now it's probably safe. But we're Boy Scouts. We should go out and look for it. You can imagine the faces of all those kids. So this folktale became the title of the book. Yeah. That's interesting.

That's really cool. We did that in the Boy Scouts too. We called it snipe hunting. And what we would do is it would be in the evening and everyone would go, hey, whoever the newbies were, you'd be like, hey, do you guys want to go hunt some snipes? There's these special birds. And they'd be like, oh yeah, let's do that. And so we were like, okay, we're going to go snipe hunting. And what you have to do is you have to walk around and go, snipe, here's snipe, snipe, snipe, snipe, snipe. And I think you had to make a special whistle or something silly. I remember sitting in the circle and he says, who's going to come out and go look for the mongoose? I swear to God, everybody was shaking in their boots. Oh, everyone was afraid of it. But they were afraid not to raise their hands, of course. What you would do is, there wasn't any fear involved in it.

So you'd send the, everyone would go out snipe hunting, and the newbies, of course, were like, everyone spread out and go snipe hunting. And so the noobs would be out there, and you could hear them off in the forest going, snipe, snipe, snipe. Well, anybody in the know would double back to the campfire and just sit there and laugh for an hour or so.

Anyway, so what motivated you to want to write this book? This is a book I really wanted to write for a long time. I think I went through this long phase being lucky enough to have all these poetry collections published. And the book has some really difficult moments. And the book also deals with a lot of abuse that I faced. And my kid brother who I brought with me to school back and forth these four hour commutes a day. Later on, he made me promise I wouldn't write the book until my mother passed on. So that's what I did. When did your mother pass, if you don't mind me asking?

She was 90. And she was a brilliant, vigorous woman who was still the very stubborn woman we find in this book. And she was on this blood thinner, and she just stopped taking it without telling anybody when she was 88 and had a massive stroke. And it was so sad to see her that disabled. But she's a tremendous character in the book and stayed that way the rest of her life so i'm sorry about your mother my dad i know my dad was at the end he was he hated that he's a coumadin his uh coumadin or some sort of thing he's like it's rat poison they're feeding you well that's precisely what happened my mother was on Coumadin because she had AFib and she just stopped it one day and decided it's rat poison. I shouldn't laugh at my dad. I know, but she knew very well that without it, there was a very high likelihood she was going to get a clot. I'm sorry. It's,

it's, you know, Hey, my dad was a stubborn, he was probably stubborn like your mom. He hated doctors. It was always funny. So give us an arcing overview of the book and kind of what's inside it. I know you've touched on it just a little bit, but anything you want to add to that? The book begins, my dad was an immigrant that came over from the Ukraine as an orphan when he was 15. He was impoverished. He went to work and by the time he was in his 20s, he opened a textile store on the lower east side of New York. And I was a kid in that generation. I started working in the store when I was five years old. But when I turned 10, we had moved out to Long Island. And I was going to a miserable public school.

And I was an avid reader. But when I turned 10 and I was entering fifth grade, he just told me, next September, you and Stephen are going to go to a school in Queens. Wow. It turned out to be a very Orthodox religious Jewish school. You guys Jewish? We're Jewish, but we weren't Orthodox. Oh, okay. To go to a school where these kids are ultra-Orthodox.

Three, four hours a day, they're studying Talmud and original Aramaic. I had no clue why I'd be going to a school like that. And the book opens up in the summer where my mom is taking me to my first Hebrew lesson. And, of course, I wanted them to turn me down. And maybe if I didn't do well in Hebrew, they would turn me down. But I wouldn't write the book if things didn't go a different way. So they took me. And I entered a relatively foreign world for me.

And when I was in Long Island, my kid brother was the kind of kid that bullies find. They can smell when a kid is that vulnerable. And he was a very small, afraid kid. And he got picked on relentlessly. And I became a street fighter. And I would have to find out who did it. And those kids would pay the price. And I had hundreds of fights. And after a while, I couldn't tell whether I started them unnecessarily or not. I guess a new kid moved into the neighborhood. I thought, might as well get it over with.

So I had that upbringing. My parents never knew. And now I go to a school and I think, oh, my God, it's Queens. It's going to be worse. There are terrible neighborhoods. It turned out that I entered a school with very smart kids, and there were aspects of it that I really came to appreciate. I came to appreciate the scholarship. But along the way, there were some really interesting episodes. And we find out in the book, I was an enormous risk taker. I did almost

unthinkable things that nobody knew about. And along the way, we find out that since before the age of two, my mother had beaten me relentlessly. And it just hadn't stopped by age 10. I thought by going to this new school, this would end it. And I became a kid who was almost impervious to pain. Wow. Do you think, go ahead, I'm sorry. Yeah. Towards the end of the book, the arc is we really learn each of the characters, I think, very well. Towards the end of the book, I just turned 12. I'm going to be going into seventh grade. And I have to find a way to stop these beatings. And I was a kid who was very strong for my age. I built myself up. But I wasn't able to end this.

And towards the end of the book, I have to find a way. Well, let me ask you this. Do you think that some of it might have been protecting your brother and that sort of thing, but do you think sometimes that a lot of the fights you were getting in was you maybe acting out aggressively by what was going on at home? That's true, but I didn't know it then. I was doing scary stuff that if any parent knew about, they'd tear their hair out.

I was doing crazy stuff. Half the time at school, I was a truant. I was off playing handball or doing anything else. I didn't go to the classes I didn't want to go to. And I saw a problem, I picked a fight. And I think so much of that was due to what was going on in the home that my older sister and younger brother knew,

but I'm not so sure my father ever knew. So your father didn't know about your mother beating you? It's been an open issue for my entire life. He was a very sweet, quiet guy who worked hard. In his store, he was brilliant. He could sell. People loved him. He was loquacious. At home, he almost didn't open his mouth. And I think his attitude then is your mom runs the house. And in truth, I realized I was afraid to tell him. I thought the consequence might be he would leave or my parents would get divorced.

And I didn't want to be responsible. This is really interesting. You talk a lot about your younger brother, too, who also looms large in the book. What do you want people to know about your relationship with him? It was an extraordinarily important relationship. He was three years younger from the moment he arrived from the hospital. I guess I knew it was my job to protect him. And I did that. And perhaps because he witnessed many of these events, that made him even more afraid. And he was a kid who needed protecting. But I realized when he was very young that he had this enormous potential. We'd go on the train and I'd buy him electronic books. I'd buy him Scientific American. And soon he was reading this stuff cover to cover. We remained so close in our lives.

He later became the head of virology at the National Institutes of Health and then the head of the National Institute of Complementary and Alternative Medicine. One of the great scientists in our country. There's a moment in the book when I said, and I didn't even realize I was making the connection. Stephen sees things that may be invisible to the rest of us. And he wound up studying viruses. Wow. That's pretty great, especially these days. We need as much virus as we can get.

So, you know, you... Oh, the question I had just got lost. So I'll ask another. You talk about a lot of different things in the book. Changing schools, cows and fences, the comeback kid. Tell us what cows and fences... You talk in part two of your book about cows and fences. I thought that was an interesting title for a section of a book.

Do you want to tell us a little bit about that? Yeah, cows and fences. I thought that was just an interesting. It's interesting. You're like, what is that? That's a section of the book. So I come to this new ultra religious school where the kids dress differently. They look differently. they speak differently.

And when you enter fifth grade, you spend a half a day studying ancient Talmud in Aramaic, which is it was written in Aramaic starting about 2,500 years ago. It's not even exactly Hebrew. And oh my God, was this foreign. But I came to really like it because I began to realize that it wasn't at its best ancient law. It's about how we try to continue to move towards solutions that are equitable, if you can, for everybody. And the class I started, I was a couple months late beginning for various reasons. I come into the class and this rabbi is talking about one cow crosses into a neighbor's field and kills the neighbor's cow and what's the recompense owed to the guy whose cow is killed so then they get into there's a fence up was the fence in good repair did the guy whose cow was killed keep his fence up the way he was supposed to?

And I get called into the principal's office, who really took me under his wing. I guess he thought he saw something. And he says, Mark, how do you think it's going? I said, I don't know. There's a lot about cows and fences. And he says, that's how it sounds give it time huh that's interesting that's interesting so i thought that was an interesting chapter of the book is the title you're just like i gotta find out what that's about that sounds really cool and your parents

are pretty much major players in the book as well. Tell us a little about them. And I'm curious specifically, I can guess, but I'm curious specifically. Excuse me, what? Your parents? Yeah. And I'm curious about why your brother made you promise not to publish the book about them. That's an important question. As I mentioned, my dad came here in an impoverished orphan he only went to school he was only allowed to go to public school where

he came from till age 11 a very smart guy hard working he had one focus, give his kids a good life in America, get us educated. Probably he wanted his two boys to be doctors. I smelled that out early on, and we both did. Don't come into the business, do something that everybody thought was important back then. Later, maybe run a hedge fund. Who knows? But that wasn't then. My mom was brilliant. And at age 15, she leaves just before she graduates high school in Brooklyn.

Because it's the Depression, she's got four brothers, but she goes out and gets a job and feeds the family. Oh, wow. And she had been one of the great kids pianists in the country. She easily might have been one of the great pianists in the country if she stayed with it. And I struggled with not understanding as a kid why she gave it up. And she never really said. And so this is from a time when women certainly had so much less opportunity, but it wasn't until she was about 70 that she was so annoying. I said, so what if you watch a game show and win?

Go back to college. Get a degree. She went to college at age 71, graduated valedictorian. I gave her a very hard time for not getting 1A. I guess the roles are reversed then. I think for whatever sets of reasons she couldn't continue the piano, which I never totally

understood, where she never continued academically. I think she gave up too much. She was very angry. Do you think that's why she took it out on you? Some of that was probably more than that. Some of that, I think, was psychological that was never attended to.

That would explain a lot. Oh, and then you asked me about Stephen. Why your brother made you make the promise. Stephen was always a very gentle guy. He was head of this huge department at the National Institutes of Health, but he was quiet and fair and considerate. And as much as he knew exactly what happened in our childhood, he thought she would be hurt too much if the book came out.

So that's quite a secret to have to keep inside you. Was it hard to keep it locked down, or were you comfortable with it until the time came? There came a time when I had the need to write it before I actually began. And I was concerned that I would be able to write it well enough and equitably. And the only way that I found I could do it was let the kids speak. I was, unlike almost every other memoir that covers any childhood, great book by Mary Carr, The Liars Club. She pulls it off. She writes it from the point of view of an adult, I couldn't do it because I knew too much and I had that unusual memory that I could be there again and tell the story. And when I realized I could tell that story that

way, then I really set about writing it. That's really important, being able to put it in the way you want to take and do. What do you hope readers come away from with your book? What do you hope they take away from this, they learn? What do you want them to come away with? I hope they love the book. I hope it's written well enough and that the kid is interesting enough that they just have to keep reading it. But I had the need to write like so many kids

who've undergone different types of abuse. I never told my kids. Oh, wow. And this is not unusual. You look at kids who encountered horrible things when they were older, gymnasts, football players in major schools. These are horrific stories. And they almost never told anybody. And mine began at an extraordinarily young age, and it was in the household per se. And I never told my two kids. And then my daughter, I have two kids, and they're grown up, of course. And my daughter wrote this wonderful book. She was an assistant DA, a lawyer in the Bronx.

And she wrote a book, Assistant DA. And in the forward, I learned she knew about this a long time, which I didn't know she knew. And it turns out my mother told her. Oh, wow. That's extraordinary. But my mother never spoke to me about it. So in the context of her mother telling her about it, your mother telling her about it, what was the context? Was she apologetic or regret or? I have it, of course, secondhand. First, I read it in my daughter's book. I think she had told my daughter that she had made terrible mistakes. And she told a fraction of it.

And my daughter understood the rest. My mother and I never spoke about it. Oh, wow. That's pretty interesting. It's quite the journey. So what I hope people come away with is I struggled with this from before the age of two until I turned 12. And I wasn't able to extricate myself. And then, of course, I did. And I think that the story of this kind of abuse, unfortunately, is so widespread.

And I think that for almost anybody, there's a way forward, as tragic as the circumstances are. are where I part company with a lot of people who've gone through terrible things is I don't think we forget. I don't think we go through a bunch of therapy and now everything's okay. I think it always remains in our life. It's just if we're lucky, we put it in a place we can work with effectively. Yeah, that's, you know, everything we go through in life, we learn stuff. You wrote a textbook on lung cancer, and you worked to practice medicine and stuff. Give us some conversation about what happened with you with Boston University and some of the work and how it influenced your life as a doctor? I don't think I recognized a lot of that till after the fact. But I wanted to go away to college where I was away and out of the family and learning and doing things I didn't do. I purposely went to a college

that turned out to be wonderful. At that time, it was affiliated with the United Church. I was taking Catholic conversion classes somewhere else, not intending to become Catholic. I wanted to learn what everybody else thought. I needed those years. But in college, we had an extraordinary pre-med program, and I was sure I wasn't pre-med. So, of course, I applied to medical school, and I went, thinking, let's see how it goes. And scroll ahead a few years,

I had some ideas for research projects. They supported me. And then I almost went to Vietnam. I got a number. I was inducted. I went through the physical. And just then I heard the National Cancer Institute accepted me for fellowship. So I got to do a lab instead of Vietnam. But I fell in love with research. And I was in cancer medicine at a moment that it was so primitive. And I thought, I really think I could do something. I think I have something if I work really hard that I can benefit people. And then I worked tremendously hard for the next 40 years, incredible hours. When I was 28, I wrote a textbook on cancer, so I was a bit young at it. Oh, wow. That's extraordinary. There's a lot of interesting stories about your life. What are

some other stories that you feel stand out about you? I was too much of a risk taker still. And certainly when I started in academia, I was a babe in the woods with politics. I got my nose rubbed in it. I was somebody who really believed that when I knew something, I knew it. And it was very difficult to talk me out of it. But I do think I made what I believe was some real contributions to cancer medicine. I was willing to really try to do the things I believed I needed to do. So I had good grants, good support.

But then I reached a time when I absolutely didn't understand it. I was in my mid-40s and I wanted to take a poetry course at the 92nd Street Y. I can't even tell you how it happened. I wasn't reading much. I dropped into that poetry section and I knew I was home. I had to write this. And through poetry, I found the language to speak about doctor-patient relationships that I couldn't have articulated in any other way. And I was completely surprised that the poetry got embraced. And a great press published it, and the book was used in a lot of medical schools in a teaching curriculum. And then again, I began to have the need to write prose. So I did that. I think part of who I became at a very young age,

I wasn't afraid ever to do that thing I felt I wanted to do. Run a practice. And then 10 years ago, I opened an art gallery in New York City, which I still have. And we go all over the world for art fairs. I have on our roster artists from about 16 different countries. So I'm out there looking for new things that I believe in. I support it. And that's a large part of my life at the moment.

That's awesome. That's awesome. So you also started some software companies. Yeah, usually nobody asked me. When I was opening my first private practice after a long tour of academia, and I didn't have much money. I had these big shot academic jobs, but it hardly paid anything. So I thought, I have an idea for a software company, maybe that'll make me some money. And it turned out to be a very good idea. And then I had an idea for another company and another company. And I never wanted to spend time running it because I wanted to take care of my patients. Unfortunately, I gave up my equity on the early side. But then as I was trying to leave the practice of medicine, ironically, I had an idea for treating patients with Coumadin.

It's a horrible drug. and it is a rat poison. And the problem with Coumadin is no matter what you eat, it impacts the way the drug works. People have too much, too little. So they either don't have enough, or they may bleed out. And doctors do a terrible job managing patients on Coumadin, and they hate it. And I decided doctors in my practice were just as bad. How do I get doctors to do a great job managing people who need this on Coumadin? So I developed a software company that made it brainless for them to do a good job. And almost every practice uses it now. That's awesome. That is awesome. My dad was

something else. He was on his own private eye. He believed, I think one time he called me up and told me cancer could be cured if you took enough vitamin E. And he was always in these quacky sort of health groups. He was in a lot of MLM, multiple marketing stuff. And he was always like, he was always like looking for, I know more than doctors. He probably would have done really well in today's world where people are like, I know more than the viral doctors. And I'm like, really? You just searched on Google and you found more than the National Institute of Health? Wow, you're really something. Crack pottery that's going on right now. My dad was a little bit off the chart on that one. But yeah, I remember the end of his life. He was always fighting his cumin and he would go off it

and then he'd have a heart attack or stroke and you'd be like, dad, you got to stay on it. He's like, I don't want to stay on it. And you're like, do you want to stay alive or do you want to? I know better than doctors. I have my own recipe. I came through two fellowships in high-end academia at the National Cancer Institute. Right out of fellowship, I'm chairman of a big medical school department. I'm a babe. One of the things I learned very quickly is all these quack medications cancer patients were on. And I needed to find an appropriate way to discuss it with them. But back when I started, Laetrile came around, which Steve McQueen took and thousands of Americans went to Mexico to take. But I watched almost every one of these things come through cancer medicine.

You have to understand when people are looking for something. But the deal I made almost every patient is, if you're going to take something, you've got to tell me. That's probably important because my dad could have used some of that. He was a funny guy. He really was a funny guy at some of the different things that he'd do you just be like maybe you should listen to doctors dad that might help that might be a good idea i don't know but i i did learn something if i ever get cancer or whatever i should take my coumadin because every time i go

off and he'd have a little mini heart attack. I guess I shouldn't laugh, but in hindsight, if you just knew how stubborn my old man was, that's just how he rode. He rode and went and it was his game to play. So there you go. Anything more you want to touch on the book before we go out? I think the book has some really precious, interesting moments and characters. And they all happen, as I tell them. One of the really interesting moments, so I come to this new school, then I got to drop my brother off. And then there's a moment around noon, I go back to my class, which is in some annex over two miles away. So I figured I might as well walk, it's two and a half miles, but then I got bored walking the same way. So one day, I decide to walk on an alternative street. And I find myself in a terrible neighborhood. And I'm going down

this street with all the stores are broken and people lying against windows. And I'm going down the street with all the stores are broken and people lying against windows. And I'm coming to the end of the street. And there are four black kids who are older than me. And this was clearly their street. And I get close and they made it very clear what was going to happen so finally i tell the biggest kid what's the big deal if four kids beat up a little white kid why don't you fight me one-on-one so he found this really pretty interesting and then i see that somebody one of the kids has a nickname Sugar Ray. So I go off on a tangent and say, well, that's the greatest fighter in history. And now we start chatting about Sugar Ray Robinson. And then one of the kids, the big kid, is holding a handball.

So I said, do you play handball? He says, yeah. I said, come on come on let's play I'm going to beat you and the chapter ends the four of them and I'm going off to play handball oh wow that's a great that's a great conversion and I wound up later in the book that's tall kid and I, I used to cut classes all the time. He and I were handball partners, a tall, slim black kid and a little white kid, and we beat everybody. That's a great story. That's a great story.

So this has been pretty interesting. And give us your plugs one more time so people can find you on the interwebs. Thank you. The book is One-gged mongoose it's up on amazon now for pre-order mark strauss m-a-r-c-s-t-r-a-u-s and it's going to be released in audio ebook paperback september 14th sounds good sounds good thank you very much for coming on the show, Mark. We certainly appreciate it. It's been a really interesting read and everyone should go order the book.

It's coming out September 14th. You can get it over at Refined Books or Sold. One-Legged Mongoose, Secrets, Legacies, and Coming of Age in the 1950s New York. Word that baby up. You can also go see this video interview that we just did with Mark on youtube.com, Fortuna's Chris Voss. Hit that bell notification button. All that good stuff. Go to goodread youtube.com, 4chesschrisfoss. Hit that bell notification button. All that good stuff. Go to goodreads.com, 4chesschrisfoss. All of our

groups on LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, all those places, all those crazy kids are happening. Thanks for tuning in. Be good to each other and we'll see you guys next time. So we're excited to announce my new book is coming out. It's called Beacons of Leadership, Inspiring Lessons of Success in Business and Innovation. It's going to be coming out on October 5th, 2021. And I'm really excited for you to get a chance to read this book. It's filled with a multitude of my insightful stories, lessons, my life, and experiences in leadership and character. I give you some of the secrets from my CEO Entrepreneur Toolbox that I use to scale my business success, innovate, and build a multitude of companies.

I've been a CEO for, what is it, like 33, 35 years now. We talk about leadership, the importance of leadership, how to become a great leader, and how anyone can become a great leader as well. So you can pre-order the book right now wherever fine books are sold. But the best thing to do on getting a pre-order deal is to go to beaconsofleadership.com. That's beaconsofleadership.com. On there, you can find several packages you can take advantage of in ordering the book. And for the same price of what you can get it from someplace else like Amazon, you can get all sorts of extra goodies that we've taken and given away uh different collectors

limited edition custom made numbered book plates that are going to be autographed by me there's all sorts of other goodies that you can get when you buy the book from beacons of leadership.com so be sure to go there check it out or order the book where refined books are sold