From Hardship to Hope: Navigating Through Stage 4 Cancer - Twice!

What could you do if you were handed a diagnosis with a steep mountain to climb, not once, but twice? Join us on a ride through the life of the unstoppable Howard Brown, a two-time cancer conqueror who has defied all odds. Listen in as Howard takes us back to the age of 23 when a red bump on his face led him down an unexpected path. The diagnosis: non-Hodgkins lymphoma, stage four. But Howard wasn’t ready to give up. He takes us through the rollercoaster ride; from the discovery of a rare familial match for a stem cell transplant to the bittersweet success of the operation.

Fast-forward to Howard at 50, celebrating his career transition to Silicon Valley, and life throws another curveball - colon cancer. How does one keep their spirits high when faced with such adversity? Howard shares his secret sauce - self-care, regular screenings, lifestyle changes, and most importantly, a 'bag of love'. Listen in as he talks about the importance of building a strong support system, the incredible role his family played, and how he navigated this period. 

Don't miss the final chapters where Howard takes us through his healing journey - writing and publishing his book. From reconnections with influential people from his past to the immense power of positivity and community, Howard's story is nothing short of inspirational. He offers valuable advice on dealing with painful news and finding hope in the darkest times. Hop on this journey of resilience, hope, and transformation right now. Warning - this story of determination and sheer willpower might just inspire you to change the world yourself.

Transcript

Greg Kuhn: 0:12

Hello, my wonderful manifesting friends and beautiful souls. It's Greg Kuhn and welcome to another episode of Manifest the Big Stuff Today. I am super excited. I want to welcome you to a fantastic episode of Manifest the Big Stuff. We love to talk about the big stuff health, wealth, relationships, our love life, those really important things and how to manifest them more like we truly want, how to be more influential architects of our life. And today I have a guest who has done this at such a level. You're going to be astounded. You're going to want to hear from this gentleman. I want to introduce you to Howard Brown, my guest today.

Greg Kuhn: 1:16

Howard is a Silicon Valley entrepreneur. He is the best-selling author of Shining Brightly. He is an award-winning international speaker, an inspirational podcaster. He's a survivorship coach, a health technology consultant and a two-time stage four cancer patient and survivor. 30 years apart, howard shares the keys to leading a resilient life, as you can imagine, with hope that drives successful community leadership, which he's demonstrated. Business innovation and innovators, of which he's won. And healthcare advocates, which Howard now is doing in earnest. Be prepared to be inspired, be prepared to meet a miracle man, a man who has already lived three lives. Howard, please say hello.

Howard Brown: 2:31

Greg, thank you for having me on. What a grand introduction. I'm humbled by that because I just try to be me each day and wake up. I am honored to be on your show and to share my story and some wisdom and learn a little bit and share a little bit with you today, thank you.

Greg Kuhn: 2:56

Well, howard, my viewers, my listeners, are wonderful souls who are very interested just as I am and I know, just as you are in making the most of this gift that we've been given, making advantage of the opportunities that we're being afforded in each moment to make the most of our life. And, of course, the perspective that you are bringing to the table is that you have manifested a life where you have survived beyond all odds. Let's start with Howard Brown at age 23 and learning that you have stage four non-Hodgkins lymphoma and being told, howard, you shouldn't expect to survive as a 57-year-old. Looking back on it, how did you survive?

Howard Brown: 4:09

So, god, I thought I graduated Babson College, at the number one school for entrepreneurship, and I started my career and, like any young person, I thought I was kind of like a superhero, invincible, and I got to my career. I got promoted and I'm driving down the Pennsylvania term pike to Dayton, ohio, for a promotion at age 23. So exciting. I had the world as my oyster and I noticed that I actually had a little red bump on my left cheekbone and I got out of the car to get gas and this is 1989, in August, and I used a pay phone.

Greg Kuhn: 4:53

Remember those.

Howard Brown: 4:54

I called my mom and dad to check in and I said you know, I noticed a little bump, because I keep looking in the rear of your mirror and I see a little red bump there and it's probably nothing. So my mom's like, well, keep an eye on it. What are they going to do? Right? So I get to Dayton Ohio and it keeps getting a little bigger. But I have a temporary housing. I'm looking for an apartment, I find an apartment, I'm going to work, I'm the new guy in Dayton Ohio and I'm working. I'm going to the gym, I'm playing basketball and I'm starting to plan my travel schedule.

Howard Brown: 5:30

This is in the disaster recovery world for banks and for retail supermarkets, and the banks actually had to put together disaster recovery plans. So I'm doing great. My mom comes out because I think you need sheets and dishes and all that stuff for an apartment. So she came out and she this is at the time you could actually meet someone at the gate at the airport. You didn't have to wait behind security. So she sees me and I'm wearing glasses at the time and this little red bump. She goes what is that? We got to get that checked out. I was like mom, it's okay, it's nothing, I'm fine, I feel really strong. So she spends a weekend with me and I actually she spent like a Wednesday night till like a Sunday night. So I worked actually Thursday and Friday. So I'd come home but she would walk across to this big mall and start buying stuff for the apartment Sheets are good, towels are good so she did what moms do and we'd go out to eat at night and we really didn't know anybody there and I kept pushing it off. She goes let's go get that checked out. I was like, nah, it's fine.

Howard Brown: 6:34

And fortunately a couple of weeks later I had to come back to Boston. I grew up in the suburbs of Boston, in Framingham, massachusetts, and I came in. My speech was on a Monday and I came in on a Friday night and Saturday morning my dad says let's go play tennis. And instead of playing tennis he took me to the community hospital and we waited in the emergency room and the doctor looked at it, says it's assist, take some antibiotic, you'll be fine. Great, but it was kind of purply and getting bigger. So imagine it started, you know small, and it's now starting to look like a small little marble.

Howard Brown: 7:13

And my dad and I didn't go play tennis, we went to breakfast and I saw some friends on Sunday you know what is that thing on your cheek? And I ended up, you know, kind of making excuses. You know I got hit in basketball or weight lifting, you know I didn't know what it was, but I felt fine. So I do the speech. The speech is great, and my go back and see my parents before I leave and they, we go back to the community hospital and this time they actually say, oh, the medicine doesn't work.

Howard Brown: 7:46

I wasn't feeling great either. It might have been the antibiotic and they took actually a biopsy. And then they said wait. And then they said they took another biopsy and then the waiting game started. Well, my parents took me to the airport, I left on my way and I didn't realize it at the time, but they were freaking out because we didn't know what was going on. And I get a call to come back. This is I don't know. It could be even like five or six weeks later, I don't even remember, but it was enough time that maybe three weeks later and I ended up coming back and I go see this community hospital and there's seven doctors waiting for me seven.

Greg Kuhn: 8:22

Not a good sign, right.

Howard Brown: 8:24

No, never a good sign. And at the end they say you have a 2pm appointment at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute. At 2pm, don't be late. Well, I'm in an Armani suit, okay, and I'm ready to basically fly back out to continue my life. And it doesn't even really register. Why am I going to Dana-Farber Cancer Institute? I actually tell you. It didn't register with me at all. Maybe it's a form of denial or protection in what I'm doing, right? And so I get there and I walk into Dana-Farber and they try to make it light and all that stuff and nice. There's a waiting room for the adults, which I will call the old people, and there's a waiting room for pediatrics. So Jimmy Fund is for kids with cancer. I didn't have a place for me. I'm 23. Do I go sit with the adults and the older people or do I go with the kid? Well, I actually sat with the kids. Then they called me.

Greg Kuhn: 9:20

You were like an adolescent.

Howard Brown: 9:22

Yeah Well, they called that young onset, you know. But I was still young, but I didn't fit with the older people in their 60s or 70s right. So what I ended up doing was I ended up going with the kids and then I get called back after a bunch of tests to this doctor's office that invented chemotherapy for blood cancers. And there was a young doctor behind him my parents were actually behind me and he said Howard, you have stage four accelerated T cell non-hunger lymphoma. It's a blood cancer, lymphatic system, and we're going to try to pound it out of you. And I didn't hear another word. Let's just say I was a deer in the headlights, my mom's ball in her eyes, out my dad's a statue.

Howard Brown: 10:06

And I look up at this young doctor who was sort of close in age, maybe seven or eight years older than that. I mean I guess you know he's a fellow. I go. What is he saying? So he was talking doctor and I didn't know anything, and so we listened and we went home and the car ride home was dead silence. We invite my twin sister that's a really important fact to dinner. My dad runs out to the library and gets a book on cancer. We knew nothing. We had dinner, we cried a lot and I was to go back to the hospital for more tests. Little did I know that Dana Farber was going to be my home, away from home, and I probably was still in denial. Now, 1989, no cell phones, no internet, and now computer use was really, you know, just starting. So this is the analog days.

Greg Kuhn: 10:58

So we had a lot. Like you said, your dad went to the library.

Howard Brown: 11:01

Yeah, went to the library and we had a landline that was always busy. The busy signal. I mean people couldn't get through because we wanted to tell people about it but people would call. The phone was always busy, right? So roll the clock forward, I start chemotherapy.

Howard Brown: 11:18

And when I get there to start chemotherapy, they test your blood and Dr Rubin, the young doctor, comes out and says there's no chemo today. I said wait, what are you talking about? You told me that you know, and I did the. I looked up. You know the prognosis for someone with stage four. You know lymphoma, which is like leukemia, blood cancer, six months to live or less. Right, anyone I knew that had that. You know that cancer or knew somebody said you know the descendants. So he says we're not doing chemo. I go, yeah, but you told me I'm gonna die. We better do chemo. And he says nope, it's not safe.

Howard Brown: 11:54

But I scheduled a field trip and he scheduled the field trip to the cryogenic center and I said cryo, what? What is that? And he said it's the sperm bank. You're gonna leave a sample. I go, why should I do that? He goes, just do it. What else are you gonna do today? It might actually feel good, you'll come back tomorrow, we'll tuck your blood and you'll do chemo the next day. So I went to the cryogenic center and I left a sample and I sort of forgot about it because I had other things that were more pressing, right.

Howard Brown: 12:21

And I did chemotherapy and the chemotherapy I was doing was extremely toxic. I lost my hair within 10 days and I went. It was very harsh side effects. I was on steroids. My whole world changed and the one thing that my mom learned is that my immune system I was very susceptible, so I actually suffered from masks and gloves and anyone that would come over and visit actually had to kind of wear a mask and gloves because they could get me sick and that could kill me faster Any type of virus, bacteria, fungus. So my mom was basically in charge of the cleaning patrol and so having guests was a luxury and we spent a lot of time. We commuted to Dana-Farber basically daily and I had some overnight stays when I needed it, and the chemotherapy was harsh.

Howard Brown: 13:17

I went to my fifth year reunion. Okay, I'm 23 and a half years old and I walk in there. I'm bald, I'm wearing gloves, I took my mask off. My mom would like put that mask back on. She came, she knew my friends and I was the vice president of my high school class. I was all state and basketball right and so they knew me and I delivered some opening remarks for people to pray. But this is the first time that many of these people had had touched with cancer. Maybe they had an aunt or uncle or grandparent, but no one their age had had cancer. And so I heard the guys poor bastard, dead man, walking, you know and again they didn't mean anything by it, they just how do you deal with this as a healthy 23 year old? But I look like I had cancer now because I was bald.

Howard Brown: 14:08

Well, none of the treatments were working. I was getting sick. I was starting on blood transfusions, platelet transfusions. I went down to Florida to visit my grandparents to get some warm weather. I immediately got rushed back home because I actually looked like a spotted purple spots all over and then this you know, basically a big red mark on my cheekbone turned out to be the size of a golf ball. I mean, thank God it came out, because if it didn't come out I would have died. It was the warning sign. Now we didn't have any good news. The therapies were not working. They tested my sister for bone marrow transplant. It's now called a stem cell transplant. She was an exact match. Okay, that's a one in 25,000 chance. Okay. And people?

Howard Brown: 14:54

now still swabbed their cheeks and they become a match To donate their bone marrow and stem cells. And that was the only good news we had. I had a brutal, a brutal, brutal winter there because I was failing all their therapies and I was in the hospital a lot because my immune system was so fragile and I didn't know. I didn't know I was gonna live. So they got me ready for a bone marrow transplant On May 17th I went in and they hit me up with such toxic chemo and full body radiation that they eliminated my bone marrow. And this is the protocol in 1990. They're following the orders.

Greg Kuhn: 15:36

Okay, I was you know I wasn't like that anymore.

Howard Brown: 15:39

They changed? Oh, they've changed the protocol substantially, but they put you in an isolation room.

Greg Kuhn: 15:43

Okay.

Howard Brown: 15:45

Think John Travolta and the boy in the bubble movie with no immune system. Right, I did not have an immune system, so when people came in, they had to scrub, put on masking. All I could see was their eyes, and they did that every single time. They came in or out, and my mom would sit with me or my dad would sit with me in the evenings, and I had my own prison. I was in prison.

Greg Kuhn: 16:08

I had to be terrifying.

Howard Brown: 16:11

It was. It was terrifying. So you know how much TV can you watch? I mean, I didn't feel great anyways, right? What do you talk about? Well, you talk about memories. You talk about the good times, right, because you don't have really that crystal ball knowing what's going on. And while they're prepping you for bone marrow transplant, you sign a document that said it could kill you right away when you take someone else's organ or blood system and put it in fusing in you. It could kill you right away. I mean, your body will reject it, you will die quickly.

Howard Brown: 16:41

You could die over time or it can give you very significant side effects, called graft versus host disease, where the body's sort of figuring out what this is and is rejecting it and there's some significant side effects. There's some significant side effects to that.

Greg Kuhn: 16:55

You're willing to do this because you want to live.

Howard Brown: 17:00

Yes, and also I had no other choice. The therapies that they sent for, therapies that mean they didn't work. The cancer was growing. Every scan you would do that the cancer was growing. I'd light up like a Christmas tree on the gallium scans. So this was a Hail Mary.

Howard Brown: 17:17

And again in the analog world, the information getting out and coming in was slow. It was really slow Now because my mom and I were showing up at the cancer center a lot. We became to get to know our environment. People would know us. My mom and I are very outgoing. She's talking to everybody, getting to know the staff and the way that she works is that she endears herself because she's a candy holly. My mom loves candy Now at the cancer center, even though sugar is not good for cancer, it makes people happy. So they had candy all over the place Tootsie rolls, m&m, any lollipops and kids like candy, right. So one day we show up and there's no candy. My mom is devastated. So one of the staff people there, carol, says yeah, we're out of candy. We don't have any more in my little supply closet. Oh my God. My mom, who's a force in nature, called 10 candy companies and had pounds and pounds that candy delivered for years, for years.

Greg Kuhn: 18:22

Yeah.

Howard Brown: 18:24

Because candy was the way of her sharing her light and goodness, it was kind of cool to watch she's just a force, and she was making that her space.

Greg Kuhn: 18:32

I mean, she was making herself a part of things, right?

Howard Brown: 18:36

Exactly so. We got to know a lot of people there.

Greg Kuhn: 18:38

You're so fortunate that you had advocates and allies.

Howard Brown: 18:42

Well, I moved back home with mom and dad.

Howard Brown: 18:45

I didn't make it back to Dayton Ohio to my apartment. I moved back home. I actually, eventually my dad went out there with some friends out there and put it all in storage and drove my car back home. So we lived there, we made it our place. But you meet people there going through the struggle. So some people were dying, some people were getting worse, a few people were healing and I mentored a young kid with leukemia. Unfortunately he passed and I got to this bone marrow transplant and I did get to speak to some other people that had gone through it and it was just terrifying. It was really frightening. My whole world had changed. I had. Now I was a patient, I was a sick young man and that's how people saw me.

Greg Kuhn: 19:32

Your identity was changing.

Howard Brown: 19:34

Correct. It changed and so my sister gives me the bone marrow. She donates it. It's basically injections out of her hip bones.

Howard Brown: 19:44

That morning at a different hospital and I had gone through all the radiation, which was very difficult, and they bring in a bag of purple bag with her bone marrow at 5 o'clock that evening and I got a lot of people in the room. They're waiting to see if this thing kills me Because they don't know. They hang the bag, they inject it in me. I think they gave me some demoral. I don't know why, but they're watching and waiting to see if my body rejects it. So slowly but surely, after a couple hours people are leaving the room and eventually it's just me and my mom in the room.

Howard Brown: 20:23

My dad came across and wheeled my sister because she was in a different hospital connected, and she came to the window and she waved and I just said I love you, thank you for trying to save my life. It was a beautiful moment in a terrifying time. And the bag is empty and it's sitting there and I looked at my mom and I said take that bag and put it in your purse. And she said what are you talking about? I said take that bag and put it in your purse. This right here is my bone marrow bag. This is my bag of life. This bag of my sister's stem cells saved my life.

Greg Kuhn: 21:07

Bag of love.

Howard Brown: 21:09

Bag of love too. Exactly so this bag saved my life. And so, rolling the clock forward because it's a long story and it's in my book is that I did a clinical trial to strengthen my immune system, my natural killer cells, and after six months of that they basically say you're on your own, you're on surveillance, quarterly surveillance, you need to get gallium scans and blood tests. They don't tell you what to do. So survivorship is a whole new adventure, a whole new journey. And what do you do? So I moved to Florida just to get myself on 135 pounds in bulk. I needed to repair myself emotionally, physically.

Howard Brown: 21:51

Now, financially I was good. I was still on disability, getting paid, and I just didn't get to see a lot of people because I didn't have an immune system. So I wasn't around people a lot. But I moved to Florida. My friend, david Herman, was getting divorced. We moved to. He lived on a golf course near Tampa and two of my high school friends came down to babysit me. My parents needed, thought I needed babysitting, and I probably did.

Howard Brown: 22:14

And I started to golf. I started to play basketball. The Super Bowl was in Tampa. We started to go to the amusement parks, started to live life a little bit. I needed to get stronger because I was really scrawny and my stamina was weak.

Howard Brown: 22:31

And I did that and while I was there I typed a letter this is typewriter time to go on the company award trip that I missed to Acapulco. And I typed a letter to the CEO of the company and I got a type letter back that said you can come if you get a doctor's letter. And I got a doctor's letter that I was healthy enough to travel and the trip was in Hawaii and the big island of Hawaii that just got devastated and I went on that trip and I got to experience some joy. But at that trip to Hawaii I had lunch with the CEO and the president of NCR corporation and they said are you going to come back to work? We have a job for you. And I said I want a job in warm weather. I want to leave New England for a couple of reasons I have to tell you. My parents were the best caregivers in the world. They were hovering like bears would on their cubs.

Greg Kuhn: 23:29

You were so enmeshed in your life by nature and you needed them to do that. But I understand now.

Howard Brown: 23:38

It was time to, but they gave up their entire lives, except for my dad working. They basically gave up everything to basically look out for my care and well-being and I also needed to break that. I needed to give them their life back and I needed to get my life back. So I took a job in California where I could have warm weather and I took an apartment near the beach so I could play basketball selfishly and I had to work on myself. And so I called that Humpty Dumpty version one, putting myself back together again emotionally, physically, in my career and also in community. And so it takes time. It takes time. It doesn't happen overnight. Everybody's a ball of clay. I was working on myself, which is healthy, healthy to do.

Greg Kuhn: 24:30

Well, you went to a precipice that I mean it's unimaginable really. And now you're back, a human being and everybody's going around doing their thing and living their life, and life is moving just as fast as it ever did and you're getting acclimated or re-acclimated. But you certainly did that. You did wind up making the world your oyster, like you originally described before that that tremendous experience with the lymphoma and you became a Silicon Valley superstar. You brought companies to market. You led companies that generated over $100 million of new revenue growth. You also met your wife during this time. So you really you had a book and you had advocacy born from your initial experiences with surviving cancer. You've got experiences worthy of talking about and learning from in your second life between cancers.

Howard Brown: 25:59

I do. So I have to tell you that I don't judge cancer diagnosis as complex, and it was analog times, so learning things were paced a little slower than they are today, and I had people that were helping me along the way, but really I had to take it on my own initiative as an entrepreneur, as a self-starter, to work on myself, and this was not an overnight thing. It took time. So in California it's 1991. Now I have to tell you in retrospect, I got sick fast and I got better fast. It was really not this long 10-year journey, it is, and I call it a miracle, you call me a miracle. Miracle number one is my sister, sure. Her bone marrow being an exact match, saved my life, without question. So that is a miracle that gave me my life back, and so I actually had to make the best of it, and so I did.

Howard Brown: 27:02

I worked hard at my stamina, I worked hard at living healthy and getting back up, and I will tell you that re-acclimating into the workforce was really hard. It was hard because it moves without you, and then, slowly but surely, my hair grew back. People didn't know I was a cancer patient, unless I told them, and so my career was getting back on track. I was getting into a rhythm and my friend says, go to check out this young leadership group at the Jewish Federation. And I did and it's who you surround yourself with and I started to go and I enjoyed the topics and the people. They were all young working professionals that were also interested in making the world a better place and I actually felt at home there because I had done charity work. My mom had always done charity work and I really enjoyed it. And there were some really young, good-looking women there as well. That was a big bonus factor.

Greg Kuhn: 28:02

And.

Howard Brown: 28:02

I saw what.

Greg Kuhn: 28:04

Plus.

Howard Brown: 28:05

Yeah. So I actually met Lisa there and it was a beautiful love story because I met her and we met at this retreat. We had a lot of common values and she was really a beautiful soul because her work was all about children, youth and families from legislation federally and nationally and also locally in Los Angeles, and our hearts met and we called it Becheret. Becheret in Judaism is the word for you met your match and so we met. We were a match and we started this beautiful love story, got married and she really pushed me towards even greater service and community.

Greg Kuhn: 28:51

So you're talking about this beautiful woman that you met through your experiences volunteering and being an active part of the Jewish community. Is this prior to your adventures with Silicon Valley?

Howard Brown: 29:12

Yeah, I ended up. I was still working for the large computer company and then they got bought out by AT&T and it became not a pleasant place to work. I took early retirement at age 26 and I went to my first startup and it was in the broadcast television business and so the change from analog to digital was happening and I got very fortunate to participate in growing a large sales and business unit and it was really exciting. It was a very cool thing to sell broadcast television equipment to television stations and the television networks and travel to Alaska and Hawaii that all have TV stations and cable companies and it was a blast and I was making great money and enjoying the work and still able to do the volunteerism. But Lisa was the lead for that.

Howard Brown: 30:02

But she was working too for children the Department of Children and Families in LA and we started our life together and we moved into her apartment. Then we bought a house together in Pacific Palace, sage, which was absolutely beautiful and things are great and she's an older woman. I was 27 and she was 32. We got married at Shudders on the beach overlooking the Pacific. We had 120 people come because it was an earthquake, so some people didn't want to come. Beautiful, beautiful wedding. It was such a beautiful romance.

Greg Kuhn: 30:36

Like a storybook.

Howard Brown: 30:39

Yeah, in my book we call it the Hollywood wedding and Hollywood romance. It was really, really was. And then a decision comes is that I get recruited to move up to Silicon Valley and she did not want to leave LA. We had great friends, a great life in LA. I convinced her to come up and eventually then she did join me in LA. We gave up our beautiful house, we moved into a small tiny house in Menlo Park near Sandhill Road where all the venture capital is, and she grew to love San Francisco because she got involved in the Jewish community. She again was leading the young leadership stuff and I would come to help clean up and then I got involved raising money and she loved wine country. We love Monterey.

Howard Brown: 31:30

And she then tells me that I'm working too much and I was, even though Humpty, Dumpty 1.0 should have learned a lesson. You just get caught up in this vortex of Silicon Valley because everybody is sprinting and I even say in my book 2 plus 2 equal 200, the new math. It didn't make sense, but it was the time. This is the late 90s and stuff. So I'm traveling around. She sits me down and says, listen, do we want to actually have a family and you got to start to be home and it made sense. So miracle number two is we called for that sperm sample. Eleven years later, through in vitro fertilization, a process called ICSI, we actually got to actually have a daughter. And it's a big process and it's expensive. But think about that time back 11 years prior, when my liver function was too high and I didn't do chemo, because if I would have done chemo I would have been sterile.

Howard Brown: 32:35

We would have actually had to look towards adoption or surrogacy or other things right or a sperm donation, I got the blessing of having a healthy baby girl, so we actually call her our miracle girl and our frozen kidsicle. She, emily Lauren Brown, was born August 20th of 2001. I mean, how blessed is that?

Greg Kuhn: 33:01

Almost just one of those things that you look back on and say, wow, that happened, just like it was supposed to.

Howard Brown: 33:08

Well, I don't know, because Dr Reuben didn't know. I mean, he sent me to the cryogenic center. Was that God talking to him? Was that a vision? Or was it good doctoring? Or was he just sending me on a field trip because you wanted to change the environment? For me, all of that doesn't matter, okay. The fact is is that frozen sperm became my beautiful daughter, emily Right, our daughter. So it was just amazing.

Howard Brown: 33:35

And so we're living the Silicon Valley life and I get to take some companies to go public and make a ton of money and use that to help other people through philanthropy, but also buy a big house which is not easy to do in Los Altos, california. And then I get this telephone call Okay, and if you want to dig more into Silicon Valley, I can. But I got this phone call from my twin sister that says I'm moving to Michigan. Well, what I didn't tell you is that leases from Michigan and it hit me like so strong that Emily needs to grow up with family. We're alone out in California, it's expensive out here, okay, and at that time I'd started my own platform so I could work anywhere, I didn't have to be in Silicon Valley.

Howard Brown: 34:19

And I approached Lisa and she wasn't, so she loved San Francisco. She did not want to move back to Michigan, although for family reasons she did. Her parents were there some of the time as well, and her step sister and half brothers were there, and my parents can come out there a lot easier than getting to California. I convinced her and we went on a house hunting trip. It snowed in April and in 2005, we actually moved from Silicon Valley here and my sister moved at the same July of 2005. We moved at the same time and it was beautiful that the kids grew up together and Emily got to know her cousins and her grandparents and family, because at the end of the day, that's what it's all about.

Greg Kuhn: 34:59

That seems like a great decision.

Howard Brown: 35:02

It was. It was, and we've been here 18 years now in Michigan. So did you want to touch base back in the feeling of Silicon Valley or continue?

Greg Kuhn: 35:11

on. No, I appreciate you sharing that. I just I think it's important to you know one of the things that we talked about as we transition into life number three. When we talked earlier, howard, you talked about us in some of your training that you do now that you, you have a message that you, I think, delivered very recently, that you, you're not a patient, you know you're, you're much more than a patient, and that your second life, I appreciate you going there with us. I think that's that's very emblematic of that principle and also seems to be foundational perhaps to that, that focus being so important to you now, considering that you, at age 50, go in for a colonoscopy.

Greg Kuhn: 36:18

I did the same thing at age 50. I had a. I had a polyp that, of course, you know it was. It was snipped and and it was benign. However, I was asked to come back in three years. So an early schedule and that, and when I came back in three years I was given a I guess would call the green light. Hey, you're good. I, I know I took some steps. I took it very seriously, you know increased my level of exercise eight more fiber. I hope that played a role in where I am now, so I'm back on a five year schedule.

Greg Kuhn: 37:02

You had a far different experience at age 50. You go in and you do that and you learn you have stage for cancer for a second time. This time it's advanced metastatic colon cancer and once again you're told that you probably shouldn't expect to survive it. So what, what I mean, I can't even imagine. Where do you begin, what is? And yet here you are, of course, but take us through that. You know Howard, at age 50 to now a healthy Howard. How is that even possible?

Howard Brown: 37:53

So it's being blessed, being grateful and being lucky. As I say, I look in the mirror every day and say that I am here because of miracle number three okay, which we'll get to, and either that or if you believe in God, god has a plan for me and that my cancer burden got taken care of, where many people that their cancer burden is too great and God calls them to heaven, and so it's hard to explain that. But positive attitude, huge resilience, huge mental toughness. You know I kind of already started to build that up from cancer number one. So all right.

Howard Brown: 38:41

So we moved to Michigan and we're here in 2005,. And my daughter's growing up she was for my sister has twins, girlboy twins and therefore and my new sister, my sister and my niece is six. My Lisa's half sister, beth, has two boys there, for six kids know each other. They're growing up. It's a beautiful thing we able to buy a nice house here in the suburbs of Detroit and life is continuing. I'm doing basketball guys. I'm doing where Lisa and I are accelerated into leadership positions in the Jewish community here. My startup, planet Jewish and circle builder are running and I'm busy and life is good. Also, I was only about 40 minutes from my twin sister, which I really liked and appreciated, because my twin sister is not only, you know, save my life, she's my wife's best friend and my best friend, she's an angel on this earth, hey where, by the way, where, during this time, where did you keep that bag of love?

Howard Brown: 39:48

Oh, I keep it with me.

Greg Kuhn: 39:49

The back of my. It was with me.

Howard Brown: 39:51

Yeah, I keep it with me. It's in my top corner of my desk here. I look at it all the time. I touch it. I bring it to my heart. No, no, I keep it with me. Now, I don't usually travel with it, but I keep it with me. Yeah, Absolutely. This is a symbol of love and life. So you know it is a lot.

Greg Kuhn: 40:08

And is that true? You know? Had that been true throughout your life? Up to that point? You know before you know, learning about the second diagnosis.

Howard Brown: 40:20

That you kept it with you all the time.

Greg Kuhn: 40:22

Yes, yeah, yeah.

Howard Brown: 40:23

Oh yeah, I keep it with me all the time.

Greg Kuhn: 40:24

Yeah, this is that.

Howard Brown: 40:26

This is, this is my. I don't have many pictures of me and during cancer one, very few. I didn't want my picture taken. Plus, also, we were looking with, you know, film cameras. We have digital cameras, we have film cameras, so I didn't want my picture taken. There's very few pictures of me with cancer one, but this is my. You know, like you carry a rope, like a rock, that says hope on it, which I actually do carry you wear a bracelet or you wear something. You know, some people wear a cross or they wear a hive, meaning life. This is. This is basically my symbol that I, my remembrance and the thing that I hold dearly, because that's why I'm here. This bag is why I actually got my life back again, and so it means a great deal to me, and so it's like a wedding ring or anything like that. It's a symbol to me that gave me life.

Greg Kuhn: 41:22

So I carry it with me and look at it, and so I carry it with me mostly every now, and now you're carrying it into this second diagnosis.

Howard Brown: 41:31

Sure. So I had my colonoscopy on an athlete. I didn't really have many symptoms, so let me let me take a break here for a second and just say that your cancer screening is how most cancer screening should turn out. Okay, get a polyp snipped, come back in three, five or eight years. It's not a lot of time. But the screening age is 50. Now it's 45, because younger people are getting colorectal cancer and this year alone, 155,000 people will be diagnosed with colorectal cancer. 52,000 of those people will die. Okay, it's a second leading cancer and it's a second leading cause of death outside of lung cancer.

Howard Brown: 42:16

So, it's very serious. So, two things that we didn't do during COVID, which was go to the doctor, okay, or go get screened for your mammogram or for your prostate or for your colo. You can actually do a poop test with ColoGuard or fit test, or the gold standard is a colonoscopy. Go get your cardio checked and stress tests for your arteries. Go to the dentist. If you're not at optimal health, you can't function to your best, you, and so part of self love and self care is your health, and so which I understand first and foremost, and so I really do stress people to do that and unfortunately, people in the African American community, latino community, indigenous communities, poor communities don't go get tested, and you that they are the highest incident of colon rectal cancer, and so I will just stress everyone to go get screened. Go to the dentist, because it's you know I'm dealing with a lot of problems with my teeth and implants now because of chemotherapy and all that. So I'm at I basically go for schedule my colonoscopy. It's June 4 of 2016. And Lisa, you have to have a driver. I wake up in the recovery room with Lisa holding my hand and the gastroenterologist I know him from the Jewish community and I say, dr Phil, everything's good, right. And he looks at me with just serious eyes and he's got a mask on and he says, no, I found something. And when I find something and he called it the seek them, I'd now know it's the connection point between your large and small intestine. And he says when I find something, I take a piece of it, I mark it and we're going to send it out for pathology. He goes I also snipped a few polyps and we're going to test those. Well, very quickly they actually went through an accelerated pathology. I think by the next Tuesday I learned that I had stage three colon cancer. I had an eight and a half centimeter tumor in my seek them and I actually had this did. My niece was graduating high school. My parents were out here when they all heard the news that weekend and lightning struck again. I mean, I had cancer for a second time.

Howard Brown: 44:38

Now people now talk about roundup and getting other cancers from chemicals and stuff like that. My doctor's like did you cut lawns and use roundup? I said, yeah, he goes. How many other friends did? Everyone. Did they get lymphoma? Did they get? No, did they get colon cancer? No, they said the reason that you got cancer and, again, most people don't know. But it can be from diet and it can be from hereditary. Mine is neither. Mine was because of my body didn't create an enzyme to control the polyp growth. Now, if I would have been screened at 40, I wouldn't be talking to you right now. I might not have had colon cancer. I would have had an early stage yeah, one maybe If I got screened at 42, it took 10 years for this tumor to grow to eight and a half centimeters.

Howard Brown: 45:24

Okay, so I did an immediate. 10 days later I did an immediate what's called a hemicollectomy or called a colon resection. The men have six to eight feet of colon like a rubber band. Women have four to six feet of colon. It's very stretchy and they cut out with margin the tumor and lymph nodes and they test those lymph nodes and one was positive. That's a bad sign actually. And they installed a chemotherapy port so they didn't have to use my veins and I waited a couple weeks. I went to the national championships for soccer with my daughter and in early August I started chemotherapy and I was back in the chair watching it drip and the chemotherapy in the chair was seven hours, slow drip chemotherapy. So you, I am reintroduced to the infusion nurses. You know, my Lisa is now my primary caregiver, trying to keep track of records and appointments and medicines and side effects. My mom comes out and helps when she can, my sister's close by and helps when you can.

Howard Brown: 46:26

But we're living in the digital age so I have a decision to whether to share my diagnosis. Many people like to keep it private and I totally respect that. I decided to share my diagnosis because I have such a big network. Now I'm not sharing every gory detail, but I'm sharing what's going on, and that's Facebook. Okay, it could be linked in, not as much, but that's text messaging, that's instant messaging. You know this isn't a pager. You know, back in the analog days. This is digital and so people are checking in and trying to show their support and others that went silent on me for their reasons. They couldn't deal with it. They had other things to deal with their life. But this is what happens when you're dealing with the fragile emotional, you know, physical, financial and relationships in this world that we did the journey called life. So it was.

Howard Brown: 47:26

I was actually more prepared now this time. Okay, I did allow my walk myself in darkness. I did get angry. I did actually, you know, was upset because there was more at stake. I had a daughter that I didn't know if I was going to see graduate high school. I was married 22 years. All right, there was. There was more at stake for me and I was actually already a veteran of cancer. I had been to the front lines and made it through Right. So I had a different perspective. So I knew that I had to learn as much about this disease to become educated so that I could collaborate, connect and communicate with my cancer team. And I called my old doctors from cancer one, even though they weren't colorectal cancer doctors, to find out their expertise and to be able to bring them into the equation. I needed to build my army and my network to be able to get make the best decisions at the time.

Howard Brown: 48:30

And chemotherapy hadn't changed in 30 at that time it was 26 years. It's the same horrible stuff. It's basically that pumping that poison to see if it can actually kill the cancer cells, right. So cancers. I actually defined cancer as building a bad you know, making a bad batch of brownies, and the body continues to build that. It's called mismatch repair. The body just doesn't recognize that you're building these bad cells.

Howard Brown: 49:00

In blood cancer, it's the white cells that are the fighters versus the red cells and the platelets that are actually healing this in solid tumor cancer. You want to stop that progression. Okay, so you're in the chemo chair and you're with other people now okay, that are going through cancer and getting chemotherapy Right. And I had already done this. I had already been through this doesn't make it any easier, but when I was able to look for resources online to learn about this and to get with my people that had been through it are going through the battle, I found Coulin town. I found other cancer research called the colon cancer coalition that does screening, and I found the colorectal cancer alliance and I found fight CRC and I basically went into Coulin town and I learned from Coulin town is a it's a 501 C3 nonprofit.

Howard Brown: 49:54

Basically, that is now 10,000 colorectal cancer patients and caregivers and families. Once you get diagnosed, you enter a private online network of 125 private Facebook groups to meet you where you're at in the disease, whether it's early stage, late stage, whether it's your caregiver or, and again, it's this learning network to help you and walk alongside of you. I didn't have that. I had a support group that I was in at Dana Farber, which was a face to face support group called stepping stones how to build your life up again and, quite frankly, it wasn't for me because it was very negative. I actually went there a few times with my mom and then I decided not to continue with it. This support group was people walking alongside of you, meeting you where you're at, whether that you were a deer in the headlights or you were actually someone that wanted to consume as much information about the science and about the future being on the front lines of colon cancer.

Greg Kuhn: 50:56

And I was where you were at the time.

Howard Brown: 50:59

Correct, and the fact is is that, although we were actually understanding that people were dying around us, people were living, they were living in treatment, they were living with what's called no evidence of disease. There were people success stories that I actually got to gleam on to and talk to, and I call this was that oh my God, it was, it was.

Howard Brown: 51:23

It was the lifeline called cancer whispering that I labeled it. They were cancer whispering to me and giving me guidance and actually giving me the questions to ask my care team and they were offering me helpful things of how to deal with the side effects, how to deal emotionally, physically and how to deal with, you know, negativity and all that because they were giving their shared lived experience. It was powerful.

Greg Kuhn: 51:51

And you took their advice and counsel very seriously.

Howard Brown: 51:57

Yeah, because I wanted to get where they were. I wanted to get to either a patient that was living on treatment or a patient that could actually living with regression, or a patient that could get. The goal was to get to no evidence of disease. And why? Because I wanted to see my daughter graduate high school.

Greg Kuhn: 52:13

Yeah, it was not a star not guaranteed.

Howard Brown: 52:17

It was not a guarantee.

Greg Kuhn: 52:19

I remember you telling me in an earlier conversation that you made a decision to remove as much negativity as you could from your life.

Howard Brown: 52:31

Correct, and that's a discipline.

Greg Kuhn: 52:35

Was that so? So you're making changes, as you know, as as led by folks who have been there and done that, or and are doing it and have been successful. Now you're one of those people yourself, or more so, I should say then, especially in this arena. It was a pretty hard one path to get here that your advocacy led you Am I am I remembering this correctly? Your advocacy led you to to be aware of an experimental surgery technique.

Howard Brown: 53:21

I learned about that in coal and town. So I have to tell you that the reason that things got bleak is that things weren't working. I failed the first 12 cycles of chemo that what I got was a lot of side effects. I got chemo brain, which is PTSD. I got stage three peripheral neuropathy, which is burning and numbness of the of the hands and the fingers and the feet and the toes. And we've actually solved that because putting an ice cap on your head and your mittens and booties on help relieve that and we learned that through colon town. It's beautiful innovation from patients to the medical community. But I didn't have that. I was failing the surgeries. I had a second colon resection and then I had to make a decision to do more salvage chemo Hail Mary chemo or to do a clinical trial. Well, I actually weighed that, weighed the evidence, talk to my care team and I did a clinical trial. Well, I failed that clinical trial.

Howard Brown: 54:19

So, a year from being diagnosed stage three colon cancer, the cancer spread to my liver, to my stomach lining called peritoneum and momentum, and to my bowel. When it spreads and you become metastatic and you actually doctor, google that 4% chance of living six to eight months, 4% chance of living for. And again they. That's a range and you know the data. You know no one knows your number, but you're faced with your mortality, your life clock is shortened Right, and you're still dealing with some harsh treatments.

Howard Brown: 54:54

So I did learn about this treatment called it's called CRS, high pack, cider reduction, hyper interpranarochemotherapy. So I went through a surgery in March of 18. Okay, after failing everything else, okay, they cut me from chest to pelvic bone and they went in with microscopic glasses. A surgical oncologist removed dead in live cancer cells that they could see, shave my liver, remove my gallbladder, remove my peritoneum momentum, cut a ton of my bowel out, and then poor, hot chemotherapy to kill micro cell cancer. It's fairly controversial, okay, but it's supposed to give you life extension from two months to two years at, with a 30% chance of success. But that's better than zero, better than four or zero right.

Howard Brown: 55:45

And then zero four percent Wow. Massive 13 hour surgery. My job was to wake up in the ICU and press the morphine drip button with 90 staples from chest to pelvis.

Greg Kuhn: 55:58

It's insane. I once again had to be terrifying.

Howard Brown: 56:05

You don't have a choice. You dealt the hand that you have to play out. It was absolutely terrifying, but the fact that I had been through cancer before helped me, because my mental toughness was at an all time high. I was a Marine on a mission. I was a cancer patient that had to see his daughter graduate high school even though that it was stacked against me.

Howard Brown: 56:27

Now I want to get back to what you said about negativity. One of the things that I had to do was I had to be focused, all right, and the advice I give to anyone diagnosed with cancer now and I do a lot of cancer whispering Is it's your time to be selfish. And the number one thing that you can't do, okay, that's don't be selfish. The number two thing is don't isolate, and I certainly did not isolate. Isolation breeds depression, it breeds anxiety, it could be breed addiction, alcoholism, anger. It can breed a lot of bad stuff, and I we need to actually go ask and accept help.

Howard Brown: 57:10

And so I was learning those lessons, and the lesson that they told me is that you know there's wars there, shootings all the time and there's friction in relationships and you, you have to take that out in order to heal. And you have to be able to sleep. Sleeping is healing. You have to be able to hydrate, you have to be able to eat, you have to be able to get enough activity. But bringing all that other mischievous, which is a Jewish word for, called craziness, doesn't heal, it doesn't help. So if you can be disciplined with that mental toughness to be able to eliminate that.

Howard Brown: 57:47

Now what happens is that you can eliminate watching TV, you can eliminate talking about stuff, but you don't have to bear your head in the sand. You can be aware of what's going on in the world and it's always not pleasant. There's a war going on in the Middle East, there's a war going on in the Ukraine. We still have school shootings and bad stuff happening around there, but also personal connection negativity I had to be able to.

Howard Brown: 58:11

There's people that left me and there's people that I actually had to leave, including certain family members that I had to just minimize my involvement with them because it wasn't helpful. The mission was to walk, see my daughter graduate high school and to get to some type of stability and cancer, and that takes a lot of energy. Just to get out of bed each day. Thank God, the dog needed to go walking right and I'm a pretty self motivated guy. But when you're loaded up on steroids and you're puking your guts out or you're living in the bathroom, okay, it's not as easy to be able to say that just to get out of bed every day.

Howard Brown: 58:48

And some days I didn't, but many days when I didn't want to, I did and took a step forward and took a step forward and boy was I getting a lot of encouragement and a lot of support to do that. And Lisa was taking care of all the life the bills, the appointments, the medicines, emily to school, emily to soccer I mean we were. If I didn't have her, I how do you get through? So again, caregivers you know there's 3.5 million unpaid caregivers are taking care of elderly and kids and sick people. They're angels on this earth, because I don't know how you do it alone I wouldn't have got through. I mean it's. I mean again and again, if you don't have a caregiver, one can be provided for you, and so that's when you get seek that help. And so many people came to my aid and I really learned a lot from this.

Howard Brown: 59:39

But I had to heal again. Now I had experience healing, you know, the first time in Los Angeles. But I'm healing now and I'm a dad and I'm married and it's still very long journey. I have scar tissue. They couldn't tell me if I was no evidence of disease yet. I'm on maintenance chemo. I'm still on tons of medications and blood thinners. I'm still getting surveillance every quarter.

Howard Brown: 1:00:05

But I was also immersed in Cullin Town. I joined the board of directors. I wanted to help others. I'm screaming at the top of my lungs to go get screened so you don't have to actually go through chemo surgery, radiation Ablation, which is basically burning it out who. I don't wish that on anyone, so go get screen. And what I do is I actually carry a piece of blue with me and this is really important about intentionality and being authentic. You is that I wear a pin on my suit lapel. It's blue. Blue is the colon cancer. Every cancer has a color. I'm wearing blue today. I usually have something blue near me, okay, at all times, and I wear blue sneakers when I speak on stage. And what that means is that one is to go get screened. It's my reminder to tell everyone to go get screened.

Howard Brown: 1:00:57

Number two, it's honoring those that are still in treatment cancer treatment, not just colon cancer. I want to make sure that they are recognized. Because I've been there, I know that the journey is complex, it is emotional, it is difficult for you and for your families. I want to make sure that I am intentionally recognizing the people that are struggling and going through cancer or any type of debilitating thing. It could be alcoholism, it could be another illness. I don't care what it is.

Howard Brown: 1:01:28

Okay, I call it cancer. And then the next thing is that I know that this disease called cancer kills people every single day, and I want to honor their memory. Okay, you don't, you don't even get 140 characters on a tombstone, but there's a lot of people in the cancer world that were my cancer whispers, that taught me and guided me through that, are now dead, and I do not want to forget their memory and what they taught me and what they shared with me, Because they were heroic in their time and they, they, they took their time to help me get through, and so it is my obligation to actually call their memory and so that I tell everybody and that's the intentionality that you bring to the table. Okay, and that's how I share my light.

Greg Kuhn: 1:02:22

That's exactly what I want to say. It's your obligation to shine brightly, and I I know that your passion is. It's palpable and it's inspiring. You are shining brightly, you have shown brightly. You tell us about shining brightly as a, as a, as a concept and as a book. Of course.

Howard Brown: 1:02:55

I'll start with the book and then we'll go to the movement. Okay, because it's not a concept, it's a complete movement now and I'm building and it's really great. So I meet a friend of mine that I, the religion editor of the free press, who's now a book publisher, the guy named David Crumb, and we go for bagel and coffee. I figure you know we meet. He's there to say goodbye to me. He heard I'm going to die. He wanted to just basically share space with me for a bagel and coffee. And we get to talking and he says to me would you like to leave a legacy to Emily and Lisa and to the world and write a short hundred page little Kindle ebook or something? I was like no, I said it's daunting to me, I'm not a good writer, I don't believe I could do that. And he says well, go home and ask Lisa and Emily and you know, think of about it.

Howard Brown: 1:03:49

But I did tell you that I go to the bathroom a lot as a colorectal cancer patient. So I make one of my several trips to the bathroom during coffee and bagel. And actually the meeting was in a half hour, it turned out to be about two hours. And, silicon Valley style. He writes on a napkin 10 kind of concepts of my, of what. During our conversation he said you know we have the basis for a book here on a napkin. And remember, in Silicon Valley I write an idea on a napkin and go start a company and write a business plan. So I resonated with that.

Greg Kuhn: 1:04:20

You're, you're, you're, you're, that's, that's your style, right there.

Howard Brown: 1:04:24

Exactly so. He has that napkin, by the way, I didn't take it, I actually he kept it. And I went home and I told Lisa David wants to write a book with me. They put Emily, they laughed at you write a book? You go. You know your punctuation and spelling aren't very good. You know you bullet point everything. And so I know I go, I go, I'm going to tell David. No, I said, and then all of a sudden I slept on it and I don't know about you, but I actually sleep with a pad of paper and a pencil or pen next to my bed, because I wake up to go to the bathroom and I have an idea and I write it down. I don't know if anybody else does that. I think some people do Absolutely.

Howard Brown: 1:05:00

I wrote I because remember where we went. Now we're actually, you know, I'm still kind of immune, compromise and all that, so I'm not seeing many people and this is right before coven I. But I basically say you know what? I can speak my book. So I wrote speak my book. So I called David and you know, zoom, it started a little bit and you know we had Skype and we have FaceTime and we had all that. I said David, I said I have one request and he said well, most authors have like 20, I got one, only one.

Howard Brown: 1:05:31

He goes to the easy. I said, if you allow me to speak my book, interview the most influential people in my life, like family friends, camp counselors, doctors, mentors, business leaders, you know, and we can teach and write a book about. You know a life guide Okay, the people can relate to from their own families, through my life experience, including cancer. I said I'll write a book with you. I heard dead silence for minutes on the phone. He's like we've never done anything like that and he said to me I got to call you back.

Howard Brown: 1:06:12

He calls me back a day or two later and he says Okay, we're going to do this, we're going to write this book. But you, we have to be extremely disciplined to be able to meet every Wednesday for two hours. I'm going to rely on you to set the schedule of who you want to interview. He goes it's going to take a year and we'll write a book. So we did what's called hybrid publishing, where I actually paid for the half the publishing, they pay for half the publishing. We share some of the royalties. I get a higher percentage and we started this journey together. It took three years in COVID.

Howard Brown: 1:06:47

I have to tell you, to be able to walk back, almost every step of my life was so healing and really cool. All right, so I couldn't do that with my grandparents or my great grandparents, but everyone else. I got to actually reconnect with re correct, with my first mentor, Mike Brennan, reconnect with the doctors from 34 years ago, reconnect with my camp counselors and when I was 12. It was really cool. I brought them on. We recorded every session. We've got a lot of b-roll and those recordings became transcripts. The transcripts become drafts, the drafts become chapters and then everything has to be edited so it's readable. Okay, and we did this three years. I think we missed two Wednesdays. I mean it was incredible to how it came together. It was hard work. There's 901 steps to actually produce a book.

Greg Kuhn: 1:07:40

It sounds like the journey of creating it. Has it surpassed your expectations and represents a reward in and of itself, regardless of what it's doing now and what the book. Obviously it's I think it's pretty recent, right, I mean it just had it's your birthday.

Howard Brown: 1:08:06

Just had it's your birthday.

Greg Kuhn: 1:08:07

Okay.

Howard Brown: 1:08:08

So I got to press the green light on Amazon on September 27 of last year and go on this year long book tour and public you never stop public publicizing your book and what you realize is that all that effort and the three years to publish the book, I am now a bestselling published author. I love it, congratulations.

Howard Brown: 1:08:27

Okay, it's amazing feeling and and to put your word and work out in the world. Books don't sell themselves. I realized that I actually had to put my entrepreneurial hat and my marketing hat on and go amplify this book if I wanted people to be aware of it, and so I've now started that journey to be able to do that. Ok, and here's. The book is not a normal book in the what you would actually say, that the author is speaking to the reader. I am not doing that. I am inviting you into those zoom rooms. You get to be an observer in the zoom rooms where my family is fighting over If we remembered which grandma's brisket is better than the others.

Howard Brown: 1:09:11

Grandma brisket, normal family stuff that you had with your family, you can relate to it. Going on a family trip and things going completely haywire right, or things going beautifully and and and what we do. And at the end of every chapter, I actually actually give homework, I tell people what they should actually, I give them a call to action with different websites and links that I care about, that they should know about, and I actually challenge them to do to shine brightly in some way after each chapter. And so this is a life guide book, a book to live a resilient life, and it starts with my grandmother talking about kindness and giving and healing and it ends with hope. And in between are a lot of cool stories in my life, from Silicon Valley, from my happy place called basketball Everyone should have a happy place because that's your stress free zone from my love life and meeting the love of my life Lisa from the Miracle Girl, emily from mentorship is leadership. This book is cool and I start with a chorus of praise. I reached out and so most books have 10 or 12 endorsements. I had a hundred. I cut it down to 65 because my we some were repetitive.

Howard Brown: 1:10:17

My book starts with a chorus of praise in each phase of my life from people that impacted me and I wanted them, in the book, to share their wisdom. And then we start with my grandmother and our family beginnings my grandfather, ok, and then my original mentor, my dad and my work mentors and me becoming a Jewish big brother and then cancer one. And so this book, ok, is really broken up and you don't have to read it all at once, but it's a quick read. And, again, for a new author, selling fifty hundred copies in a year is actually everyone's telling me oh my God, that's huge.

Howard Brown: 1:10:51

Well, I didn't sell themselves. I sell from stage, I sell. I sell them to everything on when I'm on podcasts, your listeners might want to pick up the book on Amazon or the Kindle, or contact me for multiple books and I sign everyone. I do a book plate and I sign them. If the people call me and a book plate looks like this it's a sticker, because there's no more real book signings I sign this with a personal note and they stick it on their book, and so that's the exciting part of the book, and the book really now changed the trajectory of my life, right.

Howard Brown: 1:11:23

So, now I'm saying, ok, I actually want to build a movement so that we can actually lift up others. The world is a tough place, so that's what a survivorship coach is. So I'm the only survivorship coach that I know about in the world, but I'm a life coach. I'm a mentorship coach. I can help people from getting out of bed to actually talking to your kids, to job loss. It doesn't matter it could be a small speed bump or a big speed bump, because we all get knocked down in life and in business, and in health and in relationships.

Howard Brown: 1:11:56

I'm not a psychotherapist, I'm not a doctor, I'm not a dentist OK, but I can, for lived experience, give you the breadcrumbs to get back up again, ok, from severe health to something not as severe, such as a job loss or something like that, or somewhere where you want to do life improvement.

Howard Brown: 1:12:14

And so shining brightly actually allows you to build that emotional well being, physical well being, financial well being and relationship well being all the cores in your life wheel. And I ask people to join me, to share their light, to go help others, because the big lesson I learned from two big cancers is it's not what you actually get in this world, it's what you give, and if you can lift yourself up and then lift up others, ok, then we shine brightly. Think about the thousands of people that help me during cancer these last seven years. They allowed them to share their light with me, and do you think that lifted me up? Absolutely, it did, and so I want people to be able to share their light with others. Ok, to become a force multiplier for good and positive change. And if we each do that and incorporate that into our discipline and into our intentionality and authenticity, you'll see the change move. And again, I'm not Polly Anna.

Howard Brown: 1:13:18

I know there's bad stuff happening every day and there's a major war and major bad things happening, but that's what I try to do each day.

Greg Kuhn: 1:13:26

That's a great segue, howard, because I think you're already touching on this last question I have for you. By the way, we're going to make sure all of Howard's contact information is in the description of this episode. Wherever you're watching, we're listening to it, you know. To wrap things up, howard, you've been so generous with your time, and not just the time itself, but how you spent it. We talked, before we started recording, about our intention to take advantage of the opportunity that we have right now to create something of value, and you have gone places with us and been very present for us, and I can't thank you enough.

Greg Kuhn: 1:14:19

I'd love to wrap things up here by asking you, like I said, you you have already started to talk about this, howard the places you've been, you know you're inside and outside. What is your advice? What is your best advice for somebody? You know somebody listening to this or watching this episode is has received news recently that is painful, unwelcome, even perhaps threatening their you know their sense of self and their expectations that they have for their life. What, what do you say to that person sitting in that space right now?

Howard Brown: 1:15:20

So I actually have a guide on my website. I have a guide on survivorship, a guide on mentorship and leadership and a guide on interfaith knowing the other and the survivorship guide starts about that. You actually have to still love yourself unconditionally. Ok, you're OK and we you had asked the question that before and I didn't fully answer it is that I don't consider myself a patient. Although I am labeled that, just like someone's labeled a lawyer or doctor, I am a human, I am a son, I am a brother, a twin brother, I am a husband, I am a dad, I'm a friend OK, that's who I actually am. Ok, I am going through cancer and label the patient OK, but that's not how I define myself, and so I want people to self. Love is the most important thing when you get this type of news. The second thing is to not to isolate and live in that darkness OK. The other thing is to go get help. Then go educate yourself. Be your own best advocate. I went and got help at Coalentown and all these other resources and people were willing to help me, but people sent me a joke, people checked in on me. All that added up to my positive mental toughness to get through this All right, and I'm not saying I was positive all the time. I was angry, I was on steroids, I had a lot of downtime, and so I expressed and learned how gratitude I learned actually how to accept help. I will tell you that the younger me had a hard time accepting help when I was 23. And I now matured to understand that I can accept help and I did that Right. People started to go fund me to help me with medical bills, so I wouldn't have to worry about that. I resisted that, but I now. I learned that people are there to help, and so I I that the advice that I give to people is to be able to Get through that day. But if you don't have help, help can be provided for you. I get called all the time. Someone has cancer, and it's a different cancer than colon cancer. I can still help them. I am connected in the whole cancer world. I know how to get the resources to get them a cancer mentor or to get them a nurse navigator or get them a social worker or get them a second opinion, and I know people who can do that, so I can do it probably faster than they can do that, and so ask for that. Help is really, really important. Get a caregiver, get people and surround yourself with positive people that are helping lift you up Right. And so some of this actually takes a little bit of work, but people can assist you in doing so and it's I'm not going to tell you, it's easy Right To put Humpty Dumpty back together again as you were my third life. I'm still going through the building process. I'm still a ball of clay.

Howard Brown: 1:18:28

Not everything's 100%. Now people look at me and I like, oh my God, howard, you're healthy. Well, they have no idea of the indivisible disabilities that I'm facing, and we spoke of them Chemo, brain, ptsd, neuropathy, digestive problems, bathroom problems. There's people don't know until they actually take a look inside you and walk in your steps a little bit. So I say be empathetic, walk in their steps, walk alongside them and you'll learn, be caring. I mean, these are, these are things that are manners and politeness that we can do.

Howard Brown: 1:19:00

And then one last thing I want to add that's really important when you're actually suffering, okay, in a tight spot, whether it's severe or or or or less severe, I actually take two things actually one find your happy place, go to that, stress, be placed. It could be yoga, cooking, travel, music minus basketball. Find it and go there a little bit. That stress be placed is really helpful. The second thing is that you, what you have to do.

Howard Brown: 1:19:31

I'm going through a chemo brain moment for a second here. Oh, you have to take the spotlight off yourself. Go help someone else. Go take yourself outside of your situation and go help another the endorphins and it actually helps you. It might help you figure something out because when you come back to then, oh, me and I'm in that dark space. So that's something that I counsel and help in the survivorship coaching. Did you go help someone else? Go do a random act of kindness and buy someone behind you a cup of coffee, call someone and let them know that you care about them.

Howard Brown: 1:20:13

Okay, and look in the mirror and say what you're blessed and grateful for. There's got to be something, you got to find something, or else the world's very dark and my book uses the biblical references to darkness and light and on my book cover is they actually wanted to use a Phoenix because I rose from the Phoenix. The Phoenix is a quite ugly bird. I didn't really love that. This is actually a dove and and that light bulb and I helped design the cover with a world famous artist. That light bulb is illuminating my energy through shining brightly for peace, love and hope. That's what I want to illuminate, and it doesn't happen every day Some days are dimmer than most, but it happens most days and that's my advice.

Greg Kuhn: 1:20:58

Love it and the added weight that it carries.

Greg Kuhn: 1:21:06

You know, howard, I can't express enough Thanks for having you here. As I mentioned, I do want to remind folks that let's continue the conversation, let's continue to learn about manifesting our lives more in line with how we desire, especially with the big stuff, whether we're facing, you know, major disappointment or temporary inconvenience, the parts of our lives that are most important. I invite everyone to make sure that you start by joining my Facebook group. It's called manifest the big stuff with Greg Coon creating our realities together. The link is going to be in the description here. There you're going to receive, every month, exclusive content from me that's available nowhere else and, like I said, we can continue this journey together. And you know, howard, you have now become an important part of that journey for my viewers, my wonderful listeners and viewers, who are on spiritual journeys themselves, as we all are, and I can't thank you enough for giving us everything you have. It means so much that you have shared your time here, just like everybody who's watching you share your time.

Howard Brown: 1:22:40

I want to give a final statement to you, greg, so.

Greg Kuhn: 1:22:42

I'm going to put on.

Howard Brown: 1:22:43

I'm putting on my glasses because I actually want to shine the light back on you for giving me this space and for the gratitude of letting me share my lessons and my experience and my ability to shine my light. And so I want to shine it back to you for and be grateful for you to offer me this, and to shout out to Gail Kraft for introducing us. And so I want to end with this note and then hand the back. Show for closure for you is that if we can shine brightly a little bit each day for ourselves, for others in our communities, I guarantee you the world will be a better place.

Greg Kuhn: 1:23:22

Yeah, I, I, you know what I operate on a simple maximum, that if you can love someone, you should make so lives better. And I have to say that you know, howard, your light is bright and it is shining brightly. I so appreciate you laying down this very definitive wellspring of not just information but inspiration, hope and enlightenment, and I don't know any other way to say it. So, yeah, hats off to you, howard, and look forward to seeing what you do as your path continues to unfold now in this third life.

Howard Brown: 1:24:19

Thanks for sharing it with us.

Greg Kuhn: 1:24:20

Grateful and thank you. All right, take care, everybody. Until we get a chance to meet up again, I expect to see you in my Facebook group. That would be wonderful, but until we join up again on YouTube or your favorite podcast listening network, I hope you make the most of your time and I will do likewise. Keep manifesting, my friends.