Eric Basu is President & CEO of Sentek Global a government and commercial IT and cybersecurity company with expertise in information security, penetration testing, program management, strategic consulting, engineering, software development, certification training and acquisition support. The San Diego Business Journal named Sentek Global to its “Fastest Growing, Privately Held Companies” list four years in a row, from 2007 to 2010. The company was also listed on Inc. Magazine’s “Inc. 5,000” list during the same time period.

Eric, was an active duty U.S. Navy SEAL officer from October 1988 to December 1997 and served as a reserve SEAL from 1997 to 2005. He was Chief Architect of Knowledge Management Portal for Alitum, and a project manager for KPMG and Price Waterhouse Coopers. Basu was the President for Global Entertainment Security, Inc. until 2006. Mr. Basu holds an MBA from the Anderson School of Business at UCLA, and is currently a regular contributor to Forbes.com.

To increase the number of cyber security experts he has developed the Haiku Cyber Range a training program which will be launching in a couple of months. The cyber range is a controlled virtual environment where all of the worst fruits of the criminal hacker’s labors can be visited upon an unsuspecting victim — and repelled, again and again, by white hats in training until their craft has been honed and their cyber security profession perfected.

Eric also has a blog site, The Post Objectivist, which highlights the moral obligation of a society to create a meritocracy as well as business and entrepreneur insights.

Willie Buchanon was born in Oceanside the city where he resides presently. He went on to have a prolific career in the NFL then back and re-planted in Oceanside when his children were old enough to go to school. He built a real estate business, Buchanon and Associates.

Wille Buchanon was a Junior College All-American at Mira Costa College 1969 and San Diego Padre’s first pick in 1969. Voted the Most Valuable Player in the East-West Shrine Game of 1971, Willie Buchanon was a Green Bay first-round draft pick in ‘72 and the ‘72 NFC Rookie of the Year and a three times All-Pro. In 1978, the Packers defensive back led the NFC with 9 interceptions, including 4 in one September bout with the San Diego Chargers that tied him for the still-standing NFL record for most interceptions in a game. Willie spent his last four pro years with the San Diego Chargers and tied the NFL all-time record for most recoveries in a game in 1981. Sporting News named the San Diego State All-American to its All-Time collegiate team. He was also named to the Green Bay Packers All-Time team, Green Bay Packers Hall of Fame, San Diego State Hall of Fame, San Diego Hall of Champions, California State Junior College Hall of Fame and Oceanside High School Hall of Fame.

Willie is the founder of The Buchanon Youth Foundation dedicated to serving the youth of America and a community activist serving on many boards and committees in California and Wisconsin. Buchanon and his wife, Gwen, have two children: a daughter, Jenae, and a son, Will. His son was a member of the 2003 and 2004 national championship teams with the University of Southern California Trojans, and later played in the NFL. Willie Buchanon lives in his hometown of Oceanside.

Professor Brian Keating is an astrophysicist with UC San Diego’s Department of Physics. He and his team develop instrumentation to study the early universe at radio, microwave and infrared wavelengths. He is the author of over 100 scientific publications and holds two U.S.Patents. He received an NSF CAREER award in 2006 and a 2007 Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers at the White House from President Bush for a telescope he invented and deployed at the U.S. South Pole Research Station called “BICEP”. Professor Keating became a Fellow of the American Physical Society in 2016. He co-leads the Simons Array and Simons Observatory Cosmic Microwave Background experiments in the Atacama Desert of Chile.

Keating authored a popular science book entitled Losing the Nobel Prize: A Story of Cosmology, Ambition, and the Perils of Science’s Highest Honor about the BICEP2 affair and the concomitant problems with the Nobel Prize in physics. It is one of Amazon’s ten best non-fiction books of the month and Nature magazine’s six best of the season.

At Professor Keating’s website, https://briankeating.com/ you can see his many videos, podcasts, and insights into his research.

Filling in for the vacationing Richard Muscio, Joe Vecchio welcomed Bob Kelly, former President and CEO of The San Diego Foundation and Adrienne Vargas a 20 year veteran of The San Diego Foundation and current Associate Vice President of Development at San Diego State University to discuss philanthropy in San Diego.

Bob Kelly
Robert (Bob) Kelly was President & CEO of The San Diego Foundation for 20 years from 1994 until his retirement in 2014. In his tenure, the Foundation’s assets grew from less than $90 million to more than $660 million. Prior to joining The Foundation, Kelly was noted for his 15-year career with the American Cancer Society in San Diego and Southern California, and five years with Sharp Health Care, where he served as Assistant to the President and Senior Vice President and also Chief Operating Officer for the five Sharp Health Care Foundations.

A longtime San Diego resident, Kelly attended the University of California, San Diego, earning a BA degree in communications. He and his wife, Deborah, have two college-age sons, Kris and Ryan, and live in the Point Loma area.

Adrienne Vargas
Adrienne Vargas has more than 25 years of development experience. She started her career as a student at Fordham University where she called alumni asking for donations. She then worked in annual giving for Harvard University before becoming a development officer for Grossmont Hospital Foundation. After six years at Grossmont Hospital Foundation, Adrienne was recruited by Bob Kelly to join The San Diego Foundation, where she worked for 20 years in a variety of roles, including overseeing human resources, the volunteer program, the San Diego Women’s Foundation and donor relations. Last October, Adrienne joined San Diego State University as the Associate Vice President of Development.

Filling in for the vacationing Richard Muscio, Joe Vecchio interviews Elisabeth Mack, RN, MBA founder of Holistic Caring (www.HolisticCaring.com). Elisabeth founded Holistic Caring in 2016 after working for 30 years in the healthcare industry. Holistic Caring is a concierge medical cannabis consultation service staffed with clinical nurses who educate, guide, and support patients with product choices, dosages, and timing. Integrating cannabis into a treatment plan for complex diseases takes time, knowledge and research that very few practitioners have. Marketing this service to community medical providers, Elisabeth bridges the gap between traditional and cannabis medicine. Her background includes a decade in hospitals where she specialized in psychiatry, diabetes, and medical units. She truly believes that cannabinoid medicine offers our best chance at true healing, comfort, and wholeness in a more holistic, economical, and empowering way.

She earned an MBA in Healthcare Administration, a Bachelor of Science in Nursing, and a Bachelor of Arts in psychology. She is a member of the Society of Cannabis Clinicians, the American Cannabis Nurses Association, and the board of San Diego Women Grow.

This week’s guest is the author of a book about tennis and aging, Richard’s most and least favorite things respectively.

The former editor of the New York Times Magazine, Gerald Marzorati decided at age 54 to devote himself to becoming a competitive tennis player, virtually from scratch. He details his efforts in his engaging memoir, Late to the Ball: Age. Learn. Fight. Love. Play Tennis. Win. In Late to the Ball Mazorati writes vividly about the difficulties, frustrations, and the triumphs of his becoming a seriously good tennis player. He takes on his quest with vigor and absolute determination to see it through, providing a rich, vicarious experience involving the science of aging, his existential battle with time, and the beautiful, mysterious game of tennis. Late to the Ball is also captivating evidence that the rest of the Baby Boomer generation, now between middle age and old age, can find their own quest and do the same.

Beau Treyz was the 2014 Big Ten Doubles Champion playing tennis for the University Of Nebraska. After college, he pursued a professional tennis career. While plenty of college tennis players attempt to pursue a professional career after graduating, Beau Treyz found additional purpose in something else. Professional athletes are sometimes wrongly said to have “an easy life,” where all they have to do is “travel and get paid for playing” a sport. Media portrayal often doesn’t reveal the gravel road many athletes take in pursuit of their goals. The desire to have fans see “behind the scenes” of the free-throw making and ace serving individual on the court is what drives Beau Treyz to produce his podcast “What Do You Get” that aims to find out why athletes do what they do and what they get out of it. His interviews are also available on his instagram feed.

Richard welcomed Paul Hynes, President, and CEO of HearthStone Private Wealth Management. Together, Paul and Richard explain the alphabet soup of acronyms behind financial advisors names (what is the difference between a CPA and a CFP, what is a fiduciary?).

A Certified Financial Planner, Paul founded Hearthstone in 2006 leaving a successful 22-year career at a large Wall Street investment firm. HearthStone Private Wealth Management provides independent thinking, research, advice and disciplined investment management for super-successful business owners and other affluent individuals, families, corporate ERISA fiduciaries, private fiduciaries, charitable organizations, and foundations. It is Paul’s goal to educate, empower and inspire people to make intelligent decisions when it comes to money.

Paul is also active in protecting seniors from finacial abuse and scams. Together with several other committed professionals, he has formed an alliance “Senior Safe & Sound.” The role of the Senior Safe & Sound blog is to educate people about the risk of seniors making bad decisions as well as the risk of losing money to scammers, fraudsters, and phonies.

Richard welcomed Joel Grushkin, the San Diego Regional Director of Cost Segregation Initiatives (CSI), and Company President, Curt Gautreau. CSI specializes in cost segregation, which is an IRS sanctioned procedure of re-classifying the improvements and components of commercial buildings in order to increase cash flow and reduce income tax liability. CSI performs this service for owners of several different types of commercial properties such as, but not limited to, medical facilities, shopping centers, hotels, and automotive dealerships. Listen to the Podcast below for insight about how to make commercial buildings generate increased net cash flow. Joel has directed cost segregation studies for developers, investors and owner/ users of properties that cover the gamut of property types and vertical markets. Curt is based out of Baton Rouge, Louisiana and his accounting practice focuses on emerging businesses, primarily real estate management and development.

Andrew deCoriolis is the Director of Strategic Programs and Engagement for Farm Forward, an organization that implements innovative strategies to promote conscientious food choices, reduce farmed animal suffering, and advance sustainable agriculture. Andrew deCoriolis brings extensive experience in sustainability, grassroots organizing, and corporate leadership in both the public and private sectors. Prior to joining Farm Forward, Andrew was part of the executive leadership team at Lucid Design Group, a software company that empowers civic, commercial, and educational customers to track and reduce their energy consumption.

Richard and Andrew discuss the mission of Farm Forward and the upcoming vote on California Proposition 12 in November. In 2008 Californians passed Proposition 2, to ban the confinement of pregnant pigs, calves raised for veal, and egg-laying hens in a manner that did not allow them to turn around freely, lie down, stand up, and fully extend their limbs. Proposition 2 did not provide specific square feet when defining prohibited confinement. Proposition 12 of 2018, unlike Proposition 2, would ban the sale of meat and eggs from calves raised for veal, breeding pigs, and egg-laying hens confined in areas below a specific number of square feet. The size restrictions based on animal behavior would be repealed and replaced.