 I really just wanted to use this time well to do three things. To tell you a little bit about me, I've been warned that I'm somewhat of a mystery to people because I've been gone from the community or gone from the maze for quite a while. So I'm going to try to take a little bit of that out of it and just let you know who I am and what makes me tick. Number two, I want to talk to you a little bit about what I believe the information environment is that we're living in. And that part of my talk will be based on a speech that I'd vote for a one-to-two-star fly-out for war-fighting classes that I'd go to speak to. So I'm going to give you the abbreviated version of it and hopefully it'll listen to whatever feedback you have on my theories. Hopefully when we do a link, they might be all wet. And then the third thing is just to kind of briefly talk to you about what my initial priorities are coming into the job. And these are my priorities not necessary for the community, I think. I don't come in here with a grand vision for Navy public affairs. Everything I've seen certainly in my 20 years of doing this, but in the last six years being sort of away from Navy's facilities, is that Navy public affairs remains out front? Sorry, is that better? Navy public affairs remains out front and doing extraordinarily well. So I'm not coming in with any kind of grand vision. But before I start, let me just wait one final point. And that is a new guy doesn't necessarily mean a new direction. Oftentimes when you get a new boss, wherever you are, often they want to come in and change everything, or some do. I don't want to change anything that doesn't need to be changed. And I'm going to be looking to you for guidance and advice on what you think we need to do better or change or modify or leave the same. So I want to just make that very clear, just take the anxiety out of it. Just because there's a new chin foe doesn't mean that everything is going to be topsy-turvy. I meant everything I said about Denny Moynihan and how I feel about him and the job that he did. And I know that when you come in behind Denny, you don't need to change a whole lot. Things are usually greased pretty well. So that's my going in assumption right there. Okay, about me. Now, in preparation for this job, I took the Myers-Brigg. I had a little transition coaching. Yes. And I hadn't done it in years and years. I couldn't remember what I was. But I came out as an INFJ. Does everybody know what that is? Introvert Intuition Feeling Judgmental. And when I did the stacks, on the N and the F, I was sort of in the middle ground. I wasn't in extreme, but I was way to the extreme on introversion and way to the extreme on judgmental. So I don't know what that means other than you're probably in for a tough ride with me. But it's hard as an introvert. It's hard to talk about yourself. And I was advised strongly that I needed to do that. So I'll keep this part short. And if you have any other questions about me, you can feel free to ask and I'll be happy to throw it in. You probably have seen my bio, so I'm not going to get into the jobs I've had and all the experiences and deployments and all that kind of stuff. We've all done that. I grew up in St. Petersburg, Florida, Tampa Bay area. We moved down there when I was five from Philadelphia. My father was an auto mechanic and he was just looking for better work. So he moved down to Florida. That was when the late 60s when a lot of people were moving down south and the work was better. And he stayed an auto mechanic until the day he died. He was a machinist mate in the Navy and just had a way with things. He could fix anything. And so I grew up in the same house. In 1968 we moved down there and my mom still lives in the house that we grew up in. I went to Catholic schools, elementary and high school. And then I didn't really, I didn't go away for college. I'll get to that in a second. I went to the University of South Florida there in Tampa. So I had really never been away from Tampa Bay until I joined the Navy right out of college. It had been my goal since I was very little to go to the Naval Academy. My dad, I come from a big family. Irish Catholics over there, six kids. I have four brothers and a sister. My dad made all of us boys join the military. We had like a draft in the Kirby family. Everybody else in the country could select a service. In my house you had to go. Now the only, you could choose where you wanted to go. You could go in any service you wanted, but we all had to go. Three of us went Navy, one went in the Marines, one went in the Army. I'm the only one that stayed in and made it a career. But from when I was very little, my parents talked to me a lot about the Academy. They wanted one of their sons to be an officer. I guess I was the one that they kind of pinned that on. And so my whole upbringing was all geared towards getting into the Academy. I tried hard in school, tried hard in sports. I lettered in three sports in high school. Not good enough to play in college, but I tried very hard to get in and I didn't. I got nominated by my congressman, who still is Representative Bill Young, who gave me a nom, but I didn't have the grades and didn't have the marks to get in. So I ended up going to University of South Florida. And if you attended or heard about my promotion ceremony Thursday, I did try to be a chemistry major. And I came to this little agreement with the chemistry department that I wouldn't blow up any more of their labs if they would let me stay at school and switch to history. So I became a history major about halfway through and then graduated. I went right into OCS out of college. And while I was there, I guess it's still in Newport, right? And while we were there, I met my wife. She was in a different company. We were going through OCS together. We got commissioned on the same day in 86 and we were married about four months later. We eloped. Didn't tell anybody we were doing it. That went over really big with the families. But we obviously haven't, we've been married now for 26 years. Two great kids. My son just enlisted in the Navy. He's going to go nuke. That took some persuading to get him to think like that. And my daughter just graduated from George Mason with a degree in journalism. And she just married her high school sweetheart who is an incident in the Navy. He's a surface warfare officer aboard USS Monterey. He's the strike officer. Great kid. His dad is a submarine captain. Just finished up command of USS Georgia. So a lot of Navy families and just keeps going on and on and on. And then, well, what was I supposed to say next? Sorry, I need the glasses. Okay. So I'm supposed to tell you what my likes are. I like Seinfeld. And I like the jerky boys. And I like to read good books. In fact, I've lately started getting into poetry. I wrote a lot of speeches for Admiral Mullen Patron. I was this. And I often found it very useful when you were getting ready to write a speech to read poetry. Because it really helps rhythm. A speech is really nothing more than a poem. But it's just put to longer words and longer paragraphs and bigger ideas. There's a rhythm in speaking. So I found that very useful. I like the exercise. You guys probably heard about Moynihan. And I had five o'clock in the gym every morning. It's kind of strange going down there this morning without him all by myself. But I was able to cheat a little bit more. So. And I love dogs, particularly greyhounds. And we're on our second one right now. And they're just terrific pets. And I think the world of them. The things that I value are candor. And those of you who have worked with or near me probably know this. I like people being a straight shooter. I'm a straight shooter. I value that about my relationship with Admiral Mullen. And I value it in people that are that way with me. Just tell me what you're thinking. Don't sugar coat it. Life is too short. We don't have a lot of time in our world. It's very busy. Just get to the point. I think that's important. I like diverse opinions. I like diversity in general. I'm going to talk about that in a little bit. But particularly diverse opinions. Which come from diverse backgrounds. And we're all from someplace different. We all can get up here and tell similar kinds of stories I just did. So I like to canvas a room. I like different ideas and different approaches. And then that allows me to kind of pick and choose sort of where I want to go. And it either validates or invalidates what I already was thinking about something. And I like effort. And I think we all do that. I'd rather see somebody try and try and fail than just get along and end up succeeding. And you can tell. You know when you're around people who are really struggling and trying and aren't afraid to just go for it and make a mistake here and now and now again. In fact, that brings me to the next thing. Which is what drives me crazy. There's only three things that drive me nuts. It's people that are afraid to make mistakes. People that are afraid to admit when they make a mistake. And then people that are not willing to learn from the mistakes they made. Now part of this was me growing up. My dad told me before I left the Navy, he gave me lots of devices. Most of your parents probably did too. There are three types of learners in the world. There's people who learn by reading. People who learn by observation. And then there's people that have to pee on the electric fence all by themselves. He said, son, don't be afraid to pee on the electric fence. And over 26 years I've done a lot of that. But it's okay. Making mistakes is normal. In fact, if you're not really making mistakes, you're probably not doing your job. As you probably know, if you looked at my bio, I spent a fair bit of time with the Blue Angels five years. It was supposed to be three. I got extended twice. And it was probably one of the most formative jobs I've ever had. Not just because of the public affairs aspect. I mean, public affairs with the Blue Angels is, it's hard but in a different way than what we're normally used to doing. But what I learned about, what it reinforced for me, was the notions of teamwork that I grew up as a kid believing the Navy was all about. You know, like a lot of you, I did sports growing up, football, baseball, swimming track, cross country. And you just kind of get ensconced in this team atmosphere, this team effort. It's your personal individual effort to the betterment of something bigger than you. And boy, when you go to the Blue Angels, that's exactly what it's like. I thought they were going to eat me for lunch. Here I was coming off an aircraft carrier, a former SWO PAO, and these were the best F-18 pilots the Navy produced, and I just figured I was toast. But they couldn't have been nicer and more open. And absent ego, honestly, they really are. I know some people don't think that about them, but they really, you can't have a big ego and do the kind of flying that they do. 18 inches wingtip to wingtip. It's pretty intense. And one of the things that I really value the most about them was the way they debriefed themselves and each other. So what happens is when they go fly an air show, depending on the altitude and the cloud cover, they have different ones. It's anywhere from a 30-minute show to a 45-minute show. And when they get done, after they sign autographs and visit with the crowd, they go into their briefing room and it's dead quiet. As they sit with a 5x8 card and write notes to themselves. And that's all you'll see them doing, just write notes, write notes. When they're done, and everybody's ready, the CEO of the team, we call the boss, the number one pilot, will start the meeting. And he starts by going over his card and on his card are the mistakes he made in that show. Not the things he thought he did really well or what he thought the team really did well. It's his personal mistakes. And he admits it to the whole room. And the idea is you want to cover all your mistakes so well that nobody else in that room can point to him and say, boss, yeah, but you forgot to turn your smoke on in the diamond roll or you didn't do this. Or you want to be able to own up for all your mistakes. And when he's done, his last words are, glad to be here. And that's why my last words in my team PA email for you were glad to be here. Because it just reinforces that we're all lucky to be where we are. And it's OK to screw up and still feel lucky about where you are. Then he passes it around and goes all the way around the room. Two, the three, the four, the five, the six, the seven, all the pilots will sit there and debrief their mistakes. And it even goes to the extent of the support officers who are sitting around the wall. The supply officer, admin, public affairs. If we made mistakes that week or that day, we're expected to fess up to them. It's very cleansing. And it also goes to boosting your credibility. When you're a kid, you're always told, if you fess up to your mistakes, you don't lie about things you do wrong. That's good. And then something happens when we become grown-ups and we begin to feel like, boy, if I admit to screwing up, my credibility is going to be shot. People expect me to know everything, especially as you rise and rank. There's this pressure that you've got to always be right. And everything you do, all your instincts have got to be spot on. And if they're not, boy, you don't want to admit it because people will think less of you. Because it's so wrong. It's so opposite. The more you are willing to admit mistakes, the higher your credibility will go. And so I really value that. And my time with the Blue Angels was just fundamental to me cementing that in my head. You will have no problem hearing from me when I think I've screwed up. And I guarantee you, I'm going to screw up. I'm going to make mistakes. And I'll let you know when I do. And I'll do it in a very public way. And it's not a mea culpa I'm not trying to crucify myself. But by admitting my mistakes, I hope you'll learn from them. And maybe you'll have tips and tricks to help me not do it again. Now, I'm not suggesting that we have a career based on failure. You know, you do want to do a good job. But we've all screwed up. And I could tell you a story after story about mistakes I've made, both as a SWO and as a PAO. But I've really tried to learn one. In fact, I got to the point where I would write notes to myself about, hey, you know, I did this wrong. And, you know, just so I had it written down somewhere so that I maybe wouldn't make it again. So I really do... The only thing that drives me crazy again is people that just won't... they're not capable of doing that.