In our lives, we often are influenced by two things, the books we read and the people we meet. Those two things set us off in a new directions. We always have that influential person or a few in our lives that are so influential that they take us in a new direction. For Bob Cornuke, that person was Jim Irwin who had been to the moon and back and had a cathartic moment while seeing the earth from space. Their first of many expeditions started with the search for Noah’s Ark. More expeditions followed and eventually, it led him to write books. Storytelling, Bob shares, is a skill set that he’s never tapped into as a young man. He likes to encourage people to take advantage of every season of their lives and try to find those things they have buried deep inside of them. The only way of finding and tapping buried skill sets is challenging yourself and going out on a limb sometimes. For Bob, it was writing, and now he’s doing it as a profession.

Tapping Buried Skill Sets: Living The Life You Were Truly Meant To Live with Bob Cornuke

We have something a little unusual. I’m sitting in the living room of Bob Cornuke’s house. He’s up the Base Institute. Bob, it’s a lovely day in Colorado. Thanks for the hospitality.

Thanks for having me on your podcast.

We’re sitting in the living room. I have a buffalo head behind me with a Sharps ‘52 carried by one of Bob’s family members or built by Bob’s family members.

Actually, I’m the great, great grandson of Christian Sharps. If you saw Quigley Down Under, that’s a Sharp rifle, a true grit. I am the great, great grandson of Christian Sharps.

I’ll make sure I behave.

Behave yourself.

We’re sitting here, we have this beautiful day. We’re overlooking a pond and part of a golf course. I’m going to take in, go off-grid, and let you explore and talk to some of the folks about what it is that you do and what gets you going down this path.

It’s certainly not a place I’d ever expect to go to in my life. Early on, I received a football scholarship at Fresno State early on, and then had a real desire to be in law enforcement. After college, I got involved with the Costa Mesa Police Department. I was about ten years on the department and an FBI-trained homicide investigator for the department. Then I got in a bad shoot out and the man died. I came out here to Colorado and was doing some fly fishing with my brother, Paul Cornuke, and he was an air traffic controller out here. I fell in love with Colorado immediately. From LA and Orange County and the traffic, and especially after the shooting, I said, “I’ve had a nice experience in law enforcement and I’m seeing all the older guys straining to retirement, not liking the job, and complaining about everything.” I didn’t want to be that. I thought it was a good time to step away from law enforcement and try some new challenges in life.

I came out to Colorado and I got involved with real estate development and within a few years I had 125 employees in three offices and made partnership with my brother Paul. He left air traffic control. To date, he’s very successful in real estate. He has 1,900 employees now in Florida. He’s doing quite well. We got into real estate, did well together, a good partnership, and meshed really well, but during that process, I met a man named Jim Irwin, who is the eighth man to walk on the moon, the first one to drive the car on the moon. In our lives, we often are influenced by two things. The two main things are the books we read and the people we meet. Those two things set us off in a new direction, and we always have that influential person or a few in our lives that are so influential that they take this in a new direction. Jim had been to the moon and when he came back, he had a real desire to go find lost locations in the Bible of all things. He had a very spiritual experience on the moon. He actually is the first one to quote Bible verse from the Moon.

He came back from the moon and he said it just impacted him. He was up there in the lunar surface and he looked out at the black canopy of space and he saw the earth. It was green and blue and white and brown suspended in this vacuum of depth, this vacuum of cold, dark space, and it was living and breathing. To him, he felt that there has been a master craftsman who created, God. At that moment he said he had a real cathartic moment. He came back, he met with me and said, “I want you to go look for Noah’s Ark with me,” of all things. I thought if you look for Noah’s Ark that you’ve wrapped tinfoil around your head and you look for the mothership. That’s a crazy thing to do, but I was looking for adventure. I had a little hole in my heart where my badge used to be right there. That adventure was lost for a little while. To regain it, I said, “Let’s go over to Turkey.” At the time it was a wild and crazy adventure over there. Turkey was involved in the civil war. This goes back to 1985. My first trip with Jim was in ‘85, and we went and looked for Noah’s Ark and didn’t find it, but we flew a plane around the mountain. In fact, we upset the Iranians and the Turks and when the team landed the airplane, we were arrested for spying and espionage and under house arrest and on CNN and news and astronauts captured my mom’s side on the news and I’m over there, arrested in Turkey, but they let us go off for a little while.

Tapping Buried Skill Sets: The best books, the best poems and the best music have gone to the grave with people. We don’t have them today.

It was exciting to be a part of something so adventurous, thrilling, as being in an airplane with the windows open, the doors are off, and you could see Noah’s Ark at any minute. Any minute, you’re going to see those rotting timbers of this old boat and have the greatest discovery of all time, change people’s perspective of the Bible in a unique way. That was pretty heavy stuff for me as a young guy who’s just a dumb old cop for ten years. I loved it and started doing other talks, more expeditions, and another expedition will lead to another expedition. Then people would ask me to come speak and I go to large conferences and churches and organizations. After awhile, there are some books that spun off from it and now producing documentaries. It took me in a whole different direction than I had originally planned.

You go over the books and expeditions rather quickly. How many published books have you gotten so far?

To date, I have ten books and have published by Broadman & Holman, Tyndale, Simon &Schuster, those kinds of publishers. Now I’m having my books being printed out of New Zealand, international, more of an international presence. A lot of my books are being published over into Scandinavia and we’re having them being distributed all over the world in many different languages. When I was 50 years old, I wrote my first book, so I didn’t even know that I could write it until someone said, “Could you write a book?” Then I realized I have this skill that I didn’t realize and I’m a good storyteller. I had these books in the first one, people went, “This is amazing. Can you do another one and can you do another one?”

It’s interesting that a lot of times later in life, when we’re in the autumn years of our life, we realize we have skill sets that we’ve never tapped into as young men, because we’ve pretty much convinced ourselves, “This is what I can do. This is what it can’t do.” You live within those parameters, but that is not true. There are probably some great skills that a lot of people will have and enjoy. They’re quite amazing. Someone told me once, “The best books, the best poems, and the best music has gone to the grave with people. We don’t have them today.” The best books had been buried with people that didn’t know that they had the skills. I like to encourage people to take advantage of every season of your life and try to find those things. The only way you find those is you’ve got to challenge yourself and go out on limb sometime. For me it was writing, and now I’m doing it as a profession.

I think about some of the accommodations on some of your trips overseas, and some bit of a challenge here and there, a couple of scary things. How do you think that influenced your writing?

I always tell people writing is really easy, it’s getting the words in the right order that’s the hard part. Logic makes you think and emotion makes you act. There are two parts to writing. You want people to get the cerebral, but it’s the visceral that transforms people, that really changes their hearts. If you write and it’s not geared towards changing someone’s heart, your demise will be writing a catalog for Sears or something. Your books have to have some way of nudging someone’s heart, the emotion side of man, and inspiring the humanity in people, that they can do things that they believe that can’t do. A lot of my expeditions, I take men that have been pretty much saying “I don’t have any adventure in my life. I’ve been in a business and it’s very linear and it’s very controlled and it’s very boring after awhile. Can I go with you and go on these expeditions?” One man was the former president of Avis Rent a Car, and the other was the head of Baylor Medical Systems. These guys were great on these expeditions because they were like little kids. We’re on Tom Sawyer’s island experience for these guys. When you can bring that out of them, that little giddy kid out of an older guy that’s constantly dealing with challenges, that’s always funny to.

There’s another thing build that that these guys did on a trip. I had three industry leaders, one of the biggest industry leaders in the country with me on an expedition, of all places, Iran. We’re doing a high mountain climb in Iran on an expedition. We had some satellite imagery and some people said they saw something high on this mountain, we were going to go check it out, a biblical note. Before I went on the trip, I’m thinking to myself, “When I go on a trip and I’m the expedition leader, it’s not a democracy. I know what I’m doing, and we can get in trouble if you don’t listen to me.” I told my wife, I said, “I’m worried about getting over there and having these guys that are literally have thousands and thousands of employees.” They sat me down the night before the expedition and they talked to me and I go, here it comes. They all said, “You’re the expert. We’re going to do everything that you tell us to do, and there’ll be zero problem.”

I didn’t have this conversation with them. They didn’t know I had these concerns, but that told me what great leaders they were, because they could tap into the expertise of someone else and take that controlling nature that they have, put it on the shelf, because they knew that they needed to have an expert be the leader. I thought that was amazing. They were very compliant and they had great personalities. They had great fun on the mountain, never complained. It was dangerous and hot and it was cold, and we didn’t have the best sleeping accommodations. You can imagine 13,000 feet in a tent where the wind’s whipping outside is not exactly a mint on the pillow when you go to bed at night experience, and they loved it.

When they came back, what do you think they would say was their biggest a-ha or take away?

They said, first of all, they felt that they were too old to climb a mountain. On that expedition, we had three guys that were over 60 climbing up a pretty rough mountain. They weren’t mountaineering-experienced, but we had the best equipment and we had some horses to help carry this stuff, which goes a long way. You’re not carting up 70 pounds on your back, but it is still tough because you’re going up these areas in a very remote area of the world, in a very hostile area of the world towards Americans a lot of times. They came back and said that it gave them a little breath of fresh air that they hadn’t had for a long time. They didn’t realize they could do it, and when they came back they were sore, but that’s what it is. Sometimes we get to an age. I was trying to say earlier, we get to an age or we say, “I can’t go there. I can’t push myself anymore because it’s physical.” I said, “You can go twice as far as you think you can.”

When I was on a mountain once over in Turkey, I was so exhausted and I was so tired and we had flares going off and the government was chasing us. The Kurds and the Turks were fighting and the government thought we were with the Kurds and they’re chasing us. We’re going and we’re going and we’re exhausted. I told my friend Bob Stewart, “I can’t take another step.” He goes, “When you tell yourself you can’t go any further, you’re halfway there. You got another half tank left in the tank. You just never pushed yourself that far.” I did. From that point on, I did twice as much as I thought I could do, because he’s right. We put a self-govern on our mind and our hearts and we don’t go there a lot of times. When you think you can’t go anywhere any further, you’re halfway there and there’s a whole lot left.

When you tell yourself you can't go any further, you're halfway there. You just never pushed yourself that far.

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Before you started doing the trips and adventures and now, what do you think the biggest change for you was the result of all of these trips and adventures?

I get a lot of public notoriety. I do a lot of radio, a lot of TV, ABC, CBS History, Travel Channel. I do all that, but the real change is I gain a perspective of humility. When I was younger, I was full of adventure and full of myself, when I started doing these trips, I thought, “I’m a pretty good hot shot.” If you talk to old pilots, you’re talking about aviation, these guys, they get humble as they get older. I realized that if you don’t look at others around you and treat them better than yourself, then you’re doing a disservice. For instance, I was over in Ethiopia and I’m doing an expedition over there, it’s a History Channel show, and I saw a starving little child. I said, “Who feeds him?” “No one. He’s an orphan. We raised money and we helped build an orphanage.” Then I saw these kids walking around and I said, “Where do you go to school?” They don’t have a school. I raised the money and we have a thousand-seat schoolhouse over there. This woman was complaining about all their friends, the babies were dying in this village, one out of every five baby steps within a year. I helped raise the money with a guy named Barry Hudson out of Indianapolis. It is with his family, Elizabeth. Wonderful family. We got together and in a small way I helped build a neonatal clinic over there for these babies.

Then I started realizing it’s not what you do in the spotlight that’s important, it’s what you do in the shadows. I don’t put that on my internet. I’m talking about now because we’re having a discussion about the meaning, what these things I have done for my life. When you go over there and you see these kids in school and they’re reading a book and that they wouldn’t have a school if you didn’t go make an effort to do that. I learned that principle early on. I want to tell you the guy I had met that influenced me as much as Jim Irwin. When I was a police officer, I used to have coffee in the morning. At about [7:00] in the morning after midnight shift, I’d have coffee at that Winchell’s Donut on 17th street in Costa Mesa. I pull in there and I’d have my coffee about [7:00] and the shift went onat[8:00]. Time to unwind and gear it down after a night of potential danger. There was a big guy there usually in the parking lot holding a cup of coffee in his big fists and real big guy. I went up to him and I struck up a great friendship over the time, but his name was John Wayne, the Duke, the movie star. He would come and he would listen to the radio and he would be like a little kid listening to the radio. One day, these little Hispanic kids were over there with their noses pressed against the glass at Winchell’s and he goes, “Just a minute.” He walks over there and he puts down some money. It was probably to get them what they want, these kids.

Not the fact that he gave the money because he had more money than he could probably ever spend, but the fact that he would notice these kids and do something about it, that touched me. Here’s this guy, that’s bigger than life, and he’s gone over and he’s noticing that. I thought, “This is the kind of man I want to be.” I want to notice around me those that are not as fortunate, and then I also want to do something about it. Because of that first little spark of influence and now we have this school, we have the orphanages, we have the hospitals being built in Ethiopia. What’s amazing, I was recommended by Ben Carson, Dr. Ben Carson. I have a beautiful letter downstairs. I’ll show it to you. I have it in my office. I even framed that. It’s addressed to a President Trump recommending me to be the ambassador to Ethiopia. We got a cop and I’m being asked to be the ambassador of Ethiopia by Ben Carson to Donald Trump, get the hospitals over this. My life is in a completely different vein than I could’ve ever hoped or planned. It’s these serendipitous things that come in your life that you have to take advantage of.

We talked a little bit about the shows on various channels and about your explorations. Talk a little bit about the mechanism and how all that came to be.

TV is a consuming business. They’re constantly needing things to fill up that bucket. It’s like an hourglass. The sand is going through. You’ve got to keep putting sand in it or eventually it’s going to go, but they can’t turn it over and keep replaying the same things. They do often, but they can’t. They generally have to have something new to provide. Viewers are fickle. When I started doing these expeditions, I get a phone call from let’s say History Channel or Nat Geo or somebody and they’d say, “Can you come on our show and do this?” Off we go to Africa or off we go to Europe or something, we do these shows. Then I started doing quite a few Ripley’s Believe It or Not kind of things that we did for a while there. I constantly get asked to go do shows. The problem with television though is it’s gotten to be sensationalized that you can’t maintain intellectual integrity. My whole thing and the police work and my thing in the business I’m in or the ministry that I’m in now at Bible archeology is that you want to put out the truth, because the truth is something that you’re proud of.

When you’re constantly on TV and the cameras are going, this director says, “I want you to say it this way.” “I’m sorry. I’m not going to say it that way.” I had a book publisher with a big dollar book thing that said, “If you don’t put it this way, we’re not going to give you any money.” I said, “I’m not going to do the book....