About Les
Every morning, I begin with the same short prayer — thanking God for the precious gift of life, which only the Creator of all life can bestow. Every episode of this show begins the same way. It's not a formality. When you've been where I've been, gratitude isn't optional.
The Les Duncan Show exists to prove that no diagnosis, no setback, and no string of rejections gets the final word. Through candid storytelling, Les shares how faith, family, humor, and stubborn persistence carried him from a two-bedroom house in Wichita to the Air Force, four Fortune 50 companies, and back from seven massive brain hemorrhages — so that anyone facing their own unthinkable moment knows the ride isn't over.
The beginning
I was born in Wichita, Kansas — the first grandchild on either side of the family, which my parents told me created much excitement. My mother was nineteen. We started out in a dilapidated rental in a seedy neighborhood downtown, and when I was four and a half, my parents bought a small home in the suburbs with a down payment borrowed from my grandfather. We were very poor: my mother, a homemaker who struggled to put food on the table; my father, a diesel truck mechanic; my little sister; and me — four people and a baby on the way in a two-bedroom, one-bathroom house.
What we lacked in money we made up for in people. Grandparents, aunts, uncles, cousins, neighbors, church on Sundays, games in the street, the railroad tracks, a 20-acre field that was our whole world — and a small golf course I built myself as a boy. Those years, and the people in them, shaped everything that came after.
The life that followed
I served as a decorated officer in the United States Air Force. I met Sharon — and fell instantly in love with a woman who had intelligence, beauty, goals, and purpose, and who has been proving Rule Number One ever since: Sharon is always right. We built a family, took on Alaska, drove the Alaska Highway twice, and I went on to serve as a top-level executive at four Fortune 50 companies and chairman of the board for two startups. Through all of it, God and family came before work. Always.
The unthinkable
On May 6, 1990 — exactly two weeks before my 42nd birthday, while our family was living in England and I was working in London's financial district — my life took a horrific turn: a massive brain bleed and a debilitating stroke. I lost the hearing in my left ear. I couldn't speak. I couldn't walk. I couldn't dress, feed, or bathe myself.
A genetic study performed by the Mayo Clinic later revealed I was born with a bleeding disorder that would go on to cause seven massive brain hemorrhages and debilitating strokes. On Christmas morning 2005, with our whole family flown in to celebrate, I awoke with severe neurological damage from a brainstem hemorrhage — and spent Christmas Day and the entire week in the hospital.
Thirteen neurosurgeons — including one generally recognized as the best vascular brainstem surgeon in the world — declined to operate. Wouldn't touch it with a ten-foot pole. I didn't give up. I am a fighter. I kept searching until I found Dr. Jonathan White, one of a handful of surgeons in the world qualified to perform brainstem vascular surgery. I asked him how many he'd done. Too many to count, he said. All of them successful. He took my case — and I became a likeable nuisance, calling his nurse every Tuesday until the surgery was scheduled.
Today
Life is still exciting — in a different way. I wrote eight books to give others a roadmap through challenges like mine. I started this show to tell the whole story, beginning to end. And my mission now is simple: to help the next person staring down their own unthinkable moment, and to make sure they know the ride isn't over.
