403: The Office, Art, Idiocy, and Other Tales. With Actor, Writer, Producer, Rainn Wilson

RAINN WILSON is a NY Times Bestselling author and three-time Emmy nominated actor best known for his role as Dwight Schrute on NBC’s The Office. Besides his many other comedic and dramatic roles on stage and screen, he is the co-founder of the media company SoulPancake and host of the docuseries “Rainn Wilson and the Geography of Bliss” on Peacock. Rainn is the author of the NY Time Bestseller Soul Boom: Why We Need a Spiritual Revolution, The Bassoon King: My Life in Art, Faith, and Idiocy, as well as the coauthor of SoulPancake: Chew on Life’s Big Questions, a New York Times bestseller. He lives in California with a lot of animals, his wife and son. Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/jocko-podcast/exclusive-content

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Jocko Willink?

  This is Jocko Podcast number 403 with Echo Charles and me, Jocko Willink. Good evening, Echo.

• 0:05Speaker 01

  Good evening.

• 0:09Jocko Willink?

  I had the biggest, fattest head of any baby that was ever born into the human species. My head was and remains a combination of the head from the alien in Alien and a prize-winning albino cassaba melon from the Iowa State Fair. I feel truly sorry for my parents, Patricia Shay Whitman and Robert Bob Wilson, when I imagined them cradling my doughy giganticness in the rain-soaked winter of 1966 on their houseboat in Seattle. I was one of those tots that you see and gasp under your breath in quizzical horror. I wasn't one of those babies that made it easy for viewers to hide their surprised revulsion.

• 0:51Jocko Willink?

  I'm sure no one knew that, I'm sure no one knew what to say when they saw my white, bloated Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade head lolling about on my snowy, damp potato sack body. I was like some kind of larva. I was the color of grub worms that have never seen the sun. Picture an ashen manatee with a tiny human face. Now picture this creature screaming to have its diaper changed. You get the idea?

• 1:21Jocko Willink?

  No, you don't. I need to keep going. I'm not sure if you fully understand the large-headed pale horror of baby rain. If there were a maggot with vaguely human features wrapped in swaddling clothes, that would have been me. The University of Washington Hospital probably bleached the entire pediatric ward after I left due to my resemblance of a life-size blood, white-blood corpuscle. I was like Louis Anderson with the head of E.T. If the nurse at the hospital had swapped me with a big-eyed albino hippo baby, that would have explained everything.

• 1:57Jocko Willink?

  Instead, my parents were handed a lumpy Jabba the Hutt-like infant that made sounds like a calf being strangled by an octopus. Me.

• 2:13Jocko Willink?

  And that right there is an excerpt from a book called Bassoon King, Art Idiocy and Other Tales From the Bandroom, written by Rainn Wilson.

• 2:27Jocko Willink?

  And Rainn Wilson, if you don't know, besides being a large headed baby, is an actor, comedian, podcaster, producer, writer, director, philosopher, and I made the term spiritual voyager.

• 2:42Jocko Willink?

  You might know him because in 1997, he played Casey Keegan in the iconic ABC drama, One Life to Live. In 2001, he played Guy in Supermarket on CSI for one short part of an episode. He was the janitor in an episode of Law and Order in 2002.

• 3:03Jocko Willink?

  But he's most well known for his portrayal of Dwight K. Schrute of Schrute Farms on the TV show, The Office. Now, this show came from the British version and my wife, being a Brit, we had already watched this program and we were somewhat obsessed with the British version of The Office, but the American version of The Office ran from 2005 to 2013,

• 3:28Jocko Willink?

  which were for me,

• 3:33Jocko Willink?

  some rough years. There were some rough years in there. Those were the war years. And I put my family through a lot during those years.

• 3:43Jocko Willink?

  But we got through it through deployments and distance and death.

• 3:50Jocko Willink?

  And one thing that no matter what was going on, one of the things that always connected us was that show, The Office. It was funny, sentimental, it was reflective.

• 4:00Jocko Willink?

  And we still watch it and we reference it and we quote it and we are thankful for the joy and connection that that show brought us and we are thankful to have Rainn Wilson here with us tonight to share his experiences and lessons learned along the way. Rainn, thank you for joining us.

• 4:18Speaker 02

  Jaco, Echo, bros, I'm so happy to be here.

• 4:25Speaker 02

  That was just, I was hysterical. That is some fucking funny writing.

• 4:30Jocko Willink?

  That's a funny writing.

• 4:30Speaker 02

  Who wrote that shit?

• 4:32Jocko Willink?

  That guy's talented. Your ghostwriter is a skilled individual. He did a great, he or she did a great job.

• 4:38Speaker 02

  It is true though. I, I would always see these baby pictures and family pictures from like the late sixties and I'd be like, I'd be like, that was me? I mean, I'm not exaggerating. It was like this watermelon headed, my head was the same size as my body. It was something really wrong.

• 4:55Jocko Willink?

  Are your parents large headed at all? Or is this like a skipped a generation?

• 4:58Speaker 02

  My dad's a, you know, my dad's whole side of the family is Norwegian and they call Norwegian round heads. And they, that side of the family has big, round basketball heads. No question.

• 5:12Jocko Willink?

  So let's talk about you. Let's talk about, let's start at the beginning. You're grown up. You're born with this, obviously this giant head. Your, your, your name is Rain.

• 5:19Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 5:19Jocko Willink?

  Legitimately, R A I N N.

• 5:22Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 5:23Jocko Willink?

  Uh, you, the immediate reaction is your parents are hippies.

• 5:26Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 5:26Jocko Willink?

  And, but then they're a little bit old to be hippies, true hippies.

• 5:29Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 5:30Jocko Willink?

  A lot of, a lot of people in the SEAL teams, you'd meet guys that had weird names, right? And it was just so obvious, you know, they'd be like, oh, my name is whatever, Harmony. You'd be like, oh, you know, born in 1969 or born in 1970, their parents were hippies and they just,

• 5:44Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 5:45Jocko Willink?

  That's what they're doing to rebel against their parents, by the way, because their parents are probably still hippies.

• 5:48Speaker 02

  Right.

• 5:49Jocko Willink?

  And so they're like, I'm going in, we'd be a freaking commando.

• 5:52Speaker 02

  They're like, hey, listen, Harmony, you can do anything with your life, what you want, but don't go into the military, man. So of course 18.

• 6:00Jocko Willink?

  Yes, boom. That's what we're doing. Um, what's up with your parents? So they, they're a little old to be hippies. That's correct, right?

• 6:07Speaker 02

  It's hard to, it's hard to sum up my parents. They're, uh, they're a strange lot, you know? Um, they weren't hippies in the sense of like, well, my mom, I think she did some. She did some alternative substances, as we say, but um, but like my dad in a weird way was very like, he was very like, in later years, very Reagan, kind of Reagan Republican and, but at the time, and he was, so he didn't have like the long haired kind of thing, but he had the kind of Bohemian artsy kind of thing. So he, he's this, my dad, let me put it this way, for 20 some years, my dad worked in sewer construction. He was office manager, sewer

• 6:52Speaker 02

  truck dispatcher, billing, accounts, et cetera, like that. Total blue collar guy.

• 6:58Jocko Willink?

  Yep.

• 6:58Speaker 02

  Then, put that aside, he would get home, put on opera and start painting abstract paintings, murals, like crazy fantastic stuff. And then, when that wasn't enough, he was writing like crazy science fiction books that no one ever read on the side. And he was a member of the Bahai faith. So, he's this weird thing of growing up and it's like this real blue collar home, we didn't have any money at all. I don't think he ever made over 15 grand in a year. And we lived in little rental, concrete, 900 square foot houses. And yet, we had this Bohemian artsy kind of thing. So that's what was going on when I was born. Like, they lived on a houseboat. He

• 7:43Speaker 02

  was a pancake chef when I was, chef, he was a, he was a short order cook when I was born, but he wanted to be an artist at the same time. So it's this, it was, it was a weird time.

• 7:55Jocko Willink?

  Did he grow up in the Northwest as well?

• 7:57Speaker 02

  No.

• 7:57Jocko Willink?

  I thought he grew up in like Wisconsin.

• 7:58Speaker 02

  Illinois.

• 7:59Jocko Willink?

  Illinois.

• 7:59Speaker 02

  Yeah, mom's from Wisconsin, dad's from Downers Grove, Illinois.

• 8:03Jocko Willink?

  And this, you, what year were you born? 66?

• 8:07Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 8:09Jocko Willink?

  And yet, in 1968, your, your parents get divorced?

• 8:12Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah.

• 8:13Jocko Willink?

  And what are your memories of that going on?

• 8:16Speaker 02

  Well, I don't remember any of that, but that was a You know, it's one of the defining, you know, events of my life when I look back on it because I've been in a lot of therapy around it. But um, yeah, my mom took off when I was two. My dad then remarried when I was three. Um, he moved to Nicaragua. I'm sure you have your Nicaragua questions there for me.

• 8:44Jocko Willink?

  We got Nicaragua highlighted like a boss here.

• 8:48Speaker 02

  Up the wazoo. But um, yeah, it was, it was kind of crazy because I, he would never answer why they got a divorce. So I would say, Dad, why did you and Shay, she went by Shay because she changed her name.

• 9:02Jocko Willink?

  She kind of went hippie-ish.

• 9:03Speaker 02

  She went all hippie. Yeah, she even joined like a weird like cult called like.

• 9:08Jocko Willink?

  Well, don't you kind of, isn't that part of the gig when you're going full hippie?

• 9:11Speaker 02

  Yeah, if you're going full hippie, there's got to be some kind of cult membership. Um, and then she worked in an insane asylum in Bismarck, North Dakota. Um, and she had a goat named Angel of the Morning. So she went there. She went there.

• 9:28Jocko Willink?

  We used to do training. There's a, there's a site and I forget what state it's in, but it's an old insane asylum. So we used to go in there and like clear buildings and do like extra military type exercises. But it was in this, the freaking creepiest place. You have all these Navy SEALs and be going through like everyone is on edge, freaked out, scared shitless. It's all weird there.

• 9:50Speaker 02

  And there's some like old dilapidated wheelchair in the corner with like a blood stain on it. And you're like, oh.

• 9:55Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, there's old, like you could, like weird gurneys all, it was creepy.

• 10:01Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 10:02Jocko Willink?

  Creepy thing. But that's where your mom worked.

• 10:04Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, stuff like that. So it, when I finally kind of, I didn't really see her very much between two and 15. Uh, maybe just a handful of like visits where we'd have like a sandwich or an ice cream cone or something like that. But then when I got to know her and around 18, 19, I asked her why she, uh, left my dad and what happened there. And she admitted that she had had an affair, uh, with a theater director because she was doing experimental plays. And I never knew like, why did I have this impulse to be an actor? Like. I didn't know anyone that was an actor, but I just in my body, like I always wanted to be an actor. I wanted to make people laugh. I wanted to do skits. I wanted to do characters

• 10:48Speaker 02

  and stuff like that. And turns out, I didn't even know this, and my mom had been an actor when I was a toddler. She had done the crazy experimental plays where she'd like been topless and like painted her torso blue and run around in the audience. I know you've done a lot of that kind of stuff, Echo. And

• 11:07Jocko Willink?

  Echo's already a fan.

• 11:11Speaker 02

  And she had an affair with the theater director of the crazy theater play and left my dad and left me big headed toddler. And but I do want to say like, she came back into my life when I was 15, 16 years old. She committed to coming back into my life, getting to know me. She felt bad about what she had done. She wanted to repair the relationship. And she really worked hard to have a relationship and and atone for her mistake. And, and you know, just a shout out to anyone that's, you know, had a kid and didn't raise the kid for whatever reason, no judgment. You can always come back. It's never too late. And

• 11:54Speaker 02

  she made a big impact in my life when I was a teenager. Like, she had a big heart. She really knew about emotions and she put her arm around me and just talked to me how I was feeling. And no one in my existing family did that at all. And it made a big difference. And probably I wouldn't have been as successful as I am today without kind of a mom coming back into my life. And from like 16 to my early 20s, like really being with me in that way.

• 12:21Jocko Willink?

  And one thing I noticed about this, and I was gonna talk about it later, but let's bring it up now. So I found it interesting that your dad like kind of didn't tell you. And to me, That seemed like the right thing to do. Like if I was to get divorced from my wife and my wife did some heinous things and my kids were little, I wouldn't, I would try not to be the dad that's like, your mom is a filthy, disgusting, you know, I would try not to be. I did, I would try not to be that guy.

• 12:49Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 12:49Jocko Willink?

  Because I would think that the best thing you could do is try and give them the best possible image and when they grow up, they'll figure it out. It seems like that's the move.

• 12:59Speaker 02

  You, you, you hear about this all the time. You hear about these painful divorces and you hear about both sides putting the kids in the middle and like bombarding the kids with like, well, your dad did blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And with the secretary, well, your mom stole all the money and spent it on the blah, blah, blah. And the, you know, these poor kids are being traumatized in the middle. Like it was, and my mom Shay was shocked. When she said, and I remember, I'll never forget the expression on her face. I'm like, I'm like, why did you guys really get a divorce? And she's like, you mean, your dad never told you?

• 13:30Jocko Willink?

  Salute to your dad.

• 13:31Speaker 02

  And, uh, he didn't do it. He didn't say one bad word about her. Not one bad word. And, uh, and she broke his heart.

• 13:40Jocko Willink?

  And dude, you've got this picture that your dad drew in the book. And again, this is things that the book is, hey, get the book. The, this book, you've got another book out called Soul Boom. This book is called The Bassoon King. Get the book. It's freaking fascinating to read, but you've got this picture in there that your dad drew. And it's like, it's like disturbing. It's like your dad's like laying on an altar and there's a woman and she's got a knife in her hand and it says.

• 14:06Speaker 02

  It's an operating table and it's like, he's being like tortured by her as like this naked doctor.

• 14:12Jocko Willink?

  It's very, it's very crazy.

• 14:14Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 14:15Jocko Willink?

  And, but your dad never told you.

• 14:17Speaker 02

  Never told me. No, that was, that, uh, you know, he, he had some real integrity around stuff like that, you know? In fact, I will say like my dad rarely said a bad word about anyone.

• 14:30Jocko Willink?

  That's such a good way to be.

• 14:31Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 14:32Jocko Willink?

  I recommend that course of action for, for pretty much all humans.

• 14:35Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 14:36Jocko Willink?

  Um, you mentioned, okay. So your dad gets divorced, your dad gets custody, which I guess you, you probably didn't know how that was happening, but I guess if your mom's doing all this crazy stuff, he was probably able to make it work. He

• 14:49Speaker 02

  Which never happened in 1966.

• 14:51Jocko Willink?

  Hell no.

• 14:51Speaker 02

  Babies didn't go with dads.

• 14:53Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, no.

• 14:53Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 14:54Jocko Willink?

  I mean, maybe it was just the fact that she couldn't have supported your head carrying you around. It was like, no option.

• 14:59Speaker 02

  He had enough upper body strength to be able to manage.

• 15:03Jocko Willink?

  They looked at you and they're like, no. But he gets, he remarries some woman named Kristen.

• 15:09Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 15:09Jocko Willink?

  And like you said, they moved to Nicaragua. You said there's some highlights. You definitely got some highlights from Nicaragua. Here's some highlights from Nicaragua. I remember Kristen getting caught in quicksand on the muddy beach and being pulled out of the sinkhole by a guy with a tree branch. I remember a friend of ours emerging from the ocean after a swim. He was screaming and falling to his knees covered in jellyfish stings. I remember running and flying kites on the hilltop with the local kids, all of them barefoot. Me and giant rubber boots that cheese grated my ankle bones. I remember Devil Day, the local equivalent of Halloween, when terrifying men dressed as devils in outfits adorned with wings ran around with fireworks. They would chase kids, pick them up and scare the holy bejesus out of them by tickling them and screaming in their faces. I was so horrified that this would happen to me that I refused to go outside.

• 15:52Jocko Willink?

  I'm pretty sure this was the work of the Catholic Church, turning a fun pagan festival into a helpful, traumatic reminder of the evils of Satan. I remember bulls being driven and herded up and down the mud streets in Nicaragua by Nicaraguan cowboys who lived in the jungle. I remember the best oatmeal ever made, served up by our cook, Antonia, and the fresh, and the taste of fresh shrimp and fried plantains. What's that?

• 16:17Speaker 02

  Plantains.

• 16:18Jocko Willink?

  What's a plantain?

• 16:19Speaker 02

  It's like a, it's like a banana kind of thing, but it doesn't have the sweetness and they fry it up. You haven't?

• 16:24Jocko Willink?

  Okay.

• 16:24Speaker 02

  All, Central America is really big all the time.

• 16:27Jocko Willink?

  I have, I've only been to Central America a couple of times. I went to Panama. Yeah, and that's it. You go through this list of the freaking animals and you got mosquitoes, dogs, parrots. You had a pet sloth named Andrew?

• 16:41Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 16:43Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 16:43Jocko Willink?

  How do you get to keep a pet sloth? Is that legal?

• 16:46Speaker 02

  Probably not. Probably not. There weren't many laws around there. I mean Nicaragua is pretty lawless state. But then the Caribbean coast of Nicaragua, which by the way, Theo Von is a buddy of mine. I watched his episode with you. We talked about Nicaragua, but that area, Blue Fields is where I lived, where his Theo Von's dead. We're gonna do a Nicaragua trip.

• 17:06Jocko Willink?

  Oh, okay.

• 17:06Speaker 02

  Me and Theo.

• 17:07Jocko Willink?

  I'm going with you.

• 17:08Speaker 02

  Would you provide security?

• 17:10Jocko Willink?

  Provide security.

• 17:10Speaker 02

  You in?

• 17:11Jocko Willink?

  Echo's going.

• 17:12Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 17:15Speaker 02

  Yeah, so it's a, it's a really lawless part of Nicaragua. I mean, it's, it's, it's, there's Indian tribes that wander down from the swamps. And there's cocaine cowboys and uh, it's all different. They don't barely speak Spanish there. It's a lot of Creole, a lot of English, and it's crazy Germans and uh, it's, it's pretty nuts out there.

• 17:37Jocko Willink?

  There's crazy Germans in Nicaragua?

• 17:39Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, in that, in that little part, in that little chunk. Yeah.

• 17:42Jocko Willink?

  Are these the ones that couldn't make it to Brazil?

• 17:46Speaker 02

  Maybe there's a, maybe there's a Nazi connect. I didn't even think about that. Theo Von is a Nazi. Maybe. His daddy Von.

• 17:54Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 17:55Speaker 02

  Was from there. So anyways, it was so, there weren't many laws, but what were we talking about? Like, oh, a sloth.

• 18:01Jocko Willink?

  Oh, the sloth. You guys had a pet sloth. The legality of that.

• 18:05Speaker 02

  The, the most hysterical thing, which I, I have vague memories of the sloth in the cage, but I don't, my dad would always tell the story that they would put my, the sloth in the cage and then every morning they'd get up and the bars of the cage, cause sloths obviously super slow, but really strong, right? Kind of like Echo. And the bars would be pulled open and the sloth wouldn't be there. But they're so slow that they just had to like walk around and they knew within like 30 or 40 feet. And then they'd find him in a shrub and like pick up Andrew and put him back in the cage and go

• 18:40Speaker 02

  bend the bars back and then repeat that every single night. But I think eventually they just put him in the jungle and let him go.

• 18:46Jocko Willink?

  Uh.

• 18:47Speaker 02

  Are we gonna talk about the worms?

• 18:48Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, let's talk.

• 18:49Speaker 02

  Are you gonna go there?

• 18:50Jocko Willink?

  Well.

• 18:51Speaker 02

  Is it a bit much?

• 18:52Jocko Willink?

  We got oysters, we got amoebas, we got monkeys, we got, and then we got worms, which is like.

• 18:57Speaker 02

  You really, you wanna go there? I don't know that you do.

• 18:59Jocko Willink?

  I mean, the one quote that I self-edited and self-censored was the opening line, which says, "My most vivid memory of life in Nicaragua involves worms coming out of my butthole." I'll let you take it from there.

• 19:14Jocko Willink?

  I was gonna leave it out. You know, sometimes you write things when you're younger and you're like, "This is so edgy and flashy, but now I was gonna do the courtesy and we're not gonna put it in there." But, you know, you brought it up. Obviously, this is a fond memory of yours.

• 19:25Speaker 02

  You got a tough listening audience. I think they can handle this. No, it's, it's, it's not that. It's just, I had worms. Most people have worms. You get worms down there. That's what happens. You know, the little eggs are in the water bins and whatnot, and then you take deworming medication. But, you know, what happens to those pesky little buggers? Well, they gotta come out somehow. They're not coming out this way. So, I remember walking down the street. And then all of a sudden, and I was to my Kristen, my stepmom, I was like, "Mama, I gotta go poop." And it was like, "Oh!" And then I reached down and pulled out a worm longer than this.

• 20:07Speaker 02

  And then this knife, wiggling. And there were a bunch of neighborhood kids around and they saw this happen and they were like, "Ah!" And I threw it on the ground and I forgot how to say like, "Kill it." And in Spanish, but my stepmom was like, "Muerte, muerte, muerte," or whatever, to kill it. And like, some kid came out with a shovel and they were stabbing it and, and crushing this worm that had just come out of my butt. And then they laughed at me and mocked me and that's why I have the personality that I have.

• 20:36Jocko Willink?

  I, I mean, um, I don't know if, no, I mean, I don't know what that does to your brain. You should've ended up in the, your mom's asylum in North Dakota.

• 20:45Speaker 02

  I know. I needed some treatment.

• 20:47Jocko Willink?

  Evolution.

• 20:48Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 20:50Jocko Willink?

  So you get done with the worms, you end up moving back to Washington State in 1971. That's your next move and and you weren't really quite sure, it seems like, why you moved back there? Like, what was the reason for that?

• 21:04Speaker 02

  They just ran out of money in Nicaragua. My dad tried a bunch of different business ventures. He had an oyster farm for a year or two, so he was, they had just oysters, chocolate block with oysters, and he was shipping them up and sending them to like nice hotels in Managua and then shipping some back to the United States and stuff. But there was so much corruption that everyone wanted a piece of his profits, you know? And he couldn't make it work and they just, they kind of ran out of money and came back. So he got a job in the sewer company, in her family sewer company.

• 21:38Jocko Willink?

  Oh, convenient, nice.

• 21:39Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 21:40Jocko Willink?

  You say this in the book, "My family was poor, not food stamps or Haiti poor, but poor. We rented a two-bedroom cinder block house with a dirt yard in Olympia. My dad got a job working with kids at the high school. It was a program for juvenile delinquents and troubled teens just out of jail. He taught art and English and Spanish and made $5,600 a year. I truly have no idea how he lived off of that. Kristen was a housewife, as most women were in those days, and had never learned to drive for some reason. So she was truly a stay-at-home mom. I remember my dad's shaggy juvies, often dropping by the house in their bell bottoms and leather fringed vests. Kristen would stare as if the Manson family had just stopped by for a chat. Here's how I remember our poverty.

• 22:23Jocko Willink?

  We drove an old, used Edsel from the 50s and then a 1972 powder blue Ford Pinto, replete with exploding gas tank. I drank powdered milk instead of regular and got all my clothes from the Salvation Army. I had about seven toys and 11 books and stared in awe and wonder at the grip, at the nip-nops."

• 22:45Jocko Willink?

  And the Rock'em Sock'em Robots.

• 22:47Speaker 02

  You don't remember Gennip Gennops from the seventies?

• 22:49Jocko Willink?

  No, I didn't have them.

• 22:50Speaker 02

  It's like a, it's a toy and it sends little ping pong balls through the thing. And they had, it's like Stretch Armstrong and Rock'em Sock'em Robots.

• 22:58Jocko Willink?

  I remember those.

• 22:59Speaker 02

  Yeah, it was one of those kinds of things.

• 23:00Jocko Willink?

  Gennip Gennops.

• 23:01Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 23:01Jocko Willink?

  That one slipped by me. Normally when I'm reading stuff like that and I see something I don't recognize, I, I look it up. I didn't do that with the Gennip Gennops.

• 23:09Speaker 02

  You really did not come prepared.

• 23:10Jocko Willink?

  Kind of a, kind of a shortfall. Rock'em Sock'em Robots and Light Brights and Lawn Darts and Twisters and vibrating electronic foot, electric football sets that the other kids in the neighborhood played with. We never took vacations and eating out was a complete luxury. When we did, it was usually Bob's Big Boy, Shaky's Pizza, or this crappy restaurant that overlooked the local bowling alley where I once found a rubber band in my cheeseburger. We never owned a washer and dryer and our weekend was always marked by a major trip to the laundromat where Kristen washed her clothes for the week. And I wandered around trying to fish quarters out of the machines.

• 23:44Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 23:44Jocko Willink?

  So there you go.

• 23:45Speaker 02

  There you go.

• 23:46Jocko Willink?

  The good times.

• 23:47Speaker 02

  Good times. And it's so funny because you don't, I didn't feel that poor. I mean, my friends had nicer toys. But I wasn't going to live in my life like, oh, we're so poor. Uh, but it was.

• 23:59Jocko Willink?

  I wonder how old kids are when they start to realize like what money is and how much they have or don't have.

• 24:06Speaker 02

  Isn't that a junior high adolescent thing where all of a sudden like you have this like, you're 12 or 13, you have this like burgeoning realization of like who you are and how you fit in. Like, oh, I remember like being 12 and like, oh, I'm one of the nerdy kids. Oh, they don't, they all don't like me and they don't play with me and like, and like, you know, that realization of like where you fit in the social strata, you know, and like, not only I'm nerdy, I'm poor and nerdy. It's like, hell, yeah.

• 24:38Jocko Willink?

  You got the hand me down pants and the whole nine yards. So my parents were both school teachers, which is not a high paying job and. You know, I mean, but you always had a job, you know, that's what was nice. Like my parents always had a job and so we always had food, you know? I remember, but we didn't have like the cool stuff, you know, like everything that you just mentioned, like that electric football thing. You set up your moves and your plays. I saw it, but I never had it. Never had the rock'em sock'em robots. But I think one of my sisters had the light bright thing.

• 25:12Speaker 02

  Light bright, making things with light. It's fun making things with light bright. I remember all the commercials from the early seventies.

• 25:20Jocko Willink?

  Yes. And your, your family obviously had enough money to have a TV.

• 25:26Speaker 02

  We had a TV.

• 25:26Jocko Willink?

  Because you start talking about TV and this is again, how old are you right now? Fifty six, fifty seven?

• 25:32Speaker 02

  Yeah, fifty seven.

• 25:34Jocko Willink?

  Okay, I'm turned fifty two in a few days. Um, so yeah, all this stuff is like very familiar to me.

• 25:40Speaker 02

  Welcome to the fifties, man. It sucks. Everything starts going downhill.

• 25:44Jocko Willink?

  Everything's been going downhill.

• 25:47Jocko Willink?

  Um, Addams Family, MASH, All in the Family, Laverne and Shirley, Three's Company, Happy Days, WKRP in Cincinnati and Taxi.

• 25:59Jocko Willink?

  I'm assuming that you just watched all these television shows all the time because that's what we did.

• 26:04Speaker 02

  Yeah, that's what.

• 26:06Jocko Willink?

  That's what, when I say we, I mean, the United States of America. It was like we.

• 26:10Speaker 02

  Yeah, collectively, that's what we did. It's, it's interesting. Now everyone talks about parents, you know, with kids and talk about like screen time, like limiting screen time. Cause now there's so many more options, like my son can open his phone and he can go on social media. He can play a game, you know, or an app, or he can watch YouTube, which has eighteen billion videos on it, you know, or he can get Netflix on, on his phone, or he can turn on a TV, or he can turn on his computer, do this, you know, there's just all these options. Seventies.

• 26:45Speaker 02

  Black and white RCA, turn it on and just three channels and then whatever was on was on. But boy, they knew how to do those reruns. And yeah, I was, you know, one of these. I won't say I was a latchkey kid because my, my, my stepmom Christian was at home, but it was, the TV was just on from 3pm till I went to bed at, at 8pm. And it kind of raised me and kind of taught me about the outside world. And we don't have to get there now, but I talk about this in Soul Boom about how two of my favorite television shows from the seventies. For me were kind of taught me about spirituality. And you want me to go there?

• 27:28Jocko Willink?

  Go for it. You can talk about Kane.

• 27:29Speaker 02

  I can cross pollinate the two books.

• 27:31Jocko Willink?

  Do whatever you want, man.

• 27:32Speaker 02

  So Kung Fu was a show a lot of young folk don't know about because it's not played. It's, it's so boring to watch is why, but it's brilliant. So Chinese Shaolin monk martial artist Kung Fu master. Goes to the old west and wanders around. He's looking for his brother. So he's always encountering like these racist guys and like aggressive, mean guys. And he's very peaceful and he tries to like solve all the conflicts, but then there has to be a couple of ass kicking fights throughout the course of the show. And the other show that meant so much to me was Star Trek. I just, I love that original series. I saw every episode like 10 times.

• 28:17Speaker 02

  I, I, I had one or two Star Trek books that had like how the ships worked and stuff. I memorized it. And to me, I was kind of when I was writing more about spiritual themes later on in Soul Boom, this last couple of years. I was thinking about these two shows as like a, a parallel of our spiritual journey because Kung Fu is like our personal spiritual journey that we all have. We are all, we have our skillset. We have ways in which we, you know, deal with forces that come at us. And we seek to be wiser, kinder, gentler to grow our spiritual qualities as we go about our individual path in the world.

• 28:59Speaker 02

  But the Star Trek story is interesting because I find it to be a very spiritual story because it's about humanity has gone through World War III. And which was horrific and it's come together, united as a species on the planet. And out of that unity and they, because of technology like the replicator, they're able to feed everyone, the races all get along and they're able to go out into outer space and boldly seek out new life and new civilizations. And this is like the, the collective spiritual journey that humanity is on. And that's one of the points of the book that I make in Soul Boom is like, we don't put enough focus on that story.

• 29:39Speaker 02

  Like when people talk about spirituality, they usually mean church or they mean some kind of like, I do these three or four things to kind of make myself feel better, like meditation or whatever, or read inspiring quotes or whatever. And, you know, I'm going about my spiritual path. I'm trying to be just more peaceful in my life, let's say. But we don't kind of have a conversation about like, hey, where are we going as a species? And how can we spiritually evolve collectively to kind of make the world better? And what is our individual responsibilities to making the world better? Not just making my life better and my family's life better, but expanding that vision of what our family is and, and trying to make the world a better place.

• 30:23Speaker 02

  And we do that in lots of different ways. You can do it through your church. You can do it just on a community level. You don't have to do some, you don't have to feed starving kids in Africa. I mean, you can, but you don't have to do stuff like that. But that we all have a role to play and a kind of a certain spiritual responsibility. And that was really taught to me by, by Star Trek and thinking about, thinking about that collective journey where humanity has kind of matured and kind of realized its full potential.

• 30:54Jocko Willink?

  It's interesting to think about when, when you sit here and talk about that. You would think that, look, everybody watched Star Trek, right? And how many people miss the whole idea of, hey, we're working together to try and go towards a more common beneficial scenario? And with Kung Fu, it's just interesting to me that, or what does it take? And I mean, I guess I kind of know your life story a little bit from reading your, your books, but you, not everybody gets there, you know? Not everybody gets there. There's people that are just mad.

• 31:36Jocko Willink?

  There's people that are, they're not happy unless they're undermining someone else or taking from someone else or make, who I, you know, I, I know, known many people like this in my life. And it's interesting to think about, like, I'm thinking about, again, having just read your books and thinking about even what you just said about your mom coming back to you when you were 15 or 16 years old and how that had such a big impact. Like, what if she didn't? If she didn't do that, is that the thing that made you start saying, oh, you know what? She helped me, I should help other people, or I should feel good about, whoa, this is where I, this is what I'm supposed to be doing, this is what I should be doing. And you just wonder where those, where those holes that don't get filled in, what do they

• 32:21Jocko Willink?

  get filled in with? If they get filled in with something negative? If your mom would have come back and been like, never should have had you, you little bastard, you know, whatever? Would you have been, would you have taken a, a, a left turn instead of a right turn, or a right turn instead of a left turn?

• 32:37Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, that's, that's fascinating. You know, I, I love that, that whole way of thinking and, and, you know, part of the, you know, sometimes therapy gets a bad rap. I think people are more. Understanding of it and appreciative of it these days. But it's been one of the great things about therapy is to kind of unravel this really complicated childhood that I have and had and be like, how did it lead me to be the man that I am today and doing the work that I'm doing today as a goofy actor, as a storyteller, as a producer, but also as a writer, someone who's interested in kind of spiritual themes and topics as well. You know, how did that, how did that come from?

• 33:20Speaker 02

  But I do think that, you know, a lot of parents want their kids to like do good or do good in the world or give selflessly or whatever, but the parents aren't doing it. And I think we learn it from the people around us. You know, you hear people about that do great work, you know, in service to others and they'll be like, you know, why do you do that? Well, I saw my grandfather doing that or I saw my dad doing that or my mom would always go to church early and do the, the meals at the soup kitchen or, or whatever it is that, um, you know, we mirror that behavior. So it's super important for parents to understand that, that they, you know, it's deeds, not words, you know, you gotta practice what you preach. And, uh, so, you know, I had a lot of people around me that were trying to make the world

• 34:05Speaker 02

  a better place in a lot of different ways. I grew up a member of the Baha'i faith and, you know, Baha'is are often working, trying to make the world better and doing service work and, um, looking at, Baha'is look at service itself as an act of worship. So, um, that idea that, you know, we give to others is, is really the ultimate, just like in Jesus's example, you know, you know, serving the poor and the downtrodden is, is a kind of a worship in a, in and of itself.

• 34:39Jocko Willink?

  So you're putting this together post? Situation, but in the seventies, when you're watching Star Trek, you're just like, this is freaking cool.

• 34:47Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's just cool. Yeah. Laser guns. Beat me up.

• 34:51Jocko Willink?

  Uh, and then you, you got this, again, you got this section in your book where you're talking about comic sidekicks. You go through all, again, all these characters that are characters that I grew up with as well. Squiggy from Laverne and Shirley, Radar O'Reilly from MASH. Reverend Jim Ignatowski, what a great name, from Taxi. Les Nessman from WKRP. Horseshack from Welcome Back, Cotter. You, you, you, you go through those characters and you actually have a, a guest author that comes in, right? Dwight K. Schrute comes in and writes his opinion of each of those, which is, which is really funny. Uh, get the book. And, and it's weird too, like you, you mentioned your dad was, you know, doing his day kind of blue collar job. And then he's doing this kind of wild stuff at night, writing all these books and doing this art.

• 35:36Jocko Willink?

  You, you've got a list, you've got a list of, of the books that your dad wrote. And I gotta run through these titles. Ghosts of Ia, is that how I say it?

• 35:45Speaker 02

  I have no idea.

• 35:46Jocko Willink?

  Ghosts of Ia, Curse of Gitanmu, The Chromium Kid, The Subways of Ur, Clarissa of Tomb. Arizona Hospital. I don't know how that one fits into it all.

• 35:59Speaker 02

  I'll explain Arizona Hospital, because it's set in the far post-apocalyptic future. And the only places, the only institutions that are still working are hospitals. So there's like Arizona Hospital, Minnesota Hospital, Virginia Hospital. And that's where humans have congregated to fight off the legions of mutants that are always attacking the hospital. And the lead character's name was Romeo Sierra, which you know from call signs, Romeo Sierra. And that was, that was the hero's name. And most of these don't even exist anymore. I don't know what happened to all his, it was before like. Word processors, he was on typewriters, he was writing these things.

• 36:37Jocko Willink?

  And not to mention, now you have Amazon publishing, so he could have written these things and published them tomorrow afternoon.

• 36:41Speaker 02

  And they might have done well.

• 36:43Jocko Willink?

  And people could be like, oh, my God, have you read Tentacles of the Dawn, which is the one that did get published?

• 36:47Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 36:47Jocko Willink?

  Do you have a copy of Tentacles of the Dawn?

• 36:49Speaker 02

  I have any time they come up on eBay. Now, I shouldn't tell people this.

• 36:52Jocko Willink?

  Oh.

• 36:53Speaker 02

  I buy Tentacles of Dawn, so I can have it in my collection. But yeah, I've got like seven or eight Tentacles of Dawn.

• 36:58Jocko Willink?

  We have blown out books. We have covered some old kind of historical out of print books.

• 37:04Speaker 02

  Yeah, and then they're just gone.

• 37:05Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, and I would buy, I would buy a couple of copies for, you know, $4 or $3.99 or something. And then we do a podcast and they're $280 or $350. So, yeah, if you are looking for Tentacles of the Dawn right now, good luck. You're gonna pay a pretty penny for that masterpiece.

• 37:21Speaker 02

  Damn you, Jaco.

• 37:24Jocko Willink?

  And meanwhile, you're nerding out, um, and I think you say this in the book, uh, before nerding was cool. Yours full on D and D Dungeons and Dragons.

• 37:32Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 37:33Jocko Willink?

  You are Ragnar the Radical.

• 37:36Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 37:36Jocko Willink?

  Who, this is your character that you play, 11th level fighter adept with both bow and sword, with a moral alignment of chaotic neutral, with a chaotic, with a, with a moral alignment of chaotic neutral, which meant he could do it every place.

• 37:51Speaker 02

  How ingenious was that, the inventors of Dungeons and Dragons? That you had a moral alignment of your characters. Lawful good, which is like paladins, chaotic good, which is like, uh, I don't know, the Lone Ranger, like he's doing good, but he's off on his own, just kind of doing it in his own way, not part of any structure. And then there's neutral, chaotic neutral, lawful neutral, then evil, chaotic evil. And so, you know, with the dungeon master, you know, if you, if you start to do behavior that's different than your moral alignment, then your moral alignment changes and the dungeon master can change that. So it's fascinating. I love it. You didn't, you didn't nerd out and you didn't do D and D.

• 38:35Jocko Willink?

  So.

• 38:36Speaker 02

  You beat up the kids who played D and D.

• 38:38Jocko Willink?

  So.

• 38:38Speaker 02

  Didn't you, Jaco?

• 38:39Jocko Willink?

  Well, I, you gotta, you're gonna.

• 38:40Speaker 02

  Cause your name is Jaco and it's not like sort of.

• 38:48Jocko Willink?

  My buddy Jason Gardner, who's a SEAL with me for many, many years, 30 years he did, but he's like heavy D and D. In fact, he's no stranger to putting on a, putting on chain mail and picking up a broadsword and poke, picturing, putting a picture of himself on, uh, on Instagram or whatever. But I, so I remember D and D and I probably tried to play it like four times or something and was just, I just couldn't, I couldn't get into it. Echo Charles, could you get into it? Did they even have it in Hawaii?

• 39:20Speaker 01

  I vaguely remember something. I don't know. But I dig it though.

• 39:26Jocko Willink?

  Okay. That's the most freaking politically correct answer. You've never heard of it, but you dig it. Okay. Cool. I see what you're doing over there.

• 39:33Speaker 01

  The, the chaotic neutral and all this. I, I saw that spectrum somewhere and I was like, oh, that, that makes sense. But I didn't know where it was from. So now I do.

• 39:41Jocko Willink?

  But you talk about in the book, you're, you guys are full on.

• 39:45Speaker 02

  Full on.

• 39:47Jocko Willink?

  Hey, have you ever seen LARPing?

• 39:48Speaker 02

  Oh, sure.

• 39:51Jocko Willink?

  Have you ever done it?

• 39:52Speaker 02

  I haven't done it, but I've, I've watched it. I've gone to LARPing. I've gone to LARPing festivals. I don't know what they call.

• 39:58Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, I guess they call it LARPing.

• 39:59Speaker 02

  I'm a spectacle. I'm a spectator. I'm like the popcorn. I'm like.

• 40:03Jocko Willink?

  Hey, down here in San Diego, they have like a bat, and speaking of Jason Gardner, he would send me pictures like once a year. They have like a full contact fighting with swords and shields and stuff like, but it's not, it's not role playing.

• 40:17Speaker 02

  You could, you could see videos on YouTube and it's, it's real and people get hurt and they get like their arms cut off.

• 40:24Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. So that sounds cool.

• 40:26Speaker 02

  You'd be, you'd be into that if you could actually bash people in chain mail with a Morning Star or something.

• 40:33Jocko Willink?

  That does sound like fun. Uh.

• 40:35Speaker 02

  No, we would get out of, we would get out of school, no joke. This is not an exaggeration. We would get out of school at three o'clock. By four o'clock, we were at my friend Sean Higgins' house. And I remember Sean Higgins' house because his parents were divorced and the dad was a fruit importer, importer exporter of fruit. So they never had any, and they were really poor, big Catholic family, suburban Seattle. There was never any food around, but they always had boxes of fruit everywhere. And a lot of it was going bad. So it was like stale fruit, stale basement fruit. So, but it was cool because we could go like.

• 41:17Speaker 02

  You know, like, hey, do you have any food? It's like, we don't have any food, but we got this crate of pears. You know, oh, cherries just came in. So we would like, and we would just be shitting like.

• 41:29Speaker 02

  And uh.

• 41:30Jocko Willink?

  Rolling the twenty seven sided dice.

• 41:32Speaker 02

  And eating fruit and occasionally we'd splurge for a pizza, but we would play. So we would play from on Friday night, four till eleven. Um, Saturday morning, we'd reconvene like ten AM and play till eleven, twelve, however late we could make it. S- straight, some, you know, we'd get some food in there somewhere. Sunday, we would meet again, like eleven or twelve after, I think after he went to church, after Sean Higgins and his brother, Tim Higgins, who was a dungeon master, after they'd go to church, we would play from like one to like six and then from six till nine at night. That's when we did our homework for the week.

• 42:11Jocko Willink?

  How old were you at this time?

• 42:13Speaker 02

  That's just like between ten or eleven and like thirteen.

• 42:17Jocko Willink?

  So multiple years.

• 42:18Speaker 02

  Many years of that. Yeah. Yeah. Two or three weekends a month was that schedule.

• 42:23Jocko Willink?

  Damn.

• 42:24Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 42:24Jocko Willink?

  Just getting after that D and D.

• 42:26Speaker 02

  Oh, just, it's all about the treasure. It's all about the loot.

• 42:29Jocko Willink?

  And is it?

• 42:30Speaker 02

  It's leveling up.

• 42:31Jocko Willink?

  You can't really win, can you?

• 42:32Speaker 02

  There's no winning. It's, it's like life, Jaco.

• 42:35Jocko Willink?

  Hey, I just.

• 42:36Speaker 02

  You just keep going forward.

• 42:37Jocko Willink?

  Wait, I just remembered something from, uh, from D and D. Stormbringer. Was this a sword?

• 42:44Speaker 02

  Stormbringer.

• 42:45Jocko Willink?

  I remember a sword called Stormbringer.

• 42:48Speaker 02

  Yeah. Stormbringer is a title of, here I'm going to nerd out, of a fantasy novel by Michael Morcock about Elric of Melnebonne and his sword was called Stormbringer. And there was a Stormbringer series of books. So good memory. Uh, those are from Daw books, uh, from like nineteen sixty eight through seventy eight. And, uh, that was a big inspiration for D and D. But that soul, you do not want to go LARPing with Stormbringer because if it kills you, it sucks your soul into it. So no afterlife. Forget the afterlife. Stormbringer.

• 43:23Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. There's something about naming weapons. Some occasionally guys would name their machine guns.

• 43:29Speaker 02

  Oh, I don't know if I like that.

• 43:30Jocko Willink?

  And my friend had a, he had a, he had a machine gun. And his, I, I think it's the best name ever. He had a machine gun. Its name was Roadblock. And I just thought that was epic.

• 43:40Speaker 02

  That's pretty cool.

• 43:41Jocko Willink?

  Roadblock. He'd be like, don't worry, I got roadblock.

• 43:45Jocko Willink?

  Uh, okay. So you're full on, you've, you've gone full on this nerd stuff. And if people think I'm making fun of you, this is all the self-admitted nerd activities.

• 43:56Speaker 02

  Yeah, right. I'm not trying to corner you. I have no problem with this. I own this. Yeah.

• 44:01Jocko Willink?

  Chapter five.

• 44:02Speaker 02

  I was not a Navy SEAL. Okay. Can we just like, can we just get that out of the way? Can we just say that? I don't know how to hit people, you know? I will thumb wrestle the fuck out of you.

• 44:17Jocko Willink?

  But I stand down. I, I do not accept this challenge.

• 44:20Speaker 02

  This is roadblock right here.

• 44:24Jocko Willink?

  Uh, chapter five, cause just when you don't think it could go any more nerd. Chapter five, the bassoonist.

• 44:35Jocko Willink?

  I ask you to savor the following sentence. For several years off and on, I was a member of the following clubs at school. Marching band, pep band, orchestra, debate club, computer club, chess club, model, United Nations, and pottery club.

• 44:54Jocko Willink?

  Note, the above list does not include any of my aforementioned role-playing gaming, Baha'i youth activities, medieval weapons sketching, Kung Fu movie obsession, or vast Columbia Record and Tape Club cassette collection featuring Journey, Styx, Asia, and REO Speedwagon, and you a big tangent about the whole, that whole scam, the Columbia Record Tape Club. I remember that thing too. I never got, I couldn't afford the whatever even get in the program in the first place. And then, if that wasn't enough, I decided to play the bassoon. Boom. Universe explodes, then implodes, then explodes again, quickly folding in on itself, only to create infinite other bassoon-shaped universes. So, the bassoon. What's up?

• 45:44Jocko Willink?

  Talk to me about the bassoon.

• 45:46Speaker 02

  You want to get into bassooning?

• 45:48Jocko Willink?

  Look, I don't want to get into it, but maybe a brief description would be good. Alright, get into it, let's go.

• 45:53Speaker 02

  No, man, he, he, here's the deal. You start, you start out in band, I'm on the recorder, that's cool. Then they're like, okay, pick your instrument, you know, in sixth grade, right? Did you guys play at all? It's band at all?

• 46:05Jocko Willink?

  I, I made it to recorder.

• 46:07Speaker 02

  Okay, recorder, not pass recorder, you didn't go to trumpet or?

• 46:10Jocko Willink?

  No, because I got a guitar. I got a bass and a guitar.

• 46:12Speaker 02

  Yo, let's go! Um, so, then I went to clarinet, okay, whatever. And then I played a little saxophone on the side, and then I wanted to play saxophone. Saxophones are cool. And I talk about that, like, the saxophone section, they could wear Hawaiian shirts and have sunglasses. Kind of like Bill Clinton was going on, like, doing the rock'em sock'em, rock and roll saxophone, right? And, uh, uh, and then I, so I said to the band teacher, whose name was, and I'm not kidding you, his name was John Law. John Law, yeah. And I was like, Mr. Law, I want to play the sax. And he's like, we've got enough sax players. But I've got something really cool for you.

• 46:54Speaker 02

  I have got an instrument, everyone is gonna flip, it's amazing, it's so cool. It's called the bassoon. I was like, ooh. I was very susceptible at that point, you know, after my long forty-eight hour weekend, long Dungeons and Dragons, I wasn't thinking straight. I'm like, sign me up.

• 47:11Jocko Willink?

  He profiled you too.

• 47:12Speaker 02

  Yeah, he got right in it, yeah. He was like, the girls are gonna be all over you. They're gonna be licking your bassoon. Sorry, sorry, mom. So, bassoon is a big double reed instrument, you assemble it, it's like this big. You, you hook it around your neck, and it's, and it's, it's pretty big, you know, and then it sounds like this.

• 47:38Speaker 02

  So I spent many years playing the bassoon. I actually got pretty good, and I was like, uh, you know? It's another, you talk about these life choices, there's another, there's a parallel universe where this guy is a professional bassoonist with the St. Paul Symphony Orchestra. So, thank God I dodged that bassoon bullet.

• 48:02Jocko Willink?

  Now, despite all this nerdery, you're still kinda, you're still doing some rebel-ish type things. You're forking lawns and toilet papering trees. You get rolled up by the police at some point.

• 48:14Speaker 02

  I do. Yeah, I spent my time. I did my time. I spent 11 minutes in Lake Forest Park, Washington, police precinct. My parents being called at 2:00 in the morning because we were out. We would do, we called ourselves the Taco Terrorists because we would do unusual things to people's lawns. And one time, we would, we would taco them.

• 48:35Jocko Willink?

  What does that have to do with tacos? Okay.

• 48:36Speaker 02

  We would go to like, buy stale tacos in big, in bulk. And then we'd put them all over, we'd get like shaving cream and make like shaving cream tacos and cover people's lawns with tacos. So we were imaginative. We had a lot of fun.

• 48:53Jocko Willink?

  Who'd you target?

• 48:54Speaker 02

  Assholes.

• 48:56Jocko Willink?

  Like assholes from school?

• 48:57Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah. Sometimes friend assholes, like friend, like they're really our friends, but we kinda like wanted to get them. And sometimes it was like just the asshole jocks.

• 49:07Jocko Willink?

  Did they ever seek retribution?

• 49:09Speaker 02

  No, not really.

• 49:10Jocko Willink?

  Did you guys maintain anonymity?

• 49:12Speaker 02

  We did, except to the police, that crack police force of Lake Forest Park, Washington, that arrested us, arrested us. We went into a 7-Eleven at 2:00 AM to buy eggs and bought out all the eggs from the 7-Eleven. And the cashier guy was like, hey, Marty, down in the precinct. We got a bunch of 12-year-olds buying eggs at the 7-Eleven. You might want to roll up on this. And they, we got some reports of people's houses getting toilet paper. Let me search your pockets here. I didn't, we didn't know like our rights. Be like, hey, you can't search me. What's the probable cause here? And so then we got put

• 49:53Speaker 02

  in, then the parents got called and that was it. But I did my time, man. I've been there. The big house.

• 50:04Jocko Willink?

  1982, you're 16 years old, and you end up moving to Chicago. Again, this is all in the book. Funny ass stories, details are in the book, get the book. But you end up moving to Chicago. And there's a transition that happens here.

• 50:18Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 50:19Jocko Willink?

  Especially a musical trip. Well, we'll start with a musical transition. So you know, it was Billy Squire, there's Air Supply, there was Styx, and there's other lame music. You get to Chicago and you actually didn't cover really where this introduction came from, but you get to Chicago and all of a sudden it's Violent Femmes, it's Kusku Doo, it's The Clash, Joy Division, Psychedelic Furs, B52s, X, Joy Division, English Beat, Talking Heads, and Black Flag.

• 50:46Speaker 02

  Yeah, right on.

• 50:48Jocko Willink?

  Hell, yeah.

• 50:49Speaker 02

  Yeah, there was.

• 50:49Jocko Willink?

  How did that happen?

• 50:50Speaker 02

  Well, it's this, it was this weird con that was being played and the American people, and it may not have happened in California because people in California were cool, but in Seattle, in the late 70s, early 80s, the only way you could get music was through Columbia Records and Tapes Club, or, and because no one had any real money to go buy into a record store, and we bought some records, but even at the record stores, you couldn't find punk rock, or new wave, or indie rock, or any of that kind of stuff. And the radio stations, KZOK and KISW, all they played was classic rock, rock, rock, which is pretty awesome.

• 51:31Speaker 02

  I love my classic rock. But that's, but there's this whole other world going on at that time, you know, that we just didn't, they didn't play any of those songs. And so I wrote, I'll never forget, like this girl, I can't remember her name, I've got to figure out her name, from, from my Seattle school, she's like, listen to this. And she gave me a cassette tape. And it was the early Police, like Zenyatta Mondada on one side, and it was The Clash, like, on the other side. And then she gave me another cassette later, it was like Elvis Costello and like, early kind of Talking Heads, that was way more punky. And I was like,

• 52:10Speaker 02

  Oh my, I had no idea that this world of music existed that was angry and crazy and I mean, we got some like Black Sabbath stuff, but not like this really smart, edgy, weird, experimental music. And so I was, I was all in all of a sudden on that. So.

• 52:28Jocko Willink?

  So that actually happened while you were in Seattle?

• 52:30Speaker 02

  Yeah. And as I was leaving, yeah, it was the summer that I left.

• 52:33Jocko Willink?

  And then you get, so you get to Chicago and now you're kind of like into that music?

• 52:37Speaker 02

  Yeah. And so I change up my whole wardrobe, get rid of my nerdy wardrobe. I bought a tie with a piano keys on it, skinny one. And I had a ska tie with the checks, you know, the ska, like English bead specials. And, um, and, uh, yeah, and I wore like a, it was a John Hughes movie. I basically walked into a John Hughes movie, essentially.

• 53:01Jocko Willink?

  That's when you got to Chicago?

• 53:03Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 53:04Jocko Willink?

  This is also kind of, uh, I believe where the, the acting thing started. Cause you're in Mr. Ruttenberg's acting class. And he want, he tasks you guys, is, does everyone take acting? Or do you enroll in acting? Was it your elective? Did you just get thrown in there? Cause you were late?

• 53:22Speaker 02

  This is one of those things where I'd always, you know, we talked earlier about like all the comic sidekicks on the TV shows that I used to watch. For whatever reason, even though I'd never met an actor in my life, I didn't know that my birth mother had done acting. I just had this, I want to do that. I could do that. I don't know what it was. I don't know where that comes from God or it comes from within. I don't know. It's like, I want to do that thing. That's what I want to do. And so here's my chance. We go to Chicago, has a great theater department in this big high school in the suburbs. And I sign up for an acting class. That's really my first acting class. And then, um, uh, yeah. So our first assignment, I'm the new kid with my piano tie and.

• 54:05Speaker 02

  He assigns, uh, it's called, uh, public and private, or private and public, something like that. Like, how would, how would you act in your room? Just be what you would do in your room. So I brought in a, like a record player and I put on Elvis Costello's song, Mystery Dance. And, um, and I put it on and then no one knew me and I just went ape shit. Cause this is what I would do in my room. I just was like dancing around and like air guitaring and thrashing around and pogoing and, um, and it brought the house down. And all of a sudden, for the first time in my life, Jaco Welling, um, girls talked to me.

• 54:46Jocko Willink?

  Yo.

• 54:47Speaker 02

  And all of the cute girls in the acting class came up and were like, hey, patting me. Hey, you're, you're new here from Seattle. Nice piano tie. Will you sit at the lunch table with us? We sit over here, say hi. My name's, you know, and I would meet all these girls and, and they were just like, that was so funny. That was so great. And I was just like, huh. And I was like, that's it. Fuck the bassoon. I'm in. I'm all in with the drama nerds now. And I found my tribe.

• 55:22Jocko Willink?

  You cover this in the book. I had crossed over, not from the movie cliche of unpopular to popular. I'd crossed over within sub-genres, you see. I had moved from the regular old geek nerd to the very top of the geek nerd hierarchy, drama geek nerd. And the reason that drama geeks are at the pinnacle of the food pyramid of geekdom, it's not the tragedy comedy logo or cats pins on the raincoats. It's not the black eyeliner on both the boys and the girls. Neither is it the ability to burst into song or a tap dance in the school hallway at the drop of a theater reference. No. The thing that separates theater dorks

• 56:01Jocko Willink?

  from the rest is one word. You guessed it. Girls. There were and are and always will be pretty girls who sing and dance and act and improvise and joke around and are willing to make fools of themselves. And, this is the most important point of all, and they're willing to hang out with geeky guys and even go to rap parties and occasionally make out with them. This sets up drama geeks as the lions of the dork Serengeti.

• 56:32Jocko Willink?

  So that's how it went down, huh?

• 56:34Speaker 02

  Yeah, that's how it went down. Yeah. No looking back at that point.

• 56:38Jocko Willink?

  Are you doing any sports at all?

• 56:40Speaker 02

  No.

• 56:41Jocko Willink?

  No sports?

• 56:42Speaker 02

  Just P P E, you know? You put your, you put your clothes that you wore all week and then you forget to bring them home on Friday. So you're like, ah, fuck it. And then you wear them the next week and they just stink. And you're doing kickball and stuff like that. So, but you know, I, I played some sport. I play, I play tennis, play tennis.

• 57:05Jocko Willink?

  And your grades are good?

• 57:07Speaker 02

  Yeah, straight A's.

• 57:08Jocko Willink?

  Straight A's. Are you try, you're trying in school?

• 57:11Speaker 02

  Yeah, I try. Yeah. Smart. I read books. Yeah.

• 57:15Jocko Willink?

  You have a rock and roll band?

• 57:17Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 57:18Jocko Willink?

  You don't play the bassoon in your rock and roll band?

• 57:20Speaker 02

  No, I don't. I'm the singer.

• 57:21Jocko Willink?

  The band is called Collected Moss.

• 57:23Speaker 02

  Right. Cause of Rolling Stone.

• 57:26Jocko Willink?

  Look at you.

• 57:27Speaker 02

  See? We were horrible, horrible. Two gigs. I think we had two gigs. Yeah.

• 57:35Jocko Willink?

  Not bad. Could be worse.

• 57:37Speaker 02

  Could be worse.

• 57:39Jocko Willink?

  You, so now you start applying to colleges, you get rejected by Brown, you get rejected by Stanford.

• 57:46Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 57:46Jocko Willink?

  You get rejected by Oberlin. Is Oberlin in the league of Stanford or Brown?

• 57:50Speaker 02

  I don't.

• 57:50Jocko Willink?

  You just threw it in there for balance?

• 57:52Speaker 02

  I don't know. Screw them. They're weird. They're weird. They're weird cornfield hippies.

• 58:00Jocko Willink?

  But you get into Tufts.

• 58:02Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 58:02Jocko Willink?

  And Tufts is a great school.

• 58:04Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 58:04Jocko Willink?

  Did you go visit it? Yeah, you went and visited. You loved it immediately.

• 58:07Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah.

• 58:07Jocko Willink?

  What did you love about it?

• 58:09Speaker 02

  I mean, it's like, it was like seeing those movies of like what a college is, you know? It's like these buildings and churches and trees and a quad, you know, and dorms. And it's like this pretty little New England kind of vibe and, um, and they had a really good theater department.

• 58:26Jocko Willink?

  So you're thinking theater?

• 58:27Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. I, I wanted to secretly be an actor. I was studying international relations, psychology, English. But really I wanted to, uh, I knew I wanted to be an actor, but I just, I was on the fence about how to, how to take that move. You know, to fully commit.

• 58:43Jocko Willink?

  You had a roommate, Rob. Oh, like, I think I'm paraphrasing, but basically like a long haired, muscly dude from Arizona.

• 58:51Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah. He's like exactly the kind of guy who listens to your podcast.

• 58:57Jocko Willink?

  Sounds like an awesome dude.

• 58:58Speaker 02

  Yeah. No, it was, it was cool. I'll just tell the Rob story real quick. So I move into my dorm room and there's this guy, shoulder length hair, like built. Um, he came in his truck. He drove from Prescott, Arizona to Boston. He's got his guitars. I think he's got a gun rack. I'm not sure if he brought his gun to school. He's got, uh, Jethro Tull posters all over his half of the dorm room. And like some velvet curtains and stuff like that and his bong, right? And we couldn't be more different. He doesn't talk to me for two months.

• 59:39Speaker 02

  And finally he admits, finally we start to talk and finally he admits like, "Oh, I, I, I found out you went to this suburban Chicago high school that was kind of wealthy. And someone told me like, oh, those are, that's where rich douchebags go. So I thought you're a rich douchebag. So I didn't talk to you for those first two months. But then after that, we became really good friends and it was awesome. We hung out a ton and he's a great guy. I think he's a chef now. He's like a world renowned chef somewhere.

• 1:00:09Jocko Willink?

  Hair still, hair still looking good?

• 1:00:11Speaker 02

  I think the hair's gone. Yeah.

• 1:00:13Jocko Willink?

  That's a bummer.

• 1:00:13Speaker 02

  Yeah, it happens.

• 1:00:15Jocko Willink?

  Um, you, you, you kind of talked through the, well, we talked through already. This is when you kind of, or now really reconnected with your biological birth mom. You kind of get the backstory on all that. Um, and finding out that she had gone through this whole acting phase.

• 1:00:32Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:00:35Jocko Willink?

  Do you think that made you think this is sort of genetic thing?

• 1:00:40Speaker 02

  I mean, what else could it be? I mean, I, I mean, my, my parents were really great in that they supported me in doing the arts. You know, a lot of parents, you know, kids have an artistic inclination, like that's not practical and they kind of shut it down. My parents were very supportive because my dad really wanted to be an artist and he was kind of like, He was kind of a failed artist, right? Because he didn't, he didn't really apply himself. He didn't try and get his paintings out there. He didn't like really try and publish his books like. So I had this inclination, but you know, I didn't know any actors or anything like that. It was, it was mind blowing to me at like 19 to find out that my birth mother had been an actor for several years and I, because I was, again, I was just filled with that longing to go,

• 1:01:25Speaker 02

  to go down that road. So it's gotta be genetics, right? I don't know.

• 1:01:31Jocko Willink?

  Did it scare you at all? Like your dad is kind of tried the art thing, but not really getting it done. Your mom sounds like she kind of tried the art thing and now she's not kind of really getting it done. Did you think?

• 1:01:43Speaker 02

  So, you know, we make these life choices. We don't know how they, they go down. But here's one thing that I do know that if you want to be a professional artist, you have to devote yourself to that craft, to that art, to that discipline. Hardcore. You've got to give it 10 years and you've got to work 16 hours a day at it. And there's no other way. I mean, there are some actors that have stumbled into it and other artists that have kind of fallen into things and that's all fine, but that's not, that's not the standard, right? So here I am growing up, I have a failed artist dad, kind of a failed artist mom. And I know I have this longing to do acting. I'm pretty good at it. I'm not like

• 1:02:27Speaker 02

  this prodigy, but I'm pretty good at making people laugh and playing characters and, and stuff like that. And that's when I'm like, okay, Rain, if you're gonna do this, you have got to give yourself to it and commit your life to it and your work to it. And you're a hundred percent of your focus. Otherwise you will never make it. So I, in that way, I'm grateful for what my parents taught me from what, uh, from what they didn't do and the choices they didn't make. I remember having conversations with my dad when I was like 12 or 13. I'm like, how come you never go and try and sell your paintings? And like, oh, well, I went once or twice and they rejected them and I just don't really

• 1:03:08Speaker 02

  have all these excuses. And even at 12 or 13, I'm like, no, just take your paintings, go down to art galleries and you know, knock on the door and say, hey, I got this really cool paintings. You should sell them. And he would never sell himself. So. When I finally made the decision to be an actor, I knew that this was gonna be a really important decision because I was gonna have to go all in. There's no half assing it. And you know, you gotta put both feet in. And so I applied to acting schools. I left college. I was at that point, I was at the University of Washington in Seattle. And, you know, I auditioned, I moved to New York City. I was 20 years old. I didn't have a pot to piss in. I had like $307 in the bank. And, you know, I went to NYU and went to

• 1:03:53Speaker 02

  acting school. I'm like, I'm in it to win it. And I'm gonna do 10, 20 years, as long as it takes. I'm all in. But I'm so great. I'm grateful because I knew what the alternative was. That if you just kind of try it and like it, but don't fully go in, I see where that road takes you.

• 1:04:15Jocko Willink?

  And it's also no guarantee that you could go 100% in and you could dedicate your entire life to music, art, acting, and you can still be working as a waiter or whatever.

• 1:04:29Speaker 02

  I was, I spent the first 10 years of my life as an actor, an artist. I never made over 20 grand in a year. First 10 years of working as an actor. Because I was mostly doing theater. I couldn't get into TV and film. No one would audition me because I was kind of weird looking and they didn't know what to do with me. So, yeah, and but I just kept going. I just kept going and then came out to LA and then got some jobs and then, you know, ultimately the office. But, you know, there's a lot of times I was thinking about, about pulling the plug.

• 1:05:01Jocko Willink?

  And you applied, so you applied to Juilliard.

• 1:05:04Speaker 02

  Mm hmm.

• 1:05:04Jocko Willink?

  And you didn't get in.

• 1:05:05Speaker 02

  I didn't get in, no.

• 1:05:06Jocko Willink?

  And then you, you auditioned at NYU.

• 1:05:08Speaker 02

  Mm hmm.

• 1:05:09Jocko Willink?

  And there's an interesting thing that you talk about in the book. You're doing the C monologue from Long Day's Journey Into Night, which I went and watched on YouTube because I do research things when I don't know what they are. But I went and watched somebody doing it. It was interesting. A woman named Zelda Fitchlander?

• 1:05:26Speaker 02

  Fitchandler.

• 1:05:26Jocko Willink?

  Fitchandler.

• 1:05:27Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:05:28Jocko Willink?

  She told you like, take all the performance out of it.

• 1:05:31Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:05:32Jocko Willink?

  So it was like you were going over the top.

• 1:05:35Speaker 02

  I was acting. I came in with my audition. I was like, I forget the first line is like, you told me stories about your life. Do you want to hear some of mine? They all have to do with the sea. Here's one, actually that, and then I, and then he tells this monologue about being on this boat, right? Which really happened to you, Gino Neil, the playwright. He was a merchant seaman and sailed around the world on these boats. So he was telling this story and, you know, I did it and my did my performance and scene, you know, and she's like, okay, shut up, stop it. Like, just, then there was a guy that was like the dude there, the dean, like just pretend he's your dad, look at him and just, just say the words. I start again. You told me some story. No, stop,

• 1:06:17Speaker 02

  just, just, just, just talk to him. Like, okay, you told me, no, no, no, right. Just literally just talk to him like you're having a conversation. I was like, you told me some stories about your life. You want to hear some of mine? And then she's like, good, keep going. They all belong to the sea. I remember one time when I was on, and I connected with, I started to cry, like I was just, he started to cry, like we had this like, and I was like, oh, fuck, that's what acting is. It isn't all this drama club shit. It's like, and, and so she was like, boom, come to New York, kiddo.

• 1:06:58Jocko Willink?

  So now it's on. 1986.

• 1:07:02Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:07:03Jocko Willink?

  New York City.

• 1:07:04Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:07:04Jocko Willink?

  New York City at that time was mayhem.

• 1:07:08Jocko Willink?

  Drugs everywhere, gangs everywhere.

• 1:07:11Speaker 02

  They talk about now, like on Fox News, the deterioration in the American cities, which is happening. But dude, go to New York in 19, in the 1980s. Crack epidemics, graffiti everywhere, dilapidated, you know, empty lots, broken bottles, people, I mean, it was.

• 1:07:30Speaker 02

  It was, it was nuts.

• 1:07:32Jocko Willink?

  This is when I was going to New York. So I was a kid, I was grew up in Connecticut and I was like into the hardcore scene, into the punk rock scene. And so I was going into New York City. We'd take the Metro North train down. It cost eight dollars. I'd bring like 20 bucks for the weekend. Eight dollars to get down, eight dollars to get back, four dollars for pizza.

• 1:07:50Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:07:50Jocko Willink?

  And we'd go to CBGB's, we'd go to whatever shows were going on. We'd go to the new music festival. We'd go to just mayhem. But that place was totally insane at that time.

• 1:08:00Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:08:00Jocko Willink?

  It was crazy, like walking through Times Square was, I'm not kidding.

• 1:08:06Speaker 02

  You took your life in your hands.

• 1:08:07Jocko Willink?

  I'm not kidding. Every four steps that you took, somebody offered you crack or coke or whatever. Like literally every four steps, Echo Charles.

• 1:08:16Speaker 02

  Dude, they would go, I would go down on Eighth or Ninth Avenues. Cause I had a girlfriend that was living in New Zealand and I buy stolen calling cards. You remember calling cards, like a Sprint calling card and you'd have to dial an 800 number and then boop, boop, boop, boop, boop in order to make, and I would buy stolen calling cards for like 20 bucks. But I would get $200 worth of calls off of them. But they were, I mean, they were offering like, here's stolen license plates. Do you need a passport? I mean, there was, you could get, the dark web was on the streets.

• 1:08:48Jocko Willink?

  Was on the street. The hookers would be out. It was crazy. Like we'd go to a show, we'd leave at nine o'clock at night or eight o'clock at night to go to the, to go to a show somewhere on the Lower East Side. And we'd be walking and you'd see the hookers out. And they're like looking nice, ready for the night. And then we'd come back at three o'clock in the morning and they'd still be there. Now they're looking like, you know, they've been working all night. It was freaking horrible to see. Absolutely horrible. And so New York was totally insane at the time. You got.

• 1:09:21Jocko Willink?

  You say mugged slash attacked a couple of times there.

• 1:09:23Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:09:24Jocko Willink?

  You got, you got hit in the head with a stick by a random dude and you got gay bashed.

• 1:09:27Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:09:28Jocko Willink?

  Which I, which I found interesting.

• 1:09:30Speaker 02

  Yeah, I got gay bashed. Yeah. Yeah, I, um, I couldn't sleep and I went walking at like 1 a.m. I was living in Chelsea at the time, uh, which wasn't even a gay neighborhood really at the time. It kind of became one later, but, uh, it was kind of, they used to sell drugs up and down 7th and 8th Avenue. So it was, it was kind of dangerous. This is 88 and, um, and I went down and there were a couple of guys and they, they were like, called me, I don't know what I can say, the F word and, uh, monicon and some other things. And they just started swinging at me and I wanted to be like, I'm straight. No.

• 1:10:10Speaker 02

  But I, for, for some reason I was like, I did your jujitsu shit. Like they couldn't land a punch on me. For some reason I got so instantly, I didn't, I didn't punch back, but I was like, whoo, whoo. It was like slow mo matrix. It was like,

• 1:10:26Speaker 02

  have you ever had that happen in a fight? You could kind of see it like, and then I took off and they gun, jumped in their car and they took off after me.

• 1:10:33Jocko Willink?

  These are determined dudes.

• 1:10:35Speaker 02

  They really wanted to bash some gays that weren't really gay, kind of gay, like metro sex, half gay.

• 1:10:41Jocko Willink?

  Metro, yeah.

• 1:10:42Speaker 02

  I was kind of, they wanted a metro bash. And, uh, I ran down like 13th, which was the wrong way. And then I crawled under a staircase under by some garbage cans and I like pulled the garbage can back. And I was like,

• 1:10:55Speaker 02

  and I was just, yeah. And I stayed there for like 45 minutes and then made my way back.

• 1:11:00Jocko Willink?

  It's brutal. What do you do at acting school?

• 1:11:06Speaker 02

  Well, Jaco, what do you do in acting school? People watching this are like, what the hell? Can you bring back a general, please, to talk about leadership?

• 1:11:17Jocko Willink?

  I'm trying to figure out like, what do you do in acting school? Now I will say this, uh, Acting is not easy because people think it's easy, right? People think I could do that and then they try and do it and they look like idiots.

• 1:11:30Speaker 02

  Yeah, and make and the really good actors make it look so simple. They make it look like Brad Pitt, one of the best actors in the world. He makes it just look like just effortless. It's really hard to do what Brad Pitt does, really fucking hard.

• 1:11:43Jocko Willink?

  And that's what they teach you at this acting school thing.

• 1:11:46Speaker 02

  Although he never went to acting school, but terrible example, but yeah. So you know, the whole thing in acting school is we're going to teach you how to be theater artists, theater actors, and from that you can do TV and if you have that skill set, you can do TV and film. So that it wasn't really like on camera stuff. We did a little bit of that, but so we did Shakespeare. We did clowning. We did circus skills. We did, which is all about physical kind of courage and daring and kind of putting yourself out, physically out of your comfort zone. We did tight rope, trapeze, juggling.

• 1:12:22Jocko Willink?

  Does everyone do this? Is these like the general qualifications for acting?

• 1:12:25Speaker 02

  Everyone, everyone in this program did, did it. And it's again, you know, there's some, you know, fat kids in there that couldn't really walk on a tight rope or whatever, but you do what you can, you know, and you're supported. But you do voice, you do speech and you do scene study and you do stage combat. So we did a lot of like sword fighting, like we're doing a Shakespeare play and learn, learn how to do that, which comes in handy when you're shooting in film and you have to pretend combat and stuff like that, how to take a punch or fake a punch. You know, that kind of thing. And, um, and you, the main thing you do is scene study where you go and you, you work with your scene partner, you memorize your lines, you come in and they, they give you notes on it and stuff like that. And there were some amazing teachers and I was really lucky.

• 1:13:10Jocko Willink?

  And you played Hamlet, uh, twice.

• 1:13:14Speaker 02

  Yes, yeah.

• 1:13:16Jocko Willink?

  How's that?

• 1:13:17Speaker 02

  Yeah, we, we did Hamlet. They cast me as Hamlet. Uh, which was incredible experience. And then the guy who directed, was directing it was really bad director and I was totally lost. And we would have a rehearsal and then he would give me a grade on how I did in the rehearsal. So he would write on the thing like.

• 1:13:41Jocko Willink?

  So is this a course that you're taking?

• 1:13:44Speaker 02

  No, it was just a side play on the side of the courses. We would do plays on the side in the evenings.

• 1:13:48Jocko Willink?

  But it's part of the college?

• 1:13:49Speaker 02

  Yes, part of the college, doing plays.

• 1:13:51Jocko Willink?

  But you get no credit for it?

• 1:13:53Speaker 02

  It doesn't work like that. It's just like you're going through this program and you're there from nine in the morning till 11 at night every single day. Well, five or six days a week and part of that is doing plays. So it's not really picking and choosing courses. This kind of. So he, I went to the main acting teacher. I was in tears. Um, cause I was like, I'm so lost. I don't know how to play Hamlet. I don't know what to do. And then he came and watched some rehearsals and he's like, oh, this guy's an idiot. And he fired him and he took over. So we shut down and then I had another chance. We had done like two weeks of rehearsal, shut that down. And then Ron Van Leeu, an amazing acting teacher came in and then he directed me in Hamlet and it was an amazing experience.

• 1:14:37Jocko Willink?

  There's something like 30,000 words that Hamlet speaks in Hamlet.

• 1:14:41Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:14:42Jocko Willink?

  How, how do you go about memorizing that?

• 1:14:45Speaker 02

  So I knew I was gonna be playing him like in the winter and then over Christmas break, I memorized all of the Hamlet monologues. I memorized all the, the soliloquies to be and not to be, that is the question. And, um, so I came in and then I memorized a bunch of his longer speeches. Before we started rehearsing, but what people don't understand about like the memorizing lines, first of all, when you're 22, it's way easier. You can memorize things really quickly. But you're spending hours on your feet, saying the lines and listening and responding and trying it in different ways. And so it's getting in your body. You know what I mean? It's, you're not just kind of like, it's hard to memorize when you're just sitting there with a book and you're just like,

• 1:15:28Speaker 02

  trying to memorize it. That's almost impossible, but when you're. You're on your feet and interacting with people and stuff like that. So we did a big cut down version. So it was probably only 20,000 words. Um, we cut big scenes out and stuff like that, but it was a lot. It was a lot.

• 1:15:44Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, I went and saw a version of Hamlet and man, it was impressive.

• 1:15:49Speaker 02

  Oh, cool. Where'd you see it?

• 1:15:50Jocko Willink?

  Right here in San Diego.

• 1:15:51Speaker 02

  Yeah. Great theater in San Diego.

• 1:15:53Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, I saw, I saw one version at the Old Globe, which was like the cool one, uh, well, normal one, but I also saw another version at some like other place and it was all modern and crazy.

• 1:16:06Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:16:06Jocko Willink?

  But both those dudes had to memorize a lot of words.

• 1:16:10Speaker 02

  Yeah. The thing that why, one of the reasons Shakespeare is famous, he's famous for so many different reasons. And that's one of the things that makes him so amazing. Why people are obsessed with Shakespeare, but the fact that in 1600, he's written this play Hamlet that is all about psychology. It's as modern as Freud and Jung and any psychologist or any Christopher Nolan movie that involves psychology in this, in 1601, he wrote that. And it's all about who am I, life, death, should I live, should I die, should I kill this guy? Why am I doubting? I should kill him. I was told to kill him

• 1:16:50Speaker 02

  and I don't. Why is that? Is it my own failing? Do we have souls? Like I'm in love with her, but should I tell it? Like it's this all this stuff. And that's why, that's what made him like head and shoulders better than anyone for hundreds of years. It's not until Chekhov, you know, two, 300 years later, that all of a sudden playwrights are like, and Ibsen and Strindberg are like going into the psychology.

• 1:17:14Jocko Willink?

  We covered Henry the fifth on this podcast, which obviously makes sense, but I was gonna do Hamlet and I had, uh, an, um, an actor that I was, that I met that I was like, and who had played Hamlet and I thought. If I can get them to come on, that would be kind of epic and it just didn't, I haven't pulled it off yet.

• 1:17:31Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:17:32Jocko Willink?

  But maybe you're that guy.

• 1:17:34Speaker 02

  Let's, let's do it. I'm a, I'm a middle aged doughy white Hamlet, you know?

• 1:17:40Jocko Willink?

  So that's what you're doing? You're doing this? That sounds like a long ass day, every day. That's what you're doing?

• 1:17:45Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:17:46Jocko Willink?

  You, you graduate from NYU and there's one thing that you explain, um, there's like a draft, it sounds like a draft that happens at Juilliard. Where you do like a couple, a couple performances or something, or a couple monologues or something?

• 1:18:01Speaker 02

  It's like the NBA draft. I've never heard it compared, but it is.

• 1:18:03Jocko Willink?

  That's what it sounded like.

• 1:18:05Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:18:05Jocko Willink?

  And so you go into this NBA draft thing, or the theater draft thing or something?

• 1:18:09Speaker 02

  Schools go to this theater in Juilliard and we perform little scenes for all the casting directors and producers and TV folk and people that run theaters and there's, I mean, there's maybe 500 of them, you know, who's who of, you know, in both theater and TV and film, watching it was totally nerve wracking. You know, I was 23 years old. My scenes kind of sucked. Um, I didn't do very well and I didn't get, I had just played Hamlet. This, this is, this is a good story about how show business works. These agents, pretty good agents, had come and seen Hamlet. They loved it. They called me in immediately. They're like, oh my God, your Hamlet was amazing.

• 1:18:54Speaker 02

  That was so great. And they talked about it. We talked about it. They're like, okay, you'll do these league performances, they call, and then we'll call you back in. And, and then I bombed at the league performances. Like I didn't do very good. And then they wouldn't return my calls and they didn't bring me back in.

• 1:19:08Jocko Willink?

  What's a league performance?

• 1:19:09Speaker 02

  This is that Juilliard thing where the NBA draft for actors is called, that's what they called it.

• 1:19:14Jocko Willink?

  What, what do you, and you go through this in the book, but this is you trying to be like Mr. Serious Guy?

• 1:19:21Speaker 02

  Kind of? Well, it was me just trying to get an agent, right? That's what it came, comes down to. And the, the moral of this story is like, these assholes had seen me play Hamlet and then they see me do a couple of two minute scenes. And because I don't do good in those, they don't want anything to do with me. But they had seen me play three hours of Hamlet. And that's kind of how superficial the, the business is.

• 1:19:45Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. Cause in my mind, it seems like if you can do Hamlet, you can kind of do anything.

• 1:19:49Speaker 02

  It seems you'd think, but you know, getting to what your other point about like, so I had this like wrong idea about what it was to be an actor and that's partially NYU's fault because I was still, you know, kind of nerdy, weird, uh, different kind of guy. And I was trying to be like Mr. Theater Guy, you know, and so I had this idea of like, this is who I need to be and what I need to be and how I need to present myself and um, so it took me several years and a lot of hardship to kind of figure out. Uh, and, uh, you know, I had a seminal experience that kind of showed me my, my road as an actor.

• 1:20:30Jocko Willink?

  Your first acting job, um, at least from what I could decipher from the book was 12th night for Shakespeare in the Park. You got paid $210 a week. So that was kind of what you're doing out of the gate.

• 1:20:44Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 1:20:46Jocko Willink?

  Eventually you joined something called The Acting Company.

• 1:20:48Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 1:20:49Jocko Willink?

  Founded by John Hausman. Is John Hausman the guy that, uh, used to do those commercials?

• 1:20:55Speaker 02

  Yeah, he did the commercials.

• 1:20:56Jocko Willink?

  What was that show that he was in?

• 1:20:58Speaker 02

  The Paper Chase.

• 1:20:59Jocko Willink?

  The Paper Chase. What was the Paper Chase about?

• 1:21:01Speaker 02

  It was about the lawyers in Harvard, like trying with a really tough professor.

• 1:21:05Jocko Willink?

  He was the tough professor.

• 1:21:06Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:21:06Jocko Willink?

  The ultimate tough professor.

• 1:21:08Speaker 02

  He was like,

• 1:21:10Jocko Willink?

  When EF Hutton speaks.

• 1:21:11Speaker 02

  When EF Hutton, yeah.

• 1:21:14Jocko Willink?

  So you-

• 1:21:14Speaker 02

  He worked with Orson Welles. He was a big theater titan. He started this company called The Acting Company and I did two and a half years of bus and truck tours of Shakespeare plays.

• 1:21:26Jocko Willink?

  Which is freaking hilarious in the book. You're talking, you're rolling into like whatever town in the Midwest.

• 1:21:32Speaker 02

  Waterloo, Iowa. You've got, you roll in at 9:00 PM. At 10:00 AM, you've got a show in the high school cafeteria. And at 7:00 PM, you're at the downtown local civic club. And you're doing these Shakespeare plays to places that have never seen Shakespeare before. Maybe, or not for years or something like that, audiences that- It was cool. It was cool and hard and sometimes sucky and but I loved it. You know, it was 24, 25. At that point, I was getting $515 a week. So I was rolling in it.

• 1:22:07Jocko Willink?

  And plus you're getting this experience.

• 1:22:08Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:22:09Jocko Willink?

  So you roll into Waterloo, Iowa.

• 1:22:11Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:22:11Jocko Willink?

  What Shakespeare play are you doing? Is it like a variety show?

• 1:22:14Speaker 02

  Yeah, we had, uh, no, we did Romeo and Juliet, um, and Twelfth Night. No, and Two Gentlemen of Verona. And then the next year, we did Midsummer Night's Dream. So, yeah.

• 1:22:27Jocko Willink?

  Did you ever perform to like seven people and four of them walked out?

• 1:22:33Speaker 02

  It wasn't that kind of thing, but we would do a lot of like high school theaters and high school like cafeteria theaters. You know, where the theaters up in the cafeteria and they open the curtains and they're all sitting at the, and like, we would have food thrown at us and stuff like that. We had fun though. We, we had fun. It was hard. And you know,

• 1:22:54Jocko Willink?

  I'll picture when I was in high school, if we, if I was in that situation, I would have made it really, I wasn't, I would have been like such a dick. I'm sorry.

• 1:23:04Speaker 02

  Yeah, sure.

• 1:23:05Jocko Willink?

  I was just an idiot.

• 1:23:06Speaker 02

  Yeah. We're like, school assembly.

• 1:23:08Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 1:23:09Speaker 02

  Jaco, be there at 10 a.m. to watch a two and a half hour version of Romeo and Juliet. And you're just like, the kids are like, Yeah, but, um,

• 1:23:19Jocko Willink?

  The weird thing about Shakespeare, and I pointed this out when we, when it was one of the first podcasts we did was, I think it was number 15, actually. But I was, cause when I, when I, I studied a lot of Shakespeare when I went to college and it was like, oh, you're not supposed to understand this. You can't understand this. It's written in middle English. It's, it's, it's not the same language and you have to, there's some similarities, obviously, but you need to actually look up what these words and understand the structure and, and then you go, holy shit, this guy is incredible. But you gotta get people through that transitionary period because they look at it and they go, I don't know what the hell this means. And if they say, oh, oh yeah, I read Shakespeare. It's great. No, they're not, they're lying. Cause you, there's words you don't know.

• 1:24:00Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:24:00Jocko Willink?

  You have to look them up.

• 1:24:01Speaker 02

  A third of the words you don't know.

• 1:24:02Jocko Willink?

  Exactly.

• 1:24:03Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:24:03Jocko Willink?

  So I can't imagine if you tried to present Shakespeare to me in high school. I'm sorry. I'm such a loser.

• 1:24:09Speaker 02

  Well, you you cut out a lot of the stuff that just makes no sense. And then you um you try it. It's so hard to read Shakespeare on the page. And a lot of people get turned off reading it. But you've got to hear it. Because when you speak it with intention, and like you're like, you're trying to get something from someone. And so you say, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, and you hear it in context, it starts to make way more sense. And you you have that experience, right? When you've seen these productions and stuff.

• 1:24:37Jocko Willink?

  For sure. So you're kind of

• 1:24:41Speaker 02

  The other thing we would do on the road is

• 1:24:44Jocko Willink?

  Oh, that's like the games.

• 1:24:45Speaker 02

  We would do insane games to keep us sane. One of them was pass the batteries. We'd have a little like double A battery. And it would have to go around to every single person in the cast. So over the course of the play, you'd have to figure out ingenious ways you'd shake someone's hand. And there all of a sudden, there'd be a battery in it. You're like, oh, and then you go to someone else, you put your armor, and you drop it in their pocket. And like, so the battery is making its way around. The other thing we would try and do is we would take, we would find out the mascot of whatever school we were at. And then we would try and everyone had to incorporate that word. So if they were like the badgers, you know, you'd have to say, I say thee, I pray thee, Liege, for when from whence thou come? Surely thou thou thou are no badger to say that that and we would

• 1:25:29Speaker 02

  always try and and the kids would be like, oh, really? Is the word badger 17 times in this Shakespeare play? It was that was fun. We did shit like, we would do withered hand where at some point, everyone had to have like a withered hand on stage and bunny hop, we would have to at some point incorporate a bunny hop. We got in bad trouble, but we had a lot of fun. There was a lot of debauchery on the road, too.

• 1:25:55Jocko Willink?

  And that kind of leads into this next section I want to read from the book. It says here. For an artsy East Village actor, there was simply no room for God, morality, or devotion, or at least none that I could conceive of at the time. In my quest for this tantalizing bohemian street cred during my first year at NYU, I dyed my hair jet black and started smoking a pipe. The hair dye I got from a box of Clairol Midnight Black, you know, the kind so toxic that there's an emergency 800 number right on the box in case you accidentally dump the concoction into your eyes. I looked ridiculous. The first issue was that I'd forgotten about my eyebrows. The hair on my head was like Bruce Lee's and my eyebrows were a light brown with ginger

• 1:26:36Jocko Willink?

  highlights. I looked like a serial killer who had just written his manifesto on the walls of his cabin with his own blood and feces. And the pipe, my Aunt Wendy, my dad's sister smoked one, always had. She was rebellious, artistic, pipe-smoking inspiration, and I always loved her rebellious, artistic, pipe-smoking spirit. As with most things in my life, I was simply trying way too hard. We were such a pretentious lot, us Village artists. I remember having one ridiculous late-night conversation with a bunch of pot-smoking artistites where the question was posed, would you ever do a commercial? I remember a friend of mine paused dramatically and considered this

• 1:27:16Jocko Willink?

  disgusting, capitalistic question quite deeply, stroking his goatee and drawing on his Camel Light. "I might do a commercial," and then he added headily, "for soy milk."

• 1:27:30Jocko Willink?

  So you guys were freaking...

• 1:27:32Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:27:33Jocko Willink?

  Full on.

• 1:27:34Speaker 02

  We were douchebags. No question. No question.

• 1:27:39Speaker 02

  You have to find, you always find the most embarrassing thing about me in the book, not the cool stuff. You find like the most humiliating.

• 1:27:48Jocko Willink?

  I thought these were the cool parts.

• 1:27:49Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 1:27:51Jocko Willink?

  No, get the book. There's so many, there's like, like I said, I mean, I'm reading less, I don't know, probably 5% of the book. There's all kinds of insane funny stories. And like I said, your ghostwriter did a great job.

• 1:28:02Speaker 02

  Damn you, Jaco. I wrote every word.

• 1:28:05Jocko Willink?

  Every word I say.

• 1:28:08Jocko Willink?

  At some point, you start, fast forward a little bit, now you're dating like a lawyer slash drug dealer. I believe you gave her the name Jessie.

• 1:28:18Jocko Willink?

  Your cocaine comes into the picture. You say, I spent countless nights in drunken, stumbling and almost vomiting in taxi cabs, speeded speedily through parties and bars, wafted, red eyed and high through many late night conversations and woke up desolate, fried, embarrassed and sad on countless mornings during those years. Good bohemian times. It's weird because like I said, I was going to New York at this time. And like I would see these people, I probably saw you. I, in fact, if I didn't see you specifically, I saw your people. I saw them down there. They were down there. They were looking exactly like this. This was you. This was your gig.

• 1:29:02Speaker 02

  Well, listen, so there's a bigger conversation here, which is, and this is a little bit in The Bassoon King, I talk about my spiritual journey. And I talk about spirituality more in the new book Soul Boom. But I grew up a member of the Baha'i faith. It's a very beautiful faith. It's all about love and unity and peace. And I jettisoned that, like so many of us do when you're 20 years old, you move to the big city, or maybe you go in the military, or whatever, your college, or you go get a job somewhere, whatever your life journey, wherever it takes you. And I wanted nothing to do with spirituality, and I wanted nothing to do with God and morality, and I didn't want to think about that thing. I just wanted to live what I thought of like

• 1:29:44Speaker 02

  a bohemian lifestyle, which is, party, go crazy, make art, like, you know, live life to the extreme in that, in that sense. And, you know, and, and that was good. You know, we talked about these hilarious times in the, in the acting company and other theater that I did. And, you know, and then I got more and more dependent on drugs and alcohol. I really realized now that I was using them to medicate my anxiety. So I wasn't

• 1:30:12Speaker 02

  I was occasionally like a fall down drunk, but I wasn't like one of those guys that every time they drink, they pass out in their own vomit or something like that. But I was, you know, year after year, using a lot of drugs and alcohol to just cope and just get by my daily life. And I was really unhappy. I was really miserable. And this started a journey for me, um, which was a spiritual one where I was kind of like this. And I realize now that I was having a lot of mental health issues at the time, like I would have anxiety attacks. I was depressed a lot. Um, I was experiencing extreme loneliness. Um, it didn't make sense to me. I was living my dream. We've, we've been through my life story. Here I am living

• 1:30:57Speaker 02

  in New York City. I'm working as an actor and from suburban Seattle, this loser D and D kid. This is incredible. And yet I was deeply, deeply unhappy. And why am I so unhappy? And why am I filled with so much anxiety? And that's what kind of led me to examine God and spirituality as a possible path toward recovery. I didn't at that point to go into 12 step programs, but I was, I started to really dig deep into God and the meaning of life and, you know, why we're here. Cause at that time there weren't podcasts where you could go listen to, you know, you or, or Rich Roll or someone that's going to make

• 1:31:41Speaker 02

  you like really think and learn Huberman and, you know, learn about how this stuff works. And there weren't that many resources, you know, in the, in the early nineties at this point around this stuff. No one did therapy. Therapy was for really rich people, you know, and I certainly didn't have money for therapy. And, uh, you know, you couldn't call it like BetterHelp or something like that. So that, this is the only thing I knew to do from my childhood was like, read about God. And I read the Bible. I read the Quran. I read, uh, the

• 1:32:15Speaker 02

  I was a big reader. I read the Buddha, you know, the original works of the Buddha, the Bhagavad Gita and started really thinking like, well, maybe because I threw everything to do out with religion and God and faith and spirituality out the window, maybe I threw the baby out with the bathwater and you know, maybe this stuff could actually help me. So it was like, it was the best of times. It was the worst of times. Like I wouldn't trade it for the world. I had an amazing time, had, you know, Chalk a Block with Crazy Adventures of New York and, and, and partying and, and it was, it was fun and great until it wasn't anymore. And I was pretty unhappy and was trying to make my relationship work with now

• 1:32:56Speaker 02

  my wife. We've been together for 30 years and, uh, you know, and that's what set me on this spiritual journey and, and interest in, in spiritual topics. So that's one of the threads that runs through Bassoon King that I really dive into in, in Soul Boom.

• 1:33:12Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, yeah, no doubt. Um, you just mentioned your wife. So you, at some point you take leave or I don't know what you call it in the civilian world. You go on vacation, I guess. You go on vacation and you go to Washington and you had, you knew her, but you look her up in the White Pages, which was very romantic and, and she's in there.

• 1:33:35Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:33:36Jocko Willink?

  And so you call her.

• 1:33:36Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:33:37Jocko Willink?

  Isn't it weird? You used to have to like find a person's phone number.

• 1:33:40Speaker 02

  And she tells a story really funny. Her and her roommate were so broke. They were like trying to decide like, should we pay the extra 75 cents a month or whatever it is to have your name listed in the White Pages? And they're like, yes, we're gonna make that investment. Who knows? Someone might need to look us up and call us one of these times. So there she was, Holly Reinhorn. I remember she was hot and cool and, uh, edgy and, and wonderful and gave her a call and got together.

• 1:34:11Jocko Willink?

  And you were kind of like, just kind of the romantic dream for her. I mean, you're like this actor guy living in New York City.

• 1:34:19Speaker 02

  I moved to New York. I went to acting school. I was like professional actor.

• 1:34:23Jocko Willink?

  Hell, yeah.

• 1:34:24Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:34:24Jocko Willink?

  That was just. You rolled in there, you rolled in there big time.

• 1:34:29Speaker 02

  It all goes back to that first drama class, that first drama class.

• 1:34:33Jocko Willink?

  And, and then she ends up moving back to New York with you. It's like a year later. You get it. It sounds like you got like the sickest apartment ever in Brooklyn. Like 13 foot ceilings, like this really is dirt.

• 1:34:45Speaker 02

  We, we lucked into this $800 a month apartment. That was insane. Yeah, it was insane. We had huge parties there. Yeah, it was great.

• 1:34:54Jocko Willink?

  You roll into this chapter in the book, the, the, the chapter title is I bombed on Broadway. Which is, you know, uh, doesn't sound very good, but it kind of set you in the right motion. And part of this, you know, you, you just kind of talked about this. Here you were a professional actor, yet you weren't happy at the time, right? You, you're just not happy, which is crazy to think about. There I was, not happy in Brooklyn and I wasn't exactly sure why. I would wake up in the middle of the night, deeply, deeply sad, alienated, disconnected. Then I would kick myself. Why are you feeling this way? I mean, look what an amazing woman you have asleep beside you. Think of all the incredible theater you're doing. You have everything you ever wanted, including a kick ass van. We haven't even talked about your van yet, but you had a kick ass van.

• 1:35:39Jocko Willink?

  Your dream has come true and yet you're still not happy jerk face. And fast forward a little bit, I thought I had started sneaking up. I had a thought that started sneaking up around me at this time. Perhaps the reason I'm not happy is I don't have meaning. I don't have purpose. Started asking my friends about God. This is kind of where, what you were just talking about. You go through this, like you said, it's a kind of what you remembered from your childhood. And like, there's got to be something there. Let's start digging and you start, that's what you do. You start digging. And, um, as you're digging through that, you have a good story about Darryl Strawberry. You asked Darryl Strawberry if, what is the, uh,

• 1:36:19Jocko Willink?

  Wakan Tonka, which is the Native American spirit and you prayed a Wakan Tonka during this baseball game for Darryl Strawberry to get a home run. So you can win.

• 1:36:29Speaker 02

  So I, I had, I really struggled with the idea of God. Like I was really struggling with like God, daddy, God, I call him sky daddy and soul boom, like this idea of this man, patriarchal man with a big beard, looking down at us all and judging us. And I just really struggled with that. I'm like, I'm just trying to figure it out. And I was reading a lot of Native American spirituality at the time and, and the Lakota Sioux's word for.

• 1:36:55Speaker 02

  God is Wakantanka, which literally translates to the great mystery. And it's the god of nature and the seasons and beyond time and space. And you can only know this god kind of through nature and through the wind and through the sun. And I was like, ah, that's really interesting. So I was talking to my friend about, it's like, I don't believe in God, but I believe in Wakantanka. So he's like, prove it. And I was like, okay, the Mets were down, bottom of the ninth. Daryl Strawberry was up. And I was like, let's try it. And I literally went, oh, Wakantanka.

• 1:37:38Speaker 02

  Grandfather spirit, great mystery. If you exist, please help us and have Daryl Strawberry help win this game. If you show, show yourself. I am not shitting. Turn to the TV. Whoosh, over the field walk off, home run, ends the game.

• 1:37:58Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 1:37:59Speaker 02

  And me and my friend Phil, who's one of my best friends, we still, I was just talking to him earlier. We were just like, whoa. But it wasn't enough to convince Phil. He's still an atheist, but that was, as silly and stupid as that sounds, I was like, okay, gotta keep going and go down this path. Let's see where this goes.

• 1:38:22Jocko Willink?

  Meanwhile, you, you get this role. You get a, you get a lead role in a, in a Broadway show. And you say this about the role. In the months and weeks leading up to the rehearsals, I grew increasingly nervous. The pressure was building inside. I felt an immediate stress mounting within me about how I would need to really shine in this role. A stressful voice in my head kept prodding, this play could give me a better agent. This role could land me a Tony nomination. This is my chance to get an amazing New York Times review. The pressure continued to increase and build through the rehearsals and eventual performances. Until, you guessed it, I totally sucked in the role. I bombed on Broadway, but, and isn't it funny how life works? It turned out to be one of the best experiences of my life. In rehearsals, I was stiff and disconnected. I had, for some weird reason, decided exactly how to play the role in my head. All my choices were pre-decided.

• 1:39:06Jocko Willink?

  They were also broad, fakey and strangely. Puppet like, I could feel myself throwing out all my training and rehearsed the play by doing strained line reading after strained line reading. I knew I was sucking and I didn't know what to do. I could tell internally and also from the quizzical, almost sad looks I was getting from the rest of the cast. Joe pulled me aside after a couple of weeks and spoke to me quite seriously about his concerns with me in this role. He urged me to relax and just explore and play and have fun in the process, in rehearsal process, but try as I might, I just couldn't. I was in a gigantic pressurized acting rut and I couldn't escape. All of a sudden, we were getting close to having an audience. I freaked. I began waking up in the middle of the night shaking and sweating. I was terrified. I knew that I was

• 1:39:49Jocko Willink?

  about to suck in my first big show. Holiday was in Iowa at the time. I spent many tearful hours in the middle of the night with her on the phone as she consoled and counseled me. That's when the prayers started. When all else fails, sometimes you just get on your knees and ask for help. And I did. Over and over again, I reached out for assistance from Wonkentanka, God creator, whatever. I was stuck. I was lost and terrified. I literally didn't know what else to do. The prayers didn't make me a brilliant actor all of a sudden, but I do believe they were a factor in a transformation I made as an artist and as a purpose, person at this pivotal juncture. I started to understand that I had been doing the role for all the wrong reasons. To impress people, to gain accolades, to gain fame. I

• 1:40:29Jocko Willink?

  was looking outside myself, trying to be something I wasn't for others. London Assurance, that's the name of the play you were in, broke me open like an egg. I didn't want to be that kind of fakey artist anymore, performing out of obligation, needing, neediness, and desperate need to be liked. I knew that I ultimately needed to be myself and screw whatever other people thought of me. I felt this newfound commitment to freedom in my bones and it was a revelation. After this Broadway fiasco, I learned how to relax and breathe and play. I embraced the natural nerdy oddness that was me. I was never going

• 1:41:10Jocko Willink?

  to be the same, some formal idea of a classical actor man beloved by casting directors and the New York Times and rocking an ascot. As the previews went along, I did see some eventual improvement. I was able to relax a bit here and there and get a few occasional laughs in the role. Was I good? No, but at least I wasn't completely horrible. I got almost, I got mostly poor to middling reviews, but at least I didn't get raked over the coals. More important, after the show closed, I was filled with as much great, with a much greater purpose and inspiration in my life and work.

• 1:41:42Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:41:44Speaker 02

  Keep going. Read the rest of the book. There's only about 70 more pages.

• 1:41:49Jocko Willink?

  That's gonna, this, this, this had a huge impact on you. I mean, obviously, this is like a pivotal point.

• 1:41:54Speaker 02

  This is a story that I tell young people a lot when I speak at colleges and it, and it's something you've covered on your pod a lot, but it's like what we learn from failure, you know, and, and how important failure is in making us who we are. And we kind of, in modern society, it's like failure is a weakness and it's bad and you're wrong and you should never fail. But by sucking in this Broadway play and kind of going through the fire, you know, I was on the anvil being pounded because it, you know, I mean, you've been in firefights with mortars dropping on your head. I'm not comparing it to that.

• 1:42:36Speaker 02

  But I will say that when you, your longing is to be an actor and you're doing your first lead on Broadway and you're doing eight shows a week for four or five months. And then you suck and you have to go in every single day and perform and you know you're not good and you know the audience is like,

• 1:42:54Speaker 02

  it's really painful and then it, it, it caused a lot of soul searching and like, I was trying to be Mr. Actor Man of New York to get the New York Times review and like get some kind of accolades or a Tony nomination and I was doing it for the wrong reasons and trying to be someone or something that I'm, I'm inherently not. And after I sobbed and talked to Holly on the phone after I was praying on my knees, after I was like, I just went through the wringer on this thing. I was like, fuck that. I'm never doing that again. I'm never going through that again. I'm gonna bring exactly who I am to the roles that I play. And if they don't like it, screw them. I have to be myself.

• 1:43:39Speaker 02

  This helped me find my authentic voice as an actor and as a human being. And I'm so grateful for one of the most painful four to five months of my life I've ever gone through. I'm grateful for it because on that, on that forge, again, no mortars dropping on my head, but on that particular forge, it showed me a path from my failure, my struggle, my pain, forged me into someone that could eventually play Dwight on The Office. I never would have played Dwight on The Office if I had not bombed on Broadway. So what I thought was like the biggest failure of my life actually turned into the greatest success in my life. So embracing roles like Dwight,

• 1:44:27Speaker 02

  where I could just draw on my own natural quirkiness and I and come up with my own vision of how to play the character. I wasn't, when I started Dwight, I wasn't thinking about Emmy Awards or money or stardom or any of that stuff. That showed me the way. So it's, it's a really important lesson for, for young folks especially to learn. Sometimes it's kind of like you talk to young people and like, I'm failing, I'm struggling, I'm hurting. Good.

• 1:45:00Jocko Willink?

  When we were talking earlier about giving, you're giving a hundred percent, right? And you, you were saying, hey, you've got to give yourself a hundred percent to acting or writing or whatever it is you're gonna do. And I, I've had conversations with people about two things that are somewhat similar to that, but writing books and doing a podcast, right? And right now, of course, everybody has a podcast right now and you can write books really easily. But when people would talk to me about it, they'd be like, oh, I think I'm gonna start a podcast or I want to write a book. That's the two things that a lot of people have said to me in the past 10 years, or I guess it's been seven years or whatever, however long I've been doing this stuff. And one thing that I tell them is,

• 1:45:46Jocko Willink?

  You've got to do it because you want to do it. Like even this podcast, if we were to, if someone said, hey, or if I said, hey, I'm gonna, I'm gonna do a podcast, here's what the podcast is gonna be about. We're gonna make it three, four, five hours long. We're gonna talk about war, death,

• 1:46:07Jocko Willink?

  genocide, we're gonna talk about the most horrible subjects. It's gonna be me, I'm gonna be reading from old books that are out of print. And that's what we're gonna do. There's no one that would have said, oh, that sounds like it's gonna be a hit.

• 1:46:19Speaker 02

  That sounds fun. Yeah, sign me up.

• 1:46:21Jocko Willink?

  You've got, but I, I did it. And the path that we went down was just because this is what I'm into. This is what I like, this is what I'm interested in. Same thing with books. If you're gonna write a book and your goal of the book is to be a New York Times bestseller, or your goal of the podcast is to be the number one podcast, you're gonna be like Rainn Wilson in that play, trying really hard to get a good review. And it's like, it doesn't, that's not what brings it.

• 1:46:50Speaker 02

  You're looking for something outside of yourself for validation and for happiness, as opposed to an inner motivation. And you do, you do, you know, there's a lot of people that, that write to me and talk to me about the exact same thing and they wanna start a podcast because they want the, they want the accoutrement of the successful podcast. They want like accolades and people looking up to them. And they wanna be invited on other podcasts and they wanna be published and they wanna be, get a speaking gig, lecturing gigs at colleges or whatever it is. And yeah, you gotta find your authentic voice, which you have done masterfully. And I was able to do as an actor and it gave me some success because I jettisoned all of that shit.

• 1:47:35Speaker 02

  And I was just like, I'm gonna play weird fucked up roles. And this is who I am. And if you don't like it, that's fine. You don't have to watch, screw you. And it's the same way today with social media and, you know, with podcasting and voicing your opinion and stuff like that. It's like, I gotta be me, this is who I am, this is what I think. And I get a lot of backlash sometimes and it's like, all right, that's fine. You can, you can pull your hair out and threaten to kill me on YouTube. It's all great. It's all fine. I don't give a fuck. I really don't. I've just passed that. So I do want to be part of a much larger conversation of how do we make ourselves better people? And how do we make the world a better place? Let's just engage in that conversation.

• 1:48:18Jocko Willink?

  These, these are good conversations.

• 1:48:20Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah. And have fun doing it.

• 1:48:24Jocko Willink?

  So now you get this, I'm gonna fast forward a little bit timeline wise. The next section that I'm gonna go to is welcome to Los Angeles. And I had to throw this in there. Hollywood, for the seven of you that don't know, is not anything like you think it is from the association with that famous, grandiose name. There's nothing tinsely or fabulous or razzle-dazzly about that place. This was especially true in 1999. Busy and yet somehow completely destitute, it was populated with drug addicts, strippers, schizophrenics, and Scientologists. Besides a wax museum, some sickly palm trees, and occasional confused Dutch tourists, and the stars on Hollywood Boulevard, there was nothing there to let you know that there was a show business industry in its history or in the vicinity.

• 1:49:09Jocko Willink?

  But if you wanted marijuana, wigs, a taco, or a taco, it was definitely the place to be.

• 1:49:16Jocko Willink?

  It is weird for people that haven't been to California and Hollywood. It's really like you, you wouldn't know that there's anything there.

• 1:49:24Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's different now. There's kind of more glitz. There's the mall there and some, right? It's, it's kind of a little better, you know, but you can still buy a wig and a taco and, and any drug you want, probably. So, yeah.

• 1:49:38Jocko Willink?

  You can still join Scientology readily if you want to.

• 1:49:41Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah. You can walk right in. They'd be glad to have you. But, uh, yeah, it's so funny because all the, all the, the magic gets made on the sound stages in the studios, but there's nothing in Hollywood that has to do with that. And even then you go into a studio and it just, it just looks like this. It's just like these rooms and there's a couple of cameras and, you know, some trailers and some dollies and a bunch of cables and lying around. It's nothing really that fabulous.

• 1:50:07Jocko Willink?

  And you'd come out, um, you guys had, had made a show, what is it? New Bozina?

• 1:50:13Speaker 02

  The New Bozina. Yeah. We did a, me and my friends did a clown comedy, sketch comedy. Weird surreal comedy piece that we created in New York and had done pretty well in New York and we brought it out to LA.

• 1:50:25Jocko Willink?

  And this was David Count, was David, uh?

• 1:50:27Speaker 02

  Costable.

• 1:50:28Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 1:50:28Speaker 02

  He's on Billions and he was on Breaking Bad. Yeah, he was.

• 1:50:31Jocko Willink?

  I was in Billions with him.

• 1:50:33Speaker 02

  No kidding?

• 1:50:33Jocko Willink?

  Yes.

• 1:50:34Speaker 02

  Oh, that's awesome.

• 1:50:35Jocko Willink?

  What a freaking good dude.

• 1:50:36Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:50:36Jocko Willink?

  That whole place was, I, it was interesting. It was the first time I ever did anything like that.

• 1:50:40Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:50:40Jocko Willink?

  And so I didn't really know what was going on and I didn't know how popular Billions was. And so I got hooked up, Tim Ferriss is a friend of mine and they asked him if I would want to be on it. Like Tim and I were on the same episode. Anyways, I said, maybe like, oh, it sounds cool, whatever. I was going to New York and I went out there and actually I showed up and David was like, he, he, he was like super cool, but he, he's like, I showed up and I'm like, oh, hi. And he's like, welcome to Billions. As if like, and I was kind of like, well, that's kind of weird. Yeah. I was like, that's a little strange because I had only watched like on my flight to New York, I watched the first like three episodes.

• 1:51:25Jocko Willink?

  So I really didn't know what was going on and I didn't know how freaking good that show was. Uh, then I was hook, line and sinker and I've, I've, um, watched the whole thing. But yeah, I was, that was another thing. Like I'm with those guys. And these guys are studying lines. Like I'm sitting there and that's the other freaking jacked up thing. So they, I had got a script, right? And I kind of thought like, well, you don't actually like read the script or whatever, like in a show, you just kind of make shit up. And so I hadn't memorized the, I don't know how many lines I had, but however many lines I had, I didn't memorize any of them. I thought I was going to be me and just talk because I was literally myself, right?

• 1:52:01Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:52:01Jocko Willink?

  So I get there and now I'm watching what's going on with the, as they're filming other sections and I was, and they.

• 1:52:08Speaker 02

  Like, oh shit.

• 1:52:09Jocko Willink?

  They do the same thing over and over again. Over and over and over again, like 20 times. And I was like, holy shit, I've got to do the same thing over and over again. I'm totally a Brits and I'm like sitting there trying to memorize my nine lines or whatever it was. Uh, but what a good, what a great dude. Actually, the whole, everyone there was awesome. Um, Brian Koppelman and Dave Levine have been just, they were just super cool and still super cool. Uh, but yeah. And then David from when he was in Breaking Bad and the whole nine yards.

• 1:52:37Speaker 02

  Yeah. Yeah. He's, he's one of my oldest dearest friends and it's great. He's had a great career and we started doing these weird sketch comedy clown characters. It's hard to describe what it was, but that's what brought us to LA. So.

• 1:52:53Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. Cause like your director or something was there. Uh, your.

• 1:52:56Speaker 02

  Our producer had moved there to work in TV and film and he brought us out and we did the stage play, but a bunch of different theaters and we got a TV deal at Fox and, um, you know, just started getting the whole TV and film thing going.

• 1:53:11Jocko Willink?

  And meanwhile, you do five additions. You eventually get almost famous. Great San Diego movie, by the way. Uh, Galaxy Quest.

• 1:53:20Speaker 02

  Those are my first two movies.

• 1:53:22Jocko Willink?

  The Expendables.

• 1:53:24Speaker 02

  That wasn't the, not the movie you're thinking of. It was a different show.

• 1:53:27Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. Uh, and you say, suddenly I thought I had this whole LA thing figured out. I rolled into town and gotten a pilot and a couple of film roles without a single hitch. We set up the new Bozina at Fox, do a pilot presentation and made more money in a couple of months. And in all the previous years combined, I was in and feeling like a made man. Holiday and I decided to settle down in LA and make a go of it. She would finish her book of short stories and I would be an actor who could actually pay the bills. Then within a few months, the new Bozina got rejected by Fox and I was unemployed for a full year.

• 1:54:00Jocko Willink?

  Showbiz. Eventually you do House of a Thousand Corpses for Rob Zombie. Yes.

• 1:54:04Speaker 02

  Yep. 20th anniversary just passed.

• 1:54:06Jocko Willink?

  Hell, yeah.

• 1:54:07Speaker 02

  20th anniversary.

• 1:54:08Jocko Willink?

  Uh, you did the movie, America's Sweethearts, CSI, Law and Order, couple pilots.

• 1:54:15Jocko Willink?

  And canceled shows that no one ever heard of to pay the bills and continue to build my career. You get, you get, you're one of the final actors for Arrested Development to play, to play Job.

• 1:54:27Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:54:27Jocko Willink?

  Damn.

• 1:54:28Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:54:29Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. You say this about that, after several auditions, I was once again being tested for the project. There were two final scenes that we Jobes would be doing alongside the rest of the family, who had already been cast. In one scene, there were one or two lines, and in the other scene, there were a couple of pages of really funny dialogue, and a great chance to show off what you could do with the character. We all filed in, one at a time, to show the head of Fox, the first short scene. The other Jobes went in to do the second bigger scene. I waited nervously, going over my lines and bits in preparation. I waited and waited and waited. I was sitting all alone in the waiting room, and after ten or fifteen minutes, I wandered out of the hallway, everyone had left. I mean, everyone. Actors, casting agents, Fox executives, janitors, everyone. I finally saw a casting assistant cleaning up in a corner, and asked what was going on. "I guess they saw all they needed to see from you."

• 1:55:14Jocko Willink?

  She chirped merrily, and I slunk away, embarrassed and miserable, only, having only auditioned with two lines for the best comic role I'd ever read.

• 1:55:22Speaker 02

  Yeah, that was, uh, I still, that just kinda staggers me, that there were like, three of us. The other one was, uh, Michael, um, uh, what's his name from Succession, who plays Connor, the older brother? Michael Root? Michael Ru- Rudd? I'm forgetting his name.

• 1:55:44Jocko Willink?

  A brilliant actor.

• 1:55:45Speaker 02

  A brilliant actor, who's on Succession. He was, um, and it was me, him, and Will Arnett, who is obviously brilliant. And, uh, yeah, do the first little scene, and they're like, "Okay, go wait over here, and we'll call you back in for your next scene."

• 1:55:59Jocko Willink?

  And they just bounced.

• 1:56:00Speaker 02

  And I wait, and I wait, and I wait, and I'm going over my lines, and wait, and I wait, and I wait. It's like, and a half an hour later, everyone's gone. And no one, no one thought to go over. This is how Hollywood works. No one thought, just like, the common decency, to just be like, "Rain, thanks so much. They're not gonna see you for the next scene. They saw what they needed, and they're gonna go in a different direction. Thank you so much for coming in." Like, no one could just do that. And it was, it was humiliating. It was, it was pretty humiliating. But it, it's par for the course. You just keep going. And Will Arnett was great for that. And I'm grateful I didn't get cast in that because that wouldn't have played Dwight if I had been cast on Arrested Development.

• 1:56:41Speaker 02

  He's had a great career. I've had a great career and it all works out in the end.

• 1:56:46Jocko Willink?

  I was up in LA talking to a company, but wherever I was talking, there was an audition going on. For something. And there was 500 teenage girls between the ages of like 11 and 14 lined up around the block.

• 1:57:04Speaker 02

  With, with their, holding their pages and stuff.

• 1:57:07Jocko Willink?

  It was like crazy. One of my friends works in LA and he like runs movies and shows and stuff. And he says, it's the worst thing. Like every person that walks in that room, you are holding their dream.

• 1:57:21Speaker 02

  Right.

• 1:57:22Jocko Willink?

  You are just holding their dream and they seem like the nicest and they're good for the role, but there's someone that's just a little bit better. And you just take their dream and just throw it away. And you don't even have time. Like what you're saying? He's like, yeah, I mean, you had three people, but when there's 500 people in line, it's like, oh, here's your dream. Smash it next. He said, he hates it. He wasn't doing it anymore. He has a casting director and he just like, won't do it anymore because it's heartbreaking.

• 1:57:43Speaker 02

  Yeah. Yeah. It's brutal process. But you, one thing you realize when you're, uh, because I've been on the other side casting. Go on stuff that I've produced or I was starring in or whatever. And you, especially when you see people in the room. Or now it's mostly on tapes. You see kind of on the cloud, they upload their auditions or whatever. But you know, in like 30 seconds, whether they're right or not. And it's nothing to do with that. It's nothing even to do with their talent or anything like, like you just see them and their vibe. It's all a vibe thing. Their vibe and how they're doing the lines and stuff like, yeah. And yeah.

• 1:58:17Jocko Willink?

  So that's what my buddy said, like someone would walk in and he did not even 30 seconds. He looks at the person like they can't play this role, but he's like.

• 1:58:26Speaker 02

  You've got to let them do their thing. They've worked for hours or days on it. And yeah, it's tough.

• 1:58:32Jocko Willink?

  Freaking awful. By the way, your son was born 2004. This is in this timeframe. You got the harrowing story of the birth of your son in the book. So get the book.

• 1:58:46Jocko Willink?

  You end up in this, in this show, Six Feet Under. And um, that, as you mentioned, eventually leads to chapter 14. Dwight K. Schrute, assistant to the regional manager.

• 1:59:03Jocko Willink?

  You say, "I was the very first person to audition for the office." Literally, our incredible casting director, Alison Jones, who casts all of Judd Apllo and Paul Feig's movies, as well as Veep and a myriad of other brilliant comedies, had recently gotten to know me as an actor, and I was starting to get some notice because of my role in Six Feet Under. She called me in to audition for both Michael and Dwight. And I was excited beyond words, as I loved the project so much, I sat in the waiting room clutching my pages, literally more eager for this audition than any of the hundreds I had been on in the past.

• 1:59:36Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:59:37Jocko Willink?

  And that's just because you knew the, the story.

• 1:59:40Speaker 02

  I knew the British office. I had seen it early on. I thought it was amazing. And um, everyone was like, "Oh, they're gonna ruin it, and they can never make an American version." And everyone was shitting on it, especially British people. But um, I was like, "Well, why, why not?" You know, and I still am like, there's still people that are kinda like, "I like the British better." It's like, hey, you can watch all 12 of the British series over and over again for the rest of your life, every single day. No one's taking that away from you. Meanwhile, we went and made 200 episodes of a, of a different kind of version. And it needed to be different, because they're, British has subsidized television. They have no commercials.

• 2:00:23Speaker 02

  So they're getting literally government grants. They can do much shorter seasons. We've gotta do long seasons, and with commercial breaks, we have shorter episodes. Anyways, the list goes on and on. But I was a huge fan of the British show, and, oh man, I was, I was so excited. And, and it was one of those things where... You know, Wakontanka was smiling on me, you know, like I knew from the second I read Dwight, I was like, that's my role. I absolutely know how to play this role. And I was like, there's no one else that can do this the way that I can. So I did a terrible audition for Michael. I, I went in and just did Ricky Gervais. I literally was like, so I'm a, you know, I'm

• 2:01:07Speaker 02

  a manager here and well, you know, it's hard. Everyone knows he loves me and like world's best boss and and it was, it was just really not right. And then I went in for Dwight and I was like, I can and do drink my own urine. And, you know, and they were just like, yeah, okay.

• 2:01:28Speaker 02

  This guy knows what he's doing. But it was, but even then, like I, I really killed the audition, but the callbacks weren't for months later. And the callbacks were, this is back in the day and they, they spent so much time and energy and money on the casting. I mean, it was really, they spent months on the casting. They saw everybody and it was a really important project, NBC. And then they mixed and matched us over a course of a weekend and they filmed us, which hardly, so that a test where like the, the studio executives decide in a, in a test, a TV test or pilot test, who they're going to cast. It wasn't like coming into a room and performing for a bunch of executives. They

• 2:02:09Speaker 02

  just watched the tape, which is a much better way of doing it. So I got matched up with Bob Odenkirk, who was up for Michael. He was like, it was between Bob Odenkirk and Steve Carell. Wow. Two brilliant talents, but Bob was a little dark. Yeah. He was a little dark for the role. Yeah, he could play the British one, maybe. Yeah, yeah. But he, you know, God bless him. He's had such a great career. He's such an amazing actor. And, you know, as soon as you saw Steve Carell do it, it was just like.

• 2:02:38Speaker 02

  I hadn't seen him act before and they sent us into like improvise with each other. And I was like laughing in the in the audition and um I had never seen an actor like that before or since I mean his his ability he's just so facile. He can just improvise off of anything. And that's the that's the amazing thing about I know I'm skipping around here a lot, but that's the amazing thing about about Steve is like you talk about learning lines like he would learn his lines, but he's the kind of actor like you could throw anything at him. I did it over 200 episodes and it would never break him and he would never it couldn't you couldn't throw him

• 2:03:20Speaker 02

  off. You could not he had done so much improv you could not throw him off. You know if you're doing a scene and you're talking about how well we better go to the Italian restaurant on a lunch break and and you're like and you just throw in a line like you know I I really never loved my mother and he would just be like Dwight what are you talking about your mother right now? We gotta get to that Italian restaurant. It wouldn't even like phase he would just take anything and weave it in. And that was incredible to learn from because I came from this Shakespeare background right theater background and memorizing lines and performing and stuff like that. And Steve was all about just like just mercurial and just being able to do to turn on a dime.

• 2:04:05Jocko Willink?

  Who's Greg Daniels?

• 2:04:06Speaker 02

  He's the showrunner. He was the main writer for our show. So kind of he he shaped he took the English thing and shaped it for the American audience and he's kind of when they showrunner basically means they make all the decisions. So casting, the edits, the cuts, the the the final scripts, the budgets, they're really the big executive producer overseeing the whole thing.

• 2:04:29Jocko Willink?

  And and is would you say he's the guy that like had the vision of because they're obviously putting a lot of effort into this?

• 2:04:37Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:04:37Jocko Willink?

  Is he the guy that thought like, hey, this is gonna be if we do this right, we got we got a freaking goldmine here?

• 2:04:43Speaker 02

  A hundred percent. Yeah, he Greg Daniels is he doesn't get enough credit for what he did, but he's very meticulous and he really just had lists of like, here's what I love about the British office and here's what is not going to work for an American audience. And he really wanted more heart. I don't know. Here's a good indicator of that. Look at the difference in Michael Scott from season one to season two. So in season one, Steve himself was a little overweight, he'll admit that. And he had, they had Michael Scott, like Ricky, slick his hair back, his thinning a little bit. And like, he was much more like, just unlikable, just kind of like a greasy used car salesman a little bit.

• 2:05:27Speaker 02

  And, and they realized, even though season one is pretty brilliant and pretty fricking funny. They realized like, we need to make Michael Scott more accessible, approachable, because he's doing so many more horrible things. So they kind of like, did his hair better and they dressed him a little better. They lit it a little nicer. Just look at the difference even in the lighting. And they made, they gave him a little more heart, just a, just a little bit more, not all of a sudden he's hugging puppies, right? But in fact, they say that on TV, like, if you've got an unlikable character, then you've got to show them early on being really nice to an animal. And then the audience will like them and then they can forgive all the dastardly things they do.

• 2:06:09Speaker 02

  But, but it wasn't like that with Michael Scott, but they just gave him a little more heart and a little more warmth. And you felt for him a little bit. You realize like, oh, he's kind of a lost puppy dog himself. But in season one, he was a little, it was a little more like the British show.

• 2:06:26Speaker 02

  But so Greg Daniels is the one making those decisions and going, you know, and being really sure that. And he said, early on, he said, listen, because at the time, I don't know if you remember this, but American television comedy 2005 was not very good. Putting Seinfeld and Friends aside, which were brilliant. There were, there was a lot of crappy shows out there. I love, Everybody Loves Raymond was great. There were, there were some classics and then a sea of crap. And so he's like, you know, if we can take the world of comedy and just turn it, it's like a comedy is like an ocean liner. We could turn it one degree in the right direction. We can influence comedy in the right way.

• 2:07:10Speaker 02

  And that's, that's what The Office did. It didn't do one degree. It did like five degrees and made comedy a lot smarter. But it was so revolutionary what we were doing at the time. Single camera, poorly lit, like fluorescent lights, really average to unattractive characters. And even like Jim and Pam, like Jenna and John are really good looking, but they're not like models, right? They're just

• 2:07:38Jocko Willink?

  They're real people.

• 2:07:39Speaker 02

  They're real people who are kind of good looking, on the good looking side of things. And at the time, they were casting all these like, models in these sitcoms and stuff, and that wasn't working out so well. So, the fact that it's real people, handheld, like shaky camera, there were a lot of things that really broke, and we almost got cancelled so many times. I mean, we did not do well. We got terrible reviews. Go Google the early reviews of The Office. They were terrible. Like, oh, not as good as The English Office.

• 2:08:10Jocko Willink?

  There's some haters on that English Office, huh?

• 2:08:13Speaker 02

  Oh my God. It just never, it just never, it still doesn't end. It's still, it's just incredible.

• 2:08:19Jocko Willink?

  Well, British people have a different sense of humor. Like I said, I'm married to a Brit, so I get some of that English humor, but Americans don't have that same sense of humor.

• 2:08:32Speaker 02

  Right.

• 2:08:32Jocko Willink?

  We needed the American Office.

• 2:08:33Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:08:34Jocko Willink?

  And we needed it bad.

• 2:08:35Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:08:36Jocko Willink?

  Like, The British Office, if you're an American watching it, you're depressed. You can very well end up depressed. You're like, oh, this is, this doesn't make me feel good. It's funny, but I'm like laughing at these people and I feel guilty about it when I'm done. It's like not a feeling

• 2:08:50Speaker 02

  It's pretty cynical, yeah.

• 2:08:51Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. And, and The American Office is, it's American.

• 2:08:55Speaker 02

  Yeah. Well, and I think the interesting thing is about The Office, what no one saw coming, by the way, was when it started to stream on Netflix in 2016, 17, and 18, I don't know, I don't even know when it started. So much of Google that. Get on that.

• 2:09:12Jocko Willink?

  Yes, sir.

• 2:09:12Speaker 02

  Um, never been called sir before. Uh, the, um, and all of a sudden you had, and this probably applies to your kids, you had teenagers Watching the show over and over and over again. And all of a sudden I was meeting fourteen year olds who had seen the entirety of the office like seven times. And this was way back now. Now they've seen it like seventy times.

• 2:09:36Jocko Willink?

  That's my, that's my kids, hundred percent.

• 2:09:39Speaker 02

  They, they just leave it on. But I think that little bit of heart that Greg Daniels, the reality and the heart that Greg Daniels put in every episode and he always wanted, he said, listen, the show's got to be just eighty-five, ninety percent just comedy, but just that ten to fifteen percent of reality and heart that we, that we sprinkle in will go a super long way.

• 2:10:00Jocko Willink?

  I remember that even as a kid watching MASH. I remember a while, because I was always interested in war and I'd get to watch the show and it was like funny. And then every once in a while you'd be like, like I'm a kid. And I'd be like, oh shit, these guys are at war. I remember this one scene Alan Aldous, towards the end of the series, Alan Aldous talking about like, this woman, he's like, oh, she, she had this chicken, it was chicken was making noise and they're on this bus and blah, blah, blah, blah. And she killed the chicken and, you know, and then you find out that she actually killed her kid to get the kid to be quiet. And I, I mean, I remember watching that as a little kid. So it was this funny show, but then it would have these impactful moments. And the office definitely had plenty of those impactful moments for

• 2:10:43Jocko Willink?

  sure. You got this one section in here where you talk about Greg Daniels kind of, early on, pulls you aside and says like, he told me in a very diplomatic way, he loved my acting during the improvs, and he liked my acting much less during the scripted scenes.

• 2:10:59Speaker 02

  It's true. It's true. That's not, and I'd already gotten the part and I was like,

• 2:11:03Jocko Willink?

  oh, God. And then you go and watch the videos and you're like, oh, I see it?

• 2:11:09Speaker 02

  Yeah. So I convinced the one producer who had a management company and I had a manager at the same company. And I was like, you need to let me watch the auditions. He's like, I can't like, just let me. I just need to see what I did that what Greg is talking about because we hadn't started shooting yet. We would be doing table reads and just rehearsing and stuff like that. So I got to go and watch all of my auditions.

• 2:11:36Jocko Willink?

  Wait, so the guy, you talked the guy into it?

• 2:11:37Speaker 02

  Yes. So he showed, he had just on his little like laptop or whatever. And I got to watch my auditions and I was just like zoned in. I was like, and like there's scenes that were scripted where I had my, you know, my lines. And then there were scenes where they said, you know, you and John just have an argument about getting coffee. Ready? Go. And I would look at the, and I saw it and I saw what he's, and I was like, and it was still a little bit of that theater actor-y kind of thing where I kind of like would do a line reading or I'd make a line a certain way or I'd decide kind of how a line should sound or something.

• 2:12:17Speaker 02

  And it wasn't bad. It just was a little more presentational. I don't know how else to put it. But the improv stuff was just much more real. It's just talking and shooting the shit and, and being weird and in a real natural way. And I was like, and it really, it was like, I'm so glad he brought that up. I'm like, oh, thank God. Good. This is good. So then I just made the scripted stuff to sound more like improv stuff. And then I'd improvise off the scripted stuff and, and it ended up working, working out great.

• 2:12:48Jocko Willink?

  You say this, after we were all cast on the show, me, Steve, John, and Jenna went out for lunch at a nondescript little sandwich place down the street from the studio. We had a conversation that grandiose as it may sound, is etched into all of our minds. We giddily discuss the very real possibility that this show could go on for eight years and that would change the course of our lives and how these parts we were about to undertake would most likely be our most defining roles. Just think about what we're getting into. The journey we're about to go on could be amazing, I remember saying. I remember Steve, who was just coming off of doing Anchorman and the Forty Year Old Virgin, saying, all of the role, of all the roles I'll end up doing in films, I may shoot. I believe that Michael Scott may be the role I'll always be most known for. It was one of those moments

• 2:13:31Jocko Willink?

  when destiny, when our destiny was seen with complete clarity, like a country road from a hot air balloon, all while eating a tuna sandwich. But the weird thing is, like you guys, so you guys saw that?

• 2:13:43Speaker 02

  The magic.

• 2:13:44Jocko Willink?

  You guys saw some of that magic?

• 2:13:45Speaker 02

  We were like, early on, we're like, this could really be something.

• 2:13:52Speaker 02

  This could really be something, you know, but we had no idea that, I mean, it exceeded even that. I mean, it's become this cultural phenomenon. I walk into Target and like my face is on a mug and a hot plate and a, and an apron and shoes and like

• 2:14:09Jocko Willink?

  We have, we have a freaking lot of office merch at my house.

• 2:14:12Speaker 02

  Oh, do you?

• 2:14:13Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. We got freaking pajamas with your head on it and shit like that. But the weird thing is it didn't come out like you just mentioned, it didn't come out of the gate that strong. As a matter of fact, it wasn't, it was like getting picked up ones and twosies, right?

• 2:14:26Speaker 02

  Yeah. Yeah. So the second season, the first season was only six episodes and they kind of backdoored us in and then, and it really was only because the success of the 40 year old virgin and they were like, hey, you've got a movie star on this show. Like they're like, yeah, but it's so weird. These were the Jeff Zucker years. It was not a good time at NBC. They made a lot of colossal errors and, um, and so they were like, okay, well, we'll, we'll order five more episodes and then we didn't, and then like, well, we can afford two more and then, well, one more and then, and then it just started to, and that second season started to, uh, take off.

• 2:15:08Jocko Willink?

  And then this thing happened with iTunes.

• 2:15:11Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:15:11Jocko Willink?

  Which holy, I didn't recognize this. So, uh, the first iPad, what do they call it? An iPod came out, but it had video on it.

• 2:15:18Speaker 02

  Yeah. First video iPod came out in 2005.

• 2:15:21Jocko Willink?

  And they put, what, the first season of the office or the second season?

• 2:15:25Speaker 02

  They put the office Christmas episode preloaded onto every video iPod. So every rich kid in the country, you know, whose parents could afford a $200 or $300 video iPod player, MP3 player, he got it and he had an office episode on there and they were watching it and they're like, these kids are like, and that was our, was the weirdest thing too. It's like, here's what we're doing a show about people working in an office. We thought the audience would be people that had worked in offices and our biggest audiences were high school and college kids, which advertisers

• 2:16:03Speaker 02

  love, by the way. So yeah, that, that was another thing that kind of 40 year old, so many things had to happen in the right way for us to have the run that we had. And that was another one of them.

• 2:16:19Jocko Willink?

  And then it goes like this, then all of a sudden NBC put a giant billboard of us in front of their Burbank offices. Someone on the crew had taken a photo of that billboard while driving past and I, John, Jenna and Steve huddled around looking at it laughing ecstatically. After about a hundred elated high fives, we settled back down to do the scene at hand giggling secretly. A photo of that billboard was hung on the wall just outside of our set and stayed there for the duration of the show. We knew then we were going to be on the air for a long, long time. We were off and running. So that's it. You see the billboard.

• 2:17:02Speaker 02

  Then you made it. You know, people don't understand about acting is to get on a TV show as an actor in any capacity is really, really hard to do. It's even if you're really talented and trained, you've got to have representation. You've got to get the right things just to get a single role. If you get a recurring role on a TV show, that's even harder. If you get a pilot and that pilot gets picked up to, if you get a pilot, it's so hard to do and it's a miracle that you get a pilot and that pilot gets picked up to series. That's a triple miracle. And if the series gets picked up and does multiple

• 2:17:42Speaker 02

  seasons, that's a quadruple miracle. And then if it has a full run, like nine, 10 year run, then if it wins, wins awards, then if it lasts 10, 20 years after you started it, like, I mean, it's like hitting the jackpot over and over and over again. It's like hitting the roulette wheel. I put 20 black, boom, hit it again, hit it, hit it, hit it, hit it. That's what it's like to do the office. So, you know, I'm just, even today, like 10 years after we have finished our last episode, like, I'm just in awe of what we were able to do. I'm so grateful for the, the role, the experience. I mean,

• 2:18:21Speaker 02

  it was, it was, it was, it was a miracle. And with one of the greatest like ensembles ever assembled, I mean, the amount of talent in that room was just preposterous.

• 2:18:34Jocko Willink?

  And there's gotta be some level, I'm guessing of like the Beatles, right? The Beatles.

• 2:18:41Jocko Willink?

  Were only the Beatles because of that group of people. And like when they all split off and they were doing their own thing, yeah, they made some stuff. But no one really cares about John Lennon or even Paul McCartney or like they don't care about what they did solo. Really. It's about the Beatles.

• 2:18:58Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:18:59Jocko Willink?

  Same thing with, well, with Black Sabbath, right? You had Black Sabbath. Then you had Ozzy Breakoff, Tony, like I love those guys, but it's about Black Sabbath. There's something special about that chemistry. Led Zeppelin, same thing, right? You've got Led Zeppelin. When Led Zeppelin is Led Zeppelin. And once you, once, uh, John Bonham dies. It, it's just not going to be the same. So there's that miracle as well, that you get this group of people. And if it had been a different, you know, Michael Scott, or a different Dwight, or a different Jim, or a different Pam. It might've just been just a little bit of chemistry and then you don't get what you get.

• 2:19:39Speaker 02

  Yeah, and maybe we would have done the six episodes and been canceled or canceled halfway through the second season. If we didn't have that, you know, if Bob Odenkirk had been cast and brilliant. Bob Odenkirk's one of America's best actor, writer, directors. Brilliant, nothing against him at all, but if they had gone in that direction, you know, uh, who knows, you know?

• 2:20:02Jocko Willink?

  Well, he's also highly present in my house as you know, Saul.

• 2:20:05Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:20:05Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, very highly present in my house.

• 2:20:07Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 2:20:08Jocko Willink?

  So I guess we would have been winning possibly either way, or maybe losing on both fronts.

• 2:20:12Speaker 02

  Well, he found a better, he found a better outlet for his acting. God, he was good. You know, better called Saul universe.

• 2:20:19Jocko Willink?

  Uh, well, that's what you were saying earlier, like. When, when people, like you're meant for that role, like he's meant for that role. It's hard to picture someone else pulling it off.

• 2:20:28Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:20:29Jocko Willink?

  It's hard to picture someone else pulling off Dwight. It's hard to picture some, and I guess now we're kind of all just, it is what it is. We, that's just the way it is. But if you throw someone else in there, it's just a mess, could have been a mess.

• 2:20:42Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah.

• 2:20:43Jocko Willink?

  You got nominated for three Emmy awards. How'd that, how'd that work out?

• 2:20:48Speaker 02

  I didn't, it didn't work out very well. I lost two, two of them to Jeremy Piven.

• 2:20:54Jocko Willink?

  Who's Jeremy Piven?

• 2:20:55Speaker 02

  He was on Entourage, he played Ari on Entourage.

• 2:21:00Speaker 02

  The agent on Entourage.

• 2:21:01Jocko Willink?

  So is that the leading role?

• 2:21:03Speaker 02

  No, it was the supporting, best comic supporting role.

• 2:21:07Jocko Willink?

  Okay, so you lost him twice. Have you ever sent him hate mail secretly?

• 2:21:12Speaker 02

  Um.

• 2:21:14Jocko Willink?

  Okay, we can edit this part out.

• 2:21:16Speaker 02

  No comment.

• 2:21:19Speaker 02

  I didn't send him hate mail per se. But he received some mysterious packages in the mail. I wanna, I wanna break into his house and steal one of those. He should just give me one of them. He's got two.

• 2:21:33Jocko Willink?

  After, yeah.

• 2:21:34Speaker 02

  He did great and Ari, that was great. Just give me one, scratch it out.

• 2:21:39Jocko Willink?

  Be easy.

• 2:21:40Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:21:41Jocko Willink?

  You got a whole section in here, random office memories. Just go, people, go get the book. Freaking hilarious stuff. I'm not gonna try and do it justice. And by the way, you read the audiobook too. So I obviously suck at reading you. But I just did it for this podcast. That's the way I'm doing it anyways. Get the audiobook. If you don't want to get the book, but because you're too lazy to read, get the audiobook, then you can hear all these stories. From Rain himself.

• 2:22:10Jocko Willink?

  Chapter 16, Soul Pancakes.

• 2:22:15Jocko Willink?

  After some long consultations and soul searching with some spiritual philosopher friends, mine co-founders Joshua Homnick and Devin Gundry, we decided to create a destination for the web for people interested in exploring big ideas through the portals of philosophy, creativity and spirituality.

• 2:22:33Jocko Willink?

  We wanted our endeavor to be a successful business venture and not a nonprofit because we felt there was a large, young audience out there that was longing for positive content. And you talk about in the book here about it's just at this time, there what's on the web is just a bunch of freaking negativity. And you guys want to do something positive and cool.

• 2:22:53Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, exactly.

• 2:22:55Jocko Willink?

  Hence Soul Pancake, how's that go down?

• 2:22:57Speaker 02

  Yeah, so you know, I talked about, you know, what a lottery win it is to be on a show that's going to be going for a long time. So all of a sudden, for the first time in my life, I'm like thirty nine years old, almost going into my forties, and I know that I'm gonna have five to ten years of like, real paychecks, solid paychecks. I've never had that before. Remember, this is a guy, first ten years of my career, never made over twenty grand in a year, in a year.

• 2:23:26Jocko Willink?

  What do they pay you for a pilot? Like, when you're doing the first, what'd you do, six? First, no thirteen?

• 2:23:31Speaker 02

  Yeah. So pilot fees vary for actors. I mean, there can be a big star they bring in for a pilot, and they pay him a million dollars to a pilot.

• 2:23:40Jocko Willink?

  But you weren't a big star.

• 2:23:41Speaker 02

  I was not at all. So somewhere between, you know, a per- per- episode rate for actors is somewhere between twenty grand to fifty grand an episode, you know, kind of early on. Then you renegotiate your contract, and then you start getting more, you start getting into the hundreds of thousands per episode and stuff like that.

• 2:24:02Jocko Willink?

  So this was like exponential money.

• 2:24:04Speaker 02

  Oh, my god. Yeah. So what that did is, well, and I had already bought a house, because I, we bought a crappy little house in Van Nuys, California, that was, cost two hundred and sixty thousand dollars, little eleven hundred square foot house where my son was born, and then, and then we upgraded once the office was, was going. But the, there's a responsibility that I felt, and maybe this was my upbringing, my faith tradition, I'm not quite sure. It was like, hey, I'm gonna, all of a sudden, I'm gonna have this huge platform, like, I'm gonna be this guy who's on this TV show, people know who he is, I've got something to say. I felt a responsibility

• 2:24:48Speaker 02

  to try and do something positive in the world. I, I don't know why, I mean, you talk to other people, and they're like, I just wanna have a nice life. I'm not saying I'm some saint or something like that, I'm not at all. I'm a colossal screw up, but I was like, what am I gonna do? And that's where Soul Pancake came out of, a long series of discussions with some friends about, What can we best do to make the world a better place? What's the biggest need? And what we went to was like positive uplifting content for young people that dealt with life's biggest questions. We were doing videos on mental health stuff kind of before anybody was. And uplifting joyful videos, videos that asked probing questions.

• 2:25:30Speaker 02

  I had a, an interview talk series in my back of my van called Metaphysical Milkshake. You know, and we had Kid President, we had a lot of different shows. It was right at the time when YouTube, it was a lot of crap. It was a lot of like Kardashians and auto credit score stuff and porn and, and just it's kind of fails, remember like fails with really big and

• 2:25:59Speaker 02

  it was just kind of the worst of humanity on the web. Can we make something beautiful and uplifting and important, but not, you know, it doesn't take itself too seriously. So we made this, it started as a web destination, quickly morphed into making a digital media, media content company, mostly through a YouTube channel. And we had a YouTube channel that pretty early on had two or three million subscribers. And, and we made over 3,000 pieces of content. That was very positive and uplifting, very shareable. And we had a lot of brand partnership deals and took the company, we sold the company to a place called Participant Media, which is an even bigger media company. And they had it for a couple of years and then it kind of like faded away.

• 2:26:44Speaker 02

  But it was, we had a long, good 10, 12 year run with that and got over a billion video views and made the world a slightly better place. So I'm really proud of that work.

• 2:26:56Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, and you, you were doing charity work in there as well.

• 2:27:01Jocko Willink?

  How do you say that the thing that you started in Haiti?

• 2:27:04Speaker 02

  It's called Lidei, Lidei Haiti, yeah.

• 2:27:06Jocko Willink?

  Got it.

• 2:27:07Speaker 02

  Yeah, we still work on that.

• 2:27:08Jocko Willink?

  And that's, it was a really interesting part of the book.

• 2:27:13Jocko Willink?

  Uh, where they were asking these young Haitian girls, what's your favorite color?

• 2:27:18Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:27:19Jocko Willink?

  And which is like the common question for every seven year old kid in America like, oh, what's your favorite color? That's just what you do. And these girls didn't even know what that meant. It was like the foreign question to them.

• 2:27:33Speaker 02

  They were, and these were older girls, teenage girls, and it was very clear that they had never been asked this question before. And if that's the case, you know, how are they being seen? Or how are they not being seen? Because we asked one girl and, and she was like a deer in the headlights and she was like, "Blue." And, and they were like, "Okay, blue, great, oh, great." And then, "What about you? What's your favorite color?" And just like,

• 2:28:01Speaker 02

  "Blue." They all said blue because they just like, what's right? What's the right answer? What's the wrong answer? They had never, so we realized that, um, and we, we came in after the earthquake, my wife and I, and we were working with Sean Penn and some, uh, in his refugee camp that he set up. He was doing amazing work and we started doing these classes for, and the arts and literacy for adolescent girls. And we saw how incredible, uh, what an incredible bonding community it created in the girls. Like we left doing our workshops and they still gathered and kept meeting. And we started doing the workshops and they were so shy and self-effacing and insecure.

• 2:28:44Speaker 02

  And by the end of like our two week workshops, they were like expressive and sharing their poetry they had written and their photographs they had taken and the drama they were doing. And we saw like how powerful the arts are for creating community, healing trauma, which I'm sure you know from veterans work. And, um, and, uh, you know, opening the way to seeing these girls for who they really are. And, um, I'll never forget that we, when we started doing this work with Lee Day. This girl was like, you know, at first I didn't understand what you guys were doing because other people come here, they give us shoes, you know, they give us places to live,

• 2:29:28Speaker 02

  they give us food, said, but you, you give us hope. And that's, that's really what we're trying to do is educate the whole girl. We're working with over 800 girls in 12 different locations. We have a Haitian staff of 40 and I'm very excited and proud to be a co-founder, but it's really Haitian led and run and we just support it. And I, I whore myself out as, as Dwight to raise money and send it over to educate these girls. And it's funny because in a couple of weeks, we're doing a dinner with, it's called the office dinner party. So it's me and Steve and Angela are having dinner and you could buy raffle tickets to win or the highest bidder to go to this dinner.

• 2:30:10Speaker 02

  And we've, we've already raised a massive amount of money just to have dinner.

• 2:30:15Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 2:30:15Speaker 02

  So.

• 2:30:16Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, I can see where you'd raise a massive amount of money.

• 2:30:19Speaker 02

  Yeah. Yeah. You'd want in on that dinner.

• 2:30:21Jocko Willink?

  Hundred percent. Yeah, I'd definitely be there for that one.

• 2:30:27Jocko Willink?

  I'm gonna fast forward a little bit. You, you close out this book, The Bassoon King, you close out this book with a, with a section called 10 Things I Know For Sure.

• 2:30:38Jocko Willink?

  One, the deepest happiness comes from service to others. Like 100%. If you think you're being funny, you're not being funny. This is a heads up, isn't it? It's a real important thing because it's not just think you're being funny. If you think you're being cool, you're not being cool. You know what I'm saying? This, this applies to a lot of things that we try and do as humans.

• 2:31:03Speaker 02

  Well said.

• 2:31:04Jocko Willink?

  Uh, gratitude changes everything. Rome is the greatest city on earth.

• 2:31:10Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:31:12Jocko Willink?

  So you put that in there as a thing you know for sure.

• 2:31:14Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 2:31:14Jocko Willink?

  Fair enough. Need to spend some more time here in San Diego.

• 2:31:18Speaker 02

  No.

• 2:31:19Jocko Willink?

  But no, I, I'm.

• 2:31:20Speaker 02

  I've been to San Diego.

• 2:31:21Jocko Willink?

  I'm the worst, I'm the worst.

• 2:31:23Speaker 02

  I love San Diego.

• 2:31:23Jocko Willink?

  I don't want to leave my house. Like nothing, I don't want to go to Rome. I don't want to go to anywhere. I don't want to go to Paris.

• 2:31:30Speaker 02

  LA.

• 2:31:31Jocko Willink?

  I don't want to go, I definitely don't want to go to LA.

• 2:31:32Speaker 02

  Oceanside?

• 2:31:34Jocko Willink?

  Oceanside perhaps.

• 2:31:37Jocko Willink?

  You make a little shout for Rome there. The opinions of other people are not something to worry about. That's number five.

• 2:31:45Speaker 02

  Hmm, yeah.

• 2:31:46Jocko Willink?

  That's a very good thing to learn. The earlier you learn that, the better off you're gonna be. Now, is there a dichotomy here where if I'm like, I don't give a shit what anybody says, I'm gonna freaking spike the bunch? Or whatever, whatever thing you're gonna do. Like, there's a certain point where if everyone's telling you you're acting like an asshole.

• 2:32:02Speaker 02

  Sure.

• 2:32:02Jocko Willink?

  That's something you might want to pay attention to?

• 2:32:04Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, that's common sense wisdom. Like, you, we learn, we're social creatures. So, we learn, like, oh, I keep, when I greet people, I punch them on the balls, but people don't seem to like me very much. Hmm, maybe I should stop punching them in the balls. Like, we, you know, you learn that way. But my sponsor in 12 Steps actually said this, and I just thought it was the simplest thing, and it's so, it's so profound. He said, like, what other people think of you is none of your business. What you think about other people is all of your business. So, it's always being mindful of, like, how am I, am I treating people? Am I respecting them? Am I listening to them? Am I taking them in? Am I filled with resentment? Do I have a huge?

• 2:32:48Speaker 02

  I know people, and they have, like, this resentment list, like, oh, he's an asshole. I'll never talk to them, blah, blah, blah, like this. And that, and that's, it's like a big cancerous tumor on their shoulder. You know, it's hard to live your life with all of that resentment. Like, how, how am I feeling about other people? Am I keeping that clean? People are gonna, whatever they're gonna think about me, it's fine. That's, that's, it's completely out of my control. I'm gonna try and be my authentic self and, and bring myself to every occasion with as much authenticity and integrity as possible. And I don't always succeed, but that's what I'm gonna, that's what I'm gonna try and do. And that's, that's what's in my control.

• 2:33:29Jocko Willink?

  Number six, Game of Thrones is our greatest teacher. A few things I've learned from the greatest TV show in the history of everything. A, get a wolf. B, get a dragon. C, women should rule the world.

• 2:33:43Jocko Willink?

  D politics are a waste of breath and time. Dude, I'm not, I'm not, I haven't watched it yet.

• 2:33:49Speaker 02

  What are you doing with yourself?

• 2:33:50Jocko Willink?

  I know.

• 2:33:51Speaker 02

  You say you never leave the house. So watch fucking Game of Thrones, bro. What the hell?

• 2:33:56Jocko Willink?

  My middle daughter who you met, she's like, she's like, says it's freaking awesome.

• 2:34:02Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah. The last season.

• 2:34:06Speaker 02

  But, uh, yeah.

• 2:34:08Jocko Willink?

  But I don't know. See, the weird thing is, I mean, there's like kind of a thread here of Dungeons and Dragons. And like, I couldn't get into that. And now, and like Jason Gardner, who I told you about earlier, who's like full on Dungeon Dragon kid.

• 2:34:20Speaker 02

  He loved Game of Thrones.

• 2:34:21Jocko Willink?

  Freaking Game of Thrones all day.

• 2:34:22Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:34:23Jocko Willink?

  I mean, but he's.

• 2:34:23Speaker 02

  But it's about, it's not about spells and dragons as much as it's about politics and the human nature and like, and power and it's, it's all, it's a game of Thrones. It's literally like a giant chess game. A little bit of magic here and there, but it's not like prancing elves and wands and Harry Potter and stuff like that. So.

• 2:34:44Jocko Willink?

  Wait, are you bashing Harry Potter right now?

• 2:34:47Speaker 02

  Can I give you an unpopular opinion?

• 2:34:48Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 2:34:49Speaker 02

  I think Harry Potter sucks.

• 2:34:51Jocko Willink?

  Okay, we can edit this out, dude, because I don't, you.

• 2:34:54Speaker 02

  I know I'm gonna get, I don't care the opinions of other people. I said unpopular opinion. It's funny, I've gone on podcasts before and I'm like, okay, unpopular opinion. And then I've laid out my unpopular opinion and then people are in the comments are like, I can't believe he said that. That's so stupid. It's like, yeah, I said it's an unpopular opinion. I don't like Harry Potter. I don't like the books. I don't like them. And I especially don't like the movies.

• 2:35:16Jocko Willink?

  How come?

• 2:35:16Speaker 02

  It's endless and who cares? And it's poorly written and it's, it's, it, it's really, really good for 12 year olds. And all the adults that have read it like 17 times, I'm really sorry. You need to grow the fuck up.

• 2:35:33Jocko Willink?

  Damn.

• 2:35:34Speaker 02

  Because it's all about like, I wonder if she likes me and I'll pick out a new wand and I wonder if the girl in my spells and potion class likes me. It's like, that's great when you're 12. It's great when you're 12. And the movies are four hours long and they just, they, they look like a stupid CW show and they make me sick.

• 2:35:55Jocko Willink?

  Okay. Well, I'm going to go ahead and just tell you, please, when you get done watching the comments from this, go to rule five, which is the opinions of other people. I'm not something to worry about.

• 2:36:06Jocko Willink?

  Any other sacred cows you want to slay at this time?

• 2:36:08Speaker 02

  I've got so many. I could, I could get me started.

• 2:36:11Jocko Willink?

  Here's one that I-

• 2:36:13Speaker 02

  That would be a good podcast, by the way.

• 2:36:14Jocko Willink?

  What's that?

• 2:36:15Speaker 02

  Unpopular opinions. Just bring on a guest to say you get one unpopular opinion. They'll be like, "I don't like sushi," or whatever it is, and just like, "Go, why?" You know, whatever, whatever it is. Whatever it is.

• 2:36:26Jocko Willink?

  "I don't like sushi." But, rule number seven. Rule number seven, this is for you, Echo Charles. "Sushi is about the fish, idiots."

• 2:36:35Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:36:36Jocko Willink?

  Meaning all the sauce and rice and stuff.

• 2:36:38Speaker 02

  It's not the sauces, it's not the rolls and the crispy onions and the fried dough and dressing it up with all of that crazy shenanigans. It's about the fish, bro. Right? You're with me.

• 2:36:50Jocko Willink?

  I'm- He's a sushi-

• 2:36:52Speaker 02

  You want to get some sushi after this? The answer is yes. You're not invited.

• 2:36:55Jocko Willink?

  I don't want to come anyways.

• 2:36:56Speaker 02

  You can go read your Harry Potter.

• 2:36:57Jocko Willink?

  Go watch Harry Potter. Actually, I haven't read Harry Potter. And see, anything that's magical and fantasical? Fantical? Fatsantical?

• 2:37:04Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:37:05Jocko Willink?

  Uh, anything that's that, I have a hard time, like, just getting into it. That's just the way, I don't know.

• 2:37:12Speaker 02

  Alright, fair enough.

• 2:37:13Jocko Willink?

  Once I saw the nineteen-sided dice, I was like, "Yo, this is too much for me."

• 2:37:20Jocko Willink?

  Uh, number eight, "My son is my sensei." Beautiful. Man, learning from those kids. Number nine, "Stories make the world go round."

• 2:37:31Jocko Willink?

  Very important thing for people to understand.

• 2:37:34Speaker 02

  You know, it is, we, humans are storytellers, and the earliest evidences of human kind of culture is the cave art, right? And you think about shamans in the cave by candlelight, and people putting their hands in like powdered dyes and putting their handprint on the, on the cave walls, and the shamans telling the mythologies, the stories of the hunt, singing the songs, and, and carrying those stories on, generation to generation, like, humans need to gather- Like we're doing right here and tell stories. We do that in a movie theater. That's why we've really lost something by just having streaming all the time. I went to go see Mission Impossible in the theater last night, empty, empty theater.

• 2:38:19Speaker 02

  I had my clown salad. Do you know what a clown salad is?

• 2:38:21Jocko Willink?

  Uh, do not.

• 2:38:23Speaker 02

  Popcorn, peanut M and M's poured in the popcorn. I had my clown.

• 2:38:27Jocko Willink?

  Wait, do you order that? Do they know what it is? Or do you mix it together yourself?

• 2:38:31Speaker 02

  It's a do it, it's a DIY thing. Yeah. I brought in my clown salad.

• 2:38:35Jocko Willink?

  Who are you with? With the fam?

• 2:38:37Speaker 02

  Solo.

• 2:38:37Jocko Willink?

  Solo operation.

• 2:38:38Speaker 02

  My wife's in China right now studying Tai Chi.

• 2:38:41Jocko Willink?

  Okay.

• 2:38:42Speaker 02

  And my son's off at college.

• 2:38:44Jocko Willink?

  Okay.

• 2:38:44Speaker 02

  And I was like a kid in the candy store. It was so.

• 2:38:47Jocko Willink?

  And no one was in there?

• 2:38:49Speaker 02

  No one was in there. No.

• 2:38:50Speaker 01

  Wait, which one? The first one?

• 2:38:52Speaker 02

  No, Mission Impossible, the new one.

• 2:38:53Speaker 01

  The newest one?

• 2:38:53Speaker 02

  The new one. Dead Letter Office, number seven, or whatever it's called. It's fantastic. I loved it so much. Have you seen it?

• 2:39:00Jocko Willink?

  No. I, again, unpopular opinions, like movies with a lot of explosions and a lot of that kind of stuff going on.

• 2:39:12Jocko Willink?

  They're not my thing, man. They're Echo's thing.

• 2:39:14Speaker 02

  This is my favorite action movie of all time.

• 2:39:16Jocko Willink?

  Really?

• 2:39:17Speaker 02

  Favorite action movie of all time. There was one of the James Bonds that was really, really good. I forget what it was called. One of the Daniel Craig ones. But this was like, but anyways, the, the moral of this is it's stories, right? We're huddled in a dark room and there's a, they call it, you know, the flickering myth, you know, the story that's in front of you and the story of heroism and, and courage and explosions and trains falling on cliffs and stuff like that. And uh, I, I just love it, you know, and the office of stories, your podcast is stories, humans gathering, sharing stories, 12, 12 step meetings are sharing stories. Like there's something healing, powerful. We need to share and listen to stories and create stories.

• 2:39:58Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, I was gonna say that as much smack as I talked about this podcast that we do. No, which is reading books from the historical stuff, but like really that's what it is. It's these long stories of war and heroism and loss and it's

• 2:40:12Speaker 02

  And nerdy actors. And then occasionally you bring in me and Theo Von.

• 2:40:20Jocko Willink?

  I had Gary Sinise on here. He's another actor.

• 2:40:22Speaker 02

  He's awesome.

• 2:40:23Jocko Willink?

  Have we had any other actors on here? I don't think so. Is Theo Von an actor or is he a comedian?

• 2:40:28Speaker 02

  He's a terrible actor. Barely a comedian. He's just a funny guy who tells stories about snakes and toilet paper.

• 2:40:35Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 2:40:36Speaker 02

  Now, one time I met a girl. She had three legs. We called her Three Leg Suzie. She's great. She gave a mean blowjob. Anyway.

• 2:40:47Jocko Willink?

  That's pretty much it.

• 2:40:53Jocko Willink?

  Number 10, the last thing of 10 things you know for sure is that I don't know anything, which is an important number 10, right? It's an important number 10. That's again, tons of stories in Bassoon King.

• 2:41:07Jocko Willink?

  But it seems like your next book, Soul Boom, it seems like you're trying to figure out what you do know or what you can know or what we're trying to learn. Soul Boom, Why We Need A Spiritual Revolution.

• 2:41:21Jocko Willink?

  Is it, you know, is this book trying to learn? Is it trying to figure things out? What are we doing in Soul Boom?

• 2:41:29Speaker 02

  Yeah. So when I wrote Bassoon King, there's kind of a thread that runs through it that a lot of people are turned off by, but I talk about kind of my faith journey and my spiritual journey. Kind of it's woven through the funny stories. And the great thing about Bassoon King, and I told them when I was writing the book, I'm like, listen, it's gonna be 85% funny stories. 15% is gonna be faith, God, questions and finding my spiritual path and whatever. And, you know, some people love that stuff and some people are like, ugh, but well, you can just skip those paragraphs, but. After I did that and then COVID hit and COVID kind of shut everything down, right?

• 2:42:12Speaker 02

  Of course, we all know that, but it shut down the whole acting industry too. Like, oh shit, what the hell am I gonna do? And I had just been jotting down a lot of quotes and ideas and thoughts and stuff like that. I use the notes app on my iPhone and I'm always just putting in notes and if I can find a quote that I like, and I was like, you know, I do know something. I have spent 20 or 30 years thinking very deeply about spirituality and the big, big questions about like God and the meaning of life and the nature of love and what happens when we die and what is the soul? I've read a lot about this stuff. I've thought a lot about it. Now's my chance. This was my, kind of my COVID project.

• 2:42:56Speaker 02

  And, you know, I, I wrote up, I went to my book agent, I wrote up a little outline and part of the first chapter and kind of the thesis of what I wanted to say. And I sent it out, we sent it out to 13 of the top publishers and immediately rejected by the top 12. Just immediately rejected.

• 2:43:18Jocko Willink?

  What about the people that published the bassoon?

• 2:43:20Speaker 02

  Oh, they passed, they passed so fast it would make your head spin.

• 2:43:23Jocko Willink?

  Damn dude.

• 2:43:24Speaker 02

  Yeah. They never really liked the fact that I put my spiritual journey in that they just wanted funny stories. They didn't, they really didn't want that in the book, but they begrudgingly allowed me to put some of that in. And so finally, and number 13, Hachette, God bless you, Hachette, they came in and they were like, we love it, totally get it. I think it's important, totally see you doing that. We're on board. They've been a great partner. It's pretty rare in this business. Now granted, part of the reason is because I'm a known name and they know I'm going to sell a certain number of books just because I'm the guy who played Dwight from The Office. But.

• 2:44:04Speaker 02

  Yeah, so this was, this is really my passion project. This is my like, I can get hit by a bus and die tomorrow. I'm fine because in Soul Boom is like, anything I've kind of thought about, felt deeply. I share a lot about my mental health journey and recovery journey. And I truly believe, Jaco, that we do need a spiritual revolution. That we keep trying as a society in contemporary America to put Band-Aids on a cancer. And there, we have to go deeper as a culture, as a, as a global culture of humans, but as an American culture especially,

• 2:44:45Speaker 02

  to get to the spiritual roots of the diseases that are afflicting our society. And we're not doing that. We just talk about Democrats and Republicans, like, oh, I'm gonna vote for him, or we'll vote for him, or we're gonna pass this legislation that addresses this and, you know, you know, it's like, you know, one of the examples, I, I, I started off talking about pandemics, right? The global pandemics. We're in the COVID pandemic. Everyone knows what that's like. But we're actually under a pand- there's a number of pandemics that are going on worldwide that are afflicting humanity. Now, there's a lot of different solutions for those pandemics, right? You've got income inequality as a pandemic. You've got, you know, 12 billionaires that own as much as half of the world's population.

• 2:45:28Speaker 02

  That's not fair or right. Now, there's a lot of different solutions. And already I can feel people getting a little prickly, like, uh-oh, he's a socialist. No, I'm not. God bless those billionaires. They worked hard. They deserve their money. But we've got to figure out as a way as a species, like, it's still, there's still people living in garbage dumps. You know, like, how do we, how do we rectify this, you know, under God, under the Bible, under, understanding that we're all beautiful divine sparks and shards of creation? And, and we're all light and love and heart, and how do we take care for the poorest among us as Jesus would have us do?

• 2:46:08Speaker 02

  So, these questions, like income inequality, it's not so much about, I mean, yes, you need to pass some legislation that does certain good things, right? Whatever that is. But we have to go, we have to go deeper. Racism is a great example. Like, we've passed a lot of legislation, anti-racist legislation over the years, right?

• 2:46:31Speaker 02

  We haven't solved it. If anything, it's worse now than it was a long time ago. So, but we have to go, what's, what's the cause of that? Where, why, why are we in this imbalance? Obviously there's slavery and stuff like that. And we look at the past injustices, but what do we do now? Putting, putting that aside, how do we learn and go deeper? And again, it's not going to be with a bill or the right politician or this, that you can pass all the bills you want. If people are going to hate other people and dislike them for the color of their skin and for their culture, then we're screwed. So anyways, I could go on and on, but it's about looking at using spiritual tools for our personal

• 2:47:12Speaker 02

  transformation, Kung Fu, TV show, personal transformation, using spiritual tools for social transformation. Star Trek, boom, jinx, we don't get coke. So, I mean, I could go on and on, but it's a, it's a passion project. It's something that I feel is really, really important and, and people have been digging it. So I feel good.

• 2:47:38Jocko Willink?

  Well, one part of the book that I think kind of captures a bunch of this stuff is you have, you spend some time with, with the idea that we create a religion. Like you're like, all right, blank slate. I'm just going to create a religion, the religion of soul boom, trademark. And you kind of go through, and again, this is, this all builds throughout the book and it starts off with sort of, I guess you might say the traditional things that religions generally contain. And you go through these sort of initial things that

• 2:48:11Speaker 02

  10, 10 universal truths about religion that all religions share in common.

• 2:48:18Jocko Willink?

  And, and you, you apply these to this new religion, which, you know, is fictional that you created, we created, we put together. So number one, a higher power.

• 2:48:28Jocko Willink?

  Number two, life after death. Number three, the power of prayer. And again, this is coming from the fact that you research, you read all these different books. You've gone down all these, you've had this spiritual journey of your own. That's where you're, you're putting these things together. Transcendence, talk to me about transcendence. How does transcendence play into this?

• 2:48:47Speaker 02

  Yeah, so these concepts are, it's really easy to look at the differences in religions. Right? It's real easy to kind of say, well, Hinduism has a hundred different or a thousand different gods. And it believes X, Y, and Z. I'm a Christian and I believe in God, the Father, and Jesus, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, and redemption, salvation, and resurrection, and et cetera. That's totally different. Right? And that's true. Those are, and it's easy to look at those differences. But we need to stop sometimes, pause, and go to the underlying foundational similarities that connect and bind all the world's religious faiths so that we can work together in even greater harmony. So this section right here, I'm talking about the things that all religious faiths have

• 2:49:32Speaker 02

  in common, which is harder to underline at certain points. So transcendence is this idea that we are more than just our material selves. We have, in all of us, in our hearts, in our souls, in our guts, a longing to belong, to find meaning, to rise above just shitting and fucking and eating and working and trying to have a good life. Right? We have some longing for something more. And this idea of transcendence, which we can know through God, we can know transcendence through prayer, we can know transcendence through meditation, we can also know through

• 2:50:14Speaker 02

  art, you know, and great art, whether it's Hamlet at a theater, or it's going to a Metallica concert, or whether it's looking at a beautiful painting, or hearing a beautiful poem, or dance, whatever it is, like, the art at its best is transcendence. And you, and we all know when we feel it, that, that feeling of upliftment and inspiration. So this key element that we are more than just our material bodies, we have souls and hearts that long for some kind of meaning, bonding, beyond just being flesh, is part of every faith tradition.

• 2:50:56Jocko Willink?

  Number five, community.

• 2:51:00Jocko Willink?

  At Soul Boom, our diverse community will embrace inclusion at every level. More on that in a little bit. A moral compass. This is interesting. People argue about this.

• 2:51:12Speaker 02

  Unpopular opinion.

• 2:51:13Jocko Willink?

  What's wrong?

• 2:51:14Speaker 02

  Unpopular opinion, but I do believe that our faith traditions and that God or a higher power brings us our morals and our sense of right and wrong. And that that's different than ethics. So ethics is, you know, hey, it's not cool to take the drink that you want to take off the counter at Starbucks just because it's been sitting there, but I'm not going to do it because, I mean, it is like stealing or whatever, but morals come from a higher place, right? Like, you know, it's the Ten Commandments come down from the mountain. And those don't really change. A lot of things about religious faiths change from religion to religion to religion, you know, eat this, don't eat this, celebrate this on this day,

• 2:51:58Speaker 02

  you know, give to the church in this way financially, et cetera. But this underlying moral compass about we are answerable for our deeds when we pass.

• 2:52:10Speaker 02

  We, you know, the golden rule is a perfect example of this, you know, do not do unto others as you would have them do unto you. Like, that's in every religious faith in the world. That increases compassion. So we, as a society, we've jettisoned religion to a large degree, you know, especially in the secular cities and whatnot. And that's understandable because religion has done a lot of bad shit.

• 2:52:41Speaker 02

  But we've also lost a lot, and we see that in the decades that have followed since this has been happening since the 60s or 70s, a lot of falling off of kind of basic human decency, common sense, morality, leading with love and kindness and mutual support. So I think there is a religious backbone and inspiration for a living and walking a moral path.

• 2:53:12Jocko Willink?

  Be hard, don't you think it'd be hard to get people to agree on what that thing looks like?

• 2:53:18Speaker 02

  I don't think so. I don't think so. I think you can do the same thing around morality and you can break it down into like ten basic kind of morals, you know, just even go with the golden rule, you know? That doesn't, again, it doesn't have to do with politics. It doesn't have to do with, you know,

• 2:53:36Speaker 02

  it's, uh, yeah, it's, it's not, you know, it's, it's, it's leading with kindness, love, generosity and compassion and letting that, letting that guide us.

• 2:53:49Jocko Willink?

  Well, that's the next one. Number seven, the force of love.

• 2:53:53Speaker 02

  That's in every religious faith. Yep.

• 2:53:57Jocko Willink?

  Um, you give a warning here that this is gonna get all corny.

• 2:54:01Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. Uh, we, we, I try not to use the L word on the podcast.

• 2:54:07Jocko Willink?

  Just kidding. Um, increased compassion, certainly something that everyone could use. Service to the poor. Number nine. And number 10, strong sense of purpose.

• 2:54:22Jocko Willink?

  Both the Kung Fu-esque individual answers we seek and the Star Trek-like big picture stuff.

• 2:54:28Speaker 02

  Mm hmm. Yeah. We culturally, we've kind of lost our sense of purpose. We've lost our, our goals and, uh, I, again, I try and be as universal as possible. I would love for a Hindu to read this, a Muslim to read this, an atheist or agnostic to read it, a born again Christian to read it and go, I relate, I, I get that. I wanted to be inclusive of all of those different voices. But, um, one thing that, again, we've jettisoned religion, again, for a very good reason, because a lot of them have been very corrupt and done really terrible corrupt things. But in the doing, have we lost a higher sense that?

• 2:55:13Speaker 02

  There is God the Father, and I am in service to His will, the capital H, and I want to make the world a better place and conform my own behavior and standards to a certain measures, to certain standards of morality, and serve the poor, and make the world better, and bring light to the world, just as Jesus did, brought light to the world in so many different ways. And, and, and the apostles, I don't want to follow in those footsteps. And we can do that individually, we can do it as a family, we can do it as a community, and we can do it as a nation, and that doesn't mean converting everyone to a certain religion,

• 2:55:53Speaker 02

  but, but honoring these kind of basic foundational, foundational aspects of faith.

• 2:56:00Jocko Willink?

  And we didn't go, like you said, you talked about 15% of the Bassoon King talks about the spiritual side, and you give a pretty good, which I didn't really cover, but the Baha'i faith, this is very Baha'i faith-ish in the fact that it seems like Baha'i, the, the premise is very open-minded with like, yep, all religions have good aspects to them, and it's all the kind of the, there's a lot of similarities. Would you say that's an assessment? That's accurate?

• 2:56:27Speaker 02

  Yeah, this, a lot of it is very Baha'i inspired. I try and not make it a Baha'i book, or it's not about the Baha'i faith, or to convert people to Baha'i, you know, it's mentioned a few times in the book, but this idea that there are universals in, in religious faith, and that these universals are beautiful and true, we should honor those, and, um, you know, there's only one God, and we're all ultimately in service to this one God, and let's work together, arm and arm, side by side, with our sleeves rolled up, Hindu, Muslim, Jew, Christian, Baha'i, and make the world a better place. Um, that's, that's really, that's really a key part of the book,

• 2:57:11Speaker 02

  and a lot of that inspiration does come from the Baha'i faith, which I'm still a practicing member of. I came back around about 20 years ago or so, and, um, kind of have dove in, and I really, it's a beautiful faith. I really love it.

• 2:57:28Jocko Willink?

  You go on to say this, there you have it, the Soul Boom takes on religion's fundamental verities. These elements alone are beefy enough for any upstart belief system, but for our ultimate goal of making Soul Boom as relevant to the present moment as possible, I offer up an additional 10 principles. The goal of these next 10 qualities is to show how this new faith community will embrace the ideals needed to remake and progress our modern world. Again, this is like a thought experiment that you're basically doing. Just to let people know you're not like literally trying to convince me to be a member of the Soul Boom.

• 2:58:05Speaker 02

  But again, it's important to understand that there's a lot of young people that have just rejected religion. And they're like, oh, religion is bullshit. Oh, can't take it. And it's like, okay, but what have we lost? And if it allows you to think about religion in a different way, well, what if we just took the best elements of different religions and put them together in a stew? You know, would that work for you? So it's just, it's kind of reinvesting, reimagining, rebooting the concept of what a religion itself is.

• 2:58:33Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. And I love this opener, no clerics. Like, what would you think about a religion with no clergy? So this is, there's not going to be some people that are in charge of the rest of us.

• 2:58:44Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah. The Baha'i faith has that. The 12-step meetings have that. The 12-step, the 12-steps in AA is the most successful spiritual religious movement of the 20th century of the last 150 years by far.

• 2:58:58Jocko Willink?

  How many people are on AA or 12-step? Do you know? Is there a number?

• 2:59:03Speaker 02

  I'm sure there is. Can you get on that Echo?

• 2:59:06Jocko Willink?

  Yes, sir. Echo doesn't do that stuff.

• 2:59:07Speaker 02

  He doesn't. The other pods have someone Googling in the corner like, yeah, bring it up right here.

• 2:59:12Jocko Willink?

  Other podcasts have people that sit there for a long period and they go, you know what? I could probably serve a purpose here.

• 2:59:18Speaker 01

  Whatever. See, I knew you'd say that.

• 2:59:20Jocko Willink?

  So they say, you know what? I'm gonna get a computer. I'm gonna start Googling some stuff if anybody asks me. But you know what? Echo, he's over there. You know, he's made a couple of notes and whatnot, and he pressed record a few hours ago.

• 2:59:30Speaker 02

  He did. He checked the mics.

• 2:59:31Jocko Willink?

  We're getting no information.

• 2:59:33Speaker 02

  He's security. If someone came in that door, he'd be all on them. He's a black belt.

• 2:59:37Jocko Willink?

  Yep, protecting you, homie. Thank you, thank you. I wonder how many people are into 12-step?

• 2:59:43Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:59:44Jocko Willink?

  I mean, there's gotta be in every city.

• 2:59:49Jocko Willink?

  Thousands.

• 2:59:50Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, no question. Yeah, it's mid tens of millions.

• 2:59:53Jocko Willink?

  How, when did you get into that?

• 2:59:55Speaker 02

  Um, I kind of got into it backwards when I started doing therapy and I was really unhappy. And then, um, I realized that I had been using drugs and alcohol for a super long and porn. And you name it to kind of like soothe, escape, medicate my pain. And then my therapist's like, you might want to check out the 12 steps because there's a room full of people that have gone through the same thing. So I was already, it was kind of weird. I kind of, they call it white knuckling it where you, you get sober without, without the support of 12 steps, but I, I was sober at that point. And then I, but then I started going to meetings.

• 3:00:32Jocko Willink?

  So you, you don't do any drugs or alcohol right now?

• 3:00:34Speaker 02

  I don't know.

• 3:00:35Jocko Willink?

  How long have you been clean for?

• 3:00:37Speaker 02

  It's been a long time. It's about 20, 20 years.

• 3:00:40Jocko Willink?

  Nice.

• 3:00:40Speaker 02

  Years. Yeah.

• 3:00:41Jocko Willink?

  Nice. Uh, and that 12 step, you said you got into it backwards because you.

• 3:00:49Speaker 02

  I had already been sober for, I think it was a year and a half before I entered 12 step.

• 3:00:55Jocko Willink?

  Was there a rock bottom to that?

• 3:00:57Speaker 02

  Oh, you, you want to go there, don't you?

• 3:00:59Jocko Willink?

  I mean, let's do this. You already talked about freaking Harry Potter, you know?

• 3:01:05Speaker 02

  Oh, because I insulted Harry Potter.

• 3:01:07Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. Now we're bringing the, now we're bringing the thunder.

• 3:01:10Speaker 02

  Yeah. So my story is a little different and I would love to indulge you and say, there I was, Jaco, covered in my own vomit, lying in the gutter and my life, wife had left me and my left eye was gouged out by a hobo with a spear, but I don't have that, I don't have that story, um, so much as just a lot of time of, of just being, for, for me, it's mostly about anxiety. So I have an anxiety disorder. For a while I was on medication. Now I don't go on medication for it, but I was trying to medicate in all these different ways. So it just was years and years of unhappiness, of unbalance. There was, you know, difficulties in my marriage, difficulties in my life from, from the stuff that I was using.

• 3:01:53Speaker 02

  And, you know, I went into therapy and, um, was just deeply unhappy and, um, felt really lost. And, and then realized that this is what was wrong with me. So I, I'd love to bring you that hitting bottom, kind of that beautiful podcast hitting bottom story, but it's not really about that so much as, um, like. I was imbalanced, I was unhappy, I was trying anything and everything I could to medic. Even, even career ambition can be a medication for anxiety and, and, and hating yourself. Right? So part of it for me was like trying to get that next level as an actor was like,

• 3:02:37Speaker 02

  that'll make me feel better. And that's a culturally sanctioned one, you know, we live in kind of a workaholic world, right? Where it's like, you're nothing without your career success. And, and that's not true. You are something, you are beautiful, you're special, you're a child of God, you're a spark of the divine. And your mission is to bring out your greatest possible Jaco, you know, your greatest possible Echo, your greatest possible Rain Wilson, as, under the eyes of, of the all watching, all powerful God, and, and which is love. And so it was, it's been a long process and therapy and in 12 step and in service and,

• 3:03:21Speaker 02

  but, you know, I used to be crippled by this stuff. And now I wake up grateful and, and content and, and focused on doing the next right thing. And this process of, you know, this threefold process of therapy, 12 step, and then my spirituality, my, as a Baha'i and, and studying and writing spirituality, the meditation and prayer that I do, that this combination has really made my life so much better. And I'm just, I'm so grateful.

• 3:03:55Jocko Willink?

  So anxiety.

• 3:03:57Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 3:03:59Jocko Willink?

  Wha- what is that? Like, what does that feel like? What is it? What do you, wh- when you're like, I have anxiety, what does that feel like? What are you thinking about? What's going through your mind?

• 3:04:13Speaker 02

  I actually really love this question. And it's a really important question because people don't, people don't ask that question. So we're not able to kind of start at the very beginning. So for anyone interested in this work, and you should have him on the podcast before he dies, Dr. Gabor Maté, and I know he's been on lots of other podcasts. He is the authority on addiction and trauma. And the way he speaks about it is like, He is, uh, he's incredible. I mean, I, he's, I, he's the Albert Einstein of addiction and trauma. And, um, he's been a lot on a lot of other pods and he's so, so brilliant. So there's a couple of different ways that anxiety works. So number one, there's normal anxiety.

• 3:04:56Speaker 02

  Like, oh, I'm doing this podcast here in San Diego. I wonder what the traffic's gonna be like to LA. Like, oh, I'm supposed to be on that call at six. Am I gonna make it? Like, that's anxiety, right? But that's normal anxiety and that's gonna come every day. That's gonna come 20 times a day to you, right? Young people don't quite understand that. It's okay to have that kind of anxiety, to worry about the future and, oh, is this gonna be okay? Or is that person mad at me? Or whatever it is. So that's one part of anxiety. For me, picture this toddler, and we had a lot of laughs at the size of my head and whatnot, but there's nothing more traumatic or sad than a toddler being abandoned at a year and

• 3:05:38Speaker 02

  a half and not having a mother. Have you ever seen a year and a half year old, when your kids were a year and a half, what was their relationship to their mom?

• 3:05:45Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, a hundred percent.

• 3:05:46Speaker 02

  Just all about the mom. Mom.

• 3:05:48Jocko Willink?

  I was like a, like a foreign being. Yeah. I mean, maybe a year and a half, they were starting to be okay with me, but that for, yeah, they, this is all about the mom.

• 3:05:56Speaker 02

  Yeah. So for me to have that taken away, there's something working on my nervous system that is like, where's my mom? Or where's my place? Where's my meaning? Where's my, how am I gonna be held? Am I gonna be safe? Like, and that's primal, right? That's in the hippocampus. That's in the base of the brain. You know, that's the animal flight, fight, response stuff. It's physiological. So that showed up in a lot of different ways throughout my life. And it, I'd showed up in anxiety attacks in my twenties where I would literally, so funny, I was talking to this young woman and she was saying like, oh, I had an anxiety attack because I was so afraid that my tax bill was coming in

• 3:06:41Speaker 02

  the mail. And I saw it and had anxiety. It's like, you didn't have an anxiety attack. An anxiety attack is you think you're going to die. Your heart is pounding, your lungs can't get in enough air, you're sweating and you're on the floor and your muscles are tensing without you telling them to do it. That's an anxiety attack. And I used, they're still very common. I used to get them. By the dozens in my twenties and guess what, a little vodka made me feel better. You know, a little hit, a little toke made me feel better and kind of took that edge off. So I thought, but it was a short term solution. So there's that kind of anxiety that has to do with trauma.

• 3:07:25Speaker 02

  And a lot of people have that link to anxiety and trauma. And maybe they were abused as children or beaten or had a difficult time, whatever bullied even. So those are two different kinds of trauma. I mean anxiety, excuse me. And then the thing that I had a therapist say to me once, which I really loved, which was trauma is merely an unidentified need. So I keep saying trauma. Anxiety is merely an unidentified need. And I love that. So if you're feeling that like unsettled, shaky, fearful

• 3:08:11Speaker 02

  feeling inside, the next thing is like, you don't have to be a victim to your anxiety. So how do you proactively tackle anxiety? Here I am, I'm having this, it doesn't have to be a full on anxiety attack, but I'm feeling it. How do I, what do I need?

• 3:08:29Speaker 02

  Do I need a hug? Do I need a nap? Do I need to work out? Do I need to get into nature? Do I need to put my phone down and the screens down and away from me? Do I know, need to go to the beach and watch the sunset? Do I need to call a friend? Do I need to get some therapy? Do I need to, you know, stop drinking caffeine all day long? Do I, you know, whatever it is, there's so many different ways to, do I need to meditate? There's so many different ways to, to tackle that. But it's, it's, and I love this idea that anxiety is. What is the canary in the coal mine? It's there to help you. It's saying you need something. So it's a good thing. If you feel anxiety, oh, it's a good thing. It's telling me I need something.

• 3:09:13Speaker 02

  But what you don't need is, you know, a shot of whiskey and an edible to soothe it. Because then you're not really getting at the real need that's underneath that.

• 3:09:27Jocko Willink?

  So when you go into therapy, they're starting to talk about like, what is the need that you have? Because you can't identify it yourself?

• 3:09:35Speaker 02

  Yeah, I needed a lot of help. I needed years of help to kind of identify those needs. I was really not good at it.

• 3:09:42Jocko Willink?

  Can you think your way out of anxiety? So if I'm me and I'm 20 years old and I graduated from high school, didn't go to college. I got a girlfriend. I'm starting to think like, how am I going to pay for her? And I don't really have a good job lined up. And all of a sudden, I don't know where I'm going to be doing in five years. And she's starting to look at other guys because like, so this is to me like what I think would cause anxiety to a 20 year old me, right? Like, I don't know what the future holds. Everything seems, I don't know what I'm going to be doing. And if I just think about day to day, like, hey, I'm going to the ballgame tonight, I'm going to whatever. Then I can kind of, it's okay. But as soon as I start thinking about the future and like, what's going to be? Where am I going to be? How am I going to get money? How am I going to pay for this?

• 3:10:25Jocko Willink?

  And is that like an example of where anxiety comes from?

• 3:10:29Speaker 02

  Well, that's, that's one of the aspects of anxiety. That's kind of the first kind, which is, and it's very real. Like, how am I going to pay this rent? You know, and am I going to lose my job? Am I going to lose my girlfriend? Fear of the future can be an anxiety, right? So in the 12 steps, we learn the serenity prayer. God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can. And the wisdom to know the difference. There's certain things you can't, there are certain things you can control. Show up to your job and do a better job. Go to your girlfriend, tell her you love her and be good to her. That that's in your control, but whether she leaves you or whether you get fired, that's out of your control, right? So there that and it's called the serenity prayer because you gain serenity

• 3:11:12Speaker 02

  by using that particular tool. So anxiety can be, and it usually is a little deeper than that. It's kind of like something is wrong inside. I mean, something is out of balanced and I'm and I am deeply afraid for myself. And oftentimes you can't really put your finger on what it is. And that's where you see so many kids in their teens and twenties right now, living in anxiety. And then it's an anxiety filled world, right? So we've got climate change. Climate anxiety is a very real thing that, you know, young people are feeling. There's political discord and and rage. Social media is really divisive and, you know, we live in this technological world. A lot of kids are being raised by

• 3:11:56Speaker 02

  all their different screens. They got their phone and their iPad and their laptop and their TV. And that's how they're being raised. So, you know, this, we've seen anxiety go through the roof. But, um, yeah.

• 3:12:10Jocko Willink?

  So we've talked about a lot about, not a lot, but we talk about depression sometimes on this. And we talk about that people get stuck in, the way I've described it is like people get stuck in like a cloud, like a storm cloud, right? And like, let's say you are all depressed and you're sad and you're bummed. And I'm looking at you from the outside and I can see that the storm cloud is just around your head. You just need to like come to, hey, you know, rain, come here, walk three steps forward and you're going to be out of this thing. But you look in 360 degrees, you don't see a way out, right? It's all around you. And it's the same thing with addiction. Like you can see people that, hey, man, drinking is ruining your life right now and you need to stop. But they don't see that. Or this girl that you've been going out with, that's a psycho, or this guy that you've been going out with a psycho is ruining your life.

• 3:12:55Jocko Willink?

  We can see it from the outside so clearly and yet they can't see it. So when it comes to anxiety, if I'm like, hey, listen, Rain, like the things you're worried about, you don't need to worry about these things, but it's like impossible for me to tell you that I can't explain to you that you're addicted. I can't explain to you that this girl's horrible for you. I can't explain to you that you don't need to worry about this thing in the future. I can't explain to you that you don't need to worry about like, hey, you know, who cares about the reviews that you get? It doesn't matter. You're like doing great. It's gonna be great. You're like, no, like, I can tell you that, but it's like something that you have to discover for yourself. Is that what happens? And if that's what happens, do you have a pathway to talk yourself through these situations? Or is it what we talked about?

• 3:13:40Jocko Willink?

  Is it the 12 step? Is it the faith? You know, is that what we're doing?

• 3:13:44Speaker 02

  I love it. Again, such a great question. And you had asked before about can you think your way out of it? Yes and no. So you had Ryan Holiday on here, right? Love Ryan and the stuff, the work he's doing, the Stoicism stuff. I've learned so much from him. He would have some really key things to say from the Stoics that I don't really know.

• 3:14:02Jocko Willink?

  He'd be quoting like every one of them 14 times.

• 3:14:04Speaker 02

  Yeah, exactly. And I'm sure, because I'm sure that the Stoics dealt with this exact same thing. And probably let's, let's all go to his YouTube channel and check out, you know, what he, what he would say. So, and there, and so much of Stoicism is like just about having wisdom and thinking clearly. So, so in some, in some regards, some thinking can help. There's a type of therapy called cognitive behavioral therapy. And for people who are skeptical of therapy and think it's too ooey gooey, that is a very CBT, cognitive behavioral therapy is very meat and potatoes. Kind of like, oh, you're afraid of flying? Okay, let's look at the data around flying. Let's pretend you're on an airplane. Let's, let's talk about that. Why don't you journal about like, it's really about getting the

• 3:14:48Speaker 02

  stuff that's what they call limbic, which is at the base of the brain where you're in that animal fight, flight response, and getting it up into your conscious cerebral cortex, which I have a gigantic one. And I was thinking about renting out space here. A little billboard, a little neon billboard.

• 3:15:06Jocko Willink?

  We'll put Jocko Fuel on there. I could use some money for that.

• 3:15:07Speaker 02

  Seriously?

• 3:15:08Jocko Willink?

  Absolutely.

• 3:15:11Speaker 02

  Oh my God, that'd be a great science fiction thing, isn't it? You rent out space on your forehead for advertising? Oh my God, this is great.

• 3:15:18Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 3:15:19Speaker 02

  We're doing this.

• 3:15:19Jocko Willink?

  There you go. It's on.

• 3:15:21Speaker 02

  So that's very much about thinking, but the problem with thinking is that, and this starts to get a little bit crazy. Do you ever meditate?

• 3:15:34Jocko Willink?

  No.

• 3:15:35Speaker 02

  Okay, so in meditation, there is this element where you're, you're, the Buddhists call it the monkey mind, right? So you're, it's like a popcorn machine up in your brain. Right? You're talking about someone in the fog and they're not able to see it. So you meditate and then your thoughts are still bouncing around. You kind of let your thoughts go. And then you hit a certain point and it's really not that difficult to do where you're kind of up above yourself, not, not floating above hippie dippy stuff, but you're just literally seeing yourself in your thoughts and you're a little detached from your thoughts. And maybe you have some thoughts, but you have this other part of yourself. That's kind of like witnessing the thoughts and that's the witness part of ourselves.

• 3:16:18Speaker 02

  And that's our higher self. That's our, that's our true self. So then you can kind of look down on your thoughts and like, oh, I wonder if I could call them back. Oh, I didn't return that text. Oh, shoot. I was supposed to pick up a mango for dinner. You know, you know, all of that kind of stuff and you realize, oh, that's not me. That's, that's my thinking brain, which is really important. We need that. But that's not who I am. So meditation gets you closer in touch with your real self, your present self, your ancient self that is the witness. So I would say that thinking can be very limited as we know, because it's very hard to think yourself out of a situation. But even, even like what you talked about, like,

• 3:17:04Speaker 02

  You have to find it for yourself. Yes, you do have to find it for yourself, but we can do that in community and we can do that in relation with each other. So, therapy is simply a process of like you're paying someone, you ultimately gain their trust and they trust you. So you're not, no bullshit, no one else is listening. You can lay everything out on the table and be like, I hate this motherfucker and I have a list and one time I did this and when I was a kid, I stole that. And you could just lay it all out, get the shame out of the way and the therapist is just so present for you. And then the therapist is very keen at seeing all those behaviors, you know, the girlfriend, the drinking, whatever it is. And it isn't going to tell you what to do,

• 3:17:44Speaker 02

  but it's going to tip little breadcrumbs, lead you down the path so that you make that decision yourself. In the 12-step program, it's a similar thing in that you share at meetings. So you turn your anxieties, your fears, your issues into stories and you share them. And then you pick up the phone. A lot of the 12-step meetings is just staying in touch with guys from the program and then laying it out. I do it all the time, every day. I vent about something like pissed at this, I'm afraid of this and you share and there's healing in that. And sometimes you get feedback or you solicit feedback. If you trust someone enough, what do you think? You know, and so that's part of that healing of anxiety too. So, there's a lot of tools out there and there's a lot of

• 3:18:29Speaker 02

  people who know this stuff way better than me, but it's the disease of the modern age.

• 3:18:33Jocko Willink?

  Okay, so I'm glad I really like dove into this because, okay, so I wrote a book called Leadership Strategy and Tactics. In this book, Leadership Strategy and Tactics, I talk about this idea of detachment, which I call a superpower. And I explained where I discovered it for the first time I was doing some training and I was assaulting a training target. And in order to figure out what was happening, I had to like take a step back, literally take a step back off the firing line and look around. And I was able to see what was happening and I was able to make a tactical decision when no one else really did, even though I was really young and really junior. And when we got done with this training evolution, I was like, wait a second,

• 3:19:17Jocko Willink?

  how did I know what to do and no one else did? It's because I took a step back, I detached, I looked around and I could see. And then I started doing that when I was having conversations with people, when I was starting to feel like I'm getting mad about something, I could just learn to detach. And so the, and that's why I'm curious about this stuff because when like we're talking about anxiety, I literally don't know what it is. And the reason I don't know what it is, is because I'm taking a step back mentally, looking at it going, oh, you're freaking out, that's your ego talking, that's your emotions talking, you're worried about something that you can't control. And I've always kind of wondered why I don't know what it is and why I'm able to deal with things, because I am able to deal with things.

• 3:20:02Jocko Willink?

  You know, I've been through some pretty relatively hard things and I'm like, okay with it. And now I'm from hearing what you're describing, I'm like, oh yeah, I have seen those things in my brain, but it's from a detached perspective. So I see myself, oh, you're getting caught up in the fact that you have lost some friends and you can't bring them back and you should be mad about that. Oh, that's, that's your emotions and you're getting too emotional and you're letting that, or, oh, this person did me wrong and I'm going to make them, oh no, that's just your ego talking, they actually won and beat you fair and square. And that's why you should just congratulate them for doing well. So when I was, when I was asking you, can you think your way out of it?

• 3:20:44Jocko Willink?

  That was the wrong way of, of describing what I was thinking. Because to you, thinking is like getting wrapped up in the emotions and the ego and all that chaos, to me, thinking is like, hold on a second, take a step back. What I should have said, can you detach and look at it and see it from the outside? Because that's truly what we want to do. You know what, I'm looking at you and I see that you're caught in a storm cloud. What I want to be able to do is like, hey, bro, just, just come over here, everything's gonna be okay, you can just come a little bit forward. But you, like you said, I have to get you to see that for yourself. I have to get you to see that this woman that you're involved with is a train wreck, or this drug that you're using is a disaster, or this job that you got is, you need to get away from it, or whatever the case may be, I've got to get you to be able to see that.

• 3:21:27Jocko Willink?

  I can explain it to you all day, you won't listen, you can't, it doesn't change your point of view for me to explain it to you 20 times. At some point, I can try and explain it. At some point, you've got to step out and you've got to take a look at it and go, holy shit, Jaco, I see what you're talking about. This is bad. I'm gonna quit drinking. I'm gonna get rid of that girl. I'm gonna quit this job. Whatever that thing is, I'm gonna lose my ego. I'm gonna stop thinking, comparing myself. I'm gonna stop reading the, the reviews in the New York Times about my acting or whatever. The shit doesn't matter. The shit doesn't matter. Okay, I get it. I'm gonna put my ego aside. So, to me, that's a very powerful thing. And again, it takes work. I stumbled into it as a young frogman. I stumbled into the fact that, oh, taking a step back and looking

• 3:22:12Jocko Willink?

  around is very beneficial. And I added it to everything in my life. I haven't, I was actually, one of my questions I was gonna ask you is like, what do you do in therapy? Like, what do they do? And you've kind of explained it now, so I don't have to cross that. I've written it down. Look at this. Three times I've written down, therapy, question mark, therapy, question mark, there. I don't know what the hell happens in there. But I'm like, how does it help you? Now you've explained, like, oh, they're asking you questions. They're, they're, they're luring you out of your brain. They're luring you out of your brain so that you can see what it looks like and go, oh, shit.

• 3:22:40Speaker 02

  Let me, let me amend that a little bit. Because if you're just talking from a physiological perspective, like Huberman might, you know, you're, you're not luring it out of the brain, you're luring it from one part of brain to the other part of the brain. So, so much of anxiety, fear, aggression, depression is happening at our lizard part of our brain, and it's just firing down there. And then, and, and again, therapy may not be your bag. There's a lot of different ways to do it. You know, you might do it in church, or, or through a group, or just with friends, or whatever. But you're physiologically taking all of that activity in the brain stem, and you're moving it up into the cerebral cortex.

• 3:23:24Speaker 02

  So by talking about it, you're then able, because this is where all the higher functioning stuff happens. So you take it out of the lizard brain, and you move it into the, into the angel brain. Trademark, Rain Wilson, 2023.

• 3:23:36Jocko Willink?

  Well, you said it on my podcast, so it's actually.

• 3:23:39Speaker 02

  So how much IP do you own of Angel Brain Incorporated?

• 3:23:42Jocko Willink?

  Thank you.

• 3:23:43Speaker 02

  Damn it. I never should have come on here. But that's part of the process. So part of the talking in therapy, it's like, and it gets a bad rap, but part of it is to take, you know, your fear, your shame, your anxiety, your depression, those deepest, darkest things that are like going on way down there in the shadows in the corner of the closet, bring him to the front of the closet, shining a nice light on it. And then you're able to make some decision. Okay. Once that's happened, now what are you going to do so you're not a victim? What choices are you going to make? Because it can't, some therapy is bad because it just stays there in the talky talk. And

• 3:24:24Speaker 02

  it's like, talk for a while, get it into the light. And like, what, what are the three things you're going to do every day to make this better? And a good therapist will lead their client toward making proactive decisions where they're no longer a victim.

• 3:24:38Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, that was another thing that I found when people would ask me about like grief. And one thing is like, I unfortunately have had to write a lot of eulogies, right? And I realized that in doing that, oh, that was a way for me to process. That was a way for me to think through. That was a way for me to bring some of those emotions to the surface and be like, okay, I can see them now. I can let them out. Here we go. And that's why, you know, what you're saying about therapy is something that I've done through writing. And even if it's just writing a eulogy, which is a horrible freaking task, you know, it's

• 3:25:19Jocko Willink?

  been 17 hours. Hey, they want you to talk like, or, you know, hey, are you going to speak? Yes, I am. It's like, okay, it's been 17 hours. And now I have to write and I got to get these things out on paper. And that stuff is so helpful to be able to do that.

• 3:25:35Speaker 02

  Well, that's part of journaling is a very valuable tool that does that exact same thing. And that's what you're talking about. And then in 12 steps, you do step work. So you're doing that same thing. But again, that's always a process of taking it down from the limbic system to the higher part of the brain. There's more to it than that, but that's one of the elements of it.

• 3:25:54Jocko Willink?

  Okay, uh, going back to the soul boom religion here. Number 12, diversity plus harmony. Number 13, centrality of the divine feminine. Talk to me on that one.

• 3:26:09Speaker 02

  So, in some of my reading and research, I noticed that, um, the humanity put, uh, kind of the feminine divine at, uh, the center of conversation of worship,

• 3:26:29Speaker 02

  um, early on in humanity's history. And then around 3,000, 5,000 B.C., it became all about the conquerors. And the god of, you know, the god of Ur, the god of Babylon, or the god of Baghdad, or the god of Judea, or whatever that conquered. Then you, oh, you guys have to worship this god. And it's usually a battle god and a war god. And, you know, the Greek war gods and stuff like that. So, um, but before all that, it was much more of goddess and feminine qualities. Um, nature, it had to do with birth. It had to do with the seasons. And, um, a connection to the divine was found through kind of feminine, more feminine qualities.

• 3:27:13Speaker 02

  And I do think that we, you know, I'm sitting at a table covered in knives. But I do think that we've kind of, um, we've over masculinized our, our contemporary world. And I don't mean that to be at all like some kind of criticism of masculinity. Masculinity and leadership, honor, integrity, being a provider.

• 3:27:40Jocko Willink?

  Knives.

• 3:27:42Speaker 02

  It's an occasional knife, an occasional gun when necessary. I don't know about having 45 guns in a closet, but, um, but this stuff is really important, right? But we've just got, we've just skewed in the balance a little bit. And so it would be good to kind of reexamine some of that, some of those feminine elements, especially of, of the divine and worship and connection to like Mother Earth and just like the beauty of nature and the birth cycle and springtime and what happens with flowers and with, with baby rat, we have all these rabbits in my property and all these baby bunnies hopping around. You know, and it's like the Easter bunny. It literally is the spring and it's these little. They're Easter bunnies everywhere, you know, but a reconnection to that, I think is something we could benefit from a conversation about.

• 3:28:29Jocko Willink?

  Um, number 14, cooperation between science and faith. Number 15, profound connection to the natural world.

• 3:28:40Jocko Willink?

  I surf. Usually when people ask me if I meditate, I say I surf and I do jujitsu. Because from what I understand, that's a lot.

• 3:28:47Speaker 02

  Can you do both at the same time?

• 3:28:48Jocko Willink?

  No.

• 3:28:50Speaker 02

  Well.

• 3:28:51Jocko Willink?

  No, I can't.

• 3:28:51Speaker 02

  You need to detach a little bit.

• 3:28:53Jocko Willink?

  Detach harder. Profound connection to the natural world.

• 3:28:57Speaker 02

  No, but you're, you're absolutely right that, you know, we think of this as meditation, but walking in the woods is meditation, walking on the beach is meditation, and certainly surfing is meditation, the act, but also all that time you're out there like on your belly, just like, you know, like it's, it's so soothing and healing. Also, it's important to understand that walking is a, is a meditation in and of itself. They've done studies about, we stopped walking 70 years ago. Humans used to walk for a hundred thousand years. All we did was walk around all the time. And there's something healing about walking and it literally heals the brain. Like your left hemisphere and right hemisphere, the impulses go back and forth while you're walking and it's, it's brain healing. And they've done

• 3:29:42Speaker 02

  studies about how walking reduces anxiety, how it reduces depression. Cause then you've got kids all day, sitting like this and they're not using their legs. So that's a different kind of meditation as well. There's a lot of physiological ways to do it. And I play tennis and I find very meditative because in tennis, you've got to just look at the ball. That's it. You can't be thinking about your email you need to write. You're just like, you just have to see the ball. I imagine in jujitsu, it's all about being completely in the moment. Like what's your opponent throwing at you and what's your in and stuff like that. So all of a sudden you're out of an hour and a half session. You're like, what an hour and a half just went by? Seriously? Like, holy shit, you know? And I feel that way coming out of a, out of a tennis game.

• 3:30:23Jocko Willink?

  I never heard that thing about walking before, but it definitely makes sense because it's one of those things where it's like, it's like when you were a kid, like go for a walk, like to calm down, right? You need to go for a walk around the house. And then you think about when everyone got locked down during COVID. Oh my God, I never thought of that before. They're like, yo, you can't even walk anymore. You just sit here in your room.

• 3:30:46Speaker 02

  Wiping down your groceries.

• 3:30:48Jocko Willink?

  Oh my god.

• 3:30:51Jocko Willink?

  Not crazy. Uh, number 16, centrality of justice. What's that all about?

• 3:30:59Speaker 02

  Uh, I think that, um, there's, we think about justice in terms of like the court system, right? Or Congress or the Supreme Court or something like that. But there is, um, uh, there is right and wrong. It's connected to morality. There's like right and wrong and justice. What's, what, what is right and what is wrong is inherent in, uh, belief systems. And for me, it would be really important to, if you're creating this made up fake religion, to have justice be a part of it, or conversations about what is, again, it's just what is just? What is fair? What is right and wrong? And then how can we use spiritual tools to help,

• 3:31:44Speaker 02

  you know, move that forward? Not necessarily the court system, but how can we rectify injustice by using greater spiritual powers?

• 3:31:55Jocko Willink?

  Number 17, a life of service. Number 18, practical spiritual tools. What's your top spiritual tool?

• 3:32:08Speaker 02

  Well, you know, I talked about meditation. That's one of the tools about like detaching from your thoughts. That's a, that's a spiritual tool that literally I can sit down in five minutes and my life is a shambles. I'm like, and I could just kind of go like this and I can breathe and just detach with love from my own thought process and I can gain greater clarity, right? And really anyone can, if you're just taking some deep breaths, that just taking some deep breaths is a form of meditation.

• 3:32:37Jocko Willink?

  Who taught you how to meditate?

• 3:32:38Speaker 02

  I just taught myself.

• 3:32:39Jocko Willink?

  Cool.

• 3:32:40Speaker 02

  No big. It doesn't have to be fancy. You don't need a fancy teacher or an app or anything like that. Although there's lots of great tools out there and there's a lot of them are free on YouTube. But Russell Brand has a great, he does some meditation. Yeah, yeah, for sure.

• 3:32:58Speaker 02

  Talks on podcast. And I will, here's one from the Baha'i faith.

• 3:33:04Speaker 02

  The son of the founder of the Baha'i faith, whose name was Abdul Baha. He said, if a man has 10 good qualities and one bad quality, focus on the 10 and forget the one. If a man has one good quality and 10 bad qualities, focus on the one and forget the 10. And that's a lot easier said than done, right? So we work with people, right? And maybe they're just great all around, but they've got one asshole quality. Maybe they don't listen very well, or they interrupt you or something like that. But otherwise, they're, they're kind, they're good guys, or this. And isn't it funny how we just are like, God, this guy always interrupts me. And we don't look at like, oh, he's compassionate, he's kind, he's

• 3:33:45Speaker 02

  smart, he's funny, he's this or that. We just look at that one thing, right? And likewise, you got to work with people that have, the office is a great example of this. You know, they have 10 bad qualities, you know, they, sometimes, sometimes I have dealt with people that have tried me so much and tested me so much. And I'd love to hear the, the military version of this, when you're with a platoon of guys, like in, you, each other's sweat and you're shitting in the same bucket and stuff, what that's like. But, you know, I've had to work with people where it's literally like, everything they say and do drives me batty and bugs the shit out of me. So I just have to find that one part of like, oh, they

• 3:34:28Speaker 02

  have kind eyes, or, oh, they're very well groomed, or, or they seem to be patient, or whatever it is, you find that one thing, like, focus on this. It's a practical spiritual tool to make your life better and make your day better. So you're not spending your whole day going like, Jaco does this and Echo does this and why does Bobby always do that? And you're just spending all your time focusing on all of the negativity around you. It's a way to focus on the positive.

• 3:34:54Jocko Willink?

  Had a guy named Captain Charlie Plum on this podcast. He was a pilot in Vietnam. He was shot down on his 75th mission, which would have been his last mission. He was shot down and captured and he was put in the Hanoi Hilton for six years.

• 3:35:08Speaker 02

  Jesus.

• 3:35:09Jocko Willink?

  And he had this, they had a rule. Those prisoners of war had a rule. And the rules, because they would be put in prison cells and they'd have a roommate. And usually they'd have a roommate for like six months, a year, year and a half. And then they'd get another roommate. Sometimes they were in three man rooms, two man rooms, four man rooms. But this is the deal. This is what they're dealing with. But they had a rule that if your cellmate did something that annoyed you, it was your fault. And to me, that answers the question you just gave.

• 3:35:41Speaker 02

  Wow.

• 3:35:41Jocko Willink?

  Like, like you, you and I are sitting, living in a cell. And every night while I'm trying to go to sleep, you're like picking your nose and like flicking your boogers onto the wall near my head.

• 3:35:53Speaker 02

  It's like you know me.

• 3:35:54Jocko Willink?

  Exactly. You seem like a booger flicker. I've sensed it immediately. But I don't sit there and go, why is she doing this? Instead I go, I, this is my fault for letting this annoy me. It's my fault. And that's just a, a great way to do it.

• 3:36:09Speaker 02

  It's a great way to turn it and it's a survival skill. Cause if you're going to sit in that cell and just be annoyed by everyone for six years. I went to that Hanoi Hilton last year.

• 3:36:20Jocko Willink?

  Did you?

• 3:36:20Speaker 02

  Um, yeah, when I was arrested by the Lake Forest Park Police Department in 1981. Um, no, I went on vacation to, uh, uh, to Vietnam, which is awesome.

• 3:36:34Jocko Willink?

  Did you have flashbacks when you were in the Hanoi Hilton of the Lakeshore Police Department?

• 3:36:37Speaker 02

  I did.

• 3:36:38Jocko Willink?

  Holding cell?

• 3:36:38Speaker 02

  Like, oh man, they got me. Where's Terry, man? They killed Terry. Terry, come back. Incoming.

• 3:36:47Jocko Willink?

  Um, in the words of Theo Von, everybody's got their Vietnam, man.

• 3:36:54Speaker 02

  That's great. But, uh, yeah, Vietnam is a great place, by the way, and, and the Vietnamese people are so awesome and beautiful and they love Americans and they really actually don't like the Chinese, but they love Americans and they totally, because people go and I even went like, am I gonna look weird? Like, we invaded your country and bombed your-

• 3:37:15Jocko Willink?

  By the way, yes, you are gonna look weird, but-

• 3:37:17Speaker 02

  Well-

• 3:37:17Jocko Willink?

  Anyways, you were saying?

• 3:37:19Speaker 02

  They looked up at me, like, who was that giant white Macy's Day balloon of a fleshy corpuscle above me? But, uh, it's a great place. People are so warm and wonderful and, and Hanoi is a gorgeous city, but the Hanoi Hilton, wow. It's, uh, it's, uh, it's like visiting a Holocaust memorial or something. It's just, anyway.

• 3:37:42Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, six years, six years.

• 3:37:44Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 3:37:45Jocko Willink?

  Totally insane. Um, and, all right, number 19, emphasis on music and arts.

• 3:37:54Speaker 02

  Yeah, I think all too often we lose the side of the fact that, uh, so much of religion and faith and spiritual celebration at its best incorporates music and dance and arts and, and drama and storytelling. Look at the success of a lot of the Christian films, uh, recently and, you know, how uplifting music is at church and stuff like that. So in this fictional religion of soul boom, think that arts need to be a part of it. I, I access, I access so much of like heart-based spiritual feeling through art and through, through music. And, um, I could never be a part of like some kind of boring practice

• 3:38:39Speaker 02

  that doesn't feature the arts.

• 3:38:40Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, you pointed that out earlier, uh, talking about the veterans and there's a lot of like art therapy that guys will go to and they'll start doing whatever, freaking crochet or paint or whatever and it like makes them feel better.

• 3:38:52Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 3:38:52Jocko Willink?

  So, there you go.

• 3:38:54Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 3:38:56Jocko Willink?

  And the last one is-

• 3:38:57Speaker 02

  I can see you crocheting.

• 3:38:58Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, crocheting is a big one for me.

• 3:38:59Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 3:39:00Jocko Willink?

  Yep. Number 20, humility.

• 3:39:05Jocko Willink?

  And last, but certainly not least, Soul Boom Faith admits that it doesn't know the best way to do anything. We don't have any absolute answers. We, we're in a humble posture of learning. We provide but a few markers, guideposts, and clues along the winding path of the spiritual game of life. A morsel of meaning. A soupcon of serenity? Is that the word?

• 3:39:29Speaker 02

  Supçons.

• 3:39:30Jocko Willink?

  Supçons.

• 3:39:31Speaker 02

  C'est français.

• 3:39:32Jocko Willink?

  Okay. A kernel of the eternal. I like that one.

• 3:39:36Speaker 02

  Hey.

• 3:39:38Jocko Willink?

  And plenty of questions along the way. So you, you know, to me, and I've always write and say humility is the most important characteristic for leaders and for people to have. And it's what we're lacking a lot of in the world right now.

• 3:39:51Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah.

• 3:39:52Jocko Willink?

  Because I actually think I know exactly what the answer should be, and therefore I hate you because you don't agree with my answer.

• 3:39:57Speaker 02

  Everyone does. Just look at Twitter or X. All you have to do is read X and everyone knows the best way.

• 3:40:03Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 3:40:04Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 3:40:04Jocko Willink?

  So Soul Boom, our fictional religion, is a humble religion.

• 3:40:08Speaker 02

  Yeah, I think that one of the things that has turned so many young people off from religious faith is kind of like this, kind of like certainty and judgment, um, pronouncements, this is the way it is. So we just have to, you know, as we walk our spiritual path, keep open-hearted and keep questioning and, um, and stay humble and, you know, not always think we know the best way, you know? It's hard, it's hard for me because I know a lot and I usually do know the best way. I'm kidding. But, uh, but it, no, it really is important. And I love that you say that about leadership because it's, I know it's part of your dichotomy, you know, of leadership, but the, uh, you know, humility and

• 3:40:51Speaker 02

  service and really surrender. And that's an interesting thing about 12-step recovery too, is that you find strength in surrendering. That's like weird and it's counterintuitive. Like strength is willpower. Like you have a, you know, alcohol problem or a sex problem or a shopping problem or an eating problem or a relationship problem or like you just gotta will yourself out of it and, you know, and will and determination are important qualities, human qualities. We wouldn't have have our civilization without it, but sometimes there are things that you just have to. That you have to surrender and then in that surrender, you find great strength. And, uh, and that's, that's an interesting one as well.

• 3:41:32Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, it's an interesting one too. When it comes to like leadership from a humility perspective, you have to have a like a high level of confidence in order to be humble. So it's always the people that lack confidence that don't act humble. But if I'm actually confident, I'm like, oh, you know what? Rain, it sounds like you've got a better plan than I do. Why don't we go ahead and use your plan?

• 3:41:52Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 3:41:52Jocko Willink?

  Whereas if I'm, if I lack confidence, then I'm like, you know what? My plan's better. We'll go with my plan.

• 3:41:57Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 3:41:57Jocko Willink?

  And that's problematic all day long.

• 3:42:00Speaker 02

  Yeah, indeed.

• 3:42:01Jocko Willink?

  Uh, and you do have one bonus thing, which I think is a, a big hit here for your religion. It's a potlucks.

• 3:42:08Speaker 02

  Potlucks.

• 3:42:08Jocko Willink?

  Because potlucks play a huge part in bringing people together.

• 3:42:14Speaker 02

  It's one of the greatest contributions to human civilization brought to us by our Native American brothers and sisters. The, uh, everyone brings a hot dish and, uh, my dad had one recipe. It was a tater tot casserole.

• 3:42:28Jocko Willink?

  Nice.

• 3:42:28Speaker 02

  And it was, um, uh, cream, uh, cream soup. And, uh, I think a layer of tater tots and then more cream soup and then cheese and the tater tots and then cheese. Bake on 350 for like 20 minutes. You just put the frozen tater.

• 3:42:45Jocko Willink?

  Hell, yeah.

• 3:42:45Speaker 02

  And then it's, it's so good.

• 3:42:48Jocko Willink?

  I thought you were going to say potato chips on top because I know my mom would make like the, whatever kind of casserole she was making, whether it was tuna casserole, hamburger helper casserole, or a chicken canned, there was potato chips on top.

• 3:43:02Speaker 02

  How about this?

• 3:43:03Jocko Willink?

  Crinkled up.

• 3:43:03Speaker 02

  Clown salad on top.

• 3:43:07Jocko Willink?

  So this clown salad's a thing.

• 3:43:08Speaker 02

  It's a thing. It's a nerd thing. You wouldn't understand.

• 3:43:18Jocko Willink?

  All right. So that, that's kind of like one small section of Soul Boom. And again,

• 3:43:27Jocko Willink?

  Really cool read. You did the audio book, which is, which is great. I listened to the sample of the audio book as well. And ton of stuff to ponder in here. A very idealistic book.

• 3:43:39Speaker 02

  Yeah, it is.

• 3:43:39Jocko Willink?

  It's a very idealistic book. And I actually caught myself being like, oh, hold on a second there. What's a freaking thing? Everyone's just gonna, and I caught myself being like, kind of a reactionary to some of your thoughts in there. And then I thought to myself, wait, why can't, why not be idealistic? Why not try and to, do I have to agree with everything that is said before I say, oh, wait a second, what, what does he mean by that? I caught, I found myself being a victim of my own, what I just talked about, like, well, he obviously has never been in that situation before, otherwise, no, it's like, oh, what is he trying to say? And are we not better to have an open mind? And this is again, this is one of the things I got asked recently, you know, talking about going to war somewhere,

• 3:44:24Jocko Willink?

  was China or Russia or whatever. People were asking me, oh, what would you be thinking about? And I said, you know, the most important thing that I would be thinking about if we were to go to war there would be having an open mind. Because I don't know what's gonna happen. I don't know what the enemy is gonna do. I don't know the way things are going to unfold. I don't know what we haven't thought about. And where people get trapped is they have a closed mind. In a battle and in life, they have a closed mind. They already think they understand, kind of like, interestingly, you said, playing that role where you bombed on Broadway, you already knew in your mind how you were supposed to act, and that's what you were gonna do. And you were gonna stick with it. You had a closed mind and not an open mind.

• 3:45:05Speaker 02

  And not a humble mind either.

• 3:45:07Jocko Willink?

  And not a humble mind either.

• 3:45:10Speaker 02

  Well, one of the, at the end, I put in seven pillars of a spiritual revolution. And because I really do think it needs a revolution. And one of them is to foster joy and to squash cynicism. So.

• 3:45:22Speaker 02

  Being cynical and pessimistic and negative is an easy fallback position. Anyone can do it. You can just be like, ah, that's a bunch of shit. That's never gonna work. Ah, bullshit. That's an easy, that's an easy answer. It's an easy way to live your life.

• 3:45:36Jocko Willink?

  And I'll join right in with you because that's easy too. Like you want to complain about something? I'll just jump on and complain with you. We're brothers now.

• 3:45:41Speaker 02

  So if you, if we think a little bit deeper, um, you know, squashing that cynicism and instead turning that to joy, like I'm not helping anyone. I'm not helping myself and I'm not helping the world staying pessimistic and cynical. I need to bring joy to the world. I'm going to bring joy to the world. But I want to bring, I want to uplift people. I want to inspire people. I want to come into a room. One of the things, you know, my dad passed during COVID. He died of heart disease, but when he passed away, um, and in my grieving process, I thought a lot about his best qualities, like, and something that I want to emulate is like every room he went into, he made a better place.

• 3:46:25Speaker 02

  Every room he went into, even if it's like the cleaning lady or the hotel maid or he had the Starbucks or whatever it is, like he was always like, hey, brother, nice to see you. Like, how's it going? Like, oh, that's a nice watch. What, what is that like? Or how do you shave your head that way? Like whatever it is, like he's, he's curious and joyful and uplifting and like, and at his remembrances and memorials, like that's what was, was shared. Like he always made each room a better place. And I'm so fortunate that I got to, he was fucked up in a lot of ways. He made a lot of mistakes. He had a lot of issues, but that was just a beautiful quality that he brought.

• 3:47:06Speaker 02

  So if we're going to have a spiritual revolution, we can't, when you're pessimistic and cynical, you sit back, right? When you're joyful, you're proactive and you're making choices to try and make things better and positive. And it's, we talk about a lot about giving service, right? And service to others, but spreading joy is maybe the most important service that we can do. So we can go into a room, you can make someone laugh, you can compliment them. And you can go into when someone is sick and, and, and tell a joke or sing a song and bring them some jello or whatever, and you've uplifted them and made them better. That's one of the best services that any human can give to another human.

• 3:47:45Speaker 02

  So if you're feeling a little bit lost, squash that cynicism, just try and give a little bit of joy each day. And guess what? You'll feel happier by giving joy to others and then the cycle repeats. And we can spread this like a virus. And yeah, it's a little bit kumbaya and a little bit, a little bit idealistic and, and hippy dippy. But I believe that world peace is possible and I believe that humanity can mature. I think our lives can get better and we can make the world a more beautiful and joyful place. We've just got a lot of work in front of us.

• 3:48:18Jocko Willink?

  Got some work to do on that.

• 3:48:19Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 3:48:20Jocko Willink?

  On that front. I was talking to some young, uh, some young SEALs the other day and yeah, and they, they kept going back in the water. Now, I was talking to these young SEALs the other day and, you know, and it, even once you're in the SEAL teams, you still do a bunch of training and I used to run that training. And, but I, I'd been through that advanced training, I'd done seven deployments. So seven times I'd gone through this cycle of training. And one thing I did, I always did, was no matter what we were doing is I took it as seriously as I possibly could. Like not serious like, oh, we're not going to have fun, but like, okay, this is what we're doing. We're going to do our best at it. Not being like, oh, we gotta do this again, or oh, this isn't realistic, or oh, I can't believe that. No, it's like, oh, this is what you want us to do? Cool, we're going to knock it out of the park.

• 3:49:02Jocko Willink?

  And just that reframing, that taking a positive attitude on what you have to do, it just makes all the difference in the world and you can immediately change a whole platoon, their attitude. If you have a shitty attitude, your whole platoon's attitude will be shitty. If you have a good attitude, like, oh, this, hey, this training might seem a little bit strange, but it's gonna, I bet we can knock it out of the park. And all of a sudden it's like, oh yeah, I think we can. And it really does spread. So what you're talking about on a large scale definitely happens on a small scale as well.

• 3:49:31Jocko Willink?

  The, so, so that's Soul Boom. I don't know, you might have to, if we're gonna go in depth on Soul Boom, you have to come back, bro, because I mean, this is already getting long. But you have other stuff going on right now. You have a podcast, Metaphysical Milkshake?

• 3:49:46Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 3:49:46Jocko Willink?

  Is that not a podcast?

• 3:49:48Speaker 02

  It is a podcast. It's kind of, that one's kind of

• 3:49:52Jocko Willink?

  Is it, is it

• 3:49:52Speaker 02

  winding down. It's sunsetting.

• 3:49:54Jocko Willink?

  Okay.

• 3:49:55Speaker 02

  And I did it with Reza Aslan. We talk about big metaphysical questions about the meaning of life and love and pain and wonder and being a human being. It's been great, but um, I think I'm gonna move and try and do more of a Soul Boom podcast that's a little bit more about spiritual ideas.

• 3:50:13Jocko Willink?

  Okay.

• 3:50:13Speaker 02

  So, but in the next couple of months at some point, so.

• 3:50:17Jocko Willink?

  TV show?

• 3:50:18Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 3:50:18Jocko Willink?

  This thing is not sunsetting. I'm, the, the, the Geography of Bliss?

• 3:50:23Speaker 02

  That's correct.

• 3:50:23Jocko Willink?

  So what's up with Geography of Bliss?

• 3:50:25Speaker 02

  Well, it's on the Peacock channel and you can stream it and I travel around the world looking for happiness and it's a wonderful, delightful show that I am not allowed to promote because we're on a strike. And please support the Screen Actors Guild and the Writers Guild of America in their quest for ever more fair revenue streams from these streamers' studios.

• 3:50:49Jocko Willink?

  So that's what's going on right now?

• 3:50:51Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 3:50:52Jocko Willink?

  Um, how long is that strike gonna last?

• 3:50:55Speaker 02

  Oh dear God. You know, it's really hurting a lot of working class families. People think about, oh Hollywood elites on strike, boo hoo hoo, but the majority of, I think it's like 80% of Screen Actors Guild actors make less than $20,000 a year. So it's a lot of working class families trying to feed their kids and pay their homes while being actors and writers and working in showbiz. A lot of writers, you know, the, you look at the end of a show and like the writers that are there like, you know, they, they make a good living, don't get me wrong, but. They, you know, it's, it's about middle-class homes. So the entire business has changed. So we've

• 3:51:38Speaker 02

  got to understand this is not just a strike of like, oh, I want a 5% raise, not a 3% raise. It's like, show business changed. Do you remember what show business was like seven years ago? It was completely different than it is now. Everyone had cable. You watch network television. And then there was this Netflix upstart and, oh, should I pay my $9 a month to watch what's on that one? But this whole subscription revenue, streamer kind of thing is a whole new thing. And the contracts don't reflect the new business model.

• 3:52:08Jocko Willink?

  So, so that means the people that wrote them and act in them are not getting the pay that they think they should get.

• 3:52:14Speaker 02

  The Office, I forget what the number is. Echo can Google it.

• 3:52:19Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 3:52:20Speaker 02

  And then, uh,

• 3:52:22Jocko Willink?

  Pull that up, Echo.

• 3:52:23Speaker 02

  He'll, he'll Google it tomorrow and then next Thursday we'll hear from him. Like, hey, I got that information you wanted. Um, the, uh, but the Office, when it was on Netflix, there was some number that came out. It's like 17 billion hours of the Office streamed or something like that.

• 3:52:42Jocko Willink?

  My family alone streamed 1 billion.

• 3:52:44Speaker 02

  I mean, it was, and yet the checks that we got in residuals from Netflix for those years, I don't want to say any numbers, but it was, it was pathetic. I mean, it was, it was pathetic. Like you couldn't pay your credit card bills from it. And we were being watched billions of hours. Now, I'm fine. Steve's fine. John's fine. We're all fine. But like some of the guest stars on The Office and people that are, you know, the more work-a-day actors and stuff like that, not the fabulous stars. Um, you know, that's a, that's a real struggle. That's a problem. So we have to, we have to figure out how to make that more fair and equitable without shutting down the streamers, you know? So I, I hope they're

• 3:53:26Speaker 02

  talking, but it's probably, what month is this? This is early September, but it's not going to get fixed till December or January, probably. It's already been a couple of months.

• 3:53:36Jocko Willink?

  Is there like a head of the union? Of the SAG union?

• 3:53:40Speaker 02

  Yeah. Fran Drescher, the nanny, is the head of our union.

• 3:53:44Jocko Willink?

  And it

• 3:53:44Speaker 02

  Remember her? Oh, hi. I'm Fran Drescher, the nanny.

• 3:53:49Jocko Willink?

  I don't echo.

• 3:53:50Speaker 01

  That was a mediocre to poor imitation, but yes.

• 3:53:54Speaker 02

  Oh, hey.

• 3:53:57Speaker 02

  He says one thing, the whole pod. He hasn't listened to anything. I said, look at the ten good qualities.

• 3:54:03Jocko Willink?

  There we go.

• 3:54:04Speaker 02

  Not my Fran Drescher impersonation.

• 3:54:06Jocko Willink?

  Oh, Fran Drescher. I knew exactly who it was. Thank you.

• 3:54:10Speaker 01

  Whatever, but so what I'm saying is,

• 3:54:13Jocko Willink?

  Okay.

• 3:54:13Speaker 01

  if we're trying to, uh, what do you call it? Indicate who Fran Drescher is, that wasn't as accurate as maybe it could have been, you know, to, to trigger the, the, the memory. But if you heard her real voice, you'd be like, oh, yeah.

• 3:54:25Jocko Willink?

  Show called The Nanny?

• 3:54:26Speaker 01

  The nanny is a TV show.

• 3:54:27Speaker 02

  He has a sitcom from the nineties, I think. Yeah. Yeah.

• 3:54:31Jocko Willink?

  Okay. So she's like the head of the union and she's talking to all the different execs.

• 3:54:36Speaker 02

  So they have a, um, a producers coalition. It's not really a union. It's called AMPAT, I think, and Association of, I don't know, media producers or something like that. And they have a couple of, uh, key negotiators talking on behalf. But here's the other weird thing about the strike is

• 3:54:57Speaker 02

  the streamers have a very different business model than the studios. You think about like Warner Brothers has HBO Max, but it also puts movies out in theaters. It also has Harry Potter. It has theme parks and it makes TV shows that it sells to networks and to streamers as well. But Netflix has its own business model, you know, it doesn't, it doesn't actually make anything. It's just the, the platform. And then Apple and Amazon, they're making billions of dollars selling shoes and computers. And then they make some content on the side. They don't care about these contracts and stuff like that. They're, they're trillion dollar corporations.

• 3:55:36Speaker 02

  So it's a very weird, it's such a weird time when you have like Sony, which is very specifically a studio. There's no Sony streaming platform. It's a studio that makes content, working with Netflix, which is only a streamer, working with Apple that mostly sells phones. And they're all like working together, but they kind of have different interests.

• 3:55:57Speaker 02

  Whoa, it's a weird time.

• 3:56:00Speaker 02

  So.

• 3:56:00Jocko Willink?

  And so, and the other thing is, cause like I said, I've been on a couple of these TV shows. There's a whole, there's, I can't imagine all the other people.

• 3:56:07Speaker 02

  Yeah, the crew.

• 3:56:08Jocko Willink?

  The crew, the people that make the set, the people that feed.

• 3:56:11Speaker 02

  For every show you watch and there's like 12 actors or 14 speaking actors on a, on a role. There's 200 people.

• 3:56:18Jocko Willink?

  It's crazy.

• 3:56:19Speaker 02

  250 people, the camera loaders and the people doing the snacks and the, the people cleaning up afterwards, driving the trucks, the teamsters and those guys are hurting too. It's hurting a lot of people.

• 3:56:31Jocko Willink?

  And you think hopefully by the end of the year, there's been some progress made.

• 3:56:36Speaker 02

  I, I hope so.

• 3:56:37Jocko Willink?

  What's the outcome? Like what's the most positive outcome for the writers and the actors? Is like a slice of the?

• 3:56:44Speaker 02

  Yeah, a bigger, a bigger slice of the streaming pie in a, in a fair way. Um, because we used to get a nice fair slice of the network pie. That's all been worked out. If you go still now and go do a network show, you know, you're gonna, you do Bob Hearts, Abishola, or you know, FBI, or you do, you know, uh, you know, Law and Order, you know, Chicago or whatever on network TV, that's all been worked out and you get paid very fairly and residuals get paid fairly and compensation and pension and all that's.

• 3:57:20Jocko Willink?

  Oh, but when Law and Order goes to a streamer, you don't get Jack.

• 3:57:23Speaker 02

  You don't get Jack. Yeah. And they're, and they're getting like Suits is the number one show on Netflix. That was made on TBS or TNT 10 years ago and people love this show Suits.

• 3:57:36Jocko Willink?

  Okay.

• 3:57:37Speaker 02

  Actually David Costable was on Suits. So, but those guys aren't getting paid diddly and it's being watched for billions of minutes on Netflix. You open your Netflix and the top shows, Suits is right up there, but they're making hardly any money.

• 3:57:50Jocko Willink?

  Oh, cause it wasn't in the contract, but 10 years ago.

• 3:57:53Speaker 02

  Yeah, for to stream it on internet streaming, you know, that what, that wasn't really a thing up until five or seven years ago.

• 3:58:01Jocko Willink?

  Damn, and those contracts are already signed, sealed and delivered.

• 3:58:05Speaker 02

  Yeah, we gotta, so stakes are high. It sucks. Um, hopefully everyone can find a solution.

• 3:58:12Jocko Willink?

  All right. Um, does that get us up to speed? Does that like, are we there?

• 3:58:16Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 3:58:17Jocko Willink?

  We there for the most part?

• 3:58:18Speaker 02

  Yeah, I think we're good.

• 3:58:19Jocko Willink?

  Any more insults you want to throw at people like Charles? Uh, so where can people find you right now? So you got soulboom.com.

• 3:58:26Speaker 02

  Yeah. And Instagram on Soul Boom, at Soul Boom. If you're interested in spiritual conversations, I'm going to be trying to build that out over the next year.

• 3:58:34Jocko Willink?

  You're on Twitter and Instagram?

• 3:58:36Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 3:58:36Jocko Willink?

  At Rain Wilson. There's two N's.

• 3:58:39Speaker 02

  Two N's.

• 3:58:40Jocko Willink?

  Because your parents decided an extra N was necessary.

• 3:58:44Speaker 02

  Yeah. I say the extra N is for extra nookie.

• 3:58:48Jocko Willink?

  You're, you're, you're on Facebook as well. Um, and you got this other TV show, which we can't promote because you're on a strike.

• 3:58:55Speaker 02

  Yes. The Geography of Bliss, I will not be promoting on Peacock. I'll find a happiness around the world. Yeah.

• 3:59:02Jocko Willink?

  Awesome. Uh, Echo?

• 3:59:04Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 3:59:04Jocko Willink?

  Any questions?

• 3:59:05Speaker 01

  Hard hitting question?

• 3:59:06Jocko Willink?

  Hard hitting question.

• 3:59:06Speaker 01

  Hey, why'd they put the office on the iPod? They're like, why did that deal go through? Was that just?

• 3:59:11Speaker 02

  That's a great question. I have no idea why. I think NBC must've just done a deal with them to put it on, but I don't, maybe it was an Apple thing. Maybe Apple was like, we need to put a show on that we think people will like. And maybe, and maybe NBC was just like, oh, you're going to have the office. No one's watching it. Put it on for free.

• 3:59:29Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 3:59:30Speaker 02

  I don't know. I need to dig into that.

• 3:59:32Speaker 01

  Yeah. Seems kind of like a random thing for such a big deal, even like something.

• 3:59:38Speaker 02

  Yeah. Why didn't they put CSI on or something else? I don't know.

• 3:59:41Speaker 01

  Yeah. That's crazy. Um, did you hear, you know, the movie Office Space?

• 3:59:46Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 3:59:46Speaker 01

  Did that, is it true that that's like a, you know, what do you call like a spinoff or like a movie version of the office? Was it inspired by the office?

• 3:59:54Speaker 02

  It was before the office. I think that came out in like 2002, but I don't think, no, the office is very, and you can look at it so specifically spun off from the British office.

• 4:00:03Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 4:00:04Speaker 02

  But I love Office Space. Classic comedy. So many great characters. And there's definitely, they have a similar vibe at the center, you know, the awkwardness and the.

• 4:00:13Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah.

• 4:00:13Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 4:00:14Speaker 01

  Um, and then Dwight, right? Dwight, are you allowed to be Dwight officially like at certain events and like all this? Bro, we did a, um, how's this kid? So I did a show called the Hinata Laranja Show. You might be familiar with it. So we do like parodies of certain things.

• 4:00:28Jocko Willink?

  One of the best. I mean, I don't know. Is it good if you don't, if you're not in that world? Is it good?

• 4:00:35Speaker 01

  It will be a percentage of good for sure. Cause the, you know, like a, that, that whole idea is funny, you know, that trolling idea. But yeah, if you're in the jujitsu world, it's gonna be, you're gonna get the full, the full experience for sure. But one of the parodies we did was remember the Incredible Hulk, the original?

• 4:00:52Jocko Willink?

  Sure.

• 4:00:52Speaker 01

  The OG Lou Ferrigno. So we did a parody of that intro to that show, you know, David Banner, whatever. And so for the Hulk, we use this real famous wrestler for, cause he's a black guy, right? So he turned into the Hulk. So he's the big black. Um, his name was Ezekiel something. He was like a super fan. I'm not in-

• 4:01:13Jocko Willink?

  Like WWE wrestlers?

• 4:01:14Speaker 01

  Yes, exactly. So boom, when he turned into Hulk, I, you know, digitally morphed him and did all the stuff, colored him green and what, but it was this famous wrestler. And so we're like, yeah, it's gonna be perfect. When we do the credits and boom, we'll get all this exposure right through WWE or whatever. And, you know, it comes back, hey, we can't use that name. Cause that name belongs to the WWE.

• 4:01:35Jocko Willink?

  Oh, whoa.

• 4:01:36Speaker 01

  So you gotta make up, so we just made up some funny name or whatever, but it's a famous wrestler guy, Zeke something. And he like, I think he like retweeted it real like in custody.

• 4:01:47Speaker 02

  So does WWE own The Rock or own Hulk Hogan?

• 4:01:51Speaker 01

  I don't know.

• 4:01:52Speaker 02

  Or, or what is it? The grave, the grave digger? What's that guy's name?

• 4:01:56Speaker 01

  Undertaker.

• 4:01:57Speaker 02

  Undertaker, yeah.

• 4:01:58Speaker 01

  Grave digger's monster chucks, right?

• 4:02:01Jocko Willink?

  I don't know. Cause, cause you know Stone Cold Steve Austin, who I've been on his podcast, but he, when you look at like his Instagram and stuff, it's not, he doesn't often refer to himself as Stone Cold Steve Austin. So maybe there's the same similar thing going on.

• 4:02:17Speaker 02

  Well, I do know that, I do know that NBC Universal owns Dwight Schrute, Dunder Mifflin, Schrute Farms, The Office, like all of that stuff, they own all that, right?

• 4:02:30Speaker 02

  Um, if I went around dressing up as Dwight to like make money, they could come after me or something like that. If I, although there's so much merch out there with Dwight that people make on Etsy, like you can go to Etsy and find thousand and NBC isn't prof- they're profiting from it, but they're not shutting it down either. So yeah, they could probably, they do, they do own that. So, yeah.

• 4:02:54Speaker 01

  Yeah. So, cause you do it in like charitable situations, right? Like how you, how you said.

• 4:02:58Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 4:02:58Speaker 01

  So yeah, it feels like.

• 4:02:59Speaker 02

  I do some Dwight T-shirts and I suppose that I sell for charity, but I suppose NBC could be assholes and come after me and say, you can't have it.

• 4:03:08Jocko Willink?

  And everything that goes on in that show, if you would have made up Shrewd Farms,

• 4:03:16Jocko Willink?

  it's still owned by them.

• 4:03:17Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 4:03:17Jocko Willink?

  Because they're paying you at the time and that's just the way it works.

• 4:03:19Speaker 02

  Yeah. A hundred percent. Yeah.

• 4:03:21Jocko Willink?

  Kind of like when you said Angel Brain earlier on this podcast.

• 4:03:24Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 4:03:24Jocko Willink?

  And now it's my property.

• 4:03:25Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah.

• 4:03:26Speaker 02

  Exactly.

• 4:03:26Jocko Willink?

  No big deal.

• 4:03:27Speaker 02

  Exactly. Yeah.

• 4:03:29Jocko Willink?

  Angel Brain T-shirts.

• 4:03:31Speaker 01

  Sure. Shirt locker all day. The, um, so what if, and I don't want to go too deep into this, but we're talking about it. So Shrewd Farms, what if in Shrewd Farms, uh, what do you call like, um, like the myth or the, the idea of it? There was maybe a worker in Shrewd Farms. Never materialized, but let's say as an idea, then you made a shirt, you know, like on Seinfeld, I remember Seinfeld.

• 4:03:54Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 4:03:54Speaker 01

  There was, uh, George would pretend that he was like an architect or whatever.

• 4:04:01Speaker 02

  Import X, uh, Vandaway or something like that.

• 4:04:03Speaker 01

  Industries was one of the things he purport to be like this guy of, right? Vandelay Industries. So people will make sure it's saying Vandelay Industries. Right?

• 4:04:10Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 4:04:11Speaker 01

  So it's kind of part of the ethos, part of the, you know, well, not the ethos, but part of the myth, you know? So I wonder how deep you have to go with Dwight and his whole, you know, atmosphere.

• 4:04:22Speaker 02

  Yeah, I think anything that you did that's related to Shrewd Farms or something like that.

• 4:04:27Jocko Willink?

  In any way.

• 4:04:27Speaker 02

  In any way, I think they're they're gonna own that.

• 4:04:29Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, yeah, you can't do that kind of stuff.

• 4:04:31Speaker 02

  And they will come after you.

• 4:04:32Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. What about spin offs? Are they must have proposed a thousand spin offs?

• 4:04:36Speaker 02

  Well, we tried to do a Dwight spin off and they passed on it.

• 4:04:39Jocko Willink?

  What?

• 4:04:40Speaker 02

  And they would have made a bazillion dollars off of Dwight's spin off. We'd had one episode in like season seven that was called Shrewd Farms. And what we were looking at was what if Dwight left Dunder Mifflin just to focus on the bed and breakfast at Shrewd Farms? And

• 4:04:59Jocko Willink?

  Like faulty towers sort of.

• 4:05:00Speaker 02

  Yeah, a little bit faulty towers, running an inn, you know, running a an agro inn where you get to see a working farm.

• 4:05:06Jocko Willink?

  Oh, my God, that'd been epic.

• 4:05:09Speaker 02

  And the episode that we made, it was it was really hard to make a 21 minute episode that introduced a lot of these different characters and stuff like that. But ultimately, there were new people that came in um to run NBC at the time. And they were like, they wanted to get more into big splashy, multi camera sitcoms. And The Office was kind of waning and it's in the last couple of years, especially without Steve. And so they were like, yeah, we're done with the whole office thing. But if they had done Shrewd Farms and we had done even a couple of seasons, this would be streaming all the time.

• 4:05:42Jocko Willink?

  Hundred percent.

• 4:05:42Speaker 02

  Would it have been as funny as The Office? No, that's okay, because even if it was 67% as funny as The Office, it would have been really good.

• 4:05:50Jocko Willink?

  Been damn funny, but that's not gonna like all the people that listen to this podcast.

• 4:05:55Speaker 02

  Tons of them.

• 4:05:57Jocko Willink?

  They're gonna reignite that idea and you just don't.

• 4:06:00Speaker 02

  I I've talked to them a few times about like, how do we do a reboot of Dwight or Shrewd Farms? Or do we want to? And, you know, just mostly for me. So I've had some creative conversations and with some of the producers from The Office and stuff. And and it's like, I just, you know, I had 10 glorious years. We made a great show. I'm really enjoying the other stuff that I'm doing, other acting and writing and whatnot. Do I really want to go back there? Right now, I don't really, but who knows next year? Who knows? Maybe I'll be like, yeah, that would be really fun, you know, maybe that's a it's a Dwight movie.

• 4:06:36Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. I'm trying to think of, is there examples of this that have happened?

• 4:06:41Speaker 02

  Well, Frasier is the famous spin off from Cheers.

• 4:06:45Jocko Willink?

  Got it.

• 4:06:45Speaker 02

  Yeah, right. That's the one that really worked where Frasier was maybe even better than Cheers. So there's, there's been a few. Joey was a spin off of Friends that only lasted a year or two, didn't do very well.

• 4:06:55Jocko Willink?

  Tenacious D movie came out, right?

• 4:06:57Speaker 02

  Right.

• 4:06:58Jocko Willink?

  Two of them. As a matter of fact, that's off that HBO series, you know?

• 4:07:02Speaker 01

  There's actually a lot of them that that started and kind of even like Seinfeld had a few like Kramer had one.

• 4:07:08Speaker 02

  Yeah, but it wasn't any character from Seinfeld. It was just Michael Richards having a.

• 4:07:12Speaker 01

  Off of it. Yeah, that's kind of inspired. Yeah, that's true, huh?

• 4:07:16Speaker 02

  He was similar to Kramer, but he didn't, he was, name wasn't Kramer.

• 4:07:19Speaker 01

  Right, right. It's like Cardoza or something.

• 4:07:21Jocko Willink?

  How often do you hang out with the office people?

• 4:07:25Speaker 02

  There's a lot of them. I see a lot. I see Oscar, Brian, Jenna, Angela. You know, I text with John and Steve and BJ I hung out with in New York a while back. So I see him here and there, but we're, we're spread out. We have a nice text chain and, you know, we have a good, we have a good time. So.

• 4:07:43Jocko Willink?

  Text chains are freaking awesome. Like, you know what I mean? Like my family group text is just like awesomely epic. You know what I mean?

• 4:07:52Speaker 02

  That's funny.

• 4:07:52Jocko Willink?

  And like the jujitsu group, like the jujitsu training group is like an awesome text thread of shit talking and stuff like this. Freaking, I think there's going to be a book or a movie or something. That's just nothing but bubbles popping up with words in them.

• 4:08:08Speaker 02

  And then memes and emojis and.

• 4:08:11Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 4:08:14Jocko Willink?

  Echo, anything else?

• 4:08:15Speaker 01

  That is it. Oh, wait, wait. This is like off the topic, I guess. You ever watch MacGyver?

• 4:08:20Speaker 02

  Sure.

• 4:08:21Speaker 01

  That wasn't one of your gems, girl. I guess that's a little bit, what's the opposite of ahead of your time? Like later.

• 4:08:26Jocko Willink?

  It's a little late. MacGyver's a little bit late, but still it's it's in there.

• 4:08:29Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah. I was like in acting school in New York and I wasn't really watching MacGyver then. There's a whole period of stuff that I kind of missed around that.

• 4:08:36Jocko Willink?

  That's like what you guys said about the nineties. Whatever show was in it with the girl in the nineties, the nanny. Like that that chunk of period when I was like in the SEAL Teams going on deployment, there's no TV like there's a whole era that I missed. Yeah. So, but what about it?

• 4:08:52Speaker 01

  No, no, just seeing what up. Cause that was one of those ones that when you're in it, well, I was like a teenager at that time, but or a kid or whatever, but when you think you're like, man, this is the most clever, smartest show ever. Like he doesn't carry a gun. He just figures things out with the stuff around him, you know, like that kind of stuff. And then when you grow up, you're kind of like, bro, none of that was real. Like, bro, you can't even do any of that.

• 4:09:11Speaker 02

  Yeah. Do you watch MacGruber at all? Remember those?

• 4:09:14Speaker 01

  No.

• 4:09:14Jocko Willink?

  Wait, what's MacGruber?

• 4:09:15Speaker 02

  That's the takeoff on MacGyver. Yeah. From Saturday Live and then they made that into a show too.

• 4:09:21Speaker 01

  Yeah, I saw, I saw parts.

• 4:09:22Speaker 02

  Pretty funny. The movie's funny. Watch MacGruber. The movie is very funny.

• 4:09:26Speaker 01

  It would be probably, I would think it's way funny now because back in the day, MacGyver was.

• 4:09:30Speaker 02

  You took it seriously.

• 4:09:31Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah, yeah.

• 4:09:32Speaker 02

  He used chewing gum and a piece of yarn to dismantle that nuclear bomb.

• 4:09:38Jocko Willink?

  You know, it's kind of harsh sometimes. I got my during COVID, got my youngest daughter all hyped to watch ET. Like, oh my gosh, like we're gonna have a night tonight. If I would have known about clown soup, what is that? Popcorn M and Ms?

• 4:09:52Speaker 01

  Clown salad.

• 4:09:53Jocko Willink?

  Clown. If I would have known of that, about that, I would have done it.

• 4:09:55Speaker 02

  Soup is something very, very different. I don't want to describe it here because it's kind of it's a little dark.

• 4:10:02Jocko Willink?

  So I get my daughter all hyped for ET and you know, she was whatever, 11 or something at the time. And we sit down to watch it and it is so bad. I mean, it's, it's so bad. I know. I know. I know.

• 4:10:15Speaker 02

  No, it holds up. It does hold up. I watched it with my son. It's great. Ten years ago.

• 4:10:20Jocko Willink?

  Okay, it's still held up, probably ten years ago. If you go watch it right now, it's rough, man. That's all I'm saying, it's rough.

• 4:10:27Speaker 01

  But there's a factor with this, though. So, and you talk, kind of, we're talking about it earlier, where this, there's this factor, I think, that, hey, it's not a secret or nothing like that, but back in the day, when you went in the movie theater, the lights turn out, you know, turned down, it's like, bro, you're locked in. So your attention span kind of was required for the whole two hours, right? And we were all cool with that, because think about how you watch TV, right? Same deal. Where, bro, you can't pause DVR, watch it later, watch it when I want, bro, it was on, and you watched the thing. And okay, maybe later on, you got the VCR, you record it, okay, but that's a pain in the ass. Generally speaking, you're just watching it go. And if you missed it, you miss it. So you better be paying attention all two hours, by the way.

• 4:11:05Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 4:11:06Speaker 01

  Now, it's different, bro. Our brains are trained different, and the kids, that's how they develop now, so now, they don't need, bro, two hours of this.

• 4:11:13Speaker 02

  Sometimes I find myself watching a show and watching a YouTube video at the same time.

• 4:11:18Jocko Willink?

  You need help, bro, you need more therapy.

• 4:11:20Speaker 01

  That's true. No, I think that's kind of.

• 4:11:23Speaker 02

  It's real, right? And then if I miss something in the show, I'll pause it, and then I'll just go back, like, what did they say about the thing?

• 4:11:28Speaker 01

  Exactly right. That's exactly right. Now, think of, now, think of, like, writing and producing and stuff. Now, it has to accommodate that a little bit. Back in the day, you didn't have to accommodate, bro, you, character development, all day. Bro, you ever watch Predator? The first one? Bro, you don't see the Predator till, like, freaking, like, an hour into it, or something like this. Bro, should I do that? No, they'd be like, bro, this, this movie is boring.

• 4:11:48Jocko Willink?

  I just feel, I just, now, after I just called you out, I immediately had, like, uh, internal angst and, and regret, because, you know what I'll do? I'll look at Zillow and watch something. Like, my wife, if I want something, I'll be looking at Zillow, like, checking properties. You know what I mean? I've got, like, nine locations around the country where I'm seeing if there's a good deal today.

• 4:12:09Speaker 01

  Attention not required, my friend. Just rewind that one, or watch it freaking when it's more convenient.

• 4:12:15Speaker 02

  That's why I do love going to see movies in a theater, like, it's, it's, it's old school. We need to, we need to get back to that. Sometimes, go, go see him.

• 4:12:24Jocko Willink?

  I would, my kids know this. I would go to, like, see movies when they were little. We'd go to see whatever movie, and I would 100% fall asleep. Like, you know, I was just tired, I was working all the time, and just like, I'd go in there, my dad's taking a nap, and whatever it was, and we just, the last movie we went to see as a family was It 2?

• 4:12:42Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah.

• 4:12:43Jocko Willink?

  You familiar with this?

• 4:12:43Speaker 01

  Chapter 2.

• 4:12:44Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 4:12:46Jocko Willink?

  Dude, I'm sorry, but that

• 4:12:47Speaker 02

  No, that was not a good

• 4:12:48Jocko Willink?

  That was freaking

• 4:12:49Speaker 02

  The first one was pretty good, but

• 4:12:50Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, the first one wasn't too bad, but the second one I, I, so I slept and when I woke up, I was like, this is absolutely

• 4:12:56Speaker 02

  I remember going to see Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs 2 with my son, who was like eight years old. And it was so loud. It was just, I fell in meatballs and think, and I just was like,

• 4:13:09Speaker 02

  I, I slept through half of them for sure. And it, it was an assault on the senses, but it couldn't stop me. Clown salad couldn't keep me awake.

• 4:13:19Jocko Willink?

  Oh, just no clown soup. That's what we're hoping. Anything else, Echo Charles?

• 4:13:22Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's, uh, no, nothing else. So cool to meet you. Right on. Thanks for coming down.

• 4:13:26Jocko Willink?

  Rain Wilson, any closing thoughts?

• 4:13:30Speaker 02

  Um, I'm not kissing your ass. I love what you do. I love this pod. I love your authentic self and the stories you tell. And you serve a really valuable role and I'm honored to be on your podcast. Thank you for having me.

• 4:13:43Jocko Willink?

  Well, um, thanks for joining us and you know, you talked about bringing joy to people and uh, thank you for putting smiles on a lot of people's faces, including my face, including my family. Um, like I said, you know, we were going through the war. And we had a little office and that can make us smile even in the worst of times. Thanks for what you've done. Um, thanks for what you're doing. Charity. The writing, the producing, the acting, everything that you're doing, bringing a little bit more joy in the world. Much appreciated.

• 4:14:19Speaker 02

  Right on.

• 4:14:19Jocko Willink?

  Thank you.

• 4:14:20Speaker 02

  Thanks.

• 4:14:22Jocko Willink?

  And with that, Rain Wilson has left the building.

• 4:14:28Jocko Willink?

  You good, Echo Charles?

• 4:14:29Speaker 01

  Yes, sir. Good stuff.

• 4:14:30Jocko Willink?

  Interesting stuff, right?

• 4:14:32Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 4:14:32Jocko Willink?

  Very interesting journey.

• 4:14:33Speaker 01

  Yeah. Yeah. The, I can, I think a lot of us kind of can nerd out on, on the show business side of things, especially when you watch it. You know, when you watch a show and then like, you're so familiar with the show and the characters and all this stuff and you don't know anything, not one single thing about the behind the scenes.

• 4:14:50Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. Or even about that, what that person's actually like as a human.

• 4:14:53Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 4:14:54Jocko Willink?

  Right?

• 4:14:55Speaker 01

  Very crazy.

• 4:14:55Jocko Willink?

  Like that's an actor. That's not who they are.

• 4:14:57Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 4:14:58Jocko Willink?

  It's not Dwight. Now, now there's some You know, elements in there, right? Like, like Rain even said, he called on elements of his own life to form the character of Dwight K. Schrute. But it's still not, he's not actually Dwight K. Schrute.

• 4:15:15Speaker 01

  Right.

• 4:15:16Jocko Willink?

  He's Rainn Wilson. So it's very interesting. And it's weird now you think about all those people in that show. And it comes across in the book. You know, when we were talking about like different rock bands and how, but a lot of times rock bands like the truth comes out, right? And this guy is an asshole and this person like was an egomaniac and this person was like a closet drug addict and this person was stealing all the money. Like, there's all these always or oftentimes these horrible backstories about what's going on behind the scenes. You know what I mean?

• 4:15:49Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 4:15:50Jocko Willink?

  In this, in reading the books, like, it's like everyone's cool. They're, they're all just like good people. They're all, so it gives you a nice feeling, right? And they all felt good and they all liked working together and they all did a good job and they all just enjoyed it. You know, so it's kind of a good news story across the board.

• 4:16:06Speaker 01

  Yeah, fully. But, yep, I felt that same thing.

• 4:16:11Jocko Willink?

  And, you know, I mean, now he's on this little spiritual journey, trying to find happiness. And I'll tell you, I'm all about being happy.

• 4:16:19Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 4:16:20Jocko Willink?

  Got to be healthy.

• 4:16:21Speaker 01

  Got to be.

• 4:16:21Jocko Willink?

  Got to be healthy. If you're having health issues, you got to do your best to get them squared away. And you want to maintain your health. Pretty much that should be one of the highest focuses of your whole life should be being healthy. If it's not, it's gonna hurt you, right? It's gonna hurt you. If you're not doing everything you can, because look, you might be out of shape right now. But you shouldn't surrender. You should get back on the path.

• 4:16:46Speaker 01

  Yep. So he mentioned tennis. Right? So it was, I saw this article, it wasn't tennis, it was table tennis in this article. This is what I was talking about where. Table ta- actually, you know what? Yeah, it was article said table tennis is one of the better things to do to maintain cognitive function.

• 4:17:05Jocko Willink?

  Interesting. Yeah, it's a fast sport.

• 4:17:07Speaker 01

  Right. So your brain, your hand eye coordination and the speed and the kind of the intensity of the hand eye coordination. Uh, development slash maintenance slash uh stimulus is like table tennis. And I would imagine tennis even more because you're actually running around with your body more.

• 4:17:23Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, but it's not as quick.

• 4:17:25Speaker 01

  Yes, meticulous, right? Yeah, that's true. But yeah, they said that like as far as cognitive function goes, bro, it's like one of the best things to maintain it. Plays tennis. It's like, damn.

• 4:17:36Jocko Willink?

  Okay, well, table tennis is what you're talking ping pong.

• 4:17:38Speaker 01

  The article was about ping pong, but he said he plays tennis, which to me is not very far off.

• 4:17:44Jocko Willink?

  Do you know who Jewel is?

• 4:17:46Speaker 01

  Yeah, Jewel, singer, hell yeah.

• 4:17:47Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, yeah. Uh, she was on Joe Rogan's podcast and she was talking about she runs like a school. Or like some kind of a camp or school with the help of kids and they make the kids play tennis. And she's, she didn't even play tennis, but she's like, it's a psychological game. And I'm like, oh, that's interesting. That's good. Now, look, would I prefer they did that jujitsu? Of course, of course, I prefer they did the jujitsu. Of course, nothing better for the children than getting them the jujitsu. But tennis also psychological warfare is happening, right? You see John McEnroe be smashing his racket and whatnot.

• 4:18:22Speaker 01

  Sure.

• 4:18:23Jocko Willink?

  You know what I mean?

• 4:18:23Speaker 01

  I think.

• 4:18:24Jocko Willink?

  They're frustrated. There's something about tennis. When you, you can one miss. Like in jujitsu, you make a mistake. Look, most of the times you can recover.

• 4:18:37Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 4:18:38Jocko Willink?

  You know, occasionally you get caught, like you make one mistake, but you already made seven mistakes.

• 4:18:42Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 4:18:43Jocko Willink?

  You know, very rarely does someone just catch you out of nowhere. You know, and you make two mistakes and now you're in a bad position and now you can't recover. Now they got your arm. But you had three or four chances to correct that situation. In tennis, you hit it in the neck. That's it. It's instantly dead.

• 4:18:58Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 4:18:59Jocko Willink?

  And then you can win a bunch of points in a game and still lose the game. And you can win a bunch of games in the set and still lose the set. And you can win multiple sets in the match and still lose the match. So it can be frustrating for some people.

• 4:19:16Speaker 01

  Gotta watch out. Wait, so why did Jules start this tennis thing?

• 4:19:19Jocko Willink?

  Cause it was good psychologically.

• 4:19:20Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah.

• 4:19:21Jocko Willink?

  It's cause you gotta like focus, you gotta, now look, again, do I prefer the jujitsu? Jujitsu, I think is the number one thing a person could do for life, just to help them. But kids even more so, cause kids, they're gonna be, they're gonna be scrapping, they're gonna be bully situations. Like, these things are happening. So, uh, that's what we're doing. We wanna be healthy on your path to happiness. It's gonna be a big part of it. And look, sometimes you get side swiped, you know, you get side, you get hit from the, you get T-boned by like a disease. You know, some health issue. That's worst case scenario. But the healthier you are going into that, or if you were born with something where it's like, hey, I got this thing going on.

• 4:20:03Jocko Willink?

  Still, being as healthy as you can be is the best possible thing you can do. So, we're working out. When we're doing jujitsu, by the way, you're gonna be sweating.

• 4:20:14Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 4:20:14Jocko Willink?

  You're gonna need to hydrate. You're gonna need to rehydrate. Get yourself some Jaco. Hydrate from Jaco Fuel.com.

• 4:20:20Speaker 01

  Bro, that's in my everyday rotation, every day. You think, oh, only when you sweat a lot or whatever. No, every single day.

• 4:20:28Jocko Willink?

  You know, when I have it, sometimes I have it and I'm not sweating. Sometimes I have it cause it tastes good.

• 4:20:33Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 4:20:34Jocko Willink?

  Like at night, I'll kinda want something sweet.

• 4:20:37Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 4:20:37Jocko Willink?

  But I don't wanna have a whole milk. So I'll just have, just a little hydrate.

• 4:20:42Speaker 01

  It's like a little juice.

• 4:20:43Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, little juice, like a little juice, but it's good for you.

• 4:20:45Speaker 01

  Yeah, I have one in the morning with creatine. I'm on creatine, by the way.

• 4:20:49Jocko Willink?

  Oh, yeah.

• 4:20:50Speaker 01

  So I mix it, hydrate the creatine.

• 4:20:53Jocko Willink?

  Are you threatening me?

• 4:20:54Speaker 01

  No, no, I'm just putting out work. Yep, hydrate creatine.

• 4:20:58Jocko Willink?

  Good. Greens. Get your greens on. Just, you can just have greens once a day. It's a nice little way to kick things off. It's a nice little, uh, bridge. For me, I don't, do you eat breakfast?

• 4:21:10Speaker 01

  No.

• 4:21:11Jocko Willink?

  It's a nice little bridge, a 10 o'clock bridge to get you to lunch. Cause it's a pain in the ass to stop everything. It has that mega Sammy, right?

• 4:21:19Speaker 01

  Sure, sure.

• 4:21:20Jocko Willink?

  At 10 o'clock. No, get a little hit of greens. You're good to go. Alright, so there you go. Jaco Fuel.com. Check it out. Get some milk. I just had a milk. In the break, I had a milk. Uh, Molk, Good2Go, Joint Warfare, super cool, you guys know the deal. Go to JacoFuel.com, get some stuff, or go to Vitamin Shop, or go to GNC, or go to Military Commissaries, Afees, Hannaford, Dash Stores, Wake, Fern, Shopright, HEB down in Texas, Meyer up in the Midwest, Harris Teeter, Lifetime Fitness, Shields. And by the way, if you've got a gym, a jiu-jitsu gym, CrossFit gym, weightlifting gym, whatever you've got, if

• 4:22:00Jocko Willink?

  you've got one and you want to sell Jaco Fuel there so you can help your students and your clients get better, email JF Sales at JacoFuel.com. Get yourself some stuff. We'll set up a wholesale account. Or if you go to one of those places and you want them to have it, tell them. That's how you can make it happen. There you go. JacoFuel.com. Get some.

• 4:22:23Speaker 01

  Also, Origin. If you want American-made stuff, like you don't want to support all this crazy offshore slave labor type stuff with your products, which you probably are in one way or another. It's hard to avoid nowadays, it's true. But, hey, you need some relief from that. OriginUSA.com. When you get your jeans, you will know that everything about these jeans, everything, from the cotton those harvested, all the way to the person who made them. With pride, by the way. Skill and pride. Made them here in America.

• 4:22:54Jocko Willink?

  American-made. You can get a gi, jiu-jitsu gi, and it's gonna be, hands down, the best gi that you've ever had in your life. It's not even gonna feel like a gi. Imagine if for your whole life, you were wearing a burlap and wool suit, head to toe. You know how wool, like, real itchy?

• 4:23:13Speaker 01

  Yeah, like a straitjacket or something.

• 4:23:14Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, something like that. Let's say you were wearing that your whole life. And then one day, you put on, like, a rash guard. And how good you would feel. Or like a cotton shoop t-shirt. That's what it's like. If you've been wearing a normal gi, and you get an Origin gi, that's what you're gonna feel like. That level of different, differentiation.

• 4:23:35Speaker 01

  And they keep, keep getting better, too, by the way. So I had the Rif gi. Remember the Rif came out? We were all like, oh, man, no way, no way anyone can top this one right here. Cause like, the cut, and like, the fabric, like, the form, the whole deal, it's topped. Oh, yeah. So I would just use that, every single time. The Rif gi, the Rif gi, the Rif gi, and then the Nano Pearl came out. I was like, ooh, okay. So you guys just keep getting, making them better and better. I get it. I see what you guys are doing.

• 4:23:59Jocko Willink?

  We ain't playing, originusa.com, go get yourself some gear, whatever you need to wear on your body. And don't forget about jocko store.com. That's what Echo Charles made up.

• 4:24:09Speaker 01

  Yeah, well, it's your name, but yeah.

• 4:24:12Jocko Willink?

  But you made up the name of the store.

• 4:24:13Speaker 01

  Yes, jocko store.com. That's where you can get your discipline equals freedom. Hey, you wanna, you wanna support the X flag, Defcore. That's where you can get it. The idea of good, which is very prevalent nowadays.

• 4:24:28Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, you know, Rain said that at one point, he went through his whole experience and he's like, I went through all this good. And I was like, wait, is this a reference to the good thing? And but I didn't like say anything and then we just moved on. I had some other thing, but maybe he was in the game. Maybe he was saying good, the way we say good.

• 4:24:43Speaker 01

  Very possible.

• 4:24:44Jocko Willink?

  I think he was. And even if he wasn't, it was an alignment. Cause he went through this terrible situation, freaking bombed at Broadway, did crap. And he was like, all that stuff happened and he went, all this bad stuff happened. Good. Cause that led him to the rest of his life.

• 4:25:01Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 4:25:02Jocko Willink?

  That's what happens. Imagine if he went down the other direction. I can't believe this happened.

• 4:25:06Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 4:25:06Jocko Willink?

  Drinking, doing cocaine.

• 4:25:08Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 4:25:09Jocko Willink?

  Shit could have gone wild, bro. But he got it back together.

• 4:25:12Speaker 01

  It's true. So man, yeah, the alignment, exactly right. So it actually doesn't even matter whether he was referencing your thing or not. Is it even your thing? It's a thing. It's the thing. So yeah, if you wanna represent, we've got some shirts, we've got, you know, some cool stuff on there, jocko store.com. Also the shirt locker, people seem to like.

• 4:25:30Jocko Willink?

  Been a lot of requests lately, hasn't there?

• 4:25:32Speaker 01

  Few requests, yes, yes. Shirt locker, what it is, if you don't know, a new shirt every month. The designs are cool. People kinda like, well, sometimes we go a little bit, um, deep, you know?

• 4:25:41Jocko Willink?

  We should make a freaking, uh, something like you were talking about going off, how many levels do you have to go off of? The office, like how many levels before you're clear?

• 4:25:53Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 4:25:53Jocko Willink?

  We should do something like that.

• 4:25:55Speaker 01

  Well, from the office or

• 4:25:56Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, yeah, from the office. Go far enough away from the office. Make up our own thing about the office. Like, like the shrewd farms, like there's another farm that competes with shrewd farms.

• 4:26:07Speaker 01

  Right.

• 4:26:07Jocko Willink?

  And we can make their T-shirt.

• 4:26:09Speaker 01

  Right, right.

• 4:26:10Jocko Willink?

  Like the truly the best beats in Pennsylvania.

• 4:26:14Speaker 01

  No matter what any other places say.

• 4:26:16Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, no matter what other places say. And we could make a cool, and we could do that, a bunch of those kinda, look, I don't wanna get too crazy, but let's face it, you know?

• 4:26:25Speaker 01

  It's not nothing.

• 4:26:26Jocko Willink?

  You know, the world's real best boss, right here, you know, like sell a coffee mug. You see what I'm saying?

• 4:26:32Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 4:26:32Jocko Willink?

  So we just need to go off one more level, one level of, one level of, uh, of removal.

• 4:26:40Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 4:26:40Jocko Willink?

  Plausible deniability. Like, I don't know what you're talking about. We just thought it'd be funny to have a beet farm in Pennsylvania.

• 4:26:46Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 4:26:46Jocko Willink?

  Right?

• 4:26:47Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 4:26:47Jocko Willink?

  What are they gonna say? Sue us? They're not even going after the Etsy people or the Amazon people. I wonder, you know how you look at Jaco T-shirts and there's a bunch of freaking rip-offs on Amazon?

• 4:26:58Speaker 01

  Jaco, uh, Navy SEAL inspired T-shirts?

• 4:27:00Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, yeah, that literally say Jaco on them.

• 4:27:02Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 4:27:03Jocko Willink?

  Well, don't get those T-shirts, but they, he said they don't go after, you know, whoever owns, NBC doesn't go after the Amazon people that are selling Dwight K. Schrute T-shirts. They should be, kinda sucks for him.

• 4:27:18Speaker 01

  Yeah, you figure, yeah, you know, what, what do they call it? Name likeness, right? Name, image likeness, or whatever kind of thing, you know? I guess the image and likeness, kind of thing. Well, either way, hey, look, to me, hey, man, if you could go on the other spectrum, or the other side of the spectrum where it's like, hey, if you made it better than how we made it, bruh, that's your right. Get the better one, up to you, you know, but either way.

• 4:27:41Jocko Willink?

  Let's, let's, um, let's just keep an open mind and we can, we can request ideas. If you have a good idea for a one level removed office T-shirt, we'll make it. And we'll send it to Rain, and we'll be like, Rain, you don't need to take any of this shit from NBC anymore. You're gonna be in the game, one layer removed.

• 4:28:04Speaker 01

  Boom.

• 4:28:04Jocko Willink?

  Prove it. Prove that we're talking about shrewd farms or not. We're talking about the best beats in Pennsylvania.

• 4:28:11Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 4:28:11Jocko Willink?

  You know, not what the other guy sells.

• 4:28:14Speaker 01

  Well, we don't like beats, bro. We like beats. But yes, that's what you're gonna get.

• 4:28:18Jocko Willink?

  We love beats.

• 4:28:18Speaker 01

  Yep, it's true.

• 4:28:19Jocko Willink?

  There you go. Sherlock, Sherlock. Get some. Subscribe to the podcast, subscribe to Jaco Underground, subscribe to the YouTube channels, subscribe to Psychological Warfare, which is actually an iTunes thing that we put out. A long time ago. And for a while I was like, oh, I'm gonna make another one, and I still haven't. Looks like I need more discipline in my life. Psychological Warfare out there on iTunes and whatnot. Flipside Canvas Dakota Meyer. Making cool stuff to hang on your wall from an American hero. American made. That's what we're talking about. Also, books. Clearly, today we covered The Bassoon King and Soul Boom by Rainn Wilson. Good reads, funny reads. Check them out. Final spin. I wrote a novel.

• 4:29:03Jocko Willink?

  A lot of people think it's not the best novels ever written. That's what I've been hearing. So, get on that. Bunch of other books. You guys know what they are. Get the Warrior Kid books. Warrior Kid 1, 2, 3, 4, and 5. Mikey and the Dragons. These are books for your children. Help them. Help them figure things out. Also, Echelon Front, we have a leadership consultancy. We solve problems through leadership. Go to echelonfront.com if you need help with leadership inside your organization. Also, we have live events. We've got... Well, the Dallas October muster sold out a while ago. The next one's in San Diego. It's not sold out yet, but it will be. So, check that out. Women's Assembly, I think there's a couple of seats left. No, there won't be. By the time this comes out, it'll be over. So, anyways.

• 4:29:50Jocko Willink?

  Echelonfront.com. That's what we do. We also have an online training academy at extremeownership.com, learning the lessons of leadership for business and life. You can do it online. You really can. You really can get educated online. It's a true thing. It's not a fantasy.

• 4:30:11Jocko Willink?

  It actually works. We've had incredible feedback on that. Go to extremeownership.com if you want to be educated about leadership online. And if you want to help service members, active and retired, you want to help their families, you want to help Gold Star families, check out Mark Lee's mom, Mama Lee. She's got an incredible charity organization. And if you want to donate, or you want to get involved, go to AmericasMightyWarriors.org. Also, Heroes and Horses, Micah Fink, just got his latest class out of the field, where they went into the wilderness, and got lost, and got found. Heroesandhorses.org. If you want to connect with us,

• 4:30:48Jocko Willink?

  Rain Wilson is at SoulBoom.com. He's also got an Instagram and a Twitter, at Rain Wilson. He's got a Facebook, at Rain Wilson. He's got a TV show, which we're not allowed to promote, but if we were promoting it, it would be called The Geography of Bliss. It's on the Peacock Network.

• 4:31:09Jocko Willink?

  And if you want to connect with Echo, he's at Echo Charles. And I am at Jocko Willink. Just be careful, because there's an algorithm there, and it'll grab you by the throat, and it'll put you to sleep. And when you wake up, you'll have wasted your life, and you don't want that. Thanks again to Rain Wilson for joining us. We got him stuck in traffic on the way back. He's got a long drive. He's sitting in traffic. It's miserable right now. Apologize for that, Mr. Rain Wilson, but thank you for joining us. Sorry it took so long. Appreciate the lessons from your journey. And thanks for making us all laugh and feel a little joy along the way.

• 4:31:49Jocko Willink?

  And thanks to the members of our Army, Navy, Air Force, Marines. We can live our lives because of the dedication you have made with your lives, and we thank you for it. Also, thanks to our police, law enforcement, firefighters, paramedics, EMTs, dispatchers, correctional officers, Border Patrol, Secret Service, and all first responders. Thank you for your dedication to keep us safe here at home. And to everyone else out there.

• 4:32:17Jocko Willink?

  I'm gonna leave you with a couple quotes. A couple quotes.

• 4:32:22Jocko Willink?

  From Dwight K. Schrute. Number one, whenever I think about, whenever I'm about to do something, I think, would an idiot do that? And if they would, I do not do that thing. There you go. That's quote number one. This is actually important. I said something similar recently. Don't do dumb shit. It's a very similar thing. This one takes a little bit more thought. But it's a good thing to think about. And then, here's another quote. In the wild, there is no healthcare. In the wild, healthcare is, ow, I hurt my leg, I can't run. A lion eats me, and I'm dead. Well, I'm not dead. I'm the lion, you're dead.

• 4:33:06Jocko Willink?

  So there you go. Don't do dumb shit. Don't do things that an idiot would do. And then, be the lion.

• 4:33:16Jocko Willink?

  And that's all we've got for now. And until next time, this is Echo and Jaco, out.