April 11, 2023 - The Joe Rogan Experience
02:35:32
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| Speaker | Time | Text |
|---|---|---|
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unidentified
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Joe Rogan Podcast, check it out! | |
| I appreciate it. | ||
| Yeah, thanks for asking. | ||
| You've had a wild life, dude. | ||
| How the fuck does one go from playing in Nirvana and Soundgarden to being a soldier? | ||
| It's a longer story. | ||
| I want to hear it. | ||
| How long an answer you want. | ||
| We got plenty of time. | ||
| - Okay. | ||
| So, I guess being a professional rock musician was something I kind of fell into. | ||
| It wasn't something that I had a dream of. | ||
| I love playing in bands, I love playing music, but it was at this punk rock level where you were never going to make a living at it. | ||
| It was just something fun to do. | ||
| And then I started playing with Nirvana. | ||
| And even at that level, you know, still not making money from it, but, you know, touring... | ||
| Was it the early days of Nirvana? | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| So Nirvana wasn't worldwide at that point? | ||
| No, no. | ||
| Even on the Seattle level, like one of the smaller bands, you know, like there's bands like Mudhoney and Soundgarden that were... | ||
| Better known than Nirvana was at the time. | ||
| And you played for Soundgarden too, which is also hilarious. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And when did you... | ||
| So in the beginning, did you have friction with the band? | ||
| Why did you wind up leaving? | ||
| So with Nirvana, it was just... | ||
| I guess initially, when I came on board, Kurt wanted a second guitar player for the live show, basically. | ||
| Have a heavier sound live, take some of the guitar playing responsibility off him so he could concentrate on vocals, that kind of thing. | ||
| And initially, like, I thought I was going to be able to contribute to the band creatively. | ||
| And then it got to the point where I realized that wasn't going to happen. | ||
| And the same thing happened with Chad, the drummer, I think. | ||
| And it was, like, everyone in the band, including myself, was, like, very poor communicators. | ||
| Like, a lot of passive aggression. | ||
| And, you know, I mean, we were kids, you know? | ||
| How old were we at the time? | ||
| 20, I think. | ||
|
unidentified
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And... | |
| Yeah, I just I wasn't equipped for it and became more and more unhappy with the situation and then ended up leaving. | ||
| So was it that like when you tried to put creative input in it would get shut down or they weren't interested or Kurt wasn't interested? | ||
| Yeah, so like on the rare time Where we actually rehearsed as a band, which was not a lot, Kurt would kind of half-heartedly, like, hey, who has ideas? | ||
| And, like, I'd throw a couple ideas out. | ||
| And then Chad, like a very accomplished musician in his own right, would throw some ideas out. | ||
| And then it'd just kind of be glossed over and, like, okay, here's the new song I wrote, you know, and start learning that. | ||
| So it was very... | ||
| Ego century. | ||
| Cursory. | ||
| He kind of threw it out there, but then it wasn't going to go anywhere. | ||
| So you went for Nirvana first and then to Soundgarden? | ||
| Yeah, I left. | ||
| We did a US tour, the first full US tour that Nirvana did. | ||
| 88 or 89. I can't remember what year it was, but I think it was still the 80s. | ||
| I left at the end of that tour. | ||
| I'm done. | ||
| Nice little foray into rock and roll, but I'm going to do something else. | ||
| When I got home, I was planning on going trekking in the Himalayas. | ||
| Really? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| That was the next thing. | ||
| It's like, okay, this was a nice diversion, but I'm going to kind of fulfill this dream I've had since I was a kid of trekking in the Himalayas. | ||
| So I went to Metzger's Maps in Seattle and was buying maps of the Himalaya of Nepal and Tibet and all this stuff. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Getting gear sorted and that's what I was going to do. | ||
| And then at some point that summer or fall, I can't remember what time of year it was, end of summer, Kim from Soundgarden called me and was like, hey, Hero, their bass player then, quit. | ||
| Do you want to audition for the band? | ||
|
unidentified
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Yeah. | |
| I was like you know at that point like Soundgarden was my favorite Seattle band like hands down and it was like okay you know fully not believing I'd ever get chosen and then you did yeah and how did that end I got fired What happened? | ||
| It's complicated, but I think at the end of the day, I wasn't getting along with Chris Atwell, the singer. | ||
| And, you know, obviously, you know, who's going to go? | ||
| Right, of course. | ||
| Yeah, it was me. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So how does that translate into becoming a soldier? | ||
| I mean, there's more... | ||
| There's more to the story than that, because there was still, like, I basically, like, getting fired from Soundgarden, like, put me in a pretty bad tailspin. | ||
| I mean, it was a rough patch in my life, for sure. | ||
| And so, in order to kind of... | ||
| Cut this tailspin off. | ||
| Like, I had to do something radical. | ||
| And what I did was ended up moving to New York. | ||
| And so, I mean, there's more to the story than that. | ||
| But moved to New York, like, basically, you know, I grew up in rural Western Washington, like... | ||
| So it was kind of polar opposite to what my experience was. | ||
| Like, got a job in a warehouse, got an apartment, and kind of started my New York life and did that for a couple of years. | ||
| What was your plan when you moved to New York? | ||
| Did you just want to try it? | ||
| Experience life in the city? | ||
| I think the main plan was, like, get out of this funk that I was in, you know? | ||
| How old were you at the time? | ||
| 21, 22 maybe? | ||
| So just a young guy trying to figure out life? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Like the Soundgarden thing? | ||
| Getting fired from Soundgarden, it broke my heart. | ||
| It was a bad spot for me. | ||
| Because I loved that band. | ||
| I never thought they would get as big as they did. | ||
| Honestly, it kind of surprised me when they did. | ||
| Because, yeah, they're a great band, but I always thought they were a little too quirky to be... | ||
| It's huge, despite the Chris factor, this genetically engineered rock star. | ||
| But I always thought they were a little too weird to have mainstream success, which was fine with me. | ||
| I thought they'd be like a big indie band, like Sonic Youth or Butthole Surfers, like that level. | ||
| But it was more like I just love that band and I love playing with them. | ||
| And having that taken away, yeah, it really fucked me up for a bit. | ||
| So you just went to New York City to try to experience a different life? | ||
| Just running for my demons, you know? | ||
| Like that old rubric. | ||
| But your demons tend to follow you. | ||
| Always. | ||
|
unidentified
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What were your demons? | |
| You want to go down that rabbit hole? | ||
|
unidentified
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Sure. | |
| There's a few. | ||
| Growing up, you know, and everyone has a story, right? | ||
| Like, my childhood was bad. | ||
| My childhood wasn't bad, necessarily, but there was a lot of unhappiness, for sure. | ||
| It stemmed from my mother and my stepdaughter not being happy. | ||
| I don't feel bad talking about it now because they're both gone now. | ||
| But they probably shouldn't have gotten married. | ||
| And that's one thing. | ||
| As an adult, looking back, you can kind of... | ||
| You see your parents as human beings and not, like, these magical creatures that, like, feed you and take care of you. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And, you know, they got their dreams and their, you know, crushed dreams. | ||
| Like, they're humans. | ||
| So I have a lot of compassion for them now as an adult. | ||
| It's like, oh, I get it now. | ||
| You know, it's like they weren't bad people. | ||
| They were just people. | ||
| And it's just being a child in that environment. | ||
| Yeah, because you have nothing to compare it to. | ||
| It's just reality. | ||
| It's like, oh, I guess this is what being a kid is. | ||
| It kind of sucks. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It can. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| But through that suck, a lot of times that's where you sort of get your drive, unfortunately. | ||
| Oh, I'm a firm believer that growth is the result of trauma. | ||
| Like, you need that thesis, antithesis, synthesis, you know? | ||
| Like, Stephen Jay Gould called it... | ||
| Pertaining to evolution, punctuated equilibrium, where, like, evolution tends to stay stable if there's no pressures. | ||
| But as soon as there's this introduction of new pressures, usually the result of some cataclysmic event. | ||
| It's not a gradual thing. | ||
| It's usually sudden and extreme. | ||
| And that's where these new evolutionary pressures are introduced. | ||
| And it's like... | ||
| On this level of species, you adapt and survive or you die off. | ||
| So I kind of like putting that template on the individual. | ||
| Like you kind of cruise through life and then something fucked up happens and then, you know, hopefully you step up and grow from it, you know, learn from it, all that stuff. | ||
| So you go to New York City, you were there for a few years. | ||
| What were you doing while you were there? | ||
| So initially I worked in a warehouse and it was fine. | ||
| I was paying my rent, living in Alphabet City, having this urban life that I never thought I would have had otherwise. | ||
| Did you know anybody there? | ||
| Yeah, I had friends there from touring and stuff. | ||
| And so that was kind of my foothold for moving there. | ||
| Didn't play music. | ||
| I brought some equipment over. | ||
| Initially, I went over with a backpack, and that was it. | ||
| And I had a friend of mine's band who were on tour pick me up at JFK and drive me into the city. | ||
| I still remember this. | ||
| The day before, I was doing different kind of work to save money for the move. | ||
| So the day before I flew to New York, I was like, Bucking bales of hay in a hayfield, like farm stuff, right? | ||
| And my buddy Spike, who I'm still good friends with, played in this band called Mind Over Four. | ||
| They picked me up at JFK, and I remember sitting in the van and looking at my Converse, and I still had straw stuck in the Converse from baling hay the day before. | ||
| It was like, okay, here we go. | ||
| That's an adventure. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| So you're there for a few years, living that life, and how do you transition into that? | ||
| So, I went back to Seattle at some point during the first year in New York to ship more of my personal belongings over. | ||
| And actually, I went to Sub Pop because they had UPS shipping there. | ||
| And I'm, like, boxing up my stuff in the Sub Pop offices and, like, getting ready to ship it to New York, like, including, like, a Marshall cabinet, like, some music gear, but... | ||
| I had this vague notion of, yeah, maybe I'll play there, but honestly, I probably didn't touch a bass or a guitar for the first year after getting fired from Soundgarden. | ||
| It still kind of had a bad taste in my mouth. | ||
| But what changed that was summer of Ninety-one, maybe? | ||
| I was friends with this band called Skunk. | ||
| They're this indie rock band on Twin Tone Records. | ||
| There are three Matt's. | ||
| Matt Sweeney, Matt Quigley, and Matt Coleman. | ||
| So Matt Quigley, the bass player, quit right before a European tour that they had booked, supporting Babes in Toyland, another amazing band. | ||
| And so I get a call from Matt Sweeney, and he's like, hey dude, Quigley quit, we got this tour coming up, do you want to fill in on bass for this tour? | ||
| So I'm like, I could work in this warehouse in New York, like in the sweltering New York summer heat, or I could go to Europe for eight weeks or whatever and tour. | ||
| So I'm like, yeah, okay, I'll do it. | ||
| So I learned the songs and did that tour. | ||
| To this day, it was the funnest tour I'd ever done, and I think that was because I really had nothing emotionally invested in the band. | ||
| Like, I like the music, I like the dudes, but it was just... | ||
| All I had to do was go out and play to the best of my ability, and yeah, it was just fun. | ||
| There was no burden, no heaviness to it, you know? | ||
| Like being a part of Soundgarden's immense band. | ||
| Yeah, that I was emotionally invested in. | ||
| And so how do you go from that to... | ||
| There's more to the story. | ||
| Keep going. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| So I did the European tour with Skunk. | ||
| And honestly, it was, I think, to this day, the best bass performances I ever did. | ||
| You know, I got some board recordings from that tour that once in a while I'll listen to it and go, yeah, you know, it's not bad. | ||
| Do you think it's because you were free, because you didn't have pressure and burden? | ||
| I think that was a component for sure, but also the songs were a bit more complicated, and stylistically it wasn't necessarily my jam. | ||
| I was into heavier stuff, and this was kind of more like Soul Asylum, like indie rock, which is great. | ||
| And the bass parts were really complicated, so I kind of had to push myself to learn them. | ||
| And again, like, you know, grew from it as a musician. | ||
| So I did the tour, came back. | ||
| I started playing with this kind of industrial band on Earache Records called Old Lady Drivers, which is another kind of interesting foray into a genre. | ||
| like I was a fan of like the grindcore bands for sure but like even this was like it's kind of beyond that because it's very it's a lot of synthesizers and drum machines and stuff that I really wasn't exposed to before but they had a record deal with earache and you know who John Zorn is no so he's an American treasure he's this avant-garde jazz musician based out of New York Google him if you get a chance but like | ||
| Brilliant. | ||
| He does a lot of stuff. | ||
| He's really prolific. | ||
| Definitely a genius. | ||
| Zorn was on board. | ||
| He produced the record. | ||
| John actually lived in my neighborhood. | ||
| I'd go to his apartment. | ||
| He lived two blocks away in Alphabet City. | ||
| He had this insane record collection. | ||
| The whole flat was like... | ||
| Shelves of vinyl and it was all organized very meticulously Plastic sleeves for for each Jacket it was and he was he was like a student of American music or music in general and he got his knowledge and it's just cool like oh So here's this guy At least on an underground level, | ||
| very well-known, very well-respected, huge in Japan, of course. | ||
| Mm-hmm. | ||
| And he's just like this nice, kind of normal dude, like, giving me a tour of his record collection, you know? | ||
| And we're both living in this shitty neighborhood in Manhattan. | ||
| This is cool. | ||
| So that was a good experience. | ||
| Like, played shows with them. | ||
| Like, played CB's again. | ||
| CBGB's, which, you know, the legendary punk club in New York. | ||
| Which even having played there before, but it's just kind of like... | ||
| I would still get excited about it. | ||
| It's like, dude, I'm playing CBGB's. | ||
| It's like this mythical place when I was a teenager, you know? | ||
| And it's like, oh, here I am. | ||
| So I did that, but that was kind of like just a side thing for sure. | ||
| And then I got contacted... | ||
| So going back, between the Skunk Tour and the Old Lady Drivers experience, I kind of got into playing music again. | ||
| Like, it became fun again, which is why I did it in the first place. | ||
| Like, it brought me joy. | ||
| But, you know, there was a couple times where it got to the point where the joy was, like, fully extracted from the process, and it just, it wasn't fulfilling anymore, you know? | ||
| So anyway, I'm back in New York, working in the warehouse, doing my thing, and I get contacted by... | ||
| Have you ever heard of Uniform Choice? | ||
|
unidentified
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No. | |
| Like a hardcore band from L.A., from the 80s. | ||
| I get contacted by Pat Dubar, who was, in the 80s, a singer for Uniform Choice, and that was a band I was familiar with from the punk days and everything. | ||
| So he was in this band called Mind Funk, which, first off, like, horrible name. | ||
| Like, get it. | ||
| We can go into that later. | ||
| Pat contacts me and he's like, hey, and they were signed to Epic Records, had one record out already. | ||
| And he's like, hey, we're going to replace one of our guitar players and our drummers. | ||
| Are you interested in trying out? | ||
| And honestly, I hadn't heard their record. | ||
| And I gave the first one a listen and honestly wasn't that excited about it. | ||
| But it was... | ||
| At this point in my life, I kind of knew if I'm going to give the music thing another go, this is going to be it. | ||
| It's like, do this, and it'll either catch fire or it won't, and if it doesn't, I'll go on to the next chapter, whatever that is. | ||
| I don't even think I auditioned for the band. | ||
| I think they just, okay, you're in. | ||
| So now we're looking for a drummer So I went and poached my friend Sean back home in Washington. | ||
| He played in a band that I was a big fan of. | ||
| And I was a big fan of Sean. | ||
| And convinced him to come out to New York and join this band that he'd never heard of. | ||
| And it took a lot of convincing to get him to do it, but he did it. | ||
| And so this kind of MindFunk 2.0 with Sean and I... One plus side was like, okay, major label, get put on salary, like don't need a day job anymore, right? | ||
| So once again, I'm a professional rock musician, which not that I care about the title, but it was nice not to have the day job. | ||
| So we get a house in Monmouth County, New Jersey, in order to write the next record. | ||
| So band house, five of us living in this house. | ||
| And it was just routine. | ||
| We'd get together every day, rehearse, write songs. | ||
| I was given more or less full creative reign for my ideas and stuff, which was fulfilling on that level. | ||
| The band was managed by John Zuzula. | ||
| Do you know Johnny Z? No. | ||
| So he was like the dude who discovered Metallica. | ||
| That's kind of his claim to fame. | ||
| And he had a label called Megaforce Records, which is a great 80s movie, by the way, if you've never seen it. | ||
| No. | ||
| It's so good. | ||
| It's about the band? | ||
| No. | ||
| It's this horrible yet brilliant action movie from like 1982, I think. | ||
| But that's a digression. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So John and Marsha had this management company, Crazed Management. | ||
| They own Megaforce Records, and that's the label that put out Kill Em All and the first pressing of Ride the Lightning. | ||
| And they did Merciful Fate Melissa. | ||
| They did some really good records, like the first Anthrax records as well, I think. | ||
| So John managed some... | ||
| Pretty big bands. | ||
| Like, he managed Anthrax, Suicidal Tendencies, Ministry, I think. | ||
| Like, he was this kind of known quantity in the music world, or at least in the heavy metal world, hard rock world, whatever you want to call it. | ||
| So we had Johnny Z signed to Epic, had the house in Jersey, write in the record. | ||
| Like with the name Mindfunk, which again is like a dumb name. | ||
| It kind of turned me off initially. | ||
| So I suggested like making it one word, like contracting it to make it a little less odious. | ||
| So I did that, kind of changed the logo. | ||
| So it's kind of slipping in some aesthetic values that I thought... | ||
| We're better, at least, than what was going on at the time. | ||
| Why'd you hate Mind Funk so much? | ||
| It's just a dumb name. | ||
| It's like the whole funk thing. | ||
| It's like, oh, Chili Peppers, like what? | ||
| No, it wasn't like that at all. | ||
| But, you know, there's a lot of dumb band names out there. | ||
| And if the band catches fire, it doesn't matter if it's a dumb name. | ||
| It just gets accepted. | ||
| So it's not that big a deal. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So, recording, blah, blah, blah. | ||
| Johnny Z. We get to... | ||
| So we get Terry Date, the producer, on board to produce the second record. | ||
| And I knew him. | ||
| He's from Seattle, so I knew him from Soundgarden and from other local bands that he produced. | ||
| Like a known quantity in that world. | ||
| We book out Bearsville Studio up in Woodstock, New York. | ||
| The studio's literally on this old Dutch farm. | ||
| It's like idyllic. | ||
| So we get Bearsville booked out for three months, got Terry Dade on board. | ||
| It's like September of 90... | ||
| Must be September 92. We pack up the U-Haul, all the gear, drive up to Beresville to start the next record. | ||
| So Sean and I are in the barn setting up equipment on this farm to start the pre-production work. | ||
| Like, I don't know, it's probably a Saturday. | ||
| No, it was a Friday. | ||
| It was definitely a Friday. | ||
| So we're setting up the equipment to start pre-production work when Terry gets in. | ||
| And I think Pat came down to the barn as we're setting up. | ||
| And it's this late September. | ||
| The heat has kind of left New York State, so it's pleasant outside. | ||
| It's beautiful, sunny. | ||
| Farm. | ||
| This old barn we're setting up equipment in. | ||
| Pat says, hey, we've got to get everyone together. | ||
| We've got some bad news. | ||
| So Epic, the label, had dropped the band that day. | ||
| Like, catastrophic, right? | ||
| Or could have been catastrophic. | ||
| And just the fact that it was a Friday afternoon, I'm sure it was a post-it note on some dude at Epic's computer monitor. | ||
| Drop MindFunk. | ||
| It's like, oh shit, I gotta do that. | ||
| So, it's like, fuck, you know? | ||
| It's like a $300,000 recording budget, Terry Data's producer, like, the band's literally homeless, like, we're gonna live at the studio, but it's like, okay, what now? | ||
| So the dude who managed Berardsville, and I can't remember his name, he's this British guy, super sweet, and he's like, he saw we were in a tight spot, and he's like, You know, he's out like a huge lump of money, right? | ||
| Because that studio was booked out for three months. | ||
| That's like a huge, you know, quarter million dollars probably. | ||
| He's like, you guys can stay here and... | ||
| Sort out what you've got to sort out, kind of thing. | ||
| I remember Pat and I were living in one of the cottages on the property. | ||
| It's this very quaint little farmhouse. | ||
| At least, I won't speak for everyone, but I was in a daze. | ||
| I was like... | ||
| Fuck. | ||
| I was already lining up, getting my warehouse job back, all this stuff. | ||
| And so I remember just staying in this house, sleeping on this antique leather sofa, and I had my cat with me. | ||
| So it's me and my cat, watching bad daytime TV. I think I lived on Cheerios and soda. | ||
| Just nasty, right? | ||
| Just because I was too lazy to go to a restaurant or buy food to cook. | ||
| It's easy. | ||
| A bowl of cereal and some soda. | ||
| It just sounds so gross now. | ||
| Even then, that's not how I normally ate. | ||
| During that period, that's what I was eating. | ||
| I was watching bad daytime television. | ||
| I remember there was this wall hanging in the living room. | ||
| It was this macrame koala bear. | ||
| You know? | ||
| Kind of tacky. | ||
| And I kind of started obsessing on this macrame koala bear to the point where it's like, if I ever have a daughter, I'm going to name her Koala Macrame. | ||
| You know, again, speaking of dumb names. | ||
| But luckily that passed and I came up with a replacement for a daughter's name that was much better. | ||
| But... | ||
| So during that week, Johnny Z, our manager, who personally I didn't really like him that much, you know, there was something kind of dodgy about him, like in that music business way, that also put a bad taste in my mouth on a lot of levels, just being in that industry. | ||
| But Johnny, you know, as much as I didn't like him, he came through. | ||
| And maybe he was motivated by economic reasons rather than, you know, he's being a stand-up guy or whatever. | ||
| But he signed the band to Megaforce, to his label. | ||
| Put up the money for the recording, to record the record. | ||
| Put us all back on salary so it didn't miss a beat. | ||
| Like, no one had to get a day job. | ||
| And then Terry, Terry Date, much to his credit, like, he had every right to bail, right? | ||
| It was like, okay, what's the next gig? | ||
| Okay, I'm there. | ||
| He got us studio time at Bad Animals Studio in Seattle, which is Hart's old recording studio. | ||
| It's gone now. | ||
| Like all this happened in like a week, 10 days. | ||
| Like everything was back on track, just like new label, new studio in Seattle. | ||
| And so loaded up the gear, flew to Seattle and like probably 10 days later we're doing pre-production demos at Bad Animals and recorded the record and It was done I think by December the mix was done. | ||
| I actually went back to New York and worked in the warehouse for a month to make some extra money. | ||
| And then the band, well not the whole band, but Sean, Pat and I decided to move to San Francisco just for like a change of venue. | ||
| So I think New Year's Day or the day after, I loaded up U-Haul with all our stuff and drove cross-country by myself, which was like a super fun road trip. | ||
| And then we got an apartment in the Mission District in San Francisco, and that's where 1993 was a very transitional year, and that's where things got to the point where it's like, okay, I've got to do something different for me personally. | ||
| And what happens next? | ||
| We're living in San Francisco. | ||
| Even while we're living in the house in New Jersey, during the recording process in Seattle and in San Francisco, Like, taking a lot of drugs. | ||
| Like, a lot of hallucinogens, mostly. | ||
| But, you know, had my flirtation with heroin. | ||
| Like, first started just smoking it, you know, on tinfoil. | ||
| And then went into IV use. | ||
| And, like, I honestly enjoyed it, but it never got its hooks in me. | ||
| And I got to the point where I was like, eh, yeah, I should probably not continue down this path. | ||
| And walked away from it. | ||
| It's a big step to go to intravenous. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Well, like, I'm a completist, I guess. | ||
| It's like, I don't want to do it halfway. | ||
| See what the fuss is all about. | ||
| Yeah, exactly. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| What is the fuss all about? | ||
| So the feeling, what's your experience with opiates? | ||
| Only, like, while I've been under, like, having surgery. | ||
| Yeah, so it's the same. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Just that kind of weightless feeling. | ||
| It's very nice. | ||
| I guess the analogy I can make is just that kind of post-orgasmic bliss where you're weightless and everything feels wonderful. | ||
| It's like that. | ||
| But induced artificially, I guess. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Living in San Francisco. | ||
| So we toured a lot that year. | ||
| Probably half the year was touring like Europe and the States. | ||
| And then when we're back in San Francisco, it was like, you know, still on salary. | ||
| You didn't have to work. | ||
| So just hang out and like, you know, drop acid or drink mushroom tea or whatever. | ||
| And as fun as that is, it was like, like long term, I don't know. | ||
| You know, if this is going to be right. | ||
| You know, the record never caught fire. | ||
| I think it's a solid record. | ||
| Like, when I hear tracks off of it now, you know, I'm kind of like, no, it's not bad. | ||
| No, it's okay. | ||
| There's a couple of the songs on that record were basically nascent Soundgarden songs, you know? | ||
| There were, like, riffs or song ideas I had that, while playing with Soundgarden, like, Chris would hear me playing it, noodling around, and he'd be like, oh, remember that. | ||
| So I had a couple ideas that in a different life would have been on the next Soundgarden record, conceivably. | ||
| So there's a couple of those songs on there. | ||
| Not a bad record. | ||
| We played a bunch of the big festivals in Europe. | ||
| We did pretty much everything but make a bunch of money. | ||
| Which is, again, most bands. | ||
| Most bands don't catch fire. | ||
| So what happened? | ||
| So during this period, 1993, I started, I guess, crafting the next chapter, right, for me. | ||
| And I'd always been really intrigued by the military. | ||
| My grandfather, both my grandfathers were World War II vets. | ||
| So my maternal grandfather was a tank commander in World War II. And he was kind of my... | ||
| Introduction to, like, military stuff. | ||
| You know, and I'm a little kid, so I'm intrigued by it. | ||
| Like, you know, oh, tank commander, that's cool. | ||
| Like, he, on D-Day, he was an E4 corporal, like, gunner on a Sherman tank. | ||
| On VE Day, his unit had made it all the way to Vienna, and he was a company commander. | ||
| And it was just survival, like, attrition. | ||
| I'm sure he was a fine soldier, but it was just attrition that he went from corporal to captain in a year or whatever. | ||
| My grandmother's second husband... | ||
| Was a corpsman in the Navy. | ||
| So his story is super funny. | ||
| Like, he grew up in this small town on the Columbia River in Washington State. | ||
| So his, I think there was like 20 dudes in his graduating class in high school. | ||
| And so they graduated June 1942. Right after graduation, 201, every male in his class went to the recruiter and enlisted. | ||
| He went in the Navy. | ||
| His Navy MOS was a pharmacist-made or something like that. | ||
| He's like, oh, I'll be on the ship working in the dispensary or whatever. | ||
| Wrong. | ||
| He graduates. | ||
| They give him a helmet. | ||
| And attach them to a Marine platoon, infantry platoon, and, like, you're the medic. | ||
| And so he did, like, seven amphibious assaults in the Pacific. | ||
| Like, crazy stuff, right? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Wow. | |
| Yeah. | ||
| Like, it was super hard. | ||
| And he had amazing stories, you know? | ||
| And then my father's father was in the Coast Guard and he did a lot of coastal patrolling, Oregon Coast, Washington Coast, Columbia River during the war, just looking for Japanese subs or whatever. | ||
| And so you, because you had this sort of wanderlust that made you want to go trek in the Himalayas, and you had this family that had this background in the military, you were thinking that this would be something that would be adventurous or intriguing to you? | ||
| Yeah, like I've always... | ||
| I've always had a taste for high adventure as a child. | ||
| Probably even before I was in school. | ||
| So Saturday morning cartoons. | ||
| How old are you? | ||
| 55. Yeah, we're the same age. | ||
| So I imagine I probably grew up with similar cultural influences. | ||
| So I remember in the mornings watching TV shows, cartoons, Johnny Quest was the big one, right? | ||
| Speed Racer, Marine Boy. | ||
| Speed Racer and Marine Boy were anime, but they were great. | ||
| Marine Boy was basically Speed Racer, but underwater. | ||
| Super cool, fantastical stuff. | ||
| Great to feed the imagination. | ||
| The writing for Johnny Quest was so good. | ||
| The show, in retrospect, was kind of progressive. | ||
| Johnny had two dads, and they had this A multiracial composite family. | ||
| But the writing was so solid. | ||
| Super creative. | ||
| I think it was only 26 episodes, but each episode is distinct and well-written and just cool. | ||
| I would watch this as a kid and be like, I'm not sure what that is, but I want to do that. | ||
| You know? | ||
| So that was kind of the initial impetus for, like... | ||
| And then growing up in the woods in western Washington, like, I was expected, you know, I was kicked outside after breakfast and not expected to be seen again until dinnertime. | ||
| And what I did between then was, like, on me. | ||
| And so I'd go out and do stupid stuff, like climb high-tension power lines, you know, to the top. | ||
| Like, five, six years old. | ||
| Like, so stupid, right? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| But it was like, oh, this is cool, you know? | ||
| And my mother, she definitely facilitated this stuff, like, much to her credit. | ||
| Like, we'd go camping in the Olympic rainforest on the peninsula, and there's like a couple rivers there, but one of the main ones is the Ho River. | ||
| And I had this, as a child, I had like this $20, you know, Kmart inflatable raft with the oars. | ||
| And my mom would drive me upriver like 10 miles or 15 miles or whatever in our Volkswagen bus and like drop me off, me and my $20 Kmart boat in a life vest. | ||
| And she'd be like, alright, see you at the campground. | ||
| And so I would be doing this like... | ||
| You know, whitewater rafting by myself in my cheesy little boat for several, several miles and, you know, didn't drown, obviously. | ||
| But it kind of instilled, again, or reinforced this sense of adventure, you know. | ||
| And I'm sure my mom would go to jail for that today, you know. | ||
| Probably not jail, but definitely be discouraged. | ||
| So that's background for the high adventure thing, the military thing. | ||
| So 1993, I'm like, okay... | ||
| I need to do something. | ||
| I need that punctuated equilibrium, right? | ||
| I need a dramatic event in order to promulgate the next period of growth or evolution or whatever. | ||
| So you really actively thought that way? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| That you were trying to achieve growth? | ||
| Yeah, I didn't want to stagnate. | ||
| I didn't want to fall behind, you know. | ||
| I guess as soon as I figured out what life authorship was or the concept, even though I may not have known the term, yeah, I kind of endeavored to actively author my own life. | ||
| You know, pursuing the ends of making a life that kept me engaged, kept me interested, and was meaningful to me, you know? | ||
| So the military seemed like more and more like a viable option for that next page, that next step. | ||
| So at the time, like 1993, there wasn't a lot of books out about special operations. | ||
| And pretty much the only ones that were out there were like Vietnam dudes. | ||
| So I devoured every, you know, Vietnam War special operations book, whether it was like Lerps, Rangers, SEALs, SF, whatever. | ||
| Had Dick Marchinko written his books yet? | ||
| That I don't know. | ||
| I don't think so, because I think I would have remembered reading them. | ||
| I read one of them when I was in Gulag in ranger school, and it seemed kind of Like, over the top to me. | ||
| But that's a digression. | ||
| I think there was one book out about, like, the SOF experience during the first Gulf War. | ||
| And it kind of went over different units and different operations. | ||
| And I think that's the only kind of contemporary one that I was even out. | ||
| But it was like, yeah, yeah, I'm going to do this. | ||
| So while we're in San Francisco, you know, between like dropping acid and taking mushrooms, I was going to the recruiter. | ||
| And like I went to the Navy recruiter first because I actually knew someone who was a SEAL, a former SEAL. And so that seemed intriguing to me. | ||
| So I go to the Navy recruiter. | ||
| I'm like, hey, I want to be a SEAL. And they're like, well, here, take the ASVAB. So the ASVAB is like this IQ test that the military gives you. | ||
| And so I took it and I scored pretty high on it. | ||
| And so they're trying to push me into, like, more technical MOSs, you know? | ||
| And I'm like, but no, that's not what I wanted. | ||
| What does MOS stand for? | ||
| Oh, sorry. | ||
| If I get too jargony, please stop me. | ||
| Military Occupational Specialty. | ||
| Your job. | ||
| And the Navy doesn't even call it MOS. I think they call it RATE or something like that. | ||
| And... | ||
| So I'm like, no, I don't want to do that. | ||
| So basically it came down to they couldn't even promise me a shot at trying out for BUDS, you know, taking the PT test basically. | ||
| And so I didn't know really anything about the military, but I knew enough or I suspected enough that like, okay, I'm not going to sign anything unless I'm like guaranteed a shot. | ||
| And so that's when I started talking to the Armory recruiter, and they could guarantee me. | ||
| So basically they gave me a Ranger contract. | ||
| So Ranger Regiment's interesting in that it's pretty much the only special operations unit in the U.S. military that has privates, like has brand new soldiers. | ||
| Pretty much every other unit, it's all NCOs. | ||
| So that's kind of your entry-level soft unit in the U.S. military is Ranger Regiment. | ||
| And so what happens? | ||
| So I finished my MindFunk touring obligations, which went pretty much almost up until Christmas, like into mid-December, say, in August. | ||
| Like, left the band and I think two months later I was in basic training. | ||
| What were you thinking while you were in basic training? | ||
| I mean, basic training is like... | ||
| It was like every movie cliche you've seen, like, happens. | ||
| It's like, oh, and this is, you know, this part. | ||
| It was... | ||
| It was a necessary step, right, for the progression. | ||
| It wasn't really challenging. | ||
| The most challenging part about it was, like, not being able to do what I wanted to do whenever I wanted to do it. | ||
| That was, like, the biggest challenge for me. | ||
| Your entire life, every minute of your day is controlled. | ||
| So that was kind of like, yeah, I don't know if I dig this, you know? | ||
| Right. | ||
| But, you know, sucked it up, went through it. | ||
| After what they call AIT, like advanced individual training, which for me was infantry, you go through the infantry MOS training, go to airborne school, and then go to selection for regiment. | ||
| So what was the physical aspect of it like? | ||
| Because it seemed like you're just partying and living life like a rock star before that. | ||
| You're just doing heroin and all this stuff. | ||
| And then all of a sudden, you're involved in something that's very physically grueling. | ||
| But I did prep. | ||
| I got a YMCA membership and I was swimming at the Y. I was running. | ||
| Even though I was kind of going into it somewhat blind, I knew that I can't just show up and not have any kind of fitness level. | ||
| So I did do some prep work and I think it served me well. | ||
| Was that the first time you had done physical stuff like that in your life? | ||
| No. | ||
| I played soccer when I was a kid. | ||
| Soccer was the one sport that didn't have that jock culture. | ||
| You know, so that's kind of what I gravitated towards. | ||
| So, you know, I did a lot of physical outside stuff like my whole life. | ||
| You know, I worked in Alaska on a fishing boat like there was nothing. | ||
| It wasn't foreign, you know, like physical exertion. | ||
| And so what happens then? | ||
| Go to selection. | ||
| At the time it was called RIP, like the Ranger Indoctrination Program. | ||
| Now they call it RASP, like the Ranger Assessment and Selection Program, something like that. | ||
| And I think it's a week longer now. | ||
| But like... | ||
| Like, rip is when things got physically challenging, for sure. | ||
| It was basically, you just get abused for three weeks, basically. | ||
| You know, they try to make you quit. | ||
| And so, like, the runs, like, we do these, like, non-standard runs and rip, that was, it pushed me to my limits. | ||
| Like, I was always kind of at the back of the pack. | ||
| Like, I was still with the main body, so I was keeping up. | ||
| I was meeting the standard. | ||
| But, like, right behind me were, like, all the dudes who were, like, getting put on the truck. | ||
| Like, you're done, you know? | ||
| So I was like, you look at that and, like, dig a little deeper and, like, keep going, you know? | ||
| But, yeah, I got selected and went to 2nd Ranger Battalion. | ||
| And did you immediately get deployed? | ||
| Like, what year are we talking about here? | ||
| This was 93? | ||
|
unidentified
|
No, 94. Okay, so this is post-Desert Storm. | |
| Yeah. | ||
| What was the environment like? | ||
| So it was like it was Clinton era military, peacetime military. | ||
| So like everything was geared towards training, right? | ||
| Like there was a few dudes in my company who were like Panama vets. | ||
| And so that was like 1989, I think. | ||
| Just Cause. | ||
| So there's some of those dudes hanging out. | ||
| And I could tell they were just waiting for the next, like, real-world op. | ||
| That's all they were doing. | ||
| They were biding time. | ||
| And, like, now I get it. | ||
| And I think even then I kind of got it. | ||
| But, um... | ||
| What do you mean by get it? | ||
| Like, you know, that's... | ||
| You want to do it for real. | ||
| You still want to train all the time. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| So... | ||
| Yeah, it was just a lot of training. | ||
| There was deployments, but it was just all training deployments. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| You know, I went to Ranger school, like got my Ranger tab. | ||
| And what happens after that? | ||
| I finished my enlistment. | ||
| It was like a four-year enlistment, I think. | ||
| And then I got out because it was like, In a way, I kind of thought I achieved what I aimed to achieve by going in the military, and there definitely wasn't a war on the horizon, at least one that anyone could see. | ||
| So I had a break in service for a couple years, and I kind of fucked off. | ||
| Ended up going... | ||
| To community college, which is like another kind of funny story. | ||
| If you're interested. | ||
| Sure. | ||
| So, I came back to Washington basically when my mother died. | ||
| And... | ||
| So I was kind of like dealing with her and her stuff. | ||
| And it was like... | ||
| There's a local community college where I grew up. | ||
| And like, maybe I'll give this college thing a try, you know? | ||
| And so I registered for some classes. | ||
| But the funny thing about that story is... | ||
| When I was like 18, I guess? | ||
| 17? | ||
| Like right before I graduated high school. | ||
| All my friends from high school who were going to go to college. | ||
| Because like in my mind, I was never going to go. | ||
| I was like... | ||
| Why am I going to go to college? | ||
| Like, fuck this. | ||
| You know, angry young man, dissatisfied on pretty much every level. | ||
| But I was like, yeah, I'm not going to college. | ||
| College has nothing for me. | ||
| But I wanted to hang out with my friends, like the dudes I skateboarded with and played music with and stuff. | ||
| And so they were all going to take their SATs at the local community college. | ||
| Like on a Saturday morning or whatever it was. | ||
| And so I went with them just so I could hang out with them. | ||
| And I took the SATs, but I took my SATs on acid. | ||
| How'd that go? | ||
| I had no idea. | ||
| I didn't care. | ||
| I never picked up, you know, the scores. | ||
| It was probably just like making designs on the paper or something. | ||
| At that point, academia, higher education, that just wasn't going to happen for me. | ||
| So yeah, it's kind of this fuck you punk rock thing. | ||
| I'm going to take my SATs on acid. | ||
| So fast forward 10 years, I'm in that same room at Olympic College in a class. | ||
| Taking an astronomy class. | ||
| And the building is still there. | ||
| It's called the Rotunda. | ||
| And it's this round, as you can imagine, building on campus. | ||
| And, yeah, so who's laughing now? | ||
| So what was your idea, like, doing that? | ||
| Taking astronomy classes, going to college... | ||
| Again, personal growth. | ||
| Maybe I should focus on this aspect now, like academia. | ||
| So I did that first semester, first two semesters at Olympic College, and found that I liked it. | ||
| I liked going to class, and I liked taking notes, and I liked learning. | ||
| And I'm like, oh, I get it now, this whole college thing. | ||
| So I finished my associates. | ||
| At Olympic College and then went back in the Army. | ||
| And so I was in the Special Forces qualification course like when 9-11 happened. | ||
| And what caused you to go back in the Army? | ||
| It was a gut feeling. | ||
| It was like, I don't think I'm done with this. | ||
| So I went to selection, got selected, and selection, at least at the time, was good for life, basically. | ||
| So how many years were you out? | ||
| Like two. | ||
| Two years out? | ||
| Yeah, not long at all. | ||
| I blink now and two years goes by. | ||
| But a lot had happened personally in those two years. | ||
| So I'm back in the Army, doing the Special Forces qualification course, which for my MOS, like the 18 Bravo Special Forces Weapons Sergeant, was like about a year and a half. | ||
| So it was the first day of language school, which was six months long, was 9-11. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Wow. | |
| Yeah. | ||
| What was it like being in the military when 9-11 went down? | ||
| It was, like, I think everyone there, so we're, there's a group of us in this building at Fort Bragg called the SOAV, the Special Operations Academic Facility, and we're, you know, standing around the beginning of the day, like, drinking coffee, getting ready to go to class. | ||
| First day of class. | ||
| And there's television monitors on with CNN or whatever. | ||
| And we're watching the planes go into the tower. | ||
| And, like, I think 201, everyone knew that everything's changing right now. | ||
| It's like, this is, like, 100% for real. | ||
| And, like, everyone was like, yeah. | ||
| That's how you felt? | ||
| Oh, yeah. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| All the training. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Like, finally we're going to do something. | ||
| So what happens then? | ||
| I'm in language school for another six months. | ||
| What are you learning? | ||
| Thai. | ||
| Why Thai? | ||
| It's just like my unit's area of responsibility was Asia, so I had to do an Asian language. | ||
| And I like Thai food. | ||
| So... | ||
| Graduate the Q course, like do a couple of JSETs in Asia. | ||
| So JSETs, joint combined exchange training. | ||
| So you basically go, your team goes and trains with a foreign special operations unit and you teach them stuff or you, you know. | ||
| And it's more just to, like, establish rapport and maybe get some access or whatever. | ||
| So do a couple JSETs in Asia and then get ready to go to Iraq to prep for the invasion, like in 2002. And, like, spend a lot of time in Kuwait just, like, training and preparing. | ||
| What was it like when you went there? | ||
| To Iraq? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So, that was my first combat experience. | ||
| It was unique in that my team and a couple other teams are basically attached to 4th ID to provide route reconnaissance and screening and stuff for this main conventional military invasion. | ||
| And so watching Big Army work, you know, do what they do best was pretty amazing. | ||
| Like tank engagements, like I never thought I'd witness that. | ||
| It was just almost like a, and it's probably a trite cliche, but like a movie, you know? | ||
| Watching this massive mechanized force just like crush everything in its path. | ||
| So, yeah. | ||
| When you were over there, was any doubt that you had done the right thing by enlisting? | ||
| Oh, no doubt. | ||
| No doubt at all? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| You were geared up, ready to go? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So what happened when you were over there? | ||
| Got in some gunfights, hit some targets, and then redeployed back to the States. | ||
| You say that so casually. | ||
| Got in gunfights and hit some targets. | ||
| It had to be a pretty extreme experience. | ||
| Yeah, but honestly, I think my Afghan experiences were more intense than Iraq, for sure. | ||
| Yeah? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It was a different animal. | ||
| And when did that happen? | ||
| So it did some rotations in Afghanistan following the Iraq invasion. | ||
| And it was kind of the more traditional like SF mission, like working with indigenous troops and leading them on raids and things like that. | ||
| That's gotta be a wild change of life to go from being a musician to go from being a deployed special operator in Afghanistan. | ||
| Like, the shift in consciousness is so extreme. | ||
| Maybe. | ||
| Maybe? | ||
| But I think I'm pretty good at just rolling with stuff, you know? | ||
| It's like, oh, this is happening now, okay? | ||
| But that's a big happening. | ||
| It's a huge happening. | ||
| To be in combat. | ||
| I mean, definitely. | ||
| I think the war and combat was the most profound experience of my life, for sure. | ||
| And I don't mean to maybe treat it lightly, because I don't take it lightly. | ||
| Yeah, it's by far the most profound experience of my life. | ||
| So many guys who come back from that, not only do they say it's the most profound experience of their life, but many of them say it was the best experience of their life. | ||
| I understand that, for sure. | ||
| Like, I guess I could encapsulate it like this. | ||
| Like, you got your dudes, you know, your team, your little indigenous troopers, and you're going to go crush some target. | ||
| And... | ||
| I never had a doubt that maybe I would get injured or killed, but I never had a doubt that the mission would fail. | ||
| Just because the odds were just in our favor. | ||
| You've got night vision, you've got a cast stack, you've got this huge support apparatus. | ||
| There's no way we're not going to win this fight. | ||
| But going on target, closing with destroying the enemy, and then getting you and all your dudes back to base alive, best feeling in the world. | ||
| Really? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So many guys say that. | ||
| Best feeling in the world. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| What can you describe it? | ||
| Or give an attempt? | ||
| I think, and I got my kind of evolutionary ideas about why that is. | ||
| I think that we're on a very essential level, like doing what human beings, or one of the things we're meant to do. | ||
| Or maybe one of the things we've always done. | ||
| Well, we're an adversarial species, but every species in nature is adversarial. | ||
| And it's not an evaluative statement. | ||
| It's just kind of an observation. | ||
| So I think on this... | ||
| Just the way our brains are, like, evolutionarily. | ||
| Like, okay, we're the monkeys with the big brains, right? | ||
| And we've created this very technologically advanced, if not challenging, environment now that we live in. | ||
| But the way our firmware up here, we're still hominids on the savannah, you know? | ||
| Like, 100%. | ||
| And so I think... | ||
| Through war, through combat, we kind of tap into that primal, okay, this is what we're supposed to do, you know? | ||
| Was that surprising to have that part of your mind sort of ignited in a sense where you realize that this is like something that's deeply embedded in your DNA? Yeah, I mean, I know I'm making that claim, but it's not based on, like, scientific research I've done. | ||
| It's just kind of intuition. | ||
| Well, many, many make that claim. | ||
| It's not an uncommon thought. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So it rings true to me. | ||
| Have you read that Sebastian Younger book, Tribe? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Great book. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And his thesis, that's the first kind of PTSD thesis I read that kind of rang true with me. | ||
| Because before that, the popular conception was these young men and women go off to war and see horrible things and come back fucked up. | ||
| But his thesis, where they lose that... | ||
| Lose that tribe, right? | ||
| That task and purpose, unity of effort. | ||
| Literally, we're tribal creatures. | ||
| That's how we operate. | ||
| I did a paper when I was doing my undergrad. | ||
| I think I was trying to investigate genetic impetus for human conflict or whatever. | ||
| During my research, one of the things I found that was super interesting to me was the way psychologically we're equipped to deal with about 100 to 120 individuals. | ||
| That would be our extended tribe, our social group. | ||
| Dunbar's number. | ||
| Is that what it is? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah, it's this group of people that you can contain in your mind. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And it's segmented. | ||
| There's like a small number of people that you're intimately attached to. | ||
| There's a larger number that are close but more like associates and friends. | ||
| And then there's people that you know and it extends out. | ||
| It actually extends even further than 120 or 150. | ||
| It gets to like people you are aware of. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| But it's fairly small, which is one of the weird things about knowing a lot of people. | ||
| That number gets really weird, and then your memory of people, it's almost like your brain deletes them because there's no room. | ||
| But then, how well do you know them as well? | ||
| How intimate is that relationship? | ||
| An interesting correlation I made researching this paper was that that number is the same number in army task organization as an infantry company is 120. And that's kind of like your main operational unit in the infantry, at least. | ||
| Like SOF, you're dealing with smaller teams, smaller numbers. | ||
| But I thought, wow, 120. That's it. | ||
| And is that by design, or is that just the way it worked out? | ||
| It probably goes back to our tribal roots, most likely, that we evolved being accustomed to that group of people, that number of people, or a similar number. | ||
| Just survival. | ||
| Our mission statement is biological organisms, even the big brain monkeys that we are, survive and replicate the gene. | ||
| Everything else is kind of window dressing. | ||
| You can window dress it however you want to make it seem more important than that. | ||
| I'm a huge fan of the window dressing. | ||
| That's definitely the salt in the soup, for sure. | ||
| But if you boil it down to what is the quiddity of being a human being, or any biological organism, survive and replicate the gene. | ||
| And so the whole capacity for combat, for human warfare, is like, even as an individual, if you're killed in combat, if you go back to, like, this group of hominids on the savannah, you're probably related to everyone in your group. | ||
| So it's like, okay, maybe I won't pass my genes on, but my cousin over here will. | ||
| So I'm going to support that effort. | ||
| So I think that kind of organized. | ||
| Conflict, one group against another, it's in support of that. | ||
| Like, I think anthropologists have a term for it, pseudokinship, where, say, in a combat situation. | ||
| So you got, like, the classic scenario of, like, a dude jumping on a hand grenade to save his buddies, you know? | ||
| And that's, like... | ||
| That's hardwired. | ||
| That's not a conscious decision, you know? | ||
| Because I think if you had time to actually think about it, maybe you wouldn't do it, you know? | ||
| But it's that pseudo-kinship, like... | ||
| And to me, that's always what's been, I think, the most interesting paradox about war and combat. | ||
| It's this event, this human event, that simultaneously brings about acts of pure, selfless love and brutality without quarter in the same instant. | ||
| So that's always intrigued me. | ||
| Well, it's always fascinating for me to talk to people that are intelligent, like yourself, that have experienced that. | ||
| Because that thread that you're expressing, it seems to ring true with almost all of them. | ||
| That there's something about it that, although brutal and Maybe in some ways unexpected, it also rings true with like a purpose and that your life is intimately connected to these people and in some way that becomes more satisfying than any other way to live. | ||
| Yeah, and to hear a person like yourself, who's obviously very smart, express that, it's really interesting to someone like myself who hasn't experienced that, but kind of understands what you're saying. | ||
| I'm sure you do. | ||
| I'm sure it rings true with you, right? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Like just intuitively. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And you're aware of this while you're experiencing it because you're obviously an analytical person. | ||
| So you're aware of this while you're experiencing it. | ||
| So I can think of instances where I've had these flashes of awareness like Okay, I remember one target we halved in, like a helicopter assault force. | ||
| So I was on the second 47. No, I think I was on the second lift. | ||
| Like, it was a pretty big element going in. | ||
| And I remember landing in this poppy field, like, stepping off the ramp, and, like, I could hear gunfire. | ||
| Like, it was already on, right, on target. | ||
| And so I got my little Afghan commando troopers. | ||
| So, like, okay, man, let's go. | ||
| And, like, I remember running up this hill, and I was aware in that moment, like, okay, this is odd. | ||
| This is... | ||
| The cliche of running to the gunfire, and believe me, I don't consider myself a heroic person at all. | ||
| It wasn't even a conscious decision. | ||
| I was doing it. | ||
| And it was like I was trying to get there as quickly as I could. | ||
| And it did occur to me like, yeah, this is kind of weird. | ||
| But it is your training, and it also is your purpose. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And I don't know which supervenes on what, but yeah, for sure. | ||
| How bizarre was it, the whole poppy fields thing? | ||
| Because I remember one of the most interesting aspects of the war was that we were protecting poppy fields. | ||
| And there was this weird video, I don't know if you've ever seen it, of Geraldo Rivera Who was on Fox News, spinning this in some sort of a way, but realizing how ridiculous it sounded while he was interviewing a general who was on the field, or I don't remember if it was a general soldier who was on the field who was explaining why they were doing this. | ||
| that these people could keep making heroin. | ||
| Mm-hmm. | ||
| And you know, you're looking at this, and especially someone who has a knowledge of Vietnam, that it was intimately connected with drug running, and that there was a lot of that going on that was part of the purpose of it, and that somewhere someone was profiting off of this to the tune of billions of dollars. | ||
| And you're not exactly sure how or how it was being done or what involvement the United States military had in it. | ||
| But in this particular instance, you're living in the era of social media and the Internet. | ||
| Not necessarily social media, but at least the internet, where people are very aware of things like that that are at the very least inconsistent with the narrative that we have here in America, that drugs are bad, bad people sell drugs, bad people make drugs, we have to stop the drugs from getting into the country. | ||
| Now here you are, you know, we're watching Geraldo Rivera, a Fox reporter, putting this like really clunky spin Why we have to do this and I can only imagine it's because it had already been exposed that the United States was doing that and they had to say well We have to come up with some sort of an excuse for why we're guarding heroin production So I guess my understanding of if the U.S. | ||
| mill was doing that is probably like a secondary consideration. | ||
| Because at least down south, that's a huge part of the economy. | ||
| It's like opium production. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And I would guess it would be... | ||
| Eradicating the poppy fields would be a worse choice. | ||
| Economically destabilizing these people who are already super poor. | ||
| But it's also for sure aiding in the profit of selling heroin. | ||
| The Taliban would make money from opium production, even though it's against Islam or whatever. | ||
| I don't know how to crack that nut. | ||
| Was that talked about over there? | ||
| I know DEA was over there doing their thing. | ||
| What were they doing? | ||
| Selling it? | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| That's what's so strange is that it seems like, you know, especially when you have this disconnection from the mainstream media and from, you know, channels of information getting to other people. | ||
| That this is a part of what's happening over there. | ||
| I believe at one point in time it was 90 plus percent of the world's heroin was coming from Afghanistan. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I mean, I don't have an answer. | ||
| Bizarre though, right? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Did you think how bizarre it was or was it just that was inconsequential? | ||
| Yeah, it wasn't like another poppy field. | ||
| It was just part of the landscape. | ||
| But yeah, I probably didn't put much thought into it. | ||
| How did they cultivate the – I mean they were doing all this in the middle of combat, in the middle of war. | ||
| Like how were they handling all that? | ||
| I mean like in my experience, like if we did hit a target that was like in a remote place like that, like they weren't seeing coalition forces. | ||
| Often, if at all, you know, it's kind of like they probably thought they're on a safe haven. | ||
| So, I mean, I think when you get closer to the built up areas and at least at the time, I mean, like the whole Afghan government was so corrupt anyway. | ||
| So I think probably the main people making money were, you know, Afghan generals, you know, which I think at one time the Afghan army had like 3000 general officers or something. | ||
| Like, this inverted pyramid of leadership. | ||
| Like, oh, I'm a general. | ||
| And they all have mansions, and it's all corruption money. | ||
| Where was that? | ||
| Being a part, like, that's the side that you were on. | ||
| I mean, you're over there sort of helping. | ||
| Yeah, like... | ||
| I think you just gotta focus on the tribe, right? | ||
| It's like you and your dudes and you have this task and you're going to accomplish it to the best of your ability and bring everyone back alive. | ||
| And then the political side of it, I mean, yeah, it'd be easy to get kind of demoralized. | ||
| Yeah, that's what I'm at. | ||
| If you focus on that. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Was it bizarre for you, someone who has done heroin, to think like, oh, this is where it comes from? | ||
| Um... | ||
| I mean, I think I was conscious of that, but it wasn't that crazy. | ||
| So even though you knew that there was rampant corruption and that there was a lot of things that were kind of fucked, it was still your tribe, your task? | ||
| Yep. | ||
| Did you spend any time pondering whether or not that made sense, or did you just do what you were supposed to do? | ||
| Yeah, I think I reflected on it and then would just, you know, do it, you know? | ||
| Did anybody talk about it over there? | ||
| Yeah, I think... | ||
| Yeah, and I would talk about it too. | ||
| Like, you know, as the war progressed, you would see these mansions being built around Kabul and stuff, you know? | ||
| These ridiculous, like, concrete mansions. | ||
| And, like, our tax dollars are paying for that mansion, you know? | ||
| Or it's corruption money or it's opium money or whatever. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And it's just part of the culture there, you know? | ||
| Like, how do you fix that? | ||
| It's like... | ||
| Like, I remember talking to one of our interpreters over there, and like, so I'm not married, don't have a family, and... | ||
| So, obviously, everything over there is very family-oriented or, you know, family-tribe. | ||
| You know, everything's geared towards, like, blood relations and things like that. | ||
| And, like, the stronger and larger your family is, the stronger your tribe is, like, that whole thing. | ||
| It's like a different paradigm than we have in, you know, the West. | ||
| And so we're talking. | ||
| We're just bullshitting. | ||
| And he's asking me about my family. | ||
| And I'm like, oh, I don't have a family. | ||
| Just me. | ||
| But, you know, my neighbor has the keys to my house. | ||
| And, you know, they can go in and take care of stuff if I need something taken care of and all this. | ||
| And, like, the first thing he asks is, like, and they do not steal all your things? | ||
|
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What? | |
| Because that's what he was thinking. | ||
| Like, oh, if I had your keys, I'd be stealing your shit. | ||
| And that's the mentality. | ||
| It's different. | ||
| The houses down there, each family unit house is a miniature fortress. | ||
| And it's because it's this culture that they habitually prey upon each other. | ||
| So the houses need to be these mini fortresses. | ||
| Where here in the West, I don't have a fence around my property. | ||
| My neighbors have my keys. | ||
| It's fine. | ||
| How bizarre was that, though, to go over there and experience this completely different way of life with other human beings living on another part of the world, a completely different set of values, different goals and expectations, different religion. | ||
| It was fascinating. | ||
| Just because that part of the world, like Central Asia, is such a fascinating part of the world, all the way back to antiquity. | ||
| All the history that's transpired in that area. | ||
| Any chance I got to see something somewhat historical, there's still remains of Greek ruins from 300 BC. Really? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| In Afghanistan? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
|
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Really? | |
| Oh, yeah. | ||
| There was a whole, I never got to this town, but up on the Oxus River, there's been several attempts over the decades to do an archaeological excavation of the entire city. | ||
| But it's like, it's a no-shit Greek city in Central Asia. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| So when Alexander of Macedon, when Mastodon, Mastodon, when Alexander of Macedon Alexander the Great. | ||
| Yeah, was his campaign in Asia. | ||
| So he pushed all the way to the Indus River. | ||
| But what he would do along the way is establish Alexandrias. | ||
| So you know Alexandria in Egypt, but there's multiple Alexandrias. | ||
| Like the etymology of Kandahar, the town in Afghanistan, is, you know, if you go back, it was Iskandahar. | ||
| And Iskandahar literally means Alexandria. | ||
| That was one of the Alexandrias. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Wow. | |
| That he established in Central Asia and all over Persia and Asia Minor. | ||
| That was his thing. | ||
| And it was a way to kind of... | ||
| Maintain a foothold in that part of the world, like build a city, establish like a Greek education system to educate the locals in the Greek model. | ||
| So he was kind of projecting, you know, he was in it for the long game. | ||
| Like this is part of Greece, it's going to be Greek. | ||
| And the Greco-Bactrian Empire, if you want to call it that, probably lasted like a hundred years and then it just fell apart. | ||
| Is there documentation of the Greek cities, the ruins in Afghanistan? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Jamie, can you pull some of that up so you can find any of that? | ||
| That's fascinating. | ||
| I had no idea. | ||
| So the old Alexandria... | ||
| So there it is. | ||
|
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Wow. | |
| That's incredible. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And so that's just abandoned now? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| That's amazing. | ||
| And is this from 300 BC? Yeah, around that. | ||
| That's amazing. | ||
| I had no idea. | ||
| So, at one point in time, that had been some sort of a thriving community. | ||
| Yeah, the city on the Oxus, Iconum. | ||
| See where it says Iconum, Wikipedia? | ||
| That was the city on the Oxus. | ||
|
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Wow. | |
| Yeah. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| So they had an amphitheater. | ||
| Yeah, it was a full-on Greek city. | ||
| That's incredible. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
|
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That is wild. | |
| And so how did they maintain it and how did it collapse? | ||
| I mean, I don't know. | ||
| Look at that. | ||
| That's intense, man. | ||
| But that's up north in Kunduz. | ||
| What is that statue, Jamie, where it says the history? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
|
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It's a Buddha statue. | |
| It's a Buddha statue. | ||
| The Buddha's a Bamiyan. | ||
| Like the Taliban blew those up. | ||
| Oh, right. | ||
| Fuck. | ||
| What a bummer. | ||
| How old were those? | ||
| That I'm not sure. | ||
| But a lot of historians think that the Vedas and Buddhism kind of started more in the Afghanistan area. | ||
| Really? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| No kidding. | ||
| The Vedas? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
|
unidentified
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Wow, look at all these Buddhas. | |
| Yeah, there's tons of... | ||
| There's some really cool... | ||
| So there was this really interesting period of history of Greco-Buddhism in Central Asia. | ||
| There was one of the Greco-Bactrian kings, Menander, actually converted to Buddhism. | ||
| And there was this brief moment of... | ||
| Brief period of Greco-Buddhism in Central Asia. | ||
| And so the Buddhas that were carved, so they're carving statues of the Buddha and stuff, but it's in this total Greco-Roman style. | ||
| So they're beautiful pieces of art. | ||
| And it's literally a Greek Buddha. | ||
| You know, you look at it stylistically and it's like, that's Greek, but it's a Buddha. | ||
| And it's cool, cool, you know, flash in the pan of history. | ||
| See if you can find any images of that. | ||
| Are those all gone? | ||
| The Taliban blow them all off? | ||
| No. | ||
| I mean these... | ||
| So there's actually some at the Met in New York that I've seen. | ||
| I've seen some at the National Museum in Kabul. | ||
| Look at that. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| That's so strange, because it's so obviously, like, influenced by Greek art. | ||
| Yeah, the folds and the robe and all that, yeah. | ||
| Yeah, wow. | ||
|
unidentified
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Wow. | |
| It's really, really cool, really interesting. | ||
| Human civilization is so bizarre. | ||
| The rise and fall of these empires and these civilizations and for you to go and visit it in the middle of combat must have been particularly bizarre. | ||
| Yeah, I would try to do my share of, for lack of a better term, tourism. | ||
| I went to the old Citadel outside of Kandahar, where right now, when you're on the ground, it doesn't look like anything. | ||
| But if you go to Google Earth, you can see the old outline of the city walls, and you can see the Citadel in the middle. | ||
| And it's like, it's still there, the remains of it. | ||
| Like, up in Nuristan, which is a super interesting part of Afghanistan, it's like the northeast part of the country, and it's a region that wasn't even converted to Islam until the end of the 19th century. | ||
| Like, it's, you can make the analogy of, they're like the Basque in Spain, right? | ||
| It was like this mountainous region that kind of was able to retain, like, its cultural and linguistic identity because of the terrain. | ||
| Like, it was more defendable. | ||
| So Nuristan was like that as well. | ||
| And so they were finally forcibly converted to Islam into the 19th century. | ||
| And before that, they were called Kafiristan, which is like Land of the Infidel. | ||
| And then once they underwent the conversion process, they became Neurostand, which is land of the enlightened. | ||
| Oh, wow. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| But it's such an interesting place. | ||
| I liked it a lot because it reminded me of home where I grew up because you have like alpine forest. | ||
| It looks like Yosemite. | ||
| Like, if they could ever have peace there, they could have, like, a trekking industry, you know, ecotourism, whatever, like, White River rafting down the Kunar River. | ||
| Like, it's gorgeous. | ||
| And there was places where, in Afghanistan, where I was like, I could be home on the Olympic Peninsula right now. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| Like, mountains, alpine forest. | ||
| Yeah, there's the old citadel. | ||
| That's incredible. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I had no idea this stuff was there. | ||
| The history of Afghanistan is so fascinating and so spectacular and so like the futility of trying to conquer that place and control that place. | ||
| It's going to be what it's going to be. | ||
| You're not going to change it. | ||
| You're not going to westernize it. | ||
| It's not going to happen. | ||
| Did you, like, it's so crazy that we were there for so long. | ||
| It's a 20-year war. | ||
| Would you have ever imagined that while you were there? | ||
| No. | ||
| Like, if you would have told me September 10th, 2001, like, oh yeah, we're getting ready to be in a 20-year war in the Middle East and Central Asia, I would have been like, no fucking way. | ||
| That's just not going to happen. | ||
| You know, and then boom. | ||
| What was it like to you when we pulled out of it finally? | ||
| On the one hand, it was like a relief. | ||
| It's like, you know, enough already. | ||
| It's like, we're obviously not fixing that place. | ||
| You know, it's doubtful we could fix it. | ||
| I think it would have been clever to hold on to Bagram and maintain a strike force there to put out fires, so to speak. | ||
| But other than that, let it be what it's going to be. | ||
| Protect U.S. interests as needed, but we're not going to change that place. | ||
| It's so crazy that we didn't learn from the Russian invasion. | ||
| We didn't learn from the Russians' battle in the Mujahideen, which we supported. | ||
| It's so strange that everyone makes the same mistakes. | ||
| Or the British, or the Greeks, you know? | ||
| It's like the Greek foothold there lasted, you know, what, 100 years? | ||
| So historically, that's nothing. | ||
|
unidentified
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Right. | |
| There's no place like it on Earth in that regard. | ||
| It's like because of the terrain, because of the people and the religion and just the way it's controlled, areas are controlled by warlords. | ||
| Yeah, it's all tribal. | ||
| It's all... | ||
| And that's the way they... | ||
| Politically, that's the way they govern themselves. | ||
| And it's not even an evaluative statement. | ||
| It's like, yeah, it's not Western style, but okay. | ||
| What are you going to do? | ||
| They got to, at some point, as long as they're not impinging upon... | ||
| I guess I have a very libertarian perspective. | ||
| If they don't fuck with us, we shouldn't fuck with them. | ||
| There's a futility in trying to be the policeman of the world. | ||
| It's exhausting. | ||
| And ultimately you're going to fail. | ||
| You're going to drain all your resources trying to manage something literally on the other side of the planet. | ||
| To what end? | ||
| Right. | ||
| And then there's these entities that are profiting off of that futile attempt, which they would like to continue that money flowing in. | ||
| So they continue this thing that everybody knows you're eventually going to have to stop. | ||
| Yeah, definitely. | ||
| It turned into an industry for sure. | ||
| Were you aware of that while you were there, that there was no way out of this? | ||
| I mean, I guess I always suspected that it would never be It wasn't going to be like, hey, check this out. | ||
| Democracy. | ||
| It's cool. | ||
| I pretty much knew that wasn't going to fly. | ||
| I think the best I could hope for was just stability. | ||
| And that didn't happen? | ||
| No. | ||
| You know, there was some really bizarre moments after we pulled out of Afghanistan where they were interviewing the Taliban and talking to them about women being in control or women, you know, being in government and whether or not they were going to accept sort of this Western idea of diversity and inclusion and they were just fucking laughing. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It's absurd to them. | ||
| Just like the other side of the coin is absurd to us. | ||
| So how do you bridge that gap? | ||
| Especially when you're dealing with the history of the place. | ||
| Hundreds of years, hundreds and hundreds of years of living that way. | ||
| The idea that we're going to go in there with tanks and fix it. | ||
| We're going to force you to be democratic. | ||
|
unidentified
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Yeah. | |
| It's like, okay, that's not going to happen either. | ||
| And also the rampant corruption that exists in the people that are in power. | ||
| You know, when you're talking about all these mansions and the selling of the heroin, it's like, what are you going to do? | ||
| How are you going to get those people to straighten out? | ||
| You're not. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It's ingrained. | ||
| It's cultural. | ||
| It's maybe even more than cultural, you know? | ||
| Was there a time when you were over there, like towards the end of your time there, where you were recognizing the futility of this? | ||
| Yeah, I think big pictures, yeah. | ||
| But again, you're there to do a job, so you can't dwell on the negative, you know? | ||
| And it's like, you need to believe in the mission, you know? | ||
| And I believed in the mission as far as like, Myself and my teammates, like, we're gonna do what we have to do and do it to the best of our ability and everyone come home alive, you know? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Complete your task, support your tribe. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| How long were you over there for? | ||
| I did, like, four rotations. | ||
| So I left the Army the second time, like, 2007, when I basically went back to school. | ||
| What was it like to make that transition from being over there in one of the most bizarre wars we've ever been a part of and then going back to school, going back to civilized society, going back to Western culture? | ||
| Again, I think just my disposition, I tend to just go with things. | ||
| You have a very unusual disposition. | ||
| Really? | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| I think four out of five ex-girlfriends polled would suggest I'm good at compartmentalizing things. | ||
| Four out of five? | ||
| What about the fifth? | ||
| No, I'm guessing. | ||
| No, it's just I made the transition. | ||
| I thought well. | ||
| It's like, okay, cool. | ||
| I'm in school. | ||
| Now working on this chapter, you know? | ||
| Why do you think some people struggle so much and you were able to sort of at least fairly smoothly make that transition? | ||
| I don't have the answer to that. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| Did you have friends that struggled? | ||
| I mean, most of my friends from the military are soft guys. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And I think, in general, they're adaptable. | ||
| I think that's kind of a special operations soldier criteria. | ||
| You need to be flexible and adaptable and quick on your feet like that. | ||
| And more resilient. | ||
| They're more resilient human beings. | ||
| I would think so, yeah. | ||
| Yeah, I would think so, too. | ||
| At least my experience with them. | ||
| I've had conversations with Special Forces guys where they explain to me the reason why less of them experience the kind of PTSD that some of the other guys had. | ||
| And they said because we were proactive. | ||
| We weren't reactive. | ||
| We were going and doing things. | ||
| It wasn't like we're sitting around waiting to be attacked. | ||
| And some of the guys that are sitting around waiting to be attacked, the anxiety of that was kind of overwhelming. | ||
| I can see that, yeah. | ||
| If you're just sitting on a fob, like, waiting for that rocket attack. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And so, you come back in 2007, and you decided you're done? | ||
| That's it? | ||
| Yeah, so I was at another crossroads and it was like, I can re-enlist or I can go to university. | ||
| So I applied. | ||
| A friend of mine in New York was like, you're pretty smart. | ||
| You should apply to Columbia. | ||
| And I was like, I would never get accepted there. | ||
| You know, that's not going to happen. | ||
| And so almost as a joke, I applied to Columbia and I applied to Seattle University as well. | ||
| Only two schools I applied to and ended up getting accepted to both. | ||
| And so with the Columbia thing, it was like, okay, am I going to step up to the challenge or, you know... | ||
| Go, I mean, not necessarily the easier route, but maybe the more comfortable route, which would have been Seattle U. And I went for Columbia. | ||
| It's like, okay. | ||
| Challenge accepted, you know? | ||
| And what did you study in Columbia? | ||
| Philosophy. | ||
| A lot of money in philosophy. | ||
| I don't know if you knew that. | ||
| I heard it's right up there with gender studies. | ||
|
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Yeah. | |
| Would you like some coffee? | ||
| Yeah, please. | ||
| Cheers. | ||
| Cheers. | ||
| So how much time did you do there? | ||
| So they accepted a lot of my Olympic College credits, shockingly. | ||
| And they accepted my military language school for my language requirement. | ||
| So I basically had to do three years there to finish my undergrad. | ||
| And then you went to graduate school as well? | ||
| I had a break, but yeah, ended up going to graduate school in 2016, maybe? | ||
| And what do you do now? | ||
| So, now I mostly do yacht delivery. | ||
| Yacht delivery? | ||
| Yeah, sailboats. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oh, wow. | |
| Yeah. | ||
| And was that, like, how did that come about? | ||
| So there's a story there. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| Okay, let me organize this real quick in my head. | ||
| 2014, okay, so I finished my undergrad. | ||
| I was now holder of an Ivy League degree, like, much to my chagrin. | ||
| And I went through a personal crisis that was pretty bad. | ||
| It was almost up there with like the Soundgarden personal crisis. | ||
| And so I kind of did a similar thing where it's like, okay, I need to take some time off, you know, to do some work on myself, you know. | ||
| And so how that translated, I'd always been really interested in Argentina as a country and as a place. | ||
| So I got a flat in Buenos Aires and went and lived there for a couple months and kind of did this deep period of introspection. | ||
| But during this time, before I left, a good friend of mine suggested this book called Dove, written by a man named Robin Lee Graham. | ||
| And so he's like, hey, I just read this book. | ||
| You should read it. | ||
| I think you'd really dig it. | ||
| And I didn't even know what it was about. | ||
| So I found a used copy and took it with me down there and read it. | ||
| And so it's the story. | ||
| I don't know if you've even heard of this story or Robin Graham. | ||
| But he did, I think he started in 1967. He did a solo circumnavigation in a sailboat. | ||
| That took him about five years to do, but he, at the time, he was the youngest person to ever do that. | ||
| He started when he was like 15. And it was like, it got a lot of press. | ||
| Like, National Geographic covered it. | ||
| I think he's been on the cover of National Geographic like three times. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hmm. | |
| And... | ||
| So it's an interesting account, his solo circumnavigation. | ||
| Took him five years. | ||
| Along the way, he met this woman, Patty, this young, pretty, hippie chick somewhere in the South Pacific. | ||
| And they fell in love and got married. | ||
| And she would kind of meet him in different spots as he finished the circumnavigation. | ||
| And then the book ends. | ||
| He returns to Los Angeles, circumnavigation complete. | ||
| And I'm, like, super cynical, like, going, okay, what happened now, you know? | ||
| And I'm like, I bet that marriage didn't last, you know? | ||
| Because after something, I guess I equated it to, like, a war zone romance or something, you know, where you're kind of in this super heightened environment. | ||
| So if you bring it back to just normal life, like, does it survive? | ||
| Like, what made it interesting or exciting or whatever, you know? | ||
| Do you kind of get back to reality and it's like, Eh, you know, you're not that interesting or whatever. | ||
| Right. | ||
| So, yeah, I'm super cynical. | ||
| Like, pfft, that marriage isn't at last, whatever. | ||
| But then I started doing some internet research on Robin Graham, and it turns out he wrote, like, a second book called The Sailor Returns from the Sea or something like that. | ||
| So what had happened... | ||
| And he did go through kind of a dark period after the circumnavigation that I won't get into, but he told me about it personally. | ||
| So he and Patty, in like the early 1970s, so they get back from like five years, you know, sailing the world basically. | ||
| It's pre-internet, pre the communication that we have now. | ||
| So obviously 1965 to 1970 was a pretty turbulent period in like American history. | ||
| And so Robin essentially missed all that. | ||
| And he gets back to the States. | ||
| And was it Stanford? | ||
| I think Stanford offered him like a full ride scholarship. | ||
| So he went for a semester and basically couldn't deal with all these lefty professors. | ||
| And like, I'm out of here. | ||
| And so he and Patty loaded up, like bought like a mail truck I think, loaded up all their stuff and went to Montana and homesteaded in Montana. | ||
| Like super old school, like 19th century homestead. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| And so I'm doing this research, and it's like, oh, Kalispell, Montana. | ||
| My buddy Mike from Ranger Battalion lives in Kalispell, Montana. | ||
| So I'm in my flat in Buenos Aires, and I email Mike. | ||
| I'm like, hey dude, you know a guy in Kalispell named Robin Graham? | ||
| Like 30 minutes later, I get an email. | ||
| He's like, yeah, I saw him in Costco yesterday. | ||
| It's like, no fucking way. | ||
| And so, hey, can you do like an email introduction for me? | ||
| And he's like, yeah. | ||
| And so, you know, fast forward to today, I'm very happy and proud to call Robin and Patty friends, you know? | ||
| Like amazing human beings, like so cool. | ||
| And so the sailing thing, to bring it back, Reading Dove and getting to know Robin and stuff, I started getting interested in sailing. | ||
| And, like, I, you know, I live in western Washington on Puget Sound. | ||
| Like, it's a very nautical culture. | ||
| And I've worked on boats in Alaska and actually come from kind of a nautical family on my father's side. | ||
| Like, they all worked on tugboats on the Columbia River. | ||
| Like, my grandfather, my dad, my uncles. | ||
| My dad was a commercial fisherman in Alaska, like ran his own boat for decades. | ||
| And so it seemed like kind of a natural thing, like I've always been attracted to boats in the water. | ||
| So I started looking, you know, did the practical thing, started looking for a sailboat. | ||
| And I found one for sale that was about 10 miles from my house, but I knew nothing about sailboats. | ||
| So I'm like pinging people I know who do know stuff about sailboats. | ||
| I'm like, hey, is this boat any good? | ||
| You know, look at the pictures, look at the year and the design and everything. | ||
| So it was a 1986 Jeanneau Sunrise 34 sloop. | ||
| And like all these people like, yeah, it's a good boat. | ||
| It's a good boat. | ||
| Like, yeah, the price is right. | ||
| So I'm watching it and the price kept dropping. | ||
| And kept dropping. | ||
| And then it got low enough where it's like, it was kind of in my realm. | ||
| So I contacted the broker and like actually went down and looked at the boat, like did a walkthrough. | ||
| And I was like, so is the seller taking offers on this? | ||
| And he's just like, yeah, make one. | ||
| And so I went, I had some deployment money saved up. | ||
| And I had, I could pile up about 17 grand at the time. | ||
| So I offered 17,000. | ||
| And like half hour later, it's like you got a boat. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Wow. | |
| So that was the beginning of my personal, you know, sailing adventures. | ||
| Did you live on it? | ||
| Nope. | ||
| My folks did that for a while. | ||
| When they retired, my mom and my stepdad decided to live on a sailboat. | ||
| They flew around the Keys and they went down to the Bahamas. | ||
| They just decided to just live on a boat for a while until my mom got bored with it. | ||
| My mom was like, let's go to the fucking place. | ||
| This is ridiculous. | ||
| But I think it was a very educational and... | ||
| An enlightening experience to just live in nature on the ocean for a while. | ||
| You know, that's a wanderlust appeal to a lot of people to just get on a boat and live on a boat and wake up and have coffee on the ocean. | ||
| Just exist out there. | ||
| Yeah, I bought the boat with the intent, at least the vague intent, of doing a circumnavigation of my own. | ||
| Really? | ||
| Yeah, because it seems like such a... | ||
| What appeals to me about sailing is, I mean, outside of electronic navigational aids... | ||
| It's the same as it's always been. | ||
| It's like you and the boat and the sea and the wind and, you know, you got to make it work. | ||
| And there's something like really like... | ||
| When you actually get out on the water and you've got the sails up and you're on a good tack and the boat's doing its thing, it's an awesome feeling. | ||
| I'm not going to quite say it's primal because obviously hominids on the savannah didn't have sailboats, but it's close to that. | ||
| It's obviously very appealing. | ||
| I mean, people love to do it. | ||
| And the sailboat thing, that's the highest level of expression of nautical experience for a lot of people. | ||
| Yeah, I think being a true sailor is like sailing. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And even at the Navy Academy at Annapolis, The ensigns, they put them on sailboats to teach them to be sailors, you know? | ||
| Like on that very fundamental level. | ||
| And it's like anything else. | ||
| It's like being a soldier or a musician or... | ||
| I think you have to master the fundamentals, because if you suck at the fundamentals, you're going to suck at everything else. | ||
| I've always focused on fundamentals, mainly because I'm not naturally good at anything, really. | ||
| I've always had to try. | ||
| In the support of, in the service of trying to be good at something, I've always focused on the fundamentals and trying to master them and hopefully just have a good foundation. | ||
| I mean, that's one thing that was, like, unique about growing up as, like, a soldier in Ranger Battalion. | ||
| Because Ranger Battalion is, like, super, like, regiment's a unique animal. | ||
| Like, even within the military, even within the SOF community, it's its own thing, culturally. | ||
| And they always stress the fundamentals. | ||
| And, you know, it's like being a private in Ranger Regiment is, it's not easy. | ||
| But the fact that it's hard, I would think makes you a better soldier. | ||
| Because there's no, there's like NCOs in Ranger Regiment don't, They don't tolerate anything less than 100%. | ||
| If you bring anything less than 100%, you're going to find out really quick. | ||
| Usually in a way that's not pleasant. | ||
| I think having that foundation as a Ranger private, I mean, I'm not going to say I'm any kind of amazing soldier, but I think it made me the best soldier that I could be, for sure. | ||
| And I'll always look back at regiment as being a very key event in my life, like my time there. | ||
| Well, I think that any particularly difficult endeavor strengthens your resolve in basically everything you do in life. | ||
| And when you're forced to do something that's very, very hard to do, it just changes who you are at a foundational level. | ||
| Yeah, I think it's that punctuated equilibrium that I referenced earlier. | ||
| It's like you need that traumatic event to be a catalyst for growth. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| You know? | ||
| These big events in life that change the progression of the rest of your life. | ||
| And then you look back and go, wow, what would have happened if not for that moment or if not for that experience? | ||
| Mm-hmm. | ||
| So, did you decide not to circumnavigate the globe? | ||
| I mean, that's like a huge endeavor. | ||
| It would take, I think, at a minimum a year. | ||
| And like, I don't know when the last time you had a free year. | ||
| I don't have any time. | ||
| Like, even the first year of COVID, it was like... | ||
| And it was the most free time I probably had in my adult life. | ||
| And it was still, like, not a lot, you know? | ||
| So it's something... | ||
| Yeah, I would still love to do it. | ||
| I think being able to go... | ||
| Like, there's islands in the South Atlantic or even in the Pacific that... | ||
| They don't have an airport. | ||
| The only way you're going to get there is by boat. | ||
| I think that would be really cool to see. | ||
| You can't say unexplored, but kind of the last remote places on the planet. | ||
| I would also imagine you would meet some very fascinating people that are also doing that. | ||
| Yeah, I think so too. | ||
| So like the sailing, like kind of the 50 meter target right now with sailing is, have you ever heard of Race to Alaska? | ||
| No. | ||
| So it's this adventure race, kind of a quirky adventure race that's based back home where I live. | ||
| And it's a boat race from Port Townsend, Washington to Ketchikan, Alaska. | ||
| And there's really only one cardinal rule, and there's a lot of other rules, but they pretty much deal with safety at sea and things like that. | ||
| But kind of the one cardinal rule of the race is no motor. | ||
| The vessel has to be either wind-powered, human-powered, but no internal combustion or electric engines. | ||
| So... | ||
| How long is that journey? | ||
| I think generally you could do it in a week. | ||
| It's about 750 miles. | ||
| So they changed the rules last year where... | ||
| So before, you could only go up the Inside Passage, like the east side of Vancouver Island. | ||
| And it's very constrained waterways and, like, current's always an issue. | ||
| Because... | ||
| There's pretty big tides up there, like a 12-foot tide in that part of the country is normal. | ||
| And so you get these big tides and constrained waterways and they turn into rivers. | ||
| So if you don't hit the current right, hit the tide right, you're going to have to anchor up somewhere and just wait for the tide to change. | ||
| So there's those challenges. | ||
| But anyway, they changed the rules last year where you could go up the Pacific side. | ||
| Like, just go up the straights along the Fuqua, hang a right, and just go up the Pacific. | ||
| So that's what I intend to do. | ||
| Because you'll have good wind pretty much the whole time. | ||
| It'd be a little sloppier, but you're not... | ||
| You're not going to deal with the tides and currents. | ||
| You're not going to deal with the ship traffic and the inside passage. | ||
| You're not going to deal with floating logs that you can hit at night. | ||
| There's all these things that make it less appealing to me, for sure. | ||
| What do you do at night in those circumstances? | ||
| It's pitch black outside. | ||
| You have no motor. | ||
| So I got a crew of three. | ||
| So the team is called Super Nautiloid. | ||
| It's a reference to my favorite Black Sabbath record. | ||
| And it did a logo and everything. | ||
| So right now I'm in the process of refitting the boat. | ||
| So it's a pretty big project. | ||
| So right now everything's going okay, like trying to raise money, like set up a GoFundMe page through the Super Nautiloid site in order to fill the gaps, you know, financially, because it is a pretty big project. | ||
| I've been doing most of the work myself so far. | ||
| But yeah, the team of four, it's me, two other veterans, one friend from Ranger Battalion, one friend from SF, and then I got a buddy from the Seattle Rock Days, Barrett Martin, who was the drummer for the Screaming Trees, and he's played in a few other bands, and he's actually a Grammy award-winning producer. | ||
| Like, super interesting guy. | ||
| Actually, you dig him. | ||
| You should have him on the show. | ||
| He's also an ethnomusicologist. | ||
| So he's gone down to Peru and recorded the Shipibo Shaman Icaros, the Ayahuasca songs. | ||
| And he's doing a record now called Deep Amazon, where the concept is he has all these Icaros that he recorded down in Peru. | ||
| And then he's bringing in various musicians to accompany these Icaros on guitar or whatever instrument. | ||
| So I play on it. | ||
| Kim and Matt from Soundgarden play on it. | ||
| Peter Buck from REM plays on it. | ||
| So it's kind of this interesting cast of characters supporting the Shipibo Icarus. | ||
| So the record comes out October, I guess, and any profits that are made are going to go back to the tribe. | ||
| So it's kind of cool. | ||
| That is cool. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So, how much time have you been spending sailing that you're interested in doing this? | ||
| Have you dedicated a lot of your time to that? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Like, as much free time as I can. | ||
| I love getting out on the boat. | ||
| Getting the sails up and just going. | ||
| Like, even just like sleeping on the boat. | ||
| Like, when my boat was moored at this one merino close to my house. | ||
| Is that your boat? | ||
| That's my boat getting hauled out. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| It's a real sailboat. | ||
| So the boat name is funny. | ||
| So remember when I was talking about Koala Macrame? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Mm-hmm. | |
| So it needs bottom paint bad. | ||
| That's on the to-do list. | ||
| But I'd modified the name if I ever had a daughter to Gita Alexandra. | ||
| So it's a name that at once is beautiful and strong. | ||
| So that was the concept. | ||
| But, like, you know, I'm probably never going to have a daughter. | ||
| Do you have kids? | ||
| No. | ||
| No kids? | ||
| No wife, no ex-wives, no kids. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Wow. | |
| Yeah. | ||
| How'd you skate through life without... | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| I mean... | ||
| I guess it wasn't planned. | ||
| I mean, maybe on a subconscious level, just due to my childhood, I probably avoided it subconsciously. | ||
| Yeah, a lot of people do. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| A lot of people with traumatic childhoods or unpleasant childhoods, they say, I don't want to bring that on anybody else. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Because you associate what childhood is and what being a parent is with what you experienced. | ||
| You don't think there's another way to do it. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Mhm. | |
| Yeah. | ||
| But I've had friends who'd be like, oh, you'd be an awesome dad. | ||
| And I'm like... | ||
| I bet you would. | ||
| I don't know, man. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And then, like, going down that road, and then it turns out, like, oh, I do suck? | ||
| Like, horrible, you know? | ||
| You talked about your flexibility. | ||
| You'd adjust. | ||
| You'd get better at it. | ||
| It's a strange experience. | ||
| It's very psychedelic. | ||
| Do you have kids? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| I have three daughters. | ||
| Having children is... | ||
| It... | ||
| Seeing a little person and engaging with them and having them grow with you and learning about life, in a lot of ways it gives you a chance to do it the right way. | ||
| You think about what's happened to you and you learn from that. | ||
| You learn from your mistakes in raising them and you learn how to communicate with little people who are just growing and learning. | ||
| It's very educational. | ||
| It's very fascinating. | ||
| It changes you fundamentally as a human being. | ||
| It changes everything about you. | ||
| I could imagine, like, because, again, going back to just the evolutionary thing, you're kind of fulfilling your mission. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| As an organism. | ||
| In that way, like, it really does speak to your DNA. There's something about it. | ||
| But it's also, it's like, Dave Chappelle said this to me once, it's a great quote. | ||
| He said, Becoming a father didn't just change the amount of love that I have. | ||
| It changed my capacity for love. | ||
| And I think that's very accurate. | ||
| But, you know, some people, their demons don't line up with that endeavor. | ||
| You know, they're whatever it is in their life. | ||
| It doesn't line up with it. | ||
| And they don't make those adjustments because you're going to have to adjust. | ||
| You're going to have to change your priorities. | ||
| You change who you are. | ||
| You change how you think about people. | ||
| What's fascinating with me is I always felt about people that there were these static things. | ||
| Like, you know, I met Mike. | ||
| He's 70. That's Mike. | ||
| He's always been 70. And then you have children and raise children and see them grow from the time they're a little baby to a person who's having a conversation with you that you go to dinner with, you go to the movies with. | ||
| And you know all their life experiences and the good ones and the bad ones and it's just... | ||
| I look at people now like babies. | ||
| I look at everybody like they're a baby. | ||
| It's very weird. | ||
| I go, I wonder what you were like as a baby because you obviously got to this point from being... | ||
| I see in my mind or at least I envision this journey now to get to who you are now. | ||
| I give people a lot more slack because of it. | ||
| A lot more. | ||
| I'm so much more charitable. | ||
| I have friends with horrible parents Battle to deal with these motherfuckers that raised you. | ||
| It's like a constant thing in their life that they never quite get past. | ||
| And I was very fortunate that my mom, when she married my stepdad, they're very close. | ||
| And they've been close most of my life. | ||
| So I've experienced bad and then I've also experienced like what it's like when a relationship works and when people are kind to each other and get along together and it's like so you realize like there's adjustments that everyone can make in this life to make the path smoother to make it more just you know more harmonious but It | ||
| really changed how I think about humans. | ||
| Not just like my humans, but all humans. | ||
| Like everyone that I meet. | ||
| I really think of them as babies. | ||
| It's very strange. | ||
| But I think it's kind of, I sort of decided to think that way. | ||
| Because I was recognizing, like, the way kids, like, sort of adopt your thoughts on things. | ||
| And my kids talk a lot of shit. | ||
| They're very funny. | ||
| Because in my house, we talk a lot of shit. | ||
| We're always making fun of things, making fun of each other, and there's a lot of laughs. | ||
| Because, you know, that's what I do. | ||
| I'm a comedian. | ||
| And to see my kids talk shit and say funny things, it's like, oh my god, I know where you got that from. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It's very obvious, but it's also they're very kind, too, which is very—that makes me very proud. | ||
| And it's very nice to be able to raise children in an environment where when they get older, you see them expressing the values that you appreciate and you think are important. | ||
| Yeah, I could see, and I thought about it before. | ||
| It's not too late. | ||
| Yeah, I guess that's the... | ||
| Probably still got some swimmers in there. | ||
| ...the advantage of having the XY chromosome. | ||
| Yeah, it is a big advantage, you know, for women, you know, I know women that forgot to have kids. | ||
| I mean, I say it that way. | ||
| They didn't forget to have kids. | ||
| But, you know, in our modern Western world, when people prepare for their life, they prepare for what society has established as the path that is the most celebrated, Something not just that you would be proud of, but that someone would respect. | ||
| You know, like this is Debbie. | ||
| She's a lawyer, you know, and she's a partner at her firm. | ||
| Like, oh, Debbie's happy. | ||
| And then you meet Debbie and you're like, oh, Debbie's miserable. | ||
| You know, she's very successful, but it's not harmonious. | ||
| She's not happy. | ||
| And that's It's so hard when you're in the middle of it and you're thinking so much about how other people view you. | ||
| And for a lot of people, for whatever reason, they grew up in a way that they didn't get the respect that they deserved or they were taught that the only way to get respect or the only way to be appreciated or not feel like a failure Is to be financially successful. | ||
| But some of the biggest failures that I know are financially successful. | ||
| Some of the biggest messes of a life that I know are people that on paper are winners. | ||
| And they're not. | ||
| They're just a disaster. | ||
| And they're filled with nonsense. | ||
| And they don't value human experiences and love and camaraderie and creativity and education and just... | ||
| Just extracting the most fun and the most satisfying life out of this experience. | ||
| Instead, they're concentrating on money. | ||
| They want to talk to you about numbers and expansion and, you know, are you investing? | ||
| And I have a business I'd like you to be a part of. | ||
| And there's this and then that. | ||
| And I was like, ugh. | ||
| And you don't realize that it's gonna fucking end man, and you don't realize that I think sometimes until someone close to you does die and then you go, oh This is so temporary and I'm not enjoying this process at all and One of the things that I'm getting out of talking to you is that you have sought out these These difficult but educational experiences. | ||
| And that's what makes someone fascinating. | ||
| That's what makes someone cool to talk to. | ||
| You know, the path of the most boring people to talk to are the people that are just thinking about making money. | ||
| They're so fucking boring. | ||
| It's so brutal talking to them. | ||
| They have this very narrow thing that they're obsessed with. | ||
| And that thing gives them social status. | ||
| When someone sees them, it's like, oh, there's Bill the Millionaire. | ||
| He owns his company. | ||
| Bill's right about to have a fucking heart attack. | ||
| He's got very little time left and doesn't even realize it. | ||
| And he's taking Adderall all day to try to keep up. | ||
| You know, doing cocaine and cheating on his wife and fucking flying on jets everywhere and it looks on paper like he's the man. | ||
| But meanwhile he's a disaster. | ||
| And there's a lot of people like that. | ||
| Yeah, I agree with you. | ||
| I think... | ||
| I was fortunate enough to start figuring out that stuff at a relatively young age where I made the shift. | ||
| And I think it's a very human thing to want external validation. | ||
| Yes, for sure. | ||
| We're social creatures. | ||
| We're these tribal creatures. | ||
| We want the other people in the tribe to... | ||
| Go, yeah. | ||
| But I think the internal validation, at least for me, were, like, basically, and I don't mean this, like, in a malignant way, but, like, when you kind of stop caring what other people think about you and focus more on what you think about yourself, like, for me, that was, like, a huge shift. | ||
| Like, a huge, like... | ||
| Like, giving up, like, doing things that, like, I thought that other people would think was cool, you know? | ||
| Right. | ||
| That's what a lot of people do, right? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| That's what a lot of us do. | ||
| And I certainly have been guilty of that in my life. | ||
| Oh, we all have. | ||
| Like, I have, too. | ||
| Like, it's human. | ||
| And it's not that big a dig, and maybe there's a balance, but then it's like... | ||
| As soon as I figured out that internal validation meant everything to me and the external, it was fluff. | ||
| It was this vapid thing that at the end of the day wasn't satisfying at all. | ||
| There's some satisfaction in the respect of people that you respect. | ||
| Yeah, for sure. | ||
| When you see this person's an exceptional person and they enjoy being with you, you're like, oh, maybe I'm okay. | ||
| I mean, there's actually a couple things I'd like to go back to, like, what you were talking about. | ||
| And one was, like, in reference to parents, like, I don't—maybe I'll view them as babies now. | ||
| But, like, as soon as I—you know, it was probably my late 20s where I started, like, viewing them as human beings and, like, imperfect creatures like we all are. | ||
| And, like, all of a sudden I had all this empathy for them. | ||
| There's a quote. | ||
| I think it's attributed to Plato, but I don't think it's him. | ||
| I think it's more of a 19th century thing. | ||
| It goes something like, be kind for everyone who's fighting their own battle. | ||
| I apply that to people. | ||
| I apply it to myself. | ||
| I'm definitely fighting my battles still. | ||
| I'm figuring some shit out, but it's not over. | ||
| I'm sure it never will be. | ||
| It never will be. | ||
| I don't imagine it ever is. | ||
| But the process is interesting, and obviously breakthroughs are interesting. | ||
| What was the other point? | ||
| Just the empathy for others, working on yourself. | ||
| There's an Evel Knievel quote, and I'm going to have to paraphrase because I can't remember it exactly, but he's like, You know, when I was young, I cared about what other people thought, but now that I'm old, I just care about what I think. | ||
| And it's kind of the same thing. | ||
| And yeah, obviously I care what other people, at least the people I care about, I want them to think that I'm a decent person, right? | ||
| Sure. | ||
| You know, that's normal. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And again, going back to another thing you were talking about, it's like the most important thing in my life these days is You know, our personal relationships. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It's like I'm at the point now where I'm, you know, and I'm sure you do the same thing. | ||
| You curate your tribe, right? | ||
| Yes. | ||
| And like these relationships are like so rewarding. | ||
| And so honestly, that's where I extract the most joy in my life from is these personal relationships. | ||
| Yeah, that's what I'm most protective of, too. | ||
| Most protective of those people, but also protective of not allowing anyone else in the tribe that I don't think... | ||
| You have to curate the tribe. | ||
| Yeah, you have to be very careful about that because I know so many people that have been involved in friendships and relationships with people that... | ||
| Are just disastrous and it's like a drowning person. | ||
| You try to help them and you drown too. | ||
| Some people just will fucking drag you in and other people, they'll elevate you. | ||
| And, you know, it's obviously... | ||
| They're not perfect experiences. | ||
| We're all human. | ||
| But through even mistakes and then the reconciling of those mistakes and the communication through that, it's an educational experience for everybody involved. | ||
| And everyone's sort of on the same sort of path in the sense where you're trying to be a better version of who you are. | ||
| You're trying to be a better person. | ||
| And, you know, that might be being a better parent or being a better friend or being a better artist or whatever it is you're trying to do. | ||
| But it really benefits you to be around other people that are also trying to do that thing, too. | ||
| Because, you know, one of the beautiful things for me about having this podcast is being able to communicate with so many interesting people and being able to have these conversations like we're having right now where I get to, you know, I just met you today, you know, but get a sense of your journey and your life. | ||
| And I think about it through your eyes and through your perspective. | ||
| And it educates me. | ||
| And I think it educates a lot of the people that are listening. | ||
| And it'll resonate with them. | ||
| Like, oh, I kind of see where this guy's coming from. | ||
| And it just expands our landscape of understanding. | ||
| Yeah, I mean, that's ultimately, like the word harmonious, I've used it too many times probably, but that's really what it is. | ||
| It's not going to be great all the time, but you want it to be as harmonious as possible, and you want to enjoy as much of it as possible. | ||
| Absolutely. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And sometimes, like, with you and what you did, it's like embracing things that are really fucking difficult. | ||
| And through that, you get an understanding of yourself that's really not available to someone who doesn't go through struggle. | ||
| That's the intent, for sure. | ||
| Again, it's that punctuated equilibrium. | ||
| If there's not a traumatic stressor, say, you're not going to grow. | ||
| You're just going to flatline. | ||
| Maybe there's no negativity there, but there's also no positivity. | ||
| Right. | ||
| You're just dull. | ||
| I think that's the problem with a lot of people today and why they're medicated. | ||
| They're not experiencing life in a way that seems to resonate with them in a positive manner. | ||
| It doesn't seem right. | ||
| It seems shitty and depressing. | ||
| I had this conversation with a buddy of mine the other day where he was talking about stages of his life Where he was very depressed. | ||
| And we came to this conclusion, but during that time, your life sucked. | ||
| And now your life is pretty cool. | ||
| And of course you're happier. | ||
| And that seems so simplistic to some people. | ||
| But a lot of the, I mean, there's, without a doubt, there's clinical depression. | ||
| There's people that have something wrong. | ||
| There's an imbalance. | ||
| Whether it's a physical imbalance or a life imbalance or a trauma that they can't get over. | ||
| But my friends that I know that have had those dark moments in their life, when their life turned around, now they're in a great relationship. | ||
| Now they have good friends. | ||
| Now they live in a good community. | ||
| Those people are fucking happier. | ||
| They're doing a thing that they want to do with their life. | ||
| Those people are happier. | ||
| And that's a thing that we have this... | ||
| This sort of binary view of what happiness is. | ||
| And for some people, it's like, oh, I need to get on an SSRI. I need to get on this or that, or I need to do something. | ||
| I need to, you know, some sort of chemical intervention to straighten out my head. | ||
| That's not always the case. | ||
| Like sometimes it's just you got to get through that and come out on the other side and figure out what is the process of becoming a more fulfilled person? | ||
| What's the process of living a harmonious life? | ||
| Like how do I do that? | ||
| Like what is the thing? | ||
| And I think we get A lot of the answers to that from talking to people and from listening to people talk about it and then from trying things and learning and growing and That's something we're not that's not the sound of pop up like a public narrative. | ||
| It's not something that's being discussed It's not something that's drilled in the kids heads like you you're gonna go through some shit, but you got a trust in this process and you got to have a You have to have guidelines in your mind of what you want to do. | ||
| You have to have ethics and morals. | ||
| You have to have compassion for other people. | ||
| Because if you think it's all about you, you're never going to be happy. | ||
| You're never, ever going to be happy. | ||
| The narcissists and the people that are deeply connected to their own wants and needs, We're good to go. | ||
| Yeah, I've always been intrigued by the ancient Greek notion of human flourishing. | ||
| the Greeks called it eudaimonia and it's this is being you know endeavoring to be the best that you can be whatever that is and it's not talking about vocation or external stuff but you use a person like figuring out I mean everything we've been talking about like figuring out what brings you joy applying yourself and it's hard, you know? | ||
| It's like, if it were easy, and I've had this discussion with other friends who are, you know, about human flourishing and stuff, and like, And this is going to sound a little bit negative, but I think there's a lot of people who can't be bothered, you know, who are fully capable of flourishing if they applied themselves. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And for whatever reason, it's easier to do this. | ||
| I think they also don't have the tools. | ||
| You've got to think about your life at a young age. | ||
| You sort of sought out those journeys when you can. | ||
| And some people, they don't develop those tools. | ||
| They fall into a system. | ||
| That's very unserving for them, whether it's a system of getting an education, then you have student debt, student loan debt, and then so you have to get a job, and then you get a job that pays well because you have to pay off that debt, and then you buy a house, so now you have a mortgage and you have a family, so now you have responsibilities and you have all these things. | ||
| But most of your day is spent doing something you absolutely don't want to do, but is also not rewarding. | ||
| There's a lot of things you don't want to do, but when you do them, you're like, God damn, I'm glad. | ||
| I thought I did that. | ||
| Very few people who are doing a 9 to 5 or longer job that they don't want to do have that feeling. | ||
| There's just a lot of, you know, it's like that Thoreau quote, most men live lives of quiet desperation. | ||
| And that is so fucking true. | ||
| And unless you find something... | ||
| That is satisfying and something that elevates you. | ||
| Something that with these experiences you gain insight as to why you think and what you think and what is good about these experiences with other human beings. | ||
| And if you don't, you just become this Fever-minded capitalist where you just are constantly chasing numbers because it's rewarded by society. | ||
| That external validation that you get from driving a Mercedes. | ||
| That thing that you get from having a nice house where people drive by and go, look at that guy's house. | ||
| Someone you don't even know. | ||
| That's important to you, what that person thinks. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Sure. | |
| That's what a lot of people like. | ||
| They like to wear jewelry and look flashy so when they show up, everybody goes, wow. | ||
| Look at him. | ||
| Look at her. | ||
| Look at them. | ||
| Wow, they got the thing. | ||
| They got those sneakers that I can't buy. | ||
| They got that fucking watch that I can't wear. | ||
| Look at those glasses. | ||
| Those are expensive. | ||
| We live in this bizarre society where that is rewarded or at least highlighted so often in so many people's lives. | ||
| Like, that's what you're seeing. | ||
| It's like how they sell things in billboards and on commercials. | ||
| And, you know, we don't realize that this is not going to bring you the joy that you're looking for. | ||
| Or you get that short-term fix, but it evaporates instantly and it's like, You're constantly chasing the dragon. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Well, that's the thing. | ||
| I was reading about this Russian oligarch that they confiscated his yacht, and he's got this one yacht that's fucking insane. | ||
| They confiscated another. | ||
| He's got this second yacht that's just as preposterous, maybe even more so. | ||
| It operates on massive batteries so it can literally drive as silent as a Tesla. | ||
| It's fucking hundreds of feet long. | ||
| That world that you get into of constantly keeping up with the Joneses and all the other people, it's like it never ends. | ||
| It never ends. | ||
| You get to the highest levels of it all and it never ends. | ||
| It's a series of false summits. | ||
| It's like, I've arrived. | ||
| Oh, wait a minute. | ||
| No, I haven't. | ||
| That's a great way to put it. | ||
| A series of false summits. | ||
| It's all illusions. | ||
| It's all mirage. | ||
| And then one day, he's dead. | ||
| That's it. | ||
| And then all the people around him, that guy was a fucking asshole. | ||
| And that's a fucking disaster to die a multi-billionaire who was a fucking asshole who everybody hated. | ||
| It's so strange. | ||
| So much wasted potential. | ||
| Yeah, but there's so many people that are just chasing it. | ||
| I saw this image of Rupert Murdoch with his wife and he was on the beach and he... | ||
| He literally looks like an alien. | ||
| He's just like these bones and tissue and fat and he's with this woman and they were supposed to get married and it didn't work out. | ||
| But one of the things he was saying, he's in his 90s. | ||
| I don't know which wife he's on, right? | ||
| But he was saying that I'm looking forward to spending the second half of my life with her. | ||
| Like, hey, bro, what do you know that I don't know? | ||
| You got about a month left, you know? | ||
| I mean, if everything goes great, you might have eight years. | ||
| If everything goes great, but no one thinks about that while you're in the middle of it. | ||
| All you're thinking about is... | ||
| You know keeping that fucking game going that thing that's gotten you all that those accolades a thing that's gotten you all those that respect and it's just numbers dopamine hits like It's like checking your social media forever to the end of time checking the likes on your fucking Instagram post to the end of time. | ||
| It's like it's empty and That's the path that so many people are on. | ||
| You know, I just don't understand it I'll never understand it, but I get it You know, I get how you get sucked into that path. | ||
| Yeah, I totally understand the mechanism. | ||
| The mechanism, yeah. | ||
| And it's just like it's like it hijacks the human reward systems of you being like the leader of the tribe. | ||
| But the leader of the tribe used to be the wise old warrior who had made the mistakes and proven his character and his metal and combat and life and And had wisdom to impart on the others and could lead the tribe in a way that it could help these people and protect them. | ||
| That just doesn't exist anymore. | ||
| It's been hijacked by this system of monetary gain. | ||
| It's fucking weird. | ||
| And obviously it's very easy for me to say. | ||
| As someone who gets external validation and someone who makes money, it's easy for me to say. | ||
| Because I've sort of removed myself from the hunger of that in a way. | ||
| So I can go, oh, okay, I see what this is. | ||
| Even though I've never been very motivated by money, I've certainly pursued it, but it's also not been anything that meant the most to me. | ||
| Money's freedom. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| That's the way I look at it. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| It's like it opens options. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| But like money for the sake of money, like forget it. | ||
| It can allow you to pursue things that make you happy. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| But you have to know what it is and it's not being taught. | ||
| Think about the things that are being taught. | ||
| Perhaps they teach it a little bit in philosophy, but most of the time, if you're trying to get an education, you try to get an education to get a job. | ||
| I mean, that's the way it's geared towards now. | ||
| It's not like the ancient Greeks where education was like, here's how you live a good and virtuous life. | ||
| Yeah, but the people that I've talked to that are the most boring are the ones that are just pursuing money. | ||
| The people that I've talked to that are the most fascinating are the ones that are trying to figure it out. | ||
| And they've accumulated a lot of lessons and a lot of information and they can talk about things and And I can get something out of that conversation. | ||
| Like I can go, oh, I see how this guy thinks. | ||
| Oh, I see how he got there. | ||
| Life's so profoundly weird, but it's just so cool. | ||
| It's very cool. | ||
| Or it sucks, depending on where you are and what you're stuck in. | ||
| And some of it is beyond your control. | ||
| Some of it is determinism. | ||
| Some of it is your environment. | ||
| Some of it is a shitty roll of the dice and you're working in a cobalt mine in the Congo. | ||
| There's a lot of that to it, but... | ||
| And some people, they transcend that. | ||
| They figure their way out of that. | ||
| And it's the hardest journey. | ||
| Yeah, it's like the money thing. | ||
| There's been a couple occasions where I've had people reach out to me, I don't know, 20 years ago. | ||
| A friend of mine from the music days was like, hey... | ||
| There's this Nirvana record that came out. | ||
| It's like a collection of B-sides and bits and pieces that I guess the label put out to make some money. | ||
| And they're like, hey, you play on a couple of songs. | ||
| You're probably owed some money. | ||
| And I'm like... | ||
| I started thinking about it, and I'm like... | ||
|
unidentified
|
Ugh. | |
| Like, hire an attorney? | ||
| Like, what? | ||
| Sue the label? | ||
| Sue the band? | ||
| And like... | ||
| No. | ||
| Right. | ||
| For money that I'm sure is not life-changing. | ||
| Even if it was, the process just made me so tired that it was like... | ||
| And then more recently something similar happened with Soundgarden. | ||
| Like someone close to the band said, hey, there's these Soundgarden box sets that are out and you play on a couple of the songs. | ||
| Like, you're probably owed some money. | ||
| And the same thing. | ||
| It's like... | ||
| No. | ||
| I'm not even going to start down that path. | ||
| Yeah, because even if it did make you money, it would probably rob you of some happiness. | ||
| Oh, just let it go. | ||
| It's like, you know, it's like, I mean, I guess it kind of sucks that like whoever, like the bean counters at the label are like, fuck that guy, you know, but okay. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| You know, that's fine. | ||
| I'll be all right. | ||
| You got something from that no matter what. | ||
| You can't put it in a bank account, but what you got from that is invaluable. | ||
| It's like you were there. | ||
| It changed you as a person. | ||
| Yeah, it's like that experience... | ||
| I mean, at this point, it's not a huge component of who I am, but it was definitely necessary steps on this journey. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I'm so glad things turned out the way they did. | ||
| I never look back and go, ah, I wish. | ||
| I was this rich rock guy. | ||
| And on so many levels, I'm glad that I didn't. | ||
| A lot of those guys are miserable. | ||
| Oh, yeah. | ||
| I know a few. | ||
| I know a few, too. | ||
| That's the saddest thing in the world. | ||
| It's when you meet a miserable success. | ||
| Even rock stars. | ||
| Even someone who's an artist, right? | ||
| And for so many of them, they're only happy when they're on top. | ||
| And it's not even necessarily happy. | ||
| It's like euphoria. | ||
| There's like a thing about it like, oh my god, I'm the fucking man. | ||
| You know, look at me. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I got the long hair and the fucking guitar and everybody loves me. | |
| It's almost a trap. | ||
| It's almost like a gilded cage that you're a part of. | ||
| You're like, look at me. | ||
| It would be cool to have that financial security and then do something totally different. | ||
| It's also a trap of fame. | ||
| It's hard to know people. | ||
| It's hard to get to know people because everybody's approaching you in a very alien way. | ||
| That was when I was young and obviously not on that huge level, but that was kind of When I got fired from Soundgarden, that was kind of part of the crisis where I was like... | ||
| It was easy to put on the identity of, like, being the bass player for Soundgarden. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| You know? | ||
| And, like, I was, like, the de facto cool guy. | ||
| Sure. | ||
| If you have a conversation with someone at dinner, what do you do? | ||
| I'm the bass player for Soundgarden. | ||
| Or, you know, like, women would show interest. | ||
| Oh, yeah. | ||
| Especially being, like, a painfully shy young man. | ||
| That was awesome. | ||
| You know, but then it was like... | ||
| When I did have that taken away, and it did knock me for a loop for a bit, but it also helped me recognize, like, oh, I should just focus on Jason the dude, you know, not Jason the bass player for Soundgarden. | ||
| And that was kind of the slap in the face that kind of brought me around. | ||
| Mmm. | ||
| But you had to go through that. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| But that's the thing about going through something that sucks. | ||
| Like when you get on the other end of it and you achieve equilibrium, you go, okay, it was actually probably good for me. | ||
| I wholeheartedly believe I came out the other end better on every level. | ||
| I'm happier now at 55 than I've ever been in my entire life. | ||
| And each year gets better. | ||
| That's success. | ||
| Yeah, exactly. | ||
| That's the way I look at it. | ||
| Why did you want to do this? | ||
| Do what? | ||
| This podcast. | ||
| I'm going to be honest. | ||
| To give my R2AK size some oxygen. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Your... | |
| The Race to Alaska. | ||
| Oh, okay. | ||
| But also, you know, I'm a fan. | ||
| I think the first podcast I listened to you was the one you did with James from Metallica. | ||
| Oh, that was great. | ||
| The Beekeeping? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So cool. | ||
| Yeah, he's very cool. | ||
| He's an interesting guy. | ||
| Yeah, I knew him a little bit back in the day, but yeah... | ||
| The beekeeping stuff was fascinating. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I got connected to him through my friend Jim Brewer. | ||
| Jim Brewer, who's a long time... | ||
| He's been my friend for like 30 years. | ||
| The comedian. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, yeah. | |
| He opens for Metallica. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| Which is hilarious because he's a giant Metallica fan and he doesn't need to do that. | ||
| And I think they just offered it to him because they're friends with him. | ||
| And, like, he decided that would be a fun thing to do. | ||
| And since he's such a Metallica fan, he speaks to those people. | ||
| It's not like just a regular comedian opening for a band they're not interested in and the crowd doesn't engage. | ||
| He talks about Metallica and he has material. | ||
| And Jim is one of the most prolific and interesting guys that I know in terms of, like, his stand-up. | ||
| Like, he can just... | ||
| Jim can, like something can happen in the news today and Jim can go on stage and do like 10 minutes on it and just rant and rave and he's such a fucking cartoonish character. | ||
| He's so funny. | ||
| So watching him open for Metallica is a fucking hoot. | ||
| It's so hilarious because he's in his element and he's also a brilliant comedian and just such a character. | ||
| And so he reached out to me. | ||
| He's like, hey man, you should have... | ||
| James Hatfield on. | ||
| He's fucking awesome. | ||
| Fucking be a great podcast. | ||
| I was like, let's do it. | ||
| Let's do it. | ||
| So having him on was pretty cool. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So that was my gateway to your show. | ||
| And that put the hooks in me. | ||
| It's like, okay, this is good. | ||
| Well, thanks, man. | ||
| Appreciate it. | ||
| I'm glad we did this, too. | ||
| Yeah, me too. | ||
| So let's tell everybody about your site so maybe we can get that goal. | ||
| I mean, we already talked about it. | ||
| How do I get to it? | ||
| What's the website? | ||
| So the website is supernautiloid.com. | ||
| Supernautiloid? | ||
| Yeah, one word. | ||
| So it's a play on Black Sabbath's Supernaut. | ||
| Right. | ||
| But the nautiloid is like the prehistoric marine creature. | ||
| What is it? | ||
| It's like a squid with a shell. | ||
| Oh, okay. | ||
| Super Nautiloid Race to Alaska 2023. Yep. | ||
| Nice. | ||
| Okay, so supernautiloid.com. | ||
| And the link to the GoFundMe is up there as well? | ||
| Yeah, down the page. | ||
| Are you going to document this at all on either social media or on YouTube or anything like that? | ||
| So, Barrett has a buddy who's a documentary filmmaker who... | ||
| He's going to do some stuff on it. | ||
| So, like, maybe if, like, enough people kick in, like, five or ten bucks, we actually pay Tad to do a documentary because he's a professional. | ||
| He's not an amateur. | ||
| So, it's going to cost some money to have it done right. | ||
| But Tad's interested in doing it. | ||
| I think he just... | ||
| It needs to be remunerated properly in order to complete the project. | ||
| But yeah, that's been talked about and it may happen. | ||
| Well, maybe we can make it happen. | ||
| So the other thing that I would say to you is I think you should write a book. | ||
| So I can tell a story about my brush with the literary world if you want. | ||
| Okay, sure. | ||
| So I actually was at this juncture, another juncture, basically before I went to grad school. | ||
| And I was like, maybe I should write a book, you know? | ||
| Maybe it's time or whatever. | ||
| And actually, I got an agent and... | ||
| I wrote a book proposal, actually wrote the proposal when I was in Buenos Aires. | ||
| And I remember I was sitting in this cafe in Buenos Aires, so it's like wintertime down there. | ||
| And it's pouring down rain, and there's like water leaking from the roof, and there's pots and pans around the cafe, like catching the rainwater. | ||
| And on my laptop, and I remember finishing the proposal, and it's like, cool, when I get back to the States, I'll meet with the agent, and, you know, and, like, there were so many parallels. | ||
| I'm sure you've been in that world, too, with the literary world, like the business side of it. | ||
| Mm-hmm. | ||
| And with that in the music world. | ||
| So he, this agent's promising me the world, you know, like the classic like music biz thing, like, you know, you boys are going to be bigger than Led Zepp, you know, kind of thing. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And I'm taking it with a grain of salt. | ||
| I'm like, okay, you know, I'm being pretty moderate about the whole thing. | ||
| So I finished the proposal and I thought it was decent, you know? | ||
| Gave it to him and then got another meeting with him and some other dude. | ||
| And they're like, you know, kind of making these radical... | ||
| Suggestions as far as changing the thrust of the narrative and things like that. | ||
| I'd be open to tweaking it, but if it's my book, it's going to be my vision, like any creative project. | ||
| And, uh, and then they started suggesting, like, a co-writer, which is this code for a ghostwriter. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| And it's like, you know, I'm not Hemingway, but I think I can put some sentences together, um, according to other people who told me that, who know these things. | ||
| And, uh, So basically, I got accepted to grad school, and I got a Tillman scholarship that paid for grad school. | ||
| And it's like, okay, I'm going to grad school, and put the book on the back burner. | ||
| But it'll probably happen someday. | ||
| I would suggest that you just write it. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And then try to sell it. | ||
| I've had other people suggest that as well. | ||
| Yeah, I think that's the only way to do it. | ||
| I tried to do it the other way a long time ago, and I had a disastrous... | ||
| I wound up giving the money back. | ||
| I just had a couple conversations with them. | ||
| I don't want to do it like this. | ||
| Like, nope, done. | ||
| It just wasn't what I wanted to do. | ||
| What I wanted to do was just write. | ||
| What I was thinking about stuff. | ||
| They had this very specific idea. | ||
| They had a package that they wanted it to fit into. | ||
| Totally similar to my experience. | ||
| Yeah, I mean, that's what they do. | ||
| It's like the scorpion and the frog, right? | ||
| It's in my nature. | ||
| Yeah, it's just what they do. | ||
| Well, listen, brother, I really appreciate it, man. | ||
| I really enjoyed our conversation. | ||
| Me as well. | ||
| Thank you very much. | ||
| Yeah, thank you. | ||
| And good luck, and don't fall in the water. | ||
| Have a good time doing that. | ||
| We'll be very safe. | ||
| I was reading the safety regulations, and it's like... | ||
| This isn't very hippy-dippy. | ||
| I'm sure. | ||
| Do you have any social media or anything like that you can tell people about? | ||
| Just that. | ||
| I created the site myself. | ||
| It's my first foray into that world at all. | ||
| Looks professional. | ||
| It's like one page. | ||
| That's all you need, though. | ||
| That's all you need. | ||
| I did design the Super Nautiloid logo, which I'm kind of proud of. | ||
| I don't know if you're familiar with Black Sabbath Volume 4. Sure. | ||
| My favorite Sabbath record. | ||
| One of my favorite records. | ||
| So it's an homage to that, obviously. | ||
| So I kind of mixed in Sabbath and Maritime. | ||
| Cool. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Alright. | |
| Well, again, I really enjoyed this. | ||
| Thanks for doing this. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Appreciate it. | |
| You're welcome. | ||
| I enjoyed it very much. | ||
| Cool. | ||
| Thanks, everybody. |
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