April 29, 2025 - The Joe Rogan Experience
02:12:10
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| Speaker | Time | Text |
|---|---|---|
| What's happening, man? | ||
| What's going on? | ||
| It's great to see you. | ||
| Yeah, good to be seen. | ||
| Boy, what a journey you've been on. | ||
| Yeah, yeah, yeah. | ||
| I started listening to your audio book. | ||
| It was giving me anxiety. | ||
| It gets better, right? | ||
| It takes a minute, but there's a relief for the reader. | ||
| Well, the relief is seeing you healthy, walking around. | ||
| Well, the relief is also, you kind of know the end of the story, right? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes. | |
| Before you go into it. | ||
| Right. | ||
| So then you can really kind of dive into the actual detailed narrative that I put out. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| There's no other way to do it. | ||
| But yeah, it's tough for a minute. | ||
| It's like, wow, my sister, it took her a while to read, and anybody that was kind of involved in the incident takes a minute. | ||
| It took me a long time to kind of get through it, right? | ||
| It's anxious for me too. | ||
| So how long was the actual recovery? | ||
| Because you don't even walk with a limp. | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| Some things are pretty miraculous. | ||
| Some things can be explained. | ||
| And I tried to figure it out as I was writing the book. | ||
| A lot of people ask questions. | ||
| I ask myself questions. | ||
| Some things were on my own will. | ||
| Some things were otherworldly of some sort. | ||
| But, yeah, I was given, you know, I was supposed to walk with a limp because pretty much a lot of titanium. | ||
| And then it was certainly not running. | ||
| And I'm doing far beyond all those things. | ||
| Don't know exactly why. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I can pontificate on why, you know. | |
| What do you think of it? | ||
| I think it's... | ||
| Will is a really special thing. | ||
| And the love and fuel to fuel your will, I had in spades. | ||
| I feel like I could pretty much do anything if I set my mind to it. | ||
| When it was my essential part of my life, my recovery, was a 24-hour day job. | ||
| When typically I do many, many other things, right, as we all do in our lives, but when all my focus, like even parenting, was out the window until I can get better. | ||
| So I had to do that first. | ||
| So that being the central part of every thought, every fiber, every cell in my body was geared towards a one-way street of recovery. | ||
| Oh, I'm getting fucking better. | ||
| So I just got better. | ||
| What's the alternative? | ||
| I was brought back somehow, someway. | ||
| And it would be a disservice to not do all the things I'm supposed to be doing and want to be doing. | ||
| So it just took a lot of effort. | ||
| And it looked a lot of support. | ||
| Heck, dude, I mean, there's hundreds of people involved in helping me not die again. | ||
| But at the end of the day, the recovery, as you know, everybody's injured in some sort of way. | ||
| It's a lonely road. | ||
| It's only you. | ||
| No matter how much help you have or PT you have, if your tendons go, whatever the heck happens, you still have to put in the work every day and endure the pain and manage the pain and mitigate it. | ||
| It can be quite lonely, but I always found that my daughter and my family, as I see their faces, when I get better, I could stand up, let's say, or not pee in a jar. | ||
| I could get in a wheelchair. | ||
| Any sort of milestone, I'd see their faces get a little bit less horrified, even relieved, even quite joyful even. | ||
| So as much damage as I did to my family and their hearts, me getting better can... | ||
| Can relieve them of that burden. | ||
| So it was an easy one-way road to recover. | ||
| And that's why I recovered fast. | ||
| And I attribute it to my love for my family. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| So let's bring it back to the day of the accident. | ||
| When exactly was it? | ||
| It was New Year's Day. | ||
| New Year's Day. | ||
| New Year's Day, 2023. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And I host my family at my house up there, like 25 people. | ||
| Every post-Christmas to New Year's all the time. | ||
| Family, friends, whoever, just kind of come up and we can celebrate the holidays together. | ||
| Go skiing, all these type of things. | ||
| But we had a big kind of snowmageddon type snow event that, you know, shut down the mountain that I live on at the top of Lake Tahoe at about 8,000 feet elevation. | ||
| And we got just tons and tons of snow. | ||
| But it happens often. | ||
| Maybe not that intense of a storm. | ||
| But so much so where we were cut off from anywhere else. | ||
| We were snowed in. | ||
| Fine. | ||
| I'm prepared for that stuff. | ||
| Three days without power. | ||
| Prepared for it. | ||
| It's fine. | ||
| We can have fun. | ||
| It's actually a relief. | ||
| All the cell phones go off. | ||
| All the iPads go away and computers and everybody's just playing card games with headlamps on. | ||
| I mean, it's a riot. | ||
| So we had a good time. | ||
| You know, the food supply was still good. | ||
| But, you know, it's New Year's Day and we're getting a break in the weather. | ||
| So I decided I needed to clear the roads and see, come out for air, essentially. | ||
| And in doing so, that's when the accident sort of transpired. | ||
| And it's more of a routine type of thing to have a half-mile-long driveway up there. | ||
| And I have to maintain it myself, so I have a snowcat and a bunch of other snow removal type equipment. | ||
| There was a bunch of vehicles, snowmobiles even, things that got stuck in the driveway because it was a lot of extra snow. | ||
| And some of it was very light, and then it got very icy and hard, so you're sinking down like three or four feet into it. | ||
| And it was a hot mess, so I had to... | ||
| Try to dig all that stuff out using the snowcat, pulling this stuff out. | ||
| This thing, a snowcat, to describe it in words is pretty difficult, but it's like a tank. | ||
| It's probably, I don't know, 12 feet wide. | ||
| The tracks on each side, so it spins like a tank, like a skid steer. | ||
| There it is. | ||
| Yeah, there we go. | ||
| That's a small, tiny version of one. | ||
| But yeah, it's something kind of like Star Wars, you know. | ||
| But this minor or metal track is more like that one right there. | ||
| Oh, you got one like that? | ||
| That's it. | ||
| It's exactly like the one I have. | ||
| So, it's about like 16,000 pounds or so. | ||
| And it's very nimble on the snow. | ||
| Just to see it physically, put it back up, to see it physically and to know that that's what ran over your leg? | ||
| Oh, my whole body. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oh, God. | |
| Yeah. | ||
| So, you have to step on the tracks, you see, to get into the cab to operate it. | ||
| So, stepping on the tracks is a normal thing to do. | ||
| You just don't do it while you're operating it, right? | ||
| You run the thing, you drive it, and it's just easy. | ||
| It's a thumb, go forward, reverse, and you're neutral, and that's it. | ||
| It's really easy to operate. | ||
| But the accident happened because you have to get in and out off on those tracks, and I... | ||
| It hit the thumb thing and it threw me off and I was going towards my nephew so I had to jump back on and try to stop it from killing him because it was going to crush him between the truck and that big blade that I have. | ||
| You see that thing? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It's a few thousand pounds. | ||
| That thing's gnarly. | ||
| So my instinct was to jump back on it and try to stop it. | ||
| Obviously it didn't work out. | ||
|
unidentified
|
And it got ran over and there you go. | |
| How much of your body did it run over? | ||
| The entire, all of it. | ||
| Oh my god. | ||
| If the tracks were here to jump in the cab, I leapt up and over to try to grab onto it and got sucked under the whole thing. | ||
| So the whole length of it just kind of... | ||
| So there's like a set of wheels that turn these tracks, you see? | ||
| And there's like six wheels. | ||
| So it undulates. | ||
| The first one was the worst, like the pressure and the skull crush and all that stuff. | ||
| And then it releases because of the undulation of the tire and the track. | ||
| And you're awake for that. | ||
| By the sixth undulation, just like, alright, alright, just kind of finish already. | ||
| And you're just like... | ||
| It's like you're drowning and being struck by lightning and bleeding out. | ||
| All the things all at once, man. | ||
| It's like an immense pressure and a movable object. | ||
| My skull kind of lost out but still survived. | ||
| Your skull kind of run over. | ||
| Yeah, yeah, yeah. | ||
| It's like, you know, Yeah, it's everything. | ||
| It's 38 broken bones and eyeballs out. | ||
| Oh my god. | ||
| Shout out to medical science. | ||
| I know, right? | ||
| And yeah, I mean, all the doctors were like, dude, I don't know how your eye's still operating or still working, but I think because I was on ice, because I did see it, I'm like, well, maybe I'm going to put this eye on ice and just kind of rolled into it. | ||
| I saw my eye with my other eye, right? | ||
| And I'm like, I'm going to be able to keep that thing, because I'm on like... | ||
| An icy asphalt driveway that's off of my driveway, right, at the top of the road. | ||
| So it wasn't really great for impact of getting ran over. | ||
| I wish I was on a snowpack. | ||
| It would have been maybe a little bit easier. | ||
| It would push me into snow, right? | ||
| But it wasn't. | ||
| So I just kind of rolled onto it, just like maybe I could kind of put the eye on ice until I could figure out how to breathe. | ||
| Oh, my God. | ||
| You know, I had to sort of laugh at it because it's weird to sort of think about that, you know? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Wow. | |
| So 38 bones? | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| Yeah, it was like a lot of ribs and all my spiral fractures and my legs, all my joints were broken, all my ankles, my lees, none of my spine. | ||
| And I only got a laceration of my liver from one of the ribs breaking in a couple spots and I went down and kind of stabbed it. | ||
| But it didn't really mess it up too bad, so that's okay. | ||
| But all my organs, my brain. | ||
| I don't think there's any brain damage. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I'll use an excuse later, I guess. | |
| Yeah, and my spine. | ||
| That's the miracle. | ||
| It's like, how did I break 14 ribs, right? | ||
| And I cracked my skull and every arm and leg and finger and thing, but my spine was spared. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oh, my God. | |
| And all my organs were spared in my brain. | ||
| So, like, it's kind of almost no harm, no foul at the end of the day, even though there's... | ||
| You know, probably 20% titanium in my body at this point. | ||
| So how many pieces of titanium were in you? | ||
| Well, the guy that invented this procedure worked at the hospital in Reno because there's a lot of crushing injuries that happened because of the ski resorts and mines that are in the area. | ||
| So I got really lucky to get this doctor. | ||
| But it took four doctors to get to this guy. | ||
| So says my family. | ||
| I was out in a coma. | ||
| But once they found this guy who was on vacation, the mayor of Reno actually called him and said, you've got to get back and help my friend out. | ||
| And so he rushed out and he's just like, this is what he does for a living. | ||
| He's like, oh, this is easy. | ||
| I can't wait to do this for this guy. | ||
| So it relieved on my family. | ||
| They were such relief because they were like, oh, he's going to lose his eye. | ||
| We're going to cut off his leg. | ||
| I mean, all this kind of tragic sort of prognosis, whatever you want to call it, right? | ||
| So this guy comes in. | ||
| No, no, it's fine. | ||
| We're going to hammer this thing in. | ||
| We're going to do this. | ||
| We're going to do his faceplate. | ||
| We're going to do this. | ||
| And just lucky that the orbital bone that broke and the cheekbone that broke, they only wanted to do that because my face as an actor made me want to save my cheekbone, I guess. | ||
| Not that I cared about it, but... | ||
| But yeah, he fixed up all my ribs and they used like this mesh and he has this sort of weird... | ||
| Way to kind of handle, if you fix one or two of the ribs that are all broken, the rest will kind of fall into place. | ||
| The body's pretty miraculous. | ||
| Just give it a little direction and then it heals on itself and it'll grow the bone. | ||
| So it's not as much titanium in my ribs as one might think for all those breaks. | ||
| It's only... | ||
| It looks like rebar, right? | ||
| You get a scan. | ||
| A lot of my body is like... | ||
| Do you have an x-ray of your body? | ||
| Yeah, somewhere. | ||
| Is it online anywhere? | ||
| Well, we can see it? | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| Do you have it on your phone or anything? | ||
| No, I don't think so. | ||
| I could ask my sister for it. | ||
| She's been showing everybody that thing. | ||
| It's pretty remedial looking, you know? | ||
| It looks like, you know, like I had a hammer. | ||
| And a 2x4 and some nails. | ||
| That's what this looks like. | ||
| Why is there a nail and two screws? | ||
| It's carpentry 101. | ||
| There's nothing like... | ||
| I think the guy that... | ||
| I had screws in my skull and my jaw because that broke in three spots. | ||
| And the guy took it out. | ||
| It's something that he got from Home Depot. | ||
| Literally, it's like some... | ||
| It just took it out. | ||
| I'm like, dude, it's squeaking like it's in wood. | ||
| Did he numb it or something? | ||
| I almost knocked this guy out. | ||
| It was just like... | ||
| It was unbelievable. | ||
| Unbelievable. | ||
| And I was always kind of half in the bag mentally. | ||
| It takes so much mental to deal with pain management. | ||
| And it's emotionally exhausting to deal with so many different things in your body. | ||
| So I'm always kind of half paying attention to things. | ||
| I'm much sharper mentally now because I don't have to mitigate so much inflammation, pain, and all the time. | ||
| So I can kind of be here and laugh with you. | ||
| But back then when this guy was... | ||
| I almost talked to this guy so hard, dude. | ||
| But yeah, I was really happy to... | ||
| It was a great milestone for me to get these screws out of my skull. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Jesus. | |
| But that was worse than getting ran over by the snowcat, dude. | ||
| Really? | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| In terms of pain or just discomfort? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Well, no. | |
| It wasn't so much the pain. | ||
| It's the haunting images of feeling my gums wrap around this screw and it's pulling out. | ||
| It's a lot longer than I thought it was. | ||
| And then there's three more to go. | ||
| It was more the visual is, in my mind, kind of what makes it terrible. | ||
| Because I'm a pretty visual guy. | ||
| So I don't think anything hurts me so much in a physical way. | ||
| But the visual is a pretty haunting image. | ||
| And the sounds, dude. | ||
| It vibrates your skull as he's taking it out. | ||
| And it's like... | ||
| This is what horror films are made of. | ||
| It's like a saw or something. | ||
| Is that the only thing that they had to take out? | ||
| Is the screws that were in your head? | ||
| Or did they take them out of your body as well? | ||
| No, they have to leave those in for the most part because why risk infection and open you up for something? | ||
| Yeah, so all the rest of the stuff stays in until those screws come loose. | ||
| At some point, they will. | ||
| They start backing out, right? | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| You'd think you'd put in a locking screw. | ||
| Right? | ||
| I've had friends that have had broken arms and starts poking out of the bone. | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| And they have to get another operation and get it removed. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So how many different plates do you have? | ||
| I think I got – it's only a couple in my face and they went in like underneath my cheek, a plate for my orbital socket and then for the cheekbone. | ||
| They put I think a plate or two over there to hold that bone in place. | ||
| Do you feel it? | ||
| I feel the lack of feeling in it. | ||
| It's still numbness to this whole side because they had to cut all these nerve endings to get in through your mouth. | ||
| So even this side of my face is slightly a little numb-ish. | ||
| And the rest of them, how much do you feel in all your different bones and joints and all the different things that got repaired? | ||
| Yeah, there's lots of scar tissue to work through all the time. | ||
| What's great is it's not any one spot. | ||
| It moves around. | ||
| Even if you're not injured, it's like if you just twist your leg wrong and then it goes up into your hip and then it's in your shoulder. | ||
| It moves around. | ||
| Your body kind of moves it around. | ||
| So you just kind of stay on top of it and there's always something to work through in your body. | ||
| And it's just, you know, look, I already have to do it anyway. | ||
| I'm 54. I'm going to have to take care of my health and I just have to make it a very central part of my life. | ||
| And so now do you have full range of motion, full mobility, everything is back to normal? | ||
| I don't know what normal is, you know. | ||
| I'm going to be, you know, I feel like I'm maybe 110% just because spiritually and mentally I'm so much better. | ||
| I got so many gifts from dying and coming back. | ||
| That, yeah, I'm 150%. | ||
| My body will always be, look, my body's aging, so I have to fight against age. | ||
| Well, recovery is age-reversing. | ||
| It's the same stuff that people are doing just to reverse age. | ||
| I just do it just because it's my recovery, and I have to for the rest of my life, just to prevent inflammation and discomfort and swelling, things like that. | ||
| So, when you have so many broken bones and so many broken joints, what is the recovery like? | ||
| Like, how do they even get you moving again? | ||
| Day by day. | ||
| Day by day. | ||
| Yeah, instantly. | ||
| As soon as I got home from the hospital, yeah, PT there and working to just move, keep things moving. | ||
| You have to. | ||
| Otherwise, you lose it. | ||
| You'll lock up or you lose it. | ||
| Seeing you walk around today in the studio, I would have no idea. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| You look totally normal. | ||
| Yeah, yeah, yeah. | ||
| It's great. | ||
| It takes a lot of work. | ||
| And it's still working. | ||
| I was having to stretch in your studio, you know. | ||
| I have to move quite a bit so I don't lock up. | ||
| After a good night's sleep, it's like, eh, you could be a little stiff in the morning. | ||
| And I have to do some stretches and things like that. | ||
| But I think if I didn't get in the accident in 54, I'd probably have to do it anyway. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| So it feels good to have to force the stretching, I think. | ||
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| And so just day by day, so you're completely bedridden initially, and how long does it take before you can sit up? | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| It's pretty – it moved pretty quick. | ||
| Randomly with the punctured lung and all this broke, the shoulder, the collarbone dislocation, all this stuff, that healed pretty quickly. | ||
| But that doesn't require gravity and force under your legs, like your legs have to take, right? | ||
| So that took a little bit longer in the legs, both ankles, right? | ||
| Those are under trauma and plates in those. | ||
| You know, this is all a pipe, essentially, a piece of rebar in my whole lower leg. | ||
| So that took a little bit longer. | ||
| But the ribs, ironically, it was only painful for, I feel like, a couple weeks. | ||
| I also had these, like, plastic suitcases for my lungs because I had to let it bleed out and this stuff was going in. | ||
| I don't know what goop was in that thing, but I had to carry those things around for a while. | ||
| Once I got rid of those, I was kind of sitting up a bit more, and I felt good once I was kind of sitting up. | ||
| But there's still, as you can imagine, so much trauma, so many places. | ||
| But I think the longest was really getting up to stand up, to walk, to get all your joints to work properly again, to relearn to walk, relearn to move because you really kind of have to. | ||
| There's a lot of atrophy, as you can imagine, that happens. | ||
| But I was standing up and moving around. | ||
| I got into a chair probably by February after like three weeks. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| And the more I can move, the faster you heal. | ||
| You're getting more blood flow. | ||
| You're getting your body to work better. | ||
| Help with my attitude and will to get out and sit up. | ||
| You know, all the things. | ||
| Each of these things are like milestones. | ||
| And I would just like, yeah! | ||
| And then move forward to the next thing and set a goal for myself. | ||
| Even if it was just like to sit up and turn. | ||
| I didn't have to set such big goals. | ||
| To reach too far. | ||
| To keep my confidence high. | ||
| Because I keep reaching these goals and just kept going and going and going. | ||
| And I find myself, again, it's 24 hours a day. | ||
| So what do I have to do today? | ||
| Well, I don't even have to ask. | ||
| It's got to get better. | ||
| And, you know, it just kept going. | ||
| And whatever thing, and there's so many things to attack to get better, it's like I never got bored. | ||
| I just had all these bands and stuff. | ||
| I remember being in a wheelchair and I'd wrap around like this desk and I'd be like a leg press. | ||
| You know, all these interesting ways to try to strengthen my body and get better. | ||
| Whatever wasn't, you know, anything that would work, I would do it. | ||
| I'd say no to nothing, say yes to everything, and let's try it. | ||
| Let's do it. | ||
| Took in everything. | ||
| Took in everything. | ||
| You know, they say that is one of the more difficult things with stroke victims, is the will to do the exercises to force yourself to recover. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Because so many people just, they have never done that before. | ||
| They've never pushed themselves before. | ||
| They don't, and there's this tendency to just kind of give up. | ||
| Some people have. | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| It's part of the reason why I wrote the book because it's a lonely place where people are struggling in recovery and when it's a lifetime recovery too. | ||
| I hope they can find something they can grab onto. | ||
| Like if this guy can get overcome this, I can get out of my own way here and maybe think of it a little differently. | ||
| The only thing we have control of ever in life and perpetuity is our perspective. | ||
| I could easily just go be victimized and cry about it and my career is over. | ||
| It's not even part of the narrative. | ||
| It's not even in the conversation. | ||
| It's like I'm getting better every day for the rest of my life. | ||
| That's it. | ||
| There's only one way to go. | ||
| What's the alternative, Joe? | ||
| What is the alternative? | ||
| I keep saying that to me. | ||
| What's the alternative? | ||
| I'm not going to stumble around through life. | ||
| I wasn't brought back here just to suffer. | ||
| That's not happening. | ||
| I'd say unplug the machine. | ||
| I'm done. | ||
| I'm out of here. | ||
| It's way better than being dead. | ||
| You know what I mean? | ||
| I'm not going to come back and just waddle and limp my way through life. | ||
| It's not going to happen. | ||
| What's crazy is if you didn't approach it like that, you probably wouldn't be able to walk. | ||
| Correct. | ||
| Correct. | ||
| Yeah, because there have been a lot of people that have been gravely injured that never come back. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| You have to push it, right? | ||
| Anything that's in your life for excellence, you have to obsess at it and risk everything for it. | ||
| You have to, or it's not going to happen. | ||
| No one's going to do it for you. | ||
| But what else are you going to do? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| You know what I mean? | ||
| Again, like I said, what's the alternative? | ||
| Yeah, this sucks, but like, so does a cold plunge, and so does this, and so does that, and so does that. | ||
| You've got to really test. | ||
| We've got to test our bodies, our limits, to really have real growth, and especially in recovery. | ||
| You have to. | ||
| What else are you going to do, man? | ||
| You're going to take pills? | ||
| Right. | ||
| That was, again, one of the harder things, worse than the accident as well, is getting off OxyContin. | ||
| And I got off pretty quickly. | ||
| That's gnarly stuff, man. | ||
| I'm glad it was there for the pain for me, but I wanted to get off it as soon as possible because it's highly, highly addictive. | ||
| And coming off that stuff was gnarly. | ||
| It's so hard, and you have a really strong will, and some people don't. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I know. | |
| And they put all people on that stuff. | ||
| That's crazy, dude. | ||
| Ironically, I was supposed to be doing a movie about... | ||
| The Sacra family. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| But it was supposed to happen literally that April or just that spring. | ||
| Obviously, that got canceled because I had to take Oxycontin to kind of get by. | ||
| But then I had to get off that stuff real quick. | ||
| It was really interesting, too, how people treated that. | ||
| You know, everyone, like, it was monitoring counting the pills. | ||
| It was a half a thing or this or that. | ||
| Everyone was on it. | ||
| Like, dude, what? | ||
| You treat me like I'm some sort of drug addict. | ||
| Don't give me this stuff. | ||
| I don't want it. | ||
| Jesus Christ, it's terrible. | ||
| But it's pretty powerful, powerful stuff. | ||
| And I don't ever blame sort of the drug. | ||
| I just think sort of how... | ||
| Maybe it's free to use and it's even supported in school systems. | ||
| That family kind of got away with a lot of stuff to promote that stuff. | ||
| To put it mildly. | ||
| Yeah, yeah, yeah. | ||
| It's a whole other... | ||
| You've seen Peter Berg's thing on Netflix, Painkiller? | ||
| Have you seen that? | ||
| It's a docudrama documentary. | ||
| Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. | ||
| Matthew Broderick. | ||
| Yep, yep. | ||
| It's gnarly, man. | ||
| Gnarly. | ||
| Yeah, that's an evil family. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| What they did to people and just support the idea that, you know, hey, you could just be on this and you don't have any pain. | ||
| Don't worry about it. | ||
| And it's not even addictive. | ||
| Just... | ||
| Yeah, it's the knowing part and then... | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Then double-downing and selling, really getting it out there. | ||
| And promoting it as a thing that you could be on forever. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Which is just insane. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| So you're on it, and how long did you have to be on it for? | ||
| I, again, always working to get off of it. | ||
| And I think maybe it was around, if I got home on January 13th, Friday the 13th. | ||
| I think it was probably less than a month, probably like beginning of February, because I had all my molars and stuff got pushed in, so my mouth's a hot mess, my jaw's broken. | ||
| But I'd have night terrors, as you would, being awake through that trauma. | ||
| And I bit down, and the tooth was just in a certain spot and just cracked my molar. | ||
| And it goes down to the nerve and that. | ||
| I'm like, oh, I feel that pain. | ||
| But I'm on all this OxyContin. | ||
| I don't feel it. | ||
| Hmm, maybe I don't need to be on that shit. | ||
| So I had to go get that emergency extraction and get a post put in on my back molar. | ||
| And I said, well, I'll take it one more time just for the tooth pain or whatever even what the dentist gave me. | ||
| I think I took the dentist stuff, whatever that was. | ||
| And cold turkey off OxyContin and Gabby Penton. | ||
| Ooh, cold turkey. | ||
| Yeah, I didn't know. | ||
| You didn't know how hard it would be? | ||
| Oh no. | ||
| Did they tell you to tape it? | ||
| I don't really listen to the doctors. | ||
| I don't listen to the doctors, man. | ||
| So I started crying for about three and a half days straight. | ||
| Even during my PT, I'm just like, not that I'm even sad, but full crocodile tears. | ||
| Just tears. | ||
| Tears. | ||
| 24 hours a day. | ||
| Just going. | ||
| I couldn't stop crying. | ||
| And I was shivering. | ||
| So this is all just withdrawal? | ||
| Withdrawal, yeah. | ||
| I wasn't thinking anything other than, like, why am I crying? | ||
| I didn't know it was withdrawal. | ||
| Because my mind's not there. | ||
| My mind's in recovery and getting off this stuff and focusing on holding my body up. | ||
| It takes just a lot of mental acuity to... | ||
| Just exist, right? | ||
| So I wasn't thinking that, yeah, of course. | ||
| I look back on it. | ||
| I was like, yeah, of course. | ||
| I'm coming off fucking heroin. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Jesus. | |
| So, yeah. | ||
| And so I call my sister and I'm like, I don't know why I'm crying. | ||
| I can't stop crying. | ||
| She's like, well, let's call it. | ||
| I had these different doctors that we'd Zoom call with when I was at home. | ||
| And so we called the pain management doctor. | ||
| And she's like, look. | ||
| I told him, he's like, what are you doing? | ||
| You've got to taper off that. | ||
| It takes like two weeks at least. | ||
| You can't just cold turkey. | ||
| It's no wonder you're feeling all cold and all this stuff because that's all nerve stuff. | ||
| So I started feeling gravity. | ||
| I started feeling temperature. | ||
| I started feeling everything. | ||
| It was like on fire, right? | ||
| Why did you make the decision to go cold turkey? | ||
| Because I didn't want... | ||
| I don't like the feeling of being on pain meds. | ||
| I don't like, you know, I want to have my mind. | ||
| I mean, I was always using the humor to find my sobriety. | ||
| If I could land a joke, that means I'm reading the room and I'm hitting the timing right, whatever it is, you know, right? | ||
| So I wanted my, I needed my mind. | ||
| I needed my wit. | ||
| I needed my will to recover. | ||
| I needed sleep and I needed my brain. | ||
| And the drugs kind of numb my brain. | ||
| As they would, right? | ||
| As they'd numb your whole body. | ||
| So I just wanted off of them. | ||
| And I don't like how I feel. | ||
| You feel muddy. | ||
| And I just didn't like the feeling. | ||
| You know, it came with a price, but I got the okay to take a little fiber of Oxy to sleep on if you needed to mitigate some pain, just so I could sleep. | ||
| I'm like, okay, maybe I'll do that if it happens. | ||
| And I did once or twice or three times, maybe after that moment. | ||
| But I got through it. | ||
| And I got off it. | ||
| But I got off it because I cracked that tooth. | ||
| And that, I felt pain. | ||
| Like, that is like, that's not going to let me sleep at all. | ||
| It's a heartbeat in my brain. | ||
| My face is just like throbbing, right, as you would for anybody. | ||
| So I said like, oh, then I don't need to take the pain meds. | ||
| So that was my excuse to get off the pain meds. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| Because if you're feeling pain and you're on the pain meds. | ||
| Yeah, I would have been on that shit much longer if I didn't crack that tooth. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Wow. | |
| Because I wouldn't have the will to say like, oh, it's... | ||
| Get off this stuff, right? | ||
| But it took that. | ||
| I'm like, okay, well, I don't need it. | ||
| I had knee surgery in 93 and they gave me something. | ||
| It was either Percocet or Vicodin. | ||
| I don't remember what it was. | ||
| And I took it one time. | ||
| And I felt so bad. | ||
| I felt so stupid. | ||
| I remember being in my apartment in New York just feeling so dumb and just thinking I'd rather be in pain. | ||
| And so one day. | ||
| I took it one day and I'm like, that's it. | ||
| I'm done. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And then I sold it. | ||
| I sold my pills to this guy Jeff at the pool hall. | ||
| It's a dirtbag. | ||
| It was this dirtbag guy that I used to hang out with at the pool hall. | ||
| He had a bandana and long hair. | ||
| He was a hippie. | ||
| He always sold drugs. | ||
| And I sold them to him. | ||
| He's like, I'll take it. | ||
|
unidentified
|
What do you got? | |
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| What do you got? | ||
| And then I had surgery again. | ||
| I've had a bunch of different surgeries for jujitsu injuries, martial arts injuries. | ||
| Yeah, yeah, yeah. | ||
| Second time I had surgery on my knee, I had a knee reconstruction again on my other knee in 2003, and I didn't dig anything. | ||
| I'm just like, I don't want nothing. | ||
| I'm just going to deal with it, and it was okay. | ||
| Yeah, maybe anti-inflammatory or something. | ||
| I didn't even take that stuff, because I don't think that's good for you either. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| You know, I mean, you're going to be in pain. | ||
| No matter what. | ||
| It's just going to dull it a little bit. | ||
| I'd rather feel it all. | ||
| I agree. | ||
| I agree. | ||
| Accustomed to it and deal with it. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| That was like back when I, even when I had my wisdom teeth pulled out when I was like 20 or something. | ||
| You know, that's pretty gnarly surgery, right? | ||
| And they give you like, it was a codeine or something. | ||
| You know, I just puked on that and said, no way. | ||
| Took one pill and I... | ||
| Never took, didn't sell it to anybody. | ||
| Isn't it astonishing that some people like it? | ||
| Yeah! | ||
| People party on it and they'll go drinking, like two Vikings and all that stuff. | ||
| I just, it's just the opposite for me. | ||
| I just can't. | ||
| It's just, my body doesn't agree with it. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I just, and I'm glad I don't like it. | ||
| I had a friend of mine who was a musician and he would write all his music on Vikings. | ||
| And I was like, what? | ||
| How do you do that, man? | ||
| Like, I took it, whatever it was that I took, I can't remember which one it was, but I felt like a moron. | ||
| I just felt like I had, like, 20% of my brain. | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| And it was just this dull, like, wet cotton stuffed in my head. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| But, I mean, I guess maybe it's just, like, different biology. | ||
| Maybe different people react to it differently. | ||
| For sure. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It wasn't for me. | ||
| Yeah, I agree. | ||
| So, how long did it take for the withdrawal to subside? | ||
| By the time I got to the Zoom with the pain management doctor, he said, well, don't do that. | ||
| You should taper off. | ||
| Well, I'm already off it now. | ||
| I've come off the crying train. | ||
| Especially because he also made sense of it for me. | ||
| It's like day four by the time I talked to him. | ||
| It just helped me make sense of why I was feeling the way I was feeling. | ||
| It felt like a setback. | ||
| Right. | ||
| You know, because there are setbacks in recovery, but this felt like a real setback. | ||
| Like I couldn't grab of why – and I'm pretty in tune with like my body and my emotions and my everything. | ||
| And I just couldn't grab why I was – when it's so obvious. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| But then, you know, I don't – I'm not the one really administering this stuff. | ||
| My mom just gave me the pill and doing peptide injections for me and, you know. | ||
| Rebirthing me, you know? | ||
| Taking care of me. | ||
| What peptides were you on? | ||
| Oh, man. | ||
| If I look back, I don't know. | ||
| I was getting three ml, so three loads. | ||
| And they were all mixed up, as you would. | ||
| Probably a lot of the same ones that I'm on now that I continue. | ||
| And I rotate in and out of different ones. | ||
| BPC-157. | ||
| BPC-157. | ||
| TB-500. | ||
| Yeah, all those. | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| AOD and MOTC. | ||
| And I have to do a lot of blood work. | ||
| My hemoglobin was a 2. Whoa. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| That was what it was going back to work. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Whoa. | |
| Back to Mayor Kingstown. | ||
| Crazy. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It's like the blood of a dead man, essentially. | ||
| I just got no energy. | ||
| So then I started really working with all my blood panels. | ||
| Big, giant, wide, 16-vile blood panels. | ||
| And that started to be my new course of recovery, of a cellular way, in a blood way. | ||
| And that's where I really started to get strong. | ||
| I was moving around. | ||
| I was mobile. | ||
| All the bones are healed. | ||
| By this time, it's like a year's gone by, but now I started working on cellular and blood health, and that's when I got to, like, my skin started to look great, you know, because your blood tells you what your body's producing and not producing, right? | ||
| So that was a great report card or barometer of where I was at, why I'm not, you know, where my mitochondrial levels are at, anything was at. | ||
| So it was really, really great. | ||
| Part of my recovery. | ||
| And that's what I'll continue to do and still continue to do today. | ||
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| Did you use a hyperbaric chamber? | ||
| Oh, yeah. | ||
| That must have helped. | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| What it did for me, it's not something, I don't think there's many things in my recovery that you do that feel good. | ||
| It just doesn't make you feel as shitty. | ||
| Right. | ||
| It's like you're building a mountain one layer of pain at a time. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| But hyperbaric is great. | ||
| It helps with lactic acid when you're working out. | ||
| All the oxygen you put in your body is a great necessity. | ||
| Again, they're one of those things that are even age-reversing. | ||
| It's also disease-preventative. | ||
| It's amazing, this thing. | ||
| And I got one that was... | ||
| You can sit in and do multiple things. | ||
| I can't just sit there for an hour and a half in the chamber and, like, I'll go crazy. | ||
| I have a busy brain, you know. | ||
| And so I get a computer or whatever, email, whatever I can do to kind of continue to do it, to make it a part of my life. | ||
| Oh, that's cool. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And then I go into, like, a red light bed, a high-powered red light infrared bed. | ||
| Then it moves all that oxygen through my body even more so and gets deeper into the tissue. | ||
| Amazing. | ||
| Yeah, I use both of those things. | ||
| Yeah, those are huge parts of my life. | ||
| Yeah, but I would imagine for something like what you went through, it's imperative. | ||
| Yeah, yeah, for tissue recovery, and oh man, huge, huge, huge. | ||
| Faster for repair. | ||
| And so from, so a year later, you're walking around. | ||
| Yeah, I was walking by, my daughter's birthday was March 28th, so... | ||
| I guess a few months later, I was walking, but it was assisted, very assisted, weak walking with cane or a walker. | ||
| So that had to be amazing. | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| And then I was, by the summertime, I stopped doing recovery. | ||
| The intense 24-hour day recovery. | ||
| I would do like a 12-hour day recovery and then go walk in the sand in Lake Tahoe. | ||
| Lake Tahoe is the world's biggest cold plunge. | ||
| It's a freezing-ass lake. | ||
| So I just go dip my legs in that lake, walk in the sand. | ||
| It's great for instability in your ankles, your joints, your hips. | ||
| And I would just do that kind of stuff. | ||
| Even ride a jet ski. | ||
| I was riding a jet ski in June. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Wow. | |
| Yeah, taking it easy. | ||
| I'm not doing anything nuts. | ||
| Just living life. | ||
| You know how good that is for your mental acuity, your spirit, your emotional body, and all that stuff. | ||
| So I was out in the sunshine getting vitamin D. I was in nature. | ||
| I was with friends. | ||
| I could do life stuff. | ||
| I'm back in life stuff. | ||
| That's a great confidence builder. | ||
| So I kept trying to do those things. | ||
| And then, of course, I have to go back into all the recovery stuff that I always do. | ||
| But I'm just happy I can do it. | ||
| What does the cold water feel like with, like, I mean, you have a rod through your tibia. | ||
| Yeah, the cold water, that's not the issue. | ||
| It's when it's cold weather. | ||
| Yeah? | ||
| Like anybody, you're stiffer. | ||
| Your blood slows and all that stuff. | ||
| So it doesn't help. | ||
| I need circulation in my joints. | ||
| Tendons don't get a lot of blood flow. | ||
| I really got to work at... | ||
| Getting blood flow in these joints. | ||
| Otherwise, they'll stiffen. | ||
| And I'm just slower going. | ||
| Everything just feels a little bit more robotic. | ||
| But I think that's... | ||
| Before injury, it's that for anybody, right? | ||
| Also, elevation. | ||
| I mean, 8,000 feet elevation in Tahoe. | ||
| So all those things aren't really kind of helping to my recovery, but my body will respond in those... | ||
| Oxygen-depleted environments and all that stuff. | ||
| So maybe it did help. | ||
| Maybe it didn't. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| But I did most of my initial recovery in LA. | ||
| And then when I could, I got out to Tahoe to be in my sort of happy place in nature. | ||
| Did they have to reconstruct your knees? | ||
| Did you? | ||
| No. | ||
| No. | ||
| None of that. | ||
| There was cracks in my ankles. | ||
| And my foot spun around a handful of times. | ||
| There was a spiral fracture in my leg. | ||
| So they had to... | ||
| Hit a rod down into my knee, and they had to screw it, screw it, you know, with plates and all that stuff. | ||
| So I didn't ensure I just moved those things. | ||
| So I don't know. | ||
| It wasn't full, like, reconstruction. | ||
| Like, people get a new knee or a new hip. | ||
| It was just a lot of breaks. | ||
| My pelvic broke in three spots, my hips. | ||
| You know, but you don't fix that. | ||
| They even said, you broke your asshole. | ||
| I'm like, is that what you say as a doctor? | ||
| Is that how you say it? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Come on. | |
| That's hilarious. | ||
| I think there's another word for it. | ||
| I think he was trying to make me laugh, and I did. | ||
| And Eric makes you laugh. | ||
| He's like, you broke everything, Jeremy. | ||
| You even broke your ass. | ||
| I'm like, alright, that's great. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Wow. | |
| Wow. | ||
| And so you've gone through the 12-hour, now you're in like this 12-hour day recovery. | ||
| Yeah, summertime, yeah. | ||
| So I gotta do like... | ||
| Just life stuff. | ||
| And that was really my first shot at allowing myself to think that there's a future and I'm not going to live a life of full-time recovery for the rest of my life. | ||
| Oh, I can actually go do some other things that I enjoy doing with people in kind of a normal way. | ||
| So I was without a cane, without anything by the time by June and summer came around. | ||
| So I'm moving around. | ||
| I'm moving around with inflammation and getting downstairs very slowly. | ||
| But as you would, as long as you're patient, as I was, as aggressive I was with my recovery, I allowed patients to also live within that aggressive attack on each joint or each inflammation or wherever it was. | ||
| I do allow patients. | ||
| Because I allow myself to push hard, hard, hard, hard. | ||
| I listen to my body. | ||
| The body says, fuck off. | ||
| I'm like, all right. | ||
| I'll chill out for a second and then keep going. | ||
| But I got to live life and that was so rewarding to my spirit and my confidence, which you need in those kind of dire times. | ||
| And I keep going. | ||
| And then, like I said, when we got to getting back to work because I got so ready. | ||
| Maybe I'm down to like four hours a day of recovery by the end of that first year. | ||
| I'm like, I'm gonna go back to work. | ||
| I need to get back out into the world and use life as my recovery and still only spend four hours a day on hyperbaric chamber, red light, whatever the heck I could do to... | ||
| I mix it all up. | ||
| It's a bunch of different stuff. | ||
| A lot of heat, a lot of vibration. | ||
| Power plate stuff. | ||
| That was really great for numbing the nerve endings, my back of my knees, back of my ankles, that kind of stuff. | ||
| I don't know if you ever used that stuff. | ||
| No. | ||
| What are you doing? | ||
| I used to have this thing. | ||
| God, what was it called? | ||
| It was a thing you stand on. | ||
| It's like it would shake you with different vibrations. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, yeah, yeah. | |
| And it would slow it down. | ||
| It would make it fast. | ||
| It's like that. | ||
| And that really was great for numbing the back of my knees. | ||
| That would really still ache. | ||
| Back of my ankles. | ||
| So it's not quite so sensitive. | ||
| I don't know if it floods the nerve endings with blood or whatever the heck it does, but it just kind of numbs it out. | ||
| I can go to sleep on it. | ||
| It's great. | ||
| It's beautiful. | ||
| I used to have one of those at my house in LA. | ||
| I don't even remember what it's called now. | ||
| It was just some machine. | ||
| It had a bunch of different programs. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, yeah. | |
| It's power plate. | ||
| It's probably a power plate. | ||
| Well, power plate, I think, is the one that you work out on. | ||
| You can. | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| This one was a little different. | ||
| This one would just shake you at a bunch of different frequencies. | ||
| Oh, interesting. | ||
| You would stand on it, and it was supposed to just do a bunch of stuff for your hormones and endocrine system and all sorts of different stuff just by the vibration. | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| Yeah, it helps me a lot. | ||
| Interesting. | ||
| For sure. | ||
| Oh, you're doing sauna and stuff like that as well? | ||
| Yeah, yeah, yeah. | ||
| I usually use just the red light bed. | ||
| It's shaped like a coffin or a Channing bed one. | ||
| It's just as effective, I think, as you're going to the sauna. | ||
| It doesn't take too long to heat up or anything. | ||
| You just get in that thing and cook. | ||
| It's amazing. | ||
| And it's amazing that even like an LED light like that or infrared light could warm you up so much, but it's intense. | ||
| I love it. | ||
| And then after a while, do you start lifting weights? | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| I started training as soon as I got the—when I started doing blood work because my hormone, my testosterone was at 200. | ||
| My hemoglobin was at 2. Everything was— Your body's just wrecked. | ||
| Oh, it's wrecked. | ||
| And I'm going back to work. | ||
| So I had to attack why I was falling asleep during workouts that I'm trying to do or whatever. | ||
| They only scheduled me to leave me six hours a day on set. | ||
| Because, you know, I fell asleep in the middle of a scene. | ||
| Oh, my God. | ||
| They're like, who's going to wake that fucker up? | ||
| Oh, man. | ||
| So, yeah, so I had to really work on that. | ||
| And once I got, I think it was really the testosterone. | ||
| Once I got that level to like 700, 800 constantly, then I had more energy. | ||
| And that allowed me more energy in the gym. | ||
| And once I had that, that got me more energy. | ||
| So it just started feeding upon itself. | ||
| I was doing blood panels every week. | ||
| And I just saw progress, progress, progress and then I just started lifting and I had so much energy and I felt better. | ||
| The more I lifted and moved and stretched and it just kept compiling just like most things in life and it got easier like most things. | ||
| Oxygen chamber, that's better when you compile on it. | ||
| Same with red light stuff. | ||
| No one time at anything is going to do anything, but if you do it often enough and make it a central part of your life, it's like, oh, I was on fire. | ||
| It's great. | ||
| I started running. | ||
| You can run now. | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| For distance? | ||
| Yeah, I mean, I don't know where I'm running to. | ||
| I was never a distance guy. | ||
| I was always a sprinter, right? | ||
| I was a sprinter from high school and college. | ||
| Does it hurt when you run? | ||
| It feels like... | ||
| If you've ever been in a car, you're on the freeway and it has a misalignment or it's a little shaky, or you've got a flat tire, it feels like I've got four flat tires when I'm running. | ||
| It looks great. | ||
| It looks like, oh, this guy has no problem with this guy. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Just boop, boop, boop, boop, boop. | |
| And it feels like the wheels are going to fall off. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| Mentally or something. | ||
| It just feels like it's... | ||
| Because it's a lot of pressure to put on all these joints, right? | ||
| I haven't sprinted really much in a while. | ||
| I haven't really worked on that. | ||
| I've been working on other things, you know, blood and cells and that kind of stuff. | ||
| So, I mean, sprinting is not, you know, what am I doing? | ||
| What am I going to do? | ||
| Sprint? | ||
| 54, for God's sakes. | ||
| Maybe, like, for, you know, because you do stunts in movies and maybe at some point I'll have to sprint. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| Or maybe not. | ||
| Maybe just don't do that shit, you know? | ||
| Yeah, well, maybe you can, though. | ||
| Sure I can. | ||
| I think you can. | ||
| I already have. | ||
| Believe it. | ||
| I just don't know if I want to make that a central part of the acting experience. | ||
| Well, that would be an absolutely phenomenal turnaround to go from where you were to going back to action films. | ||
| Yeah, yeah, to go play Hawkeye or something. | ||
| Yeah, that's what I'm saying. | ||
| Or Bourne Identity. | ||
| Yeah, that's tough. | ||
| That would be a tough one. | ||
| That was in excellent shape for that one. | ||
| That would be a challenge. | ||
| Yeah, I would imagine. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| Do I want to tax my body? | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| Probably should. | ||
| Is it taxing your body or is it strengthening your body? | ||
| Yeah, I don't know. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| Yeah, I don't know. | ||
| How many miles can you get on this stuff, right? | ||
| On titanium. | ||
| I think it's forever. | ||
| I think it's permanent. | ||
| I mean, everything you have just reinforces the recovery of the bones, right? | ||
| Yeah, yeah, yeah. | ||
| And then you just have a plate there that just keeps the bones in order. | ||
| Yep. | ||
| I mean, all the titanium in my body is useless at this point. | ||
| It did its job, and the bone's grown. | ||
| So it just stays there now. | ||
| Is there an argument that the titanium hinders you at all? | ||
| Well, I mean, it is foreign metal in your body. | ||
| It's not rejecting it, but there is a point where it could. | ||
| You know, just like allergies. | ||
| You don't get allergies sometimes for 40 years in your life and all of a sudden I'm allergic to down. | ||
| It could reject it. | ||
| Who knows? | ||
| You never know. | ||
| I'll cross that bridge. | ||
| I'm worrying about today. | ||
| I'm here with you. | ||
| I'll worry about that shit later. | ||
| It's just so impressive. | ||
| Yeah, it really is. | ||
| It really is amazing. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Because at any other time in history, you're dead. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, yeah. | |
| Any other time in history. | ||
| Oh, yeah. | ||
| 20 years ago, you're dead. | ||
| Connor. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| You're a Connor. | ||
| 20 years ago. | ||
| It's insane, right? | ||
| It's amazing. | ||
| It's amazing. | ||
| What a great blessing to have all those people, even the EMTs and all the people that were there, the life-saving stuff that did all the stuff that they had to do, man. | ||
| There's so much... | ||
| And I'm really known in that community, especially in the EMTs and all that sort of stuff. | ||
| I have a lot of firefighter friends and all that stuff, so it's just like a... | ||
| You're just getting a little extra juice and love from these people. | ||
| I knew... | ||
| One of my best friends is a firefighter in that area, Jesse, and he's just retired. | ||
| He got the phone call from his buddy who had to, like, stab my chest and release the pressure from the lung and da-da-da, like, on the ice. | ||
| And he's the one that says, look, dude, Jesse, Jeremy, we did the best we could, dude. | ||
| You don't want to get to the hospital. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Wow. | |
| And that's, like, code for, like, he's gone. | ||
| He's gone. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| But, I mean, but they were like, you know. | ||
| I talked to them all later. | ||
| I saw every nurse. | ||
| I saw every doctor. | ||
| I went by every ENT, even the pilot that flew me up there and just had to give everyone the biggest squeeze and apologize if I was a pain in the ass or whatever it was, man. | ||
| It's that reminds me of just why I'm back anyway and the only thing that you take with you is love, man. | ||
| The beginning of the audiobook is your daughter. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| That was the one I had the hardest time with. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Yeah. | ||
| Because it's... | ||
| Can you imagine? | ||
| Yeah, I can't imagine, you know? | ||
| Dude. | ||
| Does this... | ||
| I mean, it must forever change your perspective on life because you've crossed back. | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| Well, it just made it easier. | ||
| It's ripped away all the white noise, things I gave credence to, things I gave value to are just fucking meaningless. | ||
| Bullshit. | ||
| Bullshit. | ||
| All the bullshit. | ||
| Bullshit is gone. | ||
| And I just don't. | ||
| Sadly, I'm in a spinning rock with people and capitalism and stuff. | ||
| I just don't feel like I belong. | ||
| But I do. | ||
| A lot of times I just don't feel like I fit into how things work. | ||
| Or seem to work down here. | ||
| Or I just don't do things that I don't give value to. | ||
| I only do things that are valuable in my life. | ||
| That's it. | ||
| That is it. | ||
| I do nothing else. | ||
| It is amazing how much time and energy people put into things that ultimately at the end of the life, they're not valuable. | ||
| They don't mean anything. | ||
| And they occupy most of your thinking. | ||
| That's right. | ||
| Or even your time or your career. | ||
| Right? | ||
| How many people do careers that they fucking hate? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Whether they're in a marriage, they just fucking despise, you know, all this stuff. | ||
| You're spending too much time doing what? | ||
| Why, why, why? | ||
| Because of fear. | ||
| Because of fear, you get trapped, and it's too difficult to get out, and, you know, they get too deep and buried into some place that they get, I don't know, paint themselves in a corner, you know? | ||
| It's quite sad, you know? | ||
| It is sad, but it's also, I mean, there's an amazing example that you can... | ||
| Shine to the rest of the world that maybe people don't have to go through what you went through to realize that most of what you're thinking about all day, especially if you're one of those people that's wrapped up in social media, most of the things you're thinking about all day are just nonsense. | ||
| Just total nonsense that's stealing your life. | ||
| One of the reasons why I wrote the book is I hope there's things that I learned and the gifts that I received from Yeah. | ||
| and struggle. | ||
| It doesn't have to be a physical struggle, but, you know, it's a certain way to think and perspective to work your way through it because it is a lonely place. | ||
| And I think there's something beautiful about the narrative of an author to a reader or even just audio, which is even more intense because you get the 911 call and it's kind of dramatic in that sense, but, like, it's pretty intimate. | ||
| I think you can really move the needle for somebody. | ||
| The more open and honest and vulnerable I am in sharing the narrative, the more I have a chance at connecting with the reader or listener. | ||
| No doubt. | ||
| The thing is about when you're in the middle of a struggle, it never seems like you're going to get out of it. | ||
| And you're trapped. | ||
| And it's so difficult for people to trust the process or to trust that it will get better. | ||
| And this is unfortunately why a lot of people end their lives because they do not think it's going to get better. | ||
| And you hear it from so many people that almost took their life or failed when they tried to take their life and now realize, oh my god, I was so wrong. | ||
| It does get better. | ||
| I am better. | ||
| Everything's better. | ||
| And I just didn't see the light. | ||
| I didn't see the light at the end of the tunnel. | ||
| I thought there was just nothing but this feeling that I couldn't endure. | ||
| That hopelessness? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| That weighs heavy, doesn't it? | ||
| You can't afford that. | ||
| You can't give that power. | ||
| You can't give that power. | ||
| You can't. | ||
| I think anybody can sink into that, right? | ||
| Anybody can sink into that. | ||
| Anybody can sink into that. | ||
| It's just so hard for people that have never gone through something before. | ||
| If your life has been really easy and then all of a sudden you're tasked with one of the most difficult burdens ever, overcoming the fear and the feeling of wanting to end life because you can't take it. | ||
| See, I've been there. | ||
| I mean, Jesus. | ||
| Look, I think people need to suffer. | ||
| It is an actual requirement of life. | ||
| It is the fiber, the DNA of love. | ||
| Real love and true love and perpetuity can't exist without suffering. | ||
| It's impossible. | ||
| But you don't appreciate it. | ||
| Yeah, you have to have suffering. | ||
| And suffering doesn't have to be looked at as a negative thing. | ||
| It could be looked at as a beautiful thing. | ||
| It's where real love comes out of. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| You know, all my suffering, there was real love in there. | ||
| Everyone around me just in this recovery or in a loss I may have had from an uncle or a grandparent or whatever. | ||
| You know, there's real love that comes in that suffering. | ||
| You know, even though it can be a lonely experience. | ||
| I mean, I look at it. | ||
| That way. | ||
| And not as a negative, terrible thing. | ||
| Because it's just temporary. | ||
| And it's so counterintuitive, though. | ||
| What's that? | ||
| It's counterintuitive. | ||
| In a negative term of it, right? | ||
| But we all have to suffer, right? | ||
| I mean, it's part of the human experience, right? | ||
| It's the Joe Rogan experience. | ||
| I'm not suffering. | ||
| I'm having a great time with you. | ||
| But, you know, I don't think people welcome that or allow that to happen in their lives and let it be okay. | ||
| That the suffering that we suffer at the hard times are the building blocks to our... | ||
| To who we are. | ||
| It builds resilience. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| It builds character. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, yeah. | |
| It builds all those things. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I remember one time, I mean, this is a minor suffering in comparison, but one time I went on this hunting trip on Prince of Wales Island, which rains like 350 days a year. | ||
| And so we were up there for a week just getting drenched. | ||
| And, you know, you're camping, so you're in a tent, and you think, oh, well, I'll be dry in the tent. | ||
| You're not dry in the tent. | ||
| There's no dry. | ||
| There's no such thing as dry. | ||
| I remember I turned my headlamp on in the tent one. | ||
| Because I had to pee. | ||
| And I was going to step out of the tent to go to the bathroom in the rain. | ||
| And when I pressed the headlamp inside my tent, all I saw inside the tent was water vapor. | ||
| It was just filled with moisture. | ||
| There was just water, like droplets, all flying around inside the tent. | ||
| I'm like, oh my god. | ||
| You're never going to be dry. | ||
| There's no dry. | ||
| And, you know, it was just... | ||
| Miserable, but fun. | ||
| I was with good friends, and we had a good time. | ||
| Then I came back to LA, you know, a week later, and I remember I called my friend Steve Rinella. | ||
| I called because he's the one who took me on the trip, and I said, dude, it's sunny out, and I've never appreciated the sun like this before. | ||
| I'm at a level of happiness that I don't think I've ever felt before. | ||
| I'm just sitting outside with my eyes closed, just taking the sun. | ||
| It was wonderful. | ||
| LA is always sunny. | ||
| You get so used to it. | ||
| It's like you're a trust fund kid who can't appreciate money because you've always had it. | ||
| It doesn't mean anything to you. | ||
| But now all of a sudden just being drenched for seven days and being in that sun, I was like, ugh. | ||
| And then it made me realize, oh, you need to suffer. | ||
| Meaning to suffer, you're never going to appreciate this life. | ||
| And either you voluntarily suffer or you will suffer involuntarily because life, regular life will make you suffer. | ||
| Yeah, very true. | ||
| It seems sort of anti-human to want to do something to make yourself suffer, right? | ||
| It doesn't seem very sort of characteristics of... | ||
| We always want to take the fastest route to get somewhere. | ||
| It's just innate in kind of human nature to do that, sadly. | ||
| That leads to a life of complacency and mediocrity. | ||
| Well, if you look at life today, and if you look at society today, we have unprecedented levels of depression and unprecedented levels of anxiety and unhappiness. | ||
| Yet, it's probably the safest time ever. | ||
| And it's probably the easiest time ever. | ||
| It's so easy that poor people are fat. | ||
| That's how easy it is. | ||
| Like, that's never been the case. | ||
| All throughout history, poor people were starving. | ||
| And poor people are fat now. | ||
| Like, that's how easy it is to live, just to exist. | ||
| So, I mean, not saying that being poor is easy. | ||
| It's certainly not. | ||
| It's certainly a struggle. | ||
| But it's way easier than starving to death. | ||
| Like, this is like an unprecedented easy time. | ||
| And because of that, and because there's this narrative that people have to constantly seek comfort, to seek vacation and relaxation and retirement and all that bullshit. | ||
| And so that's in your head. | ||
| There's this softness to existence and so everything that comes your way is overwhelming. | ||
| Somebody said this once and it's like a great quote that I remember. | ||
| The worst thing that's ever happened to you is the worst thing that's ever happened to you regardless of how small that is. | ||
| So if the worst thing that's ever happened to you is like, I remember my girlfriend broke up with me when I was 18. And I was like, oh, I couldn't believe that I thought I was going to be with her forever. | ||
| I was so sad. | ||
| And then I think back, oh my god, that was the best thing that ever happened. | ||
| She was a nightmare. | ||
| But back then, I thought, I was probably a nightmare too. | ||
| But back then, I thought life was over, right? | ||
| Yeah, of course. | ||
| But you have to get through that in order to appreciate life, to really appreciate life. | ||
| We have this bizarre narrative in our head that you shouldn't suffer. | ||
| I know. | ||
| Where does that come from? | ||
| Well, because it used to be so difficult to live. | ||
| And so you would try to find a time where it wasn't difficult. | ||
| And so then it became the thing that everybody focused on. | ||
| Focused on chilling, relaxing. | ||
| And the people that I know that don't do anything and don't take any chances and don't take any risks and don't exercise and just seek comfort are the most miserable, anxiety-ridden people I know. | ||
| Pretty much dead inside, right? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| That's complacency. | ||
| And that's the definition of complacency in my mind. | ||
| But again, it's counterintuitive, right? | ||
| Yeah, exactly. | ||
| Because you think comfort is easy. | ||
| It's relaxing. | ||
| It's nice. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| But it's only relaxing if you've earned it. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Correct. | ||
| You've got to get through something in order to appreciate just chilling on the couch. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So that's why I always do – I have to fight my – I have to trick my own behavior into doing things I don't want to do all the time. | ||
| If I don't want to do it, I'm like, oh, I'm going to do it. | ||
| Don't even think about it. | ||
| Just go do it. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Because I know the lazy mind just wants to, like, oh, yeah, let me just skip the gym today or let me not do PT today or whatever the heck it is. | ||
| I don't want to get poked and prodded. | ||
| No, just do it. | ||
| Just go do it. | ||
| The thing you don't want to do is the thing you probably should be doing. | ||
| Almost always. | ||
| Yeah, and that's why I pretty much always just do that. | ||
| It gets me out of my way, out of complacency, just like laziness. | ||
| It doesn't exist because I do the opposite of what I want to do. | ||
| Well, that's why you're happy. | ||
| And that's why I'm so full of joy, dude. | ||
| I'm so happy. | ||
| I've never been happier, more connected to humans, more connected to my daughter, more connected to myself, more centered in my spirit, where I am right now, where I'll go, where I'll be, where I always am and always have been. | ||
| It's beautiful, man. | ||
| It's beautiful. | ||
| You gotta conquer your inner bitch. | ||
| You do, man. | ||
| That's what it is. | ||
| There's an inner bitch inside of everyone that's like, let's just do nothing. | ||
| You gotta go shut the fuck up. | ||
| You have to have like two minds. | ||
| Yeah, well you gotta surround yourself with others too that can inspire you too, right? | ||
| So then you do things as a, even as you and I go work out and do something, it's a lot easier than going to the gym by yourself, right? | ||
| Because we are social creatures, so let's do things that, like I'm doing, like I'm building a I have a whole rehab recovery center at my house. | ||
| Maybe I can open this to the public and make this a communal cool thing so everyone has access to this stuff. | ||
| I'm still considering doing that. | ||
| Just make it a place to be and hang so everyone can do it. | ||
| It's not just me. | ||
| Separating myself from other people. | ||
| Whatever it might be in my life. | ||
| I try to find ways to make it a communal thing so it makes it easier to... | ||
| To continue this in perpetuity. | ||
| That's another counterintuitive thing. | ||
| It's like you have to understand how important community is. | ||
| It's like a vitamin. | ||
| Yeah, big time. | ||
| It really is. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Well, that's a shared experience, too, that comes with that. | ||
| Negative or positive, in the tent with your friends. | ||
| And if you're alone in doing that, you have no one to share that misery with. | ||
| But at least you shared that experience with somebody. | ||
| You're like, dude, I never thought I'd love the sun so much. | ||
| Remember when we were fucking eating ass, sucking on the rainwater in that tent? | ||
| But even a negative experience can be, but it's shared. | ||
| It's still quite beautiful. | ||
| And it's a map, a milestone, a part of your life that uses barometer to change or appreciate the sun more or whatever it might be, right? | ||
| So those shared experiences, I think, are invaluable. | ||
| It's the only thing I chase in my life is that. | ||
| For people that ever want to start a fire when everything's wet, Fritos. | ||
| You know, little Fritos, little bags of Fritos? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, yeah. | |
| Those little motherfuckers are so toxic that if you light those things, they're like little fire starters. | ||
|
unidentified
|
No way. | |
| Yeah, man. | ||
| Fritos are crazy flammable. | ||
| They stay lit for a long-ass time because they're just soaked with oil. | ||
| Oil, yeah. | ||
| Yeah, like whatever oil, whatever horrible fucking seed oil, whatever fucking industrial lubricant those fucking things are made out of. | ||
| But when you light, they're essentially some sort of a corn byproduct and oil. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oh, right. | |
| Right. | ||
| And so if you light those fuckers on fire and then you get some semi-dry sticks and light them, light those. | ||
| And we started one fire one day because one day it didn't rain. | ||
| So that one day it didn't rain. | ||
| Me and my friend Brian Callen, we were determined to start a fire. | ||
| And so we just found like the driest possible. | ||
| Well, nothing was dry, but driest possible sticks and twigs and started it and then dried some logs out. | ||
| And they were hissing and steam was coming off them as we were lighting it. | ||
| Fritos. | ||
| Fritos are an amazing fire starter. | ||
| Kind of crazy. | ||
| That's crazy. | ||
| Makes you think about eating, though. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I was just going to say, I was about to eat this shit? | |
| Which brings me to another question. | ||
| How much did you alter your diet after all this? | ||
| Because I would imagine anything that causes inflammation then becomes an issue. | ||
| Yeah, I didn't go down so much that route. | ||
| I was eating pretty good. | ||
| It didn't go into things that... | ||
| I haven't gone into that, even yet, to like, oh, what causes inflammation? | ||
| What am I eating that does that? | ||
| I haven't really gotten that far into it yet. | ||
| I'm still... | ||
| I'm sure I will. | ||
| There was a doctor who also helped me eat stuff, and I have people prepare some certain things for me, but I couldn't tell you what causes inflammation that I put in my mouth. | ||
| Could not. | ||
| I mean, maybe if I have wine, probably does. | ||
| Yeah, a little bit. | ||
| Alcohol does, for sure. | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| But again, I don't do – I really am good at moderating all things, all things good and bad. | ||
| So my body has a chance to sort of exist and it's not forced too many supplements, too many peptides, too many anything. | ||
| All good stuff I sort of just moderate. | ||
| So once I got my blood right – because I was like – 205 pounds. | ||
| I'd never been more than $1.65. | ||
| And it's just all this surgery weight and all this stuff, and it's hard to get off when you have your hemoglobin's 2. I just have new energy. | ||
| Also, you probably have to eat a lot, too, because your body needs calories in order to help you recover. | ||
| Proteins, too. | ||
| And also, it's difficult to eat because, again, my molars got pushed in. | ||
| It's hard to chew. | ||
| I look fine, but to chew on a steak and asparagus thing, it's tough for me to get through. | ||
| Still, to this day? | ||
| Yeah, it'll be forever. | ||
| I can't fix it. | ||
| If I start to move those molars again, they'll probably fall out. | ||
| Oh, wow. | ||
| Yeah, and I'd rather keep them and just be uncomfortable. | ||
| So they just got pushed in. | ||
| Yeah, this side. | ||
| Yeah, it's usually sort of like just like an arc to your thing. | ||
| So my bite just kind of arcs and then goes straight back. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oh, wow. | |
| Yeah, all these got pushed in and broke the jaw three times here. | ||
| And then just breaking the jaw, it doesn't ever really heal right. | ||
| So biting down is quite... | ||
| It's annoying. | ||
| It's full chaos in my mouth, but I don't bitch about it. | ||
| I just sort of accept what it is. | ||
| It could have been so much worse. | ||
| I have all my teeth. | ||
| I have a smile. | ||
| It's great. | ||
| I feel great. | ||
| I'm walking, I'm breathing, and I have love and joy in my life. | ||
| So who cares about what happens in my mouth, man? | ||
| Right. | ||
|
unidentified
|
You know what I mean? | |
| Yeah. | ||
| No, it's really kind of an amazing story. | ||
| It's just amazing how these stories can be so inspirational for other people too, which is why I'm really glad you wrote your book. | ||
| Because these stories, like autobiographies, especially of people that you admire, that you've seen in movies before, it's like those struggles, they're so real. | ||
| And when someone's going through something themselves and they can turn to your book... | ||
| It can give them a lot. | ||
| It's fuel for people. | ||
| It really is. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| For me as well. | ||
| I mean I resisted writing it because I still don't know how or why it can and will inspire people. | ||
| I can only make assumptions and I think it's so particular to the actual reader and the person. | ||
| So I can never sort of pontificate on how or why it's important or not. | ||
| But it is like it was an achievement for me to get through it word by word that I didn't want to do. | ||
| To relive it. | ||
| Because it's in my body. | ||
| I talk about it all the time. | ||
| It is a part of my narrative. | ||
| It's a part of my life. | ||
| Recovery is just my life. | ||
| And I love it. | ||
| I enjoy it. | ||
| I feel better. | ||
| I look better and all that stuff. | ||
| But the book now is a tangible sort of... | ||
| This is a great dialogue that we'll have as long as we want. | ||
| But it's just a dialogue that exists. | ||
| But now this is a tangible object with words. | ||
| The words don't change. | ||
| They stay there like a tablet. | ||
| And something kind of interesting about that is like a milestone or a tangible thing that now it exists in the world. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| And psychologically that says a lot to me. | ||
| So even when I do die, that's still there so that maybe it can help somebody even when I can't. | ||
| Be there to talk with them or whatever it might be or even exist, right? | ||
| Or it'll exist long after you're gone. | ||
| Yeah, it's pretty interesting because I do movies and things like that or music. | ||
| Those are like the same thing as a conversation. | ||
| They just sort of exist in the moment. | ||
| Like, you know, it's great going to a concert, but then it's over. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| And then that's it. | ||
| Well, what happened? | ||
| Well, I could tell you about the concert. | ||
| But something about something existing beyond your life is something pretty interesting. | ||
| What was the process like of writing? | ||
| Did you physically sit down and write things? | ||
| Initially, I have a ghostwriter who helped me because I've never written a book. | ||
| I've written a lot, but I've never written a book. | ||
| So I wanted to get the format right. | ||
| So we would work through this format. | ||
| It's almost like an outline. | ||
| So we'd just do interview by each of the sections of this outline that we put out. | ||
| So then we would just talk like this. | ||
| Let's talk about this thing. | ||
| Take me moment by moment. | ||
| In the accident. | ||
| I'm like, all right, let's do that. | ||
| And we'd meet every day for like two, three hours, however long I could sustain going word by word on it. | ||
| And we recorded all the things. | ||
| And I would write on my own because it would kick up new memories and start writing about the Lamaze thing. | ||
| And, oh, gosh, that came up. | ||
| And that became a whole chapter in the book about breathing, my awareness to breathing. | ||
| I hope it became so important in my life. | ||
| Anyway, so I just kept going and writing and writing and writing. | ||
| Then I would do talks to companies. | ||
| I would speak to kids at schools. | ||
| All this was part of the writing experience because you can ask me the same question, but we're in this environment. | ||
| But then if I'm with my family and I answer the same question, it's the same kind of answer but different. | ||
| So I kept learning more and more. | ||
| Data and information was stored in my brain and my heart and my spirit, and I had to unearth it and put it down into words, which I found to be the most difficult thing. | ||
| Because as we speak, like I'm doing now, it's free to speak whatever you want, but to write down the words, oh wait, there's accountability to the words because they're written. | ||
| And you have more word choice. | ||
| My brain doesn't operate as fast as I'd like to for my vocabulary. | ||
| I'd probably drop way too many F-bombs instead of really great words that I do know. | ||
| So it was nice to be able to take the time and spend the agony to really kind of express Word by word through it, you know, in a very real honest way. | ||
| It's more like a diary, a recounting diary, than it was trying to be fancy with words and overcomplicate something that's really quite so simple. | ||
| What was the process like of going over the words and deciding what to keep and what to edit out and how to format everything? | ||
| What order to talk about things in? | ||
| The order always was working for me from the beginning. | ||
| It allowed for flexibility for what would come up in conversations, in the writing. | ||
| It allowed for fluidity. | ||
| But there's a beginning, middle, and end to this. | ||
| We already knew the end. | ||
| We already knew the beginning. | ||
| And so it was the branches off of... | ||
| I didn't know I was going to talk about Lamaze in this book. | ||
| Didn't know that was a huge... | ||
| Milestone in my life. | ||
| That got me to understand what conscious breathing was and mitigate pain. | ||
| Because there's this whole thing about Lamaze. | ||
| I was taken at 12 years old. | ||
| My mom was pregnant with my sister. | ||
| And she said, put down the cleats, son. | ||
| You're not going to soccer practice. | ||
| Just grab a pillow. | ||
| You're coming with me to the class. | ||
| I'm like, what class? | ||
| It was Lamaze class at the YMCA. | ||
| And my stepdad was out driving a truck or something. | ||
| And so my mom, she also needed me not to be alone. | ||
| And she needed, you know, whatever. | ||
| So she brought me. | ||
| The oldest. | ||
| And I laid there with a pillow between her legs and teaching her how to breathe and short breaths. | ||
| And then they pulled down a screen. | ||
| Then they showed this midwife birth at home in a bathtub and squirting out water and this whole thing. | ||
| Like, what's going on? | ||
| I'm 12 years old. | ||
| I'm mortified. | ||
| I'm like, what happened? | ||
| Is that a whale breaching? | ||
| What was going on? | ||
| You know, and so that came up in just sort of me and my partner talking about it. | ||
| And he's like, dude, you don't realize that? | ||
| I'm like, yeah. | ||
| Well, this is why the book's called My Next Breath. | ||
| You know, it's all about breathing. | ||
| And breathing was such an essential part of my recovery, my essential part of my, you know, not dying. | ||
| And to get through each and every moment. | ||
| The perspective of breath. | ||
| And it is not a conscious thought. | ||
| It is, right? | ||
| It's just, it's reflexive in our body. | ||
| And when we make it a consciousness, when we invest into our breath. | ||
| What you can do with your mind with your breath, right? | ||
| It opens up. | ||
| The more you breathe, the more you get oxygen in your body. | ||
| It's just feeding all of it. | ||
| It feeds you. | ||
| It only feeds you. | ||
| People yawn, and I say the example of like, oh, you're tired. | ||
| No, you're not tired. | ||
| It's your body that you know that you need to breathe, get more oxygen in yourself, right? | ||
| So you're not tired. | ||
| You just need more O2. | ||
| That's all. | ||
| Your body's making that happen. | ||
| Isn't it fascinating that everybody breathes? | ||
| So everybody thinks, oh, breathing, what's the big deal? | ||
| It's like nothing. | ||
| Have you ever read James Nestor's Breath? | ||
| It's actually Breathe, I guess. | ||
| But it's an amazing book on breathing techniques and the history of breathing techniques and all the different things that people have achieved with breathing techniques, including holotropic breathing, which achieves psychedelic states of consciousness and all these different feats of incredible physical endurance that people have achieved through breath work. | ||
| It's a pretty amazing book. | ||
| It was a guest of mine on the podcast a few years back. | ||
| But I read his book and started really getting into it and really trying to practice different breathing exercises. | ||
| There's a bunch of breathing exercises you can use for anxiety, for overcoming very stressful situations. | ||
| But when you say that to most people, oh, breathing, they're like, oh, you're one of those guys. | ||
| You're concentrating on your breathing. | ||
| What else are you concentrating on? | ||
| Blinking? | ||
|
unidentified
|
You know what I mean? | |
| It's like you can minimalize it. | ||
| You have a reductionist perspective where you don't think it's anything big, especially if you've never practiced it. | ||
| You know, especially with like yogic breathing, you can achieve some bizarre states of relaxation and consciousness through breathing. | ||
| Yeah, big time. | ||
| I always try, whenever I explain it to somebody, I say like when I use it. | ||
| I don't do it like on a daily basis. | ||
| I mean, maybe now I do. | ||
| But I did it for, like you said, for anxiety when I was nervous in an audition. | ||
| How do I get out of this situation? | ||
| Like, I'm not in my body. | ||
| My heart's going like this. | ||
| I'm like, I'm not. | ||
| I can't read these lines. | ||
| And I hear, like, Sean Penn in the room. | ||
| And I'm supposed to go there and be better than this guy. | ||
| I'm like, oh, I'm freaking out. | ||
| I'm sweating. | ||
| So I said, screw this. | ||
| I leave the room. | ||
| I go out of the building. | ||
| I go out into the street, like on Sunset Boulevard somewhere. | ||
| Find a tree that's rooted in this damn earth. | ||
| It might look ridiculous. | ||
| I don't care. | ||
| But the courage to go down on your knees, go... | ||
| By the route, be in this earth. | ||
| It just takes 10 deep breaths as cars are honking and da-da on Sunset Boulevard. | ||
| I don't give a shit. | ||
| I'm back in my body. | ||
| I'm back on this earth. | ||
| Here I am. | ||
| Let's fucking go. | ||
| I went back up in that room and I smashed that audition. | ||
| I don't remember if I got the role in that, but it doesn't matter. | ||
| I was back in my body. | ||
| I was back on earth, right? | ||
| It wasn't like in the state of hysteria or nervousness or that, you know, because I don't like that feeling. | ||
| So I found a way to overcome that feeling. | ||
| Some people might just live in that feeling all the time. | ||
| They might like it. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| I don't think they like it. | ||
| I don't think anybody likes it. | ||
| I think the problem is you just get trapped in that feeling and then the moment something comes up that's very difficult Yeah, that causes you to spiral again. | ||
| You just you lose control. | ||
| Yeah, terrible. | ||
| I think it's one of the most difficult things about this whole audition process that actors go through is that there's this That's a golden carrot that's at the end of the stick. | ||
| And if you do a good job, you might be a fucking movie star. | ||
| You know what I mean? | ||
| Which seems impossible, right? | ||
| Right. | ||
| I mean, it must have seemed impossible before you pulled it off, right? | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| It was never like something I was ever aiming for, really. | ||
| What were you aiming for? | ||
| Truth. | ||
| In everything I was doing. | ||
| Truth? | ||
| Yeah, honesty. | ||
| How did you... | ||
| Because if I don't believe it, then how do I expect someone watching me to believe it? | ||
| I have to ensure that everything I'm doing is truthful and honest and courageous and bold and all the things. | ||
| So it was never to try to be a movie star. | ||
| I just wanted to work. | ||
| I never wanted to be famous. | ||
| How did you acquire that perspective? | ||
| Oh, I don't know. | ||
| I was clear about what I wanted. | ||
| Very clear about what I wanted. | ||
| I didn't move down to L.A. to be... | ||
| Famous. | ||
| I moved to L.A. to be in a movie, be in a movie that was big enough that I would play in Modesto, California, where I'm from, because you don't get all the movies there, right? | ||
| And being a part in that movie that I wouldn't have to tell my family, you know, I'm the guy in the red shirt waving in the background. | ||
| It's a part big enough that you would just know I'm in the movie. | ||
| And I got that, all those goals, in the first job I ever did on camera. | ||
| In this National Lampoon senior trip movie. | ||
| So then I had to recalibrate now new goals. | ||
| So I'll get myself... | ||
| And I was working enough. | ||
| So I never... | ||
| My goals were always to... | ||
| By the time I got Dahmer and Hurt Locker and all these kind of stuff, I was ready for that stuff. | ||
| But I was like 38 by that time. | ||
| I was like the new guy in town at 38. Right. | ||
| Isn't that crazy? | ||
| Yeah, I was just ready. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hurt Locker is fucking amazing. | |
| It's one of the most complex movies about a very bizarre psychological state. | ||
| That people acquire or that people fall into when it comes to war. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| What was it like getting into that mindset? | ||
| It was interesting. | ||
| I got to spend, you know, I was at Fort Irwin for about a year learning how to build bombs and render them safe. | ||
| For a year? | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| Got to spend time with the guys and gals off campus, off base. | ||
| Interesting. | ||
| I love the whole experience, you know. | ||
| And then got to go shoot the movie, and that was on the Iraqi border in Jordan during the war. | ||
| And it's 135 degrees in a 100-pound bomb suit, you know. | ||
| It's not even hot anymore. | ||
| It's just sort of like you let that go. | ||
| You just are. | ||
| It's kind of a spiritual sort of place you have to go in that kind of heat. | ||
| And also you're drinking enough water. | ||
| Like, you know, how am I drinking all this water? | ||
| You're not even taking a leak and like, oh, I'm so dehydrated. | ||
| I got to be careful. | ||
| And that's, you know, yeah, pretty interesting. | ||
| Pretty interesting experience, you know. | ||
| What were the conversations like when you were talking to the people that actually did that? | ||
| Well, most of them look like, you know, Schoolteachers. | ||
| There's like one or two guys that one guy was like, kind of built like huge, big guy, brown guy. | ||
| The rest of them were like, you know, the guy I know did three tours. | ||
| He looks like he's totally out of shape. | ||
| His stomach is way bigger than his chest. | ||
| He's just kind of doo-doo-doo-doo-doo. | ||
| This guy did three tours. | ||
| This guy's no joke. | ||
| It's all mental. | ||
| It's all such a mental game because you have to be cool in those high intense situations because you're dealing with 155 explosives that'll blow this building off the block. | ||
| And the level of intensity is really interesting. | ||
| They were so comfortable around C4 and all these things. | ||
| You've got to be careful. | ||
| These blasting caps and all these things that people were getting injured all the time. | ||
| They got really uncomfortable when I took them to a bar in LA. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Why? | |
| We were sitting at the bar and I asked. | ||
| I'm like, what's going on? | ||
| It was the big guy. | ||
| I can't remember his name. | ||
| He's like, I don't like where we're sitting. | ||
| What do you mean? | ||
| He's like, I need my back to the wall. | ||
| I need to know where the exit's at. | ||
| I'm like, interesting. | ||
| I sit like that as well. | ||
| I don't like to have... | ||
| I don't think it's a trust issue. | ||
| I just like to kind of... | ||
| I'd have my back to somewhere I know where the exit is, where the bathroom is. | ||
| I look for the most dangerous man in the room, the hottest girl in the room. | ||
| Just do like a Terminator checklist. | ||
| And that was supported by how these guys thought. | ||
| And it's that same kind of thing. | ||
| They just noticed everything. | ||
| Just data. | ||
| Okay, now I can go be here. | ||
| I assess the room. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And I feel safe. | ||
| Situational awareness. | ||
| Yeah, situational awareness. | ||
| I always had that, but, like, really doing that role and spending so much time with these crew of amazing people just heightened that for me. | ||
| I've always been a quiet and observer, and this is where I just got information. | ||
| I can tell you the color of the hinges if they match the finish on the doorknobs in places. | ||
| It's just how my brain works. | ||
| Always. | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| Well, it's awesome. | ||
| I'm a home builder and designer, so I kind of pay attention to that kind of stuff anyway. | ||
| But it sort of just kind of helps me out in life, I guess. | ||
| And so when you were preparing for Hurt Locker, was it your decision to spend a year doing this? | ||
| Well, no, it wasn't about the amount of time. | ||
| I think I was maybe to go for maybe a few months. | ||
| Catherine Bigelow, the director, just sort of introduced me and said, all right, they're ready for you out at the base if you want to go. | ||
| So I kind of went out and just kind of did it all on my own and just waiting for the movie to kind of get up and get green and go. | ||
| It just took a little bit longer. | ||
| I think we're waiting for one of the actors that was doing another job to finish and then we could start. | ||
| And then it wasn't an easy independent film to kind of get up and get rolling. | ||
| But once we did, we were rocking. | ||
| But yeah, it didn't meant to be like a year, year and a half. | ||
| She just called me and she's like, are you ready to go? | ||
| I'm like, yeah, like I'm getting deployed. | ||
| I'm like, yeah, let's go. | ||
| I'm ready. | ||
| And then I also – like we didn't even have a – like an EOD sort of tech on the shoot. | ||
| I had to be the person that – and I had to call back. | ||
| I'm like, I don't know. | ||
| This doesn't look right. | ||
| They set up these 155s and it's electrical and it should be debt cord and all these things that I learned. | ||
| But I wasn't an expert by any means. | ||
| I just wanted to make it look authentic in the movie. | ||
| So I had to call back and call me back and we took a picture of this shit. | ||
| I don't think it's right. | ||
| Oh, wow. | ||
| And yeah, so. | ||
| Well, that's fortunate that you had so much experience. | ||
| Yeah, it was great. | ||
| Because if there's anything in that movie, especially for people that actually did that, that takes you out of it. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And I wouldn't want to do that because we wanted to be very authentic to what we were doing. | ||
| We are still making a movie, but let's live in this world. | ||
| And look, the narrative is the characters that live in this bizarre world in a very relevant time, in this war that we're in, and also the struggles of, you know, soldier and civilian life. | ||
| And because they were civilians and now they became soldiers, they'd be put in prison for life for doing the shit they're getting paid to do now. | ||
| And that was a wonderful sort of outcome of the movie of how it bridged that sort of gap or the struggles with PTSD and coming back from this harrowing sort of existence and war. | ||
| And then coming back in like the cereal aisle. | ||
| That example of like, oh, really? | ||
| Or in the rain and you appreciate the sun. | ||
| It's just such a polar opposite. | ||
| This is my existence. | ||
| It became such a really wonderful starting point for wives to deal with their husbands that came back. | ||
| They can kind of understand a little bit of what they might have gone through just in general. | ||
| The broad strokes of how hard it is. | ||
| And then to come back and change diapers. | ||
| You know what I mean? | ||
| That became such a powerful thing in that narrative that I found after we did it and we're showing it to all the military bases. | ||
| It's always going to be a special experience in my life and I'll always be connected to a lot of soldiers because of that. | ||
| Well, it was a really well done movie. | ||
| There was a thing about that movie that made you think in a way, or made me think in a way that I don't think I ever thought before. | ||
| Like, oh, I never considered what this transition to civilian life is like after dealing with the unbelievable stress of being in a war zone, defusing bombs. | ||
| And then wanting to go back. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| But it made you understand. | ||
| It made you understand, like, oh, fuck, he wants to go back. | ||
| Like, oh, my God. | ||
| Like, watching the movie. | ||
| When a movie can do that to you, it can take you into that psychology of the person that would be in that state and make it make sense. | ||
| Like, that was a great movie. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I'm just happy to be part of it. | ||
| It was more than just, you know, it wasn't just a story. | ||
| It was like you're documenting a very real condition. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| That through art, you put words to these people's existence where they don't have anybody representing that. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| That's why it means a lot to me. | ||
| They let me know it means a lot to them. | ||
| That's the most special thing. | ||
| Fuck the movie part of it. | ||
| It's created a dialogue for a lot of broken families and united families better. | ||
| Like you said, it's a greater understanding of that difference of soldier-civilian life. | ||
| It's a great bridge for it. | ||
| Yeah, I remember. | ||
| I'm very proud of that. | ||
| I saw it, and then I went back to the comedy store, and I said, oh, man, we saw Hurt Locker last night. | ||
| And my friend went, dude. | ||
| And I went, dude. | ||
| And that was all we had to say. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Like, fuck, man. | |
| It was that kind of movie that's just like, oh, my God. | ||
| It just gives you anxiety. | ||
| And it also just makes you really reflect and think about what war. | ||
| Yeah, it's interesting. | ||
| How do you decide what roles to pick? | ||
| When you're at this sort of stage in your life where you're so well-known, people come to you with things, and you have to decide whether or not this project is something that resonates with you. | ||
| Well, now it's different. | ||
| The central part of my life for so long was my career. | ||
| And then my daughter came around, and then she's number one. | ||
| So then I would do the job that would... | ||
| Allow me still to be a father because I'm not going to not be a father because my job takes me away for long periods of time and I'm just not doing that in far places. | ||
| So I'm not working out of the country anymore once my daughter was born. | ||
| So I always had reach and access to my daughter as fast as I needed to be. | ||
| And then now, after the incident, it's even tightened up more and loosened up more because my daughter is now 12 and she doesn't need me. | ||
| As much, she wants her friends a little bit more. | ||
| Right, right, right. | ||
| That's a little bit lower than the totem pole. | ||
| Just temporarily, I know. | ||
| And also, I can travel. | ||
| Like, I just worked last summer on a job. | ||
| There's a movie called Knives Out. | ||
| And then I brought my whole family with me. | ||
| Knives Out was great. | ||
| Yeah, it's awesome. | ||
| Yeah, so this is going to be a really good one, too. | ||
| But I was able to bring my entire family out. | ||
| Like, 15 people came out, because a lot of them not well-traveled, and I got to see a lot of Europe. | ||
| I took my mom and my daughter to the Olympics in Paris. | ||
| Dope. | ||
| Got to spend a couple weeks in Italy. | ||
| Oh, that's cool. | ||
| Yeah, so we can do that kind of stuff now. | ||
| So I did the job essentially just to have a summer vacation with my family. | ||
| Oh, nice. | ||
| So that's kind of how I decide. | ||
| And also, I did love the character. | ||
| I did love – I mean, come on. | ||
| All that has to line in there too. | ||
| I'm not just going to do a job for a job. | ||
| But it just lined up. | ||
| But my family has to be involved. | ||
| My daughter has to be involved. | ||
| Friends have to be involved. | ||
| Otherwise, I'm not going to remove myself from all those shared experiences with people in my life just so I can go do a movie. | ||
| I don't want to do any movie that bad. | ||
| So that's my limitation. | ||
| Well, that limitation is real success too. | ||
| Do you really choose things that you're actually passionate about that fit within these parameters and allow you to live your life the way you want to? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And work with people that inspire me and think, you know, I'm just not going to do a job like you can't pay me. | ||
| Maybe you could put a trillion dollars in front of me. | ||
| Go do this. | ||
| You only need you for two weeks. | ||
| I'm like, eh, it doesn't fit. | ||
| It doesn't check all the boxes that have real value. | ||
| Right. | ||
| The shared experience, the joy with my daughter, my family, my friends. | ||
| And, you know, then it's just not worth it to me. | ||
| To do a job. | ||
| I don't. | ||
| Right. | ||
| You do it because you want to. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And that's, to me, what retirement is. | ||
| I'm doing what I want to do with who I want to do it with. | ||
| And I'm still always going to be busy and work all my life. | ||
| I'll do that. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Let's not retire. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It's just a better life. | ||
| Well, it is in my mind. | ||
| I'm a busy guy and I like to contribute. | ||
| I'm very busy doing the Renovation Foundation, right? | ||
| Which is a huge... | ||
| Big central part of my life with my family that runs this charitable foundation in my community in Lake Tahoe for foster youth and disadvantaged youth and giving them opportunities that they don't have these poor kids. | ||
| And that's great. | ||
| And I love that. | ||
| I love I get – but is that retirement? | ||
| It's going to keep me busy until I die. | ||
| It's weird that you have to frame things like career or retirement. | ||
| It's really just life, life and passions. | ||
| Yeah, exactly. | ||
| But I don't think a lot of people are doing what they want to do in their life anyway. | ||
| But yeah, I'll always work, always do the things I love to do and I'm still continuing to do the things I love to do just on my own terms. | ||
| I wouldn't be able to start this foundation if I wasn't living life on my own terms. | ||
| I am satiated beyond satiated. | ||
| I don't need anything. | ||
| I require a shared experience on this earth and that is it. | ||
| Is this more so now since the accident? | ||
| Well, it's always been that. | ||
| But there's a lot of things in the way or things I allowed to be in the way or things I put in the way. | ||
| Allowed to be in the way. | ||
| Yeah, I allowed to be in the way. | ||
| And now I do not. | ||
| I refute it. | ||
| I push it away. | ||
| I am certainly clear when I put obstacles on my own way, when I get my own way, we all do that shit too. | ||
| But so I'm just very, very, very clear. | ||
| And I keep – I oversimplify life because life is just that simple. | ||
| If we complicate it, then you're going to have an overcomplicated life and it's just not as valuable, I think. | ||
| I live both. | ||
| And the wonderful oversimplification has allowed me to, again, use the word retirement in my mind. | ||
| I'm just living a life that I want to live, that I deserve to live, that I choose to live, and not be limited or rabbit-holed or victimized by... | ||
| Society or the country I'm living in or the neighborhood I'm living in or the job I have. | ||
| I don't have any limitations because I'm making manifest everything that I have in my life. | ||
| And it feels great. | ||
| I'm the captain of the ship. | ||
| It might take a minute to turn this bitch around, right? | ||
| But I'm the captain of this damn ship. | ||
| It's called my life. | ||
| And I think everybody has the capacity to do so. | ||
| Well, that's another beautiful thing of living life by example that can inspire people. | ||
| Because that's really what people want to do. | ||
| They want to live a life where they feel like, this is great. | ||
| Like, what I'm doing is what I want to do. | ||
| They don't... | ||
| Most people, they don't live like that. | ||
| Most people... | ||
| They have this dream in the future, one day I will be able to live the way I want to, but I'm not doing it right now. | ||
| Right, right. | ||
| I think that's a trap, personally. | ||
| I think you're doing it already. | ||
| The journey is there. | ||
| There's no end result. | ||
| I know, but there's so many narratives that people adhere to. | ||
| There's so many narratives out there in culture. | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| Where they tell you, you should be doing this, and you should be doing that. | ||
| This is a concentrate on your 401k, and you're this and that. | ||
| What are your investments? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And at the end of the night, you need a pill to go to sleep. | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| It's even crazier now with social media and all that. | ||
| That's poison. | ||
| That's this white noise of garbage, man. | ||
| I've been off it lately for the last few weeks where I literally just check it when I'm taking a shit and that's it. | ||
| I look to see if there's anything crazy going on in the world just so I know what's happening. | ||
| But I don't ever get involved. | ||
| I don't ever... | ||
| Argue with people or post things and I just see people doing it and I'm like, you're losing your fucking mind and I've had conversations with friends and they're like, you know, you know what fucking this and that and that and this. | ||
| I'm like, why? | ||
| Why are you paying attention? | ||
| This is like, let's go outside. | ||
| Look, look at all the birds. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Look, it's beautiful. | |
| Look at the clouds. | ||
| What a lovely day. | ||
| You're alive in America in 2025. | ||
| It's like a magical time to be alive and you're concentrating on some shit that literally has no effect on your life. | ||
| You're making it your primary focus. | ||
| That is the definition of madness. | ||
| Yeah, it really is. | ||
| Yeah, you're freaking out about things that aren't even here. | ||
| Yeah, well, that's where you get in your way. | ||
| You're giving that value. | ||
| You don't have to, you know? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| But, you know, it's just like... | ||
| Perspective is a very difficult thing to earn. | ||
| It is, right? | ||
| How do we get it? | ||
| Experience? | ||
| Experience, overcoming adversity, developing character, shared experience. | ||
| That's a big part of it. | ||
| With people that you love and you really connect with. | ||
| Who you surround yourself with. | ||
| That's most of the key to life. | ||
| If you surround yourself with really great people, you're forced to become a really great person. | ||
| It's like you have to keep up with it. | ||
| This foundation, tell me how you started that. | ||
| It initially started with a show that I produced and put on Disney +, which is called Renovations. | ||
| I didn't like to see a lot of vehicles go to waste, like purpose-built vehicles, like a city bus or a fire truck and all these things. | ||
| Supposed to go long, long, long ways, but they just replace them even though they're perfectly good vehicles. | ||
| So I wanted to repurpose those and help them, help communities in need. | ||
| So it's taking, I built one to be a box truck to be a water treatment plant to give kids in villages with terrible water and be able to reverse osmosis their water and give them drinkable water at their school. | ||
| Or take a, there's a... | ||
| We took a city bus and turned it into a dance studio, a mobile dance studio for these kids in Mexico. | ||
| Just these creative sort of things. | ||
| It's kind of like Pit My Ride, but with real valuable things. | ||
| Just take these really cool purpose-built trucks and make it something really spectacular for these kids. | ||
| It's all kids-driven to give them what their needs are. | ||
| And then it just went into, I didn't want to make it about just vehicles. | ||
| When I wanted to start the foundation, it became a wonderful calling card. | ||
| And then I started the foundation, and my sister works for DCFS, which was Child Protective Services in Los Angeles County. | ||
| And one of my best girlfriends in Reno, she also works for CPS, Child Protective Services, there. | ||
| So I've been working with foster youth for many, many, many years privately. | ||
| And now I just wanted to really get invested into the community. | ||
| So I started small in northern, greater northern Nevada. | ||
| And my sister now is running it, and Shayna is running it as well with me, and the whole family has now gotten involved. | ||
| And it's been really wonderful to come back from the incident, have this be a central goal for us to celebrate our time together as a family and to give back to these kids that are in great need. | ||
| And it has been a dream of mine that I've been wanting to do for a long time and now do it publicly. | ||
| I've been doing it privately for a long time. | ||
| And to really make a big splash and make a lot of movement for these kids. | ||
| And I think it's one of the reasons why I was brought back outside of all the other things. | ||
| But I think there's something working in my favor to come back outside my family. | ||
| And I think it is my reach to kids and my ability to... | ||
| Have a great effect for them. | ||
| And it's been a couple years now and it's already been moved the mountains for kids already and will continue to do so. | ||
| This is like me breathing. | ||
| This is easy. | ||
| I love this. | ||
| This is a part of my fiber, my body. | ||
| I'm the oldest of seven in my family. | ||
| I've been changing diapers and living as the oldest. | ||
| It's sort of my birthright to be able to do. | ||
| What makes it even cooler is that I'm a Marvel superhero. | ||
| So I have like a reach and access to these kids that they didn't even listen to. | ||
| They're like, oh cool, let's go to camp with Hawkeye. | ||
| This is dope. | ||
| And they all show up with plastic sacks, right? | ||
| And this is like all their valuables in their life. | ||
| And it makes me weep, right? | ||
| And this is all they're worth. | ||
| And they show up with hefty bags. | ||
| All of them. | ||
| So we give them rollers with their names on it and a passport. | ||
| It's just like a journal and they can... | ||
| I'm going to change the narrative of this. | ||
| You're a traveler now. | ||
| You're a world traveler. | ||
| You're not carrying your trash around for all your worth in it. | ||
| Your worth is much bigger than that. | ||
| We're going to just planting seeds like that in their head and then creating community for them, creating opportunities for them, safe places for them, giving them more educated stuff. | ||
| We brought in a recording studio bus for them to touch all these instruments that they'd never have access to. | ||
| Who knows what that does? | ||
| I don't care. | ||
| Let it have access to things. | ||
| Give these kids opportunities that they deserve. | ||
| This is the future of our fucking planet. | ||
| Why aren't we giving more time and effort to that? | ||
| It's the future of our world, man. | ||
| Let's give them all the tools. | ||
| We need another Elon. | ||
| We need other super smart, amazing people, man. | ||
| We need that. | ||
| We need other leaders. | ||
| What do we give in our youth? | ||
| Especially our foster youth, man. | ||
| It's not a good look. | ||
| They've gone through a lot of struggles, these kids, man. | ||
| And they're not going to struggle, not on my dime, not on my time. | ||
| That's amazing. | ||
| So it's an easy thing for me to do. | ||
| I love, it's a great focus for me that's outside of, it's things I enjoy, right? | ||
| I still do things that I enjoy. | ||
| I just get to do it with these kids and have, they teach me so much. | ||
| I learn so much to keep me in a really youthful spirit. | ||
| It's harrowing to hear what they've been through, Joe. | ||
| I don't like to know. | ||
| My sister knows all about it. | ||
| Shana knows all about it because they get the phone calls. | ||
| They have relationships with a lot of these kids. | ||
| They know, dude, I mean, you'd probably react like I would. | ||
| You want to flip a table. | ||
| You want to hurt some people. | ||
| So I'd prefer not to know how they got touched and who did it and this kind of stuff. | ||
| I just choose to focus on let's give these kids a... | ||
| Plant some seeds of hope. | ||
| And I'm good at that shit. | ||
| That's awesome. | ||
| And I love it. | ||
| So we're on jet skiing. | ||
| They've never even been to this lake. | ||
| So whatever the heck it is, new experiences, new joy, new friends. | ||
| They're all crying at the end of this camp because they had such a good damn time. | ||
| One of them was getting adopted and she was crying because, like, I can't come back because I'm not a foster kid anymore. | ||
| I got adopted. | ||
| They're like, no, you can come back! | ||
| You know, you did good then when she didn't want to get adopted. | ||
| Like, ah, it means we're doing something right for these kids. | ||
| And we're going to continue doing it. | ||
| And we're doing it not only just as a camp, but we're doing, like, lots of programs throughout the year to keep the community of the foster youth community together. | ||
| A lot of these kids are brothers and sisters that never get to see each other because they're in separate homes, separate cities. | ||
| One's in Vegas, one's in Reno, right? | ||
| Dude, you can't do that. | ||
| You can't do that. | ||
| So we're doing our best to... | ||
| Unite community, right? | ||
| We need each other. | ||
| These kids need each other. | ||
| Even beyond, they don't need me. | ||
| They need access and reasons to be together. | ||
| So it's helping the foster parents. | ||
| It's helping the kids. | ||
| It's whatever we can do. | ||
| We're going to start building youth centers as well. | ||
| We'll be building homes as well in the future with the foundation. | ||
| But we're starting step by step, breath at a time, brick by brick, and building camps and activities and education for them. | ||
| I love it. | ||
| You can see how much I love it. | ||
| I could talk about this for days, man. | ||
| You lit up when you're talking about it. | ||
| Yeah, yeah, yeah. | ||
| I love it, man. | ||
| We had these camps coming up here in June and July, so I'm pumped. | ||
| Can't wait to finish this job and go back home. | ||
| That's incredible. | ||
| It's kind of shocking that it takes individuals to be inspired to do something like this because society doesn't put... | ||
| Any emphasis on this? | ||
| Well, it's like, look, states have foster programs, right? | ||
| But there's gaps in the system, man. | ||
| It's like kids are forgotten. | ||
| And then some are, you know, it's tragic. | ||
| But put a spotlight on something, put energy into something, it builds. | ||
| And I got a loud voice and a big heart. | ||
| And I'm very actionable in what I do, and that's why the foundation's growing and making the moves and paving ways for these kids. | ||
| So I'll keep doing it, man. | ||
| It's easy. | ||
| How long have you been doing this now? | ||
| Publicly, only a couple years. | ||
| It just started out. | ||
| So, you know, then it's like learning about, oh, the nonprofit stuff. | ||
| It's like, oh, man, it's like going out and asking for money. | ||
| So I don't do that. | ||
| I'll go do, like, voiceover jobs and, like, put money in the account for – I hate asking for money for foundation stuff, you know. | ||
| I'll let somebody else kind of bother that. | ||
| I do – I stay in my lane. | ||
| I work with the kids and work with the ideas and the programs and my sister and those guys in the – And the board deal with, like, you're having to raise money and all those kind of things. | ||
| It's just not my wheelhouse. | ||
| Well, unfortunately, when people hear non-profit, they always think, okay, well, where's the money really going? | ||
| Well, that's where it is. | ||
| And that's why we operate at 8%, I think. | ||
| Oh, that's great. | ||
| Yeah, nobody does that. | ||
|
unidentified
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That's incredible. | |
| That's the opposite of how they're usually done. | ||
| Yeah, exactly. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So, I mean, even if we got to, because no one takes anything except just basic operating costs. | ||
| And if we're operating at 8%, I think maybe 13%, it's like all the money is going to the kids, man. | ||
| That's incredible. | ||
| All of it. | ||
| All of it. | ||
| So I'm trying to get the bank account to be full so we only operate off the interest. | ||
| Once we're there, then we can really start to move needle for building things and doing some stuff in the future. | ||
| So I'm excited for that. | ||
| Are you going to expand this? | ||
| Yeah, it'll grow. | ||
| It'll grow. | ||
| Again, I think to keep effective for me. | ||
| I'm very, very hands-on. | ||
| And it's important for me to be the voice for the foundation and for these kids and an advocate for them. | ||
| And so Nevada is kind of the goal for maybe the next five years for sure. | ||
| And there's still a ton of kids that I have not reached and need to reach. | ||
| So I focus on that. | ||
| That's amazing. | ||
| Then there's getting these youths that age out. | ||
| They're getting back into being counselors back in the camp. | ||
| There's a great thing with UNR. | ||
| They get a free ride at the university. | ||
| And a lot of them are going back into sociology and psychology and want to go help kids and foster. | ||
| Like, this is so great. | ||
| So I want to give them opportunities to come back and help the youth. | ||
| And maybe give them guidance. | ||
| God, this is awesome. | ||
| Self-healing and cathartic in its own way. | ||
| Whatever we can do, man. | ||
| It's a wonderful, wonderful life. | ||
| It's amazing because you light up when you talk about that like nothing else we've talked about. | ||
| Yeah, yeah, man. | ||
| Yeah, it's shit, yeah. | ||
| It's everything. | ||
| Again, I'm focusing my energy on all the positive stuff, you know, because I'm too sensitive to deal with the hardships that they go through. | ||
| So let me just be a guiding light for them or someone to laugh on. | ||
| They have to sign my t-shirts, whatever they want to do. | ||
| I don't care. | ||
| I'm their playground. | ||
| I love it, man. | ||
| Again, I think it's the reason why I came back, Joe. | ||
| That's incredible. | ||
|
unidentified
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Yeah. | |
| You could see that it means so much to you. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And that's just, if you could find something like that in life, you're a winner. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I mean, just think of the amount of positive energy you put out there in the world. | ||
| Yeah, it's pretty exponential, too. | ||
| And then also how it cascades. | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| The ripple effect of that is insane. | ||
| It changed their life. | ||
| They'll change other people's lives. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And then it comes back. | ||
| It's pretty what you put out in the world is what you give back, you know? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I see it every day, and it's exponential, especially now since the incident. | ||
| The ripple effect of just... | ||
| Dude, this happened in my driveway. | ||
| It was a private experience. | ||
| I woke up, and it was a global thing. | ||
| I didn't ask for that. | ||
| I'm so kind of glad it did. | ||
| It allowed people to see me as the man I am and not the guy that slings an arrow. | ||
| Right. | ||
| You know what I mean? | ||
| It's a fake arrow because it's CGI. | ||
|
unidentified
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Right. | |
| You know, so I'm glad it became a big public thing. | ||
| But, you know, the ripple effect of just this narrative of the recovery is... | ||
| Like you said, it can affect a lot of people, and it's a beautiful thing. | ||
| It's a positive thing, like the foundation. | ||
| And I see it and feel it every day. | ||
| You really lead an exemplary life, my friend. | ||
| You really do. | ||
| Well, what's the alternative? | ||
| I know, but I mean, it's interesting that you have this perspective. | ||
| I'm always curious to people that have such an amazing perspective. | ||
| How did you gain it? | ||
| How did you get to this place? | ||
| Yeah, well, I mean, you have to... | ||
| I think you have the life in review, right? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| You know, the life in review. | ||
| I think there's, I think, you know, there's birth order, right? | ||
| There's also being in the 70s in a small town where I was a latchkey kid, right? | ||
| I had a free reign. | ||
| I was seven years old and a key to the house. | ||
| I didn't have to come home until the streetlights came on. | ||
| Right, me too. | ||
| I made mistakes. | ||
| I broke windows and slingshots and stole shit and lighted up the cigarette butt and my mom's and all this stuff and I got caught and sometimes I learned and I reprimand myself. | ||
| I self-policed myself. | ||
| I was a very honest kid. | ||
| You know, there's a lot of things. | ||
| I had a bicycle and then that was like freedom. | ||
| That's where I began, like, oh, I have real freedom. | ||
| I got a fishing pole, got on my bike, and just went off into another county. | ||
| Like, that wouldn't happen today. | ||
| I would never allow my daughter to walk across the street. | ||
| I had a similar life. | ||
| I was a latchkey kid, too, and I just think the horror. | ||
| Where was this? | ||
| Well, I lived all over the place, but I lived when I was 7 to 11. I lived in San Francisco from 11 to 13. I lived in Florida from 13 till 24. I lived in Boston. | ||
| Oh, wow. | ||
| Then New York and out here. | ||
| Oh, wow. | ||
| Well, L.A., rather, and then out here the last five years. | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| So I lived all over the place. | ||
| Yeah, that's a good mix, right? | ||
| Well, the good thing about living in a bunch of different places, the bad thing is I never really developed roots. | ||
| Right. | ||
| For my own opinions. | ||
| Because I couldn't count on the opinions of all the people around me. | ||
| I didn't have a core group of friends. | ||
| So I always had to sort of see the world for what it was. | ||
| Did that make you an introvert or an extrovert or both? | ||
| I think I was an introvert initially. | ||
| I don't think I ever... | ||
| Even though I talk for a living and I'm a public figure, I'm not really an extrovert, which is really odd. | ||
| I don't really like... | ||
| Which sounds crazy for someone who gets a lot of attention. | ||
| I don't need it. | ||
| Which is probably why I get it in some strange... | ||
| I was very socially anxious when I was a kid. | ||
| I would get super nervous when I had to talk to a bank teller. | ||
| I remember one time I had to deposit money in a bank and I was like, why am I freaking out like this? | ||
| This is so weird. | ||
| But eventually overcame all that stuff and then... | ||
| Through martial arts, traveling around all throughout my youth from the time I was 15 until I was 22. So all I did was travel around the country and competing. | ||
| So I had a very bizarre life in that I didn't have the normal high school life of partying and hanging out. | ||
| No, I was flying to California to fight. | ||
| It was weird. | ||
| It was a very weird life. | ||
| You know, I still wasn't an extrovert. | ||
| Like, I didn't really learn how to talk in groups of people until I started teaching. | ||
| Until I started teaching martial arts. | ||
| And then that's how I learned how to public speak. | ||
| But I was publicly speaking about something that I was very good at. | ||
| So it was like I commanded sort of attention just because I would demonstrate to them things that I was doing. | ||
| And in demonstrating and talking, it made sense that I was able to talk. | ||
| About something you knew pretty well and you're comfortable in. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| You know, it's like I was really good at it so I could show them. | ||
| I'm going to demonstrate something to you, and then I'd do it, and they'd be like, holy shit! | ||
| I'd be like, I'm going to show you how to do this. | ||
| And then, if you listen to me, like, I taught at Boston University when I was 19, and it was a real counter torture GPA. | ||
| It was like, pass, fail, A. And I'd say, all you have to do is show up and try, and you get an A. And if you can't show up, call me, tell me you can't make it. | ||
| And you'll be fine. | ||
| If you fuck off, I'm gonna fail you. | ||
| But if you just try, you get an A. And then it counts towards your GPA. | ||
| This is like a legit thing. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Like, all I want you to do is, like, this can help your life. | ||
| And I'm not thinking you're gonna go and fight and compete, but I can... | ||
| Teach you something here. | ||
| And it's difficult, but you'll get better at it. | ||
| And through getting better at it, you'll learn how to get better at other things. | ||
| The discipline. | ||
| So that's like how I got into comedy in the oddest way. | ||
| Learning how to talk to people. | ||
| Because I wasn't comfortable talking to people. | ||
| I always felt like a loser and a weirdo. | ||
| I always felt like an outcast. | ||
| So to learn how to talk publicly, like that's how I did. | ||
| But all that traveling around. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| know from there's just some positive things that kind of come out from that right like I like I went to a different school every year of my life at least until I got to high school but I was in the same town I didn't move around a lot maybe just in the town I did divorce and all that sort of stuff our schools were full | ||
| whatever it was so I had to | ||
| Either engage with people, all brand new people, each grade, new school, new grade. | ||
| And then, you know, you're growing up. | ||
| I was more shy and I think more like you, like an introvert. | ||
| So either I was very gregarious or I just was an observer and I just watched. | ||
| So you just make choices. | ||
| And that's why I became an observer. | ||
| But with that, I don't know. | ||
| I like that part of me. | ||
| And I can be extroverted like I'm an actor and a thing, but I'm still more insular and quiet. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Even though the two quiet guys are yapping their jaws off for hours. | ||
| Well, I mean, it was hard, but I wouldn't have wanted it any other way because I think it made me different. | ||
| And I think there's, unfortunately, if you are in like a small town and you grow up in that town and you never leave that town, your perspective is very limited. | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| And I moved around a lot. | ||
| And I think that was very uncomfortable. | ||
| I hated it when I was a kid. | ||
| Like, fuck, we're moving again to another state. | ||
| But that made me who I am. | ||
| And again, it made me form my own opinions instead of adopting a conglomeration of opinions that everybody around me had. | ||
| You know, and I went from... | ||
| Very liberal and progressive San Francisco in the 1970s during the Vietnam War to living in Florida where it was like completely the opposite, like super conservative and kind of retarded. | ||
| And I remember just being around people like, why are they even... | ||
| Why do they even think like this? | ||
| This is crazy. | ||
| It was so strange to me to have this, like, complete juxtaposition, almost like a cultural 180. | ||
| But it also made me realize, like, wow, there's a lot of different ways to think. | ||
| There's a lot of different ways to engage with life. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| You know? | ||
| Well, don't we, like, especially growing up, right? | ||
| Because you're saying, like, 7, 8, 13, 14, all those years, we look to our friends and friendship groups as sort of, like, kind of... | ||
| Help develop ourselves and kind of be a reflection upon ourselves. | ||
| If you don't have it, you have other things that you turn to. | ||
| Like you said, it could have been a terrible thing if you stayed in the same place and you had the same four or four dues and then how limited your life would have been to staying in San Fran. | ||
| Like you said, there's a real good positive thing to take from. | ||
| Being removed from stability, removed from, right? | ||
| That's all anxiety-inducing. | ||
| Or it could be the perspective, right? | ||
| The perspective could be, but if it's a positive perspective, you know, to lean on. | ||
| Yeah, like you said, I like how I came to the thing, and it drove you into all the things that you probably like about yourself today. | ||
| I think it's pretty interesting. | ||
| Yeah, and it also, like, I got picked on a lot. | ||
| That's what drove me into martial arts. | ||
| I hate being scared of people. | ||
| It just drove me nuts. | ||
| I didn't have friends, so a group of guys would fuck with me and I didn't know what to do. | ||
| So I was like, okay, I gotta fix this. | ||
| So I became obsessed with martial arts. | ||
| And then once I started doing that, it was like the first thing that I ever did. | ||
| I was like, hey... | ||
| I don't think I'm a loser. | ||
| I just think I never figured out how to get good at something. | ||
| And now that I'm really good at this one thing, I'm like the opposite of a loser. | ||
| And then I became obsessed with winning. | ||
| And that was like my whole life until I was like, I don't think I want to do this anymore. | ||
| And then I transitioned to other things. | ||
| Period of time wouldn't have happened if I lived in a comfortable environment where I wasn't fucked with. | ||
| Where I didn't get bullied. | ||
| I wouldn't have that desire to do something that was completely terrifying. | ||
| Because I was scared of... | ||
| Physical confrontation. | ||
| So what do I do? | ||
| Spend my whole life getting involved in, like, voluntary physical confrontation with trained fighters. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Which is way more terrifying. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| The most terrifying thing. | ||
| Right. | ||
| You know, but that... | ||
| But what's the alternative? | ||
| Oh, just be scared and be bullied and beat the fuck up? | ||
| That's what I had to decide. | ||
| Yeah, take the reins. | ||
| I had to decide that. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| I just had to make this change, you know? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Fortunately, it worked out. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It's very bizarre, the turns that life takes. | ||
| And when you look back, you're like, what if that hadn't happened? | ||
| What if I hadn't done this? | ||
| What if I hadn't turned left? | ||
| Yeah, the crossroads are so, so instrumental in who we become. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And in control of that? | ||
| Like, we're not steering any ship at that point, right? | ||
| No, so much of it is luck. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Or whatever it is. | ||
| Or fate. | ||
| Whatever fate means. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I mean, fate is kind of assumed once an outcome has been achieved. | ||
| Oh, it was fate. | ||
| Yeah, in hindsight. | ||
| Was it really? | ||
| In hindsight, you could say that. | ||
| Yeah, I'm not sure. | ||
| Say that in a moment. | ||
| Right. | ||
| I do think there's a certain power to following instincts, which I've always done for whatever reason. | ||
| You know, there's a pull that you have towards a certain direction, even if it's like massively uncomfortable. | ||
| Sometimes you have to realize like... | ||
| Okay, let's go like this is what I'm supposed to do and that that is very hard to do but once you do it a few times and then you start saying That there's a little voice in your head like that motherfuckers never let me down I'm gonna keep serving that voice whatever that voice is. | ||
| I'm gonna keep listening Even though people are like, what are you doing? | ||
|
unidentified
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And I'm like, I'm not going to listen to you. | |
| I hear that a lot. | ||
| I think so do a lot of people that have accomplished great things. | ||
| I don't think anybody who listens to the advice of everyone around them ever steps out of line. | ||
| I don't think you ever really try anything crazy. | ||
| Because most people aren't going to want to support you when you're trying something that seems insane. | ||
| Whether it's trying to be a movie star or whatever it is. | ||
| Trying to be a martial artist or a rock star or anything in life that's hard to do. | ||
| Most people are going to tell you don't do that. | ||
| Especially people that are conservative. | ||
| Conservative in a sense of like to do something that is going to give you a good chance of success. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Because the more fun things are very open-ended. | ||
| They don't really have a lot of success. | ||
| What are the numbers of people that become successful actors? | ||
| Is it like a tenth of a percent? | ||
| It's probably less than that. | ||
| If you could get a chart of how many people move to Los Angeles to try to make it in show business and how many make it, it's got to be an astronomical number. | ||
| The numbers are not good. | ||
|
unidentified
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Insane! | |
| Those numbers have to be insane. | ||
| But my thought was like, fuck, somebody's doing it. | ||
| Somebody did it. | ||
| Why can't I do it? | ||
| And then people would say, you know what, with the odds you're going to make it? | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| Why am I thinking about that? | ||
| It can be done. | ||
| People have done it. | ||
| But you have to be willing to just really fucking throw yourself into something and know that Especially in the beginning, there's no time to fuck off here. | ||
| If you really want to do something that's really hard to do, you've got to be all in. | ||
| Because there's too many people that are all in. | ||
| You're competing with them. | ||
| You're not competing with these half-steppers, these people that are kind of dipping in and dipping out. | ||
| They're there as an example for you to not live your life. | ||
| Yeah, yeah, yeah. | ||
| Well, isn't there kind of a selective hearing that kind of has to happen in anything for anyone? | ||
| We have to listen and really listen to engage and really listen to learn and grow. | ||
| But then we have to have selective listening to, like, how many times I was told no or I was told I was crazy or to, like, what are you doing? | ||
| Are you out of your mind? | ||
| I'm like, ooh, now I knew I'm on the right track when I hear that. | ||
| Because that's the words of a fearful person. | ||
| Those are the words uttered from someone who's scared and not courageous and a lot of stuff's in their way. | ||
| I'm on the right track when people say that. | ||
| There are those people that would try to sabotage you because they don't want you to be successful because they haven't taken a chance in their life. | ||
| So they don't want anybody who does, who's courageous. | ||
| They want you to fail. | ||
| There's people out there that want people that are courageous to fall apart because then it makes them feel better for their own choices. | ||
| That's okay. | ||
| They've got to live with that. | ||
| I don't, right? | ||
| Right, right. | ||
| They've got to swim in that. | ||
| But again, I think that those things are just like... | ||
| You need the rain to appreciate the sun. | ||
| You need to struggle to appreciate love. | ||
| They have to coexist, otherwise they don't exist. | ||
| It's like a truth and a lie. | ||
| They both have to exist, otherwise everything's just fucking true. | ||
| So you have to coexist together, otherwise you don't. | ||
| That's the hardest part of life to truly understand. | ||
| Why is there evil? | ||
| Because you need love. | ||
| You need good. | ||
| Why can't everything be love? | ||
| Well, it can't. | ||
| It can't. | ||
| There has to be evil. | ||
| There's no evil people for you to appreciate loving people. | ||
| There really has to be kind people for you to appreciate, oh, okay, life is not just all cruelty. | ||
| But you have to know that cruelty exists for you to appreciate kindness. | ||
| Weird. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It's a weird dance. | ||
| It's strange. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Like, if God is real, what a strange game he's playing. | ||
| But you can kind of, when it all works out, you see wisdom in it. | ||
| You're like, I kind of get it. | ||
| Life is not just utopia. | ||
| It's a strange mix of good and evil. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And love and hate and all these things that are in the way. | ||
| Those tests, man, those tests, don't they suck? | ||
| They do. | ||
| All the tests we have in our lives, and everybody has them. | ||
| Everybody. | ||
| There's nobody that's exempt from it. | ||
|
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No way. | |
| How much money, how successful. | ||
| We're all susceptible to great tests and great suffering. | ||
| It's how well you overcome that suffering will determine how well you love and deeply you love in your life. | ||
| And also, the people that have overcome the most are the most fascinating and interesting and complex people. | ||
| Aren't they? | ||
| Have you ever met Amanda Knox? | ||
| Do you know who she is? | ||
| Yeah, I know she is. | ||
| She's that woman that was accused wrongly of a murder in Italy. | ||
| Yeah, I remember that. | ||
| She spent years in prison in Italy. | ||
| And she is so fascinating. | ||
| She's so strong and so interesting. | ||
| And I asked her about this. | ||
| I was like, do you ever think like you are this really unusual person with this like | ||
| cast iron integrity and character? | ||
| Would you be this person if you hadn't been wrongly accused and spent years in prison and publicly persecuted and then eventually absolved? | ||
| Like, who would you be? | ||
| I mean, would you want it any other way? | ||
| I mean, I don't. | ||
| Right. I wouldn't wish that on anybody. | ||
| Yeah. But yet here you meet her. | ||
| She's so incredible. | ||
| It's like life is very, very odd. | ||
| Yeah. And there's choices that she could have made, right? | ||
| In that. | ||
|
unidentified
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That. | |
| She could have been, like, resentful. | ||
| I don't know how she is, so I don't know. | ||
| She's not at all. | ||
| And she could have been valid in any kind of feeling she has about things, because that all sounds pretty shitty. | ||
| But, you know, again, what's the alternative? | ||
| You want to hold on to resentment? | ||
| Is that the life you want to live? | ||
| Because it's your choice. | ||
| Sounds like an interesting person to talk about, but, you know, is it a choice or a choice for her? | ||
| Did she feel like it was a choice? | ||
| It certainly wasn't. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Did she feel like that made her who she is and she's content with that? | ||
| I mean, she's certainly resigned to what it is, but she's very happy now. | ||
| Right. | ||
| But not just happy, but complex. | ||
| Like a complex... | ||
| Compassionate, charitable thinker. | ||
| What's the conversation if she's still in the joint, you know? | ||
| Oh, yeah. | ||
| I mean, she's still in the clink and there's no hope of forgetting now. | ||
| Well, she learned a lot in there, too. | ||
| Yeah, I bet. | ||
| People, like, what the terrible choices that people make, because most of the people that were in there were guilty, you know, and the terrible choices that these people make. | ||
| And, like, what happened to you when you were young? | ||
| Like, why did you become a person who murdered your husband? | ||
| Why did you become a person who, you know, robbed a bank? | ||
| Why did you – what went wrong? | ||
| You used to be a baby. | ||
| This is just something that I... | ||
| Being a parent really changed my perspective of human beings in a very profound way, in many, many profound ways. | ||
| But one of the biggest ones is I stopped looking at people as being static. | ||
| I stopped looking at, oh, Jeremy's 54. He's always been 54. That's how I know it. | ||
| Now I look at everybody like, oh, you were a baby. | ||
| You were a baby. | ||
| You know what I mean? | ||
| I love my daughters dearly, and they're very extraordinary people, but it's been fascinating to watch. | ||
| As little babies become these really complex human beings and have conversations with them and talk to them and see how they interface with life. | ||
| And then I meet people who are all fucked up and angry and fucking hateful. | ||
| I'm like, God damn, what happened? | ||
| What went wrong? | ||
| What are the things and how do you get out of this? | ||
| It's interesting. | ||
| I mean, there's so many trials and tribulations in this wonderful existence that we all share. | ||
| And I think we learn a lot through other people's, not just your own, but other people's. | ||
| Yeah, yeah, for sure. | ||
| Well, that's the hope anyway. | ||
| We can, right? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Well, I think a lot of people are going to learn a lot through you. | ||
| And without having to do it in a fearful way or scare tactics or, you know what I mean? | ||
| That doesn't really work. | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| But it's used everywhere in media and advertising and all that kind of stuff. | ||
| Right, right. | ||
| But like to do it in an honest way or it's like, I hope I still learn by talking about my experience. | ||
| I still learn by looking through the book or listening to the audio. | ||
| I'll be listening to the audio soon when I have my daughter and all my nieces and nephews around. | ||
| They're going to listen to it. | ||
| We're all going to listen to it together. | ||
| I'm not going to have them go off reading this thing. | ||
| It's too harrowing to do it alone. | ||
| But I'll be listening to it. | ||
| I'm going to learn. | ||
| And with that experience and that exchange with these beautiful young creatures, you know? | ||
| Well, you'll be learning for so long. | ||
| It's only been a couple of years, which is really crazy. | ||
| Yeah, yeah, yeah. | ||
| I'll keep trying and testing the limits of my body and my mind and my spirit and what I can pass on to others, what I can give on to others, what they give me. | ||
| I mean, it is a vibrant, high vibration that I'm living right now. | ||
| I'm so blessed to have it. | ||
| I have so much gratitude at every breath. | ||
| I almost feel like I don't have to walk anymore. | ||
| I just feel so lucky. | ||
| And I think it has to do with all the love and all the goodness. | ||
| That this world has to offer. | ||
| I think that's gotten me through. | ||
| And the attitude of it, that perspective of that. | ||
| Because it can be a very bleak, dark place. | ||
| But I choose to... | ||
| I choose love. | ||
| I choose action. | ||
| I choose... | ||
|
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My perspective. | |
| It is my choice. | ||
| I've been in dark places where it wasn't quite so positive and so lovely. | ||
| It was well before the accident, you know. | ||
| It was just like, you know, just kind of grumbly and grumpy and don't want to leave my house. | ||
| And, you know, I don't want to go sign autographs. | ||
| I don't want to be around people or, you know, just kind of whatever, you know. | ||
| Not a really great, happy place, perhaps, you know, like everybody has the right to be. | ||
| But if that doesn't exist at this point, you know, I don't get any more bad days, Joe. | ||
| That's amazing. | ||
| Right? | ||
| You're like, fuck, I wanted that! | ||
| Isn't that incredible? | ||
| Well, I can gas up a snowcat before you want. | ||
| I can make it happen for you. | ||
| Isn't that incredible? | ||
| No more bad days, brother. | ||
|
unidentified
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Right? | |
| Wow. | ||
| It's a perspective that is mine. | ||
| And a truth and reality that is mine. | ||
| Because I have a barometer to like, yeah, I know what a bad day is actually like. | ||
| And I was tested to my limits. | ||
| And I got through it, luckily, somehow, someway. | ||
| And it's a... | ||
| It's just almost science at this point. | ||
| It's a factual that it's just not going to happen. | ||
| I can't. | ||
| No matter if I tried so hard to have a bad day, it's just not going to happen. | ||
| I can have a bad moment. | ||
| I can have frustrating times. | ||
| But I'm just not going to have a bad day. | ||
| And for the rest of my experience here on Earth. | ||
| That's amazing. | ||
| And I think that experience, this perspective that you're sharing, is contagious. | ||
| I think so too, dude. | ||
| Actually, I know so. | ||
| I know so. | ||
| Yeah, I think so too. | ||
| For a fact. | ||
| It's sort of make manifestation of what your existence is you want to be. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And you can do it. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| But you got to believe it. | ||
| You got to do it. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Both those things. | ||
| I think that's why it's beautiful that you wrote this book. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| My next breath. | ||
| Yes, sir. | ||
| Thank you, Jeremy. | ||
| It was awesome. | ||
| I really... | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I really appreciate you. | ||
|
unidentified
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Yeah. | |
| Likewise, brother. | ||
| You make me happy, man. | ||
| You bring out a lot of good stuff in me. | ||
| You reaffirm a lot of good things in me in a really, really meaningful way, and I appreciate you. | ||
| I appreciate you, too. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| It was a lot of fun. | ||
| Yes, sir. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| I'll see you at the UFCs, too, man. | ||
| Absolutely. | ||
|
unidentified
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Okay. | |
| Go buy this book, folks. | ||
| Yes, sir. | ||
| Bye, bud. |
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