Jesse Itzler recounts his journey from Roslyn's chaotic 1980s success stories to founding Marquis Jet and co-owning the Atlanta Hawks. He details his month hosting Navy SEAL David Goggins and a transformative 15-day isolation at a Russian Orthodox monastery, where manual labor and prayer taught him to embrace presence over digital distractions. Adopting "Kevin's Rule" for regular adventures, Itzler now seeks to bring that same community passion to the Hawks through arena renovations, concluding with plans to meet Dave Rubin in Atlanta. [Automatically generated summary]
I said to you right before we started, I mean, I remember that 94 Knicks team so well.
That was like right in my formative years of basketball, which I love.
I said to you right before we started that that game six, which as a Knicks fan is probably one of the most painful things you ever watched, was the night of my senior prom.
Yeah, what a crazy night, because the Rangers had just won the Stanley Cup Finals, I think, and it was just like a great time to be in New York, then OJ, obviously, people must have been talking about my prom, so I can only imagine what was going on over there.
All right, so, speaking of New York, You're from Roslyn, Long Island.
I was actually just having this conversation the other day with a friend of mine, and I was saying, in my town, if you took the year that I graduated, my senior year, and went back
four years and forward four years. So in that eight-year gap or whatever it is from, you know, of
kids that went through my school, we have, I think we have two, we have three professional
sports team owners. We have multiple billionaires. I have five guys that I went to high
school with that are in jail.
We've had multiple suicides.
And Bernie Madoff was from my town.
I look at my town and think that everybody had the same opportunity.
Same teachers.
We had one movie theater.
I mean, it was a small, relatively small town.
One high school that everyone went to.
A real sense of community.
Everyone had the same Basically, you know journey through with as far as teachers and everything Yeah, we had this crazy swing of the biggest Ponzi schemer and his his family and sons were in our school You know guys that were super successful people that had super successful parents that went to jail I mean all in this community and it was like whoa, what was in the water?
I mean, even my high school, I mean, I knew a couple people that I went to high school with that ended up in jail, but we also had Judd Apatow went to my high school, Idina Menzel, huge Broadway star, Natalie Portman went to my high school, and all sorts of things.
Most of our parents, I'm guessing maybe your parents too, worked in New York City, so there was like a little bit of a commuter thing, but you weren't totally part of New York, like something related to that?
Well, no, if there's nothing else specific, you said addicted to newness, so I feel this is the right time to play a little clip from you as a rapper known as Jesse James.
Like I said, I grew up in Long Island in the 80s, you know, when hip-hop was emerging.
I got really into it at an early age, and then when I was in college, you know, when everybody was writing their resumes and sending out resumes, I was like, I'm gonna try to make a record.
You know, like, this is what I want to do.
And there was no B plan, and ultimately, you know, that passion, really for three years of college, I was working towards trying to get a record deal, and ultimately landed a deal with a company called Delicious Vinyl out in Cali, not far from where we are.
And they had two big acts at the time.
They had a guy named Tone Loke, who wrote The Wild Thing, and a fucker called Medina.
So I was able to... I didn't know that, but literally I was watching it this morning and I said to David, my producer, that that's what it sounded like.
Wow, so I was watching and I was thinking, man, time changes, you know, things change, we get sensitive to different things, but I would guarantee if a young guy like you put that song out now, talking about a white woman and a white rapper, We'd have a certain amount of people screaming about cultural appropriation and all sorts of other stuff.
It was totally good-natured, but I look back on it now, and I think if I were to go back in time, I probably would do a lot of things differently, just based on what I know now.
and I'm turning 50, so I'm very aware of what chapter I am in my life,
but when I look back at me at 21 and what I knew then, and all the mistakes I made at 21,
but it's part of the growth and part of the journey.
So what happened for me is, right after college, no resume, got rejected by a lot of people.
I had no record labels, I had no contacts.
My dad owned a plumbing supply house in Mineola, also not far from Fort Worth.
I didn't know anyone that was connected to anything, so I had to take this whole process on my own shoulders.
And I would literally take a Greyhound bus on Friday from Washington, D.C., where I went to school, with my demo tape, which was a recording of an instrumental that I played on my CD player.
And I would hit record on my answering machine and leave a rap to the music while it was playing.
Even though I didn't get picked up for a second album, I wanted to marry my two passions, which was sports and music.
And I had this idea to write a theme song for the Knicks.
I was like, all of a sudden sports were changing.
The game is only 48 minutes, and you're there, you're a fan for 48 minutes, but for the other two hours that you're in the arena during timeouts, you're an audience.
And the teams had to entertain the audience.
And now they brought in the dancers.
The Knick City dancers came in, and they had video boards that all of a sudden never existed.
So I was like, let's do a theme song.
The Bears did a song in 86 or something.
Let's do a theme song.
We'll get all the celebrities involved, and maybe it'll catch on.
So I wrote this.
I did a demo, basically, in my apartment, which was like a dorm room.
So I, when I hired a lawyer, ultimately I needed a lawyer, studio, engineer, singer, drummer, producer, et cetera.
It cost me $4,800 to do the song.
But every team that came into Madison Square Garden said, why don't we have a theme song like this?
And the Knicks got hot and it became the number one most requested song, that little jingle, on New York radio.
And I realized that's the white space.
Nobody else is, everyone's trying to get on MTV and get their records and Tower Records, but no, there's a category, a new category that I could create, sports music.
And I started doing theme songs for professional sports teams.
I look at it from that chapter of my life where I had 21 years old, there were no consequences.
Like, if I didn't get this song, I would have gone to the next team and kept, I was so deeply connected to my dream, like emotionally connected to the goal, that I was on a Greyhound bus every day.
I mean, I would do anything, so just to have the opportunity Everything else was gravy.
Whatever got him out of the chair, if I could teach that to my kids,
if I could apply that drive to the multiple buckets of my life,
then all the areas of my life would be so much better.
So I ended up Googling him, finding out he was a Navy SEAL, I cold called him, and we sat down for lunch and I realized I would never get this secret sauce in a lunch meeting, and just asked him, like, would you come live with me for a month?
And he said to me, Basically, direct quote, if you're crazy enough to ask a guy like me to come live with you, motherfucker, I'm crazy enough to come.
She called me after the lunch meeting and she said, you know, how did it go?
And I said, very quickly, he's not going to live with us.
She's like, what?
Got into a big fuss.
I said, no, he's actually, sweetie, he's coming to live with us on Friday.
And no, I mean, once he came in, they immediately, you know, took to each other.
And it was just an amazing journey.
And I never thought The notion of writing a book never crossed my mind.
In fact, the book, Living with a Seal, came out five years after he actually lived with us.
Because as I started to put some of the tools that I learned and what I learned about myself and about his mindset into action and share with others, I was like, whoa, there's something here.
So you think that that routine, even when it's all going well, and it sounds like things are going pretty well for you, that no matter what, that that level of routine will automatically stifle creativity?
And then he said, wait 30 seconds and do it again.
So I got back on the bar and I did, again, like one or two or something, you know, barely.
He said, wait 30 seconds, I want you to do it again.
And now, like, my arms are, you know, I get back on the bar, I'm trying to get my chin up over the bar, and I drop down and I said, all right, well, what's next?
And he said, well, what's next is we're not leaving here until you do 100 more.
But I was recently on a camping trip, and I was with a friend of mine who's a police officer in Suffolk County.
He had his daughter, I had my son.
And we went on a cold, winter, Mount Washington, blizzard-y, outdoor, sleeping in the snow camping trip.
And I turned to him.
I said, Kevin.
How often do you do trips like this?
This is a guy that's a police officer, you know, one of the happiest guys I know, probably not super well-off, I mean, you know, blue-collar guy, extremely happy.
And he says, every year, I take one trip a year with my college friends.
I've been doing this since I'm 21 years old.
Then every other month, I take a trip with my family or myself.
It could be running a marathon, it could be going to the lake, it could be going on a hike, whatever.
And I said to myself, if I can't take, I call it Kevin's rule, one weekend, every eight weeks, for my own adventure with my family, with friends, and it doesn't have to be something that costs a lot of money, but if I can't take five or six of those a year, then I'm way out of balance.
So, it might not be a direct answer to your question, but what I'm saying is, you know, you could, in the past, Maybe that'll be one or two times a year, and I wouldn't even be aware of it.
But once you become aware of it, look, over the next 30 years, you're talking about 150 memories.
You know, it's all cumulative, as opposed to maybe 20, 30 memories.
That's the difference of like a really full life, it could be, at the end of the day, with no regrets.
With no regrets.
Versus someone that's in their routine, going through life like this, and then you wake up and you're 75, and you're like, fuck.
I don't have the energy to go to Mount Washington anymore.
I don't have, my kids are grown up.
So, those kind of shifts are measurable.
And I can pinpoint it in time, I can pinpoint it in my relationship with my wife, and just Friday night dinners, Wednesday night date night.
All right, so let's shift to your new book, Living with the Monks.
I want to get the subtitle totally right here, because I love it.
What turning off my phone taught me about happiness, gratitude, and focus.
So we are taping this right now.
We're holding it for a little bit because I want to air this right before I go off the grid, because my audience knows I do this August off-the-grid thing, literally lock my phone in a safe.
No phone, no TV, no electronics, no nothing.
I'm gonna work on my book a little bit.
I'll probably escape to a beach for a little bit.
I'm not even totally sure what I'm gonna do, but just get Off the endless information grid.
So before we talk about me and why I think it's good to do that, what led you to wanting to do this in the first place?
Well, I'd spent, I'd invested so much in the physical side for my whole life, you know, running marathons and doing endurance events and had a Navy SEAL move in with me.
But I really had felt like I neglected the inner side and just the inner work.
And I was just going so fast.
So I felt to really, again, maybe I'm turning older, I don't know, but to get the whole package, or what I want, and be as well-rounded, I really needed that side, just the spiritual side.
And I was just thinking, well, who would be the best Teacher and I thought monks and I didn't know anything about monks other than like watching some movies and you know fringe articles here and there I thought that'd be really cool to learn about you know the traditions and how monks live their lives and Doing exactly what you said, you know, I'm bombarded by information.
Mm-hmm, and I don't spend any time alone and And when you don't spend time alone, you lose your superpower, you lose your intuition.
Because you're being influenced by everybody else.
So I said to Sarah, I think I want to go and... Was there a moment that you really felt that you had lost it or that you could really recognize that you lost it?
Because I think a lot of people walk around with that all the time now.
Just because of endless social media.
You're so hit with stuff constantly that it does make your inner monologue harder to listen to because it's just being slammed in every which direction.
We all feel overwhelmed, but I felt really distracted.
You know, I have four kids, a job, I'm married, friends, my parents are getting older, I mean, all these different things, and then all these different social media things, and news, and Netflix, and Hulu, I'm like, I just wanna like, I wanna just be alone.
And so it was a buildup, and then my wife and I were talking about it, I said, I think I just wanna, I'm gonna go and live on a monastery, and she was super encouraging, you know, and she was like, So that's what happened.
I have two words that changed my life that I refer back to all the time.
When I wanted to go home, those two words were, I signed up for 15 days.
That's what this goal was.
15 days.
Day five, when I really wanna go home and I miss my kids and I couldn't call, the two words are remember tomorrow.
When you have a big split second decision or a big major decision, how is that decision gonna make you feel tomorrow?
So I said to myself, if I drop out and quit now, the one time I'm gonna do this in my life, how am I gonna feel about this tomorrow when I get home and someone says, how'd you do?
Did you make it?
Terrible.
You know, if my legs are swollen at mile 18, I want to jump out of the race or the marathon, but I don't want to come home the next day after the New York marathon, did you finish?
So remember tomorrow.
So I just kind of said that to myself over and over, like, just remember how you're going to feel about this, and remember how proud you're going to feel at the end of the journey.
And before I went, my wife said, don't leave until you have a breakthrough or you're broken.
And I'm like, I'm not broken, and I haven't had a breakthrough.
It would have had to really take me to a place of, you know.
Yeah.
I mean, I had moments of being broken and super sad.
I mean, you know, like when you're away from everything and you don't know what's going on.
You just don't know.
You don't know, God, are my kids getting bullied?
Is something happening?
Is my wife okay?
Is the world in risk?
You just don't know.
And you start to imagine that the world's gonna end.
Your brain automatically goes to the worst.
It doesn't go to everything, it's great.
It's like, oh shit, I should have been so much nicer to my wife, because I'm gonna go there.
She's not gonna be home when I get home.
You start thinking shit like that.
And then it spirals because you have energy and space to think and imagine and dream and envision and all the shit that's like it all comes to the surface.
And, you know, because it's in the real world, if you're having a tough day, You could say to Dave, you guys be like, you know what?
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Let's put on a movie and Netflix and just fucking escape.
You know, it's funny, although this is in no way comparable, when I did my off-the-grid thing last year, and for a week we were, or ten days or so, we were in Mexico, and I just needed to do nothing.
I just needed to wake up every morning, have a light breakfast, I went to the gym, and then I would just sit.
I got the same seat at the beach every day, and I would just sit and stare at the ocean for hours, really for hours, and I'd try to do a little meditation and stuff.
But I did have that moment at one point where I was like, anything could be happening right now, like World War III could be starting, terror attack, zombie apocalypse, where you go to the craziest shit.
And then I remember thinking, I was like, you go there for a while, and then I suddenly got to the end of it, and I was like, well, nothing I can do about it right now, so I better reset to this better place.
The first three or four days there, I was obsessed with my to-do list.
And by day four or five, I'm like, if a hurricane came and whisked my to-do list into the ocean, life goes on.
Like, I'll be okay.
And I was like a captive to my to-do list because I'm always, and my to-do list for me wasn't even about finishing the tasks as good as I could possibly do them.
It was about finishing them so I could keep, it felt so good to cross them off that even if it was 70% to what I could probably do it, on to the next, on to the next, on to the next.
At the monastery, the monks only had a do list.
There was no to-do list.
It was whatever is in front of me is my task at hand.
Yeah, so they would ring a big Like Notre Dame church bell, like loud, which I was right next to, which signaled to go to the church, where we would have about an hour and a half service, which was meditation, reflection, service.
So talk a little bit about the disconnecting from technology.
I get the concerns about your wife, your kids, things like that.
How did you feel about not putting your hand in your pocket to go to your phone or not having an iPad right in front of you or television screen or the rest of it?
Did you feel that there was like a little bit of a learning curve with it?
Like when I did it, and as I said, I locked my phone in a safe, I did not know the code, and I found that for the first day or two I kept going in my pocket, even at the beach, like I'm just going, but there's nothing in my pocket, I don't even think my shorts had pockets, so I was just like going like this.
And then there's like this weird anxiety of like, what's going on?
What did I miss?
Is the zombie apocalypse or the war started or whatever?
And then suddenly by day like five, I kind of felt empowered.
By day eight, I was like, I want nothing to do with that.
Then maybe there's a little bit of like a return to, ah, it'll be okay.
The obvious ones, you know, not in the bedroom, not at mealtime, not at movies.
I mean, I used to sit in movies and if I heard a ding or a beep or a buzz, I'd go under my shirt and look, you know, so like the light didn't, you know, or look under here.
There's something there, because I do find that I actually like doing the dishes.
I know that's a little nuts, and I'm not doing it for 500 people, but I do find it's like one of, like, I can't have my phone in my hand while I'm doing the dishes, right?
Like, it's one little thing that you're doing right there.
So I do find on these brief moments, you know, I'm on tour right now, and it's like when I'm doing this, when I have these brief moments, I like doing, like, very, Meaning like I really like gardening or just like cleaning up outside or like these things that aren't much Because they seem to have this this incredible importance.
We've lost touch with a lot of those Things that help us feel connected, you know, like we have no connection to our food We go to a supermarket.
We have no unless you live on a farm like we're very disconnected from a lot of things that make us tick and And simple things like that bring us back down to earth and they ground us.
And I felt the same way.
I felt as a contributor, even if it's contributing to your own household, you know, and as opposed to having someone to come and clean it or however you guys do it or whatever.
But it makes you feel connected, important, part of it.
Even when you came into my house and you were being like, oh, it's so great here and this and that.
I really love we put a lot of effort into I want to wake up in the place that I want to be at and make it better and make it more valuable and all that.
So for the average person that can't maybe take a month to do this, What's the piece of advice?
What are you guys doing over there to just bring all of the things that you've talked about here into the game and make it fun and add some of the other stuff that's not part of the 48 minutes like, you know, the Go New Yorks Go thing?
There's the internal bucket, and Tony Ressler, who's the principal owner, he's done an amazing job of just, we have a new practice facility that's state-of-the-art, probably one of the best in the NBA.
We're renovating the arena, a massive, multi-hundred-million-dollar renovation that's going on now.
So there's a whole, there's like the internal stuff, and then there's the game presentation.
There's so many layers.
Game presentation, there's the actual basketball side of it.
There's the nights that the team doesn't play, that the arena's available, we have a concert.
I mean, there's just so many layers of it.
But I think at the end of the day, it's about enthusiasm.
And passion, and just bringing whatever you can to infuse a culture of, think of your emotional connection to the Knicks.
The first thing you said to me when I walked in was, you took me to 94 game six.
There's just so much emotion, and if we could bring that same passion to the community, and marry that with the Atlanta Hawks, that's gonna be super powerful.
Well, listen, man, it's pretty clear you're bringing that to your life every day, because this was just, I mean, this flew by, and it's like, I can feel it.