Speaker | Time | Text |
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unidentified
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♪ We are the New York Knicks ♪ ♪ We are the New York Knicks ♪ | |
♪ We are the New York Knicks ♪ ♪ We are the New York Knicks ♪ | ||
♪ Say go New York, go New York, go ♪ ♪ Go New York, go New York, go ♪ | ||
♪ Say go New York, go New York, go ♪ - Joining me today is a New York Times bestselling author, | ||
the guy who wrote that mid-90s New York Knicks anthem, a man who has founded enterprises | ||
from private jet companies to Zico Coconut Water, the co-owner of the NBA's Atlanta Hawks, | ||
and oh, a former rapper. | ||
Jesse Itzler, welcome to The Rubin Report. | ||
Thanks for having me. | ||
Dude, your bio is like, it doesn't even seem like it could possibly be real. | ||
It's been quite a journey. | ||
Quite a journey. | ||
All right, there's so much I want to do with you. | ||
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. | ||
And of course, the night of the O.J. | ||
Simpson car chase. | ||
You lived through that whole experience. | ||
I did. | ||
I was at the Knick game that night. | ||
I was at the Knick game. | ||
It was a playoff game. | ||
I'd just written the theme song for the Knicks and was starting to get momentum on the radio and in the garden. | ||
And I was so, I mean, my whole life, I grew up a Knick fan. | ||
And this was a big moment. | ||
And here we are, game six, at home. | ||
And all of a sudden, the O.J. | ||
chase, I was getting like a pretzel. | ||
I went outside and everyone's looking at the monitor. | ||
And I looked up, I'm like, what in the world is this? | ||
Oh, wow, so they were showing it, like, when you go out to the concessions. | ||
They were showing it on the monitor, yes. | ||
unidentified
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Yeah, yeah, yeah. | |
It was on the monitor, so, you know, I was conflicted, and people were running back and forth, it was wild. | ||
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'm from Syosset, Long Island. | ||
We're about 10 minutes away from each other. | ||
Neighbors. | ||
On the Long Island Expressway. | ||
I find that a lot of interesting people come out of Long Island. | ||
Have you found that? | ||
Is it the water? | ||
What's going on there? | ||
You know, it's crazy. | ||
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? | ||
Yeah in this town, right? | ||
What do you make of that, actually? | ||
Because there's gotta be something there. | ||
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. | ||
I think that I feel very lucky that I grew up in the town that I grew up in and the area that we grew up in. | ||
That it was diverse, there was a lot of opportunity, there was creativity, it wasn't far from the city so we had like a little bit of the city vibe. | ||
Is that what it is? | ||
I think it has something to do with the proximity, because we were about 45 minutes away from New York City. | ||
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? | ||
I think that's part of it. | ||
I think for me, I think it's just the time period that I grew up, you know, as a kid. | ||
Yeah. | ||
And there was just a change in music, change in culture. | ||
And we were just exposed, being close to the city, we had early exposure to all those trends. | ||
And we were early to the party. | ||
And I think that had a big impact, at least it did for me. | ||
I know as an entrepreneur and in my journey, it was exciting. | ||
There was always excitement. | ||
I want to be part of everything. | ||
unidentified
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Yeah. | |
So, you know, I got addicted to newness because there was always something new going on. | ||
And that fueled me even going forward. | ||
So I feel very lucky that, you know, we grew up where we did. | ||
Yeah. | ||
Anything else I should know about your formative years or family before we get into some of the things that you've done? | ||
unidentified
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No. | |
You can ask. | ||
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. | ||
Lovely. | ||
unidentified
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I was on a date with your hold up wait I saw this blonde who was looking great I wanted to diss my girl and forget | |
her Cause this freak looked ten times better My body was great | ||
her legs were fantastic But when she danced she moved like a spastic | ||
I didn't care cause I was in love When my date saw me staring and pulled me out the club | ||
My dick was freaking wouldn't let me speak And I pled my case and said I was only deaking | ||
Come on honey I wasn't being a flirt And besides my double ups ain't never hurt | ||
But she don't keep quiet don't even try it I told her I love her but nah she didn't buy it | ||
So I ran back to see the blonde with the curls She was way off beat but she shook it like a weight girl | ||
Now she's getting it Move that body Look it's spinning Shake it all down | ||
Wow man Oh, man! | ||
Jesse James! | ||
unidentified
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That wasn't in the email that you sent me about the show, that you're going to flashback. | |
We have a pretty crack research team around here. | ||
We're going full flashback before we get to the future and the present. | ||
How did that happen? | ||
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. | ||
It had a little bit of a Tone Loke feel to it that song. | ||
Yeah, same producers. | ||
And then we had Young MC who won a Grammy for Bust a Move. | ||
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. | ||
Yeah, so same guys, same year, same time, and put an album out in the early 90s. | ||
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. | ||
Was that even remotely something back then? | ||
Well, you know, I think it was on my mind, but the Shake It Like a White Girl was my first single. | ||
It was actually a remake, the title, of an old EU song, of an old go-go song from a band in Washington, D.C. | ||
It was all black. | ||
So I felt like I was just kind of Taking the momentum of this hit song and introducing it to the theme, too. | ||
You know, it was fun. | ||
I was in college. | ||
I wrote the whole album basically as a fraternity, in my fraternity house. | ||
And yeah, it was pretty tongue-in-cheek. | ||
Yeah. | ||
It kind of makes you wish that things were as simple. | ||
Now, as they were back then, right? | ||
Are you following me on this? | ||
I could just see some fraternity kid doing something silly like that now, and just getting a ton of shit for it. | ||
Even if it was totally good-natured and all that. | ||
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. | ||
Yeah, all right, so I wanna get to some of the growth and the journey, I wanna get to your book | ||
and all that stuff, but wait, let's just jump back to the go New York, go New York, go thing. | ||
How in the world did that even appear that you were gonna be the guy that wrote that thing | ||
and were you shocked that it caught on? | ||
I mean, the video, which we'll also link to down below, I remember every moment of that. | ||
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. | ||
That was the only way I could make a demo. | ||
Unbelievable. | ||
That just sounds like a time warp. | ||
I know. | ||
That was the only way I could do it. | ||
And I would show up and hand out that cassette to everybody and got rejected. | ||
But ultimately, I did get a record deal. | ||
But that was my only goal. | ||
So I took my foot off the gas pedal once I got the deal, and I didn't get signed for a second album. | ||
Which, to me, was crushing at the time, because the only thing on my resume now was, you know, failed rapper. | ||
I was also a kiddie pool attendant before there. | ||
So that wasn't really gonna get me a job on Wall Street. | ||
A kiddie, that's like a low-level lifeguard. | ||
Is there training involved for that? | ||
unidentified
|
Uncertified, no. | |
Like, walk, no peeing. | ||
If you could say walk and stop peeing, you could get the job. | ||
They're always peeing, no matter what you do. | ||
There's nothing you can do. | ||
Get them out of there! | ||
But in any event, I wanted to stay. | ||
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. | ||
And I played it for the Knicks. | ||
How'd you even get that meeting? | ||
I started doing jingles. | ||
And somehow I did a jingle for Nancy Grunfeld's clothing company. | ||
Her husband, Ernie, was the GM. | ||
And she loved the jingle. | ||
And I said, well, Nancy, if you love this, let's do something for the Knicks. | ||
Let's try this. | ||
So she said, well, take a shot at it. | ||
So I just did it on spec. | ||
I walked in, and I knew there was something there. | ||
And I played it for them, and they said, you know, we'll give you $4,000 for the song. | ||
And I said, OK. | ||
And I hired a... Right then and there. | ||
You said, OK, right then and there? | ||
Oh, yeah. | ||
No lawyer, nothing. | ||
Done. | ||
I didn't ask any questions. | ||
$4,000 to lose eight months of rent. | ||
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. | ||
Yeah, it's so awesome. | ||
Like, it's just such a great story of just like, a kid, basically, a kid just like, I wanna just get out there and do something. | ||
It's kind of a beautiful thing. | ||
You must look at it back, I can see sort of in your face. | ||
There's like a nostalgia to it, because it was just like, it was what it was. | ||
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. | ||
So is that really where the entrepreneurial spirit started with you? | ||
Because it seems like you got that going and then that opened up a whole slew of other doors. | ||
That opened up the floodgates for some big future successes and failures. | ||
But I was thinking about this actually yesterday on a run. | ||
You'll probably remember, I don't know if you're into tennis, but the US Open was right by... Oh yeah, Flushing. | ||
Yeah, so we would just take the train There were no rules. | ||
It was almost 8 o'clock at night. | ||
I would take the train, and I remember I would never have a ticket. | ||
I would look forward to being able to try to sneak into the U.S. | ||
Open. | ||
And I remember that I kind of figured out how to sneak into the U.S. | ||
Open regularly. | ||
So I would go, no ticket, everyone's online, and I would go to how I went in, and then I would walk out and see if I could do it again somewhere else. | ||
That was really the start of like, as I look back, like I just want, I like challenges. | ||
Yeah. | ||
It doesn't, it's not about anything other than can I figure it out? | ||
And it started for me at an early age and ultimately it gravitate, you know, it started to gravitate towards business. | ||
Yeah, so let's get there. | ||
So okay, you're making the jingles, some things happen, you're obviously making money, probably some serious money for the first time. | ||
How does this get you to starting incubators and starting these companies and all this other stuff? | ||
So every team that came into Madison Square Garden said, why don't we have a song like this? | ||
Who did this? | ||
And I was the guy. | ||
So I started writing all these team songs and ultimately sold that company | ||
to a public company called SFX. | ||
And the owner of SFX had a timeshare in a private jet. | ||
And I was like 26 years old. | ||
He invited my partner and I as guests onto his private jet. | ||
And it was like the scene in "The Wizard of Oz" | ||
when we walked on the plane when everything goes from black and white to color. | ||
unidentified
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I walked on the plane, I'm like, people fly like this? | |
Yeah, yeah. | ||
And by the time we landed, my partner turned to me and was like, we've got to start a private jet company so we can fly around on these planes. | ||
And I was like, let's do it! | ||
That's hilarious. | ||
And that's literally how we started this company that ultimately was called Marquis Jet. | ||
Became the largest private jet car company in the world. | ||
So you eventually sold the company. | ||
It's called Nest Jet now? | ||
It was called Marquis Jet. | ||
We sold it to Warren Buffett's... To Berkshire Hathaway. | ||
Yeah, Net Jets, which is a Berkshire Hathaway company. | ||
Yeah. | ||
And then, so then, now you're rolling in dough. | ||
It was a change, definitely a life-changing moment for me. | ||
But again, I love newness. | ||
And I was... | ||
At that time in my life, I had just ran a 100-mile run for charity, and I gave myself 90 days to train for it. | ||
And during the process of my training, I discovered coconut water, because I did a lot of research around hydration and nutrition. | ||
If you're going to run 100 miles nonstop, What do you eat and what do you drink? | ||
And how many calories do you take in? | ||
You're experimenting with that now through your new diet, which you're going through. | ||
But I discovered coconut water, which ultimately fueled me for this race that I completed. | ||
And when I was done, I was like, man, this is the fountain of youth. | ||
This is gonna be the next big thing in beverage. | ||
This is the next orange juice. | ||
This is the next Palm Wonderful. | ||
And I spent a year traveling the globe trying to figure out how to import coconut water. | ||
What year is this? | ||
This is 2007. 2007. | ||
It's funny because it's not that long ago and yet coconut water is so massive right now. | ||
You'd think this would have to be 25 years ago. | ||
Right, but in 2007 it wasn't even on the shelf. | ||
There was one skew on the shelf. | ||
It didn't really exist. | ||
But I realized that the learning curve, I got like a 980 on my SAT, the learning curve was... 1200. | ||
Okay, alright. | ||
And we were on old ones. | ||
I should have called you. | ||
I couldn't figure it out, man. | ||
I'm like, I know I can market this, but like, I don't know how I'm going to import this. | ||
There's so many moving pieces. | ||
So I ended up partnering with a company that was, you know, on the scene called Zico, just doing a couple of million dollars in sales. | ||
Yeah. | ||
And then ultimately, two years later, we sold it to Coke. | ||
So then you're really in the business world. | ||
At that point, you've sold two companies and you're rolling. | ||
How do you then go, all right, I like newness. | ||
What's new after this? | ||
Because that's what your story seems to be. | ||
It's just another what's new, what's new, what's new, what's new. | ||
I get bored easily. | ||
I believe in checking the box and not celebrating. | ||
What happened, happened. | ||
What's next? | ||
My whole thing, I always talk about this, is just about building my own personal life resume. | ||
Not even my business resume. | ||
I love adventure, so I was just looking for whatever that next opportunity was. | ||
For me, in the timeline of my life, the next thing was a book, but it wasn't planned. | ||
unidentified
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Yeah. | |
It wasn't planned. | ||
Let's talk about that book a little bit before we get to this book. | ||
Yeah. | ||
I was at a race, a 24-hour race. | ||
I love endurance. | ||
I participate in a lot of endurance events, and the race was a really, really format. | ||
So I was with five friends, and each runs a mile, and you rotate, and whatever team runs the most amount of miles in 24 hours "wins the competition." | ||
But at the start of the race, there was a guy sitting next to us | ||
had no one to relay with. | ||
He had no teammates. | ||
He was his own team. | ||
And he weighed like 285 pounds. | ||
This big African American guy just sitting in a chair. | ||
And I'm thinking to myself, how in the world is a guy that weighs 285 | ||
gonna run for 24 straight hours? | ||
And the race was uncertain. | ||
Are you even allowed? | ||
Right, like I mean-- | ||
Do they let you run a relay, one guy? | ||
unidentified
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He was like the only solo, you know, by himself. | |
And it was just so big and intimidating. | ||
And the race was unsupported, so they provide nothing. | ||
It was on a dirt, one-mile, unlit parking lot, and you had to even bring your own water. | ||
I mean, they gave you nothing. | ||
So I had just sold my company. | ||
I went crazy on our show. | ||
I had masseuses, a table set up like a tent. | ||
This guy had three items. | ||
A box of crackers, a fold-up chair, and a bottle of water. | ||
And I was like, man, this isn't going to work out well. | ||
And sure enough, at mile 70, because of his weight, he had broken multiple bones in both of his feet. | ||
He crushed the bones in his feet from just the pounding, because he was just so big. | ||
And because he only had water and crackers, he had kidney failure, and he was peeing blood down his leg. | ||
And my first reaction was, man, we got to get this guy a medic. | ||
immediately airlift him out of here to a hospital. | ||
But what did he do? | ||
He gets out of the chair, picks himself up, runs another 30 miles to get to his goal of 100, | ||
and then runs one more in case they miscounted. | ||
And I immediately was like, man, I gotta meet this guy. | ||
I gotta meet him because whatever secret sauce he has, whatever drive he has to get him out of the chair, | ||
you don't even get a ribbon for finishing. | ||
They pat you on the back, good job, there's no trophy. | ||
You don't get extra crackers. | ||
No, this is like, you go home and that's that. | ||
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. | ||
And that was the start of our journey. | ||
So you spent how much time with him? | ||
I spent a month. | ||
He came and moved in with my wife, Sarah, myself, and at the time my son. | ||
I had one child. | ||
We should mention his name because let's give him the credit where credit is due. | ||
David Goggins. | ||
He's an amazing human and American with an amazing story. | ||
Came to live with my wife and I and my son for 30 days. | ||
What did your wife think about this? | ||
I'm bringing a Navy SEAL in for a month. | ||
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. | ||
And that's sort of how it came to fruition. | ||
Yeah, let's explore some of that stuff. | ||
So he gets to your house first day, like, did you have a plan or were you just like, take over, man? | ||
You got a month, like, make me better. | ||
I said to him, make yourself at home, is the first thing I said to him. | ||
And I said, you know, our home is your home. | ||
And he walked right over to me and he said, I don't have a home. | ||
I said, no, no, make yourself at home is just an expression. | ||
And again, he got a little closer, like nose to nose, and he said, I don't operate in expressions. | ||
I was like, "Okay, this is gonna be a great little great 30 day house guest." | ||
And he said, "In fact, get your stuff on. | ||
Let's go see where you're at physically. | ||
We'll go down to the gym so I can map out the month." | ||
And when he came and lived with us, at that time in my life, I was in a great spot. | ||
You know, I was married. | ||
I'm still married. | ||
I just had a child. | ||
I now have four. | ||
Had some failure, had some success, but I thought I was in a really good spot. | ||
But like so many of us, I was in a routine. | ||
And I was really comfortable in my routine. | ||
My routine was get up, work out hard, go to work all day, come home, have some dinner with my wife and child, little bit of alone time, repeat. | ||
And I thought I was operating up here, but I was so comfortable, I couldn't get out of it. | ||
And like, routines are great, but they can also be a rut. | ||
And like, I realized, like, I don't wanna fucking go through life like this. | ||
Like, I wanna go through life like this. | ||
I gotta get out of my routine, man, otherwise I'm gonna wake up and I'm gonna be 70. | ||
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? | ||
Without question. | ||
And time goes fast. | ||
I have four kids, I wanna slow the clock down. | ||
And if I'm in routine, and you're in routine, you miss a lot of opportunities. | ||
At least for me, that's the way I've found my life to unfold. | ||
And I feel like when I step out of routine, You know, when I go into the unknown, that's where amazing growth happens. | ||
And that's where I feel most alive. | ||
And that's where I get the most benefit. | ||
And that's why it's a check the box and move on mentality. | ||
And that's what this opportunity was for me. | ||
Nothing other than to step into the unknown. | ||
He represented unknown. | ||
and a little bit of secret sauce. | ||
So we go down to my gym and he's like, let me see how many pull-ups you can do. | ||
So I got up and I can run pretty far in a circle or a straight line for a long time, but not really strong. | ||
So I did like eight pull-ups, which is an exaggeration. | ||
It's like four pull-ups. | ||
unidentified
|
Yeah, yeah, yeah. | |
Two pull-ups. | ||
Yeah, it'd be like two pull-ups. | ||
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. | ||
Jesus Christ. | ||
And I said, like, that's impossible. | ||
I can't do a hundred. | ||
And he said to me, well, I already know what your biggest problem is. | ||
Well, probably what all of our biggest problem is. | ||
And he said, the limitations that you're putting on yourself that we put on ourselves are self-imposed. | ||
and I'm gonna prove it to you. | ||
So get back up on the fucking bar and give me a pull-up. | ||
So I did a pull-up and I dropped down and I repeated that process until I did all 100. | ||
Holy. | ||
And I realized, it took like two hours, but I realized at that moment | ||
that if I'm under-indexing by 100 pull-ups, Like, what other areas of my life am I under-indexing in, you know? | ||
Am I under-indexing at work, with my wife, in my relationships? | ||
Am I comfortable? | ||
Am I in this routine? | ||
I mean, I just didn't want to go to that place of pain to see what I was really made of. | ||
And that started our journey. | ||
And that was a constant theme of like, how far can you take this, Jesse? | ||
Like, you know, why are you holding yourself back? | ||
And not just physically. | ||
But in everything, in work, okay, you've had some success, but how do you know your limits? | ||
It's like, when I started running, my goal was to run two miles. | ||
If I could run two miles in 18 minutes, I consider myself a runner. | ||
And that was it. | ||
I worked hard. | ||
It took me weeks to go from the couch to those two miles. | ||
There's a lot of people with a gun to their head that can run two miles right now. | ||
Nothing changed in my body since then. | ||
Same legs, same lungs God gave me. | ||
I'm not really strong. | ||
But I was able to take that same body God gave me from two miles and ultimately take it to a hundred miles without stopping. | ||
And the only thing that changed was what I thought I could do. | ||
So if I was under indexing 50x in that area, Again, what are my limits in business? | ||
What are my limits in my life resume and how I live my life? | ||
And what are my limits in how deep my relationships can be? | ||
And what are my limits in how much I can learn or travel or anything? | ||
So I think it's probably easy for people at some level to understand the quantifiable stuff. | ||
I can run faster, I can lift more, that kind of stuff. | ||
Can you talk about it sort of on the mental side, on the relationship side? | ||
Like, how do you actually judge what are the right ways to spread yourself in those areas? | ||
Sure. | ||
Well, I mean, I think for me, I think a lot of people, when we think about relationships, we think of relationships between people. | ||
How is your relationship with your parents or your child or your husband or wife or whatever it is? | ||
And I think one thing that's often very neglected is our relationship with time. | ||
And talk about quantifiable stuff. | ||
And I'm very aware of my relationship with time. | ||
That's been a fundamental shift for me over the last couple of years. | ||
And maybe because I've turned 50. | ||
But I was recently on a camping trip. | ||
You look like you're 28. | ||
You're doing something right with time. | ||
I don't know, man. | ||
It's the Long Island genes. | ||
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. | ||
It's just, what's your relationship with time? | ||
How do you spend it? | ||
Who do you spend it with? | ||
And are you doing the things you love to do? | ||
Yeah, well that's definitely a good segue to living with monks. | ||
So quickly though, do you have some of those people in your life, what Kevin just said about reconnect | ||
with the high school friends and that? | ||
'Cause I find now a couple of my most valuable relationships | ||
that I have right now are with, one of them's my childhood best friend | ||
since we were four years old. | ||
I remember meeting the guy in kindergarten, or I think maybe it was the day before kindergarten, | ||
and then another friend from third grade, and we've stayed connected. | ||
And because of that, it helps me frame the future because we've been having these same conversations | ||
about love and life and sports and politics forever. | ||
And it's like watching us all, one of them lives in Jersey, one's in Texas, | ||
and I'm here in LA, and yet our journeys, they still matter to each other. | ||
So I think it helps set the future sort of. | ||
Yeah, I'm fortunate that I do. | ||
I still have the same high school friends and friends from my neighborhood when I grew up, still super close to. | ||
And I think you're right. | ||
We're so lucky to have that. | ||
And it's still a big part of my life, those relationships. | ||
And also, they can relate to the backstory. | ||
Very often, if I meet someone now, they know Jesse at 50. | ||
They don't know Jesse at six in Ross and Little League, and they don't know Jesse, you know. | ||
You're a couple years older. | ||
I was gonna say, we probably played Little League against each other. | ||
You got a couple years on me. | ||
Right, right, right. | ||
But same thing. | ||
Same thing, yeah. | ||
So I agree with you. | ||
I agree with you. | ||
But I think... | ||
All of my friends from high school and even college and even today, I mean, they invest time in keeping those relationships. | ||
And you can do it easily now through Facebook and social media and this kind of stuff, but often we don't. | ||
But I'm fortunate that my group of friends, we do. | ||
For a while, we had a newsletter that we put together for each other. | ||
It makes me smile just thinking about it now. | ||
I just feel really lucky. | ||
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. | ||
You exercise your gut muscle. | ||
I was losing my superpower. | ||
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. | ||
It was a build-up. | ||
I just felt so distracted. | ||
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. | ||
So what do you do? | ||
You give a call? | ||
Is this a Yelp thing? | ||
unidentified
|
Yeah, Siri. | |
I actually found this monastery through a friend of mine, who's actually my publisher. | ||
And I went to a monastery with eight monks. | ||
Which already was a misconception for me, because I thought monastery meant community, meant hundreds. | ||
But there were eight monks at this particular monastery, four of which had been there for 50 years. | ||
Wow. | ||
And they lived on 500 acres in the States, but in isolation, 500 acres. | ||
And similar to what you're about to do in August, or now, you know, no phone, no internet, no news, no this, no that. | ||
And it just took 15 days to decompress. | ||
So what was it like? | ||
So you get there day one. | ||
I mean, what was the most shocking part? | ||
I sense you're a pretty open guy, so there was probably not much that could shock you, but what did they say? | ||
Did they take all your stuff? | ||
Well, first of all, they were Russian Orthodox. | ||
They weren't Buddhists. | ||
So like that, I had no expectation of anything. | ||
And I walked into my room, which they call a cell. | ||
The rooms are called cells in a monastery. | ||
And it was the size of this carpet, like where we are. | ||
And I had a bed, one little desk with a light. | ||
And brother Christopher, who was like my go-to monk, sat me down and he said, "Tomorrow at 7 a.m., | ||
we'll start with prayer, reflection, and meditation. | ||
And I said, okay. | ||
It's 6pm. | ||
What do I do for the next 13 hours? | ||
And he looked at me and he said, you think. | ||
And I said, okay. | ||
And he left the room and I realized I can't call my wife. | ||
I can't. | ||
There's no books in my room. | ||
I mean, they had books, but there are no books. | ||
unidentified
|
It's super eerie quiet. | |
And I'm like, all right, I'm going to meditate. | ||
Let me start the journey. | ||
I took a TM, Transcendental Meditation course, set my timer for 20 minutes, and I sat in my chair. | ||
And I started to close my eyes, focus on my mantra, and I'm getting bombarded. | ||
How are my kids? | ||
My wife? | ||
unidentified
|
The Hawks? | |
What are we going to do this year? | ||
Everything's going through my head. | ||
We will talk about the Hawks before we're done, by the way. | ||
I'm sitting and I'm going and I'm like, why isn't my beeper beeped? | ||
Because I've been here forever. | ||
And I'm like, I probably didn't start it. | ||
Let me just keep going, keep going, and finally there's no beep. | ||
And I said, well, let me just reset my beeper and I'll start over. | ||
No. | ||
I go back. | ||
That would be cheating. | ||
Anyway, I'm in my chair forever and I finally, like, this is ridiculous. | ||
I'll just, let me reset this and start this again. | ||
I open up my eyes. | ||
I look at my timer. | ||
Three minutes and 27 seconds. | ||
unidentified
|
Wow. | |
And I immediately calculated how many minutes I had left. | ||
On the monastery. | ||
I did 15 days, times 24, and I was like, I just said to myself, I'm fucked. | ||
Like, this is great on paper, in theory, but this is gonna be fucking hard. | ||
And I just sat in my room and I was like, oh my God, what'd I get myself into? | ||
Were you allowed to leave the room? | ||
I could leave the room, but I couldn't leave the property. | ||
This is the craziest situation. | ||
So the monks, to keep the lights on at the monastery, they breed German shepherds. | ||
So there are 11 adult German shepherds, eight monks, and me. | ||
So they're selling German shepherds. | ||
Yes, they sell puppies. | ||
And they train dogs. | ||
They're world-renowned dog trainers. | ||
They've written books, they've sold millions of copies of books. | ||
It's just a really unusual scenario. | ||
So yes, I could leave my cell and walk around the monastery, but first of all, it's four degrees outside. | ||
There's no lights. | ||
It's pitch dark at four o'clock. | ||
It's freezing. | ||
There's bear, according to the monks. | ||
So, no, I really couldn't leave the monk. | ||
I ended up walking 120 miles up and down the driveway because I had to get some exercise over the course of my journey, but I didn't leave. | ||
So, I just sat there. | ||
The first five days was really, really difficult for me. | ||
And I started immediately doing... | ||
Probably what I think most people do, and certainly what I do, I started giving myself an out. | ||
I started justifying that it would be okay to go home early. | ||
Just seven days, man. | ||
That's enough. | ||
Get out of here in seven days. | ||
No one's gonna say, oh, you didn't do whatever. | ||
And I started creating all these excuses in my head. | ||
And I started thinking to myself, what other goals do I have in areas of my life am I giving excuses in? | ||
you know, and really started to analyze everything that was going through my head and put it into | ||
out the real, my real world. Yeah. | ||
And I just saw a lot of things about myself through just being quiet and alone. | ||
How did you break through that moment of, I can get away with seven days here? | ||
What was the actual thing that turned you on? | ||
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. | ||
I'm saying. | ||
So did you get broken or have a breakthrough? | ||
unidentified
|
I suspect I know the answer. | |
I had some breakthroughs, for sure. | ||
But I never felt broken. | ||
And I think the reason I never felt broken is because it had a definitive end date. | ||
So broken for you would have been like, I'm leaving. | ||
Broken would have been like, yeah. | ||
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? | ||
unidentified
|
Let's put on a movie and Netflix and just fucking escape. | |
And you sit down, you order Chinese food, and you have your Netflix and you watch it. | ||
But guess what? | ||
The issues don't go away. | ||
When the movie's over, that shit is still there, man, on your to-do list. | ||
They're still there when I'm watching Netflix sometimes too, you know? | ||
Right, they're still there. | ||
And this forced you. | ||
There was no escape. | ||
This was your escape. | ||
So it forced me to have to think through stuff, and I got a lot of clarity. | ||
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. | ||
And there's a real discipline in that, in how you can control your mind and your thoughts. | ||
I think for sure. | ||
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. | ||
So tell me a little bit just sort of what that day looks like. | ||
So you get up the next morning. | ||
Now it's day two. | ||
Did you say 7 a.m. | ||
or 6 a.m.? | ||
7 a.m. | ||
And then prayer starts. | ||
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. | ||
Was it religious in any way? | ||
Yeah, they were Russian Orthodox. | ||
It was religious. | ||
For me, it was peaceful, but it was definitely religious. | ||
And then we would shift to breakfast, which was traditionally silent. | ||
Most of the breakfasts were silent. | ||
And that would go until, let's say, 9.30 or 10. | ||
And afterwards, there'd be a little bit of alone time, and then it would go to tasks. | ||
And each of the monks would have a different responsibility, which was just unbelievably efficient. | ||
And I spent each day shadowing a different monk, so I got two rounds, basically. | ||
And then there would be supper. | ||
Dinner was lunchtime, so they'd flip-flop. | ||
So breakfast was a really light meal, which for me is just fruit. | ||
Then their lunch was dinner. | ||
That would be the big meal. | ||
Rest. | ||
Well, it's like sleepaway camp. | ||
You get a little less rest time. | ||
A little siesta. | ||
And more labor, which could be cleaning the church, doing whatever everyone's tasks were. | ||
unidentified
|
Did they always have stuff to do? | |
Always. | ||
It's kind of funny. | ||
If you think about it, like, all right, so eight guys living at this place are always doing stuff. | ||
unidentified
|
Always. | |
It seems like there wouldn't be that much more to do, you know? | ||
Because you want to know why? | ||
If the toilet breaks, they don't call a plumber. | ||
They fix the toilet. | ||
They built the monastery by hand. | ||
They do everything. | ||
Let's get a swimming pool. | ||
Okay, get a shovel. | ||
You get a shovel, you get a shovel. | ||
Let's figure out how to do it. | ||
unidentified
|
And we'll build a swimming pool. | |
I could probably hire you for a couple jobs. | ||
No, I could do anything. | ||
unidentified
|
I was a supervisor. | |
And then there was just more time alone. | ||
So there was a tremendous amount of time. | ||
But also a lot of work. | ||
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? | ||
You know, it's funny because when I got back, everybody asked me, well, what'd you miss? | ||
And the obvious answer is I miss my family and this and that, but no one ever asked me, what didn't you miss? | ||
And what I didn't miss at all were things that I do every day that I thought I would miss. | ||
For example, I went during the NCAA tournament. | ||
I didn't miss not watching March Madness. | ||
It's been something I've loved to do forever. | ||
And if I calculated how many hours of basketball I've watched, it's probably years of my life. | ||
But I didn't miss it. | ||
And I didn't miss hitting like, liking my friend's picture in Cancun with a corona. | ||
I didn't miss any of that stuff. | ||
I didn't miss going through Hulu and Netflix and debating with my wife what to watch. | ||
And I realized I spent a lot of time on things that I really didn't miss. | ||
And if I eliminated some of those, I would have freed up a lot more time to do the things I love to do with the people I love to do them with. | ||
And I'm so comfortable with my phone, it's always in my hand. | ||
It was hard, man. | ||
Really hard. | ||
It took a long time to get past that. | ||
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. | ||
I'll manage it differently. | ||
Did you go through all of those steps? | ||
The exact steps that you just mentioned in the exact timeframe you just mentioned. | ||
Yeah. | ||
Once I got to the point where I didn't miss it, where the habit of checking before I went to bed | ||
or waking up at five in the morning and seeing anything new come in, | ||
once I got past that, I didn't miss it, I didn't want it. | ||
And once I got home and I put on the news and read what's going on in the world | ||
and all the negative stuff, it was just like, ugh. | ||
But here I am, I've been home, and now I'm back on my phone. | ||
When I came home, I'm like, I'm off email. | ||
I don't need it. | ||
And then, but you drift back. | ||
So have you been able to put any kind of just personal policies in place to manage this stuff? | ||
Because I'm still trying. | ||
I don't do phone in bedroom 90% of the night. | ||
Every now and again it just somehow ends up there. | ||
But like that's one for me so that at 5 a.m. | ||
I just don't do that. | ||
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. | ||
Right, right. | ||
But now, so I became, I think this will summarize my experience the best. | ||
They had a retreat at the monastery, and they had all these guests. | ||
And when the guests left, they said to me, Jesse, you're gonna clean up all the dishes. | ||
Like the rookie on the team, okay? | ||
There's 500 dishes stacked. | ||
So I start cleaning the dishes, and I'm drying them and cleaning them and drying them, and they go and they bring more in. | ||
And I turned to them, I'm like, this is gonna take me forever. | ||
How am I gonna do all these dishes? | ||
And one of the monks turned to me and goes, there's not all those dishes. | ||
There's only the dish that's in your hand. | ||
And I was like, it reminded me that I'm never where my feet are. | ||
And I gotta be where my feet are, you know? | ||
This is what I'm doing. | ||
Yeah. | ||
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. | ||
It creates momentum and wins. | ||
I can't explain it, but I felt the same way. | ||
I loved it. | ||
I was volunteering for it. | ||
Yeah, yeah. | ||
There's real value in that. | ||
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? | ||
Can people do a weekend with monks? | ||
Can you just do a day with monks? | ||
I think anyone can spend time alone. | ||
I think spending time alone, and I recognize I don't spend any time alone, other than going for runs. | ||
But I think it's really important, because I think the only way you can really be in tune with your gut is to spend some time alone. | ||
So I think that's really important. | ||
I think for me, I carry a lot of stuff in my head. | ||
I realize that I need to, like, I put everything on paper now. | ||
I get it out of my head. | ||
It doesn't disappear, but it frees up space. | ||
I had a lot of space and creative energy at the monastery because I wasn't cluttered. | ||
So now I have a two journal system that I use. | ||
It's very simple. | ||
I dump everything into one big journal. | ||
It doesn't go away, but it's out of my head. | ||
I don't have to remember, I have to get a kid a birthday present or whatever. | ||
And then I make my daily kind of routine and this kind of thing. | ||
And yeah, I think just being really aware of where your feet are is really important. | ||
I mean, the monks are monotaskers. | ||
I live in a world of multitasking. | ||
And I think that for everybody, I think that feels overwhelmed or feels distracted. | ||
is to do one thing at a time and do it well and move on. | ||
Have you been back to the monastery since? | ||
I'm going to go. | ||
I haven't been back, but I plan on going. | ||
To go back to partake again, or is it just like, can you go have lunch with them and leave? | ||
Just for some high fives. | ||
Yeah? | ||
And they're down for that sort of thing? | ||
I think they're down for some high fives. | ||
I guess you'll find out. | ||
I mean, I was like an alien. | ||
I came in there, I was full of energy. | ||
I'm like, where, what are we running? | ||
Did they have any idea of your history or just your successes, any of that stuff? | ||
unidentified
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No. | |
They just think it's just some guy Yeah. | ||
We're letting in on this. | ||
That must have been pretty cool in and of itself. | ||
I remember very clearly sitting down and I was telling them about my journey. | ||
I was telling them about Coconut Water and they all looked at me and said, what's Coconut Water? | ||
I was talking about the Atlanta Hawks and one of them raised their hand and said I went to an Expos game. | ||
Wow. | ||
In Montreal. | ||
And I'm like, that's baseball. | ||
They don't play anymore. | ||
Yeah. | ||
All right. | ||
Well, for our last few minutes, let's talk about the Hawks for a second. | ||
You own a basketball team, which to me is, as you know, I love basketball. | ||
That's like the greatest thing on earth. | ||
I would probably stop doing all this. | ||
I would trade it in to own a basketball team. | ||
Well, I'm not the principal owner. | ||
I'm part of the ownership group. | ||
And we've got a great group, but for me, living in Atlanta as a basketball fan, I was a season ticket holder for years first. | ||
And then I was a consultant to the team, so I got to fall in love with the players, the coaching staff, management first. | ||
And now to be part of the ownership group with my wife and friends. | ||
It's in a city that I live in, in a team that I love. | ||
It's just unbelievable. | ||
I was talking to my wife the other day. | ||
I said, you know, for my father and my family and my friends and the city, there's 80 plus games a year where I could put the TV on. | ||
Think about you as a Knick fan. | ||
Multiply it by 20 and just, you know, and just really love it. | ||
So, it's been super exciting and I think we've got a really bright future, so I'm looking forward to the next couple of years. | ||
I know it was a little before your time of owning the Hawks, but how is Dominique Wilkins not in the Hall of Fame? | ||
And I love Neek. | ||
How's that guy in the Hall of Fame? | ||
He deserves to be. | ||
He deserves to be. | ||
Not only is he a great basketball player, but he's in Atlanta. | ||
He's just a big part of the community. | ||
He's still part of the Hawks organization. | ||
Oh, is that right? | ||
Yeah, he does the play. | ||
But he's at every game. | ||
I've never seen him say no to a photo or an autograph. | ||
Ever. | ||
Never. | ||
Just, he makes people feel really good. | ||
Yeah. | ||
And he's very approachable. | ||
Yeah. | ||
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? | ||
I think there's several buckets. | ||
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. | ||
Yeah, you remember this. | ||
I remember where I was sitting for certain games, you know, what you're eating. | ||
I mean, it's crazy. | ||
25 years ago. | ||
Yeah. | ||
I don't remember what I ate last week. | ||
Right, right, exactly. | ||
You have no idea. | ||
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. | ||
And I think we can. | ||
We're on our way. | ||
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. | ||
unidentified
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We're done? | |
That's it. | ||
That's it? | ||
Well, you gotta go do Rogan now, so I don't wanna steal all your brain power. | ||
Man, no, no, no. | ||
You got three more hours with Rogan. | ||
I sense you're gonna be up to it, up to the challenge. | ||
And you don't even drink caffeine. | ||
You're just hopped up on coconut water. | ||
I am. | ||
Potassiumed out. | ||
You don't even need bananas anymore. | ||
Why would you eat a banana at this point? | ||
I eat a lot of bananas. | ||
You eat the bananas too? | ||
That's my go-to. | ||
Well listen man, it's been an absolute pleasure. | ||
I suspect we will cross paths again, perhaps in Atlanta, because even though we're holding this for a little bit. | ||
I will definitely come watch you. | ||
Alright, we're going to come to the Peterson event in Atlanta. | ||
Awesome. |