Andy Hnilo and John Baker from the Chicago Cubs Part 2

And we are live. Here we go.

Finally.

Hey, we'll just pick right off. Right where we left off.

Yeah, man. We were just talking about baseball, you know, like, that's how we met. That's how we met. And I was talking. I kind of got. I got cut off from you, but I was just. I was. I was talking about hitting and how, you know, for me, baseball became like. You know, baseball hitting especially became like an addiction. And I think that the term getting a hit is, like, so appropriate because it'll drive you mad. The longer you do it, the longer you go about kind of pursuing this really difficult mastery. And that's why, you see, when you were saying I was really stubborn, I think that you have to believe in the impossible to be good in that game. And so, yeah, stubborn, sure. I think more kind of boundless drive and unsure of where to point it is. I would describe you as like a. As a kid, you know, like you didn't know. You're trying to figure out where you wanted to point all that fire and, like, attack in that place. And so was it. Was it baseball? Was it. Was it other stuff? There was not. There was not a clear direction. And, you know, I think that when we're kids and they ask us to, like, hey, you're going to choose what you want to do for the rest of your life when you're 17 and all you care about is curls and hitting, you know, like the. It's a tough place in life, so you aren't any different than anybody else. You're just crazier and smiling more often. You think you were stubborn, but I just remember you laughing.

Yeah, no, thank you for that. I was growing into my body, finding my way as everybody else was. I'd like to. I'm seeing a hypnotist, and she's walking me through years of my life when I was younger, you know, growing in from, you know, 8 to 12, 12 to 15, 15 to 18, 18 to 21, 21, all that. And we're just going through the years, and it's interesting to really look back on how my mindset has changed and developed through certain periods of my life where, you know, it's just everybody goes through their developmental. Developmental stages where, you know, you're, you know, Little League. A lot of it was baseball and sports oriented. That's. That's just who I was. That's who I identified myself with. Whether it was, you know, always getting ready for some type of sport, Little League, basketball, football, and then in between, I just. I Became obsessed my freshman year when jocks dad Stu kind of took me aside and definitely mentored me and really took me in and just really worked with me and explained the importance of hard work and diligence and staying consistent with that and becoming really, really obsessed with your craft. And then, I mean, at 14 years old, that really molded me in to just staying consistent with that hard work and being really the fear of being outworked. But that's what led into college where, you know, 17, 18, 19 years old were you're around people that work just as hard as you and that can be physically more talented than you as well. So that was maybe a little bit of an adjustment for me. And then on top of that.

Yeah. You think going to college is a little bit of an adjustment?

Yeah.

I mean, let's stop there for a second. If you're going back in time and you're looking at the years of your life, I think it's really important to consider kind of like the science that relates to what's happening at that time. I mean, I'll give you an example. There's a book by Robert Sapolsky, who's a Stanford professor, and the book is called Behave. And it's about why human beings do and act the way that we do, from good to bad and from like a micro scale to a macro scale and on a huge time horizon. From what happened a second ago in our brain before we made a decision to, you know, our evolutionary heritage point is there in the Sierra Nevada foothills. There's this cave. And you walk down this cave and it kind of goes at a, at a slope, it declines down to get to the bottom. And then at the end of the cave, it's pitch black and there's like 150 foot drop that you can't see, can't see the drop well there. And they went down and they, and they found out there was a bunch of bones bottom. And what they found is that over hundreds of years, all of the bones belong to adolescent males, late adolescent males. And the point of that story was to explain to the reader of the book that when you are like 18 to 16 to 22 as a, as a male, you will never in your life make worse decisions than you do then. Like, that is when we are at our absolute worst. I mean, the other one that explains this too is like the greatest deterrent to jail is a 30th birthday. If it hasn't happened before 30, there's a very low chance of it happening after 30. So it's in these formative years where we're trying to find ourselves. And sometimes I think that society doesn't necessarily help us look in the right place. You know, it points us against each other. And I got to get the best grade so I can get this job, so I can join this thing and I can do it. Doesn't tell us about, like, hey, man, like, what do you. What do you like to do? What makes you happy? Do you want to be inside or do you want to be outside? Do you like to build things or, you know, like, it's. To me, it's amazing that that's not part of how we. I mean, we do it. Personally, how I raise my children, you know, they go to Montessori school. They kind of learn in a different method than most regular school kids. But, you know, pointing out, like, those things, man, it's really important, I think, for you to just kind of understand where your brain was at those times. You know, like the human brain, the executive function isn't fully like, developed until I think we're about 27 or 28. That's when the prefrontal cortex finishes its development because you need experience to get there. So your brain isn't even fully ready to do anything until it's 27 or 28, you know. And so I think about. I think about that and I think about how much I felt like I had figured out. When I was 14 or 15, I knew it all, you know, thought I knew it all. I thought I was a genius. Such an idiot.

No, well, I mean, we all looked up to you. We did. A lot of us did. And, you know, some people mature. That's actually one of the things I put into the show notes is you were valedictorian at Dael La Salle, weren't you?

Salutatorian.

So what is second?

Second.

Okay.

I got a B. I got one B. I got a B. And AP calculus.

That's a very good school. To the people out there that don't know, De La Salle had the longest. It was heavily known, widely known for their. Their football team. Right. Weren't they on the covers?

Well, when the Game Stands Tall is a movie about that high school.

Yeah.

You know, you were talking about Jock's dad and instilling hard work. And at De La Salle, from the time I was 14 years old, like, we. That their. Their whole mission statement there, like the reason that they were good was built on the premise that they were willing to push themselves further and hold each other accountable. The coaches didn't need to do anything there. I mean, it was almost like a bit of brainwashing. And it was amazing how it, how it worked. I mean, we would ask to run more in full pads, we would ask for more work. We would get there early and do work on our own without any prompting. It was, that was the culture that had been instilled there for years. And when you, when you got to that school, you expected to win everything. And you knew that the reason that you were going to win is because you were willing to do the work that the other people were not willing to do. You knew the public high school across the street, NATO Valley High School, they weren't going to be there. I mean, I can remember being a junior and senior in high school and showing up to the, showing up to the high school at 6 o' clock in the morning to pull tires and having my entire varsity team and half the JV team be there and no coaches in baseball. Like, that's just what the environment was like. There was like overworking was the way overworking was the norm. Yeah, just normal. That was normal. There was, there's nothing else there. That's why they've been so successful. I mean, they've been successful like that for 30 years. The second part of those, the, the team accountability. When they had you a deal of salad with football, especially when they had the guys write out goals, the goals were not about their own individual performance. The goals were how they were going to help somebody else on their team reach some sort of significant milestone. So the offensive line was talking about the running backs. The running back was talking about the offensive line. Everybody was talking about, how can I make you look good? You know, it's, it's a basic freshman.

Sophomore, you know, I mean, that was instilled at an early age at that school.

Oh yeah. And so I just worked, you know, and that's, that's my story. I mean, my story is not very complicated. I was a pretty good athlete. Not the best by any means. I had a good throwing arm because I played a lot of baseball as a kid, but I was just willing to practice more than everybody else for years. Not for like, oh, I'm just going to. Tomorrow I'm going to wake up and I'm going to, you know. And then it stops after a couple weeks. No, I mean, I, I practice too much until the day I stopped playing baseball and I had to find something else to practice after that. And we'll get to that later. But yeah, I just, I just, I like practicing I like practicing because, you know, baseball is the kind of game, and I've always said this, you have to be. You have to be born pretty tall to play in the NBA. And so, like, there's a limited amount of the population that can get there. You can't work hard and be 7ft tall. You know, you can work hard and be like Isaiah Thomas or something and be a great, great NBA player or Steph Curry, who's 6 3, by the way, and be a great NBA player, but you can't. You can't work hard and just be league average, you know, you can't work hard and be league average. The NFL, those guys that are. That are 350 pounds, that can run like that, that's not necessarily just hard work that got him there, that's been born like that. But baseball is the one game. Baseball and golf, I think that's why you can play golf until you're so old. But baseball is the one kind of. Of the three major sports that you can really see. When you watch a major league game, you can see not the best athletes as the best players because it's a less explosive game. It's a less athletic game. But hitting is really difficult. And the way that you get better at hitting is practicing a lot of. And so if you like to practice, shoot you. And I know even when we see each other now, we still go and hit in the cage because that's just like, there's no. There's not even a reason for it anymore. But we're gonna do it together when we hang out because it's fun and we hit. I'll never forget you and me. How cool is it when we hit in before the game at the cage in Wrigley? In Wrigley, yeah.

Dude, that's. To this day, that's one of the, like, the best moments of my life. Yeah, but. And rain out the night before, so we were able to hit on the. Maybe some other time.

Some other time we'll get on the field. But that was.

I mean, you're absolutely right, though. It's just, you know, repetition. But for me, it was just, you know, you know, something about yourself is just, you know, you maintain that even keel, you always had, you know, a funny little. You weren't too moody even, you know, 0 for 4, 2 punch outs. You were the same dude. After the game, we didn't have to, like, be, you know, walk on eggshells around you. And that's something to be, you know, said about your confidence at an early age and you're 20, 21 years old. And I, you know, if I had a bad game, it was just. It would ruin the rest of my evening and how I spoke with my family and stuff like that. So being able to keep the highs low and the lows high, so to speak, and keep that consistent mindset throughout, man, I mean, especially with you, you know, playing 162 games throughout a season and having, you know, especially towards the end of your career when you would get put in. I mean, I would always wonder about that situation with you as, you know, as a backup catcher and then going in, you know, getting your timing right and then still doing pretty well.

It's tough.

That's got to be so tough going in, seeing a guy, you know, facing an ace, throwing 95 with a cut, you know, and then still, you know, with your time, you haven't seen a pitcher, you know, six days or something like that, but you go in and just give a guy a day off. That's got to be the toughest job in baseball, I think.

Yeah, I mean, it's really hard to hit like that, but at the same time, it's a job in baseball. So, you know, like, as you know, I think people would. People probably would never understand, unless they've ever tried to do that, how difficult it is to compete against the best in the world. Infrequently in a game that is really dependent. Your success, a lot of the times is really dependent on your timing, like you're talking about in your vision, so you don't have a lot of experience. It's hard to do it well. But at the same time, man, I liked to, like, my philosophy has always been, when it comes to competition, like, show me who the. Who the best person is at this. Who's the best competition that we can face? And then I just want to try because, you know, the way that sports work over a long period of time is it's this kind of feedback loop where you practice, you practice, you practice, you train your body to get it into a certain place so that you can repeat all the things that you practice. And then you go out in baseball and you test it, and then you. Then you assess it when you're done, and then you go back out the next day, and you. Maybe you tweak your practice a little bit so that you can. You can shore up a hole or add something new perhaps when you have a longer period of time to do it, but then you just go back out and compete again. So to me, like, and that's, that's. I want to address the backup catching. Stuff like that. Like, that was great. You have to do, again, you have to do everything. You have to catch all the bullpens that the guys throw when they're not pitching so that you stay sharp defensively. You have to watch the game very closely because there's a chance that you might end up in that game. And if you haven't watched how the game has been called or how the guys have been pitched, you could pretty easily walk into a disaster there. So you have to be turned on. And I think that's the thing where, yeah, backup catching is hard. It's hard to. It's hard to be successful offensively. And if you look at any backup catcher in the history of baseball, there wasn't a ton that had a lot of offensive success. It's more important the other things that people don't understand that you don't see about making sure that if you are inserted into that game, you're not a drop off defensively or game calling wise or defensive management wise, because you have to look at the field and know where people are supposed to play. So there's a whole lot more of a kind of quarterbacking mentality that goes into baseball. And I think that when you're a catcher, like I was when you met me, you have to be even keel because you're at bat, if that's what you're focused on, you're not in. You're not in the present moment anymore. And in the present moment, you need to know what pitch to call, where to go if the short stops playing in the right place, what the, what play the coach might want to put on, what we threw this guy the last time that he was up. Like, there's all of these, what the scouting report says, how he, how he's done his last 20 at bats, what he looks like against cut. Like you have all. I have all those things in my head. There's no space for me to ruminate on something that happened in the past. Yeah, no space for it, because you're on to the next one. It's this. It's very similar, honestly, to when we were talking about De La Salle and the collaboration as a team versus competition amongst the team. It's yes, and, you know, like, yes, this happened and now this is happening. And so what that happened now what are we going to do? Because it's constantly forcing you to look into the, you know, take what you know from the past and learn from it. And look immediately into the present. So if you're not willing to sacrifice the highs, then you're going to experience the same level of lows because it kind of balances itself all out anyway. So I chose to just ride the middle as much as I could. I went up and down like everybody else. I have frustrations. I cried in bathrooms and professional baseball. You know, like, I've. I've. I've been in those kind of places before. I've. I remember almost quitting the year that I got called up, like, two days before I got called up to the big leagues because I had. Yeah, I had this meeting with my manager, and he said, hey, you know, we want to tell you that I got good news and I got bad news. He's like, the good news is you got selected to play in the All Star Game again for the pcl, which is aaa, so the next level closest to the big leagues. And it was going to be my second time playing in the All Star Game in three years without playing in the major leagues. And so, hey, we did that. But the bad news is, hey, the Marlins were who I was playing with at the time. They sent down a catcher from the big leagues, and they called up the other guy on my team, and then they told me that I wasn't going to play for, like, the next two weeks, even though I was the best catcher in the league at the time. So imagine being the best. Finally. I'm the best player on my team finally. And I'm not even good enough in the organization's mind to play. And so we were in Texas, and I was just laying in the bullpen during the game complaining about it, and. Right in. A pitcher that we had named Scott Nestor kind of snapped me back into reality. He's like, dude, you're really good. You're going to end up in the big league somewhere. You need to clean it up. He was having a tough year, and he. He was, you know, younger than me, but with some sage advice, and two days later, somebody got hurt in the big leagues, and I was in the big leagues. And then I was back in the minor leagues, I think, six years after that. So from two days. Yeah, I mean, it'll definitely. The more you do something like that, the more you. The more of your time that you invest into something and you more. The more that you feel like you should see a positive return from it. The further you go without that positive return, the harder it is to stay on that course. Like, you'll find any. You'll find any Possible avenue out, you know, and you get somebody like me who likes competition, likes being in the moment, wants to play in the big leagues. Like actually thinking about at that time 10 years ago now, sitting in Austin, Texas, being like, I'm done. I'm done. This stinks, you know, like, I'm never going to play in the big leagues if this version of me doesn't. They don't want to call it this version of me because this is the best version of me that there's ever been. I don't know that I could play better than I was playing that year. And, you know, fortunately for me, I didn't. I got talked out of it, and two days later, I was making my debut in San Diego.

And then two days after that, I'm watching you homer off Channel park, right?

Channel park, yeah.

That's awesome.

Dodger Stadium.

Yeah, I was there. I was there. I. So, yeah, if you could just give a little background on where the different. Just how you transform and like, just how you changed in how, you know, the ups and downs, peaks and valleys in. From minor league baseball throughout the major leagues, where you are now, how things have changed, and then to ultimately to where you. To lead. To where you are now, to creating your own position for the former world champion Chicago Cubs, and to how that really got you into mindfulness and being, you know, to where you are with leading meditation groups. And so where you are now.

Well, so I, you know, I played and then I played and I played and I played and I played and I played, and all of a sudden there was just no chance for me to play anymore. You know, I didn't retire. They just. No one was gonna let me back, you know, in professional baseball. I wasn't gonna. I was gonna force my. My kids to go to the Atlantic League and independent baseball and try to wait for nine people to get hurt. But, yeah, I spent seven years in the minor leagues, um, grinding it out. Some of the best times of my life, uh, some of the closest friendships I've ever made were when. When you're making a thousand dollars a month for five months and you're working full time in the off season and you're chasing your dreams, like you're. I mean, you're putting yourself on the line for something that you love, you know, and there's not a lot of people that are willing to, like I said, they'll. They'll give themselves ways to hop off of that and do something else really quickly. Uh, and it feels good, I think, to, like, really strive and, and that's the thing that I really get from my experience at the minor leagues. There's lots of ups and downs, there's lots of mechanical changes, and there's lots of games that I played and obviously. But it's this kind of self discovery of how you need to think and how you need to act and growing up, but being able to grow up slow. I always looked at it like that I didn't have to grow up like everybody else. You know, you're playing the same game you were playing when you were five, but you're playing it every day with your friends all the time. It's really, it's why sports were so addictive to me. So, you know, I'm in that environment and then all of a sudden one day they're like, yeah, you know, we don't have a spot for you anymore, so you're gonna have to move on. And it was actually kind of relieving for me. I drove away from the field that day, picked up my family, spent like a week in Seattle and then we made the drive down I5 to the bay Area where we were living at the time. And I was really happy. You know, it was like the, I felt like a burden had been lifted, you know, because it wasn't my decision. I didn't say, you know, today I'm going to retire from baseball. It was baseball retired me, they didn't give me a jersey. And from that moment forward, I stayed in shape for a couple of weeks to see if anybody called. Nobody enticing at all called. And then I just stopped hitting and I put my bat down. And honestly from that point, I never think about it ever anymore. It's completely gone out of my mind. And I think that's where the, the mindfulness comes in. You know, I recognize when I was done playing professional sports, I mean, I was 35 years old, it had been baseball. I'd been playing baseball for the last three decades consistently. And so I knew that there was going to be a hole. I knew that there was going to be a big void in my life. And there was, you know, I got home and I'm beating my 4 year old and tic tac toe over and over again. Uh, you know, and I'm, and I'm trying, I'm challenging people to gain to any sort of game that we can play. From like horse with the trash can and paper to like, you want to play Monopoly, let's play Clue. Want to play Pictionary? Like what I needed to compete right I needed. I needed to compete, and I needed sign. I needed it. I didn't have it anymore. And in professional sports, too, you know, you don't realize this, but yes, we're competing on the field, but there's so much kind of internal team competition going on all the time. In that environment, you have all these guys that are so competitive that it's card games in the minor leagues for fun, and it's card games in the big leagues for money. It's competing in the weight room, it's competing in the cage. It's competing all the time. Well, that was gone, and I replaced that with Brazilian Jiu jitsu. Because every day you go to practice and you compete, and sometimes you get staph infection on the whole right side of your face. Sometimes that happens, right? Yeah, whatever. I have, I don't know, just poisoned myself with a mat. But it filled the void, you know, and it gave me that thing. And then I also realized, too, and this is an important one, and I don't know how many people have ever thought about this concept of stress like this, but I didn't have enough stress. I didn't have enough stress. I. You know, playing in front of 50,000 people, like, physiologically, like, you reach a state of, like, anxiety. You get in fight or flight sometimes, right? You reach the state of really highly alert, and you have to learn how to manage it to successfully play. But that's not the point of this. It's that I was so used to this huge, this high level of stress, and then that was gone, completely gone. I was never nervous. I was never worried about anything. And what I've learned about the human mind and doing the job that I do now is that in the absence of real physical stress, we will create it in our own head. That's what we do. You know, we evolved as people that were supposed to be freaked out when they heard rustling in the bushes because it might be a tiger or something. And now we live in a time where it's the safest time to be alive in the history of the world. We've never had better access to food or medicine. But if you look at the psychological data, anxiety and depression are just steadily climbing. They're steadily climbing. And I think it's because people haven't necessarily attempted to go out and find that kind of real physical stress, like something that they're excited about that scares them a little bit. Like, what is that for you? It might be for a lot of people that's just simply going to the gym and exercising, you know, like, wondering if they're going to make the next rep, wondering if they're going to last on the next sprint. We need it. We need it as a human species. And if you have the higher capacity you have for it, the quicker it is for you to get messed up when you. When you don't have any opportunities to feel it. I think that what I'm kind of describing, too, is the. It's kind of the paradigm for how PTSD is viewed. You know, like, these people get into these really stressful situations, and then they don't have that when they get home. And what happens, they end up simulating it. And our minds are so powerful. The things that we can do that we simulate that on stress, and, like, they keep kind of going through this loop and things continue to trigger it over and over again. And it's, like, debilitating and horrible. Um, and there's a very, very small kind of similar idea happening when you. When you leave. When you leave sports. But people that are depressed or people that are anxious, you know, a lot of times I think they. They. They would really benefit, maybe from something scary and that would make them anxious. Like when I drive to a jiu jitsu tournament now, I get the same feeling that I did right before a baseball game would start, where I'm like, oh, man. Like, okay, this is it. This is time to. It's time to. It's time to. It's time to perform, right, for me to let. It's time for me to let my conscious mind just kind of start to fade to the edges of awareness. Start. It's time for me to say, like, to tell it. Like, okay, you prepared me. Thank you. Now it's. Now it's the body's time to go out and do its thing, you know, whatever thing that is butterflies.

Is it. What is it for you? Like, what's the excitement? Is it anxiety?

I get, like, what are my physiological symptoms of, like, stress?

I get for, like, preparing for a tournament or, you know, back in the day, you know, you said it was similar to when you would head to a game.

Well, I think that, like, right before a game would start, you know, like national anthem. National anthem time at a baseball game. I'd start to, yeah, feel a little bit. My stomach. I don't know about butterflies, but, like, like this kind of heightened sense of awareness. You know, you start to really, like, really kind of zone in, you know, your heartbeats a little bit faster. You're like, there's more. There's it's easier to grab a little bit of more tension in your body. And so you have to kind of learn how to handle that. But that's what it was for me. It was like that feeling of like, oh, man. And so now it's funny because when it started out, that feeling, that feeling started out as something that was negative to me. You know, I was of this kind of stress as debilitating, you know, mindset. But over time of being under stress, it completely flipped. So now if I'm driving to a jiu jitsu tournament and I feel that or it makes me happy.

Yeah, I was gonna say I feel right at home.

I feel that I'm like, oh, thank you. Like, where have you been? You know, like, I haven't been. I haven't been challenging myself enough, I guess, because I missed you. I missed this. I missed this feeling of. Again, like we said earlier, like you had leaps and bounds when we were 18, but I missed this feeling of like striving, you know, of like going for it, going after it. It's a. It's. It's. To me, it's the, it's the cure to my, to my anxiety and my rumination and my depression. So that for me was the kind of the physiological gap. And then my partner at work, Darnell McDonald, talked to me a little bit about meditation. And so I started practicing because, man, again, when the absence of a lot of stress, your mind will just go, you know, the mind wanders 50% of the time. The human mind wanders 50% of the Time. And while it's wandering, it's generally negative. So what I practice doing and what we teach people how to do is we're not worried about like trying to achieve some certain feeling in meditation. And we're not using mindfulness to be like, to pretend that we're so Zen or something. We're practicing catching ourselves when our thinking starts running away from us. We're practicing trigger. Having the conscious mind have a trigger to recognize, like, oh, there it goes. Okay. And then non judgmentally bring it back to the present moment and the task at hand.

I pinpoint. I've been doing that for years. If there's some little thing that's bugging me personal, relate, whatever it is, I pinpoint it, I target it, I overanalyze it, why analyze it? And then I ultimately, over time, it's gone. I mean, that helped me a lot with acting would just dissect and I'd figure out, you know, rather than, you know, just dwelling on, you Know how I didn't get a certain role or why I didn't get a certain role or who did. It would take me just one night, you know, Whereas I wish I knew that back in the day when I was playing. But it's just a completely different thing because this was something that was in my control. I felt with baseball, being that he played, striking out. Whereas acting, I could have done as good as I, you know, imagined going into the audition as possible and then lose a role because of my height or my eye color, whatever. Hair color.

Yeah, well, I mean, one of them's, one of them kind of has like fluctuating subjective variables. Right. And then the other one is you trying to hit a ball.

Right.

You know what I mean? There. It's a more base thing, the baseball playing than acting is. There's, I'm sure there's more, there's a lot more that goes on intellectually to assume a different character. Whereas hitting a baseball is generally a very mindless skill. If you learn how to, like I said, let that conscious voice just recede to the edge of awareness and give you a simple thing to think about. I mean, that's in the moment, that's hitting. When we back out further. You know, we have so much information now in baseball and sometimes guys just drown in it. But when you talk to the guys that are the best in the world, their approaches are incredibly simple to those things. And I imagine it would be similar to acting, you know, like they just, those guys I'm sure that are, that are great at it, they just, they just feel it, you know, they just feel it. And I don't know if it's believing. You know, this is another. You're saying that you said, you said the word confidence earlier. And I think that confidence gets too much positive attention. And I think that the. And Eric Barker from UCLA has written about this and done some research on it. But self compassion is more important for all of us. I think the ability to forgive yourself when you mess up is more important than being confident. Because if you can't forgive yourself when you mess up, then that's all you're thinking about the next time you go out and compete. You know, it's learning how to, like you said, learn how to ride that kind of healthy middle and stay away from the peaks and valleys of A, believing your own hype and thinking and believing that you're incredible and awesome and you're never going to fail. And then, and then B, you know, being in that black hole down in the Pit where you feel like you're worthless. You know, like, that's. For me, that's kind of how it all ties, you know, ties back to itself.

Man, I wish I would, you know, was taught early on, you know, and, you know, even in college with our coaches and, you know, it's. Some people, you know, really, you know, take that high, you know, being in the zone, being. Being super confident at the plate, but rather just, you know, just taking, you know, kind of like Brandon Belt from the Giants, you know, if he punches out or homers, you don't really know, you know, you can't read his body.

Language, can't tell him.

But. Yeah, that's interesting. So can you. What I've always not. Well, now I know, but I mean, the audience may want to know, what's your definition of mindfulness and what. What does that mean to you?

I believe in the Jon Kabat Zinn definition of mindfulness, which is mindfulness means paying attention on purpose in the present moment in a particular way without judgment. So, excuse me. Paying attention in a particular way on purpose in the present moment without judgment. And when I've broken this down before and kind of look at it as four specific things. And then there's a very general meditation practice that pairs with it. But, I mean, you have to. Basically what you're doing is. It's an attention practice. So you're cultivating attention. You're pointing it where you want to point it. You're doing it in the present moment, and you're doing it without judgment. Right. So what I'm doing, if I'm going to do a mindfulness meditation or if I'm going to guide a mindfulness meditation, the language is not. Is pretty strict. There's not a lot of room for expansion in and out, because it's a very simple process. So what you would do for a mindfulness meditation is you would set an intention to think about one thing or focus on one thing, point all your attention to one thing. We use the breath so often because it's automatic. We don't have to try and do it. You know, we don't have to try and stare at something on the wall or a picture or create a picture in our head. Even if we tried to hold our breath until we passed out, we're still going to breathe. Like, we can't overcome that. So we use the breath. It's an automatic thing. I like to use two different elements depending on the day, but generally I do the second one. The first one is you can follow it in and all the way out with all of your focus, with your eyes closed, with your mind, like a flashlight following the breath in and out and in and out. Or I like to use the sensations of the body as it moves around my breath.

Of the breath. Sorry to interrupt, but, like, do you have a specific length? About, like, how many seconds, you know, in and out?

No. Your goal here is to make it is to see if you can let go and watch it. Watch your. Watch the body breathe. It'll do it for you. You don't have to do it. You can sit there and say, when you're breathing in, there's two things are happening. I'm following the sensations of my chest and my lungs. I feel like as they expand. That's part one of it, I think that you can hold on to. And part two of it is when I'm breathing in, I know I'm breathing in, and that's it. I'm breathing in, I'm breathing out. I'm breathing in, I'm breathing out. Back and forth. Sounds super simple because it is. But that's the object of your attention. But because the human mind says 800 to 1,000 words a minute, inevitably you are going to be distracted. And that's the whole point of the exercise, is that I'm going to focus on this, but I get distracted. The meat of what we're talking about, of cultivating mindfulness, is recognizing when you're distracted and then consciously reorienting your attention back to where you originally intended to do it. So I sit down. I'm focusing on my breath. My mind takes off into the future. I start planning. I recognize that. That I'm planning. Oh, look at that. Okay, I'm planning. And then just gently I escort it back. Oh, okay. Hey, bam. There. I mean, good. Oh, there we go. I recognized it. Okay. What was I supposed to think? What did I determine to think about? Oh, I wanted to focus on my breathing. Right. So. And you go back every time you complete that loop. Every single time. It is like a curl or a deadlift for your ability to focus and concentrate.

Interesting. So did. This position was not. You know, I think it's the first position in Major League baseball that they've had the mental skills coordinator. I mean, so. Right. I mean, the Chicago Cubs, when. I think it was co. Epstein, when they came to you, that position wasn't even.

It was just me. And. Well, Darnell McDonald was the other one. We had. We had similar style positions. We call it. We started calling them mental skills coordinator. My first year, the year we won the World Series, I was just general baseball operations. I was learning everything. So I just followed pro scouting and amateur scout. I got to see the organization, the whole framework of our organization. The year we won the World Series, from, like a front row being mentored seat. It was incred. It was an incredible experience. I saw everything from the trade deadline to the draft to the championship at the end, to the. To spring training in the beginning, from the moment it started till the time that it ended. I was even. I was in January that year, before spring training, I was with some of our pro scouts down in the Dominican Republic, learning about that style of work and going to see amateur players.

The international scouting style of work. Is that what you mean?

Yeah. So I saw every. I saw everything. And the best feedback that I got in all my trips was when I would go visit our affiliates or our major league team and guys would ask me questions or we'd catch back up and hang out. And I started realizing that I was making a really positive impact on the people that were around. You know, I had a lot of experience in baseball. Our current team I played against. A lot of those guys are with them. So I know them on a very personal level. And, you know, I feel like they trust me now. But, yeah, these are. The way that our organization seems to work is they don't necessarily fill positions. They kind of meet people that they like and hire them, and then they just assign us to where we're going to fit best in the organization. And it's very fluid. Like, I'll have work that I'll do sometimes with research and development, for example, where we'll be talking about a catching thing, and I'll ask my opinion, and I'll have work that I'll do with. And then. And then, you know, next thing I know, I'm leading meditation, and the next thing I'm out, I'll put my baseball pants on. Because we have a major league player comes back to Arizona, needs to throw a bullpen, I'll throw my pants on and I'll catch him. That's my. That's my favorite thing to do nowadays, is just catch the occasional bullpen. It's like. It's my. It's my moving meditation that I do.

I bet. Yeah.

I freaked the kids out, too, Nyla. I freak the kids out. Like the young Latin kids, especially because in instructional league, you know, everybody's like 16, 17, 18, and they're trying to catch, and guys are throwing 95, and they're skipping balls and like, I don't even have to think to catch anymore because I practiced it so much. So guys are skipping 94 off the Astroturf. I'm picking it and like the, and just always no selling it because it's. I didn't even, you know, I don't even feel like I'm conscious. I'm not even consciously doing it. My body just does it. If I, if I get out of the way, my body's like, oh, it's over there. I got it, you know, and I throw it back.

And I look at the kids and.

They'Re just like, oh my God. It's unbelievable. I'm like, I'm not that good. I'm just not that freaked out, you know, anymore. Everything's much slower for me in the context of balls flying at my face because I had so much experience with it happening. But that's the thing I miss the most. Yeah. So now I do. I can do a lot of cool stuff now. You know, like we get to do these, this work. I get to be close to Joe Madden and Theo, our major league team all the time. And then like some of these great younger players that we have and fantastic coaching that we have in the minor league. So like, I'm always around just this super healthy culture where everyone's striving to get better all the time. It reminds me of De La Salle. It reminds me of high school. Everyone's striving to get better. Like, we don't, there's no, like, you don't need to be sick to improve, you know, or to get, or you don't need to get, be sick to get better. You could always be getting better all the time if you're, if you're, if you're going after it. And we do that here and I get to learn from, I think, the best people in the world with this sport. And truthfully, I learned the most from the players, you know, I learned the most from the players. I think that Tommy Listell has been a huge influence on me. I don't know how much you know about his story, but that guy in 2016, they said they were going to send him down. He just shut it down. And he's like, he's like, I'm a person first and a baseball player second. And I'm like, wow, just the balls to stand up to it and to give the organization I work for credit. Like, they listened, you know what I mean? They listened to him and they like helped him out instead of just, ah, screw it, we're just. We'll put the next body in that can come in and pinch it. And now he's kind of the leadership voice in our team. And that's. Yeah, it's amazing. And that's one of his main messages is to the players is like, hey, we're people first, we're baseball players second. So let's make sure that we nail our off the field stuff so that we're happy all the time. And then let's show up and kick ass and play baseball together, because that's what we like. We like doing it. You know, we get paid well to do it. So being around all those guys, I learned so much.

I remember that situation. That's when he got sent down. Right. Like, and he felt that he was doing pretty well in the big leagues and he got sent down and he kind of like, did he not accept his demotion or something like that? I forget exactly what happened.

He just went home. He's like, I'm not going. He's got a plane of flu. Yeah. I mean, and it was, it was a tough time. I can remember, you know, like the, it put a lot of stress on, you know, the people in our front office, I think. And this is the. What I've noticed about the Cubs and why it was the only place that I wanted to work after being a player if I was going to stay in baseball. The main thing I noticed about our front office was like, their honesty and transparency. So, like, there's not, there's no BS that goes on. It's like, we're my job. A lot of our jobs is support to these players. We're trying to give them every possible resource and as much support as we can so that they're successful. Because if they win, we all win. Like, that's the, that's the game we're playing here. But at the same time, these guys are honest and they actually care about the people, which is very different than just this, the other. A lot of the rest of baseball where it's a, you know, the players are looked at like meat or cattle or racehorses and yeah, pick them up, spit them, you know, put them in the big leagues, have them throw 96 for two years, blow their arm out, get them out of here. Like, we're not. We don't do the same things here. And that was a big burden, I think, on Theo and Jed and the people at the top of the front office. Yeah. Handling it. Because as smart thinking people, like, they understood, oh, I understand where you're coming from, you know, I understand why you feel this way. Nobody's ever challenged it like this before. But let's, let's come up with a solution. And he came back and did incredible for us last year. And he's. I think he's hitting.330 off the bench right now for us this year. And he's like, he was 9 for 21 or something pinch hitting this year. It's incredible. Incredible. He's facing every at bat this guy has. These guys are throwing 98 with a 92 mile an hour slider because pitchers are from the future. And he's, he's just getting hits and just taking pro at bats all the time. One shot, never see the guy again till next year. And he does. It's really, really, really impressive. But it's a. But his, him being around and him feeling like he has that platform that comes from that. And again, people, people before players. Joe Madden talks about be present, not perfect. Right? What does that mean? And I think this applies off the field and to anybody in life too. It's like when you get hired for a job or you show up to work or you go, I don't know, to the gym. It's not about you being perfect and like being something that you're not. You know, like it's the, what's the Dolly quote? Never don't strive for perfection because you'll never attain it. It's not about you being perfect, it's about you being there. It's about you being where your feet are and doing your job the best that you can in the moment. Like. And he tells that to our players when they come up. He's like, I don't need you to be anything else than who you are right now and go let your body go react out on this field right now. We'll put you in the right position. Go do it.

Joe Madden you're talking about.

Yeah, okay.

Yeah, I mean I just. The culture in that clubhouse is unbelievable. I've been going there for what, like three or four years now. I think I started when you were there in 2014 and that was Rick Renteria I believe was there. He left.

Another great guy, by the way. Ricky.

Yeah, he seems like a really good guy.

Great guy.

And was Epstein the, the GM when Renneria came in there? When Epstein came in. Is that when Madden Theo came in.

2011, they started rebuilding the Cubs.

Okay, okay.

When, when the. Why am I drawing a blank? I can see when the Ricketts family bought the team, they hired Theo.

Okay.

Theo and Jed came. Jed left San Diego. Theo is in the private sector after Boston and they came in and the Ricketts family has done just incredible work in Chicago. I mean, they've renovated the stadium, they renovated the locker room, they've built hotels, they've, they've, they've cleaned up the surrounding Wrigleyville area. They own all the stuff around the field. They've spared no expense for, for the players. I mean, if you go into our locker room in the big leagues, you've got float tank, you've got cryo sauna, infrared sauna, hot and cold immersion therapy, like you name it. Or if a player wants it, you know, we've got $60,000 postural machines that I don't even know how to work the machine when I look at it. You got to stand on it and it gives you some reading. You know, it's like, it's very similar to going to the kind of like a bit more, there's a bit more, we need a bit more length of research behind things. But it's really similar to going to like bulletproof labs or something where you walk in, you're like, what's this thing? And they had a bunch of research on it and they're well, we heard this thing's the best, so we bought it and we're going to use it. The food's incredible. We cater whole foods into every level of the minor leagues. We make sure in the major leagues that everything is ethically sourced, food wise. So grass fed, grass finished beef. The nutritionist makes bulletproof coffees for guys mct oil, butter, collagen, protein, green smoothies. Like we go for all real food before any sort of supplements. I think probably the most commonly used supplement at the major league level would be like a, like minerals or electrolytes, you know, so people don't get dehydrated. But there's not a lot of, there's not a lot of going outside of just the food that nature provides. And I mean, they'll even kill a pig sometimes roast it like and bring it to the field that day. You know, like the foods, the food is, it's fantastic. I mean, and it's just a, it's a, it's like the rest of it, you know, there's no, no expenses spared in the pursuit of greatness in Chicago right now. So it's really fun to just be able to ride this wave and be a part of it.

And so that, that kind of is a little bit of a segue. Into. I mean, when I.

Excuse me.

Just two nights ago at the gym that I work out in, there are a couple guys that openly admitted they use steroids in the sauna. To me, how they do, and I get asked that all the time. And I've never used anything outside of creatine, just because I'm too scared of the side effects. I mean, maybe down the road, if I were older, maybe like, down the road, seriously, if I would possibly explore testosterone. But I don't know. I don't know even that. I'm just scared with the side effects, especially with steroids and all of that. But just in your opinion, in the game, was that pretty prevalent and has it changed? You're seeing guys like Robinson Cano right now. He's in some. Man, that's.

That's crazy. I mean, pretty prevalent. I mean, I. I never saw it. You know, did I see it? I don't think I've ever seen. No, I've seen it once, but it wasn't. It was. I've seen it once, but it was not in the context of baseball. But, like, yeah, I never saw it. I always expected that something was going on with certain people, you know, like. Well, I guess I did see it because I was Yasmine grand, all's teammate, when he was putting this weird deodorant on. And we kept asking him, like, what are you doing? Why are you rubbing that all over your, like, sides and stuff? And he's like, oh, no, no big deal. It's my deodorant. I'm like, something's weird here. He got. He got popped that year and Rob as a canoe. I mean, I was with him in spring training, in 15 with the Mariners, and. Super nice guy, you know, I mean, most people are, honestly. But. But Robbie, like, I didn't see him do.

Put.

Put in too much effort into, like, weight room or anything, but he was just jacked. So hearing that he tested positive for a masking agent, it's gotten to the point where it's just not surprising anymore. And I also think that, you know, baseball sends very mixed signals to people about how they feel about it. You know, if you think about, you know, Barry Bonds, greatest hitter of all time, never been caught, not in the hall of Fame. Alex Rodriguez, caught multiple times and lies about it. We put him on Sunday Night Baseball and we have him cover the World Series on the field, talking, you know, like, we give him this job. Bartolo Colon leaves baseball for two years, takes every illegal substance known to man, comes back Reinvigorates his career, plays for a couple years in Oakland, gets caught again, gets suspended for a year, gets and gets a contract right off of that. And he's like Major League Baseball. Twitter, Instagram and Facebook's like gif. Like they love. Everybody loves Bartolo cologne, right? We love Bartolo cologne, but we're mad at Robinson Cano. You know, like, they're so two faced. The whole thing is so it's not clear what, how we're gonna feel about it because we say that this is something that you can't do. And then our culture celebrates the people, celebrates plenty of people that do it. So I don't understand what the. Looking back on it now, like, what is the, what do we do to disincentivize it? Because if I'm gonna give you a contract the next. Like Melkin Cabrera, remember when he got the Giants the World Series in 2012? He had like 360. He was running, he was running three, eight to first base, like way faster than he's ever been in his life. Just juiced out of the juice, out of his mind. He goes, and he's the MVP of the All Star Game. So the Giants get the home field advantage and then he tests positive and he gets suspended for 50 games. And then he gets like a two year deal for $20 million the next year. And so you see stuff like that and you go, what is the point here? Why don't you just either make it all legal or just ban everybody for life that gets caught? Real simple, right? It's either legal or it's not. And there's no. And there's no policy. I mean, truthfully, if you've seen like bigger, stronger, faster, if you do your own research about steroids, like zero to one person dies a year from steroids. And they're usually somebody that's mixing it with something else. And that whole Lyle Alzado steroid thing, that's bs. There was so many other drugs going into that guy's system. System. But I think they're healthy enough. I think it's more of a. It's like a moral issue in baseball, but in real life, man. Yeah, I know lots of people now that have gotten older that are super advocates of it. Like real low doses, keeping them healthy, keeping them happy, keeping them a little bit leaner than maybe they would be. So. Yeah, I don't know. I haven't explored it too deeply myself yet, but yeah, like, you know, should, should Robinson Canoe be concerned? No, man, because Alex Rodriguez is doing baseball games On ESPN on Sunday night. So I. I don't. Some weight they've never done before, like, and get the. Because your body doesn't forget, even if the steroids go away. Like, you just increased your capacity. You know, you pick up £600 or something now, you'll always have it in you if you can get back to that same level of strength. So, you know, do that. Get suspended for 80 games and then come back the next year and get to the big leagues and sign a contract. I mean, to me, that's like. That's the. What. What are we really doing to stop doing these things? And are we really being honest about the risks of doing it? And are we really being honest about the 90s and the 80s and the 70s and the 60s when. Because, you know, all these. All these people are so. I look at it like ambition. All these people are so competitive. Like, Bob Gibson said it. He was like, if I knew about steroids, I would have been injecting them immediately. He says because he was so competitive, he wanted to kill everybody that he played against. He would look for any possible edge from spitting on the ball, putting pine tar on it, to shooting himself up. I'm sure he would have gone totally after it. You know, do you want to have that be the model where it's unsafe and people. People just do whatever they want, or. Or do you want to have a model that we. Where you are safe? And right now, the current way that it works is, it's just. Who knows? Still, we don't know. You know, he'll come back. Robinson, Canoe come back next year, and nobody'll even remember.

It's. Yeah, I mean, I hope that happens. You know, they're saying a lot of things right now as far as, you know, jeopardizing this hall of Fame chances and things like that. It's. Yeah, it's tough.

Well, I feel like you're out at this point, you know, like, one. If Bonds can't. If you don't put Bonds in, and they haven't voted Bonds in, even though he's never failed a drug test, you know, you don't put Bonds in. Like, that's literally the best hitter that ever lived. He's not in the hall of Fame. And the guy with the most hits of all time, although he signed his own death warrant on that one, Pete Rose. He actually. He signed the paperwork that said, I. I will pull myself out of being eligible for any of that. Like, he signed it himself. Yeah.

Oh, yeah.

But, I mean, he's got the Most hits in the history of baseball. The guy with the most home runs in the history of baseball is a cheater. Like, when are people going to figure out that cheating is, like, the sixth tool of baseball? You know, it's been there. It's been like from the. From Trevor Bauer talking about the Astros putting extra pine tar on the ball so that the spin rate gets higher, to knuckleball pitchers spitting on the baseball guys throwing spitballs to me, scuffing the ball for Jason Marquis, to Sammy Sosa corking his bat to the steroids and the amphetamines and the greenies. Like, baseball has a long kind of bad history of always cheating, always cheating. So are people still using steroids now? Do you think there's a PED problem now? You know what I'm going to say to that? I've never seen it, and I don't see it with any. Obviously, with our players, I don't see any of that kind of stuff. But wouldn't be surprised if there's other people out there, you know, that are. That are. That are cheating. Because all I got to do is look at the last hundred years and see that they've been doing it the whole time. So I'm sure they're doing it now, whoever it is. I don't know.

So, yeah, yeah. I mean, it's. I. The thing I would do, I would. Caffeine, I guess, back in the day, you know, just with. I would drink Coke or coffee before, but. And then creatine. That was as much as I've done. I definitely wasn't.

You were just, like. You weren't just, like, downing rip fuel ephedrine pills.

Try ephedra in junior college. And then I stopped it because I just felt really, really jittery. That beta lean, actually. But, yeah, I did try a little bit of that junior college, but I stopped because it was a mess at the place.

It's too much.

Yeah. We had a question from Jackie here about time management. She's a professional. She's actually an athletic trainer, and she has a family, and she just feels like there's not enough hours in the day. And she wanted to know your advice on time management and what you do to schedule that. And I actually want to hear your advice on this as well. You know, the biggest thing right now these days is it's, like, cool to see how busy you are. And I had someone call me out on it at a conference I went to recently. Like, man, you just. You need to get better at planning. You need to get better at scheduling. And I'm like, oh, man, that actually makes a really good point, because I'm not as organized with my scheduling, and I need to get better at that. And I'm just wondering if you. How you seem very organized and you have a family yourself. I don't, but I'm running a business and things like that. So you're working as well, running a business also as a job that demands a lot of time. So what do you do to. For time management?

Well, you know, unfortunately, my wife Megan, is a great scheduler. Takes care of all the stuff like that around our house and our family. So I get updated on what we're gonna do. But, you know, I think that, yeah, I'm not busy. And I'll tell you why I'm not busy. It's because that's the life that I'm trying to live, you know, like when I stopped playing and I kind of, like I said, I got to be a kid for so long, and I thought about. I actually did the Jordan Peterson writing program, future authoring, where you kind of a bunch of really, honestly, really valuable thing to do for anybody. Say what you want to say about his politics or. Some people think he's alt, right? Some people don't. Yeah, some people don't like him, though, and that's okay. Everybody can have their own opinion. I don't just. I don't care about anybody else's opinion. I loved his program, so I did his program. I wrote, asked me a bunch of questions, and I started to kind of figure out what I wanted my days to be able to look like. I think that that's where we make a lot of mistakes. And I'm sorry, this is not going to directly address time management, but why are we busy? We're generally busy, I think, because we're trying to push happiness over the horizon. We're going to go, listen, if I do all this work now, then I'm going to get this outcome, Then I'm going to feel awesome, you know, Then I'm going to. Then I'm going to feel awesome. And if we. If we live in that kind of if then philosophy, we never reach then, because once then hits the next, then the next if then pops up. So what I did is I started looking at how do I want. Like, what do I want out of life? Like, what do I want to be able to do? And I'm like, okay, I love doing Brazilian jiu jitsu right now, so I want to be able to do that as Much as possible. Okay. I have, I have two young daughters that I want to see as much as I possibly can. So in taking the job that I took, I travel, you know, 12 to 15 days a month for five months. And so that's obviously scheduled. But my other days here we have our. I moved closer to our spring training complex so I can go into work and be done with work at one o' clock here because that's when the extended spring training game ends. And that's when the, that's when our Phoenix angel end. And I can, at the same time, I kind of killed two birds with one stone when I can go there. Because I can take my philosophy and give it to kids when they're 17 and 18 years old. So they grow up with it. They grow up with all of my experience because I'm around them, right? And then I see those kids as the years progress forward, I see them in a ball and in double A, or, you know, I see guys like C.J. edwards from a ball all the way to the big leagues. And now is like a friend of mine, but I've known him since he was a kid, you know, a kid kid. And so because of that, I wrote out my, like, what is my ideal day? I wake up, I do some. I do a workout, wake up, do my meditation, do a workout, eat breakfast with my kids. They go to school, I go to Jiu jitsu, I get done with Jiu Jitsu, I go to the field, I spend a couple hours over there making sure everybody's okay. And then I have the afternoons to pursue my own, like, personal interests if I want, or watch my kids do their gymnastics practice or go to my kids jiu jitsu class, you know, like, that's the stuff that makes me happy. So that's the shit I'm gonna do because I am not, I am not gonna become some slave to this system where I feel like I gotta work 58 hours a day and 24 hours to make enough money to receive, to get, to get some stuff that's not gonna make me happy and I'm gonna forget about in two weeks anyway. That's how I choose to live my life. I choose to live my life in the present moment. I think that a lot of the mindfulness stuff has really kind of pushed me back there because that's part of that definition is in the present moment. And obviously playing baseball and being an athlete for so long, that'll put you in the present moment. And doing Jiu jitsu, when someone's trying to strangle you. You're not thinking about your next appointment. You're not thinking about what happened last week. You're thinking about how the hell are you going to get this guy's hands out off your neck or this guy's sinking in a choke. How are you going to get away from it? You're forced into the present moment, and that's where our happiness lives, in my opinion. Fear, anxiety, that all lives in the future. It's not real rumination and depression, that's all about something that already happened that's also not real tomorrow. Like the comedian Bo Burnham says, tomorrow is a relative term. It doesn't exist without today. So I'm about what's happening now and what makes me happy right now in this moment. And so I choose to try to manage my time in a way where I get as many opportunities to experience these things that I want to experience. And in that way, I would say, yeah, I'm not particularly busy because that's what I want my life to be like. And I would rather pursue that with all of my drive and motivation and effort. How can I work? How can I. Tim Ferriss it a little bit. How can I work as little as possible and produce the greatest results and then go out there and pursue the things that I want to pursue? You know, that's my approach to time management, is how much of that stuff do you actually not have to do, right? That's the first place to look. What can you strip away? Like, what is a burden on you that you actually don't need? If you really reevaluate it, what can you sacrifice to get something that you actually want, which is our time? It's the most valuable thing that we have is our. Is our time. And if you're, if you feel like you're just stacked. Appointment to appointment to appointment to appointment. I don't know, man. I don't know if that's how, you know, we human beings as apes. I don't know if that's how we're supposed to live. So. So damn scheduled. So probably a completely different answer than anybody thought they were going to hear. But again, just like, I just, I can't look at life the same way as everybody else.

Really admire that, though. I mean, it's, it's focusing on what's important, you know, and you live that daily and you explain that really clearly. And I definitely am going to take a piece of that and run with it because, you know, a lot of us get caught up. I'm guilty of It. So I'm just going to talk about myself. See, I love what I do though. I'm obsessed with what I do and like I cannot wait to wake up and do what I do. And that's, it's all bit. I caught myself on a, you know, in a conversation recently and I didn't want. I just trying so hard not to talk about work. But it's, it's, you know when someone asks like what I did today or what you did, you know, what's new. And it's like, it's all about my work and my business and I love what I, what everything that's going on and what I do. So it's, it's hard for me. It's not all that I love to do. I love music, I love food, love working out, love. I love so many different things. But really what makes me happy is being around my family. I mean being around my family, success with the business, knowing where it came from. I mean they're neck and neck, but it's definitely my family. So I mean, I'm going to take.

Well, you're tired, but you're already doing it. You are doing the same thing. You're already doing the same thing. You're already, you're already like, you're already self aware. And another part of practicing mindfulness is developing the self awareness to figure out what you actually like to do. Not what you think you like to do, not what you grew up doing because somebody else told you to do it. Like what the hell do you actually like to do? You figured that out. I mean, you've gone through so many different jobs and acted and played baseball at all those different places, like pictures and then accidents, you know, like so much life experience. And it led to the birth of your children which are named Night Cream and Clay Mask and, and moisturizer and presence, right? Like these are, those are your kids. So you wake up every day excited about what you're going to do the same way that I do. And I think that's the whole. What you're, you hit on it. That's the whole point. The whole point is not to, is not to meet some sort of societal expectations if you don't have to, you know, you don't have to get stuck, you don't have to get stuck with some, you don't have to get stuff with some massive mortgage, right, that you're never going to pay off that you got to, you got to plug in and work the 9 to 5. Like there's places you can live where you have to deal with that, right? There's. There's things that you can do. There's. There's less. Like you, you need less stuff than you think you do generally, too. You know, we've. We've spent so much time moving from California to Arizona. And we. I've gone through, my wife and I, we've gone through every single thing that we have. Everything, right? Two kids, different size clothes, so much baseball equipment that I could have. I could have. I could have had like a team and a half with all the equipment I had. I got hundreds of pairs of batting gloves. But we went through everything and we got rid of, I mean, 75% of it. We realized, we looked at it and we're like, we have. There's no reason to have this. I have nine black sweatshirts. You know, like, what happened here?

What.

What? Waste at first. What Waste at first. But then just again, getting back to what's happening now and learning lessons from that experience, you know, looking at nine black sweatshirts and going, like, I don't need this. Thank you for teaching me that I don't need this. Not. I'm such an idiot. I'm going to judge myself for it. No, like, what can I actually learn from that? I can learn this. Okay, I'm out to the next thing. I'm back. I'm pointing my light back in the direction of something's going to make me happy. I'm not going to sit here and fester on this idea that I'm an idiot or I'm wasteful because I was sure, but I'm not anymore because I just recognized it. And that's again, that's mindfulness. That's understanding. That's understanding being focused on the task at hand, being in the present moment and doing it without judgment. I briefly touched on it earlier, but that's the final part to all of this, right? Because when you're sitting down in meditation and you're focusing on the sensations of your breathing and you get distracted and you bring it back, we as people have a tendency to do stuff like, you know, I'll be sitting there and I'll notice that I have a sensation on my face that I really want to scratch. And then I'll be like, no, I'm not scratching it because. And that's my ego right away. Like, right away, getting involved. And then I'll judge myself for having an ego. I'll be like, man, really? Like, you just scratch your face. But you can see how, like, how manipulative our own mind is to like for ourselves. You know, like I will, I'll judge myself for having a judgment in meditation and then judge that part of it again instead of just letting it go. You know, I, I'm sitting there meditating and I have a judgment about, let's say I'm listening to a guided meditation. I don't like how it's going, right. I don't like what the person's saying and I'm having a judgment about that. And I go, oh man, damn it. I'm judging somebody else. Like I shouldn't do that. And I just judge myself and just goes on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on. And the whole point of meditation is to go judge, judge, wait, timeout. It's okay. I can disagree with how this guy structures his meditation, but I'm playing Simon Says, which is I'm going to listen to what they have to say. So I'm going to go back and I'm going to listen to it non judgmentally. What was the instruction? What was in front of me right now? Not where am I going this way or that way, future or past? What's happening right now? That's where my attention needs to be.

Can you give me an example, without naming names obviously of profound experience you've had with a player or a person that you know through your teachings that really sticks out in your head right now.

Like something that I learned from somebody else.

No, that they learned from you or that you learned from you? Either.

Profound experience. I mean I definitely had them. These are be different but I definitely had them in. The more I caught, the more I kind of know. It's weird. It's really weird. A lot of times I'll be watching a baseball game and I could, I'll be able to tell you what's going to happen just because I've seen the game so many times, you know, like there was a, somebody sent it to me this year on, on Twitter, but like it was an article about Luke Gregerson when we were at the Padres together and about a mound meeting that I had where. And I actually remember two mound meetings like this where got three, I gotta give you three of them. But more of them are piling up as I, as I go back into that place. Right. But this one was. I went out to the mountain. I'm like, I'm throw a slider down and away. It was left handed hitter. He's going to hit it back to the mound. Okay, we're going to just make sure that you check the guy at third, because they're super aggressive. So he's going to tap it back to you. You check him at third base, throw it to first. We'll get the out at first, yonder will throw it home, we'll turn a double play. And the pitcher looked at me, and he was like, seriously. Like, that's. And exactly. I ran back on. Behind on plate, scooted over, ball got tapped back to the mount. He checked the guy, threw it to first base. The guy came home, we threw the ball home, we tagged the guy out, we turned a double play, and he was like. He's like, how does that happen? But I'm like, I've just seen it too many times, you know? Like, I've seen. I have so much experience doing. So much experience doing that. Or same thing in the last series ever at Shea Stadium. Chris Volstadt was a rookie. He was pitching. And David Wright, who was a superstar at the time with the. With the Mets, was hitting those run around first base, and he threw like, ball one, ball two. And I remember we ran out to the mound. I ran out to the mound. I was a rookie, too. And I'm like. I'm like, volstead, dude, turn around and look at this. And we just looked at Shea Stadium, right? There's like 50,000 people in the. In the stadium, and then there's another 50,000 in the parking lot, because if the Mets lost two out of the last three and the brewers won enough games, they're going to blow Shea Stadium up afterwards. I ended up catching the last game in the history of Shea Stadium, and we won that game. But this was the first game of the series, and David Wright came up, and there was run around first. And we were kind of nervous, but we stopped. And I'm like, dude, how cool is this? Like, you and I were in the. You were in Double A, and I was in Triple A for, like, the last five years. And now we're standing here on this mound, and this. On this ridiculous field where. Where the Beatles played. Okay, where the Beatles played. We're standing their last concert. We're standing here on the middle of that field. Like, this is crazy. This is awesome. I go throw me a sinker in. He's going to hit a ground or the third, we'll turn a double play, and we'll get out of here. And exactly, exactly. Like. Like the cue of sinker in, bam. Grounded a third ball, turns. And I think that that brings up the. I think the biggest impact that I've made on people in baseball while I was playing and after playing was helping them reframe what stress means. Like we were talking about looking for it earlier, but you know, I caught a lot of major league debuts. And what you see in those moments is a shell shocked person, right? It's like fifth deck shock. You know, you get out on the mountain, they look up and like the biggest crowd that they've ever seen looking at them is maybe 12,000 people, or maybe they were lucky enough to go to the College World Series and they saw 28,000 or something, you know. But now you're on Wrigley Field, like Babe Ruth played here. It's been around for 100 and something years. It's a really loud and crazy environment. Or you're at at&t park and it's sold out and the base is thumping in center field and it shakes your shoes and you got to go out now and execute something that's really difficult. That's exactly what I brought to the mat. I go, hey, you feel those feelings. You feel your heart racing or your stomach kind of turning over, you feel your palms getting sweaty, you know what that signal is? And they're like, what I'm like, that's the signal that you're exactly where you're supposed to be. Like, this is why we live life, man. This is why we do it. So forget about, forget about it. Just fuck it. Like, this is. Embrace this feeling. We don't get it very often. And I can tell you that I'm happy that I embraced it while I was playing because it became very hard for me to find it right away after I left. But that's the biggest impact I made. It was kind of helping people look at those really stressful situations in a performance context as where they were supposed to be, as opposed to something that they couldn't do.

And you told me that when you were playing years ago, I would embrace my anxiety and turn it into energy. It really. In the audition room and just like certain situations, meetings, things like that, I would turn that into that exact. I remember you saying you're exactly where you're supposed to be. Those goosebumps, why we do it, those butterflies. Yes, I turned it right into energy. And it really is. I embrace it now, years down the road. I think of that all the time. Thank you so much for telling me that. I think it was 2013, 2014, something like that. 12 somewhere around there. But yeah, I'll never forget that was.

Catching a lot of young guys at that time. So it was prominent. It was a prominent thing in my life.

So we. Yeah, I mean, man, we covered so much. I mean, you're. You know, the coolest thing about you, John, to me, is I've just always quietly thought to myself that your biggest impact is going to be off the field. And, I mean, you're doing that, man, and you're helping so many people. It's like you said with C.J. edwards. You watch him when he was a kid and look at him now growing into a successful player. But also, you probably watched him mature to a point that nobody else has outside of maybe his family or maybe some of his teammates that played with him at that early level and to where he is now. But that's got to be so fulfilling to you. Just me as an outsider kind of just, you know, getting your stories every now and then. It's. It doesn't surprise me at all, man. You're changing lives, and it's. Got it. You know, I just have to ask. Do you ever see yourself in the dugout? Do you ever see yourself.

You know, I go back into the dugout when I go to minor league games, I sit in the dugout. Um, and it's. It's a. You know, there's a different rhythm to a dugout than anywhere else in life. And I enjoy those experiences. But I think that I thought about. I thought a lot. I thought a lot about it after I was on point. I had some job offers to go manage different teams in the minor leagues.

Wow.

And I spent too much time playing. You know, like, I enjoy being able to. I enjoy being able to learn things that relate to baseball, but that also relate to life and pass those on to, like, a bigger population of people. I think I enjoy that more than, you know, trying to go through the politics of working my way into a major league dugout as a manager, because I don't think that the. I don't know. I just. I don't want to say the job wouldn't be challenging because there's a whole lot of. There's a whole lot of other challenging things that you have to deal with. You know, handling the media, you know, giving people bad news. I don't like to do either of those things, really. The media is not the. For me. But the bad news part is. And, you know, maybe. Maybe if the offer was right, I would do something like that. But, no, I like doing what I'm doing right now, you know, and that you have to think about the entire lifestyle of that. That's relocation To a new city that's not seeing your family half the year. That's like, that's really doing a lot of stuff that when I sat down and, you know, spent some time really focusing on how I wanted my life to be, like those things were not in it. That was not. So I have to be. It would have to be like, it'd have to be a perfect storm. The right place. Could I do it? Yeah, I absolutely could do it. And I would love. I would love doing that stuff. So. It's baseball, man. It's not, it's. It's. It's like Joe Madden says, you have to understand the simplexity of it. And I do because I spent so much time practicing, thinking and doing that that I could slide right into that role and I think I could do well.

But I'd love to be a fly on the wall to hear you and Madden talk baseball, man.

Yeah, he's something else, man. He's something else. Every time I talk to that guy, I hear something where I'm like, camp. I didn't think about it like that. Like, that's unbelievable. Again, you know, another. You got me with another one. Yeah, he's just, he's really thoughtful, really intelligent, knows. I think his greatest skill is knowing how to get out of the way. And that's what, if you think about it, if you relate that to a baseball player, that's the greatest mental skill of all is knowing how to get out of the way of yourself. And Joe does a good job of doing that with the team.

That's huge. Well, Bake, man, I thank you so much for joining me. I got to come out there and visit you.

Yeah, come see the new place, man.

Yeah, no, I really have to. And I'm sure people are going to have certain questions here as we're going to keep this posted. You're more than welcome, obviously, to share it on your wall as well, but love you, brother, and I'm so happy.

For you and thank you, bud. Love you too, man.

And no, thanks so much for joining me on this. This is really educational for me. I'm sure people are going to get a lot of. A lot of really beneficial tidbits from this as well. But, man, I'm never surprised with the stuff that I learned from you. So thank you so much, man. And thanks for joining me on this and can't wait to see you soon out in Arizona. I'll come out there.

Hi, Bud. I miss you, man. Good to see you too, brother.

See you.