301: This Is Life. This Is Death. This Is The Final Spin. An Alternate Biography.

This is Jocko, podcast number 301 with Echo Charles and me, Jocko Willink. Good evening, Echo.

Good evening.

How did I end up here?

I'm smart.

I'm funny. I look pretty damn handsome, if I do say so myself. But here I am.

Nowhere.

And it seems this is where I will always be.

Nowhere.

Bedroom. It is not an apartment, but it looks like one. Cheap furniture. Well used carpet. Not clean, but not dirty. The bedroom is not unique in its wares. Bed, desk, chair, dresser. Small bedside table with lamp. Overhead light. Janky ceiling fan spinning at a low speed.

Then there is the decor. Pictures hung neatly on the walls. They are strange, or at least indicate a strangeness that is hard to interpret. Harmless but different.

Johnny walks in. 20 something leaning towards 20.

Pretty damn handsome for an unkempt young man who stays up too late and eats the wrong foods and drinks more beer and whiskey than he should.

He looks at his brother. Johnny is frustrated. He tries to remain restrained, but it can be hard after all these years. What the hell, Cleaner man. I told you about these shirts. Artie looks distraught. Johnny sees Johnny cannot stay frustrated. After all, this is Artie, his brother. And no one could really be mad at Artie. What is it? Not clean, Arty replies, earnestly concerned, wondering if he had somehow failed his brother.

No, Artie, it isn't that. It is not clean. It's clean, but it's just a T shirt. I know, Artie cuts in. It's 100% cotton T shirt. I used a warm, warm cycle. It shouldn't have shrunk at all. I'm always careful about that. It's not shrunk, Artie. That's not it. It's just.

Never mind. Forget it. Forget what, Johnny? What's wrong? This was killing Artie, the one thing he was supposed to be good at, and it seemed like he messed it up. Artie, johnny replied as kindly as he could. It's just that it's a T shirt. You don't press T shirts. You don't put starch in T shirts, buddy. But the creases are sharp, aren't they? Artie replies, wondering what on earth the problem could be. The creases are sharp, Johnny concedes. But that's not the point. You don't put military creases in T shirts. I've told you this before, Artie. But why? Cotton holds the starch really well. Johnny starts to get frustrated again. He's been down this road before. Many, many times.

Look cleaner. I know that. You always tell me that. And I always tell you, you just don't starch and press T shirts because. Because you just don't do it.

Mom likes hers pressed. Johnny lets out a sigh. Artie realizes he's gone too far. Listen, Artie, I get it. But I'm not Mom, and I don't want my T shirts to be starched and pressed. It's a Black Sabbath T shirt. I just wear it out with a pair of jeans. Okay, can you just give me. Give them a simple wash and dry from now on, please? Low heat, tumble dry? Artie asks, wanting to get a good procedure locked down. Johnny smiles. Yeah, Artie, I think that would be perfect. Thanks, bud. I can do it now, Artie offers. I gotta go. Okay? It won't happen again, Johnny. Thanks, Artie, johnny said with a smile.

And Johnny? Artie asks.

What?

I'm sorry. It's okay, bud. It's okay. Johnny feels a little bad as Artie walks away. They are brothers. They even look a little alike. It isn't too much of a stretch to see the similar genes. Dark hair, blue eyes, pronounced eyebrows. But that is where the similarities end.

After all, Artie is different.

A little pudgy. Glasses. It is possible to tell from looking at his face that something isn't quite right.

There are medical names that could be assigned, but most of those wouldn't quite hit the mark.

He's older than Johnny by six years, but his peculiarities keep him living at home.

Johnny, on the other hand, doesn't have an excuse to still be living at home other than Artie and his mom.

They both need him around.

That's what he tells himself anyway. Johnny's bedroom is the same room he has always had. Mattress on the floor, no box spring, no bed frame. Posters of rock bands on the wall from when he was younger. Black Sabbath, Motorhead, Led Zeppelin, AC dc, some muscle cars, too. He hadn't bothered to take them down as he outgrew them. He also hadn't bothered to clean his room very often. Clothes, remnants of food and beer cans on the floor.

This was all a stark contrast to Artie's room, clinically clean, with the bed tightly made.

And then there are the walls of Artie's room and their curious decor. The walls neatly display pictures of clothes, washing machines and dryers. There are brochures about various lines of laundry equipment on his little desk. Some of the more colorful ones are also hanging on the wall. There are also coupons for laundry detergents, fabric softeners, and stain removal products on the desk in an envelope the Source of his nickname, cleaner, is no mystery at all.

Artie likes to clean laundry, to be exact.

That right there is the opening.

To a new book, a new book called Final Spin, which was written by me.

And it is a novel. I guess that's what it says on the COVID Sure. But it's also kind of a poem. It's also kind of a manuscript. I don't really. I don't really know 100% what to call it, but it's not normal in the way that it is written. And.

So as far as the storyline goes, it's. I was thinking about this. I think it's a little bit of an alternate autobiography of sorts. Have you ever heard of alternate history books? So it's where they take some event in the past and they change it. You know, what if the Nazis won? Right. What if the south won the Civil War? They. They call them alternate history books. So I was kind of thinking this is almost like an alternate biography in a way. Maybe not specifically, but maybe some of my friends, some of the experiences we had with my life, if I'd taken some different turns along the way.

Well, I did notice the guy's name is Johnny.

The guy's name is Johnny. Yeah. But then there's, like. You're gonna see, as we talk through this, there's some composite characters, and it's almost like everyone's a composite character.

What do you mean?

Compose, meaning different people from my past kind of assembled together. Maybe two people that acted a certain way or one characteristic from someone, maybe a little bit of a characteristic from me.

So that was kind of the starting point. These kind of humans, and you put them in this situation. So what is the book about? I'm going to start off by reading a review of the book. The first review to come out about the book. And this review came from.

From something called Publishers Weekly, which is a. Which is a publishing trade magazine that's been around since 1872. And the subtitle of this thing is the International News Magazine of Book Publishing and book selling. This is the heavy hitter of this industry since the 1940s. The Book Review section is sort of become the center of the magazine and the online website. And it carries a lot of weight and truly ultimately determines a lot of what you read, depending on how it does and how this publication talks about it. What's interesting is the reviews in Publishers Weekly are anonymous, they're short, they're blunt, and oftentimes to the point of being brutal. You can see that the people that write them.

Can be harsh and they're usually crafty writers. So they're harsh in a pretty savage way. I was reading a little bit about it. One author said a negative review is never pleasant. But Publishers Weekly reviews have a particularly heart stopping quality. And this guy wrote a piece. I didn't write down his name, but it was how he got a bad review and just what it felt like.

Now, as I said, this book is, it's different. It's not a normal book. It's hard to classify the form that I wrote it in. And I've written a bunch of other books before, some best selling books, some New York Times best selling books. But here's the thing, those books were of a different genre, right? And that means a big, that means a lot in this world, in the publishing world, in the literature world.

I've written a bunch of these non fiction adult books. That's what I've written. And I've written children's fiction books, but neither of those are fiction adult books. So it's like saying, well, I played professional football so I can play professional baseball too. It's sort of like saying that which we know doesn't really work that way and most people can't handle that transition and don't handle that transition. So going into this, going into writing the novel, right, I got warned, Never tell you about this probably. I got warned by my publisher, by my, I got warned by my editor, I got warned by my agent. They were, they were, I think, little bit trying to talk me out of it. A little bit trying to talk me out of it, right? They're saying it's a different world and they don't care what you've done before. And they might, they might actually hold your other books against you. They kind of say that kind of thing, right? And you should just make me stay in your lane, which by the way, I got that about my kids books too. But.

This story is one of the stories that's in my head and I got a lot of stories in my head and this was the one that bubbled the surface that needed to get out. So I got it out and this is what Publishers Weekly had to say. So here we go from the critics Final Spin, a novel by Jocko Willink. Former Navy SEAL and children's book author Willink Way of the Warrior kids series marks his adult fiction debut with the downbeat and gripping story of a group of characters abandoned by the American dream. At age 23, Johnny cares for his alcoholic mother and mentally challenged brother Artie while holding down a dead end job as a stock boy at a big box store.

Artie is obsessed with clean clothes. And when the laundromat where he works is slated to be sold, Johnny decides to buy the business in order to keep Artie employed. To come up with the $40,000 he needs, Johnny and his best friend Goat decide to rob the safe at their store, hand off the money to the owner, then hightail it to Mexico. They get the money, but the getaway scheme is flawed from the start, and Johnny and Goat quickly have the state police on their trail. To make matters worse, Johnny is forced to say goodbye to his girlfriend Jessica, who has just found out she is pregnant. Willink tells his story in quick blasts of haiku, like writing. And they give the example here, Johnny on the customers at his workplace, quote, people, flesh covered robot beings in need of fuel and meaning. They find both here, end quote. With dialogue reminiscent of early David Mehmet.

Told with a gritty simplicity, this retains a hold on the reader right through to the inevitable tragic climax. So.

That'S the plot of the book and that's the impression that they got at Publishers Weekly, which was really an awesome review. I was definitely very stoked to read that. As was my literary agent, as was my publisher, as was my editor. Everyone thinks you're rolling the dice. Everyone's nervous, they're scared.

Well, yeah, you kind of are rolling the dice, but the nature of dice is you win and you lose. So, you know, a lot of times what people worried about is the losing part.

Yeah.

But there is the winning part.

Yep. Now, so they compare me. They compare the, the.

Writing or at least the dialogue to. Yeah, the dialogue. I don't want to give myself too much credit here, but they, they compare the dialogue to David Mamet, who is.

Well, straight up, he's a Pulitzer Prize winning freaking author. He's a playwright, he's a film director. Director, screenwriter. He's written all kinds of stuff. You ever heard of Glengarry Glen Ross? Yes, sir. Yep. He wrote that.

Yeah.

Coffee's For Closers, Always Be, Closing Speed, the Plow. He wrote the screenplay for the Postman Always Rings Twice, Little Jack Nicholson, the Verdict, the Untouchables, Hoffa, Wag the Dog, Hannibal.

He wrote and directed. Things Change. Homicide, Oleanna, the Winslow Boy, State in Maine, Spartan. Just a bunch of stuff. What I'm saying is that this guy's a highly respected and accomplished writer. Definitely. I was very pleasantly surprised and humbled to be compared to him in any way. So we're off to a Strong start. We're feeling good about it so far. Much appreciated, because this is a different world.

So it's interesting. Appreciate. Yeah. People, if you. If you want to get the book, that will be awesome.

And it's not a complete dud. We'll say that. So now this is an interesting. We're gonna get into the book a little bit.

Which is going to be a little bit tricky because I don't want to ruin the story. Story. Spoiler, Spoiler alert. So I'm gonna keep it a little bit focused on not going too much into it, but at the same time, getting into the characters a little bit. So the characters. Let's start with this guy Artie. So we got this guy Artie, who you already heard about. He's got some kind of mental challenges, which I don't name in the book. And the reason I didn't name them in the book is because a lot of times I've met people in my life where I know that they have some kind of mental challenge, but I don't know what it is. I'm not a doctor. There's no. They're not wearing a label on their hat that says whatever mental challenge they've got. And so I didn't want a label. You know, I didn't want to throw a label on there. This is the particular situation that this person's in. And the other thing is I. You know, people have such a wide variety of mental challenges that you don't know what you're going to get.

So where did this character came from? Well, I. This is a very direct story. I worked at Wendy's. Hell, yeah. Yeah. I don't know if that. I don't know if that warrants a hell, yeah. But I worked at Wendy's, and when I worked at Wendy's. You've been to Wendy's before, right?

Yes, sir, I have.

Which, let's face it, kind of props to Wendy's. Wendy's.

Beautiful.

Wendy serves it up. And I used to. I used to get my chow on at Wendy's when I was a teenager. Well, at this Wendy's where I worked, it was. There's a salad bar. You know, they have a salad bar at Wendy's. I don't know. They still have a salad bar at Wendy's?

Not that I know of. Oh, I don't know.

So back in the day. Back in the day, they had a salad bar at Wendy's, and the person that ran the salad bar that took care of the salad bar that resupplied the peach slices and the Caesar salad dressing was this woman who clearly had. She was probably, I'm going to say 55, maybe 60 years old. So an older woman, thin, short hair. Her name was Jean.

And she obviously had, you know, it seemed like some kind of perhaps autism, but again, I don't know. She's not wearing a label, but she was super into the salad bar. She was probably the best, one of the best employees ever. She loved this salad bar. She wanted to be squared away. She was out there with a washcloth, wiping up. If anybody, if you spilled a drop of salad dressing on your. On your maneuver from the spoon to the plate, she was on it. She was standing by with a rag. She was gonna wipe that up, like almost bumping into you. But she also knew that that wasn't correct. So she'd give you, you know, three quarters of a second to take one step towards the croutons and she was in there getting on it.

So she's there and she's working and she loved it. I mean, like, she was obsessed with it and no one would talk to her, right? Everyone was kind of mean to her, right, because you could make fun of her and she was an easy target. And I was cool to her. You know, I'd always say, hi, hi, Gene, how you doing? You know, I'd try and talk to her a little bit, and every time I would start a conversation with her, hey, Gene, how are you? You know, hey, Gene, how's it going today? And she'd be like, I just opened up a new can of, of of croutons in the back. Or new, a new can of sliced peaches. They're going to be so good. And I'd be, oh, that's awesome. You know, And I'd say, oh, you know, it's your, like, lunch break. Hey, Gina, are you going to take a lunch break? Yeah, first I'm going to get more sliced onions out here. Have you seen the onions? They're so fresh. She was just fired up, man.

To the point where.

I was torn between thinking if it was an abusive situation where she was being taken advantage of, to where the other, like, complete opposite was. She just. Were they. So was she so lucky to be there and happy that they hired her? And like, here she was with this job.

So that was one part of it. The other part of it that struck me that stuck with me for my whole life.

Is that she was happy, right? So here I am, this young freaking punk ass kid, and I'm there with other punk ass Kids that are working at Wendy's and everyone's kind of miserable. Right. Did you ever work at a fast food joint? Do you ever work at a restaurant?

I did not work at a restaurant. The bar nightclub was closest.

But even being a bouncer in a bar nightclub is not. Yeah, that's. That's. Let's face it, that's like a little bit kind of cool. Yeah, a little bit, right? I mean, you have a little power.

I was also a bar back at one. Okay. At other clubs and bartender. So it's. It's service, for sure. But it's different. You're correct. It's different.

It's a little bit cool.

Yes.

To be a bouncer at a club.

Yes, sir.

Right. I mean, that can be a Definitely a cool job. It's not cool to work at Wendy's running the grill, running the salad bar. You're not happy about it. There's no benefits. Zero. You know, you. Other than you're getting paid money, which is kind of cool. So what struck me, what I always remembered is we're all kind of miserable. Even. This is what I also remember, like the. The general manager. And I don't remember his name, but he was like, work. He was one of those guys that was just a work working. You know, working. Just always pissed off about something, like, hey, what? You know, always mad. So even the owner. I mean, he was. I don't know if he's the owner. I don't think he's the owner, but he was definitely the general manager. He might have even been the franchise owner or something, because he was in there all the time.

Yeah.

But, you know, he had to be making legitimate money because when you. When you're a general manager, one of those, you're making good money. But he was freaking miserable. So I'm thinking to myself, everyone here is miserable. Every single person here. 100. I mean, how many employees did they probably have? Probably a total of 35 to 40 employees. You know, day shift, night shift, you know, everyone. Everyone's part time, you know, so no one's really working. So there's like probably 40 employees there total. And every single one of us was miserable and hated life. Except for Gene. And she was smiling and she was into it, and she was amped. So I took that idea. And the reason I ended up with laundry is because I worked at or the place where I used to go to the laundromat in San Diego had this. The people that owned the laundromat, the. They were from Asia. And the Wife didn't speak English, but the husband would be kind of be there, but the. The wife didn't speak English, but she'd come out and talk to me in. I don't even know where she was from, but she would talk to me and smile and laugh and make jokes.

Not in English.

Not in English, but they were funny.

They were so funny that I did laugh. I would laugh. I would be with my wife. I would laugh. And one not even know what it was about. You know, she might point it like, you know, a pile of clothes and say something in whatever language she was talking to and then just start laughing. My wife and I would just laugh. It had to be pretty funny for her to get that much joy out of it, right?

So I don't know that I landed on laundry.

So there we go. There we get Artie. That kind of wraps up this guy Artie as a character, where he came from. So now we get this other character, Johnny, which, as you said. Yeah, I guess my. My real first name is John. So do we get to Johnny from that? Kind of. But I don't know. I. Maybe just the generic of. Of the name Johnny more than anything else. But probably the strongest influence on this character is a kid that I grew up with, a kid named Jeff Lang, who I've talked about on this. On this podcast before. So Jeff Lang was like my best friend from maybe third grade, maybe sec. No, probably second, second, first or second grade until seventh grade. And in fifth grade, man, we. We were in the same classroom together all day, because that's before you start going to different classes, right? So fifth grade, we were in the same class, you know, sitting next to each other. And we were. We were troublemakers, right? Just always getting in trouble, always causing problems, always, you know, laughing when we shouldn't be laughing, just doing stuff that we shouldn't have been doing.

But he was always a little bit more. He had a little bit. He had a little bit less obedience in him. I didn't have much. He had even less obedience in him. So, like, at that point, when the teacher would threaten you two, be quiet. Are you going to the office? That was. He could. I got checked by that. Jeff wouldn't get checked by that. He go next level, get sent to the office, right? So he had a little bit extra. And he was super funny. I mean, hilarious. You know, kind of an athletic stud. Which. Which. What does that mean? That means when you're in fifth grade, you kind of kick ass at dodgeball, right? You play kickball. And he's really good and run fast. So. Yeah, just fast and all that stuff. Just a good, really good athlete. Better than me, funnier than me.

You know, just. Just a good. He was just kind of like a little bit better than me and everything. And he also had a little bit of extra rebelliousness.

So as we got older.

I started kind of. We started to deviate in our lives together. You know, we were still always friends, but he started, like, drinking, started doing drugs, started listening to. I guess he went down, like the kind of.

Hippie music, drugs, that kind of thing. And I was going into the hardcore music and more like the straight edge thing. And so our past really kind of deviated, but we were still friends because we were such good friends for so long that it doesn't matter what he's doing and what I'm doing, we're still friends. We just have this, you know, huge common connection.

And as we got so. So as we got older, he went really, you know, I don't even know if he. I don't even remember if he graduated high school because he went hard, you know, doing drugs and drinking and just doing that whole thing and not. Not a bad person. That's just what he was doing. And still I'd see him. See him in town. We'd, you know, we'd always connect. We'd always just had that friendship. And I remember I joined the military, I joined the navy, and, you know, small town, and he kind of knew. He had heard what was going on. And then I saw him, and I remember I. He said something to me because, you know, when we were little kids, we would play army all the time, right? When you're. Look, when you're 7 years old, 10 years old, 12 years old, and you live in the woods, you're playing army, right? You're putting. You're burning a cork and putting. Making your face black and putting camo on and shooting BB guns at each other. That's what we did. We shoot BB guns at each other. And every time you got hit, you had to take a layer of clothing off.

And I remember the red rider. It makes a little boom when it's like, boom.

It's spring activated. Oh, yeah, yeah. And because, you know, we try and put limits on the number of pumps you could put on the pump. Action happens. But I remember the red rider because you. You could hear it and then it would hit you.

So.

So, you know, he was into the same kind of stuff I was. And then as we got older, we deviated. So I see him the last time I see him before I leave for the Navy, he's, you know, clearly not on a great path. And he said something to me along the lines of.

He said, yeah, you're doing in the Navy? I said, yeah. And I don't even remember if we. If he knew what a SEAL was. I think he kind of did. The only. I kind of did at that time. I mean, no one knew too much about it, but he's. I remember he said something like, hey, I wish I could go with you. And I was like, you can, bro. Let's go. And I could see, like, maybe that could. And he said, I can't. He's like, I can't. I can't. Something like, I can't anymore. Like, he had knew he was kind of too far gone to correct the path that he was on.

So I end up going the Navy, and I was going through SEAL training, and I was probably around just before Hell Week, maybe just after Hell Week, I forget. But I called my parents to check in. I talked to my mom, and I found out that Jeff had killed himself, and he had broken up with his girlfriend at the time, and he'd killed himself.

And that was, you know, just. Just.

Very sad because. Well, I think what made it the most sad to me was that he had gone down this path.

And he had way more potential than I had as a human. And. And it was all gone. And that was really sad. And then when. And when I looked him up, you know, this is when the last time I recorded I talked about him on. On this podcast was a couple years ago. I had Googled him, just Googled his name, which you can Google people from, you know, 1745. And there's some record. And there's some, you know, genealogy report about who they were. And you Google someone from 1942 and there's, you know, an obituary about who they were. And I googled his name, and there was like, nothing, Nothing.

Which is just horrible because he was freaking hilarious, smart on, just an awesome guy. And. And quite. I didn't mention this, but the book, you know, the dedication of the book, it just says for Jeff, language. So that was sort of a lot of where this character Johnny came from. Somebody with kind of potential and.

Just.

Stuck, made bad choices, made maybe not bad choices, but different choices, maybe had some bad luck thrown in there.

Lived his life.

So that's Johnny. You hear about these two.

Next up, you get a guy named Goat, who's Johnny's best friend. I'm gonna. I'm Gonna go to page seven here in the book.

Nice shirt, man. Goat says with a smile as he sees Johnny's starched Black Sabbath T shirt. Its military creases running from each shoulder down to the wa. Johnny replies that cotton really holds the crease, doesn't it? Yeah, it does. Johnny says. You couldn't iron them out or anything? I tried, but damn. He uses an industrial press and he looks at me like I'm ripping his heart out. What can I say? My brother is crazy. Yeah, but that son of a bitch can iron some shirts, can't he? He sure as hell can. You want another one? What time do we have to be at work? Goat asks. Not until 10:30. Shit, let's do this. Two more, Lucy, Johnny says to the barmaid. BB's Bar. Dingy working class watering hole, cheap vinyl seats, even cheaper drinks. Goat is about the same age as Johnny, though he looks a little younger. His dark skin has an almost childlike texture. His black hair looks as if it is always organized regardless of what he has been doing. His eyes are dark and deep. He is handsome. He too has that look about him that says he shouldn't be here, shouldn't be in a dead end job, shouldn't be in a dead end bar, shouldn't be in a dead end life.

But he is.

So there's Goat, full name George Martinez. That is Johnny's best friend. And again, this guy is kind of a composite character of friends that I had grown up. The story takes place in Southern California.

So he's a Mexican kid. I grew up with a bunch of white people primarily. But when you're out in California, you see the. There's really no distinction between, you know, different people.

And that's just another kid, another kid that has a bunch of potential. Another kid that's talented, another kid that's smart, another kid that's handsome and another kid that's kind of stuck in a dead end scenario with what I say. Dead end job, dead end bar, dead end life. Right? That's where we end up. That's where we're at.

And well, we were talking before the podcast about the young.

I think, I think Kerry was saying you remember what it was like when you were younger and it was just all in kind of like you're just on board.

Right down for the.

Down for the cause. Right down for the cause. And that was the characteristic that I kind of tried to throw in here with Goat. Was that characteristic of being down for the cause? And what's cool when you, when you talked about Johnny being based on me.

There's parts, definitely, elements of me in Johnny, for sure. But one of the elements that's. That's from me in Goat is just down for the cause. I mean, the stuff that you do in your 16, 17, 18. And then when I got in the Navy, you're 19, 20 years old. Guess what? Oh, that's what, as you like to say, Echo, that's what we're doing. Yep. Down for the cause. We're down. We're ready to go. Well, with that. Is that what we're doing? Hey. All right. Once you kind of flip that switch. That's why, man, the young. The young men in the world, they'll do some crazy sometimes because they're just ready to rock and roll. Ready to rock and roll. So there's your two main characters. And again, one of the things. One of the immediate feedback points when I submitted the manuscript was, how about some more character development? Right? And what I said is, you already know these characters. We already know these characters. We grew up with these characters. Everybody knows these people. Everybody knows these people. We all know them. We are them in many ways. So I was like, what else do I need to tell you? What else do I need to tell you? You know these people. I know these people. There's your character development. Look around.

You.

You started this with Artie. And that's one of the first things that jumped out on me, where it's like, not only do I know who that guy is, I've known a guy or girl like that since I was a little kid. And it's just. He's just there. He's down for his cause. Some negative. Some pos. Some are, like, angry at everyone. Some were just happy to see every. You know, like. But. But really in a. Not a kind of. In a generic, almost kind of way. I mean, it's more particular because. Because the book and everything, but you know that guy. Totally know that guy. That's the first thing that jumped out.

Of me for Artie.

Artie.

Oh, yeah. And how many Arties have you known?

About 12, I would say. Yeah. And. But they fit that in one way or another. A little different flavor, you know? Oh, man. I could go deep into it, too, where some people would tease them just like your. Your girl Jean. Same exact thing, man. And they're everywhere. So it's like, yeah, you know, we all know Artie. I think most of us.

We all know Nardi. We all know Gene. We all know Johnny. We all know Goat.

Yes, sir.

These are our people. And there's the character development.

Yeah.

And look, obviously there's more character development that goes on, but, you know, for me to take the time to explain this. This is one thing you're gonna notice when you read this book is. I'm not. I'm trying not to waste any time.

Yeah.

I'm trying not to waste any words. I'm trying to get you there. Get you there. Get you into this as quick as possible and allow you to. To utilize what you already know as a person. Yeah. To. To put the context around what's happening.

Use the schema. I was reading this book, and they. They went deep in the word schema. You know, that's what you're doing. Use stuff that you already know to describe. You know, some. Something new.

Right.

Interesting. And you use, like, you do this in real life, too, where you use less words than necessary kind of thing. And it's weird because it makes you kind of go, like, deep in your own head almost when you read it. Like, even that one, when you're describing people, you know, me, however you described in the news just like. Well, it's like, you didn't do this. Like, the opposite of that. The opposite of that is like some grandiose thing where it's like, you know, one after another, the people piled in like a this and like a that and then this person. And it's the. But. No, you did the exact opposite. But meanwhile, you get the same effect, but it's more like in your own head, like real. Real personal kind of.

You know, there's something I talk about with leadership. It's minimum force required. Right. I, as a leader, want to use the minimum force to get you to do what I want you to do, to get you to do what we need to do. Right. Minimum force required. I don't want to say, hey, Echo, here's what you need to do. I might say, hey, Echo, what do you think about doing this? And you're like, oh, yeah, that's probably be good, right? I want to use the minimum force. I try and write. I tried to write this book where the. The feeling is there with the minimum amount of words. Get the point across with the minimum amount of words.

It does add drama to it. Let's admit that. Because even in real life, this book aside, like, it's more dramatic that way.

Well, I also say all the time, the less you talk, the more people listen. Yeah, yeah, I say that all the time. I give that as leadership counsel. Hey, if you're in there and you got Something to say in a meeting and you say it in 14 sentences and it takes you seven minutes. Yeah, maybe 14 seconds. Maybe, maybe you, maybe it takes you seven minutes to say something.

That you could have said in 14 seconds. The 14 second route was way. Is way preferred, of course. And it's gonna have so much more impact.

Yes, sir. But let's face it, the, the added, specifically added drama is undeniable. Like, so if we're here, I don't know, let's say we had to, I don't know, make keychains or something. And there was like 100,000 keychains that needed to be made. And we get here at 5pm or whatever and, and I ask you and you're like, yeah, we need to get these done, or whatever. And then I look at them, I go, hey, are we going to do all these tonight? And there's two different scenarios where you could be like, you know what? Yeah, we're going to, we're going to get all these done tonight. Or you could just look at me.

I know already the answer is fucking yes. Yeah, it's hell yes. But it's way more dramatic. Yeah.

Didn't even say anything.

Didn't say anything. Right. Or you could pull. Which would you typically do? You'll just say yes and that's it. I want more. I want you to make me feel good. I want to, but it's just this big black hole of, of nothingness that I'm just left with. Except for. Yes. Like with that.

You.

You got to make of it whatever you're gonna make of it. But yes, you know, so it's like. Yeah, way more dramatic. Good though.

So that's what the book is written like.

I. We're gonna roll into. I'm just trying to give some of the characters right, some of the. Some of the characters. Here's the.

I guess this is our leading female character in the book. Here we go.

She is a pretty but tough looking girl. Thick black hair that wants to curl, but is for the most part straightened by its own weight and volume.

Pale skin, dark eyes. Eyes with a hint of fight left in them. But most of the fight is gone. Worn away by long hours and hard work. And worn away by the reality of life.

Jessica.

Where have you been? She asks. Working. Where else? Johnny responds defensively. You can't call or anything. Sorry, he replies. I'm a prick. Yeah, you are. She says. You never held that against me before. Don't start now. You buy me a drink and I'll forgive you. Lucy, Soco and Coke, Johnny shouts to the barmaid. Soco and Coke. Got it, the bartender responds. How's work? Johnny asks, although he knows the answer. The usual. Mark's an asshole. Everybody comes into that place is a fucking asshole. And I do what I do, smile and kiss their ass. Why don't you quit? Johnny asks. It's an earnest question, even though the answer is known by him. She knows the answer too. She also has the same question. Why don't you quit your job, stock boy? Ouch. Thanks, Johnny mutters, dejected. Well, I mean, of course I'd quit that job, same as you, but who's gonna pay the rent? The bartender approaches them and places the Southern Comforting Coke in front of Jessica. Soco and Coke, she says. Matter of fact. Thanks, Lucy, Johnny tells her. Thanks Johnny, Jessica says to Johnny. Anything for you, darlin', he says with a smile. Great. You're horny, she says. Hey, he replies defensively. I'm just. Don't worry. I am too, she says with a smile.

So there's Jessica.

Again. Where does Jessica come from? Kind of a composite character of growing up, of traveling, going to different towns, different cities, restaurants, bars, you know, she's a waitress. I known many Jessicas in my time, and like you said, I think we've all known plenty of Jessica's. And, and look, she's hard working, she's determined, but she's up against the odds.

And she's also productive. And you learn this in the book. She's a product of some bad decisions. Or at least some decisions that aren't great ones. Right. So she kind of ends up in her stuck in this position as well. And, and to quote Harvey Keitel from Reservoir Dogs. Yes, sir, waitressing is the number one job for female non college graduates in this country.

And I always, I always, you know, because I worked in restaurants, man, that's a freaking hard job. And you got a smile, right?

Oh yeah. Customer service is crazy.

Got a smile. So not only are you working a hard job and people are treating you bad in some cases. Yeah, where this, this isn't cooked good enough, by the way. If you, if you, if you ever are serving me and I return something to the kitchen, it is totally jacked up. Because if it's not totally jacked up, I'm just gonna like, just gonna get it done. Yeah, I mean, you gotta give me a raw, bleeding piece of meat if you think I'm gonna return to the kitchen.

What about the wrong thing? Someone gives you straight up the wrong thing, they mess your order Up. Wrong thing.

Is it something I'm down with? You know? Like, is it okay? Is it like, hey, I ordered the rib eye. Get a piece of prime rib. Cool. I'll eat it.

What if you get a fish?

Probably going back. I'll be cool about it.

Yeah.

I'll probably just say, you know what I might do in that situation? This is how nice I am. Like, yeah, no, because I'd probably be like, hey, you know, I'm also interested in getting a steak. Can you bring me a ribeye? You can both go with my fist. And maybe. Maybe put that in a. In a doggy bag or something. Do you.

Do you on the inside? Do you actually feel bad that you have to do, like, if you have to. You feel bad, huh? Yeah. Yeah. I'm with you.

I don't like. I don't like messing with waitresses. I don't like. You know anybody in service, right? You know anybody in service? I don't like being that guy.

Yeah, the.

The proverbial guy, right? That's like, hey, yeah, man. Can you hurry up with that? Yeah, yeah. You know, I'm the guy that'd be like, hey, you know, I guess. I guess I'm not drinking water tonight. Haven't seen old homegirl in a while.

But hey, you know, when someone does good service, like, I'm definitely gonna take care of them too. You know, that's what we're doing. But that's Jessica, right? We get this. She's sort of. She's. Honestly, she's kind of like a female Johnny in a way, right? She's smart, she's good looking, she's witty. But maybe not the best choices. Maybe she didn't roll out in the best environment. And that's addressed, too, in the book. You know, there's some. There's a level of ownership that gets, you know, responsibility for our actions. And she's the one that kind of pushes that, like, hey, you can sit around here. Because at a certain point, I don't get too much into it. But Johnny starts saying, well, you know, we didn't. I didn't. You know, I. I didn't have the right upbringing and all this. And she's like, hey, dude, no one made you quit school. No one made you do this. No one made you. You did those things.

But like you said, these are. These are. These are his people. These are normal people. These are people in the world. These are people I grew up with. These are my friends to this day, people I met along the way.

Now, that's kind of your main characters and one more character I want to introduce. And look, there's a bunch. There are a lot more characters in the book. I shouldn't say a lot more. I tried to limit the number of characters as much as possible. Right. I don't want to have this big complex.

Storyline that's hard to follow. I wanted it to be when you heard someone, I want you just to know who it is and boom, you're locked. That was my goal. Simplicity.

There's another character that I do want to bring up because he does. You got some. He's got some. A little bit of impact. And this character, as you heard from the Review from the Publisher's Weekly Review Johnny and Goat. They work at a big box store. Their boss is this guy named Gerald Lundstrom.

Jerry, also known as Jerry and they call him the Weasel. That's what they call him. So let's get an introduction to Gerald Lundstrom, the Weasel. Let's get an introduction to the big box store, to what their jobs are and what they do there. They're stock boys. So here we go.

You would think Americans survived on mayonnaise. Goat says, disgusted. No stock boys. Boxes, tile floor and industrial shelves. Food, detergent, electronics. Pretty much anything can be found here every day from the time the doors open until they close. There are customers here buying milk and batteries and toilet paper and garbage bags, tomatoes, popcorn, salami. People can buy anything here and they do consumption in massive quantities to fill their massive bellies and run up their massive credit card debt. People.

Flesh covered robot beings in need of fuel and meaning.

They find both here. I mean honestly, who the fuck needs a half a gallon of Miracle Whip for their house? Goat asks earnestly trying to comprehend this madness. Well, obviously a bunch of people need it. All this will be gone in a couple of days. Goat shakes his head. What the hell do they do with it? Do they put it in their cereal or something? I think they butter their wives up with it. God damn, that's fucking disgusting. Yeah it is. Johnny agrees from the end of the aisle. A loud high pitched voice breaks their conversation. Jerry, the night manager. You guys need to stop talking and get that stuff stacked up. Less talking and more stalking. We've still got pickles, mustard, Crisco and canned ham. I got your canned ham. Goat whispers under his breath. Jerry walks toward Goat and Johnny. Thin, late 30s, smoker, greasy hair, beige Levi, Dockers polo shirt, yellow gold colored necklace with cross gold colored watch. Fake. What did you say? Jerry asked aggressively. Goat, stand up. Goat stands up Straight and belts out. I said, I got your canned ham.

Jerry shakes his head. He tries to think of an original comeback, but he can't think of anything good. He resorts to all he knows. Well, you just keep running your mouth like that and we'll see if you ever make supervisor. Not wanting to engage in a verbal battle, Jerry quickly walks away. Goat stands there shaking his head. Motherfucker, he says quietly. Then, unable to contain himself, shouts, supervise this, you weasel looking motherfucker.

Johnny looks at him. I'd fucking kill myself if I ever made supervisor at this shithole. Yeah. And that fucking prick walking around like he's fucking Steve Jobs. Loser. Fucking loser. At least he's easy to rip off. Johnny concedes. Yeah, he's got that going for him. I'm getting a couple of bottles of Jack tonight, Goat says. I'm getting the nastiest rot gut gin I can find.

So there you go. That's the manager. Have you ever had a manager like. Like my boy? Like the Weasel?

Yes, sir.

God.

Do I need to do character development or do we know who Jerry the Weasel Lundstrom is?

Right, we're gonna use the schema on that one. Yeah, for sure.

And I had so much fun writing that dialogue. I heard you chuckling. I heard K Dog behind the scenes over there chuckling as I was, Rol, just because that's what it's like, right? You know, you're 22, 23 years old. You're have. You have a crap job, you know. You know Dave Burke?

Good deal.

Yeah. He was a stock boy at Target, and he was a stock boy when he was at Target, and he was like 15.

And he's like, you nailed. You nailed that dialogue. You nailed those characters. And I go, I was, I said, how can that be? You weren't like that. And he was, no, I wasn't like that. I was 15, just trying to do a good job and trying to get money. He goes, but I worked with guys that shouldn't have been working there that were 22, 23, 24 years old. And I would hear them talking, and you freaking nailed it. These guys talk to each other and talk shit.

So we all know managers like this, kind of a stereotypical manager. And that's the way the world kind of gets put together for this book. Now, again, I don't want to spend. I don't want to start covering the plot of the book. You kind of heard it from the review. A little bit of what happens in the plot. You don't get the whole deal. But that's sort of the direction we're heading in. Got to get the book to get there. But I did want to kind of just talk about some of the themes, some of the other themes that are in the book.

One of them is, is kind of this.

Idea of being obsessed with random things, which we all certainly do. I do. We all end up obsessed with these random things. And if you look at it from the outside, it doesn't make any sense. So Jiu jitsu.

Surfing, archery, rock climbing, music, guitars, nascar.

Lawn. Super into your lawn. Right. Super into fishing, super into yoga, super into cooking, super into grill. Like there's all these things that people just get into. And that level of obsession could be about anything. Right. And that was, that was one of the fun things that I had with Artie was I was thinking, what would be the most random kind of thing that you could be obsessed with? How about laundry? Doing laundry. But there's not that much difference between being obsessed with doing laundry and, and archery.

Yeah.

And I'm, believe me, I'm pretty obsessed with archery. I spend a bunch of time doing it. I spend money on it. Like why I could be making super clean clothes. Jiu Jitsu. Hey, we're super into Jiu jitsu. Yeah. We could talk about this friggin skill and this and that. But.

At this point we have kind of the basic skills that we need to defend ourselves. We're just doing it for a whole nother reason. Right. Lawns. Right. Like lawn care. People get fired up for that stuff. So that's something that we do. It's an underlying theme in the book is, man, think about what you're doing. What are you obsessed with? Why are you obsessed with it? We get into some weird stuff.

Yeah.

Consumerism, buying stuff. That's another thing we do. You wrap that, you wrap the obsession around also around consumerism, buying stuff. And if you've ever been to a big box store, which I certainly have been to many and still go to, or I should say still shop at because. Because I don't go to them very often. My wife, My wife kind of gets that done. But you go into those places and it's. We consume a lot of stuff. Right. And here's, here's what I think is interesting. And nowadays, you know, this, this, this book takes place in the early 90s, late 80s, I'm gonna say early 90s, so there's no cell phones.

But one thing that I've found that I think I believe and you can tell me what you think I think We, I think. Have you ever built something?

Yes, sir, I have.

And it gave. That took you some time and effort. What's the biggest thing you've ever built?

Biggest?

Yeah.

I don't know.

But that wasn't. That did not come from ikea.

Yeah. So. Okay, so I don't know. The biggest thing. That's gonna take a while for me to think of. But the thing that did jump out at me was I used to make slingshots when I was a kid.

Okay.

So.

You'D go down. In our. In my case, I'd go down the valley, the canyon, whatever. And you'd find a guava tree. I like the guava tree wood. And then you find where there's like a perfect Y. It can be like too narrow of a split. Gotta be. And it can't be too wide either. There's a lot of those. You gotta find the perfect one. Boom. You cut it. You cut it all three spots and you bring it back, you skin it, let it dry for a little bit, like a few days or whatever. I used to. This is when I went extra on it. I'd sand it down so it looks kind of cool. You can put finish on it. I never really did that. And then you go by. It's called surgical tubing. Yeah. Then you. Yeah, you attach them and then you cut off the tongue of your shoe of like an old shoe or whatever. You cut it off and then poke the two holes. Use a knife or even like a hole puncher. It's harder to do the hole puncher, but you, you know, you do the two holes, attach the surgical tube tubing. What I would do is I do this circle surgical tubing, go in hole, curl back. I'd super glue it together, wrap it with thread. Not too tight because it might start cutting into when it starts to oxidize a little bit. And then tape, like, small piece of tape. So it'd be super strong.

Super strong.

Do the same thing, both sides or all four attachments, and boom. There you go. Looks nice too.

How did you feel when you were complete, bro?

Amazing. That's why I do a bunch of them. Like, I don't need like five slingshots, but. Yeah. Oh, yeah, I got two or three going.

So I think there's some. I don't know, there's probably some chemical dopamine hit or whatever that you get when you actually do something. When you build something. Like, I've built like. Like redoing my house. Like, remodel, like ripping out, gutting my hat. One time I did my kitchen, and I gutted it in 72 hours. I gutted the whole thing, demoed it, got it out, redid the electrical, read the plumbing.

Put in a sub box. What's that called? I put in a. A sub box for the electrical. I forget what it's called, but I put it in, like, a whole new electrical system, and then I drywalled it, and I did that all in 72 hours, and. But you feel, like, accomplishment, right?

Building, like, fences at my houses. Building.

Remodeled my other house, so. So, like, these major projects, you feel this good sense of satisfaction when you're done. Well, in the modern world, we do a lot less of that. Right? So. So you can replace that sort of satisfaction by clicking on the Amazon, whatever, buy now, Right. And all of a sudden you feel like. But the thing is, since you didn't put much effort into it, it's not that gratifying. So you want to do it again.

Yeah. Yeah.

So I think that's why people roll into freaking Costco. They roll into Costco, and they roll out with way more stuff because they just walk through those aisles getting that dopamine hit dopamine, hit dopamine, hit dopamine, hit dopamine. Because they feel like they built that thing or they harvested.

Yeah.

It's the same thing when you go hunting and you, like, harvest the meat. Super gratifying. Super, like, 1,000 times more gratifying than buying a steak at the store. And believe me, buying a steak at the store is kind of gratifying, too. But you get that dopamine, you're like, oh, yeah. Then when it's gonna be so good, but it's way less. So you buy another one.

Right.

You know, and then you buy this and you buy that, right? Yeah.

That's weird, huh? So it's kind of like when you kind of maybe cut it all the way down to what the hell is going on with that little transaction. It's like, you know, like, almost, for lack of a better way of putting it in the wild or in the, you know, nature, whatever you put in this work, and then you. You run through some challenges, you overcome those challenges, then you get the reward, right? Any pursuit, that's sort of the system, and your brain, you know, follows along accordingly. Boom. You put in the work, you get obsessive over it, You. You run into a challenge, you overcome the challenge, and you're back on your path to, you know, for that main goal, you know, and the harder you work, the bigger the reward. Usually Right. As far as in your brain, like, the bigger the payoff, you know, so it's like if you overcome all the. And then you. Then you re. You finally reap that reward. In your case, it's hunting the elk or, you know, whatever. Whatever the reward is. The prize right there.

Boom.

There's your. Your ultimate satisfying dopamine. Hit. Whatever. But now it's the same thing, except you reduce the work part so much, but you still get the little reward, you know?

But here's the thing. You reduce the work. The reward, you get rewarded, but it's less work, less reward. So what do you do? You do it again.

Less satisfying.

Yeah. It's less time, but you just do it again.

Oh, yeah.

Coleman, order this. I'm going to buy that.

Yeah.

And so you end up in this sort of weird cycle of. Of satisfaction by just buying stuff.

Brady. And, you know, we've talked about this, too, brother. The people who make the stores, the layout and stuff. Oh, they know about that kind of stuff. That's why they. That's why there's a thing called impulse buy. Right? So they put the candy right there by the checkout. Stuff that you didn't plan on getting, but it's like, oh, I'm gonna use one of those right now, you know, kind of a thing. It's like an impulse buy. You ever get. I don't see you doing this, but maybe you do. I don't know. But you know, when you're shopping on Amazon, right. And me, I get a lot of. Carol, relate to this, where I get a lot of little cables and little tools and whatever, you know, just for this thing or that thing or whatever. And then when you check out or when you add it to the cart, they'll introduce all these other things.

Yeah.

And then I'm like, yeah.

You sure you're like dopamine? Dopamine.

Oh, yeah, I could use that. Never going to use it, but I could. I could imagine myself using this pair of pliers, you know, so many. I have two pairs of pliers, by the way, already. Oh, but that one with the red handle and that one's kind of dope. And it has a little thing on the side.

I am the. I am the most. I research stuff to the point where it's stupid. You trying to get me to buy something. I was looking at someone's. I was looking at one of my. I was looking at one of my kids. Yeah, my kids. Instagram. And my. My daughter was like, oh, I have an advertisement every third. Whatever. Picture is an advertisement.

Yeah.

And I go that. No, I go. I hardly have any. And she's like, no way. And I showed her. And I have like almost no Promoted ads. You know why? I never click on them and never. They know I'm like, low conversion. I'm like the lowest conversion ever. I'm not even wasting their money throwing that thing across in front of me. Because you. You could have the best freaking ID in the world. And I'm going to start. Like, I'm going to have to research that.

Yeah.

I'm surprised Amazon just doesn't check me out without showing me anything because they're just over.

Don't even try.

Yeah, don't even try.

Not worth it.

So that's an underlying theme. But here's. Here's the. Here's the kind of. The real. I don't know, maybe it's the. Maybe it's the heaviest underlying theme is just the idea of. And it is. It's about happiness. Right?

Not only about happiness, but this sort of underlying.

Unhappiness in the world. Underlying sadness in the world.

When I was a kid and I was working at Wendy's and I saw Gene and I saw that she was freaking happy.

And I knew that I wasn't.

And I didn't even know if I could be. It didn't seem like an achievable thing. It seemed like there was too much.

It seemed like there was too much.

Underlying things in the world that just are going to be bad. Right.

And I always sense that in the world. I always sensed, always. I always had this sense in the world of this underlying sadness, this underlying despair, this underlying suffering.

And I don't want to use the term depression because maybe you wrap all those things together because depression seems like it's a clinical, sort of like a problem that you treat type thing. And I didn't feel like this was a clinical problem. It just seemed like life to me.

Was not going to go the way you wanted it to go.

For anyone.

You're going to end up in a wrong job, you're going to end up in the wrong relationship. You're going to. Something's going to be wrong with your health, something's going to be wrong in your family.

And we're going to die, and we're all going to die. And before we die, we're going to suffer. And by the way, everyone that you know and everyone that you love is gonna suffer and die.

And so I would always. I kind of had this underlying sense of the world.

And then I would catch, like, glimpses of people that were happy. And.

Sometimes it was someone like Gene. There was another guy that worked at a freaking junkyard who was kind of jacked, especially when I was younger. You know, when you were younger and in the. In the 70s, if someone was jacked in the 70s, like, it was a whole. It was like a next level, right? Yeah, because you're. You're not used to seeing people that are jacked at all. And I remember seeing this guy who's worked at a junkyard and. And he looked happy. And I was like, dude, this guy's just jacked and just lifting engine parts around a junkyard.

And it seemed like he was happy.

So that's sort of this underlying theme. And I'll tell you, like, when I got to the teams. Thank God. When I got to the teams, that's when I started feeling like, oh, like, kind of happy. Like, this is cool. The people I'm with are kind of cool. And life's not going to be perfect, but we're going to have a good time living this imperfect life. So I started to get a little bit relieved of that as I got. As I got older.

But I think that, you know, Johnny kind of realizes that he's not going to be happy.

And this is the other sort of. The other sort of underlying theme is this idea of.

Sacrifice.

And when Johnny realizes that he can't be happy, or at least he doesn't think he can be happy.

He sees that, you know, kind of the way I looked at Gene, the Wendy salad bar girl. But that's his brother.

And the situation unfolds where he's not gonna be able to be happy anymore where. Where Artie is not gonna be happy anymore. And Johnny knows if he makes sacrifices, he could preserve the happiness for his brother, especially, because he's never going to be happy himself.

You know, I had this conversation with Stoner one time. We were out surfing, and he was asking me that. He's like, bro, I don't know. It's like the same thing. He's like, bro, I'm never gonna. How you. How am I ever gonna be happy? I'm never gonna be happy. You know, we were literally. It's like a beautiful Southern California. We're out at our surf spot. For whatever reason, there's not many guys out. There's a little offshore breeze. The water's warm. It's a, you know, chest to head high swell. Pretty consistent. Like, it's. It doesn't get any better. And he's out Here saying to me, like, how do you ever. How you ever find happiness? And I'm like, bro, this is it, man. This is it right here. And that's what.

You know, that's what. That's what you have to be able to find. You have to be able to find that the path that you're on.

Even though it's challenging, even though there's suffering, that's. That's the happiness, too.

And the sacrifice part is putting others above yourself. You know, and obviously, on this podcast, we talk about heroes, and we talk to heroes in many cases.

And most of the ones that we talk to here are military people, right? Soldiers, sailors, airmen, marines.

But those aren't the only people. Those aren't the only people in the world that are heroes, right? And. And I'm not just talking about law enforcement and, you know, firefighters and first responders. Well, either. There's all kinds of people in the world that put others above themselves.

And put other people's happiness above themselves.

And whether that's mothers and fathers.

And sisters and brothers and wives and husbands and friends. I mean, there's friends that do that.

Friends that put other people's happiness and other people's success above themselves. And.

Really, that's. That's the under. That's one of the other underlying themes of the book is. And that, you know, that's. That's a theme that's consistent with all the books that I've written. Fiction, nonfiction, people that are putting others above themselves. That's what leadership is. And ultimately.

That'S what life is about.

So.

I think if you can put other others before yourselves.

Then if we do that, then you can find some happiness. And at a minimum. At a minimum, you can leave the world in better condition than you found it.

And if you can pull that off. I think if you can pull that off.

Then you can die with a clean conscience, and you can die with a smile on your face, and you can leave a smile on the face of the people you left behind.

And that's a good life.

And that is final spin.

So we can't obviously cover the whole plot, the details. What we'll do is maybe in a year. Remember what we did with Musashi? Yeah, with Musashi. So this is episode 301, episode 401. That's actually two years, isn't it?

We'll give people two years to sort it out. Sure. Is that long?

No.

Should we do one year? So we do. Should we say 350?

Sure.

Okay, we'll go 350. We'll shoot for 350. So 350. We'll do full spoiler. We'll just tell everyone what's going on. We'll take a bunch of questions about the book.

And, yeah, we'll do it again where we can go a little bit deeper on all the plot. You know, as I start getting feedback from people, and people start asking all those awesome questions that you ask when you read books. And what's this part about? And what does this represent? We'll do all that. The book's for sale right now.

I would order it if I were you. Why? Clearly, because you want that first edition. Here's another reason. This is us against the establishment, by the way. This is us against the literary critics, right? This is us against the big publishing companies, the media companies. We're the outsiders. I'm an outsider. I'm tell you what, I go to New York City and I roll into those publishing office offices. I am an outsider. I might as well be purple.

Because I'm not from that world, right? They don't. The interesting thing is, I mean, I was an English major in college. They don't know about that. They just look at me, think knuckle dragger, meathead, which I take as a compliment, generally.

But, yeah, they don't want us to win. So join the cause, right? Let's. Let's. Let's. Let's take the fight to them. Get that first edition. And here's the other thing. I was planning to do a speaking thing, kind of like Jocko Live. What we did last year, right before COVID hit, I was. We were booking it up, and the whole freaking.

The industry's still paranoid, and a bunch of the venues started getting crazy with the way they were gonna run them, and someone wanted to cancel. And so I said, all right, fine, we'll put it off. So I'm gonna do a Jocko Live tour with this. I don't know what. I don't know what cities I'm going to. The only city I keep saying I want to go to is Detroit.

I just want to go to Detroit. And by the way, there's. So you knew Jack White is Jack White, White Stripes.

Oh, I'm thinking Todd White. No, I do now. Yes.

Yeah, yeah. So he's got a thing up in Detroit. He's got a place where he can record.

Bands straight to vinyl. So it just. Straight to vinyl. I think it's a venue that holds, like, 50 people. So I want to do Jocko live there. I want to record it. Straight to vinyl.

Yeah.

And just get.

My man's getting artisan on us, bro.

Straight to vinyl House. I think it might be the only place in America where you can do that.

That sounds correct.

And plus, the White Stripes are awesome. Jack White's freaking awesome, so that would be sick to do. So I'm gonna try and go to Detroit. Maybe I have to do a big show before that to get everyone in there. But then after that, we'll go straight to Third Man Records, Straight to vinyl.

Do you have a record player? Yeah, looking into that on one of my Amazon spirals. The record player. They have a lot nowadays.

Yeah, it's vinyl, dude.

Yeah. It's not going away.

We're talking about people being obsessed with things.

Yeah.

Vinyl is one of them.

Yeah.

Get that vinyl out. That record sounds better. Allegedly. I remember there's. There's a Motorhead album where he put in between the songs on the cd, has, like, the record sound like this. Yeah, it's pretty sick, right?

Yeah. Well, that's. I mean, even with film, that's all right. Where it's like, no, film looks like way better video. And. And photography, they're like, not film all day.

Yeah.

Digital is whack.

Digital.

Digital.

Lame.

Lame. Doesn't look as good. Doesn't look as natural. Doesn't look as. You know, doesn't flow with your senses.

So Detroit, that's one city I know. I'm going to. Why? Because we want it to flow with our senses.

Yes, sir.

We're going straight to vinyl and straight.

To vin all day.

I don't even know if that's a possible. Possible thing. I don't. I don't know if it's possible. They. You know, people might be like, you can't do that. You need. You're not even a band. I'm like, no. I'm gonna talk, though.

Yeah, it's an L. You've done albums with tracks, Right.

So this would be an album.

An album straight up.

You've been to Jocko Lives. Yes, sir. I have some of the money being Cool records, right?

Yes, sir.

They would be vinyl.

Vinyl all day, man.

Then you get clear vinyl, you get the red vinyl. Right. You know what I'm saying?

I don't know what red vinyl is.

But the vinyl is red. That's what red vinyl is, where you get the clear vinyl.

What's clear vinyl?

Clear the records. Clear. You can see through it.

You've heard of that? I never heard of that before.

K Dog's in the house in the game.

Yeah.

So when I do that thing. But I guess it's going to be spring or something like that. We'll go live, we'll hang out. If you're rolling up, you got that second edition. Let's face it. Still appreciative.

Sure.

But, you know, I know. We all know where you're at. Appreciate the support. Let's crush the world with this book.

Echo. Speaking of crushing the world, we kind of have to crush ourselves.

Yes.

Right. In order to cross the world, which.

By the way, make you tougher.

Yeah. Which, by the way, I can't. Just came back from hunting and for, I think it was 13 days. I did not lift weights because I was in the mountains.

Brutal.

Or as I call mountains.

But I came back and I was all fired up, you know, and felt like I need. Man, I have doms in my arms right now in my. I haven't had doms in my arms in a long time, dude.

So we got to crush ourselves. That can take a toll at times. What do we need to do to kind of stay on the path to get better so we can cross the world?

Well, keep in mind, mentally and physically, dom's in the arms. That indicates that you're working out your arms, which I respect. So, you know, I'm sorry that you have the dumb, but welcome to my world.

Well, okay, so we want to minimize doms. Well, no, no. Maximize, yet minimize. Mitigate doms.

Okay. Yeah, I would say that's a good call.

It's kind of a dichotomy, really.

But let's face it, would you. Would you want to have doms every day on your arms? Would that include pro? Would that increase progress or not? It'd be bad. Right?

You know, I. Obviously there's a lot to it, but generally speaking, simply put, doms every day. No, probably not.

Okay.

You. When the doms heals, then you want to elicit more doms in one way or another. Yes. But it's a process and it's ongoing. Nonetheless. I'll tell you, what you do need is supplementation. That'll help you through doms or no doms.

Right.

You know, so through this path we're all on. Supplementation is very helpful. So we'll talk about energy drinks first. Right. As far as energy. See, I know. I said it. Energy drinks.

Yep. As if that. As if what we're talking about fits in with all the other categories of all these other drinks that are in the energy drink category.

Yeah. So may you know me if you're new to this.

When they're not. Let's face it, they don't. Don't.

The stigma that you felt like, in your brain or whatever. Oh, energy drinks. That stigma. Don't worry about that stigma anymore. In fact, forget that stigma. Forget it.

Don't totally forget it because there's other drinks that still have. You need to keep the stigma in mind. Yeah, but you can have the stigma. Avoidance.

Yes. Like you'd, like, like, detach from the stigma.

Yeah.

How about that?

Leave it behind.

Just leave it behind. It doesn't control your brain and how you think of energy drinks necessarily anymore. If you know about Jocko Go. Okay, I could. Is it Discipline Go or Jocko Go?

It is Jocko Discipline Go.

Technically speaking, I got corrected by someone on the inside, which I respected, by the way. But either way, go Jocko Discipline Go. It's an energy drink that is good for you front to back. Good for you. Not the kind where you're drinking.

You know what? You ever seen that? There's this commercial, I think, one of these comedy YouTube channels. They're like, oh, if. So, like, if energy drink commercials were honest or whatever. And they called it like a. A metal tube of psychedelic poison or, I don't know, something. But they. They kept referring to it as a metal tube of some kind of poison. Yeah, you know, whatever.

Accurate. Yeah.

Oh, Brad, watch the video. It's funny. You're like, damn, that is all true. And it's. It's interesting either way. It's not that. That's not what this is.

No poison.

It's different.

Yeah, actually good for you.

It's good for you. It's like a health drink. Energy drink. But even though that makes it sound kind of like not really what it feels like, just keep in mind, it's an energy drink that tastes good, is.

Good, and is good for you and gives you energy.

And gives you energy.

Legit.

No chemicals. None of these weird preservative things because the process. High quality. Quality. It's quality. Many flavors. The best in which is mango. Factually, in my opinion.

Check. But you're gonna have to choose for yourself on that one. It's called Jocko Go.

Also got Joint Warfare.

Yes, sir.

To win today, I must say, even joint warfare has its limitations. Because I need more right now. I take it every day. Thank God. Because otherwise I might even be completely immobilized right now. I'm gonna be laid up.

Here's the thing. Joint warfare is not going to help your doms.

Oh, really?

I mean, not. I mean, Maybe we help the doms.

The protein.

Protein is going to help your doms.

Yes, sir. So, joints, joint warfare, super krill. Right. But when it comes to actual rebuild, we need to go mok.

Yep. That's for the muscle. Yes. Additional protein in the form of a dessert.

You know what I had for breakfast this morning, which I normally don't eat?

Milkshake. Thank you.

Guess what I had for lunch because I could feel. I knew what you just told me. The doms, I know it needs.

Yes, sir.

I need to repair my muscles.

Oh, yeah.

Freaking sore, dude.

By the way, speaking of milk, the. The new. And you actually all the ingredients were in front of my face, but you turned me on to this or to the precursor of this new formula for the ultimate milkshake. Depends on what flavor you like. But if you like the chocolate one, this is the one. Mint chocolate or dark chocolate or peanut butter chocolate. Whichever one you want. Half of a. Or half of a frozen banana. Overripe Tulsi Gabbard turned me on to that. Okay, so we got a, you know, a little collab going on. Frozen, half a frozen banana, two scoops of the milk. I did the darkness soy milk, you know, because like soy silk, I don't know, whatever. The one that it doesn't have lactose in it. So it's super low. Okay. If you go regular milk and you're concerned about. If you're trying to go lower on the calorie thing, regular milk, even 2% is not the best one for you.

Because I'm over here on the whole milk. Sometimes straight up half and half.

Well, you're not going on a lower calorie scenario. Let's face it, you can't, you know, your little machine can't handle that kind of stuff. Either way, if you are, this is the deal. Because I was going to give it to the kids for the ultimate front end test. You see, I'm saying anyway, you go half soy milk or almond milk, whatever, the unsweetened one, and then half of that. It's lactose free. It was the chocolate milk that you. You mentioned.

Oh, yeah.

It's like lactose free. There's way less sugar and it's like double, triple filtered or whatever. And you go half that too. Oh, just for the extra boost of chocolate or whatever. Yeah, man, drink that one. It tastes like ice cream cream. I think the banana, but it's not a whole banana. So you don't get the real super banana flavor, but you get the sweetness from the banana. And bro, it Tastes like it's ice cream for real. Yeah. Oh, yeah. Put ice in there. Boom. Mix that up. There you go. Mole protein in the form of a highly desirable dessert. Highly desirable.

I'm desiring one right now. I've already had two today.

It's true. Also, Jack, white tea, if you're into tea, you know, something light. That's the OG that's the original. Is the OG oh, yeah, you like it? Is the OG I was never a tea drinker, to be honest with you, and. But I was. And I was surprised about how many, like, tea drinkers were like, brother Jocko, white tea is. That's. It's the legit one. Yeah. Interesting.

You can get all this stuff at Vitamin Shop. You can get all this stuff@jockofuel.com, by the way, if you subscribe, it gets shipped to you for free.

You can get the. The energy drinks.

Here's the thing. You see, you mentioned energy from time to time. You know what energy is?

It's.

Energy is an actual thing.

Yeah, it's. It's Henry Gracie's got something.

It's Henry Gracie's charisma. His whole.

Oh, that's his.

You know, like. Yeah. You know, when he talks, he's like. He's real, bro. That guy's on it, man. You want to listen to the guy talk forever. And that energy that he brings, that's a henergy. Straight up.

I thought it was like he mixed some food up, you know, maybe an acai bowl, but that was a henergy one.

I think the presentation of that.

Yeah.

Was the energy. So I'm just saying we got.

Well, we need to talk to. To Henner then and get it. You know, maybe he could approve of the energy drink over here.

Yeah, but I think it's in the present, so I'm just saying it might be. Might be. I don't know. Maybe, maybe not. But it might be misleading to say, hey, they are considered energy drinks. You see, I'm saying I don't know.

So. Okay, so this was not officially endorsed by Henry. Yes.

Okay.

But if you want to get these drinks. Genergy drinks. Just made that up because there's a Jocko energy drink. I don't know.

Genergy.

Sure.

Hell yeah.

If you want to get these gen. These genergy drinks, you can get them at Wawa as well on the East Coast. And by the way, we're. We're. We'll be rolling out for everybody else in the country that's not on the east coast that's been hitting us up like, what about this store? What about. We're working them and we should start to see some. Those other big stores across the country rolling out shortly so that you way you can get. So.

Yeah, there you go.

Especially speaking of getting some, you know, you want some, you know, some American made stuff. And when I say stuff, I don't mean just random stuff.

Right.

Good stuff. Jeans, boots, various other leather goods, depending on how creative Pete is feeling. Some wallets in there. Can you still get the wallet?

Yep. Both of them?

Yeah.

There's like a small one and a big one.

Yeah. So back to the jeans. Delta 68 and the. The what's your OG?

Factory.

Factory jeans.

Impressive. Jeans. And I care about more elements of jeans as far as. When you put on jeans than. Than this Jocko guy, you care about a number of things which are critical and fundamental. I get it.

Functionality.

Yes, sir.

Is all I care about.

Yes, sir.

In life.

But me, I care about the fit. You know, when I put on the.

Jeans, fit is part of functionality.

Yes.

In my opinion.

Okay. I care about the aesthetic. Fit is important. Okay. See, I understand. Yes, sir. So, you know, when I'm in the mirror, I look in the mirror and I look at myself.

And I look at my wife next to me, and if she's like giving me the approval, that means a lot. See what I'm saying? Versus I put them on and she's like, stoic face, maybe sour face.

Wow, that's gotta be rough in your eyes. Maybe.

Let's see, what else. Maybe you have like those types of reactions. That means. That means a lot to me.

Seems my wife's just stoked.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Well, you know why she's stoked? Because you put on the Delta 68 like it is in my case. Look, maybe it doesn't mean much to you. Nonetheless, I. It still reaps the same benefits. You see, I'm saying. And your wife. My wife, they're there to convey, you know, their approval and that, and around we go. You see what I'm saying? So it doesn't matter if you notice or not.

Origin USA.com.

Oh, yeah. American made. So when I say American made, it doesn't mean we assemble them, you know.

In, you know, sewn and grown, grown and sewn right here in America. Everything from the rebuilding this whole freaking country, bringing manufacturing back to here, and that's what we're doing.

Yep. They're doing some great stuff over there also. Jocko store. It's called Jocko Store. That's where you can get your shirts and hats and hoodies. Anything you want to wear to represent the path. Discipline equals freedom. You can go deep on the idea of discipline equals freedom, by the way.

Yes, you can.

Yeah. Sometimes kind of hard to understand, but when you understand it, I mean, I.

Wrote a whole day of book about it. So I mean, I would say I went some help.

Yes, sir. Yes, sir. Nonetheless, you want to represent.

Thank you for telling me I could go deep. I have gone deep.

Well, I'm thinking, you know how. Okay. You ever. You listen to music when you work out.

Yes.

Okay. So sometimes I will too. Sometimes. Sometimes I listen to podcasts, depending on the podcast. Sometimes the podcast can distract you from the workout, by the way, so keep that in mind. But every once in a while, I'll, I'll go with nothing. Not listen to anything good. That's when your mind, like you find your mind just going deep on some random thing that's always in front of your face or whatever.

Yeah.

And that's what happened recently to me. Discipline equals freedom. And man, I have the freedom to do all this stuff, but I'm not gonna do it because I'm disciplined. You see, I'm saying you can go deep in your own mind anyway, if you're representing that you can get your shirts and hats and hoodies and a bunch of other stuff on jocko store.com. also, we have a subscription situation called the shirt Locker.

Kind of an exclusive deal. You know, it's a monthly thing. You get a new shirt different from the, from the.

It's slightly exclusive. It's available to anybody.

It's real exclusive.

I'm just saying if you're part of the shirt locker, you're wearing your shirt locker shirts. Someone who's not part of the shirt locker, they see your shirt, they're gonna be like, hey, where can I get that? You see, I'm saying. Yeah, that's the exclusivity. It's pseudo exclusive.

Right.

Nonetheless, cool, cool designs.

Jocastore.com Speaking of subscriptions, you can subscribe to this podcast if you want to. And it's everywhere. We also have some other podcasts. Jocko Unraveling Podcast with my bro, Daryl Cooper, D.C. we're recording a couple this week. Grounded podcast. Which are we even. Were we holding on to that? Holding on to it still out there.

It's.

Yeah, people. Some people are waiting for it. Let's say seven people.

It's a non scheduled podcast. Okay, we'll see.

Maybe at some point we just roll back deep on the grounded podcast. Warrior Kid Podcast we also have the Underground Jocko Underground podcast. It's our. It's our alternative location in case things get tyrannical around here.

I don't think they will, but some days I wake up thinking maybe they will. So anyways, we've built a platform that we can operate on with pure independence and not have to rely on the current platforms that we're on. We hope it doesn't come to that, but if it does, it would be foolish for us not to have a contingency plan. If you want to help us with that, you want to be a part of that, go to Jocko underground.com it costs $8.18 a month. You can probably figure out what that stands for. $8.18 a month. But listen, if you can't afford that, but you still want to support, you still want to be in the game. Email assistanceocounderground.com we'll get you in there. We release another podcast once a week that's a little bit more. It covers some tangential topics. Try and give you a little bit more information, let you know what's going on. Do a Q and A. We're answering a bunch of questions on there. So if you want to. If you want to help us out there, go to jockwonderground.com yeah, that one's good.

It's in the way. I, you know, he. Like, you go along with a certain thing and you could try to evaluate and maybe sum up, like, what is this? What, what is this? Right? And you, you know, you say Q and A, which it is essentially, but it's like. It's kind of like when you go through life, whether it be currently or before, whatever. I'm just saying, you think about your past, you think about the present. Just all these weird questions. What? What?

But, like, this is a funny way of saying it.

Currently or before.

It is true. It is true. Nonetheless. You're still gonna have, like, you know how there's like, questions rolling around, like, what is this? What does this mean? Like, what's my take on this? At the end of the day, you know, if you're to kind of ask that question to yourself, I think you offer a really good, like, your take on it. And it's usually really informed, usually. And it can kind of help a lot of us make sense out of certain elements of life. You know, whether it be the specific questions that people ask or the first part that we talk about, like, you know, is our. Is our. Our children soft now? You know, is society becoming soft? Or like, you Know, succumbing to the. To the trick of advertising or, you know, like that. That kind of stuff. Like, that's real stuff that we're dealing with, like daily, you know.

Yeah. I think it brings awareness. Yeah. You ever heard me talk about if I wanted to scare you, but I told you, hey, I'm going to be in the house and I'm going to scare you. What are my chances of being able to scare you?

Yeah. Yeah. Lower.

Almost zero.

Yeah.

If you don't know.

I would say I'm 99.9% gonna scare you. So with life, if you have an opportunity to think through a problem or think through a question before you actually have to contend with it, it's gonna make you unscarable.

Yeah.

So just. That's another. I think that's the benefit of the Jocko underground.com podcast is we're addressing those kind of things to get you in that situation where you can't be scared.

Yeah.

Or you're ready to deal with whatever's in front of you.

Yeah. Fully.

But yeah. Also we have a YouTube channel.

Podcast. YouTube channel.

Boom.

XM excerpts on there, video version of this podcast. Some enhanced stuff on there. Some behind the scenes.

I was gonna say some behind the scenes.

Yes. Very occasional. Every once in a while we will happen a lot of times against your will, but then it usually becomes against my will. We go down like certain know, little pass or whatever. And here's the thing, I don't say we post behind the scenes stuff on there, even though we do, because it's not very irregular. But they're on there though, for sure. If there's some behind the scenes info conversations worth posting, they're on there.

Yep.

Anyway, had a benefit.

Yeah.

YouTube. That's a good one. Also Origin HD.

Yeah, yeah.

YouTube channel. Very good. You want to see the. You want to see the. What do you call, like a phoenix out of the ashes industry and how someone can do that.

Yep.

Can achieve that step by step. Boom. That's. That's a perfect example. That's. We can see that go down for sure. So, yeah, check that one out on YouTube as well.

Also got a. Speaking of albums, now, this one is not on vinyl.

No.

Not yet anyways. Not. We didn't record it at Jack White's studio in Detroit.

Nope.

I'm looking forward to that. I hope I get to do that. That'd be rad, right?

It would be. Yeah. Especially that kind like where you said there's like 50 people or something like that. Like a small. Yeah.

Super hype. I wonder if I'd get super hyped for that. I think I would. You know, sometimes I get hyped.

Yes, I do know.

Well, this one's not on vinyl, but it's called psychological warfare. Little, little mental spots to help you get through those moments of weakness. You can get that anywhere. You get mp3s. Also flipsidecanvas.com that's Dakota Meyer. He's got a company where they're printing stuff for you to hang on your wall. Awesome stuff, keep you on the path. Also got some books, obviously. First and foremost, final spin. You got the intro. Find out what the hype is about.

Good man.

Pre order it right now. Comes out November, first week in November. Competitive people are gonna be watching. Who, who's looking at it? I don't know. We'll see what happens. It's a risk. It's a risk. I asked my editor when discipline equals Freedom Field Manual comes out. Came out when it was about to come out. I said, have you ever taken this much of a risk before in a book? He said, no, never, because it's so different. He said, this one, same ballpark. These kind of book. This. The book doesn't exist. There's no book like this. So final spin. If you want to support. You want to be high fiving, you want that first edition. Order that thing. Leadership Strategy and Tactics Field Manual. The code, the evaluation, the protocols, Discipline. Freedom Field Manual. The brand new version. Way The Warrior Kid. 1, 2, 3 and 4. Mikey and the Dragons. About Face by Hackworth. And of course, Extreme Ownership and the Dichotomy of leadership that I wrote with my brother, Leif Babin. And speaking of Leif Babin, we have a leadership consultancy. We solve problems through leadership. Go to echelonfront.com for details. We also have a muster coming up. It's a live event. It's in Las Vegas October 28th and 29th. Come and get some of that.

You can find all those things@echelonfront.com we also have an online training at Extreme Ownership Academy. The leadership is not something you just learn and now you're good at. Oh, I got a. I got a shot of leadership. I read one book, now I'm good. No, you got to work at it. Like the gym. So we got a leadership gym for you. Go to extremeownership.com for that. And if you want to help service members active and retired, you want to help their families, you want to help gold star families? Check out Mark Lee's mom, Mama Lee. She's got a charity organization. And if you want to donate or you want to get involved, you want to help out, go to America's mighty warriors.org and if you want more of my ridiculously rambling reads or you need more of Echo's obtuse opinions.

You can find us on the interwebs, on Twitter, on the gram, and on that Facebook.

Echoes Attic Controls. I am at Jocko Willink, and thanks to all the men and women in the Army, Navy, Air Force and Marines. Look, Final Spin is a book. It's a fiction story. I sat around and came up with this idea and wrote it. And the only reason I was able to write it, the only reason I had the freedom to write that, is because you all are out there providing security and stability through your service. So thanks to all the military. And the same goes to our police and law enforcement, firefighters, paramedics, EMTs, dispatchers, correctional officers, Border Patrol, Secret Service, and all first responders. We get to do what we do because you do what you do every day to keep us safe.

And everyone else out there.

Happiness.

Happiness isn't a destination. You don't get there. You don't arrive.

You are there.

This is it. And it might not always seem like it, but the struggles and the sacrifice, those are life. And those ultimately are happiness. And you will find them most clearly.

If you put others before yourself.

So keep pushing, keep looking up.

Stay clean, and of course, keep getting after it.

And until next time, this is Echo and Jocko out.