Ep. #763: Jason McCarthy on the Transforming Our Body and Life with Rucking

Mike: Hey there, and welcome to Muscle For Life. I’m Mike Matthews, your host. Thanks for joining me today where I chat with Jason McCarthy, who is the CEO and the founder of goruck, which is a company that creates rocking gear. And if you’re not sure what rocking is well, I’ll leave you in the mystery you’re gonna learn in the podcast, of course.

And Jason’s company hosts events rocking event. To build communities and to help people improve their fitness and to empower them to improve other areas of their lives. It’s a pretty cool story of how he came to form this company and how he went from basically failing. It was not going well in the beginning to figuring out a formula for making it work.

And it had everything to do with connecting to people on a very personal level. And this interview is not about how to rock, how to get started rocking. I actually recorded one on that. I think it came out several months ago. If you just search my YouTube channel or podcast feed for R, you will find it.

And that episode actually led to this one because somebody from Jason’s. Came across the podcast or maybe as a regular listener. And then he heard my rocking episode and reached out and asked if I wanted to have Jason on the show. And I said, Sure. And in this interview, Jason and I talk about his experience in Iraq as a special forces soldier, but if his origins story that led to go ruck.

We talk about the importance of investing heavily into relationships and how that helped Jason not only build his business, but also fix his marriage. And he has a very unique story there that he shares him and his wife got a divorce and then they got remarried and now they are doing well with a family.

Interesting story. I’ve never known anybody that Remar. The person they divorced. And so I thought that was interesting. Jason talks about how he started the business and many of the obstacles he had to overcome and how he successfully turned it from a hobby side hustle at best to a successful business that provides a great lifestyle for him and his.

Also, if you like what I’m doing here on the podcast and elsewhere, definitely check out my health and fitness books, including the number one best selling weightlifting books for men and women in the world. Bigger, leaner, stronger, and thinner. Leaner, Stronger, as well as the leading flexible dieting cookbook, the Shredded Chef.

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Hey Jason, thanks for taking the time to talk with me today. Awesome. Glad to be here, man. Yeah. So this was a serendipitous connection because several, I think it’s a couple of months ago now actually, I released an episode, just a monologue episode me talking about Rucking, and I thought it was interesting and useful and I wasn’t sure how well it was going to be received.

I thought it would do fine, like most episodes do fine, but it did a lot better than fine and I got a lot of good feedback on it. And I, and looking back, I understand because a lot of the people in my orbit are looking for not hacks or shortcuts per se, but they are looking for ways to get more out of the time that they put into their fitness.

And that’s how I was presenting, rocking from a cardio. Vascular exercise, light intensity. Maybe you could get up to a moderate intensity endurance exercise standpoint. Yeah, we’ll 

Jason: talk about that. You can get pretty high up there, but yeah, it’s like rock the kids rock, the dog rock to wor rock to the grocery store.

It’s 

Mike: great. Yeah, I mean it’s if you’re gonna be walking and I’ve talked about walking as I, I think one of the most underrated forms of just simple exercise, particularly simple cardio, that’s very useful if you are in a calorie deficit, for example, because it’s not hard to do, It doesn’t require anything in the way of recovery.

So it doesn’t cut into your weightlift or your strength training and it burns more calories than most people think. So I was piggybacking on that with rocking and saying, Hey, if you’re gonna go for walks and I would recommend that you might as well throw some weight on your back basically. And.

More physically challenging and dramatically increase the calorie burning and increase the cardiovascular demand, but not so much that it is now counterproductive. If, for example, you are multitasking your walk with work calls, right? So I do, I have an upright bike and I just hop on the bike for 30 minutes a day to do like moderate intensity.

But I almost always, if I can, I save. Calls I have to do for the day. I usually always have to do at least one or two. I’ll save them for that. So I’ll hop on the bike and do my calls. I have to do it anyway. But many people listening, they go out for a walk instead. And so rocking resonated because it’s an easy way to make that walk more productive, so to speak.

So a lot of people, they just hadn’t occurred to them and they’re like, Oh, that’s cool. Yeah, it’s a great idea. And somebody who works with you then reached out to me. And I think I mentioned your equipment on the podcast. I think that’s why. So here we are. And instead of talking more about rocking, I’m sure that, we’ll, this conversation will inevitably go to some more specifics in terms of techniques and ways to get into it even further or get more out of it.

I thought what we would do is make this discussion more about your story. How did you get into this? Why did you decide to start the company? And then see where that takes us, because I do those kinds of, Conversations here and there often actually it’s just me talking about, Hey, here’s some interesting business advice that I have to share that’s worked well for me and my businesses.

And those episodes. I always get good feedback because although obviously this is primarily a health and fitness podcast, I have a lot of people following me who are entrepreneurial or who are executives and businesses or just ambitious people who want to accomplish more in their career. So 

Jason: if you’re American, being entrepreneur is in your blood, Go West Paradise is there, right?

Getting your wagons and head out there. It’s just a certain mindset of risk taking and just going for it. And I was a super accidental entrepreneur. This was not I mean in a business title sense, right? Enlisted into the army after nine 11 because of nine 11.

Cuz I was really mad at what happened to us. And so I had a contract to go through special forces training. , which is great as long as you keep passing, which you know, is easier said than done. But I made it through thankfully and became a Green Beret and then went to war in Iraq and then did some time in Africa.

And I guess GORUCK as a thing. Part of the thing on Special Forces training, I didn’t really know what it was. I thought it was, pushing logs over your head and flutter kicks in the middle of the night and rolling around in the dirt and stuff, and them screaming at you to quit. And frankly, it’s nothing like that at all.

It’s a rucksack on your back and you’re moving through the woods in North Carolina at first as an individual because you, to be a great teammate first, you gotta be an individual. Which is entrepreneurial in nature as well. You’ve gotta have something to do or something to say to, to start anything out.

My wife at the time, cuz we’re going through the company story, my wife at the time was in the cia, so she was a case officer and she was posted to West Africa and after my tour in Iraq, I went and vacationed over on Christmas leave over to war torn West Africa. And I got over there and it was it was odd for its familiarity.

Like it felt like a war zone but there weren’t gun trucks and there was a lot more color over there. And so it was just I was still in that mindset and so I, I made to base fortifications quote to her house and I made her a go bag, right? So a go bag is what? Use in war, we’d put it in the trunk of the Humvee and it just had extra supplies, right?

Bombs, guns, batteries, food, water, ammunition, whatever. Take your pick right in case your vehicle’s disabled and you have to fight so you have extra supplies. I made that for her because she was driving around all day, every day by herself in, over there and Hey, if your vehicle’s disabled, here’s a pair of running shoes.

Here’s a, solar powered radio, here’s some water, leave it in the thing. And there’s a different set of needs that you have, especially when you’re a white female in Africa. And so there’s just some other stuff that was relevant for where she was, We were trying to figure out, my plan was to transition over to the paramilitary side of the agency, and through her I’d met those people.

And that process was all had already started. , but it’s like trying to figure out what I was gonna do when I got out of the army, but moved to live with her. And while I was on that nice vacation down to visit her, she’s Ah, you should do the Go Rock thing. And so with a simple innocent sentence like that, and my wife’s name’s Emily, that kind of launched the idea.

And really, I just needed a hobby of sorts. So I went back and I was still training and doing. Special forces stuff, but I didn’t have a family over there. I was a single geographic bachelor, I should say. And so just started along the train of, okay, what would a rucksack look like and what would it do and what’s the brand?

And I, we always like to name goruck. And so that kind of became the, that just became the thing to build around and what she meant in West Africa was that I should train people up on the security posture or, the special forces way of life because it’s an odd thing to people who haven’t been a part of that or something as impactful, but once you go through something like special forces training and you join that community, it’s in your blood until the day you.

It’s impossible to divorce yourself from it. It’s your hometown or your family or your best friend growing up or whatever, no matter how far you get from it, it’s still just a part of who you are everywhere you go. And so those became they were challenges as a hobby at first, because I didn’t have to, I had a job, Emily had a job and all that stuff, which is oftentimes I’ll give people the advice that if you really wanna start a company, then keep your existing job and work two jobs and just take one paycheck, right?

The one that’s actually paying and see if something will actually work in the market. And, so I had all these plans for the bag and how that was all gonna go. And it just didn’t, it didn’t work because when I came back to move in with Emily, life got a little bit harder. We’d been married for almost five years and never lived together.

So our marriage started to come crashing down. And so everything got put on hold, and I’m going through that stereotypical veteran transition Murphy strikes, if it can go wrong, it will go wrong. And, but the idea for GORUCK survived on that, the plane trip back home, if you will. And, I’m crashing on my buddy’s couch in the East Village in Manhattan and stuff like that.

It remained a hobby. I’ll 

Mike: interject with a couple questions. First is the name, why the name? 

Jason: A go bag or a bug out bag or a goruck. It’s just slang for what we would put in the trunk of the Humvee. It takes on different names and it just goruck sounds better than Go bag.

The other part of it is to ruck, It’s a verb. It’s a ruck is a ruck sack, right? A backpack to ruck is to move with a ruck sack on it’s rocking. It’s it’s just that is. Common. It’s how you describe things in the army. Like you don’t camp in the army, you biv whack. You don’t backpack, you rock.

And so these things were second nature to me at that point. That’s the language that we used. And it’s not something that had ever really been introduced into the civilian universe. And so there’s a bit of an education that comes along with that, which is good and bad. But I liked the sort of play on words like a noun, a verb.

It’s really common in the military and it sounds pretty cool. So it’s the 

Mike: imperative mood, right? It’s go rock telling people go do this. Yeah. 

Jason: Yeah, exactly. It’s also a command without being a frick about it. It’s Go rock man. Go do it. It’s not just a thing, it’s not just an abstract concept.

We live our lives like that. We wanna run a company that inspires and without being pricks about it says, Man, go rock. It’ll be awesome. Yeah. That’s how I 

Mike: understood it. When I saw it. I actually didn’t know the noun meaning at first. And then when I looked into it more, I was like, Oh, okay. But when I first saw the name, I liked it because, and I understood it in, in that sense, and I thought that’s, it’s the right mood for fitness.

Yeah. Tell people to go do something . And something else you mentioned is that I totally agree with and is something that I maybe have commented on just randomly, but that is, if you’re gonna be a great teammate, you have to be a great individual. And I think that concept applies to any. Team in life and I’d be curious to hear your thoughts and just let you expound on that.

Like for example, take a marriage. That’s a team, a family’s a little team. Take. If you are working in a company, you’re part of a team there, that’s a group. Any group activity, I think you could actually expand that out and say society, a high functioning society would comprise a team or would work like a team in certain ways.

And I don’t want to go too far off into tangent land, but I’ve talked about one of the downfalls. Democracy, for example, and especially our current situation is how are you supposed to have a high functioning society with so many dysfunctional people? If you have people who can’t even make the right decisions in their own life and they are experiencing mostly negative outcomes in their own life, how are you supposed to make a great society with those types of people?

And why would you even want them to have a say in how the society functions if they can’t even make their own shit function where their interests are at stake, their S is gored and they still can’t make it work. And then you expect them to be able to extend themselves out at to the social level and make decisions that are good for the greater 

Jason: group of people.

It just doesn’t work well. I think we partially have to show a more viable altern. It’s I know for a fact that operating as part of something bigger than myself is a more worthwhile existence, and it’s very tempting and frankly, very easy to point out all the negatives that are out there.

They’re everywhere, right? I think the way that modern society has promoted the me culture, everything is I like think about the way that language is used, iPhone, iPad, I, everything me, right? It’s a mirror. They’re moving in sync. And when you look at even guys in special forces, it’s like you’ve got a bunch of guys.

Have done incredible things as individuals, but who submit, they submit to something that’s bigger than themselves. And it’s, you’ve got a lot of guys that could be lone wolves, but there’s a lot more power in America as, the stars and stripes, red, white, and blue, Just as a concept, free, all this stuff, right?

It still inspires across the entire country, this sense of allegiance sense of I belong to something bigger than myself. And so there is a way to inspire more people to say what does that actually mean? And so that’s part of our goal and our mission at Go Rock is to show what real world communities look like and to show what it looks like.

Yes, to train ourselves harder, to read a book, to think critically, to be physically fit, to go outside, to be a part of a family, a community, a team, and be a positive member to provide value. To the tribe, if you will. And so I like what you were saying earlier about everything is a team, right? There’s a lot more value in that.

If we really try to give more to whatever team we’re talking about, a marriage is absolutely a team. Now you can be single by yourself, a lone wolf until the end of time. For me personally, and I don’t want to cast judgment. For me personally though, that would not be as fulfilling as being married.

To Emily and having three great kids. And yeah, it’s like a lot of times it’s, Hey, you wanna be right or you wanna be married. It’s I wanna be married because it’s worth it. And that’s really fulfilling to be a part of something bigger than myself. And then it’s really fulfilling to have neighbors that, and we support each other.

And the pandemic has been great for that. It’s coming together outside at Thanksgiving or it’s, Hey, I’ve got an extra rule of toilet paper. Here you go. The historical definition of a tribe was you would share food in defense. And that’s there’s elements of that we think we’re so modernized and we think that we can just ignore the laws of antiquity, but they’re embedded into our dna.

We get a lot of fulfill. Out of being a part of a tribe. It’s who we are. It’s how we survived and thrived as a species. And so it’s really hard to put that phone down. It’s all about how many likes I got, knee me, or all of that kind of stuff, and shut your brain off to that and. Take some deep breaths and submit to something that doesn’t really operate like that, but it’s really rewarding.

And so what we want to do is just not say, Hey, burn down your phone forever. We’re not anti all of that stuff. But there is an element of balance and it’s just, to me, it’s just gone a little bit too far. You’re not the next Ted Kazinski. . It’s just gone too far. It’s just way outta whack. 

Mike: If you go and read some of the stuff that he had to say about technology, I think he had some good points.

He was a very intelligent guy and well-spoken guy. He just had the wrong solution. But anyway, 

Jason: yeah, you can go back in all of these. You can pull out quotes from anybody, none of which I will do, cause I don’t wanna be associated with them. These really smart, not democratic leaders.

That for a flash in time seem like they’re the next great thing and then all of a sudden they turn out to be a total tyrant. And so I believe in democracy. I think there is a check to it, but I also think that we get the leaders we deserve and we need to essentially not view ourselves at this time, this place, this exact moment as the only time, place and moment.

I think we’re still riding on the wave of, the greatest generation and subsequent generations. And what we do will really echo into the future through the children that we raise. And so I just view it as very generational. And I just, I really want our generation to start doing even more for what we can, for the values that we hold dear in America.

Mike: Yeah, I totally agree. I think that take it further and say, we don’t just get the government we deserve, but we ultimately get the world that we deserve. I think, and I also agree that we will see, over the course of our lifetimes, how all of this plays out. I think there are positive things happening.

There are negative things happening. I guess that’s always the case, so we’ll see whichever wins out. Ultimately, I’d say I’m a long term optimist simply because, not so much because that’s what I want to believe, but I think it’s historically literate. I think if we look at the general trajectory of our species, it is upward.

I think it’s hard to argue against that, but we have these periods where things dip heavily precipitously, and. We somehow figure out how to loop back around and then turn that into a higher level of prosperity, 

Jason: or we’re gonna have to figure out a way to make peace with technology being humans.

That’s not gonna be solved in one generation. And by peace, how do I live a fulfilling life? And, still have something that’s more addictive than heroin in my pocket, everywhere that I go. And, how does that evolve over time? I don’t know. We need to get too Blade Runner unless you really want to, or Johnny mnemonic or total recall.

But these have been predicted for, 

Mike: I think Brave New World is more where we’re going. I think it’s 80% Brave New World with maybe some 1984 an Animal Farm and Handmaid’s Tale and a few other dystopian. Now you mix those all together. That’s the remaining 20%. Yeah. Clockwork 

Jason: Orange thrown in for good measure.

Yeah. 

Mike: But again I guess we’ll have to see. And ultimately I do think that, I agree with you that the solution, if there is a solution, although I’m not a very utopian person, so I believe there. Certain problems, especially deep problems related to human nature that probably don’t have a solution at least available maybe in the future.

I don’t know. I think people who absolutely implicitly believe that every problem can be solved are actually probably dangerous people who would be the ones to implement the brave new world. But I think that if there is a solution to many of these problems, and if we are going to live in a better world 20, 30, 50 years from now, it has to result from improving people as individuals.

I do not think it’s going to come from a top down hierarchal, like I do not think, for example, that a political ideology is going to solve it. I do not think that trying communism again is going to work. I do not think that going for an all. No holds barred. Democracy is gonna work. That’s never worked in history.

And people now, I would say fundamentally, are probably not in much better shape for talking in again, the deep roots of our nature than they were a long time ago. And if we go in that direction of full, no checks and balances, no holds barred democracy, then it, I think Plato will be vindicated again. It’s just gonna end in chaos.

But what we can do, and this is something that resonates with me personally because it’s something I’m trying to do in my work, is just help people individually become better. And I’ve chosen to do it through fitness, and I like that because it has so many other effects, positive effects in people’s lives.

And I respect anybody else who’s doing something to help people on a one-to-one basis. Improve their circumstances and their abilities and their self-confidence and so forth. Because I think that ultimately, again, if we are going to live in a better world, that’s the only way we’re going to get there.

We can’t just sit back and hope that our favorite politicians are gonna figure it all out for us, or our favorite think tank. Elitist are gonna figure it all 

Jason: out. But that’s how it should work, right? You’ve got these, The good news is when you train one person up, those people have people in their life as well, right?

And we’re mostly like children. We view the examples that people set by what they do. And all this talk, talk and hate on social media and stuff. It’s just really off putting. But if you have someone who’s influential in your life and that they get a lot of value out of America, loves the turnaround stories, right?

I used to weigh this, now I weigh this, now I have a lot more confidence and all that stuff. And I can go do the things that I wanna do that make me happier. And so you train up one person is my point. That person has friends. It’s called force multipliers in the military.

But this is an ideological example based force multiplier where if you go and you train up one person and then they impact others to also make positive changes in your life, it doesn’t just stop with the one person. And so part of me is man, this is. We don’t have to know all of the second, third order effects of the good that we do in this world, but it’s worth considering just for a second that it, it goes beyond just I have this training session or this one event or whatever.

It’s the gift that keeps on giving. So it’s a really fulfilling way to lead a life and I very much commend you and right there with you shoulder to shoulder in, in that mindset.

Mike: If you like what I’m doing here on the podcast and elsewhere, definitely check out my health and fitness books, including the number one best selling weightlifting books for men and women in the world, Bigger, leaner, stronger, and thinner. Leaner, stronger, as well as the leading flexible dieting cookbook, the shredded.

Let’s go back now and talk about, so let’s go back to this point. You have come back and you’re trying to figure out your marriage and you have this idea for a business. It sounds like you had commented earlier, which I totally agree, is when you do have an idea for a business, if you have a job, keep that job for as long as you can.

Let that job pay your bills, and then put all of your extra time into trying to establish the other thing. Can you walk us through what happened next and how you got from there to where you’re at now? And I’m also curious in your marriage as well, feel free to comment on how you worked through 

Jason: that.

Yeah, sure. So when I got. Back. Realize the idea for GORUCK existed cuz we like the name and it was Oh, okay a rucksack and put some stuff in it. And I’m like, Oh, I’d rather just build our own rucksacks. How hard can that be? Because instead of just pre-populating stuff and kind of selling that as here’s your home security backpack, whatever, however it would’ve been marketed.

And so famous last words, right? I didn’t know anything about manufacturing. No idea. Zero. And so I kept trying to find, googling backpack designer and pretending like watching YouTube videos was really helping. It wasn’t. And so I ended up putting an ad in Craigslist, New York City for literally a backpack designer.

And I heard back from some people, 2009 say, and realize the financial crisis is roaring and it’s a really tough time economically in, in the country. Just uncertainty, right? It impacted different people differently, but there was a lot of uncertainty and I heard back from this great couple, this is like one of those lucks in the universe.

The more you fish, the more fish you’ll catch, right? You gotta get out there and put yourself out there in order to find anything. But this. Couple design team that was operating out of Bozeman, Montana, They were a cut above just in the applica. They had a real website and everything, and they had actually done this before and they showed me that they could actually build something As opposed to someone, There’s lots of people who would just do sketches for you, and then that’s the inspiration that you’re supposed to then take to someone who can actually build it.

I learned that one the hard way. So this team then signed on, I think I paid ’em four grand for th No, it was three. It became three different rocks that sort of became four. Cuz there was an in between size and I think there were something like six version one samples. And it was just a series of testing.

They would send one and Oh, this sucks, but it was better than the other stuff. And Months and months for that to work itself out. And there was back and forth and back and forth and they, I was grateful because they really gave me an education in the r and d trade offs and manufacturing stuff.

Cause I did know what I wanted in terms of what it should feel like, but I didn’t know any of the problems associated with how to make something like that. I don’t know how to sew or anything like that. So they were very gracious and taught me a lot in that process. And so in that time I was I had started applying to business school cause I still wanted to go join the agency and it’s okay, I need a little bit of time.

I don’t know what’s gonna happen with this whole marriage thing. So Emily then, Eventually moved back to Washington DC and that’s, I was up in New York and I applied to business school. I got into Georgetown and they gave me a scholarship. So I’m like, All right, that’s gonna be tough to turn down no matter what’s going on.

I was then, 2009, I was matriculating as a first year MBA candidate at Georgetown. And that’s right around the time when Emma and I were like, the plane had already hit the ground and was crashing and burning. So that’s just where we were in, in that part of the story. But, this idea of GORUCK as a hobby kind of continued and it kept costing more money and more money.

Cuz at that point I had half the money that we’d earned and she had the other half and it was like our deployment money. She had been posted overseas for three years. I’d been on a couple deployments or a few deployments I should say. And so had saved up some, We were both, we were geographic bachelors.

Both of us. What does that 

Mike: term mean? Like 

Jason: it just means that you’re technically married, but you’re living apart. Oh, I 

Mike: got it. So it’s like you’re living as if you’re a bachelor, but you’re, Yeah. Got it. Yeah. It’s 

Jason: a technical government term, you’re living in different 

Mike: places, so you can’t be together the way you’d normally be together, but Exactly.

You’re also not out there screwing a bunch of people . 

Jason: Correct. Got it. Correct. Yeah, so that’s what we were doing there. And so while I’m at business school I enjoy. Having more to do than just business school. It was just, it was a hard time in my life. The transition was hard. I’d lost my job by choice, but I’d lost my job, my team, my admission, the sense of purpose, and now against my will or, however the fate of the universe was dictating that I was losing this support structure from being married as well.

And it was just a lot. Em and I were fighting over the dog. It was passive aggressive and it was really uncomfortable. And, we both just wanted the damn dog. And so these were big stressors in my life. And so the time that it took to start Go Rock, officially started in, late 2007 in our brain.

And then came back and filed the paperwork and started being an entrepreneur by title is real easy. You can go to Legal Zoom or whatever and just fill out the form and boom, you got it right. You’re 

Mike: a CEO now and a founder. . 

Jason: Yeah, I can put that on all my cards and stuff. It’ll be awesome. . And the thing is I did not have the mental head space to actually sit down and focus and concent.

On very much. At that time, I, it was just a, like I said, a difficult time. So you know, the time that it took, the years that it took to get working prototypes of the gear and then to find a domestic manufacturer who could scale the gear, cuz that was the next hurdle. I finally had some working prototypes, but I’d expended all the cash and all of their time on those prototype.

And so they’re like, All right this is how far we got now you’re gonna have to solve a couple things at the factory. And I’m like, Man, that, that doesn’t sound perfect to me, but all right, it is what it is. So then found a factory, just cold calling and stuff like that. And went through that whole process and they have to learn it.

And then there’s It just look, if people are ever thinking that something’s gonna be easy, it’s never gonna be easy. Just when one thing gets easier, something else emerges. That’s just the nature of it. It’s just, if it’s passing through your desk, so to say, all you do is triage problems all day long.

That’s been my experience. Yeah. 

Mike: I liken it to firefighting. Everything’s on fire and you just have to choose which fires you’re gonna put out and which ones you’re just gonna let exactly burn longer, maybe indefinitely, . Exactly. 

Jason: And you’re not stationary. 

Mike: And that also is true in my experience, having interacted with a lot of successful business people over the years.

I’ve yet to have one of them disagree with. Analogy, and in some cases these are people who I think of one guy, he recently took his business public and it’s I think 2.4 billion market cap. Another guy cashed out for 30 to $50 million, like people who have made a lot of money, and that just is, seems to be an axiom of business.

Maybe. I would think the exception could be an obvious exception, could be a business that’s not trying to grow anymore, really. I can think of a few people who have set up, maybe you would call them quote unquote lifestyle businesses, and their annual growth is negligible, but they don’t care.

It just provides them income and they’ve, you still have 

Jason: to get to that point. For sure. For 

Mike: sure. What I’m saying though is to grow, to take more ground, you just, you also have. Metabolize chaos always. And I was just saying I could think of people in business who did that. They stated out their territory and they built their little systems that work and it provides them with this amount of income.

And then they just don’t really care to go further than that. And that is less, you have fewer fires to fight, but if you are trying to grow something, and especially if you’re trying to grow something fairly quickly, then that seems to just be the law, regardless of how 

Jason: big or if your goals are what yours are.

You want to impact societal change of consciousness. Sure. But you 

Mike: got, you’re gonna have to do that through growing your whatever you’re doing. If it stays small, you’re not gonna 

Jason: impact many people. It’s hard. Yeah. You have to actually build a good business as well. And that’s one of those things where it’s somehow, in some corners it’s cool to not make money.

It’s cool to brag about how. You don’t make any money or I’m just in this for the cause. 

Mike: Really, I never understood that I was never a money motivated person, but I also never really understood the appeal of not making money, especially in the with artists, but it never quite resonated with me.

Yeah, 

Jason: I mean there’s just, you just see it’s corrupted by the Gordon Gecko types that, where greed is good and it’s all about money and you’ll do anything you, you want to for money. And I think the idea of nuance is lost in our society. And so like you need to build a great business. And if you don’t, it’s if you owe the man a rent check and you don’t pay your rent check, it’s not demand’s fault when he has to kick you out.

That’s just the laws that we’re playing by. And when you’re trying to build a movement, whatever your goals or your intentions, If you can’t pay your rent checks, then you’ve got problems. So those companies out there and those brands and those movements that you support, right? You need to support them, not just by liking or whatever, but you need to actually support them if you want them to continue to grow and to thrive.

And that’s an American concept as well. And people are smart, right? We are able to see which places are gouging or don’t represent our values or all of that. At the same time, there’s a little bit too much emphasis. Placed on I don’t make any money, so I must be in this for the right reason.

I think that’s a, just a false narrative that needs a little bit of 

Mike: correction. I’ve never had anybody tell me that, but I’m sure that’s out there. And a reframe of that is okay. Yes, you have a lot of greedy people, a lot of mercenaries out there who are willing to do anything for a dollar. And if you look at a marketplace and you’re trying to participate in a marketplace, you have those people and you often have those people making a lot of money and being very successful.

And then by if you’re trying to do things ethically by staying small, you’re doing the market. A disservice because if you were doing a better job making money, that means you’d be doing a better job acquiring customers, quote unquote, saving them. You’re the deliverance from the fraudsters that are out there.

Jason: This is the balance, right? This is the balance. It’s look, I’ve got a lot of really good bodies that just hate social media, right? And they’re literally just living their lives in happiness. They’re off the grid or they’re, they just don’t do it at all. Yeah. 

Mike: Yeah. I’m on board. I do it begrudgingly for my work, and that’s really the only reason that I do it.

Otherwise I don’t have, for example, quote unquote personal accounts outside of my public accounts that I use to mostly just share my educational material. So 

Jason: why, I guess my point is I can relate. My point is you’ve made a choice to say, I can impact more people positively if I share my message through these delivery systems that the world is operating under.

Because if everybody that is live in the good life, so to. Is just not doing or saying anything, the void will get filled, and so you do actually need people to step up and present viable alternatives. It’s it’s similar to the sense of if politics is such a terrible place, but nobody that’s a good person is ever willing to enter that arena.

Like we’re in a really bad state. Like you still need people to enter these arenas that are not that great. And to me, Facebook is not that great. I don’t always enjoy it. We have a couple good groups that I do enjoy almost all of the time, and I tolerate, the fact that I know it’s not gonna be a perfect existence.

So these are not real communities. Those are forums. And the second that you stop letting the machine tell you that those are communities and that those people are, quote friends, don’t buy that. Friends and communities and stuff like that, they need real world interactions or else they’re not communities and they’re not friends, they’re forums and they’re online acquaintances, if you will.

And so you have to make your piece with certain things. And those are the choices that I’m willing to make. Like ultimately I feel. I was given and afforded a lot the opportunity to serve America and to serve with the people that I got to serve with and to experience that way of life.

And I left my service a better person than when I joined. I went to War I, I’m a better person because I went to war. Not worse, better. And so to me, I owe the guys that. Aren’t with us anymore. I owe the guys that got a little more, are a lot more banged up than I did in a lot of different ways.

And so my goal is to help spread that message of, that way of life. Because I think that America, the world people, cut through all the Bs, like people need more of that way of life. And I choose to be the messenger of sorts, but there’s a balance that, that I have to strike that I just can sense you strike as well.

And there needs to be more of that. Have you read the book? 

Mike: Starship Troopers Hedland? I have not read it. Oh, you may like it. I didn’t particularly like his writing and the story is basically nonexistent, but ha. It, the message would probably resonate with 

Jason: you. I’ll check it. Yeah. I’ve read several books.

Brave New World isn’t the best written book. No, it’s, 

Mike: 

It’s a terrible book if we’re judging it on its merits as a story, for example, it’s a joke. Character is a joke, dialogue, a joke. But it’s more the, it’s a warning. That’s a cautionary tale. And I would say it’s probably more like a blueprint given who Huxley was, who his brother was, and the circles they ran in.

But I guess that’s another discussion. But yeah, Starship Troopers is, I think it remains popular because of the message. Again, don’t expect, the writing is very flowery and the story is more or less non-existent. You don’t care about any of the characters. There’s a term for it. It’s a book that basically, again, I’m not gonna remember the term.

It’s basically an essay. It’s like a political long political essay dressed up and made to appear like it’s a novel, basically. 

Jason: So is 1984 ? Yeah. 

Mike: Completely an animal farm. Exactly. And Atlas shrugged another book that should have been like 300 pages, but I like some of what she had to say. I don’t agree with her philosophy on the whole, But the, Yeah, John 

Jason: Gold’s speech at the end was like a hundred page hundred pages.

Literally, Come on. Yeah, howard Rourke before that was too short, in the fountain head. 

Mike: Yeah. I didn’t read the fountain head after Atlas shrugged. I was like, Okay, I think I’ve had enough fine rand for a bit. Again I do like some of her ideas for sure. And Dan cos dancona is how you’re supposed to pronounce it.

The money talk was fantastic and the long hundred page monologue I did enjoy, and again I agreed with some of the message, but the extreme in individualism doesn’t quite make sense to me actually relates to some of the stuff we’re talking about. I do think that a high functioning individual feels a sort of a sense of responsibility.

And that’s not a repugnant thing. Not that they feel forced into it, but they are drawn to maybe accepting the responsibility or some sector of responsibility for society, for example. And you don’t 

Jason: owe your country. 

Mike: Yeah. I mean you could say your country or just even your even start local for anybody who wants to get involved in something more than just their own existence.

And for me, Over the years, my time basically has exclusively gone into my work, and fortunately my work is making a meaningful impact in many people’s lives. So that is a source of satisfaction that would not be there if I were just like making trinkets, little, I don’t know, Gaz and selling them on Amazon.

Not there’s anything wrong with that. I actually have more of an appreciation for the art and science of building a successful business now that I’ve done it to the degree that I’ve done it, but for me, It would have to have a bit more to it to really be fulfilling. But something that I have done is I’ve given a fair amount of money, probably on average, 10% of my income to charities that and causes and even individual content creators whose work I wanna support.

And so that’s another way to, that represents work. I mean that the money is, it helps, like you were saying, let’s take a business, right? And it’s one thing to like something on Instagram, it’s another thing to buy something from the business as a sign of support. And similarly, if there are groups or movements or individuals who could use financial support to do work that doesn’t directly make that much money, but has an impact, then giving money to those groups counts, I think a lot.

And there are a lot of people who do that and there are a lot of people who don’t. And in some cases I’ve had discussions with people that I thought would’ve at least given money to political candidates. For how much they claimed to care about either political parties or causes of that, the party’s champion.

And and again, in a couple of cases, I was genuinely surprised to learn that this person had given $0 to anyone or anything related to the party. And I was like, What? So you don’t care then? You can’t, politics runs on money. I don’t think that’s a good thing, but it does. If, for example, if you thought Bernie Sanders was great and you wanted him to become president, that requires a lot of money.

That requires hundreds of millions of dollars minimally. And where’s that money gonna come from? The party will give him some, but he has to raise it from people like you. So if you say that you care, but you’re not even willing to give them $20, do you really care? Again I would say that applies generally, I think to if somebody says they care about, Helping make the world a little bit better.

And then it’s okay, so what time and money are you giving toward that? Show me your calendar and your bank account. I’ll tell you what show you really care about. Where do you put your time and your money? Cause that’s actually what you care about. And if you don’t care about making the world a better place, if you’re just in it for you, then I think that there’s, I at least respect somebody who could tell me.

Without any qualifications. If that’s really the reality of the look, I put none of my time or none of my money into anything that doesn’t directly benefit me. I do not care about anybody else’s circumstances or the world around me. I know I live in this world, I interact with this world.

If the world gets worse, it’s worse for me. But, I have a plan and my plan is to accumulate enough resources myself so I can disappear to South America and live my own little existence. I would say, Okay I’m glad the world isn’t full of people like you, but I still would respect that there.

At least there’s no self delusion there, here’s 

Jason: the thing though. I joined the army out of revenge. That’s what I wanted. And what I did not foresee was, I would unlock this world of service and service takes on all different forms. I think that’s what we’re getting at as well.

And so I win as a human being. I win by serving more things that I choose to be a part of, and there is something out there for everyone to be a part of. It does exist. And so I think the first step is to find that thing that you’re passionate about and then to be a part of it, and not to be apologetically a part of it, but to really be a part of it and to provide value to others who are also a part of it.

That’s a really rewarding life. That’s like the secret. Of my universe unlocked right there. And sometimes it’s home life and sometimes it’s, various communities at Go Rock and sometimes it’s, other stuff that we’re passionate, our neighborhood, stuff like that. And it just, it’s actually really rewarding.

I 

Mike: totally agree. I have to hear the next phase of the story before we wrap this up. So things are not so hot and you’ve been working for a couple of years, if I remember correctly, to get GORUCK started. And then how did you go from that situation to now, your current situation? Where my understanding is, obviously you’re still with your wife and you have a family.

I’m sure you’ve sorted things out and everybody has no relationships. Perfect. And you always are working on it. I understand. Yeah, 

Jason: we got divorced. Oh wow. We got divorced and then got remarried along years later. So it was legitimately messy. That’s 

Mike: interesting. That’s rare. I don’t, You might be the first person I’ve met.

You can say 

Jason: that actually about more than once. Yeah. And it’s just, It’s look, people have these ideas about, oh, this is meant to be, or this is not meant to be. And in our case it was, Look, if you put enough strain on a person, a relationship, something it will break. Nothing is unbreakable.

There’s a lot of humility that I learned in that process. There’s a lot of grace that’s easier to pass on to others. Compassion and all of those things just by virtue of thinking that I could solve everything. This special forces guy, blah, blah, blah, right? But I can’t solve my own happiness.

And the most frustrating thing in life is to have the front row seat of your life burning down and feel powerless to stop it. And that’s very much where I was. And yeah, we took a little permanent, semi-permanent break while I was at business school. And she moved to South America for a few years and kept plugging along with GORUCK a little bit and once I figured out the manufacturing side of it, which was its own challenge, nobody really wanted to buy the gear.

I drove to 48 states trying to. Talk to people, get into adventures and deal with retail shops or anything I could do to try to sell some rocks. And none of that worked at all. And what did work was it came up with an event patterned after special forces training called the Go Rock Challenge.

And it was basically me at that point, a Green Beret that would give people a day in the life. And the first class was, September 26th, 2010 in San Francisco. It was by just me following, you know what I knew, of course it was a rucking event because that’s what all our training was in special forces.

You always had a R on, basically. And it was a rucking event there. And we did some team based pt and at the end, we drank about a 30 rack or two of Budweiser Bud Light, whatever it was, and ate some PB and j’s and some peanut m and ms and like sitting there in that parking lot, I was like, I can get behind this.

Cause the idea of a backpack company, the world doesn’t need another backpack company. And so there was this idea of the choice between the agency and where I’ll absolutely still get to serve America in a time of war versus a backpack company. It was a bridge too. , right? Like it felt too much to me, that mindset of, Oh, I’m gonna get out and make money selling backpacks now.

Stupid. Don’t wanna do it. But it was a hobby for a while, so I was like, Oh, it’s just a hobby, whatever. We’ll see where it goes. But this idea of giving back to people and showing them how to over punch their own demons in the throat or overcome their obstacles, how to push themselves, how to be a part of a team and to see that, and then to watch the change that happens in their lives, that was now this new sense of kind of a reward for me to be able to serve in that capacity.

So that first year we ran seven events and the next year it was probably a hundred. And then, it got up to where we’re running like a thousand events a year and that was just grassroots, word of mouth because it was some fight club shit man. And people that showed up for it and it still showed up for it.

That’s what they want. They want something that will be. It’s worth showing up for, dedicating their time and money to do. 

Mike: And so what do you do in these events for people wondering? They’re rocking 

Jason: events, so we have all different times and distances. Now, the Go Ruck challenge has three basic distances.

There’s a five hour version, a 12 hour version, and 24 hour version. You’ll start out with a couple workouts, right? And then you’ve got a rucksack on, you’ve got sandbags, and then there’s some movements with mission based scenarios and there’s a Green Beret or a Seal, or a Delta guy or a Air Force pj, or a Recon Marine, or someone that’s been through this kind of training, who’s building the team.

And it’s not like a bootcamp so much, it’s more kind of a more positive vibe than that. Cuz it’s paying people, We’re not degrading people or telling ’em what they can’t do. It’s about pushing them to what they can do together. And so it’s just, it’s a lot of physical stress with some mental challenges thrown in as well.

And by that I just mean, okay Go get that log and we’re gonna carry that log through the middle of city and you have to figure out a way to work through that with rotations and all that stuff. And or, you lost shoulder strap privileges or you’ve taken casualties or there’s more weight, more sandbags, more awkward stuff to carrying, You’ve gotta meet certain time hacks.

So there’s no published route, there’s no quote, obstacles that are built. It’s the obstacles that are built in your mind are, Oh, that’s too hard. I can’t do that, and stuff like that. But you can, if you just work together and you find out that the task will be accomplished and that’s rewarding and.

And then we have rocking only events. So five Ks to 50 miles that have no pushups or anything. It’s just covering, covering ground in a city. And it’s a neat way to see the city. But we’ve gotten up to the point where we run, a thousand events a year. They’re led by current former special operations guys.

That’s built the brand of Go Luck is getting out there and doing stuff. Go rock. And in that process, what’s been really, I love this part of whatever you want to describe as our success, this is how I’ll describe it, is that we have over 500 community led go rock clubs in the world. And these are volunteers, members of their community who lead fitness classes, right?

They show up and they pick, right? So sometimes it’s 30 minutes in a field, sometimes it’s you go for a couple miles after work, they pick the date, time, place, location, whatever in their community, and they get their friends and their friends get their friends to show up and to work out with them in that kind of a setting.

Turn the parks, turn the trails, do that outside. And that’s really rewarding. That’s the force multiplier concept of these folks want to take a, an active leadership role in their communities and they do it by organizing people, which takes time and energy and they show up and they bring people together.

And it’s very much an alternative to living a life just online. You show up with other people. That’s how you form strong relationships. That’s how you get a stronger body, a more confident mind, and you feel like you’re part of something bigger than yourself. And that’s where people meet people and then you say, Okay, what else are we gonna do?

It doesn’t always have to just be, Hey, an hour in apart with Rucks on our backs. What trip are we gonna take this year? Where are you going to dinner on Friday night? You. What are we doing with the kids on Saturday? These kinds of things. This is how I think more of us need to spend our time, and so we’re really happy to be at the forefront of that.

Mike: Yeah, that’s fantastic. It’s a good business lesson too. That was a smart move. When you originally came up with that idea of holding events, did you see the potential? Obviously I understand business. We have a lot of ideas and a lot of them, even the ones we think are good, often aren’t as good as we hope, but sometimes at least I can speak myself.

Sometimes. Over the years I have happened onto things where I’m like, Oh, no, that’s a good idea. I think nothing’s guaranteed that’s life, but I’m willing to bet often real money on this and a fair amount of money and a fair amount of time. When you first came up with that idea and you started doing it, did it surprise you how it played out?

Or did that make sense to you? Was it like an epiphany Oh, this is instead of just trying to sell backpacks, I’m gonna sell community, I’m gonna sell basically self transformation, and the backpack is simply a tool to make it more fun and make it more challenging and incorporate 

Jason: some fitness.

So it, it’s both, so my original goal was to show. I’m like, Man, I gotta figure out how to play this Facebook game. So organize something cool, turn it into some Special forces Thrasher stuff and take pictures. I’m like, All right, I’ll basically free at everything. I’ll take pictures and put it on Facebook and see what happens, man.

Like I gotta do something. There was certain death of the business if I didn’t figure something out. That’s just the laws of economics. There was no cash. I had all my cash in the Rucks that had already been built, and I had to figure out a way to do something. And so that became the Go Ruck challenge.

And I’m thinking, All right, I’ll play the Facebook game with cool pictures. And where it changed was after the event in that parking lot along the right next to the beach where we started, right by Golden Gate Park out there. I’m like, All right, this is now about, this is how we’ll build Go Rock. And at that point it was really no looking back, I mean it was just all of a sudden I’m on a bullet train and trying to figure out how to run more events and more and then find friends to help run more and more.

And that was really fun and exciting. So I knew quickly that the idea had been a good one and it didn’t require a lot of overhead or investment or any of that stuff. We could just do it. And so there was not that much friction to it. And so some ideas are great, but. It’s gonna require enormous spend on PR or on anything.

Take your pick. And it’s okay, how much do you believe in this? Is if it’s a billion dollar idea, then go raise a billion dollars. Good luck. But this was one of those things that I could just walk forward and I didn’t really know that this would lead to so many events or the local communities, but some of that stuff just happens.

And when you have a good idea or something just works, you can feel it in your bones. It’s like a relationship. If every day you’re waking up and you’re just getting beat up inside of a relationship and it’s, doesn’t feel that great, that’s oftentimes abusive, right? On some level or it’s not meant to be, or it’s just, it doesn’t have to be.

Everyone’s looking for a silver bullet. None of the best things in life are ever easy, right? But at the same time, this is one of those things where you can just feel the energy and it’s positive and it’s moving forward. And it felt rewarding and it was still really hard. But I felt really good about following and riding that wave.

And so that’s what we kept doing. And we’ve had to build a business essentially around that, right? How to build rocking gear and how to stay relevant as events have had to evolve and how to greater support the community leaders and stuff like that to where it’s not just us. Cause at some point you start to believe all your own ideas are great and you’re living in your castle, and that’s awesome, but the world votes every day with time and energy and money.

And so it’s conversation. And over time that conversation evolves. So it’s been incredible. And the community building side has been really, The most rewarding 

Mike: part of it. Yeah, that totally makes sense. And last question for you before we wrap up. So what are some insights that led to you making the second round with your wife work and now you have a family?

I’m curious and I’m sure people listening are curious again cuz it’s just such a unique you’re the first person I’ve met who divorced somebody and then ended up remarrying and then now has a family, which indicates some level of success. That’s a green fight. 

Jason: Yeah. We’re doing great. We’re doing great.

And don’t mean, I don’t mean that 

Mike: to imply anything. I’m just being very objective in saying, sure there are plenty of people out there who have kids who don’t have a good relationship. But given your story, it sounds like you were able to figure out what was not working previously and make it work a lot better.

Jason: To back up a little bit, just so there’s some context. We met before sophomore year in high school. She ended up, I would leave every summer. Because my dad lived in Ohio and we lived in Florida and she babysat my siblings who were younger, same mom, different dads. So they were nine and 12 years younger.

She was always around, like my mom loved her, our families knew each other. We went to high school together and we lost touch a little bit in, in college, but, still saw each other when we were back in Florida. Never really, never dated at all in high school or anything. And then right before I left for basic training is when I’m like I love This is what we’re meant to be together, Which is just, it’s one of those forcing functions in life. I didn’t want to go off to war and die and not tell this girl that I’d loved forever, that I loved her, and so we were friends for a really long time first and we had that, and that became confusing for a little bit of time when life got harder between us.

Because you start these questions of should we just have stayed friends and all this stuff. And I think the lesson is look the world put a lot of stress on us. And, life’s not fair like that man, Like sometimes girl gets away and sometimes things don’t go. Sometimes your buddy dies.

Sometimes there, there’s just terrible things happen and it’s really hard and you’re left with how can I pick the pieces up? And in my case, it’s one of those things where we weren’t really in touch and then we were a little bit, she was moving back to Florida. Both of us had to put whatever grievances and basically pride.

Do you feel fear of the world’s judgment so much that if you’re still meant to be together, are you gonna say, Oh, this isn’t like we had our shot and we blew it and it’s best to just try to start new. Guess what? I got news for you. You never get to start new. It will never happen.

You are the choice of everything that you’ve done and the things that you haven’t done. And we have to just make peace and show some compassion to ourselves and to others. And it was not like, oh, day one, it was just perfect. But it’s you know it, a lot of times what’ll happen is people get divorced or they’ll separate or they’ll make some drastic change and they’ll actually do the things that they should have.

In their first part that would’ve prevented them from breaking up in the first case? It’s emotionally can be harder to do if you’ve gotta go back and dig up the exact old wounds and solve them. But, both of us, like we just really loved each other. And time played that out a little bit more.

And I think we had done certain things in our lives that made it, we were just more compatible, not the least of which was we could live together. And so we had that opportunity to kind of 2.0 of, okay, what’s it like to actually live together? And we didn’t get married right away or anything like that.

And I learned look, if you love someone, you need to tell them. Even though they know you need to tell them and it’s no skin off your back, you probably actually feel great doing it. If you feel. Like you’re a SAP or whatever. Guess what? All your successful buddies that are, by the ones that are successfully married, guess what?

They’re also SAPs, right? The ones that aren’t, that are like, they’re right. They’re running around doing whatever they’re not. And the 

Mike: MAs judge for 

Jason: yourself. Yeah. You have to judge for yourself what you want in life and I get that right? But there’s certain things that you have to do and Emily had to better underst.

Me a little bit, right? There’s just, everyone’s got their quirks and it doesn’t mean that I don’t feel this way or don’t do that. It’s just like I don’t care what we have for dinner tonight. I literally do not care. Like I have no interest in making that decision ever. I’m probably not even hungry.

And like, how about you just take that one until the end of time? And that used to be a real thing, and now it’s not. That’s our, she knows that. And even last night she’s what do you want for dinner? And I’m like what do you want for dinner? And we played that game a little bit, right?

Mike: Something calories, some protein, 

Jason: yeah. Like whatever. But the other really big lesson learned was when I went to war, there was these first generation laptops that had cameras built in and you had to get, speakers along the sides. It was a total pain in the ass. Skype was a thing back then.

And I was like, Screw this man. It’s too much money. We don’t need to buy those. And she was in Africa and I was. Iraq and it’s one of those things where it’s not like that would’ve been the silver bullet that would’ve saved us, but a couple guys had them that were on the team and every once in a while it wasn’t like now where you can just, anytime you want, there’s wifi and you can be FaceTiming someone.

It just wasn’t like that at all. Our internet was terrible, but it’s more of the mindset that I had that was the problem, right? Like you have to spend these things that we’ve talked a lot about. energy, money, you have to spend those things on the things that matter to you. And doing something as simple as buying the thousand dollars 50, I forget what it was.

We had plenty of money back then. We didn’t have enough bonding time for us. The best we could have done back then would’ve been to be able to look at each other every other week every week. Who knew? We’ll never know. But the point is the mindset of, hey, spend all especially when you’re first starting out with somebody, spend all the money that you.

On really investing in that team that relationship, and really get to know the other person. Don’t just sit around and wait to talk, actually really listen to them and learn them. Just because being in love, it evolves over time. And you really do get to learn each other, but you have to put yourself through the hard things together.

You need to do that kind of stuff and spend as much time as you possibly can. And then you figure out how to build a life on top of that. And then every once in a while you still gotta, take some crazy trip or do something awesome and blow some stupid plane flight to wherever and go hike some awesome mountain together and get off the grid a little bit and check back in.

It’s like you’re Clover leafing back in on your relationship. That’s just you. So kids introduce more stress onto whatever foundation you have, so you have to block up the time just for you. And those are the things that we learned the hard way and we suffered because of it. But I will say, I don’t know.

That we would have survived without going through that suffering. We tried to ignore it for a while, to spare ourselves from it, and it came back to really bite us in the ass. And once we put that hard work in on the second go round, we found out that yeah, we are actually really compatible. Also, we’re friends.

We love each other and we’re really compatible and that was. That’s a pretty good combination. So we’re, It’s not perfect. It’s not easy. Nothing worth doing is, but it’s really 

Mike: rewarding. That’s a great story. I like it. I’ll add, and this is there’s actually research on this. Not that you need science to tell you this, but I’ll add that making time for sex helps too.

There’s actually, the research specifically is that, I believe it’s a, it was looking at people who were divorced versus who stayed together over the long period. And one of the conclusions of the research was that if you can have sex regularly, It just helps a lot. That was the key takeaway, basically.

And so Science commands it. Does 

Jason: anybody actually think that’s not true? 

Mike: I would say, we’ve all known people who, especially when kids get into the picture, who get very busy and very stressed and also then physically things are not quite what they were. And so 

Jason: make the time, man, do whatever you gotta do.

Yeah. And then make it important. Shameless be shameless. I understand. I’ve been there, 

Mike: I’ve been there myself, where I’ll just get into a work mode and that’s all I wanna do. And I’m working all the time and I’m not really around for anything else. And it might go for, I don’t know, a couple of weeks, for example, and it’ll occur to me , and I’m better with this now.

This was, I would say something more in the past, but I’ve experienced that. I know. And I don’t have any excuse, I don’t have any physical excuse. My wife and I have a good relationship. Every relationship has its things that, that you just have to. I guess there maybe compromises, like you had mentioned the dinner thing there.

All there are things that my wife would prefer, I just were different about, but I don’t know. There are certain things that seem just to be baked into the cake that and so you have to learn to accept there are things that were compromises are appropriate and then there are things where continually needling the person is just not appropriate.

It’s just let it be and let them just be who they are. Stop trying to change who they are to fit your conception kind of thing. And so I, I can just again say I, I understand how that goes. When you get very busy and you get your attention wrapped up in all the things that you have to do, 

Jason: you gotta prioritize it, man.

Mike: I agree. Hey man, this was a great talk. I had a lot of fun and let’s wrap up with where people can find you and find Go Rock and if they wanna attend an event, where can they check out the schedule and see if there’s something in their area or nearby. 

Jason: Yeah. Thanks man. We’re at go rock.com and at Go Rock on basically all the platforms.

Lot of Instagram and basically Instagram. And then on our website there’s a bunch of stuff like if you Google what is Rucking, Go Ruck stuff will come up as well. And Go Ruck events are on a separate website. There’s a lot of ’em on there. There’s a map with all sorts of stuff. And there’s ruck clubs that are on there.

So there’s community led groups that are close to almost everybody. And then my personal stuff, I’m on Instagram some is Jason J. McCarthy. So try to respond to dms if they ever come through as well. And yeah man I’ve really appreciated the time and dug up some good memories. . Yeah. 

Mike: Yeah.

Again, thanks for taking the time. This was fun. Yeah, man. Really appreci. All right. That’s it for this episode. I hope you enjoyed it and found it interesting and helpful. And if you did and you don’t mind doing me a favor, please do leave a quick review on iTunes or wherever you’re listening to me from in whichever app you’re listening to me in.

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And if you didn’t like something about the show, please do shoot me an email at mike muscle for life.com. Just muscle o r life.com and share your thoughts on how I can do this better. I read everything myself and I’m always looking for constructive feedback. Even if it is criticism, I’m open to it. And of course you can email me if you have positive feedback as well, or if you have questions really relating to anything that you think I could help you with, definitely send me an email.

That is the best way to get ahold of me, Mike, at most for life.com. And that’s it. Thanks again for listening to this episode, and I hope to hear from you soon.