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Jake Clark is an unexpected hero. As the founder of the Save a Warrior program for veterans and first responders, he helps those suffering from post-traumatic stress uncover the core of their pain, which often stems from trauma that came before combat or violence. His work has led to surprising breakthroughs for many people, mirroring his own journey of self-discovery after years of self-destruction. Jake and I talk about the program’s core practices of meditation and reflection, as well as the community and outcomes that arise from Save a Warrior. And as if being a founder, a veteran, and a former agent for multiple federal agencies wasn’t enough, Jake is also a big X-Files fan. Naturally, we discuss what it’s really like to be in the FBI.

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Transcript

SPEAKERS

Speaker 1, David Duchovny, Jake Clark

 

David Duchovny  00:48

I’m David Duchovny and this is Fail Better – a show where failure, not success, shapes who we are. Before we get into today’s episode, I wanted to give you all just a bit more context than usual. Today I’m talking to my friend Jake Clark. Now, Jake is many things – a US Army veteran, a former member of the Secret Service and the LAPD, and while I’ve been known to play one on TV, he’s been an actual agent in the FBI. But, what you need to know for our discussion is that Jake is the president and founder of Save a Warrior (SAW) an organization helping to address the suicide epidemicin the veteran community. The main component of this is a three day program that has been honed by Jake and his team over the years to help heal those suffering from post traumatic stress. A few weeks before we sat down together in the studio, I had the privilege of joining one of these programs myself, seeing firsthand how powerful and transformative it was for the people in attendance. We spent a large portion of this conversation debriefing on the experience I had, what I got out of it, and how Jay came to develop it. While the nature of the program means we can’t really get into specifics, hopefully listening in can give you some sense of the collective aha moments we shared. One thing we do discuss is how the fundamental trauma experienced by the men and women in the program actually happened before they saw any combat. You’ll hear Jake talk about something called (ACES), which stands for Adverse Childhood Experiences and is a Scientific way of categorizing events and circumstances that can have a detrimental impact on a child’s development. We touched on some pretty heavy subject matter in this conversation, like child abuseand suicidal ideation. I felt honored to be able not only witness Jake in action, he’s quite amazing during the Save a Warrior program. But sit down with them, decompress and contextualize everything that happened and of course, to share with all of you. Here you go my conversation with Jake Clark.

 

David Duchovny  04:29

Thank you for coming in.

 

Jake Clark  04:31

Thanks for having me.

 

David Duchovny  04:33

What I wanted to do, I was withholding this because I wanted to give you a gift when we started and it goes a little something like this.

 

Jake Clark  04:47

You still have this? Can I see it?

 

David Duchovny  04:51

I gotta do it.

 

Jake Clark  04:52

You did it perfect. It was so weird the way you would do that.

 

Jake Clark  04:56

Can I get my hands […]? This is what we do when you and I were in the FBI at the same time.

 

David Duchovny  04:56

Okay, there it is.

 

David Duchovny  05:03

FBI at the same time.

 

Jake Clark  05:04

You got paid a little bit more being the FBI than I did, but we would do this.

 

David Duchovny  05:07

When I met Jake, he was telling me that he was a fan of The X Files. He particularly liked, no, that’s yours.

 

Jake Clark  05:14

That’s for me to keep. Oh, come on.

 

David Duchovny  05:16

Yeah.

 

Jake Clark  05:17

That’s yours.

 

David Duchovny  05:17

No.

 

Jake Clark  05:17

Can I put in the center where you visited?

 

David Duchovny  05:22

Yeah, of course.

 

Jake Clark  05:23

Thank you. This will mean a lot. I’m gonna put these with the boot.

 

David Duchovny  05:25

Jake said that he loved the way that I presented my badge, like slowly and very methodically. I told him that that’s because it was a focus puller (kind of a thing), like if I had to get the badge in focus, I was getting out of my coat pocketand I go. Focus puller would go when I was there so there was always a weird stop to it.

 

Jake Clark  05:47

Yeah. Well, we thought it was some kind of.

 

David Duchovny  05:49

You thought it was a choice?

 

Jake Clark  05:51

Like a David Lynchian thing or maybe you were this alien, right? That you were an alien and that you’re natural.

 

David Duchovny  05:57

But, there was an awkwardness about you trying to be human and you were just doing something where cops were like this.

 

Jake Clark  06:08

I know.

 

David Duchovny  06:08

Put it away and you throw them a business card if they want to call.

 

Jake Clark  06:11

I’m just laughing. Thank you for descriptions of the acting were alien and awkward, I appreciate that.

 

David Duchovny  06:16

I was younger actor.

 

Jake Clark  06:19

This is like a full circle moment for me here.

 

David Duchovny  06:21

Yeah, thank you. I’d lay that on you. But, thank you for being here. Thank you for doing what you do and what I wanted to try and get today, or get around (whatever it is). I want to know how you came to be where you’re at a little bit. I also want to talk about the process of the cohorts as well of Save a Warrior. You speak a lot to me and to the guys about not necessarily the trauma of war (which is definitely a trauma), but you speak of childhood trauma. When I had Gabor Maté on the podcast, he said if you can get your kid past three without really fucking him up. I am paraphrasing, because Gabor Maté didn’t say if you could get your kid past three without fucking him up. He said something like that, that’s the major thoroughfare of trauma there zero to three.

 

Jake Clark  07:22

Actually, from zero to four, 85% of the brain is forming. From four to twenty-six, the last 15% is coming online. So you’re looking at kind of three levels – reptilian, mammalian, and this neocortex. This executive front part of the brain that takes about 22 years to fully wire in. If you can get the first four years right, there’s a lot of gains to be had there. In my early childhood that I would come to learn about as an adolescent, I found out that I spent my first three and a half years in a Catholic orphanage. At six months to three and a half years old, I was in a Catholic orphanage with a brother I have who’s 15 months older. I had a mother who was mentally ill so my childhood was shot full of neglect, abuse, and dysfunction.

 

David Duchovny  08:22

This is like pre-verbal. So, you don’t have access to those memories, nor do you have any words to put on. What was going on between zero and four. That’s the big mystery as well.

 

Jake Clark  08:33

Correct. This is pre-verbal, but there is an internal language that occurs for infants and these things are known as breaks in affinity, right? The first one that is common is something here is wrong. Probably when I was separated from my mother, who was mentally ill, who was a paranoid, clinically diagnosed paranoid schizophrenic, there was this onset of symptoms about six months after I was born. Her Russian, Jewish, Irish, Catholic family on Long Island made the executive decision to remand my brother and myself to the care of the state of New York through St. Christopher. WhenI found out as an adolescent, I was about nine or ten years old. When they told me you were at St. Christopher’s, I literally thought I lived with St. Christopher for three years, no memory. I had no frame of reference. They were like, “No, it’s a Catholic orphanage on Long Island because your mother couldn’t take care of you”. Everybody had a story on either side of the family about that. But, I had this dad who was a Vietnam era marine – blackout, drinking, compulsive gambler but to me, he was my hero. He got me involved in sports and made sure that I got good grades and went to the dentist three times a year, and all the things that needed to happen. But, there was an inordinate amount of neglect, abuse and dysfunction, and I would come to understand that as my studies progressed later on in life. I looked into all things child development, so what of it? All the people that I work with have childhood post traumatic stress. That’s what qualifies them to come to our experience. We determine that in the screening process.

 

David Duchovny  10:17

That’s what was shocking to me or surprising, is when I realized. I thought going in, we were going to be out to be witnessing people dealing with the horrors of war.

 

Jake Clark  10:27

We don’t talk about any of that. No, rarely. But, there was some of that. It was really incidental later.

 

David Duchovny  10:35

Yeah, that’s the later disturbance.

 

Jake Clark  10:38

Correct.

 

David Duchovny  10:38

As you say, it’s more of a moral injury.

 

Jake Clark  10:40

Now we’re talking about complex post traumatic stress. When you collapse a moral injury on top of a childhood post traumatic stress issue injury, I don’t like that D word. I don’t think it’s disordered. I think it’s more of an occurrence. You collapse that, and now you have this complex post traumatic stress. The way one presents typically is with chemical and process addictions. That’s a real hallmark of someone with complex post traumatic stress. It can look like borderline. It can look like narcissistic personality disorder. It can look like dissociative identity disorder. But, if you reallypull the lens back and look at the ACES score, which I think is an incredible biomarker and an indicator.

 

David Duchovny  11:22

Adverse Childhood.

 

Jake Clark  11:23

Experiences Surveys. The average adverse childhood experience survey score, which measures neglect, abuse […].

 

David Duchovny  11:30

Because you can just give the history of that. It was interesting. It was the study or the creation of the questionnaire wasmade by an insurance company, right?

 

Jake Clark  11:39

Well, it was actually done with the CDC and Kaiser Permanente, but there was a doctor. I believe his name was Vincent Felitti. They asked these ten questions prior to your 18th birthday and these ten questions deal with neglect, abuse and dysfunction in the family of origin. What we determined over a body of about a population size of about 3,000 respondents, was an average ACE score of seven which is the same ACE score as a convicted felon in the United States Penitentiary system. That told me the problem was centered in the person’s non-thinking/thinking. We actually could determine the thing under the thing, the thing that was holding the problem in place. From there, begin to ask, “Whose voice is still missing from the conversation?”. Then that led us toward internal family systems and the work of Dr. Richard Schwartz. Prior to that, we had platformed this off of things that were already existent in the American culture, which is we invented recovery, we invented integration.

 

David Duchovny  12:41

Talking about Americans.

 

Jake Clark  12:43

Talking about Americans like we took Judeo-Christianity, blended it with Zen Buddhism and came up with these modelsof recovery. As the Vietnam War was winding down, the human potential movement was really picking up and conversations were happening in San Francisco. A conversation was happening in New York City. When you blend and synthesize the best parts of those evidence based models as they made their way into the culture, some pretty magical things can happen in a very short period of time as you witnessed.

 

David Duchovny  13:12

I did witness and that was the shocking thing, because I come from kind of the world of like, “Oh, people go to therapy and they’re in therapy for years or they expect to be in therapy for their entire lives”.

 

Jake Clark  13:24

Yeah.

 

David Duchovny  13:25

What you guys did in 72 hours? Of course, you’re not claiming that it’s all done. You’re claiming there’s work to be done. There’s an affiliation that remains from the guys to you. There’s a network of support that they have. It’s not like this is afix, but this is the beginning of a mode of a fix. You’re giving them what you say is, we talk funny (that’s what you like to say up there). We talk funny because you’re giving them a vocabulary. If you’re talking about there, this was a pre verbal injury, the break in affinity.

 

Jake Clark  13:55

Yes.

 

David Duchovny  13:56

How do you put a vocabulary on that? Well, it’s made up, but it’s getting closer. You give them a way to talk about those things that they didn’t know how to talk about.

 

Jake Clark  14:07

But, there’s a little bit more of a challenge here because of what’s holding the thing in place. What the thing under the thing that we’re dealing with are these gouged experiences. I’m just going to tell you, 95% of the people that I work withwere sexually abused as children. See, that’s the part where.

 

David Duchovny  14:26

90%?

 

Jake Clark  14:27

95% of the women. About 85-90% of the men.

 

David Duchovny  14:32

Good time to just say there are female cohorts.

 

Jake Clark  14:34

Yes.

 

David Duchovny  14:35

There’s no CO Ed cohorts.

 

Jake Clark  14:36

Correct. I have never taken a woman through this experience.

 

David Duchovny  14:40

You have not. You never. You have other women that do it.

 

Jake Clark  14:42

But I’m saying, no. I know I work with the women. I see them in the tunnel of tears and I do their 500 day plan. I’m saying, over the last 13 years, I have never taken a woman through the Civil War experience who is not sexually abused as a child or didn’t experience sexual abuse on the job or sexual harassment. What’s shocking is the rate of the men who were sexually abused as children, and it’s one of the questions. It’s the third question in the adult childhood experiences survey questionnaire. What’s crazy, a couple of years later, these memories start coming back because people aren’t numbing as much as they used to. They’re titrating off their meds. They’re using our meditation practice. They’re working with their doctors to supplant these dozen meds that they’re on with a with a solid, patented mindfulness, stress reductive meditation technique. They’re in 12 step. They’re in other therapy. They’re in communities of practice. They’re engaged in purpose greater than self. They start to come off these meds and these memories come back between the denial and the dissociation and the numbing. Now they have, they have the wherewithal (not the tools). I hate that word tools. They have this internal wherewithal to be with that with which they cannot be, and the degree to which they can be with that with which they cannot be is the degree to which they experience freedom, power and full self expression because I don’t have the same fear of expressing to appropriate parties. That what happens without getting into a big story about it, because I’ve experienced it out.

 

David Duchovny  16:24

One of the things that both inspires me and gets in my way is the simplicity of your approach. Even though your sourcesare coming from the multiverse (you’re picking from so many different places). In a way, that was one of the things that was also when I first started to do 12 steps type thinking was, “Can this really be one size fits all? I’m special man. I’m super complicated. I’m super smart. I can’t do this simplistic thing. It can’t work for Mr. Complex”.

 

Jake Clark  17:02

Don’t you know who I think I am?

 

David Duchovny  17:06

On the other hand, I think we live in a culture that’s always offering quick fixes and simple fixes. So, I’m trying to thread the needle here with you because you’re coming at it with that simplicity, but you’re actually getting shit done. You know, it’s not the simple promise of lose your fat in 30 days, or whatever. All the shit that we’re bombarded with and we get. I see you guys as real and you as really doing the work, yet it’s simple. That’s the hardest thing for people understand, it’s not going to cost anything. It can’t work if it doesn’t cost anything. It’s simple, it can’t work. It can’t work if it’s simple, but it is.

 

Jake Clark  17:48

I live in an era. I live in a time where I’m drowning in information and starved for wisdom. That discernment is part of thepromises when one is chemically addicted, that’s considered stage one recovery and the outcome can be the ability to be with life on life’s terms. But it takes unfortunately, a lot of pain, a lot of disappointment and a lot of failure. I know your program.

 

David Duchovny  18:19

Hey, we got to it.

 

Jake Clark  18:20

It really takes this failure, but really it is this heroic journey that we’re all on. It’s a little different for women and men. Women get this thing much quicker than men.

 

David Duchovny  18:31

Really?

 

Jake Clark  18:32

Yeah, absolutely because they just have so much more power than men do. They’re the vessel of life that is created and comes through from the universe. They’re just a little more attuned, obviously not a little bit more. They’re more attuned than men when it comes to this, and they’re tougher.

 

David Duchovny  18:48

So, the cohort journey that you take women through is a slightly different that I went through?

 

Jake Clark  18:54

Slightly different. A little more relational, little more focused on relation. Different film that we use for them, but otherwise it approximates is both 72 hours. I remember one time the men’s experience was five days, the woman was four. And woman said to me, “Why do the men get five days and we get four?” And I said, “Well, you women get it quicker than the men”. And she goes, “We knew that. We just wanted to make sure you did”.

 

David Duchovny  19:19

You said 95% of the men and women that you’re dealing with sexually abused as children.

 

Jake Clark  19:27

Yeah.

 

David Duchovny  19:27

What is it about this culture? What’s happening? What happened?

 

Jake Clark  19:32

Yeah.

 

David Duchovny  19:32

Why is that happening?

 

Jake Clark  19:34

Well, Alice Miller writes about The Drama of The Gifted Child, Banished Knowledge and Thou Shalt Not be Aware. Look,when people live in close proximity to each other and their own boundaries were broken, hurt people. There’s people willcross lines and do things that they’ll deny having done or that they can’t imagine their own challenges and drift have brought them to. Listen if I had told my father, if I had said to my dad and this is how I got complete with my dad. It wasafter he passed away. It was just came out of nowhere. I was taking somebody through the work in the kitchen of the place where you visited. I’ve heard the voice in my head three times and this was the third time. The voice said, “You know, she touched him, too”. And I got my dad like that. I was complete with my father, because it never occurred to methat what his mother was doing with me, she would have done with my dad. The thought never crossed my mind, and it explained my dad and I got complete with him in the sense that I was okay with who he was and who he wasn’t. If I hadgone to my father David as a young boy or even as a young man and said, “You know Grandma, when she would bathe me, he would have killed me. He would have murdered me”. I can tell you the first thing he would have done would havebeen to reach for my throat and choked me. He would have choked that tube and that’s the depth of denial in this culture. But, I can’t deny having 3,000 people tell me the same story. Not only that, we give the ACES survey twice in the5th hour and in the 71st hour, and 40% of the scores go up right. Same ten questions. If I bring them back a year later and do some intensive work with them, to do some of the clarifying material that maybe they’ve slacked on, 50% of thescores go up because I’m not numbing as much. The memories are coming back. But yet, there is an issue in this culture,and I live in the reality of that every day. I have a lived experience of that now. It doesn’t own me like it once did, because not too many men in their 20s and 30s looking for help, want to sit in a room of strangers and say, “Look, my grandma used to jerk me off when I was a little kid”. Compared to what I’ve heard in those rooms of what’s happened between young men and young women and their families of origins, you think of the scenario. It’s been expressed in a container and nobody is saying it for a fact.

 

David Duchovny  22:04

Yeah. Well, you’re also not vilifying. You’re also not saying, “I want these people brought to justice”. You’re saying, “I’m trying to expiate this”.

 

Jake Clark  22:11

I’m trying to get it complete.

 

David Duchovny  22:13

I go back with my love of Jesus turning the other cheek. It’s like I’m trying to break the chain here, so I’m not going to slap back.

 

Jake Clark  22:22

Yeah. Listen, I have people that are parents that come through. The majority of these folks are parents and their  concern is, how do I unfuck the damage I’ve done? And I say, “Listen, there’s a maxim here. It’s called, saw Maxim number two”. If I really want to help those closest to me, the best thing I can do is focus on my own healing. There is something that a child picks up instinctually and intuits when their parents begin their own healing journey. There’s a different level of regard toward that parental figure that they love no matter what, but it transforms the relationship in the sense that you don’t have to do anything other than get a good seal on your own mask before you start worrying about getting a seal on somebody.

 

David Duchovny  27:16

I want to go back to your teen years when you joined the military at 17, right?

 

Jake Clark  27:23

I was conscripted. My father insisted. I was terrified of my father, I did not voluntarily enlist. I was made aware at least inthe day after you graduate high school. I’ll never forget this conversation. You talk about a break in affinity, one cominglagging. I’m defective, I’m helpless, I’m alone. When he said, “June 7, your bags are on the porch within a week in September of 1983”. Within a week, I was sworn into the delayed entry program for the US Army. I thought my life was over that my dreams were shot.

 

David Duchovny  27:56

What were your dreams?

 

Jake Clark  27:57

I wanted to be either a professional baseball player or secret service agent, because I saw Mr. Reagan get shot on television when I was 15. I saw the way my dad reacted to the reaction of the Secret Service agents. I thought the SecretService was these two guys that lived on a train out west; James Garner and Artemus Gordon. They chased this little guy around the desert, Dr. Lovelace. My dad said to me, do they educate you in that school you go to? When I saw whatthe Secret Service really was from age 15 until I was 29. I actually ended up in the Secret Service at 22 but when I reapplied to go back as an agent, when I met the education requirements after being a police officer here in Los Angeles, I knew more about the Secret Service than the dudes who were interviewing me, and they said as much. They said, “My god”. I said, “Well, I’ve been studying this agency since I was 15 years old”, because it was a sexy gig. You’re chasing counterfeiters to live and die in L.A, you’re guarding dignitaries. There’s an opportunity to maybe work on the President’s detail one day, travel the world, do sexy stuff. It was all look good dominate. It was all what young talked about, it was all Athlete Warrior – look good, dominate. There’s no statesman spirit at that point. If I do this as an order to, then all the other things that come along with being a normal person will fall into my life and I was completely wrong about that. Completely wrong. I got that all wrong then I ended up in the FBI.

 

David Duchovny  29:21

Well, so at 17 military?

 

Jake Clark  29:25

Military service.

 

David Duchovny  29:25

Uniformed division then the Secret Service?

 

Jake Clark  29:29

Spent a year at the uniformed division. I walked into work one night. There was a pamphlet for the LAPD, and all of us wanted to be cops now, since we had all this great training. I came out west in 1989. I was a street cop in Skid Row. Thatwas very impactful South Central […].

 

David Duchovny  29:44

Was this not speaking to your sense of service?

 

Jake Clark  29:51

It was all self service. I did not understand the value of service until I was about 51 Years old, right? This was all about more, better, different. How do I […] status in this culture that places a high premium on it? Because inside, I’m defective,helpless and alone. I’m the biggest piece of shit around which the world revolves who would lie if telling the truth, would get him out of trouble, and I’ve got non-shareable problems. I’m fraudulent. I’ve got non-shareable problems. I have no declaration. I have no purpose in my life, I’m just existing but it looks good. I can take care of myself. I’m desperately trying not to be like the family of origin I come from. But inside, I can’t lose that. I can’t turn that tape off.

 

David Duchovny  30:42

Were you afraid of mental illness?

 

Jake Clark  30:46

After I worked Skid Row, I was. When I worked Skid Row as a police officer, I thought that a punishing God was playing some cosmic joke on me, showing me the ultimate end. You think the mental institution was bad for your mother, whichwas horrific going to these mental institutions. This is where you’re going to end up. But, I felt like these were my people, and I was being called one day to be out there with them, that this is how my life was going to ultimately end up. Was going to be on Skid Row in downtown Los Angeles.

 

David Duchovny  31:15

They’d recognize this and I was that cop.

 

Jake Clark  31:19

Well, they’d look at me like. There was the way people would regard me. There was a knowing like they didn’t look at me like.

 

David Duchovny  31:28

I really felt that.

 

Jake Clark  31:29

Yeah, I sensed this connection with them. I don’t know if I was projecting my mother onto them, and it didn’t ruin my day. It just was like, “Wow. Okay, this is where the story ends for me”, but it didn’t, almost. I crashed my life at 31. I ultimately ended up, not going back to the Secret Service. I pulled the trigger too quick. I applied for and was accepted to the FBI in the fall of 97 and halfway through the FBI Academy. The Secret Service calls me and says, “We have a class date for you”. Now, here I am. In the middle of the FBI Academy with about seven weeks to go, the dream job of all dream jobs is calling saying, “Listen, go sign out. Resign”, (which I’ve never been a quitter). “Resign. We will send a carfor you. Go back to L.A, pack your stuff and you’re going to go to the Federal Law Enforcement Training Center back in Georgia, and you’re going to be a Secret Service agent”. I’ll never forget, I can see myself at the Bank of pay phones.

 

David Duchovny  32:31

How old are you?

 

Jake Clark  32:33

Thirty. I could see myself taking this phone call from a pay phone for you younger folks. That’s a thing that hangs on a wall. It’s got buttons on it and a thing you talk into and listen. John Gill, who was on Mr. Reagan’s detail at the time whowas also one of the recruiters, it was still a very boutique agency. Here was a dream coming true, and I can’t believe that I’m telling him I’m not going to do it. That’s the one decision sometimes I wished I had back in life.

 

David Duchovny  33:02

Did you have a mentor at this time?

 

Jake Clark  33:03

Yeah, John Gill and I had a mentor from the police department at detective Ed Medlock to this day is still a trusted advisor, who guided me and shaped me because I was going to school at night like you had to meet certain requirements to be in the Secret Service. You had to have a certain amount of education and experience. I checked every block they were looking for, like this was it? This was gonna be what I wanted to do but I couldn’t quit the FBI. But when I graduated from the academy a couple of months later, as I’m walking across the stage shaking hands with Mr. Free, I knew that this wasn’t gonna work out. The guy beside me Mike Costanza, he was bawling. He was so overcome with his accomplishment, and I’m sitting there numb. I’m thinking to myself, “You just made a really big mistake”.Because I’m like, “This is it. This is after focusing on being a federal agent for 15 years and everything I went through as asoldier, everything I went through as a street cop and a detective. As a really good student, took it very seriously, like this is it”. I could never figure out what we were doing at the FBI. I knew the Secret Service mission backwards and forwards, because I had done some cases with them in L.A and it just spoke to me. It was more family, more boutique,there was a lot more room for rookie mistakes at a place like that whereas the bureau, they were in the two year probationary period. You say the wrong thing to the wrong person on the wrong day which I did. They’re like, “We’re done”. Here I am at 31 kicked out of my own life with a self inflicted wound and unbelievably suicidal. I don’t know what to do. I don’t know what’s wrong with me. I know there’s something very wrong with me because I’m looking at my own behavior and the ways I’m acting out in my life. Then I found myself walking into rooms of recovery. That’s when things started to turn around. It took 20 years, but it could have happened a lot more quickly for me, but I could not be honest with myself or others about my dishonesty.

 

David Duchovny  35:02

What was it about the rooms?

 

Jake Clark  35:08

The courage of the people’s vulnerability. I couldn’t believe what they were sharing and I couldn’t believe they would look you right in the eye. I struggled to understand that I could still have a life that was worth living, that was salvageable. If the Ghost of Christmas Future had come in and said, “Listen, you’re a slow learner, you’re a tire kicker, you’re hard headed”, but there’s going to be a day where you really get this and you will have no regrets that all these other things didn’t work out. You’re really going to get your life, but we’re gonna have to kill off some parts of you that are not constructive. They’re not productive, they’re not appropriate, they don’t contribute. I wouldn’t have believed it. I’m with M Scott Peck calls thrice broken and he says, “That’s the limit for a human being. If you get broken three times in life, you’re unbreakable”. I live a life today where I don’t have any of the concerns that I once did and the worries that I once did with respect to, “Am I going to be okay? Is my life going to work out? Can I manage my life? How are my relationships going to be”. I’ve learned to be honest about my dishonesty.

 

David Duchovny  36:20

Thrice broken.

 

Jake Clark  36:21

First time at the Bureau, the second time.

 

David Duchovny  36:26

First time as a child?

 

Jake Clark  36:27

No. I had an American childhood.

 

David Duchovny  36:30

To be in an orphanage, no?

 

Jake Clark  36:33

I don’t have language for that, that break in affinity. Maybe I had a round trip. I look at the first break in affinity, the firstbreaking was at 31 getting myself kicked out of my life about five years later, losing a relationship with a woman I was engaged to, who I was very much in love with. Thirdly, when my marriage ended in 2017 where these repeated, known as a “katabasis”. It was just the universe kind of saying, “Look, we have something for you. You have some gifts to give away”, but until we know you are qualified for this position, there’s an old saying, “God doesn’t call the qualified. He qualifies the called”, until we can get you to submit to where we’re trying to take this train and ride it in the direction that it’s going. You’re going to stay in this vicious circle and it’s just going to be more of the same. I got tired of letting myself down. I got tired of efforting so hard in a direction only to let myself down again and I had enough sense about me to say that. If you don’t get to sort it out, you will kill yourself, and you’re going to miss the rest of the show. You’re going to miss packing something into the stream of life, because I was very selfish, very self centered, very self seeking. I got tired of this act. I just got tired of letting myself down. I was just tired of being disappointed and not being able to look myself in the eyes in the mirror. But there was also the story back there that, “Who the fuck are you? What do you think you have to contribute?”. That was a big issue for me too. Like, I don’t have anything to give away.

 

David Duchovny  38:16

Well, it seems to me that when you walked into the rooms, you go into a 12 step room. You go on your autodidactic journey at your point. It seems to me that you start reading everything.

 

Jake Clark  38:29

I’m in the right town too, I’m in L.A. You can’t swing a dead cat without hitting somebody that’s drenched in patchouli and granola that’s got some esoteric insight into.

 

David Duchovny  38:40

It is sold in those places.

 

Jake Clark  38:41

Here’s the thing, guys like me don’t walk into places like that and not because we think we’re badass and tough. We’re just so ashamed that we don’t feel that we’re gonna be welcomed or invited. I just found myself in these rooms with the most incredible mystics and metaphysicist and ontologists. I really got what they were saying. There was some part of me that was filling up. Early on, I was like, “I wonder if I could do this. I wonder if I could do it for people like me who endup in places where people like me end up in the space of warrior. What have you and give them a proper versus a pseudo initiation into adult philosophy”. Then you realize, when you do the deep research, that this conversation has been around for 4,000 years. It’s just been passed through the age and it finds the zeitgeist of the time in which to be delivered. I think that’s what happened for us at Save a Warrior. Trust me, I’m the last guy who ever thought that he would be cast in this role. I asked this very famous actor one time who about his breakthrough role. I was kind of fan girling over and I said, “Man, how did you get that part?” He looked at me and said, “I fit the suit”. I love that.

 

David Duchovny  40:03

Yeah.

 

Jake Clark  40:04

I fit the suit and I had young warriors telling me, “You were just so ideally trained and developed to do this”. But, I don’t think they understood how much work I had done in the background in that long, dark night of the soul. I never stoppedstudying. I read myself blind to try to get down to the heart of this thing and to see what is holding this problem in place. What is the thing under the thing? And that’s I focused my attention.

 

David Duchovny  40:32

Jake and I met at a health food store. He approached me because he recognized me from The X Files. We talked aboutthe FBI for a moment and then he started telling me about what was at that point or what was soon to become.

 

Speaker 1  40:32

Soon to become. I was developing it. I was just all excited and there you were, I remembered you from. You were very kind. I was like, “One of those things you attach to a garden hose with holes in it, flopping all over the place”. It was just coming out of me that here you were, here’s fox motor.

 

Jake Clark  42:49

Yeah. At that point, you’re trying to figure out how to get up and running.

 

Jake Clark  43:10

Yes, but I had enough sense about me to grab local practitioners that were doing this with high thread count recovery centers in Malibu. I was hiring them, a part of it I was avoiding my own responsibility, but I wanted to see what they would do in this, what was 120 hour experience. I had this idea that it was going to be meditation, education and motivation, and this would be enough to unstick people again. I didn’t know what I didn’t know at the time. This was the13 years ago. Now, I’ve got 3,000 participants under my belt, 282 iterations of this piece of performance theater and that was the beginning in Malibu in the summer, fall of 2012. You call it performance theater?

 

David Duchovny  43:56

Yeah, I found that to be interesting when I was going through it with you, with the guys. You call the guys who lead these cohorts red actors or the Red X on the stage where the actor stands. You trace the origins of what you’re doing to Greek drama, right? It’s kind of psycho drama or I guess most people would know would think of it as role playing in the therapist’s office. But can you speak a little about?

 

Jake Clark  44:26

From what I studied, I tend to (I don’t want to say make caricature or parody), but my understanding is when the Greekscame home from the Trojan War and got their shit kicked in, someone went to Socrates and said, “Man, these dudes, wecan’t get these cats home”. Like, we can get them home. He’s like, “Okay, we’re gonna act this out. We’re gonna put you up on this stage, but you’re going to portray your enemy”. They’re like, “Wait a second, what are we talking? He’s like, “Just trust me”. This was the origin of Greek tragedy theater was the soldiers who were struggling to reintegrate themselves back into their culture, were living in the skin of their enemy. By doing so, going through some transformational experience by way of paradox. There’s something really powerful about doing that kind of psychodrama. You saw some of that when you were with us and we do it very slowly. But, the person delivering the content is known as the red X. Somebody said something to me one day, they gave me a compliment. I was like, “Well,there’s a reason they let me stand on the red X and it just kind of stuck, right? We train our red X to lead these experiences. The thing that I would want to convey, to hear this right way. These folks that come through this experience, these are some bad motherfuckers. I mean, these are dudes that are shit hot warriors with significant time on target, but there is something in their DNA that just responds to that kind of a practicum, they really take it on. It’s almost like some part of them that they didn’t knew that they had access to. It’s really powerful to see people get something like that.

 

David Duchovny  46:20

It doesn’t come down to what I would think it’s going to come down to which is forgive your opponent, forgive the enemy, right? It goes back to mom and dad always.

 

Jake Clark  46:31

But forgiving oneself for making mom and dad wrong. See, this is the biggest hurdle.

 

David Duchovny  46:36

This is something we talk about on the podcast a lot for the possibility of forgiveness or forgetting. This is something that I was struck by during our process, you’re like forgiveness is not possible.

 

David Duchovny  46:36

Yes.

 

Jake Clark  46:36

Because of what’s happened in the story. I have about what happened in the complication, the compression and the collapse of that.

 

Jake Clark  46:56

No, it’s not.

 

David Duchovny  46:57

Can you explain that?

 

Jake Clark  46:57

Sure. When you look at the word forgive. If you look at something like A Course in Miracles, which has been around for 50 years and has found, it’s popped up here and there. It started in Columbia University back in the early 70s. Some people say it’s the elaboration of the lost Gospel of St. Thomas. There’s this idea that to forgive is to give oneself ahead of time, to pull oneself outside of time, and to emerge into this other space where possibility of possibility exists. If I say to you, “I forgive you”. I’m assuming the power of a deity, of a god (I can’t do that). What I can do that’s very powerful that can open up that space is, I can. It’s goes back to St. Thomas or of Aquinas. He said St. Francis. It was either St. Thomas or St. Francis.

 

David Duchovny  46:58

One of those saints.

 

Jake Clark  47:30

One of those saints said it is better to seek forgiveness than to forgive, right? This is ancient.

 

David Duchovny  47:30

That’s the wisdom.

 

Jake Clark  48:09

No. But see, I can’t forgive you because it doesn’t move the action forward. When I humble myself and I say, “Listen, will you forgive me for making you wrong for being human?”. It stops time. It freezes him out again.

 

David Duchovny  48:24

Because that’s something I heard over and over.

 

Jake Clark  48:27

Will you forgive me for making you wrong for being human? When I do that, there is an immediate connection, because it requires. Humility is recognizing one owns limitation and asking for support, I’m asking you to do something for me. The hardest thing a human being will ever say no to is a request for help from another person. Listen, I need you to help me. Can you help me? Will you forgive me for making you wrong for being human? If nothing else, it knocks the ultimatepause in the other person’s ass like, “Wait, what just happened here there’s see novelty”. Novelty applied to a situation that otherwise appears frozen and now you’ve just created this alternate reality game between you and this person withwhom you have an affinity. It really gives the other person, it empowers the other person to make this profound contribution to you and it restores. It restores the affinity that that’s been lost. Because if I say, “I forgive you”. It’s just there’s an arrogance to that. The other person immediately can put them on the defense. “Forgive me for what? For feeding you, for changing your clothes, your diapers, for bathing you, for protecting you, for sheltering you?”. See, now I just hit their receipts, whereas if I paradox that, that’s the breakthrough. That’s the miracle that our folks again and again. People forget to remember that. I went home and I forgave my parents. I went, “Oh, fuck no”. Listen, I’m going to tell you in English.

 

David Duchovny  50:14

Well, could they understand the formulation if you gave it? Did you say that to your dad at some point, actually?

 

Jake Clark  50:21

Yes.

 

David Duchovny  50:22

During the cohort, we say that in a role play.

 

Jake Clark  50:27

Sure.

 

David Duchovny  50:29

Usually to you, or somebody else who’s playing the father the mother.

 

Jake Clark  50:33

I got to do it with my father on his deathbed, and I got to do it with my father but late 90s.

 

David Duchovny  50:40

No need to. I don’t know what the actual person.

 

Jake Clark  50:43

No, because if you can create, there’s an ecology of transformation. If you can create the context for these enactments to occur, which is what we do in salt – you need submission, containment, enactment to have a proper secular, spiritual initiation. This is ancient. You gotta have that. If I can introduce that archetype of mother and father and you saw with your own eyes when I bring up mom, when I bring up dad.

 

David Duchovny  51:14

You have the guys stand with their palms out right?

 

Jake Clark  51:18

Yes. Mom and dad standing with the palms out there, they’re there to receive.

 

David Duchovny  51:23

Right. That’s the image you’re giving.

 

Jake Clark  51:25

Correct. There’s this moment with the participant. There’s this antipathy or there’s this regret, but there’s always grief, always. Grief is what holds these problems in place. There’s no power in saying, “Look, I need you to forgive, mom. I need you to forgive that”. But when we ask their forgiveness, the solvency of those tears, you see the person transform right in front of you. It’s immediate.

 

David Duchovny  51:51

It was.

 

Jake Clark  51:52

Now the problem is, I’ll pick it back up and I’ll have this issue with mom and dad again. So, this completion sometimes takes some repetition again and again.

 

David Duchovny  52:00

That gets back to what happens after the 72 hours are over. But I’m sure you’re like, “This is 48 hours in”. You’re seeing these tough guys rolling around on the floor – screaming, sobbing. It’s not forgiving them. That’s kind of what we’ve been taught.

 

Jake Clark  52:20

What you’re seeing there is when they’re saying, “Will you forgive me for making you wrong for being human?” Here’s what’s not said. That said, “Mom, I love you. Dad, I love you”. The only thing that matters to me is that I love you and you see that completion. I’ll ask them, “You’re never going to see them again. What do you want to say?” “It’s always thesame thing, I love you”. It is, without fail. That is the language that is evoked, that comes forth and you feel something inthe room, something really powerful because that person has been withholding that declaration for maybe decades.

 

David Duchovny  52:57

They haven’t known how to formulate it.

 

Jake Clark  52:59

They haven’t had the container for it. They haven’t had a courageous space in which to express it and we create the ideal conditions for that to occur.

 

David Duchovny  53:07

But, I think it’s important to say too now because you’re not saying, “Hey, I’m going to give you guys a talent that you’re going to go out there and get what you want”.

 

Jake Clark  53:15

I’m going to give you access.

 

David Duchovny  53:16

No, we’re nothing like that.

 

Jake Clark  53:17

Listen, we’re going to give you access to a world where you’re going to have the possibility and the opportunity for whatyou really want and hear this the right way. It’s not going to look anything like you think it will, because you’re not goingto show up as this athlete warrior with this backtrack in your mind of defective, helpless, and alone running you as a game if I continue to clarify and integrate this experience. It’s going to take some time. I have to introduce and emerge different language – repeat, relate, repeat, reframe, relate, repeat, reframe.

 

David Duchovny  53:50

Because this is something that you talk about a lot that resonated with me. There’s the thing that happened, there’s no denying that, right? Shit happens. It happened. Then there’s the story that you’ve been living with that you told yourself about.

 

Jake Clark  54:03

The story isn’t true. What happened is what happened. The story I make up is never true. No matter what and people struggle with, you’re right back to the mind. It’s like right back to the mind trap. You’re not listening. You don’t understand. Listen, I overstand. Not my first rodeo.

 

David Duchovny  54:22

Me too.

 

Jake Clark  54:23

I had adults in my childhood who broke my boundaries and interfered with me in ways that should not happen to a child, but it’s the story I make up about what happened that isn’t true, because I’m talking about something that did happen and it is never exactly what happened. If I get it down to the basic language, it disappears the story. Now there’s a breaking open. There’s a space for being complete with the source of this break in affinity. I’m into another dimension. Time has stopped. I’m outside of time. Transformation has occurred and I want more of this, because this is where the satisfaction and the fulfillment.

 

David Duchovny  55:01

Comes out about telling a new story.

 

Jake Clark  55:02

I think it’s about creating a new story. I think it’s about creating a story that’s powerful, that creates agency, elevates one’s consciousness that allows one like I live a life today, that someone like me doesn’t get to live with those biomarkersn as a nine out of a ten on the ACES scale. I’m someone that ends up institutionalized or on Skid Row or in prison. I think that’s why I was drawn to the the places I was drawn to, not because there’s a trope out there where people say, “Well, you people join the military because they don’t have any better options in life?”. No, let’s clarify that, I joined the military first of all because I was forced to, but I went into law enforcement, unknowingly seeking out opportunities to recreate the abandonment of my childhood.

 

David Duchovny  55:51

It doesn’t seem sick to me as an actor. That is the hero’s journey so often.

 

Jake Clark  56:02

Yeah.

 

David Duchovny  56:02

You talk a lot about Joseph Campbell.

 

Jake Clark  56:04

Sure.

 

David Duchovny  56:04

Work as well. I think that’s returning to the scene of the crime, the nature of human psychology.

 

Jake Clark  56:12

It’s so devastating to feel so powerless to do anything about one’s circumstances other than be in this vicious circle, right? That’s why people kill themselves.

 

David Duchovny  56:25

What I’d like to end with is something that’s been kind of not annoying at me. I’ve been thinking about since I went through this weekend with you guys. I just kept thinking, everybody should do this.

 

Jake Clark  56:39

Sure.

 

David Duchovny  56:39

I know that what you’re doing is helping people with these acute problems, and that’s where it should be. I’m just sitting there thinking, everybody should go through this weekend, that’s just my thinking. I think anybody could benefit greatly by being exposed to the kind of process – the simple, intense, short process that you take people through. There’s so much a part of me that doesn’t believe that it could work. How could 72 hours change my life? I’m too complicated again and too fucked up for that to work. Yet there’s magic in what you do.

 

Jake Clark  57:27

Thank you.

 

David Duchovny  57:28

You’re a superstar.

 

Jake Clark  57:30

Takes one to know one. I had great trainers.

 

David Duchovny  57:34

Yeah, and I think that you’re training great people as well.

 

Jake Clark  57:36

Sure. Listen, I’m turning wrenches on Bugattis. I mean, there’s nothing wrong with the Toyota Camry, but that’s not what’s showing up in the shop. I’m working with people who are profoundly courageous.

 

David Duchovny  57:48

When I say everybody should do this, I don’t want to take the focus of what you are doing.

 

Jake Clark  57:56

No, I get it. But I’m working with human beings. I’m not looking at people sitting across from me in those experiences that was a Soldier, a Marine, a person in the Coast Guard. They’re a police officer, they’re a firefighter, they’re a dispatcher. I see adult children that are stuck in an emotionality of a five or a six year old that got knocked off course, and are now moving toward an apparent death of despair. That’s the humanistic side of this experience. I don’t see that. The good news is, there are platforms and vectors out there that we seek to grow into. When Campbell did the interviews with Bill Moyer that was powerful. Tens of thousands of people wrote into PBS and said, “My god, just watching this transform my life”, and you are sitting as a witness, as a valued participant which we’ve had since the beginning. You’re having what’s known as others having gotten just by experiencing someone else’s transformation. It’s having an analogous effect on you as the percipient witness and that’s the power of this work, we are moving into an era where that technology is available. I would say to people, listen, what you seek seeks you and the greatest gift we can give ourselves is this desire to be curious about what’s going on for us internally, and knowing that’s maybe not whowe are. As we continue to inquire into those spaces, things open up for us in our world that begin to lead us to what we’re called to, because we’re all called to heal and emerge into what we were sent here to be. I really believe that and I’ve seen that in people. I’ve been in the rooms of recovery now for 27 years. I wish I had a magic wand, but I’m grateful for the opportunities I am given, even to sit here and talk with you about this because it’s so kismet, 13 years later after I first met you. Almost to the day, to circle back and that’s what I believe that this is where the culture is going. This is the zeitgeist that we are looking to heal as a nation that’s going through a lot right now.

 

David Duchovny  1:00:17

As we end, can you show me your ID? Can you present it to me?

 

Jake Clark  1:00:21

Sure.

 

David Duchovny  1:00:21

In the way that one is supposed to. Go with that quite slow.

 

Jake Clark  1:00:29

I would do it.

 

David Duchovny  1:00:30

No […].

 

Jake Clark  1:00:32

Listen, I would get a lot of laughs in the office. Thank you for this gift. This is special.

 

David Duchovny  1:00:41

You’re welcome.

 

David Duchovny  1:00:42

Trying to get some thoughts down on Jay Clark, my new friend. Let me give you this book list, because I ask Jake. “Give me a book list. Let me send people in the right direction”. The Spirituality of Imperfection, by Kurtz and Katherine. The Body Keeps the Score by Van der Kolk. The Drama of the Gifted Child by Alice Miller. How God Changes Your Brain byNewberg and Waldman, Quantum Change, Change or Die by Deutschman, A Cult of One by Grannon, Awareness by De Mello, The Three Laws of Performance by Zaffron and Logan, that’s the best stuff I believe. No bad parts. Seems like a lot of homework. Fail Better errors out there. Take it slow. Read around. See what sticks. Then start telling your own story.

 

David Duchovny  1:02:07

Thanks so much for listening to Fail Better. If you haven’t subscribed to lemonada premium yet, now’s the perfect time because guess what? You can listen completely ad free. Plus you’ll unlock exclusive bonus content, like the full version ofmy post interview thoughts that you won’t hear anywhere else. That’s more of my recaps on interviews with guests like Cris Carter and Emily Deschanel. Just tap that subscribe button on Apple podcasts or head to lemonadapremium.com to subscribe on any other app that’s lemonadapremium.com. Don’t miss out. Fail better is production of Lemonada in coordination with King Baby. It is produced by Kegan Zema, Aria Bracci and Dani Matias. Our engineer is Brian Castillo.Our SVP of weekly is Steve Nelson. Special thanks to Carl Ackerman, Tom Krupinski and Brad Davidson. The show is executive produced by Stephanie Wittels Wachs, Jessica Cordova Kramer and me, David Duchovny. The music is also by me and my band, the lovely Colin Lee, Pat McCusker, Mitch Stewart, Davis Rowan, and Sebastian Modak. You can find us online at Lemonada Media and you can find me at David Duchovny. Follow Fail Better wherever you get your podcasts or listen ad free on Amazon music with your prime membership.