Finding Mastery with Dr. Michael Gervais - Beyond Lieutenant Dan: Gary Sinise on Love, Loss & Legacy

Episode Date: November 12, 2025

What if real success is measured not by what you achieve, but by how deeply you give?On today’s episode, we sit down with Gary Sinise—Emmy Award–winning actor and director best known for his roles in Forrest Gump, Apollo 13, and CSI: New York, and founder of the Gary Sinise Foundation—to explore his lifelong arc from self to service.Gary takes us back to the accidental spark of belonging he found in high school theater, the early days building Steppenwolf, and the quiet battle with inadequacy that forged a bias for action and leadership. We trace how portraying Lieutenant Dan in Forrest Gump became an inflection point—culminating in a life-altering moment on stage with 2,000 wounded veterans—and how 9/11 transformed his work into a full-fledged mission to support service members and their families.Gary also opens a tender window into his home front: his wife’s battle with breast cancer and his late son Mac’s courageous 5½-year fight with chordoma. He shares how showing up—again and again—became a practice, a purpose, and a way through grief.In this conversation, you’ll learn:How to turn inadequacy into action—and why a bias toward doing builds real confidenceThe key to shifting from achievement to contribution without losing your driveHow to lead with presence when others seem steps aheadWhy purpose expands through loss—and how faith, family, and service hold the lineWhat it means to show up as a caregiver and “battle buddy” through life’s hardest seasonsHow to transform creativity into service—and why art can be an act of healingIf you’re craving a reminder that meaning is made in the moments we choose to serve, especially when it’s hard, then this conversation will move you.__________________________________________________________Links & ResourcesSubscribe to our YouTube Channel for more conversations at the intersection of high performance, leadership, and wellbeing: https://www.youtube.com/c/FindingMasteryGet exclusive discounts and support our amazing sponsors! Go to: https://findingmastery.com/sponsors/Subscribe to the Finding Mastery newsletter for weekly high performance insights: https://www.findingmastery.com/newsletter Download Dr. Mike's Morning Mindset Routine: findingmastery.com/morningmindset!Follow on YouTube, Instagram, LinkedIn, and XSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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this is a great place to start. Post your job for free at LinkedIn.com slash Finding Mastery. That's LinkedIn.com slash Finding Mastery to post your job for free. Terms and conditions apply. When the opportunity to audition for Lieutenant Dan came along, I very much wanted to do it and get that part because of the Vietnam veterans of my own family. I just felt like this role is meant for me.

I've got to get it. What if real success is measured not by what you achieve, but how deeply you give? The Disabled American Veterans Organization invited me to come to their national convention in 94. And I look out in the crowd, and there's 2,000 wounded veterans, wheelchairs, crutches, whatever the disability is because of their service.

And they're all cheering me on for plan, Lieutenant Dan. And that was profoundly impactful to me. Welcome to the Finding Mastery podcast, where we dive into the minds of the world's greatest thinkers and doers. I'm your host, Dr. Michael Jerva, by trade and training a high-performance psychologist. Now, the idea behind these conversations is simple. It's to sit with the extraordinaries and to learn, to really learn how they work from the inside of. This is not about hacks or shortcuts. It's about what they're searching for,

how they organize their inner life and the skills they've used to shape their craft and themselves. Today's conversation is with the incredible Gary Seneas, an Emmy award-winning actor and director whose journey from self to service has become a blueprint or purpose. We talk about how the role of Lieutenant Dan

from Forrest Gump opened his heart to America's veterans and how September 11th changed his life to one of service. After that, terrible day for our country, and the reaction that so many had to raise their hand and go sign up to serve our country and go off to war and get injured and we started losing people, I just felt like I was teed up to go to a greater call to action. And how Gary's role as a husband and father deepen that mission when his family face its own unimaginable trials.

In August of 2018, my son was diagnosed with a very, very rare cancer called Cordoma. And so I'm doing the fighting for him to keep him a lot of. and to keep the enemy from overrunning us. For me, the grief, you know, it's always there. I miss my son more than I can. We also talk about the music of his late son, Mack, that you're listening to right now. And how finishing and sharing those compositions

became both a tribute and a way to keep serving others through beauty. With that, let's jump into this week's conversation with Gary Sinise. Gary, I have been looking forward to this conversation, and you have taken up the emblem, if you will, from moving from self-to-service. And I know that that's a term that you've coined from self-to-service. And I just can't wait to have the conversation to really understand how you've organized your inner life to do just that. So let's just start at the top. Like, you know, as an artist, you've got a deep purpose that you've connected to over the years.

maybe can we just first begin with what drew you to the theater as a young man be before you even ever imagined a career on stage or obviously on screen. Oh, thank you, Michael. Thanks so much for having me. Happy to talk about that. It was an accident, really, that I fell into acting and theater in high school. I was a struggling young academic, or I don't even know you'd call me an academic. but struggling with academics is what I was.

I was really having a hard time with all that from an early age, from I don't think I ever learned properly how to read and write when I was a young youngster. And it makes you think how important those fundamentals in that early childhood age, you know, second grade, third grade, fourth grade, all those grades, how learning those fundamentals properly are, really a key to how you develop later on. And for some reason, I just failed at all that as a youngster. So I struggled all the way through junior high school and high school. One thing that I

fell into that I did connect to was music. And they had my first guitar in fourth grade, and I just loved doing that. And all the way through into high school, up into my early 20s, I was going to play. But as I was playing in high school, in high school bands, and failing just about every class and not really knowing my parents were fearful that I was going to get kicked out of school and not really knowing what I was going to do. I remember, I think I was ditching a class as a sophomore and standing in this hallway with some of my band members. this drama teacher came walking down the hall and she looked at us and we were pretty scruffy looking

and she was directing the play West Side Story and if you know West Side Story of course it's about two opposing gangs, the American gang and the Puerto Rican gang and they're living in New York City and they're fighting each other and all of that and she comes walking down the hall and she says you guys look perfect to play the gang members in this play come and audition for the play.

And then she puttered off, you know, down the hall. And we just sort of laughed it off for a second. But after school, I decided to go check out the audition. And a bunch of pretty girls were walking in there. And I just, I followed them in. And they handed me a script and said, get up there, read this part. I didn't know anything about an audition or anything. So I wasn't really taking it that seriously.

And I just got up and started goofing off. and everybody was laughing at me and the teacher was laughing at me and that next thing I know the following morning I go and I see the cast list and I got in the play and I got a little couple of line part, small part well that started me on a journey in high school

to do every single play I could do I just fell in love with it and by the end of high school I was one of the top theater students I was getting A's for the first time ever in theater classes, and I started a theater company after that. After I graduated, I wasn't going to go to high school, and I wanted to keep acting. I wanted to keep doing it. And so we started a theater company with some of the kids. This was in 1974, and that theater company is 50 years old now. It's a giant multi-feater, multi, there's restaurants and classrooms and

everything. It's a giant building on the north side of Chicago. And it started with kids who had a passionate love for theater. And that's how I got started and just learned everything about acting from working with the members of the theater company. And that led to the movie and television business and, you know, something that I've been able to make a living at for a long time now. And that theater is called Steppenwolf, the famed Steppenwolf Theater. Is that right? Yes. Yeah. Okay. So it makes sense. It was like all these divine accidents, if you will, that was taking place at a young age.

But let me go back to two pieces that I'm really interested in. What was it like? Go back to like when you were in grade school and high school. Go back to that psychology that was being built when you were clearly not good in the institution that you were forced to be in, the academic stuff. I want to understand what that was like for you walking around the hallways. and because I think that's going to be material for why you've done so much in your life. But I want to understand that piece. And the second part, you could start wherever you wanted, is do you want to know what that

intuition was that led you to the practice or led you to the audition, I should say? So those are the two things I wanted to understand. There was a lot of growing up where I was good at certain things like baseball, real good at baseball, liked all that. But again, as I said, academics just did not come. naturally to me. It was hard for me. And so I felt, you know, there was a part of me that felt pretty incomplete. I mean, I felt like a failure at certain things. Yet, you know, no matter how I may have tried and my parents tried, but my parents weren't academics either. My dad

barely made it through high school himself and joined the Navy after high school. They weren't to be able to kind of help me academically, and they didn't have the money to get me a tutor. So I was kind of flailing around a bit and therefore feeling a bit inadequate when it came to you know, meeting some of the other kids who were much better at that that I was. But I was good at music and I could play and I had bands and that gave me some confidence and some courage because the bands were pretty good for high school bands. And when I got on stage as a band member, this kind of shyness or inadequacy that I might have had academically in high school, that all went away. And I just started performing.

And I was rocking out like Jimmy Hendricks, you know. I mean, I was, you know, really having a good time. And, you know, it gave me a lot of confidence. And then when I stumbled into the theater and I found that I was good at performing, That, you know, even though I didn't make it through high school, I had to go back for an extra semester because I didn't have enough credits to graduate because of all the failing and everything. But I found this thing that I was good at, and that gave me a lot of confidence. And for, you know, many times we won't find that thing that ends up being our life source, right? acting became something that I ended up making a living at, and I discovered it as a young

16-year-old. Quite often, you know, we stumble along through college, and we think we're going to go to college for one thing, and you kind of study in one thing, and then you end up coming out of college, just paying all that money studying one thing, and then you never do that, right? You find another job, and that becomes your thing. I found a job that I was good at as a 16-year-old. So all the bumbling around and kind of failing that was done, I counterbalanced all that with performing and learning that I was good at a craft. I discovered a craft in high school that I was able to make a living at. And I was the guy who didn't go to college. And I was around all these people in the early theater company, John Malkovich and Lori Metcalfe and Joan Allen and John Mahoney,

all these people have went on to have very, very good careers in the movie business, but they all went to college and they all studied and they all were pretty intellectual. And when I got around them, I felt a little inadequate again. But yet when I got on stage and started performing, you know, I was equal to everybody else. And it didn't matter if I went to college or not. So that gave me a lot of confidence. And then I became one of the top leaders of the theater company. what does the inadequacy sound like in your head what does it feel like in your body if you can go back to

those and maybe you're still working through them you know from time to time but if you go back to those periods what did it sound like and what did it feel like in your body as an actor you learn how to pretend that you're not pretending right right that's that's what you do as an actor and as an actor I got pretty good at pretending that I didn't have this fear inside me, you know, this fear of failing. And that was, that was important because the fear of failure, even though you don't want to share that with a lot of folks, the fear of failure makes you work a lot harder, you know, I think. It made me work a lot harder. I felt sort of, you know, I was around a bunch of intellectuals, you know, that were very well read and they studied Stanislavski and, you know,

they knew all this stuff about the history of theater and all of that. I didn't know any of that. And that made me a little intimidated, I remember. But I remember never kind of showing that or revealing some of those feelings and just letting it manifest itself in working very, very hard. And sure enough, you know, when it came down to it, here's all the college kids, and yet they elect me to be the artistic director of the theater company. And it was because I was kind of an action guy. You know, what I couldn't articulate verbally because maybe I didn't have the knowledge that some of the other folks had, I turned that into action. And I would take control of things and just go at it and make it happen. And all those early lessons that I learned about leadership and fighting against your fears and never letting

your fears kind of dominate your behavior or your way of life or your thinking or anything, all of that just turned into what eventually became a confidence. And having been through many, many scenarios of leadership over the years, every time we successfully, And we did fail, but every time we failed, we learned some valuable lessons for the next time. And every time we succeeded, it gave a new confidence that, okay, we've been through that scenario before. We know how it works. We knew that we were fearful of it. Yeah, we achieved it. And that gave me a lot of confidence going forward. And that has always led life now. Now, you know, having been through that multiple times over many, many years, you just develop a confidence that, hey, it's going to work out, just got to chip in, just dive in. We live in a great country. We have the freedom to do what we want. And all you have to do is work hard to achieve it. And I've been through that scenario so many times that I feel a lot of confidence that we're going to get things done. If we can only dream them, dream them up and go make it

happen. Okay, so for you, when you're in a room when there's intellectuals, when there's these people that are talking a big game, if you will. I'm curious about your self-talk. Like, how did you work with that? Did you say, ooh, I need to stay away from those types of conversations because I'll be exposed? Or did you say, okay, I see them. I'm going to go over here and double down on like knowing my lines or understanding the character inside it out, or I'm going to be great at adding value in other places that they don't seem to want to go. Like, I want to know what your self-talk was in the moment you walk into a room and everybody else seems like they're three steps above.

Well, the more you walk into those rooms and you sit there, the more you learn. It wasn't like I was intimidated forever about being around big talkers. The more we were around that, the more I was around that, and the more, you know, you would learn from each other. And I learned a lot from the people that were maybe better educated on certain aspects of accomplish it, you know, doing theater or, you know, acting or whatever, because they had gone through college and they had been taught a bunch of things. And so they were coming out of college and they were sharing all that and they were, you know, expanding on all that. And the more

we worked together in those days, our strengths individually started to pop out. And you started to see each person's strength. One person might not say anything in a meeting. Like, I remember Lori Metcalf, okay? Lori Metcalf is one of our great American actresses, right? And Lori was always just the quiet one sitting in the corner, listening to everybody talk. And now what Lori would do is just get up on stage and just beat everybody down. I mean, she was always so good on stage. She didn't need to say anything about anything.

It wasn't that she didn't have ideas or thoughts or want to communicate. She would communicate when necessary, but other people were kind of taking the leadership role in the company, and those leaders were emerging. And I remember I learned a lot from each individual person in the original group of Steppenwell Theater. There were nine of us, and each one had different types of strengths.

And we would all learn from each other, and eventually we were a very, very tight ensemble. Everybody knew what each other's strengths were, We'd rely on that. They knew that I was the kind of person that could kind of see something and go get it and work hard to make it happen. And so that's why they eventually decided to invite me to be the artistic director of the company. Finding Master is brought to you by Defender. In the conversations I have with world-class performers, there's this theme that keeps coming up again and again.

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love it. Again, that's branch basics.com slash finding mastery and use the code finding mastery to get started. You definitely, I think, have shared what has been underpinning from self to service, that model that you, that we referenced earlier, which is like you're biased to action, you're biased to be a learner and kind of to be in service of something bigger. So I think it's starting to make sense for me. But I don't want to skip too many steps. I do want to, I want to go to, like I think most people know you and I first was introduced to, you know, it was probably mid-career for you or something, but it was Lieutenant Dan in Forrest Gump. And so how did that experience also open up your decades-long connection with the military? Well, I'll tell you,

the seeds for the military work and support work were planted earlier than that. Probably, you know, with the veterans in my own family and especially the veterans on my wife's side of the family, Vietnam veterans. And Lieutenant Dan, of course, is a Vietnam veteran. And having met them in the, oh, mid-70s to late 70s, my wife's two brothers served in Vietnam. Her sister's husband served in Vietnam. Her sister served during the Corps War and the Army. You know, a lot of veterans on her side of the family and my side of the family. So a lot of the genesis of what would evolve into an eventual full-time mission starts. there. And Lieutenant Dan was something that happened, you know, a good 10 years after I had started supporting Vietnam veterans in the Chicago area. And so when the opportunity to audition for Lieutenant Dan came along, I very much wanted to do it and get that part because of the veterans, the Vietnam veterans of my own family, I just felt like, this is this role is meant for me. I've got to get it. I hadn't done that many movies up until that point. Yeah, just only, only a few. I did an adaptation of Mice and Men.

A Misen Men came out in 1992 in October, and within months of that, I was offered a giant part in a Stephen King miniseries that was going to be on ABC four-night miniseries based on his book called, the stand. And that was really the first time, like an offer came. You know, a lot of times you have to go and audition for it, right? And then you wait around and find out if you're going to get the part. Well, out of the blue, I get this offer from ABC to star in the stand. And it's a huge part in a huge miniseries. And then shortly after I finish that, I auditioned for Forrest Gump, and I got that. So 1993 was a very productive year, and I remember just really wanting to play that Lieutenant Dan part very, very badly because of the work that I'd done in the 80s with Vietnam veterans.

And that just led to a lot of great things afterwards. I mean, Forrest Gump was a big sort of career change, a big shift. raised millions and you've done so much for the military, families, you know, from national concerts, from just so much that you've done. What have you learned about leadership from your life commitment to being in service? The self-to-service that you've mentioned, that is the subtitle of my book called Grateful American, A Journey from Self to Service. And what I mean by that is it's not a journey from selfishness to unselfishness or anything. It's a journey from a focus on myself, my acting career, what I was doing there, this small kind of singular

focus of being successful in the movie business and television business and making a theater work to service, which is taking the success that I had. in the movie and television theater business and turning it into something that could benefit others, that could be a positive, have a positive impact for other people. And, you know, the seeds of that were planted, as I said, in the 80s with the Vietnam connection and the support of Vietnam veterans in the Chicago area and then the 90s, getting involved with the disabled American Veterans Organization, which I don't know if you know much about them, but the DAV at that time, 1994, they represented about 1.5 million wounded veterans going all the way back to World War II,

World War II, Korea, Vietnam, the Gulf War, and they contacted me after Forrest Gump came out. And, you know, I'm playing a disabled veteran. I'm playing a double amputee in Forrest Gump. And they wanted to recognize me for playing that part. So they invited me to come to their national convention in 94 and receive their National Commanders Award for playing a wounded veteran. And I didn't know anything about the DAV at the time. He hadn't heard about them at all.

But yet, you know, in fact, the book I mentioned, Grateful American, and the very first page of the book describes walking out onto the stage in the ballroom in Chicago at the Conrad Hilden Hotel and being introduced and walking up onto the stage, shaking hands with the national commander. His name is Richard Marbs. He's standing on crutches with one leg missing all the way up to his hip, and I look out in the crowd, and there's 2,000 wounded veterans, wheelchairs, crutches, whatever the disability is because of their service, they were out there,

and they're all cheering me on for playing Lieutenant Dan. And that was profoundly impactful to me, and I still remember that feeling of looking out there and seeing all these real-life Lieutenant Dan's applauding me for playing, you know, playing a part, you know, a part that they were living themselves. And that was life-changing. And so I stayed, I stayed actively involved with them over the years. And so there are many, many aspects that grew into the Gary Seneese Foundation and the, the USO and all the stuff that I was doing that kind of led up to that.

Oh, there you go. So let's go back to a bit of that kind of origin moment, if you will. when you did such a good job, you felt their appreciation for being seen. What was that feeling that you had? And for those watching, you know, you put your hand on your heart. But what is the feeling? I don't know yet. I wasn't actually prepared for it. I mean, I remember they brought me down through the kitchen, you know, in the ballroom.

And, you know, I was in a hotel room upstairs. And they snuck me down through the kitchen. and I'm standing behind the doors that go out to the ballroom. And I could hear my voice on the video screens that they were playing scenes from Forrest Gump. And the scene that they were playing when I got to those doors was the hurricane scene. I don't know if you remember that.

But Lieutenant Dan climbs up on the mast of the shrimp boat and the shrimp boat is caught in a hurricane. and he's screaming at God. Come on. Give it to me. Give me everything you got. You know, I can take it. You know, come on, come on. And he's really suicidal. I mean, or he's, he's challenging God to take him. You know, and he's been a guy who has been really challenged with a lot of post-traumatic stress, you know, guilt. Because he walked his platoon into an ambush that day and people got killed and hurt. He's, He's living with that, that it was his fault, that that happened, and he's just saying, bring it on, bring it on. And he survives. And if you remember, the funny scene afterwards is like a news reporter saying, well, the hurricane came through and it destroyed all the shrimping boats, every boat except for one.

And it, Forrest Gump and Lieutenant Dan's boat, and they end up with all the shrimp. shrimp and they become millionaires. So it's a beautiful story. If you look at the story of Lieutenant Dan, it's a, it's a beautiful story because he's somebody who's dealing with a lot of guilt and pain, sadness for what happened to him. Yet, it's a happy ending, right? It's a happy ending. And the DAV wanted to recognize me for that, for playing a Vietnam veteran with a happy ending because so many movies up to that point that were made about Vietnam and the Vietnam experience when you look at them, you're questioning whether that Vietnam veteran is going to be okay at the end of the film. If you look at coming home, for example, the film

coming home, at the end of that film, Bruce Stern, who's suicidal, you know, because of what he went through, he takes off his uniform and goes into the ocean and swims out and he's never coming back. I mean, he just goes out there and dies. And if you look at the end of the deer hunter, for example, you know, Chris Walkin takes his own life. And, you know, look at the end of platoon. Charlie Sheen is flying out of the war zone after a huge battle and he's looking down. He's in the helicopter. He's looking down. He's looking down. He's seeing. and all these dead bodies all over the place. Tears running down his face and you just go,

I'm not sure he's going to be okay. But at the end of Forrest Gump, at the end of the Lieutenant Ann story, he's okay. He's moving on. He's successful. He's wealthy. He's in business. He's married.

He's pressing forward. And I always say that's the story that we want for everybody who serves their country and gets injured in battle. We want them to come home and be okay. And so I took, I kind of took that charge to try to, to help our wounded veterans to have that Lieutenant Dan story, that happy ending, that pressing on that let's, let's put the war years behind us and move forward and be okay. You know, I think that's what the DAV recognized when they wanted to show those, that story and recognize me for playing that part.

Gary, I can't help but to feel and to notice that you're still tuned with all of the emotion that you felt from that time and from your service. Am I missing, misreading that, or are you kind of in the throes of the emotion right now as well? You're right. I mean, I think your original question was, how did I feel? Yeah. And yes, you can tell it's something that I live with every day. I remember it every day.

I remember those feelings every day. I remember the thousands of wounded folks that I've met over the years. I remember those feelings every day and what it was like to hear their stories. And I remember what it was like to go on on that stage and look out in that audience and see 2,000 wounded veterans cheering me on. And, you know, standing back behind that door, I didn't know what I would feel when I walked down on that stage. But when I did and looked out into that ballroom, the emotion just took over. and that was that was as meaningful an award as you could ever get from people that really were

living the character that you played and portrayed you know as a you know fictional character yet they wanted to recognize me for that and that had more meaning than than anything and it was very powerful and somebody videotaped the moment that I walked out on that stage and spoke to the crowd, and it was overwhelming emotion, for sure. I was stunned. In fact, the chapter in the book, the very first chapter is called stunned, because I was kind of stunned and bowled over by what was happening that day. I think what I'm marked by right now is that you carry the emotions, okay, to be a great actor, you need to work well with emotions, and not to do what most people do is hold them back because they feel so overwhelming, or to be music.

with just a handful emotions that are more tolerable or acceptable or safe, like frustration or, you know, somehow that those are safer to use, which is unfortunate because it's such a narrow scope of all the full range of emotions. But listening to you and to even now 30 years later to still have the emotions be part of your experience, I think there's something just below the surface that we can all learn from you. And then to feel those emotions on stage 30 years ago when you're being recognized and then say, I'm going to do something with this for this is kind of the mark of purpose. And I am also curious about from all of the lessons that you've learned from people in uniform, is there a story or a moment that sings at the high table of changing your trajectory? Of course, this moment was on stage, but I'm also wanting to understand if the moments where somebody said something to you or didn't look at you or didn't address you, or is there other things that come forward that have helped you on your path?

Oh, there's many, many, Mike, so many, too many to. How long do you have? I mean, I could tell you one story after another of the people that I've met and the people that have profoundly impacted. That was truly an impactful moment being in front of 2,000 wounded veterans. I mean, I'd never done that before. That was all brand new. And then after that, I think that was a seed that was planted because it wasn't like all of a sudden the next day I'm out there and, you know, doing it. I think the work that I'd done in the 80s, that impact that was made on me after playing

Lieutenant Dan and the letters that I would receive from veterans and the times that I would meet veterans, especially Vietnam veterans, that was all leading up to September 11th. And there's another chapter in my book called Turning Point. And that chapter is the September 11th chapter. And it was indeed a turning point for me toward a greater call to action. After that, terrible day for our country. And the reaction that so many had to raise their hand and go sign up to serve our country and go off to war and get injured and we started losing people, I just felt like I was teed up to a greater call to action. And that's when I started really moving from self to service. In fact, right before September 11th, I was on Broadway. and I was doing

one flew over the cuckus nest on Broadway with Steppenwell Theater we won the regional theater Tony Award that year for best revival and I was nominated for Best Actor, didn't win that but it was a successful production

that closed July 29th and six weeks later our country was attacked that ended up being the last play that I did I haven't done a play since because, as I said, all of a sudden, I felt called to a greater purpose, and I just started reacting to help the men and women who were themselves reacting to what happened to our country on September 11th. So I started visiting them in the war zones with the USO and going to the hospitals

and all that manifested itself into the creation of the Gary Sinise Foundation. Finding Master is brought to you by Momentus. When it comes to sustained high performance, it's not about hacks. It's not about tips or tricks. It's about consistency. Small daily commitments that support how you want to think, feel, how you want to show up. That's why creatine is one of the few supplements I take just about every day. And now Momentus has made that even easier with their new creatine lemon single-serve travel packs

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shelby stanger this podcast features stories from people who took the path less traveled and brought their wildest ideas to life shelby has always been fascinated by those who buck the norm and choose an unconventional path on wild ideas worth living you'll hear from those wild ones, some familiar, some new. Whether they're walking across America or crushing new records or summiting mountains or breaking down barriers, they're all chasing something wild, something that they are passionate about. And my hope is that tuning in may just inspire you to do the same, to explore your edges, your frontiers. So check out wild ideas worth living wherever you listen to your podcast. The 80s and 90s were just setting the stage. And then when our country was attacked,

And the images that happened on that, you know, that I saw on that day, like so many of us witnessed on television. And that just started me on a quest to try to play a role in helping our country through that. And I thought because of the veterans' work that I'd been involved with in the 80s and 90s and, you know, starting to hear about service members deploying to Afghanistan. getting hurt, families losing loved ones, Iraq, you know, the difficulties there. That was just calling me to do something. You know, what does an actor do? You know, well, I reached out to the USO and I just said, I want to go visit our troops. I want to go support them.

I want to try to help them through these difficult times because we were seeing people get hurt. we were seeing people get killed. And it was difficult for me to just sit there and do nothing. And so I just started reaching out where I could and eventually started going on trips. And I remember the very first military hospital I went to was in August of 2003 in Germany. And what we have a hospital there called Lansstool Medical Center. And Lanshtoel is where if you're hurt in Afghanistan, Iraq, someplace like that, You will be flown to Germany, and you'll go to Landstool first, and you'll be stabilized, and then you'll be sent somewhere back home, either to Walter Reed or Bethesda or Naval Medical Center or Brook Army Medical Center, and you come home, and then you continue your rehabilitation there. Well, I went to Landstool was the first time I saw wounded soldiers and Marines and people that were

fresh off the battlefield. And I remember pulling up in the, I was very, very nervous to go to the hospital because the last time I was in a hospital was when my grandmother died. And it was hard to see her like that. And I did not like hospitals. And so here I am. I'm driving in the bus to go to Landstool Medical Center to see people that had just been blown up like two days before. And now they're in Germany. And I was very nervous about it. And we pulled up in front of the hospital and as soon as I started to get out of the van, a big bus pulled up and soldiers started pouring out of the hospital and unloading the wounded out of this big bus on stretchers with wires connected to them. And these were all people that just landed on the airfield in the C-17

and the trucks went out there to get them and now they're going to move them into the hospital. I'm watching our incredible men and women do their job, getting these wounded folks into the hospital quickly. And that was impactful. And then I went into a room and there were about 25 or 30 wounded service members in there. They were going to fix them up. These were injuries that weren't so severe that they would be sent home, but they would be patched up and sent back to the battlefield. And I walked in there. I had a little USO hat on.

I had some glasses on. I didn't really look like, you know, a tough guy at Lieutenant Dan. I looked like a kind of a nerdy guy with a hat and in glasses. And I didn't really know what I was going to do. And all of a sudden, somebody saw me. And it was very quiet in that room when I walked in. All of a sudden, somebody saw me. And they started screaming Lieutenant Dan at me.

And then the whole room started looking at me. And all of a sudden, it went from this somber, quiet, you know, pressed room to everybody standing up and coming over to me and wanting pictures and wanting autographs and wanting to talk about Lieutenant Dan and oh God, give me a, you know, and the whole mood in the room changed. It was wonderful. It was great. And I walked out of that room to go upstairs now. I'm going to go up to the very severely wounded who are going to be sent home. And I remember, you know, going into that room of 30 people, I was very nervous. And when I walked out, I thought, wow, I just changed the whole, just all I did was walk into that room,

showed up, and I changed the entire mood of these soldiers who had just come from the battlefield, saw their buddies get killed, saw other people get wounded. You know, they were dealing with some tough stuff, and yet I walked out and they were feeling pretty good when I walked out, and I felt like I just did something important. And I left that hospital feeling like, wow, all you got to do is show up, you know. I didn't really do anything. I just went there, you know, but walking into the room, I showed them that I was there for them

and that I cared about them, and that set me on a path to just do that hundreds and hundreds and not thousands of times over the years. You know, of course we need science and technology and engineering and math, STEM programs in school. But STEM without steam lacks a humanity. And what a case you're making for the arts. And what a gift the arts have given you and you've given the arts.

And in return, people like me benefit. And even more so, people that feel seen by the roles that you play so eloquently. Evidence by when you walk into a room, they know, they know that you're Gary, but they know Lieutenant Dan. Wait, I think many of them didn't have. I know I was Gary. They just, at that time, the time I'm describing right, they just knew Lieutenant Dan. They didn't even know what my real name was.

They just knew Lieutenant Dan. Over the years, you know, it's change. But at that time, I wasn't that well known. I just played a couple of parts. They knew my face as Lieutenant Dan. And Lieutenant Dan was here, and it made him feel better. So you obviously have dedicated your life to service. And it sounds like you're, you know, the purpose.

was really starting to congeal for you and, you know, it was, you were down that path even more. It was like you're getting these kind of lightning rod experiences that were reinforcing this, this inner experience that you wanted to be of service and in service. And then, I mean, this is like a transition that I can't imagine, which is then your wife gets sick. You've got your own battle on your home front between, you know, your wife and your son and and can you help me understand how you've worked through that process and maybe explain Moyers Condition and Max Condition for the listener. Yeah, well, thanks for asking, Michael.

In 2018, my wife was diagnosed with stage three breast cancer, probably about May of 2018. And in August of 2018, my son was diagnosed. diagnosed with a very, very rare cancer called Cordoma. So it was like a one-two gut punch, you know, within months of each other. My dad had had a stroke not that long before that, and he was struggling. And it was, you know, it was a challenging time. But continuing the mission of service, you know, through my dad. and his disabilities and everything that was happening with him was helping me, you know,

to be able to kind of manage the caregiving and what needed to be done to help my dad and my mom. And then when my wife got sick, having done this now for many, many years and seen so many families going through difficult, challenging times with their loved ones in the hospital. hospital, right? I had been to the hospitals multiple times, and I'd seen some of the most horrific wounds that you can imagine, you know, very, very difficult things, you know, the people surviving, getting blown up, you know, and all the, all the scars and, you know, traumatic brain injuries and blindness and amputations and everything they go along with that. I'd witness that multiple times and I'd seen these families persevere through great challenge, you know, multiple surgeries. I mean, I've seen and met, you know, wounded service members

who've had hundreds of surgeries over a period of time. They're in and out of the hospital constantly because of infections and different things that are happening that have to be adjusted. And so their families go right along with them. And there they are in the hospital with them. And I'd seen that so many times that now, you know, my dad needs help. Now my wife needs help. And especially my son needed help. And I think having been through that so many times with so many families, I mean,

And remember, I mentioned there was a time where I just did not want to be in the hospital at all. You know, I didn't like hospitals, didn't want to be in there. But the more I did it, the more I went to kind of lend a hand and to show support, and the more I could see that those visits were positively impacting these families and these wounded folks. I wouldn't say it got easier because it's never easy to see somebody with half his head gone or, you know, burns all over their bodies or whatever it is. It's, that's hard. That's hard to witness. And I have taken other celebrity pals with me to the hospitals and they couldn't go, couldn't go back, you know. But I knew that, you know, I had made a difference in their lives and they had made a difference in mine because I had seen. seen them just persevered through such tremendous challenge that when it came time to

kind of face those things on my own, I think God prepared me for this, you know, in a way. I had been prepared and I was able to kind of manage, kind of better manage the health challenges that my wife and son were going through than I would have if I'd never done that before, if I'd never been to the hospitals before, if I'd never met any of these families before, that somehow they gave me a lot of strength, courage, knowledge, you know, what to look for,

how they were persevering through these things and seeing them go through it over and over and over just gave me a lot of courage and a lot of strength to do it myself. And it was very, very difficult. Thankfully, my wife went into remission after surgery and radiation, and chemo.

Our son was a different story. His was an incurable rare cancer that, you know, there's maybe 300 cases per year in the U.S. About 70% of the time they can remove the tumor and it's gone, it's cured. But we were in the 30% where it came back and spread. And once it does that, there are no drugs that, you know, they haven't developed any drugs to fight this particular cancer. So you just try a lot of different drugs on it.

And I watched my son courageously fight that battle for five and a half years. And for folks that are not familiar, cordoma, meaning core, like spinal core, it's a rare bone cancer that starts at the skull or the spine. And one of my dear friends was just diagnosed with it. we coached together in the Seattle Seahawks and he went in and he's you know he's like god my back hurts you know it's like it's like he's pointing you know towards kind of his parispinals like between his shoulder blades and so he went in for you know soft tissue work and some chiro work and like it's not working and they gave him some some pain medications and then at some

point somebody in the process goes you need an MRI because the stuff is not working I think it was an MRI. And he goes in, did his study. And as he left and he's kind of in his car driving home, the technician called and said, hey, listen, I'm not really supposed to tell you what to do, but you need to get back in here and talk to some docs. I just called some docs. And so, you know, boom, straight away, pulled it out. It's huge. And so he's going through it right now. Michael, how is he doing? So they did the operation. They took the initial tumor out, when?

Yeah, I would say two and a half months ago. It's about, so he's not really walking yet. He will. He's standing for a little bit, and he can kind of move around for a little bit. But, I mean, you know better than anybody just how brutal anything on the spine and skull can be. And so, but more importantly than that, Gary, like, I feel like I can't let myself imagine my son developing something that would take his life before me. And so I don't, out of all of the right places of dignity for your son and I'm compassion for you and your family, what can you pass on to the rest of us to better prepare us for the most tragic of life events? You know, none of us as human beings escape suffering.

Suffering is a part of the human existence, a human experience, pain. It's part of our experience, loss, grieving. We all go through it. I can't tell you how many people I've met since I kind of went public with the fact that that we lost our son, the number of people that have been through that themselves that have reached out to me is it's a great number. And it just reminds you that this is just part of life. It's an unfortunate and sad part of life. If we get through without too many health problems in our lives, then we've done pretty damn well, you know. But most of us, as human beings,

go through something either personally ourselves or we're right next to somebody who is going through it and so there's no escape you know there's no escape from that so what what are we left with after that we're left with how we manage it finding master is brought to you by square one of my favorite local surf shops here in southern california they started really small just a few boards a tight-knit team, and a vision. And over time, they've grown into something really special. But what stood out most to me wasn't just their gear or the community around it. It was how effortlessly they ran the business.

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plus an extra $50 off on us because great sleep, it's just too important to leave to chance. We have a strong faith in our family. My son had a strong faith. He was exceptionally courageous and graceful in how he dealt with it. And that was a motivator for me as the primary caregiver for my son Mack to keep me strong and keep me fighting on. for him. And somebody in the family needs to be, needs to manage the situation, needs to be a helpful manager because there's so much that goes along with fighting a rare disease like that with the appointments and the scans and the medications and the, you know, the radiation and all these

different things that you're constantly trying and then you're and then you're managing side effects every single day about something. Oh, we tried a new drug. Now there's a new side effect. Now there's a side effect from the drug that we are using to manage the side effect. So, I mean, you're constantly adapting, just like you're fighting a war. You know, I felt like my son's battle buddy, right? I'm in the trench with him, and he's wounded. And he can't, you know, he's doing his best to fight, but he can't. And so I'm, I'm, I'm doing the fighting for him to keep him alive and to keep the enemy from overrunning us, you know, and you're, and you're kind of working hard to do that. But what, what choice do we have, you know, we either, you know, it can either make you fold up in a fetal position on the floor and try to escape it.

But there is no escape. So what do you do? You have to fight back. It's like anything. We want to do that not only for the loved one that we're fighting for, but for everybody else that's being affected by what we're going through. And I knew that in my particular case, if the family didn't ever see me feel like we were losing the battle,

then we were always going to be in the fight. right and there were only a few times where I crumbled down with my wife where I was feeling like I didn't know what to do because it was getting worse and with cordoma metastatic cordoma is what we ended up with where it spread in this particular case with our son his case was very unusual because it's a slow growing tumor. Like your friend, that tumor very likely could have been, it was growing there for years and years and years. It's slow, slow, slow growing. And with our son, it's likely it could have been growing there since birth because it starts in the spinal cord. His was on the sacrum and the coxas, the base.

of the spine and it could have been there i mean for for you know he was 27 when we finally diagnosed it and it could have been there from from birth just growing very slowly but what happened after it came back was the metastases was spreading uncharacteristic it was so uncharacteristic because it would usually spread slowly there were cordoma patients who had the metastatic cordoma situation happen, there was one patient who survived for 20 years, you know, dealing with that, you know, because his cordoma, even though it metastaside,

it was still localized to one area. Max, boom. It started shooting everywhere. Mac had tumors all over his body, and you could see a bunch of them, and they weren't getting any smaller. The more drugs we tried, we kept looking at those tumors.

They weren't getting smaller. And in the back of your mind, you know, hey, this is getting worse. In the front of your mind, you're like, what's the next drug? What are we going to do next? How do we, you know, we've got to, so I was always thinking,

even though we start one drug, I'm already on to what's the next thing we're going to try. and you just stay in the fight. And, you know, it is a hard thing. But if you don't fight, if you don't give it everything you got, if you don't try to, you know, keep that loved one around as long as possible by giving it your all and showing them you're not going to quit, you want them to remain strong.

You want them to have a better day tomorrow than they had today. you don't want them thinking about cancer all the time. So you think about it all the time. And I was just trying to be the one who thought about it so that my son could just watch TV and read his Bible or read his books or listen to his podcasts or, you know, think about music, which he ended up doing at the end of his life, which was just a magnificent thing that happened to us in the last year of his life.

Yeah, before we get to the music and the gift that is still being given through you in his music, before we get there, where are you in your grief cycle or your grief process? That's a good question, Michael. I'm like all of our family. I mean, am I, am I. crying every day. No. But can I? Yes. Yes, at the drop of a hat as something, you know, like anybody

who misses somebody who they love so much and lost, you know what I'm talking about, you know. I do. Just one, yeah, you know what I'm talking about. One little thing or one little moment or song, a smell. All of a sudden, boom, you're choked.

I was choked up with my wife last night because I was talking to her about one thing and, boom, all of a sudden it's coming out. So it's ever present, you know. Gary, what do you do when it comes up, you know, like when you're with your wife? Do you, more often than not, do you let it flow or do you try to keep it contained? How do you work? How do you work with the emotion? there well in the beginning you know you're all crying together all the time all the time right the whole family is crying every day every moment all the time and you're trying to get through there's

you know the funeral arrangements and there's the this and the that and all the things you got to do and you know you deal with and um and then six weeks after mac died i i wrote a story and i wanted people to know he worked for the Gary Senees Foundation he loved the foundation we lost him so I posted a story on the foundation website and we got thousands and thousands of comments and and notes back and it was it was very helpful and as time went on Michael what you kind of you learn you know you start to manage it a little bit a little better as time goes on and where the family would all be together and we all be teary-eyed, you know, at the same time, now maybe it's dad's turn. Dad's choked up right now about something. The daughters put their

hands on my shoulder and just let me have that moment, you know. They're not going to go there, you know, at the same time that I am, you know, but there's going to be another moment where dad is wrapping his arms around the daughters and the wife and the family members and the friends that are going through some tough stuff, and you help each other through, and it's management. For me, the grief, you know, it's always there. I miss my son more than I can,

more than I can articulate, really. Thank you, Gary. But the emotion is always there, And it's a little bit different for me, Michael, because Mac had this music thing that happened in the final year of his life, where he went back and finished a piece of music that he wrote in college. And he hadn't been thinking about music at all because he's been fighting cancer. And he couldn't play drums anymore. He was in a hospital bed. He was disabled.

He's paralyzed from the chest down. And he had a big giant tumor on his nose, another one here, another one here. He had him, I mean, he was struggling. But in early 2023, he said, Dad, I want to finish this piece of music. I never finished it in college. And I've been thinking about it. And the fact that he said that to me, I remember I'm standing in his bedroom. He's in a hospital bed.

He's on a breathing machine. I mean, it's all this stuff. We had to have all this medical stuff for him. And just out of the blue, I remember I had my back turned to him, and he started talking, and I looked at him. And he said, do you think some of your band members would help me work on it? And I just, I remember feeling so good that he was talking about music again in the midst of all this cancer stuff.

And so I said, absolutely. So some of my band members scurrying to go get every little instrument. Yeah, of course. It was like, are you kidding me? And so he got in touch with my violin player and my violin player. And Mac was our, he was our number two drummer. If my drummer couldn't be there. Oh, he was.

So he had some chops there too. Mac was an incredible drummer. That's how he started. And he went to USC music school. And he went in as a drummer and came out as a just a great musician composer. And so he would play with my band if my drummer couldn't be there. And so my band all loved Mack. The first time he played with us, he was 15 years old.

And he was a great, great drummer. They all loved him. And so he knew all of them. And he went to work with my violin player, Dan Myers, on this piece a little bit. Then my piano player, Ben Lewis, came in, started playing the piano. You know, Mac would give him the stuff. Ben would lay it out on a recording, send it back a Mac. He notes would be flying back and forth.

In July of 2023, he had teamed up with another buddy from college, Oliver Schnee, who was a fellow composer, and Oliver helped Mac finish this piece. They went into the studio, July 17, 2023, and recorded this piece called Arctic Circles. and it's at Maxinez YouTube. You can see the recording session and hear the music at Maxinez YouTube. And you can see Arctic circles. You can see Mac play in harmonica on the great American classic called Shenandoah. And other original music is on there. Well, that started him on a quest to make a whole album.

So he made an album called Resurrection and Revival that he finished. It was all finished in December of 2023, and Mack died on January 5th, 2024. So he heard all the music. He designed the album cover. He never got to actually hold the record, but he designed it all. And the record was finished after the first of the year. We put it on sale at the Gary Senese Foundation because he wanted the proceeds of the vinyl to go to the foundation.

We made about 500, and within the first 24 hours, we had 1,000 orders for the record. So now we've sold almost 9,000 vinyl records of Resurrection and Revival. And after we lost Mack, I started finding all this additional music that he wrote. So I did another album called Resurrection and Revival Part 2. And between the two records, we've sold almost 9,000. VINALs. In May, those two records were among the top 10 most downloaded albums in America on iTunes. Yes, yes, yes. I mean, it was number six and number nine, just for that moment

in time, you know, because people are constantly downloading, so that list changes all the time. You're going to get a bump with this one, too. I love it. I'm looking at our producers. They're all crying. I'm looking at our team right now. They're all crying. Like, you've got me, you know, in tears as well, Gary, like the way that you have shared the spirit of being a caregiver as a battle buddy, as somebody who kind of steps in to fight the fight, I think you just change the way I think about caregiving. I've always had a hard time thinking about that part of me, but I can get in a fight for somebody. But the caregiving, I've always had like, I don't know. I just, I haven't, I haven't been in that situation.

I don't know. But you just, I think you just opened this massive aperture for me. And I think that our community is going to stand up for no other reason other than just support you and Mac and the, the arts. And I know that you're going to get massive amounts of bumps and sales here, too. So, thank you. Oh, you know what, Michael, I mean, you would, you never, you never know what's coming around the corner.

I mean, you know, any minute, any minute. anything could happen to any of us or to somebody we love and everything like that. But you would do what you need to do. You know, what do you need to do? I mean, what's the important thing to do right now? What's really necessary? Who needs you right now the most? You know, and my wife and son needed me the most. I kept doing the mission of the Gary Seneese Foundation because they didn't want me to stop doing that. But I stopped acting in 2019, the last The last role I did was December 2019, and 2020 became the most difficult month. Finding Master is brought to you by Fatty 15.

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Fatty15.com slash finding mastery and use the code finding mastery to get 15% off your first order. Again, that's fatty15.com slash finding mastery. And the code, finding mastery for 15% off a more resilient future. Mac was walking through 2019.

He continued to go to work at the foundation. He started a podcast for the Gary Sinanese Foundation. but 2020, he had two major surgeries to remove tumors from his spine, additional tumors that had grown on his spine, and it disabled him. And I could, you know, luckily, I'd been fortunate in my career, and I, you know, did well on CSI, New York, and made some money, and I tucked it away, and I could afford to just focus on what was critically important, which was trying to keep. my son out of pain. And this cancer was painful for him. And I was just trying to keep him

out of pain and to help my wife. And they never wanted me to stop going and play in concerts for the troops or doing that work. But I had to shift. I had to shift the priorities a bit. And I had to rely on my team at the foundation to do a lot more because I was not going to travel as much away from home. And you just do what's necessary to try to keep someone healthy and feeling as good as possible and to try to have a good day today, you know, and that's all we were trying is what, let's hope we have a good day today, you know, for him. And I knew I was, I was important to, to help and make that happen. And when he started doing the music and when I went into the studio and I saw him, he's sitting

there in his wheelchair, listening to the orchestra. You can see that piece on his YouTube for Arctic Circles. It's a gorgeous piece. And watching Mack, he's sitting there with the score in his lap, and he's working. His buddy is up here, and they've worked on this piece together, and now the orchestra is playing it for them. And I hadn't known anything about it. And I sat there listening to this thing with tears rolling down my face.

And my daughter was there. mom was there. My wife was not feeling good that day. She couldn't be there. But we were there and it was all recorded on video. And now we have, there's several videos that are on his YouTube channel of music from the first record and from the second record. And the fact that people are listening to the music, they're buying the music. It's helping the Gary Seneesh Foundation. That's what Mack wanted. You know, he continues to contribute to helping our veterans by sharing his music and now I'm working on another album, part three, because I found more music. So your original question way back when was how do I get through it? How's the grief process

and everything? And I know that these projects have been a big part of helping me get through that. You know, I feel like I'm sharing Mac and I'm bringing things to life that he never could do, but I'm doing it for him. And that's a good feeling. who you Gary what a life what a conversation that you've invited me and us into thank you for sharing your pain and suffering thank you for sharing the way that you orientate your life or service to others thank you for changing the model in me about caregiving Thank you for being an emblem for a great family man. And so it's not lost on me right now what you are sharing.

And I can't remember the last time I felt this shook in a conversation. And it's not something that you've done to me in that way, but it's happened through me. And so I just want to say thank you for the words you've chosen and the way that you've shaped your life to be an absolute. alignment of the beauty of love. And so you are fully aligned, my friend. Yeah. So I can't wait to go watch you play live at some point. I know that we almost made it happen down in Tennessee, but at some point I'm really looking forward to it. So Gary, yeah, thank you so much. I mean, the foundation is the right place for people to go to support. Also the music, you know, would be a fun place to support. And maybe at some point,

you know, when you go on your national tour, we can follow you that way as well. Well, I'm hoping that at one point I can go around the country and have different orchestras play some of the music. There's orchestral music. There's jazz. There's all kinds of music here. And I'm hoping to do some events around the country where we share the music for a broader audience. We're into help. Whatever, Finding Mastery, we're into help. So keep us on your short list, my friend. Yeah. Gary, what are you? What a great gift. Thank you so much. My pleasure, Michael. Thanks for having me.

Next time on Finding Mastery, we're joined by Caroline Marks, Olympic goal medalist, world champion, and one of the most electrifying athletes competing today. In this conversation, Caroline and Mike go beyond the podium into the emotional side of competition. How she deals with pressure when everything's on the line, why trusting her tight inner circle matters, and the surprising mindset shift that helped her come back even stronger. Join us Wednesday, November 19th, 9 a.m. Pacific, only on Finding Mastery. All right. Thank you so much for diving into another episode of Finding Mastery with us. Our team loves creating this podcast and sharing these conversations with you.

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