Brian O'Hare was raised to be an investment banker, a senator, maybe president. Instead he became a Marine infantry officer, then an actor, then a National Book Award-adjacent author, then a Farsi-language film producer — and along the way decided that the richest thing a person can have isn't money, it's people. Hollywood O'Hare might be the most quietly wise conversation we've had all season.

We met Brian through Graham, a mutual friend and filmmaker who wouldn't stop telling us we had to talk to him.

We cover the Doritos commercial that nearly broke him, how he met his now-closest collaborators on the worst film set of his life, six years in the Marine Corps and the Persian Gulf War injury that still shapes his daily life, his short story collection Surrender and the National Book Award judge who chose it, producing a Farsi-language film that premiered at the London Film Festival, growing up under a Vietnam-vet father's shadow and getting "bad career advice" toward the Naval Academy, the early-90s Seattle music scene he lived inside of, raising two kids in LA on purpose, and a tattoo his 11-year-old son helped apply.

LINKS
Surrender by Brian O'Hare — Syracuse University Press
Rizu (referenced film, streaming via The New Yorker)

REFERENCED
All the Right Moves (1983 film)
Chaz Bojorquez — LA graffiti/lettering artist

TIMESTAMPS
0:00 — Cold open — technical difficulties, Silver Lake, and painful honesty
4:00 — Meeting through Graham, and what makes someone "the real deal"
9:00 — The worst commercial shoot of his life — and how Graham and Ryan saved it
14:00 — Being "the dad on set" — presence over performance
19:00 — Refusing to bifurcate work and life
25:00 — Surrender, the National Book Award connection, and six years as an actor
29:00 — Producing Rizu, a Farsi-language film that premiered in London
32:00 — The Persian Gulf War, oil fire clouds, and living with 70% disability
37:00 — What richness actually means — Wall Street money vs. people
42:00 — Bad career advice — his father, the Naval Academy, and Danang Harbor
48:00 — Early-90s Seattle — free beers, Capitol Hill, and a genre being born in real time
54:00 — His daughter's design degree, his son's music, and a tattoo shop in LA
1:00:00 — Peaking at the right time — mortality, his father's early death, and what's left
1:03:00 — The walkaway

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The Most Interesting Person in the World — hosted by Rush Witt & Joe Keller.