Working to keep your restaurant going during Coronavirus | Strange Donut's Owner Jason Bockman

About this episode

This is one of the most emotionally raw episodes in the corpus. Jason Bockman, owner of St. Louis's Strange Donuts, opens with a genuinely remarkable small-business pivot story — posting a Venmo QR code when the NBA canceled its season and getting 71 orders in five minutes, then reinventing the business daily (adding local beer, chips, hand sanitizer from a partner brewery) to keep every full-time employee working. But the conversation turns sharply personal about a third of the way through, when Bockman describes a two-hour episode of intrusive suicidal thoughts while power-washing his deck, disclosed here for the first time to a wide audience. He connects it explicitly to his brother Mason's suicide nine years earlier, and articulates with unusual clarity the mechanics of depression and isolation ("that voice wants you alone... it doesn't want you to talk to anybody else") and the specific fear driving him — not fear of failure privately, but of "failing at a more public level" given how many people depend on him and see him as the positive, funny guy. Vance meets this disclosure with genuine reciprocal vulnerability rather than deflection, sharing his own fleeting ideation and framing depression's core lie as "the fear that moment will last forever." The episode closes on a lighter, more hopeful register — Bockman's father's practice of reframing poverty-era ramen dinners as "ancient Chinese food" as an origin story for his resilience and storytelling, the Coca-Cola WWII sugar-rationing parable about scrappy leadership under constraint, and a genuinely uncertain, humble prediction about hospital capacity delivered secondhand from a BJC doctor friend who compared bracing for the surge to villagers awaiting Genghis Khan.

“In five minutes I got 71 orders... I couldn't turn it off quick enough... people from, like, somebody from Japan, somebody from Canada, somebody from New Zealand just sent money saying, hey dude, we love you.”

“My dad was like, hey guys, we're gonna make a special ancient Chinese food for dinner. And it was ramen... my dad shielded me mentally from how bad things were then. He framed it in a way that I looked forward to eating this 7 cent dinner.”

“I called one of my friends and I was just like, I forced myself to like get the first opportunity to say, hey man, I'm thinking I had thought of killing myself and I couldn't shake it.”

Key moments

• early ~5-12%: The Venmo/donut-delivery pivot story — 71 orders in five minutes, becoming an ad hoc community relief effort.
• middle ~28-32%: The "ancient Chinese food" ramen story — a vivid, specific illustration of a parent reframing scarcity into a positive childhood memory.
• middle ~48-58%: The core disclosure sequence — the power-washing intrusive thoughts, the brother Mason's suicide nine years prior, and the shared vulnerability exchange with Vance. This is sensitive, first-person mental health content and should be handled with care in any excerpted use.
• late ~70-78%: The Coca-Cola WWII rationing parable as a framework for scrappy leadership under crisis constraint.
• late ~90-95%: Bockman's secondhand doctor-friend anecdote comparing bracing for a COVID surge to villagers awaiting Genghis Khan's approach — a striking, specific image for institutional dread under uncertainty.

Notable quotes

“My dad was like, hey guys, we're gonna make a special ancient Chinese food for dinner. And it was ramen... my dad shielded me mentally from how bad things were then.”

“That's what I try to do is like... people want to kill the moment. They don't want to kill themselves. They want to kill that moment that they feel like will never end.”

“I feel that I have a little bit of an understanding to what the villagers felt when Genghis Khan was approaching.”