Well, so I'm a big subscriber in this idea of fire ready, aim, right, just get started. Just take that first step. Just go outside. You know this. I think we all get stuck sitting around. Subconsciously, our legacy hardware and software is avoiding discomfort like it kept us from falling off cliffs and freezing out in the snow and drowning. And the sooner you recognize that, that's just like old hardware that you don't need because you're not going to get attacked by a lion when you go outside or drown in the rain.

And so if you can change your mindset to, like, embracing tough stuff and committing to it, you just have a better life. Just take that first step and that first step leads to another step. And before you know it, you get it done. That's Joe DNA. And this is Episode five, 67 of the Ritual podcast. The Rich Roll podcast. Hey, everybody, what's happening? And happy holidays, welcome to the podcast. The gift giving season is upon us.

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Dautrich Roll Dotcom. No promo code required. OK, so. Those of you who've been with me for the long haul know that I like to end the year and begin the next year on a high note with some solid inspiration, some bankable life advice, and just the right amount of kick in the pants to reboot the operating system and get your body, mind and soul correct aligned so you can actualize the best of what you've got. Finally, convert those aspirations into reality.

And this year is no different because today's guest is undeniably one of the toughest humans, one of the most accomplished endurance athletes and one of the most successful entrepreneurs that I have the good fortune of calling my friend. His name is Joe DNA. And if that name sounds familiar, it's likely because he is the mastermind behind the global Spartan race phenomenon. Some might also know that he is the evil genius behind the death race. I'll let him describe that one.

But what not enough people appreciate, I think, is just what an utter machine this guy is, an absolute endurance freak who in the period of just one week completed the Vermont one hundred mile run, the Lake Placid Ironman and the Badwater 135 Ultra in one week. Think about that. He also completed 50 Ultra's and 14 Ironman events in a single year, which is a certain kind of insanity and has to be some kind of record. And he once ran from New York City to Vermont on basically a whim.

But this hussle, his relentless pursuit to push the envelope of possibility isn't limited to athletics. It shows up in all areas of Joe's life in business, beginning in high school, cleaning mafia don swimming pools in Queens, it shows up in academics. It took this guy four times to get into Cornell and it shows up in service by way of this kind of beautiful open door policy that he maintains at his Vermont farm, where he puts all comers, any who dare through what can only be described as a Lehmann's Budd's program, like a brutal routine that we talk about today, as well as this commitment that he has to leveraging his race series platform to help millions of people live healthier lives.

Joe is truly an amazing human. Again, he's a friend and his extraordinary story is coming up. But first, we're brought to you today by Blankest. I love larding. It is kind of my job, which is amazing, but I'm also crazy busy. So aside from preparing for upcoming podcasts, I find it difficult to carve out the time to sit down and take it to the next level, to continue to learn to learn more and more and more to combat this.

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OK, Jo Jo DNA, the man, the myth, the legend, the questionable masochist. Today's conversation is, of course, about Jo's journey. It's about his insane athletic accomplishments, his passion for endurance, his unique relationship with suffering. And it's also about Joe's colorful life path, his Goodfellas esque upbringing in Queens, New York, his natural born entrepreneurial inclinations, the car wreck that redirected his life and his impenetrable focus when it comes to accomplishing his dreams.

But more than anything, this conversation, which I think is super relevant as we enter into the New Year, is about turning quitter's into people who commit. It's about why doing hard things makes you better, happier and healthier, and it's about catalyzing radical transformation. This, my friends, is a no B.S. zone. Joe's message is one hundred percent experience based and paired with the many practical tools I think you'll find fundamental in helping you shatter stagnation and beat analysis paralysis.

My hope is that his words propel you to craft your own challenge for this impending New Year. Something extraordinary, perhaps. And more than anything, I hope you dive headfirst into it. Or, as Joe says, fire aim.

Ready. So it is with that that I give you the one you know, Joe. Right on that, so good to see you. We've been trying to make this happen for so long and it's taking forever. I don't know how much got to be three or four years. I think the last time I saw you, I did your show when you guys were hosting an event at Dodger Stadium.

Yeah, I think I like a last minute. Hey, Rich, go over to the stadium and we caught it. We did some foot, did some filming, and we knocked out a podcast. Right? We did a podcast.

And then I did a little shooting with you for that documentary.

What happened to that documentary?

It's done is off the editing room floor, however you'd say it, and getting ready to be pushed out.

What's it called? What the fuck is your exit strategy?

And the idea is and it probably I know it pisses you off. What are people thinking when they don't need help? They when they don't act healthy. And so, like what? Like we talk about exit strategy in business. What's your exit strategy from the planet? Like, I do plan on living in a hospital for the last 20 years.

Like and that title came about because how a mutual friend of ours called Forsman famous writer, invited me to breakfast with Larry King one day.

And so I'm sitting there and I mean. Snarls Yeah, I'm having a salad.

And Larry is pouring I mean, pouring sugar all over this bowl of cereal as I kid.

What are you doing with the salad? And he goes, I like this. I got a colonic every day. And and I just thought, fuck I what's the exit strategy? This so and it came from there.

So is Cal like the protagonist. Is he he's who were like taking this adventure with. Yeah. We took the adventure with him and he was impossible to deal with.

And unbeknownst to me, you know, twenty years earlier he did or maybe 30 years earlier he did it with Jacqueline.

And I think that was really good for an article or for film. But then, like most people, falls off the wagon when. Right when there's no reason to be taking care of yourself. Huh.

I just remember him being sort of obstinate in the interview, like pushing back. And it's like, come on, man, what do you, you know, get on board here.

I listen, I fought my in-laws when I met my wife. I my mother, by the way, my mother in the 70s was into yoga, meditate all of a sudden right into and she fought the whole world.

And so there were no Whole Foods or yoga journals back then.

So I watched the push back.

And and it's I mean, it's pretty maybe not in California, but the pushback is massive everywhere to this idea of just take care of yourself. Yeah, I mean, look at look at covid in the U.S. versus everywhere else.

Yeah. I wanted to ask you, I mean, it's got to be brutal right now for disaster with Spartan, but how are you keeping this thing from capsizing?

Hmm. You know, when it first happened, I became friends two years ago, skiing with the owner of Saks Fifth Avenue. He owns Hudson Bay Company, which is the equivalent of Saks in Canada, Saks Fifth Avenue, incredibly successful guy.

And when it was all going down, I was with Gerard Butler. Check this out. I was with Gerard Butler. I was in Sparta, Greece, for the twenty five hundred year anniversary of Thermopylae.

The movie was based on the battle at the Marbella and Trump closes the border. And at that moment it became very real because up until then we had close a few races in China.

I close if you race in Japan, but it was like no big deal, this time over in a jiffy. And I'm in Spada.

And the country gets shut down and I call my friend from Saks and I'm like, what the fuck? And he says, he goes, You've got to preserve cash.

You've got to preserve cash. You've got to protect, you know, the employees that you can. And you've got to stay in touch with your customers. And thank God I had that phone call on March 13th, 14th because because I would have just like I mean, we had five hundred one people working for us. I got three hundred and twenty five events shut down overnight right around the world. And you can't keep paying people and bills and all these things and and lawyers and you know better than anybody, the lawyers and and not have revenue coming in.

So, you know, I am ashamed to say I thought I didn't listen to the advice of him. I didn't listen to the advice of my friends that run hedge funds. I thought come July one, we're back. Right. The world is back.

Well, we've never seen anything like this in our lifetimes. There's no reason to think that we wouldn't be able to get over the hump and get back to some level of normal.

And I'm an optimist. I mean, our whole business is based on optimism. Right. And I just thought. Yeah, well, here we are. So did you have to lay off a bunch of people? Three hundred and fifty people furloughed and and I think we just did a few more silver lining and all this as we became a lot more efficient as an organization.

There were a lot of deficits in our company that we never tended to technology CRM Ekom go down the toilet, things that we just didn't have time for, put three hundred twenty five events.

And so we're becoming much better in those areas. But it's really a race against the clock. It's, you know, if we're back on next year and we're allowed to put on events. It's going to be great. Yeah, but but I just don't know, I mean, China, we just we two weeks ago had 10000 kids at a Chinese event in China. China is back in business. They got vaccines. They cost 30 dollars USD. You and I could go up to the corner store and get a shot in our arm.

But outside of that.

Yeah, so you can ramp up in China. I can ramp up in China, but but the US was 50 percent of our business in Europe was twenty five percent of our business. Right.

So China does not offset, but it gives us hope that if China is back and they were three or four months before us and shutting down maybe three or four months from now, we'll be back.

Yeah, we'll see. We'll see.

You know who fucking crazy. I know. Crazy. Crazy.

Well, what I've noticed in you just from a distance, is this kind of pivot into really a media company, like a content platform, like suddenly you're blogging all the time and you know, you're suddenly there's videos from you like every single day.

I know you have gone I've gone a little nuts. I apologize for that. We lock down on the farm in Vermont. Yeah. That's where this whole thing was started.

My wife and I had our four children.

I don't know how to say that, but politically correct, she birthed four kids on the farm. I think you're allowed to say that. Yeah. In in Vermont, along, we had cows and chickens and goats.

And that's where Spartan was started. As soon as I got back from the Thermopylae thing I just described it as part of Greece, landed on the farm. Hold up with an Olympic wrestler. That's another whole story, a video team, a bunch of people on on the Spartan team, trainers and so forth. Twelve, thirteen of us. And we just started filming every day because there was nothing else to do.

Right. I like preserve your cash, protect your employees and stay in touch with your customers.

So just film, film, film, film, film, because I like to work and we couldn't put on events.

And so that's why you keep the brand strong and you keep people excited about what Spartan is and they hear it from you directly.

Yeah. So just lots of filming, but as you know, it drains your energy levels because you like right before we just started this podcast, anybody listening or watching, Rich and I were talking regularly.

As soon as the filming started, you perked up your chest came out.

Yeah. And you were like trying to be normal, man. I only supposed to relax.

No, but we both did it. Yeah. You don't even notice you're doing it right.

So it just sucks energy out of you. Well, I just notice like this is I think this is the fifth podcast I've done in the last seven days. We're on a bit of a tear and it's draining now. I'm like, you know, I don't know, like how Rogen does, you know, four or five of these things a week.

Maybe it's because he doesn't prepare, but like I prepare, like, I put a lot of energy into it and I want it to be this amazing experience. And when it's done, it's kind of like an athletic event.

Then I go home and I crash is now like, yeah, it's like it is it's own kind of endurance thing. And it does take even though it's not physical, there's an emotional like energy toll that it takes.

It'd be easier. I think you'd agree with this. It would be easier to go for a run. Oh for sure. Right. Yeah. And your mind is working, but your body, your breathing, you're sweating.

And this is all so I can control that. You know, with this, it's sort of like there's an aspect of trying to, you know, have guardrails up and direct it in a certain way. But at the same time, you have to like, let go and allow it to be what it wants to be. So there's a vulnerability with that that's different from going out and pushing yourself where it's just you and you, no doubt.

Yeah. And so and so I just went through, you know, let's call it one hundred and twenty days straight of filming on the farm every day. And something cool happen this weekend you might not know about is once we realized, hey, this is going to go on longer than we thought, there's going to be much more painful than we thought. We've got to lay off more people.

I said, you know, we need an event. We need we need one event, something to show our community, seven million people that like we're still here and shit still happening. So this past weekend, we brought twelve women, twelve men from Crosthwaite, from triathlon, from the NFL, Spartan, and we brought them all together to find out who's the fairest of them all. And we held and my team came up with the whole thing.

I can't even tell you all the names of the athletes that were there because they ripped my team, organized.

I just wanted to have a sporting event and they came up with this whole thing and they actually they actually wouldn't allow me back on my own farm because I need another covid test here.

I was outside my own farm while this was going down, but we had a Highland Games type event. We had an ultra run, we had a triathlon swim, we had a mountain bike. We had a Decha event, which is our almost gym product, if you would, a combination of the Aerodyne bike and the rowing machine and and all that. We had a Race to the Top in the mountain and we had a Spartan race. And I don't want to give an.

Anything away, but you would think you would think that the specialists in each one of those areas would win their area and I'll just leave you with this. They didn't.

Yeah, that's interesting. Yeah, that's fascinating. I would suspect that the person that comes out on top has a lot more to do with their mental fortitude than their physical prowess or their athletic gifts.

It's so funny you say that because I was I was thinking and you correct me if I don't have this right, but I thought, all right, let's let's let's let's set some one of the items we're going to measure strength, speed, endurance, athleticism. And then I said, wait, but you've got to also measure resiliency and grit. Yeah, right. Because because some of this is going to require resiliency and grit. And when you look at without me giving it away who the winners were, they were the ones with the resilience and grit.

Uh huh. Yeah, 100 percent right. Because I don't know how long this thing.

So that's going to separate the wheat from the chaff. Right. That's like a reality show. It was so bad.

The networks were so frigging unbelievable. I'll tell you what we'll do. I'll get you some. Nobody's seen any of this. I'll get you some clips for this podcast. We weave it in that you can leave it in that no one's seen before because I just it's just so unbelievable. You can't even imagine what went down. It's a show.

Yeah, that's cool.

Well, I want to take it back. You're your back story. So epic. I mean, it's cinematic. It's like its own movie. It's just a crazy fucking story.

It's a crazy story.

You're quietly, like such a beast in terms of endurance stuff that you've done. Like it's insane. I feel like that gets overlooked. But let's go back to the beginning.

Back to Queens. Hmm. So if anybody I've seen the movie Goodfellas out there, raise your hand. Most people have seen it, right? Ground zero for that movie was the block I grew up on.

I'm trying to remember the exact address, but 84 Street, 140 9th Avenue in Lindenwood Queens or Howard Beach, Queens, Jamaica. And for whatever reason, a bunch of wise guys located on this particular block and their game, their profession was was stealing from Kennedy Airport.

And that's what's portrayed. That's exactly what's in the movie as it's exactly what's in the movie.

And so there wasn't a morning that went by where I didn't wake up with my sister and we'd go down into the garage and there was a new big box on a pallet of things there, like it could be leather ski gloves, five hundred pairs could be Adidas superstar sneakers, heisting the cargo trucks that are coming in and out.

Yeah.

And so it was very common to go shopping. We were young, my sister and I at this point, my friends. But you'd go shopping in someone's house. It wasn't like you'd have bought a store. You went to someone's house and there was all kinds you don't know as a kid what this means.

Anyway, we grew up in this in this crazy neighborhood. My parents are getting along. Everything's fine.

Your dad part of that or just the neighbors? So the way I'll answer it is my dad had a trucking business in in the airport, eventually a fairly large warehouse and air freight business.

And it was hard it was hard to be in that business unless you couldn't be in that business unless you have some relationship or some relationship with it.

Yeah, but I will say my dad no B.S. My dad was amazing in that his thing was if you go in that direction, you waste so much energy and so much time and you can't spend the money because it's not legal, like you'd be better off putting all that time and energy into a legitimate way, a legitimate life.

But but I'll say that, like, if you grew up there and you come from that place and you're in that it's pretty hard to not be in it. It was nobody not in it. Right in that neighborhood. Right. And I can't go deeper than that.

But but I got it. You got it. Yeah. So. So. And it's very few people left. So anyway, my parents are getting along.

My dad starts making some real money and we move 15 blocks south of where we were, which is a better area.

And our neighbor is the head of the Bonanno organized crime family. 15 blocks up and around the corner is the big boss of the Gambino. And there's four of the five family heads are living just around us in this area, 15 blocks south of where I where I first grew up.

And my mom goes into her mom dies of cancer. My mom goes into a health food store to just explore, like, is there another way to live rather than, you know, cannolis and raviolis and pizza. And she just didn't feel health. And she was to watch her mom just die. She walks into a health food store.

She's probably the only health officer on the entire East Coast at this point. And there's a yogi like an 85 year old yogi that just landed at Kennedy Airport, probably from India in the store. And she starts talking to him and somehow he convinces her that she's got it all wrong and she's got to become vegan. She's got to start meditating and she's got to take up yoga and how to breathe in cold showers, all the stuff we talk about now.

And she comes home and she throws out the sausage and peppers and like, literally transforms the house, which ultimately leads to divorce.

Your dad's losing his shit with this everybody we are as kids, because if you're listening to this, this sounds somewhat it was not that was that was not at all.

She might as well just landed from Mars. Right. That's how crazy the stuff was that she was preaching.

And so they get divorced and she moves us back north to that 15 blocks.

Right. So my sister and I are down there for about a year. My dad's at the other house and then she's just not fitting in. Nobody's getting this thing that she's preaching. And she moves to EPICA, New York because that was like where the hippies were and they're educated, but she's going Moosewood. She's going to Moosewood. Exactly. It was that was a big part of our life. Yeah. And and I'm kicking and screaming. My sister's kicking and screaming.

We don't want to leave our friends in the neighborhood. And any kid would feel this way.

And I'm attracted as a young boy. I'm attracted just like all the other boys in town are to the guys with Cadillacs, the guys with suits on the guys. What rolls one hundred dollar bills in there. But like, we kind of know what they're doing and who doesn't want to be that. Right.

And what is the difference between the wise guys you see in the movies, whether it's Goodfellas or The Sopranos versus like your real life experience with these guys?

There's really there's really no difference. I mean, from my perspective, at that age, no one's ever asked me that. They were a lot more quiet in in in real life.

But a film has to give you the behind the scenes.

And so I, I you know what I mean? I was there were a lot more quiet. They didn't have to say much. They earn respect. You kind of you just didn't mess around.

Right.

Like you would imagine, but very much the same in The Godfather and Goodfellas and A Bronx Tale.

You go like they did a really good job if you're from there, like they really captured the mannerisms.

Sopranos Not as much. I didn't feel it in The Sopranos, but but in those other movies.

And the thing that you get is this idea that that even though they're outlaws, they still have, you know, these rules in this code that they live by.

And, you know, there's certain aspects of that ethic that are laudable.

Right? It's not all bad. Right. And so as a young kid who's impressionable, you see the bling, but you also see there's a value system there that you can kind of hang your hat on, definitely hang your hat on it.

Things got taken like everybody runs into a problem in life. Everybody runs into a problem.

And so here, if you're sitting in, he's taking care of each other. Like I remember running to to the boss next door as I got older and let me go backwards. Mom moves to Africa. My name, my my dad falls on hard times. The seven market crash hits. All the things he's working on are starting to fall apart a bit.

And the neighbor sees this and he says, you know, and I'm probably 12 years old. And he says, come over and clean my pool Saturday.

So that's a big deal, you know, get tapped on the shoulder and the boss wants me to come over and clean the pool. So I go over and clean the pool and he sits me down and he gives me three lessons that day. And he says, look, if you're going to be here at eight a.m., you show up seven.

Forty five on time is late on that thing. I'm at Stanford. Right, right. Yeah. He says I'm an MBA. Yeah.

If you're going to clean the pool, I want you to clean the lawn furniture, the shed, the windows, whatever it takes. Make yourself invaluable.

All right. That seems fair. And three, never ask for money. You'll get paid if you do a good job. Don't have your hand out. And unbeknownst to me at that moment in time, he's grooming.

He's seeing here's a hardworking young kid. Right, right. And then he gives me another customer, you know, two houses over who happens to be connected to him. And then I got another boss's house. And before you know it, I've got 700 customers. Right. I pay for my own college. How old are you at this point?

Well, I started at twelve. By the time I graduate college, I'm twenty seven hundred customers. It's a it's a multimillion dollar business at that point and it's all these guys that's crazy. It's all I could walk in anybody's house. And so I'm feeling this is great right now.

Everybody trusts me. I've taking care of. I'm taking care of you get in trouble.

So that was my point. So so my dad is telling me and he's right. Stay away from that life.

But you find yourself even if even if you push back on that life, make fun of that.

I say that's ridiculous. Those guys are terrible. You find yourself in a situation where, like somebody owes you money or you did whatever it may be, and then all of a sudden it comes OK to ring their bell. Right. And say, hey, I need a favor. Right. And then you're in it once.

Once they do that favor for you, they're in it. That's and technically, because he got me in the business like I mean, I couldn't say no to anything. Right. Right.

But once you did, you call upon those guys to do some favors for you and then did you find it difficult to then extricate yourself from the whole thing?

Well, so, yes, I asked for favors often because people owed me money.

And I remember saying to Joe once a guy called me sixty thousand dollars and he said, bring this bottle of champagne over to his house and just let him know it came from me. And so I go over to the house. I don't ask for the money, I just say, hey, Joe, Joe asked me to drop this off. And he literally goes over to the wall, takes a painting down, opens a safe like in a movie, grabbed sixty thousand in cash and handed it to me.

There wasn't even we didn't even I didn't even know it was right.

It was. And there were a few incidences like that. Now, now to the second part of the question. Did you find yourself beholden?

I guess I got lucky in the sense that Giuliani came to be. And then one by one, all these guys that for business, they all started to go to jail.

And and so I didn't I didn't have a long tail.

And that was good. Right. Right. Right. I didn't know it at the time.

Be right back with Joe in a flash. But first, a word from Joe. The new cutting edge light therapy modality for enhancing performance, recovery and well-being.

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So where does Cornell come into the whole thing. So it kind of in the middle of the pool business, right? Yes.

I'm running this business. I'm feeling great. It's growing. I buy a backhoe and a bobcat and I got a building and like like it's a real business.

Yeah, right.

And my mom's letter never go. So I have to spend a lot of time and have to go with Mike. That's where I live.

And I've gone back and forth running the business by my dad's house, going back to mom and I'm leaving high school and figure going back to run my business.

No intention to go in college. I didn't have, like most families where they bring you on to college. It was no. Even though I lived in America where Cornell is, no one told me anything about school and my grades weren't that good.

And my friend says to me, hey, why don't we go to Cornell and I'm two months from graduating high school.

Yeah. And I said, well, how would we go to Cornell? And he said, my dad's a professor, he'll get us in.

And that made perfect sense to me because I grew up in the neighborhood where you'd have a guy and he would get you into a restaurant or whatever. So this is like, yeah, we got us in the.

So we both get dressed up, we do our interviews, we do everything we're supposed to do, it's going to be a shoo in and neither of us get accepted.

And now I now I was intrigued, like, oh, we have a guy we can't get in. And I you know, now I'm intrigued in this thing. And, I mean, I can't do it now.

Where does that come from? Because that's that's just born and bred into you, probably a neighborhood thing like like when we let's go back to your conversation about resiliency and grit in those athletes. In this neighborhood, these guys went to jail, they got killed, and that was just part of the job, right.

And then if and then if you were running a somewhat legal business, you owned a local pizza place or a trucking company, whatever, you hustled, you were up at 5:00 a.m. The diesel trucks were running.

The pizza place was second generation, third generation. They were making, you know, I mean, like, everybody just just hustled.

So probably comes from that. It probably comes from just seeing this, like, you know, fuck that. I'm going to get this done. Like, there's no right. There's no no right. Right, right. So you get the no, we get the no.

And I'm debate now. I want to go and I'm debating going back to run my business. And my friend says, listen, my dad just said we can go extramural. We could take three classes each. When everybody else gets matriculated into Cornell, we could take three classes each. They'll do five. We're not official, but if we do well, they have to let us in.

Logical.

So I said, OK, you know, we'll do that. I said, when I go back to Queens to run my business this summer, I'll go to St. John's. It's in my route anyway. And all the pools I clean in the work I do, I'll stop in St. John's, I'll take a couple of classes, I'll learn how to study and. And then. And then when I'm going to Cornell, if we get in, I'll have gotten my five classes done.

I won't be behind the other kids.

My friend says to me, that's ridiculous. If we're going to if we're going to hustle in September at Cornell, why don't we go to Vegas all summer and party. Right? Right.

And that was a divergence right there. And that was a real big lesson for me on like delaying gratification. So he heads to Vegas. I had to St. John's. I run my business. We both meet up in September. We do our three classes.

We do very, very well. I get to A's in A, B, M for me and Ivy League school. Two days I never got to ever and reapply.

They definitely get in and now they don't accept us. Right. And now I'm even more invested. I did my classes at St. John's. I just studied my ass off and they didn't accept me. And the woman, the admissions woman says to me, listen, we'd have everybody and their brother, you know, trying to get in here.

If this was allowed, you're going to have to go to another school.

And then after three years, it like it's like a college or somewhere else and then apply. And I was like, maybe you didn't hear me.

You know, I want to go here. All right? So I'm going to do it again. And she's got to let me in. And so he diverts my friend taps out. You go back to Vegas, he goes back to Vegas, he goes, do you want to be? And I, I go back, do another semester, do well, reapply. They don't accept me. Do another semester. I do. Well don't accept my my fourth semester I'm broken.

I finally hit my limit my business.

This is this is your own death race. Yeah.

It's my own death race and and I'm, I'm just feeling like my business is doing well.

I got all these white like I don't need this right. I need the headache and I tell my mom, you know, I'm going to pack it in.

And she was probably bragging for four semesters her son was going to Cornell, even though I technically was not a Cornell student.

And she says, go meet my yoga.

She teaches yoga. My mom at this point in the living room and she said, go meet my yoga student, Professor Anita Racin. She might be able to help you.

I don't know. Uh huh. And my mom was the last person I would have asked, like, for a connection because she was crunchy and bohemian and my dad would have had the contacts. Anyway, out of respect to my mom, I go meet Professor Anita Racin.

She said to me, down looks at my grades. You asked me a bunch of questions. She says, you know, I run a department within one of the schools at Cornell Textiles.

We study textiles and there's ninety two women in the department. There's no men. Do you like textiles? I was like, I love textile, even though I didn't even know what a textile was like, I'm in.

And so she finally accepts me in and I end up spending the rest of my time at Cornell studying textiles, which if I had to do it again, I would do because I could watch any movie from any era and tell you based on hemlines, what, what, what time, you know, when that was.

Yeah. When that happened. What years. Where were you at Cornell then. I entered in eighty six.

Graduated ninety.

Uh huh. So you left right before I got there because I went to law school. Cornell OK. Yeah that's cool. I was there ninety two to ninety four. Nice.

You were out there but and you got in legitimately. You didn't need the first thing I was. No well legitimately sort of. I was the last person admitted to the law school class off the wait list.

OK, so I showed up like I didn't think I was going to law school. I got in at the last minute. I was living in New York City and packed a bag and tried to figure out where Ithaca was and showed up. And everybody been studying all summer. And I was like, what am I even doing here? Because I had already decided I wasn't going to go. And it was like a very spontaneous decision. And you liked it when you arrived?

I mean, I liked being I was getting out of control in New York. So I like being in a structured environment and I like school and the law school, it's kind of like the shining there, though, because it's so fucking cold and you're all in this one building and a lot of the one else live in a dorm that's attached to the law school.

So they never go outside.

So it gets a little weird and incestuous.

But I'd basically just spent most of my time at Rudolf's I, I, I barback at. Oh you did. Yeah. I mean I was there like four nights a week. I was gone by the time you got there. But I, but I think I made sixteen dollars a week. Right. And that's tough when you're making money now mid six figures or whatever you're making in the pool. That isn't exactly.

But it was, it was good for me. It was a way for me to mingle and meet other people while I like to work. Obviously you're hearing that my and my story and rather than wasting time just drinking I which is the way I looked at it, I was I was around it while I was working and getting paid so I could have used you in my orbit back then.

Man, I need a little discipline at the time. Cool. So then you get you get out of Cornell, but then it's back to the pool business.

So first of all, anybody listening that doesn't know Cornell and correct me if I'm wrong, Rich, but the law school to me feels most like Cambridge or Harry Potter, at least from the outside. It has that law.

Yeah, right. So I'm about to graduate on time, which was unbelievable because I was so far behind from those four semesters. And I take Professor Ben Daniels class at the Graduate Management Management School MBA program. Right. You did a combine. Yeah, like I didn't do the combined.

They didn't accept me for the combine. It was just I clearly was not smart enough for this whole thing, but but I was allowed to take a class. There are a lot of people took the entrepreneurship class at that school.

And as part of it, we all came up with a business plan and we presented that business plan to a panel of judges. And I won I won the Five Thousand Dollars award that came from the owners of Reunion Wines. They were awarding every semester five thousand dollars to the best idea, best presentation. And the judge, one of the judges was an Italian guy. And being from the neighborhood I'm from, I clicked with him and I bought him a bottle of Sambuca.

I brought her over his house and we got to know each other. I didn't buy the winning slot, by the way. I just got to know him. I got to know.

And and he said, what are you do when you graduate? And I said, first of all, what was the idea that allowed you to win? So do you remember at Cornell and many colleges, they had champion branded sweatshirts with the silk letters sewn on the front? Sure. And they were fifty dollars or forty dollars.

And I just thought the way those sweatshirts were made, where people would buy the champion sweatshirts, the stores at Cornell would buy the sweatshirts and then they'd have a couple of seamstresses because I was studying textiles, wood. So those letters on and I just thought I could make them in Asia, I could make them for each school. I would change the wristbands. I'd add a little bit of Lycra so they didn't blow out because everybody would roll up their sleeves, wear those things a couple of times and they were done.

They would blow out. And so I had this idea for a better cut sweatshirt that was cut and sewn in Asia, labeled in Asia, and they like the idea. So they gave me five thousand dollars to do it.

It's amazing you didn't go into becoming some huge garments. I should have.

Yeah, I should have in retrospect.

But but so he says to me, what are you doing when you graduate?

I say, I'm going back to the neighborhood. I got this business. He says, You're an idiot. I said, What do you mean? He said, You have a work ethic. I can see it. You can talk. You should go to Wall Street. And I didn't really know much about Wall Street.

I just knew the eighty seven crash. And I just decided that, you know, I want to run my business. God, it was becoming a really big name back then. And I was plugged into that that whole thing. And he stayed in touch with me. So I went back to the neighborhood. I run my business, kept building it up and he stayed in touch. Me he called me. This guy called me every month on the month.

Have you sold your business yet? Have you gone to Wall Street?

No, Al, stop calling me every month for like thirty five months. Wow. OK, and and finally he convinces me, he calls me one day he says, hey, I'm going to give you a stock tip if you're not going to listen to me to give you a stock give. And I never bought a stock before. I was busy running my business.

And he says, I want you to buy this stock. Syntex. So it's probably like 1990, 93, 94. Why you buy the stock?

Syntex. Again, I don't I don't have an account, I don't know anything about it that day, I'm going to pick up money from a pharmacist, one of my customers, a pharmacist who owns a pharmacy, and he must know about this pharmaceutical Syntex ring his bell.

I'm going to pick up my check. And I said, hey, my buddy just told me to buy the stock Syntex, because I can't believe you're bringing that up. I said, What do you mean? He says, I was just taking a shower. I was taken over by some today. And he brings me in the house and he hands me my check. He owes me a lot of money.

And we had done more than that was like one hundred and forty grand or something like that. Right?

Yeah, because because then we were not just doing swimming pools, we were rebuilding houses, doing patio work, etc. and he said to me down, he calls up his broker and he says, hey, you should, you should you should buy ten thousand shares of this thing. Fourteen dollars share one hundred forty grand. And I you know, I'm a pretty he goes, you're single. If you don't, you know, you're making a lot of money right now.

If you if you lose it, it's no big deal when you're married and you've got children. So anyway, he talked me into it. I buy 10000 shares. Next day, the company gets taken over. I made one hundred thousand dollars and I was like, I'm going to Wall Street.

Right. This is a hell of a lot better than cleaning swimming pools and having to chase my money and bring bottles of champagne to get to safe to open. And so anyway, that was it. I sold my business to my employees. They still run it today. They're multimillionaires. They're great guys. And went to Wall Street. Wow.

I had to take a serious pay cut initially. Right. Big pay cut.

I went down to thirty five grand a year and and then thought I was a genius and started trading trading stocks and options and lost most of the money I had accumulated up until then, but then dug myself out and figured it out and ended up building a business and started my own firm where we, we executed orders, believe it or not, for the JP and Morgan Stanley, Goldman Sachs Bank, America's they were our customers.

I says, why?

Why would the big banks give business to a poor guy like and I just learned in the neighborhood out of service customers how to do a good job, a better job than whoever they were using people skills. I had good people skills. We hustled if we had to take a loss on a trade, kind of like clean the windows and clean the shed, even though you're only getting paid to clean the pool, you don't ask for money. If we had to lose money, we lost money just.

And then there was one secret weapon I had which nobody had. My neighbor who ended up going to jail had a table at a restaurant in in Harlem called RAYOS Arias.

You see the sauce in a lot of stores that from that restaurant.

It's from that restaurant at that restaurant only has ten tables. It's been around since like the twenties. You can't get a table at Ralph's.

Denzel Washington's in there, the head of New York Stock Exchange. Then there are a couple of wise guys. You cannot get a table at RAYOS.

I had a table because my neighbor went to jail. And and so that definitely helped my Wall Street business because I was able to bring potential clients to Terayon. And that's. Yeah, that's so hot.

And so where does the endurance impulse start to enter? You got this guy in your building, right, who's running stairs and shit like are you just gaining weight and feeling lazy or where does it begin?

Yeah, well, well go way back. My mom introduces me to like she's running marathons. She introduced me to this transcendence run in Queens.

I don't know, one hundred but yeah, I had Sanjay Rouxel on the podcast. You made a movie about it. Yeah, exactly. Yeah we did. Yeah. We gave money to that movie simply because of that connection to my mom. Huh. So anyway, she introduces me to that race. If you're listening, it's thirty one.

A devotee of that was one of her Guba right. Yeah. Xibalba was another guru. And so for those listening, there's a there's a race in Queens, New York called the Transcendence Run. It's one mile loop thirty one hundred times, takes fifty to sixty days to complete it and about eight people every year. Right. Right. And so anyway, she introduced me to that probably Iron Man I'm seeing on TV marathons. But you weren't an athlete in high school, not an athlete.

I buy IBM. That is not considered an athlete by any means. But I was a crazy person on a BMX bike, like I would I would bike tens of miles on.

And it's hard to do that with one gear, a little bike. So that was the only those only skill I had, if you could even call that a skill.

So fast forward, when I was running the business on mixing cement, I'm laying brick.

We are working physically every day. So I've got that kind of endurance and it feels good.

Now I'm on Wall Street and I'm sitting at a desk and we're doing two or three dinners a night and I'm getting heavy and I'm feeling terrible. And I still don't want any part of yoga or any that crunchy stuff my mom talked about. But one day the elevator's broken in the building. I got to go up to 30 something floor, and so I'm taking the stairs and I'm huffing and puffing and there's a guy as fit as rich roll sitting here, right?

Like nearly as fit as you get out here. Rich is ripped and and he's carrying two dumbbells and he's going up the stairs. And his name's Mike, if I remember correctly. And we're talking in the stairwell and I'm intrigued. This guy, like he's literally a cover of men's health type guy.

Right. And he's got a shirt off. And and when we got time to talk, because we're going up all these stairs and he's carrying the dumbbells and I'm more out of breath than he is. And he says, meet me on the stairs everyday. We'll start training. And so that was the beginning. I started training the stairs. He introduced me to an adventurous I. I'd never heard of an adventure race, which was a three hour race where we kayaked, we biked, kayak, biked and ran.

I loved it, felt like I was mixing cement again and lambrix and doing construction work. And I was just like went nuts. Right. Went nuts. Like where's the next one, where's the hard won. Give me the hardest race in the world. And I just chased races for and it was my way of eliminating some of the stress I had on the trading desk and insanity.

And so I don't I don't know from like 98, 97, 98 to like 2005, I just went nuts.

I mean, you were on this ridiculous tear where you were flying somewhere every weekend to do something bananas. There couldn't have been that much training during the week in between with the work schedule that you're holding down. So the training and the racing become one thing. But I mean, in that period of time, I mean, it's I don't know if there's anybody else on the planet who participated in more insane races.

I went I went absolutely nuts. And I call it the Spartan paradox.

And maybe you found this as well, that the training's like you've got to embrace the training. Right. It's the journey that matters. But like, training sucks, like the actual race is kind of cool. Right. And I found that as long as I had a date on account, I always had I never fell out of shape.

Right. Kind of like, you know, a boxer gets a date on the calendar. He knows he's got to fight to start trainable.

Yeah. So I just clock's ticking.

Selfishly, I was like, if I just keep racing, I'll just always be in shape. Right.

I just never I never have to try.

But you took it to such an insane level. I mean, there's that one. There was like a one like four day, five day period. You did the Vermont one hundred hundred mile run. Then you get on a plane and you fly to Vegas and drive to Badwater and you do Badwater for an Badwater is a race we talk about all the time on the podcast.

Then you go to a wedding and then you go to Lake Placid and do the Ironman, what, like four days.

You did your research in five days or something like the hardest part of that whole week was the wedding.

My feet did not fit in the shoes. How do you go from running the Vermont one hundred to running Badwater. I mean the hardest. I mean I, I pace Dean Kernis. Is it that race. And it just it almost killed me just trying to support that guy.

Yeah. It was hot. It was one hundred and thirty seven degrees the day we did it.

It was hot, my shoes melted, my shirt melted and I don't know, I you know there's something amazing about the human body. The body gets more efficient. You would think, like everybody talks to me about, well, you got to recover or whatever.

And I don't know if this was the seventeen hundreds. Eighteen hundreds you and I would not like.

We wouldn't stop on a mountain with our horse and carriage and say it's recovery day to day.

You know, you just keep going and the human body just gets stronger or it dies.

And so I just found for me just get stronger like like my fastest time. That hundred mile run in Vermont, fly to Vegas, go to Badwater. My fastest time in that two hundred and thirty five miles was the last 13 miles up to Mount Whitney like that. I was flying so.

So that climb is brutal.

I ran that whole thing like a lunatic. I probably passed eight people. And just because your body gets more efficient, I'm no, I'm not a special athlete. All I did was BMX as a kid. I didn't. What the hell am I?

You know, so so the best part is how you finish the marathon in Lake Placid, though. Yeah. Yeah. Well, what happened was I'm feeling great in the swim. We get, you know, get there. I set an ice cream.

I'm feeling great, I'm feeling great in the swim. Right. Cold water and I'm crushed and I get on the bike. I'm feeling pretty damn good on the bike. And I'm like, you know what, this is going to be great. And within three or four miles on the run, I was dead.

I was smoked. And and I asked a couple of kids, I said, hey, on the side, do you have any aspirin, Advil? They said, no, we got beer and I don't drink. Can you beer?

And I drank one beer to beer. So I basically got drunk. I was eating hamburgers. I couldn't consume enough during that, during that marathon.

Yeah, but you got that done and done. That is so impressive.

And then you've gone on, you did Furnace Creek, you did this crazy like 350 mile thing. And Quebec. Back on the white bike, I biked from Vermont to the Furnace Creek start line, get out. Yeah, I was a 14 day bike ride.

Oh, my God, that was your train. I was training for that. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I just. I went nuts. I went nuts.

Whatever what I was a year where you did 50 Ultra's and 14 Ironman. That's got to be a record.

I was in a what happened? The reason that happened is I was in a bad car accident and I was thrown out the window at eighty five miles an hour. My leg was ripped out of my hip. So I'm laying in bed and the doctor saying, you're not going to be able to walk again, you know, crutches, wheelchair.

And I just kept going to different doctors till I got a doctor that said you'd be fine. And Lisa Smith, I don't know if you know her. She had gotten me into some of this stuff. So she called to say how, you know, how are you? I hear you got in a car accident. I said, look, it doesn't look like I'll be doing these adventure races anymore. Whatever she said, why don't we do Eichmanns?

And I maybe I had done one Ironman at that point and or maybe two. And she said, we'll just do every Ironman there is. It's like, all right, let's do it. Yeah. Because I was I was, you know, just out of the hospital. Right. My leg had been ripped out of my hip. And a lot of times when you're hurt, you see those athletes come back stronger. Right. And so that just gave me something to look forward to.

And I just I went nuts that year.

It ended that year ended because my wife was eight and a half months pregnant with our first child I was at and I ah, man, I had just like barely came in walking on the marathon.

I was just exhausted, as you can imagine, doing all those things. And she said, are we going to have a family or are you just going to keep doing races.

Yeah, I mean at some point, you know, it's like, what are you running from? You know, a lot of this is so nourishing because it's it's connecting you with yourself and your potential.

And there's so much to be learned about.

You know you know what we're capable of. Right. But you can also hide behind it. Like you can run from your life by just being in too many events all the time.

I was I had never been married before, so I didn't you know, I was learning that, navigating that. But for me, although you might have better insight into me listening to me, for me it was more about like I was so stressed out in business that whenever I got to a place where I was like just wanting water, food and shelter, it was so nice.

And I just liked getting there. Just like as long as I fall asleep in my soup at dinner, I'm happy. Is that makes sense?

Yeah, of course. Like, that's what it's all about. I mean, what do you think. Like what is it that that what is that experience for somebody who's never been in that position before teach you.

I guess for me, I needed to meet myself, right, I needed to find out who I am, am I tough enough? And I liken it to if I had a Ferrari in the garage and I just looked at it and I polished it and, you know, showed photos of it versus I took it out on the track and I raced it up against the you know, how every race, a race car, you get to see how it handles.

And so I was just, I guess, learning to see how how do I handle right. How do I do right.

And you get humble.

I don't know about you, but I gained integrity during all those those crazy adventures because I liken that to like a structural engineer that checks the integrity of the parts and pieces before he puts the building together. Like I was I was testing the integrity of my parts and pieces. And and I think when you've suffered like that, like you suffered, like I've suffered, it knocks the edges off.

Yeah.

And it's like, you know, when I meet a really tough wrestler or Navy SEAL or Delta Force operator and they've got a somewhat soft handshake, they're that way for that reason.

They've been through some tough shit they don't need to squeeze. Or is that makes sense or.

Yeah, I get that. I mean, I think when I think of, you know, like extend the car analogy like you're RPM's are running so hot all the time because when you get back from that race, you're in Wall Street, so you're burning it in a different way.

So there's no, like, recuperation. Like, it's amazing. You didn't just completely flame out.

Yeah, I had I had zero recovery.

But the other thing the the other thing is, I mean, I remember flying to like you'd be able to look this up if my memory is off.

But I remember flying wants to like South Africa to knock out an Iron Man, literally land on a Friday afternoon, put my bike together, wake up in the morning, do the Ironman at the finish line, take at the finish line, take my bike apart, put it in a box and leave and then get back to New York. Work however many days I had in New York, three days and then fly back to like Western Australia.

It's like it's like crazy.

What are people in the office thinking? Well, it cost me it cost. Yeah, right. Because then the boss, if the boss can't be fully present, I wasn't present but.

But that's the negative. The negative was I was showing my people that I wasn't really interested. Right. So that was bad for business. But but what was good for business was that became my brand name, everybody else's brand. The Wall Street was like drinking and partying, my brand. Which didn't exist, you know, at this time in the early 2000s, late 90s, was on the adventure guy that takes his customers to do yoga. Right.

And then nobody was doing that. Yeah, yeah, yeah. We climb stairs for fun. We don't we don't go drinking. Yeah, yeah.

What's so unique about you? And I'm sure looking back, you know, hindsight's 20, 20, but you're this weird amalgam of street hustler with this kind of blue collar, you know, aesthetic and also like the Wall Street pedigree.

But you also have the yoga hippie thing going on at the same time. And all of these things fused to create this unique individual like nobody else could be you or do what you do without all of those elements, like kind of congealing.

Yeah, I think about a lot is because we have four children now from 14 down to eight years old.

How do you make there was a great saying in ancient Sparta, like they need to be better than us, our children need to be better than us. And so how do you make how do I make my kids better than me? And they don't have the yoga crunchy mom and neighborhood and the wise guy next door. And, you know, they have a house where it's so organized for them that it's almost like it's a negative. Yeah.

You know, so that's the problem with, you know, becoming successful. Yeah.

It's like not good for the kids in some ways. Yeah. But you run in this crazy boot camp up in Vermont with all these people. Yes.

I mean, the kids could carry rocks. Right. And the kids, the kids could climb ropes and they but but they don't have a wise guy next door. That's right. You know, street wisdom. Yeah. And so I need to I need to figure that out there. Learning Latin.

How old are they now?

I've got an eight year old girl. Twelve year old girl at thirteen year old boy. Fourteen year old boy. Yeah. I've got two daughters. Sixteen and thirteen. Two older boys.

None of them are interested in any of this stuff. Oh really. And I can't get them interested. And it's and that's fine, like they don't I don't need them to be, but I find myself thinking, like, I would probably be better off, but I don't want to be the guy who's forcing them to do something that they really just are not wired to do well.

So I forced it and I continue to force it every single day. And my theory and we will find out if I completely fucked this up. But my theory is. They get they hate it, they hate it, they hate it, and then all of a sudden they score a goal at a soccer game and they see they're more fit than their peers. And then they hear from, hey, you're in pretty good shape, the coach that right.

Like and then maybe it starts to start clicks.

And and I think I'm seeing that happen. But I might be seeing what I want to say. So but I force it.

I force it every day. And I've been forcing it since my oldest was four years.

Yeah. So. Well, let's, let's take it to you. So basically, at some point you, you know, rip the parachute ripcord and you're out in New York and you decide to move to Vermont and it's going to be retirement.

Yeah. So I've got a picture of a red barn on the trading desk, probably because in Fargo, when I was a kid, I saw some red barn in a field. I mean, it was pretty idealogues, pretty nice. And that's what I'm visualizing the country to be. And I meet my wife and I'm like, I want to find a place like that on a I don't want to be around the craziness I grew up in. I want to get away from all these crazy people on Wall Street and and we're going to find a farm.

And so we find this farm in Vermont. Vermont was not in our plan.

And the mistake I made was I associated and this is like a JV mistake. I associated country like if I go this country with like but there's academics in Africa, right? There's there's there's a university there. You run into professors like it's a little more developed that like anywhere in the country would be like that, but it's not. Yeah. And so we we found a farm in Pittsfield, Vermont, a tiny little town. Four hundred residents eight miles from Killington, Vermont, the east coast largest ski resort.

And, you know, there's not a university there.

So there's a lot of negatives there, some positives to not a big crap, you know, but it's very hard to make a living there.

And so we bought this farm. My wife was willing to move up. We got cows and chickens and goats. And I started putting on races. I put trails on the side and I mean, we did unbelievable stuff.

But it's hard to convince people, even though it's only a gas tank away from New York, it's hard to convince people to come up to Vermont. But it ultimately led to me putting on a race we call the death race.

Right, right. So let's talk about this, because this is crazy and still exists. Right. Still exist.

And what happened was I was in Lake Placid, Ironman one year. I don't know when it was it was pouring rain like like you read about, I mean, crazy rain.

And for whatever reason, I think I had just gotten done with the eco challenge in Fiji where it rained like nonstop. I was at some race where it rained nonstop for ten days nonstop. And this is not going to make sense.

I'm going to sound like I'm bullshitting. But like I did that Ironman, it rained. I didn't even feel I did not even notice it was raining. I had just left, you know, twelve days straight, wherever it was of rain.

And I saw a bunch of top athletes, men and women, quit that race in the middle of it. It's not like twenty or twenty nine.

I remember there was one year where we just it was craziness. It had to be before that because death race started before that. So I, I said, this is ridiculous. The name of the race is Iron Man doesn't say like Iron Man except if it's raining. Right. Right, right, right.

And I grew up with a mom who meditated straight for thirty days. Like, this is ridiculous. You'd quit because of the rain.

So I'm looking for ways to bring people to Pittsfield, Vermont, anyway, to our new farm.

And I'm like, you know what?

We're going to have this race called the death race and it's going to emulate life. And it's going to there's going to be no rules. And it'd be like if you get out of the swim in this race and you get to your bike in a bike seat is missing. So what you got to you got to do with.

Right. That's going to be with this race is right, because that's what a CEO would do. That's what a startup would do.

But the mind fuck goes away further with this one in mind. Fuck, yeah.

So first year we dug Lewis Olympics, downhill skier shows up the Ashley brothers, two guys from Vermont.

I don't know one of these guys, two guys from Vermont who eat barbed wire for breakfast, grew up on a badass farm where the dad made him chop wood for heat.

Their whole, I guess tough guy's a teacher, a female teacher and a kid.

I convinced from Wall Street to show up about eight people, just like the transcendence run and they don't know when it's going to start. They don't know what it includes, but it's like hand sawing through a log, right?

Twelve chunks.

So they're there for like three hours, hand sawing through this log, splitting that wood, crawling through a culvert.

A culvert is a hole under the ground. This was one hundred and twenty feet long. That water rushes through that they could barely fit in putting together a wheelbarrow with Japanese directions and no tools.

Right. But the thing is, you don't tell them when it starts, how long it's going to go for, when it's going to. Or even what they're going to be doing. And no idea, no idea what they were getting into and and the two rugged Vermonter's and the Olympic downhill skier are battling for first and the teacher is everybody else quit that. The female teacher is in dead last by like five hours.

And we're trying to get her to quit because I can't manage the front of the pack 15 miles away from this woman in the back.

And she says, you'd have to kill me. Like she literally just would not quit.

Uh huh. So ultimately, the skier wins and the brothers come in second and then the female comes in third after the two brothers. And it just the race just became this thing. The New York Times picked up a story and they came and filmed it and the world got excited. And then all of a sudden, three hundred competitors every year would descend on Pittsville, Vermont, and the race got tougher and longer and crazier with every year.

So every year you're throwing something new at them, right? Like it's never the same. Well, you have like a did you have like a bus where you would stand there and say you can get on the bus and quit?

Oh, yeah, I did. So.

So what happened with what happened was the two brothers who I've since become great friends with, the two brothers from that first race, they had done lots of big races throughout their life.

They had these are tough guys, crazy races in the tundra, like they would have done really well in the seventeen hundreds. And they took on the persona of the death race.

After doing it that first year, they started to make little skull necklaces. They got tattooed like they were just into this.

And I started to see some of the videos they were creating and they were training specifically for what we had just done that first year. And I said, I'm not going to they're not going to do the same stuff the next year. I'm going to change everything. Right. And it broke them.

It drove them crazy because they had just trained for eight or nine month, whatever it was, to do exactly what they could put a wheelbarrow to go.

Now you're trying to figure out what their weaknesses are, Zack, throw something at them that's just going to derail their whole plan. Exactly.

Yeah. And so every year became what are they expecting? What are the competitors expecting versus what are we going to throw at them?

It's it's diabolical. It was diabolical. And so, you know, they would roll into town, let's say, on a Thursday night, getting ready for a Friday afternoon start, and they'd check into the general store and they'd have khakis on and shoes and they'd be with their family.

I'd say race starts right now that they haven't even signed a waiver yet.

We're going right now, grab an axe and we're gonna and and so it just became this this mythical thing that still goes on today. Right.

And there was a TV deal on the table at one point. Right. That didn't end up panning out. Yeah, we had many, many TV deals. We've had so many TV people come up from the Discovery Channel's, The NBC's, and invariably everybody gets really nervous with that word, you know, death, race. And it is it's a crazy race. Yeah. People have come really close to dying.

And so at how ironclad is that?

Is that wait for we make them in the way it says we will bury you on the property so that we might not even tell how is it?

You know, it doesn't get like a lot of media, though. You know, you don't hear that.

You get a ton of media like 2007, 2008. But then from there, Spartan was born, right.

And Spartan took over and then Tough Mudder and Spartan took over. The thing I mean, Spartans really born out of this idea. How do we take what's great about the death race and make it accessible for for the average weekend warrior and then scale it and formalize it and standardize and like like you're not going to find woodchopping one.

Right? Right. It was more military based, like standardized for Spartan. But but that race is my baby and I love torturing people.

And how many people show up these days?

It's still about 300 people. And how many people finish depends on the year, what kind of mood I'm in.

And I like how it's up to you. It's really up to me because because we could go till Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, and we could say, all right, we only want three people finishing. So so imagine you're four days into this. Just hypothetically, Ridgewell, is it four days and you can't see straight? And there's still twelve competitors. And I say to all twelve of you, I say, guys, I'm here.

We'll go as long as you want, but until we're down to three, it doesn't end and people start dropping.

Right? They're right.

It's like Hunger Games, like you're overlooking the whole thing going, how can I fuck with these people?

And it's so easy to break people once, once.

And what have you learned about the people that break glass?

Like what does it go back to that grit and the mental fortitude that is more important than their physical conditioning?

No doubt about it. You could tell right away the big muscular guys, they're out first. They're out first, and it's a CEO, it's a mom that just waits everybody out. You must get Navy SEALs and guys like that coming in. I lost the Green Beret out there once, literally lost. And we had search dogs, the whole thing.

We found them in the attic of one of my barns sleeping.

We had shut the whole race down looking for a Green Beret. We've got them all.

We've had every form of military may. All of them have come out to try to test themselves. But, you know, a lot of them quit in the first three or four hours.

Wow. Just like this is insane. This guy is nuts, right?

So Spartan race begins. I mean, you're up in Vermont kind of trying to be semi retired and instead you build this empire. Yeah. So I'm done.

We're having children. And this was going to be like my time to recover.

We talked about recovery and death. Race leads to this idea of Spartan race. And 700 people show up to that first event in Vermont and I happen to have Discovery Channel, there's a guy from Discovery Channel at that first event and he's seeing people across this.

It's just the three mile race. Yeah. And they're crossing the finish line. He's like, oh, my God, he's seeing the transformations that take place. And I'm not really paying attention to that because I've got logistical problems of any race organized. You're dealing with other stuff, toilet paper. And he's like, this is unbelievable what's happening here.

And that gives me the impetus. All right. We're going to put on a second race and a third race and a fourth race. And then fifteen hundred people showed up and then three thousand and then Tough Mudder came on to the scene. And so then I'm a pretty competitive guy.

It like that's like not getting into Cornell or I got to bury these guys and be the best.

I'm going to win this thing. And so if they were in the US and Australia, we're going to Slovakia. We're going to be I'm going to go to you know, I'm going to go anywhere they're not. And we're going to we're just going to win this war. And really that battle between Tough Mudder and sport and I think drove both of us, the founders, me and the founders of Mudder to to really build an industry, to build a sport out of this thing.

Yeah, the difference from my perspective is that with Spartan, there's this, you know, elite aspect to it where, you know, you're you're able to tap into a different caliber of athlete. And that allows the weekend warriors to compete alongside, like these people that are like, you know, who become the Amelia Bunz and the like who became mentally celebrate.

Yeah. And I mean, that was the difference. The difference was they Tough Mudder went out and branded it. It's not a race. Riot is an experience. And we're actually going to we're actually going to laugh in the face of people wanting a medal at the finish line. We're going to give an orange headband like that was their shtick.

And our thing was, if I'm going to do this, I want to make it a real sport. And honestly, it was a business mistake on my part because it was harder to build. What I was building was easier to build.

They were much more inclusive, like write a bunch of guys high five, and they could skip obstacles and they could just earn a headband and drink a bunch of beer. I was asking people to like train and work hard and if you didn't do an autopsy, you got to do 30 burping. Who the hell wants to do that? So. So I was losing the battle for a long time, but because I'm such just don't quit. We ultimately won.

Yeah. Yeah, we ultimately won.

That is your superpower. Just you're the ever ready battery. That's just never going to run out of energy.

My team my sporting team says I'm very much like a battery on your phone. That's like just out of juice but doesn't die somehow.

Like you're you're always at six percent. Yeah, exactly. And it just just doesn't die. That's funny.

The other thing that's cool about what you do is I mean, it would be. Normal for somebody like you who's so focused on building Spartan and all the things that you're involved in, to just be focused on that, but you've really you really opened up your farm and you have all these people that come through.

It's like this open door policy, like, hey, you want to come here, we've got a bunkhouse, stay as long as you like, but you're going to have to do what I tell you to. So you're still doing this kind of one on one coaching and mentoring. And there's been some pretty extraordinary success stories that have come out of that.

Yeah, I do it. You know, my wife hates it, right? Because I'm in when I think I invited three million people to the farm once. But people don't really you know, it's a little Tom Sawyer ish, right?

It's a little Karate Kid. Was Ozzy Mr. Big? Yeah, right. Like, you come here, you paint the fence and do this and that, and people don't really want to do it. They might not be happy with their life. They want to lose weight, whatever it is. They're trying to clean up things and they think they want to come.

But in most cases, when they get there, they tap out.

Yeah, there's a few unbelievable success stories that Apple's guy or the Apple guy was an amazing success story.

Truck driver, 300 pounds. He probably should have been a hundred and sixty pounds. I got him down to 200 pounds and 30 days.

He shows up with a little wheely suitcase.

He's like, all right, you know where's you know, where my stay and or whatever I'm like up there where top of the mountain.

The rafter takes the wheely suitcase and literally climbing up the mountain, there's like four or five hours gets up there.

I got him in a stone cab and he's like, where's a shower? The kitchen?

Or there are none and a big bushel of apples. All you're getting is apples were can every day lost 100 pounds in 30 days. Obviously extreme, obviously easy to bounce back from that. But like, that's the deal. Like like you can't they can't do it on their own.

And so I provide that ability to do a structured environment and strip everything else away, phone away, take the take the food away.

And yeah, if they give me their keys and they give me their wallet, we can get them to succeed at anything they want to succeed at.

But as soon as they have a plan B or a way to escape, I can't help them.

Right. So the recidivism rate you can't control, I can't control.

I mean, I had two guys show up two months ago, big jacked guys during covid.

I had a bunch of kids come fam family, friends. They sent all the kids. I've put them through hell and two guys wanted to come. I say, you can come while the kids are here. I'm putting on a fourteen. Yeah, no problem. And they spoke with like military lingo. They were not military guys and they were going to crush it three hours. My kid stayed fourteen days. These guys made it three hours.

Wow. So what do you what's the differentiator there.

They could leave. Yeah, they could leave. I mean, when you when you can leave, you take that option.

And I learned it, you know, in this town we didn't talk about rebuilt a general store that had been around from the eighteen hundreds. I rebuilt a farm that had been around from the eighteen hundreds.

And I envisioned finding some entrepreneurs like I was back in the neighborhood to come run these things, be cool and come run a general store.

Right. And and you're not going to have to get a mortgage and all that. It's all paid for. It's already for you. Turn Quijas, walk in and this farm has a tractor and cows. All you can do is walk. You just got to do the work. You're going to crush it because you don't have the strains that any other entrepreneur has where you've got to borrow and you got to figure out ways to make this work.

I even have a place for you to live.

They'll quit and quit because they're not invested.

Personally invested. Yeah, like when you write a check and you sell your kids and do whatever you have to do to make it, you have no choice. And so that's that's the big difference. You know, with the death race, they were all quitting.

And then one year I said, we're going to do if you want to do the death race, you have to get an article written in a local newspaper that says you are doing this race and you're going to finish and all of this all of a sudden finishing rates went up.

It's that easy.

Yeah. Yeah, right. That's amazing.

All these people that have come through the farm, all the people that you've seen compete in these Spartan races, all the athletes that you've, you know, run shoulder to shoulder with over the course of these races.

Like what what are the what are the lessons that you take away from all of these experiences that can inform the person who's at the, you know, at the starting gate of a journey like this? Well, so I'm a big subscriber in this idea of fire ready.

Aim. Right. Just get started. Just take that first step.

Just go outside. You know this. I think we all get stuck sitting around.

Our brains are wired to avoid discomfort. And so I find I find myself I know every day I got to take my cold shower and I find myself looking at my phone and I'm like, what the fuck am I looking at my oh, I'm looking at my phone because I don't want to get in a cold shower subconsciously.

You know, my my my brain is telling me to avoid that pain I'm about to go deal with. So just take that first step and. That first step leads to another step, and before you know it, you get it done, and that might be signing up for something that might be telling a friend, you're going to go do something or maybe just having a friend ring your bell in the morning or having your your shoes next to your bed, whatever that is.

Just take that first step number two.

And I'm doing this a long time. So I think you have to have a frame of reference that you could you could fall back on when the going gets tough.

So what do I mean by that? Like, I always go to a place when and I say, well, it could be worse.

Like I could be in Siberia, I could be missing an arm. God forbid one of my kids could be like, I go through this place where it's like it's not so bad when I refer to some other thing that could be my reality.

And I think when you do that, you have gratitude for where you are versus resentment. And that's that's important to understand. Right. There's a lot of people that resent, like I should have what he has or she has or this that I never think that.

I think like thank God I have what I have because I don't have what they have, which is worse than. Yeah, you know what I mean.

That is it the result of all these experiences that you've like, you know, basically brought upon yourself that allows you to tap into gratitude in that way?

No doubt about it. If I didn't feel the pain and suffering, I wouldn't know how bad, as bad as it's been for me or you.

And we've done these these these races, which are really just manufactured adversity. We're still not in it, like in the Lewis and Clark expedition.

Well, I'll make it out to be like it's not that bad. Yeah, right. Right.

So but you wouldn't know that if you grew up on Park Avenue, you pampered your whole life, right. You wouldn't.

So so that's probably why the May fighter in the Navy SEAL, that's probably why their handshake is a little softer and they're more humble because they've seen how.

Mm hmm.

But with success now you're flying around, you're managing this huge business. You're you're trying to direct all of these races.

I know for myself, you know, I'm sitting at a table having conversations with people more than I am getting out after it, like as a result of of the things that we're interested in, we create a certain largesse in our lives that actually makes it more difficult. Like I found myself having to exercise, you know, stronger boundaries and and challenge myself more to get out of this comfort zone that I've created for myself.

Do you feel I mean, no doubt you've got kids and you can't go do 14 Irishman's in a year and all of that, like, do you miss it? And how do you, you know, stay connected with that?

And I mean, just to be in discomfort, I feel like it would be selfish of me, certainly for my family, if I if I did my, you know, go back to the old days and Saturdays were my twelve hour day. If I did that on a Saturday and I stayed away from my my kids, that would be selfish. And then the other thing is, I'm so fortunate.

I get these emails all day, every day that you wouldn't even believe.

I'm back with my husband. I'm back with my wife. I lost two hundred pounds.

I left my job and started a business because it's part you can't even believe the emails I get all day, every day. And so, yes, it'd be cool to go hike them out or do something. But like and I get asked by all my old friends, right. We're going to climb this and we're going to do that. You want. No, I can't. Can't do it. I got a family. Right.

I got a business and we're doing great work here. So I wake up early, I wake up super early, I get my workout in, I sweat every single day. I take the cold showers and I run.

And I told Rogan that you bring a you have like a forty four pound kettlebell that you travel with. Did you bring it here.

Is it here. I did not bring my kettlebell because it's get the last three flights. I don't know if it's because of covid, maybe if maybe there's less people working at the airlines, they're losing it.

So I end up landing somewhere where the where some like you are expecting to see it and I got to run and go buy one local leader. So I just didn't I didn't bring it.

But and that stems from that kettlebell stems from one of the people that came to the farm.

Chris Davis was six hundred and ninety six pounds. And he wanted to get down to the two hundreds.

And I told him, as you lose weight, I'll carry weight. And so he got down the first hundred pounds. I was carrying one hundred pounds in a sandbag. Wow. And it was, as you could imagine, difficult.

And it's another whole story. But we moved to Asia as a family right after that.

And so I had this hundred pound sandbag that I was carrying because I made that commitment to him and they confiscated it at the airport. So when I landed in Japan or Singapore, I said to my wife, Can you order on Amazon?

Can you get a kettlebell? I don't need one hundred pound. I'll carry just to keep it going.

I carry like a twenty pounder.

It came twenty kilograms, which was, you know, forty four pounds or so. So that became my thing. And for the last four or five years I.

Pretty much carried it everywhere outside of covid, huh? Yeah, that's got to be a trip, though, when it comes through on the baggage claim or trying to carry that thing on.

And it almost took out.

Yeah, it almost took out a lot of security officers once, you know, coming down the ramp in India, they stuck it in somebody else's suitcase. Once I checked it in, I had to open somebody else's suitcase to get it out in in the Middle East. They use a term to me and it's up to God whether or not it will be there when I land. So it's been a it's been a trip carrying this thing around and it's become a shtick.

Yeah.

So how many people do Spartan pretty covid how many people. Grekov And so I don't know if you know this right before covid we purchased Tough Mudder.

We brought Tough Mudder. I didn't know that. Yeah. So, so pre covid if you look at Spartan and Tough Mudder, we're probably one point six, one point seven million people around the world during covid. We're like twenty thousand.

Right. Fucking disaster. But but but it's a big, big number. Forty five countries. Three hundred twenty five events to two companies combined and.

Yeah, right. And you have this mission statement though that you're going to impact 100 million people. Our goal is to change 100 million lives, gets us a free pass to heaven. And I'm excited about that.

So how do we scale this thing up? I mean, you've got your books. You've got the podcast, you've got the documentary. You've got the races. I don't know what else you can do to impact people at scale other than what you're already doing.

Like at the same time, when you canvas what's going on in America and across the developed world, we're dealing with a health crisis of untold proportion.

You know, obesity rates are through the roof, childhood obesity rates are through the roof, diabetes, heart disease, all of these lifestyle illnesses that are just felling millions of people unnecessarily. There's still so many people that are suffering and challenge to find their way, you know, to a healthier way of of being.

Yeah, no, I'm in the wrong business for sure. All the data. I don't think you're in the wrong business. Well, I'm in the right business because it's something you and I are passionate about, getting people off the couch and doing these things. I'm in the wrong business and that the data is going in the wrong direction. More and more people are eating unhealthy. More and more people are sitting and watching Netflix, especially postcode.

But it's going to be it's going to be harder to get people pried off the couch.

So I would say if we could snap our fingers sitting here and do anything, we would have to get to the White House and convince them or the Pentagon and convince them that they have to work with us to mandate this kind of physical activity. It's the only way it's going to work if you want to get to 100 million people, because most people look at me and I'm sure they look at you and say, like, why?

Why would I do that? Why would I do that? I'm Netflix.

I can lay naked in bed like everybody talks about. Right. And do nothing.

So so it's a tough it's a very tough sell outside of the let's call you and I the hunter gatherers outside of the remaining hunter gatherer genes that still exist.

It's a tough sell. Yeah, I remember when we were kids and there was the presidential physical we need does not even exist anymore. I don't know, by the way, of the dodo.

And it wasn't that big of a deal, but at least it was something you need that. And now we have like lip service to like corporate wellness programs, which, you know, I question how effective they are. It's like getting people excited about going out and walking around for or standing up every ten minutes or something like that. Like, how do you have a soft enough touch that you can get that person who's never experienced anything hard to at least get interested in it, but not come at them so hard, like with your, you know, kind of super hardcore sensibility that they're intimidated and scared and never do anything.

It's tough when you that's what you need. You need programs that that it becomes part of. It's normal. Right. When my mom got into all this stuff, it wasn't normal. So she didn't get accepted. And so we just need to make it normal. When I've lived on the farm, we moved to Asia, we moved to Japan, Singapore.

When did you do that and why did you do that?

We did that because the business was growing fast. I needed to be Tough Mudder. They weren't in Asia yet and the kids were still young enough to move.

So I said to my wife, why don't we move? We'll go to Asia. Lt will live in Singapore first. Easy to do. We'll land there, we'll start putting on Spartan and then we'll expand from Singapore. And what an amazing experience as a family. So but the reason I bring it up is because when I lived in those places, the neighbors right around us started sending their kids to me early in the morning to work out with my kids so I can do it.

If I have close proximity to people, I could rope them in, given the olive branch, lie to them a little bit, you know, and get them to do more than they would. Willing to do otherwise, but, you know, when they're five degrees separated, as you know, it's hard to get them to do stuff. Look at the size of people, look at the data. It's not going you know, they'd prefer Twinkie's over this.

Right.

So a cabinet position in the White House for physical fitness.

We just you can't say whether you like Trump or Biden. It doesn't really matter. You can't have a tag line that says, let's make America great again without making America fit again. You have to you like hundred percent.

It's logical that anybody listening to this, we have to make America fit. And it all it has to be a policy driven thing.

My friend ran New York City schools food program, one point one billion dollar budget. He's just like you and I. He did it because he wanted he left Goldman Sachs. He did it because he really wanted to make an impact. He left. He says, I got the potato lobby. I got to have the French fries. I got the soda lobby. I got to have the soda. He goes, I finally finally I convinced I was able to get wheat bread on the hamburgers.

Right. He goes, I put wheat bread on the hamburgers, the bun. None of the kids will eat it. So then I had to put a wheat bottom with a white top to hide the wheat. Yeah. So he just couldn't take it anymore.

Well, you have to change the entire political system to get, you know, the lobbying, you know, efforts out of there that keep, you know, everything entrenched with the shitty food because there's too much money involved right now.

So it's impossible for a guy like that to come in and make any changes. I mean, look at how Michelle Obama just got shellacked. And I'm just saying maybe we should eat a little bit healthier.

I know. And so it's got to somehow you've got to have a politician or a group of politicians that they get it. You and I have to run for office. I mean, that's the only way this is going to work.

How is. Your mom rubbing off on you in terms of like the the the yoga and the spirituality and the diet, like what's that look like for you?

I went crazy. I went crazy with the yoga, but it had to be hot yoga, as you can imagine. I had to be sweating. I couldn't be like sitting still and, like, chanting. So I went nuts with the hot yoga, probably did a thousand classes or something. I love it. I haven't done enough of it lately. And on the spirituality front. I don't know, my mom used to say, look, no matter what religion, you just got to be a good person.

So my thing is just being the person she around, still gone, didn't make it. And she died very young. Her mom had cancer. As I said, she got cancer. Our sister got cancer. A cousin got cancer. We lived in that neighborhood. I describe within a 15 mile radius, there was a big garbage dump and massive incidence of cancer around that garbage. Oh, wow.

So a diet. She preached more plant based. She introduced me to a guy named Fred Bakhshi. I don't know if that. Yeah. Yeah. He's John Joseph's boy. I don't know my buddy John Joseph, New York City hardcore Iron Man, vegan punk rocker dude. But he he's all about peace. He talks about peace all the time, guys like. Is he still alive? Yeah, he's still alive. He was at my wedding 92, 94, 93, probably.

He's he's a good friend. It was texted me today. And so I subscribe more to plant based, but that doesn't mean a little bit of animal protein doesn't slip in to my diet. It shouldn't. But but it does.

But I'm mostly I'm probably 75, 80 percent plant based and I should be more and I fight with everybody over it, including my own kids.

Right.

It's interesting because Spartan, which is sort of, you know, kind of a cousin of like the cross fit movement, there's a there's a cross pollination was like it should be.

Paul feels like a raw meat. It's very like, yeah. It's very kind of intertwined with the paleo community that's now pivoting towards this weird carnivore diet thing. That is confusing. I know.

I know.

But that's kind of the the sensibility of a lot of the people that are participating in your races. And it's interesting that you're coming from a different.

Yeah, I mean, Bysshe, first of all, I tested it on myself. I did very long distance races like crazy races, the Iditarod by foot.

Right.

And I would carry like carrots and olive oil with me and all kinds of stuff that, like, they don't make any sense, but I perform best on that.

And so I'm just not a believer.

That said, maybe based on where you come from on the planet, maybe some people need need a little more meat than others. I don't I don't know.

But but Bishes thing is, you want to outlive your competition. And if you subscribe to that, I promise you plant based is the way to go.

Yeah, she was like she's like a weightlifter or something is Weightlift Hunger Games weight lifter. And he said he said he was going to try different ways. Fifty five years in right now on raw fruits and veggies. Wow. Fifty five years worth of fruits and veggies. Yeah.

What are the the big obstacles that you face for yourself now. Like what are the things that you struggle with, dealing with and overcoming.

Well, my biggest obstacle is I got twenty years of my life invested in this thing. I levered up right before covid and bought my competitor Tough Mudder. And my whole life is upside down, right. Yeah, financially. So how are you how are you maintaining your sanity?

Is there so much you can't you can't control. Right. Netflix and Twinkies.

Right. What are you doing in L.A.?

I came out to L.A. I have a thing tonight. This is a funny story, actually. Ayn Ran and Atlas Shrugged. You know, the book Atlas Shrugged, her fountainhead. I get asked on a podcast like this, like, what's one of your favorite books? And I'm like, Atlas Shrugged.

So I guess there's an American society that reached out to me and said, Oh, I know that your favorite book is Atlas Shrugged. So can you come to this thing? So Laird Hamilton, Gabby Reese, maybe Peter Thiel, some people will be there tonight. And they said, I promised pre covid I would be at it. So I got to.

Great thing. That'll be an interesting it's crowded. It's going to it's going to be interesting. Yeah.

How does you know how you look at the world and you know, think about people and potential effect, the kind of people that you hire for your business, like when you're looking to bring somebody on into your organization, like what are the qualities that stand out to you, you know, in the early days, because I just didn't have enough funding to do what we were trying to do is size and scale.

It would be if they had a heartbeat, they were good enough to work for us because we were I was paying like two thousand dollars a month for the first hundred people to make this thing work. We expenses were just insane, I would say.

Now, if we really narrowed it down, a much more professional approach, it's you got to be really enthusiastic person. You've got to be like relentless. I don't even care if you have domain expertise or not because you can learn that. But if you're just relentless and 24/7 and just like not going to accept. No. And you're honest and you've got integrity, that's good enough for me.

Yeah. The specific skills can be trained. I don't care about it. It's more about that. It's more about the disposition. Yeah. I just, I just I want you to know that what is a Pareto's principle, right. 20 percent of the people do 80 percent. To work, I just want more of the those, I just want more of those ones. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

So we'll wrap this up with some thoughts for the person that feels stuck, who's inspired by what you just shared and is looking for, you know, that that little dose of inspiration to just start to get out of that cycle of analysis, paralysis that, you know, keeps you on the couch scrolling for the best pair of running shoes.

You've got to sign up for something, doesn't it? Could be learning a new life. We can't we can't sign up for anything right now.

It could signing up for something. It could be as simple as saying to your friend and then screaming it from the rooftops, are you committed? You're on the hook. We are going to walk six miles on Saturday. I mean, that could be the thing you sign up. It's just got to be said. Could be we're going to learn a new language by this date. It's got to be this is what we're going to do. And by this date, we're going to be held accountable.

And then I would say, you know, we have a prayer at Spartan.

We have our brand has a prayer, and we stole it from a World War Two French paratrooper who they found in the field dead.

They pulled the prayer out of his pocket.

And basically he was saying, look, God, everybody is asking you for the good stuff, right? They want to get back with their spouse. They want to get home. Warm shower meal.

You probably don't have any of that left. So I'll just ask you for the tough stuff like the turmoil, the toil, suffering, and just promise me you'll keep it coming and you give me the strength to deal with it. So, like, if you can turn your thinking around to more like that, like like I might you and I might text you and say, Rich, I hope you have a shitty day.

And that's like, yeah, it's wild day I got to fight through today. Right. We don't want we don't want a complacent, easy day.

And so if you can change your mindset to like embracing tough stuff and committing to it, you just have a better life.

And what do you think is the main obstacle that gets in people's way?

Well, I think I think subconsciously our legacy hardware and software is avoiding discomfort, like it kept us from falling off cliffs and freezing out in the snow and drowning.

And the sooner you recognize that, that's just like old hardware that you don't need because you're not going to get attacked by a lion when you go outside or drown in the rain, you got to do this stuff.

Look, I have a friend who runs the largest hedge fund in the world. He doesn't need to do anything. OK, he's fine. And his theory was no pain, no pain, no no pain, no gain, no pain, no why would I want any pain? And lately, he's come around to my way of thinking, which is your way of thinking, which is you know what? Look, he came to Japan when I was living in Japan and they had all these five star hotels, everything all lined up to do.

And you know what I did? I took him and his family to the waterfall monks and it was freezing. It was wintertime and it was ice on the mountain. A waterfall is coming down and we got to go down to nothing, take all our clothes off, get down to basically nothing and get under that waterfall and hold these metal chains while the Japanese in their language are pulling the demons out of us. And he said that was the best part of the whole trip.

Yeah, right. Yeah. He's not going to forget that. That was the best part the whole trip. It wasn't the fancy hotels, the fancy like that suffering was awesome. So just do it.

We stick the landing. Powerful Joe Hasana. Thank you, my friend. It's great to see you. You're awesome. Yeah, that was very cool.

Yeah, appreciate it. If you're digging on Joe, pick up his book Spartan Ops Spartan Fit the Spartan Way at the Spartan podcast. We don't even talk about the Spartan X leadership stuff that you got leadership stuff.

We got all kinds of stuff. Shoot me an email, Joe. It's Barton Dotcom. And if you come to the farm, just don't quit. It would suck. I mean, it would really ruin Rich's reputation if you came to the farm based on this talk with Rich and you were one of those ones that quit right away.

Yeah, that might be me. I might show up. You're not you're just going to push me too hard. I'm going to be out of here on my whole ship's going to sink. Hopefully not. All right. Thanks, man. Thank D. I dig it, chances are you do, too, if that doesn't leave you motivated to get after it. I don't know what to tell you, man. Share the love with Joe himself at Real Joe Torre Center on Instagram and Twitter.

Check out his podcast, Spart, not crack his book of the same name and dive deeper at his world by perusing the show notes on the episode page at Reenroll Dotcom. Finally, a reminder that we video all of our podcast, which you can watch on YouTube dotcom slash rich role. And we recently launched a second channel, just four short clips. It would mean a ton if you would subscribe to both links in the show notes. If you'd like to support the work we do here on the program, the single most impactful thing you can do is subscribe subscribe to the show on Apple podcast, Spotify and YouTube.

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Until then, fire em. Ready. Peace plans a.