Joe De Sena - Spartan Race Founder, Endurance Enthusiast, and Life Transformer

Full transcript: Joe De Sena on London Real

5:47 This is London Real. I am Brian Rose. My guest today is Joe DeSana, who is the CEO and co-founder of the Spartan Race, the world’s leading obstacle racing series with, what, over a million participants? This year. Wow. And since 2010 when you founded it, right?

6:13 2010. You are also the author of the New York Times bestseller, Spartan Up, a take no prisoners guide to overcoming obstacles and achieving peak performance. You’ve competed in over 50 ultra events and 12 Ironman events in one year alone. I believe your favorite quote is, death is the price we pay for life, so make it worth it. Joe, welcome to London Real.

6:34 Thanks for having me. There’s so much I want to talk to you about. I saw you first live a couple weeks ago at the Masterminds Talks in Napa, California. What a great bunch of people that was. That was awesome.

6:45 It was really fun, and it was great to hear your story. I had heard bits of your story before, but you really went into the stuff that happened to you in New York, you know, with a lot of the pool business and kind of the good fellas’ overtones. And I want to get to that, but just to put it into perspective, the pieces that you used to compete in. You did the Vermont 100-mile trail run, the Lake Placid Ironman, and the 135-mile Badwater Ultra in one week, right?

7:10 By accident. By accident. And the Badwater is over 8,500 feet up to Mount Whitney, temperatures into the 120s. That’s kind of 50s, I think, for us here in the UK. How did that happen by accident?

7:22 You know, I had done a bunch of races. I forget what year it was, maybe 2004-ish, maybe. And invariably, you get lots of people that shoot you an email and say, hey, Joe, why don’t you do this race? Hey, Joe, why don’t you do that race? They want to basically crush you and do it with you.

7:38 And so I was in this mode of accepting those challenges, friendly challenges, because they’d get me out of my comfort zone, forced me to do something that wasn’t necessarily on my radar, and I never said no. I wasn’t married yet, so maybe it was 2003. Hopefully my wife doesn’t watch this. And so I accepted those challenges from Out 100, Badwater, and the Lake Placid Ironman. And then when we were about a month out, my assistant at the time came over and said, you realize, because she didn’t really know what the race was, she said, you realize these were all in the same week.

8:12 And there was silence from me for a few minutes, and I thought, who do I back out of, right? Which person do I say I’m out? And then I realized, you know what, let’s just do it. If I’m in shape, for one, I’ll be in shape. For the other one, just deal with it.

8:28 And so we rolled the dice, and a big challenge was logistics. Because you had different locations to get to. Yeah, and it’s all in seven days. And then my wife, I had committed to going to a wedding. So how do you go do the Vermont 100, quickly recover, get on a plane, fly out to Vegas, drive from Vegas to Death Valley, which is a big trip, get through that over a day and a half, wedding, get to, it was a big logistical challenge.

8:55 But I committed, and commitment is something I believe in, in a big way, right? You go out there and you commit publicly, and you put the noose around your neck, and you live and die by what you say. And I was committed. And you made it through? Did you have injuries?

9:13 Funny story, it starts out with the Vermont 100, and I’m with this woman, Lisa Smith, who is an animal by all measure, just ferocious when it comes to endurance sports. And Lisa is going to get me through this thing. And when you do a 100 mile run, the goal is to break 24 hours. You’ve got to do under 24 hours to get the belt buckle. So we weren’t going to do this and not hit the required time frames.

9:39 And so we said, all right, let’s get under 24. So it was me, Lisa, my friend Heath, who has a funny piece of the puzzle when it comes to Spartan, which I’ll explain. And then at mile 70 and 80, we have friends coming in to push us the last 30, 20 miles to the finish line. Okay, as in just be there to support you. Kind of pick up the pace.

10:02 Did they run with you? Yeah, run with you, and you’re going to start seeing things, you’re hallucinating, and you might say to yourself at that point, I don’t really care about the 24 hours, I just got to get to the finish line. And so they’re going to make sure you stay on track. And so that’s our plan, and we start out. And Lisa says to me, you know, the first 70 miles will be easy.

10:22 I’m thinking, how could the first 70 miles be easy? Literally, you can’t grasp that statement. But what I found in this endurance life is the reason that holds true, kind of like Moore’s Law, is 70% of any challenge. It doesn’t matter if you’re on a marathon or you’re going to work out for two hours. The first 70%, your mind accepts, says, all right, I’ll get there.

10:43 And then something flips a switch in your mind and says, all right, you’re almost done, now it’s going to be hard. And so what I like to do to trick myself now, and then we’ll go back to the race, is I’ll purposely tell myself I’m doing something bigger than what I’m actually doing, and I can move the needle on the 70%, if that makes sense. Yeah, and can you trick your brain? You can, for a little while. Okay, so you’re thinking 130 miles, 130 miles or something.

11:05 But you’re really only doing 100, right? Okay. Is that what the wall is, they say, in a marathon? Just move the wall. Okay.

11:12 So in a marathon, that wall at 20, 21 miles, that’s just mental. It’s just a mental thing because the wall occurs on a 10K. There’s always a wall that occurs. Okay. And so…

11:22 Crafty, that subconscious brain. Yeah, I mean, that’s the thing that stops everything in life. And so anyway, we’re running it, and my buddy Heath is having a tough time. Around mile 50, we run into this guy, this big navy seal type. He’s got muscles coming out of his ears.

11:40 I mean, he is a specimen. Sweating like a madman, which is abnormal. Because if you’ve got 50 miles of life, you shouldn’t be sweating like that. He’s got no water bottle. Again, abnormal.

11:50 You’re running a racist distance, you usually have a water bottle in your hand because the aid stations are about seven miles apart. You don’t want to go seven miles without water. Anyway, he says, yeah, I’m not carrying a water bottle. I like to jump from station to station, and I just deal with it. So Lisa, who’s got a ton of experience at this point, she’s run 50 of these things.

12:10 She says, well, that’s odd. I want to nickname you Jackrabbit. I’ve never really seen anybody do that before, and I’ve got tons of experiences. How many of these have you finished? And there’s some silence.

12:21 He says, none. Well, maybe. Maybe this is the reason. He goes, I don’t really like running. How many have you done?

12:30 20. You haven’t finished one. You don’t like running. None of this is making sense, right? Well, you know, I really like weightlifting.

12:39 So nothing’s making sense here, right? But this guy is giant. So anyway, he takes off on us. Full speed ahead, and he leaves us. We’ve got our pace, and we continue along.

12:49 We get to mile 70. Don’t quote me on exact distances here. We’re about mile 70, and the pain, as Lisa suspected, is starting to kick in. And Heath, my buddy, has got something bothering him, like his kidney, and he’s holding his side. One of our runners shows up.

13:04 He’s going to take us into the finish. And who shows up? But Jack Rabbit. We haven’t seen him. Big muscle guy.

13:11 We haven’t seen him for 20 miles. And there’s a weigh-in station. At this particular race, they weigh you in. If you’ve lost too much weight, you’re out of the race. They want to check on you health-wise.

13:22 So Jack Rabbit, the big guy, says, hang on, hang on, guys, because now we’re going to walk in together with him to the weigh station. And he’s picking up rocks from the ground, and he’s stuffing them in his pockets, because he doesn’t want to get pulled, because he’s been sweating for 70 miles, right? And all you can hear, because he goes in first to weigh himself, you hear the lady say, wow, it’s crazy. You weigh more than when you started the race. Comes out, drops a bunch of rocks.

13:47 We go in. We’re fine. And we start running again. He takes off again, big guy. Heath starts to feel some pain, my buddy Heath.

13:56 So now it’s Lisa and I, and he’s falling behind. He actually gets rushed to the hospital. It turns out his kidney fails. Okay. Which happens why?

14:05 Dehydration? Yeah, he’s completely dehydrated. We’re pushing him too hard. The runner that’s helping us is pushing a pace that’s way out of his comfort zone. And what tends to happen in these events is you’ve now gone 70 miles, right?

14:19 You’ve done whatever, 18 hours. And so you’re feeling, I’m almost at the finish line. There’s only 30 left, but you forget. You’re feeling marathon plus. I don’t need any drink.

14:29 I’m fine. I’ve been drinking all this time. I’m almost at the finish line. And that’s where you get hurt. Because you got to stick to a plan.

14:36 Right. And you’re not thirsty anymore. All those keys go away. Yeah. I mean, you all are, but you’re saying, I don’t feel like stopping.

14:42 I don’t want to stretch. And I’m so close. But you’re not really close, right? Your mind’s playing tricks on you. So anyway, Heath gets rushed off in an ambulance.

14:49 So now it’s down to me and Lisa. And we haven’t seen the big guy. By the way, this particular race has a horse race going on simultaneous, 100 mile horse race. So throughout the day and night, we’re seeing horses go by, right? So you don’t know if you’re seeing things.

15:04 Move out of the way, another horse. Is that just for no other reason than they just do them? They just have it at the same time. And they can keep an eye on you, maybe. The horses, the guys on the horses.

15:12 Who knows? Okay. It’s America. It’s America. So we’re running along and we’re probably at mile 85.

15:21 And we see like a light or some flash or something in the bushes. It’s Jack Rabbit. Big guy. He’s passed out in the bushes, right? We go over, we shake him.

15:32 He jumps up. As fresh as can be. Like he’s literally passed out. Gets up and starts running with us again. And now we leave him.

15:42 We’ve got 15 miles to go. We’re on pace to break our 24 hours. I think we come into the finish line. Don’t quote me like 23 and a half hours. And I sit right in an ice tub.

15:54 My wife has an ice tub and a pickup truck. We get there because I’ve got to recover quick. Because in three days I got bad water. And that works. That cold.

16:02 Nothing like ice cold water to get. It’s like a sponge. Your muscles are like a sponge. It squeezes all the lactic acid. Okay.

16:10 At your legs. Good 30 minutes in it. I mean solid ice water top. You’re shaking. Does it hurt?

16:16 Oh, it hurts. The whole time too? No, it hurts. And so I’m in the ice tub. And all of a sudden I hear the staff of the race.

16:27 Now it’s like 3 in the morning, whatever. I hear the staff of the race scream, Quick, everybody get ready. A horse is coming in. Because when the horses come in, they’ve got to grab the horse. A horse has been running 100 miles.

16:37 It’s not a horse. Jackrabbit. He’s such a big guy. He’s running. They think a horse is coming in.

16:43 Anyway, he finished his first. He completed his first 100-miler. That race. Lisa came in. She finished.

16:50 And Heath got out of the hospital. He recovered. We jumped on a plane the next day and headed out to Badwater. How are you feeling after a 100-mile race? Are you calorie depleted?

17:02 Do you get sleep? I mean, are you trying to eat everything in sight? I mean… It’s hard to sleep because your heart’s still racing and you’re pretty messed up. You’re hungry beyond description.

17:15 You can just eat nonstop. Your metabolism’s going to run like another six days at a pace that would get most people nauseous. You just can’t eat enough. And are you sucking down those electrolyte gels and stuff during the race? I mean, when you’re doing it, you’ll eat anything.

17:32 All your rules get broken as far as eating properly, proper nutrition. But I’m not a believer in all that stuff. You really don’t need much. Okay, so you can eat beforehand and not eat during… No, no.

17:46 I mean, I’ve run… As long as I did 300 miles once, I ran. And I had a very systematic system where we ran every three miles. I made 100 stops. And every three miles, I had a salt pill and a tiny little piece of sandwich, cheese and mustard, whatever I felt like, like a little quarter piece, and water.

18:08 Okay. And so I didn’t need any special powder or this or that. It was salt pill, piece of sandwich and water. Every three miles. And you kept the discipline and that was enough.

18:18 I kept the discipline. And that’s a separate story we can get into when the discipline went. I want to get to the second event. But for a lot of people that are watching, and I’m sitting here thinking this, I haven’t even done a marathon. That seems like something that’s going to kill my Achilles tendons and my knees and stuff like that.

18:30 So when you start talking about these long distance races, it makes me always think like, why, how, are you not injured? All that stuff. Bikram yoga. Okay. Bikram yoga is a big one.

18:42 Anybody listening must do bikram yoga. I’m constantly screaming at soldiers, civilians, everybody I do workouts with. You’ve got to go do yoga at the very least. Okay. And if you can go to bikram yoga.

18:53 I don’t care if you don’t like it, you’ve got to do it. Because winning in life is about outliving your competition in a healthy manner. And that means you don’t want to be bedridden, right? You want to be active and flexible and be able to sit down, stand up, lift a box, and you get that, in my opinion, from yoga. Okay.

19:12 But we can get into that later with my mother. And get into the why at some point as well. The why, I’ve lost a little bit of the why at this age. The why in the beginning, that 12 years of doing these crazy races was, I just needed to see what I could do. How far could I push myself?

19:33 Could I get that done? Could I throw challenges out to myself and complete them? And it doesn’t exist so much for me anymore. Because I know I could do this stuff. And so can you.

19:45 And so can anybody. But I had to prove it to myself. And I did that. Now it’s just about maintaining health. Okay.

19:53 And you were proving it to yourself or to other people at the same time? Well, I was committing to other people because I think that’s the best way to force yourself to do it. Social pressures. Yeah, I’ve got to commit publicly. Okay.

20:07 Because now I’m on the hook. And that works with you because it bothers you if you don’t stay up to your word. Exactly. And is that something that your parents taught you? Yeah, I mean, probably.

20:17 And we’ll get into where I grew up in that crazy neighborhood with organized crime and everything. And so that was, you know, you’ve got to be a man of your word and not go back on it. And so I was pounded in our heads. Okay. And I mean, what are you?

20:29 If you’re telling people you’re doing things, but then you’re not doing them. Right. And I just always wonder if that value is still important in America or in the world, you know, kids these days. Well, I’ll tell you what was really important is I ran businesses from a very young age. If I told those people, those customers, and same with you.

20:46 Yeah. If you said, meet me here at 3 p.m. and then you weren’t here, you go out of business. Yeah. Right?

20:52 Yeah. As an entrepreneur, your word is everything. Yeah, it’s everything. So definitely with the entrepreneurship, that just pounded the nail into the wood that, like, you told me we were going to do something, you better do it. Okay.

21:03 All right. And we’re going to get back to the… That’s a whole other show. I mean, it’s going to get to the growing up in New York and the bosses and everything. Okay.

21:13 Second part of that race was… Bad water. Bad water. Okay. So now we’re out of bad water.

21:18 It is 135 degrees Fahrenheit. Okay. This is Death Valley. This is Death Valley. It’s the lowest elevation in the United States.

21:24 Okay. And it’s at 135 degrees. You might not understand how hot that is. Am I allowed to curse? Yeah.

21:32 It’s fucking hot. I mean, crazy hot. I can’t even… I mean, it was crazy. If you’re in Europe, that’s like 50 or 55 degrees centigrade, I think, so yeah.

21:40 Crazy hot. Crazy hot. And I’ve got one of those big, like, white safari hats. I’ve got a full white lycra-style loose shirt, white long pants, because I’m trying to cover all my skin. And Lisa, who’s with me, says, all right, here’s our strategy.

21:57 Let all the runners… I don’t know how many runners were in the race. Let’s call it 150. Let all the runners take off on us. I want to be last and second to last.

22:04 We are going to walk the first marathon. We’re not going to exert any energy. We’re going to walk it. And I’m thinking, what do you mean, heat? So long.

22:13 Why don’t we… Right. But she knows. I’m sticking with what she says. Right.

22:18 And we walk in. And Dean Carnass is… I mean, the best of the best runners are out there this year. And we walk that first marathon, and my shirt melts. Melts.

22:28 Right. My shoes melt. Just like they’re sticking to the ground. The rubber is falling off. My shirt is shrinking up and shriveling.

22:36 It’s hot. And we pick up the pace slightly for the second marathon. And we get to a place where there’s a swimming pool. There’s a gas station across the street through the swimming pool. And she said, all right, we’re going to take a 10-minute break, which is fantastic.

22:51 We jump in the pool. Now, the sun is just setting, and now we’re about to climb out of Death Valley. And the sun comes down, and it’s dark. And we start running. Now, she says, now we can run.

23:02 And we start running. And one by one, we are seeing these 150 runners on the side of the road passed out, covered in puke. I mean, being hella vacked out just destroyed. Her strategy was ingenious, right? It was so hot, you could not overexert yourself in those early hours.

23:20 Has this race been run before? Had anyone known? It had been run. But it might have been one of the hottest ever recorded times. So every runner, and it’s no different for Lisa and I, has to have a support crew.

23:34 And the support crew drives a minivan. And it’s funny, because the support crew doesn’t realize how bad it is, because they’re in the car, and the air conditioner is going, and they run out to help you, and they go back in the car. So they’re not hydrating properly, they’re thinking they’re covered, but really they’re getting destroyed. They’re awake as much as we are. And so they were getting hella vacked out one by one, the support crews.

23:59 They weren’t running the race. They were just there in the heat. They were running. They were just falling apart. At one point, my wife and my father-in-law, my support crew, at one point I look over to the minivan that they’re driving.

24:11 They are both in the back of the minivan, making me a sandwich, getting some ice cubes. There’s nobody driving. Now, I’ve been in long races before, and I’ve hallucinated, so I think I’m just seeing things. No, they were hallucinating. They literally went to the back of the van, left the car and drive, were driving in the desert with nobody, the steering wheel staying straight, and I’m banging on the car and straightening them out.

24:34 That’s how crazy everybody was getting. By late that night, that first night, like two or three in the morning, we’re in fourth and fifth place, from second and fourth and fifth place. So at the beginning of the race, they had given us, this is going to sound silly, they had given us these wooden stakes with our number on it. I literally thought it was going to sound silly. I thought they were like, if you’re done, why would you need wooden stakes?

25:09 Wooden stakes, or if something happens to you, you’re allowed to pound the stake into the sand, and then come back to that location. There’s some rule. You’ve got so much time to come back. So then you come back and continue? Continue.

25:22 Okay. So we continue to run. We’re about mile 100 now, and Lisa, my partner, breaks her arch in her foot. So we’re a team. I’m not going anywhere.

25:34 I’ll take some rest. I’m resting about an hour and a half, two hours, and a ton of runners are passing us. So it’s very disheartening, right? Eighteen people maybe pass us over that hour or two. She’s working on her foot.

25:47 Finally, she knocks the stake in the ground, and she releases it. She says, go. Okay. I don’t know if she’s done or, but she’s out. And I don’t know what comes over me, but I am like a madman that I am getting those 18 places back.

26:03 Because you saw them go by. Oh, man. Now it’s nighttime again. That’s the second night, and I want those 18 places back. So it’s not as hot.

26:13 We’re getting closer to Mount Whitney. We’re only 35 miles away. And I take off like a bat out of hell. And I probably run the fastest I’ve ever run in my life before or after. And we get to the base of Mount Whitney, and there’s about a 13-mile climb straight up this mountain.

26:30 And they pull up. My support vehicle pulls up, and there’s a big sign says, watch out for grizzly bears. And I’m not really fond of grizzly bears. I’m like middle of the night. I’m already delirious.

26:39 I’m on mile 220 at this point, 217 for the week. And I just decided, I said to my wife, I don’t eat chocolate. I don’t really drink coffee. I said, how many of those chocolate-covered espresso beans? I throw my music on, and I’m going for it.

26:59 And I take off up this mountain. And I become obsessed, literally obsessed. I’ve lost my mind. Somebody that would shoot up a post office or something. Don’t talk to me.

27:11 Don’t look at me. I’m getting this over with. And I race up this thing to the point where competitors I’m passing are saying, who the fuck is this guy? Where did he come from? And I get right near the finish line, and there’s an older guy, probably 55, 60.

27:26 And at this time, I’m maybe whatever, 40, high 30s. And I’m so obsessed, I knock the guy out of the way right before the finish. I’m embarrassed to say it, but that’s how crazy I became. My wife yelled at me, what the hell are you doing? But I was possessed.

27:43 I was somewhere else. Came across the finish, said, you’ve got to get me to an ice tub, because now I’m thinking about the next race. And I think it was a four or five hour drive to an airport from there, did my ice tub, hit a wedding on Friday night with my wife, caught another plane to Lake Placid, crushed the swim in Lake Placid, crushed the bike ride in Lake Placid, feeling fantastic, go out on the run. I’m three miles into the marathon thinking, I’m going to smoke everybody.

28:14 I already ran 235 miles this week, feeling great. And my legs broke. Broke. Broke. When you’re at the wedding, are you walking around flying?

28:22 Oh, I can’t even get the shoes on. My feet are swollen. It’s a mess. I got a smile on my wife, and make believe I’m having a good time. Oh, I want to get out of there.

28:30 I’m smoked. It was the hardest part of the week. She wants to dance. So the last Iron Man, the marathon of the last Iron Man, third mile in, your legs are no more? Toast.

28:43 And I’m thinking, I need aspirin. I don’t take painkillers, but I need something. So I’m asking some spectators on the side, hey, do you have any aspirin, do you have any ibuprofen? Nobody’s got anything, and I see some kids drinking beer. And I’m not a drinker.

28:57 To be fair, I say, give me a beer. I chug the beer. Give me another beer. I drink three beers. And it gets me to, like, mile 18.

29:06 I’m drunk. Gets me to mile 18, and now I’m starving. I mean, starving. So I grabbed some hamburgers. So they got me on film, drinking beers, which is rare, and I’m an Iron Man.

29:19 I drink three beers. I’m drunk, I’m eating burgers. And they filmed it, and I got into the finish line. And it was a brutal week that I probably wouldn’t have done had I not committed. Had I not said to people, yeah, I’m done.

29:37 We’ll do it together. I don’t want to be that guy that said, no. And then you’re there. You made it, right? You got to get that last leg done.

29:46 Right. Did you ever think about not finishing it? You know, I heard, I can’t think of the actress, a little blonde actress that’s in all these movies. She just did a movie about hiking the wild in Reese Witherspoon, and there’s a scene in the movie that must be from the book where somebody asks her, you think about quitting, and she says, yeah, about every two minutes. And so my answer to that would be, yeah, about every two minutes.

30:13 But you get through the next two minutes, and the next two minutes, and right. And the community itself must keep you going, too, because that’s the hardcore of the hardcore. Lisa’s unbelievable. Lisa went back and did Badwater four times in a row, start to finish, turned around, went back to the start. She’s a different breed.

30:34 What kind of person does that? You know, I thought for the longest time that these endurance people, when I entered the community, would be the greatest people in the world from an ethical standpoint, a moral standpoint, because when they’re nearly broken, they’re being honest with themselves, they’re pushing through, everybody can be good when things are good, how good are they when things are bad. But what I found, not to take anything away from the endurance community, because some of my best friends are in it, is many of them are running away from demons.

31:09 They’ve got drug, alcohol problems, and so they’ve got big issues, and so there’s not necessarily this correlation. It’s probably just as correlated as any other walk of life, whether a person’s good or bad. There’s no correlation to some endurance person being this quote unquote great ethical and moral person. Lisa happens to be fantastic. She does all this for charity, and there are certainly those out there, but there’s also great people in finance and other parts of life.

31:39 I guess it’s a great way to escape from the world for that 24 hours. I guess you really can’t think about anything else, right? I didn’t know it. I recently had a conversation with the person who did my medical at one of the big races I put on, where people that quit have to do an exit interview with the medical person, and this medical person, after 10 years of me putting on these races, other races, too, said, I’m surprised you didn’t know it, Joe. I said, what do you mean?

32:06 He says, well, I guess you don’t talk to the quitters. And the medical guy did, and he goes, every single one of them had some suicide they were dealing with, a death, a drug problem, an alcohol problem, and so most of them are running from something. For me, I just wanted to get healthy. I don’t want to see how far can I push myself. And by the way, it feels really good.

32:27 During or after? All of it. As much as it sucks while you’re in the middle of it, you’re alive. You get down to water, food, and shelter. I just want water, food, and shelter, right?

32:38 All that bad news is gone. This thing is gone. Water, food, shelter, I promise, God. I’ll never complain about that. Just give me water, food, shelter.

32:47 So it uncomplicates life. It uncomplicates life. For those British periods. Yes. OK.

32:51 Because you always say, you would say, embrace the suck. And you always say that when you go through things like this, then the fact that Starbucks doesn’t have your vanilla flavored latte that day, all the other problems would work. Change of frame of reference, right? And so that’s why I’ve hired. I’ve had business assistants.

33:06 I’m a kid. I’ve hired Eastern Europeans. I’ve hired Americans. I’ve hired, and I have to say, without somebody taking shots at me for saying this, but you cannot compare the Eastern European with somebody that comes from a third world country that had a really tough life with somebody from a first world country. These guys just ask for more hours.

33:27 They don’t ask about vacation time. They don’t want special lunch privileges. Just give me more hours so I could send money home back to my family. And that’s a lot of fun to be around. Because that person’s so hungry, they’re fighting for milk, and you want to help that person, right?

33:43 As opposed to the person that has their hand out, they’re complaining, they can’t make it, they’ve got excuses. So you’d rather employ and hang out with a third world person than a first world person, a lot of times? Or a first world person that’s really still hungry. And I have this debate all the time with intellectual people, because should we, as societies, give people a floor, some basic things, or should we let people rise and fall based on their own desire and energy and motivation, and I lean towards, I think people should fight for milk.

34:18 Right, which is the Spartan way. And I want to get all into Spartan race, which you’re the CEO of, and how that was created through death race. But before that, I want to go back, because you just dropped in briefly when you were talking about these ultra races, about your upbringing in New York. And you talked about it when we were at the Masterminds. Can you give us a quick synopsis of what your life is like growing up?

34:40 Yeah, I mean, when you’re a kid, so you don’t know where ever you are. And so our environment was good, fellas. It was organized crime capital world. For whatever reason, I’ll never understand. Somebody needs to do a study.

34:53 90% of these organized crime captains, bosses, moved to this little neighborhood of Howard Beach. It was in Queens. There were 5,000 new homes built in this neighborhood, near a disgusting beach, next to a garbage dump. And not far from the Rockaways, many people may know the Rockaways, and I don’t know why. They all migrated to this place.

35:17 If you were the federal government, and you wanted to wiretap them, you’d just, one telephone line going to this neighborhood, you’d have them all. So they were all there. And it was next to Kennedy Airport, which was like a candy store for theft, because anything coming into the airport or coming out might not make it where it was supposed to go. And I’d wake up in the morning and go in the garage, and there were things in the garage that weren’t there the day before.

35:48 And my friend all of a sudden had Adidas shell top white sneakers, those were the rage back then. Everybody had their $50. I can remember friends all of a sudden had 300 pair. How did he get 300 pair? You got them because they fell off the truck.

36:05 For coats and paintings, and then people would disappear. People would go to jail. So he grew up in this crazy place, and my father was doing really well, and then things changed. He lost his business. He lost his access he had in his business he had at Kennedy Airport, and started to lose real estate and things he had accumulated.

36:28 It was the best thing that ever happened to me and my sister, because my mother, who made a complete left turn and got into yoga, meditation, spirituality, which might as well have been a Martian in Queens, an Italian neighborhood, into that in the 70s. And had monks in our living room teaching yoga, and she made a left turn and taught us a different way, and started to give us this open mind. Because if you grew up in a place, that’s all you know. And so you don’t necessarily accept change, but if you have a mother that’s completely different, and she’s introduced you to Buddhism, and runners, nobody in the neighborhood, they were all wearing fancy shoes.

37:09 Nobody was running. And did you look up to those mob bosses and all the guys that had lots of money? Of course you do. Every kid did. That’s who you wanted to be, right?

37:16 They’d pull up in beautiful cars, had $100 bills they’d give to you. That’s who everybody wanted to be, gold chains. And the conversation around the dinner table was about people that were going into jail or coming out of jail. How does a mother influence that? Most mothers have a hard time competing with anything that’s in the media with their sons.

37:35 Yeah, that was a tough one. So she finally realized she had to move us out of the neighborhood. So they got divorced, and she moved us to Ithaca, New York, which was new age, forward thinking, accepting of these crazy ideas, which are now mainstream. And wheat bread. It’s funny, because my mom introduced me to all this stuff, but I was in California, and that was in the 70s.

37:56 It was normal in the area. It was more open-minded to that. Yeah, but not where you were. Not where we were. And so she moves us to Ithaca.

38:04 I was selling fireworks. I was like eight or nine years old, and in Queens, I would sell fireworks for $0.13 a pack. Pay $0.10, sell it for $0.13. I’d run around on my bicycle, pedal in it. And it was tough, because there was a lot of competition.

38:17 There were a lot of kids selling fireworks, right? All the mob bosses, everybody had fireworks, and so we would push them out. And you couldn’t really make much. $0.03 a pack, not a couple of bucks, selling 80 packs which was a lot of literally pedaling, too, right? And she moved us to Ithaca, and I’m able to sneak a ton of fireworks onto the trucks that we’re moving, all our furniture and fireworks.

38:42 And I get to Ithaca, there’s no competition. No one is selling fireworks. And I quickly learned supply and demand, because all the kids have $1 for lunch. So I sell a pack for $1. And I’m making like $0.90 a pack.

38:58 It’s unbelievable. My speakers, in the old days, the speakers had a hole in them, I’m stuffing all the cash. And I don’t want to get caught by my mother or anybody. Now I’m trying to convince my mother to take trips in the car back to New York so I can get more fireworks. And I finally got busted.

39:13 I got in trouble in school, because no one was buying lunch. They were all buying fireworks. They caught me. And did you start a business in Queens before you went? Before I went to Ithaca, I started a swimming pool business, my neighbor was a boss.

39:29 He was the boss at a Bonanno organized crime family. Bonanno, was that what we were doing? Bonanno. And he takes me in under his wing, and he says, clean my pool, I’ll give you $35 a week. Clean my pool.

39:39 And he teaches me all these lessons. And then he gives me, I had a Lacazy family, and the Gambinos. And before you know it, I’ve got 750 customers, most of which, I mean, I had Germans, and Jewish, and black, and Spanish, and also, but the bulk of my business were these guys. Did he push you toward a legit biz, as opposed to an illegitimate biz? I mean, was he looking out for you?

40:02 I’ll never know what he was thinking. But hypothetically, they liked earners. The quote was, are you an earner? And so you get a young 11, 12, 13-year-old kid that has my work ethic, right, building a business. I’m a good guy later in life to have around.

40:22 I’m going to work, whether I’m going to run a cement business, or garbage business, or whatever. He had a need. He needed his pool clean. He needed somebody he could trust. So did these other guys.

40:33 You don’t want somebody you don’t know in the backyard. And I took it to the next level, and it was really on just a couple of principles he taught me. Commit. If I say I’m going to be there at 7 AM on Saturday, I better be there. Go above and beyond.

40:46 So if I’m cleaning the pool, he said, you better straighten up the lawn furniture, too. Clean the shed. If I need my windows taken care of, take care of that, too, even though I’m not paying you for that. Because I’ve got 25 guys with my hands out to do work for me. I’m doing you a favor by giving you this work.

41:02 And he taught me to understand that. And then don’t complain. Complainers don’t get more work. Commit. Above and beyond, don’t complain.

41:10 Don’t complain. Business school. Power beach, business school. And so I recently told a guy worth a quarter of a billion dollars, who’s like a mentor to me. He’s a Wall Street guy.

41:20 I told him those lessons. And he said, Joe, it’s not weird that you learn those lessons from mobsters. Because captains of industry are mobsters, too. They just wear white collars. So these guys are successful.

41:31 They had one way of doing business. And white collar guys, right? So it’s logical that I would get lessons from him. And anyway, he helped me build this very big business, which later became a construction company. And then I moved to Ithaca, and I would come back every summer and run that business.

41:51 So your mom’s plan kind of worked, because you didn’t turn into one of the bosses. But you still kept on drawing. You draw them back. Yeah, so I’d go to Ithaca, and I’d get formed like a piece of metal, starting to go a little towards the yoga stuff, starting to accept her being a vegetarian and possibly a vegan. But then I’d go back to the neighborhood, and I’d see all these guys with money.

42:12 And here I am, friendly with all the bosses. And yeah, that’s really where I want to go. So I started to become this guy that really didn’t fit in in either place. I was a little too weird for Ithaca, and I was a little too soft. I was becoming for the neighborhood, because I wasn’t wearing collars and glasses.

42:33 So anyway, I’m about to pack it in in Ithaca. I graduated high school, and I’m going to go to New York. I’m going to run this business full time. I don’t need college. I’m doing very well.

42:42 I’m making great money at this point. And my friend in high school in Ithaca, John, says, my dad’s a professor at Cornell. Why don’t we go to Cornell? And I said, I’ll never get in. Plus, I’ve got to run my business.

42:55 I’m doing really well. I don’t need college. And he said, no, we should do it. And Cornell’s in Ithaca, so people know. But it’s an Ivy League school, right?

43:02 It’s an Ivy League school, and no one had given me any lessons or direction on going to college. Nobody in my family had ever gone to college. Nobody was thinking about it. My mother wasn’t pushing me, really. And a kid needs that.

43:16 Kid needs to be directed, right? You learn later. Like, I look back at why some kids knew all that. Well, they had parents that were pushing them that way. And so, at least did that, even watching a parent that did that always plants the seed in the head.

43:31 You’d know to go that way. I didn’t know to go that way. So thankfully, this guy says, let’s go to Cornell. And so I said, all right, if your father can get us in, which made sense, the neighborhood I was from, that would be the way things work. They didn’t get in anywhere, right?

43:45 You need something. Somebody knew somebody. So we go in the interviews, and we think we crushed him. Turns out neither of us get in. So his dad says, don’t sweat it.

43:55 He said, I can get you in extramurally. You could take three classes. All the kids that got in are going to go to this phone, take five classes to get 15 credits. You can go do three classes, get nine credits. Your credits won’t count.

44:07 But if you prove that you can handle the workload with the three classes, we can make a good case, and you can get in. So I said to John, listen, I got to go back and run my business this summer. St. John’s University is right near where I’m running my business. Why don’t you come with me?

44:23 Help me run my business for the summer. We’ll go to St. John’s. We’ll take two classes, because we’re going to be short. If this plan works, we’re going to be short a couple classes.

44:30 We’ll learn how to study. We’ll get tuned up. Nah, he goes, I’m going to Vegas. And funny enough, that summer, I do it myself. And I’m in the middle of this class, and I learn about delayed gratification.

44:40 I learn about this marshmallow test that Walter Mitchell, in Stanford, does on children in the 1970s. Takes kids, gives them a marshmallow pretzel cookie, says, eat it now, or if you wait, I’ll come back and I’ll give you two. Most kids eat the marshmallow, and they can’t wait. He follows the kids for 30 years. The kids that can wait are highly correlated to being successful.

45:06 They’ve got better lives, they’ve got better marriages, better houses, better school. Everything in their life is better. I learned that that summer while I’m there, and I’m thinking, John took the cookie. John went to Vegas, and he parted all summer. I’m buckling down, right?

45:20 I’m not taking the cookie or the marshmallow. Anyway, we go back that fall. Do you think that can be taught delayed gratification? Or do you get something you’re born with? I tested my son.

45:29 And my son was seven. And I don’t know if, I was sweating. Because I was like, what if he’s a cookie eater? And I give him a thing of ice cream. And I say, take it, eat it.

45:47 We don’t eat junk food around the house, so highly unlikely he’s going to hold out. And after about three and a half minutes, he turns to me, he says, dad, how long do I have to wait to get 15 scoops? And I said, this is the greatest kid ever. That is the greatest answer ever. And it occurred to me at that moment, we’re playing for 15 scoops.

46:02 That’s what my life’s about. We’re playing for 15 scoops. We’re not playing for one scoop. Or two scoops. Not even two scoops.

46:07 So he wanted to know about 15 scoops. He wanted to know about 15 scoops, right? That’s the game we’re playing in life. And so anybody could have one scoop. Let’s go for 15.

46:17 Or two scoops. Or two. So anyway, we both go back to school. We do pretty well. I really work hard, I get good grades, reapply, figured for sure I’m in now.

46:31 They deny me. They deny my friend. You must have wanted this. Was this a competitive thing for you? Because you could have easily just done the construction business back home and not taken the classes.

46:40 It was probably not a cool thing to be doing with your buddies there. Well now I’m thinking at this point, I’m gonna have a leg up on these guys in Howard Beach. Okay. Going to an Ivy League school. Educated.

46:51 Right? I’m gonna be educated and run the business. Like now I gotta do this. Okay. And so, and I probably already talked that people know that I’m doing it, right?

47:00 And I can’t say well I’m not really doing it. I haven’t been accepted. I’m a Cornell. But I’m not really a Cornell. So I have to get in now.

47:08 I have to finish the 100 mile run. Right. Little social pressure too. So John says I’m out. Says I’m not doing it.

47:16 I’m going to Vegas. I’ll go to UNLV. University of Las Vegas. I say well I’m staying. I’m gonna give it another shot.

47:21 I do another semester. They deny me again. They said listen. You’re not getting the message. We can’t have people coming in this back way to the school.

47:30 Go to another school. Come back later. If you have good grades we’ll consider transferring. I said no. No.

47:35 Keep going. You’re coming in with community college credits. Yeah. Which is not exactly Cornell material. Yeah I’m not doing it.

47:40 I wanna do it the right way. I wanna do it. So I do my third semester. They deny me. My fourth semester they’ve broken me.

47:48 Right. Didn’t know it was a word in my vocabulary. They’ve broken me. I’m gonna quit. Now my business is getting really big.

47:54 Back home. I definitely don’t need this aggravation. And my mother doesn’t want me to leave Ithaca. Right. Says listen I teach yoga to this lady.

48:04 And she works at Cornell. I want you to go talk to her. And I’m thinking my mother has no connections. She’s like into yoga, branch sandwiches. She doesn’t know what she’s talking about.

48:13 But I’ll go meet the woman. So I sit down with her. A professor, Anita Racine. And she says do you like textiles? I said well I’ve sold some T-shirts in my time.

48:23 Whatever. She says well I got 92 women in this department studying textiles. And I’ve got no men. And we wanna develop and get more men in the program. I said I love textiles.

48:33 You gotta get me in there. Right. So she accepts me. And I’m the only guy in this department until later they recruit one more guy. And I push through and I graduate Cornell.

48:46 Which was just for me an awesome achievement. And just a testament to perseverance and persistence. And here I was I was gonna quit. It’s like the age old fable. The guy’s digging for gold.

49:00 And when you look back he was four inches away when he quit. Right and there I was. It would’ve changed my life forever had I packed it in and not listened to my mother and met Professor Anita Racine. And by the way, at this point you could see this recurring theme. I seem to keep finding these mentors at critical junctures in my life.

49:19 And I don’t think, certainly it’s lucky, but I think it’s because I don’t complain. Yeah. I’m respecting, I’m looking for help, right? Yeah. Because what a lot of people don’t know, people listening to this podcast right now is, do we call this a podcast?

49:34 I mean this is a production level of like Brian Gumpel. Thank you. So what people don’t realize is older successful people actually want to help you. Yeah. I didn’t realize that until I became a little older and successful.

49:48 Yeah, they want it. Right. It’s like I’m happy when there’s a young person. I feel like, thank God, there’s another one of us that actually has some energy and drive and motivation and wants to get something done. Is it because it reminds you of yourself?

50:01 I think so. Or does it just give you optimism in the world? I think gratitude, I think doing good things for people feels really good. I think it gives you optimism. I think it’s wonderful to see somebody like yourself.

50:12 So I think it’s a bunch of things, but man, it’s welcome. It is. I think it’s nice to see someone who’s, like you said, respectful, open-minded, willing to work hard and willing to really not waste your time. I think that’s it. And they must have seen that in you.

50:24 Because that’s not luck. I was not wasting their time. I would go above and beyond. I’d bring somebody a bottle of alcohol or something. Like I learned, my father taught me those things, right?

50:35 I was respecting these people. I never had my hand out asking for money. I’m gonna go off on a tangent here. So one of the bosses says, I need you to go see this guy they call Gaspipe. He wants a pool.

50:47 He’s got this house. It’s a strange looking house with a flat roof. It’s called Gaspipe. And this is the guy that you’re talking is the ear, right? No, the guy that gives me that customer is Little Vic.

51:00 So he says, Is this guy still around? Little Vic, I believe is still alive. He had a Lucchese family and is a very dapper. He was an awesome guy. I once had to work on his pool heater in a very confined space.

51:15 And the work I was doing ran the risk that the heater would explode because they had a tendency of exploding. And he got in that room with me and he said, if we go down, we go down together. And that was a power. Again, I learned all these things. Literally climbed them.

51:25 He hadn’t known. That’s a management technique, right? It was fantastic, right? I do anything for these guys because they, listen, they had to get people to walk off cliffs for them, right? And so they definitely had some terrible tendencies but also some great things we could learn from them.

51:43 So anyway, I go to Gaspipe’s house and I’m waiting. Look at my watch. He’s about an hour late too. I’m not leaving. I’m waiting, I’m waiting, I’m waiting.

51:50 Comes out later when all these guys start going to jail. He was killing an architect at that time while I was, so thank God. In the house. Yeah. Thank God.

52:03 He didn’t go in. Thank God. The architect apparently was complaining about not getting paid or whatever. So I never asked these guys for money. Okay.

52:14 And they would just take care of you if you did all the work. They paid, they paid, they didn’t pay, they didn’t pay. Right, right. And it came back tenfold anyway. Like the few dollars you’d get from that job, and that’s where people, young people today make such a mistake, right?

52:30 Don’t worry about it. Like just get in with the person and the customer and the, like just take care of them. If you’re, make yourself invaluable. Right. Then they’ll pay you.

52:40 Right, that’s the tool. Yeah. Don’t worry about getting that first paycheck. That’s taking the cookie. We’re playing for 15 cookies.

52:45 Right. Right? Make yourself invaluable. Invaluable. That’s the long day.

52:49 Don’t worry about it, it’s on me. Who cares? Right, make it so where they need you so bad that. Yeah, I can’t tell you how many kids from the neighborhood wanna get in with me now or now in the last 10 years and would come up and just do that. I just wanna do this for ya.

53:04 Which was a technique we learned. Right. Right? What do you mean you just went, okay, I got it, right? And then when something comes up, of course you wanna help that person.

53:12 Yeah. But it’s a tool that no one uses today. No. People always email and ask me for things. Rarely does someone wanna do something for me.

53:18 And if they do two or three things in a row, finally I’m like. You gotta do something back. Yeah, what can I do? They’re just putting money in the bank. That’s just putting money in the bank.

53:24 Right. So, I don’t know where I was. So that was the pipe. Yeah, so you graduate Cornell. I graduate Cornell.

53:31 You’re very proud of that, right? That was a big moment. Big moment. And it was setting up a pattern in your own brain of I can accomplish great things. I know how not to quit.

53:39 I know how to attract mentors. I mean, are you grasping all this now or are you still young? I’m lucky because that last year at Cornell, I take a management class at the business school. I’m attempting to do, and get an MBA. I wanna get an MBA now.

53:53 Now it looks like I’m gonna graduate. I’m going for broke. I’m gonna do the five year program so you can do a year on the thing. They don’t accept me for that. But I get to take a class.

54:04 I take an entrepreneurship class in there. And I end up learning about Ken Blanchard’s one minute manager and I can’t remember his name, Peter, another management guy in search of excellence, Tom Peters. And so those two books continue to add lessons on top of what I learned from all these guys in the neighborhood about customer service. At that point in time, Japan was crushing us. And they were beating us in service.

54:32 And so you’re hearing stories about Nordstroms. How a guy came into Nordstroms and said, look, I wanna return these tires. And they took the tires and they gave the guy money back. Well, it turns out Nordstroms doesn’t sell tires. Yeah, let’s say.

54:44 But that was like 1990 and we’re 25 years later and I’m talking about it, right? Right, because it’s the concept. It was worth giving the guy the money back. 25 years later, we’re talking about on your show, right? So anybody listening who’s running a business, find those moments where you can go above and beyond, where they’re so big and so powerful that the story’s gone for 25 years.

55:07 Right, which is over-delivered customer service. Over-delivered, like crazy. And I did that with my business. I learned it from that classroom study and Ken Blanchard. The other thing Ken Blanchard taught me was when you’re managing people, come in hard.

55:23 Gotta come in hard, you can’t come in soft. Like these are the rules almost like a drill sergeant. Then you can ease up and get soft. If you come in soft and then start to tighten the screws later, it doesn’t work. Interesting, okay, and you use that to this day.

55:35 To this day. So they come in, you get the rules. So it’s a drill sergeant style. Come in hard. Okay, interesting.

55:41 And then loosen up later. So he was a game changer for me. So now I go back to the neighborhood. When did Wall Street come in? Well, I met a guy in the entrepreneurship class who at that time must have been 50 some odd years old.

56:01 Takes me under his wing. Okay, he’s at Cornell. That’s late for being at Cornell. Well, he’s a judge on a panel. He lives in Ithaca.

56:09 He’s well off, he’s retired. He’s a judge on a panel. Takes me under his wing, same thing. Mentor. Mentor.

56:15 And it’s funny because if I look at my list of mentors, I’m actually upgrading mentors each time, right? How many mentors have you had, do you reckon? Gotta be half a dozen, right? And I just keep upgrading. The opportunity presents itself and somehow I’m able to quickly ask, this is a guy I gotta get close to.

56:36 Right. And then make it happen. And make it happen. A bottle of this or this or that. Yeah, and just show that you really appreciate their advice.

56:46 You’ll do anything for help, right? Can’t be a burden to them. You gotta, you have to, there’s an exchange that occurs between two people, right? You gotta figure out what it is you could do for them so that they could do something for you. Because if it’s just about you, it ain’t going anywhere.

57:04 And the terms of that are unsaid. So you have to figure it out beforehand. Someone said the other day, I bet you never said to the guys, will you be my mentor? No. Never.

57:13 So you figured out in their mind. I’m listening, trying to figure out what is it that I could do for this guy. Right, right, right. And so he takes me in and he says, what are you doing after college? And I said, well, I’m gonna go run my business.

57:26 That was your plan, to take the university degree and just make your business better. Yeah, well, I’m running a quarter of a million dollar business. I’m making a quarter of a million dollars myself, right? And this business in 1990. And so I built a building on a main Boulevard in Queens.

57:41 I’ve got all these customers. I got a girlfriend. I’m set, right? I got, I’m a boss. I got employees.

57:48 I got trucks, right? Heavy equipment. I mixed cement, all the things. Right? Right.

57:53 So, and he’s like, I don’t know what you’re doing. He says, you gotta go to Wall Street. And the only thing I really know about Wall Street at this point is the 87 crash, which occurred three years earlier. And I just heard terrible stories and it affected my father even negatively, right? And so, cause then real estate went down and I heard him even more.

58:10 And so, I’m not going to Wall Street. I don’t, it’s unknown to me. I’m very comfortable in what I’m doing. Anyway, this guy calls me every month at the start of the month for four years. What are you doing?

58:24 I’m running my business. You gotta get to Wall Street. Al, leave me alone. I’m not going to Wall Street. Literally, every single month, like 40 phone calls, right?

58:34 And, but he’s alone up in Ithaca with his wife and he’s got a daughter and he sees something in me and we’ve got this clique. He’s Italian, I don’t know. He’s giving me great advice every time we’re on the phone and I’m listening to him, but I’m not going to Wall Street. Right. Anyway, four years in, I am just finishing a big construction job for a Jewish guy.

58:54 I don’t know, irrelevant that he’s Jewish. And he’s a pharmacist and he owes me like $140,000 and I’m going to pick up the check that day. And Al calls me and he says, I want you to buy this stock. And I don’t even have a brokerage account. I’ve never bought any stocks at this point.

59:12 And it’s a drug company. It’s called Syntax. And the guy I’m going to get the money from is a pharmacist. He sells drugs in his pharmacies. And he’s a smart guy and he trades stocks.

59:25 So I go home and I sit down with him because I was very friendly with all my customers. He’s coming out of the shower. He’s towel drying himself. And I said, hey, Eli. I said, I got a crazy question for you.

59:33 I said, my friend just called me. He wants me to buy the stock Syntax. I don’t really buy stocks. And he stops in his tracks and he’s silent for like an uncomfortable 30 seconds. He says, I was just thinking in the shower, I’m going to buy some Syntax.

59:46 And he sits me down and he says, listen, you’re single, you’re making a lot of money. I’m giving him, he’s handed me a $140,000 check. He says, you should take the bulk of your savings, whatever you got, you should buy the stock. Because if it doesn’t work out, you recover, you’re not, you don’t have kids, you’re fine. And if it does work out, it’s really going to make an impact on your life.

1:00:06 And so he helps me open up an account and I take his whole check to 140,000. I buy 10,000 shares. Put it all on black. All on black. And like within a couple of days, the company gets taken over.

1:00:17 It’s up 10 points. I make $100,000. And I’m like, I got to go to Wall Street. This is unbelievable. Now, what are the odds that, I mean, it was just a complete, right?

1:00:27 Again, makes a complete left turn of my life. Had that, like, what if it would’ve went the other way? Yeah, I probably wouldn’t have went to Wall Street. So anyway, I spend the next seven, eight months knocking on doors and trying to get a job. Literally driving my construction truck into Manhattan with a suit hanging up, changing in the thing and doing a interview.

1:00:51 I finally land a job. And the job I land, which I learned later, Wall Street, the attitude and the daily routine in every office on Wall Street goes up and down based on the market. Like, if things are good that day, there’s training programs going on, we’re recruiting new people. If things are bad, all hell breaks loose, right? Nobody’s got time for anybody.

1:01:12 None of the new people, we don’t need that stuff. Cut lunches, we’re not paying for those anymore. And so it’s completely contingent on how the market’s doing. And so there was probably a ripple in the market after I got hired at this first job and so nobody was paying attention to me. By the way, I was making a quarter of a million dollars a year, I took this job to 35,000 bucks.

1:01:31 I sold my business to my Polish employees, gave them a sweetheart deal they pay me over the next five years. And, you know, I didn’t care about it because I was on to bigger and better things. And for them, they’re now multi-millionaires. I saw them recently, they’re killing it. And you were all in, you were just like, I’m gonna be the Wall Street guy.

1:01:47 I’m going to the Wall Street guy. Because that’s what the money is, or that excited you. I could make more money in my mind than a shorter, like, how many trucks could I possibly get to? How many headaches would I have to deal with? I could do it faster, I’m not dealing with blue collar workers that might or might not show up for work.

1:02:02 This is gonna be fantastic, the people I’m gonna be working with are from Yale, Harvard, Oxford, you name it. Right, no scumbags there. This is gonna be easy, this is gonna be, that’s what I had in my mind. So, I’m in the back corner, nobody’s paying attention to me, and I gotta study for my Series 7. Well, I’m a tinkerer, and before you know it, I’m talking to people, and I learn everything about this new business called Prime Brokerage, because that’s where I’m sitting.

1:02:27 And nobody’s paying attention to me. So I studied for my Series 7, I learned about Prime Brokerage, which is the back office for hedge funds, this new industry that’s developing. What year did you take your Series 7? How to be 94, 95? Okay.

1:02:41 Which is late for, first of all, it’s late in the business because people that are listening to this show that understand the business, you would make 25 cents a trade before I got there, right, then you’d make an eighth a trade. When I got there, it was down to pennies. Pennies, right. Right, six cents or whatever. And now it’s down to?

1:03:03 Yeah, now it’s down to, yeah, a penny, two pennies. I took my Series 7 in 93. Okay, so you were a couple years before me. Yeah, but you were a couple years older than me. A couple years older than you.

1:03:12 Yeah, I think so, yeah, because you started in the late 20s, mid-20s. I started in mid-20s. Mid-20s, okay, yeah. So anyway, I learned about Prime Brokerage, and now I’m calling my buddy, Anethika, and I’m saying, hey, give me some advice, what do I do next? You gotta go learn about stock loan.

1:03:28 So I go into, I start having lunch with the stock loan guys, then they let me work in their department for three months. What do I do next? So you gotta go into research. So they’re writing the first Yahoo research report. I’m helping with the first ever Yahoo research.

1:03:40 I’m in research. What I gotta do now, you gotta work in banking. So literally, I am just writing my own ticket. I’m just learning the entire business, right? I get on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange, still making peanuts, getting yelled at by people.

1:03:57 But within a couple of years, I learn the entire business, and I say, I’m gonna start my own company. And everybody says, who the hell is gonna do business with you? You’re like a pool guy. I say, I think they will. I have a specific idea.

1:04:10 I think this industry is completely backwards. I think there’s too many people making money from the time the order comes in on the phone to the time it gets executed. There’s an analyst, there’s a salesman, there’s a trader, there’s a floorbroker, too many people. And I think with technology that’s coming out, because I was a pool guy and a construction guy, I looked at the business differently. Had I just come out of school and gone there, that’s the way it would have been, and that’s what I would have accepted.

1:04:36 Right, but you saw too many metal men. Too many metal men. And fat margins. Fat margins, didn’t make any sense to me. Right, for doing nothing.

1:04:42 Clearing the trade, you don’t really do anything, right? The crazy thing is, they’d all tell you they’re working to death. Right, okay. Right, and I’m saying to myself, hang on a second, we get a credit card to take people to dinner, and we sit in a desk vault. This is like, have you guys mixed cement?

1:04:57 Just so everyone listening, that’s all you really do on Wall Street. You take people to dinner at night, make great relationships. And you get paid. And then you get paid and feed them through the machine. And you have to be relatively smart, but you don’t have to be.

1:05:08 I mean, there’s some things you’ve gotta be good at, right? You’ve gotta know when to talk more, when to talk less, when to hang up the phone, like there’s little nuances, but you could learn that with a couple of Dale Carnegie classes. Yeah, basic sales stuff, and then treat your customers really well. Treat your customers really well. Which means everything, I’m sure you did, you know.

1:05:25 I went above and beyond, because look what I had to do with the business that required like heavy, heavy lifting with my customers, right? Right. For $35. Guys pay me $3,500 in 12 seconds. He’s getting serviced.

1:05:39 Right. Right? Yeah, he’s getting your attention. He’s getting my attention. Right, right, right.

1:05:43 So, now what I learned, now I’m on the street, I’m starting my own business, and what I learned is these people, I was thinking white collar, Yale, Oxford, Harvard, right? These people have problems I can’t fix. Like they have major issues. Like what? Like, are you kidding me?

1:06:01 You’re fighting because the guy next to you got a $50,000 bonus more than you, and you made $700,000? Like, what kind of planet are you from? Right. Right? We’re all making more money than we deserve.

1:06:11 Right. We’re not doing anything. And so, they all had problems, and I stumbled upon this. I was feeling terrible. I was getting fat.

1:06:22 I was doing all these dinners, not feeling healthy, because I was healthy running my, you know, you mix and move bricks, do stuff like that all day. You’re just naturally fit. Because the Wall Street lifestyle is, you know, take them to Lugers for steak, get the bottles of red wine, maybe drinks afterwards, then you’re up early. And the more you do that, the more money you make. Yeah, the more money you make, and then the more times you have to do that.

1:06:42 And then you’re out on the weekend, maybe here, and then you’re up super early, you’re in the office eating lousy all day. You guys are screaming at you if you don’t take them out. You’re out with who? You’re not out with me? I mean, it was just insanity.

1:06:51 So, I’m completely out of shape, feeling terrible, getting screamed at because pizza I sent over for lunch showed up four minutes late, right? I’ve done that before. I’ve screamed at someone for that. So, yeah. So, I run into a guy who’s on the cover of a fitness magazine, completely shredded in the stairwell, because the elevator’s broke one day and I have to take the stairs and he’s carrying dumbbells up and down.

1:07:15 Mike, Mike takes me under his wing. Perfect mentor appears when I need him, right? When the student is ready, the teacher will appear. And that is true? And that is true.

1:07:23 It’s happened my whole life. So, when you’re ready, he’s there. It’s because of the energy you’re giving off. And you have the energy, you have a student, right? And you’re looking for him.

1:07:32 And you’re looking for him and you’re willing to listen. And you’re willing to listen. Yeah. So, I stumble upon this guy and he says, meet me in the morning, we’ll run stairs. And now I’m sweating again and I’m feeling good and there’s nothing better than carrying weight in the stairwell.

1:07:46 Very little oxygen. I mean, you… That’s good. You like that one. Yeah.

1:07:50 All right, it’s tough. And so, I lived in that stairwell for that year and we became good friends and he introduces me to these crazy races. He says, you gotta come out and do an adventure race. I don’t know what he’s talking about. You had never done a marathon or a distance running before.

1:08:03 Well, I’d seen the runs with my mother. I had done some running, but never something that included like kayaking and running through the woods and navigating and like, wow. Like, it literally felt like I was doing construction again. The construction had those primal tendencies, right? You’re under pressure.

1:08:18 You gotta get the job done on time. Otherwise, the guy could kill you. Climb this, carry this, get under this. Yeah, like we were carrying bags of cement. We worked hard.

1:08:26 And so, I do a three-hour race and I’m just in love. This is fantastic. What’s the next level up? He’s like, well, you could do 12 hours. Sign me up, we gotta do it.

1:08:39 Next level up. What’s after that? Sign me up. I need the toughest race in the world. Where is it?

1:08:44 Sign me up, right? We can’t do that. It’s crazy, people die. I don’t care, I gotta do it. Now, I’m not married at this point and I’m seeking adventure.

1:08:51 I’m making money. I’m obviously a endurance junkie, right? I need the action. The trading desk is stressful. And so, I find myself in Alaska in January, 30 below, waist-deep snow, nearly dead, right?

1:09:12 And it felt great. It felt great. Which race was this? This was the Iditarod. So, the Iditarod is usually done with dogs and sleds.

1:09:23 And what is the… So, there was an opportunity to do it without the dogs, to actually head out before the dogs. And so… How long is the Iditarod? What is the history of that?

1:09:31 Well, the full Iditarod is 1200 miles. We took about 380 miles of it. And it was brutal. I mean, terrible. I won’t even look at Alaska on a map anymore.

1:09:42 Really? It was… How do you move in that kind of snow? You just move. You just slog forward.

1:09:48 I mean, it was terrible. But wonderful. But wonderful. How can they be this… We can go on for two hours.

1:09:56 Regarding that race. So, that was like when you’re still at Wall Street, but that was one of the crazier things you had done at that point. The Eskimos have no concept of time. So, you’re out there. Time or distance.

1:10:09 No concept, right? You’re frozen. You just wanna know where that next village is. TP, whatever. Igloo.

1:10:19 Five miles. 18 hours later. It’s still not there, right? So, you wanna kill somebody, right? Okay.

1:10:26 I’m gonna tell you what’s gonna come soon. For them, if you get there when you get there. Yeah, they’re in the other. I remember once we ran into this… I don’t know if it was a TP, Igloo, what it was, but this family was in this tiny little thing.

1:10:39 Smaller than this… You’re not supposed to mess with them. The event organizers said, don’t bother them, don’t impose on them. But we were screwed. And so, we asked to come in and they let us…

1:10:52 They’re completely awesome. They let us in. And we take off our boots. Literally, it’s this size. There’s a family in there, we’re in there.

1:10:59 I mean, it felt like the Ritz Carlton, right? Frame of reference. I don’t wanna go back outside. I don’t even know what kind of… They’re giving us moose supers.

1:11:07 I don’t know what the hell we’re eating. But again, it felt like caviar and champagne. I would paint anything to get more of whatever they were giving me. How long did it take you to complete? We were out there like nine and a half days and it was just…

1:11:22 You know, you’re peeing on yourself. Because you can’t even get your pants down. It’s so cold, it was… Okay, you’re not going back to Alaska anytime soon. No, no, it was awful.

1:11:31 All right, so when did you decide to leave the Wall Street lifestyle? So, I always had a picture of a red barn on my desk and that’s where I was eventually going. And it’s funny, a bunch of my very good-looking friends on Wall Street, when I got into these races, said, what the hell are you doing? You’re never going to meet a wife or anything doing these stupid… This is crazy stuff.

1:11:57 And sure enough, I meet then this girl at a race and I’m completely enamored. My first date I asked her to come out on a kayak, whether or not I had a strategy. I said, we’ll just kayak for like eight and a half, 10 hours and stupidly or smartly, I never would take food or… When I work out, I try to do it with no food, no water, no drinks. Because I want to simulate what the race was like because we typically didn’t have stuff.

1:12:27 But she wasn’t used to that. So here we are in an eight and a half, 10 hour kayak. She doesn’t know she’s going on. We’re just going to go for a kayak. And we got nothing.

1:12:35 But that was it. That was the telling tale that this was the right woman for me, right? She didn’t say uncle, it didn’t complain. Didn’t complain. We talked the whole time and at one point she passed out.

1:12:49 How do you deal with it? I won’t go back to the story, but when your blood sugar drops like that, when you’re training. You’d be surprised. I’ve talked to some people now, I’ve done it enough myself and I’ve talked to enough people that have done 40, 50 day excursions and it doesn’t tend to happen. It’s mental.

1:13:08 Well, no, if you’re not eating junk, like if you’re eating the right fats and the right food and human body is amazing. I’ve done, and it’s not just me, anybody that’s done these long distance stuff has done it on minimal, minimal food. Okay. So if your diet for the weeks prior has been good, you’re not gonna get it? Good diet and then good diet during the event.

1:13:26 Okay. But if you’re constantly spiking it with all kinds of sugary things and then you’re basically giving your body sugars and glycogen to use as fuel, well then that’s what it’s looking for. If you’re giving it fats, which is why all my training comes on the heels of a fast, because I wanna get that switch used to being turned on. We’re burning fat. Fat’s a much better fuel to burn.

1:13:48 You don’t wanna be burning sugar. Okay. So you train yourself to burn fats when you’re preparing. Burn fat, yeah. And then when you’re on the race, you’re burning fat too.

1:13:54 Yeah, now obviously if you’re running at full speed, you’re gonna be burning sugar or muscle if that, but I’m telling you, we’ve gone out for a long time, and I just got done talking to people that are out 45, 50 days, and they did it on zero sugary foods, no processed stuff, just nuts and oils and good stuff. Okay. So you meet your wife in this whole circle, and you’ve got the picture of the barn. It’s funny, all the guys on Wall Street, they’re always thinking about what they wanna do next, right?

1:14:24 Isn’t that funny? They never do it. Like, nobody wants to spend their lives there. The greatest line is from Wall Street when Bub Fox says, when I get done with this, I’m gonna ride my motorcycle across China. And like, there was a guy that wrote a book called Vagabonding, and he said, when he had that line, he said, first of all, it doesn’t cost anything to ride your motorcycle across China, so you don’t need to work on Wall Street.

1:14:40 But a lot of people have this fantasy of what they’re gonna do next, right? And they never do it. And that guy, that mentor, the one in Ithaca, said to me, the problem you’re gonna have, he goes, I’m gonna introduce you to this. He goes, you’re gonna get golden handcuffs, and you’re not gonna leave. But if you go back to my childhood, I had a really strange child when my mother and father were physically fighting in that neighborhood, and watching my father lose all his stuff.

1:15:06 I wanted to make a lot of money, but I didn’t have that desire like I would imagine a billionaire had. I don’t need to make a billionaire. I just needed enough so that I don’t wanna physically fight with my wife. I associated those fights coming from money issues, and so I just had to have enough that we were good, that somebody wasn’t gonna show up and take my house or my car, right? So it wasn’t about getting that 100 million or whatever, it was about getting enough.

1:15:34 It was getting enough, because I don’t understand that. I don’t need, thankfully, because my mother, I guess, right? My mother, I didn’t tell you this, my mother one day, we’re in Ithaca, I wake up on a Saturday morning, she throws everything out. My sister and I get up, there’s nothing in the house through our stuff, bicycle, money, everything is in the garbage and they’re throwing it in the garbage truck. And it’s this whole thing where she was learning.

1:15:59 Material things aren’t important. I remember getting a big fight with her saying, yeah, Ma, your material things you could throw away. Not my, your daughter and mine. But you learn something from it. Planting the early Spartan seeds in your brain.

1:16:13 Yeah, and so then you’re more accepting to that idea. I mean, she would pound those concepts into our head. We were not accepting it, she was crazy. But she turned out to be right. These material things, and I’ve got plenty of material things, I bought the barn and the farm and the house, which if I had to do over again, I wouldn’t have done.

1:16:31 I would rent everything to listeners out there, rent your knives, forks, shoes, clothes, rent everything. Everything. Don’t buy anything. Wow. The heat with, when De Niro says, you gotta be able to move on a dime.

1:16:44 60 seconds flat. Yeah, that’s you, now. Gotta be able to move on a dime. So you buy the barn and the house and everything in Vermont, and you walk away from the street. I walk away.

1:16:54 And you got the picture on the desk. You got all that stuff. I got it. Marry my wife. We get married on the farm.

1:17:01 Ideal, exciting. We’re gonna watch sunflowers grow. We’re gonna have goats and chickens and. And you’re held now, 40s? Let’s see, I’m 30 something.

1:17:13 Young 30s. And I’m done. Yeah, 33, 34. I’m done. And it lasts about three days, right?

1:17:24 My assistant was crazier than I am. My assistant was like a machine. She comes up to visit me about five days into this new life. And I’m sitting down in a chair and I’m actually having a beer. And she goes, you’re right.

1:17:39 And I don’t know where she’s going with it. But literally, she’s never seen that before. What are you doing? You’re sitting still, like. And so she saw it coming.

1:17:46 And so I immediately had to start some businesses. So we started a wedding business on the farm, which was logical because there was taxes. There’s big expenses having a farm. So I figured if we could pay the bills. And then we needed a kitchen for the wedding.

1:18:01 So we bought the local general store and then we needed housing. So we bought a bed and breakfast and it just kept growing and we kept buying stuff. And in retrospect, were you just looking for something to do, you think? I love building. Remember my previous life, I love construction.

1:18:18 I love saving old buildings. I’m a stickler for waste. So when I see an old beam and I know a hundred years ago what it took for that guy to chop down that tree, because I know I did physical work for a long time and hand you that beam and this thing’s gonna go in a garbage container. You gotta save that beam. You gotta save this building, right?

1:18:40 Stupid or not, that’s just some issue I have. I love saving old buildings. And so it was an opportunity to save old buildings. It was an opportunity to build this awesome little town. And then secretly somewhere in my head, I was thinking we’re gonna have a ton of children.

1:18:54 Wouldn’t it be awesome if my daughter was running like the general store, my son was running the farm or whatever. Like as an experience through their teenage years, like I had. And then wouldn’t it be awesome if I found those young teenagers like I was where that neighbor had a helping hand to help me, now I could help some young kids that wanna run businesses and they don’t have to worry about going out and buying a tractor or mortgage payments or trucks, like I had those issues.

1:19:21 The problem is, doesn’t work that way. What, doesn’t work that way in Vermont? Doesn’t work that way in life. The very thing that made somebody successful is actually the adversity. So I mistakenly thought that you could give somebody this general store that’s completely stocked with inventory, has no mortgage payments, painted, ready to go, the register, it actually is gonna fail.

1:19:45 Counterintuitive. It’s counterintuitive, it’s gonna fail. Because the very thing, you know this, anybody running a business knows this, the very thing that keeps that person going, when the going gets tough and guess what? Every single business, the going gets tough. Every single business.

1:19:59 You’re gonna quit. If you don’t have a mortgage payment, if you don’t have your neck on the line, you didn’t tell everybody you’re doing this, sell your house, tell your, like sell your clothes to make it work, you’re gonna quit. I’d quit, you’d quit, right? But it’s that commitment that forces you to hang in there and push through and make the business work. Building that pool business, that first business, I should have failed 40 times, I should have quit 40 times.

1:20:24 Wasn’t working, I didn’t have money to make payroll, the truck broke down, I didn’t, you know, everything that can’t go wrong went wrong. Right, but you made it happen. I had no choice. Somebody asked me last night, somebody said to me last night, Joe, you got Spartan Race now, 131 events, 20 countries, I see you’re pulling your hair out, your phone doesn’t stop ringing, you got emails, you know, why are you really doing this? I said, I’m pregnant.

1:20:49 Like I already jumped out of the plane. If you jump out of the plane, you can’t have a discussion on why did you jump, you already jumped, now you’re dealing with landing. I’m already, you know what I mean? I’m already around the bit, it’s too late. Can’t even ask me that question.

1:21:01 This is yours, your name’s on it. I gotta finish it now. And there’s one way. There’s one way. It was 15 scoops, is the only way.

1:21:09 So how did the death race happen, and then how did Spartan Race come out of that? So backing up, it’s a great story, 2001, 2000-ish, internet business just exploded, right? All the internet stocks are going down. Oh one, they crashed, yeah. Oh one, and I get a, I’m in the internet space.

1:21:31 I’ve got this Wall Street trading firm, I’m really interested in all these little startups, and I get a call from a guy out of Seattle who owns peak.com. And I’m into racing, I’m doing races myself, and I’m thinking, I wanna put on races. Peak.com is a fantastic URL. So I cut a deal for way too much money, I mean a seven-figure deal to get peak.com. But the crazier story here is, the guy that sells it to me, his brother is starting up this thing, he’s involved in this startup called Google.

1:22:02 Do I wanna invest in this? And I’m like, world does not need another search engine. It was like the 13th search engine, just so people know. Like yeah, I was in the .com startup business in New York in 2000, and Google wasn’t around then. It was Alta Vista and AOL and all these others, so.

1:22:19 Well the guy in Ithaca is telling me, Alta Vista is actually the best system out there, and these guys are talking about Google, I’m thinking this is stupid. Anyway, screw that up. So. But if you had made the money on Google, you might not have started spying. I might not have started spying.

1:22:32 So anyway, I buy peak, and I hire a guy, and I say, right here’s my vision, we’re gonna put on these crazy races around the world. My first race is called Expedition BVI. It’s a peak, peak race. And we’re gonna hold it down in the British Virgin Islands, not far from Branson’s place. And we’re gonna have the best of the best athletes come, it’s gonna be like three or 400 miles, swimming, sailing, scaling mountains, just crazy, crazy stuff.

1:23:01 And so I send my team down there to start laying out the course, and the first day somebody’s down there, they fall off the rope, as they’re setting the ropes, and they cut their leg. And the guy that cuts his leg has to go get stitches, and he gets into a dingy, a small boat to head back to the island at Tortola to get stitches. Fast forward two days later, I get down there, the gun goes off, the race starts. It’s fantastic, six, seven day race. Race finishes, massive storms during the week, the worst I’ve ever seen.

1:23:32 Everybody survives, we have a party that, actually a great story, my assistant, who’s five foot, who’s like General MacArthur, this woman. The rule in this race was you had to stay as a team. And so I had some Wall Street guys down there that did the race that had no business being there, and they lost one of their team members. So technically they were out of the race. So I didn’t say to my assistant, who has no experience kayaking, do me a favor, jump in the race with that team, so at least they could experience getting to the finish line, because they need another member.

1:24:04 It technically wasn’t allowed what I was doing, but I figured let them get the experience to the finish line. Anyway, I throw her in the boat. There’s like 15 hours left in the race, right? Storm rolls in, finish line, we break the champagne on the boats, we get pictures, everybody goes to the party. I got to get her picked up by like a search and rescue Coast Guard.

1:24:22 They drift out to the ocean, are in this team, save her. Everybody say, my team member comes over and whispers in my ear and says, hey, we have a problem. I said, what’s the problem? If we lost the guy, I said, how do we lose a guy? You’re just telling me now?

1:24:40 He said, well, about eight days ago at the start of the race, this guy was set in the ropes I mentioned before, he got in the dinghy, that’s the last time anybody saw him. We assumed he went and just rested with his stitches and he’d be at the party. We figured he went and partied, he met some women, who knows? Nobody’s seen him. So my dad’s there, it’s the first race I’m putting on, it’s like 2001.

1:25:01 And my dad says, you know, I don’t know down here if negligence is criminal. You might, you know, this guy’s dead. So we’re pacing back and forth, what do we do, we call a Coast Guard. Coast Guard comes in, they lay out the maps, they said, listen, the storms have been terrible all week. If this guy was last seen here, he’s most likely dead.

1:25:19 But, we’re gonna go to Little Tobago, we’ll fly, it’s 150 miles away, we’ll fly over, we’ll see if he’s over there. It’s like an uninhabited island. Anyway, he drifted 150 miles to Little Tobago, he’s surviving on Little Tobago, eating crabs and like drinking bottles of water. They rescued him, they brought him back, I figured for sure he’s gonna sue us. And it turns out to be a great guy, he just wants dinner, he’s starving.

1:25:43 So that was where the term death race came, Sports Illustrated this story about it, we had mumbled at that race, like man, that was a real death race. Okay, so because of that incident, Because of that incident. It was called death race. Yeah, that was just a term that we, AKA. Okay, so it wasn’t, all right, I figured you just made up this crazy race, and you called it death race.

1:26:02 No, so we had this in our head, I lost a half a million dollars putting on that event in the British Virgin Islands. I continued to put on events as a hobby over the next five, six years. Now I’m in Vermont, we’re living in this town, we got the weddings going, I got the general store, and I can’t get any of the businesses to work financially. And so I’m thinking, I gotta bring more people to this town, there’s only 400 people in town. Weddings are helping a little bit.

1:26:27 Nobody in town, I’ll put on some races. So one of the races I decide to put on is the death race, in addition to a 50 mile running race, in addition to a bike race, five or six races that are gonna bring people to town. I can’t get that business to work. It just bleeds, so now I got the general store losing money, I got the bed and breakfast losing money, I got the race business losing, everything’s losing money. Okay, did you tell me what the death race was all about?

1:26:52 Death race, the death race was basically what I described down in the Virgin Islands, just a crazy insane race that would try to emulate what it’s like to start a business, what it would be like to climb Mount Everest, what it would be like, from the experiences I had, doing these crazy adventure races, could I condense it down to 24, 48 hours, get somebody really to their breaking point, and just quit. Right, you were like telling people to dig like tree stumps out of the ground. Yeah, just crazy, crazy stuff.

1:27:22 And like crazy stuff that you wouldn’t even know if they were gonna take you seriously, right? Exactly. But you would find people to come over and try to do it. Just break them. Just break them.

1:27:29 Break them. Would you get up in their face and break them, or did you say you gotta do all this stuff and they would just break themselves? No, you’d get in their face and you’d get them to, you’d give them the unexpected, over and over and over until they break. And so, did that, was losing money, and I really started to question all this stuff I was doing because we were just bleeding so much money. The guy Heath, who’s kidney had failed in that run, had been training with me over the years.

1:27:59 And every time we trained, he’d say, you gotta put on a military inspired obstacle race. Back in the 80s, there was some show on TV, talk about this thing, and I’d say, Heath, that’s the dumbest thing I ever heard. There is nobody that’s gonna jump over a fight. Like, it’s stupid. It doesn’t even sound real.

1:28:14 It doesn’t sound professional, it’s stupid. It’s like an 80s TV show. He’d say, oh, just like the guy that said, you gotta go to Wall Street, he just, in my ear, right, just wouldn’t stop. Well, I read a magazine article in 2009 about somebody that’s putting on a race like this and they’re getting eight or 10,000 people. And so I fly out and I talk to them, and when I walk in their office, they’ve got like 40 women, young girls in a room just out of college, they’re all on this new thing, Facebook, and they’re hammering away on talking to people.

1:28:43 It looks like Boiler Room, almost. And I’m thinking, for sure, I am not getting in this business. Last thing I need, I already got a general store losing money, I got the wedding, right? A Boiler Room is a place where they line guys up and they call and sell stocks, just in case people don’t know. And right, and these guys are doing it, and these women are doing it for races.

1:29:03 Right, selling it online. Selling it online. Yeah, yeah, yeah, okay. So I don’t need, I need another business like I need a hole in my head. And Thanksgiving comes, I’m with the in-laws.

1:29:15 I’m not one for sitting around and chit-chatting at Family Affairs. So I get online while everybody’s eating turkey, and I’m thinking, maybe I should do this. And so I ask my brother-in-law, I say, hey, come inside, take a look at this on the computer. What do you think? And he’s out of work at the time.

1:29:32 He says, yeah, let’s do it. So we lay out a business plan. It’s not called Spartan yet, it’s this idea of putting on this race. So after two weeks, he backs out, after we’ve got somewhat of a plan. I call one of the neighborhood kids who just had some trouble, got out of trouble, but I knew him all those years I ran the business.

1:29:53 From Howard Beach? From Howard Beach. Who I knew was a go-getter, who was the kind of guy that over the years had just done me favors, not asked for anything, and now’s the time he gets the phone call from me. And I said, listen, I think I wanna do this thing. I want you to run it.

1:30:06 I’ll give you 40% of this business. He listens. I said, meet me in Connecticut. We sit down, we have a meeting. I round up the guys that helped me with the Virgin Islands race.

1:30:20 I put together a team, somebody that could maybe run one of these operations with 30 women in the room, and this guy that I know for years from the neighborhood that I trust that’s gonna run the thing. They say, we got it. So I say, I’ll invest. And this guy from the neighborhood lays out the first seven races. He’s got a plan.

1:30:37 We’re gonna start in Vermont. The reason we’re gonna start in Vermont is if we trip up, no one is gonna see that we screwed up, and then we’re gonna go from there to Brooklyn, and then from there, we’re gonna go to Texas. And I find a few people that wanna help bring it to the UK and bring it to Canada. And we’re about five races in, and my neighborhood friend says to me, you know what, Joe? I know you wanna give me 40% of this thing.

1:30:58 He says, I’m out. I said, why you out? He says, because I know you. You’re gonna wanna take it around the globe. You’re going for 15 cookies.

1:31:06 He goes, I just need, I need a fucking cookie now. He says, I wanna make money now, right? And you’re just gonna wanna keep putting money in. I know you’re never gonna stop. And which is my M.O., that’s the way I operate.

1:31:17 Which is fair. It was not contentious at all. And I said, I’ll tell you what, why don’t you take the food concession? You can make money right away. He said, yeah, done.

1:31:24 So he takes over the food concession, which he still does now. And I get plugged back with this thing. And my bookkeeper turns to me at some point and says, I don’t know what you’re doing with this business, but we’re going out of business. We cannot support the general store, these stupid races in Vermont, the wedding business. You’re burning through $300,000 a month here.

1:31:50 You’re gonna be out of money any month. And so I remember going skiing with my kids on a Saturday and I’m sweating. Like you’d sweat, right? I’m up against the wall. And I’m thinking, do I kill it?

1:32:03 Do I have to go back to Wall Street? I said, you know what, I’m gonna call some guys, some young guys on Wall Street that are making a lot of money. Don’t have the family commitment yet. So I called my friend and I said, listen, you’re not gonna understand this business. I really can’t get into it.

1:32:18 I have no paperwork. I need money. And I need it by Monday. I’ll cut you a good deal. Don’t worry, I need a million dollars by Monday.

1:32:25 And they send it. They send me the money. And- This is 2009, 2010. This is probably late 2010. Okay.

1:32:34 Early 2011. They send me the money and it buys me like six, seven months. And death is knocking on our door again. And I’m thinking, I remember reading something about the Subway sandwich guy. He said when he started, no one went to the first store, but he knew he had something.

1:32:51 So he opened the second store. Nobody went to the second store. And he quickly was going out of business. So he opened the third store. And he figured if he just keeps opening stores, eventually people will say, man, these sandwiches must be great because they’re everywhere.

1:33:04 And the strategy worked. And so I thought, that’s what I’m gonna do. We’re just gonna keep putting on races. And maybe there’ll be a network effect, which I don’t really understand, but I hear people using that term a lot. And it’s a good term.

1:33:17 Sometimes it’s used desperately. And there’ll be like people in San Francisco will talk to people in New York and it’ll just happen. And so I quickly learned, which I’d never used in business before. I quickly learned, I said, you know what we’re gonna do? We’re gonna push out our payables six months and we’re gonna move our, we’re gonna collect money now and we’re gonna push payables out.

1:33:37 And then I went to all the employees and subcontracts and I said, all right, here’s the deal. We don’t pay anybody more than $2,000 a month. It’s a company-wide policy. That’s our policy. It’s like Russia.

1:33:48 This is what we’re doing. And if anybody wants to leave, I understand. This is all we can do. And 99% of the people, so one guy, one guy walked. Which is great, looking back on it now.

1:33:58 So they’re effectively investing in your business. They’re basically creditors of your business. Yeah, they believed in it and they knew I was sweating pretty heavily. And we were doing something good. We weren’t on Wall Street just making a bunch of money.

1:34:15 We were doing something. People that were amputees at PTSD, divorces, overweight, everybody was getting those messages and meeting those people. We were doing something good. And we couldn’t- And that feels different than when you’re just cranking out the money. Yeah, we couldn’t lose this.

1:34:31 So everybody hangs in and it doesn’t matter, we’re going out of business again. And a company that does the back end processing for these types of businesses wants our business because they collect the five or 6% every time somebody swipes a credit card to sign up for the race. And they’re a public company. I don’t want to give their name. And they’re a public company and they lost one of their major customers.

1:34:56 And so I happen to know something about Wall Street, right? And they’re gonna have to make an announcement. They lost one of their biggest customers. So they need to fill that customer quick. And the salesman’s been calling me, he’s hounding me.

1:35:05 And he says, we really want the business. And I said, I need a million dollars to move. And he says, okay. I said, send me the money first because I needed the money. And they write the check and they buy us another six months.

1:35:18 And you fill their earnings gap. And we fill the gap. And so everybody, there’s that exchange. Everything works. And we buy some more time and it’s looking like this might work now but we’re still sweating.

1:35:30 And then all of a sudden the private equity guys and venture capital guys start calling and say, hey, we want to be involved with this thing. Did it turn? Had it started to turn? It hadn’t turned yet. The day we closed on our VC money is the day we no longer needed it.

1:35:45 However, it was a good move because those guys really helped us elevate the business and take it to the next level. And they weren’t such formal sticklers, these guys. The company’s name is Raptor. And Jim Pallotta, who I knew of from Wall Street. And he was Paul Tudor Jones, partner there.

1:36:08 And he wasn’t such a stickler that the board meetings were so onerous and things were so terrible in this startup phase that they choked us to death. They looked the other way. They let us really take some liberties and grow this thing. They helped us hire management. They really helped.

1:36:27 And how big is Spartan Race now to give people an idea? Well, just here’s the funny thing. And I think you’ll appreciate this. And maybe some of the listeners will. Once we got the NBC show and once they see that we’re in 130 locations and they see that we’re in 20 countries.

1:36:42 And I mean, we’re pretty global. People think we’re a billion dollar bid and we’re this giant company. And so the bad people out there, right? The ones that want their hands out and like want something from us. And you get those in every business.

1:36:56 Mistakenly think we’re this giant company that, now, part of me, and we want people to think we’re a big company because from a customer’s perspective that gives people comfort and that makes them wanna use our product or service. But the couple of bad people out there that have their hand out and wanna take advantage of us, we’re not a billion dollar company. We’re not even close to it. We just look a lot better. Fake it till you make it.

1:37:20 And you guys look great. You must have those 20 girls in the room now because your social media looks great. Your videos are amazing. I mean, it really feels great. We work really, really hard.

1:37:33 Now, in fairness, we have a product or service that lends itself to social media. I mean, we are Zuckerberg’s dream, right? Because if we were selling Gucci handbags, how the hell do you get people to like that page? Like, right? Like, our imagery is like awesome.

1:37:53 It’s spirit, right? It’s spirited. It’s awesome, right? You wanna be affiliated with that. You wanna share that.

1:37:59 What is your product, do you think? Well, we’re a lifestyle business. Like, I don’t care what you think we are today. Where I wanna be is we are a lifestyle. We are what we want.

1:38:11 We want people to define themselves as Spartans, right? We wanna turn back the clock. Like, I know the world’s trying to advance and get better technology and make things cheaper and faster. I wanna reverse that and get people buying less and consuming less and performing in purposeful suffering. Right.

1:38:34 Sounds ridiculous. Sounds like words I’m just making up, but they’re not. I do a lot of work at Cornell University for obvious reasons. They’re awesome to me. They changed my life.

1:38:43 They let me come back there. I’m like, they’re my hero, but it’s awesome. Like, I go to Cornell and I get to hang out with these professors that are doing this fantastic research and I hang out with a happiness professor. And the happiness professor and I get to spend, you know, a month together, understanding human psychology around happiness. And guess what?

1:39:03 When you buy that Gucci handbag, I’m sure Gucci will never sponsor us now, or you purchase that fancy car, or you get that brand new big apartment, your happiness level actually dips. It goes below where you were before the purchase. When you participate in this extreme experience and the harder it is, the better, the purposeful suffering, your happiness level actually rises. And the reason that is, is think about, there’s so many billionaires that are unhappy, right?

1:39:30 You can’t advance your happiness by piling more things on. Doesn’t work. You can advance your happiness by stripping things away because when you strip things away and you put yourself in Alaska for nine days and you’re way steep in snow and you’re 30 below, you appreciate the things you have, right? People say, Joe, you don’t fly first class. I can’t believe you’ve stuffed yourself in that little seat.

1:39:54 Hang on a second. I’ve done seven days straight on a bicycle seat. I appreciate any airline seat, right? I’ve slept in the rain in the mud. Of course, I don’t need to be in a fancy hotel.

1:40:08 I’m just happy it’s not raining in the room. Right. It sounds a bit like Fight Club. Like in the premise of Fight Club was, you know, Ed Norton had everything, all the fancy stuff, but he really wanted grits. You gotta strip those things away.

1:40:18 He really wanted human contact and human connection. I mean, you know, your events are group events. That’s not by accident, right? You’re either competing with each other. Well, competition’s important because a human being, you and I, we need competition to perform at peak level.

1:40:34 Otherwise, we’re just gonna go through the motions. So yes, we want camaraderie. We want to come out with a bunch of friends because that’s good, right? We want you, you’re an average of your five best friends. So we gotta upgrade your friends or we gotta get your friends working harder.

1:40:48 But once the gun goes off, it’s every man for himself. Within your group, but then I’ll watch and you’ll actually lend a hand to some stranger, right? But you want to beat your friends. Right, right, right, right, right, right. But that’s good, that’s good.

1:41:02 The Cornell University Wrestling Coach says to me, when they come in at the beginning of the season, they put them on a treadmill. They put it at full incline, fastest speed possible. Run as long as you can. Guy falls off when he’s done. I couldn’t take one more step coach, that’s all I had.

1:41:15 Really? This guy next to him, he goes one more minute. That guy gets back on, he goes a minute and a half longer. So we need competition to push ourselves. Right, right.

1:41:24 And that’s why you have times when you’re racing. That’s why we time, right, you got it. Some other races don’t have times. It’s a party. It’s a party, parties don’t push people.

1:41:32 Right, okay. It’s good, it’s getting them off the couch, but no, we want to bring you, we want to put you into that war setting where you’re gonna get so uncomfortable and get yourself out of your comfort zone that you’re gonna be happier. Right, you’re gonna be happier. And talk to me about the mud and the uncomfortableness. How do you know how far to go?

1:41:50 How do you know not to go too far? You know, I mean, how did you design these races? Because I know you’re very involved. I do it myself, right? So I competed myself.

1:41:58 I know the things that are gonna get people just to the edge of breaking, because I’ve been there, and then you bring them back. And I want to say, although it sounds ridiculous, it’s somewhat proprietary, right? We know how to just about break people. And that’s the secret sauce. That’s what gets them coming back.

1:42:19 And our return racer numbers are fantastic. Which is good, because that means we’re changing their lives. I had a guy, I get so many emails every day, he changed my life, I was gonna get divorced, I lost weight, thank you, which are awesome. I had a guy send me a picture, he tattooed our logo on his face, permanent tattoo on his face. Which is a Spartan logo?

1:42:39 Spartan helmet, yeah. And I couldn’t resist. I said, hey man, I love it, but I changed our logo. But like, so they can take it too far, but it’s awesome that people are finding something to affiliate with and something to define themselves as. And you don’t want somebody defining themselves with Louis Vuitton, right?

1:43:01 That’s a good thing to find, it’s just helping. Yeah, and like you said, what you’re doing is a lifestyle business, so it’s not, what’s going on. When I look at your brand, it’s fascinating, because it’s not about the race. There is the race, but there are so many other things. The race is just a test.

1:43:13 I want you eating healthy, I want you working out every day. You had workouts in Hyde Park on Sunday, you have an eating healthy, you have a children’s race. I mean, it’s a whole thing. This is a lifestyle. I want you off the couch, I want you getting outside.

1:43:25 When it’s raining, great, get outside. You’re not gonna drown. Right, stop making the excuses, and if I did it, you can do it. You can do it. And tell me about this concept of less, because it’s the last thing we’re talking about these days, of just dealing with less, and just stripping things down.

1:43:40 You were telling me earlier the story of the Spartans and what they originally thought. People say Spartan here, they don’t really know what that really means. No, he was so smart, the Lacergis, right? He said, let’s make money heavy and bulky within this society, because then you’re not gonna be able to carry it. You’re not gonna deal with it.

1:43:57 It’s not something you’d wanna accumulate. Let’s make food really simple so that everybody isn’t chasing that next dish and that next meal. You could have any meal you want as long as it’s this black soup. That’s all they had was this black soup, like pig feet and vinegar. On purpose.

1:44:13 Yeah, it was nutrient dense. It got them what they needed to get through the battle, but it wasn’t something you were chasing. Now, listen, some people would look at the Spartan culture and the way they ran that society back then and say, well, some of the things were a little weird, they were. But you take the good from it. They were big on letting women get educated and pushing women to the forefront.

1:44:33 They were tough women. That’s awesome, right? Women weren’t wearing burqars back then. They were up front because the woman was the one making the Spartan men. I keep thinking of the movie 300.

1:44:46 Is that all we know of? Is that a pretty good dose of what Spartans were? Steven Pressfield, if anybody wants to learn more about, he is the preeminent expert. Is he the same guy that wrote The War of Art? That’s Steven Pressfield, how is he?

1:44:58 He’s a preeminent expert on Spartan. Oh, is he, okay. You’ve had a few conversations. Yeah, he’s awesome. And so this whole less is more concept, strip it down.

1:45:06 Imagine if the billionaires had to carry around like a billion more of weight than everyone else. How silly would that look? You know, they are in a way, right? Because I believe you don’t own things, they own you. And so I got caught up in the consumerism, right?

1:45:25 I bought the general store and all those businesses and they’re just giant weights and chains on your shoulders that you’ve got to carry and deal with and pressure and I got to deal with it. Can I ask you a personal question? When I met you at Masterminds a couple weeks ago, I said hi and we spoke and you don’t have this aura that I would just associate you if I read your bio with like this drill sergeant aura. I thought I’d have a cape. Not a cape, but I thought you might be sizing me up or I thought you might be a little overbearing or something like that.

1:45:57 Now in retrospect, I think that would be ridiculous because if a guy did all this stuff, he wouldn’t be like that. But you don’t act like the guy who did all this stuff. You seem like a pretty normal guy. Do you hear that very often? I’m gonna answer the question backwards.

1:46:13 I found that these really tough American wrestlers, there’s nobody tougher than American wrestlers, not the silly WWE wrestlers, the real wrestlers, like collegiate wrestlers. You shake their hand, they got a soft handshake, they’re kind, they give you a hug. Completely opposite of what you’re expecting, like these are tough guys, right? And the reason is they’ve been to battle every day and they win some and they lose some and they know what it’s like and they’re humble.

1:46:41 And so I think people that have their chest puffed out and the feathers are acting like peacocks is because they have an ego and they’re unsure of themselves and they’re insecure. And so I think when you’ve been through these battles, my battles were these long distance races, you become secure with yourself. You win some, you lose some, it’s not special, right? So I think that’s what it is. I remember reading Schwarzenegger’s book, I think it was Pumping Iron, and he said before he started winning the big competitions, he had to like fight people because he was insecure.

1:47:20 And the analogy used was you pull up with a car that may or may not win a race at a stoplight with another car and you’ve got to rev the engine and go. But you pull up with like a Lamborghini, you don’t need to rev the engine, you’re gonna win. Leave me alone. You’re almost reluctant to talk about some of these races because you’re like, yeah, yeah, I did it and that was a long time ago. And I don’t wanna be too cocky either because I’ve quit some races, I’ve had some tough times out there.

1:47:48 I remember one race, I did an Iron Man and I was lucky. I entered the Iron Man scene coming from these crazy adventure races. What that means is so an Iron Man is like a 12 hour, 13 hour event, still very hard. But if you’re out there nine, 10 days, 12 hours is a training day, right? My frame of reference was different.

1:48:11 Now, today if I jump into it, Iron Man is still hard. I’m not taking anything away. So I’m out there, I’m never gonna quit an Iron Man and I’m just having a bad day. I’m not trained up because I’m probably thinking it’s no big deal and I’m nauseous. And I go up to the ambulance and I say, listen, you gotta give me something.

1:48:28 I’m nauseous and they give me Epitat, which is like they give pregnant women to vomit. I don’t know what they’re giving me and I’m vomiting like crazy and I’m nauseous. I’m thinking, you know what, I’ve done enough of these. I’ve done like 23 Iron Man. I don’t need to prove anything to anybody.

1:48:41 I’m just not feeling well. And as I’m about to raise my hand, the white flag, this woman with one leg hops by. I’m like, motherfucker, right? And so now her and I battle out the next 15 miles, right? And she like elbows me to the finish.

1:48:57 And I don’t know where I was going with that, but- Competition. Competition. And do you still do them? Do you still do Iron Man? I just did a, I’m just coming back.

1:49:06 I’m just coming back. I just did a 50K last weekend. And then I followed it up with a half marathon in Bear Mountain. So wasn’t, not back to the old glory days, but you know, no excuses. If I have four kids, I’m on the road 250 days a year.

1:49:20 I cannot come home. I’m home one day a week, two days a week, max. I can’t come home and say, hey guys, here’s kisses and hugs for everybody. I’m gonna go on a 12 hour bike ride. I’ll catch you later.

1:49:31 I can’t do it. So I’ve figured out a way in my life to do an hour, hour and a half a day working out. And so hour, hour and a half will get me through a 50 mile. Or it’s not gonna get me through a hundred miles or something. And you’re traveling 250 days a year for Spartan.

1:49:45 For Spartan. Because you try to be, I guess, at every race or- I gotta be everywhere. I gotta deal with headaches everywhere, all over the world. Important meetings, meeting somebody like you. I gotta do it.

1:49:54 So I’ve tried to make other people the face of the brand because I really wanna be with my family. That was my goal in life. The problem is when you do that, people tend to think they made the company, right? And then you’ve got problems. So it’s very hard to find.

1:50:15 I’ve got a great guy. I got Colonel Nye out of the Special Operations Command Center who just retired after 30 something years. And he’s somebody that’s trustworthy enough to say, hey, Colonel, you can go give speeches. You could be a face. Certainly got the credibility.

1:50:28 Fantastic speaker. And I know he’s not gonna go off his rocker one day and say, hey, I own the company now. Right, okay. So you have to be careful. You gotta be careful with what you’re doing, baby.

1:50:36 Talk to me about parenting. Is it true? Everyone gets up 5.45 in the morning. You got some young boys. How do you do it?

1:50:43 Well, let me tell you the reason. This is gonna be a great story. I don’t know if you know this story. So I have children and like you said, I got two boys, two girls, and I wanna do the best I can with the kids. So I want them to learn another language.

1:50:59 I’m enamored with Asia. So we hired a Mandarin-only speaking nanny, and the job is to drill Mandarin into them. So then we said, all right. I don’t know if we said or I said, but we said, we’re gonna watch TV, let them watch TV, but they gotta watch it in Mandarin-only. Which was another one I took out of Pumping Iron with Arnold Schwarzenegger, because he said he learned English by watching TV in Europe.

1:51:22 So I thought, well, I’ll just reverse it. They’ll learn Mandarin by. So then I said, I saw Kill Bill, and Uma Thurman is training with the guy that’s just like, what is the sound of one hand clapping? And I’m like, I gotta get one of those. I gotta get a guy, a Kung Fu master.

1:51:39 It only speaks Mandarin and just tortures the kids, because I would have wanted that as a kid. And so I find this guy from China and he comes over and he lives with us in 545 every morning. Is he martial arts guy? Martial arts Kung Fu. And he wakes the kids up and he does an hour with him in the morning.

1:51:55 And then at night, another hour at night. And the kids just assume at this age that every kid just does two hours of Kung Fu every day. Right. And all your kids do it, boys and girls? Yes, but my two-year-old is not up to speed yet.

1:52:07 Okay. Which four-year-old does burpees? Oh yeah, they’ve all done. My daughter, who’s five, just turned six, has done 300 burpees straight. My seven-year-old boy has done 300 burpees straight and run a marathon.

1:52:22 My nine-year-old has done 300 burpees straight fast, 1857 or 1845 minutes, and done a 50K. And he’s how old? He’s nine. Nine, okay, wow. So there’s no starting too early.

1:52:37 No, no way. And my argument then, people are listening and saying that guy’s a screwball. Right, 50K, 5-0. Yeah, he’s torturing his kids, but that’s not the case at all. There are cultures where kids walk seven miles each way to school every day, so give me a break.

1:52:52 I would argue it’s a crime, what we do to our kids today. They sit in front of the couch, sit on the couch 12 hours a day in front of video games.

1:53:03 And I’m not dragging the kids, they get it done. Right, 300 burpee challenge, I think I’m gonna give it to everybody. So a good time for- Well, an amazing time, off the world record time would be 15 minutes, would be insane. Under 20 minutes is fantastic, fantastic. 30 minutes is good.

1:53:22 And you did 4,000 straight? I did 4,000 for a little over 4,000, eight hours in change.

1:53:30 And how’d that feel? It was tight, I was going for 10,000. But you told them not to tell you how many, right? What happened was I hired a new social media team and they’re pretty savvy guys, and I think we were gonna hit three million Facebook fans at the time. And so they said for every like, I didn’t know they were doing this, for every like and share that we get today, Joe, our founder, will do a burpee.

1:53:53 So anyway, I’m at Reebok, I’m having a meeting with Reebok, and they’re great guys, and they’re big CrossFit guys, and they know more about the burpee than I do at this point. And I get this email from my social media team, says, hey, you gotta do 10,247 burpees. And I’m thinking, well, yeah, I mean, I could do it over a few weeks or whatever, and then you go, no, you got 24 hours, you go, there’s no way I’m doing 10. So I tell the guys at Reebok while we’re in the meeting.

1:54:18 And one of the guys says, you realize if you do this, you’ll be like, an icon. I was like, yeah, there’s no way I could do 10. And they go, you gotta do it. And so they show me how to do the burpee the way they do it. I’m thinking with the pushup, right?

1:54:33 And it’s a CrossFit burpee, so your hips could hit first. You still gotta do the pushup, right? Okay, well, your hips can hit first. So they show me the move, and it’s a Wednesday, so I’m like, if I’m gonna do it, I’ll just do it Friday. I’ll just start at midnight, and I don’t know if I could make it or not, but if I’m gonna do it, I don’t wanna think about it for three weeks, I’m just gonna do it.

1:54:47 Right, and go all night, too. I’m just gonna go all night, because- Just because you’re used to racing all night, too? Well, I’m a big believer in any big challenge I’ve done. I like to start around 10 p.m., because I like, what happens is your worst time is between 2 a.m. and 4 a.m.

1:55:01 That’s where you’re seeing things, you’re exhausted, and then the sun starts to come up and you get a new lease on life. And so I’m thinking I can get a ton done between midnight and 8 a.m., the sun will be coming up, and that’s how I’ll push through. And so I start at midnight, and I’m thinking I’m gonna do 120 per set. I make 100 boxes, I gotta check each box, right? Right.

1:55:25 I’ll do 100 times 100, but maybe I’ll do, I’m thinking I’ll do 120, so I put 20 in the bank. Right, each time, right. And again, you overshoot, right? Yeah, I’ll overshoot. I’ll shoot 20, and then if I’m feeling good, maybe I’ll do 125, or I’ll add a couple each time.

1:55:39 But I said, do not tell, they’re gonna see the boxes, do not tell me what I’m up to, ever. Right. I don’t want to scream or cry, do not tell me. I don’t want to know. Because I know I’ve done enough things in my life to know what’ll break me, right?

1:55:52 Knowing that I’ve got 6,000 left, or whatever. So I really didn’t have time to strategize this out, because I didn’t realize what’ll happen is, you can’t really eat, right? Because you’re getting nauseous, because you’re jumping up and jumping down, and jumping up and jumping down. And I’m about eight hours in, and everything’s starting to stiffen up. Eight hours, and you’re just sitting there, doing, and you’re filming this, you’re streaming this?

1:56:15 Up, down, up, down. Every time I hit about 120, they tell me, they say, hey, you’re good. And I say, oh, you’re not feeling good, I’m gonna do another five. Keep track of it, right? And that’s a box, right?

1:56:25 That’s a box. But I don’t know how many boxes I’m up to. I’m just another one. There’s a hundred in your head, or a hundred, okay. And I’m taking about a two or three minute break between sets, I’m trying to get some liquid in, I’m stretching out for a second, I’m back at it, back at it.

1:56:38 And it’s about 8 a.m., and my burpees look terrible now, and I’m thinking, and this is where the mind messes with you. And my mind is saying to me, all right, I can get them done. I know, I’ve done some crazy things. I can get them done, but the form is so terrible that the public, because I’m streaming it live, is gonna say he didn’t really do them. Right.

1:56:58 Or someone’s gonna take the last burpee and say that was what he did. That didn’t really count, right? And so, I’m convincing myself wrongly that I should stop now, because if I continue, they’re not gonna count anyway, and I’m gonna have all this public backlash. And so, guys, you gotta tell me what I’m up to, and he says, ah, 4,100, whatever I say. That’s a pretty good number.

1:57:17 And I’m out. And that was eight hours. And that was eight hours, they didn’t change. Was it a pretty good media event for you? It was good media.

1:57:28 I regret it. I think I could go back and do it, but the problem is they’re just terrible. Is it the worst thing you can do to the human body? And how long does it take to do a burpee? Five seconds, three seconds, I mean.

1:57:40 Yeah, I mean, you could do. In that period of time, there’s not much else worse, right? No, no. It taxes the body that much. You could do like two second burpees, a little over two seconds.

1:57:53 Something happens horizontal, vertical, horizontal, vertical, that I feel like it’s like blood pressure gets affected as well. If a physio, if somebody was to look at a doctor, there’s something that happens to like the blood vessels because of that change. Because you’re going there. Also, if I think about it, it’s like you’re taking the center of mass, like all the way from the floor into the jump at the top, and it’s like, so you’re taking 80 kgs and you’re really lifting it quite up and down.

1:58:20 It’s quite a big move, as opposed to say a squat, where it’s just, it’s a lot less, isn’t it? So I got a great story for you. I got a couple of great stories if we still have time. Yeah, yeah, we do. So I’m trying to figure out what to do with my kids.

1:58:32 At this point, we got the Mandarin being taught by the nanny, we’ve got the Kung Fu guy, and I do dinner with some old Wall Street friends, and I see my friend Nick Morris, who owns a company called Health Warrior. They make Chia bars, they’re awesome. And Nick says to me, that’s cool you got the kids in the Kung Fu, but you know much about wrestling. I said, I really don’t, I wish I would’ve wrestled because I don’t know much about it. He said, well, I grew up in Seattle, and my neighbor had a brother, and they both played football with me, but their dad was an ex-green brand, he was a lunatic.

1:59:04 He would make them every night after dinner go down the basement, blindfolded, in the dark, and wrestle each other, because he wanted them to be like best of the best wrestlers, and if they could wrestle blindfolded, they’d kill it when the lights were on and they could actually see, right? And this went on for over a decade, he says. He said, every night, down the basement, he said, to the point where the neighbors were upset, the wife wanted to divorce the husband.

1:59:27 Anyway, fast forward, these kids become fantastic wrestlers. They don’t medal in the Olympics, but they play at a pretty high level. One becomes the coach at Stanford. While he’s at Stanford, as many wrestling coaches do, he lets neighborhood kids come in and mix it up with the regular kids so they have different competition. One of the neighborhood kids who’s been coming in for a few months says to the coach, again, the coach is one of the two brothers that wrestled in the basement, hey, coach, I got nowhere to sleep tonight, you mind if I sleep on the mat?

1:59:54 Coaches, don’t be ridiculous, stay in my apartment. 2 a.m., door breaks open to his bedroom, kids on the couch, right? He’s got a gun, freak thing. This kid has been staking out the coach, he’s gonna kill him. Strips him down to his underwear, zip ties him to a chair, hands behind his back, legs, pillowcase over his head, duct tapes it, gun to his head, about to pull the trigger.

2:00:19 Guy says, do me a favor, could you shut the lights before you kill me? Train in the basement for over 10 years in the dark. Shuts the lights, this guy proceeds to beat, can I curse, beats the shit out of this perpetrator. Gets him on the ground while tied to a chair, in his underwear, pillowcase over his head, has him pinned on the ground. While he’s still in the chair.

2:00:39 In the chair, dials 911 from behind his back, while he’s holding the guy down. Stanford police break the door down, come in, it looks like it’s seen out of Pulp Fiction, right? They don’t know who the bad guy is. They call the father and they said, we’ve been to motorcycle crashes, we’ve been to car, we’ve never seen anybody beaten as bad as what your son’s done to this guy. I heard the story and I said, my kids are gonna be wrestlers.

2:01:04 So we’re now into wrestling as well. And I’ve become friendly with the Cornell coach, who is running one of the best programs in the country. And it is the most amazing sport. Yeah, do you wrestle now too, with them? Only, yeah, so we practice and I take them to things, but I’m not wrestling anybody my age or size or anything.

2:01:24 But you’re learning the moves. I’m learning the moves and trying to show them stuff. It’s an amazing sport. And it’s the hardest. I wrestled for one year in high school and that was it, and I went from a little skinny guy to like this.

2:01:36 And the workouts were just like… They’re insane. They’re just insane. You’re trying to break the other guy as well. It’s a mental game wrestling.

2:01:44 And they try to break each other all day long, right? So I’m enamored with the sport, the athletes. I become friends with this guy. You see Foxcatcher, the movie? I saw Foxcatcher, so the guy, without giving his name, who I just described, knows the surviving wife and had me on the phone with the surviving wife.

2:02:03 So he was supposed to go there to Foxcatcher. Oh really? And Dave, I think Dave was the one that was shot, called him and said, don’t come, there’s some weird stuff going on here. And then shortly thereafter was shot. Wow, what I loved about that movie was, I thought it depicted amazingly just what was going on in wrestling, just the moves and the strength and brutality.

2:02:24 Not brutality, just the beauty of it. And Channing Tatum did a great job. He did a great job. And he walked around like a wrestler. The ones that I know, they do look like that.

2:02:33 Because in wrestling, your start always like that, so you’re constantly hunched over, kind of like Cape Man style, so that’s good. So your sons are doing that. And you’re off to Singapore soon. Going to Singapore, we’re gonna turn, we were getting comfortable, right? Things are going well.

2:02:50 We’re on a farm, and it’s time to do some purposeful suffering. So I made the pitch to my wife, that we just completely disrupt the family, pick up, move to Singapore for a year, and struggle and deal with it. So now we’re not gonna live in a tent or anything, so it’s not gonna be, I mean, most people would say it’s not that hard, but it is, it’s hard to uproot your family and be in a different culture, and have the kids jump into a new school, and they’ll play rugby, some brand new sport they don’t know anything about, and it’d be great.

2:03:22 Purposeful suffering. And is that something you try to keep doing in your life? Just gotta keep doing it. Always. Things are getting hard.

2:03:28 It’s hard, especially at your point in life. It’s hard, you get to the place, you’re in Vermont. But look, things were good in Howard Beach, right? And I said, I’m going to Wall Street, right? And you could have gone to Vegas.

2:03:37 Things were good before I went to Cornell, and yeah, you just gotta keep off in the ante. Just keep moving that bar higher. Someone interviewed you, and they said, where are you on a scale of one to 10 with Spartan Race? You know what you said? Two.

2:03:50 Somebody asked me today, they drew a chart, and they said, this would be the end point on Spartan. Where do you think you are on that chart? And I said the same thing. I said, we’re just at the bottom. We got a billion people to change, so.

2:04:01 Right, so what is the plan? What does Spartan Race look like in five years or 10 years? I mean, we could get to be an Olympic sport, and we could literally, I mean, you remember Jack O’Lane. Yeah, yeah. If we could literally transform the world into this kind of thinking where let’s slow down on the consumerism, let’s start eating healthier, let’s start sweating more.

2:04:23 Yeah, all these apps and everything are cool, but we gotta get back to basics everyday too. Right, right. So really make a big global lifestyle change. It could happen. I mean, people before me have made, Steve Jobs did an incredible job getting us to do, live a certain way.

2:04:38 Let’s see if we could, and the great news is it was started way back before me. So I’m just carrying this brand and continuing it on till I hand it to somebody else. I got a feeling that you’re always gonna be too at something. I got a feeling, you know, in I train Brazilian Jiu Jitsu and there’s white belts, you know, blue, purple, brown, and black, and the great expression of a lot of black belts say, like we’re always, everyone’s a white belt at something, and it feels like you like being a white or blue belt.

2:05:07 I like being a white belt. Right, you don’t like being the brown black belt, you get bored maybe. I never get there, I just keep working. You keep pushing the goals best. Joe, I always ask people here, just a few personal habits that you have, just I call them your success secrets.

2:05:23 So I’m gonna ask you a few things. Is there something in your daily routine that you think, you know, that kind of guarantees you having a successful day? I know you have an early wake up, and I think, you know, burpees are part of it, but is there something that you do every day? These success secrets are only available on the London Real Academy. Become a member and get access to live shows, exclusive courses, my webinars, bonus content, meetups, live events, an amazing community, and much, much more.

2:05:57 Now back to the rest of the show. You know a lot of famous people. You know, Branson, you interviewed a lot of very big people for your Spartan Up podcast. How do you know these people? It’s not from, is it because you attract people because of everything you’ve done?

2:06:13 Yeah, I mean, this drives the MBAs crazy. The MBAs I’ll define as those people that get put into the organization because they have the right resumes, right? And they do everything structured, and they went through life perfectly with the one they went to school and the one they were supposed to. And I take every meeting. I take every single meeting, and I don’t know when I learned that, but there was some moment in time in one of my businesses at a young age where somebody that looked like a dead end called me up and probably said, hey, I got a friend of mine for a customer.

2:06:48 And that customer made me a fortune. And I probably thought to myself, I am never gonna kill those dead ends because you never know when it re-triangulates back to you. I had so many duds on the trading desk that you probably should have cut. And one day they land some new customer and they’re doing $9 million a year. And so you become afraid to disconnect.

2:07:12 I always liken it to watching an old TV show about cops who would stay in touch with the drug dealers and the bad people because they were a source of information. Right. And so, I don’t know, there’s that seven degrees of separation. If I stay in touch with people, they know somebody and it connects me to somebody else. Okay, so you always stay in touch?

2:07:35 You always pick up the phone call? I try to answer everybody’s email, answer everybody’s phone call, even the ones that are takers and don’t give back. Something comes back eventually. Right. What do you think of London and Britain?

2:07:49 I like London. Wherever I go in the world, I think, could I live here? And it may just be unique to the times I visited here. It just seems like the weather sucks. And I mean, the weather’s tough in Vermont, but I mean, we’re on the planet for a short time.

2:08:07 I don’t know if I wanna be in places where the weather sucks. Yeah, all right, fair enough. Yeah, the weather in England is, well, it’s funny. I think it’s very dependent on what you’re doing when you’re there. So, if you’re at a place when you’re with all sorts of cool people doing cool stuff and running a cool thing, then sometimes you forget about the weather.

2:08:26 And then when you’re there at a certain time, and it’s easy to do all the weather. So, I think it’s all relative. But if you’re going through the process I’m going through, which is would I live here, right? If you have choices of where to go, which I have now. And Singapore is looking pretty sunny.

2:08:41 Singapore is extremely sunny. I’m secretly hoping that it’s a change of reference for our wife because it’s a city, there’s gonna be traffic, it’s gonna be expensive, they’re gonna, right? It’s gonna have some adversity in those respects. And she might say, man, the farm is awesome. That’s what we’ll say.

2:08:57 What’s it like dealing with NBC or a major brand like Reebok and things like that, just for the business people listening? Like, before and after that deal, I mean, that’s a big change for you as a company. And what’s it like dealing with big brands and big TV companies? It’s tough. I mean, Reebok has been awesome.

2:09:13 And quite honestly, if we had gotten another partner in that industry, I don’t know if they would have been as flexible and as kind to us. Reebok was going through a transformation when they reached out to us. And that transformation and the fact that they were humble probably made the relationship work. We haven’t been perfect for them, they haven’t been perfect for us, but the relationship all in all has been spot on because we recognize our weaknesses and we make adjustments and they make, I mean, we’ve got our own shoe.

2:09:46 We’ve got a Spartan shoe. That’s awesome. That’s awesome. Right? They make great gear for us.

2:09:52 They listen to us. They helped us in Korea. They help us everywhere. But dealing with a big organization that moves slow because they’re big is tough. You’re a little nimble company that needs to move fast.

2:10:06 It’s live or die each day. And they are slow, not because they’re Reebok, but because they’re a giant organization. NBC, same thing, NBC’s awesome. They gave us this platform. They put us on TV.

2:10:18 They made us legitimate. We stand above everybody else, I think, because of that NBC relationship. But man, it’s hard dealing with a giant company that makes $40 billion acquisitions. Yeah, with annual timelines to get things done. We’ll revisit that in next year’s budget.

2:10:35 Just getting meetings is big. And we just signed Panasonic, and we just signed Tom Tom, who makes awesome GPS watches. Panasonic, I want to bring up because they make so many things that we don’t even know. They work with Tesla making the battery, which I didn’t know. They’re pretty humble.

2:10:57 They don’t put their name on a lot of things. So they’re gonna make our own POV, Spartan camera. All right, so more things come in there when it comes to brand stuff for you. And I don’t know if we’ll go beyond that. I mean, I’m feeling pretty full on Tom, Tom Panasonic, Reebok, NBC.

2:11:17 I’ve fought a lot of brands that have come to us, and that doesn’t really fit what we’re doing. Tell me about safety. What you do is you push people every day. Then that becomes dangerous sometimes. People get hurt.

2:11:28 People can die. What’s your lead on that? People get hurt. If you look at the total number of participants we have, it is minuscule. But if we put a million people in a room, somebody’s gonna have a heart attack, somebody’s gonna have a stroke, it’s just a law of numbers and statistics.

2:11:48 I can’t say there aren’t days or weekends when I have a moment to myself when I say, man, because of the laws and the way things work, are we better off just giving out cotton candy and having people walk in a bubble-wrapped suit, right? Obviously, I would never do that, but the way the laws work and the lawyers, right? It becomes hard to do what we’re doing. It’s a tough sell what we’re selling. We’re selling grit and some danger and hard work.

2:12:21 And with that comes some potential injuries. And in America, there is a lot of laws around it and you have to be careful. Yeah, which is why phys ed is getting pulled from schools, which is why people are getting obese, which is why when a woman checks in to give birth, she immediately gets put in the bed and gets dosed up with drugs and that’s not the way you’re supposed to give birth. It’s not the way you’re supposed to live. We’re animals.

2:12:49 But hospitals want to get sued. And so the laws are written in a way that is causing the epidemic we’re dealing with. Pat, maybe the Spartan race will bring us all back from that. I mean, you’re trying to get people to really think about. If we get all the lawyers to come out to one of the Spartan races and set them on fire, rather than the fire jump, then we’re set.

2:13:12 Joe, I always ask everybody who comes on, a few questions at the end. I’m gonna hit you with these. If you could make a phone call to the 20-year-old, Joe, give that young man a bit of advice, what would you tell him to do? Be patient. Be patient.

2:13:29 And I’m playing for the 15 cookies like we talked about, but still, I’ve had impatient moments and it’s a long game. Longer than you think. Even though we all say life is short, it’s a long game. And visualize playing chess, some bad moves you can’t get out of. So take your time.

2:13:49 Good advice. Best advice you ever received. Business, personal, could be from one of the mentors you talked about, or maybe not. Yeah, I would say go above and beyond, right? Clean the shed.

2:14:01 Yeah, clean the shed, arrange the pool furniture. Yeah, go above and beyond. Don’t have your hand out. Just do, it comes back 20-fold. Good advice.

2:14:10 Last one, to the 20-year-old that’s listening to us around the world, Asia, China, Africa, Third World, First World, what’s your advice to them if they wanna, really make something out of their lives? Find that person, on TED Talks, on a podcast, wherever, that really enamors you. Figure out a way to get in touch with them and ask for help, and they will be willing to help you. But you better be willing to work because I had a guy drive 20 hours to come see me.

2:14:48 And it was exactly one of those moments where this was like a kid that really needed advice, came from the bottom of the barrels. I forget where, Detroit, wherever, literally drove to see me at one of our events and fought his way to get in front of me through the security. And this, of course, let him in. I’m excited, right? Here’s a guy, slept in his car, and I said, all right, here’s what you’re gonna do.

2:15:11 I’m gonna put you out on the course right now. You’re gonna volunteer for the next 12 hours, and I’ll talk to you after that. Because if I’m gonna give you my time, I wanna see that, right? Lasted an hour. I put him back in the car back to Detroit.

2:15:24 So if you’re gonna do it, do it. Right. Right? If you were expecting a good story out the back of that, you came to the wrong show. I thought you were gonna tell me he wanted an autograph.

2:15:36 That would have been just as frustrating. No, no, he wouldn’t. He would have been, listen, he could have been the CEO of this company. Right, anybody can be. But I’m gonna put you through, we didn’t make a profit in that first business I had for like eight or nine years.

2:15:50 You’re not coming, I don’t care you slept in your car and you drove from Detroit. What do you think you’re getting from me? A check? Like, no, you’re gonna get an opportunity. Opportunity’s gonna be painful.

2:16:00 I love it. And that’s good advice. If you’re looking for a mentor, just figure out what you’re gonna bring to the table. You can’t just call people up asking for free advice. Come back, bring them something that’s real, that’s a sacrifice, and then see if they notice, right?

2:16:13 Do it 10 more times, right? Yeah, and just keep doing it. They’ll notice. Make yourself so invaluable that they can’t live without you. Right, yeah, that’s the advice.

2:16:23 Did we cover everything? Jesus, Joe, we could talk for hours, I’m sure. But yeah, we covered a lot of it. When are you officially moving to Singapore? July 1st, we’ll be there.

2:16:35 Good for you for making that move, just when things could be too comfortable. It’s best to move out. We’re gonna get out of the comfort zone. Okay, good, and Spartan Up podcast, you’ve recorded a lot of episodes, you keep releasing those every week, is that right? Every week we release them, and I think people like them.

2:16:51 Yeah, no, definitely, they’re very good. Video and audio, you’re gonna be filming in Asia as well. I can’t wait to see these. The Marathon Monks. The Marathon Monks, yeah.

2:16:58 That’s not saying anymore, we don’t want anybody to know what’s coming. We’ll just leave it at Marathon Monks. Joe, thanks so much for the time, I really appreciate it. Thank you for catching my micromanaging style earlier. I’m definitely like that, but I’m getting better.

2:17:09 I’m getting better, slowly. That’s all right, they have treatment centers. Yeah, it’s called Spartan, right? As we say on London Real, it’s about the journey. I wish you well in yours.

2:17:17 Thanks so much, I’ve been a big fan of your work ever since I heard you first on Ferris, and then again in Masterminds, it just was perfect. So, thanks so much. A lot of our guys were really excited about this show. So, thanks for the candor. All right, take care.