 On today's show is a New York Times best-selling author and founder of multiple businesses, including some big names, Ziko Coconut Water, which was sold to Coca-Cola, Marquis Jet, which was sold to Warren Buffett at Berkshire Hathaway. He's also, outside of all of that, an ultra-athlete running marathons, races over 100 miles, and apparently you rented a mountain for some people to summit similar to Everest, so we'll dig into that story as well, talking about some new challenges. You're also married with four kids, so I don't know how you balance all of that, we'll delve into that as well, as we are big on relationships and obviously the both of us want to know how you make something like that work with all these other fascinating things you've been up to. And you are releasing your latest book here, Living with the Monks, which is a follow-up to your best-seller, Living with a Seal, quite a difference in terms of stories going from the all-out physical to the all-out mental battle. Yes. First of all, I hope you guys join me on the mountain, you guys have an open invitation to climb the mountains with me at any time, so we'll come back to that later. One of our producers has been twisting my arm, especially, so I'm going to start twisting Johnny's arm to see if we can get him up to the summit. Okay, very cool, very cool, thanks for having me, guys, that was a great intro. Yeah, and we're laughing at this a little bit before you got in, also a white rapper, which is a little unusual, especially back when you were getting into the game because that was pretty much a rarity as far as it is now compared to your Post Malones, your M&Ms who kind of blew up that scene, so how do you end up rapping? Well, I grew up in a really interesting town. I grew up, I was talking about this the other day with somebody. It's funny that John is here because we went to high school together too, but in the town we grew up in, if you took four years from my senior year and went four years up and four years down, we have multiple billionaires, we have two professional sports team owners, we have several kids that went to, ended up in jail, we had Madoff, the biggest Ponzi schemer of all time, we just had a wide range, there was something in the water in our town that was a little bit different, but we were close to the city and I grew up in the in the 80s when hip-hop was emerging, close enough to get kind of exposed to that early on because our proximity to New York and Long Island was a hotbed and I just gravitated towards that early. I just saw it early at a basketball camp that I went to and I saw somebody breakdancing and I was like, man, this is so cool and what is this all about? And I just got into the music and it stuck with me and when I went to college and rap, radio started to playing rap music, et cetera, and record labels started signing artists, I was like, that's what I want to do. You guys write your resume and send it out to all those corporations, I'm gonna go try to get a record deal and that was my journey right out of college, you know, no B-plan, no resume, I made a demo and, you know, that started my journey on trying to figure out how to get signed. Was there anyone particular artist that was heavy hitting for you at that time? I mean, I was a big Run DMC fan, which is interesting because years later I ended up managing Run DMC. I liked it all. I was a sponge and there wasn't a lot of ways to consume music back then. It was really just radio station, like local radio. And, you know, I guess as I got a little bit older in my high school years, MTV, right, but that was really the only way to consume me. You could buy records or, you know, cassettes or albums, but that was it, not even CDs and, but I had no connections. You know, I had this, I recorded my demo tape by literally taking an instrumental, putting it in the CD player and hitting record on my answering machine and leaving the raps while the music was playing. That was my demo. And my senior year of college, I took a Greyhound every Friday to New York City and I handed out that demo to every record label. I was sitting in the lobby and just handed out the cassette to whoever with a note with my dorm room phone number on it. I got no responses. And I ended up moving back to New York City after college and worked at a studio to professionalize this demo into a real demo. And one day when I was there at the session before me, there was an artist named Dana Dane. I don't know if you guys remember Dana Dane. He was a Brooklyn-born hip hop artist. I loved him. And his first album was a big hit, but no one heard his second album. He just finished recording his second album, the session before me, literally like just mastered it and left the cassette or an extra cassette on the mix board. So I asked the engineer. I kind of took the cassette, asked, stole, whatever you want to call it. And to listen to it on a plane ride, I was taking out to LA. And as I was flying out to LA, I read that the owner of Delicious Final Records, this hot independent label in LA with tone low, wild thing. And young MC, you want to grab me for bus to move. That label, the owner's favorite artist was Dana Dane. So when I landed with this cassette in hand, I cold called the label and said that, you know, I had this cassette and maybe the owner wanted to hear it. And they got confused and thought that I was Dana. And the assistant came back on and said, Dana, if you can come at two o'clock, you know, Mike Ross, the owner would love to meet with you. So I said, you know, Dana will be there at two o'clock. And I showed up and when he said, you know, where's Dana? I said, Dana's running late, but can I play my cassette while we wait? And that's how I got a record deal. You know, it's it's something that you had. There are several parts of the book where that adaptation of finding a way to get it done when it was for getting people interested in Marquis Jet by buying all the the donuts that were in Starbucks and sitting there with that bag knowing, well, I could get to talk to people this way. The story with Dana here of finding a way to get through basically telling a bit of a fib to work your way through. Can you speak to anything about that? When did that something that you had seen your father maybe do or that led itself to you taking that sort of role of finding a way to get it done to find a way to get that meeting? Yeah, you know, I love challenges and it's more about the journey and the challenge and seeing can I get this than even anything that comes after. I just remember as a kid growing up in Roslyn in Long Island where I grew up, I remember I used to take the train to the U.S. Open and I would always go without a ticket and the challenge would be like, can I get into the U.S. Open without a ticket? And I remember like maybe in ninth or tenth grade, cracking the code with my friend, Todd Nemet, probably remember Todd Nemet, John, and we figured out a way to get in as soon as we get in. He was celebrating. He was celebrating. I'm like, let's go back out and see if we can figure out another way to get in. No, I had no interest in going even watching the tennis. It was just about the challenge and that carried over into business. It was like the bigger the obstacle, OK, I don't have an attorney. My dad owns a plumbing supply house. I don't know any of no connections. The more engaged I was to try to crack the code on how I could get signed. And, you know, we have no airplanes and we want to start years later, a private jet company. The more just the more I wanted to try to attack it. Yeah. And it wasn't even the business. It was just the journey of, like, can we figure this out and make it work? That's where the passion was. Right. And what is a young stir in the 80s white rapper rap about growing up on Long Island with the fathers of Plummer? The only thing he knows about girls and beer. I wrote my album in college when I was in a fraternity. So it was like I called it frat rock, you know, frat rap, frat rap because all the themes were around what a college kid was going through. And and that was just honest to where I was in my life. Right now, right at that point, I couldn't write about the streets or I'm just from Rosalind Long Island, but I could easily feel comfortable writing about college girls and parties and Dave the bookie and all these things that were going on in my life at that time. Right. And what was your rap handle? Rather not say it was Jesse James. But don't Google it, man. It's ugly. So can we find your tracks on Spotify? Another one, I too, I'm sure they're on Spotify. I haven't even I haven't even checked. I've tried to bury, you know, I believe in checking the box and move on that box. Well, so rap was not your only musical outlet. You had a hit, a big hit that still played at Madison Square Garden. Yeah. What's the story behind you and your basketball tunes? Well, after my album came out. I didn't get picked up for a second album. So I moved back to New York City and I literally had two things on my resume. I had prior to that, I was a kiddie pool attendant and then I was a rapper. That was my basically my resume. And but I love the music and I love sports and I really wanted to marry those two things. So I was like, let me write a theme song for the Knicks. You know, the Knicks at the time basketball was going through a change because the game is 48 minutes of actual action. And but the fans are at the venue for three hours. So for 48 minutes, they're a fan, but for the rest of the other two hours, basically, they're an audience and the arena has had to entertain them. And they started introducing dancers and they started introducing videos and video screens. So with all this change in like the atmosphere, I'm like, let's do a song, a theme song and get all the celebrities and the guard and like rally everybody, you know, like a rally song. So I I did this song on spec for the Knicks called Go New York up. And they paid me $4000 for the song. It cost me $4800 to make the song, which is not a great business model. But the Knicks got really hot. The song caught on and the song ended up becoming the number one most requested song on New York radio. And every team that came into Madison Square Garden was like, why don't we have a theme song? Who like who's doing this? And I realized there was a tremendous amount of white space in that lane. Like this new category of sports music was a category that I could own. I created it. Yeah. So I started writing theme songs for professional sports teams. And I believe a famous person was your intern at the origination of Alphabet City Sports Records. Yeah, I had I was working with Jam Master Jay from Run DMC. We shared a desk like not knowing you guys, people can't see, but not, you know, like a really good desk like we're at right now, a regular office desk. And one day he said that he had a guy that he was going to sign who was a boxer and he needed a job. And he was going to sign him to Jam Master Jay Records, Jam Jay Records. And so this kid came in, he was 18, you know, great boxer. I thought a terrible rapper. Back he had a partner named Kaysan, who I signed. And my intern Curtis worked for about, I guess, for like almost over a year with us, and he became 50 cent. Wow. I signed Kaysan. So she'll show you where for our listeners like, yeah. We're all about trying to build self-confidence. And a lot of people find us because they're struggling with confidence in the social realm. Obviously, with your background, where did you get the confidence to just waltz in with a record? And wow, these execs, was there someone you picked up this confidence from role modeled yourself after, you know, it's a big ass to go from, you know, a kid in Long Island into these boardrooms to make these ass to make these requests. Was there something that inspired all this confidence you at a young age? You know, I don't think there's one thing that happened. I think people are born with different levels of I wouldn't call courage, but socialization or whatever. Some are extroverted, some are introverts and all four of my kids are very different, some are outgoing, some aren't. I just remember growing up that my mother, there were no nannies, there were no babysitters. My mother, I was the youngest of four, took me everywhere she went. So if my mother had a board of education meeting for two hours, I would sit in the corner and figure out how to entertain myself. And I would have to dream and I'd have to play and be alone and deal with it as opposed to I look at my kids now, they have a much different existence. You know, they're entertained constantly. And so I was a dreamer, you know, and my mom encouraged me to be in the school play and do different things and try different things. And she just put me in a position where I had no choice other than to socialize and get to have a level of comfort in these scenarios. So I really thank her for that gift, but it's been a struggle. You know, there are times where I feel very uncomfortable and times where I've had a, you know, I've been in meetings where I felt like I didn't belong in the meeting. I've been, you know, just like all of us. And the way that I deal with it now is, you know, this is probably a technique that you guys don't teach. And I probably wouldn't even necessarily recommend it, but it works for me. I'm very aware of my own mortality and everybody's. And I say to myself, there's nobody here that's going to be around in a hundred years. Everybody look around the street. Jesse is my own internal pep talk like, we're all gone. I'm turning 50. I probably won't be here in 50 years. Do I fucking care if I bomb this speech or if I don't do well or if someone doesn't like this podcast? I mean, that's kind of my mentality to kind of get me, give me a little nudge to go for it. And for me, it works. But, you know, I've tried a lot of different techniques until I found something that like clicked in my head. That said, go for it. You know, well, the one thing that I've noticed from both books now, and also your coaching program is, is your ability to quantify and then work out the math so that you do maximize those opportunities. So one of the things that really struck me was this idea of as you're turning 50, right? Looking at the average lifespan and saying, you know what, I only have 20 plus summers left. I got to get myself into gear. And now approaching 50, I believe you're bringing in 50 experts to learn 50 skills for your 50th birthday. Yes. So this quantification, how did you stumble across this? How did this idea of, OK, I got to count my steps to equal miles. I got to count my years to equal this amount of time. I've been living my entire life forward. You know, like, what are we going to do this summer? Asking about what are we doing for Christmas? What am I doing next year? What, you know, it's all been forward. And I just kind of took a step back and said, like, you know what, let me reverse engineer the rest of my life. You know, like my 70s, the average American lives to be 78. I, you know, I read that multiple times. And that that stat changes over time. If you get older and all this other, but in general, that's a pretty safe thing. I'm turning 50. So if I'm average, that means I have 28 years left. I just was on Mount Washington doing a hike in the winter. I didn't see any 60 year olds on the hill. Yeah. It made me realize that, like, you know, the things that I love to do that make me tick, that make me feel most alive, that window to accomplish the long list of things that I want to do in my life. It's shrinking every day. And if I reverse engineer out, you know, the next 30 years to when I'm 80. And again, how many? I don't see a lot of 80s and marathons. I don't see 80s jumping in frozen lakes or water skiing or doing the stuff that I enjoy. If I, if I reverse engineer those years, well, 70 and 80 looks a lot different. That means I have 20 really active years. If I'm not gone wood and healthy and injury free. And then like your whole relationship with time changes when you look at it through that reverse lens, because then it's like, well, holy cow. Who do I want to spend that time with? And what is it that I want to do? Like your enemy becomes the clock. Yeah. And when that happens, you get a tremendous amount of urgency. You know what I mean? And urgency and everything. Like I said to my wife, I want to run this this race called Bad Water. Yeah. I do a lot of ultra marathons. And she said, well, think about that. You can't do that because when you're in your 70s, your hips and your knees, I'm like, you think I'm worried about 70. Like I'm going to, I'm going to plan for when I'm 70, so I don't do what I want to do now. No chance. And that's sort of how I've kind of looked at it. And it's just, you know, made me live my life a lot differently. And with that idea, how much of this are you focused now you have four children passing these lessons on to them at such a young age or are you kind of waiting for them to figure things out before you start passing down some of your mantras and views, especially that quantification one? My brother, my brother just called me up and asked me how my eight year old, my oldest is doing a swim season this year in Atlanta. And I said to him, you know, he's a decent swimmer. I said, but you know, he's a, he really just doesn't have that fire to compete. You know, it's frustrating as a dad. And my brother said to me, well, as long as he's happy, you just want him to be happy. And I said to my brother, my son could sit on a couch and he pipes of ice cream and play Minecraft and be very happy. That's not what I want. I want him to maximize his potential and have experiences. Right. And so it's it's a big part of how I parent and I try to make sure that they have, you know, multiple that they're exposed to as many experiences as they can with me and on their own. So, you know, that doesn't mean like we're going to go travel the world and, you know, ride camels and through the desert. It just means that they're they're doing and they're creating opportunities in their own world. Is there anything that you can speak to that about that and what you tell your son like, for instance, like with Sarah, it was very common or household to talk about what she felt at today. What did she try? It was like a very common thing. That's what they discussed. And and for yourself with how you're raised of being able to try everything, failure was just it wasn't a word. It was something that you tried. It was something to get better at. So is there any mantras that you've laid out for an eight year old child to get the wills turning a bit that it's OK for you not to be good at this? It's OK for you to learn this. Yes. So for starters, both Sarah and I, you know, we praise the effort, not the result. It's just we're all constantly praising the effort over and over. Really, that's a big theme. And, you know, we when we set goals, which we do often as a family, as a husband and wife, we make sure that our kids have goals. So this summer, each of our children has a goal, you know, that they we've talked about. Right. I'm going to work towards it. I'm talking about they're four years old. And but more importantly, they experience. I try to expose them to everything that I do so they can see the hard work that goes into. And I felt a lot of stuff, of course, but I want to see it. Right. You know, I just took him to a basketball tournament that I played in for four days at Duke University. OK. I lost in the semis. And my every time we won't we did win to get to the semis. My son said, did you get a trophy to get a trophy? And I at the end, when we lost, I said, I'm not getting a trophy because we didn't win. You have to win to get a trophy. Right. And but he got to experience that and experience me and my teammates, you know, my teammates and myself just being sad that we lost. So just exposing him to that stuff and not exposing him to, you know, participation trophies all day long. Right. And with that, there is a fun story that John was sharing with us earlier about a polar bear challenge where your son, I believe, was ready to do it, ready to do it. And then you went full blast. And yeah, it's a great example. He was still on the beach. Yeah. We went to the fire department, put on a polar polar bear challenge at Lake Linear in Georgia, where we live. It's freezing in Lake Linear in February. And I was getting my son all excited because he was going to be the youngest. I'm like, there's no five year olds there. You know, you're going to go nuts when you jump into the lake. And I'm putting on Rocky in the car. He's grabbing, shaking him and we're yelling at each other, getting fired up. And they blew the whistle to jump in the water and everybody sprinted into the water, except the one person standing on the beach, my son, crying. And so I came out and I said, you know, and he was disappointed. He felt like he let me down. I said, no, no, no, I'm so glad you got a chance to watch me go in the water. Yeah. And, you know, but he had to live with that for a year, that, you know, failure of not being able to go in. And the next year we went back. Same routine in the car. Rocky again, and they blew the whistle and he was the first one in. They blew the whistle to get out and he wouldn't get out. But it changed him. Right. You know, it changed him. And my four year old just went through yesterday. We had a swim meet in Atlanta. I took the red eyes. I'm look so tired. And I was getting them fired up and we got to the starting line and they blew the start. All six racers got up on the block and dove into the water, except my son, who stayed on the block crying. And my wife was all upset. I'm like, this is an amazing opportunity. Like this is there's nothing to be upset about. He's four, you know, and like, this is great. He's going to have to understand it and get over it. And, you know, we're going to coach him into the next one. And it was a great moment. I was I wish he jumped in. Right. But I was just as happy that, you know, he tried and he was out there and now he's going to get another shot. He's going to feel what it feels like to stay with something and actually jump in the water and get wet. He's going to have that feeling of overcoming fear at four. That's amazing. You know, so it's it's a blessing. Something else that I really enjoyed about your book and it's something I see in confident people and successful people that and I. It's about embracing all the worst parts of you and you and you put it together and titled it Billy. Billy the bully that you're internal bully. Can you speak to a bit about that? Is it something that you've always noticed in yourself of talking yourself through these things and to that that made a person? Yeah, no, I think for all of us, I don't think there's anyone listening that I would say is an exception to this that probably our biggest enemy is our own voice. Absolutely. Yeah. And I call that Billy the bully that lives in all of us because it's graphic. It's easy to remember. But and that's just our own self doubt, you know, that the we can't putting limits on our self and what we think we can do. Right. And once we get past that limiting self talk, that's really all the greatnesses. And I'll give you the most obvious example in my life. You know, when I started running, I could run too much. My goal was to run two miles. And that's what I wrote down on a piece of paper. And I worked towards that goal. And I could do that in 18 minutes. I'm a runner. And fast forward a couple of years later, I ended up running 100 miles nonstop and nothing changed in my body. It's not like I got stronger. My legs didn't change. My lungs are the same ones God gave me. But that that the belief that I could do it, the actual belief that I literally could run 100 miles nonstop is what got me there. Along with training, but if I was stuck in the world of, okay, two miles was enough, I would have never realized that I was capable of 50 times what I thought I was. So now I ask myself all the time, what are the areas of my life and my under indexing in? If I was 50X greater than I thought I was initially, could my net worth be 50X? Could my relationship with my wife be 50X? Could my health be 50X better? Like, where am I? And the only way you know that is stepping into the unknown. You know what I mean? And to me, all the growth in my life, any success, anything has come from stepping into the unknown, not necessarily pain, it's going into areas that could be like, okay, record deal. I'm going into the office. I have no idea what's gonna happen. They think I'm Dana Dane. I'm going into, I could just every example in my life has been like that. There was, I think a lot of people when they have those bad feelings where they hear that voice, the easiest for them to do is to shut it away or push away and not have to deal with it. By embracing that person and talking to them, you can work your way through it. And obviously with being Dana Dane or getting your way into somebody's boardrooms, that's so much different. Well, it's a bit different than the physical challenges that you have to push your way through. And obviously meeting up with David Goggins pushing you and through that is definitely a story in itself, which it is in the book. Was there any physical challenge before that that allowed you to know that you could push through those things much like having a hurdle in front of that boardroom that allowed you to find your way into it? Do you remember the first physical challenges that were laid out for you? Yeah, I mean, I think I've always been a competitor in the sense of wanting to liking the challenge, no different than getting into the US Open even physically. I've always kind of wanted to be better, I guess, on some level. The first real challenge was the New York Marathon I did when I was 22 or something. And again, I had no, the most I had ran was 12 miles and now I had to run 26.2 miles. But I just knew that I was gonna finish it no matter what. So the bully, it didn't really exist because I said to myself, I was looking at other people that were finishing and I'm like, they don't look like they're in better shape than me. You know, I created this whole, I beat them up, the bully got beaten up that way. But I'm in that situation a lot and I have to really have a conversation with myself but the good news is for anybody, the more you face challenge and the more you go into the unknown, the quieter the bully gets, you know? The bully only exists when you let him exist. But the more experiences you do, I talk about this all the time, the more edge you get. Now I went and lived on a monastery. My takeaways weren't like, oh, you should be meditating every day. And like everybody knows that that's gonna have a positive benefit. My takeaway was like, this is a new experience that I had no idea what to expect. And it built what I call my life resume got built up and my experience meter got higher. And I got to, you know, it's just something that now has given me another layer of experience and they always say the more you experience, the more you can offer, the more you have to offer. And I just feel like the more of these experiences that you put on your plate, the more interesting you become, the more you can offer the world or your kids or yourself and the quieter the bully gets. Well, I think that's what's so remarkable and refreshing about you, having accomplished all of these things. It's easy to just blast out victorious mantras and I overcame this and I'm so great. But to be vulnerable enough to say, listen, I do have this bully, everyone has it. I'm still battling it, even though I've completed a hundred miles, even though I've got this record deal, I've created companies. So with that idea, again, going back to your kids, a lot of our listeners are parents or thinking about becoming parents. How have you instilled that belief of conquering their doubt and their bullies in those moments where they're on the sidelines crying and their bully got the best of them? Oh my gosh, it's so hard because one of my kids has anxiety. So that's a whole nother extreme level of bully. It's completely irrational. I've just various coping mechanisms, giving them my necklace or something that makes them feel like it is magical. I mean, they're kids, so magical powers or a magic marble or something or empowering them. My son is now eight. I got him a phone where he can now call me if he needs to. It's a one way calling system. He can only call my wife or I. But those things have really helped but really just talking to him. And before my kids go to bed every night, we say three things that they're excited for and happy about. So we put real, think about that. If you do that every day for a year, they're getting a thousand positive thoughts in their head. Everything is cumulative. So it's not like, oh, it's just, it's not three thoughts a night. It's a thousand positive things that they're going to bed with over the course of a year. And to end the day on that, right? We talk a lot about it's easy to beat yourself up. Sometimes it can be hard to find the positives that things you are excited about are looking forward to when Billy is winning. So to bookend your day, to make sure that you're finding ways to be grateful in the morning and to end the evening on that, you don't allow that carryover through the night where you're waking up and Billy's right there in the room ready to bully you again. It allows you to sort of clamp down and focus on the things that matter, the positives. But I'll tell you guys, you know, here I'm 50 years, I'm turning 50 this year, in a month, 50 years old. I've had, like I said, I've had plenty of egg on my face. I've fortunately had plenty of success as well. But I still struggle with it. I put this book out and there were multiple times, multiple times, up until a week before the book, I had to hand the book in where I said to myself, I'm just going to return the money. Any money the publisher has, I'm just going to pay it all back, any expenses for any whatever and just move on. Because why do I need this? What if people hate it? It's not as good as a seal book in my own heads. Is it as funny? Is it, you know, what if it gets bad reviews? And what, I had all the what ifs, you know? And I was like, I don't fuck it. Let me just go, take the easy way. Write them a check, go home. And then I had to have my own conversation with my bully. Like, no, get back in your chair and keep working on it until it's at a place that you're comfortable with and why you can't give up on this and people are counting on you and da-da-da-da and all the other thoughts and now I'm going to have my own, I'm like at a fist fight with myself. So it still happens. It doesn't go away. It's still a work in progress. Well, I want to dig into this because, you know, your story to most of us sounds larger than life and sounds like you've had all these amazing opportunities because you've been blessed and you talk a lot about how you don't have the professional resume. You're working on this life resume. So for our listeners who are trying to land that job or trying to get their career off the ground, what do you tell them for building their life resume if they don't have the ability to scale a mountain, you know, the next weekend with their friends or they don't have the ability to compete in a 100 mile race? Well, I don't think that you need to have events like that. I just think that I think that by building your life resume and we can talk about how you can do that without having a lot of money or a lot of time or anything. But I think that that can help you land your dream job. I think it can help you, you know, scale up quicker in your office setting and get it, you know, maybe land the position, the higher position because it makes you a lightning rod. It makes you more interesting. If I said, you know what, I went this, I volunteered, let's take something that's free. I volunteered for and built a home for a home through what's it called? Habitat for Humanity. Habitat for Humanity and I built a home in Mexico for this family and I went and it was unbelievable. I want to know about that. Tell me about that. I want to talk to that person. Or this week I slept outside for the homeless for the Ronald McDonald fund and it was unbelievable and I met all the, one CEO was there. I want to talk to that person. Those things, that's a lot more interesting than, oh, I went to, you know, I went to Honolulu and I sat on the, you know, in the lounge chair, read the newspaper, had an amazing vacation. We swam in the ocean. Who gives a fuck? That to me is what I'm talking about. Like you can take these moments and think about this. I have a friend, my friend Kevin and every year, Kevin, who's a police officer and I'm sure a very reasonable salary and stuff at the county. Every year, Kevin takes a trip since he's 21 with his high school friends. They go away. Once every two, every two months, Kevin circles something on his calendar with his family and they go on a trip. It could be in a camper, it can be to run a race, it could be to go to a fishing, whatever. So in the next 30 years, Kevin will have created 150 lifetime memories through these little stints, stints, whatever you want to call them, right? And I call it the Kevin rule. And I said, if I can't take a weekend, every eight weeks to mark my calendar and build my resume with 150 amazing, memorable moments and the younger you start, you start at 35, then you have 225 moments. That's how you do it. And it doesn't cost anything necessarily. But it makes you really interesting, really well-rounded. It beats up the bully. It makes you charming and more approachable. And I just think it's so important. And if you don't, you end up in routine and then you wake up and you're 60 and you're like, I blew all those weekends. I can't believe, my knee hurts. I can't do that now. And all of a sudden you have regret. That's exactly what we're trying to avoid in our life. And you have such a refreshing take on networking. Obviously we're big on building relationships and connecting with people here at the Art of Charm. And we completely agree that experiences are what form those bonds. And you end the book with this exact concept of listen, networking, business cards, that's all bullshit. Give me experiences over running a room and trying to collect business cards any day of the week. And you look at your life with all of these friends. I mean, you have your lifelong friends here in the room and it all is tied to these experiences together, going up the mountain together, going on this race together, volunteering together. And I think a lot of times we get this feeling like, oh, I gotta collect friends or I gotta collect business cards or I gotta be doing something to be moving ahead. And it's just so refreshing to hear, book the trip, book the event, get people together to experience something together. And then you don't have to worry about the network maintenance or the transactional thing. You can phone up your friend that you went up Mount Washington with in two years and instantly be connected based on that experience. For life, without question. But even what we're doing right now, I was running late. It created this thing where I feel guilty. I feel like I owe something. I'm just talking about this is human nature. And there is a, now there is a connection, right? We're sitting together. I can physically see you guys, you guys seeing me. That is, I probably will never forget it. You know, I might, but I don't think so. Let's hope not. No, you guys are super memorable. John and I went on a little cross bus to gain, like it just, you can't take it away. You just can't take it away. The business card goes away. It never happened. The experience can't be erased. It's just, it happened. Right. And again, I love going back to the kids and we are gonna delve a little bit more into your marriage too because Sarah Blakely is just fascinating in her own right. But you talk about training kids to run marathons and how you think everyone should run a marathon and take on such a physical challenge. Can you unpack that a little bit for our listeners as to why the marathon is like the gold standard for you challenge-wise? I said that a long time ago, but I'm gonna stick to it. I just think that, you know, it allows, I think that it requires certain things that translate into all life skills. It requires planning, training, execution, and maybe failure. And I think that all kids should have to go through, you know, that discipline process because it'll just, regardless if they cross the finish line or not at the end of the race, they will come out a different human for the better. And when you, to get real change, the challenge has to be big enough to affect change. You know what I mean? So like, if I said we're all gonna go in here and run a 5K, oh that sucks man, I don't wanna run her, man. I don't know. But you would do it and it wouldn't be that big a deal. You'd be like, oh, that wasn't so bad. But if I said we're gonna go run 50 miles, we're gonna hold hands and we're all gonna finish the finish line, cross the finish line together no matter what, even if we all have to carry John. Sorry John. We would come out changed humans. Right. You know what I mean? So the challenge has to be big enough. And I think for kids, that's a, for anybody, that's a really daunting, oh I can't do it. And it immediately, for those that complete it, shatters what they think their perceived limitations are. Well, I like that with all those steps that you put in there, failure is still in there as well. And it's a very real possibility. But it's not the end of the world. It's not a big deal. It's just what it is. Yeah, I mean, it's just, I don't really judge things based on the outcome. You know, I've had plenty of businesses that I thought were, I just, the outcome is kind of almost gravy. Think about this. A UFC fighter trains for six months, right? They're eight hours a day. And then there's diet and video and training. You know, all this stuff, the mental meditation. Forget about the gym. And then they can lose the fight in six seconds or they can win it in six seconds if they catch the right angle or whatever. It's like, you can't, it's the preparation. It's the process. It's like the journey, man. It's like, you know, the win is the gravy. It's the process. That's what's so great about the mantra that building a life resume, right? If your focus is gaining as many experience points and trying as many things as possible, then there certainly is not gonna be one singular failure that sticks out to you or one singular victory that sticks out to you. It allows you the opportunity to really enjoy the process. And I know for us in building the business over the last 11 years, it is a process and it's a journey that never feels done, right? You're onto the next level. You're onto figuring out YouTube now and figuring out how you can leverage this. So it allows you to prime yourself for that idea of life is a journey. I better get used to it. I better enjoy the process because at the end when it's over, that's the only thing I'm gonna have to look back on, not the outcome, not the finish, but where I was through that journey. Right, I totally agree. To go with that, any time that we have been in trouble in the past and we've talked to anyone who we thought had the answers and much like when you went to see the girl's father for the record deal for the games he was gonna give you 10 grand, to people that we thought had the answers and they're like, oh, where are you guys are? That's nothing. You'll be laughing about that in a few years. Well, when you're in it, it feels insurmountable. Yeah, but to their credit, yes, every time that we have looked back to those moments, they are hilarious and it's what made this journey so spectacular and so fun. It's, you know, I feel like I'm part of your journey because I feel the same exact way. Absolutely. I look back and things that were insurmountable and you laugh at them now and you're like, oh my, you know, and because you've gotten past them and you've realized that you can overcome and you've gotten better and wiser and you build you indoors greater and all that stuff. Yeah. Well, it's funny how we've kind of tasted how we've taken this twisted path, right? Your first podcast ever was The Art of Charm podcast with Jordan. Yes. And now our first interview ever is with you. It's unbelievable. Your journeys are intertwined and we really appreciate the opportunity because we agree with so many of your mantras and this book is full of them. And as Johnny and I were reading it, every time we went to a bolded section, I'm like, yeah, I remember saying that exact thing to you. So these mantras that you live by and it seems like you've been collecting over ages at this point. Is there anyone that really stands out as your go-to mantra for anyone who's looking to become the next Jesse Isler? Oh, I don't know. I think one that really moves the needle with me that I rely on often are two words that really impact my life. And I refer back to them whenever I have a big decision and whenever I have to make a split second decision. And those two words are remember tomorrow. And when I have to make that decision, I think about how will I feel tomorrow based on the decision I make today? So if I wanna drop out of the marathon at mile 20, I can do that now, but remember how I'm gonna feel about that tomorrow when someone says, how'd you do? Did you finish? Do I wanna get drunk at the holiday party and dance on the table? That's amazing that night. Oh, Jess, look at yourself a little. Until tomorrow you walk in the office and you feel like a jackass. That saved me. It saved me a bunch of times. So those two words are very powerful. And so I think that's probably one of the, because I can use it every day. I use it with my book all the time. No, no, get back up there. You're gonna, it'll be so mad tomorrow. And the reverse works too. Think about how proud you'll be tomorrow. You know, that's been a big one, yeah. So this month, and with this episode it's gonna fall into, is going to be our first impressions. And there was one that I wanted to ask you about, because you always get vibes from people and there's a first impression that you get where you're like, I wanna hang out with that guy. I wanna meet that person. I wanna do that. And I had watched, I had discovered David Goggins when he went on Rogan and I was blown away by his story. And I was laughing so hard about you with the full cabang with everybody there, the masseuses and the food. And here comes this guy with a folding chair, a box of crackers and a bottle of water. And he's shitting blood and he's just beat up and he just refuses to stop. I just have to hear just your thoughts on seeing David and what was going through your mind. So as a first impression or just in general. Just what you were getting from him. Well before the, so. Spiked your curiosity. I was doing the race, a 24 hour race with a bunch of teammates. He had no teammates. He was doing the whole race himself. And before the race even started, I identified this guy as someone I was gonna follow during the race and ultimately beyond because he was just massive. He was just big. He just stood out and he had this different energy about him. So immediately I was drawn to him. And ultimately that led me to pursuing, a relationship with him. But he gave off a strong first impression at that race. We're gonna have the good opportunity of meeting him and interviewing him in September. So we're looking for that. Well you're his first impression of you as well. Oh that's cool. He's got some things to say. I think another great story around first impressions and this is you making an impression on Sarah, your wife. What was the backstory between you two coming together? Well she was a customer of Markey Jett, a company that I co-founded. And we were having a customer appreciation poker tournament in Vegas. And it was of the 4,000 customers we had, we can only invite, I think we had 40 slots because NetJet's our partner had the rest. So each rep could invite one, it was very, very difficult to get an invitation because it was like one in 100. So our Georgia rep sent in a picture of Sarah to me and said I think this would be a good fit. And I wrote her back, please don't invite anyone else. You know like make sure she comes kind of thing. Cause it was just a picture of Sarah who I didn't know. I didn't even know the name, the company or anything. And she had an apple on her head. It was just really weird. I was like, this just, she seems really interesting. And we met at the poker tournament. And we were in Vegas and it was 9.30, we went out to dinner and she excused herself because it was her bedtime and she was gonna go to bed. I'm like, who goes to bed at 9.30 in Vegas? Like this is a really interesting human. And I married that interesting human. We also talk about how it's easy to get your first impression wrong of someone. We like to think that when we meet someone we can see everything we need to see and we trust our gut and that snap judgment. And a big character in the book is Lenny. And your first impression of Lenny. Completely wrong. Completely off the mark. Explain that without giving away too much of the book. Well, let me start by saying that it's one of the reasons why I went to the monastery cause I lost my gut instinct. I think maybe if I had a clean, if I wasn't so distracted, I think maybe my instincts would have picked up a different vibe. I honestly feel that. How did you lose your gut? Can you break it down a little more? I was, your instincts are like a muscle. They have to be exercised. The only way they can really exercise your intuition is by spending time alone. Otherwise you're influenced by your friends, the radio, TV and like you're just being influenced. If you're alone, there is no influence. And that's how you exercise your intuition. But I have four kids and the internet and Netflix and a wife and everything else and I wasn't being alone. And so that's that. So when I got to the monastery, there was an intern there named Lenny. And Lenny made the hair of my arm stand. I mean, he freaked me out when I first met him. To the point that I was locking my door literally at night, I had a chair that I put, this is 100% true underneath my door. And I had a hanger from the, I like rigged my whole room so like the door couldn't open. The door could, like you didn't have to be like a bowl to open the door. But as it turns out, I was wrong about Lenny. He wasn't what I thought he was. Or at least I think he wasn't. And with that whole idea of throwing yourself into the monastery after coming out of the seal situation, you've been talking about in the book how crazy Sarah thought you were for this whole idea and how spontaneous you are and not even doing the research. And then I will save the surprise for the readers, but a lot of us have this image of monastery in our mind as one thing. So you were already coming in thinking it was one thing and you got quite the surprise when it was not that. How do you throw yourself in the unknown and allow yourself to adapt? Because I feel like a lot of us are so stuck in our routines and our comfort zone. And this adaptability is something that I find really remarkable about you. It seems like any situation, Starbucks just outside of the event, you can't get in. All right, I'm buying some donuts and I'm gonna start hawking these to get some FaceTime. I think it comes from first from gratitude, like having opportunity. I love opportunity. I love newness. I think it comes from just being open-minded and not having, you know, if you have a movie in your head of what you think it's gonna be, very often, if it's not, you're gonna be disappointed. And so very often I leave that movie blank in my head so I can just, sometimes it's good just to experience. Other times I don't. Other times I just have the whole misconception or I could be disappointed about something, but a lot of times I'm just like, I'm just gonna let it be and a little free spirit with it. The monastery I didn't wanna have, I didn't wanna do a lot of research because then I would have had, it already kind of, the whole script already written. And I would have been going through a script that I already knew. I wanted to go and watch the movie for the first time. So I didn't go on the internet at all. I didn't research it at all. I just didn't wanna know. From some of the anecdotes in the book, it seems that you do that quite frequently. I do, I do, I mean, it just makes it more exciting. Well, even the process of writing this book, right, hidden the book, you talk about your doubt around completing the project. Coming out the other side and saying, there's no book here. I'm not even sure we have something here. Without question, but there are parts of my life where I don't, listen, I don't go into meetings unprepared. I don't go walk onto stage to give a speech unprepared. I don't, I make sure I read the report card before I have the parent teacher conference. I'm not reckless, but in certain adventures, I find a benefit in just experiencing, you know? But I'm not gonna go climb Mount Washington without researching what to wear and what to do and how to survive in the cold and all that stuff. So it plays both ways. But I just think it leads for a much more exciting life when you actually can experience instead of having everything explained. We live in a world where you can get everything. You can Google images and see where you're going and get all these things, but sometimes it's good just to show up. Right, without the preconceived notions that can lead you to have a crappy experience or not as full of an experience as you'd like. Yeah, oh wow, I thought the rooms were gonna be so much bigger from the pictures or I thought the water looked like, the ocean looked like it was so much blue, you know? Let me just go in the ocean. Like the, let me just go in the ocean and then enjoy the ocean, not be disappointed because it's not as blue as the picture. The other part that I really thought was interesting as a dog lover myself is here you're at this monastery and you're not a dog person, you admit, and you come to find out that dog training also goes on at the monastery and you're gonna play a role in this. So, were there any points, and you talk a little bit about it in the book, were there any points where you were like, I just can't do this anymore, I'm ready for Sarah, I'm ready to get back home and screw these dogs and screw these monks? Yeah, not so much because of the dogs, but more just because of the isolation that I thought that like really, I was like five days is enough. Who's gonna really care if I went five days or 15 days? Like, would you guys care like, oh, is it for five days? You'd be like, okay, or there's no difference. And before I left, my wife said, make sure you stay until you either have a breakthrough or you're broken. So, I definitely felt like I wanted to cut it short, but again, remember tomorrow, I was like, I'm gonna stick this thing out, I don't wanna have to regret the one opportunity in my life to be here and to experience and to go through it, that I sure changed myself. What I love about your relationship with Sarah is that ability to allow both of you to be high performers, high achievers, go after what you want, but still have time for each other and for the family. And you talk a lot about your love of sports, but again, calculating the amount of hours you spend passively watching sports and realizing that I'm kind of wasting away here. This is time I need to focus on myself to grow. So, how did that start early in your relationship and then how have you managed that through your marriage because obviously running multiple companies and jet setting and doing everything that both of you do, I know it's difficult for me in my relationship to balance that work, life, and my own personal pursuits. Well, once you bring marriage into the equation, you're 50% of your time, maybe more, maybe less, I don't know, but a significant amount of time gets taken away, not taken away, it just gets redirected because now you have dinners, two sets of friends, my friend Sarah's friends, you have when I wanna eat, when she wants to eat, stuff she wants to do together, stuff I have to do out of obligation to her work, so you lose a lot of time, so you have to be way more efficient. You take a look at, well, what has to go, something is to give. And when I looked at my life, I realized like, whoa, I'm watching, I don't think Sarah's gonna really wanna watch the Florida State USC game today, or like the Hawaii, Wyoming battle on Saturday night. So when I looked at it, I took a real deep dive into it and I realized, at the pace that I'm on, watching football, I love watching football, if I continue this until I'm 80-something years old, I will have watched 36,000 hours of football, which is several years worth of football of my life, and I just took the plug out, I cold turkeyed it basically, and then it freed up time, I just reallocated a lot of that time to my marriage. Right. And were these conversations that you had pre-marriage to around what your pursuits were and what were non-negotiables for you versus what she needed for herself? No, nope, I got married later in life at 40, Sarah was 37, and so I had a lot of the adventure, of my, I kind of had a lot of adventure, but we didn't really talk about it. There were a couple of things that we talked about that were kind of important to me and important to her, but yeah. So it's been adapting and adjusting through marriage and now having so many children. And it's constant, we're constantly changing, I mean, we just started meeting once, trying to meet once a week, just to go over family stuff, like we realized that how are we not meeting to go over our own? Right, with all the other meetings we have. We have a million meetings and we're not even meeting? And we go to dinner and we go to, we do stuff, but we're not sitting down and checking in on summer plans and this and that and what we want to do and how we want to parent and what's going on here and what's working and what's not working. So we reevaluate now and get together. I like it. Oh, I had one other question because we're just the first impressions and I think it's a great anecdote. You talk a lot about preparation and being prepared before you get to the meeting, whether it's a marathon. And there's a story from a presentation at Goldman Sachs where you actually made a poor first impression and some people left the room because you weren't dressed in the proper attire. Was that on purpose going into Goldman Sachs, knowing, you know what, I don't want to be a stiff suit, I don't want to be seen as everyone else, I want to be me or how much thought did you put into that first impression knowing that it may turn off some of the people in the room? You know, I didn't think, I didn't really give it much thought. I give speeches and this is, I wear stuff that's comfortable for me. It wasn't offensive. I wasn't in Hawaiian outfit, like, you know, party. I was in, you know, maybe a pair of dark jeans and a shirt, but everybody else was in suits. And someone came over to me afterwards and said, you know, oh my God, I'm so glad I stayed. I got so much out of the speech because like, because my department left because you weren't wearing a suit. I was like, what? They left because I was, first of all, I didn't even get a memo about a dress code. Right. But, you know, I understand it and I didn't mean to offend anyone in that, but at the same time, like, I would have said no to the speech if I had to wear a suit because that would be like, that's not me. I mean, maybe not, no, I think I would have said no. It just, I want to be comfortable delivering my message the way I live my life in a suit. It's just, it's a good, nothing against suits, but I don't wear suits. Right. So I've worn them, but I don't wear them now and I'm not going to give a speech in one, you know, just because you guys want me to fit into the thing, it's just like, and I'm talking about adventure and life resume and it just doesn't fit for me. Right. Plus, where do you get a suit these days? You wouldn't even know. Well, with all the experience, resume and the challenges that you've been on and putting this book together at the end, well, you've talked about your 50th birthday and the 50th, the 50 challenges that you're going to put ahead of you, but also there is a, on your website for people to put in the challenges they want to overcome this year. Could you speak a bit to that? Yeah, I just, I'm just, you know, this is the big part of my life putting on challenges and for myself. So I just said to anyone that they went to jessejitzler.com slash life resume, they could fill out what it is, the challenge they want to do and it could be big or small. It could be take piano lessons, it could be learn how to be a comedian, whatever. And every month I pick somebody and fund that journey for them. So it's been fun and several people, you know, it's interesting to see what people are posting. But I just think it's like, you know, you've spoken about this a lot today, but I just think it's so important, you know, for you as an individual, for individuals to again, step into that unknown. And it could be a small thing like I'm going to learn how to play an instrument or it could be a big thing like I'm going to climb Everest. Out of the 50 challenges to rap, is there one that stands out to you as the most daunting, the one that you're maybe a little nervous of out of learning all those 50 skills? Yeah, we didn't get into it. So for my 50th birthday, I'm bringing in 50 different instructors one a week to teach me things I always wanted to send my master. Right. You know, free diving, wake surfing, how to play chess. I don't know how to ride, drive stick shift. I don't know how to ride a motorcycle. So those kinds of things. I'm excited to have a survivalist come and just teach me how to like, you know, light a fire with sticks and do all kinds. I just always wanted to learn how to like stay dry in the rain, in the wilderness and do all this stuff. So that's something I'm just excited about for me. A lot of firsts. Yeah. Firsts for you guys, a redo for me. Is there anything that you want to close with to pitch? I know you have the summit coming up. Is there anything else you're trying to? I just want to thank you guys for, you know, this is the first podcast I ever did was Art of Charm. And I didn't know what in the world I was doing. And I still don't. But you guys still stuck with me and gave me a second shot. So I appreciate it. And I'm just really happy to be here. So appreciate you guys, man. We appreciate it. Love the book. Love living with the seal as well. So check out both. And we're excited for the next one. Have you picked who you're living with next? Probably with Stanley. I don't know. Not yet. Not yet. All right. Thank you. Thank you guys.