 If you want to pump your body and expand your mind, there's only one place to go. Mind pump! Mind pump! With your hosts, Sal DeStefano, Adam Schaefer, and Justin Andrews. In this episode of Mind Pump, may be my favorite. Oh, we're finally releasing it! Ever done. I'm so mad it took us this long to release this one. This is, I'm not exaggerating, one of the most entertaining episodes I've ever done. We interviewed Joe Decina from Spartan Races. He has the podcast Spartan Up, so it's a very popular podcast. If you're not familiar with Spartan Races, they are the obstacle course racing kings. Yeah, they're dominating. We went to a Spartan race not that long ago. It was a great thing to experience. Our buddy Ben Greenfield competes in them. But Joe Decina is one of those people that you just want to hang around. First of all, he's very down to earth, very real guy, very, very cool guy. We got the best vibe from this dude. Right away, we love him. We talk about him this way all the time. The stories he tells in his podcast are fucking compelling. Super entertaining, super compelling. If he was at a party with 50 people... He's had a very interesting life. Very interesting. He would be the guy in the middle of 50 people just for the whole party. Everybody will shut up and just start listening. That's what's going to happen with this podcast. You're going to wish it doesn't end. Unfortunately, it ends up ending, obviously, at the end of it. We'll have to have him back at some point. Great guy. We are going to be at the Spartan Race Championships, which are coming up. We'll be over there in Tahoe doing some podcasting, doing some hosting. So if you're going to be there, look out for us, come say hi to us. Jodecine is taking care of us very, very well. What a great guy. I love working with the dude. So great podcast you're going to listen to. Also, this month, enroll in any maps program, any individual program, get maps prime for free, or enroll in any bundle and get maps prime for free. Or lastly, if you enroll in the super bundle, which is one year, one year's worth of exercise programming, all planned out for you, you go from one maps program to another throughout the entire year, where your body is just progressing the entire time, which already includes maps prime. We will give you maps prime pro for free. So basically enroll in any of the programs. You're going to get something for free this month. You find it all at mindpumpmedia.com. So without any further ado, here we are interviewing Jodecine from the Spartan Up podcast and from the Spartan races. Well, Joe, we should do a formal introduction. You can call me Joe. I'm actually Joseph Adam Schaefer, but I go by Adam. But my real first name is actually Joe. So it'll be very easy for you to remember. My name is Sal. Sal. And Justin. And you've got Justin right there. The beefy one. Joe, Sal, and Justin. All right, just to Adam. We're going to fuck our audience up. It's Adam. But my real birth name is Joseph. It's Adam. So how'd that happen? So my real dad's name is Joseph. And they didn't want to call me junior. And so they called me by my middle name. And then when I got old enough to where I actually wanted to change it, it was too late. And I thought about it. I had a family member that did Adam. Here's the thing. Here's what you get. It's never too late, bro. You can do whatever you want. That's true. That's how life works. Well, as a kid, what I didn't like, here's the thing. So I was born in the 80s, early 81. And Adam was like, that was when Adam was a big name. So as a kid who was like 15, 16 years old, Adam was a very popular child name. So I hated it. So you know how we all were when you were kids growing up? You always wanted to be older. Then we get older. Then all we wanted to be was fucking younger. So now Adam's fucking cool. I'm cool with Adam now. But when I was growing up, I hated it. You were the first human. Yeah, right. That's kind of cool. That's according to that science book. Heavy science. The only reason I went with Joe was I grew up in Queens. And it was very Italian neighborhood. So as you guys were rolling your names, I thought, how am I going to remember this? I got Sal. I got Joe. And then Justin kind of threw me off. There was no Justin in our neighborhood. Really? We beat the Justin's up. I'm pretty popular. We scared him out of there. Go to the Irish neighborhood. So Joe, I'm so excited to have you here. And I have so many questions. You were going to tell us the start of Spartan race. How did that get going? And first of all, I didn't know that it was twice as big as the whole Tough Mudder thing. What did I call that thing? Yeah, they're not even count, bro. Yeah, exactly. How did you get it started? So go way back. So I grew up in Queens. I grew up in a town called Howard Beach. And for whatever reason, it was organized crime capital of the world. Four big bosses of five of the families lived in this town. So if you were the feds, you just had to tap like one phone line. You got everybody. So you really grew up in the air of like Bronx Tale and shit. Did you see Goodfellas? Of course. I watched it this morning. So Goodfellas was filmed in our neighborhood. Oh, shit. And it was about... I grew up right in the middle of it. Wow. So the characters it's based on were neighbors. So you knew all those people basically? You knew everybody. Oh, shit, really. That's cool. Fuck, we could be whole episode talking about that right there in the cell. So it gets crazier because I started a swimming pool cleaning business. And I started it at pre-teen. So, you know, 10, 11 years old. And the reason I started is my dad was doing real well and he lost everything because real estate started to fall apart. He had some tough times. My neighbor was the unbeknownst to me because I'm pre-teens. My neighbor's the boss of the banana crime family. Literally my next door neighbor. But I don't know this. He's just a big guy in many respects. Big house, just a big guy. And so he had daughters. He takes me in under his wing and he sees the stuff going on in my house and he's like, hey, why don't you clean my pool every week and I'll pay you 35 bucks a week. And he teaches me a ton of lessons which I think your listeners would enjoy. But anyway, he takes me in. I do a good job. He teaches me how to run a business, how to be on time, how to do all these things, go above and beyond, never ask for money. Shit could happen if they pay you when they want to pay you. Because a lot of people show up to do business with their hand out. And right? And that pisses you off. You know business with people we like. And so anyway, he taught me all those things. He introduces me to 700 clients over the next 12 years. When you can imagine who these people are, many of them still in jail are dead. But they were amazing clients at the time. Because at that time you're growing up. You want to be those people. You're a product of your environment and so you're seeing all this stuff and you want to be those people. So anyway, I'm on that path. Who divorces my dad, goes into a health food store, which back in the late 70s was not very common in Queens, walks into a health food store, her mother's got cancer, so that's why she's diverting from raviolis and granolis and going to take a shot at buying some like flaxseeds or something. And she walks in and in the back of the health food store is this yogi who just came in Swami Bhava from India. He's like 70 years old or something, right? She never heard of yoga. She thinks it's a food or whatever, but she goes hook, hook, line and sinker. She falls into this new life in 30 minutes. She's going to study yoga. She's going to become a yoga teacher. She's going to meditate. She's going to eat health food. She drank the Kool-Aid. She drank like a branch sandwich. So she gets hooked on that and my dad and the neighbors and my customers, everybody's like, so she lives about we end up living a mile from my dad and she's got us now on this new path. So to your point of how Spartan started was really hard because in Queens at that time through one of the yoga connections is a 3,000 mile run race. It's a one mile loop and so it's a transcendence run they call it, right? Because you're going to leave your body. You're going to do 3,000 miles which is one thing. Very difficult but you're going to do it around a one mile loop. Just over and over. Over and over and over again and completely get rid of all the demons everything you're dealing with in life. Anyway, she introduces us to it. My sister and I don't do it because again we're kids but we see it and we learn that between that and watching my mother meditate for like 30 days straight, levitating like all those crazy stuff monks in our living room. No shit. You couldn't think, I couldn't imagine two more contracts. He's got good fellows for half and then he goes to the other side. Wow. Crazy, crazy shit. And stand alone like the only person in the neighborhood into this stuff, the only person, right? So to us, to my sister and I, she's a crackpot. To the neighbors, she's a crackpot and you're almost embarrassed to have a mom like this. I've got pictures of Indians with wooden things around their neck and afros in our living room and you don't even, how do you explain that to like Joey and Frank? Well, especially in your generation at that time too. It's getting a little more popular now, but back then that had to been like what the fuck things are going on. The conversation, literally, the conversation, outside of her, the conversations were Ravioli's, Ganoli's like did you try Sal's new Sicilian pizza? Concrete, somebody going to jail. Like that, it was never about the stuff my mom was into. So anyway, I'm going to go all over the place here, but it's alright, we're with you. She introduces us to that run and seeing that and seeing her and her brothers, my uncles go to India and just start to believe in like, because we were in a Catholic school, right? And we're in a neighborhood where everybody believed in one religion and one way of thinking and so she just opened our mind up, even though it required like a crowbar to open somebody's mind in that neighborhood, right? But she was slowly getting wedging in there, this idea that the mind is much more powerful than we think, right? We probably should eat healthy, like all this stuff is ridiculous that we're putting in our bodies. All this stuff you guys probably talk about and believe in now, but let me tell you, like, this was Revolutionary. This was late seven days, maybe in California, this was happening, it was not happening in Queens. Dude, that's crazy. So anyway, I got that in the back of my head, but I want to I want to Cadillac. I want to make money. I don't fucking hang out with monks, right? They look porn. Little did you know you could have opened up the first yoga schools and you'd be, you know what I'm saying? You don't even know. You don't even know the opportunity. Now looking back between the magazines in that space, the business opportunities, I just wasn't applying the entrepreneurship that I had in my head, the wheels returned in my head, not applying it to that industry at all. I just didn't believe in it. It was great. By the way, there was like four customers. It was like nobody was into this stuff and they were all in my living room doing yoga for free. So anyway, she introduces us to all that stuff. I stay on track with I'm going to build a business. This neighbor's got me doing swimming pools, which eventually turns into concrete work and brick work and construction. The bearing people. You can't talk about that here. But you don't even know some of the stories. Oh, I could imagine. I could blow your audience away. I could imagine stories. I mean, it's almost such a bummer that I've only got you for a couple hours today because I feel like now that you open this box, I feel like I don't even want to get to the sporting race. I want to know all about your childhood, bro. That has to be you've got probably one of the most amazing stories ever, bro. That's crazy. So they trusted me because I, you know, I go in the backyard. I'm not stealing anything and I'm not wearing a wire. So I had access to all these folks' houses. Like I could walk in and I could sleep on a couch. I could go in the refrigerator. I was that integrated with these families. And by the way, it wasn't just all those guys. I had a complete cross-section of different backgrounds, different religious beliefs, etc. But what it did do for me was I said to myself a little bit like Bruce Lee over this 12-year period, wow, I'm going to take a little bit of that from that family. I'm going to discard a little bit of that. So from a sociology perspective, I had this look through this looking glass. What an opportunity. I wish I could recreate it from my kids because you can't get that. You dudes don't get that, right? It's one thing to read up on people and maybe listen to a podcast. It's not the same when you're in it. You have to be in their houses. I had guys saying, hey, could you go take care of Lisa's pool down the Schultz? He was banging. Right? I'm dealing with his wife over here again. It was just crazy and I couldn't say anything. I had one guy. I'm not going to mention any names. So I had one of my customers say, hey, you got to go, you got to go see this. I'm trying to avoid using any names. Oh yeah, no problem. You got to go to Mel Basin Brooklyn and you've got to take care of my partner's pool. He wants to put a pool in. You got to go see him 12 o'clock, Thursday, whatever. So I get there, ring the bell and nothing. I'm waiting outside. It comes out later, years later. He was inside. He was killing the architect while I was outside. Oh, shit. Because the architect was complaining about getting paid. Oh, shit. So thank God I didn't like walk my way into the backyard or something. But so it was crazy, crazy, crazy time. And how old are you at this time? At that time, I'm probably 17, 18. Wow. So anyway, build that business. My mom moves us to Ithaca, New York because in Ithaca, they're a little more spiritual. They're a little more open-minded. This place in Queens is crazy. I think it was like the hippie capital of that area, right? It was a hippie. It was five hours north, but because Cornell University's there, Ithaca University's there, there's waterfalls. It just, it's very, more like California. Sure, sure. Right? So, so we move up there, but I still got my business in New York. So I'm going back and forth on the weekends and she's just trying to get us out of that environment. Anyway, up there, I opened my mind up even more, even though I'm being resistant to all this stuff. I'm leaving high school, graduating high school. My grades have been terrible. I've been focused on my, I don't need good grades. I'm not that smart. And my buddy, who I've gotten to know now at Ithaca High School says, hey, why don't we, why don't we go to Cornell? And I was like, well, one, my grades suck. I'm not going to be able to get in Cornell, but two, I got this business. I'm running in Queens. I don't need to go to college. And he says, no, my dad's a professor at Cornell. He'll get us in. Coming from the neighborhood, somebody says, they got a connection. It makes sense. Like they'll get us in. So we both apply. Neither of us get in. He doesn't get in. I don't get in. But now I'm interested because they didn't accept me. So, so anyway, I'm thinking, gee, is there a way to get in? And then he says, well, my dad said, we can go extramural. We don't have to take regular classes like everybody else. We could take just three classes. Well, all the kids that got accepted could take five classes. We do well in those three classes. They don't count towards anything. But if we do well, they'll accept us. They have to accept us because we've proven that we could handle Cornell University. So I was like, all right, let's do that. But if we're going to do it, I'll go to St. John's in Queens during the summer while I'm running my business. I'll do some night classes. I'll learn how to study because I haven't studied. My SAT scores suck. He says, fuck that. He says, let's go to Vegas for the summer and party because we're going to buckle down in September. Why would we work hard during the summer? Complete the virgin in ideas and this whole concept of being successful in life, which is something we preach at Spartan, right? That was a key moment. He went left. I went right. So I go to Queens. I run my business. I go to St. John's at night. Oh, so you chose not to go with him? Yeah. You go to Vegas? I didn't take the cookie. He went to Vegas. Oh, wow. Big decision to make at that young age, man. Big decision to make and it ties to something that I'm really focused on called delayed gratification, which we'll talk about in a minute. So I decide to study because they turned me away and so now I'm... You're driven. I'm driven. I'm focused, right? So I study. I do well. We meet back in September up in Ithaca. We buckle down. I'm so serious about going to school now because I've never really worked on school, ever. I wasn't a good student. I've got like a briefcase. I've got like... Official. I've got a button-down shirt. I'm going to be serious here. And we do our three classes and we do well. He even does well coming off of the haze of Vegas for the summer. Neither of us get accepted again. And so he diverts and goes to UNLV. And I'm like, fuck this. I'm going to do it again. They're not going to turn me away. I'm going to do it again. So I do another semester. I do well. But the problem is my credits are falling behind because everybody else is doing five classes. So I do it again. I reapply. No go. They turn me away. I do it again. Third semester. Shit, you did this. Now I'm on my third time and they turn me away. So I'm done. I'm going to New York. I'm going to run. My business is doing great now. We're building houses. We're doing all kinds of stuff. I don't even need school. My mother, who's upset that she's going to lose her son, because I'm going back to New York, I'm done in Ithaca for good, she says, you know, I teach yoga to this lady who's at Cornell. Why don't you go talk to her? My mother was the last person that I would have leaned on for a connection. She didn't... She wasn't like that anymore. She's too busy talking to monks. If I needed a connection to monks. She's not a strong arm in anybody. Way better connections for that. A yogi or something, she'd be the call. So anyway, she has me meet Professor Anita Racine. I remember the meeting like yesterday. And I go meet her, and I've already made my mind up, I'm done. They've embarrassed me three semesters in a row. Didn't let me in. I'm way behind on credit, so I won't even graduate on time if I get in. Sits me down, and she says, hey, I took a look at your grades. Your mother told me a little bit about what you're going through. I understand you want to give up. She says, I run... Within Cornell, Cornell University is pretty amazing, unlike many schools, in that it has all these different topics of studies. You could study, you could be a veterinarian, you could be an engineer, you could study literature. One of the things, one of the programs they have is a textile department. So she said, I run the textile department. I've got 96 women in the program. I've got no men. We want to get some diversity. We want to get men in here. Do you like textiles? I was like, I love textiles. 96 women. But I don't know what a textile is. I love the idea of 96 women in a group of no men. So she actually takes me in. And I end up doing the next two and a half years studying textile. So if we were to stop the podcast right now and go see a movie, I could tell you exactly what era that movie is from, based on hemlines, because I know all about ladies' clothing. It's a unique skill. It's an unique skill. And my wife does come to me and say, hey, does this look good? So that's good. I've got an edge there. But so I get accepted and I get through it and I graduate Cornell while I'm running the business back in Queens. When I graduate Cornell, and you guys didn't ask me this question, so just stop me at some point. No, no, no. Keep going. I'm rambling here. But when I graduate Cornell, I meet an Italian guy in the entrepreneur. You're allowed to take classes outside of textile. I'm studying all kinds of things. One of the classes I take is an entrepreneurship class. I meet this Italian who's awesome. And he takes a liking to me right away, because I'm from an Italian neighborhood. I'm Italian background. So we click right away. I buy him a bottle of Sambuca. And he says to me, what are you doing? Like, why are you running this? What are you going to do after you graduate? You should go to Wall Street. And I don't know anything about finance at this point. I do know that there was the 87 crash and everybody lost a lot of money. So I assume nobody's making money there. And he says, no, you've got to hustle. You're driven. You've got to go to Wall Street. So anyway, I graduate. Woody said to the back of my head, I'm running my business. I'm a big man on campus, figuratively in Queens, because I got all these customers, right? All these wise guys. I've got all this political capital. I can walk in anybody's house. I'm making money. We're building houses. I've got trucks. Trucks always make you feel like a man, right? I got to listen into the truck start in the morning. I got heavy equipment, bulldozers, backhoes. I got a girlfriend. How old are you? Right around this time now? So now I'm like 21. On top of the world. On top of the world. It's a million-dollar business, right? So I'm not going to Wall Street. I'd be going backwards. You got to start all over. I got to start all over. But I'm not really putting my education to work, right? I'm still running this business where all these guys and girls that graduated are going off and going to go build careers. So this guy, this Italian guy, he's probably 60 at the time, continues to call me every month on the month. Every month for five years. What are you doing? How are you doing? How am I going to get you to Wall Street? And I'm just blowing them off. Because my business is getting bigger and bigger and bigger. Maybe I got married to this girl, everything's going well in my life. So anyway, we're about five years into those phone calls, which anybody listening should take, you've got to find mentors in life. You've got to find older people who always want to help, just like you guys are doing the podcast to help people, right? They're always willing to help. As long as you take their advice, people don't want to waste time giving advice that no one listens to. So anyway, he calls me five years in and he says, listen, if you're not going to take my advice, he goes, just buy this stock. And I'd never bought a stock before. I didn't even have a stock account. And he gives me the stock tip. And I've got to go, it's a drug company. And I've got to go a pharmaceutical to pick up a big check, a $140,000 check from a customer that owed me money. I finished the job and this final payment. And it's free money at that point. It's going right in the bank. And the guy I'm getting the money from is a pharmacist. So it's obvious to me that, oh, I'll ask the pharmacist when I pick up my check about this pharmaceutical company, the guy's telling me to buy the stock in. I walk into the house. He's towel-drying. He just got out of the shower. This guy's name's Eli. And I say, listen, my buddy just told me I should buy this stock, Syntax. And he says, I can't believe you're bringing it up. He goes, I was just in the shower and I'm gonna buy 10,000 shares of that today. So he sits me down and he walks me through this whole thing. You're not married. You're still making money. It'd be a great time to take risks like this. If you lost the money, you'd recover pretty quickly. Later in life, you've got kids. You can't take risks like this. Convinces me to take the whole $140,000 check and plunk it down. Oh, shit. That's a bold move, right? Yeah, it's a bold move. 21 years old, you got that? No, now I'm 25. 25? So I do it. I take the whole check. I listen to them. I plunk it down. Well, the next day, the company gets taken over. It's up $10. I make $100,000. Right away? Right away. One day, 24 hours. Wow. I'm like, this is the greatest business ever. I don't have to do a day like this. I wasn't for it. That's a man. I don't have to start the truck. This is unbelievable, right? I'm selling the business. I'm going to Wall Street. Oh, shit. Just like that. Just like that. So I sit down with my guys who were Eastern Europeans. I had been very, very fortunate. The reason the business is so well, I found Polish that were coming over back in the late 80s, mid to late 80s that were escaping. The walls were up. I don't know. You guys were born later. But they were tough motherfuckers because they grew up in tough times. And they work hard. Nothing. They never asked for vacation. They never asked for more. They just wanted more hours. Just give us more hours. And so that was a natural. I just sat down with them and I said, look guys, I'm making a pivot here. I'm going to Wall Street. Why don't you guys take the business, pay me overtime, whatever you can. Business is still going and they're multimillionaires now. No shit. That's awesome. What a cool story. To swing by there 25 years later and see it's thriving and they're crushing it. Oh, very good. So I go to Wall Street and I got to take 40 steps backwards because I got to interview. And then I got to take a $30,000 a year job and then I'm getting shit on and yell that and going to get coffee for people. Talk about the size of your balls to do that. Dude, let me tell you my balls shrunk because I literally, I remember the day. I'm saying this on camera. I remember the day I was crying because I was like, I was the fucking, I could walk in anybody's house. People that kill people for living and you're shit not you motherfucker. Right. I had to take it. I had to take it. But I rebuilt myself. Hard to rebuild yourself in a brand new industry. I rebuilt myself and I was really fortunate because I was in an industry that I had no experience in. Hard to do, like you said. But what was awesome about it was I saw the inefficiencies of that business because I wasn't from it. I was looking really as an outsider. Everybody else was in it. This is the way things have always been done. This is the way we do it. I was looking at saying, you guys are idiots. New perspective. Yeah, you're doing this completely wrong. So I started my own business on Wall Street. We crushed it. Had a 10-year run. And I'm getting to your original question which is how I was born. I'm loving the story to this. I mean, it explains so much why Spartan is kicking the shit at everybody too now. Now it makes a lot of sense to me. It was so easy. I called a couple of guys from the neighborhood. I was like, hey, this competitor just started up. Can you whack him? So that's what we finally used to do. Resources. It's so easy to succeed in business when you have those kind of connections. Yeah, we'll bring in the muscle. You know, that whole thing I said about paying us to do some work. Go ahead and scratch that. We'll just go ahead and do some favors for you, bro. No problem. Johnny's going to love that. So where were we? Wall Street. You're starting to do that 10-year run right now. Meet my wife. And I decided we're selling the firm. We're going to sell the Wall Street firm and we're going to Vermont. I want a farm. I want chickens, cows, kids. And I'm done. So sell the business. Move up to Vermont by a farm. Start having babies. And I retired for like three days. Literally, I paced him back and forth. Now, did you sell everything in Wall Street? I mean, you're done with it completely. And you decide it's family time for me. And how old are you right here? So now it is 17 years ago. I'm 30 years old. 31 years old. Oh no, hang on a second. Sorry. I'm 35 years old. So I'm 35, 36. And I'm on the farm and I'm done. And that lasts about three days. Because I'm just, I'm full of energy. I want to make stuff happen. And I start, I say, you know what? Next to the swimming pool business in Queens was this great business still there called Rousseau's on the Bay. It's a wedding business, probably one of the most lucrative wedding businesses in all of New York. They'll charge, you know, a couple of hundred thousand dollars to a wedding and they're pumping them out. Like there's four weddings on a Friday night. Must be the company that handles most celebrities. No, it's more, it was handling the celebrities that were my customers. Those kind of celebrities. So it's just, it's become a machine. The food's great. They know what they're doing. But it's a little tacky. It feels a little bit like good fellas. I'm sure I'll get in trouble for saying that. But they crush it. And so that was in the back of my head. I want to be in the wedding business maybe on this farm I have. So I start a wedding business where you can get married on a farm. We get married. My wife and I get married on the farm. We're the first one. And it just, it starts to work. But I find myself in this weird spot because I have no room for guests. And I have no kitchen, right? So the general store in town comes up for sale. And I'm like, you know what, I'll buy the general store. We'll turn that into the kitchen for the wedding business. And it'll be this cool quaint general store anyway when people come to the weddings. So I call some buddies on Wall Street and I'm like, look, you really won't get it. Why don't you invest and we'll buy some of the things in the town and we'll buy this general store. We'll do some cool, fun stuff. Because if you're sitting on Wall Street sitting on a trading desk typing all day, it'd be kind of cool mentally to think, oh, I own some acreage up in Vermont. I've got a general store. So we ended up buying a large part of the town over time. And definitely pissed some people off. I had to do it again. So we bought that. We bought another farm. We built a bunch of rooms and we built this wedding business. One of the ways to drive traffic to all the stuff we had was races, putting on races. Because I was participating. I didn't tell you this, but while I was on Wall Street, I was participating in races. I was doing... What kind of races were they back then? Because this is well before any of the... This is well before. So it's like, it's mid-90s. I just get to Wall Street and like an elevator is busted. So I got to take the stairs. So I'm in the... And again, I did construction like push wheel, barrels, mix cement. I'm in the stair. I was fit. And I see this guy carrying dumbbells in the stairs. And he's a cover men's health guy. Looks it and it actually is it. Shredded. Sweatin' six pack, eight pack. It's a fantastic looking guy. And I would end up walking upstairs with him while he's got the dumbbells. And we started talking and he's like, hey, meet me in the stairs. I work out every morning. We'll work out together. So I start working out with him. And he brings me to an adventure race. I don't know what an adventure race is, but it's fucking awesome because it feels like I'm mixing cement again. I'm not sitting on a trading desk, right? I'm kayaking. I never kayaked before. I'm biking. I'm running. This is unbelievable. Like we're at war. This is like Game of Thrones. It feels... I'm alive, right? Right, right. And so that was three hours. That was three hour race we did together. Mid-90s. So just because of my personality, I'm like, what's tougher than this? I got to do something bigger. I didn't win it or anything, but I just want to test myself. Right. Well, you could do 24 hours, but that's, you know, you got to be prepared for that. You got to sign me up. I'm doing 24 hours. So signed me up for 24 hours. I do that in Malibu. Actually, it was fantastic. I fell in love with it. I was like, all right, I need the toughest race in the world. What do you got? You can't do that. You got to have a team. You got to train. I said, just fucking sign me up. I got to fucking do it. I wanted, before I changed my mind, and he's like, well, I did a rod. You know, the dog said, right? Oh my God. Get the fuck out of here. But you could do it by foot. So like, sign me up. So instead of having the dog pull you, no dogs, right? You're going to make it harder and you're going to... You're a maniac, sir. So again, I don't know what I'm getting into, which is the best way to do things, because if you know too much and you study it, and I'm just an idiot that way, right? So he's like, well, I'll try to convince this team. You need a team of four. I'll try to convince these three people. If you're paying the bill, they might take you on, but you know, it's dangerous for them. If you're like a loafer and you quit in the middle of the, you know, waist-deep snow in Alaska, you're going to fuck everybody. So I got to go through a series of tests with these three people for months to make sure that they're okay with me coming on their team, even if I'm paying the bill. So anyway, I hold my own. I convince them enough. It's probably more that I was paying the bill than it was my athletic ability because I'm not that athletic. And they take me in and they decide that we're going to do a series of races to get ready for that race. Kind of like a boxer would go into the ring and knock a couple of guys out to feel good. And these are going to be easy like Gimmies, right? Well, one of them is in northern Quebec and this is just going to be a Gimmie. And it was not a fucking Gimmie. Even these guys said this was harder than the race. Minus 30, it's got to be seven days. It starts out with ice boating across the St. Lawrence River. Ice boating. I don't know what ice boating is, right? By the way, they've checked all the boxes for the organizers that I'm certified and all these, I've never done anything. I don't, I've never done anything. I'm climbing. What is that? Is it a boat made of ice or what? The fuck? You're going across and you're in the water and many glaciers are smashing into you while you're going across and you've got to then jump off the boat and run with spike shoes on the snow ice to push the boat through, right? So sometimes you're waist deep in the water. This is like, you know, cold fucking water. Hypothermia type shit right here. Crazy shit. So that's the start. Like gun goes off in the water and smashed into. At that moment in your head you got to be thinking, what the fuck did I sign? Yeah, the glaciers, you know, the size of like buses are hitting the boat. So anyway, we were out there for six or seven days and that was a game changer for me because when you're out there, what goes through your head and this is what we try to recreate with Spartan and we're going to, when I get to the end of this whole thing it'll answer your question, which is you forget about like payroll. You forget about relationship problems. You forget about everything except water, food and shelter. Like, man, I just, I just want to get out of this boat. I just, I just want to get home, right? Like the frame of reference completely changes and it's a very refreshing place to be because all that stuff drops off your shoulders, your shoulders drop and it's just, I just want to live, right? I just want to- We talk about this all the time on the show of being ultimately present, right? Like just being, I mean, it forces- You have no choice. Yeah, it forces you. It humbles the fuck out of you. It forces you to be just mindful and present and realize like, God, how simple. I think it's also powerful and transcendent because you realize just how capable your body and your mind truly is and then you go back to your regular life, your normal stresses and stuff are trivial. You know, you look at the emails and the whatever and you're like, that's not a big deal. I was waist high in snow water and I had no food and now this email, who gives a shit? It's not a big deal. That's why some of the calmest people you ever meet are people that deal with that stuff on a regular basis. You know, I used to- Right. You know, when you meet people who actually- there's a lot of people who think they're tough guys, you know, they want to fight all the time in the bar. You ever go hang out with actual fighters who get their ass kicked all the time and fight? They're the calmest people at the bars because they don't need to do that stuff. So, pretty amazing. No doubt about it. And to that point, as I'm going through all this, it's like all that the stuff my mother was saying over the years about the meditation and the yoga and the fasting and everything- Making sense. That I wasn't accepting, right? You're out there in waist deep snow, my eyelashes are frozen, right, literally frozen and everything she was saying was right. The other interesting thing coming out of that race in northern- we almost died in that race, which is that we could do- we'll do another podcast at some point and I'll tell you about that story. But I wrote- I recapped the whole race. I wrote it all down and I sent it to all my buddies, a lot of them Wall Street buddies. And I remember this very, very successful guy, still a great buddy, wrote back and said, shit, I thought I had a tough day today because I couldn't find the parking spot near the grocery stores. I had to walk like two blocks carrying four bags. And I thought to myself exactly what you just said, right? Like that frame of reference of, hang on a second, that would have been a big deal prior to going and doing something tough. So it's really important that all of us take ourselves out of our comfort zone and go way past any perceived limits because it just makes everything else in life simple. Like all the experiences we could talk about here and all the stuff I've done or you guys have done, what it does for me in an airplane, like you could be upset, Wi-Fi's not working, you could be upset that you're stuck in this tiny little thing, you had to pay for baggage, whatever. I don't get upset because I say to myself, if the plane lands, I've won. I just want the plane to land. Right? Because there's other options. The plane might not land. Right, right. So... Whole new perspective. It's one of the reasons why sometimes you see, my parents are immigrants and when you were talking about the Polish guys that you work with, it reminded me a lot of my father and my grandfather. I mean, they're Sicilian immigrants and they were poor. And it's just, they worked so hard. Grateful to have worked. Well, they were just so grateful for opportunities to do these things and they never complained about being tired or whatever. They were genuinely happy and they just had a different point of reference and it's interesting because humans, we evolved being challenged quite a bit and it's relatively recently that we've got all these comforts, climate control and I don't have to worry about freezing or being too hot. I have water whenever I want it. We have so much water, we take a shit in it for God's sake. We got food whenever, any flavor we want of food, I can learn any piece of information I want at my fingertips and so it makes sense that races like yours and challenges in that sphere are gaining more popularity because it's something that we need. It's almost like we desire and we need it. We don't have it anymore and we know something's missing. We know something's missing. We got all the stuff that we could ever want. People aren't starving anymore. People aren't dying from infections like they used to, but people aren't happy and they can't figure out why. Why am I not happy? I have everything I want. Maybe it's because we just don't get challenged like we used to. We don't know what that feels like because it's similar to what you're talking about. People have experiences like that when they travel. You talk to somebody who travels to another country, especially a third world nation, they come back and they're changed because it changes the perspective of things. They realize now when they were complaining about their house being small and they got too much shit and they come home and they're like, I can't believe I have all the space and all this crap that I don't need. You have to go kill my food for dinner. The process, all that takes. We just take all this stuff for granted. There's a piece of fitness. We're obviously a fitness podcast. There's a piece of fitness there that we talk a lot about some of the drawbacks of fitness where they go into working out and they beat themselves up too much and they hurt their bodies and they don't take care of themselves. They train because they hate themselves. But sometimes I think the message gets a little twisted and then people think that the challenging part of fitness isn't important and that you shouldn't test yourself. You shouldn't go push yourself to your limit because it's not always good to do that but there's a lot more benefit that you get from it and it's not necessarily the physical. That race you did where you almost died in the snow or whatever in the water, you didn't come back more fit physically necessarily from it. You probably were a little damaged. I'm sure you felt like shit for a little while afterwards. But the emotional and mental gains you got from that you couldn't have gotten otherwise. No, it helps you push further later. Whether it's lifting a gym or whether it's dealing with a business or a relationship or whatever. Who are your biggest... I guess the market that really jives with your races, the kind of people that really enjoy doing those races and sign up. Of course you have the hardcore athletes that do it but I got to assume that a majority are just people who just want to challenge themselves. I had a 696-pound guy come out and do one of our races. I had my mother-in-law who's in her mid-60s knocked out our race in Tokyo last week so I had an 81-year-old in Shanghai three weeks ago come out. We've got my... I've got 7-year-olds, 12-year-olds. They all come out and do it. But if you said, Joe, who's the biggest audience? It's obviously CrossFit. It's obviously military. It's anybody that's hitting the gym and wants to be fit. That's the bulk of it but that's only 30-40% when I say bulk. The balance is just anybody that's saying, you know what, I'm not happy to your point. I'm not happy. There's got to be some other way to define myself instead of a cubicle and some handbag to say that I'm cool. And so tens of thousands of tattoos logoed on their body because they want to be... Who doesn't want to be a Spartan? Forget about our brand for a second. Who wouldn't want to be a Spartan to find it? That just has all the values and qualities that you'd want. You were telling us how many races happen a year? So 200 events a year, 30 countries and a million participants. Holy cow. Where's the growth? You guys are televised and you're seeing a lot of growth there. Couple of television shows working on more. Additional shows. Big growth overseas. Obviously I just did two years in Asia with my family specifically to grow out Asia for Spartan so China's going to be our biggest market. Oh my gosh, I can't even imagine that market with Trump ours. I got a funny one for you. So Japan was the hardest market for us to crack which you would think sitting in this room Japan would be easiest, right? It was tough people. As a matter of fact Ninja Warrior came from Japan. Obstacle races in general. He came from Japan so that was my first go to could not crack that market. I had to have focus groups. We had to sit around with 30 Japanese and show them the videos and they all winced at the barbed wire. We got to change the product and we're not sure. Nobody's going to be interested. I said fuck it, I'm moving there. So I moved my family to Japan. To figure it out. I landed there. I had a race open within three months. It sold out two months later. All Japanese, I just had the race last weekend. Japanese are going crazy for it but here's the really funny story. I get a call from a company that makes Hello Kitty. You guys know Hello Kitty? Of course I do. I don't know what Hello Kitty is, right? Bring me into this thing. They sit me down in a pink chair in the residence room. That's going to be crazy for a guy who doesn't know Hello Kitty, right? I don't know what I'm doing here. They're showing me mock-ups of the Spartan logo with Hello Kitty. No way. Are you insulted at this point? I can't be, right? That's a huge brand, too. Hello Kitty's massive. So, yeah. So anyway, I'm driving a minivan. I got Hello Kitty. They're trying to soften it. So what happened in that meeting? They sit you down. A lot of it was in Japanese. I'm still trying to figure out what they said but I did see the photos of the logo with Hello Kitty and they want to do something. I think my audience would revolt. They'd probably kill me if we did something with Hello Kitty. Holy cow. It was really funny. It sounds like you were born with this kind of driving attitude. Obviously, look, hindsight, right, 2020, all the decisions you made were the right ones or whatever, but at the moment it would sound crazy to a lot of people. All the pivots you did in situations where you were already killing it. You were already doing great. You made it and now you said, no, I want to start over and do something else. You've interviewed some extremely successful people. Do you see that attitude? Is that a common attitude amongst these people just like, this is my new thing. I'm challenged here. I'm going to tackle it. I'm going to do it. I interview a lot of people specifically on success. That is a question I try to dive into. What makes a person successful? I think the one attribute is not really caring what other people think. Right. Forget about what other people think. Those pivots, why would somebody not pivot? Let's talk about that for a second. Why would you not change what you're doing? The whole thing too is you're afraid. Like, is it not going to work? Fear is a big one. The great samurai, I got some great stories for you. The great samurai, what they would do when they went to bed every night to eliminate fear because they're going to go into battle and probably die, was to burn everything in their mind. In their mind, they burned their family, they burned their possessions, everything. They were basically dead. They lost everything. You're no longer fearful when you're in the battle. I've already dealt with it. I dealt with it last night. It's all gone. Now what? What's your next move? You're not going to scare me. I'm sure fighters, that's the trick. If you could just think, what am I afraid of and then come to terms with it? Let's say that happens. Here's my biggest fear. Now what? What's your next move? If I lost that $140,000, what Eli was saying to me when he sat me down was, it's okay, you're making money. You're young. It'd be much worse if you had five kids and your back was against the wall and you were trying to make ends meet. But that's not the situation. So I do a lot of upside downside decision making all day long. What's the upside? What's the downside? The upside is if this works going to Wall Street, I'm going to make a lot more money at that moment in time. That was my life's purpose because if I had money, that was a tool for me to do some really cool things. Great way to put that. If it doesn't work, well, I already got a business. I'll go back to doing this. So I don't know. It's easier for me to pivot than maybe most people because I use that quick analysis upside downside decision making. One last thing, sorry to interrupt you, life is too short for me to be stuck doing one thing. I want to do a lot of things. And I didn't want to be a pool guy for the rest of my life. Not that there's anything wrong with that. That was not my plan. I didn't want to be sitting in front of a computer screen for that. That was not my life long plan. And so maybe deep down inside somewhere there was this purpose. I want to get people healthy. I didn't know that that was in there. But if you do go out and make some money, well, then you can afford to do some cool things. It was actually a wise guy that told me this. He sat me down at his long wooden table in Queens in the house. I was just done working in his backyard. And we were probably eating some mozzarella and tomatoes on an assembly in Italian bread. And he said to me the most surprising coming from him, the most important thing in life is to help people. Right? So, you know, maybe he was feeling bad for some of the things he did. But it stuck with me. So, I don't know if that answers your question. And so, you know, now you have a business that does that. So you get to do both. I'm very, very fortunate. You guys are very fortunate. Absolutely. In that we get paid to help people. And we get people thanking us. Right? And so that, so, yeah, I got to kiss the ground. I walk on. It's unbelievable. So, knowing that, what scares you now? What are the things now you look at and say, okay, here's the fears I need to work on and tackle now? Are there any things that... Yeah, so yesterday I put, so we just flew back from Tokyo. I packed all the family up. Our job was done when the race went off. You have kids, yeah? Four children. Oh, good for you. And I put them on a plane yesterday morning at 5 a.m. And the thing that scared me was having the whole family on a plane. Right? God forbid. And so that scares me. Other than that, like, you know, a lot of Italian guys used to say to me, it came to this country with two shoes. I'll go home with two shoes. Like, you know what I mean? I saw lots of guys make it big and success is like a moment in time. And so you just got to know that that same ladder you go up, you're probably coming down. So I'm not really fearful of that. It's really my family. Something you said that was kind of stuck with me that reminded me a little bit of an experience I had getting into the fitness industry was when you got into some of these new industries, you didn't know that you couldn't or you didn't know how hard it was. Had you been in Wall Street or had you been in that world, you would have known how crazy it was to try and jump in and be successful. But you had no idea. You went in there and it's like, I'm going to do this. I had a similar experience running health clubs. I mean, I was 19 years old, they gave me the big gym to run. I didn't know that it was a hard thing to do. I just did it looking back. I thought, oh my God, that was crazy. And sometimes it's better. Sometimes I think it's better doing something but not having any idea what the risks are and what the challenges are. No, I was going to say, a guy like you, I would think too, something that it took me a while, it took me a couple of businesses. We're all serial entrepreneurs. We all have that in common. I started to realize really quick that the more, you know, scary situations or starting over situations I put myself in, the better I became too. I think my biggest fear is getting comfortable and staying in a business or the same thing for so long, I like to be challenged and the best of me comes out when I put it. Do you find that about yourself too? I think it's all of us. As a human being, you mentioned it earlier and the way we've evolved on this planet, I think our best does come out when we're pushed, when our backs against the wall. I was going to say something, but I forgot but let's dive down that road. So I build these businesses in Vermont. I build the general store, the farm, the bed and breakfast all around this wedding and event industry. And what I say to myself is I need a young Joe to come and run that general store. I need a young person to come run that farm. I need a young person to come run and I'm going to give them a leg up that I didn't have when I was starting. The mortgage is already paid for, the cows are already purchased, there's already inventory in the general store and it's going to be easy. I just got to find some guy or girl with fire in their belly to run these businesses. Home run. I wish I was given that opportunity when I was starting. I had a steel stuff to... I had no... So I get people over a decade. And what I found was when the going got tough, they quit. And so why did they... I'm analyzing why was that happening over and over and over. I'll tell you why because their back wasn't against the wall because they weren't uncomfortable because the cows were paid for, the mortgage was paid. Actually what makes us successful, which is to your point, is the adversity. The mortgage, the fact that you told all your friends you were going to do this. So you got to get out of your comfort zone to be successful. You have to. That's what drives success. 100%. If this was easy and you just walked in and everything was paid for and there were advertisers for your podcast, you actually wouldn't be successful. It's a nice metaphor for your races. They're not easy. No, they're not. And purposely. I feel like I've got to recreate what happened to me in Alaska and Northern Canada that I described earlier. And I've got hours to do that to somebody. So people look at me. Is there ice boating? No, no ice boating. But we do have winter races. Funny enough, we're very big in Eastern Europe. Really big in Eastern Europe. And the reason we're big in Eastern Europe is because of my guys that I had the swimming pool business with. You're kidding me. So they and some others from Slovakia helped me set up the business there. And our first winter race because they're the most badass people on earth, was over there. I said, who's going to do a winter race? They did it. I went out there and did it. It was in the snow. You still do the races? I still go out and do the races. I'm not competitive, but I go out and do them. Oh, that's insane. So you did the Q-Back one. I think you said you had two more races. When did the company take offers and how did that happen? So I do all these races and in the back of my mind I've been paddling for 24 hours. You've got nothing to do. I'm going to put on some races. So the first race I put on is actually in the British Virgin Islands. And I'm going to do a 350 mile event I'm going to put on. It's going to include paddling. It's going to include swimming, sailing. It's going to be unbelievable. And I bring in my friends now that I've been racing with for some years and we put it on. And it's a disaster. It's a disaster on a few fronts. There's not a lot of people that want to do 350 mile eight day races. So there's just not enough entry fees to pay the bills. But in addition to that I lost a guy literally lost a guy who was working for us and setting ropes. And apparently he was on a dingy on a little boat and a storm rolled in and the engine didn't start and he drifted away. Well eight days later I find out from our staff that we're missing, I forget his name Mike or whatever. How the fuck are you missing? Eight days later you're telling me well we thought he was on the island and when the race was over I got a Coast Guard involved Coast Guard triangulates where somebody last saw him the storms that rolled in and they estimate that if he's alive he's in Tobago which is 150 miles away. They take the choppers Coast Guard and they find him. He drifted 150 miles literally like eight day survivor where he's living out there eating crabs and drinking bottles of water that drifted to little Tobago. No shit. So that was the end of that format of races. That could have ended horribly. I lost a guy and a half a million dollars. That's gnarly. So then the next format I tried a whole bunch of formats of events. 20-10 after losing millions of dollars attempting this and trying to get it to work sitting around the kitchen came up with the name Spartan changed the format to three different distances three mile, eight mile and 13 mile and the thinking there was when I go into a season racing we start out with something easy right after the holidays you get a little plump and then you're coming out and you're like I want to do something at this distance and then you finish it like October-November with something big. That's your big event and when you do three events minimum a year what I was finding over this decade of racing was you actually get in shape to change your habits because you're always training for something. If you just have one event a year on the count just doesn't work so the idea was alright we'll call it Spartan three distances people space it out that way and it's going to have a philosophy to it right because my mom had this deep philosophy to all this stuff it's going to be around health and wellness we'll never have a brand that's unhealthy as a sponsor that was the idea again it's 2010 10 years of losing money doing this it's probably not going to work the most I'm going to invest in this new idea is 50 grand that's it and we'll take a swing at it because I'm done losing money in this and it's just I don't know if I can get it to work 50 grand quickly turns into 150 grand which turns into which always does right we know that and then it turns into literally 300,000 a month on my credit cards 300,000 a month what is it that's costing so much money to try and get this to work? Well I'm an idiot I'm a complete idiot and we talked about it before I subscribe to Fire Ready Aim you're in good company you're in good company right now welcome to the team so I had fired and we launched an event or two and when you're in the event space and you launch an event you say in July 2nd we're having this race well you're having that race whether it's 10 people there or 10,000 people there if you have integrity and you want to honor the ticket you sold and so you're really going to lose a ton of money if you don't get people there you're dead and so we launched in Vermont which was the wrong place to launch and then coming out of Vermont we quickly went to like Canada and then from Canada we went to UK and if you're smart about launching a brand you build rings around you cluster them but I'm not smart so I've got to plunk down money to market and put on these events everywhere and I'm juggling credit cards and I remember a bookkeeper walks into the office one day and it's probably 2011 and she's like you're almost out of money, like what the fuck are you doing and I remember thinking I just worked like 23 years straight between the swimming pool business construction business, Wall Street and I've blown all this fucking money in a year and a half on trying to make this thing work and I said to her, I'm telling you there's something here, I know there's something here and I called Central Wall Street Buddies and I said look, you're not going to understand this business I have no business plan I have no valuation but I need money and I need money by Monday and or I'm dead kind of thing I love this attitude and so they sent me money and they're doing very well because of it they were awesome and so I remember the day it turned was probably 2013 so two years later I remember the young kid that was doing our accounting walks in and says, hey we had 1300 registrations yesterday there's no fucking way we had yesterday as in one day but we were averaging, I'm making up numbers just to give you an idea we were averaging like 80 a day 90, right? and you fucked up the numbers and we went back and forth and we looked and it was like wow and so I think what happened I think it just took a while when you don't cluster and don't build rings it just took a while to create a network effect where all of a sudden everybody knew what this thing was and so it's always it always shocks me at just how long a freaking overnight success takes, you know what I mean? 17 fucking years 17 years and 95% of your money exactly, yeah because people always look back and like overnight success Spartan race from nowhere to now when this was all happening do you know what's going on with the other ones like Go Ruck and Tough Mudder and like did that happen after? Are they competitively going at the same time? So in any industry podcasts, radio automobile manufacturing everybody rushes in and at that time you were coming out of a really difficult financial crash so anybody that was in construction that had a hammer or a screw gun well now they were in the obstacle racing business so there were three or four hundred competitors that popped up overnight whoa that meeting they didn't even know that but what happened was a lot of them ended up not putting on the events because to put on an event cost $600,000 to put on an event so if you don't have enough people there you're going to lose cuts both ways it's pretty painful so these guys all launched out of everywhere everybody had an opinion on how they were going to do it and a name and that and we were fighting battles competitively everywhere on just getting our brand to stand out now we got really lucky on a couple of things one is we got lucky with the name like I wish I could say to you we sat around and strategize and had branding experts no it was like Spartan oh that sounds cool let's just do it I didn't even know but that name has meaning for thousands of years it just means something to people right so that's great two is I because I was racing for over a decade was not going to do something that was just silly and about mud and about hurting people it had to be authentic it had to be athletic that was just my I wasn't going to be involved in something that wasn't legit we were going to time people and by the way if you couldn't do an obstacle okay but you're doing 30 burpees it was going to be painful right there was going to be punishment not in a negative way but like you had to attempt and to do the obstacle and you had to get proficient at it and if you didn't oh well you're doing 30 burpees which sucks right and by the way on all these things timing people on making forcing them to do the burpees that they can't do making it athletic and not doing silly things those actually hurt the business in the early days because they're not gimmicky they're not gimmicky and people were afraid of it right but but I stuck to it and I said no this like I'm not going to be involved in it if it's gimmicky I'm just not going to do it that's a long-term thinking there but yeah and it was I again I wish I could say I was smart but it was just like no I'm it's just not me sure right integrity and yeah and then and then third was my mom and the philosophy from all those years of the monks right and the yoga and the fasting it was like this the race is just a tip of the iceberg below the surface is a philosophy on how to live and that's what's going to be oozing out of this this brand and so again people didn't notice it right away but when we look back now seven years later seventeen years for me but seventy seven years later from the start of spartan we're growing at twenty percent a year we're the largest endurance running company in the world it's because of those silly little things you know they say we make a lot of small decisions in life that are seemingly insignificant but I like to use the analogy of if the four of us were in a rocket ship right now and there were a bunch of dials and knobs and stuff and we turned one a millimeter to right you'd be like oh it's no big deal except you end up on the wrong planet right eventually yeah and so the little decisions that I just described I think are the reason we're we've got a moment of time where we're successful especially in today's market it's not just about a product but it's about the why behind the product you know like apple does as well as they do for example because of the whole thing the whole brand the whole philosophy and it sounds like you guys are doing that you've got that understanding so what's giving you you know so much market share and why you continue to grow no doubt about it and now and now everybody's trying to copy what we did but it's hard because if you're not authentic about it it's the consumer knows now besides the the race is how else does you guys monetize is you guys have apparel and retail and stuff like that what does the whole business look like we do so we have an apparel business which is what should be really should dwarf everything we do because of this name Spartan right but we're just too busy with events and grown events right now but it's a sizable business put it this way anybody would just like our apparel our apparel business big enough that it'd be a nice little side business for anybody but it should be much bigger we've got a little bit of a training business we built a gym down in Miami with Barry Sternlich from Starwood so he built a brand new kick-ass hotel on the beach called The One O&E and he built us out a 5 million dollar gym it's unbelievable you gotta see this place so we got a complete creative control and a complete programming control and he's an awesome guy I've had him on the podcast he's a badass and so he helped us out with that and we hope to stamp more of those around the world and then we got the podcast and all the media and the television shows and stuff but if I told you it was easy and I had a perfect strategy in front I'd be lying to you I'm fighting fires every day that's part of it though and I love when people like you share that and talk about it because everybody sees the glamorous side of it like oh he's flying around all over the world and he gets this he's got nice cars he's all these things like that and people think it's just like oh come on driving a fucking minivan a minivan and my kids say what is that and I say well that's first class well come on we're not sitting there exactly we have to get that photo by the way of him in that minivan when he leaves today for sure what are you looking at moving ahead what are you guys looking to tackle or do now well I mean the big thing for me is could we change 100 million lives big bold ambition and how do we do that and we want to get people eating properly just like you guys we want to get them it's a big thing right thinking like a Spartan and then getting out there and actually living it and training and unfortunately the way the human beings are today to your point unless you have an event on schedule unless you're a very unique individual you're not going into that gym every day and training you guys are unique some of your listeners are unique but most people they need a date they need something that's scaring them into training and not taking the extra scoop ice cream so I'll tell you a funny one so we talked about delayed gratification so Stanford not too far from here I would assume professor Walter Michel 1972 puts out very familiar with the study should I do it talk about so puts a bunch of kids in cubicles offers kids marshmallow kids could take the marshmallow now or they could wait and get to later we've talked about this great great study most kids take the marshmallow but they followed them for 30 years and what they found were the kids that were able to abstain from eating the marshmallow had better lives in every respect better SAT scores, better marriages, better cars, house everything yeah the whole thing was basically eat one marshmallow now or wait and they gave them some amount of time wish to a little kid is forever and if you wait I'll give you two marshmallows and the ones that did that across the board far more successful it's that delayed gratification so if I wait now I'll get more later and they find that very very common amongst all most successful people except for the few you know lucky ones outliers yeah and I learned a lot of that probably from the neighborhood with those guys in some respect certainly my neighbor got me started in the business he would say to me look you're in the backyard anyway straighten up the shed straighten up the lawn furniture clean around the pool I know you're not getting paid for that for a while because when that person comes home that customer comes home they're going to say oh my god I can't live without this guy but most people would say I'm not doing that I'm not getting paid if I don't get money right now anyway I expanded that to my whole life my son he's six years old at the time I got to test them I got to do the marshmallow test but I'm a little scared because I'm like what happens if he takes the marshmallow I'm fucked the rest of my life do I want to know or not so we're out late one night we're in Brooklyn I take him on a little trip and we're in Brooklyn and it's like 10 o'clock at night he should be in bed at 8 so I'm already I'm justifying on my head well if he takes it maybe he's tired right there's a lot of excuses I can come up with so I give him a scoop of ice cream and I'm like hey Jack which I don't give them junk foods so already I'm against the wall on this one so I say or you could wait and I'll give you two and my timer on my phone is about half a minute and he turns to me and he says hey dad how long do I have to wait to get 15 scoops oh I thought but you know you want to end this conversation we're having here we're playing for 15 scoops in life we're playing for 15 scoops so don't take the cookie that's a beautiful way to wrap that's a beautiful way I really appreciate the conversation man what a pleasure having you down I hope we can do something together in the future we're gonna do stuff let's turn this shit off because I actually want to talk to you about business my wheels have been turned the whole time you guys want me to sign off here alright so 30 days of coaching available for free mindpumpmedia.com you can also find us on instagram at mindpumpmedia and our personal pages mine is mindpumpsal, Adam is mindpump adam and Justin is mindpump Justin okay Joe you gotta tell me the Japan story bro so lay it down I don't know if it's 10-15 years ago I read in the New York Times about these marathon monks and it catches my attention because of my mom's background having the monks in the living room and believing in all this stuff and I never dove deep and really understood Buddhism or any of this but the marathon word I think with the monk got me excited right so I dive in and I start learning about these guys in Japan that basically let's say the four of us wanted to become monks we would go up this mountain mountain high anybody Japanese listening says I'm saying it wrong and we would knock on the door and these these temples on this mountain have been around for like eight, nine hundred years they came over from China and if there's eight I'm gonna screw this up disciplines within Buddhism six of them came from this mountain so we show up there we knock on the door we're like alright we're ready we want to be monks throw in this robe take these wooden sandals you guys look fit right you've been training in San Jose so you should be fine and they're like you gotta do a hundred days of marathons there's like a trail system a hundred days so every day we're gonna do a marathon and along the way it's not a race guys they're telling us you pray and you've got your incense you light and you get spiritual and so we do the hundred days we shaved our heads we got the wooden sandals on we got the robes we knocked out a hundred days we high five each other like this is gonna be awesome we're gonna do a podcast we knocked out a hundred days we're gonna be monks they're like alright great job on the hundred days take this rope and take this sword now we know you're serious you got eight hundred more days to go but if you decide to quit guys you gotta kill yourself on the course so that's the deal that's the deal and this has been going on for close to a thousand years and so I gotta go see these fucking monks dude holy shit I'm in southeast Asia last year and I meet this guy just like I met you guys randomly and I'm telling him about this he's like dude I got the map from that New York Times writer I know her I said we're going I'm buying you a ticket I gotta meet these marathons matter of fact we're gonna go scout it out I'm gonna bring my family cause I wanna show my kids the monks that kill themselves cause they're quitters versus the monks that finish and are winners right oh my god so he gets the map we go out we're gonna go do it ourselves the week in advance and my family come I can't tell my family I'm just gonna tell them we're gonna go for a little walk I can't tell them oh by the way my wife will kill me right so me and David go out we bring a third friend and he's trying to navigate I didn't live in Japan at this time I was in southeast Asia I don't know Japanese he's trying to navigate the train system to get us to this mountain no one really knows this place we take the train the train ends we get off and we're like oh it's gonna be awesome the trolley that goes up the mountain is shut for the season so we're like well fuck it we'll just hike up the mountain right he's like yeah I think I could kind of figure it out anyway it's like a two hour hike straight up this mountain we get up the mountain we're a little lost we're going in circles and it doesn't look like we're gonna be able to find this thing out of the corner I hear like chanting and I again I grew up with my mother in the house with the chant I'm like that's them I'm here like a little bells or something so we we hike through the woods and you know beautiful temple pops up right in front on the other side of the hill we come over and I'm like this is unbelievable we found the secret look I feel like Indiana Jones we found this thing right I take off my shoes I don't know if we're allowed to go in or not but I'm going in and we go in the thing and the incense is burning they're praying and all of a sudden now we're praying this is unbelievable right so we come out we walk around the stairs we're checking the whole thing out before we try to find the the course that the 25 26 mile course and what do I stumble upon a fucking parking lot and a ticket booth it's like it's like tourists come every day we didn't need we could have taken a taxi we could have taken a taxi so anyway if you're listening out there you gotta go see the marathon monks but so we do the course we we hike the thing and it is awesome we get a little lost but we figured out because it's not just a straight there's lots of off shoots on the trail so you really gotta know where you're going and it's not something they allow you to do we just we just went out and did it the next week my family comes because now I kind of know the course and I tell my wife I got my wife I got my four kids one of which is a three-year-old that I'm going to carry and I go no we just check this thing out it's awesome it's spiritual just go for a little hike but in my mind we're going we're going 25 miles right you're not telling them this yet no and I came and the thing is I can't carry much because I can't say that she would say well why do we have such a bad why do we have a backpack full of food and drinks so I can't really bring much so um so anyway we go and I get lost oh shit I get lost and we are and we are like 13 miles in oh god and I see this like I thought it was a wolf I got scared we all got scared it was just a dog but it was strange because there's nothing out there for there to be a dog and um and the dog is coming at us and it leaves and my wife's convinced to this day it was a spirit but anyway we walk we walk past where the dog was coming at us and we go about another 20 minutes and there's a dead end I'm like oh we must have missed a turn back there so I turn around now I say because I'm about to lose you know they're about to lose their shit my family so I gotta get ahead of them maybe 10 minutes just to try to figure it out so that I'm oh it was no big deal we just missed this turn right so I run ahead a bit and sure enough 40 minutes later the dog's coming at me again fucking dogs lost dogs lost we're all lost anyway we are out there and it turns into a complete shit show because the sun's going down it's cold there's no way we're going back up that's gonna take forever we end up going down into a ravine stuff I would have did in adventure racing it would be no big deal for the four of us but I got a three year old right we go down into a ravine I don't know where we're gonna come out we end up popping out in the middle of the night into a cemetery there's crows flying over and it's pretty fitting for for what went on but um awesome experience from my perspective awesome experience got to show the kids all the little to the tombstones of the guys that killed themselves are like wow so they're actually just killing themselves yeah they're tiny little broken like they're not celebrating those guys and then you see the big the big um you know whatever tombs tombs yeah for the for the guys that did it number you know number 45 I got it done one guy one Japanese guy was so upset with himself from World War two that he did two sessions he did 1800 days oh my god to cleanse his soul so anyway if you're listening out there make your way to Japan go check out the marathon monks wow yeah excellent story that's amazing thank you for listening to mind pump if your goal is to build and shape your body dramatically improve your health and energy and maximize your overall performance check out our discounted rgb super bundle at mind pump media dot com the rgb super bundle includes maps anabolic maps performance and maps aesthetic nine months of phased expert exercise programming designed by sal adam and justin to systematically transform the way your body looks feels and performs with detailed workout nutrients and over 200 videos the rgb super bundle is like having sal adam and justin as your own personal trainers but at a fraction of the price the rgb super bundle has a full 30 day money back guaranteed and you can get it now plus other valuable free resources at mind pump media dot com if you enjoy this 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