EPISODE #893 Ways to Build a Resilient Family Joe De Sena

You're listening to the Human Upgrade with Dave Asprey. Today is something that I've wanted to do for you guys a long time, and it's get a little bit deeper into families. You know that I'm all about resilience. The whole original tagline, back when I started Bulletproof on the coffee, it said coffee for mission critical performance. And the underlying thing there has always been resilience. How do you be hard to kill, but also how do you be mentally tough so you're unflappable, so that people can make fun of you whether you're in fifth grade or whether you're 50 and you don't lose sleep over it. And maybe you don't punch them unless they really deserve it, and you chose to punch them instead of you punch them because you lost control. There's a difference there. And I'm not advocating punching people. Well, maybe there's a few people who probably actually do deserve that, but we'll leave that for the sociopaths later. And I'm like, all right, who am I going to interview? Okay. At the last biohacking conference, which was the seventh. At that conference, one of the really popular speakers was Joe decenna, and I asked him back. He's a founder of Spartan, and he joins our show today to talk about exactly that, resilience, specifically based on his latest book, which is about mental toughness for families. God knows, if there's any time in history that you wanted mental toughness for families, this might be one of them. Joe, welcome to the show, my friend.

Thanks for having me. You're awesome.

Thank you. Now, you're the founder of Spartan, which is, you know, endurance sports and just people, I'm going to say, beating the crap out of themselves to show themselves they can do it. And my first big question for you here, how do you know the difference between beating yourself up until you've overdone it? For instance, you can be getting emotionally abused. And, like, I'm mentally tough, I'm resilient. People are all over me. I'm just going to sit here and be in my Zen bubble. Or you can go in a race and say, you know, actually, that's my femur poking out of my thigh. I think I'm done. But you just keep going. So how do you draw the line between resilience and breaking something?

Yeah, you know, I thought about this for, God, 30 plus years, Dave, and you have to have a true north, a North star, something we call your why. Right? Like, why Dave wants to be the Greatest family man that ever lived. Joe diseno wants to be the greatest mountain climber that ever lived. You and I are both climbing Mount Everest. We're 100ft from summiting. Terrible storm rolls in. It's going to be risky. Dave needs to do a quick check on what his why is. And his why is to be the greatest family man that ever lived, he should turn around at that moment. He should not continue to take the beating on top of the mountain. Joe, on the other hand, has to do some quick analysis. And Joe says. I say to myself, gee, I want to be the greatest mountain climber that ever lived. That's my. That's my mantra. That's my why. This is my chance. This is my window. It's risky. I'm single, I don't have kids. I might go for it. So you have to start, whether it's your family, whether it's your business, whether it's you personally, you have to start with, like, why are you doing this? That's number one. Number two, are you happy? I mean, I've been in lots of races, Dave, all over the world, where it's all these things are tough. Climbing Everest, like we just described, running a marathon, working out in the morning, it's hard. But. But is it a happy hard or is it your femur sticking out of your leg? You gotta do some analysis and be truthful with yourself and say, like, how hard is this? Now, the litmus test, you're gonna love this. I'm down in Florida right now, which is the antithesis of Spartan, right? It's softer, there's Disneyland. I shouldn't be here, but I'm down here. We can get into that further in the conversation. But this morning in Florida, I was at a school called Lake Highland Prep, and it's a fancy school, K through 12. And there's a coach there, Mike Palazzo, wrestling coach. Who, Dave, you would love. I. This is Rocky, Rocky's trainer. Drago, Apollo Creed, Gene Hackney, all mixed together. Okay. He's motivated.

At a high school. Wow.

Yeah. At a high school, he. This is a one of a kind. And it's 6am and it's 1 of his two practices a day. He mandates for his wrestling team six days a week. They get Sundays off. And holidays, doesn't matter. There's no holidays. It's two days, you know, two days, two times a day. And he is pushing them. And about three quarters of the way through, and you could see kids were hurting, including my own kids, he's pushing them and I Said to them, my mantra, which is, guys, it could be a lot worse. You could be in Siberia right now. You could be in some remote part of India with no food. Like, so you do it. You do a quick head check. I do it. You do a quick head check, and you say, yeah, this is hard, but my femur is not sticking out of my thigh. Like, I'm not pissing blood. I'm not in Siberia freezing to death. Like, it's just uncomfortable. And you know what? I'm still kind of happy. So it's hard to ascertain, right? But. But you got to do. Now, where most people fall, Dave, and you know this. You know this. Most people fall on the light side. Oh, this is. No, no, you're not pissing blood. Your femur's not sticking. It's not that bad. You're not dying. Might feel like it because you live in such a comfortable place 99% of your life, that anything outside of that bubble feels like your femur sticking out of your leg. The trick, I'm sorry to keep interrupting the magic, Dave, is to live so far outside the bubble that it's not that uncomfortable.

So are you a proponent of just regular discomfort?

I think you gotta take it in micro doses. I think, look, let's go back in time. Let's think about Lewis and Clark. That's a pretty rugged expedition. I mean, if you and I. You could say that if you and I were going cross country, we'd need a little more than the bulletproof coffee. I mean, grandma dies along the way, wife gives birth, wooden wheel breaks, stuck in a snowstorm, can't get over the Rockies.

I mean, coffee fixes all that, just to be clear.

So I'm just saying, like, we're not going to recreate that, and we shouldn't. But a cold shower, 30 burpees a workout consistently every morning. Where, you know, my litmus test is, do I want to puke? And if I want to puke, I push myself. And unfortunately, you know biology a lot better than I do, Dave. But unfortunately, the body requires those kinds of tests to make it more efficient and make it better and healthier. Like, it requires that you go to the zone. Now, if I puked, I probably pushed too far. So it's like, did it feel like I was. Was it that? Like, this morning I was on the. As I was watching the kids, I was on the. The air dime bike. And. And you could just sit there for two hours and go easy. And that's in the comfort zone. That's like living in a greenhouse. Right. It's just nice and smooth. But then I said, all right, I gotta do. I gotta get 10 calories done every minute or 20 calories done. And it takes you to that zone where it's, like, uncomfortable. And I know I'm doing some good.

And you just mentioned Florida, but you have a farm up in Vermont, or did you move to Florida permanently?

No. So let's go down this road if you're up for it.

Yeah, sure.

We have a farm in Vermont. That's where a Spartan was born. That's where all my children were born. We still have it. The farm is epic. It's in a little town called Pittsfield, Vermont. We have a new CNBC television show that gets filmed on the farm. We've got a podcast like you that gets filmed on the farm. We brought in investors years ago for Spartan. As it started to grow, it had to move off the farm. And the investors said, let's move it to Boston. Which was perfect for my wife because we have a. She has family involved. And anybody that's married listening to this knows that the wife wins. And you always end up migrating to wherever the wife's family is.

It depends on how much you really Spartan up. I mean, you could wait until she breaks her femur, right?

You could wait until she breaks her femur. And it was getting to that point, so we moved to Boston. We kept the farm. We'd go back and forth. And the pandemic hit, and we moved back to the farm, and we operated from the farm during the pandemic. And then the pandemic subsided, and we moved back to Boston, and we went back into the office, and the kids went back to school. And what I found over the last eight months, I can't get people back to the office. The young people, the new people. I was hiring through natural attrition. You know, we lost people. We have to rehire new people.

They froze to death on one of the death races. So you just have to get new ones. Yeah, you kill a few redundant array of inexpensive employees. Is this your strategy here?

It's so much easier to get rid of somebody if they die in the death race. So we have to get new people. And the new people are coming into the office. But I can't get many of the old folks to come in. And some have legitimate reasons because of COVID but others just are used to staying home. They don't want to travel in the traffic, and the trains aren't working like they used to. And there's so much friction in Boston and New York because we have an office in New York that I did something bold. I was talking to a friend of mine who's got a big company and he said he was showing me his 80,000 square foot office in New York that was empty. And it was the day of my peak frustration. And he said, you know what you have to do? And I said, what? He goes, you got to go to Indianapolis. And I said, why Indianapolis? He goes, I have a company there with like 300 employees. They never stop coming to work. They show up, they get the job done in the office. And so I flew to Indianapolis the next day because I had to see this with my own eyes. And I was like, this is unbelievable. People are showing up for work. This is like it was before COVID I told my wife, we're moving to Indianapolis. And she said, we're not moving to Indianapolis. I'm going to break your femur if we move to Indianapolis. So I had to find a place in America where people still come to the office where I could put my kids in a school. And Florida, it's no surprise. You've all seen the news, has not been as shaken with the pandemic and folks are still going into offices. Now, it's a whole other argument. You guys might say, joe, you're old fashioned, you do jazzercise, you wear leotards. People don't need to come into an office anymore. That's probably true, but I need to be productive. I want to be around people. It helps me be better. And I'm a bit of a maniac. So I.

I'm with you there. Both on Florida being the most attractive state to attract the wealthiest and most entrepreneurial and innovative people from around the world right now. And it's happening that California is draining all of its talent because Florida is like, hey, you can innovate and be free here. And there isn't about a red or blue or any of that other made up nonsense. It's just about people who like to get stuff done, like to not be restrained irrationally. So they, they naturally go there. But there's, there's something else in what you were saying there. You have community when you have an office and when you have remote zoom community, it's like following a bunch of people on Instagram or snapping them. It's not the same thing. And part of resilience, I think, is having a strong community. It's one of the reasons that I travel for New Year's. I wanted to see my People, because, well, it's hard to travel, as I was just reminded. I'll say that again, as I was just reminded. But I feel like the office community is a real thing. And it's not just productivity. It's actually about having support to solve a challenge, a mission, something that matters. That's why I just built out my headquarters. You guys have to come to work, you have to be here every day, but we need to be together three days a week. By the way, I put a restaurant here, and there's an upgrade labs here. I'm pretty sure that you're going to like that. And my upgrade labs headquarters, which is a headquarters where you go to work, is in Tampa. We're building that out. So I'm all in on this. And if you're sitting here going, I only want to work from home. No, work from home a bunch, if that's productive for you. But spend time breathing pheromones and looking people in the eye. And my question for you after that bit of a rant is, how important is your community, your family, your coworkers, for being resilient? Can you be resilient alone? Or is it better to be resilient when you have shared suffering?

Well, so let's do community, and then let's get back to the office, because I can't. So community 1000%. If you were working out this morning by yourself, Dave, and I was working out by myself. And then after 10 minutes of working out by ourselves, we bumped into each other getting a bulletproof coffee and then started working. We would both work out harder together. We would be here together now. Check this one out. You're gonna love this. I'm interviewing people down here. And yesterday I had an interview, and a woman came in, and I just was wondering, like, do you want to go to an office? Like, I had to ask the question, right? And she said, let me tell you something. She said, she's a lawyer. She said, two years before the pandemic, I did the work from home thing. I left the big law firm. I started my own little law firm. And I did zooms before it was cool. And she goes, I can't wait to get back in an office. She says, I want to see people. And she said. She literally said, I feel better around other people. I feel stronger around other people. So there's something there. You and I know the reason you asked the question. You and I know that look. People all around the world have said, joe, you gotta build permanent Spartan and tough mudder obstacle courses. I Said, look, they don't really work. The obstacles are cool, the brand is cool, but the thing that makes it work is the 8,000 people that show up on Saturday to do the race together. If you have, like, just Dave and Joe going through the course alone, it's not the same.

It's the same reason that when pro sports teams play in an empty stadium, it kind of sucks.

Kind of sucks.

There's energy that goes into that. And I have run. At least I started. I'm not involved with Bulletproof anymore, but I started Bulletproof and until I left, grew to north of 100 million. And I did all that over zoom from an island and I traveled a lot, but I did that because of the happy wife thing and happy family, and I'm also on a farm and all that kind of stuff. So I was already set up for remote work, but it meant I had to travel 150 days a year to see people. Otherwise I'd go nuts. It's lonely to do that. So I feel like we're creating a world of loneliness there. If we go down that everyone works remotely and never sees each other. And we're all going to put on our Metaverse goggles, which, by the way, I do have VR goggles, but I'm not putting Mark Zuckerberg that close to my eyes, thank you very much.

We should create. You just gave me an idea. We should create Spartan bulletproof goggles that they're like 27 pounds and they spray.

Pepper spray in your eyes every now and then just to remind you to be tough.

Yeah, exactly. They don't really do anything.

It's just a blindfold. They're dawn from the Upgrade Collective, which, by the way, is one of the communities I've built really actively over the past pandemic. I miss people not being able to have the conference, so. Got a lot of people doing the Upgrade Collective, but he's like. He has his beer goggles. Would those count? So, Don, I think your beer goggles would count for sure.

There you go.

So just going back to so. So Community matters. And you're saying when you have these 8,000 people doing this shared suffering thing, I can't imagine that all by yourself in the morning. Like, I'm going to wake up today and go slog through mud and get zapped by electricity or other. Whatever other bad things you invent to do in there. And just to prove you can do it to yourself, it's to do it with others. All right, so if you're sitting here going, I never Want to work from an office again, you might ask yourself the question what percentage of time. When you Let me put that again, what percentage of time going into the office makes you most effective? And if your answer is never going into the office, you probably need to find a very solitary kind of thing like writing you can probably do or some kind of research. But Otherwise, if it's 20, 30%, you can probably do it. But if you really don't like people that much, then okay. It limits what you can do. The FaceTime thing, and it's been studied over and over. If you just look at someone face to face for one time and then you go off and you zoom with them, the trust is built. But if you never meet them, it doesn't work.

You ever. What was the movie? Papillion. French guy gets arrested, gets banished to a rock in the sea. In the ocean.

Wasn't it to Australia or something? It was a rock. Yeah. It was an amazing movie. By the way, everyone, you have to watch Papillion. What a great reference. I forgot about that. It means butterfly in French. It's like the only French word I know besides croissant.

Yeah. So let's. For anybody listening to Dave that believes they don't need to go in an office because they don't want to deal with traffic, or maybe they're very young and this seems. Watch that movie because you'd probably do really good in prison.

Yes, Solitary confinement again for me.

I know a lot of guys that went to jail. I grew up in a tough neighborhood, Dave, and I know a lot of guys that got 25 year bids. And I don't. Maybe that's why I want to be in an office and I want to see people. I don't. That doesn't sound exciting to me. I don't know, maybe I'm strange.

You know, people might say, well, Dave, I'm at least I'm at 28%. That's my age. But they might say, you know, you know what you're talking about. You grew up when things were different. But I really, truly believe that when people actually work as teams and they support each other that way, that they, they create better results. The ideas are better, the creation's better. And I spent God knows how many millions of dollars flying people to be together. Which sounds kind of dumb, except that it works. My very first team off site. When I first started, I couldn't afford to have a team that was centralized, so didn't have an office. Everyone was remote. And after we had our First, I think million or $2 million a year. I said, all right guys, we need to have an all hands meeting. Cause we've never actually seen each other, a lot of us. So since everyone has to fly anyway, it's in Maui and we all just flew to Maui and it was a really good thing to do. And pretty soon it was time to get an office. And I went out there every day. But I'm right in the middle of the pandemic. Building out an office in Victoria bc. And I just think it's how everyone's going to perform better and be happiest. And if that doesn't work for someone, hey, there are places you can go.

Papillion.

Now, papillion, talk to me about resilience with families. Because family resilience means staying married. It means not yelling at your kids. It means being present, frankly, when really boring and stupid stuff like one of our Upgrade Collective members is like, oh my God. I just. I ended up wiping poof off my kid and my camera was still on. Like that's a form of resilience called parenting, which is probably much worse than the average top mudder if you just look at all the crap you have to do, not counting all the good stuff. So where does it come from in families? How does resilience apply there versus in work?

Or. Funny enough. So I co wrote the book with a psychologist, a wonderful woman, Dr. L. I call her Lara Pence. And I did that because I needed some expertise. Who the hell am I to say that I know how to parent? My oldest is 16. I haven't proven that I could be successful at it, but my instinct. Well, you know what happened? I saw, I saw the movie with Uma Thurman, Kill Bill, when I was.

I watched on the airplane yesterday. Are you serious?

Yeah. And winning. And so I'm watching the movie and I'm seeing, seeing Uma Thurman carry these buckets of water up and down the stairs. And I said, oh my God. My dream growing up would have been to have a kung fu master. So I said to my wife, this is when the kids were young. I said, how do you feel about, could we get a kung fu master to live with us and train the kids every day like Uma Thurman was trained, right. And toughen them up. And she went for it. So we imported a kung fu master from China and he lived on the farm. And every morning the kids got up at 5:30. And those people that are listening might be saying, because I hear it all the time. Oh my God, Joe, you got to let them sleep. And Dave, you tell me if I'm wrong or not. But like, sleep can occur by going to bed earlier. You don't just have to stay in bed longer. You can go to bed earlier. Is that right?

All right, here's the reality for that. Kids, when they're teenagers, biologically shift their circadian rhythm, so they really, really should wake up late later. But I. Biologically, if they go to bed when the sun goes down, they can wake up early and it's okay. The problem is that they're not wired to go to bed at that time like normal people are. They're wired to, and this is so they'll reproduce to be perfectly straightforward. Like, that's how Mother Nature did it. They're wired to stay up until 10 or 11 or 12, because that's when you would, you know, make sure we got some new humans coming out here. So you are fighting against biology. But I will tell you that for most kids, because they stay up late, if you make them start at 5:30, they break. So if you have disciplined bedtimes, you'll have very healthy circadian biology. Kids who never reproduce. But that's okay, man.

I didn't consider the reproduction component to it.

They shouldn't be reproducing at that age. But Mother Nature wants them to. She's a mean mistress at Mother Nature.

I didn't consider that part. But what I did find in my little study was exactly what you said, which is if they were sleeping by 8, 8:30, which is hard to get done. Now, as my, my oldest is 16, they had no problem getting up at 5:30. It's still a little bit of a battle. Right? But, but if I let them sleep on their own, 6:15, they're up on their own. So the five, you know, it's that extra 45 minutes they're probably looking for.

Yep.

If they go to bed early, how.

Many years or months of kung fu master living on your property? Or was this actually in your home or.

Yeah, Ye, living in our home, on our property, on the farm. And we did about five years with the kung fu master. And we stuck to that program of, you know, in bed by 8, 8:30, up at 5:30 in the morning. Didn't matter if we were traveling. Whatever kung fu master came along, he. He taught only in Mandarin, no English, so the kids speak fluent Mandarin now thanks to him, as well as some other things we did.

Wow.

And, and what I found was that they're better athletes now they're happier, they're stronger, they're more confident, their chest is out, their shoulders are back. Because it was basically gymnastics. They basically did gymnastics twice a day with this guy who by the way took no prisoners because of the way he was trained in China. It wasn't like delicate American. Are you feeling okay?

They're not nice.

We are training motherfuckers. And thank God my, my wife was in the house next door to the barn. So she didn't see it or hear it because she would have definitely shut it down. Her instinct, you tell me the biology of a female was be to protect the kids. So it wasn't the same as the male, me, the husband, trying to make them stronger so they can go survive on their own.

So and that's you say 16 year old and how many other kids?

Just I got a 16 or 14 or. And a nine.

And boy, girl. What's the.

Two boys are older, two girls are younger.

Okay, got it. And so the girls were doing the kung fu as well.

Yeah, everybody, everybody did. And then you'll like this. Then we moved around the world. We moved to Singapore. We moved because I wanted to build spartan overseas and I thought being disruptive to their lives, they say that moving is a very difficult thing for a family. So I wanted to build resilience. So we're just going to move to a foreign place and Singapore is kind of Asia light. It's pretty easy, it's pretty affluent. So we flew into Singapore, we put the kids in a Mandarin English speaking school. They fought their way through that. Then we went to Tokyo, we did a year in Japan and then I think, you know, we lived in Vancouver for a year. And while we were in Vancouver we found this thing right up the street from our house that everybody listening to this must go visit. In addition to visiting Dave called the Grouse Grind, which is a two mile hike up this mountain. Grouse Mountain, all stones. I think a half a million people a year hike this thing. It was awesome. We would go there every day and my little one, who was probably three or four at the time, she would do this hike. She would go up there, she'd be complaining. But everybody on that mountain got to know little Alex and she, she built resilience.

I, I agree. You know, making the kids go hiking.