218. Joe De Sena & Ryan Lennon | Extreme Balance: Paradoxical Principles That Make You a Champion

Hello, Book Thinkers family, and welcome to our personal development podcast, Book Thinkers Life-Changing Books. During each episode, we interview one of the world's top authors, and as a listener, you can expect to discover new books, new mentors, and new resources that you can use to achieve more and live better. In today's episode, we have the pleasure to interview Joe De Sena, author of Extreme Balance: Paradoxical Principles That Make You a Champion. And we have another special guest joining us, Ryan Lennon, who is a Navy combat engineer and, quote, psych boss for the Navy, a rugby player, and Men's Health magazine Ultimate Men's Health Guy champion. Joe De Sena is a successful entrepreneur who started out at a young age and created a multimillion-dollar pool and construction business in college. He is now the CEO and founder of Spark Spartan Race. He has inspired millions worldwide to embrace the Spartan lifestyle. He's a bestselling author and legendary competitor. Joe's achievements include founding the Death Race and completing over 50 ultra events and 14 Ironman races in one year. His mission: to push the limits and transform lives through grit and resilience. In this episode, Joe and Ryan delve into the challenges of Spartan races, the importance of resilience in children and adults, and the impact of technology on modern parenting. They explore how adversity fosters personal growth, the need for accountability, and the value of creating a resilient family environment in a digital age. The conversation highlights optimizing human potential through daily physical activity, insights from Joe's Spartan summer camp, and Ryan's experiences in the Navy. They also discuss the concept of extreme balance, the significance of continuous learning, and how travel broadens perspectives and deepens appreciation for life. Now, get ready to learn and enjoy this incredible conversation with Ryan Holiday. Ryan Lennon and Joe De Sena.

Joe, Ryan, welcome to the Book Thinkers Life-Changing Books Podcast. Yeah, we're excited. So you were just telling me that out of the 1,100 events that happen every single year that Spartan hosts, Boston is the one where everybody throws up.

I remember the first year next to the rowing machines, there was a countertop that was clearly operating as a bar during a typical Fenway game. I looked behind the bar. I don't know why. There was a 3-foot-high pile of puke. People would row and then throw up. And I thought, 1,100 events, we don't have this happen anywhere but Boston.

Why do you think that is?

There is a drinking problem in Boston.

And you're a Vermont guy.

I'm a Vermont guy.

You grew up around this. Yeah, that was a lot of fun. It was so cool. So I just finished the race. It was so cool getting to run through the old locker room and up on The Green Monster is just such a fun experience.

It's a great event. I was against it when the team first came up with this 7 or 8 years ago, maybe more. I said, who would possibly want to run a stadium? That's the dumbest idea ever. This is a real sport. It needs to be on a mountain, some ski resort. And I was wrong. It works in a big way. People love it.

Yeah. And you've had how many? I think I read in one of your books north of 10 million people.

11 now. 11 million people. Yeah, I've crossed— 11 million people have crossed the finish line. And the common theme, you don't have to listen to me, you could go walk around and ask. Every single person has a story that'll blow you away, bring a tear to your eye. I'm back with my husband. I'm back with my wife. I lost 200 pounds. I gave up drinking, gave up drugs, didn't kill myself. Like, I had a guy yesterday. I'm not supposed to be here. A year ago, I found out I had cancer. I'm supposed to be dead. I've done 10 Spartan races. You saved my life. Wow.

Yeah, that's truly amazing. And I know you're addicted to that feeling.

That's the only reason I do it. This is the worst way to make money ever. You start with $10 million, you end up with $1 million, but you end up with 11 million people telling you amazing stories and you get to pinch yourself.

Yeah, I can tell how much you love it because before I ran the race today, you pulled me aside and as people were finishing, you'd say, hey, 14:06. Yeah, sorry, you only did 14 burpees. And you would literally cut their finisher medal off.

I love fucking with people. I, and I do it because, you know, the military for thousands of years, thousands of years, military, ancient military figured out that if you don't have humor, if you don't have a song, if you don't have something to get your mind off of how bad things are, you can't get through it. And I want people to know that, yeah, it was tough. Yeah, they're out of breath, they're sweating, they might have just puked, but we could still have some fun.

Yeah.

And I think a lot of times, like, when you're doing something really difficult with other people, that novelty creates camaraderie.

Oh, it's out.

You do something difficult together.

Yeah.

You're bonded now in a different way.

You had 20 people do it with you today. Well, you— and you know from rugby, same thing, right? When you guys do— when you guys do hard things or any team does— military goes out and they're in foxholes together and they're dodging bullets, they're bonded for life.

It's immediate.

It's instant.

And it's like, it can roll last, you know, it doesn't—

Doesn't get any deeper. It's not superficial. It's not like going to a bar or playing golf.

You know, of hell on the golf course. Yes, it's more of a— it's a true bond.

Yeah.

Yeah.

So Joe, we're going to dive deeper into some of the books in a minute. But Ryan, I want to give you a chance to introduce yourself. This is our first time meeting. So tell me, there might be a little men's health thing going on here.

Yeah, I just recently found out I was named the ultimate men's health guy for this year. You know, the contester that The competition was throughout the summer, and I found out recently that I won the thing. So it was a, it was a really pleasant, pleasant surprise. Very grateful and happy to wear that mantle for the next year.

But in fairness, he had a huge edge. He's Navy and plays rugby.

I am a rugby player of a Navy officer. So yeah, maybe there's a couple of things.

That is very serviceable.

Not even a fair fight. That's not a fair fight.

Yeah.

A regular guy is like, you want to help?

You know, I entered the thing because I've been reading Men's Health at least since I was in middle school, 6th, 7th grade. And I said, you know, I would enter this contest this year. Just for the hell of it. And it turned out in my favor. So glad to—

Now, how did you two get linked up?

Because of this.

Yeah, we just met this morning, actually.

Oh, wow.

Yeah, best friends. Yeah. No, they, they came over to me and they said, Joe, we just need you to vet this guy. We're about to name him Men's Health Man of the Year. Are you okay with it? I looked at him. I said, well, yeah, he's okay.

He looks fit.

I barely squeaked in there.

And so you've run these?

I've had in the past when I was in college and stuff years ago. You know, I'm 39, so college was a long time ago for me, but it's been a while, but it's just good to get around this again and see this and see the joy and the camaraderie Joe was talking about, like the stories that people had that brings them here. Yeah. You know, it's a touch.

Well, we're going to pull you in a lot because I'm a total health nut. Now I wanted to start talking about this rule, this book, 10 Rules for Resilience, Joe, because my wife Rachel and I, We just welcomed our first baby boy about 5 weeks ago.

Congratulations.

And I see an epidemic of soft, weak kids as a result of soft, weak parenting. And I know you feel the same way. So is that why you decided to write this book?

Yeah.

So we have— my wife and I have 4 children, and our children were born right around the time smartphones were becoming a big thing. And I was watching right after we had children, our first child, I was watching a movie called Kill Bill, in case you guys are too young to know it. And Uma Thurman was in Kill Bill being trained by a kung fu master. And I thought, you know, we need a kung fu master. We've got to toughen up our kids. We've got to make sure they, they get a little taste of what it was like in the '60s and '50s and '40s in America and not just devices and, you know, cotton candy. So we hired a kung fu master from China to live with us. And, and the kids were only allowed to watch television in Mandarin. And the kids had to do kung fu twice a day. And if it was snowing, we didn't care. And we took their presents at Christmas time and put them on top of the mountain. They had a hike around.

Nice story.

We did crazy, crazy things with the kids. And now our oldest is 19 years old and we look back. So you got a little data for your wife. The kids are amazing. The kids are tougher than the average kid. They're more resilient. They don't break under pressure. And it's not because they're my kids. Like, my kids are still soft relative to what they could be. They're not as tough as kids growing up in Siberia, for example. But, but I look around me at the kids that grew up when my kids, our kids grew up. And, and it's a shame that other parents didn't follow some really simple things. Your, your wife and your instinct is not going to be what I just described. Your instinct is going to be, you know, pick up the spoon and wash it before— wipe their butt. Don't let them go outside in the cold. And it's all a mistake. If this was during the Civil War, I would say, yes, your instincts are right. But today, where everything is so coddled and so easy, you have to throw obstacles in front of the kids. You got to do it every single day. My kids used to come to this race. I would make them run it 10 times.

What?

They'd come up into this box, the adult race. They'd come up into this box and I'd say, take the medals off, go do another one. And there's an age you'll see where they still listen. At some point they age out and they don't listen anymore. But while they were listening, I could get them to do 10 races in a row.

Yeah. One of the best concepts from this book that I took away is the idea of a resilience data point. Once you have done something difficult as a child, you can now lean on that experience and it gives you more confidence and momentum to roll into the next one. But most kids are never asked by their parents to do anything difficult, right? I mean, so I think that the idea of you having them do 10 in a row, I mean, how exciting is that? And Honey, we're going to have to do that.

If you guys want, and I did a lot of things wrong, my wife and I did a lot of things wrong. But if you guys want, use us as a sounding board. But I had my 8-year-old son, who's now my oldest, run the Boston Marathon. My 7-year-old ran the New York Marathon. My 6-year-old ran a beast in Indonesia. They complained during the whole time, like it was not easy. I could tell you crazy stories, but they have resilience data points. And so when shit hits the fan, In our lives like it does in anybody's life, the kids can lean back like you just said and say, wait a minute, this isn't that bad.

Yeah, sometimes I feel like— now, this is a book-related podcast. We cover nonfiction, personal development, mindset type stuff. And a lot of people, once we were having our first baby, said, yeah, there aren't really any great books on parenting. And I thought to myself, out of the billions of people that have lived on this beautiful planet, some people parented more effectively than others. They have to have. And so you go out there and you find resources like this. You're condensing decades. Your oldest is 18, 19?

19.

2 decades of parenting information into a book that I can consume in a couple of hours and take your best lessons and apply them to my child. Like, of course there are books that can work. So why do you think it is that maybe it's just that parents are soft and they don't—

I'll tell you why they don't write books about it. My wife was dead set against it. What if we're wrong? Oof.

Yeah.

What if we're wrong and we're sharing this with the world? And so that's why those books don't exist. But I know because we've had 11 million people cross finish lines, I know that doing hard things is good. There are certainly stories throughout the decades where parents push too hard, where they— but there's a great, great movie you should watch to get the counterargument to what we're saying here. Iron Claw.

Iron Claw.

Yeah.

It was about a wrestling family. Most of the Kids died. It was a disaster. It's the complete antithesis of what we're talking about here. But he went too far. And so there's a delicate edge. There's a razor's edge to bring the kids to. It's manufactured adversity. But don't go too far. And, you know, that's up to the parents to figure out. I will tell you, you're always going to err. You probably know this from the Navy. Everybody's going to err on the side of too easy.

Right.

There's very few people that push too hard.

Yeah, I imagine in the Navy you see people break all the time. So how do you flirt that limit of too much and not enough?

Yeah, you know, let's, uh, because everyone does have their own personal limit or personal, uh, resiliency threshold, I guess. So it's, it's a fine art of finding out what people respond to versus, you know, what they break as a result of. Uh, so it's, it's, there's no prescription, I think, for, for everyone. Uh, but I think the Navy or the military in general does a great job of Knowing just how humans think and behave and act, and kind of getting it to that level and not too far where everyone's breaking. We were losing people.

Well, you guys will take people back a little bit after that and then push a little further and constantly stretch the rubber band.

It's like their resiliency data point you're talking about. You could say, okay, yeah, but last week I did this shitty stuff that sucked and hey, you know what? I'm feeling a little bit better about this right now. And so you're kind of like you said, pulling it back, pushing, pulling back, pushing, salsa. an incremental approach to resiliency building that really is effective. And we've been doing it for 250 years, basically, with the military. So it's kind of almost like, you know, I say an art form, but it's almost a science these days. We know where to put it and how to put it.

So are we okay to talk politics on this podcast, or should we avoid it?

Let's do it.

It feels like America just responded. So we're recording this on November 10th. So we just went through the election. It feels like Americans recognized an overwhelming softness or weakness starting to brew and it was getting out of control. And I think that people responded in the opposite direction. I think that people are looking for accountability, personal responsibility. They're looking for confidence. And, you know, the military is a great representation of that. And I think that as a country, we're kind of swaying away. Do you guys agree?

Yeah, my immediate response would be, and I just had this conversation with a buddy of mine who's incredibly intelligent, incredibly successful, studied government. I said, you think about it, ice tubs are really popular right now. Spartan races are really popular right now. Fasting is really popular right now. And so people are wanting—

naming all my favorite things.

People are wanting to push themselves to limits and optimize their lives. But society was going in the other direction. So there was— what's great about our country Is there checks and balances? When it goes too far one way, we tend to come back to the middle. So it's an exciting moment for me. Look, I just had RFK on the podcast and like him, don't like him, doesn't matter. I love the fact that he's going to go out there and try to reverse some of this nonsense that's been going on.

Now, I think it was actually your wife talking about her parents in this book, but saying that for 50 years they never agreed politically, so they would always cancel each other out when voting. And how amazing is that? The idea that you can sit down and, and have a respectful conversation with somebody that you love, even if you don't agree entirely with their opinion. I mean, I wish we would wake up and get curious instead of just rejecting somebody like RFK right off the bat, or like Trump or somebody like that. Like, if somebody is a Republican and you're a Democrat, ask why. Have some conversations about it.

Well, there's a big problem today. There's a big problem today. And the device is an echo chamber. Device only feeds you what you like. So you become more and more emboldened, more and more galvanized in these thoughts, and it becomes harder to change.

Right. I think politics these days has become an identity for a lot of people, which it never used to be that way and never should be that way. Because you think about politics, it's a compromise inherently. So you're always going to lose something. So if you take politics as your identity, left, right, whatever it is, You're inherently going to lose part of your identity when your team doesn't win. And that's always going to happen. So it never used to be that way. And now people are very much like, hey, I'm left or right or whatever it is. And so you're inherently going to be pissed off half the time. So we've got to remove ourselves a little bit from the attachment to politics or politicians or that identity aspect because it's a fool's errand. It's a losing game.

So yeah, I think so too. So now do you feel even more people are going to flood to Spartan as a sport?

Well, I think coming out of the pandemic, that helped. I think the fact that it's in the zeitgeist right now and guys like Robert F. Kennedy and Rogan and you name it are talking about cold plunges and pushing themselves and sweating. By the way, it's almost surreal for me to say this because in the 1970s, I was born in '69, in the 1970s, My mother was pushing all this stuff before there was a Yoga Journal or a Whole Foods or anything. Cold showers was normal. Like, so to see it, you know, come full steam ahead and become part of our— it's unbelievable for me.

Going through this book, I sort of fell in love with your mother's self-assurance, her self-confidence. She didn't care what anybody else thought. She was going to run and then meditate, run and then meditate. And who cares what anybody else thinks? And I wish that more people had that level of self-assurance to just stand on what they believe in.

No doubt. And they're very hard for people to do for the reasons he said, right? They attach their identities to being liked by a lot of people. And that's a tough one.

And that becomes a, you know, like an obsession at some point. That's never going to work out in your favor at a certain time. So Why waste the energy to make that your entire focus?

And Ryan, do you have kids?

I don't.

No, no kids.

Not yet. Not yet.

As a man, we don't have a biological clock, but one of these days. But yeah, no kids for me. But one of these days, I'm sure that'll be on the cards.

We'll give them the buck.

Yes. Yeah. And so you just brought up one of my questions for you, which is around cell phones. Now, our baby is only 5 weeks old, so it's going to be quite a long time before He has the temptation for something like this. But what are the rules in your household? How did you handle that?

It was a tough one. We lived— as phones were unfolding and the kids were coming of age, we lived in China, Japan, Singapore, Vancouver. And my wife was definitely afraid after losing one of our kids in Japan a week into living there for a day, that if they didn't have phones, this would be a disaster. And so reluctantly, we went with phones. If I had to do it again, no phones. We have survived on the planet for 1 million years as a species without a phone. If, by the way, and I talk a big game, but I didn't do it. Give them an old-fashioned phone. I used to joke and say, let's give them a payphone. Something they got to carry around in a backpack that's 25 pounds.

Yeah.

A leather bag.

Yeah. But we failed. We failed and we gave them phones.

Yeah, that's a tough one. You're right. Like, not only are there echo chambers of ideology in here, but also every minute that you spend mindlessly scrolling is a minute that you're not exercising or building resilience to communicating anything.

I mean, yeah, I think free thinking is always just spending some time thinking about something instead of like distracting yourself.

Yeah. What role do you think phones are playing as far as health overall?

You know, I'm in the mental health field. I'm a Navy therapist by trade. So it's absolutely critical that people take a step back from these things at a certain point. Because I mean, people get wrapped up in it, it becomes their entire life. I think it's really detrimental in general. So I, yeah, I'm not a huge fan of it.

I mean, I have my phone right here.

Obviously we all have them, but it's definitely not contributing to Psychological well-being, that's for sure. I think it's detractive for it, but we're in that we're in that era where you kind of have to have it, or a lot of things happen on the phone. So it's we're caught in the middle, you know, unfortunately.

So yeah, it's a weird feeling to know that you need the device. You can't live without the device. You can as a kid, but as an adult, it's difficult too when you're running a business.

I was I was going to bed last night, and you know when you're going to bed and you think about a bunch of things, your mind races. One of the things I thought about was. I can't wait for the day where I could literally just throw that. I've always had this vision of just driving over a bridge and throwing it out the window, you know, and just not needing it. And then my mind started, all right, how would people communicate with me? Well, do I need people to communicate? Could I just forget about communicating with people from now on? Like, yeah.

Could they just go through your assistant or something?

But just stop communicating with people. Just, it's done.

It's tough because like, I mean, even the gym I go to at home, I need to Pull up a QR code to scan in. Like you can't go anywhere without it. You know, it's kind of like ridiculous how attached we got to it.

But you know, it's the wool of it, unfortunately, at this point.

But yeah, one of these days, maybe we'll, you know, we'll wake up and get rid of like, you know, the attachment to it.

So you mentioned you're 39. I'm 30, turning 31 soon. And so I feel like when I was growing up, I was maybe the last generation to not have a cell phone up until high school-ish, you know, middle school, high school. And even back then, nobody was on their scroll, on their phone scrolling through anything like that. But yeah, I can't imagine what it's like for a kid to go through a traditional high school experience or something like that.

Yeah, when I was 16, I got a flip phone. It was about this big. It was a flip phone with a green screen just because my dad got it for me. He said, hey, if you're really driving now, you know, if you need something, give us a call, whatever it might be. But that was the only thing we had. Nowadays, it's got the entire web at your fingertips, obviously. And yeah, I've got young cousins who are like 10 years old with phones. They're sitting there, they're at a family function and they're sitting there on their phone. They're not interacting with their grandparents or their aunts and uncles. It's like, it's very disheartening.

Yeah, it is.

So Joe, kicking another question your way about parenting. One of my favorite takeaways from this book is the idea that yes, there are weak kids, but that stems from weak parents. And in order to be a strong parent for your kids, because behaviors are Kind of caught, not taught. They observe what you're doing, not what you tell them to do. As a parent, you need to step up and build some resilience. So other than a Spartan Race, what are some good examples of ways that today somebody watching this podcast can get out there and do something a little different?

Listen, I used to wake up the whole family at 5:30 in the morning because I said to myself, we're not going to have a family that wakes up at noon. We're going to have a family that wakes up early, and I'm going to drill it into their brain for as many years as they'll listen. I had bagpipers coming through the house. I blasted AC/DC. I did burpees in every room.

Honey, take note.

I was a complete maniac for a decade plus in waking the house up. I had them watch TV, as much TV as they wanted, but it had to be in Mandarin. So that was a challenge, right? But they speak fluent Mandarin now because of it. I took them on hikes every single day. They saw me outside. We went on bike rides. Like, like, I, I walked the walk. Whatever I said, I actually did myself. If we were not eating or, you know, my family didn't know, I would turn off the hot water heater. Oh, must be broken. And we had to do cold showers. So like, and me included, right? We got in the cold river out front. We— I mean, if we were getting on a flight to do a 15-hour flight to the other side of the world, we did 300 burpees in the airport. That's what we did before we got on the plane.

See, it sounds ridiculous, And it is compared to the norm, but it really shouldn't be.

It shouldn't be.

It shouldn't be. I mean, you think of an actual Spartan, you know, the Battle of Thermopylae. I mean, those were like— they seem like they're not even humans compared to the average human today.

No. And so, and so recognizing if we all believe those watching, listening, you, if we all believe that to optimize a human being, you have to sweat every day. You have to breathe heavy. You've got to move blood. You've got to drink more water. You got to eat more salad. If we believe those things, then who cares what people think around us? Let's act that way so we're optimized. Right? And if everybody's drinking, but we know it's bad, why are you drinking? Why are you doing it? Because you want to fit in?

Right. It takes a personal, like, you know, stand to take care of yourself.

In a way that you are not familiar with or even comfortable with.

But hey, it's your body, it's your life, and you use it as maximally as you can.

And maybe I got lucky. Maybe because my mother broke the rules in the '70s, maybe, maybe. And I was around it through osmosis and she was pounding this. Maybe it was easier for me, but like, we have all the tools now. We listen to the experts. Who cares what people think? Live optimally and make sure you're doing it with your child. Otherwise, It's going to be a real disaster. By the way, you're raising an adult. You're raising an adult. That's your responsibility now. And so you need to prepare them for adulthood.

What are some of the most common criticisms that you receive, given what a lot of people would think is an extreme form of parenting?

Oh, I got you. I had my son, my second son swimming a mile. He was like, I don't know, 5 or 6 years old, had a life jacket on. Sun was going down. We had 100 yards to go. Somebody got on their kayak, paddled off the dock and started screaming at me. We're fighting over my son to finish the swim.

Right.

Like, I'm at a ski resort with my kids. I don't give them cookies. We have a good, clean, healthy lunch. People are giving them cookies in front of me. I'm like, excuse me, I'm the parent. So it was, it, it was a battle for 18 years.

Yeah. It seems like a lot of, well, I'll say this, since we're 30, a lot of people in their late 20s and early 30s are getting a lot of very negative and divisive social media content almost forced into their feeds about not having kids. There's this big swing away from traditional family, which I hate to see. We have a lot of friends that are our age that are scared to have kids for financial reasons or for political reasons or world reasons. And it just seems like the most beautiful experience to work on yourself is to have a kid.

It was the best, best part of my whole life. You know, we were going to have 7. We had 4 because we had a little touch and go on the 4th one and thought, well, maybe God just wants us to have 4. And, um, now that they're aging out of the house, I wish we had 14. Yeah, I've adopted— informally adopted 2. I just want to keep them coming out of the house.

Another one today.

I got a new guy here.

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So one of my other favorite parts of this book was listening to the summer camp that you host in Vermont. Does that still happen?

Death camp, we call it, which is terrible branding. But we have about 100 kids come out to the farm where Spartan was started in Vermont, and we go through everything we're talking about. It's 2 weeks of hell. They're being woken up at 5 in the morning. They're getting right into the ice-cold water. They're carrying rocks up mountains. They're eating clean. Their phones are taken away. And, you know, it's 14, 16 hours a day of just good, clean, hard living. The kids in the early days, unbeknownst to me, when I gave them their phone every night to check in with their parents, they were calling anybody they could. If they couldn't get their parents, they called neighbors' houses and they were saying, this guy's a crazy guy. This is not a camp. This is prison. You need to get us out of here. Mom, Dad, you would die if you were here. SOS. And I didn't know any of that was happening. Thank God I have friends that are— some of the parents were funneling me back the messages. They are hilarious when you read the messages. And then the parents, my friends, would mess with them and write back, sounds like a Peloton workout.

I don't—

You wouldn't survive one minute here. You guys are sitting on the couch. You left your kid to die at this camp. But, but, but now it's been going on so many years, I'm seeing those kids go off to West Point, to Stanford, you name the college. They're leveled up. Georgia Tech. Like, it's unbelievable. Um, this year was all the year— like, I got like 12 kids asking me for recommendations for school. They've completely leveled up because of a 2-week boot camp that— and any parent, because I could play the tape in my head over all these years, oh, that's ridiculous. I'm not sending my kid. Night and day, the kids that have been to our camp and the kids that haven't.

There's a story you tell in the book where some kid doesn't want to do the final day.

Yeah.

And he really tries to get out of it. Maybe on the car ride home or something like that, you convince him to get out and walk 6 miles. And then he gets back in with his dad and says like, oh, I can't wait to do it next year. That's right.

No, my favorite story is every year there's a bunch of kids that come up and want to quit. And so you're 6 days in and it's early, early in the morning and I'm in the barn doing some emails and I see a kid walking through the field and I'm like, here we go. And a kid comes up this one time and he's like, sir, I thought about it. I just, I can't continue. I got to quit. And I said, no problem. I said, but today is Sunday. Quitter's office is open on Wednesdays, early morning. So just come back, quitter's office, 3 AM, top of the mountain, Wednesday. I'll meet you there. We'll fill out the forms. And then you— and sure enough, right? I just keep messing with them until they're through it. And they're like, ah, it wasn't that big of a deal. I didn't need to quit. Right, right.

See that push.

Yeah. The other— this is great for your wife to hear. The other interesting thing is whenever I've let any kid do a Zoom call with their parents, As soon as they see their mom, they're, they're roughing it, they're killing it, they're not complaining, at least publicly they're not complaining. Soon as they see their mom on the screen, they start crying. Moms are designed to protect it. Like, that's just the thing. There's nothing the mom is doing wrong, but moms need to know that the kids use that as a lever.

At what age can I send my son to this camp?

2.

Honey, she said okay. You heard it. It's on camera.

We had our 4-year-old turning purple out there in the cold water. My wife wanted to kill me, but she's tough as nails now.

Yeah, that's so funny. All right, we're gonna make that happen.

What do you got, a couple years away?

Yeah. In the Navy, what are some of the ways that you see men building resilience and women building resilience?

Yeah, it's, it's, uh, Basically, when you, just by joining the Navy, essentially you're kind of putting yourself in the position where you have to do what is being asked of you without, you know, without—

No discussion.

Yeah, no discussion.

All right.

So I think it's like going on deployments and doing these exercises and just, you know, going out to sea and things like that that are inherently boat job that, you know, sets you apart a little bit from I guess the average bear. So I think just the day in, day out kind of stuff that we do that we, once you get out of it, once you retire or get out, whatever you might, you know, whatever it is, if you take a good step back and look at it objectively, you say, you know, I did some pretty unique stuff. I did some pretty cool stuff. And if you take the time while you're in to appreciate those things, I think the resilience just builds naturally from there. You're saying, you know what, imagine doing something that's, you know, of a norm.

Something really interesting he just said based on your question, how do we build resilience? The sooner we can teach a human being and ourselves to be grateful for the experience, not wait till you're out of the Navy.

Yeah.

One of the things I do, I ran the course early this morning and it sucked, right? It always sucks. And I said to myself, it could be worse. I get to do this. I could be missing legs, arms. I could be living in Siberia. I could be taking fire. I get to do this. I get to be here. And if you could change that narrative, if we can change that narrative in our kids and ourselves, oh my God, life becomes easy.

Yeah, I was telling you I did this with 27, so there are 28 of us today. And at the end, I was surveying everybody. What was the hardest obstacle? What was the hardest obstacle? And everybody told me it was the weighted vest crawling under the ropes today. So what was the hardest for you?

It's funny, when I, when I had the weighted vest on and I was going under the ropes is exactly when I was saying to myself and out loud to all the participants, it could be worse, which is my, which is my thing, right? We get to do this. We could be in Siberia. Everything I just said to you was at that moment.

Yes. Yeah, it was tough. And my hamstrings and my quads are feeling it right now. I'm letting them breathe.

My team, who is awesome, by the way, saw me there and they said, Joe, what can we do to make this harder? I said, well, you can electrify these.

Yeah, but that's that's what we're talking about at the beginning of today's interview is that novelty doing something new and difficult and fun with your friends and your coworkers and the people in your universe, your family. It's where growth comes out. It's where growth comes from. And when you think back, you're not going to remember that 48th time that you went to the bar, to the same bar and have the same drinks and told the same stories. But You will remember the one Spartan Race you did that year.

1,000%. There's no one on their deathbed saying, I wish I watched more movies. I wish I laid on the couch more. Right? They're remembering those amazing moments in their life. I think we're in—

we just, we kind of crave like some physical activity. So, some challenge, adversity in a way that, you know, this is where you get it right here. And we need more of that in life, you know, especially in this day and age right now.

Yeah, I think so too. I have a tattoo on my neck that says Memento Mori.

I know all about it.

And I look at it. I try to look at it. Now, sometimes you're so asleep at the wheel and you don't notice it in the mirror, but I try to think about it every time I see it and say, you only have one life. Use it well. Prioritize your time. Don't just be a victim to the phone or the TV, but act.

Yeah.

So I think about mortality and regret minimization a lot.

Well, I'm very fortunate in that where I grew up, a lot of people went to jail for decades. And I saw that at a young age. People died. I saw that my mom died at a young age. Like, I saw these things. And so I very quickly understood that this— there's no guarantee tomorrow's coming. We got to squeeze everything we can out of today.

There you go. Yeah, I think so too. Now we'll kind of wrap up today. Tell us about this new book, Extreme Balance. Those words seem to fight with each other.

Yeah. So Extreme Balance is an awesome book. I'm very sad to say That some people that bought many of our books over the years have said to me, this is the best one yet. So that's annoying because I did this with a guy named Ben Askren. He's a fighter, MMA fighter, fought Jake Paul. People probably know him. The concept here is a pretty unique concept. It's not written about ever, which is if you want to be the best, we're taught that we've got to crush our competition. We got to step on their neck. As one example, we're not taught we also have to respect our competition. So the example with me was I had Spartan, then I had this competitor Tough Mudder, and I wanted to kill them. I wanted to put them out of business. But at the same time, I had to respect them. Right. And so, but if you respect too much, then you lose. If you want to kill them too much, then you lose. So it's this delicate balance across all parts of your life. You want to be extremely disciplined, we're taught, extremely fastidious. You want to, you want to count every single thing that has to be done in order to be successful. But at the same time, you got to Let it fly and shoot from the hip. So it's a delicate balance, right? So that's where Extreme Balance comes from. It's an incredible book written with a psychologist, Ben, and myself. And I'm annoyed that they say it's the best book we have.

I love that feedback. Now, when you hear Extreme Balance, what does it make you think of?

You know, I think it's, as Joe was talking, I kind of realized, you know, we can, we could try to play in everything or plan for everything, but it's never going to work out that way where we are fully prepared for whatever life throws at us. So like shooting from the hip or just, you know, letting it fly. I think that's part of this, you know, do something that prepares you for the future, but also don't be afraid to approach something blind, you know.

Well, you guys are taught that, right? Like you plan to death, but then once boots are on the ground, No plan lasts.

Yeah, it's like the old Mike Tyson quote, everyone's got a plan until they get punched about. And it's completely true. You can plan and that's always good. The plan is not the important thing, it's the planning process that's important. So that you're prepared, you're feeling prepared, you're confident, but also having confidence in yourself to know that, hey, whatever gets tossed at me, I'm gonna be able to handle it on the fly if I need to. So I think extreme balance, there we go right there. It's a little bit of this, a little bit of that. So yeah.

Yeah.

When I was, when I was in the process of convincing people to do this with me today, there's the extreme aspect of the Spartan Race, but there's also the balanced aspect of, hey, I'm giving you 2 months to think about this. Start running stairs, start doing burpees, you know.

You could get ready for it.

Yeah, absolutely.

When you, when you get to the, to the event, you're not 100% sure how you're going to respond, but at least you put in some work beforehand. So.

It's—

that's the extreme balance, I think.

Now give me a couple of— give me a couple of clips that I can post on socials about the importance of reading, because— and I know your wife is a really big reader as well, and she kind of instilled that in your kids. But look at all of these books. Clearly, you see value in documenting what you've learned.

You know, I don't— the first book that came, Spartan Up, was because I was in Austin, Texas, at a big health and wellness conference, and a guy came up to me and said, you need to write a book. And I had no interest in writing a book, but I had been thinking about stories my whole life. The stuff we spoke about here. When I wrote the book, it was cool. People bought the book. 8 months went by and a book got shipped to my office. This book got shipped back to my office. Somebody had bought it and it was about 3 times as thick because it was swollen and there were like 500 notes in it and yellow stickies. And it was from a military woman. A veteran who would race with the book and go through the water with the book and underline things. And I was like, oh my God, this is the Bible. This is, this is like helping people. I didn't realize that that's what it did. So that then I said, oh, we got to keep writing books because not only do we teach people physically, but we need to teach them mentally how to think. And so that's the reason for the books. If you think about this, everybody in this room, think about this. We are taught how to live, not by my mom, who had it right because she met this ancient Indian. We're taught how to live via social media, via billboards, via commercial organizations that are trying to sell us stuff. And the companies that have the most money, that teach us the most, are the most addictive things. The gambling, the drugs.

Yeah.

The alcohol. They have the most money, the phones, the devices. They're the ones telling us how to live. I'm not acting like a conspiracy guy. I'm just giving you facts, right? There's very few companies that are teaching us how to live, to eat salad or do burpees. You know why? Because nobody wants to do those things. There's no money to make in those things. I know, I'm in it. Right? Like, like DraftKings has an enormous amount of money. They can teach us how to live, just not the right way to live.

Yeah, and I saw a video recently to piggyback on that idea that young kids will believe that the tooth fairy put money under their pillow. They'll believe Santa Claus came down the chimney. So they're also going to believe that they're not worthy of something if you teach them that. Or on the other side, they're going to believe in themselves if you put them through hard things. They're very malleable young minds. And so that's why I'm so interested in the parenting side of what you teach, just because, I mean, we're about to raise an adult like you highlighted, and I really want to make sure that this person is resilient and tough and self-confident and has belief in themselves.

You're— I'm happy for you to subcontract out the work, send them to the farm. That boy will be as good as nails. We had one, by the way, people send me 19 and 20-year-olds. It's too late when I get them at that age. Very wealthy families will send me 19, 20-year-olds. I had one addicted to ketamines, complete disaster, not talking to his dad, on the razor's edge of life. I had to go on Rogan. I had to leave the farm while he was there. On my way to Rogan, he escapes my farm, jumps, hitchhikes, jumps in a car.

Wow.

Explaining in the car to the woman driving him he was being held against his will on my farm with some crazy guy named Joe DeSena. She says, "Wait a minute! I know Joe." Turns around, brings him back. It's the greatest recovery story. He's completely healthy. He's back with Dad. He doesn't do drugs. He doesn't drink. So you can. It's harder when they're nineteen twenty. We're better off putting the time in, the energy in when they're young.

Yeah, do it up front. Do it up front. Well, hey, Ryan, any final thoughts for today's podcast? We've got a lot of people listening today, and they want to improve themselves. So. Any final advice?

I like how you talk about books. I'm a big reader. I've read, you know—

Give me some of your favorites.

Oh, gosh.

Or maybe some that have had the biggest impact on your life.

I think there's a— he's, I guess you'd call him a philosopher. His name's Alan Watts.

He was around the '50s.

I've read a lot of his books. I really appreciate it. He's a little bit esoteric and some of his stuff is kind of hard to grasp at first. But once you get into it, you kind of understand like what he's talking about. You know, it's very much a free spirit kind of Way of living, so I'm a big fan of Alan Watts. I love pretty much. I like to read basically all nonfiction, so kind of me too nerd in that regard. But yeah, you know, I think anything that kind of forces you to think about yourself in the larger picture, a big picture, is really something that people should be tapping into. You know, it's it's we we get so blinkered and blinded by. You know, just the narrow focus that we have on the day-to-day oftentimes don't step back to kind of appreciate things from a large perspective. Like they're saying, we get to do these things. We get to sign up for a Spartan race and do all these things that, you know, we're lucky to be where we're at. So let's take it a little bit of a different vantage point and really start to appreciate and be grateful for that. So anything that kind of like, you know, falls in that realm. Alan Watts is the first one that popped in my head for some reason. I mean, if you give me a couple hours, I come up with a thousand other, you know, recommendations. But yeah, things things along those lines. Awesome. Are good to to touch on. Yeah.

And who are you learning from today?

I think about books like Adrift, the gentleman stuck at sea for 72 days alone. I think about Shackleton's story, The Endurance, where him and his men were stuck for two years in the ice. Like I go to really dark places so that whenever I'm in a dark place, relatively, it's like, come on, Joe, you're not stuck in the ice. You're not eating your dog.

Yeah.

Well, I'll challenge you on something that you said in here, which is that comparison can be the thief of joy. But I think when you start to compare yourself to the deep, dark stories, you realize life's not so bad.

Not so bad.

Yeah.

Right.

And a lot of international travel will do that for you as well. Less than 50% of Americans have passports. And of those that do, less than half of them use them. And but once you start to travel internationally and you go to some places where—

Open your mind.

Yeah, you open your mind up a little bit.

We have races all over the world. I was in Abu Dhabi and some folks from Iowa, they said, I want to thank you. I said, for what? They said, we would have never left our farm ever. But because of you, we're in Abu Dhabi. We're in the desert. We would never come here. And it changed their whole perspective on everything, to your point. Yeah.

Asia, Middle East. you know, all over the country as well. And you do start to see things differently when you get a chance to interact with people in that part of the world or different parts of the world that you've never been to. It's eye-opening.

Let's offer your guests next year's race, either both Fenway and Killington, Vermont, 300 free entries. I want you to build a team of 300 strong, no charge. It'll be a trade-off. I'll— I got your son for the next 17 years. You, you get me these 300. All right? Yeah. Uh, no charge. And we're gonna torture them.

All right. Fenway or Killington?

Both. Both. Whatever.

All right.

Locked in. We'll fill it. It's gotta be 300. If it's 299, then your son only gets 2 years. You want? I'll be it.

I'll be here.

All right. So 299 more to go.

Yeah.

You're in. You're in, honey. If you're not pregnant again.

You could do it pregnant.

Fine.

You could do pregnant.

Hey, listen, it's been a real pleasure today.

Pleasure was all mine.

Yeah, that was a lot of fun. Great to meet you, Ryan, and thank you for providing value. Sure you did. That is a wrap. Thank you so much for listening to today's episode of Book Thinkers, Life-Changing Books. It would mean the world to us if you could write a review and share this episode with a few of your friends. I mean, these books truly have the power to change people's lives, and by reviewing or sharing our podcast, you're helping us make an impact. If you have any recommendations for future guests or any constructive feedback for us on how we can improve our show, please feel free to submit a form on our website, www.bookthinkers.com, or send us a direct message on Instagram @bookthinkers. With that, I am signing off, and I hope you have a wonderful day. Don't forget, go read something.