Lessons - Why Comfort Is Destroying an Entire Generation | Joe De Sena - Founder of Spartan Race & NYT Bestselling Author

In this lessons episode, discover why discipline and physical resilience are becoming increasingly essential in a world built around comfort and convenience. Understand how embracing discomfort can strengthen mental and physical performance. Explore the habits that create lasting health and purpose and uncover how small daily actions can reshape long-term success. Why should everybody join the military? Look, if this was the early 1900s, the 1700s, I would say we need more Netflix, more penicillin, and more couches. I would suggest that's what we sell more of. In the world we live in today, especially in the United States, and I've lived all over the world with my family, we are fat- We are sick. We are undisciplined. We lack motivation. The couches are overused. We're with too much screen time. It's no wonder everybody's depressed. There's over half a million psychologists needed just to like talk to people because we have too much free time. We got to take these young kids, mine included. And give them some purpose, give them some discipline, have them learn how to make their bed. I'm not suggesting for all the idiots that are going to comment on this, that every one of our kids should go to war. I know that is what happens when you're in the military, but... there's also a lot of benefits that come out of it as well. And when you look at the data and you look at our children today, there's not a sidewalk being used. There's no kids playing in parks. They don't look like they used to look. And, you know, whatever um i would say put every kid in the middle now if i had my if i could do anything if i could snap my fingers right i would say and i'm you know i was with a general on sunday i i meet with the pentagon i would say let's do like a two-year deal where where kids don't have to commit for six or more years let's let's give them two years right out of high school and Pay for their college those two years. If they want to stay in longer, they can. Let's level them up as human beings. Let's make them proud of this country. Let's make the country proud of them. It's a layup. It is a layup. Anybody who comments and says, that's ridiculous. I can't believe this. Here's what they're going to say. Your listeners are going to say. I don't like the current leadership and it's bullshit and there's people behind the scenes that are pulling lever. Like, I get it, I get it. You don't like the leadership, but like, do you like the kids? Do you like where they're going? Do you think they are the same level that kids were in the 1930s, 40s, 50s? Do you think they have- Not even 20 years ago, not even 20 years ago. What are we talking about? presidents are going to change every four or eight years. Leadership's going to change. Wars come and go, and they've been coming and going for thousands of years. Like, we can't do anything about it. Eventually, hopefully, it fizzles out. We stop killing each other. But in the interim, could we level each other up so we at least know how to make our bed in the morning and how to drink a green juice and go to bed early? Like, I don't understand. Yeah. How did we get so soft in terms of physical fitness, in terms of doing hard shit? We haven't prioritized those things, right? Like, so, again, I'm not like you and I and business people that are type A personalities that are getting after it every day. We're probably not going to become teachers. We probably are getting after capitalism and business. And I'm not saying one is wrong and one isn't, but that type A personality that wakes up early, gets in the cold plunge, drinks more water, eats more salad, likes to do pushups. Most cases, it's not, you know, there's a generalization. They're not the people in academics. Sure. There's a PE teacher here and there, but like, and so, What happened when there was like a budget shortfall? Get rid of PE. People making the decisions didn't do push-ups to begin with. So they didn't prioritize. They did not optimize for that. More math, less push-ups. I get it. But when you look at the data and you look at the science and you look at our biology, actually, if you take kids and you have them do more PE and a little less math, they actually do better in math. It's no surprise that if you move blood around, the brain gets a little fresh blood. It's a little easier to understand the math. If you sit there all day and you're loaded up on ice cream and garbage and you didn't get any sleep last night and you don't do any physical fitness, math becomes a little more complicated. And you know that there's a whole bunch of things that come from competitive sports that help in the business world and the career world and in life. Like everybody who I know that is killing it at business played some sort of competitive sport growing up. I'm a CEO. I'm a founder. I know a lot of founders. I worked for a long time on Wall Street. Companies love athletes. You hire an athlete from a good school. They've proven that they've got perseverance. They've proven that they understand teamwork. They've proven that they can go through tough times, good times. So like how we don't have... a mandate in this country like like JFK tried to do, you know, presidential fitness, you know, Obama did their thing. But it's all it's all bullshit because we could talk every day about the border. We could talk about Ukraine. We could fight over this thing, over that thing. Let's get our own house in order. Start by making everybody do 30 burpees in the morning, take cold showers. Let's start with that. You know, it's funny. So the lens that we look at life through, like the lens of somebody who is in the gym, is waking up early, is committing, played sports, whatever, that lens skews our perception. And I was listening again to some of your origin stories and how you assume that something like 50,000 people would love doing all these endurance sports and, and, you know, going on these multi mile hikes and runs and swims and whatever. And that's not the case, or that wasn't the case initially. That's actually what really hurt when you were trying to build out Spartan, like in its first couple of years. And I think that, We don't realize how bad it's gotten because the people that can change and the people that do have the positions of power, the people that do have the positions of influence, they're all type A personalities. So their reality is not the reality of the average person who's overweight and depressed and sad. And I don't think they realize it's as big an issue as it really is in the U.S. especially. And you see that more when you go abroad. You see that more when you go to Europe. I don't spend a lot of time in Asia, but you see that, I'm sure, when you go to Asia. I told you, I lived all over the world. And every time I came back to any city in the United States, when I landed in the airport, didn't matter what city, everybody's three times the size. The drinks are three times the size. The amount of food being served is three times the size. The amount of steps being taken are three times less. We are fat, sick. And by the way. We're so smart as Americans that now we're putting fat, unhealthy people on the cover of magazines and we're showcasing that as OK. We are we are idiots. We're idiots. And I'm not taking shots. I'm just saying don't normalize that. Normalize what it means to do the work and be fit. Mm hmm. It's a symptom of a lazy generation. It's people don't want to do the work. They want handouts. They don't want to put in the hours. Here's the thing. I didn't know. I'm sorry I'm all amped up on this. No, no, no. I love it because we're kindred spirits. But I mean, it's something that has to be said. I didn't know this. Everybody listening, listen up. The human brain, it is more motivated to avoid discomfort than it is to chase sex or food or drugs or rock and roll. The number one motivator for a human being is the avoidance of discomfort. You go to bed, you say you want to work out in the morning, you wake up and you want to make some coffee, you want to just scroll on your screen. That's your brain trying to avoid the hard work of working out because you're going to expend energy and that's dangerous for the brain. 5,000 years ago, expending energy without knowing where your food was coming from was a dangerous thing to do. Our legacy hardware and software has not changed in these 5,000 years. We are still being protective of doing hard things, eating high caloric foods because we don't know when we're going to get our next meal. It wasn't designed for this world we live in where we have 5,000 calories at our fingertips all day long. And we have couch. There's no danger in going to the gym. There's no danger in taking a cold shower. There's no danger of running outside while it's raining. You're not going to drown. So yeah, it's not the next generation. So, okay. So no, but how do you, so how do you fix it? I know, I know your story. Maybe give the listeners a little bit of background of where you came from. And I thought it was interesting because even when your mom adopted an early, healthy, healthy, new age lifestyle when you were growing up, that was so against what you knew. And I'm curious how, even though there was such a, I guess, a knee-jerk adverse reaction to when your mom adopted that lifestyle and brought it into your house, you still ended up pursuing a path of health, wellness, fitness. So you've been exposed to both sides of it. You've obviously adopted this lifestyle and you've built a business around it. Can you sort of connect the dots going backwards as to what turned you into who you are now with all the different experiences that you had growing up? You know, I created a video yesterday. We'll just send them to that. I created a video yesterday and I was thinking, everybody needs to understand what I'm about to say, which is how did you get your operating system, your lifestyle, whoever it is that's listening to it? How did you get to where you are, the way you sleep, the way you live, the way you eat? How did you get there? Most of you didn't have the advantage I had, which was my mom. And we'll go into that in a second. Most of you, including me, right? We got bombarded with advertisements. with companies wanting to sell us stuff, with somebody really smart on Madison Avenue coming up with a TV dinner, or an advertisement where doctors promoted cigarette smoking, or baby formula rather than breastfeeding because breastfeeding was barbaric. Most of the things we learn, we learn from companies and commercial advertisements. phones. That's where we get our information from. We're not sitting around the way our ancestors did with a shaman, somebody in a teepee, some ancient Chinese medicinal doctor in China teaching us the way of the world and how to operate. We don't learn that way. We don't Living the traditional commercial lifestyle, smoking cigarettes, and we were eating raviolis, and men that were 50 are smoking cigars and fat and soon to be dead. She walked into a health food store in the 70s, and she wanted to save her mom. Her mom had cancer. And she ran into a yogi who didn't learn it the way I just described. He didn't learn it from billboards and magazines and Instagram. He didn't learn it. And he said, you're living all wrong. You don't want to save your mom. You're living all wrong. You got to meditate. What's meditation? You got to do yoga. What's yoga? You got to become a vegan, eat more salad. What's that? Why? You got to run. This yogi believed in long distance running. And so my mom soaked it all in, came home, threw out the sausage and peppers, and much to my grandfather and I's frustration. I remember the day. And completely changed her life around and anybody else she can convince to change their life. And so I didn't want any part of that. I mean, I got monks in my living room with beads. They're chanting. I can't explain that to my Italian friends who bring an old rake plant parm sandwiches. And we're like, we're going to watch Jaws on TV. Or Scarface, right? Like, this is all weird shit. I don't want any part of that. And so I pushed back hard for many, many years. I went the traditional route. I somehow landed on Wall Street. And before you know it, I didn't feel healthy. I became very superficial. I'm sitting there typing, sitting on the screen, not feeling healthy, getting yelled at by clients or yelling bad, whatever it was. It just was not a healthy lifestyle. And I stumbled upon my mother's teachings again. And I started doing yoga. And oh my God, I came out of a hot yoga class. I was like... I feel like a brand new human being. It's unbelievable. And I signed up for a crazy race. And in the middle of the race, I was like, oh, my God, I feel alive. This is incredible. And I did more and more and more of it. I have a very addictive personality. And I'm crazy with races all over the world. And I wrote people in, friends and family. I lied to them. I said, hey, come this weekend. I got a barbecue on the farm. We're going to do a barbecue. And I'd wake them up at 5 a.m. and... They'd say, why are we waking up at 5 a.m. for a barbecue? I said, well, we've got to carry the barbecue up the mountain. And they didn't know they were the ones being barbecued. But we would do stuff like that, and people would change just like I did. And they would feel alive, and we'd have great stories to tell. And I thought, man, I wonder if I could do this as a business. So 24 years ago, first race I ever put on was down in the British Virgin Islands. It was with Richard Branson around his island. And we lost a person. We had a team setting up rope climbs out of the ocean. It's called coastal leering. And he cut himself. And we sent him back to Tortola to get stitched up. And unbeknownst to us, his engine didn't start on his little dinghy boat. And he drifted away. And eight days later, the team figured out they hadn't seen him in eight days. And we got Branson's helicopter. My father-in-law was FBI. He jumped in the helicopter with Branson's pilot. We got the Coast Guard. And luckily, we found him 150 miles away. He had drifted. And he was on a little tobacco, which is a deserted island. And he was eating crabs and drinking water from water bottles that had drifted there as well. And so anybody smart would have said, I'm not going to put on races for a living. I'm not good at it and it's too dangerous, but I'm a glutton for punishment. So I started putting on races one after the other. And here we are today. Thanks for tuning in. If you found this valuable, don't forget to hit that subscribe button so you never miss an episode. And if you want to dive deeper into this conversation, check out the links in the description to watch the full episode. See you in the next one.