Joe De Sena’s 44-pound kettlebell—originally a 100-lb sandbag—became his global discipline tool after TSA hurdles, inspired by clients like a 696-to-265-pound hiker and a 300-lb truck driver who lost 100 lbs in 30 days on apples. His "warrior camps" (e.g., Vermont’s 14-day no-phones trial) push kids to carry rocks, hike mountains, and endure cold showers, sparking debates on struggle vs. coddling, with Rogan comparing it to martial arts’ belt system. De Sena’s Spartan Race empire—300 events across 45 countries—clashed with Tough Mudder, driving innovation, while COVID-19 exposed gaps in public health, from Florida’s high infection rates to lab-leak theories. Both agree hardship builds resilience but warn against systemic overreach; Rogan praises De Sena’s approach as a potential antidote to modern laziness and societal decline. [Automatically generated summary]
The woman will wrap it perfectly, as if it's like Godiva chocolate.
Wrap it in cardboard, tape it, put a little handle, and then in high-heeled shoes, she'll carry it 100 yards like she's sweating, and carefully place it in location.
They have one of the lowest death rates and lowest problems with COVID. Like, they're one of the countries that handled it the best.
And we're trying to figure out why, and I think it's probably, they're really good at following rules, very disciplined, and they wear masks all the time when they're sick.
It's so interesting how human beings that, you know, basically not much different other than they're from a different climate, you know, different genes, but it's just amazing how differently they live.
It's amazing how they all have, like, when I was in Japan, I've only been once, but when I was in Tokyo, I was like, everyone is so polite.
Like, you're walking down the street and...
It's like there's no garbage anywhere.
It's very clean, but yet it's very packed.
There's a lot of people.
And everyone is very friendly.
It's like the way they handle everything.
Everything is very polite, very orderly.
One thing I found interesting, I couldn't go to the gym unless I went back to my hotel room and put a long-sleeved shirt on.
And if you follow back to the warrior culture, the samurai and I mean, their long history of martial arts, it's really kind of amazing that this island had so much innovation and so much mastery of hand-to-hand combat, of swordsmanship, of sword making.
He said to me, my parents were going through a divorce.
I'm 12 years old, and he wants to help me.
So he says, come over.
You're going to clean our swimming pool for us.
I'm going to pay you $35 a week.
So I come over on Saturday morning.
He says, alright, the first lesson...
Sit me down for lessons.
First lesson is if you're going to come at 8 a.m., you show up 7.45, right?
On time is late.
Great lesson for life.
Second lesson is if I'm paying you to clean the pool, I want you to straighten up the shed, straighten up all the lawn furniture, clean the windows, do whatever the fuck you have to do, but make it so that when I get home, I can't live without you.
You are irreplaceable as far as a service provider.
And number three, never ask for money.
You'll get paid if you do a good job.
And it just stuck with me for life.
And really, really good lessons from, like you say, a most unlikely source of advice.
I would bet if it wasn't genetic and unique to him, I've done very long-distance races where we had limited food, and I've read about people that have been stuck at sea, let's say, for 72 days, and their teeth get extremely white and their skin, if they're not getting sunburned, it gets beautiful.
You know, one of the things that fuels them is not just this desire to compete.
They're wild.
They like to get fucked up.
They like to drink.
They like to party.
They like to womanize.
They like to go out on the town and be the fucking man, you know, and they get fat.
Like Roberto Duran was famous for that, right?
He'd get real fat in between fights and then you'd have to lose weight and just...
You know that there's guys that don't like Bernard Hopkins never never gained weight and he was super disciplined and always ate really clean and Was a elite athlete deep into his 40s.
I mean it was a world champion deep into his 40s Yeah, which is very unusual for a boxer and and so my question is is um Makes sense why they go in and out and they don't they don't maintain it, but then the very disciplined fighters Would perform better I would imagine right because then yeah in the for the most part.
Yeah Do you think, because this is the way, I call it the Spartan paradox, right?
You probably have a better name for it from all the years of fighting, but like, if you have a date on the calendar, the Spartans knew they were going to battle.
If you know you've got a fight coming up, you'll do those push-ups, those squats, right?
Just got too wrapped up in the fact that he was the champ and too wrapped up in partying and next thing you know he lost the title and now he's faced with this very difficult task of trying to get a fight for the title now because he's a dangerous fighter still.
But people, he's not really the draw that he could have been.
If he beat Joshua the second time, he's a superstar.
Would you say, at least I see it in our community, is for the most part, most people, if they know they got something hard coming They'll wake up a little earlier.
It's a good motivator, but some people cram for tests, right?
Some people push it up.
Like if you tell someone they have a fight in three months, some people start drinking water right now, and they start eating healthy right now, and they write down a schedule, they start monitoring their heart rate, maybe they get a whoop strap and start Checking what their heart rate variability is.
Make sure they're recovering from their workouts correctly and do it scientifically.
Other people go, three months?
Alright, we're gonna party for a month.
And then two months, I'm gonna get after it.
And then two months into it, look, I only need six weeks.
Let's go to fucking Cancun.
Let's go do this.
And then they say, I'll be fine.
I'll fuck this motherfucker up no matter what.
And then come fight time, they know they didn't put in enough work and they're nervous.
And so they talk shit at the weigh-ins.
They try to push the guy.
They try to fuck with his head.
You know, did you see all this insecurity come out?
The psychological aspect of fighting is a crazy battle.
And oftentimes that psychological aspect of it is either reinforced by discipline or the opposite.
If you know you don't have any discipline, it plays on your psyche and it fucks with you and it really gives guys tremendous anxiety.
There's a lot of very, very talented fighters that, for whatever reason, are just not very disciplined.
It's really common.
Sometimes the most physically talented guys, it came a little too easy for them.
Maybe they have some unique gifts.
Maybe they're very fast or maybe they hit very hard.
And those things are really kind of genetic, especially hitting hard.
You could take a kid who is just starting out.
And he can hit harder than a guy who has been fighting for 10 years.
And it's weird.
It's just the way you're built.
It's just the way you're built, you know?
And some guys just have it and some guys will never have it.
They could be world champions.
They could be fighting 10-15 years and then retire and never have a real one-punch knockout power.
And other guys are born with it.
You get a guy, first day of the gym, he hits the pads and you're like, holy shit!
And other guys don't.
And some of those guys with the power, sometimes they just fuck off.
Sometimes they're not disciplined.
Sometimes the guys who don't have the power, they work harder.
And they develop a better, more well-rounded skill set to compensate for the fact they don't have that one-punch knockout power.
That's a Roy Jones Jr. That's a spectacular athlete, but who's also super intelligent and disciplined.
You need intelligence, too.
People look at intelligence, unfortunately, like book smart.
And by book smart, I don't mean someone who's intelligent, who's uneducated, is not capable of being book smart.
Because most of them are.
But Mike Tyson is a great example.
Mike Tyson is a very intelligent guy.
And when you talk to him about boxing history, when you talk to him about the history of philosophy, when he starts talking about great warriors and Marcus Aurelius and some of the books that he's read, he's very intelligent.
But he's intelligent in figuring out how to fuck people up.
You can't get that good.
At heavyweight boxing just on physical talent, which clearly he had, and just on genetics, which also...
He was 190 pounds and he was 13. Wow.
When he was 13, Teddy Atlas told me he took him to these smokers and they wouldn't believe it.
They're like, how holds that kid?
He's like, he's 13. He's like, get the fuck out of here.
He's like, okay, he's 16. And so he put him in there with 16-year-olds and he would knock them out cold.
So I graduate high school, and I want to go back to the neighborhood.
I don't want to go to college, right?
Because for obvious reasons, I want to be around these guys, and I got this business that's doing great.
And a friend of mine says, because my mom moved to Ithaca, New York, to get me away from the neighborhood when they got divorced.
So a friend of mine in Ithaca says, why don't we go to Cornell?
Cornell's in Ithaca.
And I said, how the fuck would we go to Cornell?
My grades suck.
I'm not planning on going to college.
I got this business.
He said, my dad's a professor.
He'll get us in.
So coming from the neighborhood I came from, that made sense.
We got a guy that's going to get us into college.
So we both apply.
We do great in the application.
We do great in the interview.
Neither of us get in.
But now I'm interested, right?
When somebody pushes back and says, no, you're not allowed to come here, now you want in.
It wasn't even my intention to go to college, but now I want to go.
Because they said no, right?
So I say to him, and this ties to what you were just saying, I say to him, well, fuck, if we're going to do it, why don't I spend the summer going to St. John's in Queens while I'm doing my pool business and learn how to study?
Because I've never studied.
Buckle down, get serious, get disciplined.
He says, screw that, we're gonna go to Vegas.
Why don't we go to Vegas, give up your business, go to Vegas, we'll party all summer, and then we'll buckle down in September when we get here.
Why would we waste the summer?
This is our last summer.
So we diverge.
And I study, and I run my business, and he goes to Vegas.
And we both come back, and we reapply.
We do well that semester.
We're allowed to go, it's called extramural, allowed to take three classes, non-matriculated in the school, and then apply.
We both do it, and they don't accept us.
So he diverts, he goes to UNLV. And I stay, and I say, fuck this, I'm doing it again.
And I do it a second time, I do it a third time, finally fourth time.
They accept me and I pound my chest and I tell people this story, right?
Look how great I am.
I was disciplined unlike him who went to...
He became a giant medical marijuana guy.
And I'm fucking laying barbed wire for a living.
So maybe, maybe disciplining that guy, I don't know.
Well, you know, sometimes people find a path that suits their personality.
Like, oftentimes people confuse discipline with focus.
And this is why that's important.
There are things that...
Some people can excel at because they're focused on them and because they're drawn to it and they have an incredible passion for it Versus like you tell a guy like hey, you know You're gonna study to be an electrical engineer and it's like I don't want to be a fucking electrical engineer Well, you gotta have discipline and so they don't have the drive and they don't they don't get excited about it and they don't do but if you tell that guy Whatever, you're gonna be a golfer, and he fucking loves golf, and he's practicing every day, and he becomes a professional golfer.
And you say, well, I thought that guy didn't have any discipline.
Well, it's not that he didn't have any discipline.
He's just not interested in that other thing.
I was never a disciplined kid, but I would find things that I loved, and I was obsessed.
And I always felt embarrassed by it, because people would say, oh, your son, like to my mom, Your son is so disciplined.
And she'd be like, my son's fucking crazy.
Like, he's not disciplined.
He finds these things and that's all he does all day long.
Like, it's not really disciplined.
Because he doesn't clean his room.
He's fucking lazy.
There's all sorts of shit he's supposed to do.
I never did my homework.
But if I had a thing that I was into, I was obsessed.
And it was kind of stunning for my family, because they didn't even know I had that in me.
Like, they thought that I was just going to be this ne'er-do-well, you know, because I just really couldn't concentrate on these jobs that I would have.
I just...
I was bored.
But when I wasn't bored, I was very excited by things.
I think, for whatever reason, whether it's my genetics or my upbringing, I just had a very weird personality that didn't fit in with normal...
Like, I was allergic to the idea of having a nine-to-five.
I've never been in an office.
I've never worked in a place where I was around a bunch of people.
Never.
Never had one.
I used to deliver newspapers.
I worked on construction sites.
I drove limos.
And then I became a comic.
And I taught Taekwondo along the way.
But that's it.
I luckily dodged that bullet.
But that was the fear.
There was something in me that was like, I can't fucking do that.
I would go to visit my mom at work.
I would see people that were working in an office.
What's not rewarding to me is being compliant to a bunch of other people where you've got some weird rigid rules and you're under fluorescent lighting and you're in some strange environment that's not natural.
What I think is the people that adapt to that world, that 9 to 5 world, are more compliant.
I don't know whether it's cultural, but there's something about the human beings that are willing to do that office work, that are willing to go and abide by the rules of human resources.
I found, I don't know if you agree with this, there were a ton of kids along the way growing up as I was building my business that would say, oh, I'm not into this.
I'm not into that.
Kind of like you described yourself.
And they don't do anything because they're looking for that thing.
I always found things that I was interested in, just none of them seemed like they were normal things that other people wanted to do for a living.
Like the path, like a career path.
But I think that there's a lot of people that don't have any...
There's no one...
They're not modeling...
Their life after someone that they see that they admire.
Someone that's successful, someone that is doing something that they enjoy and love.
Sometimes kids have to see that.
And if their parents are living a bullshit life, and their neighbors are living a bullshit life, and most of their family lives a bullshit life, they just fucking lay around, you know?
And then they seek refuge in drugs, or video games, or something that stimulates them.
Yeah, if I have 100 students and those 100 students are paying me X amount of dollars per month, I can make a living.
Holy shit, this would be amazing.
And then you see your jiu-jitsu school...
And your jiu-jitsu instructor has all these students and drives a Mercedes and he's got a nice family and like, that's the future.
This way you're doing something exciting and fun and you don't...
Or you could just be playing fucking video games.
Three years later you could be that same kid just playing video games waiting for the next whatever the fuck game is, you know, next Xbox game to come out and you're gonna waste your time.
Yeah, I was like, I'm going to find my way through this, and since no one's telling me it's impossible, no one's telling me I can't, occasionally I would hear someone say, what are the odds?
I'm like, listen to this fucking loser.
My thought was always like, that guy's a loser.
If you think like that, you're a loser.
But there are kids that make a lot of fucking money playing video games.
But the thing is, like, you have to be adaptable.
You have to be able to play multiple video games because the one video game that you get really good at, what are the odds that it's going to be around five years from now?
It's on me, but I'm going to turn them into, you know, it'll be fun.
I'm embellishing a little bit when I use some of these words, like fun, and...
Really what I want to do is turn them into warriors and get them off their friggin' phones.
And selfishly, for me, selfishly, I want my kids to be, like, it's hard for me to do this to my kids alone, but if there's another 16 kids around, 18 kids around, everybody gets sucked up in the vortex, right?
So anyway, first day, unbeknownst to me, we left their phones in their rooms.
And unbeknownst to me, every night when they got done with their work, they would then get on the phones.
Of course they would.
I just wasn't thinking about it.
And start texting the parents.
Get me the fuck out of here.
This guy is fucking nuts, right?
But I don't know that's happening.
My wife's not there.
I got our four children.
I got 18 other kids.
And the texts that are going back to the parents those first three days, I'm going to read you one.
But they're going non-stop.
And they eventually get to my wife.
She then immediately races to Vermont.
Like, what are you doing?
This is not even your business.
Why are you doing this?
People are going to hate us.
We can't do this.
We're...
So I'm fighting with her.
I'm fighting with the kids' parents.
Because now I'm five days in and I'm saying, listen, our four kids are going to finish.
They need to understand that you can struggle and you can realize that sometimes when things are really hard to do, you think, oh my god, I've got to stop doing this.
But once you do it and you complete it, you have a satisfaction, this sense of satisfaction that you did something really difficult that is irreplaceable.
Some kids never get that and they just stay fat and stupid their whole life.
And some kids, they get these little lessons and then they realize like you can push yourself and you can get somewhere.
You know, some kids get real lucky and they get involved in sports.
Or martial arts early and one of the best benefits of sports is you realize that through hard work you get improvement through improvement You get success through success you get that big dopamine rush you get that good feeling you get confidence you get this knowledge Yeah, you get sometimes I didn't but you get this knowledge that you can do something That's difficult and you can overcome even though it feels like you can't I can't like that's one of the beautiful things about the belt system of martial arts you start off and As a beginner,
you start off as a white belt.
And then as things go on, you get a new belt and when your instructor takes your old belt off and ties your new one off, your new one on, you have this amazing feeling of accomplishment.
It's an opportunity to focus your energy and your thoughts on the deepest aspects, the deepest center of your mind and think about your breathing and think about that.
And don't think about the fact, oh my god, it's so cold.
Oh my god, it's so hot.
I'm an dishonest.
I've got to get out of there.
Instead of thinking about that, just think about your breathing.
Just go deep.
Close your eyes.
Go deep to the center of your mind and stay there.
When all these texts were coming in and my wife wanted to divorce me and all this shit was happening just three or four weeks ago, I got in touch with a neurosurgeon and I said, would you talk to the kids?
And the neurosurgeon said, which I didn't know, you probably know this, he said, kids, when you take on something hard, it could be a cold shower, it could be this 14-day crazy camp with Joe, the belt system, if you don't finish it, it leaves a physical gap in the brain.
Literally, we could see as a neurosurgeon that the wires are unconnected because you never finished it.
But when you finish it, it leaves like train tracks.
And so the more tracks you could lay, like you were laying them as you were getting the belt system, right?
The advantage, you're going to have an advantage over your competitors.
And I think sports are really the best way for kids to learn it.
Sports are the best way because there's something about physical pursuits where you have to motivate.
The mind has to force the body to plow through discomfort.
It's a different kind of mental strength.
There's mental strength in terms of your ability to sit down and be disciplined and study and do homework assignments and complete projects and do complex problems and problem solving.
There's mental strength in that, too.
But there's also the strength of the mind telling the body who the fucking boss is.
So I built the swimming pool business, turned into a little bit of a construction company, somehow fight my way, graduate college, and meet a guy at Cornell who says, what are you doing when you graduate?
I said, I'm going back to the neighborhood.
And he says, well, you're a fucking idiot.
He goes, you got to go to Wall Street.
I don't know anything about Wall Street.
I remember the 87 crash.
I figured people don't make money there anymore.
He says, it's just like the neighborhood, only they do it with a pen instead of a gun.
You gotta go to Wall Street.
So he pushes me there, and I land on Wall Street.
I get a job.
I eventually build a business.
I had a nice run.
Just like you, I didn't want to be at a desk.
I didn't like it.
I didn't feel good.
I started to gain weight.
The folks around me, we were making a lot of money, but folks had psychological problems I couldn't fix.
Like, I can't believe John next to me got $50,000 more bonus than I did.
And so we had gone on a date, my wife and I, to a friend in Idaho.
We went out to Idaho for like a snowshoeing thing.
And on the way back, I saw this real estate magazine in the plane, and it had homes and ranches in Jackson Hole, which you got to be pretty wealthy to buy anything in Jackson Hole.
20 million, 25, crazy numbers.
There was one ad in that magazine that said, farmhouse in Vermont, covered bridge, mountain, horses, 420 grand.
Wife gets in the car, I'm driving to dinner, and I call Dave Fisher.
I'm remembering the name, my neighbor.
And I said, hey, Dave, I got a deer in the bucket on my backhoe.
You know, I'm not going to get into how it got there.
Yeah, I'll get it.
I said, well, it's a pretty warm night.
Should you get it now?
No, I'll get it in the morning.
Perfect.
Problem solved.
Go to dinner with my wife, come back, go to bed, wake up in the morning, no deer in the backhoe.
Everything's great.
I go to the general store.
There's only one general store in our town.
It's the only place to eat.
Go into the general store, and the manager of the general store says, Hey, Joe, you want some venison for lunch?
I said, How is there venison?
Never have venison.
He says, You never believe it.
He says, Late last night, the Slovakians were done doing the carpentry.
They walked past the backhoe.
They found a dead deer in the fucking backhoe.
They dragged it here a mile.
They dragged it to the general store, gutted it, and it's now in the freezer.
I said, this is not even believable.
This fucking story is crazy.
I said, I don't want any venison.
And if Dave Fisher, the neighbor, happens to come in, do not tell him about this.
Because now I don't know the law with this, right?
You're supposed to have a tagged deer, not tagged deer.
Fast forward.
It's now Christmas time, right?
Hunting season was November.
It's now Christmas time.
And I am stuck in New York during a snowstorm.
I call a car service that I used to use when I was on Wall Street.
There are a bunch of Turkish guys.
They speak with very little English.
Do you want to drive me up to Vermont?
It's like a five-hour drive with a snowstorm.
It might be eight hours.
Yeah, yeah.
Tony will take you.
Drives me up.
We're 15 minutes from the farm.
He says, Joe, anywhere to get any deer?
Up here.
I said, I can't even believe this fucking guy's asking me this.
I said, go to the general store.
Go see the manager.
There's deer.
He'll cut you a piece.
Again, I don't know.
A week later, it's Christmas.
It's the only time the Slovakians take off.
They're taking two weeks off.
They surround me in my garage.
They don't speak English.
I called my friend in New York.
York I said you got to translate I don't know if they want to raise I don't know if they don't want to work for us anymore I don't know what it is he says um they want to know where the fuck their deer is I said what are you talking about I called Michael at the general store I said Mike what happened to the deer he said what do you mean the Turkish guy came he said he could have the deer we loaded the whole deer in his trunk frozen he drove it back to New York oh boy Fucking crazy story.
I gave the address of the Turkish guy to the Slovakians.
I never heard from the Turkish guy again.
I have no idea.
I probably shouldn't be saying it on the largest podcast in the world.
The only time that could happen is if the animal's in the rut.
Sometimes when they're in the rut, the males go so crazy that there's a video, it's a crazy video, of a guy is in a blind, he's in a hunting blind, and this buck is so out of it that he actually taps his antlers with the arrow.
He's got an arrow in his hand, he taps him, like tap, tap, and the buck's like...
He's just so out of it, because they're so horny, they lose their fucking mind.
It's very rare that they behave like this, but they could work themselves up into such a frenzy that they're hallucinating.
We were definitely overpaid for our job, no doubt about it.
I mean, the whole place is crazy.
So I agree with that.
But the other side of it, I think there's always the pendulum swings too far.
The other side of it is in Vermont, and again, I'm going to piss a ton of people off here.
There's a lot of free stuff.
Free cheese, free phones, free this.
I've had a lot of stories where people say to me, I haven't had this experience myself, where there's negative selection, where folks will come to Vermont because of all those free things.
Like I'm sweating and working and eating healthy and kind of like I have a...
I find that I have a boxing match coming up and it's forcing me to train for it.
So, right?
I'm waking up earlier.
I'm not drinking.
I'm going to bed.
I'm doing all the things I'm supposed to do because I got a battle coming.
And I had so much fun with it that I said, I want to do this for other people.
I want to put on events and have them experience.
I get to meet myself during those events.
I find out who I am.
I get to places where I just want water, food, and shelter, and I'm not worried about payroll and all the bullshit of life or deers being buried in my back, right?
I just want to survive the next step.
Could I do this as a business?
This would feel really purposeful.
Kind of like you found your things and you felt good about.
And so put on the first race and it was like hell to get people there.
It's kind of like the kids camp.
I got to lie to people and say, this is going to be fun.
It'll be like a barbecue, which it wasn't.
And I'm going to just, I'm going to torture folks.
I'm going to put obstacles out there.
It'll be very military inspired.
Got a cool name, Spartan, and 500 people showed up.
Then 1,000.
Then 1,500.
Then 2,000.
Then 10,000.
Then we're in one country, two countries, 10 countries.
Eventually 45 countries.
I was in a battle with a company called Tough Mudder.
We bought them and the way I look at it, and you tell me what you think, the way I look at it is we want to be the LVMH. The Louis Vuitton owns all these brands.
Vail Resorts owns all these ski locations.
We want to own all these different types of events that are basically the boxing matches for people.
And so you could sign up and buy a season pass and you just choose your poison.
I'm going to do this this month, I'm going to do that that month.
And so I don't want to, they're not going to converge.
Tough Mudder is going to be its own thing just like it was when we were fighting.
Spartan will be its own thing.
We've got a couple other brands in there, just trail runs, this thing called DECA. And I'm really just trying to put dates on people's calendars like a boxing match.
But what happens in that funk of that fog of cocaine and alcohol and nicotine and just mashing those keys and just digging into the deep recesses of his mind?
I'm not convinced you could reach that on the natch.
I don't know if you can.
I mean, there is discipline in the fact that he sat down and did that work.
There's discipline in the fact that he was there, but he wasn't taking care of himself.
He wasn't drinking water and doing sit-ups.
That motherfucker would sit in front of that keyboard and torture himself with blow and write these masterpieces that, to this day, freak people the fuck out.
I think we look at it in terms of good and bad, and sometimes you can't look at things and you can't – everything is not binary.
You want to talk about a healthy person, right?
A person who's running, a person who's competing in athletic endeavors, well, that person has very specific requirements of their body.
Like, you know, if you're gonna run 3,100 miles, man, I mean, Jesus Christ, you're gonna have to do that running.
You're gonna have to be in shape if you do the Moab 240. You know, you want to do that.
You want to run 240 miles through the fucking mountains.
But if you want to write a book, You don't necessarily have to do sit-ups.
You don't necessarily have to even be healthy.
And there's some people who just want to write a book.
And there's some weird energy to being drunk.
There's weird energy to smoking cigarettes.
There's weird energy to taking amphetamines.
There's weird energy to sitting in front of a computer and coming up with these ideas.
It's not good for the body, but sometimes the results, like sometimes people sacrifice health and they sacrifice wellness in order to achieve creative goals.
I don't know if it's required, but I just know it's been done and the results for some people are amazing.
This is nothing I would ever encourage.
Certainly never encouraged my kids to do it.
Certainly would never encourage good friends to do it.
But there's something about these people that have made some of the great works of art, some of the great works of literature.
I wonder if they would have achieved that success If they had been eating healthy and taking care of themselves, and I wonder if they would have looked at things the same way.
Like, what is your ultimate goal?
Is your ultimate goal numbers in a bank account, or is your ultimate goal to feel good?
Yeah, I don't know if that's the way to go to make your heart last.
You know, there's a lot of variables and there's a lot of people that have differing opinions, a lot of experts that have differing opinions in terms of nutrients that you're not going to get and, you know, and how to get those nutrients and how to make sure that the protein that you're getting is bioavailable and that you're getting a full suite of vitamins with everything, you know, with all your meals and making sure all your bases are covered.
And again, I had my mom pushing for 30 years, right?
The diet, which I was pushing back from because I wanted the raviolis and the meat.
If you're 10th generation or 20th generation from a particular place on the planet that ate a certain way for 20 generations, and there's survival of the fittest, right?
Like those that couldn't last on that diet, died off, and You probably have a predisposition to eat that way in that part of the world, I would think.
There's a genetic argument for your diet in terms of they can sequence your genome and go over your history and prescribe to you a diet that's based on your ancestry.
It's controversial.
Makes sense, though.
It does in some ways, yeah, but it's all anecdotal.
And then also different people.
That's the problem with biodiversity.
Some people do great on just fish and rice and veggies.
Other people, really, they need more protein.
They need more meat.
They survive better on a red meat-based diet.
Some people, they survive better on just eggs and vegetables.
But I think the most important thing is you have to have your nutritional bases covered.
This is so important, man.
You mean checking all the boxes?
Yeah, so many people go through life vitamin D deficient.
I mean, that is like one of the most common ones.
That's one of the big ones with COVID. More than 80% of the people in multiple studies, 80% of the people that were in the ICU with COVID had vitamin D deficient levels.
So, I mean, that doesn't, you know, correlation, causation, it doesn't exactly mean that vitamin D is going to protect you, but it is, it's crucial for health, and it's a vitamin that's actually also, according to Dr. Rhonda Patrick taught me this, that it's also a hormone.
You know, and it's, you know, it's something that It's crucial.
And most people don't get it.
And if you stay inside all day, you definitely don't get it.
And African Americans have an even harder time getting it because their ancestors developed all this melanin in their skin because they were constantly exposed to sunlight and the melanin was there to protect you from the sunlight.
And they didn't have to worry about absorbing the vitamin D because they were out there all the time.
Well, as people move into colder climates and climates that are cloudier, that's why people got paler.
They got paler because your body became essentially like a fucking giant solar panel for vitamin D. Right.
It's a survival mechanism for vitamin D, for the one thing.
My doctor told me that when he was measuring people, he would measure black folks in New York, and some of them had undetectable levels of vitamin D, which is insane.
Yeah, my friend Steve Rinella actually went to Guyana and was hanging out with these tribes, and they would kill a monkey, and they were so excited, and they would smoke the monkey and cook it in a soup, and that was their favorite thing to eat.
My friend David Cho, who's an artist, was just in Africa, and he was staying with a tribe, and their primary diet is baboons because he sent me some pictures.
I don't know if I can use them, so I won't post them to you.
But he sent me some pictures of these people cooking up baboons.
He said that people like miners and people that are out there that Have killed essentially so many animals in that area.
They've depopulated that area so badly that baboons are like the last thing left.
We're related to them in some sort of a strange way.
It's like cannibalism.
I've read a lot about Native American history and one of the more disturbing things is how prevalent cannibalism was and how prevalent cannibalism was where they would kill their enemies and eat them and roast them over the fire and sometimes eat them while they're still alive.
I mean, when you're talking about people that evolved first primarily without horses, right?
It's like without horses for who knows how many thousands of years until the Europeans came.
When the Europeans came, they taught them horseback riding, and then they started stealing horses, and they started raising horses, and they started getting better at riding horses and doing battle on horses than any of the Europeans were.
Like the Comanches were far better on horseback than any – and it's one of the main reasons why the West was so difficult to settle because the Europeans, the settlers, only had muskets, single shot, take you like 30 seconds to fucking reload, whereas the Comanches can unload 30 arrows in that time. whereas the Comanches can unload 30 arrows in that time.
You know, in probably 30 seconds, probably more.
They probably unload 40 or 50 arrows in 30 seconds.
The Europeans hadn't figured out how to fight on horseback.
They would climb off the horse to aim their rifle and then shoot it, and then they'd have to reload, and the Comanches would just run up on them and shoot from horseback.
So...
The idea that these people who grew up in this place or evolved in this place where they didn't have horses, they ate whatever the fuck they could.
But when I talked to my friend Brett Weinstein, who is a biologist, he explained scientifically that there's all these points, all these things you could point to about this virus that indicate that it's been manipulated.
That it evolved too quickly.
The jump from animals to humans is too quick.
And that this specific type of virus, they were working on it in that lab.
They had a level 4 lab in Wuhan.
It's more likely, he said, given what we know about the virus, that it was released or escaped or accidentally released from that lab.
Well, you know, that's like a bunch of compounding factors, right?
You know, you have the George Floyd murder, and then you have the protests afterwards, which ignite most likely is one of the factors in the kick-up of the virus again, the second wave of it.
You know, there's a lot going on, you know, and then also people don't like to be told what to do here.
I took the approach of we could put on a safe event.
The second that I get a state or a country that allows us to put on an event, we're back on.
And we're going to put protocols in place because I believe, fight me on it, I don't know what your thoughts are, but I believe that you're more likely to get it like we're sitting right now as opposed to being outside.
The idea that the sunlight's going to kill all of it, it seems ridiculous.
And it's also going to get into people, and they're going to bring it to their home, and it's going to get to them.
They're going to go to work.
They're going to give it to other people at work or other people wherever, gatherings that they get to.
Whenever you get to...
You're having, like, the way...
Someone described it recently as like a music festival in every city all across the country for weeks at a time.
And that's what the protests were like.
I'm sure it had an impact.
And if you looked at the numbers, like so many of the people that have it now are young people.
I think bars had a big impact on it too.
I think a lot of, you know, drunk talk in bars, you're right on top of each other, you're indoors, you're drinking, your inhibitions are down, you're not thinking, you're not washing your hands, you're yelling, you're talking loud.
I'm a little annoyed because it's not going to be the race I'm used to where everybody's like getting together in a festival area and I can't have like mud pits where we're mingling people.
So I don't know how it's going to go.
I drive with my family because I've got to be there.
If I'm the leader of this organization, I've got to be there.
Drive with my family down the East Coast and When I get to South Carolina, there's no virus.
There's like corn dogs and partying and beaches full of people all the way to Florida.
It was completely different than New York and everywhere else.
I don't know what your feeling is on Sweden, but thanks to that warrior call we spoke about at the very beginning of this conversation where I had all the people from around the world chiming in.
It looks to me—I know people are going to listen to this and say, Joe, you're crazy.
Sweden's got more deaths than Norway and other Nordic countries.
But when you look at the charts, you look at the number of people infected in Sweden versus the number of people dying.
And no one should die.
I'm not suggesting anybody should die, but like— It looks like it worked its way through the system, and they didn't shut down.
Now, granted, they're in good shape, unlike us, right?
Swedes are in good shape.
They socially distance anyway.
They keep their distance, not like us.
They're not hugging as much as we do and shaking hands.
Maybe this thing's just got to work its way through because even if you get a vaccine, I happen to be close with a gentleman that's invested in one of these companies coming out with the vaccine.
Moderna.
And even if you get the vaccine this year, let's just say, you know how Americans are with vaccines.
They don't even want to take the flu shot.
So is everybody going to all of a sudden take the vaccine, or do we just have to stay shut for another year?
Like, you can't.
The only way out of this, again, people are going to be pissed off, the only way out is get on with our lives.
You give people freedom and you get a lot of things.
The problem with this disease is this is not like anything else.
You can't compare it to the flu because it's clearly more infectious.
And there's, you know, there's flu shots.
People can, even if you have a flu shot and it's for the wrong strain of the flu, there's enough in that that will protect you at least a certain amount from whatever flu.
There's nothing like that for this.
So all you got is vitamins and nutrients and health and sleeping.
So when you say, alright, let's get them healthy, you're president, and you want freedom, which I agree with freedom, but freedom has led to, like when I lived in Japan and I land anywhere in the United States, it doesn't matter what airport I land in, people are three times the size.
I don't want to say that about my American brothers and sisters, but they're three times the fucking size.
Milkshakes and fries and soda and the massive amounts of sugar is what's led to people being enormous.
Massive amounts of calories and sedentary lifestyle.
It's all terrible.
But it's not all of us.
I mean, look how many people are into CrossFit.
Look how many people are into Jiu-Jitsu.
It's a small percentage, though.
It's a small percentage, but that's what freedom gets you.
There's a small percentage of people that are going to excel.
I mean, that's just part of the recipe of exceptionalism.
If you're going to give people the ability to do whatever the fuck they want, you're going to have some people that are going to ruin their lives because of that.
What if you're president and I whispered in your ear and I said, all right, Joe, if you won't accept getting rid of the Doritos, can we at least have an FDA that's not, in other words, a department that just doesn't allow factory farming, doesn't allow bullshit foods, maybe puts a sugar tax on things?
Okay, factory farming I think should be a crime because I think it's a crime against nature.
I think what they do to those pigs, when you see pigs stuffed into those cages, standing in their own shit and then The shit and piss gets filtered out into a giant pond that's outside of it.
Because in order to get cheap meat, you're going to have to do something.
You're going to have to figure out a way to stuff these animals into these pens.
And you're going to have to maximize your profit.
That's how it got to the position that it's in right now.
It should have never gotten there.
But now that it's there and now we know about it, we gotta pull it back.
And if that means that these fast food places are gonna have to jack up prices and they're gonna have to use organic, free-range beef, And instead of, you know, the shit that they're serving people now, well, then that's what's gonna have to happen.
And if things are more expensive, then people realize, well, this stuff is better for you, but now it costs more.
You know what?
I can go to the supermarket, and I can get it cheaper, and I could cook it myself, and maybe we could wean people off of this fast food.
The idea that we have to eat fast food is fucking crazy.
But then you've got people that live in these poor neighborhoods, and, you know, you can get a Big Mac for what?
I mean, look, what they're trying to do in Portland is a different story because you're trying to break up looting, smashing windows, attacks on federal property.
That's sort of a different thing.
And I don't think...
I'm not educated enough to decide, nor have I really sat down and thought about it, whether or not they need the Department of Homeland Security to break that stuff up.
I don't know what's going on up there.
But I do know that the mayor, who is in support of what he was calling peaceful protests, is now like, okay, this is a riot.
They were screaming at him.
He's the guy that's on their side.
He let Antifa take over the streets, and they're throwing water bottles at him.
You also can't let people, like, these mass gatherings have become violent, and they think they're doing it for a good cause, but it's totally directionless.
Like, what are they trying to do?
They're trying to take over the federal court buildings?
What are they trying to do?
Like, look what happened in Seattle where they took over those six blocks, the Chas area.
Look what happened in there.
They started beating people up.
People got shot and killed.
They wouldn't let anybody in.
They put borders up.
They developed their own security system.
And then when people were violating that, they were kicking their ass.
They were literally physically assaulting people in the name of this new utopia.
Like, they did a way shittier job of governing that spot than America does.
Look, how much time do we spend talking about certain issues that we have, whatever those issues are, and how little time do we spend—how little time does our own government spend talking to us about our diet, talking to us about, like, literally one of the most important things— Even doctors don't talk about our diet.
They don't know anything about it.
The amount of time that the average physician spends in medical school— Study nutrition is miniscule.
It's tiny.
Unless that person's actually studied, unless their actual education is in nutrition, there's very little studying of it.
If you're a doctor that's a general practitioner, If you're a doctor that's an orthopedic surgeon, how much time, unless you're independently studying it, how much time in medical school do they spend studying nutrition?
I'm not a conspiracy guy, but I was on Wall Street, and if you're a Burger King, you're at one of these big public companies that's making food that's not so healthy.
You've got scientists, you've got Madison Avenue advertisers.
You've figured out a way to get into our psyche where you can't live without that thing.
Yeah, I wonder if like for every good ad you would have to have a bad ad.
Like you'd have to have an ad.
I like that.
So like for every good ad for Burger King had, you could hire like a company that would make a creative, very compelling ad showing fat people having heart attacks.
So because I have this long history of exercise, it's like it's just a normal part of my day.
And if I don't do it, I don't think right.
Like if I don't do it, I'm not calm.
So it fucks up everything else.
So it'll fuck up podcasts for me.
When I was doing stand-up before COVID, it would fuck up stand-up.
You can't be in a bad mood.
And for me, the best solution to a bad mood is hard workouts.
Hard workouts cure it all, man.
A heavy bag, smoke a joint, hit that heavy bag, play some Hendrix, just whack the shit out of that heavy bag, and then after it's over, man, I feel great.
Wandering around, driving 60 miles an hour in these metal boxes with rubber tires over this artificial road that we've created and covered the earth with.
And you're trying to navigate this time the best you can.
Trying to be nice and be a good friend and be a good neighbor and be a good husband and a father and all those good things and a good wife and just a nice co-worker.
And you're trying to just do your best.
It's complicated and you're interacting with all these different people with all sorts of different issues and problems and needs and wants and desires and egos and There's a lot going on, man.
And the more that you can mitigate your own stress levels, the more that you can calm the demons inside you, the better you're going to interact with people, the better they're going to feel about their interactions with you, the better they're going to interact with other people, there's a ripple effect.
And it just makes the whole world better.
Like, if you're a better person, if you do your best and you get better at it and you keep doing your best, you keep getting better at it, like all things in life, You'd do better at creating a healthy environment for all the people around you, too.
I mean, for some people, it wouldn't worry, oh, yeah, well, my dad worked out 20 minutes a day.
He was still a dick.
That's the outlier.
But if you looked at the mean, if you looked at overall, like if you got 330 million people or whatever we've got in this country, And all of them worked out 20 minutes a day.
And then you looked at what the results were two, three years down the road.
I would imagine you would have less aggressive behavior.
You would have probably less violent crime.
You'd probably have less arguments.
People could be more peaceful about things.
You'd probably have people that were healthier.
They'd have less visits to the doctor.
They'd have less medical problems.
I bet there would be Overall, a host of benefits that we would achieve nationwide if we could convince people.
And I'm not talking about taking a fucking brutal CrossFit class or going to jiu-jitsu and getting strangled every day.
I'm talking about going on a hike and doing some push-ups and sit-ups, some bodyweight squats.
And I think as an adult, sometimes people have to know, I am an adult now.
I'm held to a different standard.
I need to hold myself to a different standard.
I can't just fucking be a ne'er-do-well and fucking skip my way through this life and live off of unemployment.
Fuck people over and scam my way through life.
No, I want to be noble.
I want to be respectable.
I want to be someone who I respect.
A good citizen.
Yeah.
You want to respect yourself.
You want to appreciate yourself.
And I think that...
It's hard to do that.
It's easy to do nothing.
But it's hard to do nothing.
Because if you do nothing, you're going to live a hard life.
It's going to be a sucky life.
You don't realize it.
But everybody pays.
You pay no matter what.
Either you pay now or you pay with regret.
You pay with a lack of success.
You pay with a sloppy body and a fucking weak mind that falls apart in any challenge.
You don't have any structure.
You've got no rigidity to your thoughts.
You don't have any resolve in your mindset because you've never been tested.
And a person who goes through life without ever been tested is a sad person.
The saddest thing is seeing a person who's never been tested when the shit hits the fan.
And that's one of the things we're seeing from COVID. We're seeing a lot of people that just have weak minds and they're just panicking and screaming at people, wear a mask!
People on the other side of the street and Because they never face tough times.
They don't know.
They don't know how to buckle up.
They don't know how to strap in.
They don't know how to overcome.
And so this heightened stress level that comes with the pandemic is freaking them the fuck out.
And that's one of the reasons why social media is such a fucking shithole right now.
It's so bad.
It's because so many of those people are shut-ins.
So many of those people are shut-ins, have never been challenged.
They don't really know who they are.
You know what you're saying?
Like when you do a race, you meet yourself.
These people never met themselves.
So all they're doing is judging other people, constantly bitching and bickering about other people.
You learn a lot from someone about how much attention they spend on other people's failures, how much time they spend pointing out other people's failures, and how little time they spend reflecting on their own.
Where the people are accountable, but because of COVID, you tell them that event is going to happen, the event is going to take place in six weeks, and this is what you need to do.
Yeah, maybe you have an app or maybe even simpler...
They just use a fucking timer on their phone, you know, and say, okay, you know, ready, set, start.
Start your timer, and then you have to complete all these things, and maybe you have a checklist on your website where they can check off all the different things that they have to do during that day and get it done.
And maybe someone like that 600-pound dude, it takes him seven hours, and the average person takes him 90 minutes, but everybody does it together, and then as a community, they all report it, put it up on Instagram, maybe with hashtags.
Yeah, give these people an event without having a physical location.
I mean, look, there's probably nothing better than that physical location when you all get together and the camaraderie and the energy of all the people together running together.
I just want to go somewhere in the center of the country, somewhere it's easier to travel to both places, and somewhere where you have a little bit more freedom.
Also, I think that where we live right here in Los Angeles is overcrowded, and I think...
Most of the time, that's not a problem.
But I think it's exposing the fact that it's a real issue.
When you look at the number of people that are catching COVID because of this overpopulation issue, when you look at the traffic, when you look at the economic despair, when you look at the homelessness problem that's accelerated radically over the last six, seven, ten years, I think there's too many people here.
I think it's not tenable.
I don't think it's manageable.
And I think every mayor does a shit job of doing it because I don't think anybody could do a great job of it.
I think there's like certain things you're gonna have to deal with when you have a population of whatever the fuck LA is.
In stand-up you have to test in front of a live audience.
Sometimes I write bits and they are finished before they ever get to the stage.
They're done.
Like the moment I bring them to the stage, they're already done.
But that's rare.
Most of the time I have an idea and I think I know how it's going to work and then I say it but it doesn't work that good or I have a new way to do it that's better or I come up with a new tagline that changes the bit.
It's a weird art form because you have to kind of do it in front of people.
I've been getting some 21 or 22-year-olds from very, very wealthy families that are saying, hey, Joe, they know me through somebody or whatever.
My kids are a little...
They need some help.
I want to put them on the farm with you.
They're hard to fix.
By the time they're 21, 22, they're hard to fix.
These little kids, I make a big impact.
I mean, the letters I got are tearjerkers after the text I saw them writing the parents about how terrible I was, and then seeing 14 days later the impact.
15. And the dad hit me up and I said, listen, next time he talks to you, tell him we have an 11-year-old girl by his side that is finishing this thing.
Are you kidding me?
So you can't blame them because they've never tested themselves.
So Andy, the Olympic wrestler, when he, 2008 Olympian, didn't medal, went to Russia.
And he spent a couple of years in Russia to learn their system.
Why did the Russians get all these gold medals in wrestling?
And they climb mountains, and they climb ropes, and they just fucking work hard.
Not that American wrestlers don't.
And so we took a bunch of that Russian system, we took a bunch of the mountain warfare stuff, and then we just added the Spartan sprinkles in there and the stuff my mom...
Spartan sprinkles.
Spartan sprinkles.
And so, you know, they're waking up early, they're hiking the mountain, they're doing miserable shit, carrying rocks, always purposeful, so we're building stuff out of the rocks that'll be there for the test of time.
And so they can come back and see the efforts of their work.
Cold water is always involved because as you said with the shower, cold water sucks.