Joe De Sena on Andrew Tate, Losing $100M & Working For Mobsters

I learned some amazing things from the head of the Bonanno organized crime family. He said, three things I want to teach you. He was letting me clean a swimming pool. He said, number one on time is late. You say you're going to be here at 8am. You should be here at 745. Number two, you got to go above and beyond. If you're going to clean my pool, he said, I want you to straighten up my shed, straighten up the lawn furniture, clean the windows, even though you're not getting paid for that. If you do that, it'll be recognized and rewarded later. And then number three, he said, don't ever ask for money. You'll get paid if you do a good job. And I thought that third one was strange, but I employed those tactics for most of my life. Welcome to super entrepreneurs podcast. Today we have with us Joe DeSito. Joe is the founder and CEO of Spartan. He's a globally recognized entrepreneur, investor, speaker, bestselling author, media personality, and a thought leader. Thank you, Joe, for coming on our show today. Thanks for having me. My pleasure. So my first question to you would be people when they face discomfort in their life, they tend to go towards personal growth. What are your thoughts on that? Is it something that more people should be doing when they're feeling this discomfort? Here's what I like to say. The human being, our brain for the last 10, 20, 30,000 years has been optimized and designed to avoid discomfort. It has protected us and kept us alive as a species on the planet for a long time by telling us not to go out in the rain, not to go out in the cold, not to go across the desert, too dangerous, expends too much energy. And we now live in an environment that is completely different, that has Uber eats and climate controlled apartments and indoor plumbing. Everything is right at our fingertips, but our brains are still protecting us from going to the gym, from eating the salad because we get more calories from something else and the more calories will keep us alive when we, but that was 10,000 years ago. So our brains are telling us to not do the hard thing to avoid discomfort. And the problem is here's the big problem. The problem is there's no way to avoid tough times. Shit's going to happen to us. Our businesses are going to fail. Our relationships are going to fail. We're going to run out of money. Our dog is going to get run over. Shit happens. And if we are not prepared, if we have not practiced, if we are not used to doing hard to going against our brain and tackling the uncomfortable, then when something bad happens, we may completely break. And so we practice piano. We practice cooking. We practice math. We got to practice hard. So hard is coming. Whether you like it or not. Challenge is a part of life. It's the deal there. No one gets out alive and no one gets out without facing tough time. You've got to do the tough things. My, our kids, my wife and I, not always aligned on this because a woman generally, I'm sure I'm going to get yelled at here, generally is going to be more protective. A husband generally is going to be a little more, Hey, let's toughen this child up. So there's usually some friction there, but, but generally we're aligned on this idea that, Hey, the kid can go out in the cold and should go out in the cold. The kids should swim across that. Obviously we'll put a light vest on. We're going to keep them safe, but we're going to, we're going to. Manufacture some adversity in a child's life. And we're going to teach the child and the family why we're doing it. We're going to have a purpose and a family plan, a mission statement. And if we do those things and the children see us living this way and living a healthy, hard, challenging outside our comfort zone life, then, then they're going to take that up hopefully when they grow up and then hopefully they're going to pass that on to their kids. But if we coddle the kids, like most of us do, and we hand them a 32 ounce sugary drink and an iPad. And we let them stay up late. We are not only furthering the problem, we're making it worse. We're making it worse because our forefathers, our, the generations preceding us, they had a ride by horseback and then they had cars that broke down and you had to change a tire and people had to find a quarter to put in a pay phone and they had to read a map. But now you don't have to do any of that stuff. And so if you don't manufacture adversity in your family's life, you're, you're making it worse, not better. Take steps to get comfortable with being uncomfortable. Take steps all day, every day. Every day. Speaking of challenges and your own experience, can you share what challenges you faced during the pandemic for managing and to stay resilient with your Spartan race? Pandemic was an absolute disaster for us. We got shut down across 45 countries. We completely ran out of money, not once, but 10 times. Had a tough time making payroll. I had the wall street journal head of bankruptcy section called us to do an article on us going out of business and not being able to pay our bills real bad. And we didn't quit and we could have quit and everybody would have said it was okay to quit. We could have tapped out. We could have avoided paying all our bills. We could have like, but we didn't quit. We had board of director meetings where I said to the board, I don't know if we're going to make it another week. I just don't know. But we didn't quit. You did it. We burned the boats. That proverbial saying from the ancient world where, where the men didn't want to fight. And so the leader burned the boat. So there was no way out. We had burned our boats. There was no way out. We had to survive. And then we had employees that were like, this is way too dangerous for me. I don't know if my job's going to be secure. I'm going to leave. So lots of talented people that we were depending on left us. And the vendors and the customers and a lot of the employees stayed with us. And here we are, we're going to be very profitable this year. And I would say, I would say the contributing factor, it was really just not quitting. And I guess in our lives, on our team's lives, we practice so much adversity and we preach it so much that we were able to live it. Joe, is that part of how you lost the $50 million? Was that a different story? The way we lost the money was we had already sold $50 million worth of tickets when the world ended and all those people wanted their money back. Oh, we couldn't afford. Yeah. We, they had already bought tickets for races that were coming that I couldn't execute. So we owed them 50 million. So I wanted to do an honorable thing. I offered everybody two tickets. I said, you could have two tickets when the world opens up in two weeks, but the world didn't open up for us for two years. Yeah. And when it finally opened up, I realized, oh my God, I gave away a hundred million dollars worth of tickets. So the first hundred million dollars in revenue we didn't get, which made, which compounded the problem, made it much worse, but again, we hung in, our customers hung with us, our vendors hung with us and it's really, it's an amazing miracle, I think a lot about Shackleton and his amazing story of being stuck in the ice for two years with his men and having to eat their dogs to survive. And I would tell my team every week, I, we got to eat the dogs, we got to survive. We're stuck in the ice. Yeah. And the fact that the customers hung around for two years is brand loyalty on the next level. We got about 50,000 tattoos, Spartan tattoos out there. We got another 50,000 Tough Mudder tattoos out there. So this is a real badge brand where these customers, they own the company. Yeah. Literally own the company. Literally. Yeah. Do you still participate in these events yourself? I do at a very slow pace, but I do. Okay. I get them done. I love them. I love getting outside. I love getting dirty. I love taking a cold shower. I hate it all, but you love it when you're done with it. Yeah, definitely. What advice can you give an individual who struggles to keep their new year's resolution? Every human struggles to keep their new year's resolution. Every human is optimized, as we said earlier, to not do the hard work. But if you have a date on the calendar, when a boxer or an MMA fighter puts a date on the calendar, they have to do the work in order to succeed at that event. So just by having a date on the calendar, just by saying on April 15, we're going to do this Spartan or Tough Mudder or trail race or whatever it may be, you're going to start going to bed early. You're going to start waking up early. You're going to put down the cookie. You're not going to drink the extra glass of wine. You're going to be a healthier person because you have a pending fight with yourself coming in two weeks, two months, two years, whatever it is. I love this. You're all about resilience and even your brand is all about resilience and your personal life and every everybody around you lives that. That's the way to do it. I studied ancient Sparta and the ancient Spartans believe there was no way to live that life that they were being asked to live unless they surrounded themselves with like-minded people and they optimize their environment for living that life. So if you want to be healthy, you're going to, you're going to be more likely to be healthy if you're living next to a green juice store above a gym than you are, if you're living next to a cookie factory, right? So you've got to, you've got to create an environment that makes it easier to live the way you want to live. Hmm. Yeah, definitely. So how do you approach nutrition in your daily life? My, my typical day is 5 AM. Wake up, jump in the cold water, go get a sweat on, come back. I'm not eating until 10, sometime between 10 and 12 AM. I'm working all day, trying to get a light second workout in just something. Get to bed early, rinse and repeat, do it all again. So you incorporate intermittent fasting in there too? I've always tried to give my stomach a break and not just be consuming food nonstop, my mom was into all this stuff in the seventies. So I was awoken to this style of living back in the 1970s when I was a little kid. I pushed back on it, but she was right. Everybody else was wrong. And so yes, more salad, less eating windows, more cold water. That's just the way I was raised. Yeah. I love cold showers as well. I started back in 2018 through a recommendation, but it's amazing. Yeah. Can you share anything else on how you built a hundred million dollar brand that could help someone? Yeah. I would say my son asked me last night, he's got a little brand called Iron Threads. He's selling used wrestling, used wrestling. He's 16 and it's awesome. I didn't push him into it. He just did it. That's wicked. He's selling gear every day. And he said, dad, how do you advertise? And I said, you got to, you could advertise where you just want to advertise to make a sale today. Or you could advertise to build a brand. I've always taken an approach that we want to build a brand. We want to build a brand for ourselves. We want to build a brand for a company. I was taught at a young age, you've got to feed your business until your business can feed you. We're lucky at this incredible 2,500 year old brand that we get to build on top of, right? This mindset, this ethos that means so much and we live it. We live it. We don't, we're not doing one thing and telling everybody something else. We live the way we ask people to live. We, your product, the product. Yeah. And it's a, it's a tough, very tough product that we sell. It's asking you to be disciplined and committed and do the hard work. And quite honestly, if I was selling two minute abs that came with a chocolate cake, that would be a much easier sell. Then, Hey, you're going to do a lot of burpees. You're going to make a lot of water. You're gonna need a lot of salad. You're gonna go to bed early and you're gonna have to work your ass off crawling under barbed wire. That's a tough thing to sell. Yeah. Very tough thing to sell, but, but it means something. It stands for something. It changes your life. It changes the way you feel. It's a tremendous global community that you get to be part of. And I leaned in really heavily with build the brand, stick to its principle, stick to its principles, spend. And now we survived COVID and probably because of all that work and we have a fairly substantial business. Congratulations on all that, Joe. It's incredible, very inspiring. It was an honor, obviously, to have you on the show to speak about this stuff. I heard that you helped a man go from 600 pounds to 265 pounds. Can you share how you helped him? Yeah, I had to move to the farm and I burned the boats. I took his keys and his wallet and he lived on our farm for 18 months. And during those 18 months, he ate a lot of salad. He walked a lot and he carried around a, he was a 20 pound sandbag and every day he lost one to three pounds. It was pretty incredible. Wow. As did he keep it off still? Kept a lot of it off. You can touch it all. He kept a lot of it off. That's inspiring for anybody that is at that weight. I was at 300 pounds. I went down to 150. Sorry, not 150. It never been 150. Now I'm 280, 290 for a while, consistent. Intermittent fasting has been helping a lot. What we're going to do is we're going to get you and all your friends tickets on me, no charge. And I promise you just the act of committing to that. Yeah. You're going to take weight off. You're going to get fitter. You're going to be more connected with your community. So it's on me. You can set up a little tent if you want. How many countries do you operate in? 45. Nice. Appreciate that, Joe. Thank you so much for that offer. My next question. Can you share what you learned while cleaning pools for mobsters? I learned some amazing things from the head of the banana organized crime family. He said, three things I want to teach you. He was letting me clean a swimming pool. He said, number one, on time is late. You say you're going to be here at 8 AM. You should be here at 7 45. Number two, you got to go above and beyond. If you're going to clean my pool, he said, I want you to straighten up my shed, straighten up the lawn furniture, clean the windows, even though you're not getting paid for that. If you do that, it'll be recognized and rewarded later. And then number three, he said, don't ever ask for money. You'll get paid if you do a good job. And I thought that third one was strange, but I employed those tactics for most of my life. And it's really helped me in a tremendous way to build a business. It's been really an unbelievable journey and I attribute it to those things. Do more for what you get paid for. A hundred percent. I love that. Thank you for sharing. So how do you raise your children in a society where people often cut corners to achieve success? Listen, just like raising a dog, people are going to hate hearing that. You've got to correct. You've got to correct, immediately correct when you see something that is happening that is not optimal. So if they cut corners, if they quit, if they compromise, you've got to correct that right away and you've always got to be doing hard stuff with them. If they know they can do hard stuff and that it's not going to kill them, they can then do and make the hard decisions that are more uncomfortable. They can hold to standards because they know that, you know what, I've been in cold water every morning. I've done 300 burpees. I've run 10 miles. I could certainly do whatever that thing is that they're being asked to do. Yeah, it's so true. That's so true. That is nice. Thank you. Your voice matters. Do you think Andrew Tate is a good role model for self-improvement? Look, I think you could find good in everybody, right? And so I think if you find, look, I took good from an organized crime boss. I learned things. That's true. So take a look at everybody's got something they can teach you. I like, I like Bruce Lee's motto of take the good, discard the bad. He took a little bit from here and a little bit from there. And, and you end up building a life that works for you. So I hear some of his stuff. I'm not a big social media follower of people. I just have a lot going on in my own life, but I hear some of his stuff and there's some things I hear and I'm like, doesn't sound too illogical to me. Yeah, it's just some things I hear that people are hating on is that they might encourage men to be misogynist and your values are different. So I wanted to hear from your perception. Yeah, I don't know. There was a great saying in ancient Sparta that the women would say, the only reason these Spartan men exist is because we gave birth to them. And my mom was a warrior. I never looked at gender as weakness or a strength. I just look for, I just look for hardworking people. Yeah, I agree. So for your success, it comes down to from what I see is resilience. That's the top of the list. Correct? Correct. Yeah. And if you could give advice to someone today that's listening or watching that may not believe that self-improvement is important because they're in the grind. They're going about it day by day. What message would you send them to look into self-improvement that could potentially change their life and the people that they love and care for? The number one thing I would tell everybody is sign up for something hard. And it's not self-serving because if you need a free race, just send out an email to me, joetspartan.com. I'm happy to give anybody a free event. And just as I said earlier, it's just signing up. The event is going to force you into a more disciplined life. Just that act does it. So love it. So that's, you talk about it. We could listen to podcasts. We could read books. We can go to conferences. None of it. And I have a podcast and I've written books. None of it matters until you get a date on the calendar. It's all just nonsense. Talk, just talk. Yeah. It's like they say, action is true wisdom. Take that step, move forward, and you will see what happens in your life. I love it, Joe. I appreciate you, man. It was so great talking to you. Your energy is great. I wish you all the success and growth, continue to change your lives. Turn that six countries. I think you said multiply that by two in the coming years. And we're looking forward to meeting you in person one day. I'd love to meet you and take me up on that event. I will. Thanks, Joe. You're awesome. Take care. Thank you, sir. All right. You too. Bye.