Muscle for Life with Mike Matthews - Charlie Engle on Lessons Learned Beating Addiction, Running the Sahara, Going to Prison, and More

Episode Date: October 19, 2018

Charlie Engle has had a lot of ups and downs in his life: - He ran 300 miles straight, without a break. - He ran across the Sahara desert. - He almost died from a cocaine binge. - He was a producer of a top-rated T.V. show. - He served 16 months in federal prison for a crime he didn’t commit. And as you can imagine, he also has a lot of hard-won lessons and wisdom to share that we can all benefit from, which is what this interview is all about. If nothing else, maybe by the end you’ll have a few things to remind yourself of the next time you’re tempted to tell yourself that you “can’t,” because let’s face it—we almost always can. For instance, I loved how Charlie dealt with being sent to prison for mailing loan documents that, unbeknownst to him, had been illegally altered by his mortgage broker, which he proved in court. Yes, Charlie beat the IRS’s claim that he forged documents and proved that it was in fact his mortgage broker and he had no idea, but was still sent to prison because he mailed the fraudulent documents to the bank. #justice Anyway, as you’ll hear in the interview, Charlie made the absolute most of the experience and by the end, was saying a lot of sad goodbyes upon his release. Oh and I have to also give a big shout-out to Spartan for inviting me to their world championship to interview Charlie, who’s working on a very cool project with them that you’ll learn more about in this episode. 6:43 - What was the most extreme thing you did before running across the Sahara Desert? 9:31 - How did you get an academy winning crew to create your film? 12:05 - Why did you run across the Sahara Desert? 14:06 - What lessons have sobriety taught you? 15:36 - How did you become comfortable with discomfort? 32:45 - Have you recorded an audio book before? 40:00 - Do you still have inertia when you begin a project? 41:26 - Why is your project called 5.8? 58:44 - Why was your tax return such a mystery to the IRS agent? 1:00:06 - Did you overstate your income on your home loan? 1:03:14 - Have you read Meditations by Marcus Aurelius? 1:07:34 - What plans did you have after prison? 1:13:13 - Did you get a prison tattoo? 1:14:41 - Are prisons privately owned? 1:17:15 - What's next for you? Want to get my best advice on how to gain muscle and strength and lose fat faster? Sign up for my free newsletter! Click here: https://www.muscleforlife.com/signup/

Because if you want to actually do things, accomplish things, make a difference in the world, whatever shape that takes, I have this mantra of mine, to keep it, you have to give it away. Thank you. Продолжение следует... Thank you. Продолжение следует... So so This is where I would normally plug a sponsor to pay the bills, but I'm not big on promoting stuff that I don't personally use and believe in. So instead, I'm just going to quickly tell you about something of mine, specifically my 100% natural fat loss supplement Phoenix. It has sold over a hundred thousand bottles in the last several years, and it helps you lose fat faster in three ways. One, it increases your metabolic rate to it amplifies the power of fat burning chemicals produced by your body. And three, it increases the feeling of fullness from food. In short,

it speeds up your metabolism, it helps your body burn fat more efficiently, and it helps you control hunger and cravings and maintain high energy levels. Phoenix also contains no artificial food dyes, fillers, or other unnecessary junk. And all that is why it has over 700 reviews on Amazon with a four-star average

and another 250 reviews on my website with a four and a half star average. So if you want to burn more fat every day and have an easier time sticking to your diet without having to pump yourself full of harsh stimulants or potentially harmful chemicals, then you want to head over to www.legionathletics.com and pick up a bottle of Phoenix today. And just to show how much I appreciate my podcast peeps, use the coupon code podcast at checkout, and you will save 10% on your entire order. And lastly, you should also know that I have a very simple 100% money back guarantee that works like this. You either love my stuff or you get your money back, period. You don't have to return the products. You don't have to fill out forms.

You don't have to jump through any other hoops or go through any other shenanigans. So you really can't lose here. Head over to www.lesionathletics.com now, place your order and see for yourself why my supplements have thousands of rave reviews all over the internet. And if for whatever reason, they're just not for you, contact us and we will give you a full refund on the spot. Alrighty, that is enough shameless plugging for now at least. Let's get to the show. Charlie, thank you for coming on the show incredibly happy to be here so it's my pleasure great so um tell us a bit about yourself i mean obviously i did my prep but for

the people listening and you know which quickly gets to you ran this across the sahara desert uh which is insane yeah before that though i was a drunk so okay so well, did that help? No, I like that. I like to start off with, no. And I mean, it is a, what's interesting about the other way I said it is that it is a, it's a direct line, you know, from one to the other, but we'll, we'll work it backwards. So I did this, you know, I had this idea as a runner to try to become the first person ever to run all the way across the Sahara desert. And how far is that? Who knew Africa was so big? It was like 4,600 miles, it turned out. It seemed like a good idea at the time, like so many things. But the run itself was this adventure

that in a way became a real linchpin for my life in a lot of ways. But I began to tell people that I was going to be the first person to run all the way across the Sahara. And I had done enough things in the running and athletic world where people weren't going to just completely dismiss it because while it was outlandish, it wasn't like completely out of the question yet. What I found was the most extreme thing you had done. Yeah. So there was, there was a, there was a lot of, I'd run, you know, 300 miles at one time. I had, there was a race called the eco challenge adventure racing years ago, which was Mark Burnett's first big production

before he created, you know, survivor and apprentice Apprentice. So, and those were like 10-day suffer fests. So, they were 10 days of expedition running and biking and paddling and navigating and orienteering. And there were team events. So, I always say that that's kind of where I learned once I got sober, which talk about that in a minute, but once I got sober, that's where I really learned how to suffer was in adventure racing. So when I had this idea to run across the Sahara, people did say though, I mean, to a person, close friends, strangers, anybody I was willing to tell, which was pretty much everybody, because I have a strong belief that saying things out loud gives them a much greater power quotient in your life. Yeah, I think it's an individual component. There's some research that shows the opposite, that in some people, if they talk about their goals too much, it gives

them basically a false sense of satisfaction, especially if people are, you know, praising them for something they say they're going to do. Oh, right. So they can kind of shortcut the process of doing it. But then there's research that in some people committing to it, some things publicly can increase stick-to-itiveness. So I guess it kind of depends. Use an individual.

In reality, of course, if you don't ever go do it, then you're, as my British friend would say, then you're just a wanker. Yeah. And, you know, you got to sooner or later you got to. Yeah, it's true. You only get so much praise until. Right. Then you become the guy that always talks about stuff and never does it, you know, or the girl.

And so what I found, though, was this interesting dynamic. And I think it's that I felt to myself like every time someone said that's impossible, you know, I did feel my heels digging in. I mean, almost like a physical thing. And I realized the power, like I actually began to look forward to telling people so they could say, you know, look, it's great. And I'm sure you're a good runner and all that, but that's just not possible. You know, there's too, it's too hot. You can't get resupplied. I mean, all the practical and rational reasons that this can't happen. And I did find that I let them, you know, I let them take possession of the impossibility of it. And I took full sole ownership of what was possible.

And it really made a big difference. And I continued to tell the story. And I think that's a lot of it because it took a lot of money. It took a lot of effort. Ultimately, I had an Academy Award winning director get on board, James Mall, and then Matt Damon comes on board to produce the project. How did they hear about it? Yeah. So James Mall, I was working as a television producer for a show called Extreme Makeover Home Edition. So for many years, and I started on the pilot on that show. I think my wife likes that show. Oh my God. It was an amazing, you can admit to liking it. It's okay. I actually, the only reason I say that is because she, we don't watch too much. If we watch any TV together, it's usually like a movie. It hasn't been on for a few years now.

But she'll tell me sometimes that it's the- It was the number one- HGTV. Absolutely. It was the number one show on TV for a few years. I would admit to that. I would admit to keeping up with the Kardashians. And it was a good show. Yeah, yeah.

It was a good show. We weren't all about the personality drama. There was some of that. But it really was about taking a deserving family and building them a house. And so it was cool to work on there. So because of that, though, I was around Hollywood. I'm using air quotes for those people listening, you know, people, and a friend of mine who I swear, he just got sick of hearing me talk about the Sahara. I said, look, if you'll shut up about this, I think

I could get you a meeting with this guy, James Mall, who, and James had won the Academy Award for Best Documentary like just a couple of years earlier. It was a movie called The Last Days. And it was literally about the last days of a group of Hungarian Jews at the end of World War II. And they were in the Holocaust and part. And so clearly this like really heavy, but heavy on storytelling. And so what I liked about James was, in my view, I didn't want to be part of a movie that was, because who wants to see me run 50 miles a day? The numbers sound impressive and whatever, but really. Yeah, it's not that dramatic.

Oh, there he is again. Hey, there he is again. I feel like when people want to get a view into my life, how does Mike Matthews live? I'm like, it's very boring, actually. Yeah. I wake up at 5 30 every day right i don't do very all i do is i sit in my cave and work you know it's not that exciting yeah they want this and so so i james said i said james let's make a you know i want this to be a real

film i want it to be a film about sure we established that we're running and we're doing this thing but i want it to be about cultural exploration and I want it to be about the people. And Matt Damon and I co-founded this water nonprofit that we had no clue whether anything would actually come out of it. Today, that water nonprofit is called water.org and it's really the biggest nonprofit in the space. And Matt is still very much the face of it. And, you know, it all came out of this just crazy idea to run across the Sahara. And it is- Why the Sahara? It was a random thing. I had been doing a lot of racing. And so I will take a quick step back

into addiction and sobriety. I have a background, you know, for 10 years of my 20s, I really struggled with addiction. And it's not that unusual a story. There's a whole lot of extreme athletes that came from extreme addiction. And there's a personality aspect to it. There's an endorphin release desire aspect to it. There's a need to fill some, if you want to get really psychological, and the need to fill some missing part of me. And all those things are true to a certain degree. But ultimately, when I finally made a decision that I was going to die and my first son was born, and if I wanted to be around for his life, and then I had another son

a couple of years later, then I better get my shit together. And it needed to happen like right away. And as I was like to say, I had a choice between living and dying and I chose running and suffering. Yeah. Suffering. And, but, but kind of like, so I mentioned a minute ago that the like eco challenge taught me to suffer properly. Really addiction taught me to suffer. Like there's no suffering like doing the unexplainable, going on a, you know, you just get a raise at work or a job promotion or some event and you go on a four-day binge and piss away your money and ruin relationships. And like nobody would choose to live that way because it's a horrible, awful existence. So once I finally got out of that life, what I did realize though is the greatest

lessons that I learned were from addiction and were from, and to be more specific, the suffering part of it, which most of it was suffering. But I was able to take that and transform it into action where it came to running an adventure. And what is that lesson exactly? Yeah, well, you know what? The lesson is that you have to do things in order to learn lessons. And there's, I mean, that sounds again, almost cliche and like I'm being flippant. But this idea that sitting on your sofa watching television or playing video games or whatever you might be doing is going to somehow enlighten you in some way is foolish, of course. And I don't think many people think that. They may be just not interested, though, in the kind of personal growth that can really only come

from putting yourself into, and when I say risky, you know. Uncomfortable. Yeah, uncomfortable at least, right. And so, you know, one of the things I found that I was really good at, and I am still good at today, and my wife, we've been married five years, second marriage, said to me right after we met, she said, you know, she heard my story the way you do when you're dating someone early and you're trying to be honest, but you're putting the best face on us.

You know, it's all the dance, right? And she's like, man, you are really good at getting through stuff. Like, you know how to survive and get through. Do you have even the smallest clue how to just actually be happy? Like when there are no problems? Like I really, and I looked at it, I said, no, I have no clue. Maybe you could teach me because like, I'm comfortable with discomfort and it's still like a problem today. Like I, yeah, well, it's not that I purposely go out and like, you know, I don't know, whatever, have a car accident or overdraw my checking account. Like I'm not, I'm not trying to create chaos, but I am trying to do things. My life would in theory be easier if I took the nine to five sales job where I could just

make a good living and come home to my wife every night and run the occasional marathon on the weekend and whatever. Like if I had that life and there are times when my currently chaotic life feels so out of control that I look at that and I'm like, man, I'd like to try that. And yet. I think of, did you read the book Principles by Ray Dalio? No, I know, I know the book. I know the short version of the book, but yeah. He talks about in there, and I agree with him, that you can basically, you have two ends of a spectrum. You have save your life or make a difference, basically, or achieve what's at the top of Maslow's Pyramid. What's the term itself?

Oh, brain's not working right now. But anyways, the point is, you can choose if you really want to save her life. That's what we're talking about. If you have the job, you make the money, and you save her life. And there's something to be said for that. And I actually agree with Dalio's take is you have to really be honest with yourself as an individual. If that's really what you want to do is just save her life, as long as you know that these things are mutually exclusive, you're not going to be, you're not going to make a big impact in the world just because it takes too much time. It takes too much work and you have to continually deal with a lot of burden and a lot of stress.

It's just the way it is. So many people get married. Maybe you can stop at one point, maybe because he talks about it, but maybe when you're, you know, at some point you can be like, all right, now I'm changing. Now I'm going over to the same. Okay. And the best example of that is what? Retirement, right? I'm going to wait until I'm 65 before I actually go out and live the way that I really want to live. I mean, what kind of freaking life is that? I mean, I just do not get that. But in your case, do you think at some point you're going to be like, okay, I'm actually going to, I'm going to swing in the other direction a little bit. When I'm living under a bridge, I'm actually going to swing in the other direction a little bit. When I'm living under a bridge, you know, maybe.

Yeah. Yeah, but I mean. Because I can relate because I'm very much the same way. I just always want to keep going. I don't know. I don't want to stop. I just don't. No.

And it's not, you know, savor to me is such a, you know, it's such a scary, boring. You know, yes, there are times when I need to savor something because I am capable of being in the middle or at the end of a big project, even running across the frigging Sahara Desert, and I'm already thinking about what I'm doing next. And I have this self-conversation of, how about trying to be present, dude? How about trying to just be right here, feel this? You probably get the same thing with writing, right? Absolutely. Yeah, I'm the same way.

Oh, my gosh. Once you're toward the end of the project, I'm like, I just want to get this done and start on the next thing. Well, first of all, because I already hate what I wrote. I mean, not really, but it's just once I read my own – In a couple of years, you'll hate what you wrote. That's how it is with me. I've only written one book. I've written a it is with me. I've only written one book.

I've written a lot of articles, but I've only written one book, and it's a memoir. So it is my story. So I commonly point out to myself that it's not like I can be wrong. It's my story. I get to tell it the way I want to tell it. I wrote 700 pages for a 300-page memoir because I wasn't capable of self-editing. I found out that for me, I had to get it all out. Like if I was going to tell a story of the Sahara Desert, like that story in a draft form was a hundred freaking pages long. And while I'm not sure that the Sahara couldn't

have been its entire, its own entire book, But that would be for the reader who wants to read about that. So the memoir, of course, is an all-encompassing thing. But I also, even in that, I tried to move the story along. So sobriety, I don't want to give away too much, but probably listeners can tell I am sober today and have been for over 26 years. So in my book, I don't drag people through 200 pages of a drunk-a-log, you know, and all the shit that I messed up and whatever. They can read like a Tucker Max book for that. Exactly, which is highly entertaining. But you get the idea for 60 pages of it. You're like, wow, that guy, I'm glad I didn't, you know, run into him in a bar, you know, or on

the road. You know, it's this idea of, you mentioned books, and I'm sorry to be so rambling and all over, but I love this kind of free form. I'm reading a book right now called Anti-Fragile. Tele-ethnicity. Exactly. What a mind-blowing, I mean, it's one of the first books I've read in a while that really makes me feel stupid sometimes. Like I have to, a friend of mine

recommended it and he said, I know you like to listen to books on tape or on, you know, while you're running. Don't do that with this one. Buy the book because frankly, if you're listening to it, you're not going to get it. Yeah. I stopped listening to audio books. Like I would listen to them. I prefer to read, I prefer to read a hard copy book, but digital is too convenient and your highlights and your notes are, you can pull them all out. It's very easy, right? No doubt. And so I, what I would do is I would, I would supplement the, I read first thing in the morning, then at night I would supplement that with in the car. But I stopped for the reason of just like, yeah, cause I mean, I was like me just being OCD. So if I'm, if I'm hearing something and I like that,

or I want to make a highlight or a note, pause it, wait for a red light, flip over the Kindle. You know what I mean? So, but I actually got through probably an extra 20 pages a day. It was annoying, but it produced. Now I listen to lectures and stuff. Yeah, exactly. You know what I listen to? I listen to Ron Chernow books if I'm going to listen to something. Ron Chernow is the guy. Right, because the thing is, Washington is 45 hours of listening. And quite frankly, I'm not going to read that book. It's too dense. It's whatever. But listening to it on a six-hour run,

I actually don't have to pay so close attention to every single detail. That's interesting. So you prefer that over music, huh? I can't listen. You know, music, A, I get too, unless I've really scripted out the right kind of music, I'm too manipulated by the tempo of the music.

And it actually does exhaust me at some point. I can remain engaged with the book, whereas I will lose interest in the music. So I mix it up sometimes. But back to, so did you read Anti-Fragile? I haven't read Anti-Fragile. Well, the idea, you probably know behind it, is really this. And I think, again, that maybe listeners will enjoy this idea because this is what I've taken from it. I'm only a few chapters in even right now. Is this idea of being comfortable with chaos and randomness? Like when you get through something hard, when you get through a difficult situation, either by your own choosing, like something you've self-inflicted, like doing a frigging ultra obstacle course race, right?

That's self-inflicted. I don't think anybody's here with a gun to their head. You're paying for it. Right, you're actually paying to be part of this pain. And then there's things like going to prison or having a disease or whatever might happen. Life. Yeah, you didn't choose a lot of these things. But if you can embrace whatever is happening with this idea

that just surviving, I always picture like holding, white knuckling, like holding onto the chair and just trying to get through it. If that's what you do and that's all you do, then ultimately at the end of whatever you've gotten through, you're're essentially your goal is to be the same person you were before it started like that's what you're trying to do you're trying to survive it you're trying to just get through it if you can find a way to take it to that next level and say and let really open your heart and say what am I gonna learn from this like what can I learn? How can I not just get through it? How can I actually thrive through it and get to the other side of it and

be and feel like I learned, not that I learned some lesson, like some new nutrition. Tweet tip. Right, right. It's about, am I changed as a person? And I think that that's what this book, you know, I'm still just getting into it, but I think that that's where a lot of it comes from and that we're, that's the premise. Yeah. People want to like have perfect experiences. Well, what the hell does that mean? Perfect lives. I see a lot of that where I live. Oh my God. Well, and we know, you know, behind their closed doors, they got the same crap that you're dealing with, that we're all dealing with. And because if you want to actually do things, accomplish things, make a difference in the world, whatever, you know, shape that takes. I have this this mantra of mine to, you know, to keep it, you have to give it away.

you have to give it away. And so whatever you're good at, whatever I'm good at, and what I'm good at is I've been sober a really long time and I am actually good at sobriety. I understand in myself where it comes from, why I feel the way I feel sometimes around it, except the fact that I may not have all the answers. There are times when I need to not overthink it. I'm having a terrible day. Even after 26 years, what I'd like to go do is go do a line and drink a beer. I mean, there's a part of me that even after all these years, that addict is still in there going,

yeah, let's go do that. But I don't. I say to myself, instead of denying even, I'm like, okay, let's just, let's shelve that thought until tomorrow. Well, I go to bed and I get a decent night's sleep and I wake up in the morning. I'm like, what the hell was I thinking? Like, I'm going for a run. This is a beautiful day.

Yeah. Let's go get busy. You know, I think of talking about Chernow. I read his biography of Rockefeller, right? Oh, yeah. And Rockefeller, do you remember when he was saying that he never, so he was a teetotaler, he didn't drink, right? Right. But he had said, I'm paraphrasing, or exactly, basically, he never became an alcoholic because he never took the first drink, basically.

Yeah. like, you know, he was obviously an interesting person, but he lived very strictly according to, you know, Christian morals in his personal life. And he was merciless in business, which was an interesting dichotomy. But I think of that. And actually, I think of that myself. I've never, I don't drink. I've actually never even been drunk, which is strange. My wife either. So I look at her like she's an alien. And so people ask me like, oh, why? Right. And I'm like, I don't know. I just never really got into it. And then, you know, the more I got around it as I got older, it just seemed like one. It's not a habit worth taking up, I think. Dude, but you know why, though? You're a normal person

where at least in that regard, you may not be normal in lots of other ways. But I like my wife is a great example. She has a glass of wine. If she has a second glass of wine, usually by about halfway through that, she's kind of going, eh, you know, I've kind of had enough. Like we need to go to a restaurant where she can order one and a half glasses because that's like, yeah, because I don't want to pay the $12 for the second glass. I'm like, you're not going to leave that, are you? Like as an alcoholic, I'm like, well, what is wrong with this picture? But interestingly, like Rockefeller, I would argue that he probably was an alcoholic. Because you can be an alcoholic and not drink.

Because a normal person doesn't actually have to go to great effort to control their behavior. Right. It's no skin off my wife's teeth. She doesn't have to control. Yeah, sure. All of a sudden, she's going to have two behavior. Right. It's no skin off my wife's teeth to, she doesn't have to control. Yeah, sure. Like all of a sudden she's gonna have two bottles of wine. Yeah, it's a switch, it's all found, done, whatever.

Whereas with me, I would have to control it like immensely. You know, I still get the question regularly, you know, couldn't you just have a beer? I'm like, yeah, I absolutely could. Chances are like pretty much 100% I could have one beer tonight and that would be it. I could probably do it again tomorrow night. I might do that for a year, but the day would come. A hundred percent, no doubt about it, the day would come that I would not just have

one beer, I'd have a hundred. And the worst part about it though, is that in the meantime, I'm torturing myself every day with the thought of having the second beer or the third beer or whatever. Like it's such a, it's so much easier to just not do it. Yeah. If I could take a pill right now and like, and, and not be an alcoholic anymore and drink like a normal person, no way in hell would I ever consider it. You know, early, and this is actually,

I'm answering a question you didn't ask me, but I ran like an addict. When I finally got sober at 29 years old, I ran like, every time I went out that door, I ran as hard as I possibly could every single time because I wanted to beat the addict out of me. Like if I could have taken a knife and just sliced it out, I would have. Like I thought that that was poison. That was like cancer.

If I could just get rid of this, you know, then I'd feel like a normal person. That was like the self-mortification. What is the whip on the, you know, the silice belt. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And self, what do they call it? Flagellation. So, although I always made fart jokes when somebody said that. Self-flagellation. Because I clearly didn't understand what was going on. How would you fart on yourself? Maybe sometimes that's actually a form of self-punishment. Yeah, and I did. I felt badly

enough about myself and the kind of person I was that it was a form of punishment. And it was also a form of absolution at the same time. And anyway, cut to the chase after like three years of that and running like 30 marathons. And because clearly I wasn't an addict, right? I ran 30 marathons in the first three years. I clearly had addiction under control. I finally realized, though, that my addictive nature and that part of me was the best part of me. And then, in fact, if I was not an addict with those character traits and flaws,

that I probably would be the guy sitting on the sofa with the game controller or the remote control in my hand, you know, eating chips and watching TV. Yeah. Not running the set. It makes me want to do things. And where I have to try to find balance is way overrated in my opinion. I'm not seeking balance. Yeah. But I do need to, I need to be aware. You know, my wife looks at me every once in a while and I see the look when I say, I'm going to go do this race this weekend or I'm going to go do that thing. She'll look at me like, really? Like you've been gone like five weeks in a row or whatever doing this.

And so that's like I lose sight of the personal parts of my life sometime and how I do need to just like be. If I'm moving, I don't have to think too hard. I don't have to like I'm busy. don't have to like, I'm busy. I'm doing stuff. I'm active and it's all for this great purpose, whatever the hell that is. And so the thing that I still struggle with is finding a way to just like calm down. Yeah, and I can relate to that.

And be. That's the same. I've been in that place with my wife a number of times where she's like, But what if I become irrelevant this week? Like if I don't do something. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, again, I guess I've just tried to, I've just tried to build in enough and take, take that talking about work life balance again. I, yeah, I don't think there's any, I think that's more of a, that's a mirage more anything else. I think that for what you're

talking about to do things that, that, that matter things that matter, if you think on a big scale, it means, yeah, your life's going to have to go way out of balance. But this is just me speaking from my experience. The only thing that has seemed to help is then swinging it back the other way occasionally and letting it go out of balance in the other direction. And so for me, I don't have much of a social life. So that is what it is. I don't care about that. I don't care about hanging out with friends or anything. I work with my friends and that's about it. So for me, it's like, cool, my family and swing it that way and make sure that I put enough there. But I know exactly what you mean. Well, and you know, and she, and if I fucked it up too much, my wife would

probably leave me one day. Yeah. Well, no doubt. No doubt. Well, I mean, you, you need to be present to actually have a relationship. And I, and I am reminded of that, you know, regularly. And I am reminded of that regularly. And my wife is a very, she's a scientist and an amazing intellect. And she helps keep me, I hate the word grounded because I'm not grounded at all. And she doesn't want me to be. She likes that part of me, but she also reminds me every once in a while that I occasionally make myself so busy that I don't have time to actually pay attention to whether I'm doing something that's actually useful. I love, like even coming here to Tahoe, I actually love the pod fest and you probably do too because you get to do a number of these in a day and hopefully have dynamic conversations that are different with

different people and get it done because I don't like to say no to things. So out there in this sort of real world, you know, I don't care if somebody has, you know, 12 downloads a week or 12 million. I normally say yes, because I figure if someone has sought me out, I owe them the respect to, you know respect to talk to them. But I love coming to this because it gives me the chance, almost like an event, to just run an ultra marathon today. Ultra podcast. Ultra podcast, yeah. And I love this conversation because this is different than anything I've done today or that I normally do.

This is different than anything I've done today or that I normally do. Hey, quickly, before we carry on, if you are liking my podcast, would you please help spread the word about it? Because no amount of marketing or advertising gimmicks can match the power of word of mouth. So if you are enjoying this episode and you think of someone else who might enjoy it as well, please do tell them about it. It really helps me. And if you are going to post about it on social media, definitely tag me so I can say thank you. You can find me on Instagram at Muscle for Life Fitness, Twitter at Muscle for Life, and Facebook at Muscle for Life Fitness. Have you recorded an audio book before? Did you record an audio book? Yeah. So my book, I had to audition to read it, but yeah. So Simon and Schuster published my

memoir. I mean, the book has done really well and I've sold a ton of audio books, interestingly, because runners do like to listen to books when they run. And it's called Running Man, very positively reviewed all over the place, including in the New York Times. And so the book has done really well, but it was funny. I got a phone call. I was actually in Poland for a wedding, strangely. I got a call, like an urgent call from the publisher saying, we want to do an audio book, but we need to know if you're capable of doing it can you audition yeah so i literally had to get my phone i mean some authors yeah it doesn't work

yeah it doesn't work and right she doesn't just don't know i have a i have an odd voice or at least i'm told and like dogs in the next county right now can hear me like they're like you know it carries over everybody else's voice. I drown people out. My wife has a very loud voice, too. So we're very unpopular when we go to restaurants and things like that. Loudness works for audiobooks. Yeah, it does. So I read for like six days, for six hours a day, you know, and it was fantastic.

I loved doing it in this little studio in Asheville, North Carolina. So you liked it. I hated it. I just got done recording. I'm releasing third editions of two of my more popular books. And we did, it was probably about 80 hours in the chair. Wow. In like three weeks.

Actually, I haven't done work in a long time that I actually, I got to that point where I'm like, I fucking hate this. By the end of the, when we got toward the end of the audio book, I was like, I truly hate this. I can't wait for this to be over. Like, I really hate this. I'm not, I fucking hate this. By the end of the, when we got toward the end of the audiobook, I was like, I truly hate this. I can't wait for this to be over. Like, I really hate this. I'm not just saying I hate it. Yeah, no.

I was like, I almost physically feel this now. You know what I mean? I actually enjoyed it. I mean, I probably would get over it after 80 hours, that's for sure. I mean, not 80 hours of recording, but that's what it took. Because it also, it served, for me at least, as a final draft as well. Because inevitably, I'm reading, I'm like,'m like I don't like that hold on and I would edit it in my phone because you know the manuscript I'm working through in Google Docs so I can do that and that just made it added time and I do

some writers you know workshops and I'm not a my wife gives me a hard time when I say I'm not a professional writer I'm not a professional writer only because it's not my main way that I try to make a living. I think I could do a lot more of it if I chose to, but I can't do everything. And so whatever. But I tell other writers all the time who are trying, especially young writers who want to break in and start writing articles, I'm like, if you sit down and you read it out loud to someone else, don't just read it to yourself, read it out loud to somebody else. And like,

if you're embarrassed by your own language or, you know, it's not your voice and you're like overwriting, you know, one of the, I, my wife gives me the best compliment she ever gave me was that I have an amazing vocabulary. And because she's the smartest person I've ever known. And I'm a college dropout. You know, I drank my way through college and couldn't get through it. And I do. It's because I love to read.

I've been a voracious reader my whole life. And so I know a lot of really big words. But if you read my book, there's not like two of them in there, you know, because I wonder. But that's the essence of good writing. Yeah, it's a plain spoken, I write exactly the way you're hearing me talk. It's exactly the way I write, you know, without as many run-on sentences. That's my voice. And so I learned, I did learn, just as you said, you know, if you read it out loud to somebody, if you kind of overwrote a paragraph, you can feel it when you say it out loud. The next level of that is having somebody

read it to you because then you see their reactions. Oh yeah. Yeah. If they can't read it to you, if they can't get the nuance right. Or if they stumble on something and that's all. I didn't mean to go that far, but reading it yourself, yes, is that's a great tip for just improving your writing. I do a lot of speaking too. So I do get the, sometimes the unfortunate opportunity to practice either in front of my wife or other people. And I know if I'm saying something that's either just disingenuous or I'm trying so hard to, I mean, I'm an anecdotal speaker and writer. I'm not a prescriptive person in general. I'm not an

advice giver. I'm not the person saying, you know, if you want to do this, here's what you should do. I would say, if you want to do this that I did, here's what I did. Here's how I did it. And if there's something useful there for you, then great. And if somebody presses me and says, hey, can you help me with a program to run a marathon or whatever, then sure, I'll sit down with that person and I'll actually tell them what to do. But in general, I don't like doing that. But I like to tell them that they, you know, writing is a muscle. And if you don't flex it, if you don't sit down to write regularly, or however you might do your writing, then stand up to write. Regularly. Yeah. If you want to have any hope, yeah, you have to write regularly or however you might do your writing, then stand up to write.

Yeah. If you want to have any hope, yeah, you have to write regularly. And it's amazing how much better you get. Absolutely. You know, if you're doing it on a daily basis. Yeah. I mean, I look back at stuff. So I've written between books and articles, I've probably written a million and a half words. And I look back at stuff I wrote. So the second editions of these books that I'm updating, I wrote four years ago. And so I thought I could just go through, update things.

And I start going into it. And I'm like, I hate all this. I start reading from scratch. So what's different? I'm just a better writer now. Well, not just that, though. But I mean, the other thing is different. My standards are probably higher now.

Not a trick question. Well, your standards are, but you're different. Yeah, sure. So the story I always tell is about the Boston Marathon. I've run Boston like six times. But it's from 1980, mid-80s, all the way up till a few years ago, right? So it's spread over a long period of time. Well, guess what? The Boston course, it's exactly the same every single year. But those first couple of years, I saw like the ground, my watch, feet in front of me. I could not have told

you one thing about the course. By the time I did the last one, I high-f front of me. I could not have told you one thing about the course. By the time I did the last one, I high-fived every kid. I stopped in Wellesley and kissed girls. I ate every orange slice out of some five-year-old's hand who handed it to me. Like I had that experience. And Boston was no different. I was different. It's not that one was good and one was bad. They were just different. Yeah. I mean, I think this is a writing point. I think it's a life point. So you look, if you were to look back on stuff you wrote years ago and you probably, if you didn't feel at least I could do this better, that's probably a bad sign. If you are considering yourself an actual, yeah. But then I think in general, right, if you, if you look back at yourself,

and this is something that I try to remain cognizant of, look back at yourself even a year ago. And if you have, if you think exactly the same, if you can't find one thing that you think differently about or one way that you are different, I think that's also a bad sign. And I speak for myself personally. Reading helps a lot with that as well, but also having experiences. If you go back to what you're saying, just go out and do stuff. I think of Fight Club, right? Where they joke about who wants to die without scars? You know what I mean? He looks at the old, what did he say, like the 1955 car and it's still in perfect condition. What a shame, right?

Yeah. No, it's so true. And I mean, there's that old joke about, you know, leaving, who wants to leave a pretty corpse? You know, I want to be on my, I want to have, you know, used it all up. Do you still have, if you're gearing up for something, do you still have the initial, maybe it's just inertia. Like, do you feel that at all? And then once you get going, you're like, all right, I'm into this. Or is it for you? Like you make a decision to do something and you just don't feel any inertia and it's just go, go, go. You know, that's a great question. And I, I, it depends on the project. It depends on what I'm

doing. You know, again, you, you as a professional writer, among other things, are, it sounds like you have more discipline around writing than I do. And I am that guy as a writer who will clean the closet, wash my car. Like I will do, I will do everything that doesn't need to be done. Because those things, it's important. You know, I get those out of the way before I write. At least you're not going through the Hunter Thompson routine. Right. I mean, my joke is who could possibly write with dishes, clean dishes in the dishwasher?

Those need to be put away right now. That's all I can think of. Right. But with a project, and I'll even move ahead to this big project that I have coming up. It's called 5.8. that I have coming up. It's called 5.8. And this project is, you know, ultimately I'm gonna go from the lowest place on the planet, which is the Dead Sea, to the top of Mount Everest. Really? Human-powered. So it's the lowest to the highest. And of course it's a metaphor, but it's also, you know, in this case it's

going to be made into a real thing. The idea being that we all... Why 5.8? Maybe a dumb question. So 5.8. No, no. I set you up to ask me that question. Thank you. Okay, good. My ignorance made me look good. The journey point to point. No, no one would ever get this. And the point to point journey is probably about 4,500 miles. But in reality, and if I'm speaking to an audience, I always suck people in the same way. In reality, it's only 5.8 miles. It's 5.8 vertical miles from the shore of the Dead Sea to the top of Mount Everest. And the point that I'm really trying to make there too is that we, you and I, everybody else who's here in Lake Tahoe,

everybody on this planet lives within that 5.8 mile tiny sliver of space that covers the planet. Like we're all, we're in it together. I always tell people, you know, you, you may not want to be part of my, this project, but you're already in it because you live in that 5.8 miles. And I am, my wife is very very much she's a wildlife biologist, environmental scientist, you know, all kinds of fancy things. And we do care about the planet. We you know, we do a lot of things that I think are very positive. But I we try very hard not to take the negative approach of saying, you know, look at all the destruction, look at the people that are being harmed, because it goes just right over people and through people now. You see so much of it. So I take the viewpoint of looking at beauty and what my goal out of 5.8 and by going from one

point to the other is to show people what they're missing and why protecting the planet should matter. That's great. You know what I like about that, too, is it's easy to point out what's wrong in the world with people, anything. It's easy to sit on the sidelines and be a critic, right? There's a Bucky Fulminster quote where basically it says, I'm going to butcher it, but paraphrasing basically that point. Yeah, it's easy to criticize, but that doesn't work. Instead of just trying to tear things down, you have to offer what the next thing actually. It's much harder to be creative and offer a solution.

I think it's fine if you're going to point out what's wrong, if you can also offer a solution. And you could argue that there is a role for, there are the Voltaires out there there and that's what they do is they point out the absurdity. We live in a clown world. Yes, it's true. Run by clown people. And so there's a, I think there's a value to that. What you're talking about, I think is much more valuable. You're saying here's something I can do about it. And here's something all of us can do about it. I want to take people who are, and I hate to even use the language, but like climate change deniers or whatever, that's fine. Be that. I always make the analogy of if I get shot, like if I'm shot and I have a bullet wound, is the first priority who shot me or is the first priority to save my freaking life?

You know, I can tell you right now, I'm worried right now about living. You know, I want to get to the hospital. I want to get this figured out. And then maybe at some point I do care about, you know, how or why I got shot or whatever. But the plan of this is the same thing. We can spend countless hours arguing about why things are the way they are, or we can just agree to do something about it, you know, and to try to be, you know, have a big vision. But I also am very careful about saying that this is a personal quest for me and my why is not as satisfying to most people as maybe it should be or could be because I don't pretend to know why. When I ran across the Sahara

Desert, I ran 4,500 miles and I ran two marathons every single day for 111 consecutive days without taking a day off. Yes, I started a nonprofit with Matt Damon that today is the biggest water nonprofit in the world. Aren't you supposed to die? Right. Yeah, exactly. And, you know, and the thing is, all the questions that I thought I was going to answer by running across the Sahara Desert, I answered those probably by day 20. By the time I was done on day 111, I had so many more questions. And to think that it was like I was satisfied. You know what I was? I was sad.

I was bummed that it was over despite the hardship. And I was proud and relieved to have accomplished this thing with two teammates. You know, all three of us made it all the way across. And it was this big adventure. But I would tell people listening, you don't have to run the Sahara to have that experience. I mean, I've had my own version of that experience. Just getting through that project I just told you about, that was when I was done. It's when I was done with the audiobooks. I mean, I've had my own version of that experience. Just getting through that project I just told you about, that was when I was done. It was one of the audio books. I mean, it's a silly example, but it was a pain in the ass.

Starting a business, starting a family, doing a project like what you just described is your version of that same thing. And you go through the same emotional experience, and there's an emotional curve to it. And it's very fulfilling. If you don't say, fuck this, at least five times during a hard project, or even while raising your kids. I've got to tell you, if there's parents out there who they never hate their kids at least once in a while, and I don't mean really necessarily deep down hate them, but like, right. It's like, for God's sakes, please stop doing that, you know, whatever, or your job or even your, you know, your spouse. I mean, again, there's a difference between genuine hatred and just, if you don't hate some moments in your life and you, I always say that we spend 99% of our time basically preparing for the 1% when things go wrong.

And that's the whole point. Who we are is far more revealing or revealed in that 1% than it is in the other 99%. The 99% is pretty easy in general. It might be tedious. It might be a little mind-numbing. And you may hate the monotony of it, even if it's kind of exciting. There's still difficulty in that. You become desensitized to anything eventually.

Yeah, well, okay, so running across the Sahara Desert. I knew instinctively making this film. I'm like, I am not even remotely interested in making a film about running across the Sahara Desert, despite the fact that it's called Running the Sahara. Who the hell wants to see me run 50 miles a day for 100 and whatever straight days? Exactly. Hey, there he is again. Hey, there he is again. You know, it's like, that would be absolutely boring. What's interesting is the interpersonal dynamics along the way. And I even told my running partners, I'm like, if you're going to yell at me or something's going to happen and

you don't give the camera crew a two minute heads up to let them turn on the camera so that we can record it, then don't do this with me because I want it to be organic and real and ironically the film makes me look like a bit of a jackass not that I'm not a jackass but it it takes like every time I did yell at somebody or whatever it that's in there and so I'm kind of like the hero in the villain in the movie and that's okay with me because that's probably the you know, I'm probably 20% asshole and 80% pretty nice guy You know kind of in real life, too But I think that that's I want to share the struggle like if I'm gonna make a film if I'm gonna write a book

Or an article give a talk do a podcast Why would I want to put it's not like I'm like beating myself down and saying I'm a piece of shit, but if I don't share the struggle or if I like represent that I've got all the answers, that is just such nonsense. And I don't really believe that anybody has all the answers. They might potentially have all their answers. They certainly don't have all my answers and nor would I want them to. I need to do it myself. Yeah. You know, I think of in relation to suffering in particular, I forget who said this, but basically there's a writer said, and this was kind of just a quip about

writing in general, is the book could have been good if only the author were willing to suffer a bit more. And I think that there's something to be said for any level, anything. That's an awesome quote. Yeah, I like that. It's stuck in my brain. But that's life, I think. There's a lot to be said with the work that it takes to make a relationship work or raise good kids or to build a business.

It's not all suffering, no. But there are, if you're going to, and this is at least for me, I feel like I have high standards for myself. And I tend to hold other people up to those standards to some degree. It just is who I am. But that involves a certain level of suffering, not just with work, but in life. And so I think of that. And I think that, I mean, clearly you are comfortable with going through that, but I'm sure it's paid off in many ways. Well, there's also an art form and some of it sure comes with age and whatever, but I am good at apologizing. Because it's one thing, I do hold people to that same high standard. And like in the Sahara, I was out there running my ass off every single day.

And if someone didn't have the same passion that I did, and I don't even mean just, I was a little unfair. There was my fellow runners, but there were crew people out there. And yeah, they were maybe, maybe they did get a paycheck or whatever. But still, there was a limit to how much shit I could give them because they couldn't actually have the exact same passion for the project that I did. Yet I kind of expected that from them. And it wasn't until later that I, I did have to go make some amends. And I sort of realized I was- That's the quintessential CEO's problem. Yeah.

Finding people. Yeah. And you know what- That really get it. And people appreciate. They do appreciate most of the time. There's only a couple of people in my life that haven't forgiven me. And I actually recognize through therapy and through a lot of other stuff, that's actually on them. we had an argument, right? And I might've called them a name and they probably called me one. And maybe they're, you know, to me, that kind of stuff is so unimportant. And it's so, it is important that I acknowledge my responsibility in it, but I can't make somebody else do it. And if they all, if they want to write me out of their life and that's the, we're not friends anymore or whatever, then I don't know. It was probably an argument well spent then. I can move on to other people.

Well, how often do we worry about the people, you know, nine out of 10 people can like me and who do I focus on? Frigging number 10, right? I give all my energy to trying to make that person like me instead of giving my love and energy to the nine people who already do. And I think I do a better job these days because everybody is a critic. Back to our critic thing. If you write something, you film something, you say something and you put it out there in the world, somebody is going to criticize you. Somebody's going to call you a name. Somebody's going to tell you, you don't know what you're talking about or you're completely wrong or whatever. And if you take all of that personally all the time, it just plays right into that person actually needs your response. And I think I've done a pretty good

job through the years of not responding to negativity. I feel it sometimes and I try not to read reviews. That's funny. I do the opposite. I've read and replied to every single, I mean, I have, I don't know, 7,000 reviews on Amazon. I've literally read and replied to every one of them. And so if someone criticizes you, what do you say? In some cases, like I say, you know, a lot of one-star book reviews are kind of nonsensical.

And so in that case, it's just, I have copy and paste responses and then I'll call, oh, if they need to be customized, I'll customize them. Right. But it's, it's usually just long lines of, Hey, thanks for the feedback. I'm sorry you didn't like the book. Let me know if you have any questions, you need any help. And that's it for that. And then, and then I actually mean that I don't, I'm not, I'm not upset. That's not me being passive. It's actually not me being passive aggressive because I don't give a shit that this person thinks the book, this book was dumb, all the information on the internet for free. Yeah. Okay. That's what they think. Fine. Big deal. Uh, and, but I've actually gotten a lot

of good feedback from one star reviews again, tend to be not very valuable, but two and three star reviews, uh, have been very valuable over the years. And that's where I've gotten a lot of, a fair amount of, so I keep a running list of things that I want to change and update in the next editions of whatever books. And a fair amount of that comes from those negative reviews because people will bring up valid points or they'll tell me something. In some cases at this point, I already knew it because somebody else had brought it up or it's something I didn't even think of. Well, if you can take your ego and get it out of the way and actually hear what they said, maybe they didn't say it eloquently, but part of you knows,

just like in most arguments that we have, part of you knows if there's a nugget of truth or even a whole lot of truth. And I'll take that and I'll acknowledge that and I'll just ignore the rest. And another thing that's always been for me is, I guess this kind of goes back to, you know, young age, it probably sounds a little bit bad, but I think that a lot of people can't live up to their own standards themselves. So why the fuck should I care what they think about me and what I'm doing? And so that's, I've in a, I still am a personable person. I think I like people and I, and I, and I don't, I don't run around judging people or, or, and I just enjoy genuinely sitting down and talking to people like this. But at the same time, I don't really care what they think about me and what I'm doing.

No. And I, and I, I think that that's taken me a while to get there, but I'm absolutely the same way. And it's, so I don't know if you know this part of my story, but you know, my prison story. Yeah. I, I, I, I was on my list, but I figured we'll just jump in this and see where it goes. We'll just touch on it real quickly. So I mentioned running the Sahara. So I had this movie where I am, if you had a PE coach or if you were in the military or a policeman or fireman or a CEO, and you were in a position of authority, you understood a lot of what happened in running the Sahara for me. I was the expedition leader and we had a goal. We had a mission. We agreed before the project that this was under, we're going to get- You're the standard bearer.

We're going to get from here. We're going to get from here to here. And we're going to do it, whatever it takes, we're going to get the job done. And it's not like I was a jerk to people all the time. But at the times when I didn't think they were living up to their part of the bargain, it meant that I wasn't necessarily all that nice to them. And I wasn't. Especially if you feel like they're jeopardizing. Absolutely. Because I also know that what it was a lot of times was fear-based.

They actually were, a brief example in the Sahara, we were not given permission to go into Libya until literally three days before we got there. So we had run 3,000 miles before we got permission. Well, at about 2,500 miles, we reached this center point of the Sahara Desert, Agadez Niger. And it's in the movie, so I'm not busting anybody, but my teammates wanted to quit. And it was because of their fear. They were afraid we were going to run 500 more miles and be turned away. Like, what was the point? Why would I go ahead and do the rest of this? And my point to them was, that's fine. I'm going to take a camel and a box of Snickers bars and I'm continuing. And the reason is I can live with getting to the border of Libya. And if I'm going to take a camel and a box of Snickers bars, and I'm continuing. And the reason is I can live with getting to the border of Libya,

and if I'm turned away, I go home, and I know that I did everything I could do. Them letting me in is out of my control. I can live with that. What I couldn't live with was wondering whether or not we would have been let in for the rest of my life. And, of course, now I got the pleasure of saying, see, I told you so. I tried not to say it, not too loudly. But, you know, and that made a big difference. Where are we? Oh, that's right. We're in Libya.

Yeah. Where are we again? There's Momar. All right. But running the Sahara sort of put me on the map. But a lot of people, if you had a PE coach that yelled at you or like if you didn't handle authority well, you probably didn't like me in the film, at least the way I was depicted. So flash forward a couple of years, you know, I've been on Jay Leno and NPR and all the morning shows and I got a book deal and I got this and I got that after running the Sahara and I'm given speaking gigs all I got this and I got that after running the Sahara and I'm given speaking gigs all over the place and life is good. And it made me, so running the Sahara put me on the map, but it also made me a target. And so it's 2010 and I actually get targeted by a small town

IRS agent who decides he wants to know how a runner can afford to take the time to go run across the Sahara. So he doesn't even audit me. He investigates me without my knowledge and like 20 years of tax returns and comes up empty. Like I have the memo still that says, you know, I found no evidence of any wrongdoing. But he wasn't willing to let it go. This was 2010. And I had a mystery. I mean, you can just tell them like,

yeah, this is where the money came from? Yeah, right. Well, all my money was all my tax returns. And it's not like I was making a million dollars a year. Shit, it wasn't that hard to figure out where $75,000 was coming from. And also there was a movie thing here. Right, Matt Damon, you heard of that guy?

Yeah, he has a little bit of money. He paid for it. And anyway, I ultimately end up coming home from running errands one day, and I get, I see out of the corner of my eye, six armed federal agents come out of a coffee shop, and they handcuff and shackle me and take me to jail. And I honestly have no, like, I am at a loss, stunned. I don't know what's going on. And it's not until the next day that I find out that I am actually being charged with supposedly overstating my income on a home loan application from 2005.

Okay. A ninja loan, basically a no income, no, like this is a stated income loan, the kind that everybody had, you know, it was a, it was a, I had a good credit score, but was overextended at the time. And, you know, you could get a loan. This was an investment property, you know, whatever. So I got a loan. When the bottom dropped out, you know, that property ended up going back to the bank. So I had a foreclosure. I lost, I lost $100,000 of down payment. I lost my good credit. I, you know, the losses that I already had far exceeded. Did you, did you overstate your income? No, I actually didn't. I had a broker who-

How does that work? You go, what are you talking about? Here's the loan application. So here's the crazy thing. At trial, I ended up going, I took this to trial, which nobody does against the feds because you're going to lose. Yeah, because you're fucked. Right. 97% take a deal because you're going to lose. So I because you're fucked. Right. 97% take a deal because you're going to lose. So I went to trial. At trial, I proved beyond a shadow of a doubt that the mortgage broker actually forged my name on, I mean, the government's own handwriting experts proved that it wasn't my signature. I ultimately was convicted of mail fraud. I was found not

guilty of providing up false information, but guilty of mail fraud. I found not guilty of providing up false information, but guilty of mail fraud because I signed a closing package. I signed, you know, where the red sticky notes are, and there was false information enclosed that I didn't know was there. I didn't, whatever. And I, of course, put it in the mail and I send it back. So anyway, the part of what I'm getting at is fair or unfair, whatever. The predisposition of some people who saw running the Sahara, I get arrested like overnight. It's all over the country. Yeah, I told you that guy was an asshole. So I had to like deal with this hatred from a certain group of people, you know, even some people who, you know, liked me or purported to like me. And it was painful,

who, you know, liked me or purported to like me. And, and it was painful, you know, it, it hurt. And, and the crazy thing is, all right, so this whole process takes place. I have to like, I'm off the board of nonprofits that I started. I lose, you know, $100,000 in speaking gigs overnight. I'm, I have no more sponsors. Yeah, you're like, you're unpersoned at this point. Yeah. I'm, I'm basically purged from my own life. Like I've been, I'm just purged. I'm, I'm shat out the other end. So I go to trial, I'm found guilty. I'm sentenced to 21 months in federal prison. And I'm, that's coming up. Like I have to do it. This is 2011. So on, I report to prison on, on Valentine's day, 2011. And I'm angry. I'm bitter. I put on a happy face for the people around me because once I got sentenced, I actually had 90 days before I had to report to

prison. It's like- Trump's like the worst probably. It's the word limbo in the greatest sense. What do you do? Fuck it. Just go now, whatever. Right. What do you do when you can't have a life? I mean, people treat you like you've got a terminal illness and like they don't know what to say. So I spent all my time actually making other people feel better instead of they didn't

know what to say to me. You know, I go to prison and I figure out very quickly though that, you know, I'm 19 years sober. I've been through a lot. I know how to get through hard times and I've run all over the world. Anti-fragile. Right. And I've put myself, right. So this is my opportunity, right? I mean, in a weird way, I recognize very quickly that I have a choice. I can either let this be like this incredibly bitter pill that I suck on for a year and a half, or I can figure

out a way to make the best of the situation. And I have that conversation with myself. I'm like, fair or unfair, who I'm going to be in here is up to me. My happiness is up to me. I'm sure you've read meditations. Of course. Yeah. And I started reading. There's a chance to practice it. Absolutely. Well, I even read, oh my God. So Jack London, one of the first books I read when I was in there, interesting, was an old Jack London book called The Rover. And The Rover is this amazing sort of true story. It's fantasized in a bit, but this sort of true story about him and being in an asylum and wearing a straitjacket. And short version is he teaches himself how to transport himself into adventures. And so he's in this straitjacket sometime, you

know, the warden wants him to suffer. And so it's first, it's a few hours, then it's a day, then it's a week, then it's weeks at a time, you know, and the book goes off into these fantasies. Like he's living these adventures, like he's going off and he comes back and he's actually satisfied and not unhappy. And it pisses the warden off, of course. Yeah, the best revenge. Right. And so I take these lessons and I sort of say, okay, who do I want to be in here? And so I do what comes natural. I start to run. I run every day. And when we're in lessons and I sort of say, okay, who do I want to be in here? And so I do what comes natural. I start to run.

I run every day. And when we're in lockdown and I'm stuck in the cell, I run in the cell in place every day, sometimes for hours at a time. And people thought I was nuts, which is in prison, actually not all that bad a thing. This guy fucking sits and runs in his cell. I'm the middle-aged white guy. Don't mess with that guy. Something's really wrong with him. Serial killer for sure. Yeah. And I start doing yoga-aged white guy. Don't mess with that guy. Something's really wrong with him. Serial killer for sure. Yeah. And I start doing yoga three days a week, like out on the softball field,

which I don't recommend for people who are going to prison. The strange thing is, by the time I leave there 18 months later, 21-month sentence, but you get a 15% volume discount, I always say. So at 18 months, I'm leaving. I've got a running group of 50 guys. I got 25 guys doing yoga with me a few days a week. I'm teaching. The federal system has no addiction recovery. It's crazy. 85% of the people are in there for some drug-related thing,

and there's no addiction. There's no AA. There's no NA. There's none of that. Like, you could kind of do it on your own if you have some knowledge, but I taught classes and I taught nutrition. Anyway, so I had all these guys who were like, you know, I had guys who lost a hundred pounds or more. I had all these wonderful stories and a bunch of friends. They were sad to see you leave. Yeah, absolutely. And in a way I was sad

to leave, but what's crazy is they thanked me so profusely and these people, like I changed their life and all this. And, and they, they thought I did that for them. And what they didn't understand was I didn't do it for them. I did it for, I, it was a purely selfish and selfless act at the same time. Yeah. Like I'm going to do this. If you guys want to join in to keep it, you have to give it away, you know? And so for me, the act of helping other people and getting out of myself and sort of feeling that satisfaction of seeing someone else transform and, and knowing that hopefully they're going to leave and take running with them or take a little bit of knowledge about addiction recovery or nutrition or even yoga and go home and do something with it. And prison is

weird because it's not like college. You know, you're actually not allowed to have contact with people, at least not in the short term, you know, because you're a felon. So you can't go out there. It's not like you can keep in touch because technically it's a violation of, you know, probation or whatever. And, you know, so I got through it and, and you know what, just like anti-fragile, you just said it. I, I actually left prison a far better person than when I got there. Would I have ever in a million years have chosen it for myself? Of course not. Would I have ever in a million years have chosen it for myself? Of course not.

You know, it cost me everything I had, which is an interesting way to put it. It cost me everything I had. So even when I got out, despite all the lessons I learned for the short term, I started trying to recoup everything I had. You're still a felon that just got out of jail. Yeah. Whether right, wrong. Yeah. And so I'm trying to get all this back. And I finally am like going, why the hell am I trying to get that back? I'm actually a different person now.

Go do new things. Go figure it out from this point forward. And what are the new things now? So the new things are actually, wow, I learned so much compassion for myself. You said it a little while ago and it's the first time you and I have ever met, but I can tell you're an intense person and you are, I'm sure, very hard on yourself. So you probably have great compassion for the world, for the people around you, but you probably have very little for yourself. Or I'm being wildly judgmental when I say that. That may not be true at all. I think I'm strange in that regard, that that's not how I am, but I do get what you're saying. I could see you being very hard on yourself. Yeah, for some reason.

You kind of said that, but you don't dwell on it. Some people sit in that and they like to, again, almost... For me, I think it comes to actually something you said. So yes, I have very high standards for myself. And I would say that on the whole, I have done a good job living up to them and meeting them. And I don't mind, you know, there's the cliched stuff about failures. The real failure is if you just quit and walk away, right? So you make mistakes and you learn. And I don't mind if things don't go the way that I wanted them to go, as long as I know that I worked really hard at it and I really gave it my best. And in many cases, the things that I have done that and they have not gone the way that I wanted or weren't as successful as I had hoped, I've always been able to look at that as, okay, what can I learn from this? Now looking back, so now I know that like, I thought that my estimation of the amount of time and effort it was going to take to produce this result, whatever it is, I was wrong. So I can look back and walk away with, I can learn from that and

be like, well, that's what it would have taken. Okay. I should keep that in mind. And, you know, I've, I have a few businesses and have gone, that have gone through evolutions and I've now kind of learned a lesson of taking whatever I think on the more extreme end, estimating effort time or whatever, or pain that I'm going to have to go through, and then going, okay, let's be a bit extreme on this. And then let's double it from there. And then let's see how I feel about it. You know what I mean? So for some reason, I don't come back and go on myself. And I'm not a very self-critical person. I think writing has something to do with it too because you understand, I mean, if you took away writing from you, like if you couldn't write, then where would your, you know, chances are good you'd find another outlet.

my assumption is probably to a lot of the angst or difficulties that you may have, you know, they come out the end of your pen or figurative pen, you know, you're probably on a computer, but, um, you know, they, they, right. They come out on, that was another interesting thing in prison. I wrote every day and the other gift that it gave me was I read 150 books. I ran every day. Life was actually pretty easy once I just sort of embraced it. And I wrote every day. And like a muscle, I actually, you know, two hours a day of even just journaling. And like you were saying a little while ago, like I got a couple thousand letters while I was there. And I answered every single one of them was one of my commitments,

even if it was a short answer. But to sit down in this day and age and handwrite letters and to handwrite a journal was so empowering. It was magic in a way. It really helped me. And before I lose this thought, you made me think a second ago of in addiction recovery, there's a great saying, it's one of the first ones I ever learned, and AA and NA have like amazing, but very, you know, there's a million cliches that come out of the programs, you know, but one of them is, you know, that serenity, because we talk a lot about serenity, serenity is, you know, is the ability to be content with unresolved problems. Because essentially, our daily existence, my daily existence for sure, is filled with unresolved problems.

That's life. I always say you're always going to have problems. I think hopefully we can have the problems that we have meaning. Hopefully we're not just dealing with bullshit problems but if you're going to be unhappy because the body shop messed up the fender on your car that they were supposed to be fixing like if that's going to ruin your freaking week you need to you need some therapy you need to start writing some real problems right yeah you need some real problems those are those are those. Those are first world problems. Go visit some place that's got real problems and then tell me what yours are. Well, that was another thing about prison. I get to prison. I've got 21 months. First of all, the first guy who showed me around, this little five foot tall black guy named Pick and Roll was his name too. And I don't remember

what his name was, but that was what everybody called pick and roll and he's like he's like angle he's like how long you got here how are you gonna be here with us I said 21 months he's like shit you ain't even got time to unpack your bags you know and he'd been there for 20 years you know and when here's the other part african-american he was there for an amount of drugs that I had in my possession a hundred times. But I was a middle-class, clean-cut white guy in the hood driving a decent car, and nobody messed with me. And so I got a perspective of what life was like to be somebody else so what I'm going to complain about 21 was it unfair absolutely you know I mean the worst part about it is I couldn't

figure out what kind of prison tattoo to get like you know I thought about like a fountain pen did you get something no I didn't okay you get hepatitis you get hepatitis unfortunately is what you get if you do that in there but but that was the joke, you know, was that, you know, what am I going to get? You know, I want to tell people. I'm embarrassed to tell people. What are you here for? Yeah, no shit. Yeah, you know, overstating my income on a home loan.

But I didn't even do it. Right, it's like, what? I'm like, I didn't want to admit that. Well, you see, there's this investment property that I was looking at. I've been there with these guys who looked at me like, what are you talking about? You know, but anyway, it's it's I did learn also. This is my my I won't make it a long stump speech. But, you know, the prison, the prison industrial complex, as we call it in this country, is an incredible waste of time and broken.

And, you know, prison was meant for people that society was afraid of, you know, not people they were just mad at. And, you know, it's an equal opportunity thing between both sides of the political aisle. You know, you've got tough on crime people like Reagan, you've got Clinton who actually put it on steroids. Clinton kind of said, OK, if you want to do this, let's make a business out of it and make money. And so incarceration rates went up 600% while he was in office. And consequently, it's a business more than it is anything. And if taxpayers- Well, they're privately owned, right? A lot of them or all of them? I'm ignorant about the prison system, but a lot of them or all

of them are privately owned, right? A vast majority are privately owned these days. And it's government money, obviously. Absolutely. Yeah. So it's like... No, it's our money. It's your money. True. I mean, that's the issue that I tell people all the time. A dollar that, you know, you can be tough on crime. Why? Because some crackhead, you know, broke into your car and stole the stereo. A dollar that, you know, you can be tough on crime. Why? Because some crackhead, you know, broke into your car and stole the stereo. Okay. You're mad at him. Well, he's going to go to prison for 20 years or he can go to treatment and okay, maybe he doesn't get it. Maybe, maybe it takes a couple of times or maybe he commits a worse crime. Yeah, that is, there is a chance of that. And there reaches a point where the guy does belong in prison or girl.

But from a taxpayer point of view, for every dollar we spend on either prevention or treatment, you save $10 in taxpayer money. Like that is an absolute, I'm not just making that number up. Like that is a verified number. The problem is you got lobbyists, you got people who are paying politicians, you know, because in this country, we make sure that we, I always make the joke that at least in South America and a lot of other countries, they have enough decency to pay their bribes under the table. You know, we just allow our politicians to take money above the table. You know, we pay them

millions of dollars and allow companies and lobbyists to pay them money directly and pretend like it's for nothing, when in fact it's for their vote. It's for their, if you're the prison lobby, who are you going to pay? You're going to take people that are going to make sure that the prison unions stay strong and that prisons stay full. And that takes a concerted societal effort. And it's the easiest mark because you know who society doesn't care about? Inmates. Period. Unless you have one in there that's a family member or something. So anyway, that's my rant on that. It's just people, especially in upcoming elections, should pay more attention to tax dollars that are spent on infrastructure and on things that we actually need and treatment programs that actually...

Who do you want to have live next to you? Do you want to have a person who came out of treatment and got some help and whatever? Or do you want to have a guy who just did 15 years and he gets out all pissed off and... Mad at the world. Mad at the world. Does that who you want as your neighbor or living down the street from you? Or do you want the guy who's like, okay, you know what? I got a chance. I don't want to be that person anymore. I want to be better. So there you go. I do agree. I do agree. So, so what's next for you? So you have, yeah. So 5.8 is the big thing. Yep. And then you also mentioned that. Spartan. Spartan Trail.

Which is in Virginia, right? Yeah. So the first. So I am. And I got permission from Joe to say that, actually, because I wanted to make sure I wasn't like divulging some huge secret. To at least tease a little bit a new product from Spartan, which is Spartan Trail. And it is what it sounds like. It's going to be a series, a nationwide series of trail runs and races associated with current Spartan obstacle course races. So, for example, the first ones in your current home state in the middle of Virginia, in Arrington,

Virginia, where on October 13th, there's already a Spartan super and sprint on that weekend. And so I just last week even designed a course, a 10K course and a half marathon course. They will be in, they'll go different directions from the regular Spartan regular race. That's all they kick off from. Yeah, but they'll start, you know, the people doing the trail run will get a taste of the Spartan vibe.

So they'll get the emcee there to take them through the chants, and they'll take off. And when they finish, they'll jump over the fire and go across the same finish line. And the hope is twofold for me. And Joe and I have been talking about this for a while. But there's also another guy, Louis Escobar, a very well-known runner who's here. He'll be handling most of the West Coast and I'm doing the East. And the hope is that we entice new people into the Spartan fold that are like, I don't want to jump over obstacles. I don't want to do this. I don't want to do that, but I would come do a trail run. And then maybe when they see the energy and get a sense of it, maybe they do jump in.

But also for a lot of, generally speaking, Spartan athletes have somebody in their life that supports that lifestyle. And so maybe it's the husband, the wife, you never know which way it's going, or boyfriend, girlfriend. But whoever the obstacle course athlete is, is probably bringing somebody. And that person may not want to do an obstacle race, but they'll get out there and do a 10K. So it gives both people something to do over the weekend where they leave with a medal and a T-shirt and some memories. And I will say it will be a Spartan trail run, though. Which means it's not going to be. If there's mud, though. Which means it's not going to be.

If there's mud, you're going through it. If there's, you know, Virginia, North Carolina is rocks and roots. That's the nature of our trails there. So, you know, I'm going to make it challenging but doable. And give people a little taste of what the Spartan sort of lifestyle. Yeah. Yeah, because you want to feel like when you're done with a trail race or with an obstacle course race, you want to feel like you've earned it. And, you know, you want.

My goal is halfway through either of the races, you're thinking to yourself, why did I think this was a good idea? Yeah, because then you know the payoff. Yeah. You've got to get to that point. Yeah. You'll suffer a little bit. If you don't want to quit, then I've done something wrong, you know. But then I want you to get to that point. You'll suffer a little bit. If you don't want to quit, then I've done something wrong. But then I want you to get to the end. As we've said so much here

today, share the struggle. And people can find more. That's a little hard to find on the Spartan because it's a new thing. But anybody who's ever clicked on a Spartan tab understands that you will be bombarded with advertisements for the rest of your life anyway. So trust me, we'll find you. You'll see Spartan Trail. And for anybody that wants to find ways to buy my book, Running Man, or be in contact with me about sobriety or about running or anything, one-stop shopping, charlieengel.com. And that will direct you to all my social media, E-N-G-L-E. Oh, yeah.

Yeah, yeah. So charlieengel.com. Instagram is the place that I'm most active these days on social media. So everything else gets posted to Facebook and Twitter. But I kind of just, I don't have the energy to do more than one thing. So I'm pretty negligent in my social. to Facebook and Twitter, but I kind of just, I don't have the energy to do more than one thing. So, um, I'm pretty, uh, negligent in my, in my social media activities because I just, I'm not personally into it at all. And not a good excuse because I should actually be making better use of it. I'm hiring somebody. I want to actually, the thing is I want to get somebody

because to do it right takes a bit of work actually in terms of planning it out and really doing a good job. It's about consistency. Because what I found as a consumer of social media, if there's somebody I really like, whatever, pick somebody big. Like I follow Gary Vee. And he's the man. He's got gazillion followers. One of the things that he does that's so good is he's consistent. Like every single day, I know I can count on something from, I don't

want to watch it or listen to it every day, but I know it's there every day. I want a little boost. I want him to curse at me a little bit and tell me to get off my ass and go do something. Right. And I don't even have to pay for it. So, um, but that's the way to find me. And I, you know, I welcome, you know, I welcome questions or just inquiries about all these subjects. And hopefully with Dead Sea to Everest 5.8, there will be a production deal. So it will be available in a variety of different formats for people to kind of follow along. That's great. Yeah?

Thanks for taking the time. My pleasure. Thanks for having me. Hey there, it is Mike again. I hope you enjoyed this episode and found it interesting and helpful. And if you did and don't mind doing me a favor and want to help me make this the most popular health and fitness podcast on the internet,

then please leave a quick review of it on iTunes or wherever you're listening from. This not only convinces people that they should check the show out, it also increases its search visibility and thus helps more people find their way to me and learn how to build their best bodies ever too. And of course, if you want to be notified when the next episode goes live, then just subscribe to the podcast and you won't miss out on any of the new goodies. Lastly, if you didn't like something about the show, then definitely shoot me an email at mike at muscleforlife.com

and share your thoughts on how you think it could be better. I read everything myself and I'm always looking for constructive feedback, so please do reach out. All right, that's it. Thanks again for listening to this episode and I hope to hear from you soon. And lastly, this episode is brought to you by me. Seriously, though, I'm not big on promoting stuff that I don't personally use and believe in. So instead, I'm going to just quickly tell you about something of mine, specifically my 100% natural fat loss supplement Phoenixoenix it has sold over a hundred thousand bottles in the last several years and it helps you lose fat faster in three ways one it increases your metabolic rate two it amplifies the power of fat burning chemicals produced by your body and three it increases the feeling of fullness from food in short it speeds up your metabolism it helps your body

burn fat more efficiently and it helps you control hunger and cravings and maintain high energy levels. Phoenix also contains no artificial food dyes, fillers, or other unnecessary junk. And all that is why it has over 700 reviews on Amazon with a four-star average and another 250 reviews on my website with a four and a half star average. So if you want to burn more fat every day and have an easier time sticking to your diet without having to pump yourself full of harsh stimulants or potentially harmful chemicals, then you want to head over to www.legionathletics.com and pick up a bottle of Phoenix today. And just to show how much I appreciate my podcast peeps, use the coupon code podcast at checkout and you will save 10 percent on your entire order.

And lastly, you should also know that I have a very simple 100 percent money back guarantee that works like this. You either love my stuff or you get your money back, period. You don't have to return the products. You don't have to fill out forms. You don't have to jump through any other hoops or go through any other shenanigans. So you really can't lose here. Head over to www.legionathletics.com now, place your order and see for yourself why my supplements have thousands of rave reviews all over the internet. And if for whatever reason, they're just not for you, contact us and we will give you a full refund on the spot.