Ep. #337: Charlie Engle on Lessons Learned Beating Addiction, Running the Sahara, Going to Prison, and More

Charlie: Cause if you want to actually do things, accomplish things, make a difference in the world, whatever you know, shape that takes, I have this mantra of mine to keep it. You have to give it away.

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Obviously I did my prep, but for the people listening and which quickly gets to, you ran this across the Sahara desert which is insane. Yeah. Before that though, I was a drunk. 

Charlie: I like to start off with no, and it is a what’s interesting about the other way I said it is that it is a, it’s a direct line, from one to the other, but we’ll work it backwards.

So I did this. 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? Just for people to see. It’s who knew Africa was so big? It’s 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 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. Yeah, what I found was What was the most 

Mike: extreme thing you had done? 

Charlie: Yeah, definitely. There was a lot of, I’d run, 300 miles at one time. I had, there’s a race called the eco challenge adventure racing years ago, which was Mark Burnett’s first big production before he created, survivor and apprentice.

And those were like 10 day, 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’s 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, 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. 

Mike: Yeah. I think it was an individual complaint.

There’s some research that shows the opposite that in some people, if they talk about their goals too much, it gives them a, basically a sense of a false sense of satisfaction, especially if people are. Praising them for something they say they’re going to do, so they can 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 it.

So I guess depends using the 

Charlie: 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 and you got a sooner or later. That’s true. You only get so much praise until you become the guy that always talks about stuff and never does it, or the girl.

And 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, I did feel my heels digging in. Almost like a physical thing. And I realized Power. Like I actually began to look forward to telling people so they could say, look, it’s great and I’m sure you’re a good runner and all that, but that’s just not possible.

There’s too, it’s too hot. You can’t get resupplied. All the practical and rational reasons that this can’t happen. And I did find that I let them. 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. Cause 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.

Okay. So for many years, and I started on the pilot on that show, my wife likes that. Oh my God. It was an amazing, you 

Mike: can admit to liking it. It’s okay. The reason I say that is because she, we don’t watch too much. If we watch any TV together, it’s usually 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 TV.

Yeah, absolutely. It was the number 

Charlie: one show on, TV for a few years. I would admit to that. I would admit 

Mike: to like keeping up with the Kardashians. And it was a good show. 

Charlie: 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, 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 in James had won the Academy award for best documentary, like just a couple of years earlier, it was a movie called the last thing.

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, 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, cause who wants to see me run 50 miles a day?

The numbers sound impressive and whatever, but really, oh, there he is again. Hey, there he is again. I feel like 

Mike: when people want to get a view into my life, how does Mike Matthews live? I’m like, it’s very boring, actually. I wake up at 5. 30 every day. I don’t do very, all I do is I sit down. Sit in my cave and work, 

Charlie: It’s not that exciting.

Yeah, they want this. And so I, James said, I said, James, let’s make a, 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, 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, for 10 years of my twenties, 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.

It’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 were 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.

Together, we’re 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 so I mentioned a minute ago that eco challenge taught me to suffer properly, really addiction taught me to suffer.

There’s no suffering, like doing the. unexplainable going on a, 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 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, 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. You know what the lesson is that you have to do things in order to learn lessons and there’s, 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 there may have been just not interested though, in the kind of personal growth that can really only come from putting yourself into. And when I say risky, uncomfortable at least and 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, 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, it’s all about the dance.

And she’s man, you are really good at getting through stuff like, how to. Survive and get through it. 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 how so yeah What’s not that I?

Purposely go out and I don’t know, whatever, have a car accident or overdraw my checking account. Like 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.

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 

Mike: Dalio? 

Charlie: No, I know the book. I know the short version of the book, but yeah, he 

Mike: talks about in there and I agree with him that you can basically you have two ends of a spectrum.

You have savor life or make a difference basically, or there’s, or achieve What was the top of Maslow’s pyramid? The what’s the term itself? Oh, brain’s not working. Yeah. But anyways, the point is you can’t have, you can have, you can choose if you really want to save her life.

That’s what we’re talking about. If you have the, 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 you, if that’s really what you want to do is just save your 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 could stop at one point. Maybe you, cause he talks about it, but maybe when you’re, at some point you can be like, all right, now I’m changing. Now I’m going over to the same. 

Charlie: 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.

What kind of freaking life is that? I just do not get that. 

Mike: 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 

Charlie: bridge, maybe. 

Mike: 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 

Charlie: know. And it’s not, savor to me as such a, it’s such a scary, boring, 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 fricking Sahara desert.

And I’m already thinking about what I’m doing next. And I’m, and I have this self conversation of, how about trying to be present, dude? Just have, how about trying to just be right here, feel this, the same thing with writing, right? Absolutely. I’m the same way writing. Once you get toward 

Mike: the end of the project, I’m like, I just want to get this done and start on the next thing.

Charlie: First of all, because I already hate what I wrote. Not really, but it’s just, once I read my own 

Mike: In a couple of years you’ll hate what you wrote, that’s how it is with 

Charlie: 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, I commonly point out to myself that it’s not like I can be wrong, like 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. If I was going to tell a story of the Sahara Desert that story in a draft form was a hundred friggin 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, and all the shit that I messed up, and whatever. They can read like a Tucker Mac’s book for that. Exactly! Which is highly entertaining, but you get the idea. But for 60 pages of it, you’re like, wow, that guy, I’m glad I didn’t, run into him in a bar, or on the road.

It’s this idea of you mentioned books and I’m sorry to be so rambling all over, but I love this kind of free form. I’m reading a book right now called anti fragile. Tell it. Tell it. Exactly. What a mind blowing. 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, while you’re running, don’t do that with this one by the book. Because frankly, if you’re listening to it, you’re not going to get it. Yeah. 

Mike: 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 in your highlights and your notes, or you can pull them all out. It’s very easy. No doubt. And so I, what I would do is I would supplement the, I read first thing in the morning and then at night I would supplement that with audio books.

It’s in the car, but I stopped for the reason of just yeah, cause I was like me just being OCD. So 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 but I actually got through probably an extra 20 pages a day.

It was annoying, but it produced, what I listen to lectures and stuff. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. 

Charlie: You know what I listen to? I listen to Ron Chernow books if I’m going to listen to something. Ron Chernow’s the guy. 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 like so close attention to every single detail. That’s interesting. So you prefer that over music, huh? I can’t listen, 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 be, I can remain engaged with the book whereas I will lose interest in the music. So I mix it up sometimes. But, yeah. But back to, so did you read Antifragile? I haven’t read Antifragile. I know the idea. The idea, you probably know behind it, is really this, and I think, again, 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 friggin, ultra obstacle course race, right? That’s self inflicted. Don’t, nobody, I don’t think anybody’s here with a gun to their head.

You’re paying for it, actually. You’re actually paying to be part of this pain. And so and then there’s things like going to prison, or having a disease, or whatever might happen. Life. Yeah, life. 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 essentially, your goal is to be the same person you were before it started. 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 like really open your heart and say, what am I going to learn from this?

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 some new nutrition tweets. Yeah it’s it’s about am I changed as a person and I think that’s what this book, you know I’m still just getting into it, but I think that’s where a lot of it comes from in it that we’re that’s the premise Yeah, people want to like have perfect experiences.

What the hell does that mean? Perfect lives I see a lot of that where I 

Mike: live. Oh, we’re just talking. 

Charlie: And we 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, shape that takes, I have this mantra of mine to, to keep it, 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. 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.

I go to bed and I get a decent night’s sleep and I wake up in the morning. I’m like, what? That’s the last thing I’m thinking. Like I’m going for a run. This is a beautiful day. 

Mike: Yeah. 

Charlie: Let’s go get busy. 

Mike: I think of talking about turnout. I read his biography of Rockefeller, right? Oh yeah. And Rockefeller you remember when he was saying that he never, so he was a teetotaler.

He didn’t drink, but he had said I’m paraphrasing or exactly. Basically, he never became an alcoholic because he never took the first drink, basically. And that was one of his things is he was obviously an interesting person, but he lived very strictly according to, Christian morals in his personal life.

Yeah. And he was merciless in business, which was an interesting dichotomy. But I think of that and I actually, I think 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?

And I’m like, I don’t know. I just never really got into it. And then, the more I got around it, as I got older, it just seemed One, eh, why, it’s not a habit worth taking up, I think. Dude, but you know 

Charlie: why, though? You’re a normal person, 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, by, if she has a second glass of wine, usually by about halfway through that, she’s going, eh, I’ve had enough. She, we need to go to a restaurant where she can order one and a half glasses. Cause that’s yeah, cause I don’t want to pay the twelve dollars for the second glass.

I’m like, you’re not going to leave that, are you? As a, as an alcoholic. I’m like what is wrong with this picture? But but interestingly 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.

It’s no skin off my wife’s teeth to, to, she doesn’t have to control. Yeah. All of a sudden she’s going to have two bottles of wine. It’s a switch. It’s all found on whatever. Whereas with me I would have to control it like immensely, I still get the question regularly, couldn’t you just.

I’m like, yeah, I absolutely could. Chances are like pretty much 100 percent 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, 100%, 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. If I could take a pill right now and and not be an alcoholic anymore and drink like a normal person, no way in hell would I ever consider it.

Early, and this is actually I’m asking, 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.

If I could have taken a knife and just sliced it out, I would have I thought that was poison. That was like cancer. If I could just get rid of this. Then I’d feel like a normal person. the self 

Mike: mortification. 

Charlie: Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. And self, what do they call it, flagellation.

Although I always made fart jokes when somebody said that. Because I clearly didn’t understand what was going on. How would you fart on yourself? Sometimes that’s actually a 

Mike: form of self punishment. 

Charlie: Yeah, and I did. I farted on myself. I felt badly enough about myself and the kind of person I was that I, 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 three years of that and running like 30 marathons and cause clearly I wasn’t an addict, right? I ran 30 marathons in the first three years. I clearly had an addiction under control. I finally realized though that, 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, eating chips and watching TV, it makes running the, 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, 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. I’m going to go to that thing. So look at me like, really? Like you’ve been gone like five weeks in a row or whatever doing this.

And so that’s I lose sight of the personal parts of my life sometime and how I do need to just be, if I’m moving, I don’t have to think too hard. I don’t have to like, 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.

Mike: Calm down. Yeah. And I can relate to that. And B. That’s the same. I’ve been in that place with my wife a number of times where she’s like. 

Charlie: But what if I become irrelevant this week? If I don’t do something. Yeah. Yeah. 

Mike: Again, I’ve just tried to, I’ve just tried to, to build in enough. I’d 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 morning thing else. I think that for what you’re talking about to do things that, that, 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 I, 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 cool, my family and swing it that way and make sure that I put enough there. But I know exactly what you mean. And and she, and if I fucked it up too much, my wife would probably leave me one day. She, yeah no doubt.

Charlie: You need to be present to actually have a relationship. And I am reminded of that, regularly. And she, my wife is a very, she’s. A scientist and an amazing intellect. And she, she helps keep me, I hate the word grounded cause that’s, 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, I don’t care if somebody has, 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, to talk to them. But I love coming to this because it gives me the chance, almost like any, an event to just run an ultra marathon today, ultra, ultra podcast.

Yeah. And it’s. I love this conversation because this is different than anything I’ve done today or that I normally do.

Mike: 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. 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, And 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 

Charlie: record an audio book?

Yeah. So my book, I had to audition to read it, but yeah, so Simon and Schuster published my memoir. 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. Yeah. Yeah. And it’s called running man, very positively reviewed all over the place, including in the New York times.

And so it’s, 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. And, but we need to know if you’re capable of doing it. Can you audition? 

Mike: Yeah.

Charlie: So I 

Mike: literally had to get my phone. Some authors. Yeah. It doesn’t work. It doesn’t mean you can read. It just doesn’t. 

Charlie: 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, Oh, I, 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. The people look loudness works for audio books. Yeah, it does. So I read for six days for six hours a day, and it was. Fantastic. I loved doing it. This little studio in Asheville, North Carolina 

Mike: and I hated it.

I just got done recording. I’m up to, 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. And like in three weeks, I actually, I haven’t done work in a long time that I actually got to that point where I fucking hate this.

Yeah. By the end of the, we got, 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 done. I’m done with this. No, I was like, I almost physically 

Charlie: feel 

Mike: this now, 

Charlie: I actually enjoyed it. I’m, I probably would get over it after 80 hours, that’s for sure.

But 

Mike: Not 80 hours of recording, but so it took, cause it also, it served for me at least as a final draft as well. Cause inevitably I’m reading, I’m like, 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 the added time and 

Charlie: I do some writers, 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 love, 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 if you’re embarrassed by your own language or, it’s not your voice and you’re like overriding.

One of the, I, my wife gives me the best compliment she ever gave me was that I have a an amazing vocabulary and because she’s the smartest person I’ve ever known and I’m a college dropout, 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, because 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, with, without as many run on sentences, that’s my voice.

And so I learned, I did learn just as you said, if you read it out loud to somebody, if you overwrote a paragraph, You can feel it when you say 

Mike: it out loud, the next level of that is having somebody read it to you. Cause then you need to see their reactions. Oh yeah. 

Charlie: Yeah. If they can’t read it to you, if they can’t get the new one or something, 

Mike: or that’s all.

I didn’t even go that far, but reading it yourself. Yes. Cause that’s a great tip for just improving your writing. 

Charlie: 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’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, 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, writing as 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 regularly, if you want to have any hope, yeah, you have to write regularly and it’s amazing how much better you get, 

Mike: If you’re doing it on a daily basis.

Yeah. 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 saw a reader. So what’s different? I read, I’m just a better writer now. 

Charlie: Not just that though. But what, the other thing is different. My standards are probably higher now. Not a trick question. Your standards are, but you’re different. Yeah, sure. So the story I always tell is about the Boston marathon.

Like I’ve run Boston like six times. But it’s from 1980, mid eighties, all the way up until a few years ago. So it’s spread over a long period of time. 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 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 

Mike: think this is a writing point. I think it’s a life plan. So you look, if you were to look back on stuff you wrote years ago and you played, if you didn’t feel at least I could do this better, that’s probably a bad sign.

Yeah. If you are considering yourself an actual, but then I think in general, if you look back at yourself and this is something that I try to remain cognizant of. Look back at yourself at 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, you can go back to what you’re saying. Just go out and do stuff. I think of fight club, right? Where the 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 still in perfect condition. What a shame, right? Yeah, no, it’s 

Charlie: so true. And there’s that old joke about, leaving who wants to leave a pretty corpse. You, I want to be on my, I want to have, use it 

Mike: all up. Do you still have, if you’re gearing up for something, you still have though the initial, maybe it’s just inertia.

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. 

Charlie: That’s a great question. And I, it depends on the project. It depends on what I’m doing.

Again 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 right. I will do everything that doesn’t need to be done. Because those things, it’s important.

I get those out of the way before I write. At least you’re not going through the Hunter Thompson routine. Joke is, who could possibly write with dishes, clean dishes, in the dishwasher? Those need to be put away right now. That’s all 

Mike: I can 

Charlie: think of. And but with a project, and I’ll even move ahead to, This big project that I have coming up, it’s called 5.

8, and this project is, ultimately I’m going to go from the lowest place on the planet, which is the Dead Sea, to the top of Mount Everest, human powered. So it’s the lowest to the highest. And of course it’s a metaphor, but it’s also, 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, but 5. 8. No, I set you up to ask me that question. Thank you. Okay, good. 

Mike: My ignorance 

Charlie: 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 at 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, 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 much she’s a wildlife biologist, environmental scientist, all kinds of, Fancy things.

And we do care about the planet. We, 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, look at all the destruction, look at the people that are being harmed because it’s 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 off from one point to the other is to show people what they’re missing and why protecting the planet should 

Mike: 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 be, it’s easy to sit on the sidelines and be a critic, right? There’s a, it was a, is a Bucky Fulminster quote where basically it says I’m going to butcher it, but paraphrasing basically that point of yeah, any, 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 you have to, it’s much harder to be creative and offer a solution.

It’s, I think it’s fine. If you’re going to point out what’s wrong, if you can also offer a solution, you could argue that. There is a role for, there are the Voltaire’s out there that’s, and that’s what they, 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 it’s much more valuable. You’re saying here’s something I can do about it. And here’s something 

Charlie: 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 fricking life. I can tell you right now, I’m worried right now about living, I want to get to the hospital. I want to get this figured out.

And then maybe at some point I do care about, how or why I got shot or whatever. But the planet 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, and to try to be, 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 non profit with Matt Damon that today is the biggest water non profit in the world. Yeah, exactly. And 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. I was proud and relieved to have accomplished this thing with two teammates, all three of us made it all the way across.

And it was this. This big adventure, but I 

Mike: would tell people listening, you don’t have to run the Sahara to have that experience. I’ve had my own version. I experienced just getting through that project. I just told you about that was the, that was when I was done. It’s when it’s on the audio books.

It’s a silly example, but it was a pain in the 

Charlie: ass, starting a business, starting a family doing a project like what you just described is your version of that. It’s the same thing. And 

Mike: you go through the same emotional experience and there’s an emotional curve to it. And so if you don’t say 

Charlie: fuck this at least five times during a hard project or even while raising your kids, I gotta 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 to hate them, but it’s for God’s sakes. Please stop doing that, whatever, or your job or even your, your spouse. 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 percent of our time basically preparing for the 1 percent when things go wrong and that’s the whole point.

Who we are is far more revealing or revealed in that 1 percent than it is in the other 99, 99 percent 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 exciting, there’s still, there’s difficulty in that you become desensitized to anything eventually.

Yeah. Okay. You may run. And 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 a hundred and whatever straight days?

Exactly. Hey, there he is again. Hey, there he is again. It’s 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 takes, like every time I did yell at somebody or whatever, it, that’s in there. And so I’m like the hero and the villain in the movie. And that’s okay with me, because that’s probably the, I’m probably 20 percent asshole and 80 percent pretty nice guy, in real life too.

But I think that’s I want to share the struggle. If I’m going to make a film, if I’m going to 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. Or if I like represent that I’ve got all the answers, that is just such nonsense.

And I, 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. 

Mike: I think of in relation to suffering in particular, I forget who said this, but basically it was, there’s a writer said, and this was a, just a quip about other, about writing in general is the book that 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. For any level or any anything, I like that it’s stuck in my, whenever it’s stuck in my brain, but but 

Charlie: that’s life. 

Mike: I think there’s some, there’s a lot to be said with what 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 have, 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, clearly. You are comfortable with going through that, but I’m sure it’s paid off in many ways. 

Charlie: There’s also a, there’s a, 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 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 expected that from them. And it wasn’t until later that I did have to go make some amends. And I realized I was 

Mike: quintessential CEOs problem.

Yeah, finding people. 

Charlie: Yeah. And you don’t 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 that’s, and I actually recognize. Through therapy and through a lot of other stuff. That’s actually on them.

That’s not, I didn’t like, I didn’t murder a family member or something. I, we had an argument, right? And I might have called them a name and they probably called me one. And maybe they’re, to me, that kind of stuff is so unimportant. And it’s 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 end, 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. How often do we worry about the people, nine out of 10 people can like me and who do I focus on?

Frickin 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 

Mike: reviews. That’s funny. I do the opposite. I’ve read and replied to every single, 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, the, like I said, a lot of one star book reviews are 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. But 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 that actually mean that I don’t, I’m not upset. That’s not me 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. Okay.

That’s what they think. Fine. Big deal. 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 have been very valuable over the years. And that’s where I’ve gotten a lot of a fair amount of feedback. 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. And I’m like, 

Charlie: 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 

Mike: and I’ll take that and I’ll acknowledge that and I’ll just ignore the rest if it’s and another thing that’s always been for me is I guess this kind of goes back to even at a young age.

It’s 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 all I’ve in a, I still am a personable person. I think I like people and I don’t run around judging people or and I just enjoy genuinely sitting down and talking to people like this.

But at the same time I don’t. Don’t really care what they think about me and what I’m doing. 

Charlie: No, and I think 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, my prison story. Yeah. 

Mike: I was on my list, but I just, I figured we’ll just 

Charlie: touch on it real quickly.

So I mentioned running this era. So I had this movie where I am, if you had a P coach or if you were in the military or a policeman or fireman or. A CEO or, 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 the 

Mike: standard bear. 

Charlie: We’re going to get from here. We’re going to get from here to here and we’re going to do it. How, 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 was, 

Mike: you feel like they’re jeopardizing. 

Charlie: 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 3000 miles.

Before we got permission. 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’s, it was because of their fear. They were afraid we were going to run 500 more miles and be turned away.

I’m 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 turned away, I go home and I know that I did everything I could do.

They’re every, 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 get the, I got the pleasure of saying, see, I told you, I tried not to say it, not too loudly, but and that, that made a big difference.

Where 

Mike: are we? Oh, that’s right. We’re in Libya. Yeah. Where are we again? There’s 

Charlie: Momar. All right. But running the Sahara put me on the map, but a lot of people, if you had a P. E. coach that yelled at you or. If you didn’t handle authority you probably didn’t like me in the film, at least the way I was depicted.

So flash forward a couple of years, 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 over the place and life is good. And. It made me, so running this error 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 ought, doesn’t even audit me. He investigates me without my knowledge and like 20 years of tax returns and comes up empty.

Like I, I have the memo still that says, I found no evidence of any wrongdoing. But he wasn’t willing to let it go. This was 2010. And I had a 

Mike: mystery. What do you mean? You can you just tell him like, yeah, this is where the money came 

Charlie: from. Yeah. 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 

Mike: movie. Matt Damon. You 

Charlie: heard of that guy? 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 got.

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, a ninja loan basically a no income, no, like this is a stated income loan.

The kind that everybody had, it was it was I had a good credit score, but was overextended at the time. And, you could get a loan. This is an investment. Property, whatever. So I got on when the bottom dropped out, that property and they’ll going back to the bank. So I had a foreclosure.

I lost 100, 000 of down payment. I lost my good credit. I, the losses that I already had far exceeded. Did you overstate your income? No, I actually did. No. Yeah. Okay. Bye. How does that work? You 

Mike: go, what are you talking about? Here’s the loan application. 

Charlie: 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 

Mike: you’re fucked. 

Charlie: 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, 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 a false information, but guilty of mail fraud because I signed a closing package, I signed, where the red sticky notes are, and there was false information and clothes that I didn’t know was there. I didn’t whatever.

And I, of course put it in the mail and I sent 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 and like overnight, it’s all over the country. Yeah, I told you that guy was an asshole. So I had to deal with this hatred from a certain group of people.

Even some people who, liked me or purported to like me. And it was painful. It, it hurt. 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, a hundred thousand dollars in speaking gigs overnight.

I am, I have no more sponsors. You’re unpersoned at this point. I’m basically purged from my own life. Like I’ve been, I’m just purged. 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 Valentine’s day, 2011 and I’m angry. I’m bitter. I put on a happy face for the people around me because no, who is once I got sentenced, I actually had 90 days before I had to report to prison. It’s it’s the word limbo in the greatest sense. What do you do?

Fuck it. We’ll just go now. Whatever. What do you do when you can’t have a life. People treat you like you’ve got a terminal illness and 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.

I go to prison and I figure out very quickly though, that, 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 and I’m anti fragile, right? And I’ve put myself right. So this is my opportunity, right? In a weird way, I recognized 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 and my happiness is up to me. I’m sure you’ve read meditation.

Mike: Of course. Yeah. So 

Charlie: yeah. And I started to run a chance 

Mike: to practice it. 

Charlie: Absolutely. I even read oh my God. 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 in short version is he teaches himself how to transport himself into adventures.

And so he’s in the straitjacket sometime, 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, and the book goes off into these. 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 

Mike: revenge. 

Charlie: And so I take these lessons and I say, okay, who do I want to be in here? And so I do what comes natural. I started 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, 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 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, it’s 21 month sentence, you get a 15 percent 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 percent of the people are in there for some drug related thing and there’s no addiction. There’s no way there’s no N. A. There’s none of that. Like you could 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, 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. 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 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, it was a purely Selfish and selfless act at the same time. 

Mike: Like I’m going to do this. If you guys want to join in 

Charlie: to keep it, you have to give it away, and so for me, the act of helping other people and getting out of myself and feeling that satisfaction of seeing someone else transform 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’re actually not allowed to have contact with people, at least not in the short term, cause you’re felon, so you can’t go out there. It’s not like you can keep in touch because technically it’s a violation of, probation or whatever.

And. So I got through it and you know what, just like antifragile, you just said it. 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. It cost me. Everything I had, which is an interesting way to put it, it cost me everything I had.

So when, even when I got out, despite all the lessons I learned for the short term, I started trying to recoup everything I had. 

Mike: You’re still a felon that just got out of jail, whether right, wrong. 

Charlie: Yeah. And so I’m trying to get all this back. And I finally, am I 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. 

Mike: And what is that? What’s, what are the new things now? 

Charlie: 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’re, 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 like judgmental when I say that, that may not be true at all, but I think I’m strange in that regard. 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 said that, but yeah, you don’t dwell on it. Some people sit in that and they like to, again, 

Mike: like 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. There’s the cliched stuff about failures or failure, real failures if you just quit and walk away. 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 were, I have done that and they have not gone the way that I wanted or weren’t as successful as I had hoped. Yeah. I’ve always been able to look at that as a, okay, what can I learn from this? Now, looking back, so now I know that 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 that’s what it would have taken. Okay. I should keep that in mind. And, I’ve, I have a few businesses and have gone that have gone through evolutions and I’ve now learned a lesson of. Taking whatever I think on the more extreme end stick estimating effort, time or whatever or pain that it’s going to, that’s going to have to go through to, and then going, okay, let’s go, 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 

Charlie: with it too, because you understand, when you, if you took away writing from you.

If you couldn’t write, then where would your, you, chances are good you’d find another outlet, but my assumption is probably to a lot of the angst or difficulties that you may have, they come out the end of your pen or figurative pen, you’re probably on a computer, but they, 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 embraced it. And I wrote every day and like a muscle, I actually, two hours a day of even just journaling and I 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, like it really, it really helped me. And I, 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, there’s a million cliches that come out of the programs, but one of them is, that serenity, cause we talk a lot about serenity.

Serenity is, is the ability to be, Content with unresolved problems, because essentially isn’t, our daily existence, my daily existence for sure is filled with unresolved problems. That’s why 

Mike: I always say you’re always gonna have problems. I think hopefully we can have the problems that we have meaning.

At least there’s, hopefully we’re not just dealing with bullshit problems. 

Charlie: 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 gonna ruin your friggin week You need to you need some therapy.

You need to start writing yeah, you need some real problems. Those are those are those are first world problems, you know go visit some place that’s got real problems and then tell me what yours are that was another thing about prison I get to prison. I got 21 months. First of all, the first guy who showed me around this little like 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 him pick and roll. And he’s angle, how long you got here? How long are you going to be here with us? I said, 21 months. He’s shit, you ain’t even got time to unpack your bags. And he’d been there for 20 years, and 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. The worst part about it is I couldn’t figure out what kind of prison tattoo to get. I thought about a fountain pen or did you get something? No, I didn’t. You get hepatitis. You get hepatitis.

Unfortunately is what you get. If you do that in there but that was the joke, was that what am I going to get? I want to tell people I’m embarrassed to tell people what are you here for? Yeah. Overstating my income on a home loan, but I 

Mike: didn’t even do it.

It was like, what? I’m like, I didn’t want to admit that. There’s this investment property that I was looking at. 

Charlie: I’ve been there with these guys who looked at me like, what are you talking about? But anyway it’s I did learn also, and this is my, my, I won’t make it a long stump speech, the prison industrial complex as we call it in this country is an incredible waste of time and broken and prison was meant for people that society was afraid of, not people they were just mad at and it’s an equal opportunity thing between both sides of the political aisle.

You got. Tough on crime people like Reagan. You’ve got Clinton who actually put it on steroids. Clinton said, okay, if you’re going to, if you want to do this, let’s make a business out of it and make money. And incarceration rates went up 600 percent while he was in office.

And. Consequently, there’s just it’s a business, more than it is anything. And if tax payers 

Mike: 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? Or a vast majority 

Charlie: are privately owned 

Mike: these days.

And it’s government money, obviously. Yeah, so it’s like it’s, no, it’s our money. It’s your money. 

Charlie: True. That’s the issue that I tell people all the time. A dollar that, you can be tough on crime. Why? Because some crackhead broke into your car and stole the stereo? Okay, you’re mad at him?

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 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, you’re, we’re, for every dollar we spend on either prevention or treatment, you save 10 in taxpayer money.

That is an absolute. I’m not just making that, that number up like that is a verified number. The problem is you got lobbyists, you got people who are paying politicians, cause in this country we make sure that we always make the joke that at least in South America and a lot of other countries there they have enough decency to pay their bribes under the table.

We just allow our politicians to take money above the table. 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. Sure. Unless you have one. In there, that’s a family member or something like, so anyway, that’s my rant on that.

It’s just a 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. Yeah. Does that who you want as your neighbor or living down the street from you? Or do you want the guy who’s 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. That’s it. I do 

Mike: agree. So what’s next for you? So you have, yeah, 

Charlie: so 5. 8 is the big 

Mike: thing. And then you also mentioned, yeah, 

Charlie: Spartan, Spartan trail, which 

Mike: is in Virginia, 

Charlie: right? Yeah. So the first, so I am, I got permission from Joe to say, and actually, cause 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 and the middle of Virginia and 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 10 K course and a half marathon course, they will be in, they’ll go different directions from the regular Spartan. Regular race. That’s all I kick off from. Yeah, but they’ll start, the people doing the trail run will get a taste of the Spartan, vibe.

So they’ll get the MC there to take them through the chance 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, 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’m, 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 probably bringing somebody and that person may not want to do an obstacle race, but they’ll get out there and do a 10 K. So it gives both people something to do over the weekend where they leave with a metal and a t shirt and some memories and I will say it will be a Spartan trail run now, which means it’s not going to be if there’s mud, you’re going through it.

If there is, Virginia, North Carolina is rocks and roots. That’s the nature of our trails there. I’m going to make it challenging, but doable and give people a little taste of what the Spartan sort of lifestyle. Yeah. Yeah. Cause 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 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. Cause then, 

Mike: The payoff is, you gotta get to that. Yeah. If you don’t suffer a little 

Charlie: bit, if you don’t want to quit, then I’ve done something wrong, but then I want you to get to the end.

We want, 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. Cause it’s a new thing but any, 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, charlie angle. com. And that will direct you to all my social media. E N G L E.

Yeah. So charlieangle. 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 just, I don’t have the energy to do more than one thing. I’m pretty, 

Mike: Negligent in my, Yeah, I like my social media activities because I just, I’m not personally into it at all.

And not a good excuse because I should actually making better use of it. I’m hiring somebody. I want to actually, the thing is I want to get somebody cause it do it right. Takes a bit of work actually in terms of planning 

Charlie: 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 V, and he’s he’s the man. He’s got gazillion followers. One of the things that he does, it’s good is he’s consistent. 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. And I don’t even have to pay for it. But that’s the way to find me. And I, I welcome. I welcome questions or just inquiries or, about all these subjects and hopefully with Dead Sea to Everest 5.

8, there will be a production deal. So you will be available in a variety of different formats for people to follow along. 

Mike: That’s great. 

Charlie: Yeah. Thanks for taking the time. My 

Mike: pleasure. Thanks for having 

Charlie: me. 

Mike: Hey there, it is Mike again. I hope you enjoyed this episode and found it interesting and helpful.

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