[SPEAKER_01]: You gotta take that first step into the darkness.
[SPEAKER_01]: You gotta give up the fear and just trust things work out and it's better to try and fail than not to try.
[SPEAKER_01]: So I've always lived that way.
[SPEAKER_01]: I will try to walk into that dark room and see what happens rather than let fear keep me from doing that.
[SPEAKER_01]: And that's the way to open up new horizons to shake up your world a little bit.
[SPEAKER_00]: Welcome to another episode of Success for the Athletic Minded Man.
[SPEAKER_00]: We'll talk on harnessing your athletic drive for clarity, consistency, and focus, and business, and life.
[SPEAKER_00]: This is your host, Jim Harsher Jr., and today I bring you Dean King.
[SPEAKER_00]: There are times in your life when you get to come across these amazing individuals, you get to meet them personally, just going through life.
[SPEAKER_00]: And Dean King is one of those people for me.
[SPEAKER_00]: And we met back in two thousand fourteen, we both gave our TEDx talks on the Charlottesville TEDx stage, TEDx Charlottesville's in the top one percent of largest head events in the world.
[SPEAKER_00]: and he gave a talk on his book that is about the Hatfields in the McCoy's.
[SPEAKER_00]: Fascinating story and ever since we would come friends and he lives in Richmond about an hour away so we've connected and he was a college athlete, played the cross at the University of North Carolina.
[SPEAKER_00]: Of course I wrestled at Virginia so we had that athletic background in common and we stayed in touch of the years, got to know him and his family a bit and got to read some of his books and just see how somebody like him goes about
[SPEAKER_00]: his craft.
[SPEAKER_00]: Somebody who is a master at what he does in the lengths that he goes to in order to produce the type of work that he produces because sometimes we go through our own jobs our own lives and we think boy thinks should be going better for me.
[SPEAKER_00]: I think I should have more success right now because all the hard work that I'm putting in and then you meet people like Dean you go oh
[SPEAKER_00]: That's the standard and my coaching program, we have something called the environment of excellence where you want to be around people of a high standard, high caliber, high expectations for themselves, professionally, health and fitness, wise relationships, all of that.
[SPEAKER_00]: That's why the community
[SPEAKER_00]: component of what I do in my coaching program.
[SPEAKER_00]: There's eighty some guys in my community that community component is so so critical.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's not just the coaching.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's not just the framework.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's also the type of people you're around and you're sharing ideas and not trying to figure out life and in business on your own.
[SPEAKER_00]: You're around these other high performing people who can help you grow.
[SPEAKER_00]: And indeed, has been really a part of my environment of excellence.
[SPEAKER_00]: He's written ten nonfiction books.
[SPEAKER_00]: And he goes on these absurd challenges and adventures in pursuit of his work and pursuit of his craft.
[SPEAKER_00]: He goes on these sort of, you know, their physical and emotional and psychological challenges of going through the Sahara Desert is one example in his book, Skeletons on the Sahara, which is such a really, really cool book.
[SPEAKER_00]: That was the first book of his, I read, one of his more recent actually most recent book is Guardians of the Valley, which is about John Muir and the creation of you, so many National Park.
[SPEAKER_00]: And because of his dedication to his craft and because of the type of adventures that he's been on, he was invited to be a collaborator in consultant on the Netflix special called Golden Greed.
[SPEAKER_00]: If you've not watched it, it is absolutely just a fun watch.
[SPEAKER_00]: I think it's just three episodes about Forst Fend and this eccentric wealthy man who hid a treasure in the Rocky Mountains.
[SPEAKER_00]: This is just in recent years in the whole of the story behind that.
[SPEAKER_00]: So anyway,
[SPEAKER_00]: Dean was a consultant on that.
[SPEAKER_00]: All right.
[SPEAKER_00]: So let's get into my conversation with Dean where we explore how do you master your craft?
[SPEAKER_00]: What lengths does somebody like him go to to really pursue mastery and dedicate himself to his work?
[SPEAKER_00]: All right.
[SPEAKER_00]: Here we go.
[SPEAKER_00]: My interview with my good friend, Dean King.
[SPEAKER_00]: You have done some amazing things, ridiculous things in pursuit of research for writing your books.
[SPEAKER_00]: Can you think of the most ridiculous situation or crazy thing you've ever gotten yourself into in the name of researching a book?
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, I have an act for getting myself into some pretty precarious situations.
[SPEAKER_01]: And if I ever asked you to come on a research trip with me, you should not do it.
[SPEAKER_01]: I took my daughter to West Virginia.
[SPEAKER_01]: We got shot at.
[SPEAKER_01]: I plan to trip for the Sahara for about two weeks after nine, eleven.
[SPEAKER_01]: Of course, I've planted a year ahead of time and then ended up actually going on that trip.
[SPEAKER_01]: plan to trip to China to research another book and there was an earthquake in Sichuan province that prevented us from going ahead to go the next year.
[SPEAKER_01]: You know, when you go to some of these outer limits, you're going to encounter things like this and, you know, as part of the fun part of the excitement and part of the challenge that a lot of my subjects had to deal with.
[SPEAKER_01]: So I had to come back to actually West Virginia to get shot at.
[SPEAKER_01]: I guess that may have been the harriest situation that was in.
[SPEAKER_01]: So I was researching a book on the Hatfields of McCoy's.
[SPEAKER_01]: And my family is originally from West Virginia, but not that part of West Virginia.
[SPEAKER_01]: This is Southern West Virginia where the coal mines are and my family's from Parker'sburg West Virginia up on the Ohio River.
[SPEAKER_01]: So we go down to the Mate One area and I had two private forestry rangers taking me, not uniforms or anything and I told them I wanted to go to this place where a certain McCoy was killed by a hat field.
[SPEAKER_01]: So they figured it out on the map and we go there.
[SPEAKER_01]: and we walk out on a little delta where a creek comes into the river and this is perfect.
[SPEAKER_01]: I'm taking notes just looking at it so I can write about it and all of a sudden we hear an ATV driving on the trail behind us and it goes around and we see some heads looking around and they get back on their ATV and go up to the other end of the river then we hear a gunfire and we see the shot hitting the river, you know, not ten yards from us.
[SPEAKER_00]: They weren't just shooting into the air to scare you away.
[SPEAKER_00]: They were shooting at you.
[SPEAKER_01]: Oh, yeah.
[SPEAKER_01]: Well, you know, if they wanted to hit us, they would hit us.
[SPEAKER_01]: But they were shooting very near and from a distance that it was pretty dangerous and I have my daughter with me to my old was daughter Hazel and so the two Rangers who have to work in this area and it's kind of place where you have to save face.
[SPEAKER_01]: You can't just turn tail and run or, you know, they say, let's get your daughter in here and we're going to count the three and walk off slowly.
[SPEAKER_01]: So that's what we did.
[SPEAKER_01]: We walked out.
[SPEAKER_01]: Before I went back the next time, I called a guy and met in the town of Maitwana, said, hey, you know, I can't come in with some forestry rangers.
[SPEAKER_01]: I got to come in with some hat fields and a coys to research this book.
[SPEAKER_01]: And he said, I've got a guy who works for me who's a hat field.
[SPEAKER_01]: He'll take care of you.
[SPEAKER_01]: So I go out and meet him and I go to his house and he's got gallon jugs of moonshine sitting on his dining room table.
[SPEAKER_01]: And, you know, he gets to know me a little bit, but a little bit of distance.
[SPEAKER_01]: Once he gets to know me, the next time I go, he says, well, I heard you got shot at the first time you were in here.
[SPEAKER_01]: And I said, yeah, I did.
[SPEAKER_01]: And he said, well, I know that fella.
[SPEAKER_01]: He's a good old boy.
[SPEAKER_01]: He just don't like nobody in his marijuana patch.
[SPEAKER_01]: We had bushwack down to the river through somebody's marijuana patch without realizing it.
[SPEAKER_01]: But this guy, this had field once he got to know me, it was like being part of the family.
[SPEAKER_01]: You know, he took care of me and I got great research after that.
[SPEAKER_01]: But that was pretty scary.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, no kidding.
[SPEAKER_00]: So has there ever been like, some of these stories you've written are just these incredible fascinating tales and stories and journeys that people have been on.
[SPEAKER_00]: Has there ever been one where when you uncovered the truth of the story like it was more inspiring or more shocking than even the legend or like what you expected?
[SPEAKER_01]: Well, I think that what I try to do is, you know, when history is legend, I try to make it real by making the people real, not legendary figures, not statues.
[SPEAKER_01]: It was a statue of Devalan's Hatfield, a life-size statue of them in the cemetery in Serian, West Virginia.
[SPEAKER_01]: But to make something powerful, I think, you need to be on a level with
[SPEAKER_01]: that the hero who did something heroic.
[SPEAKER_01]: Because if you see them as somehow elevated and better than you with superpowers that you don't have, you can't relate to that.
[SPEAKER_01]: But if you see them as a human being like you who made a great decision or did something very courageous, then you can really connect with that and you can grow from that experience.
[SPEAKER_01]: So really what I try to do is go in there and find out and make these people real.
[SPEAKER_01]: Make devil ants hat field a real person for you.
[SPEAKER_01]: or Captain James Riley, who was a subject of my book, skeletons on the Zahara, who crossed the Zahara with his brew and made it to freedom after a shipwreck.
[SPEAKER_01]: How did he do that?
[SPEAKER_01]: How do you relate to him?
[SPEAKER_01]: So what I always found is that history's been told a certain way.
[SPEAKER_01]: And if you really dig in, you're gonna find new paths through that history, new ways to relate to it, new ways to make it relevant.
[SPEAKER_01]: And that's what I really love doing.
[SPEAKER_00]: the books you write are fascinating the stories are fascinating and the life that you have to live and the adventures that you go on are fascinating as well because you're retracing a lot of their steps and going back to the scene of the crime or the scene of the adventure or the scene of the event and living out some of this yourself so how did you how did you get into this like how did how did you get to this point
[SPEAKER_01]: Well, the adventures, the reward for a lot of time, like a lot of people behind their computer with a nose and a book or in a library.
[SPEAKER_01]: And I started out, I went to NYU to, and it got a master's degree in creative writing, but I always wanted to be a writer.
[SPEAKER_01]: So it dates back to, you know, time with my mother taking me to the library and to the stacks, you know, pulling out biographies and my grandmother always doing the New York Times crossword puzzle, loving words and wordplay.
[SPEAKER_01]: So I was surrounded by that all the time.
[SPEAKER_01]: I really had a duality of loving sports and being very active and reading for pleasure and for escaping into new worlds.
[SPEAKER_01]: I loved it when an author could transport me into a different place.
[SPEAKER_01]: And I've always tried to do that.
[SPEAKER_01]: I tried to transport the reader and not shake them out of that.
[SPEAKER_01]: So any kind of modern context I had is usually in the end notes and that sort of thing because I want you to be there with these people and to live there.
[SPEAKER_01]: I don't want to fill you up with information.
[SPEAKER_01]: I want you to experience something.
[SPEAKER_01]: So I guess my first break was I was researching a companion book to Patrick O'Brien's novels.
[SPEAKER_01]: And he wrote Master in Command of the Far Side of the World.
[SPEAKER_01]: The Russell Crowe movie you might remember was called Master in Commander based on these twenty-one books written by Patrick O'Brien.
[SPEAKER_01]: The New York Times called them the best historical novels ever written.
[SPEAKER_01]: It's been called the most profound literature about male friendship ever written.
[SPEAKER_01]: So when I read those things, I knew I was going to love these books and I read them.
[SPEAKER_01]: Then I realized they're on square rig ships in the Napoleonic Wars.
[SPEAKER_01]: So you read them, the plots are great and the humor and all kinds of things in these books are fantastic.
[SPEAKER_01]: But I realized you needed to know more.
[SPEAKER_01]: So I went into, I was living in New York City at the time.
[SPEAKER_01]: I went into the Newark Yacht Club and started digging there.
[SPEAKER_01]: I actually did my very first book was a dictionary in Cyclopedia, a companion book for people reading these books.
[SPEAKER_01]: So you know the geography of the Napoleonic Wars, you know the parts of the square rig ship, you know the language, the politics, all that's kind of stuff.
[SPEAKER_01]: But while I was there, I discovered Captain Ryanley's his narrative of his shipwreck in eighteen-fifteen.
[SPEAKER_01]: I just looked up on the shelf one day and saw the words sufferings in Africa.
[SPEAKER_01]: And I pull that thing down and I start reading them like, oh my gosh.
[SPEAKER_01]: You know, I knew at that point, I worked on the on the companion books in a autobiography of of Patrick O'Brien.
[SPEAKER_01]: So for eight years, I kind of imp, a penist under Patrick O'Brien, really not not that he knew it, but I read a biography of him.
[SPEAKER_01]: I did three different companion books.
[SPEAKER_01]: I did an anthology.
[SPEAKER_01]: I edited a series, but this little discovery of this book, you know, I knew sailors tales on rent.
[SPEAKER_01]: I was like,
[SPEAKER_01]: This is a real story, you know, this is accurate.
[SPEAKER_01]: It's just two strange to be fake in a way.
[SPEAKER_01]: So I then went down to the New York Public Library, which is just a few blocks from the New York Yacht Club, went in there and went into the card catalog and found out that another one of the sailors he had listed wrote a memoir also published in eighteen seventeen.
[SPEAKER_01]: Nobody had put those together, and then maybe the greatest piece was I discovered that Abraham Lincoln had read the captain's memoir as a boy, instead it was one of the five books that made a big impression upon him as a boy.
[SPEAKER_01]: So I knew I had this little piece of American history that had been forgotten.
[SPEAKER_01]: And so I was able to put those things together.
[SPEAKER_01]: That led to the trip, you know, in the Sahara, nine eleven happened in the middle of all that.
[SPEAKER_01]: So it got really crazy.
[SPEAKER_01]: And, you know, the trip almost didn't come off.
[SPEAKER_01]: One thing I think maybe a good takeaway is you kind of think that maybe a writer goes on the adventure and then writes about it.
[SPEAKER_01]: Well, what I did was I took all the book information that I could get.
[SPEAKER_01]: Everything I could find maps, you know, and put it together in the manuscript so that when I went on the adventure, I knew what I was looking for.
[SPEAKER_01]: So, you know, I knew I could only go to the Sahara across the Sahara on camels with land rivers, you know, using both at different times.
[SPEAKER_01]: But I knew it was a one-shot deal in National Geographic had also bought a story from me, so I had a photographer.
[SPEAKER_01]: But I had to be prepared preparation.
[SPEAKER_01]: You know, we talk about our sports background, everything, how important preparation is.
[SPEAKER_01]: But I knew what I was looking for.
[SPEAKER_01]: So when time's got tough on that trip and it was a really rough trip.
[SPEAKER_01]: There's a saying over there on wall wall, West Africa wins again.
[SPEAKER_01]: No matter what you plan, West Africa is going to win.
[SPEAKER_01]: And I experienced that everything went wrong.
[SPEAKER_01]: Well, okay, it was out right after nine eleven.
[SPEAKER_01]: So I had to prove my entire trip to the Moroccan tourism board.
[SPEAKER_01]: But when I got there, they didn't care anything about the Moroccan tourism board.
[SPEAKER_01]: I was in what was Spanish Sahara, now Western Sahara, and it's controlled by the Moroccan national police and military.
[SPEAKER_01]: So, you know, they didn't want me there after not eleven.
[SPEAKER_01]: They were afraid something might happen to an American that would, you know, reflect badly there in, in cause problems.
[SPEAKER_01]: So they disrupted my trip.
[SPEAKER_01]: And they would, for instance, the local sheriff would say, oh, yes, you know, it's so nice to meet you.
[SPEAKER_01]: You can go tomorrow.
[SPEAKER_01]: And then tomorrow would come and they, and they go, oh, but you need the approval of the chieftain of the area too.
[SPEAKER_01]: And he's not here.
[SPEAKER_01]: You know, and they kept doing stuff like that.
[SPEAKER_01]: They took us on to the military base at one point as we were going down to the southernmost part of the arc that Captain Riley's trip took him on where I wanted to start.
[SPEAKER_01]: They took us to the military base and I didn't take it that seriously, you know, because I have never encountered anything like that in the United States.
[SPEAKER_01]: But my guide came to me to talk about it.
[SPEAKER_01]: I could see that he was very disturbed.
[SPEAKER_01]: He tried to light a cigarette and he couldn't get the lighter in the cigarette together.
[SPEAKER_01]: So that's what I realized.
[SPEAKER_01]: We got a problem here.
[SPEAKER_01]: This guy's really scared.
[SPEAKER_01]: They taken his ID papers and the whole crew's ID papers.
[SPEAKER_01]: So I realized, OK, this is really serious to these guys.
[SPEAKER_01]: So it's serious to me.
[SPEAKER_01]: And I don't think they would have really messed with me.
[SPEAKER_01]: But my crew was under threat.
[SPEAKER_01]: So it went on and on like that.
[SPEAKER_01]: We saw a camel that had been blown up.
[SPEAKER_01]: It's the most land-mind place in the world, the border of Western Sahara.
[SPEAKER_01]: And that's a whole political thing I could talk about, but it's a pretty big digression.
[SPEAKER_01]: The Spaniards left in seventy-three and then Morocco and Mauritania and Algeria have all kind of fought for the place.
[SPEAKER_01]: But in the end, all these things
[SPEAKER_01]: You know, we also talked about the role of failure in life and projects.
[SPEAKER_01]: And Riley, Captain Riley, faced the worst kind of failure.
[SPEAKER_01]: He, he wrecked his ship.
[SPEAKER_01]: He was lost.
[SPEAKER_01]: He thought they were going to starve and die of thirst on the desert.
[SPEAKER_01]: And he tells you, in his memoir, he's surrendered to the will of God.
[SPEAKER_01]: You know, it was an amazing thing to read that.
[SPEAKER_01]: And for me to go there and experience that kind of disruption, not life threatening like his, but complete disruption of this big trip I had planned and put a lot of resources into and plan for over a year.
[SPEAKER_01]: And my reputation, I felt, wrote on it.
[SPEAKER_01]: And I think we go in thinking, okay, we're going to be in control of situations.
[SPEAKER_01]: And I wasn't able to succeed until I let go of that, of that feeling that I had a controlled situation, just like Riley Riley said, he surrendered to the will of God and that that's what allowed him to survive.
[SPEAKER_01]: I even at one point
[SPEAKER_01]: was you know trying to control like we need to go this far every day we need to do this that and the other finally one of the guys challenged me to a foot race on the desert and we go tear it off across the desert you know it's not that pretty sandy desert it's it's hard pan with stones and and pretty soon you know i've trained for this to physically i'm i'm ready to go and i'm out stripping the guide well
[SPEAKER_01]: What good does that do you?
[SPEAKER_01]: I don't know where I'm going.
[SPEAKER_01]: You know, we want to outrun your guy.
[SPEAKER_01]: That's pretty stupid.
[SPEAKER_01]: You hit one of these stones.
[SPEAKER_01]: You're gonna break your ankle and your trip's done.
[SPEAKER_01]: You know, so that's how tight I was wanting to make this trip work and be successful for my partners and me.
[SPEAKER_01]: But it was a moment where I had to let go.
[SPEAKER_01]: And it wasn't then, you know, I was upset.
[SPEAKER_01]: It wasn't until later where I got to reflect and go, oh my gosh, just like Riley had to let go because what he faced, I had to let go too.
[SPEAKER_01]: And so it was a deeper experience than I even thought I'd be able to get.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, how does that relate to the listener, right?
[SPEAKER_00]: The guy who's listening, you know, mid-career, maybe has this athletic background like you and I share, there are things that we want to control in our careers and our businesses and our lives.
[SPEAKER_00]: And you got put into a situation where like, you know, we always say control the controllables, but man, there wasn't a whole lot in your control.
[SPEAKER_00]: I mean, how do we embrace this mindset out here in the real world for the rest of us?
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, well, I think, you know, as athletes who've been on teams, you know, it's so important to have a team, to trust your team, know your role, and get in a situation where you can rely and trust on your teammates, and let go a little bit on occasion.
[SPEAKER_01]: You know, I did have two people who had come along, they skipped their honeymoon to come along, and they had been to third world countries and everything, but they went to experiences, but it was so miserable.
[SPEAKER_01]: We were stuck in the jeeps at some points for, you know, a day and a half.
[SPEAKER_01]: not being allowed to go anywhere and that there was upsetting to me that I was not performing for them and everything.
[SPEAKER_01]: And there was tension.
[SPEAKER_01]: But I think as you said, control what you can control and then try to be graceful, try to be pleasant and reasonable and to make the best of a bad situation.
[SPEAKER_01]: Look for that proverbial silver lining as well.
[SPEAKER_01]: But for me, and a lot of these instances of faceless kinds of things where you don't immediately realize that you're learning and growing
[SPEAKER_01]: until afterwards and you kind of reflect and realize, well, that was a good experience for me.
[SPEAKER_01]: And I think sometimes if we're struggling in a project or things aren't working out the way we thought they were going to work, being a little more agile and looking for new ways to solve problems and opening up the mind.
[SPEAKER_01]: As we get experience, we learn these kinds of skills, I think.
[SPEAKER_01]: It's more closer to wisdom probably.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, you know, for the listener, like, how does this apply to your life, you know, after you, you're done listening to this episode is like whatever challenges your facing struggles and things aren't happening on the timeline that you want.
[SPEAKER_00]: You actually have to be present in that moment.
[SPEAKER_00]: Like Dean talked about, you know, we learn these lessons oftentimes in hindsight and we have to carry those forward and go, okay, I heard Jim and Dean talking about this on the podcast episode and the project that I'm working on didn't get done or the job that I want that I didn't get it.
[SPEAKER_00]: Like you got to truly and actually embrace this.
[SPEAKER_00]: I have a client who
[SPEAKER_00]: He was applying for a very big job, a very big, a huge next step form.
[SPEAKER_00]: The right next step for him and his career.
[SPEAKER_00]: And there were a hundred applicants.
[SPEAKER_00]: He got down to the final two and there were interview after, interview after round after round.
[SPEAKER_00]: He didn't get it.
[SPEAKER_00]: And I was texting with him.
[SPEAKER_00]: I said,
[SPEAKER_00]: What would, you know, in our world, he's a former wrestler.
[SPEAKER_00]: I'm a former wrestler.
[SPEAKER_00]: I said, well, how would Jordan Burroughs handle this?
[SPEAKER_00]: I think this is the goat of wrestling in America.
[SPEAKER_00]: And, you know, he, he won an Olympic goal medal.
[SPEAKER_00]: And then the next time around at the Olympics, he got eliminated.
[SPEAKER_00]: He didn't even medal.
[SPEAKER_00]: And he was still went on to become the go.
[SPEAKER_00]: He's still went on to win multiple World Championships afterwards.
[SPEAKER_00]: And it's just like, how does that guy handle it?
[SPEAKER_00]: How does Dean handle it in this situation?
[SPEAKER_00]: And we've got to go and carry that lesson forward.
[SPEAKER_00]: In that moment, as opposed to hearing this nice story on a podcast episode and reflecting on the lesson, but actually not utilizing it.
[SPEAKER_00]: So Dean, for you, why pursue this?
[SPEAKER_00]: It's one thing to be a writer.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's a whole other level to be a writer who's going on these these impossible journeys at times
[SPEAKER_00]: To do this, I mean, what does this come from?
[SPEAKER_00]: What it's, are you trying to scratch with each book and each adventure?
[SPEAKER_01]: You know, I remember back to being a kid in watching sports on TV.
[SPEAKER_01]: There's a basketball, neighborhood basketball court, not too far.
[SPEAKER_01]: I could see it from the TV room.
[SPEAKER_01]: And a certain point I made a decision that there is ever a choice of watching the game on TV or actually playing the game.
[SPEAKER_01]: I was going to play the game.
[SPEAKER_01]: And I think being out there in the world, being active and interacting with people in situations is invaluable.
[SPEAKER_01]: We all, I think, crave some sort of adventure interaction, human interaction in terms of writing books, you know, you can gather all the information that's in books and archives and pull all that together.
[SPEAKER_01]: There's no substitute for going out on the trail, you know, living by the campfire, smelling the campfire smoke.
[SPEAKER_01]: You know, I was gonna slaughter a camel of while I was there because Riley, there's a very important scene where he has a camel slaughtered.
[SPEAKER_01]: And as soon as he does, all the Arabs come and eat the camel.
[SPEAKER_01]: And he bought the camel and had it slaughtered so that he'd get his men across the desert.
[SPEAKER_01]: And the people he's hired is, God, won't stop the others from eating his camel.
[SPEAKER_01]: And he's destroys, you know, he's American.
[SPEAKER_01]: He doesn't understand that.
[SPEAKER_01]: And then they explain to him, no, you know, I'll us giving us this food.
[SPEAKER_01]: It's all as food.
[SPEAKER_01]: We have to share it with anybody.
[SPEAKER_01]: And when I went over there, I experienced similar type things.
[SPEAKER_01]: We would sit down to have tea in the middle of the desert.
[SPEAKER_01]: Nobody for miles.
[SPEAKER_01]: The minute we light a fire and start cooking the tea, somebody would appear walking across the desert.
[SPEAKER_01]: It was mind-boggling and they'd come to the fire and our God would be, oh, please join us.
[SPEAKER_01]: We're going to share the tea and split if we had sandwiches, we would cut them up and share everything.
[SPEAKER_01]: And to learn that different culture to be there, there's a scene in the book where Riley describes his men get what they call moon sickness, what the natives call moon sickness.
[SPEAKER_01]: And they're very just, you know, their bodies are failing and their Arab gods say, we can fix this and they take their knives and put them in the fire and heat up the back sides and they brand these guys who are screaming because they got, you know, hot knives being applied to their skin.
[SPEAKER_01]: And that was one of the most sort of outrageous scenes I read in Riley's narrative.
[SPEAKER_01]: And I thought, well, maybe he's stretching the truth a little bit there.
[SPEAKER_01]: Well, I get over there.
[SPEAKER_01]: I'm in one of the jeeps with my driver.
[SPEAKER_01]: And I see these two scars on his neck.
[SPEAKER_01]: And I say, how'd you get this cars?
[SPEAKER_01]: He went on to describe being sick four years earlier in the exact same treatment that they heated up the knives in the fire and branded him.
[SPEAKER_01]: And he said it saved his life.
[SPEAKER_01]: So that was amazing.
[SPEAKER_01]: One more quick anecdote.
[SPEAKER_01]: I'm on the camel for the first time.
[SPEAKER_01]: You know, in my guide was a camel jockey instructor.
[SPEAKER_01]: So he goes flying across the desert.
[SPEAKER_01]: I'm, you know, racing behind him, rouse of camel, you know, foam flying out of the mouth trying to dodge that.
[SPEAKER_01]: And my saddle starts to just slide.
[SPEAKER_01]: off, and eventually, otherwise I'm going to go into the whip-sawing logs, legs of my camel.
[SPEAKER_01]: I didn't know how to stop a camel, even.
[SPEAKER_01]: So my guide comes riding up and goes, King, what's wrong with you?
[SPEAKER_01]: You know, I'm checking to see if something's broken, you know, my metaphor for riding a camel is it's like sitting on a bar stool on a horse.
[SPEAKER_01]: said though you know horse going one way the bar still is one the other and you fall in from pretty pretty high up and goes king what's wrong with you and it and I don't really answer goes never mind those who fall from camels are protected by a la you're not hurt you're okay now this would have been small solace to me having just fallen off of the camel except for
[SPEAKER_01]: Riley's guide said this exact same thing to him in eighteen fifteen and I read that and it's been more and again I thought okay maybe stretching the truth he fell off of this camel the guide said hey you fell off of a camel if you'd fallen off of an ass you know you might be dead but you're fine and so that was a thing I didn't expect to experience but being there I actually experienced that yeah fascinating
[SPEAKER_00]: So you've experienced, you've gone through a lot of pain and suffering and mental anguish and physical anguish to bring these stories to life.
[SPEAKER_00]: Well, I'm curious your take on this.
[SPEAKER_00]: There's a great book called The Comfort Crisis, I don't know if you've heard of this by Michael Leister, where he talks about just the Comfort Crisis, especially in America, where things are very easy for us and we can punch a couple buttons on our phone and food will arrive at our door and
[SPEAKER_00]: You know, we never really have to exert ourselves.
[SPEAKER_00]: We can live in air conditioning and heat.
[SPEAKER_00]: And like, what value do you place on?
[SPEAKER_00]: If any, and this is not, I'm not trying to throw you a softball here.
[SPEAKER_00]: I'm just curious, like, do you value that hard, like doing the hard thing and that experience of, you know, falling off a camel and the challenges that you've had to, like, do you value that physical part of that?
[SPEAKER_00]: How important do you feel that is for people to experience?
[SPEAKER_01]: Well, I think it's super important to shake up your normal life and get out and to be physical and to get paired down.
[SPEAKER_01]: I do a lot across country walking.
[SPEAKER_01]: I walked across England, you know, year out of college.
[SPEAKER_01]: And I've walked across England twice now and done the Tour de Mont Blanc and walked the Welsh border.
[SPEAKER_01]: And you know, so getting out and realizing that you can survive off of what you carry on your back.
[SPEAKER_01]: You know, I was a boy scout too.
[SPEAKER_01]: So I did all that kind of hiking and survival camp.
[SPEAKER_01]: And I love that.
[SPEAKER_01]: I love adventure.
[SPEAKER_01]: But I think being paired down and understanding how little we need to actually exist and be comfortable or at least to survive is really important.
[SPEAKER_01]: It puts other things in perspective to be hungry out on the trail when you get back home and in something's not cooked the way you want or it's not the perfect meal.
[SPEAKER_01]: You know, your attitude's a little different.
[SPEAKER_01]: It's like, hey, that looks pretty good.
[SPEAKER_01]: You know,
[SPEAKER_01]: And so I think these kinds of experiences are important.
[SPEAKER_01]: As you know, I just walked the Camino Portuguese with my daughter.
[SPEAKER_01]: We went a hundred and eighty miles in thirteen days.
[SPEAKER_01]: And just being out on the trail in that rhythm, you know, it just changes your perspective on, you know, you're in pain, your legs hurt, your feet hurt over time, your joints hurt, everything hurts.
[SPEAKER_01]: You know, you're hungry a lot, but those are basic needs.
[SPEAKER_01]: And it makes a lot of other worries and neuroses and things just go away.
[SPEAKER_00]: You know, like how many likes you got on your most recent social media post or?
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, yeah.
[SPEAKER_01]: Hundreds, you know, people really enjoying seeing that experience and bonding with the people you're with meeting new people.
[SPEAKER_01]: You lose a lot of your baggage.
[SPEAKER_01]: So it's a lot easier to meet people and to write to them, you know, because you're you're suffering their same experiences.
[SPEAKER_01]: Again, it's sort of maybe analogous to teammates where, you know, you did two days with guys.
[SPEAKER_01]: you struggle, you hit each other, you punch each other, you know, all that kind of stuff, you know, to achieve a goal.
[SPEAKER_01]: And that's incredibly valuable in a stuff and it helps you form bonds and grow in many ways.
[SPEAKER_00]: There are two podcast episodes that I remember and there's a one quote from each that I
[SPEAKER_00]: They just really struck me, struck deeply inside of me is the one is by Dave Redding, who's the founder of this F-III workout group, men's workout group that I'm a part of.
[SPEAKER_00]: They talk about a fair bit on this podcast.
[SPEAKER_00]: And he said, maybe somewhere deep in the hearts of men, we don't want everything to be easy.
[SPEAKER_00]: And I think there's a lot of truth to that.
[SPEAKER_00]: And then the other one is from Joe DeSena, who's the founder of Spartan Races.
[SPEAKER_00]: And he said, if you architect a little bit of discomfort into your life on a regular basis, you can be happy just eating a cracker in the rain.
[SPEAKER_01]: Exactly.
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, that's great.
[SPEAKER_01]: And I think that, I guess, again, it comes back to that thing.
[SPEAKER_01]: It's the journey.
[SPEAKER_01]: Usually not the place you end up.
[SPEAKER_01]: And so in terms of writing books or achieving in your career, if you work hard and you put the time and you put all the effort in and things don't go your way, you can still be happy and proud.
[SPEAKER_01]: And that's important to know that you gave your best effort.
[SPEAKER_01]: I do that with my books and when I launched them, you know, they're going to go out to cruel critics who are just going to potentially, you know, break them over the calls.
[SPEAKER_01]: They don't have anything invested and it is a good reader not.
[SPEAKER_01]: You know, and so I'm subjected to that.
[SPEAKER_01]: A lot of people have a hard time with that.
[SPEAKER_01]: I don't.
[SPEAKER_01]: If somebody reviews me unfairly, I'm not saying I don't get a little angry, but it doesn't affect my self value and worth and feelings about myself.
[SPEAKER_01]: If I know, I put everything I could into a book.
[SPEAKER_01]: If I turned every stone and edited it five extra times, they're limits.
[SPEAKER_01]: But if you do the best you can do, how can you question that?
[SPEAKER_01]: And I know I do, like, on the I still play squash and now playing Padel, this other racket game.
[SPEAKER_01]: And when things go wrong, I tend to blame myself.
[SPEAKER_01]: Instead of, you know, more often, I should say that guy had a great shot.
[SPEAKER_01]: And there are other factors there.
[SPEAKER_01]: And so, again, as we live in gain experience, we understand that we put the effort in as best we can, and we give it our all, we can be proud of that.
[SPEAKER_00]: Has there been a time in your career where you've put forth what you thought was a good enough at least effort and things didn't work out at the time when you failed?
[SPEAKER_01]: Well, I think life is in some ways continuing series of failures, you know, when professional tennis players go to a tournament, one guy wins.
[SPEAKER_01]: At the end of the season of every professional sport, one team wins.
[SPEAKER_01]: Everybody else lost.
[SPEAKER_01]: We have to deal with those things.
[SPEAKER_01]: They're, you know, sure.
[SPEAKER_01]: They're writers whose work I read and go, you know, I think much better.
[SPEAKER_01]: But they're achieving more selling more books or for whatever reason that it is.
[SPEAKER_01]: You have to come to terms with those kinds of things as well.
[SPEAKER_01]: That luck plays a part in it.
[SPEAKER_01]: Maybe certain choices play a part in it and you know, so be it.
[SPEAKER_01]: But again, I think ultimately we're looking for living meaningful lives.
[SPEAKER_01]: and positive lives and giving back in some way leaving the place better than we found it.
[SPEAKER_01]: And so, you know, those are things that I think that we do all struggle coming to terms with every day.
[SPEAKER_01]: And I think experience helps.
[SPEAKER_00]: What do you say to the guy who's listening, who is maybe stuck in a career or a job or even growing business that is just not fulfilling for them?
[SPEAKER_00]: Well, what I'm getting at is you've pursued your passion, right?
[SPEAKER_00]: This is something that just it seems like found you, right?
[SPEAKER_00]: It was in you, you pursued it, it found you, you get to do
[SPEAKER_00]: the thing that was in you since you were a child.
[SPEAKER_00]: What do you say to the guy who maybe didn't take that path, right?
[SPEAKER_00]: They took the path of they felt like they were supposed to do or what society tells them they're supposed to do and they feel stuck.
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, look for change where you can.
[SPEAKER_01]: I find it a lot of times in just opening my mind as something else.
[SPEAKER_01]: I just gave the example to a young writer today.
[SPEAKER_01]: When I did my book Guardians of the Valley about John Mir in the creation of the Yosemite National Park and the modern environmental movement, Mir's life was so complex that I didn't really know how to harness it.
[SPEAKER_01]: Because I don't tell a biography, I tell a narrative story.
[SPEAKER_01]: And I read a novelist named Anne Pagitt's book Common Wealth.
[SPEAKER_01]: And she jumps through time.
[SPEAKER_01]: It opened my mind.
[SPEAKER_01]: I saw, oh my gosh, I don't have to tell you.
[SPEAKER_01]: I don't have to give you every little piece.
[SPEAKER_01]: I can jump through time with this life.
[SPEAKER_01]: It'll allow me to go back into his life and strip out what I didn't want to tell and create this narrative arc of what I think the reader needs to know about John Muir why he's so great.
[SPEAKER_01]: But anyway, it was just, it was almost random that I read that book.
[SPEAKER_01]: But I found a solution there.
[SPEAKER_01]: And I think letting go and looking for solutions in other places may be taking that walk.
[SPEAKER_01]: I mean, the walk that I just took was fantastic.
[SPEAKER_01]: Sometimes it's picking up the telephone and just making a call to an expert that you don't feel like you're totally prepared to do or you know, you feel sheepish about just making yourself vulnerable.
[SPEAKER_01]: sometimes I think and to look for ways to shake you out of the patterns or your fears, a lot of people want to write and there is a threshold that the people who've already written a book or two, they forget there's a threshold there for people who haven't who don't understand.
[SPEAKER_01]: So always say you gotta take that first step into the darkness.
[SPEAKER_01]: You got to give up the fear and just trust things work out and it's better to try and fail than not to try.
[SPEAKER_01]: So I've always lived that way.
[SPEAKER_01]: I will try to walk into that dark room and see what happens rather than let fear keep me from doing that.
[SPEAKER_01]: And that's the way to open up new horizons to shake up your world a little bit.
[SPEAKER_00]: The listener go back hit the rewind button thirty seconds or a minute and go back and listen to what Dean just said about taking that first step into the darkness.
[SPEAKER_00]: And this is a guy who you may like, oh, he just successful and he goes on these adventures and writes these books and they're great and people buy him and everything's easy.
[SPEAKER_00]: Like we're talking to a guy who is taking that step into the darkness over and over and over.
[SPEAKER_00]: So the point where he makes it look easy, I just saw something on social media today about this image of a ballerina who makes it look easy, but it's so hard to make it look easy.
[SPEAKER_00]: It takes so much time, so much energy, so much effort to get to the point where you make it look easy.
[SPEAKER_00]: And you've certainly done that, Dean.
[SPEAKER_00]: So I'm gonna ask you a question that's maybe a little bit selfish, because one of my core values is adventure.
[SPEAKER_00]: Actually, in about twenty four hours, I'm leaving to go on a weekend adventure with an old buddy, a couple of old buddies.
[SPEAKER_00]: And I just think adventure is so critical.
[SPEAKER_00]: I work out in the morning and this morning I didn't really really hard work out.
[SPEAKER_00]: And early in the morning with a bunch of friends and I consider that a daily adventure that I get to do.
[SPEAKER_00]: I think it's so critical to go and do hard things and go on adventures and have someone certainty and to do just things that are outside of your comfort zone.
[SPEAKER_00]: So what do you say to the guy who maybe has lost touch with his sense of adventure?
[SPEAKER_00]: Because I be honest, like I think
[SPEAKER_00]: I think it's in particularly men.
[SPEAKER_00]: I think it's certainly in women as well.
[SPEAKER_00]: I think there's something unique about adventure and men that really can bring the best out of a man.
[SPEAKER_00]: But I think a lot of guys don't pursue it.
[SPEAKER_01]: You know, I agree.
[SPEAKER_01]: And I think it's often little things that stop us from taking adventures.
[SPEAKER_01]: And again, I'm going to go back to that image of stepping into the darkness.
[SPEAKER_01]: It's like, you know, you don't know how to set up that adventure.
[SPEAKER_01]: But if you just make the first phone call, you're going to find somebody who's going to help you.
[SPEAKER_01]: You know, you're not going to do it all alone.
[SPEAKER_01]: And you know, most of these things aren't being done for the first time.
[SPEAKER_01]: There's people that have experience and people want to help you.
[SPEAKER_01]: I think people want to help move you along.
[SPEAKER_01]: So again, it's sort of addressing your fears.
[SPEAKER_01]: And I agree it's why we do these things, it's why we go on adventures because you're going to be faced with stuff that you're probably scared of, you know, of thirst, of getting lost, of, you know, not being prepared if you're out in the wilderness, that kind of thing.
[SPEAKER_01]: And then to deal with that, to learn from it and hopefully to succeed at your efforts brings you pride and well-being and the ability to face more adventures and
[SPEAKER_01]: makes us feel good about ourselves.
[SPEAKER_01]: In addition to you're talking about physical fitness too, I think that's very important.
[SPEAKER_01]: And so if you've lost your sense of adventure, it may be as little as, hey, putting all the gym clothes and going out for a run today or a walk, you know, just making a walk a part of your routine.
[SPEAKER_01]: Whatever it is, it can be little tiny steps that lead to bigger steps.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, excellent.
[SPEAKER_00]: And I always ask, you know, for an action item coming out of these episodes, and I think you just gave it to us, like take that first step, make the phone call, reach out to somebody who's already figured it out, go do the hard thing, put on the running shoes, go for a walk, go for, go for a run.
[SPEAKER_00]: Those are good concrete action items and take away is your dean.
[SPEAKER_00]: Thank you so much for the listener who wants to buy your books, find you, follow you, who work and they do that.
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, I've got a website, dnajking.com, and also on Amazon, if you look up Dean King, all my books are up there.
[SPEAKER_01]: Should be in your local bookstores, too.
[SPEAKER_01]: I have love to keep people in local bookstores, but either way.
[SPEAKER_00]: And these are some phenomenal, phenomenal books that just stir the solid adventure inside of me.
[SPEAKER_00]: So Dean, thank you so much for coming on the show.
[SPEAKER_01]: Great to be on GM.
[SPEAKER_01]: Thank you.
[SPEAKER_01]: Good luck with all your pursuits.
[SPEAKER_01]: Likewise.
[SPEAKER_01]: Take care.