UNRATIONED

Charlie Brenneman, former UFC fighter turned professional speaker, joins Evan and Joshua for a conversation that moves from fighting to prisons to parenting to Spain and back again. Charlie grew up a scared, insecure kid in small-town Pennsylvania who hated fighting, developed nervous ticks from the anxiety of it, and then spent the better part of a decade training alongside future UFC champions before becoming one himself with a record of 19 and 8. Now he speaks in schools, prisons, military bases, and corporate settings, chasing the same thread through all of it: extending a hand to the person who needs it most, the way he once needed it. The episode closes on travel as the antidote to ignorance, a journal he’s been secretly writing to each of his kids, and what it means to him to pursue rather than possess an extraordinary life.

Tony Rezac, host of Basecamp for Men, joins Evan and Joshua for a conversation that moves fast and covers a lot of ground: chapters of life, the hero’s journey as a living language, addiction as both curse and gold, marriage as the longest and most demanding initiation of all, and myth as the medicine that sustains humanity through whatever is coming next. Tony brings thirty years of men’s work, a long marriage, a deep esoteric streak, and the kind of hard-won honesty that comes from someone who has been through enough chapters to stop pretending any of them are the last one. The conversation lands on the idea that transformation is not an event but a constant, that the myth is eternal and only our awareness of it needs tending, and that the liminal spaces we’re all living through right now are exactly the terrain where myth does its best work. It closes with Tony naming his compass for truth: sit in silence, get into nature, and notice what carries an easy yoke and a light burden.

Evan sits down with Mike Box, a Jungian psychoanalyst, for a wide-ranging conversation about male psychology, suffering, and what it means to actually engage with life rather than just move through it. They cover legitimate versus illegitimate suffering, the wild man from Iron John, the Ouroboros, the red shoes, and why men so often identify with what they do rather than who they are. Mike shares his own story of coming back from the Gulf War, drinking too much for years, and eventually arriving at the legitimate suffering he’d been avoiding, and how that arc maps onto the men he now works with who wake up somewhere in their forties asking whether this is as good as it gets. The conversation ends on the importance of play, the loss of male community, and why spaces where men can talk about things that actually matter are rare and necessary.

Ido Dassa, a twenty-eight-year-old Israeli ultrarunner turned startup founder based in Vienna, joins Evan and Danny for a conversation that covers a lot of ground: growing up overweight and checked out of school, discovering sport at seventeen, becoming a professional athlete and national record holder, and now building Race Pace, an AI-powered trail running co-pilot. What makes Ido's story compelling is not the race results but the way he thinks, like a person who keeps saying yes to things that terrify him, from signing up for an Ironman four months after learning to swim to competing in the backyard ultra world championship satellite race in October. He talks about how sport gave him a toolkit for everything else in life, how getting comfortable with failure in training made him willing to try things he would have never attempted before, and why he deliberately seeks out situations where he has no idea how the day is going to go. The episode closes with a pitch for Race Pace and a reminder that the backyard ultra world championship satellite races are happening in October with live tracking available online.

This is a short, unscheduled drop from Evan, Danny, and Joshua giving people a practical look at what the Unrationed annual gathering at Zion National Park is actually going to be like. They cover the campsite, the meals, the shuttles, the routes, and the community app that comes with registration, keeping it grounded and honest about what you’re signing up for: camping, not luxury, but with a chef, showers, pickleball, and some of the most spectacular scenery in the world. The guys also make the case for signing up sooner rather than later, both because the early bird price ends October 31st and because the earlier you’re in, the more time you have to get to know the fifty men you’ll be covering ground with before you ever set foot in Utah. They close with a promise of a future episode on how to have the conversation with your spouse about going.

Evan, Danny, and Joshua go without a guest and end up in one of their best conversations yet, wandering from CrossFit gyms and tarantulas to the real question underneath a lot of what they do: how do you relate to work, money, and growth in a way that doesn't cost you the things that actually matter? Danny shares the arc of fifteen years of self-employment, from a boxing and barbell gym to sixty grand in credit card debt to now feeling a glow walking home from the Unrationed office that feels like walking the path. Joshua names the thing he's been stewing on, why didn't he scale Mission Matters Group when he had the ingredients, and lands somewhere honest: he just doesn't care enough about growth for its own sake, and the trampoline wins. The episode closes with Naval's long-term games with long-term people as Danny's only career goal, and a shared sense that maybe their generation is slowly finding a more balanced relationship between work and the life that work is supposed to be serving.

Fred, an Unrationed community member and window covering company owner who grew up in Atlanta with two hardworking parents and a dad who made him mow the neighbor's yard too, joins Danny for a conversation built around a set of principles Fred has been quietly collecting for the past year. The episode moves through what it means to be precision-oriented rather than perfection-chasing, why the greatest trick of the pessimist is convincing you they're being realistic, and how a throwaway comment from a community member about forest management in Costa Rica turned into one of Fred's most clarifying mental models. He closes with the advice he'd give his thirty-year-old self: study yourself more, and learn earlier how to tell your authentic desires apart from the ones handed to you by everyone else.

Evan, Danny, and Joshua take on the second of the two most common questions they get about Unrationed: do you have to be an ultra runner to be a part of the community? The short answer is no, but the longer conversation gets into why each of them actually runs, what it does for them that nothing else quite does, and why the physical hard thing seems to be non-negotiable even if the specific activity is up for debate. They get practical too, covering heart rate over pace, trekking pole recommendations, uphill intervals, and why having an objective in front of you is the thing that makes any of it sustainable. The episode closes with a reminder that the emotion that comes out on long days in the mountains is part of why they keep coming back, and why that might matter more for men than we give it credit for.

Pete Durand, executive search founder, husband of 44 years, father of three, and grandfather of two, joins Evan and Joshua for a conversation that is less about career and more about what actually holds a life together over the long haul. He traces his family's health back to two things: faith at the center of his marriage and marrying someone who was simply wired to be a mother, and he is refreshingly honest about how much of his own parenting was a constant process of adapting, not just executing. The conversation moves through prayer, the first six years of parenting, what it looks like to let your kids grow into friends, and what Pete saw in a seven o'clock Mass one morning that made him want to kick himself in the face for caring about the wrong things. He closes with a practical word for what Unrationed is building, never lower the bar, but meet people where they are, because everyone starts at their first mile.

Nick Klingensmith, four-time cancer survivor, type one diabetic, recovering alcoholic, Iron Man finisher, and author, joins Evan and Joshua for a conversation that covers more ground in one hour than most people cover in a lifetime of hard things. Nick draws a clear line between before and after he started choosing hard things, and how the shift from victim to survivor to someone who actively picks fights with adversity changed everything, including his sobriety, his health, and how he shows up as a husband. The conversation moves through his five epic goals, his obstacles to actions framework, and why the day he became an Iron Man was November 20th, the day he decided to do it, not May 16th when he crossed the finish line. He closes with a reminder that inspiration is a choice, hitting reset is always available, and the best way to fire yourself up is to do something you don't think you're capable of.