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The Hard Way With Joe De Sena

From Crack Binges to Service: Matt Grace on Addiction, Enabling, and the Moment Everything Changed

The Hard Way With Joe De Sena

Spartan Races

Self-improvement, Health & Fitness, Education

4.8 • 874 Ratings

🗓️ 19 May 2026

⏱️ 20 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

At 29 years old, Matt Grace weighed 129 pounds and walked into his mother's house after a three-day crack and alcohol binge. She told him that if he was going to die, it would not be in her house. That was the boundary that started everything.
 
On this episode of The Hard Way, Joe De Sena sits down with Matt Grace, author of God Doesn't Relapse: Sex, Drugs, and the Life That Almost Killed Me, a former ABC TV reporter who overdosed in a newsroom and spent 13 years destroying every relationship through addiction, manipulation, and enabling.
 
Matt breaks down how his father's well-intentioned spoiling robbed him of grit and ambition, how his family's enabling nearly killed him, and what happened the morning he got on his knees with a rifle beside him and prayed out of sheer desperation. They also dig into why parents loving their kids too much can be a death sentence, why service is the foundation of lasting recovery, and how structured accountability and community pull people out of destruction.
 
Things You Will Learn:
  1. Why enabling and over-providing destroys a young person's ambition and capacity to endure hardship.
  2. The difference between a boundary that saves a life and a rescue that ends one, and what it takes to hold the line.
  3. Why service and community replace the void that addiction fills, and why recovery without purpose does not hold.
 
Tools & Frameworks Covered:
  1. Hard Boundary Setting: Draw the line. Hold the line. Let consequences teach what words cannot.
  2. Service as Structure: Replace self-obsession with outward action. One hour helping someone else is one hour not destroying yourself.
  3. Earned Identity Over Given Identity: Stop handing outcomes to your kids. Let them grind. Let them earn. The struggle builds the person.
 
If this episode moved you, do not just listen. Do something about it. Sign up. Show up. Do the work. Spartan.com. No more excuses.
 
Matt Grace is an author and transformational recovery expert who has spent more than two decades sober after overcoming addiction himself. With a degree in Addiction Studies and over 10,000 hours mentoring individuals and families, he has dedicated his life to helping people break destructive cycles and rebuild their lives. His work focuses on long-term sobriety, mindset transformation, and guiding people through the difficult but necessary process of reclaiming responsibility and purpose.
 
Connect to Matt:
 
We gave you the tools, now use them during your next SPARTAN RACE! Use codeword PODCAST on checkout for 10% your next race.
 
👉 Find Your Next Spartan Race: https://www.spartan.com/en/race/find-race 
👉 For everything Spartan: https://www.spartan.com/
 
Rise and Thrive with Essentia. Don't just sleep, recover, perform, and wake up ready for anything. Essentia's certified organic Beyond Latex™ mattresses provide deep, restorative sleep without toxic chemicals, allergens, or compromises. Use code SPARTAN25 at myessentia.com. 
 
🎧 Listen & Subscribe:
 
📲 Short, Impactful Content 
👉 Instagram: @spartanuppodcast
👉 From me directly: @realjoedesena
 
The Hard Way Podcast With Joe De Sena, Hosted by Joe De Sena, founder and CEO of Spartan, this podcast delves into the principles of resilience, discipline, and the Spartan mindset. De Sena's journey from building a multimillion-dollar pool cleaning business in his teens to establishing a successful Wall Street trading firm showcases his entrepreneurial spirit. In 2001, he transitioned from finance to operate an organic farm in Pittsfield, Vermont, where his passion for endurance events like ultramarathons and adventure races flourished. This led to the creation of Spartan, aiming to inspire individuals to embrace challenges and push their limits.

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0

I had a rifle sitting next to me. And I said, God, if you don't show yourself, I'm going to kill myself.

0:05.0

And the whole room lit up. The obsession to use was removed instantaneously. That moment changed my life forever.

0:11.9

I realized how sheltered I was and how powerful it was just to get out of myself to try to help someone else.

0:18.5

And that's what I'm most passionate about, is men helping other men.

0:21.9

Spartans, listen up. We need to sleep better. Was it how do you sleep better? Never thought about

0:26.7

before. And so I met Jack. I met Ascencia. I had attention to the mattress to sleep on because it's

0:32.5

loaded with chemicals. Recovery, cooling, and pressure relief, all in one mattress, up to 60% more deep and REM sleep.

0:41.3

Less inflammation, faster bounce back. No toxins. No EMFs. No BS.

0:47.3

My buddy Jack, over at Ascentia, he's kind enough to give us a code for the Spartan community.

0:52.3

That's DECA, that's tough money of all of us.

0:54.5

Use Spartan 25, get a discount, prioritize your sleep so you can sleep faster, you can do more

1:00.1

burpees, you can train more, you can get healthier. When you sleep well, you live well.

1:05.0

Joe DeSenter here, a CEO founder of Spartan, hosts the Hardway Podcast. Got my buddy Matt Grace here,

1:12.8

wrote an unbelievable book.

1:21.9

Everybody's got to read called God Doesn't Relapse. Sex, Drugs, and Life That Almost Killed Me. Sex, Drugs, and Life That Almost Killed Me. I've been doing Spartan for like 25 years.

1:26.9

I've been putting on events around the world, and I've met so many people that have had a fight with addiction.

1:34.9

By the way, we're all addicted to something. I'm addicted to burpees, right? Like, some people are

1:41.0

addicted to chocolate bars. That's all I have left. Some people are addicted. We're all addicted to phones. That's like crazy with the phones. So it's so nice when I meet somebody that survived it. Like I just heard a story. I was with some friends the other day and they were talking about a friend of there is it down to like 120 pounds. It didn't seem like this this person was gonna make it out. I was with another friend of mine who owns 20 rehab centers.

2:03.6

So, and I have four young kids, so I'm always nervous about what can happen.

2:11.6

How did you get hooked?

2:12.6

Like, what tell us your story, what happened?

2:14.6

So one of the things that I'm most passionate about is parents are loving their kids to death

...

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