What Physical Asia Teaches Us

And Why I Was Rooting for Mongolia

I was born up on the border with Mongolia. Literally one mountain over. Part of my ancestry traces back to northern Mongolian tribes, and my family historically bred horses. So when Physical Asia aired and Team Mongolia made it to the finals, I had skin in the game beyond just good television.

I’ve followed the Physical series since the first season. But watching Adiyasuren and Enkh-Orgil work through those challenges felt less like athletic competition and more like watching founders navigate a market where everyone else has more capital and better connections. They compensated with something harder to build: strategic thinking under extreme constraint.

Elite Sport and Founder Life Share More Than You’d Think

When I trained in kickboxing, I was surprised by how naturally I connected with my coach — a professional MMA fighter. We spoke the same language even though our contexts were completely different. Pushing through limits when your body is screaming to stop. Understanding that recovery isn’t weakness, it’s part of the strategy. Knowing that brute force alone gets you nowhere when everyone at the top has similar capabilities.

The best founders operate the same way. They understand resource management the way an athlete understands energy systems. They know when to push and when backing off prevents catastrophic failure. They develop tactics that compound over time rather than just throwing everything at the immediate problem.

This is partly why I think unlimited funding often damages startups. When you can throw money at every mistake, you never develop the instinct for efficient resource allocation. You don’t learn to feel your constraints. In elite sport, nature enforces those limits. Your body will shut down. Your technique degrades under fatigue. No amount of confidence overrides biology.

The market works the same way, just slower.

Australia’s Mistake Was Confidence in Overwhelming Force

Team Australia was probably the most physically powerful team in the finals. In the last challenge, they leaned almost entirely on that advantage. They were so confident in their raw capability that long-term strategy seemed unnecessary.

They lost.

Team Mongolia showed up with tactical creativity layered over solid fundamentals. When Enkh-Orgil approached the castle gate challenge, he didn’t try to muscle through — he read the mechanics and found the efficient path. The Japanese team, used to relying on power, didn’t see it. Australia didn’t see it either.

I watched the same dynamic play out during the recent venture winter. Startups with inflated budgets and easy capital access collapsed in sequence. Founders from top-tier schools who’d worked at prestigious companies — people used to doors opening based on credentials — simply didn’t have the mental models for operating under real constraint.

The strategies that come naturally when you’ve always had to stretch every dollar, make one engineer do the work of three, negotiate payment terms because missing payroll isn’t hypothetical — those are the strategies that win when easy money disappears.

The Math on Women That Nobody Bothers to Check

In the pole-holding challenge, Team Mongolia’s decision to field Adiyasuren was tactically brilliant. Not just because she performed well, but because it demonstrated pattern recognition that creates asymmetric advantage.

Women get systematically underestimated in physical competition. Research analyzing over 5 million ultra-running results found that female runners are faster than their male counterparts for distances longer than 195 miles. In ultra-distance swimming, the best women have been 12 to 14 percent faster than the best men on average over the past 30 years in events like the 45.8km Manhattan Island marathon swim.

The physiological reasons are documented: women have more Type I muscle fibers which produce less force but are significantly more fatigue-resistant, better fat oxidation rates that preserve glycogen stores, and reduced inflammation and muscle damage allowing faster recovery from extended exercise.

But the cultural narrative stays locked on sprint distances where male physiology dominates. So investors see a female founder and pattern-match downward. Competitors underestimate. The woman who learned to operate without anyone expecting much from her develops capabilities that people with easier paths never needed to build.

Team Mongolia had the most diverse composition in the finals and used it as a tactical asset, not a diversity statement.

What I Miss In Western Competitions

Asian athletic shows maintain something that gets lost in most Western productions: you can push humans to absolute physical limits while maintaining basic dignity. You bow. You acknowledge your opponent’s capability. Win or lose, nobody’s screaming insults in someone’s face or performing dominance.

This matters more than it seems on the surface. Founder culture often mirrors the same toxic competitive framing — the “crushing it” language, zero-sum positioning, casual cruelty dressed as ambition. But the companies that survive long enough to actually matter tend to operate differently. They compete intensely and collaborate generously. They push limits without destroying the people doing the pushing.

Physical Asia proved you can have both. Brutal competition and mutual respect aren’t opposing forces.

What Mongolia Actually Gave Us

There’s speculation about whether Mongolia should have won. Korea fought to the last second, had home advantage, had competition experience. These factors are real.

But here’s what matters more: millions of people worldwide now know Mongolia exists as something other than a historical footnote. They saw warriors who treat women as equals, who understand that proximity to nature builds physical intelligence that gyms can’t replicate, who approach impossible challenges with creativity instead of just force.

The world got to see what happens when you combine traditional physical culture with modern strategic thinking. When you value tactical intelligence as much as raw capability. When you understand that in any competition at the highest level, everyone is strong — so strength alone doesn’t differentiate.

I’m grateful for what Physical Asia revealed about performance under constraint. Strategy compounds over time in ways that raw capability doesn’t. Diversity of approach creates blind spots in homogeneous teams. Respect and intensity coexist just fine.

These aren’t just sports lessons. They’re lessons about building anything that lasts — companies, teams, systems that work when conditions get hard.

Sometimes the strongest team doesn’t win. Sometimes the smartest one does. Usually the smartest one was also the one nobody expected.

P.S. For what it’s worth, riding horses does excellent things for stress regulation.