Digital Social Hour - IQ vs EQ: The Hidden Key to Business Success | Andy Triana DSH #903

Episode Date: November 19, 2024

🧠 Discover the powerful relationship between IQ and EQ in business success! In this eye-opening episode, performance expert Andy Triana reveals why the intersection of emotional and intellectual intelligence could be the key to unlocking your true potential. Ever wonder why some super-geniuses struggle in business while others with average IQ thrive? Andy shares fascinating insights from his work with hedge fund executives and pro athletes, explaining how the balance of EQ and IQ determines your real capabilities. You'll learn why having extremely high IQ isn't always an advantage and how emotional intelligence plays a crucial role in business success. From groundbreaking research on cognitive performance to practical strategies for optimizing your mental capabilities, this conversation is packed with game-changing insights. Andy breaks down complex concepts into actionable wisdom, sharing real examples from his extensive experience working with high-performers across various industries. Whether you're an entrepreneur, business leader, or anyone looking to maximize their potential, this episode reveals the hidden factors that truly drive success. Learn about the surprising truth behind intelligence testing, discover how to leverage both IQ and EQ for better results, and understand why balance is the key to peak performance. Ready to transform your approach to business and personal growth? Don't miss this powerful discussion about the real drivers of success in today's business world. 🚀 Email: [e-mail] #sportsperformanceoptimization #eq #personaldevelopment #athletedietarychoices #leadership CHAPTERS: 00:00 - Intro 00:32 - Andy's Recent Projects 02:19 - Data and Analytics in Competition 05:30 - Intersection of EQ and IQ 13:17 - Latest Research Studies 16:39 - Strategies to Increase Intelligence 19:59 - Enhancing Cognition Techniques 22:27 - Vision Improvement Drills 24:38 - Benefits of Breath Work 26:31 - Importance of Random Physical Activity 27:56 - Understanding Memory Loss 33:17 - Health Tests and Biomarkers 36:11 - Connecting with Andy APPLY TO BE ON THE PODCAST: https://www.digitalsocialhour.com/application BUSINESS INQUIRIES/SPONSORS: [e-mail] GUEST: Andy Triana https://www.instagram.com/gosuperbrain/ https://linktr.ee/gosuperbrain LISTEN ON: Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/digital-social-hour/id1676846015 Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/5Jn7LXarRlI8Hc0GtTn759 Sean Kelly Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/seanmikekelly/ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Whoa. If you have excess IQ, you're gonna be limited, kind of what I said about the protein, by your lack of EQ. And if you have the other, that seesaw concept, you're just not gonna be able to optimize because that intersection is your true ability. All right guys, Andy Triana here.

We're gonna talk optimization. Yeah. Let's do it, baby. Looking forward to it, man. Yeah. What you've been working on lately? I have a patent pending in the food science world that has to do with protein and optimizing it. And I'm doing a lot of like just quote unquote nerd stuff right now, scientific advising. But as always, sports performance and looking at the vision, information processing portion, and sensory motor aspect of the brain has always been my hot topic in sports. performance and looking at the vision information processing portion and

sensory motor aspect of the brain has always been my hot topic in sports. Yeah let's start with the patent first so what what do you try on you probably can't spill the beans on it? No no I can spill the beans because we have some stuff going on the patentable portion is an algorithmic equation I created with some software in which I could take your standard amino acid breakdown of a gram of protein, in the US it's typically 18 amino acids, you plug in your information and it spits out an optimized form. Because essentially, especially in the early 2000s

when bodybuilding was kind of really taking a lot of hold on the nutrition world and the supplement world, it was all about leucine driving more anabolism through mTOR and these very specific things. And biology is overarchingly a balancing act. When people ask me about health, I tell them to answer synergy, not anything in particular. And we disrupted the balancing act of protein. And of course, these ripples into modern day proteins and the foods we consume today are unbalanced to a degree that we're unlikely to be in protein synthesis

as long as we think we are due to some limiting factors and my algorithm hopefully corrects for that. Nice, that sounds intense, man. Yeah, it's a wordy, but in reality, just think about a seesaw. The optimal biological outcome is a balanced seesaw. And anytime you unbalance that seesaw, there's pros and cons that come into play. And the amount of time you spend unbalanced

is really the deleterious issue. So I take that philosophy and I kind of applied it to food, sports, and I've applied it to a few things. Nice. So sports performance, were you an athlete growing up? Yeah. I did wrestling growing up. I did all the basic sports.

I really, really loved strongman, though. And that happened when I got to college. There was a team that we had that did so in a great gym setup. I really, really loved Strongman though. And that happened when I got to college. There was a team that we had that did so and a great gym set up. And that got me into the world of skill. Cause Strongman, if you're familiar, is like lifting the rocks and cars

and all the events are different, every single competition. So there's so much skill involved in your ability to be flexible with that skill, the precision and all that I fell in love with. And that transitioned me into the sports world, honestly. Nice, so is that the competition for World's Strongest Men? Yes. Oh, got it. There's heavy weights and they have a kind of,

they're separate contest from everyone else. Everyone else is still involved in the sport, but with like licensing, copyright and TV rights, they're kind of separated. Got it, so you were competing in that. Yeah, I did 90 kilogram, a little bit of 80 kilogram, but I was most successful at 90. Okay.

In my first world, I took fifth. Wow. And it's funny how life changes. At the time, I was so displeased with it because I felt like I underperformed for what I was capable of. But now that it's been probably six years, I see it so differently, especially working with athletes

at the pro level quite often who have incredible talent and still get upset about something going wrong You know, I saw myself in them a little bit I was wow It's so easy to feel that way and have the world look at you and be like but you did X Y and Z be happy But that's not what they're feeling everyone's reality is so individual It's easy to believe even with your best friends that your realities are kind of similar in you know Not to use the same word in reality, they're probably not, pun intended.

Yeah, that's the crazy thing about it actually, but everyone's in their own world in a way. Yeah, so you have coffee, the guy next to you has coffee, that's different, and even if you have coffee on Monday, it's different than having coffee on Tuesday for you. Our whole life functions this way, and oftentimes we overlook that. Were you using a lot of data and analytics

when you were competing at the time? Somewhere in between. I think the intersection between data and humanics is where sports and life most successfully tends to occur. Because if you get too data driven, you can't see the difference between two small facts. And if you get too humanics driven to, in your head, if you will, feelings driven, you also are subservient to potentially, you know

Feeling something that's not real a lie or a fleeting emotion and making decisions based on it So I think somewhere in the middle for everyone is most successful I have some athletes that they don't measure anything But we'll make up a test for them to give them some semblance of objectivity And I have some athletes that love numbers and have intense Excel sheets, and that's how they function. Right, so you need both. Yeah, for sure. Yeah, because you need good genetics and good work ethic.

Yeah, you know, I worked with a very successful hedge fund owner for a really BetMGM, authorized gaming partner of the NBA, has your back all season long. From tip-off to the final buzzer, you're always taken care of with the sportsbook Born in Vegas. That's a feeling you can only get with BetMGM.

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novel, was based on that. The intersection of your EQ to IQ was what he looked at. And so that's like your workable ability. If you have excess IQ, you're going to be limited, kind of what I said about the protein, by your lack of EQ. And if you have the other, that seesaw concept, you're just not going to be able to optimize because that intersection is your true ability, if you will. That's so fascinating. So when it comes to super geniuses with heavy IQ, they usually lack EQ, right? So IQ in and of itself is a weird little subject to analyze, but typically 120 is when they see social decline, regardless, because think about averages, right? Like not that there's a normative person in the world,

we're all so individual, but the average world IQ is roughly 82, the average American is roughly 86. Is that low? Yeah, because don't forget, we're so common to think that everyone's literate and all this stuff, but there's still a good amount of illiteracy,

there's still a good amount of people that might immigrate from somewhere else and come here and don't speak the language and all that stuff, it's gonna impact your IQ score. People think differently in different languages. Orange is actually the most disputed color in the world. Really? Yeah, yeah, yeah, different sections of the world

define it slightly differently based on the red, yellow hues, and that goes back to the reality thing, right? You know, if you grew up, different sections of the world define it slightly differently based on like the red yellow hues No, I'm to the reality thing, right? You know if you grew up in one section of the world where the sunrise and sunset are very like red Versus yellow you're gonna view the oranges a little differently. Mmm. That's crazy. I think but I always thought the average like a hunter But 86 is let lower than I thought for sure So a hundred was intended to be average is lower than I thought for sure. So 100 was intended to be average, but the problem with the IQ tests

is the type of tests you do. You can do ones that predict on it. It also has correction factors. So if you answer really fast and you're young, you're more likely to get a better IQ score. Rather, as you get older and speed declines at all, it will weigh on your score. Do you think the lower attention spans are affecting IQ?

Because I took an IQ test five years ago and I took one two months ago and my score was lower. So there's a lot of variables. I think it's not as much as how the IQ gets weighed. It's the perception of the user. So for example, like let's say you're going through an emotional period of time or you had a recent event that made you philosophically change

there's ripple effects on that too so your brain and the frontal cortex will look at decision making processes a little different so as you go through the ebbs and flows of evolution philosophically in life that will oftentimes be reflected in your IQ score even something like acute anxiety got it make it go down i was pretty anxious while i was taking it actually. It was dealing with some personal stuff and business stuff on the side. Yeah, totally. That's why it's a weird number. It's like, what's your average heart rate?

You know, it's like, well, you know what I mean? And it's more of a gauge for, I guess, how far off your baseline you are. So if we were, let's say, a scenario we were working together and you're like, Andy, I'm feeling stressed. I did an IQ test, it's low. It's more likely to be that your stress manifests in cognition Rather than seeing it maybe in your heart rate or your gut because some people get stressed and they're the same in between the years

But their guts ruin, you know, whatever it may be Yeah, I just took a heart rate test two days ago and my average beats were 59 But it it was only ten minutes, but it ranged from 47 to 77 and they noticed when I picked up my phone It hit 77 Isn't that crazy? Oh not surprising so your heart rate actually gets more consistent the more excited you are So when your heart rates above 100, it's like very metronome like and when your heart rate is below 100 It's less metronome like and that's one of the things that HRV the score on the whoop and all that stuff attempts to describe but it should go up because

Everyone wants to believe that like if you can operate like a monk all day, you'll be very healthy But monks purposely avoid things intervening with their life. Double mean detox, right? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah They will they not even a detox. They just it's a way of living for them They're not detoxing from anything. You know what I mean? They just live that way. Whereas for us we are Culturally bound to stress. You know what? I mean they just live that way. Whereas for us we are culturally bound to stress. You know what I mean? Think about it. It's always grind grind grind do more do more do more and sure that's a wonderful thing it's created all everything all this right? But that has perils to it because you're now associating stress with a positive and not that it deserves

connotation at all but then all of a sudden, that's how you get to how'd I get here scenarios. Everything was going so good and all of a sudden X happened. That's a philosophical problem, more so than a biological problem oftentimes. Right. How are you dealing with stress? Are there ways to mitigate it? Yeah.

So it's funny. I just had a little bit of a humbling experience. Really? I travel a lot. Yeah. And I got gut parasites. I've never had any gut issue traveling. And to put it in perspective, I'm 29 now.

I've been traveling internationally for work since I was 23. I got a little lazy. I didn't bring the same things I bring with me typically to an event. I was open to more foods. I wasn't paying attention to the food sanitation as much. Your teen requested a ride, but this time not from you. It's through their Uber Teen account.

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It was kind of intense. I got over it and I realized how much I was just forcing and using rigidity as a means to get things done. And that in and of itself was making me a little more stressed than I needed to be. I'm naturally fast. I'm naturally want to do stuff. So even going back to that seesaw, my behavioral practices should probably be skills that slow me down, not speed me up.

And I looked at what I was doing in life recently and I was like, all my behaviors are accelerants, if you will. I'm already a fast person who's in busy season for travel. I tend to overwork myself a little bit and then I was layering more caffeine, more this, more that on top of it. And acute, I think it's all fine.

You know, I think everything exists under the sun for a reason as a tool, but sometimes you just need to get that step back. And it's funny, now I'm like glad I got those parasites because I would just get burning it at both ends otherwise. Damn. For sure. What do you think caused that fast way of thinking? Because I was the same in school, first test finished,

walk fast as hell, like is that a genetic thing or? Could be genetic, could be honestly just how you are. We are so easy to believe that most genetics write your hair color and eye color, but so much about our experiences molds who we are. Robert Sapolsky in his series of books, but specifically his book Determined, talks about how free will might not be something

that you exactly think it is. And it's funny, after all these years of doing stuff, I've come back to that quote of like, you only use 10% of your brain. And I feel like that is actually relatively accurate, but we're looking at it wrong. Wow. It's that only 10% of your brain is needed for consciousness and this volitional stuff. What words am I I gonna say? All of the other stuff, even information processing, is below that conscious gap. So our arcuate fasciculus is a part of the brain that links speech information in your frontal cortex

and decision making, and that moves at speeds far beyond like we could process. You think a Ferrari or a jet goes fast? That goes way, way, way faster. Damn. So that's why that 10% quote might be a little more accurate than we gave it credit for. I made a whole movie about that.

Yeah, Limitless, right? Yeah, Limitless, yeah. So that's actually true. That's crazy. Yeah, but you've got to look at it the right way. It's not like can we unlock it. It's that the brain is so superb at managing experiences, decision making, and all this other stuff,

that it can do it without you having to be aware of it. You know, like you don't gotta think about breathing. They say that one of the worst diseases in humanity is Andin's curse. It's an inability of the brain to breathe automatically. Right? That sounds terrible. Like no one's really made it past 13 or 14, I believe.

Holy crap. Yeah, I mean, you typically die of psychosis or falling asleep and passing out or something related. Yeah, because we're just automatic breathing right now, not even thinking about it. How would you ever like, or even your glucose levels, your heart rate, like if you had to focus on that, you would never make it through life. Right. You wouldn't even come close.

Damn, that's crazy. Yeah. Wow. There's a lot of interesting stuff you're studying any any recent things you're looking into right now Um, I think the power of microdosed exercise, especially cuz you know in the last two years I just that's why I'm sweating. I just got some microdosed exercise done off. Oh, yeah. Yeah Went straight to microdosed exercise like cuz my point is we all think we have to go to the gym and work our hardest They're kind of saying everything's got to be so intense.

If you go for a run, run until you're dead. My last two years, I haven't been able to exercise and train as normal. Because, you know, I do think microdosing of like compounds has other usage. But I think an eight-minute run, 10 med ball throws, five or six reps of deadlift done really, really fast, has so much more return than we give ourselves credit for, especially in the world of feeling good. Might not be the same for professional athletes, but I have felt fantastic doing 30, 20,

or less minute workouts, but just very synergistically planned what I need to do. That's cool, because there's guys that travel a lot, don't have time to do an hour workout a day. Yeah, absolutely. I deal with a lot of them. I'm one of them at the moment. So that's how I came to it.

It's kind of like desperation is the best for ideas. Absolutely. Do you have a holistic approach to your health routine? Yeah, absolutely. I think, again, synergy is the most important part. So you kind of assess yourself. If you're a fast person, learn skills that slow you down, and find supplements, foods, and habits

that allow you to find that balance. So for me, I practice meditation quite often and I practice exercise that I can maintain with a calm, peaceful, or quiet mind. That's what I try to do the most because I don't need help with the other stuff. The other day I was speaking with my wife and it was when I had the parasites she was trying to get me to go to the hospital. I was like look I feel fine and I just easily jumped onto the

counter. I've always been able to jump high and do that stuff so that my exercise is a lot of times based on the opposite and I do the things that I really love to do like jump and lift heavy when I need to feel good and I'm in a position where I might not. So for example, today woke up before 30 a.m. Florida time landed here. I'm here for 12 hours flying to Toronto tonight and it's going to be a weird little ride for the next few days. I find that to be quite often in my life. That's how I got into the microdosed exercise stuff. An eight minute run, especially if you just close your mouth, go slow, breathe through your nose, has tremendous positive impacts and over time adaptations on your liver.

Your liver is so important metabolically for managing your energy levels. So I was like, let's get just that move on and see what happens and the results were better than I thought. That's cool, I'll look into that for sure. How'd you get rid of the parasites? I totally went the pharmaceutical route, it was bad.

Oh, you did? Like quite a large amount of my poop was dead worms yeah yeah it wasn't like I saw a couple like you know not to get it was like a third of my feces holy shit so you are willing to go to the pharmaceutical route I'm loyal to what gets the outcome I'm not loyal to systems too often got it so I have athletes like I said that like hey you know I just want to chill do breathing stuff and this is how I interpret the world and sports. And that's the plan I create for them.

So people who view the world quite differently, how could we expect the same plan, medical advice or anything to be the same for them? A bowl of cereal or a cup of coffee is not even the same for you two days in a row. Hmm. That's true. Yeah. We'll dive into your athletes. First, I want to talk about the talk hosts. So you manage some people that are talking for what six to eight hours at a time? Yeah or more, you know?

Speech is its own like trainable thing. I have a cool little Neutropics user manual I called it on Mark Bell's Power Project website. And it's kind of like when you get a new video game or something you've never played before as a kid, you read the user manual. What is the A button do? What is the B button do? That's what I created the Neutropics user manual, help you learn about yourself and learn about the Neutropics as well. And it turns out the best ones tend to be choline related as far as using it often as much as you need No, I'll get a little off topic here and the new tropics can be quite cool as well when they're specifically paired up with speech So I gave speech protocols Creativity protocols and I believe visual acuity protocols. It's been like two years since I wrote it in that user manual and I wrote it in that user manual and learning about if the talk you're giving and the information is you're presenting is really in depth, like sometimes I do really nerdy stuff, you have to slow it down because the nature of what you're presenting requires increased amount

of processing. Right. Whereas maybe if you're speaking like a Tony Robbins, Gary Brekka, and you're breaking your information down to small chunks, you can go faster and have that messianic voice because they're compressed little nuggets. It's the same, I talk to people who educate. If you use a PowerPoint versus a podcast versus writing, it's different in what information can optimally

be presented and how they're gonna remember things. I think the art of the conversation's been lost and that's one of the things I'm grateful for social media because we learn far better from conversations and real human interactions than we do from like the first time you learned algebra. Oh, absolutely, it's not even close. No, right, like think about like the hard subjects

in high school or middle school. You ask a friend, they tell you a couple weird things and you're, oh, that's all it is? Yep. You know, it's not that your friend knows it better in the teacher, it's the way you're cognitively set up. Have you seen ways to increase intelligence at all? Absolutely.

Really? Yeah, I think it's one of those things that starts with thinking that it's like just math is intelligence. Intelligence is a way of looking at the world. So what we see when we talk about the differentiation between two small facts, so there's 59% and 60%, when you're in school it's like an F or a D,

and that's really, really broad, right? It's so different even though it's 1%. What one of the traits of most intelligent people is they can tell the difference between two small facts. They can differentiate very well. And one of the other things that's a common trait of highly intellectual individuals is they can think of multiple ways to get the same answer.

And when we see that, and I can talk about the research aspect of it, you realize that that has nothing to do necessarily with knowing math. It's a chef who can think of deconstructing a hamburger seven different ways. It's the parent who can deal with a high functioning child and a low functioning child and teach the same morals and ethics to their kids. And that's really what intelligence is.

It's much closer to meeting someone in the middle So I have a nonprofit that I'm gonna publicly announce to everyone next year That's based on visual motor function for the ASD population as a proxy for improving cognition What's ASD autism spectrum disorder? Got it. So looking at what? The most prevalent research and the vision world for autism spectrum disorder, I think that the proprietary information I do with a lot of pro athletes in their eyes has incredible transfer and I've brought a board that helps us look at the autism spectrum developmental model through a lens of vision and changing the brain as their proxy for

improving cognition and communication, not just sending them to speech pathologists or speech therapy And doing typical communication drills I think if we approached it through a brain architecture standpoint that there can be more progress to mmm Yeah, autism is an interesting one because there's people that can really hone in on it and actually make it like a weapon Yeah, absolutely I mean I've had plenty of people label me as autism level one or Asperger's, because I actually lived through both, just because I'm 29, so they changed it

when I was in my late 20s, early 20s, something like that. I think a lot of people are properly and misproperly labeled on it, but I think what's more important is allowing yourself to see that everyone gets to that end product of a mature adult differently. I've seen athletes get way smarter by talking to them different and doing vision drills. So the vision drills I talk about kind of unlocks the brain a little bit.

And then talking to them like, hey, you know, I have one football athlete who we talked about altering head motion in certain cutting drills and how the recognition of you can cut multiple different ways makes you think deeper. And that's how I've come today to have like the intellectual philosophy I have on in getting smarter and improving yourself. Cause I've seen people who've been labeled as dumb

and just tried hard at different things in a different way and got to the end outcome. The same way I've met plenty of people who are hands-down crazy intelligent but struggle to do anything. You know, I think who we really are exists in between our ears but who we are in reality is what we speak and communicate and I think that disparity is where mental health and a lot of problems come into play because you only feel Alienated when you feel like what is real to you is not what's real in the world around you Wow Yeah, that's deep. So talk to us about these vision drills. So that's actually increasing like cognitive abilities. Yes

I certainly believe so so I categorize them into two sections There's the relaxing and the vagus nerve focused section of the vision drills. The vagus nerve brings blood to our heart, lungs and stomach and chills us out and it takes all the extra excitation away from everything else in the body. And the exciting ones are meant to improve the information processing. Because what a lot of times like even you and me we spend a lot of time talking, looking at people, and interpreting facial data. We have lymphatic sites on our eyes and in our face

that need to be released and help us relax. I'm sure days you do a lot of talking, you lay down at night, you might feel like your cheekbones are really high up, and right before you fall asleep, your face relaxes finally. That's quite common in a lot of people that speak. Have you ever felt that before? Yeah, I have actually.

Yeah, that's a whole section of vision drills I focus on. And then that would be the relaxing ones for typically people like us. It seems to be the faster you go naturally, usually you're better at information processing and you need more help relaxing. And conversely, whether it's the ASD population or certain athletes that struggle with decision making,

because people think pro athletes are freaks who always make the right choices, but that's not true behind the scenes. When you see them practice, they practice for more hours than anyone else typically, as far as just trying to do it right. Not into gym training per se, they just practice the art and skill of it,

because they still make mistakes too and want to eliminate them. And I saw this dichotomy between this person got smarter just meditating and being more in touch with the humanic, mindful aspect of themselves and just doing a couple of vision drills. And it's funny because I see a lot of guys in the NFL who experiment with nootropics or other sports where

they have a lot of plays and things to remember. And that alone gets them smarter because they had already had the stressor of learning all these plays and stuff that they needed help with. And then the nootropic alone made them smarter. But that's why I'm hesitant to say like, well, if you just pick up a nootropic, will it make you smarter? It might not. It's only if that seesaw is really in place. You still have to take action on it. Absolutely. Have you seen anything interesting with breathwork?

Oh, for sure. I think the coolest thing about breath work is that it costs you nothing and the amount of gain you can gain from it is tremendous because whether you're on the road or at home relaxing and you're truly in a relaxed state or you're trying to get to one, it still has benefits and then you can alter your breath work to help you adhere to a habit better or just help you deal with people's crap better. It's the ultimate moldable skill. What's your favorite type of breath work for athletes?

I think doing an outdoor meditation. I think the five senses needs to be incredibly sharp. In an athlete, ears, eyes, everything. And then we expose ourselves to the outdoors, I tell the athletes to go meditate and lay on your back. So you'll get the sense of touch from the ground. And we know grounding has a lot of positive benefits. I tell them to focus on hearing things, smelling things,

doing it with their eyes closed. Guess, based on having your eyes closed, what's going on in the world around you and then open your eyes and look at it and that alone, even though it can take 90 seconds, I've seen have tremendous benefit in people's ability to get through the day a little bit better and sometimes when we get excited,

we joke like caffeine just makes you tired faster. I found that breath work and microdosed exercise ameliorate a lot of the problems with caffeine where you just got to take more and That tolerance buildup I've found pretty much goes away with a lot of this Wow And that's short and sweet because some meditations are like 30 minutes like kind of long Yeah, I think you it once you have the skill you can get away with the shorter bouts But if you've never developed it doing something you've never done before is hard to miracle You could do something you've never done before really right my goal for a miracle you can do something you've never done before, really. My goal for everyone that needs it in their life

should be under two minutes. It's great to do it longer if you have the time, but if you can't control your breath in under two minutes, you have a lot of low-hanging fruit left. Any other daily practices you do? Med ball throws. Med ball throws. Yeah, whether it's a med ball, a rock, a jump.

Not to get too off topic, but the pecking order for neurological degeneration with age, it starts at a substance a substantiate nigra. This is what sends off the dopamine signals for motion. And after that, it turns into your hippocampus with memories. Then finally, it's decision making your frontal cortex. And after many, many years of looking at this, talking to executives who are aging and stuff like that, I started to think that, I think the best defense for it

is this creatine dopamine-esque exciting, just do a jump randomly, sprint randomly, throw something randomly. Obviously you've gotta be able to do those skills first, but I think once you do them, doing them randomly for eight minute bouts with a fun time, it doesn't, like I have someone that's 55, almost 60,

who is big in the financial world, and things were tough for him at the time. I had him pick up a coconut in the backyard. I'm like, let's throw coconuts with our bare feet for eight minutes, I miss some of the other stuff we do. And I've found it to be insane how much it makes, not just caffeine work better, your day go better and all this stuff.

And I really truly believe with all of me that it will prevent holistically age-related decline, assuming it hasn't set in so far. Wow, that's interesting. So you mentioned memory loss earlier. So what ages are you seeing that in commonly? It's funny, I've seen it tragically early in some people's twenties. What?

I'm kicking in. Yeah. I know someone who's trying to get on the LPGA and she had chronic fatigue syndrome. She got really, really bad nutritional advice for multiple years. Yeah. Like couldn't even walk a quarter mile without having some serious dysfunction. Yeah. Very talented athlete, like 22, 23 type thing. And she was showing signs of age-related decline early. So I think it's more of, you know,

Mark Bell on a podcast once asked me like, why does testosterone degrade after 30? I think it's the same answer, it doesn't. It's that you degrade. You start letting go of habits, and you start allowing yourself for longer and longer periods of time to play the blind eye, and then it starts to disappear.

Because I've also seen people who are in their 80s that I would have never believed, I would put my whole bank account that they were in 80, and are just as clear as you and me at our age. And I am grateful for, you know, sometimes it stops me from being on social media, but I'm grateful for the bandwidth of people I've met and worked with,

because it's made me think about life and what's possible so much differently. Yeah, testosterone's an interesting one, because I have heard that at 30 drops, like what, 1% a year or something? Yep, and there is some research to say that, but that same guy I just told you about who's throwing coconuts at 55,

before I met him, had testosterone levels that were nearly a thousand nanograms per deciliter, which was equivalent to the Great Depression at the time. And obviously he was in a lot during that. But what tells us is environment, what you do just plays such a huge role. He's a savage in the finance world, was going through a hard time in life. I'm sure he's got some genetics that bolster that, but it just doesn't mean that you can't have a healthy testosterone level at 50, 60. It also doesn't mean that it can't be in the tubes

at like 19 or 21 either. Right, was he fully natural? Yeah, 100%. Wow, 55. So it's funny, he's someone I was close with. I asked him when I saw it, I was like, dude, you don't gotta lie to me. If you're doing something, just tell me.

He was like, why, what's wrong with my testosterone, Andy? And his sheer confusion alone was verification for me. No one had even ever talked to him about it. Wow. So like I said, these experiences I've been able to have behind closed doors have really made me realize how flexible we are as humans. And that's why I have these seesaw concepts,

synergy with your life. I think you'd be healthier eating a ton of carbs and being super fast if your heart weight was really high, then you would be trying to go keto with that same approach. Because I've seen, you know, I did a lot of track and field work at one point. People who were running the marathon that were trying to go low carb had blood work that looked like they were in their 60s. Damn. And the kids who ate candy on the track team running the same thing had fantastic blood work and better heart rate score.

Whoa. And it's that synergy. The 800 meter race is as sugary as it gets. It's glycolytic in the exercise science world, we call it, as it gets. And they were just trying to apply fats to it. You're trying to fit a triangular peg into a round hole. And that's how I started seeing like this person shouldn't be unhealthy, like, especially if she was a freak. You know, and I saw a guy had to do the same thing. You were a freak and you had horrible blood work. I saw it in pro golf as well, quite often. And it goes to show how moldable we all are and then how much you can just be, have so much faith.

I believe tattooed on my collarbone, ironically. You could have so much faith that you're doing everything right, and then get data back. I had one golfer who had some mental health stuff and looked healthy, seemed healthy, lean, no signs of inflammation, had some of the worst professional blood work I've ever seen in my life.

Whoa. Horrible, horrible blood work. And what caused that? A multitude of variables, but ironically enough, a kid that was once tutored as having mental health problems solved his blood work and Obviously along with some just general mental health support no longer as mental health problems dang It's just interesting how multiple we really are dude. I wish I knew you when I ran the 800 Yeah, you must have been fast. I 159 Wow decent decent in high school

Yeah, but if I knew you and if I implemented diet tool changes and lifestyle changes, dude, I would have been like 150 probably. I mean, you're obviously meant to be helping people and spreading the good word. Yeah, I think I found the right job. Probably a good thing you didn't run too fast. Yeah, dude. It's been a journey though. I mean, if I look back at my career and really added these diet changes, dude, I think I could have been D1 easily

I think that was ceiling for performance is so far away still just because I've seen so many athletes where it's like this person Doesn't have the criterion level of talent We would typically think of like an elite level pro But everything behind the scenes is perfect and he's able to attain that elite level. And I've seen guys who are top 10, top 15, that don't do very much at all, and they're in that same place. That's why I'm big on individualization. And when I talk and work with people,

it takes a little bit of time to getting to know them, because mostly they don't know themselves. It's insane how many times I've spoken to a pro athlete and been like, if you didn't have anyone around and you went to practice What would you do and they say I have no idea. It's like, you know, that's a glaring like knowing yourself issue It has nothing to do with your sports It's if you don't know yourself well enough to just say this is what I love to do And here's my intuition you're gonna run into a lot more problems and the person who can answer for sure

So what health tests and more specifically what biomarkers are you really stressing importance in right now? I think in general, one of the best starting ones is your creatine kinase and homocysteine in relation to each other. Not that they need to be some type of specific, like your HDL to LDL or HDL to total. They don't need to be a specific value.

But they both exist on the methionine amino acid cycle. And creatine is favored for methylation, meaning it'll get the good stuff and the support from your B vitamins ideally first. So the thing I want to see is what's your normal level of creatine kinase and how much homocysteine do you have? Because this has told me the robustness of that methionine amino acid cycle, and it's really, really important for looking at long-term health. Like I mentioned, the creatine involvement with the substantia nigra

in preventing that degradation in the first place. I think it's the best place to start. Then I look at creatinine and bun relative to the stress in your life. So when we stress in general, whether it's in the gym lifting with a contraction or just good old fashioned oxidative stress, we have breakdown. So what I like to do is you'll give me like a little paragraph about the typical stress

breakdown in your life first. Now I'm going to ask you like high, medium, low essentially. And then looking at those values, I find it's far more useful when seeing it relative to that context in life. Because then if I see your creatinine is like barely over one, but you're like, dude, that was like the hardest, most stressful phase of life. I flew a ton, I was working out.

I'm like, that's a great value then. But if you told me you were lazy as crap and that same 1.1 comes back, now suddenly I have a small problem with it. Because I think blood work is like when you see a screenshot of a Ferrari and like the rims are blurred out From the moment you're in the womb right when your heart starts beating as like a little baby Atherosclerosis is also starting. So, you know the end starts with the beginning, right? And a lot of religions also say that ironically enough, but it's very true for our biology

So if we're constantly moving chemical biological equation, blood work is just a short snapshot of it. So that's why I love looking at what you're doing in life and seeing it relative to what. And then we could really say like, hey, was that just really hard for you in life or are you actually poor at dealing with protein-based breakdown and nitrogenous waste? And that's where I go from there. That makes sense because your blood work can change fast. Super fast, and also relative to what?

Did you just have a parasite like I did? And my CRP and my lymphocytes were crazy high. But I literally had worms in my stomach. And I actually probably want them high in that sense, because I want interleukin-6 and all his friends to go party and do their best to deal with it. Even though I obviously needed pharmaceuticals, I at least want resistance, right?

But if I didn't have parasites and saw those same values, suddenly we're looking at a person with an ailment. That makes sense. Andy, it's been cool, man. Where can people find you and learn more from you? Ah, the hardest question ever. You can email me at go superbrain at gmail.com. My assistant's excellent at emailing back and responding.

I'm slightly closed off at the moment because of all my scientific advisory work, my protein patent and all this other stuff, but I try to get back to everyone. I always do on email. I don't quite frankly on social media, not a big social media guy, it's just not me. But I love helping people. So if you reach out, I have over 20 mentees who have spent all at least 18 months teaching who can at least help some people. And my plan is in the next one to two years

to have some type of platform where that can be a thing. I love it. We'll link your email below. Thanks for coming on, Andy. My pleasure, Sean, you're the man. Thanks for watching, guys. See you next time.