FoundMyFitness - #006 Jim Kean Talks Biomarkers, Building a Spectator Sport

Episode Date: July 2, 2015

Jim Kean Jim Kean is the CEO of National Pro Grid League (NPGL) and founder of WellnessFX. In this podcast Rhonda and Jim discuss the quantified self movement and the importance of measuring biomarkers more than once, the gut's role in cholesterol and serotonin in the gut versus in the brain, about the role of exercise in preventing neuroinflammation and the effects of overtraining on sex hormones. We also chat a bit about the psychology of constructing a new, non-gender segregated, team spectator sport and bringing it to market, the factors that separate a professional spectator sport from any other form of entertainment: including patriotism, justice, and vicariousness, the mathematical nature of the sport and the floor coach's role in monitoring athletes before they start "redlining," how NPGL teams may find new ways to tune their gameplay and find an edge on the competition in the future by stepping up the use of more advanced athlete-level analytics. In this episode, we discuss...  (00:00) Introduction (01:11) Optimizing performance and health has become more accessible  (07:18) Frequent blood tests helped Jim find his optimal level of Vitamin D (09:45) Jim's habits for optimizing insulin sensitivity and lean body mass (11:06) Exercise reduces inflammation caused by kynurenine (12:16) Exercise increases BCAA uptake by muscle, increasing serotonin in the brain (13:33) Jim Kean introduces the book, Grain Brain (14:32) Dysfunctional insulin receptors are found in Alzheimer's disease (16:11) Endotoxin reacts with LDL cholesterol to form heart disease-promoting foam cells (19:09) How you make a successful sport (29:13) What is overtraining in cross-fit and what are the consequences? If you're interested in learning more, you can read the full show notes here. Join over 300,000 people and get the latest distilled information straight to your inbox weekly: https://www.foundmyfitness.com/newsletter Become a FoundMyFitness premium member to get access to exclusive episodes, emails, live Q+A's with Rhonda and more: https://www.foundmyfitness.com/crowdsponsor

Dr. Ronda Patrick here. Today I'm in San Jose at the Fitness Expo where the National ProGrid League games are taking place. And I'm sitting here with my friend, Jim Keen, who happens to be CEO of the National Progrid League or the MPGL. I'm really excited to have a conversation with Jim because he's all around a really interesting dude. He's a... Thank you, Ronda. You're a serial entrepreneur, Jim. You founded a company called Wellness FX, and for those of you listening, Wellness FX is a company that allows consumers to directly order blood tests without getting a doctor's prescription and to track that data over time. You also founded a company called Sapien Health Network, which went on to become WebMD's consumer health business.

Yes, that's correct. In addition to that, you've got a pretty dynamic athletic history. You played college football, track, you did ballet dancing. You partake it in the CrossFit games. You hiked the Pacific Crest Trail. All 2,700 miles. Crazy. So really, really interesting background and lots of perspective.

But I think where you and I have the most overlap is that we're both self-experimenters. Yes. And so maybe we could start there by talking a little bit about the quantified self-movement, what you think about the movement and where you think it's going. Sure. Well, you know what's interesting to me is we look at where we are in history. And you think even 15 years ago, the tools that we had back then were fairly primitive, right? We're still kind of back in the days of the LDL tells you all about heart health that you'd ever want to know. And here we are 15 years later. And a lot of people actually, and then 10 years later after that, so 2010, when I founded Wellness Effects,

not a lot of people knew about fractionated proteins or if you did it was kind of the highly expensive kind of just unattainable for the average person lipoprotein fractions right and then if you were like the CEO of Exxon you got that and so then I really feel like my company had a big role in starting to democratize this but also let people know that your biology didn't have to be your destiny and that you could actually get these tests that you used to think were the like the magic behind the curtain secrets that wealthy people, movie stars had. So now that those are out, when we look at where we are in the stage of development, you're starting to see the prices come down. You're starting to see accessibility. And given the internet, you can pool all this knowledge. So it's

really exciting right now, just where it's going from like early adopters. I think we're right in that kind of inflection curve. Yeah. I think what's really interesting about wellness effects is that, you know, you were able to, there's a lot of companies right now that are not. able to overcome the hurdle of having, bypassing a doctor's, you know, prescription to get your cholesterol check, to get, you know, different micronutrients or different, you know, hormones tested in your blood. And you were able to overcome that, which is really interesting. How are you able to do that? Well, so you're right. It's prescribed and prescriptions are all regulated at the state level and each state board of medicine has a heavy influence on state law about how

that happens. So we literally started in California and New York are by far the most difficult too. I don't think they're in New York still. But we took California and if you get California, generally when you review the statutes of each state, can get about another 20 if you just make some tweaks. And so that's how we got going. And when I sold the company at the end of 2013, we had 47 out of 51 jurisdictions and we were looking at Canada as well, which ironically was probably more, it's probably easier to go to Canada than it would be to go to Maryland, which was one of the remaining ones we haven't gone into yet. Yeah, so one of the things also that I really like about Wellness FX is that, you know,

it allows you to measure, you know, your cholesterol, your different LDL particles and your, you know, different vitamin D levels, thyroid levels, a whole host of, you know, different biomarkers that are relevant for nutrient, for performance, for, you know, just health in general. And it allows you, you know, to track that data over time so you can actually see, you know, what dietary and lifestyle changes you've made, you know, and how those have affected. You can quantify those markers. And that's like the beauty of this quantified self movement is because now you have something you can measure and say, look, this, I'm taking, you know, vitamin D now or I'm doing X, Y, or Z now.

and this, you know, my C-reactive proteins gone down or, you know, something like that, where, whereas instead of it's just being guesswork where you think you feel better or something like that. Or, you know, the traditional, get the physical twice, you know, once every two years and you get the blood test with it. Well, it really doesn't. That's a snapshot in time. And the other thing I think came out of this whole deal is that kind of quantified self, another way of saying that is it's always quantified. identify yourself regularly because you want to figure out the trend. You want the picture, you don't want the individual data point. Absolutely.

The individual data point maybe is useful for saying, hey, you have a full-blown fire going on in your attic. Right. But it could also say that you just happen to get done with the flu and you're highly inflamed. Exactly. Or that you're stressed. Right. You know, when you're stressed or when you're inflamed, you actually make more VLDL.

Yeah. So your, your body's adaptive response at that point. It is. It's interesting because when you're in flame, you're actually, you're actually, you're actually And during an inflamed state, your body makes more VLDL because it binds up what's called endotoxin, which is... Yeah. And it's a beneficial thing for you at that point. It's kind of like a sponge soaking up this bad stuff that can do all this damage.

So your body is like, wait a minute, I got to make more of this cholesterol so I can sop up this stuff that could damage other parts or, you know, my body. And so if you get just one time, you go to the doctor and they measure cholesterol and it's really high, your doctor's going to get you on statins. And they do. They do end of one. If you say, if you know that, you know, my biology is super plastic, and every 100 days I have a new crop of blood cells that have responded to the past 100 days, or fresh, it's a fresh slate. And so I'm going to do this every, you know, three or four months. And even after a year, I'll have a really good idea what I should be working on. Right.

Yeah. I think it's a really good, the quantified self movement in general is a really good thing because people are becoming more educated. People are tracking and measuring their own biology so that they can make progress, whether that's progress in becoming more mentally, bettering their mental performance or bettering their physical performance or just extending the fit part of their life, which I know that's something that we're all interested in, being as fit as long as we can. Extending your lifespan is one thing, but extending your fit span or your health span is also really, really important. You know, so you get all these complex movements, but by the time I was getting towards the tail end of when I was running wellness effects,

I was starting to transition to this different idea, and things got a lot simpler for me because I kind of knew the things I had to work on, and I could ignore 98% of the other biomarkers. So it's kind of funny. I had this big wide funnel, and I say, here's the things that I know that for me really moves the needle for me, because once I discovered that my vitamin D being at 50 is my optimal level. Higher than that, my inflammation would go up, lower than that, my inflammation would go up. So once I kind of had that and I knew how to titrate myself, then I pretty much started ignoring it, you know. That's very interesting.

So what else? The vitamin D in itself, there is a U-shaped curve with vitamin D levels in mortality, and, you know, too much vitamin D can be bad because several reasons. It causes the same things on both ends. It does. And it's very interesting. What other biomarkers for you were you? Because you're a pretty fit guy.

I mean, you're in your 50. Yeah, so I also got over my fear of cholesterol, you know, or my societal-generated fear of cholesterol. And I know I'll have some doctor friends who will call me after this and criticize me or saying this, and we'll agree to disagree. But for me, it really got down to you. I was measuring my ratio of APOA and APOB, right? And then if that was a good ratio,

then because those are the best fraction of the HDL, and the worst fraction of the LDL, for me, then if I measure that ratio but then said, okay, if that's a pretty good ratio and my inflammation is always in pretty good order, like homocysteine and CRP, then I'm doing pretty well, and I'm not going to even pay attention,

so I don't even care about LDL anymore. As long as my ratio's good and my inflammation is good, I'm pretty good. Exactly, yeah. I work out a lot, so I always have kind of high levels of APOB, but my APOA is just completely off the charts. So it's highly protective, and my ratio is great, and as long as my inflammation's down, I could care less.

Right. How often do you work out? Like, what's a typical day workout for? Well, it came down to kind of the other things. So one book I really, I've gotten more and more into just the influence that your inputs have on your biology, because we're this complex system of, you know, 100 trillion cells and 10 of them are actually work for Jim Keene Inc.

The other 90 are independent contractors who happen to reside with my other cells. And so I started thinking about myself as a system and how do I manage that and what inputs influence both my cells and my biome and basically diet. So lifestyle, and I also think it's all cumulative. So things like my house is always super clean. Take off my shoes because if you walk on pavement, you have. accumulate heavy metals and so decreasing kind of the biological load of toxins and heavy metals you know cleaning products things I wash myself with just all those if you show you know one day's

not going to matter but if you do it every single day then it's cumulative so decreasing the amount of work I have to do to maintain kind of a clean system is good the other thing is when I really get down to the two things I boil it down to are it sounds really simple but it's maintain your sensitivity to insulin, right? Because when that decreases, it decreases with age, then you kind of have onset diabetes and other things like that. So number one, number two, which goes hand in hand number one, is your lean muscle mass. So maintaining lean muscle mass is just so beneficial for you. I mean, you have your movement, your mobility, your circulation, your ability to just do things. it soaks up a lot of excess carbohydrates and other things like that.

So those two things for me are the most important. Yeah, it's funny that you mentioned that because lean muscle mass recently has been shown to soak up what's called kineurin, which is something that's generated from inflammation. I didn't know that. So it's made from tryptophan. So we eat triptophan when we eat protein. And tryptophan can either be metabolized into serotonin. So tryptophan gets into the brain and gets converted to serotonin, which is a neurotransmitter.

or if you're inflamed or sick or stressed, all those things shunt tryptophan into producing something called chineurin. Yeah. Kineurin then gets converted into something called quinolinic acid, which crosses over the blood-brain barrier and causes neuroinflammation. Muscle, when you exercise, muscle turns kineurining into a metabolic byproduct that cannot be converted into quinoletic acid.

So literally, and by the way, this quinoletic acid, which goes into the brain and creates neuroinflammation, is also associated. with depression, many other different brain disorders. Well, it's interesting you say that. So a lot of times when I've had people say, oh, I'm so depressed. And I'll say, first thing I think is since serotonin, a lot of it's produced in the gut, I was to ask them, what's your diet like?

Yeah. Oh, so the serotonin gut thing, let me say this. Most of the serotonin is produced in your gut, like 90% of it. Yeah. But what's interesting is that the serotonin produced in your gut doesn't cross over the blood-brain barrier. Oh, it doesn't? So does it affect your meat or not? The serotonin in the gut actually cause it, so your gut cells make it and your platelets take it up,

and it plays a role in vasoconstriction and clotting. Oh, okay. And it also causes inflammation in the gut. So in your brain, is it manufactured in your brain then? But it's manufactured. So the tryptophan either gets converted to serotonin in your gut, in which case it doesn't get into the brain. Or when you exercise, branch chain amino acids like lucid and isylucin, get taken up into your muscle, and they alleviate the competition between triptophan and branching amino acids, which usually occurs in the brain.

So tryptophan gets into your brain more when you're exercising because you're not having that competition with other branched amino acids. So exercise itself makes less serotonin in the gut and more than the brain. So I had the wrong intuition for the right reason. Right, exactly, yeah. The mechanism you had a little off, but you're right. It does make more serotonin in the brain. But yeah, so those two things, though, I think you can maintain your lean muscle mass through your life, which implies a whole chain of activities that had you doing that,

and you maintain your insulin sensitivity. And then the thing that really key for me is, have you ever read Grain Brain? No, but I'm aware of it. So David Perlmuter wrote that book, and he has a new book out that I've heard really good things about. But it's one of the most, right? Yeah. And it's one of the most extensively researched books from a scientific standpoint. And literally he has these massive studies that he has found.

that are, he's very statistically driven and quantitatively driven, so very high quality ones that he does these meta studies. And he consistently shows that if you are soaking yourself in simple sugars or simple carbohydrates, in essence you're stupider. So he, and it was quite controversial, but he doesn't get into like belief systems. He just says, here it is. Yeah. So it's actually, from a mechanistic standpoint, it makes a lot of sense.

You know, when you're, if you become insulin resistant, first of all, this one, you'll find this interesting. Recently they found there's a biomarker, a blood biomarker that you can measure. And this blood biomarker is called IRS 1. It's insulin receptor substrate like 1. And if it's inactive, you can measure it in the blood. If it's inactive, it's inactive form of it. It's a 10-year predictor of Alzheimer's disease, which gives you a 10-year time window

to make a dietary lifestyle change. But it's very interesting that that is a biomarker that with 100% accuracy can predict Alzheimer's disease. But anyways, insulin resistance is associated with inflammation and these things. Inflammatory molecules cross over the blood-brain barrier, and they start to activate microglio cells, which then cause amyloid. a plaques to aggregate, amyloid be a plate of plaques, play a major role in Alzheimer's, and this causes this vicious cycle, but, you know, absolutely, you know, insulin resistance, and type 2

diabetics are more likely to get Alzheimer's. Yeah, and so he's actually, in the book, he calls, he names kind of CNS diseases as type 3 diabetes. Right. So, so it's really interesting to have that perspective. It's also a very important, we were talking about cholesterol earlier, the insulin resistance and the inflammation that results from being insulin resistant, having blood sugar around and not having your cells. I mean, there's a whole thing in your cells not being able to make energy

and all this stuff. But what's also interesting is that that is the major problem with cholesterol, not the cholesterol itself, LDL for what I'm talking. When I say cholesterol, most people know HDL is good and LDL is bad. That's pretty much, I think, the general public knows that. But, you know, you actually need LDL. You need LDL cholesterol to repair, damage of any cell that's done.

Yeah, I mean, how do you build muscle? How do you build new cells? You need cholesterol. That's what LDL does. It shuttles it to the cell, whatever organ, whatever tissue needs repair. We're constantly damaging our tissues, just living, normal living. Working out, you're definitely causing more damage. But so you need LDL, but the problem is when you have inflammation, the inflammatory things

that are released, endotoxins, so when you're, you know, endotoxins released from the gut, I mean, this is a major thing that happens with people who are eating a lot of sugar. Sugar like literally causes what's called the mucin, which is what makes the gut barrier to, like, break down. And so you start to generate endotoxin. And because endotoxin binds to cholesterol, the same receptor on the cholesterol that is used to recycle it back to the liver is what binds endotoxin. So what happens is that your LDL gets to your cell and it gets cleave because it gives a little piece of the LDL to the tissue or cell to repair it. Now what's left is a smaller particle, so the smaller LDL particle then bound gets bind up to this endotoxin and now it can't get recycled.

So now you have endotoxin sitting around bound to LDL in your circulation. This is a signal for your immune cells. They're like, oh, bacteria. So now you have macrophages and stuff going, I got to get rid of this. So they come and try to get rid of it, but they can't get rid of it because it's cholesterol. And so you get the beginning of this, you know, foam cell forming in your... in your blood vessels. And that, so the danger really is the inflammation.

So I mean, I think that, you know, 20 years ago, the blunt way of dealing with this was, okay, just cut out the cholesterol. Right. I mean, and, you know, it makes sense to some people who won't change their life, they won't, you know, getting them on statins will probably increase your lives to spend by five years.

There's a whole host of problems that come along with it. But for those people that won't do anything, it probably will extend their life for a few years. Well, it's been interesting doing this fitness league is there's kind of one dirty secret I found out doing it is if you're in a fitness, if you're CEO of a fitness league, you get less fit. Because I travel so much. It's like being with the circus. You're loading up 200,000 pounds of weight, and so I'm going around getting less fit. And so you're asking me, I mean, I just having some people ask me what I do now.

And so I generally work out my garage when I'm at home. And then when I'm on the road, I have the kindliness of various CrossFit boxes. owners who welcome me into their, into their gyms. And so I've been mostly just lifting weights and doing randomized workouts and trying to kind of maintain myself why I run this league. Wow. Do you do like traditional crossfit training? You do? It's the first, it's the first year I haven't been in the top 200 of my category. So I like was 255th. But literally, I haven't been working out that much. So yeah. So the the, the, the NPGL, the national Procate League, which is the event that I've witnessed here for the first time, was really

blew my mind, actually. I've never been to a CrossFit game. I've never seen a CrossFit games. In fact, I've never really even watched someone do traditional CrossFit training. So this was all very new to me. Yeah, and these are all movements that derive from standard Olympic disciplines like Olympic listing. You'll see it next year in the Summer Olympics, gymnastics, and track and field. And so it's kind of the greatest hits of those.

And a lot of, it's been really interesting designing a sport because if you do it from scratch, you can use a lot of technologies that say the old traditional sports haven't had. And I've really read into like the subconscious cues that cause people to decide to follow a sport or be a sport fan. It's been quite fascinating from a behavioral standpoint because I used a lot of game mechanics when my team and I were designing this last year. because in the past fitness events like the CrossFit games were in for three to five days, and they're a big cattle call of people, they're hard to follow, and they don't fit the traditional form factor of a spectator sport that you can view

in like a two or three hour segment on TV. And so you can design it to do that. So we simplified a lot of things. We created rules. We also borrowed freely from existing sports and kind of took these kind of cognitive foundations that people assigned, like the box score that you see. in baseball, our box score kind of looks like baseball. And, you know, there's something like seven factors that separate a functional fitness,

or not functional fitness, but a pro sport, a spectator sport, from any form of entertainment. And so, and I use this framework of this book that was written in 81, the first chapter of it outlines it perfectly. And so ever since, my whole staff refers back to it. And a couple of the factors are like spectator sports. generate patriotism. So that's why you'll see the San Francisco fire. So, and they have their colors and their identity and it's their flag almost. So that's a very primal trait to be territorial and patriotic. Of course. So that's fans. American fans demand justice. So we have

instant replay and each coach can throw a flag once per match if he sees like, maybe, maybe a repetition wasn't counted correctly or an error in the rules. So you can have justice because you don't want to lose by a bad call. You also have the vicariousness. So American fans, a lot of people have fairly ordinary eight to five day lives. And so sports for a lot of people becomes this artificial world where they understand all the rules. because most individuals like ISIS appears in the Middle East. How much control do any of us have on that?

Not a lot. And so the world becomes this incomprehensible place that you have no influence, that you don't understand why things happen. However, sports is this like artificial rules, and if you just study the rules enough, you can become an expert, even if you live in your mom's basement, of this sport, and everybody else in the sport will worship your level of knowledge. So all the fantasy stuff and all that.

So vicariousness is the ability to master and know the sport as a fan and then freely criticize decisions by players, management, and coaches. So that's something people have to have. American fans hate ties. So all these things you can roll in. And then what it really gets down to is the name of this book was sports illusion, sports reality. And his central premise is that every single sport in the world

has conquered the requirement set up that you have to create. an illusion and the illusion is that the outcome matters because if people don't think if somebody hitting a home run in the ninth inning is important then it means that you fail that your ability to create an illusion about that sport that is that it matters but if somebody's depressed for at the end of the season because your team in the ninth inning of the seventh game of the world series gave up a home run and lost and for six months afterwards until the new season starts or maybe with the rest of their lives they're depressed and

I think we've all had friends through life that are profoundly depressed when their team loses. That means they've succeeded in creating the illusion. So that's been a very interesting part for me. And it's a tiny bit of a divergence because I've always been in health and wellness and fitness, but not much because this is a sport about fitness. And then the great thing about doing this is we condensed it to a two-hour format. Last season, our final ran on NBC, and it generated a rating that was better than the NHF. playoffs and they put us head to head against the NFL. And I really love our sport because the rules

are slightly designed, are basically designed, that the seven men and seven women on the team, all their skills have to be utilized to win. And so we didn't want to have tokenism or whatnot. So it's really finely balanced and you have this respect between the sexes, they're cooperating. So we've kind of gotten rid of segregation in sports. I really was impressed with the women that I saw out there today. I mean, I've heard you say on a previous interview with Bloomberg business that it really comes down to the women because the men cancel each other out in a way. So it's like the women kind of seem to be really important in terms of...

Well, they're the bigger unknown. So the men, and I've had a couple people also say, hey, are you implying that the men aren't important? I say, no, no, the men, though, men have had a history as athletes of competing. competing, being scouted, being drafted, being in highly competitive programs and whatnot. So they're, as males, if you get into like collegiate sports or even pros, you're used to all that. Whereas you can be the most kick-ass female athlete on the planet in a Division I program, and the day you graduate from college, you're done.

You know, you can do rec leagues and stuff like that. But you may be pro-level as a female. And so you've never had this pool of female talent coming out that has the same resource sources of being scouted and women are slightly different athletes and whatnot and how they approach things. So you have these coaching staffs knowing how half the universe works, having a lot of, have a pretty good idea but not a complete picture about how the other half works. And so the teams last year that ended up in the finals, one of them was San Francisco, which you saw out there today. The other one was DC that played yesterday. They're in the finals. They did the

very best job of finding female talent that matched the needs of the sport and then drafting it, putting it together, and then training it up. And they both got to the finals. So how do these athletes, I mean, I watched them, and it was just amazing what they were doing, the training, you know, how are they training? And I know I'd heard you mentioned previously about measuring biomarkers to see, to make sure they're not overtraining, because I imagine a lot of these athletes probably are so driven that they end up probably overtraining. Definitely, overtraining was a category that we would measure for one of our channels at Wellness Effects because we did a lot of CrossFit Games athletes, we did some 2012 Olympic athletes.

So figuring out because every athlete always drives themselves really hard because you want to get to where you're trained to 99th percentile. But if you go to 100 or first all of a sudden, because it's not like you're a little overtrained. A lot of times it's when you're overtrained, you're way over trained. And so that one or two percent can be pretty. So I think in the future, what I'd like to do, because we're going to keep as we evolve as a sport, we'll have more and more things that we bring in to help the athletes be just freaks of nature, as it were, from an athletics standpoint, able to leap tall buildings and lift lots of weights and do all kinds of amazing things, both gymnastics and springing and all that.

So part of that's going to be, I'm really fascinated about potentially introducing a wellness effects like panel for for all our athletes is kind of both a health benefit but as well as a research tool, because I like to see these athletes with that. The other thing where we're going is the metaphor I use for designing the sport is like a gigantic video game. And everything, every surface can collect data and be fed into an architecture.

And so we'll probably start putting radio frequency IDs on all the athletes so we can measure on off time. on the court. But also, the sport is so complex in mathematical that the floor coach has to keep an idea of about kind of max physical load. And if an athlete kind of caressed that and they start hitting red line, the coach has to know. And in general, the average athlete, it seems like they can tolerate doing about 15% of the workload in a match. And after that, they have a rapid decline. Some athletes are phenomenal, can go up to 16 to 18%. But that starts to really, it's a diminishing returns and yet for coach to internalize 14 athletes on a

squad rapid substitutions doing the equivalent of like pitch count or rep count is really hard to follow so they're starting to have these back-in analytic groups that all they do is track athletes and I can see athlete boards developing both teams will probably have analysts that look at their team and the other team to see if there's weaknesses to exploit I could also see putting on like dr. Justin Mager yeah the spectra bio harnesses to measure like respiration and heart rate and are they redlining and you know wactic and all that stuff so that would become part of the game board for

athlete management during the match what are the like specific biomarkers that you have previously measured to know that overtraining is occurring are there any oh you know reproductive hormones are big like men you know it's funny dr major 2012 was looking at a a guy who's going to the CrossFit games, and he was a top 10 athlete the year before, and his coach suspected he was over-training. But he never could quite catch him at that. And so he ran it and basically had the testosterone of like a 12-year-old girl. And so his hormones were crashing.

He was over-training. Wow. And so he confronted the athlete, and it turned out his friends had been making fun of him because he had dialed back the amount of training and was in hand. advancing his recovery as well. And they're kind of like, as 23-year-old men would do, going, oh, you're a wuss and this and that. And so he'd been secretly training on the side and adding volume.

And so the coach ended up firing the athlete because they got into it. And no, athlete was in good enough shape. He went to the games, but he finished in like 30th or he's not a top 10 athlete. And so clearly I think it kind of bore out the coach's supposition on all that. So are there, you know, I know that I know that a lot of athletes, for example, they require up to 20% more magnesium than just normal people. And we know that

even people that are non-athletes are not getting enough magnesium. So do people that are training heavily like this, like people that are in the MPGL? Are they, you know, coach to get adequate levels of these micronutrients and things like this? You know, it's interesting. So we're

not like an endurance sport. We're like a whole, a two hours of just max effort you know, kind of 30-second sporadic efforts, but the athletes when they're done are just knackered. And I've been thinking, I haven't really found a supplement company. So when I split the supplement in nutritional enhancement world into what's useful, I think there's two windows. There's the window an hour before the match all the way through an hour after the match.

And that's like in-race prep and fueling and recovery. And since we have 11 races, 4 to 8 minutes long, you do a race with a bunch of max effort, short burst, then you have two or three minutes to rest, and you start the next race. So I think there's a niche in the market for somebody can figure out a recovery drink that addresses that, because I haven't seen anything

that particularly is tuned. A lot of them are like more kind of, I'm doing a whole bunch of work over two hours and this and that versus boom, boom, boom. And then the other part is when you're not doing a grid match for the athletes is more of the supplementation for, you know, to basically have your recovery process. And to me that's kind of the when you're doing regular training schedule, I'm not competing. So I haven't seen anybody completely matches up for that. but I'll probably, I may end up just partnering with the company and putting together our own approach because, you know, we have a lot of ads based on the MPGL, because part of our deal with TV is we run it,

we get part of the ad inventory allocated back to us. Very cool. Yeah, so this has really been a great interview, Jim. Thank you so much for talking with us today. Always a pleasure, Rhonda. The MPGL was awesome. Oh, I'm glad. I'm glad you guys came out. Yeah, thanks to let Jim. You bet. Bye-bye.

Bye.