Kyle Kingsbury Podcast - #308 Optimize Like a Pro w/ Andrew Herr

Episode Date: June 21, 2023

Today’s guest is an optimization encyclopedia. I know I use that metaphor a lot, but it’s never been truer than for Andrew. In case you need more references, his company, Fount works with SOF guys, olympians, and pro athletes. They may have got their start working with high performers of all ilks. They are developing a program for the masses with the idea that no two humans are built the same. It starts with a month-long elimination diet to start the process of optimization.  In this conversation we dive into all things optimization. Andrew walks us through the variance of each individual’s dietary needs, optimal training and how they can work together We dip the toe into wearables and more specifically how to utilize them It’s not really a deep dive on optimization without sauna and cold plunge exposure, so we get into that and he gives us a nice little surprise on some protocol items with cold/heat Last but not least, we dive into sleep and how to structure your sleep hygiene Keep an eye out for their app coming out this year for the masses!   ORGANIFI GIVEAWAY Keep those reviews coming in! Please drop a dope review and include your IG/Twitter handle and we’ll get together for some Organifi even faster moving forward.   Connect with Andrew: Website: ​​Fount.bio  Instagram: @fountbio - @andrewherrbio   Twitter: @AndrewHerrBio    Sponsors: Organifi Go to organifi.com/kkp to get my favorite way to easily get the most potent blend of high vibration fruits, veggies and other goodies into your diet! Click that link and use code “KKP” at checkout for 20% off your order! Ancestral Hunting School To learn many skills of survival and ancestral tradition, head over to ancestralhuntingschool.com, punch in “KKP” at checkout for 10% off! Cured Nutrition has a wide variety of stellar, naturally sourced, products. They’re chock full of adaptogens and cannabinoids to optimize your meatsuit. You can get 20% off by heading over to www.curednutrition.com/KKP  using code “KKP” Mark Bell’s Mind Bullet This Kratom Extract supplement supports your cognition like no other and that’s not just because Mark’s a homie. Get some over at mindbullet.com and use “KKP” at checkout for 20% off! To Work With Kyle Kingsbury Podcast   Connect with Kyle: Fit For Service Academy App: Fit For Service App  Instagram: @livingwiththekingsburys - @gardenersofeden.earth  Odysee: odysee.com/@KyleKingsburypod  Youtube: Kyle Kingbury Podcast  Kyles website: www.kingsbu.com - Gardeners of Eden site    Like and subscribe to the podcast anywhere you can find podcasts. Leave a 5-star review and let me know what resonates or doesn’t.

Welcome back to the show, everybody. Today's guest is Andrew Herr. I've heard quite a bit about this guy. Running around different optimization circles and podcasts. And Andrew's kind of a, he's a unique character in that he's in the field of optimization, but he has worked exclusively with some of the best teams in the world, including the Navy SEALs, and gleaned a lot from his experience there, and really trying to map how do we create the best of the best.

And through that experience has quite a few takeaways. So really, I like this podcast a lot. I love this podcast with Andrew because we open up much of his findings and different things that people can do, different things you can run, little N equals one experiments on yourself to figure out what is the best way forward? How should I be eating? How should I be training? Different ways like that to really fine tune and figure out what's best for ourselves because everyone is different. And I really enjoy that.

He's got some really cool programs and things like that that are available for people as well. If you want to dive a little deeper and go one-on-one with one of his coaches, you can do that for four months. And they're really working to expand this out so it can reach quite a few people. So I had a really good time chatting with Andrew and I'll have him back on at some point in the future. And he's just doing

great stuff. So share this with friends. This is definitely an optimization podcast, kind of like back in the day when I was at Onnit, total human optimization. We really focus a lot on key takeaways in this one. And I think you guys are going to dig it. Share it with friends. Leave us a five-star rating. Organifi all year long is going to be hooking up people. So you leave a five-star rating on iTunes or Spotify with one or two ways the show's helped you out in life and leave your IG or Twitter handle. That way we can easily contact you and get you your prize. You're going to get my favorite supplement from Organifi and you don't have to wait. Don't wait. Leave the rating, but don't wait. Support our sponsors. When you support our sponsors, you support me. You make the show possible. And Organifi has been one of our longest running sponsors. They're incredible. I got a podcast swap coming up with

their founder, Drew Canole. So be on the lookout for that. It's going to be awesome. Drew's been diving into regenerative agriculture and organic farming and all sorts of good stuff. So we're going to have plenty. He's also going to be a father soon. So super exciting. We're going to have plenty to discuss on each other's podcasts and I'll make sure that we continue to hype that as we get closer to it. Organifi.com slash KKP. You can head there and grab a sunrise to sunset kit to be covered with the red, the green, and the gold. And you're going to get 20% off everything with the code KKP. In addition to the 20% off, you'll receive a free 30-day sample of Pure, which will be 30-count travel packs, super convenient, clear your mind with this brain-boosting blend. Pure is made with

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you extra energy. Like I mentioned, the beetroot extract is going to help with improved nitric oxide production, which is great. It helps you get the pump. And a lot of people associate the pump and nitric oxide strictly with working out. But the truth is it's one of the most excellent ways to improve cognitive function. As we open up vasodilation to the brain, we're getting more oxygen and more nutrients to the brain. It's something that I take pre-podcast as well as pre-workout. The green is a phenomenal balancing act. It's one of my favorite ways to get tons of superfoods I'm normally not going to get in my diet, like moringa leaf. And in addition to that, it has a whopper of ashwagandha. So if I'm well caffeinated and I need to balance out my nervous system, ashwagandha is going to do that. A number of other great things there in the green. And then the gold is my ultimate wind down.

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and use KKP at checkout for 20% off. We are also brought to you today by my homies at Ancestral Hunting School, Primitive Rendezvous. Hey, y'all, as you know, I'm a vocal advocate for making time to reconnect to nature, to experience all the benefits of recharging through time away from the trappings of our modern lives. I've learned a ton from the numerous hunting experiences I've participated in over the last several years and even those excursions which don't result in an animal harvested.

There's a ton of value in learning the principles and practices you'll need to employ to put a hunt together. The experience and knowledge handed down to participants in Ancestral Hunting School's primitive rendezvous will go a long way to reconnecting you with your primal roots and ability to survive in the wilderness like our ancestors did. If you're seeking to expand your skills and curious about acquiring knowledge of essential hunting strategies and tactics, along with tracking, basic orienteering, foraging, butchering, processing, and general survival, then I encourage you to check out Ancestral Hunting School's Primitive Rendezvous program. I absolutely love this. I got to participate with Ken Conte, who is putting this together. Ken has been a longtime member in Fit for Service, just a phenomenal guy, a friend,

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Jocko Willink always says, you win or you learn, right? There's no losing. You win or you learn. And I feel the same way about hunting. Whether I bring animal back or not, I'm always learning when I go out there and I'm always experiencing a deeper level of connection to nature and a deeper understanding of what I did right, what I did wrong and how to improve. And I really find that the stuff that Ken's teaching is absolutely imperative. Hunting is hard enough. There's plenty of hunts that I go on where we're not successful and I'm constantly learning. And the thing is, if there was only a place you could go where you could be educated on a lot of the shit, so you're not learning this through losses, if you will, you're not learning this through mistakes, but you're learning

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Hey, Kyle. Great to be here today. I just had Johnny Wilson out at the farm face-to-face, which was great. I don't know. It's funny having different teams guys on because there's many of you, even though there's very few of you. Johnny Wilson was on recently, my last guest face-to-face, but I've had Jeff Gonzalez on, Andy Stumpf, and I'm sure I'm forgetting a couple. Do you ever, were you in with any of those guys? So I was never actually a SEAL. I just did some work with that community on human performance, on optimization stuff, and was looking at some of their, a couple of really weird mission profiles to try to figure out if there was anything we could do to help.

Fuck yeah, that's rad. Well, we'll dive into that. Yeah, I was confused on that. What cracked me up is because you don't look like a seal and yet at the same time every every seal i've met like johnny wilson looks like fucking batman but like andy stump looks like a regular dude and that's not a knock against andy he's a fucking badass same thing with with jeff gonzalez like they just look like regular guys who have zero quit in them like that's the only common denominator the only common denominator.

The only thread that I think that goes through the guys that make it through buds is that there's just something in them that won't give up no matter what. And then guys like me, you know, NCAA, whatever division one, this and that, you know, pro pro guys that look the part, they all seem to fail at some point when getting through those tests. So I think that's, that's something that's always fascinated me, um, with the people that make it through and the people that end up, you know, becoming a teams guy. So talk a little bit about, I want to jump into that. We can talk about a little bit of what we know. I would absolutely love that. I do want to start where I normally do with like, what made you who you are today. So talk about, you know, like the trajectory of your

education, what drew you into this field and then how you got linked up with working on, on all the mad scientists with the teams guys. That'd be really cool. Um, yeah, I guess it starts as a kid, really, you know, my dad's a doctor. I often say that, like, if I lived my life 10 times, I would have been a doctor five of them. Like, you know, really found it interesting, the sort of like detective work part of it, probably not, not so much like hearing about talking about insurance companies and stuff like that. And then mom's side of the family was really rich military history. Grandfather, you know, took home everything short of the medal honor from World War II in the Pacific.

And so that was really a big part of my childhood. And so, you know, when you put those two together and then literally somebody yells at you down a hallway, hey, you should check out this program where you could do technology and national security. Literally, I never heard of it. Somebody yelled at me down a hallway, found this ability to go to college and combine them. And that really set me down this path. Then I had an opportunity, got a fellowship to go to grad school, really wanted to go deeper into the biosciences, ended up doing a degree in health physics, a second master's in immunology, and a third one in national security policy. And then serendipity strikes again. Somebody walks into the career center, they're like, hey, we need to hire somebody who does biology, national security, and can write. And they're like, well, we know this guy, Andrew.

And that was to run a studies program on the future of human enhancement for what's sort of like the Secretary of Defense's private think tank on the future of warfare. Damn, that's cool. Well, my mind's racing in many places. I don't know if you listen to this podcast, but we go all over the place, from fitness to world events at large. And certainly there's been a lot of world events over the last three years. And the first thing I think of

when we think of human enhancement from a military standpoint is some amalgamation of man and machine, Terminator, transhumanist shit. It makes sense from a warfare standpoint. Hopefully it's not the end all be all for the plan for humanity, you know, but, but, um, um, so talk a little bit, I mean, yeah, my fucking mind's just rabbit holing that shit right now. Uh, talk a little bit about,

you know, where you first got, like, what were your first assignments? What were you first starting to study? And what were you gleaning from that? Because I'm sure, you know, there's, there's a vast difference. And it's one of the reasons why I'm glued to having conversations with guys like you and guys like the, the team's guys is because there is something that separates that bunch. You know, if you think of the best athletes in the world, and I look at this, like in basketball, you know, there's a lot of great basketball players and nothing against them, but they wouldn't make great fighters. They just wouldn't make great fighters for, for all the reasons they didn't go into fighting. Obviously there's, there's money and shit like that. You make a lot more in basketball, but

they became basketball players because they're great at basketball. And they're tremendous athletes. Some of the very best. I like watching the NBA finals and playoffs because you get to see like the best of the best of human nature. Like what is a 50 inch vertical look like on a fucking six foot 10 guy? You can see that in basketball, right? You're not going to see that in football. You're not going to see it anywhere else. And at the same time, there's a grittiness that's gone, right? That would have led them to football or to boxing or to something else. And it appears that, you know, the, the, the special operators seem, seem to have that on the teeter totter scale of athleticism, whatever they might be lacking. And they still have a lot of athleticism. So it's not like they're fucking way back on the scale,

you know, couldn't play division one or anything. They could fucking do all that. And they have this thing that won't say no. They have a thing that says yes, yes, yes, every single time when their body's aching, no. So yeah, actually that's an incredible segue. So the first two things I was looking at were a project looking at the biggest opportunities and threats to human performance. So what are the biggest opportunities to enhance? What are the biggest opportunities that our adversaries might use to try to degrade the performance of our troops? And then the second piece was, why is it that some small units can go through the nearly unimaginable stresses of combat and perform at incredible levels despite taking casualties no sleep the rigors of all of

it and some units fall apart and that actually dovetails beautifully with this question of like what is what is it about these people who can make it through special operations selection? And so to dive into the second one, basically what we found was the units that were able to do this and whether that was grinding out, you know, you look at units and unit histories from World War II in Korea, or the ones who were grinding out these missions in Iraq and Afghanistan where they had to do route clearance every day. And just their job was to find IEDs and the other guys were just trying to put IEDs to blow them up every day.

And just the sort of brutal combination of incredible stakes and a degree of monotony almost that is just so hard for the human brain. And what we found was the units that could do it had two things. So the first thing is what people talk about a lot, which is high trust. And so, but the cool physiology that appears to be behind it is if you trust the person you're with, you have lower physiological stress hormone levels. So I put you in a stressful situation by yourself, cortisol levels might be here. With a stranger, they'll be lower. And with someone you trust, they'll be even lower. So it looks something like if you have a leader that can generate a high trust unit

environment, you actually have lower stress hormone levels, more cognitive adaptability, less burnout, more physical recovery. And in fact, those are all the mechanisms by which we see the low trust units fall apart. Their brains can't adapt, their bodies can't recover. And this combination eventually leads them to make terrible mistakes. There's a like kind of classic story from world war ii um guy gets shot and he's going to run back to the aid

station makes perfect sense but the rest of the unit is in a good tactical position but everybody's brain so flooded with stress hormones they see him run back and everyone starts running. It's just like an immediate response, no adaptability, no situational awareness. And but it turns out that if you look like, for example, in a factory, if everyone trusts and likes each other, that group doesn't perform better. And so what's going on? Well, it turns out if everyone trusts and likes each other, they might all, let's say, slow down and make sure the slowest guy doesn't fall behind and look bad. And so you need to combine that high trust with high mission focus to be able to get the most out of it.

And then you can imagine sort of a two by two, you know, low trust, low trust, low mission focus. Obviously, that's a poor performing group. High trust, low mission focus, that's going to be a consistent group because they've got those stress buffering effects, but they're never going to perform at peak. And then I think the most interesting one in a sense is low trust, high mission focus. They're going to perform really well until the stress hits a certain level and they're going to fall apart. It's really brittle. And then the high trust, high mission focus is this incredibly powerful force that can carry groups and

teams through, you know, what's almost otherwise, you know, people haven't been there and nearly unimaginable stuff. And so to tie that with the soft guys, turns out we have, there's very good published scientific, you know,

in the scientific literature data showing that under stress, their brains and bodies react to stress differently. And that in fact, they have this like innate stress buffering effect. They have higher ratios of DHEA to cortisol. So they're, they're not like nuking their sex hormones and other things under stress as much. They, their stress hormone levels peak really high actually, but then come back down to baseline and don't dip below afterwards. So they recover faster. Um, and all these really fascinating kind of phenomena. Oh, that's, that's super interesting. I remember talking with Dr. Kirk Parsley, who was a Navy SEAL and then became a medical doctor for the Navy SEALs. And since then, he's partnered with Rob Wolf on a couple of, one on sleep product and then Element, Element T, which is're in at, and you've been in the game for long enough, you know, those levels start to tank. There is a point of diminishing returns in how much we're extracting from them. And that's part of the reason you guys have a job, right? Like you're brought in to solve

those issues, but that makes a lot of sense on how they make it in, in the first place. Right. Like I said, I, that was something that I was unaware of until the last year and working with some hormone specialists that DHA and cortisol do have an inverse relationship. I was like, that makes sense now. But I mean, at the time, it was just like, this is very curious to me. You take DHEA in hopes that it buffers cortisol if cortisol levels are out of whack, those kinds of things. But just like circling back on the common denominator that allows them to get through that is that they can reach these peak States and then fall back

to a normal level without tanking. Like every other human on the planet seems to be like, they would just fucking eat shit. You know, like you'd, you'd go through that and there'd be no recovery. I can imagine even like people that sign up, I forget the name of the guy, uh, became really famous for putting people through seal type training you know i'm talking about um what's his name it's gonna fucking kill me now jose i'll mention it not one of the guys who's written the books or something like david goggins or not goggins before goggins uh blew up but he was a guy that would bring people out for

divine mark divine he'd bring people out for like ass kicker training and people would say yes to that regular ass people would say yeah i'm gonna go do that i'm like who would sign up for this like you don't know what you're signing up for like i get it i understand the why but like you could do an iron man or i did an ultra so i guess i had the the dummy itch at some point um But it just doesn't make sense. Like, it's like, that's to weed out people. It's not to make you better. It actually makes you worse to train that way.

So like, I understand like, all right, I want to see if I have it. It's true. Although the one piece is like, and I'm sure you've experienced this. When you go through something that looks on face like you can't do it then you know you can do you know there's a in military called stress inoculation like now you know you've got that extra gear or you know hey actually you know probably mine not not my 100 my 95 is here but yes people absolutely sign up for the pain yeah yeah yeah not to your point that's exactly what i got from from doing the ultra we did a 55k in zion and it rained all night the night before they went to cancel the next day because it's

effectively like this very fine clay it's dust until it's rain and then it's clay and so people were losing their shoes it was like walking on a suction cup oh man each step you're hiking through this you know you're at elevation and then, and then maybe you'd get like 200 yards of actual running and then you go back through the clay. And so that was that way for 31.7 miles. And I was the last person to finish in the, in the 10 hour time limit they gave other people still came through, but that was it. I was 238 pounds. They said, Hey, people were asking my wife, like, did you see the bodybuilder running? And I was like, I understand I'm a lot bigger than a runner, but I'm nowhere near what

a bodybuilder looks like even at 238 pounds. Um, but that's, that was it. You know, at the end of that was like, cool. I can go fucking 31 miles through anything, even when I'm not the correct weight to do that. You know, like I should have been, I feel better running around two 12 to two 16. Uh, but I did it. I did it when I was heavier and, I feel better running around two 12 to two 16. Uh, but I did it. I did it when I was heavier and I did it when I was stronger and there was something to that. And I haven't done it since, you know, I have no, no, no desire to do that after the fact. I'm like, all right, one's good enough. I know what my body's capable of and I don't need to put myself through the ringer again. Beautiful stuff though. Yeah. I mean, that's why I do these kinds of things, like exactly for that reason.

You look like a good runner though. You look like you'd be able to just fucking coast. My wife is like Legolas from Lord of the Rings. She could just run on mountainsides like some kind of mountain goat, steep hillcliffs, deep in the snow. She's just going to float on top of the snow and not have to worry about much. I definitely have a gear and it's one of my favorite things to do. If I'm not trying to go for top speed,

if I just have a gear where I can get into it and just go and I can just keep going at that gear for sometimes feels unlimited. Obviously that's not the case, but yeah, I've done the last five years. I'm mostly done though. I kind of Spartan race type stuff. I've done a couple ultras there. And you've just got to be able to get in that gear and enjoy it.

And sometimes you're getting punched in the face. It's the old Mike Tyson quote, right? You got your plan and then you get punched in the face. But yeah, I've really enjoyed that kind of stuff. And I've done less of them recently just because of building the startup, building the company and the big mission there. But I've been looking at the calendar again. I've got that itch again. Yeah. It's nice to have something planned. I've always talked like the main benefit to me doing that race was that there was the most consistent running I've ever had. And I wasn't a consistent

runner before that. I wrestled and did football in school growing up. And a lot of the guys on the wrestling team would do cross country. So that made sense. You get into shape pre-wrestling season. But I never really enjoyed it. And then my wife was a cross country runner at NAU. So when we got together, I was still fighting, doing a lot of sprint work.

I got her into the sprint work. And then when fighting ended, she's like, hey, let's do a half marathon. Let's do a 5K, let's do a 10K. And I was like, ah, all right, all right, I'll try. And there is something to that. When you fall into that rhythm and you get the runner's high, like it is, it's very freeing. It's lifting. It's almost like an active meditation in a way that you can't, I can't scratch that, you know, sitting in a dark, quiet room, oming or chanting or just

getting it. Like it's, it's its own thing. And I really do appreciate it for that. And, and I'll do that for a lesser distance, you know, where we're doing like two to five miles now and nothing crazy and, and just enjoying that nice flow state. We'll talk a little bit about your, at what point do you get, do you really get in? Like, was it right off the bat that they started having you with, you work with soft guys and studying them? Talk about that transition, like who you were first looking at, what type of data were you getting? And then when you started to work with, you know, the really high level people, what were you seeing as the main differences? Yeah. So when I first got in,

these first questions really were more about what you could do for the broader force. Look, I love the mission of how to enhance the best. That's so fun to think about that. But in a sense for the military, the biggest bang for your buck is like, not what do you do for a thousand soft guys, but like, what do you do for a hundred thousand army grunts or things like that? And so, you know, I was thinking more

about the regular force to begin with, but, you know, every time you're doing that, you're thinking about the elite because there are lessons from the elite that you can draw for the regular force. And know some of the questions are like could you physiologically turn somebody into one of these elite guys temporarily permanently so um so i was really thinking about that and then what got me into kind of this other than you know look using them as as kind of exemplars and understanding what the research about them said was got into working with the navy trying to look at this question of

these very long dive missions and how i got into that was we were looking at recovery protocols and had understood from just some casual conversations with some people in the CEO community I met that that some of what they were doing were these like eight hour dive missions which is like you know an incredible level of stress in your body on a rebreather the water could be cold anyway so lots of lots of and obviously like hot really high stakes stuff if you're doing that and so basically what ended up happening is I was, you know, they mentioned this. It was fascinating to me. I glommed on it.

I started talking to the people at Office of Naval Research, trying to get them to fund some stuff. And then they invited me out to their research reviews and started to get some depth in dive science. I wouldn't call myself an expert by any means, but I got to sit and talk and ask the right questions, hopefully, from some of the leading dive researchers in the world, because as you can imagine, the Navy funds a lot of the best dive research in the world. And that all ended up with me talking more and more to these SEALs, one of the underwater delivery vehicle units. And they had started in a group

that was looking at innovation. And so they came to DC and I was still working out mostly out of the Pentagon then. And they came to DC and I was one of the people they wanted to talk to, sat down with them. And that was sort of the start of this discussion where kind of organically, the guys started coming to me and being like, hey, do you mind helping us out? And so that was really a lot of the, you know, a lot of it was like me, you know, more and just come to you with challenges and you start to see what works for them differently than other people. And honestly, one of the things that's really cool is when they understand if something works because they're operating so close to the edge often. And two, I find a lot of our tools work really well on them. Like their bodies seem to respond so well when we use

all the kind of recovery and performance tools. So yeah, I'd say like, that's kind of how I got there. Became really close friends with some of those people, you know, still to this day have, you know, some really awesome friendships out of that time and just have so much respect for what they do and so much kind of interest in helping people who are willing to put themselves on the line like that. Yeah. Hell yeah. Yeah. There is something to that. It's a, I mean, I think that's what my second mountain was post ASU in the fight game, really learning all this stuff as I was going, knowing I wasn't good enough to just sit at home and play video games and eat Popeye's chicken, like, uh, Daniel Cormier, my teammate. So like

I had, I had to study in between practices and, you know, doing two or three practices a day and just literally reading, you know, Kelly Stratton's mobility wide stuff and becoming a supple leopard and anything that could enhance, uh, remember right when Wim Hof went on Rogan's and Tim Ferris's. And I was like, Oh, this is big. Let's get into this, you know? And, um, having that test, you know, on a three days a week we'd spar. So I got to test it in the gym and then I got to test it for real, you know, in the cage. And I think there's something so important to that, you know, because it's not just a, does this work in pickleball, right? The stakes, when the stakes are that high, like it really does matter.

And anything that moved the needle and really changed how I could operate in there was something that I held. It's something I kept, I put it in my tool bag for later because I knew if it works here, it's gonna work absolutely everywhere. And that's obviously to an exponential level higher

when death is on the line. It's never was in harm's way in the sense of, uh, there was no point where I thought I could die in the cage. Right. I knew I was going to live through every fight. Um, but that makes a lot of sense. I'm trying to think here. Did you ever run across a Dominic D'Agostino's work? Dr. Dom? Yeah, man. Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. Yeah. yeah. He's got all this stuff. Exactly. Yeah, yeah. The Navy and stuff was super interesting there. Yeah, very cool. We've had him on years ago.

I think it was 2014. I was listening to the Tim Ferriss podcast, and he had on Dr. Peter Attia and Dr. Dom in that year. He also had on Dr. Jim Fadiman, who wrote the Psychedelic Explorer's Guide, which was all on microdosing. So I was just fucking chewing through stuff, practicing. And I was like, there's a lot of good here on the neuroscience side from psilocybin microdoses all the way up to the ketones and fasting and stuff like that that really helped me post-career. That was right when I retired.

So I had a lot there to chew on. I would love for you, we're going to talk about Fount, which is the company that you've created where you've taken all of this, really just tried and true information and extracted it and then been able to try to apply that to a broader audience. How can this work for dads, for moms, for everyday folks? And I think it's a beautiful mission. I would love to also break open some of the techniques. I want to know what some of the N equals one experiments are that you're running.

I want to know what some of the universal good things are. I mean, ketones for me seem to work better having been in ketosis before, but they also seem to work for people in the right set and setting. Like if you're going to run a race, you don't necessarily have to have been fasted or done a ketogenic diet before to experience the benefits of ketones. But I just wonder like what's most applicable in the people that you're working with

from a supplement standpoint, from an experiment standpoint, like what are some of the things that are tried and true that you know are like people are going to eat this up, they can use it now. And if they can't sign up for Fount, you know, for the four months package, what can they do that's going to help them operate better?

Yeah, love it. So first thing first is like, the biggest takeaway from working with these elite communities was that everybody's physiology is different. That what works for you is going to be different from me. And that might sound like a challenge. And it should sound like, hey, you know, my stack's not going to be your stack. But it means that we have to fall back to a methodology that does give us a solution, though. And like you said, though, you already highlighted it, end of one experimentation, just run experiments on yourself. And hey, if LeBron's got this stack, and he says that works for him, awesome. It doesn't mean it's going to work for you. You could try it though. You can experiment

with it. Maybe your stack is 50% the same as my stack or 75%, but really running those experiments is key. And so what are the experiments we run and what do we see work for a lot of people? So I would say, we're thinking about nutrition, supplements, meditation, breath work, sleep, light temperature, exercise, recovery. So we could go through each of those, but I'll try to just speed run some of my favorites from those groups. So not everyone does well with ketogenic diets, but most people do well with a higher protein diet. And so, you know, most people do well, especially if we look at America today with a lower carb diet, because almost people are

starting from a very high level. So, you know, then diving into what proteins, you know, we see almost everyone do well in fish. Almost everyone does fine on chicken, red meat, we find high variability. Some people feel insanely good on it and their numbers look great some people feel great and their numbers go the wrong way and some people feel a very clear pretty striking level of inflammation from red meat and so even the good stuff even like the good grass-fed stuff so i think there that's fine like i don't think there's anything you know i don't think the data the research shows any clear negatives for meeting red meat. Sure. If it's processed crap stuff, like that's what all that data originally was from, but just experiment. If it works for you, great. You feel

good. Maybe look at your numbers, look at your lipid profile. That's all in a good place. Then amazing. Fantastic. And if you feel worse, like notice how does your gut feel? How's your digestion? How are your energy levels? If those are lower, then maybe you stick with fish and chicken, maybe you experiment with it. So, you know, that's where I think on protein side, you know, there are definitely people who do well on these carnivore diets, but most people we find do well by upping vegetable consumption. You know, all these vegetables have high levels of polyphenols. These are these compounds in there that activate the cellular protection mechanisms. People used to think of them as antioxidants, but it turns out they don't actually work that way. But what they

do is they turn on these switches in your cells that say like, hey, there's some stress in the environment. Let's beef off and get stronger. It's almost like, you know, without the side effects, it's like a TRT for your cells protection or something like that. Testosterone. So. Yeah, it's a hormetic stressor, right? I think that's something that gets lost in the conversation. I mean, I've read, Saladino is a good buddy of mine, carnivore doc. He's been on a number of times. I think he's doing fantastic stuff in the world and his diet now is a bit broader, right? He's having raw dairy, he's eating all fruits and berries. I still think he's off any vegetable wagon, including starches and things like that. But he's probably having like 300, I think he was saying 300 grams

of carbohydrates a day from honey and fruit and berries. And his blood sugar looks great, everything looks great. And again, that's N equals one. That's worked for Saladino. It's not gonna translate to everyone else. But I think about the work of Dr. Stephen Gundry who wrote the plant paradox and how most plants have mechanisms inside them that are designed to keep things from eating them, right? And our ancestors understood different ways of cooking

and stripping away some of these anti-nutrients, if you'll call them that, phytic acid, things like that. You soak beans for seven days and drain them and wash them again and then cook them. Obviously, our ancestors weren't using pressure cookers, but that's one way to destroy lectins and things like that. Oxalates have been a big part of conversations. I don't think Saladino's too worried about that, but I wonder for some, as we talk about gut issues and things like that, how much of that, it seems like there's one side of this conversation that's saying plants can harm you.

And if you have issues, go with more meat and less plants. And then the other side of that conversation is these can act as hormetic stressors. They can flip the epigenetic on-off switches in a positive way. And one of the first places you'll see that is in your poop. You know, Paul Cech is one of my favorite guys and he talks about, he has the poop lineup and it's this drawing

and how to eat, move and be healthy of a cop. That's a perfect shit. And he's looking at like seven different bad poops, you know, like the ghost and the iceberg and all these, the bodybuilder shit, and you know, and all of that can be adjusted very quickly without expensive testing to find yourself having good bowel movements. and the iceberg and all these, the bodybuilder shit, and all of that can be adjusted very quickly without expensive testing to find yourself having good bowel movements. It's

such an important piece of the conversation when it comes to digestion. I think they both can be right. So I think, look, we absolutely see people who are getting major GI inflammation from eating often vegetables, also some other things. And so what's going on? The recent research, I guess now a little bit over a year old, but very cool work done out of Belgium. Basically, they demonstrated that you can have an allergy in the lining of your gut that doesn't happen peripherally. So no blood tests can find it. And so all these tests, skin tests probably won't find it. So basically, like all the tests can't see it, but they showed that you can have this allergy. And so we see, for example, take

nightshades, you know, seems very likely this is the mechanism that's going on there is people have an allergy in the lining of their gut. And that matches the symptoms we see for people. And so if you have a gluten or a nightshade or one of the other intolerances, you know, people like doctors would say, hey, we tested you. You're not allergic to it. And the answer is you tested my blood. Doesn't mean I'm not allergic to it in my gut. And so we think this is the source of many food allergies, food sensitivities.

And like you said, if you have those and you keep eating those foods, you're going to feel terrible. It's going to drive inflammation in your body that histamine is gonna get released from your gut it's gonna affect your brain your joints your skin so for people like that we absolutely love elimination diets and so take out the things that are hurting you and if if that leaves you know meats and berries phenomenal dairy is another one Some people do phenomenally well on it. Other people get these food sensitivities to it. So keep it or leave it. So yeah, I think my sense is that

because people are so variable, that the people out there who are disagreeing with each other, sometimes the answer is they're both right. Yeah, I think that is very, very well said. Yeah, and it took me, I did an elimination diet back in the day and discovered gluten and dairy issues. And then once I found this really good A2 Jersey cow raw milk in Texas, like that has been perfect. I don't get snotty. There's zero side effects. I don't get gassy. And then we actually made homies with this guy, Joaquin, who started a company called Dos Lunes. Sorry, it's only available in Texas, but it's made exclusively

from this one farm's Jersey milk. So it's raw cheese made from raw milk and it's fucking lights out. Like it's our favorite thing. The whole family's on it. Nobody has any problems at all. And there's a big benefit to that. You know, like if you can take that in, it's a calorically dense, it's really a superfood, you know, and you were getting lots of vitamin A. We can even see the yellowness of the cheese change based on which season the milk was taken from, right? So it's pretty fantastic. Yeah, it's pretty fantastic to have that relationship with the food. And I understand not everyone's going to have that, but you're exactly right. You know, like both of them are right. They're speaking, you know, at different points of the argument and then both can be correct.

So, so elimination diet, and that would be basically, you know, you're cutting out all grain, you're going to cut all nightshades. Um, you might even cut greens and some veggies out and then slowly reintroduce those. Um, where do people, where, how do, how would you set that up for somebody that wanted to run that experiment for how long I did 28 days, but there's variety, you know, you Google this shit and you're going to get a thousand different ways it can be done. Yeah. I mean, so you've got to be realistic with people, but you've got to really put the time in because one day of not eating something is going to tell you something. So we, we have about a 31 day protocol and, you know, what we've done is like, we've tried to sort min-max it. By which I mean, what is the minimum

amount of time to get the maximum value? What are the things that are most impactful to most people? And so we've got a full protocol that lays out what do you not eat here and step by step. If you want, we'll send you a copy of it and you can post it along with this or we can send you a link to it. There's different protocols out there. But the key thing is like, how do we get rid of the things that cause most problems for most people so that you can get to a baseline? And so, you know, you've got to be able to eat something. So the things in each category, chicken and fish seem to be the least reactive for most people then um vegetables wise like the green cruciferous vegetables like broccoli and other things seem to be like pretty easy on most people again not everyone and then if you're going to have a carbohydrate it's usually rice is the least reactive for people

and so basically we're going to start you on this very boring diet for a washout period get your let your body like kind of calm down from any stuff we're going on. And then we're just going to add things back one by one. And we're going to go after the things that are the most common. So I was joking the other day that pizza is sort of four horsemen of the apocalypse.

Gluten, dairy, nightshades, and alliums. Garlic and onions are an underrated source of food allergies that are really impactful to a lot of people. But you're thinking about soy, dairy, alliums, nightshades, and wheat, I would say are your top five probably. And then you're going to think about red meat. We see some people who feel so good on saturated fats. Other people feel bad on saturated fats. And so it's really this month of exploration. And the cool thing is, it's not, oh, did I feel bad or not?

It's sometimes like I had that back and I felt better. And that's amazing. The other thing is we see sometimes people who get upset. They're like, I didn't find that many things that bothered me. I'm like, that's amazing. You don't want to have to cut everything in the world out. You want to have as easy a diet as you can. So, um, but yeah, happy to, happy to share our protocol with people. And you know, the key is cut things out, let it calm down, add them back one by one, give it a few days for each thing. Yeah. That's, that's, that's perfect. I'd love to share that

in the show notes. Um, yeah. And, and, and also one, one last point on this before we put a pin in it and move on was my wife, it can change over time. Tosh after her, after her second pregnancy, who's always done well with higher fat, you know, red meat, darker meat, chicken, things like that, high fat fish. She just started throwing up and I was like, what's happening here? It's not, I don't know if, you know, we're way past morning sickness stage. You've already delivered. And, um, we actually supplemented with gallbladder for like three weeks and was eating primarily, you know, very lean cuts of red meat, like a filet mignon, if any, and then fish and, um, and chicken. And that she seemed fine through that. And we gave it about three or four weeks with the gallbladder supplement. And then she could slowly start adding in heavier meats again,

but it was like that fast she delivered. And all of a sudden her body was like, nope, I'm not taking in anything heavy right now. And so, you know, and it's not just for pregnant women, you know, we, depending on training loads, stress and all these things that it can, it can shift over time. And it's important that we're listening to that, that system, whatever that is, whether it's some type of wearable or just being attuned to what's happening in our bodies through digestion, through what's happening in the toilet. These kinds of things can give us pointers in the right direction. Let's keep moving down the list. We mentioned a bunch of stuff there that's obviously very important. What are some of the stuff there that's obviously very important.

What are some of the sleep hacks that you find? And I find this really important too. I was listening to you on another podcast and based on your goal or your mission, it's gonna change. And so if you're telling, I teach the four doctors from Paul Cech. You got doctor movement, doctor quiet, sleep and meditation, doctor diet, anything that you put in your body, water, supplements, food, and then doctor happiness. What is your mission? What brings you joy in life?

And how do you attain that every day? Those are really important pieces. But if you've got, you know, somebody that's going out at 3 a.m. or even a firefighter, any of these other people that don't get their eight to 10 hours of bedtime, like you're not going to have the same ability to work with them at that level and preach the importance of sleep is kind of comical because they work a night shift or because they can get called out in the middle of the night. So talk a bit about sleep and how you mitigate for some of these people that have to get up in the middle of the night, what are their best options? Yeah. So starting for people who don't, but yeah, that's a great point. So starting

people who don't, The keys are temperature. And there's actually some cool hacks here. So, you know, it's been become more popular recently, like cold room, amazing, cold bed, if you can afford the like eight sleeps of the world, those things are incredible. But for many people, I'd say about 85% of people, if you take a warm shower before bed, what it does is it raises your body temperature so that when you get out, your body temperature starts to fall really quickly. And that you're falling body temperature is a signal to your brain to fall into deeper sleep quickly. And your body actually starts to dump heat really well when you get out of the shower, because pores are open, it's got a lot of heat. And then you but you still have enough in your body to get

into bed and your body then warms the bed up really quickly, even if you've got like an eight sleep running. And that's important because your body doesn't want to go to sleep in a place that's cold because it might, like, you know, evolutionarily, you went to sleep in a place that was really cold. There was no reason to believe it was going to warm up. You could freeze to death overnight. So your body warms the bed up. So your body's like, okay, I'm safe to go to bed here. My body temperature is dropping. And then you suck that heat out through the night with the room air and the eight sleep. And that combination can be incredible. So, okay. Temperature, light, obviously,

if you can get blackout curtains and then light before we're talking about blue light, then, you know, blue light inhibits melatonin production we've got these melanopsin receptors and our eyes are not visual but they're seeing that blue light and they're telling our brain it's daytime and so you know evolutionarily the only blue light out there at meaningful you know kind of volume intensity was the sun and so when the sun went down you know fires were not these blue natural gas fires they were red orange wood fires and so um you know what that what went down, you know, fires were not these blue natural gas fires. They were red, orange wood fires. And so, you know, what does that mean? You know, for me, the last part of my night, the lights in the house go orange, go red.

And so that, you know, I don't mind that. Some people find that real weird, but we've all got our things. So it's also easy to put on a pair of blue light blocking glasses. But a lot of people ask, you know, they have these like clear lenses that are blue light blocking or orange if arms are yellow if they're not orange they're not blocking enough blue light um you know the the yellow ones are maybe at most 60 70 the ones that you're that you get in your normal glasses are maybe 20 30 if they're kind of clear looking um so gotta be the orange lens blue light glasses so so yeah so i'd say like light temperature and then you know what time we're eating you know

eating before bed is you know suboptimal makes people sleep worse actually research is pretty funny it's like not even fully clear why that is but we know it's true um caffeine not too close to bed for people who are drinking caffeine um and you know if then there's like different supplements that can work we try to use melatonin more as a timing signal than to put you to bed you know so it's not like kind of all the time we use it to shift your circadian rhythm around for example on sunday afternoons if you've been up later on the weekend and you want to get back on your schedule you can take a a melatonin dose Sunday afternoon and it'll shift your circadian rhythm back an hour, which is probably about how much you threw it off Friday and Saturday night. We use it for our jet lag protocols and other things.

We find magnesium compounds can be helpful for sleep, MAG3 and 8 in particular. Some people who need a little bit of like a calming effect, like an L-theanine can be helpful. And then we've just discovered this new fruit extract, which is kind of a weird finding. A third of people it works incredibly well for. A third of people it does nothing. And a third of people makes their sleep worse. And so this is like why we love what we do. Cause if you ran a research study with that, it would, it would show no effect, right? It would just be like, you know, it would all balance out, but we know that a third of people works for, it's not a placebo effect

cause they've already tried other things. And it like, for some people reverses 20 years of bad sleep. It's insane stuff. So, um, you know, we're, we're working on new stuff, new things there. And we're working on, um, getting that out to the market. Okay, cool. So that's a, that's a compound you guys are designing. Yeah. So we, we cool. I won't dig it. I won't dig in any further than I was going to ask. I'll ask you off air. Cool, man. Very cool. Yeah. I remember reading, um, it's funny cause the print I got from Amazon was actually like six chapters and then it reprinted the first six chapters two more times. So I don't know how it fucked up, but I think it was called a keto fast.

It was one of Dr. Joe Mercola's books before, um, before he went down an infamy telling the truth in 2020 and beyond. But, um, really brilliant. One of the things he said is if you were to make one change with regard to your food timing, you'd finish your last caloric intake three hours before you hit the sheets. If you just do that, that creates a guaranteed window that's big enough for you to digest what you need and actually fall asleep on time. And I think he was working or linking to some of Dr. Sachin Panda's work from the Salk Institute who first started to say like our microbiome actually has its own circadian rhythm, right? Like the living beings that are held within us actually

have their own rhythms. And if we fuck with that, that can mess up our sleep as well. Yeah. I love that. And I'd say three hours is great. And if you have gut issues, try four, because maybe yours is going to digest a little more slowly. But yeah, I think for most people, three hours works super well. And then depending you know, depending on your bladder stuff, you know, drink water earlier, drink water later, that can be valuable for some people. But yeah, love, you know, light temperature and kind of nutrient intake are probably the highest value. I guess I'll just add one more, which is dopamine. So, you know, the world around us these days is just designed to hammer on your dopamine circuits, especially our phones. And so, you know, people hear this advice to keep the phone out of the bedroom.

But like, really, if you think about what drives dopamine the most, it's unexpected rewards. Give you the highest dopamine hit. And your phone is like an unexpected reward generator. You have no idea when that text will come in. All your apps, all your social media apps are intentionally giving you notifications at random times to give you that social media boost, dopamine. So if you can, I really love for people to try to mitigate the effects of that. And what we know is exciting content plus bright light have a synergistic negative effect. And so when they did some studies,

it was like bright light plus TV or bright light plus reading. And the effects of bright light by itself or TV by itself are sort of like not as strong as when you do them together. So try to get rid of exciting content and bright light together. And so the glasses can help turning down the lights, whatever you can do to help that. Yeah. It's funny. We don't, I don't watch a ton of TV and somebody got us turned. I think a Jack Carr was recently on Rogan's. And so we were like, all right, let's watch the terminal list. And we had a date day. So we watched the first episode and I

was like, the only time we really have to watch is after the kids go to sleep. And I was like, this shows, we're gonna watch this show when we have a fucking date day and that's it. We're not putting this on at night. There's zero chance of that. So it was a hard no. And thankfully it's a hard no

because I've wasted a lot of good night's sleep staying up watching Game of Thrones and different things like that. And at least I know better now as a 41 year old. Well, I think that's all really, really important stuff. And there's a lot of takeaways there for many people. What are some of the things that you look at from a technology side?

You know, like obviously there's light stuff that we can get just from being in the sun. I want you to speak to that. But maybe some of the tech out there. I've got a Juve light. I think it's fantastic, especially in the wintertime. And, you know, the wearables. A lot of people get hung up on the wearables.

We had Dr. Andy Galpin and Brian McKenzie on years ago when they wrote the book Unplugged. And they were really speaking to, you know, the fact that this is, it's emerging and it's not 100% accurate. And we've compared this at the Huberman Lab to actual, you know, stuff that we're finding in Stanford, you know, using million dollar equipment.

And it's not a one for one. And at the same time, I do feel like it can be a way for people to bridge, to know more, to see whatever the estimated HRV is, to understand how their body's recovering from their workouts, how their body's sleeping. And I think it can be a useful tool to teach people how to feel it. You know, and then once they feel it,

they can take the band off, the ring off, whatever the thing is, and actually continue to listen to that and to find their center. But, um, I know you guys are big into this and I think for people just starting off, they can be wonderful tools. So speak to the technology side of things that people can, can learn from. Yeah. So starting with wearables, I think you just absolutely nailed it. It's so, first of all, all the people who, you know, and the gel and others are absolutely right. The absolute accuracy of these things is not that great.

Meaning like how close is it to the exact truth? But what we find is they're pretty accurate in a relative sense. Meaning like, hey, if it got better, does that mean you're getting better? If it got worse, does it mean you got worse? And that's really what we want to use them for. So like, hey, if it says it's low, don't worry too much. Don't get nagged by it. Let's just find the

things that make it go up and to the right. And so that's how we want to use them. And I think exactly what you said, using them to train your interoception, your ability to interrogate the internal state of your body, your intuition. We want to take you from a place where you're not sure what's going on to one where you track and monitor to one where you don't have to track and monitor because you know what's going on. And so I don't know if people on Twitter, there's a midwet meme, it's a bell curve. And the person on the left will say something like, I just do what I feel. The person in the middle will be like, I measure every component of my life. I have nine wearables.

And the person on the right says, I measure every component of my life. I have nine wearables. And the person on the right says, I just do what I feel. But the difference is that person can modulate their program based on their hardwired, you know, their brain is hardwired into the body. Let's use that data source. And if you can train that, like you said, it's more powerful than any wearable that exists today. So 100% agree. On the other tech side, I mean, look, the best data we have says that sun is good for you, especially if you don't get burned.

So try to stay away from the burns. That's actual, what a sunburn is, is DNA damage caused by the UV radiation, cross-linking bases in there, and then your body's got to clean that up or kill those cells. So let's stay away from getting burned. But look, this is an observational study. And there's some reasons to believe this effect shouldn't be as strong as it is. But when you go to Scandinavia, where the people who get the most,

first of all, the sun, there's a big spread. The difference in health outcomes is the equivalent of the people who get no sun are like they're smoking. So like, we believe, you know, I think sun is a hormetic stressor and the skin is this underappreciated organ. It's like the biggest organ in our body. So we've got to like, we got to take care of our skin. I think, you know, moisturizing it without like kind of the wrong chemicals and things like that. I'm not a big fan of sunscreen unless it's going to prevent you from getting burned. And then let's use like the zinc and other things that aren't those chemical hormone disruptors. And, you know,

from there, look, similarly, we think for sure, infrared light is one of the components of that hormetic stressor. And so the juve you have, which is an infrared light or infrared saunas can be really fantastic. And that segues into saunas together. So whether it's the infrared generating heat to cause hormesis or a traditional hot sauna causing that heat, again, hormesis is this insanely powerful effect of, you know, a stressor causing our body to build back more, you know, stronger. So we love sauna

cold plunge also. I will say, I get asked this a lot, like, hey, if I have an option, should I get an infrared sauna or traditional hot sauna? And I think, you know, the answer is we have more data on traditional hot. I typically go with that if I had a choice, but both are great. And I think you know the answer is we have more data on traditional hot I typically go with that if I had a choice but both are great and I think the reason for traditional hot is you're getting that hot air impinging on your lungs when you breathe in and I think that hormetic stressor on your lungs is underappreciated when we talk about infrared because you're not really getting that you're it's heating your tissue up and that's fantastic, but I love that hormetic stress on your lungs and your nasal passages. You know, one of the big results you see from Scandinavian countries is they get a lot less upper respiratory infections

when they, you know, over lifetime when they do sauna. And so, you know, I think that's got to be the hot air on your lungs. Yeah, it's an important one. I think I had, I was talking to Taro, the founder of Four Sigmatic, who is from Finland. And he was, one of the things he was pointing out in some of Dr. Randall Patrick's research, you know, cause she's been like the sauna queen on Rogan's is that all the research done on sauna is on Finnish style sauna. It's on hot rock sauna. None of that is from infrared. It doesn't mean that infrared is not good for you. We know, you know, infrared has its own science backing it and it is really good for you. We know infrared has its own science backing it and is really good for us. If you're up watching the sunrise or the sunset, you're going to get a lot of infrared. You could use something like a Juve. Certainly an infrared

sauna will do it. But when they're talking about 60% drop in all-cause mortality, it's based on hot rock sauna. They're not getting that from infrared sauna. So I found that to be really interesting as well. One thing I'd love for you to bring up is the question on cold bath, you know, like when, when do we hit the cold bath? Do we do it post-workout? These kinds of things. And I know your answer. So I have a follow-up question to that answer, but I'd love for you to say this because it does come up quite a bit. You know, and the people that I'm, that I'm talking to podcasts, stuff like that. It's, it's an important one. Yeah. I love cold plunge. Like there's less research on it than there is for sauna. But like, I think for those of us who use it, it's just sort of obviously obvious that it works. So, um, what,

when do we like it? I want to do it when I don't want to give you a stress hormone pulse and when I don't want to shut down certain inflammatory signaling. So what does that mean? Not right after a workout because your muscles use some of those inflammatory signaling mechanisms So what does that mean? Not right after a workout, because your muscles use some of those inflammatory signaling mechanisms, IL-6, Neleucin-6, and others. And so you can actually block some of the benefits of your workout by cold plunging right afterwards. But hey, 90 minutes, two hours after, no problem. And then, you know, right before bed, a lot of people will get that cortisol bump from it or dopamine bump from it. And so for most people, we try not to do it right before bed.

Although I do know people who tell me that it gives them the best sleep when they do it. And you know what? You ran that experiment. You find that works for you. Love it. So my general sense is not right after a workout, not right before bed, unless you've done the experiment with sleep and you find that it's even better. Cool. But my follow-up question is for, I mean, the sauna is different, right? If you jump in the sauna post-workout, that actually can aid in your cardio, your detox, but also you get to

piggyback off of whatever heat shock proteins your body's already created and you're just adding to that. It can be an excellent way that doesn't damper your training effect. So whatever the load was from your workout, it's not going to take away from that by getting the sauna. Can you do contrast if the contrast of the cold is just a quick blip in the cold so you can handle another round of sauna? Or is any amount, even seconds in the cold plunge, just to dip to go back in for round two or round three with the sauna, is that going to be too negative with the anti-inflammatory aspects? No, dip should be fine. It's really like the effect of sort of, you know, people used to do the ice packs on their muscles and sometimes you need that for inflammation. It's really the deep cold. So if you're

just jumping in and out, like shouldn't have any problem. In fact, may give you another level of that hormetic stressor without doing the muscle problem so yeah i've seen no physiological reason that should be a problem and in fact i love that feeling of getting a little cold and going back in yeah it's the reset necessary especially you know we've got one set up at the farm a pretty big ass sauna that we'll all jump in after after working out as a team and we all we all hit the. I'm like, make it quick, make it quick, just get in and out. But it's something that's nice

because Texas is hot as fuck in the summer. And like, you can't get out. I'm not going to recover getting out of the sauna for a minute and getting back in outside in the Texas sun. Like it's nice to have something that can quick reset and then jump back in. I think the other thing that's cool about cold plunge, you know, separate from that is,

you know, look, you're able to expose expose some parts of your body are much more exposed. So your gonads, you know, are really exposed to the cold there. And so I'm interested in like the specific effects on your skin, your outer fascia and your gonads in particular, which are the most exposed. And what does that mean? Like, how are they preferentially being affected? As well as the fact that like, I have some friends who got vasectomies and I will tell you, PSA, you know, public service announcement to guys out there, like people don't tell you how bad it hurts afterwards and almost all of them are hiding it. And the rate at which people have really nasty pain afterwards is really high. And so what is one of the things you can do to expose that area and calm down that inflammation?

Cold plunge. I'm just picturing somebody that doesn't like cold plunges dipping their balls into a little ice cup. I'm not going to go all the way in but i don't know practice you're right and also like i'm trying to get that image out of my head now well i'm happy we just gave it to everybody um i know we had a long list i want to keep this to an hour but but keep keep shooting rapid fire me through some of the rest of these things because they're all important pieces um you know there are we thinking about? So proper protein intake, collagen protein, especially in the presence of zinc and vitamin C can accelerate soft tissue recovery. We even have

studies on faster grafting of post ACL surgery. You get a little faster, heavier grafting there. So like the right kind of protein, right, there's pro anabolic proteins, like whey tends to be, let's say the most anabolic, the most pro muscle building. But if you need recovery and healing, you might be looking at more like collagen or a mix. Tart cherry juice is like the magic elixir of workout recovery. But if you pull it, there's only I think there's only one study out there, but shows that if you don't keep it at freezer temperatures, so meaning even in the fridge, and God forbid on the shelf at room temperature, you're losing the most bioactive

compounds within weeks, meaning like by the time it gets to your house, if it wasn't stored frozen before that, you're it's kind of a lot of the best stuff's dead. So you got to source this like cold stored, and then you got to store it in the freezer at home. But tart cherry juice plus protein, you know, assuming you can handle the natural fruit sugars in there, seems to be one of this like insanely effective recovery tools. And then, you know, not only recovering physiologically of the sort of like muscular and inflammation stuff, but also how do you recover your central nervous system? And then you're looking at things like yoga, nidra, meditation or breath work to really calm down

your central nervous system to get you into that parasympathetic recovery state. So it's all working synergistically with the other things you're doing intake to recover your muscles, your joints, things like that. So, you know, glucosamine and chondroitin are like old school supplements, but the research seems to be pretty good that like if you take them for at least a month, they start, they help your joints. You know, we like omega-3 fatty acids as long as they're high quality and you're not getting, you know, oxidized stuff. You know, we use high dose omega-3 fatty acids. There's a specialized form called omega-3 SPMs, specialized pro-resolving mediators that are even more powerful anti-inflammatories. Like, you know, we know people in pro sport who are using this with their guys in lieu of like

Advil and NSAIDs because they're so powerful. So, you know, omega-3s, omega-3 SPMs. Would that be something that you're going to use post-workout? You know, like almost like the antioxidant conversation, you don't want to have vitamin C or vitamin E pre-workout that negates some of the benefits. Would this be something that you're going to have like at dinnertime after your training is all completed? Yeah, the SPMs I would. The, would. The regular omega-3s typically work more as precursors to anti-inflammatory compounds. So I'm a little less worried there because it's not a precursor has to be activated. So it's not like inherently blocking, like you said, that vitamin C and E that are going into your cells and blocking the free radical signaling we need.

So I think those are a little safer. But yeah, definitely don't want to like, you would not want to take tart cherry juice before you worked out, you wouldn't want to have those anti inflammatory effects before you worked out, unless it's competition. And then you might, because competition, you're not using for gains, you're using to do your best. So you know, when I was doing some of the ultra Spartan stuff, some of them we had like laps and you could do stuff in between. And so I would hit that in between to lower the inflammation for the next lap because I just want to perform as well that day. But in training, I would never do it before. That makes sense. How does, have you guys worked

with, you know, in, in some of your experiments has fasting at all been a part of that in any way, shape or form? I know there's been a part of that in any way, shape, or form? I know there's been a lot of talk from really since 2014, where it really came online in my world from 16-8, different forms of intermittent fasting, 24-hour fast. I think it was four days with water. It might've been three days, but Stanford's kind of like gold standard of this is where you get maximum benefit. And then after that, there still might be mental, emotional, spiritual benefit, but not much more physiologically. Talk a little bit about how you guys fold that in and who that works for. Yeah. So I think we use those for sort of almost different reasons. I almost think of like the

time-restricted eating or intermittent fasting, like 16-88 as a tool to both decrease calorie consumption and heal the gut. Again, people with more gut issues, if you're constantly forcing it to work, you don't give it as much time to heal. The one challenge is if you're not doing resistance training at proper doses and proper timing, then studies show that like 16-8 compared like time-restricted eating or intermittent fasting compared to just cutting calories but eating more frequently, you lose more muscle in many studies on time-restricted eating. But you can reverse almost all that effect with weightlifting and resistance training. So you've just got to be smart about these combinations. And then I think these metabolic reset, these multi-day fasts, even the fasting mimicking diets, which kind of like only

give you certain nutrients and not the ones that tell your body there's a lot of nutrients there. Yeah, absolutely. These longer term, three, four day fasts, I think if you can do them, even a one day one, but if you can get up to, let's say three, four days, you know, whether that's once a quarter, twice a year, whatever works for you, I think they can have some real reset benefits. But again, you're going to lose muscle during that time unless you resistance train. So, you know, during that time, you probably don't want to be doing kind of cardio work because your body is going to really bonk out really quickly. But you can do weightlifting, be smart, you know, know what your body can handle, but working all your major muscle groups multiple times a week to prevent that muscle loss. And then that tells your body to

preferentially lose fat. I know there's a study they did with army guys. They were looking at like, if you put someone in a dramatic calorie calorie deficit can do they how much muscle mass do they lose these were at like a 2000 calorie a day deficit so they were eating but they were working out and training so hard that they were you know a huge deficit they're also looking at the effects of trt on this but um i think the most interesting takeaway from that study was for the group that resistance trained lifted hard, even at a 2000 calorie a day deficit, they did not lose meaningful muscle mass throughout, I think at least a week. And that's an incredible story for how to lose fat preferentially. Yeah, that's super important. And there's less, you know, take, take a one step back to take two steps forward. Yeah, a hundred percent. So I think weightlifting and eating fewer calories, ideally also higher quality, less carbs. Like I think all that together, you know, for people out there looking

to lose fat, that's the closest we get to a solution that works for most people is less calories, more weightlifting, and to keep it off long-term, higher protein diet. Yeah, I like that. We'll talk a little bit, I mean, we've been breaking down everything that you've gleaned in the work that you do, but talk more about how Fount works, who you work with, how that shifted over the years, and how people can sign up if they can get in on that and then where you're taking this in the future. Awesome. Yeah, I appreciate it. So basically what I've come to believe over the years is, at first I thought people knew what to do and then just needed help doing it. And over the years, I've come to appreciate

there's just so much bad information out there. There's so much contradictory information. There's a lot of good information out there. But how is the average person who doesn't do this for a living, how should we expect them to go and just immediately become an expert? It's like if you have a legal issue, you don't go to law school. You hire a lawyer. And if it matters, you hire a good one. And so what we do at Fount is we want to be that elite coach that you can hire to accelerate

your progress, whether you're starting from the couch or whether you're already deep in this. We want to be there to help you implement this end of one experimentation methodology and combine it with habit formation because we want to help you in the short and long term and then know what the best protocols are in the world. Know how to interpret your data, even though it's not going to tell us exactly what will work for you. Know how to have it guide us to what the highest ROI, the highest return on investment experiments are. And so what we do is we bring clients in, we facilitate data collection, we help analyze it for them, we walk them through what it means. And then we design the experiments

and help make them easy and fit into their lifestyle. We want to do a triple customization to your body so it works, to your goals so you care, and to your lifestyle so it sticks. And you get this one-on-one relationship. Most of our coaches are prior military, mostly special ops. So these are fun people who understand performance and they understand the constraints on life. You know, a lot of our clients are executives, entrepreneurs. These are busy people. And so, you know, it might not be possible to like take two weeks off and meditate every day. So we, but, you know, same as special ops guys are like, yeah, bro, I got to go out on a mission now.

So it's, you know, what works for you in all these facets. So we provide that coaching. We do iterative work. We facilitate, we repeat blood testing, wearable data. And we want to work with you to help tune your interoception, tune your ability to know. So long term, you may not even need these data collection systems. And along the way, we discover really cool phenomena. So we've discovered that pressure change in flight

when you take off causes an inflammatory response and how to turn that off. So using that, it turns out when you turn off that inflammation, you can rapidly switch someone's circadian rhythm. We can now send about 95% of people anywhere in the world with no jet lag. We expect people to sleep well their first night. So we've turned that into a product, FlyKit. We're launching more products coming up here soon. We seem to have the ability to turn off most of the negative effects of PMS for women who have a hard time with that now. So we'll be launching that product soon.

And then the big... Keep me posted. Yes, sir. The big mission is how do we make these tools available for everyone? Look, I love working with the highest performers, executives and entrepreneurs, founders, new parents. We work with everybody now. But how do we make this available to people who can't afford an elite coach? And so what we're doing is we're taking the data and the learnings from Fount Pro, which is our high-end coaching service. And we're building Fount AI, which is an app that will make this available

at a price point that's successful to millions of people. And so the big mission here, just as I was saying earlier, is how do we go from 1,000 special ops guys to 100,000 army grunts? It's how do we go from people who can afford our coaching service, which will always be the best

because one-on-one relationship, there's a level of compliance and customization when you will always be the best because one-on-one relationship, there's a level of compliance and customization when you're working with the best. But how do we get that to everyone? And I will say, I'm seeing it in development now. We're going to launch the first version before the end of the summer. And I'm so pumped. It looks so good. The methodology behind it is exactly right. So obviously you can, you can see I'm pumped about it. Yeah. Yeah. I'm, I got, I'm pumped hearing about it. I think it's going to be really cool. So that's rad. So where can people find that and where can people find you online? Yeah. So website is fount.bio, F-O-U-N-T, like fountain of youth.bio. You can follow us on social media at FountBio and then I'm on mostly Twitter

at AndrewHerBio and my DMs are open if people have questions feel free to hit me up and I love having conversations like this your questions are amazing, really appreciate it Kyle It's been awesome having you on. I appreciate you. Bye.