The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett - Sleep Apnea Expert: 1 Billion People Have This And Most Go UNDIAGNOSED! | Dr Andy Galpin

Episode Date: August 13, 2026

Performance Scientist Dr Andy Galpin reveals the BIGGEST sleep mistakes ruining your health, how to build better energy every day, why your sleep tracker could be making things worse, and whether health optimisation can actually backfire! Dr. Andy Galpin is a Professor of Kinesiology and Executive Director of the Human Performance Center at Parker University. He has spent over 2 decades working with Olympic gold medallists, world champions, professional athletes, military special forces, and also hosts the Perform with Dr Andy Galpin podcast.  He explains:  ◼ Why millions unknowingly have a sleep disorder that's silently damaging their health ◼ The morning routine that resets your body clock for better sleep at night ◼ The truth about melatonin, and why most people are taking it the wrong way ◼ The simple sleep tests you can do at home before visiting a specialist ◼ Why waking up exhausted after 8 hours could be a warning sign Independent Fact Check: https://stevenbartlett.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/08/DOAC-Andy-Galpin-Independent-Research-Further-Reading.pdf Chapters 00:00:00 Why do you do what you do 00:03:38 What goals bring people to you? 00:07:30 Health anxiety and over-optimising 00:08:33 Sleep disorders are a health crisis 00:10:29 Does sleep apnea disrupt sleep? 00:14:20 Why is sleep apnea so common? 00:15:17 Do I have a sleep issue? 00:18:28 Pros and cons of wearables 00:21:20 What causes a high resting heart rate? 00:21:48 Why is sleep getting worse? 00:22:58 Morning light and light pollution 00:25:16 How much does sound matter? 00:26:51 Best evidence-based sleep supplements 00:29:25 Do you recommend melatonin? 00:34:38 Is there a downside to coffee? 00:36:46 What mattress should I sleep on? 00:37:49 The real issue with screen time 00:47:08 Sleeping when you share a bed 00:48:48 Sleeping in new environments 00:49:34 Optimal temperature for sleep 00:55:34 Ads 00:57:32 Energy management for high performers 01:02:35 Steve's cholesterol results 01:07:06 Why healthy people can have an enlarged heart 01:10:20 Lowering cholesterol with lifestyle and medicine 01:13:55 Low vitamin D 01:16:42 Omega 3 and mercury levels 01:17:32 Exercise and the SAID principle 01:23:17 Use it or lose it with age 01:27:51 Ads 01:28:53 Is grip strength linked to mortality? 01:33:53 How to build muscle power 01:36:26 Does more exercise equal better? 01:40:59 What supplements do you take? 01:42:56 The best way to lose weight 01:50:25 Exercise and weight loss myths 01:52:32 The 54321 method for fat loss 01:54:08 Why am I not progressing? 01:55:50 Can AI create a workout plan? 02:00:06 What motivates people to change? 02:06:26 Are my goals bad? 02:08:43 What is worth doing if you might fail? Quiz Links: PSQI (Pittsburgh Sleep Quality Index) — https://link.thediaryofaceo.com/E41eW4P ASSQ (Athlete Sleep Screening Questionnaire) — https://link.thediaryofaceo.com/3yDF4PF ESS (Epworth Sleepiness Scale) — https://link.thediaryofaceo.com/9RKtDoZ STOP-BANG (Obstructive sleep apnea risk screener) — https://link.thediaryofaceo.com/7UxNsxH ISI (Insomnia Severity Index, PDF) — https://link.thediaryofaceo.com/4mgzHRs Follow Dr Andy: Instagram - https://link.thediaryofaceo.com/CQDR1q8 YouTube - https://link.thediaryofaceo.com/5Squ4wN X - https://link.thediaryofaceo.com/1Fw5A7k Podcast - https://link.thediaryofaceo.com/Fu8uPd7  LinkedIn - https://link.thediaryofaceo.com/5ykmlog Website - https://link.thediaryofaceo.com/8T6M9KJ Performance Coaching - https://link.thediaryofaceo.com/8QLLu9w The Diary Of A CEO: ◼ Join DOAC circle here - https://doaccircle.com/ ◼ Buy The Diary Of A CEO book here - https://link.thediaryofaceo.com/BWjLTZK ◼ The 1% Diary is back - limited time only: https://thediary.com/products/one-percent-diary ◼ The Diary Of A CEO Conversation Cards (Second Edition): https://thediary.com/products/the-conversation-cards-2nd-edition ◼ Get email updates - https://link.thediaryofaceo.com/5IB1H6E ◼ Follow Steven - https://link.thediaryofaceo.com/AGU9QP4 Sponsors: Ketone - https://ketone.com/STEVEN for 30% off your subscription order Shopify - https://shopify.com/bartlett Function Health- https://functionhealth.com/DOAC

Everything you see in this table has the strong scientific evidence that it will help us sleep. So we're going to dig into all of those in great detail. So the first one is a really good one. Kiwis. Kiwis. Yeah. But there's been good studies on them. So if you have two to three Kiwis before bed, you'll see people sleeping better.

Next on our list is sleep divorce. People generally don't sleep as well when you're in the same bed as others. Next, without this. This has more evidence than the rest of these things combined. And it is effective. Another one to think about is sound. And it really matters sound when you sleep? Yeah, as much, if not more of any other factor.

There's also screen usage, light, your pillow, and wearables. But the other thing is we're spending more on sleep, and sleep is getting worse. And for the last 20 years, I've been doing science, coaching, and education that enhances human performance. And I've been fortunate to work with the world's mostly elite athletes, entrepreneurs, leaders, and even 50% of athletes have a clinical sleep disorder. It gets worse. 70 to 80% of people who have clinical sleep apnea will go undiagnosed. And for women, it's somewhere in the neighborhood of 90% to 95%, and it is deleterious to your health. because it's highly associated with long-term death risk, cognitive function, mood regulation, performance, recovery, metabolic health.

And it happens for a bunch of different reasons. And we can go through them. But we look at the 8 billion person population. We need more people to pay attention to their health. And so I just want to get the best possible out of people. So this could be energy. It could be metabolic. It could be cognitive function. Could be muscle growth and fat loss. And so I want to give every person listening to this the opportunity to reach their goals and dreams. I'd love to go through all of those. And you have a 5, 4, 3, 2, 1 method. What is that? Yeah, it's just a little thing I came up with this, is, all right, can we help people with fat loss?

So the first thing to think about is... Guys, I've got a favour to ask before this episode begins. The algorithm, if you follow a show, will deliver you the best episodes from that show very prominently in your feed. So when we have our best episodes on this show, the most shared episodes, the most rated episodes, I would love you to know.

And the simple way for you to know that is to hit that follow button. But also, it's the simple, easy, free thing that you can do to help us make this show better. and I would be hugely grateful if you could take a minute on the app you're listening to this on right now and hit that follow button.

Thank you so, so, so much. Before we start the recording, you said you want to do scientific research, coaching for your clients, and you said, education. You also kind of alluded to the fact that you were less interested in money and these kinds of things.

So the question is, why do you do what you do? And what is it you're doing and who are you doing it for? The most concise way I can say it is, I want to give every person listening to this the opportunity to reach their goals and dreams. You want to look this way or not look this way. And you want to perform this way. How can we get you there?

I want to remove those barriers. And if you get there or don't get there, it was because of you. It was not because something was holding you back that was in your way. And so that's why I get equally excited to work with the best linebacker in the NFL and some person who just wants to wake

up and not be in back pain tomorrow. So tell me who you've worked with then. Who has been a client of yours? Yeah, I've been fortunate to work with the world's mostly elite athletes for 20 years at this point. So this is your number one draft picks in every major sport, Hall of Famers, Cy Young winners, MVP's, Olympic gold medalists in many sports, world champion fighters. We've worked with hemiplegics and periplegic individuals. We've worked with, you know, the cliche executives, the mom and pops, the person dealing and struggling with paramedopause, like, we've really done most of it. And what kinds of symptoms or goals do they come to you with?

So I'll go to your broad categories and specifics below that. Broad categories, we tend to say it's either rebuild or upgrade. Rebuild is there's something wrong. Hurt, broken, damaged, I'm overweight, I can't fix it. I'm dying from sleep restriction. I have a clinical sleep disorder. I have some injury. I have some huge, clear limitation that needs to be resolved.

The second half is what we call upgrade. I don't have any of that. I feel pretty good, feel okay. Now I just want to get the best possible out of my life. So this could be energy. It could be metabolic. It could be cognitive function. Why I can accomplish that and our folks I work with can is because I'm after the physiology.

What does you mean by that physiology? It's your biomolecular signature. Do you have a muscle imbalance? that's creating neck pain, that's making it hard to sleep, and that's giving you a hard time regulating your emotions. It could be classic things like inflammation, everything that is inside of your body in both the way that it is running and expressing itself. And what are your credentials? So my PhD is in what's called human bioenergetics. I started my lab in 2011. Your lab? So I'm an active scientist. I'm a professor. That's my real job for the most part.

So we conduct and disseminate research there that enhances human performance. And then I've started a number of companies and privately coach people. That's what I've been doing for over 20 years. We talked about the different personas and the types of problems they come to you with. If you had to, and this might be quite difficult, order them in terms of the frequency in which people come to you with these issues. What would that sort of top five be? I'll break them from our professional athletes and I'll probably spend more time on non-professional athletes, assuming most of your audience is probably not a professional.

I wouldn't take that. Pretty close. I wouldn't take that, guys. 50, 50, 50? Yes. We'll also say it. We'll assume 50. 50.

Yeah, great. The athletes typically come to us under two circumstances, frequent injuries I'm getting, or tanked energy, bad sleep. They deal with the same human problems we deal with, right? The other one is, what we'll just say is the upgrade, the optimizer. Feel great. Feel young. I just want to get ahead of things and I want to catch things before they start.

The general public is a similar breakdown because we have a lot of, people who are like, I do feel pretty good. I'm great, but I don't want to play the game backwards. I don't want problems to come up, and then I got to go scrambling and figure it out. So let's collect baseline data now. Let's get ahead of things. Let's predict problems before they arise. But I've only got a few minutes a day, right?

I'm not trying to, like, take over my whole life with all this stuff. Like, probably the most common ones are things like sleep and energy. Performance goals can't seem to get stronger. Can't seem to lose that little bit of weight. maybe touch a brain fog i don't feel as sharp well i'd love to go through all of those sleep energy performance strength struggles weight but also i've got my blood test results here which um andy has taken a look at for me it's not all good okay so that's a pre-warning it's not all good but he's going to run me through my blood test results in this episode tell me how i improve things

and there was a couple of deficiencies that i had that i had no idea that i had because i thought i was doing everything right which have completely changed my supplement um but also my behaviour generally. And also you've got this here, which is a gentleman, I believe, whose blood test results you did, similar age to me, and you took him from not so good to great. And we'll talk about that as well. So hold on for a second while we touch first on the subject of sleep and energy, which is one of the first thing you talked about. A lot of people listening struggle with sleep. And they also, in their waking life, feel variances in their energy. Um, If we start then with sleep, what are the like most people problems of sleep?

This is a great question. We'll start off, and in fact, I think this is a nice framing of everything we're going to talk about. We want to be weary of what we call health anxiety. This is over fixation, over concern, worrying too much about little things with your blood work, with your sleep, everything. You're in a really great spot. So we can look for some upgrade, but we want to be careful of pushing that line. Why that also matters is if we look at, the 8 billion or so person population,

we probably need more people to pay attention to their health than to not pay attention to their health. We're not in an abundance of people caring too much. But if you're listening to this show, you are probably not representative of the general population. And so I want to be really careful

of everything I'm about to save for the next couple of hours. I don't want to create health anxiety. I don't want you to be so terrified to touch a receipt that it sends you a three-day tailspin. Anytime we're talking about a health or performance,

We want to run the spectrum of disease to optimization. We should not be playing around with optimization and performance if we're in the presence of a medical disease. And why I say that is sleep is probably the biggest place of clinical disease that exists that no one knows about. Somewhere in the neighborhood of 70 to 80% of people who have clinical sleep apnea will go undiagnosed. Wow.

If that existed for a broken bone, Right? If that existed for diabetes, you'd be like insane. It gets worse. 50% depending on which study you look at of athletes have a clinical sleep disorder. For women, it's somewhere in the neighborhood of 90 to 95% of women that have clinical sleep apnea will go undiagnosed. Why? If you were to look at me and you would say, if I said, Stephen, you think I have apnea? No. No, right?

if I were to bring in a whole table of 10 people, and I said, pick the person in here, least likely to have sleep apnea. You'd find the smallest girl. True. You don't think about apnea as something that can happen unless you're big and fat. Women also are less likely than men to complain.

They're less likely to think about it as an anatomical issue. They're going to charge it to hormones, to their menstrual cycle. to their cognitive load, to what it's the demands that it is to be mom. All these are true, by the way. It is also in the same point true. You could have apnea that has nothing to do with body composition. And let's define apnea for a second. You stop breathing at night. And that wakes you up. Sometimes it doesn't. That's the problem. It won't necessarily wake you up. But it is deleterious to your health. It's highly associated with consequences from long-term death risk to short-term cognitive function, emotion, food regulation, performance, recovery, metabolic health. It's really, really nasty.

In fact, one of the larger things that can go wrong in your health is not breathing at night. This might be a silly question, but does sleep apnea disrupt your sleep? It can. So it doesn't always? It doesn't always. Okay. This is why do you think it's so poorly diagnosed? So the classic giveaways, if you were that person who wakes up four counties because you snore so

loud, snoring doesn't necessarily mean you have sleep apnea, but it's a really strong indicator. That's one form of it. So apnea happens for a bunch of different reasons. More evidence recently has suggested like neck size was this kind of original thing that we say like a big neck. It's just a problem. It doesn't look like that says true, but certainly it is true. As you increase obesity rates, you'll see an increase in apnea as well. So what's happening here is now you're talking about, I'll call it anatomical or physical. Like something physically is landing on your and your tongue and your throat, your larynx and esophagus,

and that's stopping your breathing. And why this matters is when you're standing here or sitting here in this chair, you're in this vertical position. And as you go and lay down, anatomy shifts. You also have a lot of research

showing that the larger the human being, the more fluid they have, which is pretty normal, right? So a person who's twice your size will have twice the amount of water in their body that you do. Imagine if you had, I mean, we'll take this beverage right here.

Why do you have red wine? Well, anyways, we'll come back in case you get thirsty. So you see the water is sitting vertically, right? If I were to shift this cup horizontally, the water would shift and it would balance horizontally to where the gap in the air would be on the top, right? That happens in your body. So imagine this top piece start up here.

That's your neck. Now when you lay down, your neck is over here, and I would tip this over, but it would spill everywhere. That fluid then shifts up into your neck. So it's not even necessarily a physical size thing, but it's the fluid associated with being a larger human being that the fluid shift can happen. What we're now finding is a whole series of other types of apnea.

Now there are neural causes to it. They're environmental causes. There are positional causes. And so as a classic example to round the story out, traditionally, if you're told you have apnea, you're going to be given one of about three choices. Medication. What's called a CPAP device.

right so that's the big like Dorffator breathing machine or potentially what's called an oral appliance it's a mouthpiece that kind of repositions your jaw and neck I'm for all of those treatments

why they all have such low success rates is because they're given out generically you come in you have apnea you get the same stuff now what the field is moving towards is precision and saying you have this specific type of apnea

an oral appliance won't help here you actually need this surgical intervention. I was looking at some of the data here and it says that sleep apnea is very common globally, much more common than I expected. It says men who are middle aged have a 24 to 34% prevalence of apnea. Women, 9 to 17%.

At seniors, 30 to 60%. That's right. Postmenopausal women 25%. So yeah, rough numbers. That means that listening now, If you're a middle-aged man listening, if there's three of you listening right now, one of you, statistically, might have apnea. Now, that's clinical sleep apnea. That doesn't even count subclinical.

And if you're a senior listening now, which is 65 years older, there's a 30 to 60% chance. Wow. Depending on some numbers you see, Stephen, you'll see a billion people across the year. Yeah, that's what it says. It says a billion people. Now, that's only apnea. That's not insomnia. That's not all the other sleep disorders.

That's simply the one variant of it. Why is this happening? Because, again, from an evolutionary perspective, sleep apnea couldn't have been great for survival. Yeah. Three primary reasons why this is happening. The first is the fact that our environment is physically changing. Our ancestors never had to deal with this. Two, our current solutions for testing are either insanely outdated or incredibly difficult.

to get to. The third major one is our solutions that we provide people in public communication are wildly generic. That's not helpful. In fact, if you were to pull everyone listening right now, sleep comes up and you go, oh, great, they're going to tell me to sleep in a quiet room that's cold and dark and they're like, I've heard it all. And you have. Where we need to get to next is how do we help people find these precision solutions based on their type of sleep issues? But that's the three-part reason why this stuff is happening. I'd like to go into all three of them. I also would like to just pause on the diagnosis part because there'll be people listening here that might have a suspicion that they need help.

But again, they're going off their feelings. Yep. How can they know for sure what help they need and what their problem is? Yeah. I always start with subjective. How do you feel? If you feel good, let's now like immediately take a breath. You have good energy, you wake up, you feel good. Like everyone's going to be a little bit tired. We also don't want, we've actually had a, I've been working with for several years, a very close friend of you and I. We constantly have to battle because he'll just get like really honestly terrified because he gets

sleepy at the end of the day. And I'm like, bro, that's the point. People that are hard chargers, high performers are actually afraid of being tired. We have to recognize and realize that is natural and needed. You need to feel a little bit sleepy in the early afternoon. And you should feel tired, unmotivated, lack of focus at the end of the day. What if I didn't used to? Because that's what people will, they compare it to an old version of themselves. Sure.

Again, we can say natural. When you are sub-25, like you're just a powerhouse, right? When you're past 25, we shouldn't just accept frailty. We shouldn't accept a permanent decline, but we do have to start to realize we're not going to have the energy of a 20-year-old.

It's just not typically super realistic. And if you do, you're probably getting there exogenously, right? Stimulants and other things, which have a place, but we just want to be a little bit careful of those things. We'll talk about stimulants, melatonin, and all these things. But going back to this point of diagnosis, so Jenny, who doesn't have much money, how does she get? Okay, great. So one thing we can do, and we can put these in your show notes for you for free, there are a ton of completely free short questionnaires that are scientifically validated. Okay.

You can do these for RLS, you can do them for insomnia, you can do them for. For apnea, you can do them for circadian disruptions and disorders. You can do them for chronotype. Are you a morning person or tons? And I'll put in many of these for free. So my answer there would be start with one of those. Okay. If you flag that and you want to move up the next step, then you kind of have a couple of different ways.

And your two options are what we'll call wearables at home tech. These are typically, we'll call the $100 to $600 range. Then past that, you have a true medical option, which is a sleep hospital. this is when you would go into, you know, the hospital, you go into that weird room and you sit there, you get all the wires, someone looks at you through a window, you sleep in for one night. You can see from the look on your face already,

you're just like, all right, who wants to do that? If you have a true disease, at this point, for the most part, the sleep hospital, depending on the disease, it is where you need to get to. Now, what our group is working on and others is, can we bring the sleep hospital into the home? It's not super affordable at this point. We're going to get it there.

But that is the clear future. If you have insurance, take that validated. The questionnaire just said, go to your doctor and say, here's what I scored this saying. Will you order me that sleep study? It is a giant pain. I know it, but it is probably worth it. If you want to use the wearable, you can do that. The problem with the wearables is numerous.

They are awesome at things like awareness, at accountability. right they're pretty good for things like total sleep time they're really really bad and a major pitfall for wearables is predicting things like deep sleep and REM sleep do you know what i was i was thinking about i was thinking about certain times where um i've done certain things behaviorally and then i got in bed woke up feeling terrible and my wearable said to me yeah you had a bad really bad night sleep and i could kind of put two and two together and kind of establish cause and effect and I could almost, I guess, test that then going forward and say, okay, don't do that or maybe get in bed earlier or the heat was way too high, whatever it

might be. And I could sort of maybe test my way to a better outcome. Yeah. So they can give you things like total sleep time, as I said. What you want to be careful of are the aggregate sleep effectiveness score, sleep quality score. That's the stuff that directionally won't be there. But you actually said something interesting a second ago, which is you felt worse. That's the only directional thing we need to have to pay attention to. If you go, wow, I feel worse today, and then you can go backwards and go, yeah, that's because I did A, B, and C, yesterday, or I felt better today, that's not the only metric. And to be really clear, I'm not advocating to ditch all the wearables. We use them extensively. It's just really being careful about what data from those we pay attention

to and what we don't. So stuff that we do now is find big themes that they're oftentimes missing. Here's a good example. We had 1,200 days of data from, I think it was an aura ring. And we are actually able to find that in one of our clients, for every one drop and resting heart rate, so his resting heart rate, saying went from 65 beats per minute to 64, he got six more minutes of sleep. And so we were like, okay, great, you want to add an hour to your sleep. Let's continue to work on your cardiovascular fitness. Every time he got more fit, his resting heart rate dropped, he slept.

more. Additionally, every time you put and you invest and down regulation, you will lower your resting heart rate going into bed, you will sleep longer. So he was a classic case of like, I try to go to bed, I do all the things, but I just can't stand bed. So the key there, to get him the more sleep is to put his physiology in a position that would allow him to have more sleep and for him. Like, that was the canary in the coal mine. So that's the type of stuff where wearables can be, like you can't replace that, not only from a data, but from a coaching perspective. It was so. easy for me to communicate to him, here's your data, this is our target. And he's an extraordinarily busy person. It's like, great, I got one thing to pay attention to do, do whatever it takes

to keep that heart rate low going into bed. Copy that. What in his case was making his heart rate high? When it comes to something like sleep, anything that is in your physical environment that's in your lifestyle, that's in your physiology, can impact it. I mentioned earlier one of the reasons why sleep is getting worse is because these physical changes in our environment. Annual spend on sleep is like 600 billion right now, but yet we have seen a 60-minute drop in total sleep time over the last 60 years. So you're seeing an inverse. We're spending more on sleep, and sleep is getting worse. I think your team printed out some cards here, and we can go through them. The first one is a really good one. The world is physically brighter. In fact, there's data

from NASA, satellite data that can look and say the world is physically brighter now. You're expected to be communicating with Singapore and Australia and the U.S., which means you're going to be up later. Your business is going to be on. Your lights are going to be on. There's also a phenomenon called sky glow where the light from Earth is going up, hitting the clouds and being shot back down. And so it's keeping our world brighter. So when you hear people talk about things like you got to have these blackout curtains and masks and you're thinking like, I never did that when I was a kid. Like, what's the big deal? It's because of this. I mean, there's some graphs that I found here. Yeah, yeah. Which kind of demonstrate this, which I'll put up on the screen. Yeah. More people

are moving into urban environments. And if you look at some of the studies, not to be dramatic, but some of the studies have found things as high as anxiety and depression are up 20 plus percent when you move into the city. And that's largely attributed to things like light and sound. It's extremely bright and extremely loud in cities. It doesn't mean they're bad or you can't live in them. It just simply means that's why you have to take extra steps. I think a lot of people listening to this will think, well, Andy, my bedroom's very dark. Great. But that's actually not what you're saying, is it? Because the way I was thinking about it is we are here in New York City now.

And if I walked to the shop last night at 10 p.m. Yeah. And walked back, I was exposed to so much light outside at a critical time when my body should be not exposed to light that it's going to impact me even when I get into that dark room. It goes even better than that. There's evidence now that the light exposure you have both in the morning and throughout the day dramatically counteracts what you just mentioned.

So yes. you went for that walk, you went for that thing when light was still out, and you had a brighter light exposure and we'll just call it the three or four hours before bed than you would have had ever in the past. But you can mitigate that damage by seeing light appropriately during the day

and in the morning. Oh, okay. And this is actually something my friend, Andrew Huberman, has talked about for years now, and I'm like, oh, he's joked and laughed at him. But then I'm like, damn, he nailed this. Like, he was way ahead in this one. light exposure in the morning

will impact your sleep at night the next day. He always explains that as setting your circadian rhythm, but it's more than that, actually. That's the part where I was like, yeah, whatever. Like, I'm in the same time as though what do I care? But now I'm like, oh, because then if you were exposed to a high amount of light later in the day, that exposure to light earlier will help reduce that damage.

There's this whole cascade of things that influence when it is time to be awake and when it is time to go to sleep. And this is both hormonal based as well as nerly based. So your brain will shut down or activate in response to light, in response to exercise, in response to arousal, in response to food, in response to stimulants, and a whole host of other things.

That light earlier in the day sets that rhythm. Okay. So it's like starting the... It starts the clock. Okay. It starts the sleep pressure. This is, oh, this is the graph of rural versus urban plot. And so, yeah, I mean, you can see that pretty clearly.

The red line here is... the noise in a rural environment and this is the noise here. The typical number you want to see for sound at night is like 35 decibels. Right. So if you see the rural environment, you're cruising about that

and you see the urban environment, you're looking in the 60 to 7 as a baseline. And it really matters sound when you sleep? Tons. Really? Yeah, as much, if not more, of any other factor. The big thing with sound is inconsistency.

A lot of people will do things like put a sound machine in the room. Most people put them too loud because of that thing. So you put them pretty common default as like 40 to 50 decimals for a sound machine. More of the data suggests sub 40, especially for kids. If you're using a sound machine for your children, most people put them too close and too loud. What's the sound machine?

Just a little device that makes a white noise. And what that does is it cancels out a bunch of low-level inconsistent sounds. Oh, okay. So the dog getting up, the window creaking, the car driving by. And so it can kind of cancel that noise level out. How come I can have like a great night's sleep listening to a podcast falling asleep? Whereas my partner can't. She needs silence and I almost feel like I need to listen to something to fall asleep.

Most likely you would do better if you didn't do that. Really? Yeah. You turn them off before you go to sleep, right? No. Yeah, okay. That will never lead to your best sleep. Okay.

What happens is you get to bed and something is happening cognitively. And you're like, I need something to switch me off. To distract me. Yeah. Great. if we took that away from you, you might sleep worse because you're going to sit there and struggle through that moment. If you wanted to go from upgrade, we would say, okay, let's figure out what is actually a way for you to downregulate cognitively, give you that same thing that won't then disrupt your sleep throughout the night. Have you dealt with people in that situation before?

It's super common. Podcasts are an incredibly common one with that. TV, books, my philosophy is let's step back and solve causes. let's solve constraints rather than mask them. You've got a host of different supplements over here. Everything you see in this table has moderate to strong scientific evidence that it will help us sleep. What are those things? So lovely delicious looking tart cherry juice, and I'll go through why that is there.

You've got some chamomile tea. You would see this in a supplement form of apigenin. It's a really common way of that as kind of like distilled chamomile. Look at these lovely Kiwis. What's funny here is this is actually what happens. happens in research. They will give people two to three Kiwis that will eat them right before bed, and you will very routinely see people sleeping better after ingestion of Kiwis. Other things that are high on the evidence-based list are, of course, magnesium and various forms.

More of the research now on magnesium for sleep is turning to a particular form called magnesium bisglycinate, rather than threanate. That's up there as well. You will also see things like, omega-3, this is your common fish oil. Oh, this is actually interesting because this popped up on your labs as something we have to work on. Oh, my test. Yeah. We'll come back to that in a second. Okay.

And then, of course, you've got melatonin, right? The issue with all these is the same that you have with your podcast. These are doing the exact same thing. So one thing we could do is say, dis the podcast and let's go with one or multiple of these options. Because they're doing the same thing. They're a cognitive turnoff. Api Jen and our camomile specifically, will play that role. It is a reasonable switch that says frontal cortex turn off. And so you're

getting there through the podcasts where you could get through there's through food or supplements, if you'd like as well. Kiwis. Kiwis have scientific evidence that they improve sleep for some people. It's really common. If there's like levels to this, you'd probably like level one, two and three, level one being things like actually surprising enough, magnesium, chamomil, melatonin, of course, lots of randomized control trials. Level one being the best. The best of the best. The best, highest quality.

And you'd say, what, magnesium, kiwis? Yeah, Kiwis would probably be like a level two or level three. Okay. So there's been good studies on them, enough to put them on this table, enough to say there's data there. So you're getting some product below it, in this case, Apigenin, in this case, other phytal chemicals that either reduce a little bit of cognitive function, they reduce arousal, they put you in some sort of checkout state.

And then there's this one over here, melatonin, that a lot of people are aware of. Yeah. Strong. What level is melatonin? So melatonin probably has more evidence than the rest of these things combined because it's a medicine. It's a drug. There's a ton of research on it from children to aging to bone health and tons of other stuff, right? It's a hormone.

You're going to be able to move some units with this one. Nobody is going to be super concerned about risk factor profiles with eating two Kiwis. But you start getting to level of level of. of something like a melatonin, and now you have to have real conversations about risk versus benefits. We typically don't use melatonin at the dosage that's normal.

So a common dosage for melatonin is like 5 milligrams, sometimes even up to 10. Wow. We will typically use like 0.3, maybe 0.5, so about a 10th that dose. A lot of times we're trying to find like 1 milligrams, cut them in half, kind of things like that.

The only real reason we use melatonin outside of some fringe cases is when we actually legitimately need to reset circuton. circadian rhythm, travel, jet lag, things like that. And it is effective and it is useful there. It is safe in small doses where people mistake melatonin is I use it every night to go to sleep and or I wake up in the middle of the night, can't go back to sleep. I go grab a melatonin. Why is that bad? It doesn't work. It doesn't work. No, because the thing that melatonin is supposed to do is reliance circadian rhythm.

If you're in the middle of the night, you're already in that rhythm. It's not going to do anything. would in fact, not to, I don't want people to do this, but you would actually be better reaching for something like a camoamel perhaps, because if you're having a hard time getting back to sleep cognitively, this is not going to do it. The other issue is we've done a lot of morning urine testing. There's enough studies that look at the dosage that's actually in the pill versus those on the label. And they can be up to 100x higher. 100x. And we see this in morning urine. We have seen people who are consistently tired their sleep doesn't look horrible,

they're doing all the right things, it's cold, it's dark, they're meditating, they're doing all this stuff, they're popping in even a moderate dose of melatonin. And the amount of melatonin the next day in their urine

is 100x, the upper end of the reference range, which means they're spending the rest of their next day in a hyper-dose melatonin state. So they have to live then on stimulants to get back to them. How would they feel?

Horrible. They would feel sluggish. You wake up the next day. stay and you're like, man, it's what we call sleep inertia. You're wildly groggy. You can't get out of bed or you're just getting throughout the day. This is like, don't talk to me until I've had my coffee kind of response, right? This is not a normal waking physiology that you should be going through. Presumably, that's just melatonin from sort of cheap sources that haven't been tested. That's going to knock off a huge part of your problem, right? Only this is why we'll always say you don't,

no one needs supplements. Like no essential person. needs to have any supplement to live a great, happy, healthy life. If you choose to use supplements, though, just buy them from third-party tested, transparent companies that place their testing on their websites that give you open access to it for these exact reasons. Vitamin Ds has a similar profile of inaccuracy. The other issue with that, then simply, let's say you're buying it from a high-quality source. You're dosing it too much, and you're taking it too late. So take it earlier than you think before bed so that your body has a chance to break it down before the next morning. What kind of time? And how quickly acting is it?

It's person to person dependent, but a lot of times you'll see things like an hour before. Some people will feel a response in 10 to 15 minutes. Some people will feel it closer to an hour. But that's a pretty good window. Hang on. If it's 2 a.m. in the morning and you're getting in bed, don't take it. Don't take it at all. Okay. We're going to use this in very specific situations and then we're coming off of it. This should not be a part of your nightly routine most of the time. What exactly is going on in my brain when I take melatonin?

Because a lot of people take it, and we know that it makes us feel tired. But understanding the mechanism, I think, will help us understand the application. So it actually doesn't really make you feel tired. That's part of the issue. Oh. The mechanism is a circadian shift. So it's telling your endogenous system that this is nighttime. So it doesn't hit you with like a, oh, my eyes are there.

This hits you with a shift in cortisol. This hits you with a shift in a whole cascade of epinephrine, norepinephrine, serotonin, that are moving around and saying, this is the milieu that you need to be in, that is consistent with a sleep pattern. Okay, so I take it, and then it regulates my other hormones, which would be getting in the way of me feeling tired, theoretically.

That's probably more appropriate to what it does. Okay. Because, yeah, I've taken it a couple of times. Again, always for jet lag issues. Yeah, yeah. And within about 30, 45 minutes, I feel a bit drowsy, and then I find my eyes going shutting and I'm off.

Great. And then you get out of those, that two or three-day window, put it back away, and you're off of going. Yeah. That's a good use case for it. The mistake is when this is like,

I can't go to bed without. I'm generally scared of all these things because honestly, anything that's effective, I'm more scared of. Yeah. And so it's really effective, which makes me hesitant to use it frequently.

Yeah. It's a good default position to be in, by the way. It's a good strategy. Yeah. Because one of the things you learn from doing a podcast like this is you just learn

that everything has a trade-off. Always. And again, this might not be logically sound, but I assume that the big of the upside, the big of the trade I'm making on the other side, as a general rule. So do you know the only thing that I've still not been able to,

I guess, understand the full tradeoff of is coffee. Because the upside is so significant. No one can articulate to me the downside other than they say if you have it

after midday, it's going to impact your sleep. But I'm like, come on, there's got to be. The phrase that I'll say in my class all the time is there's no free passes

in physiology. With coffee specifically, actually, we have a meta-analysis led by my colleague, Dr. Ben House, puts it together, But if you look at the research on caffeine and sleep, it's very interesting because if you go through sleep deprivation, your physical and cognitive performance goes down. No surprise there. Coffee can offset that. Caffeine specifically is the thing. But what it doesn't do, at least the data and the meta analysis suggests, is it doesn't actually put you back into the augmented spot. Meaning if you, did you sleep great last night?

I think so, yeah. Full night. Okay. Let's just say you're there. If we took you out and we had you throw that medicine ball and we did a grip strength test and we did some sprints up and down or whatever you want to do, you would perform well. And then if we gave you caffeine, you'd perform better. It's what we call it ergodenicate. It's a performance and cancer. Caffeine is really effective primarily at endurance-based events, but it is a stimulatory thing that people will use. So let's just say you have normal baseline performance, then caffeine augments that performance. If you go into sleep debt, The sleep itself will reduce your performance. And the coffee can bring you back to normal. But it won't bring you back to that augmented state that you had when you were rested and caffeinated. This is important because a lot of people will be like, ah, I'll throw away the sleep or I won't worry about it as much because I'll just take more stimulus tomorrow. And I feel great.

You will feel as good, but you will not perform as well. So what you need to perform at your best, if you're a caffeine user, is to be both well-rested and then caffeinated. Another thing you want to pay attention to do in your sleep environment labeled ergonomics here is your pillow, your bed, your mattress. This is mostly based on feel. Is there any no-goes in this regard? Not really. Not really.

No, unless, let's say you have a sleeping partner and you're sleeping in a bed that is too small and that results in you hitting each other or touching each other. And you don't like that. So other than those, the framework themselves, there's really no, nothing to be concerned with. What about these like eight sleep beds? A sleep is fantastic. So A-Sleep is not a bed. It's a cover, which regulates temperature. If you are in a bedding situation where you're getting hot, then that's a problem.

So if then an eight-sleep will help you regulate that temperature, it's a great solution. If you're not in that situation, then you're going to be just fine. So temperature regulation is a really big deal. And you'll quite often see people that do that, whether that's getting a product like that, or it's getting a sheet that's cooler or a mattress that is better. with ventilation, then you'll oftentimes see them sleep a little bit better. Next on our list is screen usage. Everyone has been told, and you know, perhaps nothing's more destructive to your sleep

on the screen. What's more interesting here is the stuff that people generally don't talk about. It's not the fact that necessarily screen usage is shooting your face with a bunch of blue light. What's more dangerous about your screen is the arousal associated with the search for novelty. The search for novelty. What does that mean? You're engaging in a podcast, social media, a game, it is puzzle-driven, it is solution, it is interest, it is engagement, it is search for the next. That's the stuff that more likely than not cause sleep disturbances.

In the studies that I've looked at things like TV time versus tablet versus phone versus reading, those all can be equally dangerous to sleep. Here is the example. I am a TV before bed guy, a giant TV with a blast of blue light. I sleep great with that. My wife really struggles with light before bed. She will read, and yet she chooses to read things that I don't think she should be reading before night,

and then she'll wake up because of the topics that she's reading, where I'm watching things on TV that are documentaries on Ulysses Grant or something, and you're just like, that is the least engaging thing ever. So it's not the fact that the light is there. I use that stuff much like you use your podcast, which is my entire day is so driven by somebody wanting my attention and time. I have to have something that gives me a cognitive switch that says, you get to turn off.

I wanted to add something to this, which I've been thinking about this week. So in Meta, Meta own Instagram and Facebook and WhatsApp, etc., in Meta's earning is called this week, Mark Zuckerberg talked about how they changed the recommendation algorithm on social media apps using AI. And this was something that we've always forecasted would happen. And we've been thinking about the creator economy and how it would impact it.

But specifically for people listening, what essentially he said is every time you post something on Instagram, whether it's a real or a normal post, they now feed it to a large language model in AI. And the AI effectively, and again, I'm summarizing here, watches it. And it can now understand the full context of what it's watching. So if it's watching a clip of you and me right now, it'll understand that that is Andy Galpin. He's holding a card. he's wearing a black t-shirt he's they'll look at the transcript will know what you said and this is all pertinent because it then can without in the past needing to look at the caption and the hashtags it can then decide with way more context than ever before who exactly would want to see that and the net impact of that for the user of instagram or these other social media apps or tictock whatever it is is you're going to be more retained now than ever before and as you were talking about that i thought i wonder if they think about timing of day. Like, I wonder if they think at 11pm, there's a certain thing that's going to keep Andy scrolling versus something at 9am when you're off to work. And of course they do. Because, and you know,

they were talking about on the earnings call, Mark was saying how it's increased retention by, I think, 15 basis points. And there's this quote where he said, there are already two large sets of content to draw from. First, from your friends and people you follow. And second, from creation. that you don't follow. But now there's going to be a whole new and nearly infinite universe of personalised content, which from the eye and felt what they're saying

is with their new large language model called Muse, is we're actually going to make new content to show Andy Galpin that no one made, no humans made. We're going to make stuff that we know Andy will like. And so I say all this to say that in this sleep conversation, we've been talking about its creators, we've been saying basically it's going to get really difficult

if you're a creator because now if you have a million followers, it doesn't have. No. If Jenny has zero followers but she makes something that is contextually more interesting than the million follower guy, Jenny's thing's going to be seen to every one. But actually now, you're going to be competing with an AI that's going to be churning out super personalised Andy Galpin content.

Like that just Andy would just love at 11pm. I said to my team this week, I was like, just take care of yourself. Do you know what I mean? Like just be aware, you know, when you open your phone, that the AI is doing everything it can to retain you. Yeah. I mean, just don't be on your phone. We've been making this argument for years, but geez, you got every disadvantage possible coming in your way. And look, we're all human.

I think I remember last time I was here, you were talking about how, like, you wake up and your phone's right there, but your fiancé doesn't touch your phone for the first hour of the day or something. It's just like on the charger until noon or something. You're just like, what? I'm more like you, right? I'm like, my phone is in my room. It's not three rooms. Like, I'm just not doing it.

stuff, right? And we started this entire piece by saying the environment you're in is just different than it's ever been before. And it's not getting any better. And at some point, you have to make that decision of, do you care about your own health? Do you care about the thing the next day that you didn't do well? And do you care more about that than you cared about that next real? What is it that's causing us to understand everything you just said, but to ignore it and to pick up our phone anyway. You are hard-driven the entire biology of our species to search for novelty. In fact, I look at this from the lens of sports. Why do you care about high achievement? Why do I care about performance? There has direct translation. When someone breaks a barrier, we all benefit from

that. And I could give you direct examples of this. But we have every story you want to go to Joseph Campbell Heroes Journey, right? You want to go back to Hercules, the story of the marathon. Like, you pull any story from history out and what are you actually looking at? You're looking at somebody did something that no one has ever done before. You care more about records than you do regular wins and losses. Why? Because they're novel. Why are you more interested in watching Messy break that record than you are the other team winning in the exact. same shot. It's because you saw something. You got to be there when someone did something for the first time in human history. I get more of a dopamine hit from the novelty, from the new thing.

It's more than the dopamine hit, though. It's a sense of purpose. Your life mattered because you got to be involved in something no one else has ever seen. And even as that bystandard on TV, 30,000 kilometers away, you got to be a part of that. And that all comes down to we are so wired to reward novelty. So then now that comes back to your life and you have to be thinking, how do you walk away from that core drive? Thinking about a study I read about in psychology class and school with pigeons getting variable rewards. I'm going to butcher this, but bear with me, they took a pigeon and they got a little lever for it to press, and every time it would press the lever, and sometimes it would get a reward. And they found from the study that if they made the rewards

variable, i.e., it couldn't predict when it was coming, the pigeon was more likely to keep pressing the lever, i.e. it was more addicted to the behavior if it didn't know when the dopamine hit was coming, or the treat in that case. Scrolling on social media is kind of like the slot machine of variable rewards. I just don't know what I'm going to get. But every fourth, you know, scroll, I get something that... Or every 40th. Yeah, or 40th. It doesn't mean better, right? Because the more unpredictable it is, the more likely you already be like, one more, one more, one more, right? Like, if it actually comes too quickly, you care less. So you're going to scroll through all the boring stuff, boring stuff, boring stuff, boring stuff, boring stuff for the one at every 40 that gets you.

That's what you're actually there for. I mean, if I gave most people and I said, like, you can have $10,000 or you can have $10,000 in equity in a startup. Look at your face. Like, I know what you're doing. You want to, like, people are, it depends on where you're at, right? But it's just like, okay, and if I said right now, the most likely scenario was that, that $10,000 goes zero. Yeah.

Which is what happens, right? You're like, kind of hedge. Can I go five and five? Like you're going to go, you don't, unless you need the 10 grand, which a lot of people do. But you get the point because you're like, man, walking away from belief, walking away from hope, walking away from what if is insanely hard to do. I deleted one of these social media apps just completely from my phone. And honestly, you always think that you're going to have like phomo, you're not going to know what's going on or there's going to be some huge loss to your life if you don't have. an app on your phone. And it's just remarkable when you delete some of these social media apps,

how positive of a net impact it has on your life. I have a friend of mine named Sean O'Malley, a famous EFC fighter. He was sitting at his pool and his daughter was like one or two years old. And he was like scrolling Twitter and was like, what am I doing? Like my daughter's over here in front of me. He's two years old and like I'm on scrolling, like not doing work or not making a post, not, then I'm just scrolling. dumped it. Was this like, team, you guys handle it. Not on any social media anymore.

So that screens. That screens, my friend. Another one to think about, which we've sort of touched on, is called the presence of other beings. This is our classic sleep divorce. I assume you, as I do, share your sleeping environment with your partner.

Yes. Tough to make the argument of, like, get a sleep divorce, right? Yeah, I'm not telling you. You can tell that. It's funny. If it was up to my wife, we would have a sleep divorce. You're joking? No.

She's like, get away from me. Don't touch me. She wants to, like, if we could have separate beds and separate rooms, I don't snow-orning, but she's just like. My fiancee is the opposite. It's not super realistic, but it is true. There are data behind it. People generally don't sleep as well when you're in the same bed as others. The realistic solution, try to get sheets or a sleeping situation in which when one partner moves, it doesn't rule the other person.

Oh, like separate sheets. Separate sheets or simply the type of sheets. My wife loves to be really constricted. So she likes the sheets tucked in tight. She likes to bed. And I hate it. Like I feel like I'm in Shawshank. I'm like, break me out, like rip it all out of there.

So there's little things like that that don't require you to buy anything. Where you just change kind of the setup and the scenario to where their movement doesn't impact you as much. Noise would be the same one. If you are sleeping with somebody who makes a lot of noise, tosses and turns a bunch, You could put a pillow in between. So when they roll over and move, they don't hit you, ear plugs, things like that. So that one's a pretty straightforward one. But that said, it's pretty impactful.

It can really make a big difference. And if you're really struggling, maybe do a partial sip divorce. Okay. Next, sleeping in new environment. This would oftentimes be called first night effect. So your first night, whether it's back home, whether it's in a hotel or somewhere else, you don't feel as comfortable and as safe. and your circadian rhythms,

the things that set your timing aren't there. This is sound, this is light, this is feel, this is temperature, this is smell. What you can do, if you travel a lot, our athletes travel every three to five days, right? This is what they do. You can try to mimic your sleep environment at home on the road.

Some people will take their pillows. Other things that are on this similar list are smells like lavender. Lavender is moderately associated with helping people fall asleep. None of those is going to, like knock you out. What you're looking to do with stack winds. Next is temperature. You want to be cool. Generally, you're looking at 64 to 68 degrees. This is personally dependent. Some people actually

like to be a little bit colder so that they can have a heavier blanket because I'd like that feeling. When this idea got popular a few years ago, people just started raking the ACs, right? And you're just like, get the room as cold as you possibly can. That can become a problem because we're seeing this somewhat consistency where when people's air conditioners kick on, it actually wakes them up. And as we talked about earlier, with noise, it's not necessarily always about the volume, but it's the change. Okay. And sound. So you have something kicking on, kicking off, kicking on, kicking off. The other thing we see is because of air quality situations. We've seen quite often when we have environmental sensors and stuff that if your air conditioner's

not clean and the fan is out in there, you can actually kick a bunch of dander and particulates and other things into the air, and then you start breathing those things in it overnight, and your nose starts to get a little bit stuffed up, you can't breathe through your nose, and then, boom, you have this hypoponic or apic event. The last component that comes up pretty often at absolute rest is fans.

This can make your mouth dry. So if you're waking up with that and you're like, ah, I got to get a drink of water or something, then maybe consider not having the fan blow direct out your face. An interesting thing I was thinking about there, which is there was the viable. experiment done in 2009 by Mind Lab Sleep Study, where they conducted the sleep experiment at the University of Sussex, researchers hooked men and women up to an ECG machine to measure their brainwaves

and played a variety of ambient sounds while they slept to see which noises triggered an immediate wake response. And the top wake responses from men and women was completely different. Men's top trigger was a car alarm. Women's top trigger was a baby crying. Men's top trigger was wind howling outside. Women's second top trigger, I should say, is a dripping tap. Men's third top is buzzing or flying of a mosquito. Women's was shouting outside,

and both of their fourth top trigger was snoring. But it was interesting that the thing that woke most men had their top trigger in that study was an alarm outside, but women's was a baby's crying. Yeah, every mother out there is gone. Yep. It's, in fact, one of the largest causes of such, disorders in women is having children. What happens after childbirth, and it's a whole interesting

field here of postpartum care, is really poor in women. Like, if we just sort of like start paying attention to baby, stop paying attention to mom as soon as baby comes out. Well, I'm saying that because it is obvious and clear that in the last trimester can present a lot of sleep challenges for women. And then especially as soon as the baby's there, like you're just going to have some known period of sleep deprivation, whether it's delivery or having a newborn, all that stuff. And that can actually cause patterns. This can cause insomnia. This can cause irregular sleep schedules, circadian disorders, natural thing.

Totally fine. In some percentage of women, those patterns will persist. And so you'll see women who have sleep disorders, even with adult children, that started because of the childbirth. We were advocating at all times like, yeah, get through it. I got two kids. You know, I've been there. But then just make sure you're providing care and going back to try to fix those things. And why that is difficult is because the study just mentioned.

It's worth saying there is an evolutionary theory behind this that says, you know, men and women are attuned to different things. But there's also a counter argument that says the difference in who actually wakes up and who gets out of bed is often heavily driven by social roles, parenting expectations, and individual sleep depth rather than a biological inability for men to hear the baby. So how do we close off on the subject of sleep? Is there anything that we haven't touched on that we should have touched on as it pertains to how to have incredible sleep? One thing that I think will help everyone, whether you're at any of those stages, free a little bit of money, or you've got to go to the full end of the spectrum and use a hospital or a service like ours

is everyone has the ability to run self-experiments. We have a free guide that anyone can go use, and it's just a quick tutorial about how to run your own self-experiment for sleep specifically. Oh, there you go. Yeah. So this is up and available for free

on our website. Anyone can check it out. There's a lot of stuff in here we've covered. You can get more into it. But the short answer of it is we don't want to make people think sleep has to be the center of their life. Oftentimes when sleep comes up, people start thinking, I'd love to sleep more, but I'm too busy. Hey, I'm the same boat. Like, I can't afford to have a 12-hour sleep routine where we should be paying attention to is sleep resilience.

Steve, I want you to be as resilient to bad sleep as possible. I don't want you optimizing your sleep because optimization turns into that. Giant routine before bed. I got to take 12 different supplements and four different cocktails. If I have to do that along the way, great. The end game, though, should be resilient, meaning you had a bad night of sleep. Cool. And you still performed.

We had this challenge. Flight got delayed. Great. We still executed. I want you to know how to get a good night of sleep. sleep so you can feel as refreshed as possible, execute the next day, and then get right back onto it. The way you get there is, and that's the way our company works, like we're just going to run

a series of experiments. And everyone can do that. Start by changing one thing. Your trackers, your data, are going to tell you how you're sleeping. But they're not telling you why you're sleeping that way. So that's your quest. Go figure out why you're sleeping that way. Is it your bedroom temperature?

is it your partner? Is it the fact that you're sensitive to light? Is it the fact you're exercising too late? Are you eating too late? Like all these things are possible? One at a time. Just like John Jones, where marginal improvements in your cognitive performance can have a massive impact. Sometimes I podcast for 10 hours a day. Over the last couple of weeks, I've been in filming for a TV show and then I have like one or two days off to get all of my work done, which means there's lots of cognitive load. And so I turn to ketones because I find myself more articulate, able to think more clearly, able to work out better when I'm fuelled by ketones. And so the reason I became a co-owner of this company and the reason why they now are a sponsor of this podcast is because,

I remember one of my team members called Christiana, she tried it once and came up to my desk and she goes, this is the best product ever made. And I think in part that's because she really cares about those cognitive benefits, as I do, as John Jones does. And as I think most of my listeners probably will. So if you haven't tried these yet, all you have to do is go to ketone.com slash Stephen. And you'll also get 30% off your first subscription order, you'll get exclusive Ketone IQ merch. And of course, cognitive benefits that might just change your life. If you're thinking about starting a business, one of the first decisions you'll have to make is actually one of the most important, which is where do you build that business? Our product team, who manages everything we do from

our conversation cards to our diaries, has always used our sponsor Shopify. There are a few reasons for this, but one of the big ones is that when you're running a business, you really need your own store and your own customer data. And Shopify gives you exactly that. You aren't renting space from someone else's platform, hoping the rules don't suddenly change. And you avoid the classic founder challenges that inevitably come, like sorting out payments and logistics and storefronts, because it's already built into Shopify. Those early days are messy enough without the infrastructure challenge to create extra problems for you. And Shopify's distribution piece is underrated too, because your products automatically get in front of people on Google, TikTok, YouTube,

chatGBT, which again isn't something you have to figure out yourself. It's just already built into their platform. If you are serious about starting your own thing, start your free trial at shopify.com slash Bartlett. I guess one could argue that the antithesis of sleep is being awake. And when we're awake, the thing we care about is energy. Now, I had a really great conversation on this podcast with several people that talk about mitochondria and energy and those kinds of things. Some of those conversations have really, really changed me. If you have had to be, I haven't listened to the more recent conversation we had on mitochondria in the channel. Please do go listen to it.

Martin Picard? Martin Picard. It was a real, honestly, it's one of my favorite conversations I've had this year just because I knew about the mitochondria. Like I conceptually knew what it was. But I hadn't thought about it as being so central to everything in my life. Because energy is essential to everything in my life. Like my relationships, my ability to do this, my joy, my everything.

If someone is trying to improve their energy levels, and that's what they come to you with in terms of a symptom that they self-describe, where do you aim? Okay, so we've talked about sleep, but where else do you aim? Energy is probably the number one thing on our list of reasons people come to us. What do they say? I'm tired all day, can't figure it out, or I don't have the energy I used to have,

or I can't sustain output like I used to, whether this is physical. My recovery is longer. than it used to be, or I just can't hang working as many hours as I used to do. I get fatigued at the end of the day cognitively.

I'm not of the camp that this is entirely mitochondria, but I certainly will agree that energy would be the number one. In fact, probably the most common question to regard my career is what separates

these world performers from the rest of us? And people want me to say things like they work harder. They don't. They are categorically though better at energy management. That is,

the one thing that seems to be most consistent again with the world's highest performers, athletes, entrepreneurs, leaders, executives, you name it, however you're defining success. When you get better at managing energy, you're more effective. This is everything from cellular energy to understanding things like your own interpersonal communication. What type of relationships give you energy? What type of relationships take energy from you? What type of activities give you energy? What type to give you back? When can you be more? more efficient, when are you running for the sake of running and not actually running in a direction? And I mean this figuratively, not literally. This is all energy management. And what you see

is these people are world-class performers, get incredibly good at going, 80% of my energy suck comes out of here for 20% ROI. I'm going to switch that out. They're better at choosing what matters and what doesn't matter. Okay. And this is everything from what supplement is working to what type of person that they work with. Where people struggle is in the like, what a I could also be doing this? What if I could also be doing this? What if I add this on top? What if I had this on top? Okay. So I thought you were talking about, I guess if I try and put this into some sort of analogy or metaphor, the high performers wake up with 100 energy chips, let's say, and they're really, really good at allocating them against the most important thing. Yes. Whereas maybe Jenny and

Dave listening, kind of let it seep out. They put 20 on Instagram, 20 over here on this. And they spin their wheels. They spin their wheels. They go, okay, great. I'm going to, I, I love listen to this podcast and I get super excited about Zone 2. I'm going to go hop into a bunch of Zone 2. And then I listen to this other podcast and I get super excited about journaling. Let me go add journaling to my mix. And then what ends up happening is you see their daily routine and you're like, okay, your daily routine is 20 hours. And then at some point, like you didn't actually do anything that mattered. What is the one thing I can get you to that goal in the most effective way possible? And then everything else has to actively be stripped away. So they're

The traditional thing we like to do is we give one to two what we call active movements per week, which is this is something, Stephen, you have to actively remember to do. You don't actively remember to brush your teeth. You don't have to actually remember to showers, blah, blah, blah. You might at this point not have to actively think about your gratitude practice or your meditation time. Like, you probably have these things you've been doing for years. Great. I don't actually call those additive because you do those, you're going to get those in.

But I might ask you to do one thing different. I don't know what that would be, but I was look at this and say, here's your constraint. I'm not going to ask you to do five things now. It's too difficult. Maybe this is a change in what time you eat. Okay. Your training style. Find what's constraining you from your energy.

What things could it be? It could be sleep. It could be mismanagement of relationships. It could be you're working too much. It could be your under-fueling. You're not eating enough. It could be that you're overusing stimulants, sleeping poor, and you're in that cycle. Right?

It could be you're not seeing sunlight. So what you need to do is run a quick analysis and think, what is the single biggest thing in your way? Is it the fact that you're in pain? Great. Maybe the only one thing I want you to go after then is, let's go figure out why that knee hurts. Okay, so for me, you've seen my blood results.

Yeah. So what things might improve my energy from the blood results that you saw? Okay, great. What are you, mid-30s? I'm 33. 33. All right. You're lean, you're active.

The first thing that jumps out on your report. Yeah, can we skip that page, please? Skip the page. You're going to see quickly the difference between medicine and performance. Okay. This is medical. So we're looking at cholesterol and cholesterol-related markers. You've got, I don't know, a dozen of them or so there.

Not one's good. This is incredibly actionable. Can I ask a question about this? What does it mean? And then I was going to ask a secondary question, which is I was going to try and self-diagnose. why I think this is the case. I would love that second question.

That'll actually tell us where to go. So when you look at things like blood work, these are secondary measures of physiology. They're trying to predict what we'll call it outcome, meaning in this case, we are looking at your heart health. Okay. There is an association, and I choose that word carefully, between cholesterol and cardiovascular disease.

Okay. High cholesterol, low cholesterol, good cholesterol, but... All the above. Very traditionally, excessively high cholesterol, is going to be associated with earlier heart disease. Heart attack could even manifest itself into strokes and things like that, right? So if we were to just like zoom all the way out and we say, all right, your cholesterol is extremely high, I'm concerned about your heart health.

There's way more to the story. But at the top of it, that's where we're at. So the second question I was going to ask is, at the time that I did these blood test results, I was frequently in a ketogenic diet. I know. There's a lot to unpack here and a lot of areas. people are going to get mad online. Cholesterol has lifestyle, dietary, and familial causes. Oftentimes,

you might have high cholesterol and all these various markers simply because that's a familial genetic inheritance and there's not a lot of action behind it. When you see these things independent of obesity, now we have a different connotation. If I were to look at all this stuff and go, oh yeah, sure, you're 35% body fat. I know you drink alcohol. Then I'm like, okay, this is true, but let's tackle those things first. Because those have so many robust implications on your health, that's the starting place. You don't drink alcohol excessively. I don't even know if you drink alcohol at all.

And have it in years, I assume, right? You don't smoke. You don't like, I know. So all those things are checked off the list. This means this is actionable. I should give you some context here. My uncle died of a heart attack and my dad had a heart operation last week. Ooh.

So. Do you remember what kind of heart operation? He had a pacemaker put in. But he's been on statins, I think. for a long time. I think he's been on stance for about 15 years, if I was to guess. About 15, 20 years. Yeah.

So when I look at this independent of your obesity with your familial history, do you remember what advice you got when you got these results of what to do? Do you know, I did two tests. I did this one with function health, who I believe are a sponsor, so I should say that. And I did the second one with Nico Health, where I'm a big investor in the company. They both said to me, like, Steve, stop eating steak all the time. bacon, stop eating bacon all the time. The way that I heard it was, damn, this ketogenic diet you've been on, Steve, you need to just take it easy.

And have you done blood work since then? No. All right. First thing that would pop up, and this is the order I would do this in, when you get something like blood work, the value is not in the data. The value is in the interpretation. What they're talking about why you heard that as steak, butter, bacon, is because those are food items high and saturated fat. saturated fat is not evil. There are no evil foods.

It's only evil context, right? So in your particular case, if we saw those, and we don't have this, but if we had your baseline before that test, and then we had this and we went, okay, when you change your diet and increased your saturated fat intake, and then we saw these numbers increase, most ethical people in this space would look at that and say, that's not a positive thing.

That does not mean ketogenic diets are bad or unsafe. not at all. It only means if we had those theoretical data for you, it's probably not healthy. You stack that on top

of the fact that you have your uncle and your dad in there, then I would triple down and go, talk to your doctor, I'm not your medical doctor,

but I'd be really concerned about that. Then what I would do would be go to the next step. Let's run the experiment and see. This is an indirect marker. And remember, what is it trying to predict?

Your heart health. Have you had your heart scanned? Yes, I have. And? They said that I had like, I had a thick wool. Okay. Exercise induced cardiac remodeling, especially if it's left ventricular, it's a good thing, right? So your heart has four chambers, two on top, two on the bottom.

The two on the top are called atria. Ventricles on the bottom. Oh, you've got a great image there as well. Yeah, so you can look at this as amaze. Okay, so we'll use double modeling here. Can you see how the left ventricle is much larger? than the right ventricle. There's a reason.

The right ventricle only has to kick blood to your lungs. Yeah. Which are, you know, physically... Quite close. A few inches away.

The left ventricle has to kick it up, out through your entire body, down to the tip of your toes, all the way back up against gravity, and then back up into your heart. Mm-hmm. And so what you're seeing here

is strength training. This is resistance exercise. Your left ventricle's lifting weights. It has to be bigger. It has to be bigger. It has to be stronger so that it can contract really hard and shoot all that blood up and down and up and out. If you said you had a thicker wall, either naturally or exercise induced, just like when you lift with your biceps more, it's larger, the same thing is happening in left ventricle. Incredibly common and healthy adaptation.

Okay. What we would be concerned about is if there was any type of blockage or any type of plaque buildup. One of the things that I remember them saying is they, again, I'm going to butcher this, but they told me there's kind of like two types of plaque built up in my veins or my arteries, whatever. And they said, the bad type you haven't got. And they said, but the other type you have got. And I think they were referring to like the bad type as being like more sticky. Yeah. And it like doesn't go.

It'll dislodge. Oh, okay. And that can cause a risk. Yeah. They said, I didn't have the bad type, but I had this other type that can, is like temporary, but could turn into the bad type or something. Yeah. One thing you want to be really careful of, and this happened to a dear friend of mine, Joel Jameson. Young, super fit, all the things.

No stress, doesn't smoke, doesn't drink, much like you, all this stuff. Family history. Didn't think about it. Blood work came back, totally fine. Still asked to get a CT angiogram, scan of his heart. His cardiologist said, no, you don't need it. You're young. You're all the thing.

Got it anyways. And I think he had a 50% blockage of what's called the Widowmaker. You're flipping the dice. whether you're going to die here, right? So this is a classic case to me where he's doing all the right things, but imaging saved his life. Let's not live in fear. Let's go look. You went ahead of looked. I'll just trust your physicians. Great. Then I'm less worried about this because this could be a direct response to your ketogenic diet, which it almost certainly was. And if it's presenting no risk to the place we actually care about, then I'm less concerned about your cholesterol.

But if it carries on like this, could it create a risk? Absolutely, could. Okay. Because they all did tell me to fix this. Yeah. Just keep getting a scan every few years. And if you see any buildup at all, then I would manage it. Okay. Now, what you're seeing over here is that client of ours. And so as an example, I'll give you a specific number. His total cholesterol was 3.47. We got him down to 223. What did you do? Fiber. Why fiber? Stress reduction. Fiber, depending on the type of cholesterol, will actually bind the cholesterol and clear it from the system. You will physically reduce it. That's why one of the supplements I was told to take is a fiber supplement.

It's not always going to solve something and I want to be really clear. If you have numbers like you had, you need to work with the doctor. And you need to get screen. Don't just be like, I took fiber, I'm fine. This guy said on a podcast, that's not what I'm saying. But it is, it can be effective. The other thing we did was massive stress reduction. It was a very hard charging CEO for a large company.

How is stress reduction going to impact my cholesterol? Things like cholesterol can be what are called acute phase reactants, some parts of them, not all of them, meaning it responds to acute stress and stimuli. When you look at things like blood work, they aren't static. They're responding to the entire system. And so if you were to be stressed and we'll not to blame are they in cortisol, but cortisol is elevated. You are in a heightened alert state.

This causes short-term inflammation. In fact, if you look at, I think your inflammation was a little bit, not too there. This guy as well. Probably like your most classic inflammation marker is called CRB. P. His was at 2, which is really high. We got him from 2 to 0.2. So 10x reduction. That then allowed cholesterol to normalize. The easiest most technical way to get to say it is it's an acute phase reactant, meaning it will change in response acutely to inflammation. Some markers will go

up and some will go down in response to that, like vitamin D goes down. If what, if you... In a stressed environment. Some go up, some go down. Blood glucose goes up. So you've got your stress down, you've got its fiber up. And that took him from 347 to 223, which is still high. Went from 223 to 163. Now that took a statin. Oh, so you did give him a statin. We didn't, but his medical team did.

Okay. And so this, why I want to draw this point out is we were able to go a long ways with lifestyle. But he wanted to go more. He wanted to be green, green, green, green, green, green. So that's when medicine came in. And to me, this represents a great marriage of the two. some people are very anti-medicines, some people are, that's not my decision, that's up to you and your medical provider. But I think it's unfair to tell people things like all of it can be done

with lifestyle. And there's no need for medicines ever. Or the opposite. I'm just like, oh, just take the drug. Don't worry about it. He needed all of it. He needed stress reduction. He needed some changes in his diet. And that met a huge change in his biological health. So if you were to be like, look, this is so complicated, this guy, like, how can I make actionable advice of all this stuff this guy's saying, I don't have a private doctor, cool, just run the experiment. Try more fiber, try to regulate your stress. If you want to go the opposite route and jump right onto the medical side, that's fine too. But it doesn't need to be super scary or super daunting because these are not, like, especially

if your heart has been scanned. I'm not concerned about an acute emergency. The two things on here that I thought were shocking to me are my vitamin D level. in my omega levels, which I was told were deficient. Yep. I thought I was smashing it with those two, because I think I was living in LA at the time. Yeah, so your vitamin D was borderline low.

Fairly traditionally, people of African heritage are going to be lower in that marker. Okay. You're at 37. Kind of lower end of that number is 40. That might actually be fine. I think I heard you say something about vitamin D. Again, I don't want to butcher your words

if this was more you said, but you kind of make the assumption that most people are deficient. Yeah, it is true. Why does it matter? So vitamin D is a nice microcosm of all health. So what I mean by that is you will tend to see people low in vitamin D who are also tending to make poor health choices. So it's a little bit like grip strength and all that where it's kind of a one snap shot at saying, are you generally healthier, not? Why is it needed specifically? It is involved in every reaction from your brain to your gut to your hormones, to your immune system, metabolism and everything in between. It's critical to maintaining bone health. It's critical to being able to grow skeletal muscle. It's also clinically low in a high percentage of the population and even subclinically low in a vast majority of the population. So should we be supplementing if we are low? The real world will always win. Whole foods, sunlight, positive social environments. That's

always the place to start. So do you want to supplement with it? That's up to you. I would much rather you get sunlight, if possible. Now, enter everyone in the chat going, I live in the UK, there's no sun, sort of up here. Fine. If you want to choose a supplement because you live in those situations, then that's absolutely fine. Or I work in an office for 12 hours a day. It's interesting because there is a bit of a paradox here in, we're all in search of

very natural solutions in a very unnatural way of living. I had this conversation with my fiancee a couple of weeks back about a few things, where in one area of our life we're trying to be really, really natural. Yeah. But I'm like, Babe, look at the rest of our lives. It's so unnatural. We get on planes and have these smartphones. And so almost forcing this one part to be natural is arguably going to cause a bit of a problem.

I mean, it happens to me, right? Like, I'll put in the entire hours of the day and not even realize I didn't step outside. Yeah. It absolutely happens. So what I think you have to do is, number one, give yourself grace, right? Like, you're not going to be perfect. I'm especially thinking about, like, single parents. it's just like you're not going to go out

to spend 30 minutes in the sun. Night shift workers. Totally. Boy, that's a really hard thing. We've dealt with a lot of nurses and surgeons and things like that where you're on call, you're out. And that's when we can lean towards modern medicine,

mud of supplementation. It's why those things are not trash. They're not garbage. They're not fake. Our strategy typically is, can we find one actionable thing? One thing that you're doing as a focus that is something you've got to go out of your way and do.

And that might be, you have to go outside today. That might be your one thing to pay attention to. When you start asking for more than one to two active things per week, you start end up failing. Okay, fine. So with your omegas, so your omega score at five is low. You want that to be eight.

But you probably didn't notice your mercury was right on the line of high as well. Those things will typically track. The more omega-3s you consume, the more mercury goes up. Oh, really? Because most omega-3 sources are going to be filled with, the mercury. But I was low omega and high in mercury. So what that tells us is, if you were to jack your omega-3s up, your mercury's going to get into the line that we don't want it to be in. So, solution, you need to alter the source of your omega-3s, get it from a higher quality place.

So I'm not sure where you were getting them from there. All over the place. Yeah. But you would want to either choose your supplement more carefully or choose better quality foods. What actually moves the needle on this subject of energy, which is what we're talking about here? Is there anything that is more consequential as it relates to these people that are trying to get more energy in their life? They feel lethargic. We talked about sleep as being a real foundation here. If you're looking for more energy, I would divide everything into two buckets. Hidden stressors and visible stressors. Visible stressors are things like you're not exercising.

We know from excellent databases, physical exercise enhances energy. ham how. Mitochondrial health is one of the many aspects of it. You'll have more mitochondria if you exercise more. Generally, not only we have more, they'll be larger and they'll be healthier. And mitochondria basically process or energy. So you get a bit more efficient energy production. They're one of the ways you can make it.

You can make energy a lot of different ways. It is the end path of all aerobic exercise. So in other words, anytime you're using oxygen as a byproduct to make fuel, mitochondria have to be there. So it is central and core to that. but it is more than monocondri. You'll have more total blood. If you exercise.

Yes. It's one of the primary adaptations to endurance is you'll physically have more blood on your body. And that will mean... You carry more oxygen. Oh, okay. You have more blood cells. So you're able to carry more oxygen

to fuel those monocondriot. Is that a certain type of exercise? That gives you more blood? Generally, anything that demands blood flow will increase blood supply. cardiovascular exercise. It can be. It can be anything.

Okay. Stress. equals adaptation. Meaning, if you put a demand on your heart to pump more blood, it'll get better at pumping more blood. If you put a demand on bone to resist tension, it'll get better at resisting tension. You run the whole cascade of connective tissue to cellular health. It is simply, it's called the said principle, S-A-I-D, specific adaptation to impose demand. And also, is it fair to say then, if we take the word exercise out of the traditional definition, which is like in a gym doing a thing, and we broaden it to work or just, you know, cognitive performance.

Remember, exercise is a novel made-up term. This is a new thing to us. Historically, humans have carried, have sprinted, have jumped, have climbed, have grappled, have done all those things. Putting that into a structured non-daily activity is a last 75-year phenomenon, right? It wasn't actually until we started to realize that stress reduction to the end of the limit is a bad thing. And then we had to recreate stress into our lives. One form of that was we call that exercise. So yes, if you think about exercise as either running, cycling, swimming, or lifting

weights, you have left a bunch on the table. I don't care how you're challenging yourself, even if that structured exercise in your example is more vocationally based. It's the stress being provided to the system. And so when you start to look at things like what's the best exercise protocol for AB&C. One of the things you start to realize is all of them can have equal responses given a few constraints. And if they hit that constraint, they work. So if you have a movement practice, use skateboard, you play pickle, you walk, you garden, fine. All those can have equal clinical outcomes, mortality, joint pain, body composition, because they're getting to the same spot. Does this make sense then? So if I'm a podcaster and I want to have more energy

to podcast. Yeah. I should podcast more. Yeah, you'll be more resilient to it, right? Okay, so you could apply that to sort of any vocation or activity. If I want to have more energy to lift my kids up and run with them in the garden, then I should lift things and run with them. Stress inoculation. And then in the future, my body will adapt and it will give me more energy for that particular activity. So sometimes when people say they don't have energy for a thing is because they haven't challenged themselves in that particular activity enough to expand. adapt. It's really difficult, right? So if walking up the stairs is a VO2 max test for you, how likely are you to walk upstairs? Oh, okay, so it's like a downward spiral. Too difficult,

right? So then what happens? You don't do it. And you get, yeah, let's get able to do it, right? Yeah. So when we started thinking about energy, and I started talking about like hidden visible stressors, right, I'm looking for constraints. Do you have an undiagnosed pathogen in your body? We have a major League Baseball player felt horrific. I'm talking like, can't make it through a baseball game. Legs are shot. No energy whatsoever. In his particular case, we were able to confirm in his blood, in his physical bedroom,

and with a bunch of other tests for actually, you test his eyes and you test a bunch of other stuff, he had a very gnarly exposure to mold. Oh, yeah. All we had to do in large part was get that cleared and his energy came. back. That's an example of a hidden stressor. But one of the things where Louis is looking for is, are you in energy toxicity? Meaning, are you eating too many calories? Which is not the same as being obese. Or are you in low energy availability? You're sleeping fine, but you're of low energy? Are you eating enough calories? Oh, you're not. Like, we have to go no further on this train.

You are under-fueled for what you're asking. So there's things that are hidden stressors like that. There are visible stressors, which we just talked about. Like, you're not actually doing the thing. another easy way to explain this is cognitively. If you want to write a book and you don't currently write and you sit down to write is going to be exhausting. And then you talk to a writer and there's like, oh yeah, I need 45 minutes so I can crank out a thousand words. It's like not exhausting at all, right?

Stress andoculation. This is exactly what you said before. You can build up endurance in those things by them. This is one of the things I've learned from this podcast and meeting all these exceptional people is this like use it or lose it principle. You know, because I'm getting older and you start to feel the odd pain.

You know, and so you start to like not use that part, you know, your back, for example. Yeah. Or bending down. And so you find ways to not bend down properly so you can avoid the pain. And what's happening there is because something is difficult, you do it less,

which then means it becomes more difficult, so you do it less. And there's this downward feedback loop to decline. Atrophy, least atrophy. Yeah. And like, you know, I think the, critical idea that got in my head a couple of years ago from someone I was interviewing the podcast was that aging isn't always the excuse. And I think we assume it's just aging,

so we accept it and we don't fight back. When I sat here with one of the exceptional PhDs that I interviewed, she showed me, I think it was a dexas scan of a 70-year-old. He was like a pentathlete and then a dexter scan of someone that was like 30 years old. And this 70-year-old was just phenomenal. Yeah. Their sort of bone, their muscle. et cetera, and she basically proved to me, I'll put up the scan on the screen. It really is a mind-blank scan. I've actually sent it to my best friends because it really did, I couldn't get this idea out of my head that I actually don't accept everything as an aging problem because the minute you do, you go on this downward cycle. And it blew my mind. And that was such an important

idea to get in my head at my age at 30 years old. So when I feel like a pain in my back, my solution isn't, oh, okay, Stephen, you're getting older. Stop bending down and protect the pain. It is go to the gym and start squatting and bending, etc. There are some things that will go with age. Sleep is actually one of them. We typically just see you will sleep a little bit less as you age. Fine. There are some aspects of that, but I think you can resist and fight as much of that as possible. This is actually, you're seeing a turning of the tide right now that this just starting to emerge with longevity. Longivity is currently being positioned as this anti-aging phenomenon, and people are already bored. Like, is your goal to just not age?

or is your goal to dunk a basketball at 70. Do you want to have the 4x4 truck that has the best off-road package ever and it stays in your garage? Probably not, right? Like, you want to be able to be like, no, you want to live because you want to experience life.

And so then you want to be able to take advantage of those capacities and functionality. Yeah, someone said to me, you want to extend your health span, not necessarily your lifespan. It's not the health span, though. Oh, really? No, that's what I'm pushing back on.

Health span, cool. I mean, lifespan, fine. Great, we're all past that. Health span, though, is still like, I don't want to be in pain. I don't want to be. I'm saying performance span. I'm saying, I want you to be focused on having the most skill.

I want you to just be crushing cognitively. I want you to do anything you want physically for as long as we possibly can. And not just being like, well, that's going to go away. Let's just stay alive and be out of pain. I want you to be thinking. thinking about, no, like, I'm going to be doing awesome stuff in whatever venue you like to do it in for as long as you possibly can. I think people want both.

Yeah, of course. Yeah. But let's not, let's just not leave that into the table off and assume the performance has to go away. So on this point of energy then, I think we've covered a lot of it and given me some sort of like really actionable principles there for how to have more energy. I do notice, I have to say, because I travel quite a lot. And so on occasion, my gym routine will be impacted. And there's quite a clear correlation for me between the amount of times I've gone to the gym in previous weeks and how I feel in terms of energy today. I was thinking about this this morning. We're in New York here. And over the last couple of weeks, I've probably been going to the gym like three or four, like three times a week, if I'm being honest. Whereas usually I'd go almost every day.

And I have felt a difference in my energy. And I wasn't sure if that was just like psychological or if that was supported by science. Both. If you go and do a moderate to light lower intensity, actualization, those are generally going to provide energy. If you're like, no, I did a, like, to the death training, I pegged it, I went all the way, whatever that is with your lifting weights, intensity, whether you're getting your heart right all the way up, then you might walk out of those and be like, whoa, I'm exhausted, but on aggregate, those will provide more daily energy. If you're traveling, sick, super busy, do the former.

Like, just get in some motion. You'll feel better. You'll get a sweat in. If you're healthy and looking for long-term adaptation, then that's when you can start to push the pace on the training. I want to speak to the business owners listening and watching right now. I know what it's like to be personally responsible for every decision. I founded my first company at 21 years old, and honestly, the pressure can be immense.

It's the kind of mental load that takes its toll below the surface. I recently did some tests through our sponsor function, which got me thinking about that invisible impact. I found that I had low levels of omega-3s. I had deficient levels of vitamin D, probably because I sit in. inside this dark room all day. And that has totally changed how I construct my day going forward. I get up in the morning and the first thing I now do is I go for a walk outside in the sunshine, in part to help my vitamin D levels increase, but also because it helps to reset my circadian rhythm. With function, you can check your brain health, your aging, your stress and so much more.

They provide over 160 lab tests for what is equal to a dollar a day and member pricing on advanced imaging. Head to functionhealth.com slash DOAC to join. and use code DOAC 25 for a $25 credit. Speaking of training, you know what this is, don't you? Sure. This is a grip strength machine. Yeah. A lot of people told me that grip strength is the single biggest predictor of,

I think they said like longevity and stuff like that. I wouldn't call it the number one predictor of mortality. It is a really nice scientific test. Late 1980s, Stephen Blair and his team started looking at giant databases. and started to realize that cardiovascular fitness, V-O-2 max, V-O-2 peak, things like this, were predicting how long people are going to live. And in fact, they started to realize it was out-predicting

what we call traditional clinical markers, blood pressure, your cholesterol levels, things like that. And this launched an entire 45-year field that we're in now, which is like, wait a minute, these performance-based markers are actually predicting health more than these indirect markers. The unfortunate problem is that got like too, taken too far. And so when you hear things like people and my colleagues have been on your show and said things like,

oh, grip strength is an important predictor of mortality, it's good, it's great, it's an important message. But we have to be careful in being lost in what that means. Getting a grip strength device like that, which is probably under $40 is amazing. And what you will see consistently is those people that are really, really, really weak are in worse health on average. where we become false is saying, okay, therefore, you need to alter your lifestyle to maximize grip strength. I did do my grip strength results, actually.

Do you remember how they worry? It was good. It was high. You know what that tells me about your health? Nothing. Okay. Why wouldn't it be high? You're young, you're fit. I have all those other markers.

It's not going to tell us anything. You know, and these things are really powerful, somebody who doesn't have blood work, or doesn't have a body composition test, or doesn't have anything else. It can give us a crude strength, or a crude metric to say this person's probably

at a health risk. So I've always been quite confused by this because is grip strength a proxy for my overall strength of my entire body and therefore it's just indicating that my overall strength is low or is it actually like my arm?

It's both. Oh, okay. It's both. Here's why. You know what you're really testing right there? What's that? Your nervous system. Oh, really?

You're testing your brain. So you're not testing your strength as much? You are. But it's both. is an overlap. That's why your grip strength does it indicate general poor health? Yes. That's the value. Does it tell you anything directly about your, it can? And so this is when you see two camps here. So camp one is like, great, I'm going to open up a gym down the street and it's going to test your grip strength and then we're going to focus all of your training on grip strength training. That is, we've exaggerated the point. The other camp is it doesn't matter. It's all indirect. That's not true either. It is an actionable, useful thing where you don't need to work. about us optimizing it. Like, if you're in the 80th percentile, going to the 90th percentile probably doesn't make you live a day longer. Over the last probably three years, I would imagine there's over 20 to 25 studies that have been published on a very specific type of grip strength

and that's grip strength asymmetry. Do you know why that matters? I don't, but I know that I'm stronger on my left side than my right. It's not uncommon. Typically, your force dependent limb is not your neural control limb. So you write right-handed because you have to have fine motor control. Okay. Gross strength can be in the opposite side. Look it like this. You know, keep it in here.

Don't touch your arm to the table at all. You're 90 degrees like that. Yep. And then you're just going to squeeze, you know, one good effort as hard as you can. Wish me not. All right. Don't blow out now.

All right, let's see. Gosh, my head nearly exploded. 130. So you're above average. So not. Can I try this side as well? Yeah, go ahead. This is my, so this is my weaker.

All right, here we go. A weaker hand. All right. You got to beat it, though, now. Gosh, it's a bit slippery. I think you did. Did I beat it? Oh, my God.

Wow. 160. You're joking. 160. What the? Ow. Oh, I'm like crushing. Wow.

130. Okay. On that side. And your left side? Let's see. 110. Cushing, man. That's really good.

But what it taught me is that it doesn't correlate to a, overall strength because Jeff is definitely stronger than me. For sure, for sure. Yeah. I mean, it's a very specific type of strength, right? So the asymmetry actually matters because most of the work in that area is in groups with neurological disease. So you're trying to look at early predictions of Alzheimer's, Parkinson's and things like that, which ties into my earlier point is it is not simply an overall proxy of your health. It can tell us direct things like nerve denervation and overall neurological health. So it, to me, is a great tool. But what we don't

want to do then is optimized for that. What is a better marker of my overall health? There's not a single marker that will tell you everything. What about muscle power? Muscle power is great as well. What is that? Power is defined as force multiplied by velocity. So like if I throw this, do you want to vote it?

Go ahead. I can put your hand up then. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, great. Is that muscle power? That wasn't much power because you did it slow. Okay. So think about it this way.

This is 12 kilos, right? 12 kilos, I don't know, pounds, kilos. That is mass. Kilos, pounds is a unit of mass. Force, that's what you think of when you think of strength. That's force. Force is defined as F equals MA, as mass times acceleration, is force. Okay.

So it's the mass multiplied by how well you can accelerate. Power is your force multiplied by your velocity. So here's the difference. if I were to take this 12 pounds of mass or 12 kilos and hand it to you slowly Okay, that is an expression of 12 pounds of force That's how I'll think about it. Now, if you hand it back to me

This exact same speed, that is the same amount of newtons of force. How I create power is now I do that same thing with speed, ready? So the two ways you can get more powerful, more force, more velocity. You would use an implement like that because you're trying to say, give me a little bit of mass, but you can obviously lift more than 12 kilos. But now I'm going to emphasize the velocity in the spectrum.

Where people make the mistake in training for power is if you go slow, the mass is too light to do anything. So you don't get stronger and you don't get faster. Why this matters in the current conversation is you see power and what some people would call things like power pina. so that the term that we've been using for a long time is sarcopenia, and this is the accelerated loss of muscle and probably muscle strength with aging. You're going to drop some, but sarcopenia is, are you dropping faster than you should?

And now there's a turn of scientific attention to power pina, which is are you losing the power faster than you should be losing power? That matters because it is everything from prevention of fall, catching yourself when you slip, to be able to move and accelerate quickly. And so you see that stuff highly associated with breaking of bones, fractures, dislocations, which are incredibly impactful to health, especially post-age 60 or 65. I think a lot of people listening, and me too,

so I guess one of the questions we have as it relates to the gym and working out is we often think that in order to get better results in the gym, and you can define that however you want to. Fat loss, muscle game, whatever, strength. We need to go more often. And I was curious, someone who spends so long with athletes, is that a bit of a myth? Because even me, I'm thinking,

well, if I want better results in the gym, I probably just need to, I'm currently going three or four days a week, I need to go back to going six or seven days a week to get better results. You could go either way. It is generally true that if you train more,

you give yourself more opportunity to create stress, which is more opportunity to create adaptation. But that said, depending on the marker, the answer here could range from yes to no. Let's use muscle growth as an example. As long as you hit the same volume throughout the week, the amount of times you go to the gym

doesn't matter that much. In theory. Volume. How much load did you lift? How many times? Does time period matter, i.e. if I lifted four weights in one hour versus lifting four weights and 20 minutes? Nope because now all you've changed is really the rest in between.

Yeah, does that matter? It does in the sense that if you take a short rest interval and that leads to excessive fatigue accumulation and then that compromises how heavy you can lift or how many reps you can do or how many sets you can do, that will have compromised your volume. Wait, so because everyone talks about taking shorter rests in the gym. to build more muscles. Not consistent with the evidence. Really?

Yep. But this is the game you're playing at all times, right? Who has the time to wait two and a half minutes between every set? You're going to be in the gym for an hour and a half.

A lot of people are on their phones. Totally. And then because of that, they're like, I've got to get out of here, so they do half the amount of stuff they leave because they're out of time. So the battle is, in an isolated world,

if you were to probably spend 60 to 90 seconds, or maybe up to two minutes resting in between each set. Generally, you recover enough to have a higher quality set the next one. So is that the most important thing to be optimizing for is making sure the next rep you do is high quality? In my world, quality is always number one. So you're saying take a bigger break as long as you can recover and are more strong for the next rep? As long as it doesn't put you in a position where you're in the gym so long

that you won't do all the stuff you need to do. but in a world where you had unlimited time. Really? Generally. Depends on what adaptation we're working for. If we're working on endurance, then we don't necessarily have to do that. Okay.

But if we're working on speed or skill or flexibility or balance or muscle growth or fat loss, now we have options. So depending on the outcome you're looking for, you have tools. I think the biggest point we want to make here is where the field struggles right now is making a little bit of information, get in the way of motivation. if you're going to the gym three days a week, I'm clapping.

Done. Like, we're winning. I don't want you to hear messages and go, oh, I'm doing it all wrong. I'm not going to get any results. I'm tanking my metabolism. I'm breaking my hormones. That's the shit that drives us nuts. You're motivated.

It's hard enough to get to the gym. And when you get there to try really hard. We've gotten over the hill. Now, if you're past that point, we could start tinkering them to some things. but I hate it when people leave conversations like this and go, oh, did you know that if you don't rest more than 60 seconds that you're not getting anything? That's not true.

So we can get like upgrades, but in general, I think most people, quality should be the biggest thing you pay attention to because this is going to reduce your likelihood of injury. And there's even evidence that whether you're trying to get stronger or grow muscle, the quality of the repetition as defined by your technique, as defined by your range of motion, as defined by your intent,

as defined by what we call your mind muscle connection. So if you're trying to contract your shoulder, are you really contracting your shoulder? Like all these things start to matter. And so what you'll see happen is you can get more results with less work and shorter time because each individual repetition is of a higher quality and a more focused intent.

I mean, this might be a good time to just quickly take a... I mean, everyone's talking about creatine at the bloody moment. Do you have your athletes taking it? Yeah, of course. You do? Yeah, everybody.

Do you take it? Yeah. What do you take? What's in your supplement stack? My personal supplement stack, same with all of our clients and athletes. There's two things. Correct physiology, performance enhancement.

Totally separate categories. Correct physiological deficiencies are, in your case, your vitamin D. What is low, what is high, what is off track based on blood work, right? We try to solve this through food. But what this oftentimes looks like is a high quality multivitamin, oftentimes fish oil. Now you have performance accelerators on the other side of that equation. This is when creatine can come in. If I'm traveling, I'm going to take things like fiber, right, because it's harder to get vegetables when you travel. You probably

know this, but airplanes, airports, restaurants, like vegetables are nowhere to be found. And so I know those are going to be struggle. I'm going to take fiber there. Or I'm generally not taking it as much when I'm home because I can control my diet. Performance enhancers are things like creatine, are things like beta alanine, sodium bicarbonate. So depending on what fitness training goal

I have, at the moment, I'm going to alter those based on if I'm looking for muscle growth or endurance or... What are you taking right now? Zero. Zero. Vittman D? Like this week? No. No. Summertime. Okay. I live in the forest. Omega-3?

Nope. Why? I got full control of my diet, and we get a lot of fish right now. So we are good there. I also have, I'm fortunate. I get to harvest my own meat, and one of the things you'll see pretty consistently is even in red meat sources,

they're higher in a lot of nutrients wild caught versus animal cats. So we're in a pretty good. Plus, I have my blood work. I know our omega-3 numbers are, so I'm going to get there. If I don't have to take those things, I don't. A lot of people imagine,

to you with weight loss goals, whether they're trying to cut weight for a fight or if it's just mum and pop looking to lose a few pounds. What are the big misconceptions about weight loss? Yeah, it's the magic of it, right? It's the, there's one specific element you can't eat or one way you have to train or can't train. That is the biggest misconception around fat loss, the specificity. It is categorically quite simple to lose fat. It's probably, practically hard. It's difficult human endeavor, but categorically, it's incredibly simple. We only have a few things we have to do. And now you have a billion choices of how to get there. So if you are the type of person who struggles with moderation, then I'm not going to give you moderation.

Moderation of calories. Could be. Or exercise or environment. Do you know the difference between baking and cooking? Yeah, I guess so conceptually. I Baking is chemistry. Okay. You mix something together and put in the oven. You can't just fake the amounts. Because it won't rise, it won't set. It won't do the things, right?

If you're cooking on a stove and you could just put like, okay, what's in the fridge? You can't do that in baking, right? Depending on what you're baking. We will address this fat loss problem with trying to identify, are you a cook or are you a baker personality type? Here's what I mean. If you came to me and we were going to help you lose some fat, you're already pretty lean, but let's say you wanted to get super leaned. All right, great.

First question I would ask you is, how do you want this to operate? You get one of two ways. One way is I tell you exactly what to eat. You weigh and measure every single thing. You do not deviate. You check your weight every single day, and you follow exactly what I tell you.

The other option is I give you concepts. We have one to three rules. You're going to check weight maybe daily, maybe once a week. and I want you to stay airtight to those concepts. I prefer the concepts. Concepts. Great.

Concepts are cooking. Okay. Baking, weigh and measure everything, right? Here's what this matters. You're a concept kind of guy. Why? You don't not want to be thinking about all that little stuff

because you've got other stuff you'd rather be thinking about, right? It's great because it's freeing. You know, the downside is, if you don't know exactly what's in your food and you don't have a really good eye in calibration, someone like you might have a hard time losing fat because you're already at the end. We need to be weighing that olive oil.

We need to be measuring that rice cup. We can't just be like, a little bit of rice over there, right? If you're trying to lose 100 pounds, we can probably eyeball a lot of things and get really, really far. Yeah. But personality type is what I'm really getting out here.

Okay. If I gave that concept to some people listening, some people would be going blah blah blah like how many meals am I eating like what's the fiber company like they want the detail right what's the concept

the concept could be something like give me example of the three concepts I want you eating fresh vegetables in every meal and I want you to have a dedicated protein source every time you that might be the only rule I give you could it be an eating window

could be sure I could say eat whatever you want but you're only going to eat between these hours I could do whatever kind of one to three rules I want. I could say none of those things and I'll just say, all right, just cut out all your junk food. Okay. I'm not going to tell you what to eat. I'm just going to give you a list of things not to eat.

I could only give you the, I prefer to do the opposite, defer to give you things rather than take things away because you're going to take those things away, right? So I could play with your meal timing. I could play with your meal frequency. I could play with your meal composition. So what types of food you're eating, the combinations of them. I can do anything there and why all those work? Because those are simply different strategies to likely reduce food intake.

That's all we're really doing. But some people hate that because it's not enough detail. There's no specificity. There's no precision. They get anxiety from guessing. If I've had plenty of athletes before, just be like, okay, but six ounces of chicken or seven, and I'm like, six point three.

Like, okay, who cares? Like, it doesn't matter, but they just, like, they don't want to make any decisions. You have to make decisions about what you're going to eat because you've only had concepts. The nice part about the way you measure is you have no choices. I think the average people listening would rather have the concepts. Like it's much easier for me to go.

They're busy lives. They don't want to be weighing 6.3 grams of... So... You'd be stunned. Most people want that. Most people want the... They want the detail. Because they don't have to think.

They don't have to guess. They don't have to worry. They don't have to go, God, like, maybe I ate too much time. Maybe I didn't or whatever. But that's, like, hard to measure. Super hard. So here's the recommendation. Do the baking approach first for two weeks. And by that, you mean measure everything, understand what's in it? 100%. Then you can back off and start to go, okay, I have a better sense of what a tablespoon

a peanut butter looks like. I have a better sense of what a couple rice is. I'm getting a better sense of what three ounces of this is, whatever. Now I can start toning things back. I think this is really great advice because I think the big shifts that I've seen in my own diet have been in that exact order where for one particular week I did, it might be calorie counting or it might have been some of these apps where you can scan the food by using the barcode and it tells you what's inside there. And through that, it only took me a week or two to discover that the things I ate frequently weren't what I thought. Both in quantity but also in like nutritional profile. I think it's super important for as many people as possible to spend

at least a week doing that. And then I could make informed decisions about what I wanted to keep and what I actually didn't really like that much anyway. You know, I used to run this experiment in class every year. These are graduate students getting master's degrees in this particular field, and we would have them do a seven-day diet recall. Just measure away everything you eat for seven days. Consistent themes that popped up. Almost everyone ate way more fat than they think. Is that a bad thing? If you're eating more calories than you need Oh, so the calories is the problem versus that.

That's not bad for you. There's no evil foods. People ate way more carbohydrates than they realize. Same answer. People ate way less protein than they think. What about sugar? Everyone knows they're eating sugar. Where they're always stunned is they're like, whoa.

I thought I was eating a small percentage, you know, 20% of my calories from fat. They didn't realize they're at 40%. This is why the keto diet actually did help me. because it forced me to check everything for a while. So this is great. It was really learning. It was learning what was in all these things that I loved. And keto forced me, you know, the principle of a concept that I had when I was on keto was that I could have about 50 grams of carbs a day.

And stay in ketogenic. Yeah. Ketosis, rather. So I would think about it like a budget. I'd be like, oh, I'd spend 23 grams of carbs on this particular thing. But to do that, I had to look at everything, research everything. Yeah. And now I have an intuitive idea.

Exactly. The point is simply your awareness and consciousness of what is actually in the elements that you want. And then if you want to change and tweak, you can do that because you know. But if you don't have the knowledge, you can't even play the game. What are the big misconceptions about exercise's role in weight loss? It is valuable. Forever we've been telling people burn more calories than you ingest, right? And then it's still true.

And then we had a bunch of research pop out that was sort of like, hey, exercise is not playing the rule we think it is in phallos. And those data still hold true in the same. sense that you don't burn as many calories in your workouts as you think. Most of the time, if you hop on a piece of exercise equipment and it tells you you burned X amount of calories, you burned most likely significantly less than that. It's also true that there is places where you can get to with adaptive thermogenesis, meaning if you burn, say, 500 calories with exercise, if you are lean enough or non-lean enough or fit enough, your body will change how many, you're calories it burns throughout the day in response to that 500 calories from exercise.

Meaning, you could be in a situation, theoretically, where you burned 500 calories in your workout, but then your body downregulated your energy expenditure by three or four or even up to 500 calories. To make up for it. So it was neutral. Okay. When you're lean, like that can happen quite often, right? And so then what do you do?

You pull more calories. you train harder. You get a more of a response. This is like, okay, calorie counting doesn't matter. Like, it absolutely matters. It may not be the strategy you want, but it matters there. So then there was a big push of like exercise is playing no role in fat loss, which was fundamentally also not true because now we have meta analyses in the recent years

as well as more studies showing probably the fairest way to say it is exercise is a fantastic way to burn some calories. it is not the only thing that you can do, though, to lose weight. You can handle weight loss entirely through nutrition if you want. That said, people who exercise during their weight loss journey consistently are better at keeping that fat off over the weeks to years at the end of the diet. You have a 5-4-3-2-1 method. Ah, sure. 5-4-3-2-1 was just a little thing I came up with that says, all right, can we help people with fat loss rules?

Five days a week, be active. Now, this can be exercise. It can be walking. It can be your vocation. I don't really care. But what has to happen with fat loss is you have to be able to produce caloric expenditure. And you've got to do a lot of it. This is my way of saying be active.

And also, I'm saying, it's cool to take a rest day too. Like, it's totally fine. It's just veg. You can do that. But be as active as you possibly can. Then from there, I want four days a week of, structured exercise. One of these days can be a super hard day. It can be light. One of those days could be a yoga day. Like, not all four days have to be head to the gym, volume 11, like train

as hard as you can. But four days a week where I want you doing structured exercise. At least three days a week, I want you training hard enough to sweat. If you're doing all that, you're active five days a week, you're doing structured exercise four days a week, three of those sessions, you're doing it hard enough where you're getting a really good solid sweat, you're probably doing enough to burn enough calories to give yourself a chance from the exercise perspective to losing weight. If you've done those first three, we could even, we could even just call it the 5,4,3, like you're in a pretty good spot. If you may work granular, I would love a couple of days a week of strength training, and I would love at least one day where your heart rate's getting

really, really, really high. So a lot of people, including myself, often think, you know, I'm going to the gym three, four days a week, but nothing's changing. I feel like I've stagnated. Yeah. What is going on there, typically? Typical solutions for this are lack of focus. And I don't mean in your training. I mean in your programming.

So if you are looking at your program saying, I'm going to the gym three, four days a week, my first question would be, okay, what type of training program are you on? I'm kind of just winging it. That's why. Okay. If I said the same thing to you and gave you any business. analogy here, you would look at me in the face and smile. You have a plan. Why would you expect without a plan to get to any particular direction? That's a good point. 80% of the time, that's the answer. Now, here's the thing. And we have literature on this. There's good evidence. The plan itself

isn't the biggest factor. It's actually just having a plan. Interesting. Because you have the ability to progressively overload. What does that mean? Meaning you were able to increase your number repetitions than you did last week. You can do a few more sets than you did. You can increase the load. You can increase the range of motion. There's all kinds of ways that we can overload the system progressively. You can't do all that. This is, you know, I think this is really the heart of it, which is most of us go to the gym and we do the same thing. Totally. We do the same thing we did last week. We put the stairmaster machine on level eight and we do 10 minutes. Yeah. And we did that for the last seven months. Whereas we should really just put it up one, but in order to do that, we kind of need a

plan, as you say. Because you can't just go up one every time. Yeah. Like how many, how many weeks in a row can can you add five pounds? Three, four, like it's not going to be very long. This is the entire reason exercise is a scientific field, right? We have that. So my strong recommendation would be, if you're a absolute beginner, and you're not going to the gym at all, you're not doing anything, you can probably use AI tools and give you some basic starting program. In fact, people send these things all the time to me and be like, hey, I prompted my thing with, like all of your content and I have a complete personalized training program from Andy Galpin. I'm like, great. And I look at them, I'm like, pretty good. Like, all right, that's pretty

reasonable. And it's, they're good enough to get you started. They're going to get you the basics. They're going to get you going. And then you have something to follow for six, eight, ten weeks, whatever. Let me ask AI for Andy Galpin's. Put in your constraints. Tell it how many days a week. Okay, let's do it like so everyone can hear. Hi, I want to go to the gym four days a week, and I want Andy Galpin's formula for me to gain muscle. But what are the principles that I need to apply based on Andy Galpin's work over the next four months in order to gain this muscle? To gain muscle in strength over the next four months, you'll want to focus on a few key principles from Dr. Galpin's work. First, prioritize progressive overload by gradually increasing the weight, reps, or reps,

sets over time. Second, use a variety of repetition ranges, incorporating both heavy low-rep work for strength and moderate to high-rep work for muscle growth. Finally, ensure you're taking adequate rest between sets, usually two to five minutes for heavy compound movements to allow for full recovery and maintain high-quality effort. Pretty good. That's not, there's a little bit of hallucination in there, which is AI, but that's pretty close. A lot of people aren't doing this now, aren't they? They're using AI as like they're... We've sought a huge pendulum in the last five years. 2020 almost ended health and fitness.

Jims went out of business. Everyone went home, everyone bought their exercise equipment, and as soon as AI came online, online coaching tanked, and online companies got crippled. Because everyone is like, why am I going to pay you $100 a month,

$200 a month, $300 a month for that? And they were right. It's going the exact opposite now. It's already swung back. In-person training is way more in demand. I'm not surprised. Everyone's tired of that. It's also personal trainers don't just tell you what to do.

No. They make sure you do it. You know, so. How do I do it? It's the emotion. It's the connection. It's the emotion. It's the like holding me accountable.

So what you're seeing is people going, it was never about the information. Yeah. We always had the information. It was had it. Nothing in that? Yeah. I made up. Yeah.

That stuff's been around for, like, it's funny. Every time I talk about like exercise prescription, somebody will hit the comments and be like, why don't you give credit to blah, blah, blah, blah. they're the one that invented that. And I'm like, none of us invented this stuff. Dumbels, barbells, barbells, like, rep ranges. It's not the information.

It's ever been it. So what is it then? Like, why do people keep listening to these conversations when they kind of, a lot of them kind of know the stuff? I don't know what's happening on your platform. But a lot of people are not listening to podcasts anymore because you're going to see this probably in the comments section. Hey, Grock, tell me the 10 actionable things from this three-hour conversation.

Because they just try and extract the day. data, right? And then they don't do anything. You know who's going to take action from this? The people who listened. True. Yeah. Yeah, because it's not, it's the... It's not the information. Yeah. And part of, in part, it is the story. And I say the story in particular, because one of the most compelling things that we see on these podcasts is when you tell me real case studies of real people, you talk about what Jenny did, and you were training Jenny and she had this thing and she had this thing, and she was perimenopause and she did this thing with this thing and, and people go, ah, okay, those stay with me. You know what I'm willing to pay for?

You know what the world is willing to pay for? Have you done it before? Oh, yeah. Yeah, true. Human experience, like lived experience. So when you see a story, you're able to go, okay, I believe that person's done it. And now I trust that opinion because I could just go grab the program, right? The other thing is saving me time.

Like, you could sit there and go, okay, here's all the prompts of whatever, throw it in there and get your own training program. Or you could be like, yo, I'm just going to go pay Andy. I know he's done it before. I trust him. And now I'm going to go spend my time on this other thing that I care about learning about and spending my time on. Are there any commonalities in the catalyst moment that causes behavior change in people who are otherwise stubborn? So I think everyone that I sit with, and just even myself, there was a moment in my life where I heard something or something happened where I go, fuck, yeah. Yeah.

And that was the day, it was like a before and after moment I call them. That was the day that I decided to take this shit seriously. Yeah. And do you see any commonalities and what that is for different people? It's such a fabulous question, and I don't have a good answer for you. Because it's always so different. It's so hard. I would love to say it was the rock bottom moment.

I mean, it can be true. It's not always true. Can I suggest another? Please. Maybe like big life changes like kids. Death, friend, family, life becomes real. I've heard that a few times on this show, actually. You'll see that.

My dad had a heart attack and blah. That's crazy. The threat of death doesn't motivate anybody. Right. If it would have, we wouldn't have a 40% of people. rate. Yeah. Who doesn't know obesity tanks? Everybody knows. It's not a information issue. You know the risks associated with alcohol, smoking, social media. That does not change behavior. You get closer, though, when it's at home, right? Somebody died in the car accident. Fuck, I'm going to stop, look at my phone when I drive. Because my neighbor just died. My ex, like, that's the thing that makes you go too close to home. That's so true. I was saying to my fiancé when I was driving the other day in the car

because I'm notorious for asking everybody to put their seabults on. If we get in a car, I'm the guy in a black cab or a... I'm like, everyone, can you put your seat bolts on, please? My team know this as well. Like, if we're going anywhere, I look around at every single person and make sure they have their seabults on. Yeah. When did this begin?

When I was 10 years old. Yeah. And they came to my school. I remember being sat in the front row. I almost remember my seat number. It was that vivid for me. Two things I remember from 10 years old. They brought a mother who had lost her child in a car accident.

And then they brought out a police person, and he described going to the scene of the accident, looking down at the person who had just been in a car accident's phone, realizing that they were deceased, and then looking down and seeing their phone ringing, and it said, Mum. And I just, I've never forgotten it. It was somewhat traumatic. But it's meant that for the rest of my life, I've policed seatbelts. And that's what I mean by these catalyst moments where an idea gets in your head, and it just completely changes. And so I'm wondering what those ideas are for people, as it relates to, like,

weight loss and health, and so we ticked off some of them. Someone gets a linear family, maybe a diagnosis. In the performance perspective, this is when we'd argue for data. Because we've had this happen earlier in my career with a professional athlete who was not fast enough and was convinced he was fast. And then we put him on a force plate and we started collecting objective data and at the same time I had some of my students around and I had them do it. Kind of like what you did with your grip strength with Jeff. And it was like, you see how they're as fast as you are? And he was like, oh, everything changed. Like, he was totally bought in, made every training change that we asked. He had to see it in front of his

face. Like, he had to see his data. So my other answer to that, to you would be, now that we've democratized health in this sense, the ability to see your own data, I would be willing to bet. Had I pulled up a blood panel that had the cholesterol levels that you saw, and I said, oh, this is a client of mine. You would be like, oh, okay, great. Uh-huh, uh-huh. But then when I pull up yours and say, this is, you're like, go, I start shitting myself. You're gonna get us over. Like, we're done with that, right? Like, there's no question. I was looking for some research and there's some evidence here backed by some research that goes to answer the question. And I think we actually answered, we hit most of them, which is an acute health shock or diagnosis, which is the primary catalyst.

Vicarious health events, which become wake-up calls, which you talked about as well, which is someone else, a peer, a friend or sibling. Number three you touched on as well, which is this quantitative biometric feedback, so data. Yep. Yep. Yep. It says major life, this one we didn't touch on, major life transitions, i.e. Yeah. Such as becoming a parent, turning a landmark age like 30, 40 or 50 or reaching retirement. You see that a lot? Yep. You know what? Actually, that may think. Here's one we've seen the most. Sold my company. Oh. That one changes everyone's life. It's similar to post-gold depression. Oh, you've lost purpose.

Oh, fuck what I do. I need to do something. Now I got money, now I have time. Interesting. I'm investing in my health now. Like, I sacrificed my health the last 20 years. Ding-da-ding-da-ding. Now I got to turn around and I'm like, okay.

But is it also just like, I need a new purpose? And my body then becomes the project. That's exactly what it is. Where in the past, I had the excuse of sacrificing for the company. And I couldn't focus on myself. It was selfish. It wasn't fiduciarily responsible to do that. And I have no more excuse.

Well, looking at this list then, listen, we can't, we're going to pray no one in your family. Sure. No one you know gets sick. So let's stay away from that one. The two of them there that can be quite motivating. And again, we don't want to motivate you if you're completely fine. But this actually answers the question is to go and get your health checked.

Yeah. That's like a simple solution because maybe you're fine and that's great. Maybe you're doing everything right. But also just saying, oh, I want to lose a bit away. or I want to do this isn't as solid enough as going and finding out how you're doing. One thing also I think is important because I will default to performance

and optimization and getting the best and excellence. Like that's just the language and stuff I do. But that's not the opposite of what you just said. To be really clear on that point, not everyone gravitates the idea of being the best possible ever. Yeah. Totally fine.

But that still doesn't mean it's okay to just check out on your health. You can have it both ways. You can be like, look, I'm not an optimizer. I'm not a maximizer. That doesn't live with my ethos and cool. We can still, though, say you still want to live that life for as long as possible, right? All right, let's just make sure we're paying enough attention to where nothing catches up.

And we're not waking up one day and be like, oh, my gosh. Now I've got to go invest all these time and resource energy and all those things to go backwards in that. So pay attention enough. How important is it to get clear on your why? You're not going to love the answer because traditionally when people approach me, they already have that figured out. They're getting to me, they figured out why they're here or they're, if they haven't figured out, they at least have had the motivation to seek outside counsel like that.

So now they're getting to the what and how part. What about bad goals? I look back at my life and I had some bad goals. So that set me up for failure. That's more realistic to what we'll do. Okay. And this is a, you're aiming at the wrong target. I was aiming at my goal when I was 20, I think it was 27, was to go to the gym every day and I failed.

Oh, yeah, yeah. I failed six months later, but then once I'd failed, it was catastrophic. And how are you not going to fail? Yeah, yeah, but yeah. Like, were you going to go every day the rest of your life? It was a terrible goal because the day that I missed one day because some flight, it was like my entire motivation was over. Yeah, yeah. Sure.

And then I was like, how do I get back on the horse now? Here's an example. You want to lose fat. Your goal is fat loss. Cool. Why aren't you leaner right now? And you automatically think I have to exercise more in diet. And I'm like, great, that's the tactic.

I want to know why you're not there right now. Like, what is the thing that's actually getting in the way? Because like calorie, fine. Like, yeah, yeah. Like, you know that, though. But you're just not working. What is really in the way? Do we actually have some hidden stressor?

A lot of times people will say things like, I gotta lose fat so I can get healthy. And we will generally say you need to get healthy first. And then the fat loss would be a whole lot easier. That's the bad goal. And so we'll ask this question, like, what would success look like? What would failure look like? And when we hear things like, oh, success is I'll lose these 25 pounds.

All right, great. Let me ask you this. If we lost 12 pounds and then your shoulder pain went away, you have normal bowel movements now for the first time in 10 years. Your energy is way up. Is that all a failure? No, that's success. So then we didn't just find success properly.

So it's a huge focus of how we help people actually make progress in those areas that they've struggled with. Dr. Andy Galpin, we have a closing tradition where they'll ask us a question for the next, not knowing who they're leaving it for. And the question left for you is, if you were sure to fail, what would still be worth doing? A great question. Yeah. Fantastic question.

I am ultra competitive, but I really don't mind losing. So my answer to that question was it sounds like a cop-out, but it's all of it. Because I actually don't care about failing that much.

It just doesn't bother me. Like, I just like the competing thing. I like the doing thing. So my initial reaction of that was like, God, being around my kid, kids, right? There's, you fail anything you want there. And I'm like, winning, right? And then I went to business things and I'm like, I don't even really care about losing those. Like, because you get to do it. You get to be active and whatever. So kind of a cop out, but my answer would be all of them, man.

Like, the process is dope. The podium is the process. Yeah, man. Not the process over the podium. Dr. Andy Galvin, thank you so much. Thank you. You're held in such high regard by everybody. I think there's two reasons. I think it's so you're so deeply obsessed with this subject matter for reasons that we talked a lot about last time, but also I think the essence of your motivations is so unbelievably pure. Before we started recording, you were saying to me how like, you're really not that concerned with the business side of things, because what you'd love to do is just be focusing on the research, the education and the coaching, and I think that says a lot about you. And it comes through.

People understand that you're just deeply obsessed about this stuff in a way which allows us to benefit tremendously from all the work that you have done. And you're a wonderful synthesizer of very, very complex things. So please carry on doing what. what you're doing. If people want to go and listen to your show or if they want to go consume more of your stuff, if they want to continue this journey with you, where do they go? Where's the best place to send them? Well, first of all, thank you for those kind words. And to be invited back, it's a huge opportunity and I will never be ungrateful for it.

My podcast is called Perform with Dr. Andy Galpin, available everywhere. And then Andy Galpin.com and social media, Instagram and all that stuff is probably the easiest way to follow along. I highly recommend you go and subscribe to Andy's channel. and we're going to link it down below now, but it's, it's, it's, you're incredibly rigorous with all the work that you do. Having spoken to Andrew, Andrew Huberman, who's a good friend of both of ours, he, he's also told me just how utterly obsessed you are with truth and also your mission of helping people become who they could be. And that shines through in all of your work. So please go and subscribe to Andy's podcast as well, perform. And I shall link all of his other resources below, including some of them that we've mentioned today, including the tests and,

questionnaires that we talked about. Andy, thank you.