This Week in Startups - E1027: Orreco CEO & Founder Dr. Brian Moore built a platform that optimizes performance of elite athletes, shares cutting-edge benefits of blood sampling, biomarkers, inflammation reduction, glucose monitoring & more!

Episode Date: February 11, 2020

0:46 Jason intros Dr. Brian Moore 3:39 What does Orreco do and how do they help elite athletes? 4:46 Do they sample blood? 6:33 What teams do they work with? 7:50 What is a bio-marker? 9:05 Why has inflammation monitoring become so popular? 15:01 Brian demos the Orreco app 22:56 What are the top reasons for elite athletes to use Orreco? 28:06 How did Brian get into this business? 30:34 How does blood differ in elite athletes? Is it regional? 36:25 What does Orreco have the biggest impact on? 43:40 What kinds of performance optimization should or shouldn't be legal in pro sports 51:12 How have they monitored machine learning? 56:47 Importance of glucose monitoring 59:15 Correlation in NBA between minutes per game and years played? 1:01:29 Taking a personal loan out to fund Orreco in the early days 1:15:39 Marc Andreessen asks Jason a question

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by going to zapier.com slash twist and health IQ. Take as little as 20 minutes to save up to 41% on life insurance premiums compared to other providers at health IQ.com slash twist. Hey, everybody, welcome to another episode of this weekend startups. If you follow me on the Twitter, you know I got knocked on my ass back in December over the break. I got some terrible flu or something. A lot of people got hit with it. And I was so beaten up over three weeks of fighting this thing. The worst I've ever had in my life, I had to get IVs.

I didn't have to get them. I guess I elected to get them. And I tweeted it to get a little sympathy and to flex that I was getting IVs at home. Okay, Boomer. And a fan of the podcast reached out, fan of the pod, Brian Moore. And he is the CEO founder of Oracle, not Oracle, or E-C-O-R-E-C-O-R-E-C-O-C-com. And he said, hey, I'm a fan of the pod. I was seeing that you're sick.

That's terrible. I run a blood company, a science company. I work with some of your friends in the NBA and other teams. And, hey, here's some things to help you recover and maybe avoid getting sick to begin with. And I clicked on the link. You know, he didn't have to be on the pod or wasn't selling anything. It was just, you know, here's some advice to keep yourself resilient and to not get sick. And I clicked on Oracle.

and I looked at your website, Brian, and I was like, well, this is brilliant. I asked you a couple questions, and I said, hey, the next time you're in San Francisco, do come on the pod, and here we are, Brian Moore, you're in San Francisco, and you're on this week in startups. Welcome to the program. Thanks very much. Pleasure to be here. Now, you're from Galway, Ireland. That's right.

Wild West. The Wild West. I've been there myself. Did you guys ever widen the road between Dublin and Galway? Because I was there about 15 years ago, and you could fit about two and a half cars. And the way you guys drive those double-decker buses is terrorize it. Yeah, it's good for the reaction time and for the nervous. But it is wider than like two and a half lanes with three cars?

It is now. We decided that the grass grown down the middle. That was just, you know. Superfluous? Absolutely. So, yeah, we're now, we've got a full motorway. It's two hours straight to Dublin. So next time you fly.

Really? It took me about four or five when I went back in the day. Probably stopped for a pint somewhere, though. I did. And then I went to the ring of Kerry and cliffs of Moore and all that. and literally those double-decker buses. Yeah, they're scary, yeah. Were barreling down the highway,

and I had been provided like a very wide BMW, to which my girlfriend at the time lost the left-hand mirror. Okay, yeah, yeah. I was going to say lost a BMW. No, BMW was fine. The left-hand mirror was gone. Right. Because of those roads. I'll leave it at that. Tell me, you know, Oracle, I know Orrin, Irish is gold.

I don't know if you knew that. That's right. Thank you very much for that. That's very helpful. So I don't know. And obviously RICO, I don't know what that stands for, but recovery. Oh, recovery. Gold recovery.

Got it. Okay. I know that. So what is it that Oraco does? And who are your customers and why do they give you money? Sure. So we look after some of the best athletes on the planet. Our job is to help them to optimize their recovery and to plan.

and to play as long as they can. And we do that using biomarkers and data science, machine learning. So take small amounts of blood and give them insights about how their bodies adapting to the training, the games, and then help them recover to perform their best on any given day. Okay, so it's like Fitbit for professional athletes in a way? Absolutely. We'll take all the data out of your Fitbit in terms of the distance you traveled, the intensity you're working at.

But it's like that really super high end. We take, like for a pro athlete, if you're in the NBA, you've got second spectrum data in your game, like how many passes you're making, how many minutes you're on the court, your accelerations, your decelerations. And then we'll also look at your training data, so in the training facility,

and map that all together because that gets pretty complicated very quickly. So are you pulling blood as well? And if so, how often and what quantity? That's a great question. So we started off and we were taking venous sampling, so two or three tubes of blood. And we're getting really lots and lots of information around your immune system, around like muscle damage, around your hormones, how everything, again, how you're adapting to your training. And we realized, and that was great.

You could do it maybe once a quarter. In Olympics, they'll probably do it once a month. They're more used to it. And in the NBA, for example, there's a CBA. So you can't, there's limits to what you can. Collective bargaining agreement. Absolutely. So the players have fought, perhaps against their own best interest, to have their blood taken as little as possible?

No, I think there's just kind of rules and regulations to make sure that the information is being used to help the player, which ordinarily will be. So it's a privacy issue. Absolutely, yeah, yeah. But there is some concern, I guess, from the players union, where I'm just interpreting this, much like people who own cars and have black boxes in cars, that this data. it could be used against them, perhaps in a contract negotiation where they could be suspended. So putting aside using substances that you're not supposed to use, you're not checking for that kind of stuff anyway. No, not at all.

Right. No, we're partnered with the NBA Players Association where their official bioanalytics partner. So they went through all our evidence because there's a lot of noise in the space. So we make sure that we have 300 peer-reviewed papers, we've 16 PhDs on staff. They could see what we have. And they said, okay, if you're an athlete and in your own time and, I mean, the offseason in particular, when you do a lot of heavy work, that they suggested that, you know, their athletes come to us. So can you say which teams you work with or a team you work with? Sure, some of them.

Some we've signed confidentiality. So come up to my children's children's children, which is fine. But, yeah, the teams we can talk about are the Dallas Mavericks. Okay, my boy, Mark Cuban. Mark, yeah, he's fantastic. So open to new ideas, but equally very, very, he has a low tolerance. I would say, I know you don't have a swear jar anymore, but he has a low bullshit tolerance. Yeah.

You know, he'll find out very quickly if you're, if it's legit or not. Absolutely. And his trainer, Casey Smith at the Mavs. So we start, you know, we work with the Mavs also do some work with Chelsea Lane, the Hawks. Got it. And, yeah, it's kind of designed there to optimize their players. So of the players, they have. 15 people on the roster, I believe.

How many of them elect to do this? Do they have to elect to do this? Or is it mandatory? It's completely optional for the team. So it's there to help. So Casey would say, I think, 14 of the 15 players will report. So the players are into this? Absolutely.

They can see, it's brand new. They can say, okay, this has given me, the feedback is, man, that's exactly how I feel. Ah. So you mentioned biomarkers. Explain to a neophyte what a biomarker is and what you learn from them. And is what you learn from them in that biomarker at the moment or the biomarker over time? They're really good questions. Yeah, that's why I'm the hostess.

We've done a thousand of these. Well, it chose. But thank you. I appreciate it. A biomarker is a biological marker that gives you like an indication of a process, something that's going on in your body. Okay. So it's a generic term for something going on in your body.

Exactly. Yeah. We could be, you know, we look at cells, for example, or hormones. So like your red blood cells carry oxygen around your body. Gotcha. Your white blood cells help with your immune system. So we look at things like inflammation in your system and we'll understand what's exactly what's happening day to day.

Some of the biomarkers will look back in time, some are of the moment. So for example, we'll look to a test. We'll look at your free radical levels and your antioxidants that's given you a state of play like today, like you're driving your Tesla, it's like a check engine light for today. Gotcha. The free radicals. Exactly. And antioxidants.

And the balance between the two. Got it. And also we'll look at your high sensitivity CRP. So that's your measure of your inflammation in your body. I hear people, Tim Ferriss and Kevin Rose and all these doctors out there, Dr. Agus, they talk about inflammation, inflammation all the time. Yeah. And certain foods cause inflammation, certain foods, reduce inflammation.

Yeah. Stress, I think, causes inflammation. Absolutely. What is the obsession with inflammation all of a sudden? Because if we were sitting here 10 or 20 years ago, nobody was talking about inflammation. And the only time I heard about inflammation was if you twisted your ankle and it was something acute. Like you broke your arm, it got inflamed. You twist your ankle, it got inflamed, you put ice on it.

But now we're talking about whole body inflammation. Why is that important? If you'd met us, if you'd, you know, when you were driving the BMW around, you'd come in, we were talking about it. You were talking about it? You were talking about? Nobody was listening. Yeah, that was it, really. in the very early days, not just inflammation,

but some of the ideas were really far out there. So like inflammation is an important part of process for adaptation. That's one of the things. You need some inflammation or some stress to get better. Okay, you need some amount of it. Got it. If you get too much, then your systems become overwhelmed.

And I think I was described, I describe it like space invaders. So you're at the bottom. There's your bases at the moment. There's free radicals at the top inflammation. And once they overwhelm your defenses, I talked to one of the players, and they said, yeah, I said, what happens then?

They're like, yeah, you're dead. So, but you're sick. That's when you crash and burn. Yeah, you're sick. That's when you're exhausted and you get sick. Absolutely. And it's on a continuum. So we can use foods like that are rich in antioxidants to help reduce inflammation.

So antioxidants can reduce inflammation. Inflammation is healthy if I'm lifting weights. My muscles are going to get ripped up. And there'll be some inflammation which tells my body to heal it. You need some amount of inflammation to kind of to get adaptation. And so when you pop in anti-inflammatories, that knocks out your adaptation. You know, if you're if you're using ice baths all the time, again, that'll suppress inflammation. So you, and it'll actually, you'll get less return on your training. So you need

some inflammation to get better. And it's just when that balance gets out of whack, that then problems can happen. And we're using that as a surrogate then to say, okay, you're adapting to your load or you're not adapting to your load. Got it. And one of the things like if you got, load means training or the workouts or the games. Exactly. But like, but like, it's all like, If you're stressed, like the saying in Ireland, I think it was, it has to be Yates are wild. It's like when you hit 40, you get the face you deserve. You know, so like that if you're under pressure all the time and you're stressed and you're not sleeping. And, you know, that's one of the things for us as sports scientists, you know, if you're saying, eat more vegetables, sleep lots, limit your amount of alcohol.

Like that gets pretty old pretty quickly. You know, you can't say the same thing over and over again. And so we use this information to kind of, it's adapting to that Fitbit that you talked about. Right. So I did 10,000 steps. So what? What do we do tomorrow? Right.

Because telling people, telling people what to do and why they should do it is different than them showing them what to do and showing them the data behind it. Exactly. When we get back, I want to know how many years you've been doing this. And if you can claim or make any claims about the efficacy. of your service because it is a bundle of software and, I guess, tracking and blood testing when we get back on this weekend startups. Do you know it costs at least five times as much to acquire a new customer as it does to keep an existing one?

Your existing clients are your best new clients. Don't lose them. And a startup, especially ones in the SaaS space, that's software as a service, enterprise, they call it sometimes as well, building relationships with your customers is everything. And without having those rabid raving fans, those net promoter score nines and tens who are advocates for you, your business does not stand a chance because other people have curated and built those deep relationships to have advocates in the market selling your product when you're asleep or working on something else. But you can't earn raving fans with basics offer that treats customers like a ticket. They don't want to be a ticket. They want to be an individual.

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their customers and build that deep bond and turn them into super fans. Eligible startups under $1 million of funding less than two years old can access everything. Help Scout has to offer for only $50 a month. For your first year, visit helpscout.com slash twist to learn more. That's helpscout.com slash twist to get started today. And thanks to my friends at Help Scout for supporting independent media like this week in startups. It means a lot to the fans of show and to me and my team. Okay, let's get back to this amazing episode. All right, my Irish brother Brian Moore is here. You know my middle name is McCabe. Oh, I didn't. Yeah, I used to use it all the time because I was trying to get my mom equal billing. And I should bring it back. Definitely.

I'm going to start putting it on my book jackets, Jason McCabe, Calacanus. And I think we're from Cork, but you're from Gawley, so we're a little south. My dad's from Cork. So it's known in Ireland as the People's Republic. Yeah, people's from Cork. Absolutely. They do think their own way. And it's their own capital. Yeah. And he is with a company called Oroco. You can go to their website, O-R-R-E-C-O, as in gold recovery. And he provides biomarkers and uses data science to help athletes perform optimally. Absolutely, yeah. And you showed me the software before. You have an app. And we'll look at it now with some data removed. So we're not going to look at a specific player's information, but looking at your phone,

you could see that the player themselves and the coach, and I guess the entire coaching staff, can see what's going on with the player? Yeah, this is the kind of the athlete's own homepage, really, that pulls everything into one place. Got it. So that's one of the challenges, I think,

it's almost into the super app space that, okay, your Fitbit data is here, your sleep date, so your training data is over here. Right. That's where I think, Under Armour got so close to getting it right. They had the three kind of pillars with their acquisitions of Matt My Fitness, Endamondo,

and the third one. What are the other company? Three quarters of nutrition planning. Got it. So, yeah, like, basically. Those are the three pillars. Activity, food, sleep. Absolutely.

And then you need to get them to kind of all sync and talk to each other. Got it. So for a pro team, you have athletic trainers, you have physicians, you have physiotherapists, got it. everybody on site. Do they have sleep coaches or no?

Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. Do they travel with the team or they just call them and say, put your device in the draw and get off Twitter? Well, our app will do that. It'll kind of, it'll just kind of say a little nudge to say, you know,

because that's one thing. So get off your phone. But we're all on our phones. What time do you turn your phone off at night? It's a bit of a problem for me, but what I started doing was now doing audio books at night, as opposed to podcasts, because the podcast get me a little amped up.

Yeah. But then I have a series of books that I read that are, just incredibly boring. Okay. And so I just put on a nice boring book. I'm not going to say who. Zero one.

I'm kidding, Ben Horowitz. It's not zero to one. Zero to one. Kept me up all night. That's why I'm so tired. Actually, because you're an investor in Kamm, aren't you? Yeah, we were the first, I think, major investors back in the first round.

I use KAM, I think it's excellent. Yeah. Because the athletes, like, they're finished game at 11 o'clock at night, have to get on a plane, you know, flights three hours. Brutal. And then they land in a city at 2 a.m.? Exactly.

You have to go to a hotel at 3 a.m. and then get up at what, noon? Yeah, it depends. Well, it depends on the schedule in terms of their time of shoot around is, but probably get some food, try to get some sleep, try and then get a nap. But actually just on the cam, guys, if you're talking to them, I owe Matthew McConaughey like at least 10 beers because he just knocks me out.

Like, it's not, you know, when I listen to his sleep story, I'm gone. I've never made it the end of it. Also with his movies too. Thank you. I got you, man. I got you, man. Thank you.

Put a rim shot in there, please. Put the, if you can't, get me the monkey giff, the cellar. I like the pirate monkey gif. That's my favorite on the interwebs. So here in the app we see they're playing, their travel, and their data. Do you have a preference for the Apple Watch or the Fitbit? Or can you do both, ingest both data? We can't ingest both.

data. Is the heart rate legit on either of those? It's garbage. Yeah, to be honest, for real time heart rate, you need a chest strap. And same applies for HRV. It's not that very, not that. What is HRV? Heart rate variability. So the watch stuff is BS? It's a start. It's something. How accurate is it? 60%, 70%. You don't use that data, do you? We, to honest, use it as a guide in terms of just general hours. We have more advanced actigraphy, so we'll do like a full-on week where we'll use clinical grade stuff at different

phases the season for our guys. But it's just of interest for them. It's an alert to say they're not sleeping at the well. Maybe they're stressed. Maybe there's a lot going on. And then it's as a rough guide. But for the high-end sports scientists, we really use like super,

like the granularity of the data is amazing in terms of what's coming off cameras. So I think a lot of the tracking now, you know, you see sometimes there's GPS units between the shoulder blades where they'll measure. Yes, I know that company. It's from Australia.

Catapult, yeah. Catapult. Yeah. We've had the founder on the pod many times. Carapolts. I think Cuba was an investor. He was, yeah, absolutely. And I think they sold that company, yeah.

I think they went public? The output went public in Australia. And then, yeah, so like in that space, you've catapulted statsports and you take the output from those. But then we can do cool stuff now with the tracking data from Second Spectrum. It's giving in game and then connects on. What is Second Spectrum? Explain with that. So it's a company I think Steve Ballmer is invested in where you might see the Clipper Vision,

where you're seeing like percentage makes on different passes. So it's getting more information in game. You can't wear the tracking systems in game. So they just use cameras. Yeah, I heard that they're down to knowing like every single thing a player does. And this might be why James Hardin is coming up with these new, I don't know if you saw his new shot where he steps sideways or something and does his three-pointer on one leg. Nick, you can cue that up.

I think you know what I'm talking about. But he... If you see his job step is ridiculous. He's got the jab step. And then there's this one where he does a step back and to the side. it's like a double step back. It might have been traveling 20 years ago. But anyway, he seemed to have worked on this.

And I was talking to somebody in the league. I won't say who, but, you know, top, I don't know, 25 person in the league. And we'll pull it up here on the screen. I'll show it to you. But it's supposedly he worked on this over the summer and now nobody can guard him. It's a crazy shot.

And he pulls the ball over. And if you watch this, yeah he hops on one leg and while in the air from what do we call that is that the uh the baseline what do you call that edge of the three point circle over there the corner three yeah so he does this corner three but watch how he hits the left leg right and hops up and he's going his momentum is going to the baseline and he's elevating and falling backwards the degree of difficulty is insane but how do you guard it? You can't.

Of course, the guy's flying through the air and shooting a three. It's bonkers. It's pretty spectacular. But I think this kind of stuff is being modeled through that system. What'd you call it again?

The camera system? Second spectrum. Spectrum. Second spectrum. Second spectrum. Because they've now got cameras in every court, right? Yeah.

And the same, there's an equivalent in, they have it now in the Premier League as well. So in football. What's the Premier League? The soccer. Oh, okay, got it. I heard you say football.

I'm joking. No, in soccer too. Yeah. Yeah. And have they figured out like new plays and new, you know, strategies because of it? Is this taking, like, the coaching out of it and made it like more robotic and algorithmic? I think you can, it helps the coaches make different calls and brings, you can, our jobs to help make the coach's job easier. It's never to put the white coat on and walk in and go, you know, load management, him, him and him out.

Or her, her and her can't play today. It's more, say, trying to make them as available as possible. And that is the goal. Make the players as available as possible. That's our number one goal. And so why do they, you've been doing this for two years for teams? Yeah. Is this the third year?

No, we're heading into our sixth team, sixth year. With the team that's the longest running. With the team that's the longest running, yeah. How has it changed? We won't say the name of it. How has it changed their decision making, signing of players, minutes players get, walk through, because they're not doing it for six years to test it. No.

Two or three years would be a test. Four, five, or six years means they're paying you some pretty penny for this. We're an expensive solution. Hundreds of thousands a year per team, I would assume? Yes. Or seven figures? Yeah, hundreds of thousands. Hundreds of thousands.

So, listen, Mark is, he's not cheap, but he's frugal. He's not going to waste money, at least not on that, at least not on, like, player optimization. So any team that's doing a four, five, or six years, they've got to have some thesis. What are the top three reasons? If I were to ask them, top three reasons you use this in order? Well, I'm really nice guy. Yeah. But apart from that.

The charity. Absolutely, yeah. No, it's, I think they're seeing tangible results in an individual level. It's telling them things that they didn't already know in terms. It's allowing you to. So it's new insights on the individual level. And to look under the hood. So beyond minutes, it's to say we could, you and I can play the same minutes.

You're obviously taking really good care of yourself. Right. You know. Yeah. So, like I was up late and I'm a bit jet lagged and whatever. how does that impact on me? Got it. And then it also allows them to kind of personalize the nutrition

because you might need, you know, deficient in a certain... So number one is to understand the player with new data. Yes. And these guys and gals who run these companies now, they're all data junkies. Yeah. So they just, any new data, they're going to take it as an edge? Well, I think... To make decisions on playing time?

In the early days, it was, you know, I think any data was like, okay, this is new data. Now teams realize, hang on a second. Data's fine. We're drowning in it. It's typically a small cohort of people, guys and gals who say, this is all the data, you go and figure it out and come back to me. Right. And so we're designed as a team within the team to help them, gives them another input into their data set. And then our data science team then help mine it all together.

Got it. So does that make sense? Yes. And so what is the outcome? I guess I'm getting out of, if I were to ask them, what are you getting out of this? Why do you pay for this? Yeah. So the MAVs, like last year, before last time, zero days lost to illness.

of 15 players across 82 games yeah that was it yeah like just over a year ago it's Casey Smith he think he was quoted in the New York Times piece where they had zero days lost and that's not us

that's obviously we contributed to it our nutrition team went in and worked with the how many days does the average NBA player lose typically I think it was like five like there was four to five four to five per player I know across a team you're kind of like six and sevens because players will

still play when they're feeling under the weather. Got it. So they would have six or seven days where somebody's just hard out. They got the flu, they can't get on the court. Yeah. They're not on Twitter, though, saying, oh, what was me?

What was me? Look at my IV. You're crying like a baby. Well, you can't as a pro athlete, you can't have an IV. What? There's rules around how much. They can't do an IV?

No, there's rules of how much. Post game, can they do an IV? There's really strict rules around IV. Wait a second. Yeah. That makes no sense to me. Why? What's the justification?

I think, well, particularly in Olympic sport, that there's and in the Premier League and in anything that's associated with the world anti-doping agency. Got it. There's very strict rules around how much you can use in an infusion as an anti-doping procedure. Got it.

All right. When we get back from this quick break, I want to know about that EPO and how you think about what supplements and what techniques and how the world thinks about it should be legal versus not

when we get back on this weekend startups. Hey, everybody, we're back with our ZAP of the week from Zapier. You know Zappier makes you happier. And at launch, we use project management software to track all of our different projects like you probably do at your company. We have so many projects and things are constantly changing here that our associate press created a Zapp that updates our Slack channel whenever things are changed. This is really helpful. So this Zapp gives our organization real-time updates on what's changing on Monday.com. If you haven't heard of Monday.com, it's project management.

offer. And this makes us so much happier. Zapier, as you know, is the easiest way to automate your work. So I want you to study everything you do and then write down on a piece of paper something you do that takes more than an hour a week. And I want you to consider, is there a zap you could create that would make this process seamless and take it off your plate? That's what we do here. And it works so well. You can instantly engage with leads and send them, your CRM in a spreadsheet, let's say. Or you can integrate with 1,500 different applications. You know all the applications they have,

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free trial. Zapier.com slash twist. Zapier makes you happier. All right. It's great episode. And actually, Mark And Dresen is watching the live stream and he's got a question. So when we get to the fourth, he's a big fan of the show. So when we get to the fourth segment, I'll have Mark and Tristan come on and ask the question. He's a big fan of the pot. So when we left, I want to talk to you a little bit. I know that you had studied EPO. You got into this because your parents were...

Both of my parents were biomedical scientists. Yeah. So, yeah, my dad was in hematology. You were in the blood business? No, like, last thing I wanted to do. Like, I love sports. But your parents were in the blood business. Yeah, my dad was like a young, like, he was one of the youngest chief biomedical

scientist in hematology. My mom did cytology, studying cells. So cervical cancer. Really? And yeah. So, but all I want to do is... Sure you guys aren't vampires or something? No, we do.

Vampire cult from Galway? We do collect blood? You know, do you like the dark? So, you get into this in college. Yeah. And you're studying blood in college? When did you first get into blood? Really, I studied physical education, sports science.

And the place I wanted to get into was a place called Strawberry Hill in London. It's a PE teacher training college. Ah. For, it wants to be a gym teacher. Yeah, absolutely.

Well, it was, I wanted to be a pro athlete. And I said, what's the way I can definitely get paid to play sports? Right. And I was like, gym teacher.

Perfect. I can get in there and start. What was your sport when you were? It was track and field. I loved running. Oh, really? Yeah, I was an endurance runner. Really?

Yeah. Yeah. I've run around Boston once, London twice. Really? What's your best time in Boston? 310. 310?

Yeah. I broke four hours once in New York But 310 But it was a really bad word Why are Irish people good runners? Is it because we have big quads? Well, I think We're

Huge quads, right? We're not Is it the trunk? It's the trunk, right? I can't see you. I have giant quads. You have them too, right? No, it's true that Irish people are good runners.

We do have good runners. We have like the best Runners. Not like the English people with those stick legs. You know what I'm saying? Well, they like, I'm pretty much Irish. Charles.

It's not all about you. Yeah. You need you back there. Sir Charles in the control. room. He objects. It's not a courtroom. You don't get to object, Charles. Charles. Well, like, English, obviously, it gave us a lot of sports. So, Association football, cricket, rugby. But the Greeks gave us the marathon. There you go, absolutely. And, um, but the Irish have had a good showing and running. Yeah, we have, we've had phenomenal athletes. We still, and we still have, you know,

an up-and-coming coming crop. I work with Sonia Sullivan, who's our greatest ever Olympian. She wants silver in Sydney and, uh, multiple-liber champions. What sport does she do? track and field five five case was a yeah she's second and what what makes up for the i mean might as well just go there uh the regional differences when you look at is it is it is the blood involved is genetics involved in long distance running because the Ethiopians have just been tremendous in their winning and there is a biological case for this correct yeah there's well comes back to you you asking me how this got started so my very first day in university I landed and all I wanted to do is be a gym teacher.

Love physiology and on that day, Moses Kiptenui, the world champion Olympic silver and world medallist ran past me. Just randomly in London. It was in, well, as far as I knew. So I just, I was like, oh my God, that's Moses Kiptonui. Like I've been watching him every Friday night on the TV. Somebody who can do what, like a two and twilight here? He broke eight minutes for the 3K Steeble Chase. like so it's effectively not far off to

four and miles back to back over jumps in water that's bonkers it is and you were saying about my Boston Marathon I did 310 but I did a 40 minute 10K and then a 20 mile cool down because I got the I got the pacing all wrong it was terrible so bad so bad anyway

Moses ran past me and I like oh my god I might never see him again this is like I was 17 drop my bag full forest gum ran after yeah I'm picturing it here there you go and basically then you didn't catch him.

No, I didn't. He was a shoulder going, oh, my God, like, what, I've been chased by some lunatic. Yeah. But then in the jigs and the reels of it, about six years later, I was in his, six years later, I was in his house taking his blood.

Because I got, in that meantime, I did an undergraduate dissertation, and to see, like, is the blood of an athlete different to the blood of an athlete? Is it? There's certain numbers that are a little different,

but, but that's from, that's not, that's, uh, nurture, not nature. Yeah, There's different things. When you train really hard, your blood becomes a bit more dilute.

So the plasma volume expands so it can flow easier. So the count to drop. There's loads. It's amazing. It's amazing. I wrote my PhD, I put out the start. It was a physiologist from the 1800s, a pathophysiology said, blood cells are like cut flowers.

They don't last. But it's a tribute to nature's a recondite harmony, despite life's perturbations, they're maintained with the narrow limits. So your body is constantly regulating everything all the time, which is amazing. So if things jump out of range, then you know what's significant. And what we do is, you know, when was the last time you got a blood test? Like a month ago.

Okay. And when you got the results back, there were. Oh, my God. I mean, we did 15 vials. I got this crazy doctor. Oh, yeah. I'm like in this concierge level of doctoring now. It's pretty fancy.

White glove. Yeah, it's pretty crazy. You get a round of flowers from they gave you a little. Exactly. And I did, my wife sends me for this thing. They took, I think, 15 vials. They did every, the woman at the blood testing place was like, what is going on? Are you okay?

Like, I've never seen this before, and I'm like, yeah, this is just rich people problems where, like, they literally are testing me for everything. Like, I'm an athlete, like, and I'm like, yeah, no, I had a cruller this morning. And I'm trying coffee. Before your test? No, no, no, I did right after. Good. Good. Good.

Good. Good. Like, just right. Yeah, so, like, it's, yeah, it's amazing, really. Like, the, what? So what about this nature versus nurture thing? We're bouncing around here a bit, but I'm curious if, uh, if, uh, And I know it's a little bit third rail,

but there's clearly different genetics lead to different abilities. That's proven. And does that go to blood? There's a genetic component to performance for sure. And like you'll see like the one of the first, like my PhD supervisor was Professor Craig Sharp, who,

who held the records, the fastest sentiment Kilimanjaro, was a Nobel Prize winning research contributor in veterinary science and then what's the fastest land animal? Well, most people would say the cheetah. How do you know?

Yeah, I don't. Because Craig basically was a vet in Kenya, hand-timed his own pet cheetah three times over 200 yards, average the time. And if you look up Guinness Worldbrook Records, maybe the guys might want to do it. It'll be Craig. So he was my, I was his last PhD

and he was like the Yoda of sports science. Really? And he had a pet cheetah. He had a pet cheetah, yeah. Kind of baller. He was a vet, like, yeah, he was amazing. Yeah. I mean, as far as being a vet goes, fringe benefits, pet cheetah?

Yeah. It's up there. Amazing. And, like, can you imagine just saying, so slab of meat over the back and then gun on the Jeep? Kind of like, that's how they did the timing. So it's like, I would not want to be in a Jeep.

Back to the future. Try, you're getting chased by a cheetah. Kind of like the start of every nightmare I've ever had. Yeah. So, like, um, created amazing work in, in, in Kenya. and like there's definitely like East African athletes

so Kenya and Ethiopia are very good at longer distance typically, now that's not to say you can be good at you can't be a good sprinter from East Africa but equally the sprinters

are coming from West Africa and there's a genomic component of it and so there's a lot of tests now at the moment to say or I'll test my kids and I've got the ACE2 gene for like insurance or

but I think it's not that's kind of oversimplifying it. I think it's not just if you have the genes it's whether they're switched on or not. Got it. So it's having the gene if you're switched on, and then there's if you tap into those genes.

Gene expression in context. And I think in the future it'll be it's like psycho-neuroimminology, thoughts and feelings, impacting your nervous system, impacting your immune system, your gut microbiome. But for that, we've got experts in it, like Professor Carl Schoiga handles all our genomic stuff. He's a lot smarter than me. And then Professor John Newell does all our data science because we get very excited from time to time over a new finding. And he just goes, no, when he runs the stats. whereas we come back

and then he'll but when he gets excited then we get excited what is the takeaway that people are using most let's take

you know Premier League or NBA is it how often to play players or diet or sleep what are the things that you've had

the biggest impact on as a company I think there's the really exciting or the very interesting ones have been times where we flagged a player

that they're risk of illness or injury is going up and they get sick or hurt. Interesting. So you could predict that somebody might get hurt, tear an ACL or tear their Achilles because they're weak? It's more to say that they're, you can't say like you're going to tear an Achilles,

but you can say that your risk profile is going up because you're under recovered and your system is under huge pressure. So like it's a combination of how this all started. Mark Stein did an amazing article. on us in the New York Times that talked about this work and JJ Barreya had kind of talked about him being

flagging and he was feeling fatigued and then had a soft tissue injury. So there's a lot of folks that'll say. So when fatigued, injury risk goes up. Obviously illness risk goes up. But illness is going to pass. Yeah. Injury is going to last.

Yeah, absolutely. It depends. And there's amazing practitioners in the league. Like you've got Alex McKechnie and Toronto Raptors. Like Casey, Andy Barr, who was at the the Knicks. It's a like we talk about the if your car, like the the chassis has to be like set up properly. Yeah. But if there's an imbalance and then you put torque through it, then boom, things are going to go pop. Yeah. So it's kind of used to be, you know, robust and strong. And then

our work then helps you figure out like when to put the foot down or when it back off. Got it. So. And what impact does alcohol have on all of this? Yeah. They get slows recovery really significantly. and which upsets me to say as an Irishman. Yeah. I'm kind of broken up, but we're kind of having them. I know you're the Kleenex over here, but a pint is not going to help the situation, period.

No, I mean, it's about balance. Like, yeah, I wouldn't have an issue with the player having a pint. It's more, if there's a lot of pints,

because it's not just slowing down your regeneration also impact your sleep. I don't know if you notice off your Fitbit. If you have a couple of glasses of wine. Oh my God. It's terrible for me. Terrible for me. Yeah. So,

I'm glad. I mean, if I drink, like, I'm a lightweight, but sometimes I'll have one of those McAllen 18s or something, you know, like a nice scotch or something. Oh, my Lord. Yeah, it really does impact on you. I mean, if I have two of those, my sleep, I'm like three hours in, I'm tossing and turning.

It's terrible. What about cannabis? Because a number of people in the league, like Steve Kerr, have been proponents of it, taking all these anti-inflammatory drugs like Alonzo Morning and Patrick Ewing and that generation of centers were taking. Motrin or whatever ibuprofen like it was M&Ms they said giant boles of them could not have been healthy for them could lead to kidney failure I heard or something

can cause kidney issues it rips through your gut lining you know it cause a lot of problems and and cannabis has some anti-inflammatory properties or too soon to tell I think it's it's very early there's some interesting trials particularly

around pain management for cancer patients and so like I mean there's obviously really important work happening there for athletes the big concern or is using CBD type products as if you would if it gets contaminated and you pop a drug test so something to be kind of ridiculous that it's becoming legal in the majority of states in America and then you're forcing NBA players who live in those states to not be allowed to use it on the federal level yeah and suspending them if they do use it when this is likely, or all indications are that this is certainly better than taking OxyConnor

Perkissette, which I also understand are like M&Ms in the league and are passed around, like, as such. Well, I think you have to be weird, really lucky in the last week or so, Joe Dumars. Join your board. He's joined our board. Yeah. Bad boy pistons. Absolutely.

But he's a gentleman. He's such a nice man. He is now. Yes. Yeah, I mean, age will take the edge off, but. She was a gent and obviously amazing. Just watch out for elbows in the boardroom, quite literally. Right, when we got back from the break, I want to know how you landed Joe and what impact he'll make.

And then also get back to this, what things should be legal, what things should not be legal in terms of getting an edge with your biology on this week's startups. Do you average eight hours of sleep a night? That's what I'm trying to do. And you know what else I'm trying to do? I'm trying to eat more plants. I want that plant-based diet. I eat guy lawn. I'm eating some broccoli.

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Health IQ.com slash twist. It's an incredible service. And if you're not working out four times a week, come on. It's 2020. Let's do this, people. All right, let's get back to this amazing episode. All right, Brian Moore is here with us, CEO founder of Oric O. O'R-O. O'R-E-C-O.com. It's Dr. Brian Moore, because my mom will kill me if she said you work too hard for that, PhD, not to have it mentioned. Dr. Brian Moore, Ph.D. Congratulations. That's amazing. Mr. McCabe.

So what should be legal, what shouldn't be legal when it comes to athletes? Obviously, swapping out your blood that you trained at a higher level feels like cheating to me, but training at a higher elevation does not. Yes. Are we in sync all that? Absolutely. Okay. Whatever you could eat in nature seems legal to me.

but if something is in a lab that contains hormones is that is taking hormones something that you shouldn't be allowed to do like testosterone so hormones should not be allowed but precursors to hormones things that facilitate the creation of hormones okay or not okay to be honest I think there's a very fine line between pushing the boundaries and cheating. And it goes against the spirit of the sport. And like for me, like I helped in my early days,

I helped validate the EPO tests. Yeah. What is that EPO? Evertipo. Evertis a hormone that's producing the kidney. It makes your long bones produce red blood cells. If you've got more red blood cells, you've got a bigger engine and you can go for longer.

Right. And it kind of ruins sport in the 90s. Right. This is what Lance Armstrong and many other cyclists were taking. Absolutely. And you would take these as a shot? Yeah, they were taking them as a shot. And what would do would be it would basically accelerate red cell production.

And then when you stop taking it, it decelerates. So your marrow pretty much shuts down. But cyclists and runners and endurance athletes, blood was becoming so thick that they were literally dying at night time. They were of heart attacks. Because EPO would put too many red blood cells in. said before that the Kenyans or the Ethiopians had thin blood running. Everybody who works hard, trains hard, the blood becomes more dilute to help it to flow easier so you can deliver the oxygen.

So I helped validate the model because people would say, oh, my numbers are off because I went to altitude and I've just come back from three weeks in the mountains. So I said, okay. And I was getting fed up of people beating athletes that I knew were competing cleanly and fairly to do that. So Sonia was another amazing example. She was robbed through the 90s. And one of the other challenges about it,

well, I think one of the self... Well, you're also up against these other countries like Russia or North Korea or China who maybe don't have the same ethical or moral compass we are in this. Well, I think you, if you... Did you see the Icarus documentary? You know, I'm halfway through it.

I forgot to finish it. It's like, go back and check it. Yeah, I got to finish it. It's like, if you read that in a Grisham novel, you'd be like, nah, it's too far-fetched. Right. So, like, um... I mean, the basic gist of it is

Putin wanted to win. He was endorsing this. Well, sport is a play, like it can be a play thing internationally and politically. So, yeah, for like the sad thing about drugs, I think, is that it's difficult sometimes to look at something in amazing performance and not ask questions. That's the kind of takes the good out of it. I do believe it is possible to compete, cleanly and fairly and win. Like, it was one person, I got a bit disenfranchised for a time at the, in Olympic sport, but there was one person that really, that actually rekindle the spirit for me. I was working with people that were coming second, third, fifth, sixth.

I was like, is it possible to win? And then Ashton Eaton, the US, the Catalyst. The first time I saw him in Oregon in about 2010, I think, I was like, oh my God, who is that? He was just running. I was like, this. He looks amazing. And he ended up breaking the world record in the Catalan, retained his title, like, went twice. It was before that.

It was 2000. And he was clean. Yeah, absolutely, cleanly and fairly. Of the last 20 years, less 30 years, since the 80s, I think this all started. started in the 80s, right? A lot of it. I mean, like there's, when you were in school, there was always a kid who was going to cut a corner.

You know, I think there's always... That kind of was me, but okay. Thanks for calling out of it. But yes, there was a kid in my class. It was cutting corners. They looked like you. Guilty ass charge. But, you know, so it's in nature.

And I think if you go back to Greek times, there was, you know, there was in, there was things, there was substances being used. For us, we're all about, clean sport, like work into the limits of your potential and then often these athletes are absolutely wired to overreach. So a byproduct of people taking

drugs is people who are clean have to train so much harder to try and compete against them, then they get hurt. Ah, right. So that's the killer. Wow, that stinks. Of medals won in the Olympics over the last four decades, 80s, 90s, aughts and the teens, is that right? Of those four decades, up till now,

what percentage of those medals and the athletes who won them do you think were doping? I couldn't honestly say, I don't know, I do know there's some really good people working in the space. Like I left in 2002, I said, I want to help people go faster without cheating. But people like Mike Ashton and Rob Parasato,

he wrote an amazing book called Blood Sports. That's one to check out if you're interested in this. I couldn't say, that's the thing. That's the sad thing. Right, nobody knows. No. But every year you have dozens of people disqualified in the drug testing process. And if dozens are getting tested or getting caught, that means dozens are getting through.

Yeah, absolutely. That's a kind of a known failing. Now, they are getting smarter in terms of, like, there's a whereabout system where you have to be guarantee where you are an hour of every day in the Olympics. And if you've missed three of those tests, then you can, that's a failed test. So they're working on their. trying. But I think my biggest thing is for the sporting public is to believe what you're seeing. And that's the sad thing about drugs and sport, aside from the health risks.

And there were some studies done of, you know, abnormal samples of, like, in blood profiling in some endurance sports. But again, I'm really focusing on the ones that are clean and want to be the best they can be. have you started to look into the impact of impact in sports? People don't think of basketball as a high-impact sport, but obviously there's now a concussion protocol, and we've been seeing more and more of that. There's obviously industries like ACLs and knees and meniscus

and all that kind of stuff, very well-known stuff. But contact and concusses. is a major part of the protocol now. Have you started to think about that in terms of your models? We have, we would partner with different research groups so because it's so broad and such a

wide area and obviously we're early stage business so we're really focused in on the getting the biomarkers right, building the ML analysis to build the recommended systems to help an athlete. And then we'll feed off the latest research in if it's a concussion

if there's blood-based biomarkers the degree of it or if there is research to minimize the impacts of concussion like evidence-based then we'll look at that too. So it's really we're kind of like trying to, I suppose, be that kind of assistant coach for the client to say, okay, have you looked at this? And then here to take this to your medical team. Has there been something that's come out of the machine learning part of this? I'm not sure where you're at in terms of dumping data into an algorithm and seeing what comes

out. But a lot of times people say, you know, we're not sure exactly why the algorithm gave us this answer. It doesn't actually explain it. It just analyzes the data and says, here's the next video you should watch. Yeah. And why it's telling you to watch that video, it may or not, YouTube in that example may or may not know why that came up and why the algorithm said to do it because the data sets are so ginormous. Yeah. And it may not actually be a healthy reason.

So are you using machine learning to that level yet? and have there been things that have come out as recommendations or insights that are confusing or surprising? Definitely. So, I mean, this is where. And what are they? It's like our data science is led by Professor Newell, a mathematician in Ireland, and we have a data science team working on this. And we're less of a big data, but it's small data, but it's really rich data sets that we can really dig into it and use supervised and unsupervised learning. And sometimes on the on the unsupervised learning, players cluster.

and you don't know why. And that allows us to go and dig in a bit deeper. Define unsupervised learning. So it's like that we're using basically the algorithms are picking out of selecting cohorts of athletes to that are clustering around similar kind of characteristics. Got it. And so rather than we're just using the, we're not using the input on the output. We're just looking exactly at just here's a dataset, cluster the athletes. and certain athletes that are performing extremely well

and there's other athletes that aren't performing very well and that's where you start to dig in and then you start seeing things like compromise immunity or their muscle damage is extremely high but they've had the same load so you try to understand it's about being a 24 hour athlete it's not about just okay I've played X number of minutes

and that's where the really interesting insights are coming out and then we can use this intervention with you so we can hit you with the immunical we can use your antisinus whatever but some athletes will respond to it, some won't. So it's just about finding what works for you. Fascinating. So the algorithm might just say,

hey, here are two buckets of athletes. They all had similar playing time. You pivoted on playing time. But the result is these ones are performances off and these ones performance is crisp. Yeah. And then it's left for you to find out what happened when they're not in the game.

Yeah. And the sleep tracker might give you some insights. That gives some insights as well. and their food diary or if there's stress at home or, you know, sponsor pressure or so we work with their athletes agents as well to help understand that. Got it. It's because the agents might be able to be a bridge to say, hey, your performance is a little bit off.

Yeah. Yeah, you were, and it's interesting how your performance in Miami and New York seemed to be off, but when you're in Milwaukee and, yeah, and these other cities seem to be getting trying, you seem to be getting to bed on time, but for some reason, It must be time zones you're crossing, I think. Well, it was known for Michael Jordan,

I mean, when he would be going to Vegas and playing blackjack until four or five in the morning and then still beating, you know, or going to Atlanta City and then coming back and beating the Knicks. There were stories of him helicoptering down there, playing Blackjack all night, coming back and just destroying the Knicks the next day. Like, amazing players can do amazing things. What we're trying to do is to say,

allow them to do that for as long as possible. So extend the Blackjack session. Absolutely, yeah. Yeah, it's a delicate discussion. because you do as an athlete get to have a life. You have to have a life. But the athletes who really do well, like Kobe, rest in peace, they sacrificed a lot in terms of, you know, when they weren't on the court, just how they worked out.

Is there a point at which people are working out too much? Is the Kobe work ethic where he was, you know, just obsessive? Are you getting to the point where you're telling some people to back off the workout? Yeah, absolutely. There's a point at which the law diminishing marginal returns applies where you put more in and you get less back and using the buyer markers. And so I talked about your individual threshold. So using the streaming algorithms, we'll find out what's normal for you. And then once you stay within that zone, you're fine. If you start to test the limits, it's kind of like a put or a call option on your portfolio. This is where I'm happy. But if it goes outside that, then the risk is rocketing. Yeah. So, but if you can, and you can say that to you. player but if you can show them. So we'll have indications where, and these guys and girls are wired to overreach. They got to where they are by working extremely hard. And we're not saying don't work hard. It's just like work smart and work hard at the right times. And I just saw a quote from Kobe. And you talk about like the power of sport and out like outpouring of grief from around the

world. But he said that I am, so quote he said, look, I with his young family, the kids were waking up and I was there in the morning and I was there when they go to sleep, I just chose to sacrifice sleep. And we now know the impact of sleep. Right. Then, you know, that does have a... I did see that same quote where he worked out with weights, drove his kids to school, got in a helicopter, worked out, took the helicopter back.

Yeah. And that was the origin of the helicopter for him was I wanted to just pick my kids up from school and be able to be there for them. Yeah. And drop them off and pick them up from school and then still get the workouts in. Yeah. I mean, the work ethic was insane. Talk to me about continuous glucose and monitoring glucose.

Are players doing that yet where they put the pin in them and they continually monitor their glucose? And is that important for you as a data set to know their glucose levels all the time? Yeah. And what impact does sugar have? And what's, is it, you know, is that sugar addiction that everybody has and some athletes have? Is that really dangerous? We don't use like CGM for our athletes all the time. We know obviously a lot of folks are doing it to understand to regulate.

Continuous glucose matter. Exactly. Yeah. And particularly when they're maybe doing like fasting or trying to get into ketosis or there. So we have a whole nutrition team that will work with each individual player and find out, look, what do they like and dislike? The biggest thing we find is what's a habit you can stick with. And like with respect to, you know, if for day to day walking around with the, um CGM it's not practical for an NBA player so they they have a dedicated team of

nutritionists that will look look at their sugar intake we don't want buckets of sugar obviously some of them some of the athletes will um we'll will all their fueling is completely individualized so in the off season maybe we'll um do some sweat patch monitoring we'll do um hydration testing maybe we'll do um we'll monitor them every day with the with the antioxin defenses and the free radical in a really heavy phase of training just to see how their body is responding and it was very interesting with one player who was trying to make it back to the league

and was just literally pushing, pushing, pushing. We showed them their numbers. They were really pushing the threshold and we're outside, they were in their risk window of getting hurt. And when we showed them objectively the day that they backed off, came back four days later and hit PBs.

So sometimes like personal bests. Oh personal best, yeah. So for them, like it's, these are finely tuned to athletes. They're working at the, peak of their powers and it's trying to get realistic inputs, things that they can actually do. Do you believe

in this load time in relation to the longevity of the athlete? Because now we're looking at people like LeBron at 35 and I guess he got in the league at 18 or something. Yes. And so, you know, can he make it to 38? Can he make it to 40, 42? We had Vince

Carter play for four decades or something crazy. Or play in four decades. I mean, it's really three, but is there a correlation between the minutes per game and the longevity? Can that be proven yet? I think it's down to what we spoke about, where it's what's the impact on you? What are you doing outside of the game to promote your own recovery?

You know, LeBron famously spends a million dollars plus on his body every year. And like we've had like, for example, golfers as an example, where they can maintain one of our clients is Potter Carrington, three-time major winner, writer cup captain for Europe for this upcoming tournament and his club has to be in ball speed is as fast as it was five or six years ago

so it is possible with you know with diligent training and recovery to to maintain it doesn't have to be down on you think someone like LeBron James or other athletes who are not centers you know not seven footers but you know forwards and guards what do you think the upper limit in the NBA will be now that we're moving

to this level of data science that's a really good question I can see, well, first of all, is the drive of the athlete. These guys are insatiable drive and they also adapt their game like you were showing a clip. So like I can see like players

hitting the 40s, 41, 42 you know, doing that. And like as long as they're taking care of their body and that the way, but the game is changing as well in terms of the speed of it and how it's structured. And Darrell Morris is doing interesting things

in terms of. I know. I'm going to be in Houston. I just DMed him. I was like, hey, remember you said if I'm ever in Houston? I'm in Houston the night of the Clippers versus rockets.

That's going to be a hell of a game. So you started this company in Ireland? Started in Ireland, yes. How many years ago? It's just on 10 now. And you funded it yourself or you took some personal loans? Yeah, we bootstrapped and then took, kind of sold everything I had and got started and it was in the teeth of the recession. So got a European Investment Bank loan, Enterprise Ireland, matched fun with this.

They were brilliant. And this is like what? the million, two million dollar range? Yeah, we raised, we've only raised like 5.5 to days. Wow. And because in, how many employees now? We've got 30 employees now. Oh, wow.

So super capital efficient. Absolutely. 16 PhDs on our staff. Yeah. 16. Yeah. Yeah, my job is to hire very clever people. Break even yet or getting close?

Right. I break even now. Fantastic. Congratulations. A big milestone. And you took a personal loan, a personal guarantee on these lines. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah.

Everything. Really. Talk about skin in the game. All in. You wouldn't believe, yeah, it's all in for sure. I mean, I talked to American founders and they're just like, yeah, you know, I got to shut the company down. And the company can't pay me $180,000 or $190,000 a year. And I'm like, okay, sounds okay.

Like, yeah, I'd rather just shut it down. And I'm like, you're making $200,000 a year at a startup? And they're like, yeah, well, when I was at Facebook, I made $3.50. And it's like, okay. Yeah, yeah, I guess you should shut it down and I should I move on. Yeah. It's a, I mean, I was really blessed to have some. It's scary, though, for you to put that personal guarantee in.

Yeah. You're on the hook for a millie? Oh, well, half a million. Look, I think I have a very understanding and wife as well, and my girlfriend at the time. And we just said, look, I have to do this. There's just no other way. This has to, I needed to get this information out. Like, when I was a kid, I remember missing a whole summer because I had a problem my knee.

And the local physiotherapist, look, it was to the kind of limit of what they'd been exposed to. When I got to London, physio went, hang on, this, this, bang, and I was back. And I remember thinking, getting so frustrated, like that your geography shouldn't dictate to you what the caliber of information that you can get to. So why shouldn't I get access to an Olympic coach? And I kind of smashed myself for training. Like I got glandular fever.

Like I just ran myself into the ground. I used to run it with the Kenyans. I would like, there be 10 Kenyans in the line and me at the back or the red face just hanging in for dear life. But like, I was like, we should be able to get this information to people. And that's kind of what started. And then we work with female athletes. and now the even huge opportunity on the female side of you.

Have you looked at tennis? We just started, actually. Yeah, that seems to me, because I'm just thinking where the most money is at stake. There's a lot of money in NBA, Premier League, golf and tennis. Golf? Golf. Serious money, but does, I mean, they're swinging that little stick and hitting that little ball? I mean, how much is involved?

Like, does it actually matter? Oh, I mean, I, look, when we started this, I got the miss of the decisive. you're going to work with the international sailing team. And I threw all my toys out of the frown. I thought, what? Does anyone know what I do in this place? Sailing, I was like, what am I going to do? How difficult is it to like cut some cheese and open a bottle of Chardonnay on the deck of a sailing ship?

That's not work. I had the joke with the athletes that I say it was the time. I said, less gin, more tonic. Exactly. More gin, less tonic. There we go. But, you know, don't you guys sit down all the time? And when I went down, it was Dr. Pete Cunningham, who did work with the Artemis America

Cup Challenger here in San Francisco. Those guys are doing work. Amazing. And I put the kid on, went down out in the boat. I was like, oh, my God, you can see they're on the water for six hours. You know, if they're doing America's Cup, there's a lot of transatlantic flying. It was really difficult. Oh, you know what?

MMA and boxers are the other one. Boxers are a lot at stake. Yeah. Like anyone, but I would argue that we all, like, we only get it so many days on the planet. If you look at, like, everything that we're doing should be around for each one of those days to be as good as possible. And why shouldn't you have that information to you that'll help that the best, athletes are using. You ever consider moving the company here to America and being closer to the,

you know, the NBA and the, your clients? Yeah, I'm relocating now this to, to LA in the next, in the next month with my wife and our little, little fellow, Dahi.

Fantastic. Yes. I lived in LA for 10 years. It's amazing. It's a great spot. You're going to love it. I mean, it's going to be a little weird for you because it's warm every day.

I know. Like literally, it's going to get to 55 one day and everybody's going to be talking about how cold it is. And they can't take it. And you're going to want to, you're going to laugh. We work with Dr. Patrick, Kazarin in the Valley.

He's in SRLA, and we have a lot of the athletes who would come there in the off season. And I thought we'd land in the sun. It was so hot, you know, for an Irish person. But it's kind of nice over there now because they got rid of the smog issues. Pacific Palisades, also very nice. I lived in Brett Wood when I lived there. But Pacific Palisades, a lot of athletes and folks live there. That's a nice place to live.

You know where you're going to put your office? Or is it going to just be a small team? We have the office in the valley in the high performance center. Oh, and we'll... Studio City area? It'll be in Encino. Oh, Encino. But then you should live in the Valley.

Yeah. Yeah. Because you don't want to... Happiness is... Happiness in Los Angeles. Yeah. Is living within 10 minutes of your work, 15 minutes you work. If you live in Pacific Palisades and had to get to the valley every day, it's 10 miles or 15...

It's going to be... An hour and a half, two hours. It's going to be a disaster. I mean, this is why Kobe got a helicopter is because he was trying to be... This is why Elon is building tunnels. He literally started a company because he was going crazy on the 405, going to SpaceX. I'm maybe I can borrow your chopper. You know, I have been in a chopper a couple times, and I gave a big speech to all my friends,

you know, five, ten years ago about their private aviation use, and they kind of gave me a hard time. And I said, listen, helicopters, I looked at the action tariff. These things are much super dangerous. And, you know, it's really important to study why these accidents occur. And when you look at this accident specifically, I think what everything is, you know, thing will show is this pilot, if he was with a co-pilot and didn't have a celebrity, you know, boss, customer, client, whatever the relationship was, I think he was his regular pilot. You know, the two pilots probably would look at each other and say, this is probably not worth it.

Let's land in Van Nuys and drive the rest of the way and get an Uber, get a car. And I've seen it up close and personal where the celebrities, the pilots sometimes can defer to their celebrity power customers, clients, or clientele because they don't want to disappoint them. And that's really dangerous. And there's no reason to fly into like that kind of, what do they call it, soup, like just fog. And it's clear like this could have been avoided and the other people were not flying in this. It's all sad, really. Yeah, it's just tragic, you know, and the majority of these crashes occur before they take off is what they always say. And the big disease is get theiritis, like we have to get there.

And, you know, this is one of those ones that's going to clearly be, who knows, we'll see when all this stuff comes out. But I obsessively watch these YouTube channels where they talk about, and the pilots deconstruct these. There's a couple of these channels that deconstruct the accidents. and I'm just fascinated by it, and especially helicopters. And, you know, one pilot, and weather conditions and taking off when you shouldn't, whether it was JFK Jr., going to Martha's Vineyard, or this case, there's just a judgment error that occurs because of get theiritis. And you were talking before about who, because people are attracted,

because these people are incredible athletes, you know, and they drive themselves, you know, people who are incredible, business people who drive themselves, et cetera, athletes, stars, they sometimes just take unnecessary risk. And I was at dinner with a bunch of people who are doing hellas skiing and who scuba dive past, you know, 100 feet. And I just said to them, I said, you know, you got kids. You've been doing this for a long time.

It's really high risk behavior, which is why when you get life insurance, did you get life insurance ever? Yeah. You know the section that asks you if you helloski? Yeah. Or ask you if you scuba dive? Yeah. There's a reason they're asking you on the life insurance.

for him about those two specific activities. Heliskiing. Helicopter plus mountain, plus mountain, plus wind and snow? Yeah. Terrible idea. And every year, tragically, rich people go up in these helicopters and they roll down the mountains and they die. I'm a beginner slope kind of guy.

And then you look at scuba diving. There's nothing that you see at 30, 40 feet down. That's different than 100 feet down. And they were like, oh, dolphins. I'm like, how many times you've seen dolphins your lives? Hundreds. Hundreds of dolphins. I'm like, 400th Dolphin, any different than the 200th?

Answer is no. Right? Yeah. So don't do it. I'm not doing it. I'm just trying to get through to you here. Come on, Brian. No, I'm really talking to a lot of my friends because there's a term here in Silicon Valley,

they call toxic wealth. Okay. And what it is is people all of a sudden become very affluent and rich. This isn't applied to Kobe. This is a separate phenomenon. And this is a different type of tragedy, which is somebody gets rich, what's the first thing they do? They go buy a Ferrari. And then they hit the gas paddle and you, just a top speed.

You want to see what it can do. And the guy from Eagle Computers, you know the founder of Eagle Computers? No. The reason you don't is because after his IPO, he bought a Ferrari and killed himself and his lawyer on the way to the IPO party. And he just flipped a Ferrari. And Elon got that goddamn McLaren, which was a three-seater. He would drive in the middle. And I remember when he had the car.

And I remember when he sold it. Like, that car is too fast for people, for any human. Like, it should only be on a track on McLaren at that level, that million-dollar McLaren. Have you ever been to McLaren to the setup there? No. Oh, it's amazing. Is it? Where is it based?

It's in walking in London, just outside London. And it's like, what I imagine walking into the Death Star was like, it was just, it was so immacquately engineered there's some very clever people working there yeah and you know Elon

very famously spun that car out with Peter Thiel and it going off an exit ramp on the 280 I think you know in Palo Alto

and he did like some crazy you know amount of damage to the car thankfully he survived but man to realize that's a

like an analogy we use for the athletes that imagine if you get two cars and you go down to you buy a Ferrari and you go to Marinello and say, say that we all go.

Yeah. Charlie and Mark and we go, let's go. And we all get, but the rule is, whoever finishes 20 laps gets to keep the car. But the only kind of rule is that you've got to max it. You've got to gun the car. Yeah. All right. And so, and whoever survive.

But we don't know which one's got no oil in it. We don't know which one's got low tire pressure. And that's the kind of analogy with our athletes. Right. That you've got like phenomenal assets and you yourself are like, you're your own corporation effectively in many ways and that if you don't take those inputs it's like gunning the ground in the

without knowing the tread on the tire and you can blow one of those out and the car flips and you know now you've got a somebody on a hundred million, 250 million. I don't know what the biggest contract in the league is now but it's getting towards 300 million now. Yeah there's like I mean the contracts are yeah I think

yeah you know like there was five years at 40 million a year yeah there was three I think it wasn't a $3.3 billion, or over 2 billion of contracts, guaranteed contracts written this summer in a matter of days. So, I mean, it's an amazing industry. But that, again, that's why it's so critical

that the athletes are minding themselves. All right, well, listen, congratulations on a decade of grinding through this and hitting success. Well, with help, like I said, we got support from, like I said, E.I, True Ventures came in very, very early. Oh, really, True Ventures? Yeah, so.

Who Tony Conrad? Phil Black. Oh, cool. Came in and... Was that the Series A or something? Series A, yeah. When did you do that? We did it just two years ago.

We're doing a B now. Okay. In this quarter. Maybe you save a slice for J-Cal. Maybe I can sneak in there and do a quick five-hundy. Well, you are Irish, so... I'm Irish.

I can sneak my way on that cap table. We'll get a pine. We'll talk about it later. Once again, this weekend startup's a front for me to weasel my way and get that little tiny slice of that cap table. I don't need a big slice. That's what I would tell people.

Well, to match your quads. To match by John. I need a tiny slice. That's it. I don't need a big slice of one company. A little tiny slices here. Make a living. All right, listen, you've been a great guest.

Thanks for coming on the pod. Thanks for reaching out to me when I was sick. It did work though, didn't it? Yeah, you pointed me towards, I guess we can mention the product. It's called Immunical. Immunical. It's made by a private company. Immunatech out of Canada.

Mutatech out of Canada. On the natured weight protein. So we don't, we basically go source. the best in class around the world. Use sources or do the nutritionists on the teams already do it? Nutritionists on our team did it and we share it with this. There are nutritionists using it around the, but we've kind of published on it.

That's the other thing. We've 300 peer review papers. 300, another one out today. Because that was the, I looked at, I saw your Theranos behind us. Bill Browder and one of the things,

like it was Professor Craig Sharp and then Carla Bernhardt, we spoke to him and I said, Carlo, was this real? He's like, there's no way, microfluidics can do what they say it can do. Microfluidics. Oh, you mean, there are noes.

Yeah, yeah. Yeah, I mean, listen, there are breakthroughs. And typically when there's a breakthrough, people can explain it. Yeah. And if you can't explain the breakthrough, like, if you ask Elon about self-driving and cameras versus LIDAR, he will give you an in-depth reasoning of why he believes 20 cameras are better than LIDAR. And we'll be able to get to self-driving and autopiliting better.

And here's his reasoning. With Theranos, when you asked her to explain it, she would just talk in generalities and not let you see the machine. So you just knew it was a fraud. And ironically, when you read the book, it was the same kit we used as the Siemens analyzer that was at the back. Yeah. They literally were running people's test results in a bogus machine,

taking the blood to the back room, putting the result into their bogus Fugazi machine. Yeah. Oh, my God. Well, listen, you're a great guest. Everybody follow Orico Bryan. O-R-R-E-O-R-E-O-R-E-O-R-E-O-R-E-O-R-E-O-C-O-R-E-O-R-E-O-R-S-SOR. Engineering, sports scientists.

Great. What a great company to work for. All right. And I got a text from Mark. He said he was listening to the private stream, and he asks, Jason, I'm so impressed how your bullishness on Tesla has paid off, in your opinion. What is your best Tesla rant you ever did? Oh, thanks, Mark.

It's a great question. I thought this was for you, Brian, but I would say my best. one according to the guys in the control room they pulled up this one and thanks for the question mark is this rant and I'll just end with that we'll see you all next time on the street concerns it's the product stupid the product the model three is the greatest car ever made hands down period and if the product's that good someone like Elon Musk who can land two rockets simultaneously back from space is going to figure out how to get from 3,000 cars to 4,000 to 5,000 the fact

that people are so critical of Tesla and Elon is just the nature of the fact that Elon sets incredible goals that are industry changing. He's changed the entire automotive industry. They laughed at him, and now they're all chasing him. So people are going to throw rocks at you for trying to change the world, but at the end of the day, it's the product, stupid. Look at the product. It is transcendent.