We Study Billionaires - The Investor’s Podcast Network - TIP434: The Billionaire's Peak Performance Playbook W/ Louisa Nicola

Starting point is 00:00:00 You're listening to TIP. A quick note before we start today's episode, Clay, Robert, and I will be attending the Berkshire Hathaway shareholder meeting on April 30th. If you don't know Clay and Robert, be sure to check them out on our millennial investing show. This event is often referred to as the woodstock of capitalism and takes place in Omaha, the birthplace of both Charlie Munger and Warren Buffett. For those who aren't familiar, all you need to attend is to be an owner of one Berkshire B-Share. Also, each shareholder is a shareholder is a new shareholder. entitled to a maximum of four meeting credentials. So if you're not currently a shareholder,

Starting point is 00:00:34 you may be able to attend through someone you know. We'll be sending details on this to our email subscribers soon in case you're interested in meeting up with us. We'll see you there. My guest today is neurophysiologist and billionaire coach Louisa Nicola. Louisa founded neuroathletics to provide scientific strategies to help athletes and investors achieve peak performance. In this episode, we discuss why sleep is the lead domino for health and performance. what peak performance actually looks like, how inflammation can be good and bad and what to do about it, why the brain likes routine, how to use heat and cold treatments to boost performance, and a whole lot more. I had so much fun with this discussion and I could have talked to Louisa for hours

Starting point is 00:01:17 longer. I learned a lot and I think you will as well. So please enjoy this discussion on peak performance with Louisa Nicola. You are listening to The Investors Podcast, where we study the financial markets and read the books that influence self-made billionaires the most. We keep you informed and prepared for the unexpected. All right, everybody, like I said at the top, I'm here with Louisa Nicola from neuroathletics. Louisa, I'm so happy to have you on the show. Thanks for coming on. No, thank you, Trey. I'm very excited to be here. I really wanted to have this discussion because, as you know, we study billionaires on this show. And what we haven't really explored too much is How billionaires achieve peak performance? I want to kind of understand if you agree with this

Starting point is 00:02:14 sentiment where physiology changes psychology or does psychology change physiology? What's your opinion on that? That's a really strong start. I really do think when you look at brain health and brain science, we do have a bidirectional kind of access there. So the brain changes the body or the brain changes physiology, but also physiology or the body does change the brain. And we're going to get into that later. And this obviously has an effect on exercise and mood, just like behavior changes our psychology and psychology changes our behavior. So it's hard for me to pinpoint which one, you know, starts first. But that's what I know from the art, from the science. And when you find a billionaire that you want to work with and they're trying to achieve peak performance,

Starting point is 00:03:03 let's just start by outlining and defining what peak performance looks like. And especially when it comes to when you're modeling out the brain and looking for certain indicators and you put somebody under a scan and they show up as is. For example, I'm fairly familiar with blood work. And I know the issue with blood work, for example, is that you're kind of getting sort of like a one-time snapshot. And it could change based on if you slept or if you ate something different that day or whatever.

Starting point is 00:03:31 When it comes to the brain, is there that amount of change that happens in the brain on a day-to-day basis? Well, there is. So first of all, let's define what I consider peak brain performance. You know, I started neuroathletics back in 2014. And it really came out of, first of all, my love for neuroscience and neurology and also my love for athleticism. I was an athlete.

Starting point is 00:03:56 And I was performing at what I believed was my peak back then. So when I look or when I talk about peak performance, I like to understand, well, I like to define it as being at your best every day and not feeling lethargic or not feeling down. And I'm sure you've woken up some days and you've thought, I've got brain fog today. I'm tired. Things are just not going well. And sometimes you can't manage your impulses or your reactivity. And this all has, you know, we can have a look at this and think, well, where does this stem from? and we can see that it stems from more often than not the brain.

Starting point is 00:04:34 So, you know, what we do first and foremost with all of our athletes and all of our portfolio managers, investors, is we put them through a brain scan. So we literally put them in a hospital grade EEG, and we find out what areas of the brain are not performing optimally. So you can kind of think about it, like, you know, we've got the frontal lobe of the brain, which is where all of our executive functions live.

Starting point is 00:05:00 attention, etc. Then you've got the side of the brain. I'm not going to go into all the different loaves. I've got the occipital lobe, the temporal lobe. If you look at all these lobes, they're all responsible for different things. And once we put somebody through this brain scan, we can find out whether these areas or these different subsections of the brain are working at their peak. I haven't met somebody yet with an absolutely brilliant brain. So we can then go through and say, well, this area of the brain isn't working at its peak. Let's put you through a program to get it to work at its peak again. So that's kind of like my thesis.

Starting point is 00:05:37 Everything comes from science and we back everything up with, you know, hospital grade technology. So you really can't lie with some of the things that we do. You mentioned the cravings there when it comes to lack of sleep, which we're going to dig into a lot more. And yes, I've definitely had brain fog. I have two young kids and I attributed to that the lack of sleep. I want to kind of run some other ideas by you just on that note.

Starting point is 00:05:59 And I wanted to see if you had much experience or if you have a lot of knowledge around the limbic system, because I'm under the impression that human brains are highly influenced by even your gut, for example, and you've got some cravings that come from whatever that balance looks like in your body and how your brain can kind of just be looking to solve emotional needs or anything like that when it comes to cravings and all kinds of other stuff through the limbic system. How does that tie into the whole picture there? Well, I mean, I wouldn't go too much into the Olympic system per se, but yeah, there is certain neurons in the brain that are responsible for turning on and turning off dopamine, for example. And we know that we've got, you know, specific neurons that when you have an artificial sweetener or even sugar of some kind, it does have this massive release of dopamine. And it kind of makes you want to have more of that. And your neurons, without any fault of your own, it's just on a subconscious level. kind of craves them even more. That's why you find yourself reaching for sugary snacks. And this

Starting point is 00:07:06 often happens when we are in a sleep deprived state. And the way I like to describe this to a lot of my clients is you always want to shield yourself or your brain so it doesn't go into this default network. So what do I mean by that? Well, I say to them you always want to be hydrated because as soon as you're a little bit dehydrated, your brain isn't going to be functioning optimally. You always want to be sleeping well. Why? Because when you're in a sleep deprived state, you won't be able to fight off those cravings.

Starting point is 00:07:37 Well, now I'm going to open up a can of worms around hydration. So for that, I'm really curious about hydration as well because Seinfeld had this funny quote, for example, at one point where he said, like, I'm pretty sure my body will tell me I want to drink water well before I get dehydrated, right? And so there's a lot of speculation around how you get dehydrated. hydrated. What are your general thoughts around that? I love this area. So I look at our thesis and your athletics. We've got macronutrients to putting a performance program together. The first one is sleep. The second one is exercise. And the third one is nutrition. We like to outsource a lot of our

Starting point is 00:08:12 nutrition because we're not nutrition based. But one thing that we don't outsource is the hydration protocol. And hydration is so important. And let me explain why. When I look at hydration, Most of us think about water. You've just said, you mentioned water, but I like to look at hydration in terms of electrolytes. So our brain, our brain has cells in them. You've probably heard of them. They're called neurons, nerve cells. And they're aside in our central nervous system, which is our brain and our spinal cord. And what happens is with our neurons, what they do is they fire together. I don't know if you've ever seen the structure of a neuron, but when we're having a thought or we're moving or literally just standing upright, our neurons, we've got billions of them, are creating

Starting point is 00:08:57 these little synapses. So one neuron fires on the other and it creates a synapse or what we call an action potential occurs. And for this to actually occur, for two brain cells to fire together, we have this thing called a sodium potassium pump. So our brain is literally made up. Well, the synapses are made up of electrolytes because what are electricians? When you drink an electrolyte, what is it? It's sodium, potassium, chloride. We actually have these pumps in our brain. So if we are dehydrated, we are going to have information processing speed is going to be lacking.

Starting point is 00:09:34 So we're not going to be as fast to react or think. We might get dizzy depending on how dehydrated you are. So we have a hydration protocol like neuroathletics and we don't just say hydrate with water. No matter what you're doing, no matter even, you know, you could say to me, Louisa, I don't go out and run and sweat. It doesn't matter. Your brain is such a selfish organ. It is eating up so much of your energy.

Starting point is 00:10:00 And the more that you think, the more that you do, the more that you need these electrolytes. So if, you know, I always say it's like a little hack. You should carry around sachets of electrolytes. You should have them throughout the day. Because the moment that you are just even 1% dehydrated, you're going to have thinking problems. If one of my clients has just 1% of a decline in his information processing speed or his thinking or his ability to make sharp decisions, he could lose a lot of money. Yeah, I want to talk about that because you've now not only started out advising and coaching

Starting point is 00:10:36 star athletes, but now hedge fund managers, billion dollar portfolio managers, etc. And I'm kind of curious what you often find when you diagnose or assess. these people first thing. I mean, is because a lot of these billionaires, I know, they're drinking coffee all day, they're drinking Coca-Cola all day, they're not really drinking water. They're not hydrating especially. And I'm kind of curious, what is the typical thing you diagnose first or address first? So let's talk about the life cycle of why somebody would come to me. It's generally through referral-based. Let me give you a K-Sex study. Louisa, I'm 49 years old. I've been at this game now for 20 years of my life. I don't know what's going on. I'm just seeing a decline in my

Starting point is 00:11:20 performance. I've looked at my team. My software's working, but something's going wrong with me and I don't know what it is. I've tried everything. I've consulted with my staff. I've, you know, I've even pulled myself out and let other people make the decisions, but I'm still seeing a decline in my own performance. I'm also getting frustrated and I'm fighting with my wife. I just don't know what to do. That's generally when people come to me. They're making, people don't come to me when they're on top of the world. They come to me when there's a real big problem. And so I go, great, get him in the chair. We're going to scan his brain. And we're looking for so many different things. We do, like I mentioned earlier, we do information processing speed. So we can find out how well your brain's functioning,

Starting point is 00:12:00 how well you're able to make decisions, fast, rapid decisions. We look at memory, like memory decline, mild cognitive impairment. We're looking at the visual system, literally the entire visual acuity. We're looking at everything from how the brain perceives a stimulus in front of them to what it says in your brain. And so many different things come out of this. I remember having, like you just mentioned, I had somebody come in with $5 billion in asset management, and he was freaking out. He had no idea what was happening. And we found that his brain, let's just say he was 49, his brain actually looked like a 65-year-old brain. And we know this because our scans come out through this database called a normative database.

Starting point is 00:12:42 where they scan hundreds of thousands of individuals at all different ages and they say this is what the brain of a 21 year old should look like, etc. This guy literally had aged himself many, many years and it was puzzling because I thought, how does your brain look like this? So then we go through the next step, which is a questionnaire. So we do a lot of clinically relevant questionnaires and you can get these on medical databases. The questionnaire that stood out the most was his sleep questionnaire. So get this train. This guy, 49 years old, from, I would say the age of 30, he has been sleep deprived. And I described sleep deprived as six hours or less per night. And he was sleeping at like, you know, sometimes he was sleeping at 2 a.m. He told me that the market

Starting point is 00:13:31 predicts when he's going to sleep, which is scary for me. He's like, I don't have a set time that I sleep. I don't know, you know, the last time I went to bed at the same time as my wife. Sometimes I'm sleeping at 10 p.m. Sometimes I'm sleeping at 4 a.m. And that is so scary, especially for the brain. So sleep is a huge, huge, huge thing that we implement. It's actually probably the first thing that we implement in any program at neuroathletics. All right.

Starting point is 00:13:58 Well, let's talk a lot about sleep because there's so many different interesting questions around it. And it does seem like it's the first, the lead domino or the first pillar. here that you build off of. So this one I find super fascinating because there's lots of schools of of thought around it and you see different case studies as well out in the field from what you can tell, right? So for example, Jeff Bezos, a billionaire we study quite often, has been outspoken about how he's very protective of his eight hours of sleep. He has to get his eight hours. Whereas someone like Elon Musk, I mean, he's almost on this Uberman routine as it's called where you're like napping, you know, 20 minutes, eight times a day or something just to fall.

Starting point is 00:14:36 in a quick REM sleep. Six hours or less, is that a matter of quantity or quality? Meaning, if you got 20 minutes of REM sleep, is that worth three or four hours on its own? Or do you really need that six to eight hour window just in one fell swoop? Well, there's so many different things that's involved. It's both quality, it's both quantity. Just to piggyback off those two people that you just mentioned, you look at Roger Fedra. He's sleeping 12 hours a night. You look at LeBron. He's sleeping 12 hours a night plus, he's also including a 60 to 90 minute nap whenever he can. And so, I mean, it's no secret. You look around and you see some of the most successful people. I don't know if Warren Buffett, I know you guys, you know, study him and speak about him often. I don't know if

Starting point is 00:15:21 he's ever spoken about his sleep. I think 91 now. He's 92 right now. Yeah, I imagine you take a lot of naps when you're 92. I could be wrong. I mean, who knows. Who knows? But let's talk about a really famous paper that was, it was put out around two or three years ago in a very high stringent journal. It was called PNAS. What they did was they took a group of healthy individuals, okay, and they sleep deprived them for one week. So they had a control group, okay? And the control group was, you know, they'll sleep around. The other group was just going about with their eight hours of sleep, all right? The sleep deprived group only after one week of sleep deprivation, which is six hours or less. Oh my God, Trey, the things that they found from this were absolutely amazing.

Starting point is 00:16:08 What they found was there was an epigenetic change of 711 genes. You think about that for a second. The human genome has around 20,000 genes. We have 20,000 genes in our human genome and they're all responsible for different things. You are changing 711 genes just by one week of sleep deprivation. So that's around, if you do the math, that's around 3% of an epitone. epigenetic change just by sleeping, by depriving yourself of sleep for one week. That's the first thing. But this is what else they found. They looked at these 711 genes and what they found was the ones that are responsible for the growth of new tumor cells were upregulated. And the genes responsible for immunity were downregulated. So this is why when you're stressed or when you're lacking

Starting point is 00:16:57 sleep, you get sick. So I have this theory. Okay. So that's that's really. That's really. really scary to know that we're changing our genome, our actual genes and getting sick and causing diseases by sleeping less. I have this theory and I put out this post. I have a weekly newsletter. I put out this post saying compound interest can be your worst enemy because this gentleman that I was speaking about that came and saw being 49 years old with a 65 year old's brain, your sleep isn't like a bank. It's not like you can, you know, it's not like where you can pay debt back to the bank. It's if you sleep deprive yourself for a week and you suffer this up regulation and down regulation of 711 genes, you don't get that back. Actually, it compounds.

Starting point is 00:17:43 So thinking about this notion of compound interest in finance. And this is what's been happening to him. He's compounding. So he doesn't go on a track to better brain health after that one week. No, he does it again. And it's not like it's just, okay, 711 genes, okay, we're going to start from the start, it keeps compounding and compounding. And what happens over time is you have this underperforming brain and you think to yourself, oh, why am I not thinking properly? Why am I making bad decisions? Why can't I remember faces and names and things like that? That's really scary. So that's the one, that's the first thing. The second thing is let's talk about something really beautiful that happens during sleep. And this goes into the sleep quality. We've got different stages.

Starting point is 00:18:24 We've got four stages of sleep. You've probably heard of deep sleep. And you've also heard, because you've mentioned it, REM sleep, rapid eye movement sleep. Are these things quantified by waves, like actual frequencies of your brain? Absolutely. Yeah. The reason actually why it's called REM sleep is because when you go and do a sleep study, which is what I was doing primarily before I started in your athletics, you put an individual in a polysumography.

Starting point is 00:18:52 It's a PSG or a sleep study. And when they're in REM sleep, you see these horizontal, eye movements. Okay, so it looks like their brain, it's basically mimics being awake, but they're completely paralyzed. So that's why they're called rapid eye movements and they're horizontal. Whereas when we look at deep sleep, which is also known as slow wave sleep, on the EEG, these huge big waves like that.

Starting point is 00:19:19 That's why they would call it slow wave sleep. Now, during this time, so many things happen. And without going into too much of the hormones that are secreted during slow wave sleep, I want to talk to you about this system. It's called the glymphatic system. And the glymphatic system is kind of like a sewage system, but for your brain, you've probably heard of the lymphatic system. A lot of people go and get a lymphatic massage.

Starting point is 00:19:43 I know you're married. Maybe your wife has gone and gotten a lymphatic massage. There's even those brushes before you shower out of the dry brush, right? Yeah, that's very well done. Yeah. It was only until recently, it's been about 20 years, which is quite recent, that neuroscientists found that we have a lymphatic system in our brain. It's called the glimphatic system. And this kicks in during slow wave sleep. And what happens during that time is all of the vessels in

Starting point is 00:20:08 your brain, they move around. And when the lymphatic system kicks in, it clears out all of the debris and all of the toxins. So if you're not getting into deep sleep, you're not going to kickstart this glymphatic system. Therefore, you're going to wake up feeling lethargic, that's why we have brain fog. When you wake up and you've got brain fog and you kind of like, oh, you know, you feel that fog, you know, the kind of the dizziness in front of your lymphatic system didn't kick in. And that's also scary because this is how the accumulation of plaques happen. And we know that plaques are associated or amyloid beta, I should say, which is a toxin. It's associated with Alzheimer's disease. So that's another bidirectional kind of cause.

Starting point is 00:20:53 lack of sleep can lead to Alzheimer's disease, but Alzheimer's disease also, once you have it, you find it hard to sleep. So it's just sleep is probably the most underrated high performance tool than an investor or a billionaire has at their disposal and it's free. Let's take a quick break and hear from today's sponsors. All right. I want you guys to imagine spending three days in Oslo at the height of the summer. You've got long days of daylight, incredible food, floating saunas on the Oslo Fjord, and every conversation you have is with people who are actually shaping the future. That's what the Oslo Freedom Forum is. From June 1st through the 3rd, 2026, the Oslo Freedom Forum is entering its 18th year bringing together activists, technologists, journalists, investors, and builders from all over the world, many of them operating on the front lines of history. This is where you hear firsthand stories from people using.

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Starting point is 00:25:26 And in the book, he highlights a study from UC Berkeley where apparently... With Matthew Walker? I believe so. Where they essentially... He said that they surveyed, you know, 1.6 billion people or something like that. But it's not that they actually logistically put that together. They were just basically looking at the fact that. that during daylight savings, during that one hour change, they basically saw an uptick and heart

Starting point is 00:25:48 attacks and even car accidents. I think it was 24% this increase, just from that one hour lack of sleep. And then when you fell back and you gained an hour, less heart attacks, less accidents, etc. So just gaining that one hour is super interesting. You kind of highlight for me what sleep is to some degree, especially calling out the two really seems like most important stages. What are the other two of the four stages?

Starting point is 00:26:13 Well, that's light sleep. So once we close our eyes, we go into light sleep. And then as we move four, we're going to stage two. Then we end up getting into deep sleep. And then we move into REM sleep and then we come back out again, into light sleep and we wake up. So I just wanted to also point out the traffic accidents that you mentioned. But wonderful study that was done on NBA players.

Starting point is 00:26:36 And what they did was they took a group of NBA players and they put them through a sleep extension protocol. So they got them sleeping and extended, I think it was one or two hours per night. Oh my gosh, you've got to pull up this study because it was amazing. They saw decreases in reaction time. They saw jump shot rates like what people were scoring more. It was incredible. So sleep is, it's a drug. It's like it's everything. And it's scary because we all know about it. But why, why are these people? If, if money, and making decisions is at the forefront of what you do in everyday life. Why are you skimping out on sleep? I have so many more thoughts on this. But the one that's on top of my mind is,

Starting point is 00:27:23 is this compound interest you mentioned, say the 46-year-old who looks like a 65-year-old brain-wise, is that reversible? Meaning like, you know, say you change course and you start sleeping more, etc. Are you seeing an improvement on that? Or is that like a done deal? well, look, that's a biomarker, and that's really hard. We can never, it's like Alzheimer's disease. You cannot reverse mild cognitive impairment or Alzheimer's disease. What you can do is you can modify your lifestyle factors and slow the process down. So with this individual, I literally said quit work for three months.

Starting point is 00:28:00 He laughed at me. He's like, yeah, I can't do that. But it was just one biomarker. Okay, so when we look at the sleep deprived state, that's just one biomarker. So we can't just say, okay, I'm going to get you to sleep for eight hours and you're going to be fine. No, we had to do so many other different interventions. We have exercise intervention. We got him completely off alcohol.

Starting point is 00:28:20 And look, we rescanned his brain and he's not at that 65 anymore. He's also not at 49. He's sitting right now. I saw him, I would say, scanned his brain back in like January, January 5th around then. And, you know, he's got around a 53-year-old brain right now. So he's going good. He's going very good. He's very deliberate every day.

Starting point is 00:28:41 But yeah. Okay, so there is hope. Let's talk about achieving optimal sleep. And I know you, for example, have what you call a sleep stack, right? Or are you similar to a tech stack, et cetera. What are the variables at hand? What are the things we can control? And what are maybe some quick fixes if we don't get that night of sleep that we need?

Starting point is 00:29:04 So first of all, I think good sleep starts the night. before. So when you, let's just say you go to bed and you wake up, the first thing you should be doing is going out and getting natural sunlight in your eyes because this is starting your circadian rhythm. We've got a 24-hour circadian clock and it's really dictated by the sun. And if you're going to start your circadian clock at 11 a.m., then you're probably going to get tired at 11 p.m. So you really want to be really deliberate with getting outside and getting natural sunlight, you can't get the sunlight from, you can't get the light from above, just artificial lighting. You have to go out and get natural sunlight. So that's the first step.

Starting point is 00:29:45 The second thing is, if you are optimizing for sleep, okay, and you really want to start to wind down and get tired at around 8 p.m., then you really want to stop having any form of caffeine past the hours of 12 p.m. You know, caffeine has a really long half-life. And, you know, I get people that say to me, but Louise, I have a shot of coffee. at around 4 p.m. and I sleep fine. I don't know if they're sleeping or sedating themselves. That's two completely different things. So you really want to be optimizing for sleep for your brain, not just for how you feel. So it would be getting off caffeine. And then as you move further into the night, you want to have a three-hour window of eating before you actually go to sleep.

Starting point is 00:30:29 meaning if you want to be asleep by 10pm, which is the neuroathletics kind of method, we want everybody lights out at 10pm, if we want you to sleep at that time, you really want to stop eating at around 7pm because as soon as you have something to eat that signals to your brain that you're awake, it starts to release cortisol, which primitively means run after the, or run away from the lion. Now, regarding lighting again, around 8pm, I would say it around 8.30, if you can, you want to start dimming the lights so your brain can start to get used to. Okay, the sun's going down. I need to start winding down and going to sleep. Because we have this hormone. It's called the sleepiness hormone. You've probably heard of it.

Starting point is 00:31:15 It's called melatonin and it's secreted by the pineal gland, but it's only secreted in response to darkness. So if we've got artificial lighting coming in our eyes past 9 p.m. or 10 p.m. PM, you're really signaling to your brain that you're awake. So these are, these are some things that you can be doing. And then look, there's some other things that I do, you know, some crazy things. If you saw my apartment, it's like a lab. I sleep on a temperature controlled mattress. So I actually literally control my temperature via my phone. So when I'm in REM sleep, I go down to a cooler phase and then in deep sleep, it goes even colder. And it helps me. I love it. So I've had, just on that note, I've had an issue convincing my wife about something like an eight sleep mattress because in her mind, and I think it's an interesting point to touch on, it's sort of like we're looking at screens all day, we're on our phones all day.

Starting point is 00:32:08 Once we get into bed, I want an analog experience, right? I don't want to feel like I'm sleeping on some more electrical app, you know, technology that's reading my body, et cetera, et cetera. What's your take on that? Is there any, you know, any science based on, you know, EMF frequencies or anything like that to be concerned about? It's very low. You get more from literally going outside or flying on a plane, which unfortunately, I do once a month. I'm not saying that's good or healthy. But no, look, I've definitely gone down that path because I'm actually hooked up to so many things. I wear anything from an aura ring or a whoop strap. Sometimes I even go to bed with an EEG on, which, you know, just to scan the electrical signals in my brain as I sleep. This is all in the name of science. I know I'm not telling anyone to do that. But when you look at the science behind temperature, it's a really big one. And we've mentioned Matthew Walker before, and he speaks about this very frequently. We know from the science and the scientific literature that in order to fall asleep, that's your sleep latency, in order to fall asleep and stay asleep, our core body temperature needs to drop at least two degrees. And depending on what we've had, if you've had a glass of wine

Starting point is 00:33:25 at night, that's a whole different ballgame we can touch on that. That's going to raise your core body temperature throughout the night. So it's going to wake you up. If you've eaten close to bed, it's going to wake you up. The only known method to control that is via a temperature controlled mattress. There's a couple points here. I want to keep going on. So you mentioned cortisol a minute ago after eating, let's say, after 7 p.m. Cortisol is a really interesting thing I wanted to touch on just kind of in general. But I came across a podcast recently where the guy being interviewed was talking about how your body naturally seems to release cortisol around like 9 or 10 p.m.

Starting point is 00:34:04 Or unless say you've done an exercise that day and you've gotten it out in other ways, but it seems your body has this purge that it will do regardless of if you exercise or not, which resonated with me and my wife, especially because we've experienced an onset of anxiety that is always like at 9 or 10 p.m. Like as soon as we're like getting into bed, it seems like, oh, that's this triggered response sometimes of like anxiety setting in. And we kind of looked at that and said, okay, that's a cortisol release and have gone to take action to release cortisol in other ways throughout the day, which has helped.

Starting point is 00:34:38 I'm curious if you've come across this, if there is science backing this or what, you know, other purposes cortisol might solve or serve us just in general. Well, look, again, it depends on your circadian rhythm, but you actually just reminded me of a phenomenon that happens, I think, across a lot of high-performing people. And it's, once they go to sleep, they start to think about a lot of things. I've got to go to sleep. This is what I've got to do when I get up in the morning. And for some reason, it all comes to us during sleep or as we're about to fall asleep. So you've probably, you know, realize this, if you've gone through a stressful period in your life, you have trouble actually falling asleep. It's not like you get, you know, maybe you get woken up during the night, but you really have

Starting point is 00:35:19 trouble falling asleep. And that's because your mind is just racing. It's ticking. You know, it's just firing. So that's, you know, something that you could be having. It's not uncommon, especially for athletes. I'm going to talk to you about this neurotransmitter. It's called GABA.

Starting point is 00:35:35 Okay, that's the acronym. And it stands for gamma amino butyric acid. It is our chief inhibitory neurotransmitter. So inhibitory. it is responsible for inhibiting those action potentials that I spoke about earlier. So when our brain is going 24-7, we usually have, or we tend to have low levels of GABA. So this is why there is a very popular supplement, which is GABA, that people supplement with at night to help them with a racing mind or help them get over that anxiety.

Starting point is 00:36:10 That's one way to overcome that. Another way is journaling. I don't know if you've done this, but if you've ever gotten a journal out, here's a really good hack. When we think about journaling, we think let's put our thoughts down and really happy things. I reserve a journal that is specifically for negativity, meaning like when you've got all this stuff in your head that's keeping you up at night, you want to just dump it somewhere. Your brain, you need to release it. And a really good way to do that is through just a negative journal, just put all of the negative

Starting point is 00:36:42 things in there, get it out onto paper, spend five minutes. it's doing it before you go to sleep. It's like a relase. It's very therapeutic. I'm so happy you brought up journaling because I have a lot of questions around that as well. So the negative journaling makes a lot of sense, especially at that time and night just getting it out of your head and feeling like you did something with it. I'm kind of curious about morning routines and you've often find when you study successful people that they have some kind of morning routine and very often it involves not only meditation, which we should talk about, but also journaling. And I'm kind of curious what your take on morning journaling is. It's something

Starting point is 00:37:18 I've had no luck implementing in my life. And I would love to at some point, which is a whole another topic we should talk about. But my point, I guess my question off the top here is just what are some of the benefits of journaling? Can you see it in the brain specifically? Does it do anything for memory, et cetera? What's your just general takeaway on it? Oh, look, journaling, I put that in the category. I put in the same category. as meditation and breath work. So when you look at the human nervous system, we've got the parasympathetic nervous system, rest and digest, we call it.

Starting point is 00:37:51 We've got the sympathetic nervous system, which is that fight or flight. And what we're always trying to do is imagine a seesaw. We're always trying to come back to homeostasis where if our sympathetic nervous system is going up like this, we're trying to do whatever it takes to bringing us back down. And the way to do that is to activate that parasympathetic nervous system. system to kind of bring it back into equilibrium. A really great way to do that is by journaling or by meditation, for example. So I really like it.

Starting point is 00:38:22 We have a lot of our clients on a morning routine, which is very specific. Journaling is not part of their morning routine, but it's actually part of their routine. So we do get them to do that a few times a week, whether it's at night or during the day. It's usually whenever they've got a stressful thing happening. I tell them, don't react. don't do anything, don't put it on anybody, put in the journal. But back on to the morning routines, one of the things that we do is,

Starting point is 00:38:49 first thing is you get outside and you walk. If you can do it for 20 minutes, that's amazing. If it's only five minutes, then that's okay. So you've just got to work with what you do, but it is literally get outside and see natural sunlight. And then after that, sometimes they come in and if they're an athlete, I have them visualize. So you've probably heard in sports psychology, visualization is key. We get them to visualize their day, their goals, their training, whatever that is. But it also works on some of my investors and finance guys.

Starting point is 00:39:23 I get them to visualize. And they're more settled when they know because it's telling their brain what they're doing throughout the day. So it kind of calms them down. Okay. So first thing when you get up is get outside. I love that. And you also mentioned earlier about just getting your.

Starting point is 00:39:38 clients off of caffeine in general, which I also want to talk about. That one seems kind of obvious if you think about it because it is essentially a drug and it has negative consequences. So I'm kind of curious how you supplement for that. Is a walk what you supplement with or do you make your clients get into like an ice bath in the morning like to just wake them up? Like how do you get awake person and get going to start your day? Look, if you're coming off caffeine, it's going to be a tough process. I actually don't tell my clients to get off caffeine. They can have coffee. I just tell them, wait 90 minutes. Like, get your body to start reacting to normal things and mother nature first thing in the morning. If you're going to have a coffee,

Starting point is 00:40:19 have it around 90 minutes after you wake up. Generally, that is well and truly before midday. But the general rule is definitely no caffeine after midday. But look, that goes hand in hand with what you're eating, right? Doesn't mean, just because you're not having caffeine, doesn't mean you can go and load up on sugar. And that's unfortunately what a lot of people are doing. Even having things like honey is going to, you're going to get this insulin spike. So that's another thing that we need to be careful of, which is that whole nutrition subfield that we talk about as well. So there's some of the things that we do as a morning routine. We've mentioned night routine. As we mentioned earlier in the very start of the podcast, I said that things, you know, such as

Starting point is 00:41:00 behavior has an effect on the body and vice versa. That's where exercise comes in. And when we think about exercise, we look at aerobic exercise running, being good for the brain and brain health, because it releases this thing called BDNF. But I'm more interested in two subfields of exercise. The first one is strength training. What we know from the literature is that strength training, literally resistance training, doesn't mean you have to go and push weights. Anything that's providing resistance to your body is going to have massive. effects on the frontal lobe. So I keep doing that because when we're teaching neuroscience, we always say that the frontal lobe is if you just get your palm and you put it up to your forehead.

Starting point is 00:41:40 That's where your frontal lobe lives. Your frontal lobe is where all those cognitive functions reside. Thinking the way you react to somebody, communication, they all reside here. Logic, reasoning. So if we're sleeping well and we're doing various forms of resistance training, we're working that prefrontal cortex, that frontal lobe. So that's one thing that it does. Another thing that it does is it has these protective hippocampal subfields, meaning that when we train, you can work when we do resistance training. It works out different areas of the brain around the hippocampus,

Starting point is 00:42:15 which we know is responsible for memory formation and memory function. So there's so many wonderful things that are being exercised during resistance training. And I think we're missing, I think we're really missing the ballmark with that. I think when we hear about exercise and brain health, we only equate it to running, cycling, walking outside. Whilst those things are fantastic, I think we really need to look at at least 150 minutes a week of resistance training. So it's another great thing to be doing.

Starting point is 00:42:44 Wow, that's really fascinating. So basically, it's pretty well known that if you work out, you think better. But you're actually saying that there's real science here on the prefrontal cortex. that you're actually able to see using your scans and using the improvement of thinking actually from stress testing your muscles. That's fascinating. Not just that. You're also getting a release of these differential growth factors, and they're known as IGF1, which we've all heard of, and ERISA. We're not going to go through those, but they're wonderful molecules that get released during strength training.

Starting point is 00:43:19 So these are just wonderful ways that you can be enhancing your brain health, your brain function, and optimizing your brain performance. And then we move into neuroathletics. So there's a subfield of exercise called neuromotor exercise, and this is anything to do with a ball. And when I was studying this, so when I was back in uni and I was studying this, I came up with this drill, and it was back in 2014, and it was a drill where you just get two balls and you throw them to the wall.

Starting point is 00:43:51 Okay? I started performing these drills and they are amazing. a lot of my soccer players were doing it, a lot of my MBA players were doing it, and now I've got all of my investors doing it because this form of exercise, which is also known as neuromotor exercise, I call it neuroathletics, is it's a form of open skill. And there is scientific, like literally articles in really high stringent journals that show that open skill movements, such as juggling, for example, or the bore drills, you can see changes in the gray matter of the brain. So you're literally getting a thicker cortex. So that's brilliant. So then I've got all of

Starting point is 00:44:30 these athletes and these investors just doing neuromotor work. I tell them 10 minutes a day, they get two balls. We've got neuro balls. They get two of their balls. I'm literally just throw them to the wall. Start throwing them to the ground because you're cupping them so you're getting hand-eye coordination. You're getting learning skills. So your brain has to focus to learn the activity. You're just doing so much to strengthen these sub-regions in your brain that are responsible for everything, from making more money to making great decisions, to having a good relationship. Let's take a quick break and hear from today's sponsors. No, it's not your imagination. Risk and regulation are ramping up,

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Starting point is 00:48:13 other information can be found in the income funds prospectus at fundrise.com slash income. This is a paid advertisement. All right. Back to the show. Okay, I'm really fascinated about gray matter as well. And when you study a lot of successful people, you will often find that they have some sort of meditation practice. And I've heard that monks have been studied.

Starting point is 00:48:37 And by meditating, you've actually seen them increase their gray matter in the brain. What does that even mean? and what's the importance of that? And have you seen that with meditation and or breathwork alongside exercise? Yeah, I love meditation. You know, I try and stick to my own field and we do get, you know, we do have a meditation protocol that we use. But I'd rather go into breathwork because I think when we're implementing a breathing

Starting point is 00:49:03 exercise and literally getting more oxygen to our brain and activating that parasympathetic nervous system, which is most likely, I can just, you know, the reason why I say most likely is because I haven't gone in and studied it is what meditation is doing. I consider meditation just sitting there and doing any form of stillness where you can just calm your mind down. And I think any form of meditation, whether it's via breath work, visualization or just stilling your mind, is going to pay dividends. And I get my clients to implement this at 2 p.m., which is specific. Because when I look across the board, and I have coaches as well. Once we look across the board and we see when most of our clients are having a spike in their, I'll say insulin, for example. We get them set up on CGMs, so continuous glucose monitors. So we can see when they're going to get an insulin spike. We can check their HRV. So we can see what times during the day they stress out. It's usually around 1 p.m. to 3 p.m. So I say at 2 p.m., I want you to sit there and do a specific breathwork. We get a,

Starting point is 00:50:08 them to do a psychological sigh, which is a double inhale and exhale. We get them to do any type of breathing exercise just to calm them down for 10 minutes. And I have to tell you, this tool is, it's like they're God sent. They do this when they're really stressed out and they're able to make better decisions. They're not going to react in a certain way and just calms them down. That's actually very surprising to me. I would have thought that the breathwork would be something you do very early in the morning. And it kind of ties back to that. routine or establishing a routine. And I understand how important things like habits and routines are, but I don't know why. Why does the brain like routine, need routine? How do you start

Starting point is 00:50:51 establishing routine, especially if it's a drastic change from where you were today? You know, when we talk about things like sleep, you know, the two most common complaints when you go and see a doctor and you say, I'm having sleep complaints, the physician will say, okay, are you having trouble falling asleep, are you having trouble staying asleep? And there are obviously two different diagnostic protocols after that. However, your brain, the reason I bring that up is because when we look at sleep, for example, your brain loves consistency. It loves to be on a 24-hour clock. It wants to be the exact same every day. It doesn't want to be shocked. It's just this lump of fat sitting between our ears that just likes routine because it's just like the sun. The sun comes up every day

Starting point is 00:51:38 around the same time and it sets. And that's how we've been trained back in the cave days when we didn't have light. And you literally had to train your brain to know when the sun was coming up and run back into the cave when the sun was going down. So it likes routine. So if you're going to start anything, if you really want to start a process of getting on the bandwagon towards better performance, whether that's physiological performance or neurological performance, First thing you need to understand is it likes routine. So you have to be sleeping at the same time every day, waking up at the same time every day. Is that a viable option, especially for a lot of people who have children and other stresses? No, but you can kind of get there. With exercise,

Starting point is 00:52:19 it likes the same routine. It likes, you know, if you're going to be exercising every morning, which is I definitely think everybody should be rather than doing nighttime exercise, you want to be doing it at pretty much at the same time every day. And you kind of want to eat at the same time every day. So it really loves routine. Absolutely. So I was actually a Division I athlete when I was in college. And when I would do those workouts, which were unbelievably difficult, you'd be walking off the field shaking, right? Your muscles would just be shaking and you would be craving an ice bath. And usually that's what they'd have you go do directly after is jump in this big tub of ice. I've heard you talk about how that's not a great thing to do, actually, post-war.

Starting point is 00:52:58 workout. But there is a lot of significant study around ice, especially and also heat. When is the optimal time to incorporate something like cold, ice baths into your life or into a workout? Well, this is actually where inflammation can be a good thing. So we know that chronic inflammation over time is bad. But when you go and work out, especially when you're doing strength training, what you're doing is we know you're tearing some of the muscle fibers and then the muscle fibers, you're creating inflammation and then your muscle fibres rebuild. What happens when we get cold is it blocks those inflammatory processes from happening. So you're actually going to block that hormetic response to exercise. So that's why I say, and it's in the science, to not get into a cold bath

Starting point is 00:53:47 within a two-hour window pre and post exercise. So that's one thing. You don't want to block all of the things that you just did. And the famous study that was done was on the hypertrophy of your quads. So we don't want that to happen. But ice is absolutely incredible. Getting into cold immersion, I've written about this, one of the best things that you can be doing apart from sleep for your health, physiologically, and for your brain. Likewise with heat. Okay, we've got heat shock proteins that get released when we're in a sauna. Just like when we get ourselves in a cold immersion bath, we've got cold shock proteins. And these are absolutely wonderful and they can actually go to the brain as well and having neurological effect.

Starting point is 00:54:29 Wonderful studies out to show that if you go into a sauna, I think it was around, I think it was four times a week for 60 minutes or 50 to 60 minutes, you can mimic cardiovascular exercise. So there was an RCT done, randomized control trial, that showed that individuals who were performing cardiovascular training during the day, you can get the exact same effects by going into the sauna. So if that's what you're after, then you have to be really deliberate with the temperature and the timing. However, if you're after just general health, I think the recommendations for the heat is 45 minutes, at least five times a week. Whereas with cold, again, dependent on the temperature. So in Australia, in Celsius, I get it down to 13 degrees and I have the person

Starting point is 00:55:20 and stay in there for a minimum of eight minutes. And here's the tricky thing, Trey. It's not just the temperature of the water. I believe it starts the timing when the temperature of the person drops, because that's what it's dependent on. It's not the temperature of the water that's going to be determined by great health outcomes. It is your core body temperature. So if the science says, okay, with cold immersion,

Starting point is 00:55:45 you need to be doing it at least five times a week for a minimum of eight minutes, That eight minutes starts when your core body temperature has dropped. Really interesting. What does your body temperature need to get to, you know, what's the range you're looking for there? I would say at least four degrees below the average temperature. And, you know, you mentioned earlier that you have Tony Robbins. So Tony Robbins, you know, is notorious for getting into the cold bath or the cold plunge

Starting point is 00:56:14 every morning. And he does this as a state of, you know, I want to get in. I want to be in a powerful state. And that's great. But what's happening on a chemical level is once you get your body into this state, once it's cold and you've reached, you know, your core body temperature has dropped, you get a massive, you get a robust release of noropenephrine. Now, noroprenephrine can act as a hormone in the body and a neurotransmitter in the brain. And as a neurotransmitter, it is responsible for vigilance and focus and attention. That's why you get out and you feel powerful.

Starting point is 00:56:48 And on that, it's a 200, correct me if I'm wrong, a 250% increase in noropenephrine release. So it's like drugs, right? So Tony Robbins, as you mentioned, loves the cold plunge. He also has a cryotherapy thing. I think he gets up in the morning and hits it first thing. And I know you have some different opinion on this. So that's a matter of seconds being in cold. So maybe it just doesn't have the same effect.

Starting point is 00:57:12 But I'm curious, what's your take on that? My only take on that is the science just isn't there yet to show the same results. That's the first thing. And the second thing is I try and make a lot of the things that I talk about accessible to the general public. If you look at a cryotherapy machine, I think there are upwards of $400,000 to have one in your home. Second to that, it's really hard to go out every day to a cryotherapy chamber.

Starting point is 00:57:36 And I think, you know, especially in New York City, I think each visit costs around $90 and to get the same effects of a cryotherapy chamber as a cold bath, you need to be visiting that cryotherapy chamber five times a week. So it's fine, you know, you do the math, you do the time. It's just not viable for a lot of people and the science isn't there. I was actually involved in a study that was done on rugby players in Australia where as soon as they suffered a concussion, which was, you know, for NFL athletes is, you know, every game. As soon as they suffered a concussion, we've seen that what happens with a concussion is your brain goes science. side. So you're getting a heating effect of the brain, which is scary because if you heat

Starting point is 00:58:16 your brain up too high, you die. But we don't want to have that heating effect. So this study was done where they were implementing, as soon as a concussion happened, the athlete would come off the field and you'd put a cold pack on their head. It was like an actual like a helmet, if you will, but we were doing like cold pack, ice pack on their neck to try and cool them down. And that's another way, that's another reason to show you that there is science there to show you that cold immersion is absolutely fantastic for the brain and the body. I've heard Tim Ferriss talk about this where he mentioned in college, I think he would do a synthetic spray or something before a test and it would allow you to essentially cram for a test and memorize it and then go in and perform

Starting point is 00:59:00 well, which brings up just a question around memory in general. A lot of billionaires that we study seem to have a sort of photographic memory. And I'm kind of curious if you have a take on photographic memory just by studying the brain. And if you study people who have something like that and if there's a certain profile that matches someone who has something like that. You know, I haven't studied that, but it wouldn't surprise me because a lot of the clients that I'm working with do have like this shocking, like, you know, memory. So it was actually very new to me. I was like, wow, you guys, and he's like, yeah, I've got, you know, my memory's just fine. What I think this is, trade, people think that Warren has these magical formulas that he puts into place,

Starting point is 00:59:44 but instead it's not that he has a century of experience and knowledge. And I think that's what it is. A lot of investors start young, and what happens over time, and this is like, this is like LeBron James. LeBron picked up a ball when he was very young. But this thing called neuroplasticity, which you've probably heard of. It's one year on fires together, the other one wires together. It's like the more repetitive actions of the same thing, you keep building these pathways in the brain, which we know as habits, and that's via neuroplasticity.

Starting point is 01:00:14 That's what I think is actually happening when you talk about this photographic memory, is their ability to keep being on the same topic every single day, day in, day out, day and day out for many, many years to come. It's just habit formation. So there are a lot of companies out there that sell things like supplements for memory and all kinds of stuff. I mean, how much do we want to buy into that kind of thing? And what have you found to be credible or not?

Starting point is 01:00:40 That's a touchy subject because the evidence just isn't there. If they were, every supplement out there would be FDA approved. But I'll talk to you about what the science does say. And just keeping in mind, this is not medical advice for anybody. This is just science. So there are a lot of things that our brain loves. And the first thing is, if you look at our brain, it's basically made up of fat. We know that. And the particular type of fat is DHA. And DHA is one of the three things that comes

Starting point is 01:01:10 from omega-3 fatty acids. And you've probably heard omega-3 is a great for the brain, and they really are. And we have this in all of our training programs. It's like an absolute must that all of our athletes take EPA and D-H-A. So before I move into that, I'll tell you some of the things that we give our athletes and I'll tell you the reasoning why. There's also another thing that happens in this nutrition world. Okay, now that we know, you know, that the science says, okay, great, taking EPA and DHA is going to help us over the long term. What happens then? You know, which company do you buy it from? I think that's where we're going wrong with marketing, because you can literally go and pick up anything off the shelf and it could be laced with

Starting point is 01:01:51 God only knows what. This is why I really strongly recommend that if anybody's out there and they're contemplating taking a supplement, obviously from the guidance of their physician, look at the companies, look at where they're manufacturing these products, because I've actually gone through, there's been so much third-party testing being done on some of these things that are sold in CVS and some of the pharmacies, and it's just laced with absolute crap. It's scary. And that actually happens with melatonin, by the way. So if anybody's out there taking melatonin, sometimes the bottle claims that there's three grams in there or three milligrams of melatonin, when in actual fact there's a hundred times that in there. You just don't know it. because it's not FDA approved so they can really put anything on a bottle. So you really want to be careful about where you're going, which companies. So EPA and DHA, there are forms of omega-3s fatty acids and they do wonders. One of the biggest things that they do is they help bring down inflammation. So we've mentioned inflammation before. You get it when you work out. You get it when you're stressed. Inflammation isn't a bad thing. You know,

Starting point is 01:02:57 cortisol is like that Goldilocks hormone. It's not bad. Too much of it, which we know is chronic inflammation is bad. That can lead to neurodegenerative diseases. It can lead to cancer. That can lead to many different diseases. So we really want to be able to balance out this inflammation. So we've got the body inflammation, but then we've got neural inflammation. And EPA and DHA goes in and it really helps you with that. So I have two milligrams in the morning and two milligrams at night. So during the day, I'm having four milligrams. grams of each. So I've always got a large circulating amount of EPA and DHA in my system. Two or 200? Two. Two. Interesting. Two grams or two grams.

Starting point is 01:03:42 Two grams. Okay. Got it. So that's the first thing. The second thing that I always recommend is if you're going, you know, a lot of my clients, like I said, if you're having trouble falling asleep or staying asleep, I really love to supplement with magnesium L3.A. So you've probably heard of magnesium citrate.

Starting point is 01:04:00 and there's three different forms of magnesiums. But this magnesium L3inate is really special because this is the only one that can actually pass through the blood brain barrier. So we've got this protective, this beautiful little protective cap that doesn't allow certain molecules to go into, which is known as our BBB blood brain barrier. And thank God we have it, because imagine everything we put in our bodies if it penetrated the brain. A lot of things don't, a lot of drugs do, but magnesium L3.

Starting point is 01:04:30 and eight goes through, passes a blood-brain barrier, and it really relaxes you. That's a wonderful supplement that I get some of my athletes to take when they're traveling a lot, when they're jet lag, and when they just want to be able to fall asleep faster. And then every other supplement is really coming at the discretion of their lab work. So we get lab work done. They could be vitamin D deficient or put them on a vitamin D protocol of 5,000 IUs per day. They could be zinc deficient. There are a number of different things they could be deficient in that will start to supplement. But if I could say, if I could recommend or if I could say what are the must haves, it's definitely EPA, DHA. It's definitely electrolytes.

Starting point is 01:05:12 It's like a hydration protocol. And it's definitely some form of magnesium. So interestingly enough, when you look at a lot of billionaires, I wouldn't say that they're often the profile of like peak fitness or health, right? There's a lot of people out there who, you know, like Warren Buffett, for example, eats McDonald's every day and not the healthiest diet. But obviously one of the smartest guys alive. And a lot of these folks just have such horsepower between the ears that it's just unmatched.

Starting point is 01:05:40 And I imagine a lot of it is just tied to like DNA or something, you know, hereditary and et cetera. And so it brings the question up for us mere mortals that are just trying our hand at this stuff, what can we do? What kind of improvement is viable that you've seen to date? Look, if you are coming to me as a 21-year-old, you're going to have bigger improvements than if you're coming to me as a 60-year-old. At the age of 25, our brain is fully developed. So there's more chance at that age than at 60 years old. But then it comes down to how deliberate do you want to be? How deliberate are you with your nutrition, with your training and with your sleep because this stuff, unlike personal training, where you go and you see an effect,

Starting point is 01:06:23 you know, you look at your body and you see, oh, I'm losing weight, I'm going to keep going. You can't see that. The effects of neuro training, cognitive training or neuroathletics comes at a cost of probably around three months. It takes a long time to really change your brain, rewire your brain, and to get those effects. So there is change and it comes after a deliberate effort. and it really depends on how dedicated you are.

Starting point is 01:06:49 So I wanted to go on record here that while you and I are recording, you are standing, you have a standing desk, it looks like I am sitting, unfortunately, that I'm ashamed of, but I hear that sitting is the new smoking, right? We're sitting all day long. Are you seeing that effect with people? And is that something we should be mindful of as well? Absolutely. This is why we're getting things like standing desks.

Starting point is 01:07:10 I've got to be honest, I only got this two months ago. It's been the best investment I ever made because now I'm standing more. And we're going to have to do a whole new episode on training, but there is a particular type of training that's very well known for longevity and health span. It's called Zone 2 training. You can test what your Zone 2 is. But there's been, there's a really famous study that I think it was only released. Or what's getting out into the media now within the last six months saying that.

Starting point is 01:07:38 So the recommended dose of Zone 2 for longevity purposes is a minimum. of three hours a week. So three by one hour intervals. Those you don't know, what do you mean by zone two? So we've got different training thresholds. Zone one is what you and I are in now. Zone two is when you're exercising, but you can talk comfortably. Then you go to zone three. And zone five is like when you're about to die, you know, on one of those ergo bikes, whatever you call them. So zone two, training for longevity purposes is wonderful. But this study shows that you completely eliminate all of that Zone 2 training you've done by sitting down and being sedentary.

Starting point is 01:08:18 So this is why when I read this, I was like, oh my God. So I opted in for a standing desk. And it's actually like, I reckon if I timed our podcast now recording and how many calories I burn, I reckon my heart rate would have been up there because I'm standing and I'm in this powerful state. And you can probably hear it in my voice. So I think it's much better. Well, Louisa, I could honestly talk to you all day. I find this stuff super fascinating.

Starting point is 01:08:45 I do not consider myself a biohacker or even remotely close to anything like that. But you're definitely piquing my interest in all these ways that we can kind of optimize our thinking, which then optimizes our performance. We'll have to pause here and save it for another day. But I really appreciate you coming on the show. Before I let you go, I definitely want to make sure you have an opportunity to handoff to our audience where they can learn more about you, neuroathletics, any other resources you want to share. Yeah, no, thank you. I've had so much fun being here.

Starting point is 01:09:13 Look, I generally put everything out on Twitter, which is just my name, Louisa Nicola. And if there's a link on there, in my bio that takes you to my podcast, we have the neuro experience. It's on all platforms. We have a weekly newsletter and also have an Instagram page. It's all Louisa Nicola. And the substack is neuroathletics. Louisa, thanks again. Let's do it again sometime. Thank you. All right, everybody, that's all we had for you this week. If you're loving the show, please go ahead and follow us on your favorite podcast app. I'd love it if you could reach out

Starting point is 01:09:45 to us on Twitter and let us know how we're doing. You can find me at Trey Lockerbie or the network at TIP underscore Network. And with that, we'll see you again next time. Thank you for listening to TIP. Make sure to subscribe to Millennial Investing by the Investors Podcast Network and learn how to achieve financial independence. To access our show notes, transcripts or courses, go to theinvestorspodcast.com. This show is for entertainment purposes only. Before making any decision consult a professional, this show is copyrighted by the Investors podcast network.

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We Study Billionaires - The Investor’s Podcast Network - TIP434: The Billionaire's Peak Performance Playbook W/ Louisa Nicola

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