Feeling stressed? You’re probably dehydrated! Make hydration a habit, with Phizz

0:00Fearne Cotton: Hello and welcome to Happy Place with me, Fern Cotton. Today, let's head back to the Happy Place Festival with Dan Cray and Dr Paul Anastaciades, the founders of Fizz. Dehydration will affect your body, it will also affect your brain, and it will affect the interactions between the brain and the body that's going to cause all of these negative effects associated with dehydration or sleep. that's going to be impacted. Other signs that people may be not familiar of are things like headaches, nausea, tiredness. You're probably familiar with the term hangry. The food version, the water version is thangry.

0:42By the time you're thirsty, like those changes inside your body have already started to happen.

0:46Fearne Cotton: So Fizz were the sponsors of our talk stage this year and I'm so grateful that they were because there were so many incredible people giving talks across the weekend. Oh my God. That is one of my favourite parts of the festival. Dan and Paul founded Fizz in 2015 after spotting a gap for hydration products that go beyond sport to support everyday life. They created what was at the time the world's first hydration tablet to combine electrolytes with a comprehensive multivitamin, bringing hydration and wellness support together in one very clever and delicious, may I add, tablet. A decade on, Fizz is the UK's number one selling hydration brand and they've helped millions of people build better hydration habits every day.

1:32Fearne Cotton: But what does that actually mean? Because I have to say, these guys taught me so much on the day about what's going on in our bodies when we're dehydrated, as well as how, when we get it right, it really can make such a difference to our energy and focus and honestly, our personalities.

2:11Fearne Cotton: Before we kick off, could you please introduce yourselves to our delightful audience and tell us what your name is, what your job title is or how you describe yourself and what your passion is. I'm Dan. I'm a co-founder and CEO of Fizz. We've become the number one hydration brand in the UK. It's been a decade journey. And as you learn today, I am not a scientist, but the gentleman to my right brings a lot of credibility. And you'll see exactly why when we started a business, we thought it was a necessity to have someone like Paul be a part of it so we could develop up something with real impact and be proud of.

2:46Fearne Cotton: Thank you, Dan. Yes, my name is Paul Anastasiades. I'm a neuroscientist and senior lecturer at the University of Bristol in my day job. And then I'm also one of the co-founders and head of product development at Fizz with Dan. And my role is essentially to help design the products, make sure they're kind of grounded in science, and then help educate people about the benefits and the science behind the products in our day-to-day business. So you guys, you're the dream team. You both bring your skill set to the brand and to get the name out there. Dan, where did the idea initially come from? You obviously saw a gap in the market and thought, right, I've got this moment of inspiration.

3:25Yeah, it came from, so I'm Australian, although my accent's faded a little bit in the last 10 years.

3:29Fearne Cotton: You've got a bit London. Although my Aussie mates think I sound English and my English mates think I sound Aussie, so I'm caught in no man's land. But I was working with a lot of professional athletes back in Australia, a lot of netballers, a lot of footballers. And I was really surprised, actually, that when it came to their hydration strategy, they wouldn't use sports drinks. They'd use rehydration sachets that were typically used if you had food poisoning, which got me really curious as to why not. You learn a bit like a lot of the energy drinks are more just high sugar and fuel energy, but less so about the hydration strategy.

4:01and you learn that the benefits that you seek from this are, you know, focus, performance, decision making, exercise seems easier, all of these things Paul will talk on a little more later. But those are all benefits that I thought, why would I not want to have that in my own life? You know, whether that's tackling hangovers, long haul flights, office days, and me and the other co-founders started using this in combination with the multivitamin. And so the natural next step was let's go and buy that combination product of, you know, something that can taste better than a food poisoning medication and then also combines a multivitamin.

4:31And, you know, in Australia, it didn't exist. In the US, it didn't exist. In the UK, it didn't exist. So the natural next step was to call one of the few scientists we knew and say, Paul, we think we found a gap. How the hell would we go about putting this all into one tablet? And then I guess the rest is a short decade of history.

4:46Fearne Cotton: Okay. So, and you know, Paul, how, how, why was Paul the guy? So we met in New York just when you were starting your fellowship at NYU through mutual friends. We shared a lot of beers in Manhattan, having a few good nights out. And if you'd asked us back then, we never would have thought that we would ever do any. You know, I was working in sports marketing. You were slicing brains and looking at root cause of schizophrenia or whatever the hell you were doing back then. And the two of us had a great time. We got along well, but you never like you could have sat down and said, oh, you two will own a business together one day.

5:17And we would have both laughed you out of the bar.

5:18Fearne Cotton: That's why I love when these little journeys happen, like these unexpected meeting of minds at the right time and something magical can happen. So, Paul, Dan comes to you. He's got this idea. What was your initial reaction? I think for me, there are a couple of things. I really was excited by the idea. The first one was I understood the science behind it. And so I could see that there was like a use for it. In fact, when I was at university, I used to do a lot of rowing and playing football and stuff. I actually used to play football in this park. No way! I did my PhD, yeah. And I would actually go home and make my own little concoctions of salt and sugar and electrolytes and all these kind of things together.

6:00So the opportunity to make our own one at industrial scale was like super exciting. And then as you kind of highlighted, we have this like really nice complementary expertise. I kind of felt I could do the science. I knew that they could do the other aspects of the business. So it kind of makes sense. So we decided to just go for it.

6:18Fearne Cotton: So you're a neuroscientist. What from that skill set have you brought to the table to make this really work? So I think when I initially started speaking to the guys about how we would take this idea forward, they were quite surprised to learn that a lot of the aspects that are important for Fizz were really important to the kind of stuff I was doing in the lab as well. So the core components of a rehydration formula are obviously water, but also electrolytes and sugar. And so your brain needs all of those ingredients to keep the neurons in your brain functioning normally. So I was recording from neurons in a little Petri dish in the lab.

6:58And so every morning I'd go into the lab and I'd make these little concoctions that had just the right amount of water. If you have too much water, the cells actually expand up and explode. If you have too little, they shrivel up and you look down the microscope and you're like, you know, this is going to be a terrible day. And you start again. You need electrolytes. So things like sodium, potassium. These are really important for the electrical activity of your brain. So the brain waves that you might have heard of in, you know, reference to your brain activity. It's basically like the movement of these electrolytes into and out of the neurons in your brain.

7:32right? So you need to give the right levels of those electrolytes to keep the neurons happy to make sure that they're able to, you're able to record from them. And then that process is really energetically demanding. So your brain weighs about 2 % of your entire body weight, but it uses about 20 % of the energy that you'll use over the course of a day.

7:52Fearne Cotton: I did not know that. And the reason is that electrical activity is hugely energetically demanding, right? So you need to give an energy source which is sugar to keep the cells happy and functioning right so what I was doing every morning was going into the lab and making up a solution that's very similar to this obviously didn't taste as good and have all the different vitamins and stuff but the the process was very similar so there was quite a lot of synergy between my research and then what we then had to do to get this product to the market. That is a fact anyone else know that I didn't know that about the brain also what I loved was that you were doing this like deep chat about neuroscience and someone was just playing the bongos over there.

8:30Fearne Cotton: That was really working for me. I was like, I'm vibing. That might be a first. I'm like, yeah, exactly. Maybe our brain patterns like synchronize to the beat of the bongos as we're listening. It's so great. But what I find so interesting, you know, I'm deeply fascinated by how the brain works and then looking at mental health, physical, general well-being. And often we still have these conversations where we talk about physical health, the body. Are you doing exercise? Are you eating right? And then, oh, there's the brain over here. Let's look at what helps with feeling mentally well. And of course, it's all linked.

9:04Fearne Cotton: It's all one thing. We've got to think of our brain and our body as one whole thing. And if we're looking after our bodies, we will feel mentally better. It still feels like there's a bit of a disconnect with that conversation. Yeah, I think so. I think the reality is, like you say, the two totally interact. And so take dehydration as an example, right? Like dehydration will affect your body. It will also affect your brain and it will affect the interactions between the brain and the body that's going to cause all of like these negative effects associated with dehydration. Or many other like afflictions that impact your brain will also feed back into your body and vice versa.

9:43If you're not treating your body properly, it's going to, you know, we're talking about sleep. That's going to be impacted. Yeah. Stress levels are going to be impacted. All of these other things, they all feed into each other. And so the kind of philosophy that we've taken is sleep is hard. It's really difficult to, you know, structure your day in a way that lets you sleep and, you know, get the right number of hours. Maybe you're busy with work or you've got all this other stuff going on. Exercise is important, but also hard. Like who has the time to go and do the requisite number of hours in the gym or like, you know, like hydration is quite a simple thing that you can do.

10:22It's low cost. Right. It's high impact. And we kind of view it as the foundation that you can then build on all those other things. So if you're well hydrated, it's going to make it, you know, you're going to be feeling a little bit mentally better, physically better. You're going to maybe have the energy to go to the gym, right? Or that task that you've got to do is not quite so demanding. Or you're going to sleep a little bit better and then that sets up the next day. So, yeah, I think all of these things, they're all interconnected. And it's really important to kind of view your body as like this entire object that needs to be taken care of at all those different levels.

10:59Fearne Cotton: When we're dehydrated, what is actually what's happening in our bodies and our brains? Water is like the most important thing for life. Like every living organism on the planet requires liquid water to function and to exist. The reason for that is water has these amazing properties. It's a really powerful solvent, which means all of the interesting molecules that are important for your biochemistry, so the proteins, the DNA, the electrolytes, they all require water to dissolve them so that they can interact within that water. It's like the substrate that allows the biochemistry to happen. And if you don't believe me, go home, get a glass of water, get a glass of olive oil, put some salt in it, put some sugar in it, and see how easily it dissolves in the water compared to the olive oil, right?

11:50And it has this amazing biochemistry and chemical properties. That means that water is removed from your body when you become dehydrated. So one of the things that happens is your cells will kind of shrink up, right? And I could see that in the lab when I was having a bad day and I hadn't made my solutions properly. It will shrink the cells. And what that means is all of those things that are dissolved inside the cell become more concentrated. All of the chemical reactions in your body are concentration dependent. So if you alter the concentration of those ingredients inside the cells, it's going to change the biochemistry of every single cell in your body, because all cells need water to function.

12:29Another key reaction is this process called hydrolysis. So hydrolysis comes from the Greek, it means splitting by water. And it breaks down molecules in the body. One of them is fat, so if you don't have enough water molecules, your fat metabolism is reduced and that kind of is going to impact you know that and other reactions that require water another example is your blood pressure so the way that we typically measure dehydration in the body is by a percent of body weight so if you're one or two percent dehydrated it's it's not a huge amount to to be to be dehydrated I think people probably feel but like that's going to increase your heart rate because your blood gets thicker right because there's less water in it right so it's more concentrated your blood's thicker and then your heart has to pump harder to move that blood around your body it's not a huge amount it's maybe three to five beats a minute you average that out of a whole day that's thousands of extra heartbeats and extra stress on your heart that you're putting just by being dehydrated so there's all these different effects that i mean even even to just comment on that for a second when you think about like the sort of background that all of these products have in the sporting field i always thought that was looking for the marginal gains and unless i'm trying to set a pb you know you know an hour's run why do i need this but even when you think about rocking up to a spin class in the morning like okay nothing's unless they make that easy but if you're going in there with a dehydrated state and having thicker blood it's gonna feel harder right yeah so it's not just to get that incremental gain it's just to like have the best foot forward into whatever activity

14:03Fearne Cotton: you're doing so you can see that so when you were working with athletes you can see if there is any level of dehydration, their performance is going to be compromised. Yeah, I mean, whether it's a sports nutritionist, a team doctor, strength and conditioning coach, like they would be very clearly putting forward a strategy, which again, wasn't coming from sports drinks. It's so funny because, you know, we often get told constantly, whether it's social media or reading things online about, you should eat a certain amount of this a day, you should cut out on this, you should drink this amount of water.

14:32Fearne Cotton: And these amounts, numbers fluctuate and change. And we're like, wait, how much am I meant to be drinking? Can I drink too much water, too little? You've got my parents' generation. They were here yesterday. They're not here today. I don't think my parents have ever drunk a glass of water in their lives. They're like, oh, we don't need it. We drink tea. I'm like, no, I do think you might also want some water. My dad's like, oh, it's disgusting. I can't bear it. He might have a glass of fizzy water when we go to a restaurant. And that is, I've never seen them drink water. That generation, I'm talking like they're born in the 50s, not interested.

15:07Fearne Cotton: I think we're much more, I mean, I'm older than you guys, but we're much more like, oh no, we need to, I instantly get a headache if I haven't been drinking water all day. What is the correct amount of water that we should be drinking? Well, first off, let me interject here before you go into a very good scientific answer, but we don't pick a fight with tea or coffee. And the guy on my right loves a coffee. Oh, I love coffee. Please. If you said you can't drink coffee, I would say, I don't care. I still will. I can't live without it. Yeah, we're not here to fight that fight. We love coffee. So I guess there's two components to that.

15:39One is the water. How much do you drink? So the recommended amount is around two litres a day.

15:45Fearne Cotton: Oh, wow. Okay. And there are different ways that you're going to lose water for the body, but that's pretty much standard is around two litres a day. But that doesn't mean you should only drink two litres a day. For example, today's hot, right? So we're sweating, we're losing more water. So you're going to need more. So this is a guideline. It's not like an absolute number that, oh, if I hit that, I'll be totally fine. So you need to learn to listen to your body and listen to the signals of dehydration to understand, like, oh, actually, I need to start taking some proactive steps to restore my hydration status.

16:22Things like first is a really obvious one. Your urine is going to change color. Both of those, it's already around 1 % to 2 % dehydration. dehydration so when we're talking about the effects on your blood pressure and all this kind of stuff that's already happened by the time you're right by the time you're thirsty like those changes inside your body have already started to happen other signs that people may be not familiar of are um things like headaches nausea tiredness um you're probably familiar with the term hangry the the food version the water version is thangry that i've not heard of i like that it's not as catchy though i think it's why it hasn't caught on it doesn't quite roll off the tongue marketing team hasn't quite adopted yeah yeah like oh i'm just desperate for a glass of water

17:05Fearne Cotton: it's less you know like if it's a burger or something people are more like i i need i need food but we don't think about water in in that way but we need it like what you've just said there about how it impacts literally every part of our body and and we don't really i don't know i don't give it much thought i i sort of you know i'll probably just drink while i'm thirsty but What you're saying is we need to be ahead of the game, like drink so you don't end up feeling thirsty at all. Exactly. Exactly. So that's kind of like the key message. And another reason why that's really important is once you get dehydrated, basically your body starts to move out from its kind of like normal operating range.

17:44Right. I'm going to borrow your phrase, Fern, of it's moving outside its happy place. right it's dehydrated and so consequently your body does something to recorrect and try and move back right and so what it does is it starts to release the stress hormone cortisol so both the reason that when you're hangry or thangry or when you're hot like today your body temperature or your your body starts to release cortisol and that signals to the rest of your body that you're under some sort of stress right cortisol stress hormone so it's going to alter your mood it's going to alter your attention it's going to alter your ability to kind of like regulate your your personality essentially and so if that's already happened on a daily basis and that's kind of like pretty detrimental yeah right and there's a to put into context how easy it is for that to happen on a daily basis there's a really nice study where they they basically took two groups of people a group of people that didn't drink water a group of people that drank more than this two liters a day right and they exposed them to some sort of stressful situations like they gave a mock job talk they did some maths tests in front of some people so it's we know that that's stressful it's going to increase stress levels um but what they found was the people that habitually don't drink water regularly so they have maybe like one one and a half liters a day their spike in cortisol was much, much higher than the people that were actually well hydrated.

19:19So if you're, you know, everyone is encountering these kind of things throughout the day, right, where they're kind of, you know, these little things that cause stress. And, you know, if you're well hydrated, you're going to regulate through those better than if you're dehydrated. Again, it's a really simple thing.

19:36Fearne Cotton: It is like I know I've got a problem with that whole cortisol thing, Rush. I can feel it happening when, you know, probably I am dehydrated or I'm overtired and I'm overstimulated and I can like feel that whoosh of cortisol adrenaline. And to know that actually there's a way we can quite easily fix it. And it's by drinking water. It's very simple. It's actually, yeah, it's so simple. Can you drink too much water? You can actually drink too much water. So just as dehydration is a state where you have too little water in your body, there's another term is hyperhydration, which means that you have too much water in your body.

20:09and essentially then you start to so i said earlier everything's concentration dependent right so then you start to dilute all the ingredients all the salts and other components of your body that you actually need for the various different chemical reactions so they get diluted and that also has a negative effect it's a little bit harder to do that because your body will obviously like remove the water that it doesn't need whereas it can't create water that doesn't exist right so that's less of a sort of health risk and less prevalent but it does exist so if you drink more water than your kidneys can process within an hour your water level is going to come up it's going to affect your heart you're going to have a whole host of other different

20:47Fearne Cotton: problems as well we've heard the word electrolytes a lot what does it actually mean like i i will throw that word around quite flippantly but if you said what is it i have no idea yeah i think it's something that's come up i think people actually do know what they mean i just think they probably don't know what the word means because it's kind of come to the fore recently. You've probably heard of things like minerals or salts, right? Electrolytes are the same. The difference being that salt, sodium chloride is the classic salt, sea salt, table salt. It's an ion of sodium, an ion of chloride. The sodium is positively charged.

21:24The chloride is negatively charged. They cancel each other out and they create a salt crystal, right? It's pretty chemically inert. It's not that interesting but when you dissolve it in water then it dissociates and you get the electrolytes so these are now positively charged or negatively charged and those charges on the ions within the the water mean that your body can use them to do some really really interesting biochemistry and just to kind of like highlight what this means for you know our bodies in fact all living organisms basically we know that life evolved at the bottom of the sea right and salt was eroded by the ocean from the rocks around the sea, and that gave rise to the fact that the sea is salty.

22:09The life forms that were emerging at that time, they're little balls of fat. Essentially, our cells have a lipid layer around them. Lipids are fats, essentially. And that's an excellent electrical insulator. So what the cells learned was this trick of concentrating the sodium and the potassium ions either inside the cell or outside the cell. What that does is it creates what's called an electrochemical gradient. That gradient is essentially a biological battery, right? So four billion years ago, the dawn of life on Earth, the cells basically created a way to harness electricity and use that for biology.

22:49So that's why electrolytes are really important. So just like you can use a battery to get a radio to work to make sound or get a torch to work to make light or whatever motor for motion, the cells can harness those electrochemical gradients and they can use them to do a whole host of really important biological functions. So we talked about the brain, your muscles, absorbing nutrients, all this kind of stuff. They all critically depend on these electrolytes moving across these electrochemical gradients. So that's why they're so fundamentally important for a whole host of different aspects of our biology.

23:23Fearne Cotton: That's so fascinating. I mean, this is like a science lesson, God. I was not this is like I need to take notes this is so fascinating so like we've covered salt what about sugar because I think most people would go oh I know I probably shouldn't be having too much sugar we hear the dangers of it is that an important thing you mentioned sugar earlier in terms of experimenting with with what our brain needs yeah so the idea that sugar is bad I think has come from like ultra processed foods that have lots and lots of sugar in them and that is that's definitely bad you shouldn't you know that has some negative effects on your biology for sure.

23:55But your body also uses sugar. As I said, your brain uses a huge amount of sugar every day to generate energy for all that brain activity. In the context of hydration, the reason that it's important is because there's this really amazing molecule called the sodium glucose co-transporter. And what that is, it's a molecule in your intestines that drives water absorption when you consume it, but only in the presence of sodium, so salt electrolytes, and glucose. So that's why all rehydration formulas have both of those. So it's kind of like a door with two locks, right? If you open one lock with the glucose, the door doesn't open.

24:38The other one with the sodium, it doesn't open. If you have both of them together, you open the door and then the water can flow into your body. And this molecule is like, Again, it's really, really powerful. So if you just have one glucose molecule and two sodium ions moving into the cell, that's going to absorb 260 water molecules at the same time. So one of these little proteins in one second will absorb 9 ,000 water molecules into your body. So it's a really, really powerful way to kind of hydrate your body more efficiently and faster. So in that context, sugar-free isn't really useful, right?

25:13Because if you don't have sugar, then you don't access that mechanism. So it's all about having the right tools for the job and the right levels to give you benefits, but not necessarily to have like the negative effects. So to put into context, using our products as an example, we have about the same sugar as a grape.

25:33Fearne Cotton: Right. So it's not like you wouldn't see a grape and go, I'm not going to eat that because it's too sugary, right? No. Or most people, I think, wouldn't. So it's not, yeah, it's all about not having like a binary understanding of stuff, but using the biological reality to help guide your decision making. There's a real alchemy to this. And I love it. I absolutely love it. Yeah. And it's difficult as well. You know, I think the marketing team would find it maybe easier if we could say sugar free. Yeah. But, you know, for the sake of one grape, what we're doing, we think for the scientific benefit, all that additional speed of absorption is very much worth it.

26:08So it's an authenticity piece.

26:11Fearne Cotton: Yeah, it's why it's important to have these chats and to understand it. And because, you know, like I said, we can all, we all hear the word electrolyte or know that hydration is important, but we probably couldn't tell you why or what it's impacting and how it's affecting us day to day. It's an astonishing thing that you've built over the last 10 years together. And obviously, like, we can all sit there and have an idea like, oh, I can see a gap in the market here, or this would be a really exciting project to work on. Making it happen is something entirely different. How have you found that route, navigating it in this big world of business and getting a product out there?

26:46Fearne Cotton: I'm sort of fascinated by how you've done that. Keep walking forwards whilst taking punches. Yeah, it's been quite a journey. It's 10 years, so it hasn't happened quickly. It hasn't happened overnight. It started self-funded with a group of four of us, and we've gone through a co-founder who's had cancer. We've gone through difficult times with not being able to pay ourselves or staff. I mean, this is, you know, you look at the festival you've got on here, you would have gone through equally challenging times as every sort of small business owner. But, you know, we had real belief in what we did.

27:20What we're doing is going to have impact. Like, it's not a magic potion that can fix everything, guys. But to be honest, it does. It's for the sake of 40p in your day to get ahead of it that can have impact on your mood, can have impact on your exercise. can get you thinking clearer. It has tangible science behind it. So we always believed in it. And we've just managed along the way, through hard work, a bit of luck, we've gotten contracts with Emirates Airlines. We've sold to professional sports teams. And now we've got a great team here. We were talking about it before. It took his wife to get us to put up our first tent from Alibaba because the four men founders were just like, I don't know, bumbling around a park for like two hours trying to do this.

27:58And Bailey just got sick of it. I think she wanted a beer or something. She's like, okay, do this, do this, do this. and the tent was up in two minutes. So now we've got a nice big tent here at Happy Place and a team of like 20 people putting it on and it's kind of chalk and cheesy.

28:10Fearne Cotton: If you want something done, ask a woman. They'll make it happen. We all know that. There's a bunch of women here. You know what we're doing. There's a few men. Hi, I see you. You're great too. I'm not slagging you off. No, it's phenomenal and to have gotten it to the size that you've gotten it and the scale. Have you taken a moment to go, we're doing all right here? because when you're in it, it doesn't stop. You know, there's not those moments, those markers where you can go, oh, you know what? We've actually, this dream that we've had is working. We don't really pause and reflect too much and maybe that's something we should change a bit.

28:44But I mean, it's quite crazy. Like we've become the number one seller in the UK. Last year we sold 65 million drinks. Like I can't even, you'd need a computational model to look at that properly. But that's insane. Yeah. So yeah, I think, you know, the team's doing amazing things and, you know, the ambition to keep going and introduce new products or introduce new markets. And where we can have impact with improved hydration is things that we want to do. And even we look at now today, okay, we're all blistering hot and sweating. And as Paul's talked about electrolytes, like it's the sodium pushing the water out to cool you down, guys.

29:17Well, for those lucky enough to have a fan or electrical fan, that's also helping. But when we look at the winter, it's typically an area of life that we don't think about needing additional hydration. But actually when it comes to your immune system and cold and flu season, And one of the first things that stops you getting sick is your hydration levels in, stop me or you'll overtake in a second, mucosal membranes. Yeah, so Dan's done a very good job of picking up on the science over the years. Yeah, so one of the things that is important in the winter is your mucosal membranes, right? So these are the linings of your mouth, your nose, your lungs.

29:51They're like the first barrier of getting infection, right? so normally what they do is if any bacteria or whatever virus comes in they get trapped on those they get pushed down to your stomach your stomach's a big vat of acid essentially breaks them down nothing to worry about if you become dehydrated then that barrier protection essentially is reduced or lost and so it's something that people don't often consider as a another thing that like hydration is really important as it's like all of the different cells in your body use it for something so it's going to impact all of these different aspects and you've got the vitamins in

30:25Fearne Cotton: there as well which is a massive boost I mean I've just finished filming um a tv show and there was a lot of travel involved and we were you know the whole crew were kind of moving from place to place we were working long hours we were in all parts of the UK when the heat wave started here we were in northern northern Scotland and we had hot water bottles that were shivering and it was you know a full-on but brilliant production but we had fizz everywhere this is before you know they didn't know that you guys are going to be at the festival whatever it was everywhere on set everybody was popping one here and there just to get like a boost of when you're having that moment where it's probably i don't know a few hours after lunch you're having a bit of a slump you know you haven't drunk enough water because you're literally running from place to place and it's just knowing that you've got that pick me up like you say there's no one thing that's going to fix everything but like doing all the right things in life where you can, even when you're really busy.

31:21Fearne Cotton: And this is like, you know, an easy thing to fit into your day. It doesn't take any time at all. It's a nice little pit stop, a little ritual. And I mean, everybody on the crew massively benefited from that, just having them on hand there. Honestly, I think that's one of the reasons I didn't even know that story. But this is, we encounter this a lot of like, you know, we walk around and say, oh, I know Fizz, I've used it for this. Or you go to some event and, you know, Formula One, and like you find out that like the i can't say the team like they're using it and they're just gone and bought it or a musician pops up on their instagram it's in their rider in the backstage or like these are the sorts of real moments like you talk about 65 million that's really hard to actually digest and understand but the real life moments of walking some oh yeah i know that or actually my that that's my brother uses that and they'll pull out the phone and be like here's a picture of him with yeah that's so cool that's an uncanny bit so it's amazing amazing what you've Bill, knowing what you both know from everything you've done with Fizz and your backgrounds, what do you both make sure you do to make you feel good, balanced when things get busy or tough?

32:23Yeah, so it's actually harder. Dan has a great story. I'm sure he'll tell you about this in a minute. But it's harder than, you know, we have a hydration company, right? And so in my experience, sometimes I'm in the lab for a really long period of time. for obvious health and safety reasons you can't just like snack while you're doing experiments with like chemicals and stuff so I have to remind myself I need to go and have some water right because if you don't you're going to go through the whole day you're going to feel absolutely exhausted yeah end of it so I think just prioritizing starting the day right with you know getting hydration you're you know you won't have had any water while you're sleeping you do lose a little bit of moisture as you breathe so you know you're sleeping you're breathing can't stop that you can't stop that water loss and then just setting like regular reminders throughout the day some people even use like stopwatch or they have water bottles that have like yeah time of the day along to just give you that like reminder just to make it easier because you know we both run a hydration brand and we still don't do it perfectly oh i run a

33:32Fearne Cotton: percent absolutely mental all the time so like i know what you're talking about it we can we got we talk the talk but walking the walk is a whole other thing well i mean i don't even think my team fully knows this story like i run a hydration company and earlier this year i had a blood test and guilty as charged like i you know i think i played some sport in the morning went into work back-to-back meetings and like the day just got away from me and i didn't have my fizz i didn't really drink any water and i had to rush off to the doctor for this blood test i walk in nice to me okay pull out the needle and they go to find a vein and they can't they can't they push it in nothing and they and i was like oh like what's wrong about it so you're very dehydrated i'm like try it again i drunk some water try it again and they're like even i know that it's not going to work but i'm just like no this has to work and then did it again no sorry and they're like so we can only do this one more time because illegally we can only try three times.

34:29Whoa. Well, we're going to try it a third time, guys. And I'm like, I can't even tell these guys what I do for a living. All right, do it. And it didn't work. And I had to like embarrass and hang my head and go away. But it's so easy to overlook. Of course it is. Nobody's perfect. No. My realization for that is like you get that real wake up moment. That does have such an impact on me physically. Yes. I probably was a dick in the office all afternoon in the meetings that I was in as well.

34:52Fearne Cotton: Well, this is it. But look, that's why I really appreciate you telling that story because I never want any of this to be prescriptive or like certain people are doing everything perfectly and nailing life like we're all racing around at a silly pace trying to do way too many things and we forget the basics and that's certainly what what we're trying to do here and what you're doing with is reminding all of us us three sat here included that like eating good food drinking enough water moving when you can taking rest essentially is so important but we all forget the basics all the time yeah and we we echo that completely is look at the fundamentals and yeah we argue hydration is one of the easiest and the cheapest things to fix yeah it's not the only thing right like one of our co-founders actually i won't say which one he loves a nap and that's not really on brand unless you're in certain parts of the mediterranean to have a nap but like meditation and just like taking your mind off things and going through a guided meditation where you know there's one brilliant stage next to us that's doing that and that is amazing take half an hour out and like the amount that you can just de-stress from that is massively important will help you get to sleep i definitely do a lot more in the last even last six months yeah i need i've fallen off the wagon with that one that's why i'm probably sleeping like shit quite frankly um i think what you guys are doing is absolutely amazing before we wrap things up i'll ask you both where is your happy place my happy place i'm actually very lucky i'm going there on tuesday is uh my family's home in cyprus we're gonna love all the cousins like very much my big fat greek wedding yeah everyone comes over we eat and relax and gorgeous amazing i love that how about you dan my happy place is uh where my parents live in queensland it's just on the beach it's you know nice little national parkland it's got little like rock pools there's surfing there's like dolphins and it's every time i talk tell someone about it say well what are you doing living in the UK yeah um no it's not somewhere I get to go back to a lot but I love going there oh brilliant well I can't thank you enough for not only talking today and massively educating all of us because I've learned a hell of a lot but also for being here for sponsoring our talks tent which is my favorite part of the festival we've got so many fascinating podcasts and talks all day so we are thrilled to have you as part of the festival if anyone here hasn't popped into the fizz tent over there do pop in get a drink learn some more.

37:12Fearne Cotton: It's wonderful to have you here. Please give it up for Dan and Paul, everyone. Thanks, chaps. Thank you. Thanks for having us. Dan and Paul, that was like an educational break for me during the Happy Place Festival. I took so much away from that. And let me tell you, since, guys, I've been drinking my two liters a day, I actually bought a really gorgeous water bottle at the Happy Place Festival and had my initials engraved into it and I've been making sure that I drink three of them a day and I, surprise, surprise, do you feel better? I mean, why was I not drinking enough water? We just get into bad habits but anyway, they've been a big reminder for me and having the educational backup has really helped me get my arse in gear to drink enough water.

37:58Fearne Cotton: Right, I'll be back here in a few day's time for a seriously raucous episode live from the happy place festival it is gossip galore and you're gonna love it in the meantime a massive thanks again to dan and paul and to you you gorgeous lot

38:30Thank you.