The Muscle Growth Doctor: "The Anti-Ageing Cure No One Is Talking About!", "Exercising At Night Is A Terrible Idea!", "Your Grip Strength Predicts Chronic Diseases!" - Andy Galpin

21:58I'm okay with people really pushing vitamin D. Obviously, supplements, the better answer is the sunlight. Right. But if you want to take a supplement and you don't have the, don't have money for or availability to get blood testing done, then you're not sure. Going after a little bit of vitamin D is there are worse things you could do. We'll put it that way. So I'm okay with that one. Are there other deficiencies that you're more concerned about in terms of vitamins? Yeah, well, well, you should be concerned about vitamin D being low because it is so effective in so many areas. That's generally how vitamins and minerals work.

22:30It's also very, very, very common. And maybe I sort of inadvertently blew past that so much because there are things that we are going after much more that people are unaware of. When you see vitamin D on a blood panel, and if it is low, you can take vitamin D. That said, you do want to be really careful if you get blood work done of trying to just move those numbers up and down. And I'm going to say this for a couple of reasons. Vitamin D is one of those ones that's okay. If it's low, take vitamin D directly, move it up. No problems there. That said, when you go to interpret blood work, you have to realize most of those values when you're being told that numbers high or that numbers low.

23:13I won't say they're irrelevant, but they're misleading at the least. And that's to say, you've got some blood work done, right? And it gives you a whole bunch of things back. Let's see you did a basic thing like what we'll call the CBC and CNP. So a complete blood count and then a cardiometabolic panel. Those are the most common things you'll get. And you'll see all kinds of stuff in there. White blood cell counts and vitamins and hormones and things like that. Okay, great. And then, as you look over at the paper on the right side, it's going to tell you a reference range. That reference range is going to tell you whether you're high or low.

23:45And so on that test you did, right? It probably said, you know, your vitamin D level is 20 and it should be between 30 and 100 or something like that. Great. Well, is that 30 to 100 part where things get squirrely? Because did they take into account ethnicity? Okay, those numbers differ based on your ethnic background, right? What is normal, as you said earlier, is also not the same as what is common. Okay. And it's definitely not the same as optimal. Now, remember, and I'll try not to say this too many times, I don't deal with disease. I deal with like, I'm not in disease state, but I want to get better and optimize.

24:24And why I'm drawing that distinction is because on a blood test, you're looking for, do you clinically flag for an actual metabolic disease or otherwise? Okay. Most of those things are set against that. And so their reference ranges are built off of databases like the UK Biobank, like, and Haynes here, who are generally not healthy people. And the people that are in those data, in fact, we actually ran this and published this last year, that in the Haynes database in America, at least, the people that had the muscle mass had no association between their muscle mass and their exercise history, which means these people did not gain muscle by exercising.

25:05Now, some people exercising these database will be talking very, very small numbers. In addition, when they build reference ranges, so they're building it off of populations that are not the healthiest and, as you're aware, our world is not getting healthier. So those numbers are moving. Now, when they build a reference range, they use typically most companies, by the way, every company that you get a blood draw front, has a different range. So they're not all the same. Okay, so they're not nefarious. It's just like, they have different databases to pick from. Many companies will give you a reference range based on their own database.

25:42Okay, so all you're seeing is like, what's normal for the people that bought their lap? Not population, okay? And they use a 95 % curve, which is to say 95 % of people land within this bill curve. And so if you are within that, you're normal. Two and a half percent of the top, two and a half percent low. So what that could mean is you could be in like the 94th percentile and be told you're in the reference range. An easy example is something like blood glucose, okay? Now, a normal blood glucose is going to be in the mid -80s rather. It's 80 -85 something like that. Okay? Technically, you're not going to flag on most people's databases until you get past like 110.

26:22120. 130 plus your action diabetes. And so you can come and flag for like 108. And technically, medically, you're not diabetic yet. You're not pre -diabetic yet. But there's no world on this earth where somebody has a fasting blood glucose of 108 and they're healthy. Or they are optimally healthy, we'll say, right? That is, in fact, we have strong evidence. You get past 95. You're starting to increase your risk of oxidative stress, retinopathy, tons of issues happen with a consistent blood fasting blood glucose over 95. And so a great example that would be you would be within the reference range there.

26:57You'd be told you're normal. And then I would look at it and be like, that's absolutely suboptimal. Is it clinically, officially diabetic? No. But I'm telling you right now to have to perform it your absolute best. That's not the range you want to be in. I'm going to make it worse for you. So the reference ranges are one particular concern. The second one is, and the reason I brought this up with vitamin D. Vitamin D is okay. It's low. You push it up. No problem. Most of your markers you don't want to do that with, though. Because physiology is responding to physiology, which means something moves something up or that it moves something else down.

27:32In the way, it's the push pull thing. So if you don't know what you're pushing up, you might be pulling something else down. You're pulling something else down. It might be pushing something else up. You don't know what you're doing there. So you don't want to treat those markers as like A and B and C or low. I should make them all go up. You need to understand why they're doing that. Low test Ostrone is an easy example. Low test Ostrone is oftentimes a symptom of something going on. You need to go back and just forget why your testosterone low to begin with. Because if you can do that, then you get out of the way testosterone will go up.

28:05We've done this a countless times with people. We've doubled testosterone more times than I could even count without using hormones at all. Again, I'm not against hormone therapy at all. But you don't necessarily need it. If you can understand, well, why is your testosterone suppressed as it is if it truly is? Sometimes it's not. There are normal ranges for different people. But if we can see something going on where you've got a immunosuppressed or something else happening, that's again subclinical. So you're not sick all the time. You're not like in the hospital, but it's like, okay, we can see A, B and C happening.

28:39Those are known to be associated with compromised testosterone. Clear those things up and then back out of the way. I watched testosterone just take off. Easy example. This one is my colleague Dan Garner. Did this one famously? He had an athlete or a client who actually had a number of markers that are in a blood test, a basal field specifically that are associated with allergic reactions. They're not an allergy test, okay? But he noticed that this particular individual was doing everything right. But that number was off the chart, found that actually what was happening is there was a tree in this gentleman's neighborhood that it was causing him a little bit of a response.

29:17So he had to make sure he stayed away from that tree. His basal field number went back to normal and his testosterone rocketed. Really? Yeah, absolutely. It gets more complicated, okay? So take something like Albumin. Bumin's a protein, it's actually the protein on egg whites, which is great. It does a lot of things, it's a carrier protein though. So carries, red blood cells, it carries cortisol throughout your body. It's also what's called an acute phase reactant. I mean, it will respond to acute changes in your body. Albumin is a really good way to measure hydration. Most people have no idea about that, right?

29:56It's because when you get dehydrated a little bit, Albumin is measured based on concentration. So how much is there relative, how much blood? So if you take the tone on a blood down, then the concentration of Albumin looks like it goes up. You see them same? So when you're dehydrated, Albumin levels will go up. However, when you're inflamed, it goes the opposite direction. And so if you look on a blood test, if you're a little bit dehydrated and a little bit inflamed, what's Albumin going to look like? Level. Dead in the middle. Yeah. This is exactly what happens when people do things like I feel suboptimal, I terrible or just not my best, but my labs look okay.

30:37Nothing's off the markers that much, I'm not clinically deficient or excessive something. So everything can be within the reference ranges, but given the reference range problem, given the association problem, and giving other things that we realize happen as that multi -faceted approach, we can absolutely see what's explaining why you're feeling what you're feeling dead in your blood panels without anything ever being off your reference range. In that particular case, if your Albumin was up or down, and then you went in and did something specifically to change your Albumin, you've actually now messed with the entire system when it had nothing to do with Albumin, it was just the fact that you needed to drink some more water and lower overall inflammation.

31:20So I say that to caution folks of saying, like be really careful about, especially if you're going to go to minerals, and then absolutely with medications, please let a qualified physician or somebody that understands blood work at this level, really make sure that they're helping you. One more time vitamin D is a good example of something that's okay. You push that one up, no problem there. For the most part, there are times when it is, but the rest of them folks, be a bit careful there. So if I stay away from the temptation of the industry that says, like drugs, in minerals, and supplements, or the answer to everything, and I come back down to these fundamentals of health and performance, sleep is one of the fundamentals, right?

32:03Arguably the core, yeah. So thinking about sleep then, so many of us are suffering with sleep. My sleep for whatever reason is really, really good in terms of duration. I don't know about quality. You're making a face to me. I don't know about quality, but the duration is great. And I speak to so many people, I think, at an increasing numbers that are struggling with sleep for whatever reason. If someone comes to your labs and you realize that there's an issue with sleep, A, how do you realize there's an issue? And what are the first steps you take to help correct that so that they can get that foundation in place?

32:37So I want to know exactly how you're sleeping. So I know exactly why you're sleeping that way. So then we know exactly what to do about it. And that's why frankly our success rates are so high. Okay, what do we want to do? I want to run the most in -depth analysis of your sleep absolutely possible. So I have a company called Absolute Rest. And so what we do is we actually build full functional sleep labs in people's houses. And this is all wireless. So we can run full clinical grade FDA approved sleep studies in your house. You don't have to go to a hospital, you don't have to go anywhere else.

33:11We're going to run that. We're going to run this all wireless sleep. And we're going to run, we're looking at not only depth of sleep, the goal standard of science is called polysumnography. So it's like the wires attached to your brain all that stuff. Actually, I don't think polysumnography is the best way. There's a better way to do it called cardiopulmonary coupling. We can actually look at your autonomic nervous system and how that's actually responding. So I prefer that method. We'll do both. We actually run full PSGN cardiopulmonary coupling as well. But we're looking at that. So we can look at, are you, do you have Brexism?

33:44Like are you, are you, are you jaw clenching at night? We're looking at you, are you leg moving? We're doing that also while we're looking at position. So we're having this on your right side, on your left side, on your back, where are you at? We can actually do a whole bunch of other fancy stuff with ocular metrics, with eye tracking, with facial scanning and like all kinds of other stuff. But we want to most specifically look at how you're sleeping. We're looking at then why. And so in terms of why you're sleeping, that's in a bunch of different buckets. So one of the buckets is environmental.

34:15And so we actually run full -time environmental scanning of your sleep environment. We actually have a little device. I take it with me like everywhere I go. So we have our athletes always checking the environment when in our hotels and places like that. We can always run environmental scans and make sure that it's an optimal thing. So we're looking for temperature, community, but carbon dioxide, dander, pollen, allergens, molds, things like that. We can all measure in real time instantaneously on that thing. So we want to make sure nothing in the environment is causing the sleep. If we can check off environment, then we're looking at behaviors.

34:50You've probably heard a lot about sleep hygiene and you know, don't watch exciting TV thrillers before night. Don't get on your laptop and work and answer emails and then fall asleep. Try to fall asleep five minutes later. That's all behavioral stuff, right? And I'm happy to talk about as many of those as possible. But that's the like stuff people have kind of shared the world a lot, right? But then those are very true and very real. Outside of behavioral, then we're looking at physiological. So what are your actual melatonin concentrations? How much serotonin are you making? Dope of me. What is it in your blood bowel chemistry?

35:23Pre -cursters. What is actually happening? Well, so we're taking a salivary markers and blood markers to see what is going on in your physiology that is potentially causing or as a result iron concentrations, B vitamins, like a ton of stuff that are needed for proper sleep physiology. We're measuring all of that. We also are measuring psychology. So we have a very in -depth way to evaluate psychology of sleep. So previous trauma on PTSD and associations. There's a fun enough, there is a ton of actual sleep disorders caused by people's psychological state of their sleep. Meaning we have had a lot of success fixing sleep problems because people just have such a negative association with their sleep because they've slept so poorly for so many years that they actually start getting anxiety when it starts getting late at night because they just know they're not going to sleep well.

36:17So now actually the problem is gone but they have such a problem that they get into this is a common one of like I get so tired, I get so tired, I can't, I fall asleep when I couch and then I get in bed and I lay there for hours. Or the classic one we get here is I fall asleep immediately but then two to three hours in the night I wake up and then I'm shot awake. Okay, great. Like those are all like pretty clear solutions or causes a lot of the time so they have very clear solutions that are not very often supplements. What you do in those cases because a lot of people that have message me speak to exactly what you've described there.

36:51Yeah, so we would go back and actually figure out again is this behavioral. So are you doing the offense, the idiot proof stuff? Like are you drinking? Are you like doing all those things? So a lot of times it is simple. A lot of the times you don't need to spend a dollar on any assessment. It is really, truly do the stuff people have told you a hundred times to stop doing. I mean on the psychological point. Yeah. If it's just an anxiety reaction. Well, I started there for a reason because that can be causing it. So it is an actual sleep problem you're happening. You're having because of your behaviors.

37:21Okay. Now, let's say it's not all those things. Remember early when I said your body's superpower is adapting and responding. That's exactly what's happening. If you get into bed and you learn a pattern of continuing to lay there and stay awake or wake up in a certain hours, that pattern will be recognized and that pattern will be repeated. You have to break that pattern. So how do you do it? This is not very common, but I'll give you like an extreme example. Okay. There's a thing called sleep restriction training. Okay. It's very effective, but it is brutal. We don't go to it often. One more time, but we have gone to it.

37:59I have used it. It can be successful. This is the same for people who wake up after a few hours or struggle to fall asleep. So what you do is let's say you want to get up at, we'll make the math easy here. Five o 'clock in the morning. Okay. Great. And you typically get in bed at 10 and you lay there and you're kind of up all night and you have all these sleep issues. And then you wake up at five, you're exhausted. So you have to have caffeine all day and then you're up from your caffeine. So then you have to have melatonin. I can't tell you how many times we've looked at people's next morning melatonin concentrations and seeing them 20, 30 or 40 times higher than the upper limit on the reference range of value.

38:36So then what happens when you walk around with extreme amounts of melatonin the next day? Like you're sedated. Great. So how do you break this cycle? Well, one of the ones that you stop those habits, like not that much caffeine that late and then you stop the melatonin. Okay. I don't like melatonin at all very much for almost anything. But we're going to set the clock and you're going to wake up at five o 'clock in the morning. I don't care what happens. You're waking up at five in the morning period and we're not even going to get into bed until 11 .59. So you're going to have five hours of sleep at most and you don't happen to night one.

39:12You lay there and you don't fall asleep because you're in that pattern, right? And you're also staring the clock knowing I have to get up at five and you're laying there worrying and thinking about how you're not sleeping and it is brutal. And you're going to have a couple of hours of sleep and you're going to wake up at five and you're going to get up at five every single day period. No sleeping in a weekend. Okay. You're also going to not get into bed no matter how tired you are. You're not getting into bed until 11 .59. You do that for a week. What will happen very quickly is your body will start to realize a new pattern of yo.

39:44The second she lets us lay down, you better fall asleep and you better not mess around or in those five hours because we're not getting any naps or not getting in the house, right? You will start to fall asleep quickly and you will jump right into deep sleep and you'll you'll go through a pretty compressed or a proper sleep architecture. Every week then you add back 10 to 15 minutes. So next week you go to bed at 11 .45 and you don't happens next week when you get into bed at 11 .45. You lay around falling trying to fall asleep. No chance, right? Because now you've got a week with pretty gnarly sleep restriction you fall asleep immediately.

40:2310 or 15 minutes a week after that. And so what you end up doing is you backfill until you get back up to your eight or eight and a half hours. But the pattern you're learning the entire time is when I go to sleep, I fall asleep and I do not wake up until that next time. So you stop the overnight waking, you stop the struggling to fall asleep. It takes a couple of months clearly and it is brutal, but it is very, very effective. How effective from your recess? We've never had a problem with somebody in not working. Really? Putting it that way. Now again, we don't use it very often. You don't need to.

40:57Yeah. You can do a subtler version of those things. So I want to acknowledge that as an extreme sort of thing. I don't recommend doing it, especially if you have legitimate health concerns. Like you want to have an MD walk through that something like that on you. You can do it on a more condensed scale though. If you generally, if you're laying there struggling to fall asleep, almost every sleep scientist is going to tell you get out of it. Because you don't want to set that pattern of like every night I toss and turn for an hour and a half. That's a problem, right? And so you want to break out of that pattern one way or the other to not just set up that routine.

41:33And the same thing would be this is why it's important to not do things first thing in the morning that are deleterious to sleep. So rolling over waking up and immediately turning the TV on or immediately looking at social media. Because your body will anticipate that response. It will then start a cascade prior to that that kicks you up and starts waking you up earlier and earlier every morning. Because it knows that stimulation is coming at 6 a .m. And so instead of you waking up at 6 a .m. with your alarm and then checking your phone. Your body starts to wake you up at 545 535 515 because it just knows that thing is coming at 6.

42:10And so making sure that your morning is not jump started in that direction that it really does wake up appropriately. It is really important to those that like wake up super early and that is can't get back to sleep. There's obviously a well known proct might be a myth. I don't know that says we should sleep for eight hours a night. Well, anytime you throw out numbers like that again, you're talking on average for most people most of the time. We certainly have some people that are high performing at seven maybe seven and a half. We certainly have plenty that need 915. Need more. There's actually excellent research on is called sleep extension research.

42:48When you look at so this is I love this because this is a great example of going from like are you talking about risk of long term health? Are you talking about maximizing performance? Okay. Now the research is clear going from like seven and a half hours to nine hours is probably not needed to minimize your risk of brain health over there. Okay, like seven out probably fine. However, if you're trying to maximize your performance, it's a different answer. The sleep extension research will show you that the most classic one. Sherry Ma's work at a Stanford many years ago. Now, but she took the Stanford basketball team and she had them sleep an additional two hours a night.

43:29In season, right, they ask them to sleep for 10 hours a night. The end result was I think like 1 .8 hours of additional sleep per night for five to eight weeks in season. Okay, now there's no control group. There's there's lots of potential criticisms. All acknowledged all that but it doesn't matter because what we're getting at here, you'll see the bigger point. And so she did this in high level athletes in season, right? These also were not chronically sleep deprived. So they didn't go through like three hours of sleep and like they were sleeping seven hours or whatever and said go from seven to eight hours go from eight to 10 on average.

44:05Those numbers differed for every person, but that's what she did. And what she saw was a 9 % improvement in free throw percentage. Enormous, right? Wow, about a 9 % improvement in 3 point shooting percentage improvements in reaction time reduced sleepiness improved mood at a handful of other markers improved in season in division one basketball players.

44:33Now probably what have gotten better in season anyways, right? Like that tends to happen again, no control group. So I don't oversell it, but I think it's pretty powerful saying, hey, going from OK sleep to maximizing your sleep. Pretty big improvements in all the tests and some of the tests like the reaction time test. They did daily for the whole season. So it wasn't just like well, the one time they did a test, they happening at better that day. Same thing that free throw and 3 point shooting percentage stuff was done like in a weekly practice. And so they measured it, you know, weekly over the season and pretty marked improvements.

45:06That's been repeated in tennis, swimming, cycling. It's been done in as little as 45 minutes of extra sleep per night for three days. And we're seeing improvements of reductions in cortisol by 20 % has been shown in rugby players. Reductions and body fat improvements in VO2 max all this stuff has been shown when you go from this like even seven to seven and a half hour range to eight, eight plus. There's been there's actually evidence of 30 additional minutes per night reduces likely to getting a cold by four times. So good to great. It's not the same thing. Now I run many companies in a lab. I have two small children like I know some of you out there going like, oh my god.

45:51Yeah, if I could only sleep for 10 hours like trust me, my wife will murder me to see her in that. But my point is not that my point is to say, look, what if what if that work at Stanford was exaggerated? Okay, so instead of improving 3 point percentage by 9 % it was actually 5 % or four, I don't know, but who cares, right? Pretty powerful. And look at all the other studies like they're all generally in science when you see multiple studies from different labs, different scientists, different groups, different populations and they're all generally pointing towards the same thing. The numbers aren't exact and the mechanisms.

46:31Yeah, yeah, but that is when you start to get real confidence and with sleep extension. That's where I believe the collective research is just like there's a lot of studies from a lot of different scientists on a lot of different athletes measuring different things. And you see this 3 to 10 % improvement in most measures when you go from anywhere between 45 to an additional two hours per night for as little as three days to up to five to seven weeks. So from a normal person perspective, if you can sleep even 30 more minutes, it's probably going to matter. If you can, if you need it, if your person who needs an app and does well with napping, that can be your additional 30 minutes or 45 minutes or 90 minutes or whatever.

47:12So different people will get this differently. I personally hate napping like as a personal human, but we'll use it a lot. A lot of actually in our like our executives and CEOs, we do a ton of very concentrated intentional napping. That's super, super effective. So whatever it is for you, I personally do better if I just go to bed earlier. I can't sleep in that will never happen, but if I can definitely go to sleep earlier. I can't nap those things. So whatever works for you in your situation and your physiology, but it's generally a good idea. I can't make the argument that you live longer by going from eight hours to sleep to 830.

47:52Not at all, but I can make a strong argument that it will make you perform better. What about sleep debt? You know, because there's a lot of misconceptions that if I sleep for four hours today, I just make it up tomorrow by sleeping another four hours. And I think I've lived under that illusion for a certain several years of my life. Yeah, it's an excuse. I tell myself, I'll just make it up on the weekend. Here's the misconceptions about sleep debt. One of the guys that works for us at Absor -Rest even locally from Harvard, he will always laugh about this. You know, say, yeah, man, you can't time travel.

48:23As in like, you can't go backwards and make the debt up. So if you only suffer four hours, you'll never get those additional four hours back. But that's not what we're saying was sleep debt. Okay, you can't do that, but you can absolutely go from consistent, diminished sleep to getting back out of that sleep debt. So when you think about sleep debt that way, you absolutely can do it. You phrase it, well, oh, a second ago, which is to say it is a huge mistake to think I'll have inconsistent sleep, short sleep, and then just sleep more. And over the course of seven days, as long as the total amount of hours add up the same, I'm fine.

48:58And that is is a terrible strategy. I don't think a single sleep scientist in the world would disagree with me there. Trust me, we interact with as many of these people as you can. So one of the things you mentioned earlier, you said your total sleep duration is good. Okay, great. That's only one component of sleep. You also mentioned sleep quality. That's another really important component. I would argue the overwhelming majority of people have never had an accurate assessment of sleep quality. But that's another thing, right? Well, people also don't realize is sleep consistency. And in fact, a lot of data will suggest that sleep consistency is more important than total sleep time.

49:36Meaning you need to be going to bed and waking up at rough at the same time. Plus or minus 30 minutes is the goal. I'm a human too. I will stay up, you know, later, you know, occasionally do things like that. So we'll give our people typically 45 minutes, a grace period. But as like your default state, you should be trying to go to bed and waking up plus or minus 20 to 30 minutes. Most of your nights. If you can do that, you will see many of the benefits of longer duration by simply getting more consistent. The other major component of sleep here is sleep timing. So the performing at the same time of day, the same type of tasks is as important as sleep duration and sleep quality.

50:23Meaning we take advantage of this without the toilet time. You can predict winning percentage of NFL games NBA games NHL games and major league baseball games. The big four in America over a 30 year span can be predicted by simply looking at who performed not in their time zone, but who performed in the time that was their normal circadian time. What I mean by that is let's say you had a West Coast team, whether they traveled to the East Coast or not doesn't matter, but if they played on the East Coast at the same time of day that they normally play on the West Coast, it doesn't matter that they got on a plane for three hours.

51:00They performed at the same time of day that they normally did. They have a competitive advantage somewhere between two to four percent depending on the study, maybe a little higher over the team that is playing at home in their same building if they're playing at a different time and they normally play. So I'll give you like one example we worked with the University of Washington football team this year on their sleep. And so if they play a normal West Coast game at one o 'clock, a normal West Coast football time, one PM. And then we had to go to the East Coast, which we didn't have to do often, but next year we're going to start having to go there.

51:34And we got there and we played a game in Ohio, but we played it at four o 'clock or how time, which is still one o 'clock our time, then we don't have any concerns with jet lag or travel. But in fact, in that case, the Ohio team typically plays at a different time is having to compete way earlier or way later than they're actually at a circadian disadvantage because we're playing at the same local circadian time zone. So it's not the time change that gets people we do the same thing by the way with with our executive professional clients, when especially neck negotiations. If you're doing like a team meeting, you have to think, well, that's great.

52:10But if you're going to like actually have to battle somebody like negotiation or make really hard decision, I want you making that decision on your local schedule and I want your opponent off schedule. Don't tell anybody said that. But you have an advantage. So you get these coast person have to have a four p .m. or five p .m. West Coast meeting. That's eight or nine o 'clock their time. They're they're cognitive performance is going to be lower than yours or the inverse. So we make sure we give our people advantages. I was thinking about the gym because the time that I go to the gym fluctuates wildly.

52:45Sometimes I go in the morning and I'm going to be honest because it's what I have to do. Sometimes I go at midnight. Terrible idea. I know you're going to say that. We actually have we encounter this a number of times where we see sleep issues. We see energy issues. We see struggling to lose body fat issues. Things like that. They come in and they think they want this like secret recipe of supplements and you know, blood markers and they want all this stuff. And I'm like, we do it. I'm like, yo, you gotta stop training at night. And we start looking at things like their respiratory rate, their HRV, other markers of sleep quality.

53:15And it can be as simple as the fact that you are doing too much high intensity stuff in the evening. That has to carry over. That carryover can be a couple of hours. Some people it could be six hours for other people. And so if you are doing a training session at 10 p .m. You better expect not to sleep very well. That's going to happen. Now some people are a little bit more resilient of that. And others it's really, really, really damaging. And so we have to pull people off of exercise a lot at that time or at minimum. And so if you're going to go, hey, yo, for you, if you're going to train at night, it needs to be restorative training.

53:48Short duration, get a little sweat going. Don't get your heart rate up too high. Don't do anything too neurologically fatiguing. And then get out of there. We got to do our harder work in the morning. I'm just making this not always the case, but it's more often than not that we have to peel people back. That said, again, I work with professional athletes. We played majorly baseball games at seven o 'clock. We're not done till 10 or 11, whether it's like, hey, they literally can't control it. That's their job or, you know, schedule wise, whatever, you can work around it. The world is not perfect.

54:21But in an ideal scenario, you really want to pay attention to that because that can seriously affect. What are the topics on sleep that most people just aren't talking about? Because you're right. There's a the edit proof stuff we all know about. Yeah. But from your research, you must have discovered another set of issues that just don't get the same level of spotlight and attention. Yeah. I mean, I could I could go on about this stuff for a long time. We've mentioned the environmental piece of it. We actually have a literature review in review right now that should be published fairly soon. And entirely on environmental factors.

54:55I never thought about it before. When you started talking about sort of pathogens in the environment, I thought Jesus Christ, I don't know. That was an issue. Oh, oh, yeah. Yeah. I didn't think that was an issue when I was asleep. Oh, absolutely. So think about it this way. When you take a breath in, you breathe in oxygen. When you take an exhale and you breathe out, you're breathing out CO2. So the difference is O2 and CO2 is the carbon molecule. Now, your tissue is breaking down carbon for all of the tables. In fact, the way that you produce all of your energy doesn't matter if you're using carbohydrates or fat.

55:25Remember, fat is just a big long chain of carbon. That's what fat molecules are. Carbohydrates are a carbon that has a water on it. It is a carbon that has been hydrated. So the chemical equation for like glucose, blood sugar, is C6H12O6, which means 6 carbons and 6H12. That's all carbohydrates are right. The big chain to carbon. So whether you're using carbohydrates or fat, it doesn't matter. The end product of metabolism is going to be three things. Water, ATP, which is this central energy currency and carbon dioxide. Great. So it doesn't matter what you're using for fuel. It doesn't matter what you're using the fuel for.

56:08Exercise, digestion, building your immune system, thinking. It doesn't matter. Remember, your brain is a massive suck of energy, right? It uses the majority of your ATP throughout the days is to power your brain. So great. It doesn't matter what it's coming from or what it's being used. More metabolism for any reason, for many source, results in more carbon dioxide build up. You take the carbon dioxide out of your organs and tissue and you put it in your blood. Your body is paying attention to carbon dioxide deeply, right? That's one of the primary ways in which you regulate your pH. Your body will regulate pH almost over almost anything else that it has.

56:42Blood sugar, pH, blood pressure, things like that, or like the tight things that have been done on a mass of pH is arguably the number one thing. And the reason is if you get to alkaline or to acidic enzymes don't work. So everything shuts down. So you want to keep your pH will stay very, very, very tight. You could do basically whatever you want. You could eat and drink. You could do anything you want. And it's going to keep pH really, really tight, right? It's hard, hard, hard to change. So it's watching that CO2. You'd take a breath in of O2. You're pretty much using that to run and regulate cellular metabolism.

57:17You're managing O2 by altering respiration. And so if you were to hold your breath right now, and you were to 10 seconds, 15 seconds, 20 seconds would go on right now, you could actually do this at home. I would encourage you to hit pause and do this if you can, not while driving. If you don't breathe, what's going to happen is you're going to not breathe in oxygen. Okay, fine. But really you're going to start building up CO2. Because the way that you do is you build it up in the blood, you get it to the pulmonary system, and then you exhale and you get rid of it. So you're breathing your respiration rate is entirely determined by how much O2 or O2 you want in your system.

57:54That's what regulates respiration, such to say that air hunger you're feeling. When you're holding your breath, it's not that you're running out of oxygen. You have anaerobic metabolism. You can produce boat loads of energy without oxygen. You have enough oxygen in your system currently to go extensive amounts of time. You're not running out of oxygen, where your feeling is a buildup of CO2. It's the CO2 that drives your respiration. So when you then breathe out, you've exhaled, and then you're probably going to go, breathe pretty hard for a few times because what you're saying is there was too much CO2 buildup.

58:29I need to dump it so I can lower that level. Now, physiologically we call that hypocapnia. Capnia is carbon dioxide and hypo is low. If you breathe a bunch, hyperventilate, you're getting CO2 concentrations very, very, very low. I'm going to make that. If you hold your breath and hypoventilate, you let CO2 concentrations go up. CO2 concentrations have a bi -directional relationship between psychology and physiology. So if CO2 rises, none of you feel a physical sensation in your chest. You feel a physical panic, but you'll feel a psychological change. It is telling you you need to move into what's called sympathetic drive.

59:11This is your fight, flight, or freeze. And this is great. If you think about this from a normal exercise perspective, we'll get to it in more interesting one here a second. If I start moving and start expending energy, I start building up CO2. I want my brain to know, hey, this is potentially a fight or flight situation. It doesn't matter if it's that extreme. It's just a gradient. Be more focused. Be more alert. Be more aroused. Be more intense. Your vision literally narrows. Be more focused. I'm on task. Right now, I guarantee you our respiratory rates are higher than they need to be. Our HRV is a little bit lower.

59:50HRV is heart rate variability. It's a measure of where I'm out in the sympathetic, per sympathetic drive. I'm more focused. Our vision is very narrow right now. I got four feet to look at. And I'm at 2 and I'm paying attention. All of our senses are really heightened right now. When we're done, we're probably going to go the exact opposite direction. Our vision is going to open back up. I'm not going to be paying things and such. I'm going to go into parasympathetic. Parasympathetic is rest, digest. It is chill. It is zen. It is depressed. It's lethargic. It's all these things. Parasympathetic sympathetic is not good or bad.

1:00:26You as a normal human want high resilience on both sides. When you go to bed tonight, I want you to feel lethargic. I want you to feel no motivation. I want you to feel zen. Great. I want digestion and things like that. Right now, I don't want you to feel super zen. I want you to be a little bit like, do me a million. Same way, right? A little bit alert, speaking a little faster than you'd like to be, but really focused, driven and motivated. That's great. I don't want you feeling that though, before going to sleep. I don't want you feeling lethargic when it's time to wake up. I don't want you feeling lethargic when we got to go to the gym.

1:01:00It's about just making sure we're on when we want to be on and not. I'm not even. Your CO2 is going to tell you that. A physical stressor, like the exercise, elevates CO2. That was the brain, sympathetic drive. A psychological stressor does the exact same thing. We can be not doing anything. We're experiencing that right now. We're not moving at all for the most part. But I guarantee you our cortisol levels are higher. Our glucose being dumped into the blood elevated. I guarantee you our strength right now is higher. Our speed, our power, our muscle endurance is higher right now. Then in the exact same situation, if we are watching TV.

1:01:36We are primed and ready to go our nervous system is actually literally prime. You just set out neural transmitters in the system already that are there ready to activate. So it's faster. That's awesome. That's telling us to go the direction we want to be in. Now, if CO2 goes the opposite direction, we have the opposite feeling. So we get, super zen, super zen. So what you want to be doing is breathing at a rate to where your supply meets your demand. If my supply is up a little bit and I have a little more demand, then I'm going to breathe a little bit more. Normal respiration rate at night should be something like 11, 10 breaths per minute.

1:02:14If you're looking at your overnight sleep tracker and you're seeing your breathing 16, 17, 18 breaths per minute, a couple of things are probably happening. Number one, you may have some form of sleep apnea. You can't get enough oxygen. So you're ventilating more than you need to be. Number two, you could be in sympathetic drive more than you need to be. Now, that can be happened for a number of different reasons, but you're over breathing. You shouldn't be breathing that much because your demand of energy is very, very low. And so you're dumping CO2. By doing that, your CO2 concentrations get too low.

1:02:47This puts you in a little bit of a state we call respiratory alkalosis. Your kidneys will oftentimes, not always, often though, respond by trying to put you into metabolic acidosis. And so there's a lot of research showing that people that are diagnosed with metabolic acidosis. It's actually misdiagnosed in reality. It's respiratory alkalosis that caused the, it's the over breathing that caused the problem. The metabolic acidosis, you'll start changing how much by carbonate you recycle, electrolytes. We see hydration issues with this constantly. So if you're an over breather, like you're going to have all kinds of hydration problems, all that's going on over there.

1:03:25Okay, so getting back now that we have a little bit of foundation to what's really happening with CO2 in your room. If you are what we call CO2 sensitive, and you're intolerant to CO2. So a little bit of CO2 starts building up, and your body already kicks you into a position where it thinks your way too high. It then will tell you to start breathing. You'll start over breathing. That whole cascade I just explained in kickstand. So what happens to your HRB? It gets worse. What happens to your ability to fall asleep? It gets worse. Oh, I wake up and then I can't get back to sleep. You look at your respiratory rate, you check your CO2 tolerance, you're going to know exactly why.

1:04:05Right? Now I'm about to finish the circle. If it's not those things, and you simply are sitting there, let's imagine you and your partner are in your room. You guys have any other living things in your room. Let's see if I can put you. My dog. Your dog. Yeah, besides a dog. Not big. Not big. I've fed half. Okay. Now, without getting too personal here, what does your room look like when you guys are asleep? How big is the room roughly? It's about the same size of the space we're in now. Great. Fantastic. And is your door shut? Is it closed? Always closed. Always closed. Yeah. Perfect. You couldn't be seeing me out better here.

1:04:43So. You're at night laying there breathing in, and you're breathing out. And you're breathing out CO2. And your lovely little bulldog is breathing out CO2. And your partner is breathing out CO2. So what's happening to the CO2 conservation in that room as that door is closed? It's rising. Right. Going up, generally not an issue, not a huge deal. But what of you is maybe a little bit CO2 sensitive. The amount of CO2 in your room is rising. You're re -breathing out CO2 right back in. CO2 is then getting too high. That's going to cause your entire system, like we said earlier, when CO2 levels increase, this kicks off sympathetic drive.

1:05:21Put you into fight or flight, now also an HRV goes down a little bit. Resting heart rate goes up a little bit. Arrouse goes up a little bit. Your body temperature changes. You're not getting into the same sleep stages. And we're having either a struggle falling asleep, staying asleep, etc. In addition to that, there's a handful of studies now. We need way more research here. There's a handful of studies that have taken people at what's called 900 parts per million. That's the CO2 concentration. That's the level, right? Below 900 parts per million, we have no issue. Normally, I'll check my house.

1:05:51If there are doors or clothes and stuff all day, I myself, to a shepherd mix, you know, rescues, wife, two kids. Ars will easily get up to 1 ,800 parts per million. Now, the research on this stuff has done experiments where they take people up to like 3 ,000. Can I make a strong claim that if you're at 1 ,100 parts per million, it's really going to screw up your sleep? I don't think so. But now we're playing a game of like the studies have gone to the extreme. And what they will see is a huge reduction of sleep quality, both subjective and objective. So I actually measured on like a PSG system or similar as well as subjects saying like I did not sleep all last night.

1:06:32Next day, cognitive function, memory, reaction time, sleepiness, wakefulness, next day executive function, decision making it work. All this stuff is significantly. And when I say significant here, I want to make sure I'm saying not only like research statistically significant, but of a magnitude that matters to your life. So it's both clinically relevant and statistically significant. So we're seeing real reductions in sleep quality. In fact, there's a thing called something with like a building sickness where people like they have headaches and they have, they feel like brain fog and all that stuff.

1:07:05Because they're in large like apartment buildings and the quality of the air gets so low. And by that, I specifically refer to CO2 that they feel these issues. And once they get CO2 out of the room, then this building sickness thing goes away. So if you're in that situation and that starts to rise and it does get up to 22 ,000 or 2500, which is not that crazy, you're absolutely going to see reductions in sleep quality. Sleep onset. Again, this is a time. It's called latency. The time. Take you to fall asleep, waking events, disturbances and then next day. Sleepiness, wakefulness and cognitive function will be compromised certainly up to 3 ,000 to 3500 parts per million.

1:07:45What happens at 2000? I don't know. Like again, we need more research. Like where is the exact line that starts to matter? I do know you get up that high. It starts to matter. And that number is not crazy, especially for people who close their door. Yeah, it's just thinking down. Right? People who live in apartment buildings or hotels where they can't control people that live in environments where they can't open up their windows because it's too hot or too cold or rainy or the air quality is really poor. Whatever the case is. So if that happens, a couple of steps you can take. One, you're not going to do because I don't do it either, which is don't have your dog.

1:08:25In the room. I have two dogs and I sleep right on the end of my bed, not on my bed, but on a floor below it. So that's that's not a question. But making sure you have a lot of ventilation in your room. If you can and you want to use a fan in your room, that's fine. Don't make it too loud. If you want to download, there's all kinds of apps you can download on your phone that allow you to measure the decimals of noise. Keep it under 35. 35 decimals. Same thing, by the way, if you're using like a white noise machine, white noise will actually compromise sleep quality. I'll make it worse if they're too loud.

1:08:58The other thing to do is if you can get away with having your doors and windows open during times of the day, where you can at least let that clear out a little bit and then if you can shut them, you know, even if you can open up for half an hour or something like that, all those steps will help manage CO2. That's the CO2. I mean, gotten to the other stuff in your environment. So is there any other big ticket sleep items that are unobvious? CO2 for me, that's a revelation for me. Sicking with the environmental theme, there are some things you can do for travel that are not super well understood.

1:09:29One of them is we've talked a lot about patterning. If you can pattern your sleep environment at home with your sleep environment on the road, you're going to have much more success. Many people are aware of the first night phenomenon, which is the first night you get into a new place you tend to struggle. So the first night in a hotel or other place doesn't matter how comfortable it is. Because the body's on edge. Hang up. So how do you take that away? We'll make the body think it's at home. So how can you do that? The sound, the smell, the temperature. All of this is, all these sensors are going in your brain.

1:10:05If you artificially design your sleeping environment in your house, any way that can be transported with you, then you can cut that problem down in large parts. So if there's a particular scent, I don't mean like have a plug in there. But some like lavender is very common. Lavender is highly associative with sleep quality. So a lot of people will do like a little bit of a lavender spray on the bottom of their bed, on the corner of their room, or just something very, very subtle that you're not paying attention to. There are companies that make little lavender sprays. And so then you have that lavender scent at your house.

1:10:40Again, something that you would barely even be conscious of when you walk in. Then you take that scent on the road with you. When you get in your hotel room, you can spray it around a little bit. And now your body will go, oh, okay, we're at home. Not going to fix it entirely, but these things can start stacking little behaviors like that. Trying to stay in the same rhythm. Do the same thing. The 90 minutes before sleep that you did at home when you're on the road. So don't all of a sudden switch out and shower at a different time, or eat at a different time. Like try to be as consistent with your sleep routine as possible.

1:11:11We'll be the bigger ticket, but then little things like having the same setup. If you have a noise machine, take that thing with you and try to bring that environment as much as you can. But the smell is a very big one because it's very high reward, very low risk. And pretty easy to take a couple of ounces of a spray or something with you on the road. Is sleep equal to recovery? Because I'm thinking, can I am really well slept? Sometimes I wake up like last night, in fact, and I had eight and a half hours sleep. I'd flown in from London, landed here in LA. My recovery on my Woop band here was 10, 12%.

1:11:46It was really, really low and I was shocked. Even though my HRV was quite high, it was quite confusing. I spend a lot of time thinking about my HRV. I'm pretty obsessed with it. And I spend a little bit less time thinking about my recovery. But my HRV, me and my friends are almost like competitive with it. We all have a little league table. Me and my girlfriend, it's one of the first things we talk about in the morning every morning. Do these things really, really matter? HRV is a very, very strong metric. It is effectively telling you the overall balance of your autonomic nervous system. And that is very strong.

1:12:16There's a lot, there's, I don't know, 50 plus years of research on HRV. It's not new. It's not, it's very well established. It's highly associated with actually long -term cardiovascular risk, strokes, hypertension, blood glucose, hyperclestralemia, like lots of things that are associated with HRV. Mental health, anxiety, depression, tons of stuff. We also know interventions that are generally associated to be positive for you. Exercise, stress, regulation, breath work, meditation, all generally improve HRV. And things that are associated as poor for your health, like lack of exercise, low quality nutrition, alcohol use, are also things that are going to reduce.

1:12:58In December, about December the 20th or 30th, around that time, that 10 -day window, my HRV was fantastic. And then I went keto for about four or five weeks. For the entire time I was keto, my HRV was in the bin. And then I came out of keto and my HRV was still in the bin. And to be honest, it's only in the last three days, and we're in February now. We're like mid -February, when my HRV has started to recover. And I was like, what the hell happened? Was it the keto that I did? Was it, I don't know. Again, a lot to say on that. Difficult for you, what may go down this road? I'm not surprised. I would love to see your blood work.

1:13:38I can probably tell you exactly what's happening from that that will explain a lot of what's going on. The reason I'm saying that is we have seen many, many times situations which people are fatigued. HRV goes down, sleep, like we see all these issues, right? And you'll see kind of an interesting combination here. And I've used this example a lot because it's come up so many times. Where testosterone starts to go a little bit low. And you start looking at another thing called sex hormone binding globular. It's one of the hormones that's sex hormone binding globular. And it's like a collection of proteins, right?

1:14:09So it's a protein that holds on to sex hormones like testosterone. So when that gets really, really high, you're not a free testosterone goes down. That's what free testosterone is. How much is not being gloved up? And so you see this combination of like sex hormone binding and globular gets really high testosterone. It gets super low. And then you start poking around and you look at insulin. And insulin's low. And you're like, oh, okay, great. And we know that there's a known association. There's an inverse relationship between sex hormone binding globular and insulin. Okay. Now, it could be a million things.

1:14:40You know, now anytime, like this is one of the reasons why I love blood chemistry so much. Because it allows you to be in a little bit of an detective. Now, you're always working off the human. You're always working off symptoms. You don't treat or coach blood markers. It's a bad way to go about it, right? But you're looking for clues. Okay. So you're looking around your poking around there. And like, trust me, you can check the record. I've given this example plenty of time. So I'm not saying this for you. It's just going to work. You're teaming me up, man. Like you just lighten me up here. So in this particular case, you think, okay, why is insulin low?

1:15:10Again, it could be many, many, many things. You started asking additional questions. But what we've seen a lot is you start poking around looking what carbohydrate intake is like. And if carbohydrate intake is insufficient and lower than what that person needs, now, that number is different for every person situation, all contact. But if it's lower than what you need in that particular instance, then your insulin can start getting too low. As a result of that sex hormone binding glogulin goes up, as a result of that testosterone starts going down. As a result of that, you start feeling the feelings of low testosterone.

1:15:41So the solution in that particular case, we give people carbohydrates. Do you know what it feels like? When they have some carbohydrates back, insulin starts going up, testosterone starts going up, they start feeling incredible. In addition, they start sleeping better. So we know there's an association between carbohydrate intake and serotonin concentrations. This is the molecule that helps you fall asleep at night. There's also metanolces that will show a pretty tight correlation between carbohydrate intake and sleep onset and sleep quality. That is not at all to say you can't be ketone and sleep great.

1:16:13That is not at all to say you can't be in ketosis and have high testosterone. Absolutely possible. I'm not against it. We just see that one often enough to where this is a good example of, it just didn't work for you in that situation. Does it mean it doesn't work for anybody else or any situation? Plenty of times to go after it. We actually just put one of our clients in our coaching program, on a ketogenic diet, for like a very specific brain health reason, actually, a brain cancer. But nonetheless, the other times it's sort of like, okay, great. It's not working for you right now. Why is it, how are you feeling?

1:16:46Not feeling there. How was your, your HIV? How is your sleep? How is your respiratory rate? How is your performance? How is your training? Like, I want to know all these things. How is your nutrition? In these particular cases, it's like, all right, sometimes the subtle is, in additional 50 grams of carbohydrate at night, wow, feel amazing. Sleep goes up, testosterone goes way up, body composition doesn't change at all. You're not going to gain any additional fat, as long as you reduce the calories elsewhere, right? And you feel great. So we use the carbohydrates at night a lot, not like right before bed, but in your normal thing, high quality carbohydrates, as long as the total amount of carbohydrates throughout the day are counted for all that.

1:17:25So you're just switching. You're saying, okay, great. We're going to pull a little bit from morning or lunch, put a little bit more of that in the afternoon and changing the order here. If needed, in that particular case, that's why I would love to have seen your blood work there. I don't know that that was happening, but that probably have, because you've seen that one so many times now where we're like, all right, to step back and watch you. Without knowing some having this sort of blood markers from me or having any tests done on me, or anyone that's listening now, what are the first things you would look at?

1:17:54If I'm trying to what my friends are, so HLV, in our little HLV league table, what are the like fundamentals of HLV? Are you sure you want me to tell? You want me to tell you afterwards? Yeah, no, I can cut this out. I don't know when you need to hear it. So I can, just so I can know, because this is a big thing. It's like a big thing in my family now. There's like family league table. And then it's like my best friends league table. Then me and my girlfriend. So I'm trying to, and I'm losing right now, because this bloody keto thing that I did. It really honestly, my honest answer, I hate to do this, but it does come back to what is your biggest anchor.

1:18:22So we're going to figure out, because this is going to be different for everybody. If, let's assume you've eliminated all the, what we call, 88 practices, all that stuff is gone. Okay, now we start getting to kind of level two, like level B level things, all right? I would want to see what that respiratory rate looks like. I want to want to see what's the sleep data actually look like. That's your starting place. No question. You want to think about it this way. Okay, maybe I'll back up. It'll be easier. When I go solve this problem, I'm using what's called first principles. Okay, so I'm going to very, very fundamental things saying, what's causing stress?

1:18:53And then what's causing stress relief? Two sides of that equation. And I want to see what's going on. Where's the problem? Too much in or not handling enough of what we currently have. Nate thought is one of the two ears. So coming in. Is there any changes we can make in your total stress that is a non -specific stressor? So things that are not helping you achieve an adaptation that are not business. Can we solve those things, right? Relationship wise. Like, right. Something in an environment like is there some other non -specific? Are there any hidden stressors? If I can remove these hidden stressors, all of a sudden the stress bucket just got lowered.

1:19:32Now listen, you're automatically having your HIV. And so I'm going hunting, right? I'll take you through the full battery, kitten, caboodle. And I will find like what are the non -specific stressors that are in there. And we're dialing those things up. Let's assume you either can't do all that stuff or you've done all that. Now, how do we modify how we handle the stress, the stress resilience is the piece. Okay, great. What are we doing for stress management? How much time are you spending decompressing? I mean physically and physiologically. Okay. One of the things I love is we are in a state right now for better or for worse.

1:20:09I'll just assume better, where we have way more arousal in our daily lives than we've probably had in human history in the past. Okay, great. So how do we, how do we address that? We need intentional times when we're removing in, but a mistake that some folks will make is, okay, I'm working and then sometimes I listen to music or a podcast and that's great. That's part of your day. And then what do you do after work? Okay, I go to the gym. Okay, awesome. Love you there. What do you listen to? I'll listen to more podcasts. Okay, great. So arousal or arousal or arousal. All right. Then what are you doing when you're done?

1:20:42Like, okay, great. I watch TV. Okay, great. Like, what kind of TV? All right. And you see that you see that the calculus I'm going through. What are we doing the other time or day? What do you do if you get done with work early for an hour? What are you doing in the weekends? Right? I'm not judging, but I'm trying to run the calculus of going like, where is our time where we don't have been put coming in? And so sometimes I'm not, I listen to music and stuff when I train occasionally. Not against it. I've said this stuff before and people have been like, oh man, Andy's like, you shouldn't ever listen to a podcast like no, no, no, no, no.

1:21:14They please listen to both costs. Definitely. I'm like and subscribe. If I, you know, absolutely. We five star rage. Please. Come on now. I got kids to feed. Dogs to take care of. Well, just when is the time where we don't have sensory input coming in? So one of the things we'll do often is saying, okay, great. Can we do one to three ten minute walks with no input? Nothing in your ears. If you want to make it a 45 minute walk, great. If you want to do one, I don't really care what it is, but we need some time where you can, I like three a day because I want to start your day like that. The compressed, get focused.

1:21:56Because you're going to notice I'm sure your brain works similar to mine. We're like, if you go 20 seconds, it's like all of a sudden, and you're getting back and you're going to fire off 50 emails and taxing, like you're on, right? Which is great, but you need that time. I like doing it lunch. Same thing. You've been on, on, on, on, on, on. Give yourself ten minutes. If you want to do actual breath work. If you want to do actual, just closed eyes. If you want to do meditation, if you want, I prefer to just like walk outside personally. Whatever it is, but you need some time when we just stop the world.

1:22:32It's like torture for me. It's horrible, right? It's awful for me. You know how much I have to like, force myself to do those that part? My girlfriend's a breathwork practitioner. So she finds it so easy. Of course. She'll wake up in the morning and she'll do like an hour and a half yoga and breathwork in front of me. Never. Yeah, and she doesn't, she doesn't, she hasn't even gone and got her phone off charging. She'll then walk into the kitchen and had drink her water, make her little tea with the herbs thing in it. And she'll drift back and she'll go and she sits on the balcony and just sits in the sun.

1:23:04Me. Whatever the opposite of that is, is me. Yeah, I know. I wake up like the second my eyes are open, I'm like, I'm like, I'm like, I'm doing it. 100 % I'm raging to like get after something or I actually tend to wake up with a huge creative explosion. So I don't have sister like having anxiety of like stuff I have to do, but I have excitement of like, Oh, I got idea like this is really cool. Like I want to try like I want to get raging, right? But I don't like I play with my kids and stuff like that, right? So can you give me five minutes, right? What can you give me the morning of just down?

1:23:37Can we do the same thing at some point during the day and trust me that mid day one is like awful for me, right? Because the whole time I sit there just going, all I'm doing is wasting time right now. But it is a it is a worthwhile investment because even that amount of time. Like to re -center. I don't close my eyes. I don't do breath. Like I don't I don't even try. It's just like, okay, great. I'm going to literally walk outside. Like I'm going to take one lap around my house. Like I'm doing something to like bring it back down. And then I love it for guys like you and I at night because there has to be some sort of physiological signal that we're done.

1:24:12I have to have a thing. If not, I'm like, boom, kids dinner, playing with them, get them to bed. And then I'm like, everything I can do to not walk back in my office. Like everything I can do the wife disaster be like, now, so if I can finish that with like, fine, we're going to dinner. And then we're going to go play outside. We're going to take the dog for a walk. We're going to go to nature walk or something. I have to have something that tells me you're done. The last thing I'll say on this is there's actually really interesting research that will find a disassociation. Between HRV and respiratory rate and sleep quality.

1:24:49And the reason I'm saying that is they are all entwined, but they are also different. There was actually a study that came out last year and found for every breath rate per minute. So one breath per minute rate increase. This was in college freshman. There was a 25 % increase in likelihood of experiencing moderate to high stress. But it wasn't found in HRV and it wasn't found in any sleep objective or subjective markers. What that's telling you is again, those are associated, but they're independent variables to pay attention to. And so just because you're like, always sleep enough. And just because, and the last one to get to is we actually use scientifically validated questionnaires to look at mental health and every person we work with.

1:25:31It's not our expertise that we have somebody on team that does that, but really we're looking for red flags if we need to refer out, right? But we do that because there's just no way you can optimize the human experience with just total disregard for mental health, right? But what happens often is we see people who are fine or just not like major issues and mental health, but they can still have an extremely stressed physiology. And so understanding stress when I say stress, I did the same thing. I associate that with like, oh, I'm not stressed. I'm not stressed. But then when we look at your HRV and we look at all these other markers, we're looking at a bunch of blood markers, another molecular markers, we're seeing like, well, you have a very stressed physiology.

1:26:11Now for whatever reason, you're handling it finds like logically, or it's not making an impact, whether it is or not or I don't know, that's not my area. But we can see it physiologically. And so coming into your equation, it goes, okay, we have levers to pull here. You asked a few minutes ago, is sleep and recovery the same thing? They're not. They're associated, but this is a good example. You could be sleeping fine. But if you're not physiologically recovering enough, that can be a separate issue. There's a Venn diagram here. There's an overlap, but they're not necessarily just the same thing.

1:26:44And a lot of people, you'll see the same pattern with CO2 tolerance, respiratory rate, sleep and HRV. They'll be highly associated. But in some people, you might have to disentant one from the other one or another one and really pull something apart. So that's what we would do for you is to go in with this HRV game is to say, okay, great. Where's the place that we have to go? And usually you'll see something poking out there that says, okay, here's our opportunity to go after something and improve and work on. And this is where we're going to get the most bang for the buck for you. Does red light play a role?

1:27:17Because for Christmas, she got me too massive red light. I don't even know what they are. They're just like panels. There's a lot of data on HRV, red light therapy. This is actually a good example of something that I missed a vote on. I've changed my tune on this one big time. I didn't think there was anything here. And I was wrong about that one. There's a lot of research. What is red light therapy doing? It might have been maybe it's mimicking the sun or something. Okay, so there's a couple of wavelengths. There's one around like 640 -ish nanometers and another about 850 nanometers plus or minus you.

1:27:52And what we're looking at here is red light therapy in those wavelengths have an ability to cross and get into tissue so they can get past your skin layer. And they activate a whole series of cascades of things that are beneficial for skin health. We've seen injury. We've seen actually seen changes in endocrine system, or more balances for them. There's that again, it's pretty impressive what it's actually doing because it can get in and stimulate it absolutely can mimic. There's actually data on it potentially improves vision. When actually like in the eye, work with your eye doctors on that one.

1:28:28Please hear ophthalmologist and stuff. But you can actually see that you'll see this a lot for overall global recovery. Again, for muscle soreness and muscle damage, it can actually benefit those as well. I have them. There's a bunch coming out but they actually get hyper specific and like focusing on a certain area of your body that is damaged and tissue. We've used them a lot with athletes coming back from surgery specifically. So one of our quarterbacks this year had a pretty gnarly lower body injury at the very beginning of the season. We were able to get him back in pretty good shape pretty fast and we used many different things but red light was certainly one of them.

1:29:06I haven't found many people yet where I'm like, you definitely have to go get red light. It's one of those things where I'm like, oh, you got it. Oh, cool. Like I would do it. Or like, hey, you have a $60 million contract this year on the line. Well, we're doing everything like, like bringing it on. That's kind of where I stand with it. So it's another area that I am paying attention to more and more. See what more things come out. But really the ability for those those wavelengths to penetrate skin to actually get into tissue is what's causing active change inside your actual physiology. I'm someone that works every day.

1:29:41I've got to be honest, not all the workouts are great workouts. Some of them are pretty terrible workouts because this by the way is the next place I was going with your HIV question. Okay. Another thing where we could potentially see some improvements to your HIV is breaking down higher training. What types of training you're doing and what time of day you're doing them. Typically, lower intensity, longer duration stuff, often times increases HIV over time. Higher intensity stuff can put people in the hole. And what I mean by that is people that have very high demanding jobs. And then they couple that with really high intensity, high sympathetic drive training.

1:30:21Well, now we're wondering you're like, you're high sympathetic drive all day. And in the only break from it, you have from that you went higher sympathetic drive. And now we wonder why your total drive is pretty high sympathetic. You know, when I think about training, you always talk about these trade -offs that you're making. One of the questions I have is, can I achieve it all at once? And being more specific, I want to gain muscle mass and I want to stay super lean at the same time. And there's a school of thought that says you've got to like load up and then you've got to cut. But I don't want to do that.

1:30:56I just want to gain muscle mass but stay lean. Is that possible? Yes. Oh, good, great. Yeah. A couple of things to think about here. It depends on your baseline fitness and how lean you are to start. Now you're pretty lean as it is already and assume you're reasonably fit. I mean, clearly you work out and stuff like, okay, great. It's going to be a little harder for you. If you're really, really unfit and you're really overweight, it's much easier to gain muscle and lose fat at the same time. So it's going to be challenging for you, especially you've got a number of three years of training. That's still kind of like early in your training age.

1:31:37That's a pretty young training age. We got some newbie games that we'll still be able to take advantage of. Especially you don't have like a specific plan and tension with your training. You have to kind of just, you know, work it out. All right, great. We would be able to have pretty good success with that. Physiologically, it's possible. It's never going to be 100 % though. There's no way I can put, especially without exogenous testosterone. There's just no way I can put 15 pounds of muscle on you and zero fat. That's just not going to happen. Could we put on seven or eight pounds of muscle and one pound of fat?

1:32:07Yeah, we could do that. That would not be a crazy thing. You would see that pretty consistently in the research and certainly thousands of coaches and practitioners are like, oh, yeah, like I've seen that countless times. And so it's kind of like, what are the reasonable expectations there? So what I would do is for you is recommend saying, you don't have to go like 40 pounds and like, you know, but how much you really want to be at? What's that number? Right? We would figure that out. Maybe run analysis on you and see where you're actually at. All right, great. And then we set reasonable expectations.

1:32:37So you want to end up being, you know, you want to put on five kilos total. Okay, tremendous. You really accept, you know, five kilos, four and a half kilos of muscle and maybe one of fat. Oh, okay. We could get reasonable back to patients. And then what you would want to do there is train consistently. You would want to be in a close to caloric, slight surplus as possible. We have to add calories to gain mass, right? But how we're going to do that is 10 % surplus, something like that. So if you're normal maintenance with all your exercises, 3000 calories, I don't need you to go to 6000 calories.

1:33:11That's a recipe to put on some muscle, but a lot of fat too. Now, we don't know the exact number here. There's a lot of studies going on. Actually, friends of mine, Eric Helms and New Zealand has done a handful of studies like this recently trying to figure out what is that number? 5%, 10%, 20%, where is the number in terms of caloric excess that you want to be on to put the most amount of lean muscle mass and the least amount of fat on? Because it's not going to be zero, right? 10 or so percent, which for you would be 10 % of 3000 be 300 extra calories. Maybe 15%, maybe go to 500 extra calories.

1:33:44We're not going to 5000 calories. We're not making these crazy jumps in your situation there. We'd make sure protein is really, really high. At least two grams per kilogram, something like that, maybe even higher, making sure we have enough extra on there. But we're hedging on, if we're going to miss the mark, I'd rather be missed by 15 % too high than 2 % too low. There's just no advantage of being down there. And then we'll regulate chloric intake in terms of your calories and fat. We would play with those ratios. If you want to do a little more fat, a little less carbs, we could do that. We want to do the opposite.

1:34:18We can play with that stuff. Those would be the standard we'd set. Does it matter what time I eat in terms of exercise? Because I've always had that you should eat sort of immediately after you do a workout. Doesn't matter. In terms of protein timing, if you're just looking at muscle growth, none of the other human factors, which there are many, then timing of protein is pretty irrelevant. You're fine. Timing of carbohydrates does start to matter though, specifically for recovery. Now that typically happens in athletes that train multiple times a day. That's said, with both of them, you have options.

1:34:54Again, look at the research on intermittent fasting. You don't see, especially if you look at the classic kind of like 16 -8, which is you, you know, you have a condensed eating window of just six hours a day and they're 18, you're fasting. That is not any more advantageous for fat loss than non -fasting. It doesn't seem to be any difference at all when you count for calories and protein. So if you want to eat six meals a day, great. You want to eat one meal a day? It won't matter for fat loss. So that still though tells us timing of protein, it's just not super important for someone like you, for muscle mass gains.

1:35:33The only practical challenge is this. If we need you at that two grams of protein per kilo, maybe higher, can you get enough food in during your timing of eating? Sometimes, yeah. You know, in our study, we had plenty of participants that had no issue eating all their food calories in a caloric surplus in a six -hour window. No problem. All there was really struggled. And so now we're not talking science or physiology. We're talking practical application. You and your own personal life, my stomach is so full or timing of work or whatever. But if that's not the case, then I'd be like, great, we're going to have no problem.

1:36:11So I wouldn't be super concerned with the timing of either of your, or any of your macronutrients outside of personal preference, real world situations, things like that. If I'm just a normal guy, which I very much am, and I'm maybe a busy business person or I just have a job as a manager or something, and I'm thinking about the types of training that are going to help me perform at my best, cognitively in my work, but then just be healthy over time in my life. What is the like blend of training types and styles and durations that are optimal for me to just be a great average Joe? You need a handful of physiological skills to age super well.

1:36:53Okay, so if you want to live and live as well as possible for a long time, and it comes down to a couple of things, you need to move well. What does that mean? Different definitions, but you need to move it away that is not getting hurt causing pain. Great. That comes down to movement skill. There's some flexibility in there, there's some mobility, and there's also just like, do you know how to stand up? Do you know how to walk? Right? So you need to move well. So something where you're addressing, I don't need you to be the most talented sprinter in the world, but we just can't have glaring holes.

1:37:23Can I have huge problems in mobility, flexibility, posture, range of the motion, because we have to stay out of pain. So number one, biggest key to successful aging when it comes to exercise is not missing training. We can't miss training for big chunks in time, months and years, because we're hurt. We have to stay active. Okay. See what I'm saying? Yes, so mobility means that we can be consistent. If it does, yeah. Right? So there's no like strong tie there of like, hey, the more range of motion, you're hamstring, the less injuries you'll have. I'm just talking, if you have some really bad issue, where all of a sudden you're 40 years old, and you're in so much back pain, you can't walk.

1:38:03Okay, you're, that's going to be a problem. So don't get hurt. Time number one. Number two is now speed and power. And I'm saying that because if you look at one of the most significant issues that we face during aging, it's our falls risk. You can't fall. If you look at the data, I don't know what it is, I'll stop my head, but if you look at the risk of dying after a hip break in those over six years old, it's something alarming like a 50 % chance of death of the next 15 years. Like, it's absurd. And you could, whatever the number is, it doesn't matter. When you look up the real ones, you're going to be like, wow, it's just as bad as, as I exemplified there.

1:38:42So you, you can't afford to do that. Why do you fall when you're over 60? Well, sometimes the dog just walks out in front of you and, okay, great. But the things that you can control, you can't lose your balance. Don't, like, you need to train balance. Okay, great. Secondly, if you lose your balance, you need to have the foot speed and the hand speed to move your penances out in front of you to stop that fall from happening. Right? This is a foot speed. This is a hand speed. Mostly, since your legs are the way that you interface with the world most of the time, we always start with our lower body.

1:39:17Right? We can't, we can't have bad knees, can't have bad ankles, and we can't lose foot speed and power. Let's assume that freak accident happened. You had a slip and you had the ability to get your foot out of front of you and you're falling. So you're tripping, you're falling forward and then you flung your right foot out in front of you, and you planted it to stop yourself from falling. So you didn't smash your hip. You then need to have the eccentric strength to stop yourself from collapsing on that foot. So you had the foot speed to get it out there, but did you have that strength to actually stop yourself from falling?

1:39:50Physical strength is one of the strongest predictors of mortality of any metric in the entire world. The only one that is sort of close to it is your VO2 max. Those things will outpredict how long you're going to live more than almost any metric. If you look at them stacked up directly against traditional clinical risk factors, blood pressure, cardiovascular disease markers, coronary artery disease, smoking, diabetes, things like that, those are all bad. But leg strength and VO2 max typically will predict survival rate more so than those other markers. There's actually a couple of studies that come to mind.

1:40:30One of them had a Jonathan Myers lab, the famous one. 750 ,000 people in the studies, like big studies and all the course of it, I think 174 ,000 people died. These are retrospective studies and stuff like that, right? But what you're looking at is like, who stayed alive and who didn't? Not like a surrogate marker, not some sort of like direct marker. And you will definitely see what's called a hazard ratio, which is to say, OK, 1 .0 is neutral. Below one is reduced risk of dying. Above one is increased risk. And you'll look at things, you'll see smoking and diabetes put you at HR of like 1 .3, 1 .4.

1:41:08So 30 % increase hazard ratio, 40 % increase, like that's not good. And then you start to see the things like VO2 max and you start seeing like 4X increases, 5X increases. Like they just outpace smoking and diabetes by massive amounts. It's not like smoking is 30 % and VO2 max is 40%. It's like smoking is 30 % and VO2 max is 300%. What is VO2 max for anybody that doesn't mean? Your maximum ability to bring in and utilize oxygen, cardiovascular fitness, if you want to think about it, like that. When you compare leg strength and those same studies, depending on the studies, it's comparable, if not higher of a predictor, than the VO2 max.

1:41:52Can I just think about that when I get older? Because a lot of people, you know, I'm 30 years old. Great question. You can. You're welcome to. But here's what happens. We know that VO2 max will drop something like 1 % per year after the age of around 40 to 45. Yes. Right. Now you can. You can. You can. You can. A lot of that. So it will drop automatically. Yeah, with aging. Okay. For sure. Regardless of what I. I mean, obviously my work will go against it. Yes. But if left alone, it kind of drops itself. Not even if left alone. We actually did a study years ago in Stockholm, Sweden, where we took.

1:42:32We ran VO2 max tests on cross -country skiers. And these people were world champions in the 1940s and 50s. And they were still competing in 2010. So they are on your 50, 55, 60 of continuous training and competing. It's really, really cool. It's like get these people in there. They're like, again, your studs in the 1950s and you're. They haven't stopped competing. And we compared them to age matched individuals in back here in the States. Now all these people were over 80. Some of them were up to 92 years old. And we ran their VO2 max tests. And there's a bunch of fun stuff for you to do there.

1:43:09But when you look at the VO2 max, our group average was something like 35, 38 milliliters per kilogram per minute. Those people, we don't have their data from 1940s. But if you're going to win a world championship and cross -country skiing, you're probably going to be in the 80s or 90s for VO2 max. So they were way up there in the 80s or 90s, presumably when they were in their 20s and 30s. We're down to the mid 30s, 50 years later. But people their age that don't train, typically on average VO2 max is about 20. So it is way higher with training. The slope in terms of the decrease can really be blunted.

1:43:53But it will still go down. You'll never see an 80 year old who can outrun a 30 year old if they're equivalently trained and talented. So it goes down. The same thing will happen with muscle strength and muscle size. How is this linked to mortality though? What is it about my VO2 max that ends up putting me in a grave? So here's what happens. When men cross below 18, milliliters per kilogram per minute, for women, it's about 15 to 16. It's what we call the line of independence. And what that means is basic tasks of everyday living represent so much oxygen utilization that you can't do anything.

1:44:30As an example, if your VO2 max is 15, things like getting dressed in the morning are about 12. Getting up from the toilet, 12 or 13, walking 14, 15. You imagine doing a workout where you're at literally at your maximum heart rate, just walking up your stairs. You shut down. And so what happens is it's multifaceted. Number one, cardiovascular, your heart is just no longer fit. Right. The amount of blood pressure and the amount of stress your heart is under all day just surviving is enormous. So what do you think happens to your HRV? What do you think happens to your sleep? What do you think happens to your global is a very stress physiology.

1:45:10It gets worse not though. You tend to stop doing things. So you socially isolate. You stop being around people. You stop having purpose and drive because you can't do anything. Mental health can decline because you don't feel like you're worth anything. So self -worth goes really low because you can't do anything by yourself. You can't even make your own breakfast. You can't. And so you start to just read. And so this thing just catapult. So it is a it is a multi -faceted problem. You can talk about just the ability to you can't bring any utilize oxygen. You can't feel your brain. You start to deteriorate.

1:45:42But then you can go all the way to the unknown spectrum that I just said of like social isolation because you can't walk. You can't be in the world. You can't get out in the sunlight. Like you can't you physical activity starts to plummet once legs ring legs. And specifically will tell you how long you'll be physically active. Once your legs get weak. You stop being physically active because everything gets really really down hard. So you're like I'm not going to go for a walk. Why? Because I'm going to be exhausted because my legs are going to be shaking because my legs are so weak. So you tend to stop.

1:46:12You tend to sit. You tend to not want to move. And then all those other problems exist. And now what we call this is that's released to atrophy. So atrophy is a loss of muscle. But now because we're weaker we want to do less things which means worse and worse than we just spiral down. So not ever getting into that cycle is critically important. So why can't you wait until you're old? First of all, trainability is still really high. We've done training studies on people 80 years old. You can grow muscle and strength at 80. No question. In fact, almost as well as you can when you're in your 20s.

1:46:45But if you're starting out of VO2 max of 35 when you're 40 years old. How long until you cross below 20? Well, 1 % per year you can run the math there pretty quickly. You're going to cross that line of independence by 60 65. And now I guess you can start working out. But really, really challenging. Alternatively, you drive it as high as possible now. So when you see that decline over time, your buffer is much higher. Last point I'll make, I'm sure you got a hundred questions there. If you run that gamble and you get to 50 and you have any little thing go wrong. You got to have a hit replacement.

1:47:28You got to have something going on and now you're bed ridden for six weeks. Boom, you just fall off the cliff. You get really busy at work. You got to take care of your mom. All these things that happen in real life and you can't work out as much. Great. So the way that we say this, like one of the golfers I work with Don Rom. We were talking about this a couple of weeks ago as well. I bring it up. And he was like, you know, look, one of the strategies is we always control the things we can control. So there are parts of the golf game that you can't control the weather and what your opponents are doing.

1:48:01And so he always makes sure he gets really good at the things he can physically control. I would say the exact same thing right here. If you have the time right now and there's never a good time, but you can control it. You can work out. You have the ability. Then you want to put that as high as possible because when things then come out of your control and you get hurt or work or all the gyms in the world shut down like, you know, all these things that can happen. Then you've got some buffer. But if you got no buffer, you're running a pretty high risk and you're running a risk of losing your health, which means you're not able to do anything.

1:48:36Reminds me of a conversation I had at Christmas with a derelative of mine who to scene set of Christmas. We've got three little kids below the age of six running around, which my brothers kids. We've got all the generations there. And then we've got the oldest generation and a member of that generation isn't able to move for many of the reasons you've described anymore. There's not an injury there, but just going up the stairs even will make them out of breath. And we sat down as a family at Christmas trying to figure out whether this was reversible or not. And we all concluded, you know, again, being optimistic and loving this person very much that in fact, it was a part of a downward spiral.

1:49:12And this individual had kind of accepted that it was their fate. They said, like, they had blamed on something that was unchangeable. And I was there on YouTube trying to find videos to prove that, you know, if you start, I'll get you an exercise bike. And if you start moving, it can, it can change. Well, there's extensive evidence to show you right. Okay, good. Tons. Again, you can look at our, any of our work or any other groups of scientists that have done training studies in untrained 70 year olds. Men, women, 80 year olds plus there's actually the reason I'm saying 80s because of a study that came out last, I think it was last year that you're before on that strength training in 80 plus your olds that are not currently active.

1:49:53Huge improvements in strength, muscle growth, like your camera exact one, but you think it was like over 15 % increase in muscle size, like numbers that matter. So yeah, you absolutely, you could pick your study. You would have thousands to pick from that would show work. Now can you get that person to do it? That's the hard part. That's the ultimate starting starts with it, even believing it is possible, which most people don't believe it's possible. They think once you get to 60, it's kind of an inevitability and there's nothing I can do, change it. Yeah, absolutely fundamentally not true. In fact, if you look at the papers that have been done on the rate of decrease, I don't remember exact numbers right now.

1:50:32But it's stunning. What percentage of physiological decrements are stopped entirely, like specifically with VO2 max your view to max will remain highly stable. The kind of number we always play with is 50 at 50, which is at 50 years old. I want your view to max to be at least 50. If you train consistently, you'll see tons of people who, I remember I said earlier, tends to start dropping around 45 to 50. You'll see people who do not drop into their 60s from their 20s if they consistently train and that is a very real phenomenon. So you have a huge control over it. The earlier you start, the better.

1:51:10But if you've already missed that window, it's no problem whatsoever. Your ability to change, like really never stops in response to exercise. Positivity in tissue is extraordinarily high and it responds very well to training and there's just no reason to think you can't make huge progress at any age. What kind of training for VO2 max? I understand leg strength. I can kind of figure out what I need to do there, but to improve my VO2 max, what do I need to be doing? Yeah, think of a couple of things. You need to challenge your heart to pump consistently over time. What that means is if you want to think about that as lower intensity, more continuous work, that's great.

1:51:45The mode, running, swimming, cycling, pushing a sled, doing a circuit, joining a group activity class, those things don't matter that much in terms of they all work. Great. So something that continues makes your heart rate elevated for, let's call it 20 minutes minimum, somewhere between 20 and 60 minutes. So if all you can do is 20, let's start at 20. No problem. What zone should you be in? I don't care. What heart rate? I don't care. Elevated. Great. I'll take that as a win. That's all I need. Then we need to do something that requires your heart rate to get closer to max. What heart rate? I don't, it doesn't matter.

1:52:23Go up high. I would bank on those two things. Something that is a lower intensity, longer duration, and then something that is a higher intensity, shorter duration. If you want to do something like 30 seconds as hard as you can and 30 seconds of rest for four to six rounds, great. No problem there, right? If you want to do something that's a little bit different. If you want to not even worry about that, and again, go to a group activity class, go to a spin class, go to a kettlebell circuit class. Great. You want to go to cardio kickboxing. All that's going to, fine. Great. That alone will check the boxes offer a lot of people.

1:52:57When you think about this, people get, as an exercise scientist, people get way too caught up in the specific protocol. How many reps exactly? When you ask a question, how do I improve my view to max? Specificity always matters towards the end. But at the highest level, it's like, just get your heart rate up. There's a principle in science we call said, SAID, specific adaptation to imposed demand. That is to say, if your physiology is challenged, it will adapt. That's all it has to be. If you want your heart to improve, just challenge it. That's as complicated as we have to be. You do that consistently, ideally, you overload it a little bit over time, it will adapt your view to maximum improve.

1:53:45And does that also count for muscles? I'm 100 % really keen to ask you. I go to the gym every day. And I think I'm not growing my muscles very well because I'm basically doing the same thing. I'm like, I know that I should be doing something differently here. We can do better than that. One of the fundamental things I need to be thinking about. I'm going to go to the gym tomorrow morning now. But what do I need to be thinking about? What you've kind of described is playing a game of variation against specificity. Like anything pros and cons here, it's not much better. If you were to go hyper -specific, you did the exact same workout every single time.

1:54:20You would drive a lot of adaptation because you're seeing exactly what you're going after. At the same time, though, you've increased our chance of overuse, injury, problems because we're putting all of our load and stress in the same movement patterns, the same joints, etc. If you go the other direction, which is like, I literally just make up my workouts every single time, right? Chance of overuse of a specific movement pattern goes down, but progress also goes down because there's not enough stimulus in the same pattern. So we need consistency. We need to drive a groove and get better at something, but we don't want to be there.

1:54:54So how do we play the game a little bit? Well, we want to have what's called variation. We want to have for you some sort of progressive overload. How do we achieve that? We can go up and load or wait. We can go up in reps per set. We can go up in sets. We can go up in number of exercises. We can go up on what's called frequency. So how many days per week? We can do a combination. We could reduce your rest intervals. How much time are resting between reps? Any combinations, right? We have to have some strategy. We can't do it all. And what we want to think about is 10%, which is no more than a 10 % increase week to week.

1:55:33Okay, that'll be enough where we can progressively overload you, but also not really make our injury just too high. So we would want a fairly consistent plan for maybe six to eight weeks or so that we can watch and monitor. I'm going to get great. What I would recommend you doing is having say 50 workouts all planned out. And you're going to get to the end of 50 whenever you get to the end of 50. We're not doing like you workout legs Monday. You do upper body Wednesday. No, no, here's your workout. And this is the order you're going to do them in. And here's the 50 you're going to complete. And we're going to write a new program when you're not of 50.

1:56:09But if you can get extra workout one done today. And tomorrow you can get workout number two done. Great. And then it's three days before you get to number three. Fine. Number four. So instead of thinking about this on like a seven day micro cycles, what we called it. No, we just have this much work to get done. Ideally, we want to get this 50 done in the next 100 days. Okay, great. Whatever. You're going to go three, four days in a row because you're like, hey, actually I got a trip going on. I'm not going to train those two days. So I'm going to train four days in a row. That's not ideal. But it's better than skipping three days.

1:56:41Okay, great. Then you're going to come back and go, hey, I'm actually home for 10 days. I got a stretch. I'm going to go three days a day off. Okay, great. But that's what we would do is a system somewhere like that. Well, we you know what the end goal is. But that allows us to then construct those 50 days with intentional overload. Q1 is often when businesses start implementing new systems and processes in hopes of creating efficiencies for the year ahead. And over the course of my career, I've learnt just how crucial having the right systems in places, one which has helped me across many of my investments is net suite.

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1:57:53How to big debate this Christmas with my girlfriend about creating. So we're in Cape Town in South Africa and I went and bought creating and I put up the table and I was like, I'm going to start taking creating right. That's so me not really known what it is what it's for. That's right. And she picked it up and then looked at the label and gave it back to me and she said, creating is not for women. And she she felt. And I think a lot of people feel this. This is why I wanted to ask you it is she thinks that she thought.

1:58:21And she thought that she thought that she thought that she thought that she thought that she thought that she thought that she thought that she thought that she thought that she thought that she thought that she thought that she thought that she thought that she thought that she thought that she thought that she thought that she thought that she thought that she thought that she thought that she thought that she thought that she thought that she thought that she thought that she thought that she thought that she thought that she thought that she thought that she thought that she thought that she thought that she thought that she thought that she thought that she thought that she thought that she thought that she thought that she thought that she thought that she thought that she thought that she thought that she thought that she thought that she thought that she thought that she thought that she thought that she thought that she thought that she thought that she thought that she thought that she thought that she thought that she thought that she thought that she thought that she thought that she thought that she thought that she thought that she thought that she thought that she thought that she thought that she thought that she So, what are the best supplements for fat loss for brain function for cardiovascular health and it'll give you answers based on there so it's a really phenomenal site so when you ask does it work well work for what and work how much that's the two questions right work for what so in the case of creatine it improves say muscle strength probably why she had that muscle strength probably why she had that muscle strength probably why she had that muscle strength probably why she had that muscle strength probably why she had that muscle strength probably why she had that muscle strength probably why she had that muscle strength probably why she had that muscle strength probably why she had that muscle strength probably why she had that muscle strength probably why she had that muscle strength probably why she had that muscle strength probably why she had that muscle strength probably why she had that muscle strength probably why she had that muscle strength probably why she had that muscle strength probably why she had that muscle strength probably why she had that muscle strength probably why she had that muscle strength probably why she had that muscle strength probably why she had that muscle strength probably why she had that muscle exercise.

1:59:19Okay, what's the way to the evidence? Lots of studies, hundreds and hundreds of studies, men, women, young, old children, all kinds of stuff, right? Astronauts, space flight, bed rest, tons and tons of research. Okay, check that box. What's the magnitude of effect? You're probably looking at somewhere between a three to 12 % okay, that's a pretty good magnitude of effect for something that has an insanely good risk profile, meaning like, like, you can't cause imbalances with it. It's not a hormone. It's not a minerals. It's not causing oxidative stress anywhere. It's like really, really robust in there.

1:59:58And so when you look at it, you go, okay, great. Pretty easy choice here. I'm not it's not like the hormone stuff. Like I said, we're like you're turning on something. It's a fuel source. So in fact, remember earlier when I said metabolism, you're either using carbohydrates or fat as a fuel. Actually, creatine is the third one. It's a faster one. So the stoichiometry is one to one. So you can break down one molecule of fossil creatine gives you one molecule of ATP. It's the fastest one, but it gives you the lowest energetic output. So it's a fuel. And because of this, there is extensive research on performance based things.

2:00:36This is where it started on fact, I remember as a kid when the entire balco and steroid thing hit baseball in the early 2000s. Creatine was like on that list. And that's where this entire association came because Mark McGuire and Barry bonds were using all of course, allegedly, whatever performance enhancing drugs they were not using. And they were also using things like creatine. And so that just kind of got lumped in is like, oh, it's a steroid. It's like a because it came from that world. And most of the evidence and most of the research was on that. Fortunately, the last 20 years, honestly, people have sort of left that with creating because we know the answer there.

2:01:16More interesting stuff is coming in things like bone health. Now my friend Darren can do just finished a really great study two year study on post -minal puzzle women at 20 grams a day. Typical dosage for creatine to five grams. So your typical body builder at the gym is using five grams a day. He put this in post mental puzzle women for exodose and did it for two years. No adverse effects. No kidney issues, no problems. Improved some of the bone markers. I think in the actual like the femur area. That's exactly it didn't improve others. It's not a miracle. It's not a panacea. But it was like, hey, didn't do it in bad potential to help bone real density in an in an issue.

2:01:55And a population that really needs it. From just a simple fuel. It's kind of rather than thinking about it like a mineral or vitamin or hormone. I think it more of like protein powder. Like it's just it's a nutrient that you get that that fuels it. In addition, there's been at least two trials that I can think of at the top of my head that have shown that it may enhance things like mood. There's a ton of research on traumatic brain injury long term physical brain health. Because it is such a fast fuel source. It's actually a preferred fuel source in your brain. The your astro sites, which are kind of like the central nervous system cells thrive on creating so they absolutely love it.

2:02:35So it is a neurological as well. So it'll help the neurological system. As well as brain and tons and tons of stuff going is an antioxidant and time has some like mild anti accident properties and a bunch of other stuff. So while I understand a lot of people still here and think about as like the muscle thing. That's because this was came from the dominant research. But really I would encourage people to look at more the last 20 years what people that are doing creating research. The topics that are actually studying and it's not muscle growth and young healthy guys. There's two most replayed moments.

2:03:10These most replayed moments are basically from the podcast and interviews you've already done. The thing that people replayed the most. And I was looking at what those moments were because I find it quite interesting and I thought just let you know what they are. The first one was people over rating burning fat in anaerobic exercises method of fat loss. And this is really what I want to talk about is. I've definitely grown up my whole life thinking that the way that you burn fat is by running. I mean this is what most people think right they think you want to burn fat around here the belly fat the best way to do is go for a run.

2:03:44And a lot of people have very little luck with that and then beating themselves up. So to close off on this conversation I'd like to hear your take on that. You need to think about fat loss in a broader approach than most people give it to. When you say fat loss, let's get specific. What we're meaning is we're losing fat and ideally we're preserving muscle. That's what that's what we typically want. We're also talking about losing fat so that it stays off as long as possible. Those are baked in to that phrase but oftentimes forgot. So the advice I'm going to give you is with those two assumptions in mind.

2:04:26You're trying to keep as much lean muscles you can and you're trying to make this a successful journey and not something you have to repeat again time and time. Totally right. Yo, yo dieting. In fact, one of the more probably the highest most cited paper I've ever published was on. Yo, yo dieting. I can review article on that so you can go read that. People love that paper. I was just a co author. Jackson wrote that paper. So credit goes to Jackson for that. But making sure you're paying attention to see those parameters in mind. How do I lose weight? You can look across meta analyses and review articles and you will see the number one predictor a long term successful weight loss and my can weight loss.

2:05:11I mean fat loss is always adherence. It's adherence to your workout program and it's adherence to your nutrition program. So step number one before we worry about any change in diet, we started arguing about which method of exercise is best before we start really going way down the line to things like genetic testing, like you're really wasting your time here. And a lot of that stuff, especially if you're not paying attention to what's going to make you adhere. The longest amount of time. In fact, if you just stopped right there, that's enough for most people. Can you put yourself in a position where you're able to feel abundant with your nutrition approach and notice I'm trying not to say diet here.

2:05:55Should be an nutritional approach. You have a balance between living life and flexibility, but then also figuring out what triggers you and maybe you don't have a trigger. Maybe you can be more flexible, maybe you need more stringent like all the things that go into it. You got to figure out a system. So you're not people will not be on a diet very long collectively, right? On average diets don't work going on quote for those exact reasons, right? You got to get to a caloric deficit somehow. But you got to do that in a way where you still are happy and sustainable, totally, right? And you're still for energy and you're you're there and that it's working for you, right?

2:06:28And that's different for every physiology. Okay, great. And you got to meet the exercise system the same thing. Or if you hate running, there's no reason you don't have to run a step to lose a ton of weight. If you love running, you should run. If you hate lifting weight, fine, I can work with any parameter you give me if all we're concerned about is preserving the muscle mass and losing fat over the long term. That's really what we have to consider the most. Okay, now within that does that mean every training and nutrition program is the same? No, no, not at all. There are fundamental differences.

2:06:59Here's the problem to think about. If I said, hey, you're going to do the same training program in us your life. You'd probably be like, whoa. But if I told you that with nutrition, people are like, well, yeah, of course. Like there's magic diets that do like, no, keto, great, meta training, great, high card, great, great, great. You can do them all. They can all work for you. Some people take it on gluten helps. Some people, great, great, great, great. I'm sure all of it is possible. We come from very different backgrounds. If you look at any of the research, for example, like a really interesting point on genetic testing.

2:07:41If you're not taking account genetic background on that, genetic testing for things like nutrition, precision, precision, is entirely worthless. Because we see classic markers that are associated with say more effective carbohydrate utilization or fat utilization or body composition. And they might predict a decent percentage of variance in European occasions. You apply those exact same things to West African or East African and those variants go to zero. People forget that part when they start talking genetic testing. They have not been validated across all ethnic backgrounds. The ones that have shown they range from like 40 % variance to zero.

2:08:23So like really like you're way, way, way ahead of the cart here paying attention to things that just do not matter. We got to get you on a system that works. Okay, great. For some people that might be more nutritionally based. You can lose and preserve muscle mass really well by just going decently high on protein. And then regulating your calories. The example I gave you earlier, you want to go more carbs. Less fat. Great. You want the opposite? Like we can play those levers. No problem. All right. What's your problem though? Oh, I struggle with car cravings. Okay, great. Oh, I struggle with hunger pangs.

2:08:58Okay, great. I struggle with, okay. Well, then we're going to make those decisions based on more of this more lap based on like where is your pain point? I wish your problem. I struggle with the, okay, great. I have to now we're personalizing now we're individualizing it based on things that are going to matter orders of magnitude more than other things that I've just talked about right that stuff will trump it. Exercise the same thing. Maybe you hate exercise. Okay, great. Maybe we can get you to walk a few times today and we'll get most of our fat loss through nutrition. Maybe the opposite. You love training, but who man you just struggle to eat whatever or not eat something.

2:09:31All right, great. Maybe we'll play the game more with, you know, willpower will push the pace on exercise. High intensity, fine, low intensity, fine weights, great cardio, great surfing, great, like don't zone six. I don't care. All of it can be done. Okay, some of the foundational things that tend to be consistent for those two things. On most people is you need to make sure protein is adequate. Hard to maintain muscle mass with lower protein. Especially if we're going hypochloric. So keep protein high. You want to do something revolving, strength training, at least once a week for the same exact reasons.

2:10:12Something that makes you burn a lot of calories, long duration, high intensity either way. That's all you really have to do. If you can do that stuff consistently over time, you're going to get there. You're going to be just fine. Where we see problems are people that put themselves in a position of scarcity. Which means by scarcity for anyone that doesn't know that depriving themselves of. You feel like you're never good to do the thing you want to do. This is a psychological thing, right? Totally. Which causes the yo -yo effect. Which causes the problem of consistently adherence over time. So making sure you do that, I personally have some go -to standards.

2:10:50I like to do. I'll happily share that with you. I tend to like to have a decent balance between kind of our anaerobic strength training. High heart rate stuff and our more steady state longer duration stuff. If someone's going to be able to work out three times per week, I'm probably doing one thing where we're going a long duration. Call it a hike, call it a swim, call it a run, whatever we can do. And then the other two days I'm probably doing a combination of lifting and then probably finishing with some high heart rate. Thank you. So we'll do a little bit of strength and hypertrophy muscle growth work.

2:11:23And then we'll do a circuit or an aerosol bike or some sprints or what can we get you into? It's really, really hard. If I can get you in an environment where you're working out with some other human, I love that. Is there any reason why you do the strength first and then? Absolutely. That's a great question. If you do strength training before endurance work, your strength training will not compromise your endurance. In fact, sometimes it exacerbates it. If you do your endurance first, you're going to be more fatigued and you're going to lose strength. So you'll have worse performance in your strength training.

2:11:58What's the most important thing we haven't spoken about? If there was one more thing you could add of all the things you know, that would allow Jennifer, who's a 34 -year -old single mother or Dave, who's a black cab driver in London, the average person. I think it is exciting what's coming in the world of human health. And I think it's helpful for people to know that stuff because a lot of challenges we're facing, I mean, at worst we have things that are going to be possible pretty soon. Kind of stuff I'm talking about, this idea of precision exercise, precision nutrition. It's not really available to many people, to expensive, et cetera.

2:12:46We're going to cross those barriers pretty soon. We are working on a project right now called the Human Digital Twin. So this is a combination of a couple of my companies, so the sleep company, absolute rest, our blood work company, Vitality Blueprint, Springbok. There's another company called Axial Force that actually has four sensors in your shoe. And we can see early changes potentially in gate, so how you're walking, which could potentially, and research is needed here, but potentially be early signs of Parkinson's development, or logical disorders. So we'll see this in gate before we'll see this in symptoms.

2:13:23Companies that are involved in this entire thing, we can take all those data, we're actually doing this right now, put them together and make what's called the digital twin. This allows us to make your physiology, and so from our perspective of Vitality, we've got all your blood work and molecular biomarkers from absolute rest of your sleep. We've got your movement patterns, we can actually work with another company to watch you physically move and do those stuff. We can take your physiology and upload it. Then from there, we can run endless simulations of combinations of nutrition, and training, and supplementation, medicine, movement, daytime patterns, sunlight, water, all those things, and figure out really quickly how you're going to respond the best for whatever outcome we want.

2:14:07It's not ready at all right now, but we're actually, again, running it right now, we'll have our first cohort done probably in the next week or so. We have really, really soon. I don't know how well the model is going to be the first time through it. I don't know if our group's going to be the best at it. It doesn't matter, but this is clearly going to be something the world is capable of. As we get better at being human sensors, and we can bring those data in, we're going to be able to deploy things like this and say, hey, yo, this is most likely to work for you. The digital twin is already being used for the heart.

2:14:42It's in place, we have the digital twin of the kidneys as well. The lungs are coming soon, the heart is coming pretty soon. There's lots of groups. I'm not involved in those projects, but that's coming on board. So the ability to not have to guess anymore, and most importantly, try. I tried this for six weeks. It didn't work. I tried this for nine. That's going to go away really fast. Great. You still have to go do all the work. The technology won't work out for you. Well, we have some stuff that I'll do that too. What's the cost though? Like when you were saying all of that, I go, do you know what I mean?

2:15:17We spent the entire length of human history with one, maybe arguably two singular goals. One of them at the core was stress reduction. That was what we're after, right? You create communities, so you're safer. You create homes, so you're environmental, you create agriculture, so we're food, and we all wanted to reduce the stress thing, right? We didn't call that, but that's what it was. Then we got to the year 2000, or so we realized, oh, fuck. Maybe that was the wrong target. I saw in your bookshelf at home, there's a book called The Comfort Crisis. Oh, yeah. And that just flashed in front of me as you were saying that.

2:15:57Yeah, shut up. Michael, it's a great book. When we have astronauts come back from the National Space Station, getting people to live on Mars, it's a bit of a rocket problem, but it's a bigger physiology problem. And this HDT project, Marwan, is part of the people we're working with is Cody Burkhard, who runs human works at NASA. Figuring out that line of going, hey, you don't want to release stress. If you do, like what happens when we send people up to space, because there's no gravity, your physiology tanks really quickly. Right? They come back oftentimes, astronauts come back and they can't physically walk for a few days.

2:16:42In that case, that aspect, now other aspects of stress are way up. We've lost some of the core tenets that it means to be human, and we are not ready for that. We are not ready at all to be able to be told, oh, you're running this scan, and here's the exact culmination of life. You need to run. Not even counting the ethics behind on that. Like the ethics of genetic testing alone are really, really interesting to say the least. The ethics of doing something like that, we have not thought through this stuff, collectively we. There is more in our world than our human experience than just straight answers.

2:17:26This is one of the beauties of this ride we get to take.

2:17:33I don't know if we have good answers. I think we've clearly shown. We're not very good at asking those questions before. Never. Because the incentives in the short time is so tempting. We're seeing this with AI at the moment. It's just so tempting. And then we figure out we get the results back in 20 years. And by then it's just too late. Look at the current health position that we're in, right? We went after that entire idea of minimizing as many stressors as we possibly could. And we worked. Oops. Now we have to go back and do this weird thing. We re -engineer stress back into our lives. You have to be very careful and judicious when you pull things out of a natural state.

2:18:22I'm being very choosy with my words there. If you're not directing stress, you're letting something else direct that that stress is still coming one way or the other, which means adaptation is coming. So you can be intentional and point that ship in one direction or you can cover your eyes and think it's not happening at all. And realize you're getting pointed somewhere else. It's better to at least have the acknowledgement. This is why the word consciousness is in the title of my book. It's this is part of the process, right? You can be aware of it or you can not. From there you can choose whatever you want.

2:19:01That's entirely up to you and all that. I just want people to realize you're making a choice one way or the other. So when you involve technology into the picture, AI is another really, really challenging thing. In a lot of ways, at all rate or rate, we've seen this already play out when we know the answer is this gets worse in terms of we're not going to make very good choices right away. How does that manifest itself in the end? I don't know. Nobody knows. But to date, we're not particularly good at making that decision. So there's lots of consequences there. I think that we have there. One last thing I'll say on this is, if you break down, the way that we structured is there's four pieces.

2:19:51In order for you to have more success at your performance and health, you number one, have to have assessment. Once you have all this data, you have to go to step number two, which is then you have to qualify. Good, bad, great, worst ever best in world history. We're struggling on that. We don't know what healthy it looks like. I know what clinically deficient records looks like. I know what obesity and type 2 diabetes, we know disease. We don't know what good versus great means. There are no databases I can pull from. There is no metric I can look at and say, what is a great, what's a great vertical jump number?

2:20:28What does somebody need to be able to jump in their 40s to be healthy? Like, we don't know these things and I don't know what by ethnicity. And I mentioned that before, that's a critical component because it's clearly different, right? There are some markers in basic blood chemistry that are not different in Southeast Asians or that are different in Southeast Asians versus Northern Europeans. We don't have that fully fleshed out. And if we do, it's for disease markers. We don't have that. So I don't even know what I'm judging. Okay, no, assessment, great. Where are we going to get these databases of super healthy people as the world continues to get less healthy?

2:21:02I'm losing my population to pull from really, really quickly. Okay, and the next piece is, okay, great. You've told me that this marker should be here. Pick your marker whenever you want. How do I get it there? And that's really where we're struggling. So the second problem is what I call Polaris. Like, we have no North Star. We don't know where this thing should go. The third one is, okay, how do I get there? What is the intervention? What is the thing? That's where I actually think people in my field are going to not only maintain but increase their value. Such as like personal coaches, physical therapists, athletic trainers, people that are going to annuercise because you might have an AI that can come in and run something and say, great, your numbers are here and our metrics are you should be here and then you should go do X.

2:21:53I want somebody there with me. I want a human taking me through X. That's going to feel better because we don't know. There's almost no data on, okay, great. Well, what is the optimal training for that marker? What is the optimal nutrition? That is really, really limited. So we have to rely on expert. We have to rely on people that go, I know the evidence base, but then also in my experience, I'm thinking about this this way. If you were an NFL quarterback and you tore your ACL and we ran all that stuff on you, you would still come back and go, oh, great. There's a coach over there who's actually run people through ACL recoveries on 15 starting NFL quarterbacks.

2:22:33What's it going to cost? You're hiring that person, right? Because you've done it before. Fantastic. The budget doesn't matter at that point because the person's actually done it and they will be there. Fantastic. I really feel like our field is going to increase in the value because of that. They're going to want to say, okay, awesome. The numbers came out on this. The AI told me this is there. You've done it before, yeah? Done a lot. Great. I trust you the most. I want you by my side. I want that companionship. As we lose more and more connection to other people, this is my bias, depending on my field, that this is a great place where people want someone there.

2:23:11Online coaching is great. That's fine and all that. But you're seeing actually already a premium coming on like, you know, I want to hire an in -person trainer. Can you give me that person? Where like the boom is the opposite for a while. And now it's already swinging back where people would rather have somebody there in person for all those reasons. So that is, I think, an incredibly interesting challenge. But that's the way to think about it. That top one's going to get better. Lots of problems. But what are we comparing against? And then what do we do about it? That's going to be the real trick.

2:23:44We have a closing tradition where the last guest leaves the question for the next guest, not knowing who they're going to leave it for. Who on your team or in your life, can you not function without who rarely avigates the credit they truly deserve? Oh, man. I can't see any scenario how that answer doesn't go straight to my wife Natasha. I don't want to be, you know, cliche on you and that one. But it's not cliche in my case. It is like she is fundamental to so many things about my life. The success I've had in the last any number of years is in large part. Like because you're her and I mean tactically, but I also mean like unfortunately, I'm not particularly fond of talking to people when it comes to like someone crummy happens or whatever.

2:24:40I'm just like, okay, like I'm honestly pretty good about separating those things out. So I don't like locked it, talk to people about this stuff. But when I do, that's pretty much going to be her for the most part. And she's also very good about.

2:24:59Sometimes because it's, you know, when things that affect me affect her. It's the same thing. So sometimes it's like, oh, she needs me to talk to her. Like, I don't want to talk to her. I don't care. It's like, okay, I have to get in in. But she's good about being like, this is what you need. And so you know, so yeah, I mean, there's no scenario in which she's not the answer to that question. Thank you so much. You know, this is probably the longest conversation I've ever had, but for good reason. Because I could have carried on talking to you for a very, very long time. I find it absolutely fascinating.

2:25:30And you're, I've never really met anybody like you in the sense that you're so, so innately passionate, mission driven. And so rigorous in the way that you present information. And you provide really, really important nuance to everything you're saying as you're delivering it. And I think it's really, really remarkable. It's really, really, really remarkable. And I don't say that lightly, but I've spoken about this subject matter before. You know, I've had people on this podcast to speak about this. But I've never ever learnt so much. Oh, man. You know, I don't really, really mean that. But I've also never felt so empowered, which I think is an important point to add.

2:26:11Because sometimes you can learn something, but it can feel disempowering. But to make me feel like I've, I'm intellectually better off in terms of like my intellectual wealth around these subject matters. But also feel really, really empowered is a real superpower. You know, and I just wish we could bottle you up in a jar, use AI to keep your life forever. Because I think you're a real force for good in the world. So thank you so much for giving me your time today. It's a real honor. Oh, man. I don't know how to accept compliments like that. So thank you so much. So I can say it's a moment. Thank you so much, Dr.

2:26:38Andy Gopin.

2:26:58Music Q1 is often when businesses start implementing new systems and processes in hopes of creating efficiencies for the year ahead. And over the course of my career, I've learnt just how crucial having the right systems in places, one which has helped me across many of my investments is NetSuite. They're also a sponsor of this podcast. NetSuite is the number one cloud financial system through their streamlined platform. You'll find all of your accounting financial management inventory and HR in one place. Their technology has been a real game changer, especially for my team at Flight Studio. As over the last year, we've moved out of startup mode and into scale at mode.

2:27:38We no longer have to juggle multiple systems and having everything together has reduced the number of manual tasks and errors. Over 41 ,000 businesses have chosen to future proof their business with NetSuite. So if you'd like to learn how it can help your business, head to netsuite .com slash Bartlett and free download the CFO's guide to AI and machine learning. That's netsuite .com slash Bartlett.