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

You know how your mood dips when you’re hangry? Well, being thangry is a thing too! Thirst – being dehydrated – can have a very real impact on everything from your stress levels to cognitive function and physical performance. We’re heading back to this year’s Happy Place Festival, where the Talk Stage was sponsored by Phizz, the UK’s number-one selling hydration brand. In this chat with Fearne, Dan Cray, CEO and Co-Founder of Phizz, and Dr Paul Anastasiades, Head of Product Development and Co-Founder, explore what hydration really means, why it’s so easy to overlook, and how getting it right can help us feel more energised, focused and more like ourselves. They also explain why effective hydration isn’t just about drinking more water, but about getting the right balance of electrolytes and nutrients to help your body perform at its best. Plus, how much water should you actually be drinking each day? Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy https://acast.com/privacy for more information.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:01Fearne Cotton?

  Hello and welcome to Happy Place with me Fern Cotton. Today, let's head back to the Happy Place Festival with Dan Cray and Dr Paul Anastasiades, the founders of FIZ.

• 0:13Speaker 01

  Dehydration will affect your body, it will also affect your brain, and it will affect the interactions between the brain and the body that's going to cause all of these negative effects associated with dehydration or sleep. That's going to be impacted. Other signs that people may be not familiar of are things like headaches, nausea, tiredness. You're probably familiar with the term hangry, the food version, the water version is thangry. By the time you're thirsty, like those changes inside your body have already started to happen.

• 0:46Fearne Cotton?

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

• 1:32Fearne Cotton?

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

• 2:12Fearne Cotton?

  Before we kick off, could you please introduce yourselves to our delightful audience and tell us what your name is, what your job title is, or how you describe yourself and what your passion is?

• 2:23Speaker 02

  I'm Dan, I'm a co-founder and CEO of FIZ. We've become the number one hydration brand in the UK. It's been a decade journey and as you'll learn today, I am not a scientist, but the gentleman to my right brings a lot of credibility and you'll see exactly why when we started the business, we thought it was a necessity to have someone like Paul be a part of it so we could develop something with real impact and be proud of.

• 2:46Fearne Cotton?

  Thank you, Dan.

• 2:47Speaker 01

  Yes, my name's Paul Anastasiades. I'm a neuroscientist and senior lecturer at the University of Bristol in my day job. And then I'm also one of the co-founders and head of product development at FIZ with Dan. And my role is essentially to help design the products, make sure they're kind of grounded in science, and then help educate people about the benefits and the science behind the products in our day-to-day business.

• 3:10Fearne Cotton?

  So you guys, you're the dream team. You both bring your skill set to the brand and to get the name out there. Dan, where did the idea initially come from? You obviously saw a gap in the market and thought, right, I've got this moment of inspiration.

• 3:25Speaker 02

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

• 3:29Fearne Cotton?

  You've got a bit London.

• 3:31Speaker 02

  Although my Aussie mates think I sound English and my English mates think I sound Aussie, so I'm caught in no man's land. I was working with a lot of professional athletes back in Australia, a lot of netballers, a lot of footballers. And I was really surprised actually that when it came to their hydration strategy, they wouldn't use sports drinks, they'd use rehydration sachets that were typically used if you had food poisoning, which got me really curious as to why not? You learn a bit, like a lot of the energy drinks are more just high sugar and fuel energy, but less so about the hydration strategy. And you learn that the benefits that you seek from this are, you know, focus, performance, decision-making, exercise seems easier, all of these things Paul will talk on a little more later. But those are all benefits that I thought, why would I not want to have that in my own

• 4:15Speaker 02

  life, you know, whether that's tackling hangovers, long-haul flights, office days? And me and the other co-founders started using this in combination with the multivitamin. And so the natural next step was, let's go and buy that combination product of, you know, something that can taste better than a food poisoning medication and then also combines a multivitamin. And, you know, in Australia it didn't exist, in the US it didn't exist, in the UK it didn't exist. So the natural next step was to call one of the few scientists we knew and say, Paul, we think we found a gap. How the hell would we go about putting this all into one tablet? And then I guess the rest is a short decade of history.

• 4:46Fearne Cotton?

  Okay, so, and you know Paul how? How, why was Paul the guy?

• 4:50Speaker 02

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

• 5:18Fearne Cotton?

  That's why I love when these little journeys happen, like these unexpected meeting of minds at the right time and something magical can happen. So, so Paul, Dan comes to you, he's got this idea, what was your initial reaction?

• 5:32Speaker 01

  I think for me, there were a couple of things, I really was excited by the idea. The first one was I understood the science behind it and so I could see that there was like a use for it. In fact, when I was at university, I used to do a lot of rowing and playing football and stuff. I actually used to play football in this park.

• 5:49Fearne Cotton?

  No way!

• 5:50Speaker 01

  For my PhD, yeah. And I would actually go home and make my own little concoctions of salt and sugar and electrolytes and all these kind of things together. So the opportunity to make our own one at industrial scale was like super exciting. And then, as you kind of highlighted, we have this like really nice complementary expertise. I kind of felt I could do the science, I knew that they could do the other aspects of the business, so it kind of makes sense, so we decided to just go for it.

• 6:19Fearne Cotton?

  So you're a neuroscientist, what from that skill set have you brought to the table to make this really work?

• 6:26Speaker 01

  So I think when I initially started speaking to the guys about how we would take this idea forward, they were quite surprised to learn that a lot of the aspects that are important for FIZ were really important to the kind of stuff I was doing in the lab as well. So the core components of a rehydration formula are obviously water, but also electrolytes and sugar. And so your brain needs all of those ingredients to keep the neurons in your brain functioning normally. So I was recording from neurons in a little petri dish in the lab. And so every morning, I'd go into lab and I'd make these little concoctions that had just the right amount of water. If you have too much water, the cells actually expand up and explode. If you have too little, they shrivel up and you look down the microscope and you're like,

• 7:11Speaker 01

  you know, this is going to be a terrible day, and you start again. You need electrolytes, so things like sodium, potassium, these are really important for like electrical activity of your brain. So the brainwaves that you might have heard of in, you know, reference to your brain activity, it's basically like the movement of these electrolytes into and out of the neurons in your brain, right? So you need to give the right levels of those electrolytes to keep the neurons happy, to make sure that they're able to, you're able to record from them. And then that process is really energetically demanding. So your brain weighs about 2% of your entire body weight, but it uses about 20% of the energy that you'll use over the course of a day.

• 7:52Fearne Cotton?

  I did not know that.

• 7:53Speaker 01

  And the reason is that electrical activity is hugely energetically demanding, right? So you need to give an energy source, which is sugar, to keep the cells happy and functioning, right? So what I was doing every morning was going into the lab and making up a solution that's very similar to this, obviously didn't taste as good and have all the different vitamins and stuff, but the process was very similar. So there was quite a lot of synergy between my research and then what we then had to do to get this product to the market.

• 8:20Fearne Cotton?

  That is a fact. Does anyone else know that? I didn't know that about the brain. Also, what I loved was that you were doing this like deep chat about neuroscience and someone was just playing the bongos over that. That was really working for me.

• 8:32Speaker 01

  That might be a first.

• 8:33Speaker 02

  That might be a first.

• 8:34Fearne Cotton?

  I'm like, yeah, exactly.

• 8:35Speaker 01

  Maybe our brain patterns like synchronise to the beat of the bongos as we listen.

• 8:38Fearne Cotton?

  It's so great, but what I find so interesting, you know, I'm deeply fascinated by how the brain works and then looking at mental health, physical, general wellbeing. And often we still have these conversations where we talk about physical health, the body. Are you doing exercise? Are you eating right? And then, oh, there's the brain over here. Let's look at what helps with feeling mentally well. And of course, it's all linked. It's all one thing. We've got to think of our brain and our body as one whole thing. And if we're looking after our bodies, we will feel mentally better. It still feels like there's like a bit of a disconnect with that conversation.

• 9:16Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think so. I think the reality is, like you say, the two totally interact. And so take dehydration as an example, right? Dehydration will affect your body. It will also affect your brain and it will affect the interactions between the brain and the body that's going to cause all of like these negative effects associated with dehydration or many other like afflictions that impact your brain will also feed back into your body and vice versa. If you're not treating your body properly, it's gonna, you know, we were talking about sleep, that's going to be impacted.

• 9:50Fearne Cotton?

  Yeah.

• 9:50Speaker 01

  Stress levels are going to be impacted. All of these other things, they all feed into each other. And so the kind of philosophy that we've taken is sleep is hard. It's really, you know, difficult to, you know, structure your day in a way that lets you sleep and, you know, get the right number of hours. Maybe you're busy with work or you've got all this other stuff going on. Exercise is important, but also hard. Like who has the time to go and do the requisite number of hours in the gym or like, you know, like hydration is quite a simple thing that you can do. It's low cost, right? It's high impact. And we kind of view it as the foundation that you can then build on all those other things.

• 10:32Speaker 01

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

• 10:59Fearne Cotton?

  When we're dehydrated, what is actually, what's happening in our bodies and our brains?

• 11:05Speaker 01

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

• 11:50Speaker 01

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

• 12:34Speaker 01

  It means splitting by water. And it breaks down molecules in the body. One of them is fat. So if you don't have enough water molecules, your fat metabolism is reduced and that kind of is going to impact, you know, that and other reactions that require water. Another example is your blood pressure. So the way that we typically measure dehydration in the body is by a percent of body weight. So if you're one or two percent dehydrated, it's not a huge amount to be dehydrated. I think people would probably feel, but like that's going to increase your heart rate because your blood gets thicker, right? Because there's less water in it, right?

• 13:13Fearne Cotton?

  Right.

• 13:13Speaker 01

  So it's more concentrated, your blood's thicker and then your heart has to pump harder to move that blood around your body. It's not a huge amount. It's maybe three to five beats a minute. You average that out of a whole day, that's thousands of extra heartbeats and extra stress on your heart that you're putting just by being dehydrated. So there's all these different effects that.

• 13:34Speaker 02

  I mean, even to just comment on that for a second, when you think about like the sort of background that all of these products have in the sporting field, I always thought I was looking for the marginal gains and unless I'm trying to set a PB in a, you know, an hour's run, why do I need this? But even when you think about rocking up to a spin class in the morning, like, okay, nothing's necessarily make that easy, but if you're going in there with a dehydrated state and having thicker blood, it's gonna feel harder.

• 13:57Fearne Cotton?

  Right, yeah.

• 13:58Speaker 02

  So it's not just to get that incremental gain, it's just to like have the best foot forward into whatever activity you're doing.

• 14:04Fearne Cotton?

  So you can see that, so when you were working with athletes, you can see if there is any level of dehydration, their performance is going to be compromised.

• 14:11Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, whether it's a sports nutritionist, a team doctor, strength and conditioning coach, like they would be very clearly putting forward a strategy, which again, wasn't coming from sports drinks.

• 14:21Fearne Cotton?

  It's so funny because, you know, we often get told constantly, whether it's social media or reading things online about you should eat a certain amount of this a day, you should cut out on this, you should drink this amount of water. And these amounts, numbers fluctuate and change. And we're like, wait, how much am I meant to be drinking? Is that, can I drink too much water, too little? You've got my parents' generation, they were here yesterday, they're not here today. I don't think my parents have ever drunk a glass of water in their lives. They're like, oh, we don't need it, we drink tea. I'm like, no, I do think you might also want some water. My dad's like, oh, it's disgusting. I can't bear it. He might have a glass of fizzy water when we go to a restaurant and that is, I've never seen them drink water.

• 15:02Fearne Cotton?

  That generation, I'm talking like they're born in the 50s, not interested. I think we're much more, I mean, I'm older than you guys, but we're much more like, oh no, we need to, I instantly get a headache if I haven't been drinking water all day. What is the correct amount of water that we should be drinking?

• 15:19Speaker 02

  Well, first off, let me interject here before you go into a very good scientific answer, but we don't pick a fight with tea or coffee and the guy, am I right? Loves a coffee.

• 15:27Fearne Cotton?

  Oh, I love coffee. Please, if you said you can't drink coffee, I would say, I don't care, I still will. I can't live without it.

• 15:34Speaker 02

  Yeah, we're not here to fight that fight.

• 15:36Fearne Cotton?

  We love, we love coffee.

• 15:37Speaker 01

  So I guess there's two components to that. One is the water, how much do you drink? So the recommended amount is around two litres a day.

• 15:45Fearne Cotton?

  Oh, wow, okay.

• 15:46Speaker 01

  And there are different ways that you're going to lose water for the body, but that's pretty much standard is around two litres a day. But that doesn't mean you should only drink two litres a day. For example, today's hot, right? So we're sweating, we're losing more water, so you're going to need more. So this is a, it's a guideline. It's not like an absolute number that, oh, if I hit that, I'll be totally fine. So you need to learn to listen to your body and listen to the signals of dehydration to understand like, oh, actually I need to start taking some like proactive steps to restore my hydration status. Things like thirst is a really obvious one. Your urine's going to change colour. Both of those, it's already around one to two percent dehydration.

• 16:31Speaker 01

  So when we're talking about the effects on your blood pressure and all this kind of stuff, that's already happened. By the time you're.

• 16:36Fearne Cotton?

  Right.

• 16:37Speaker 01

  By the time you're thirsty, like those changes inside your body have already started to happen. Other signs that people may be not familiar of are things like headaches, nausea, tiredness. You're probably familiar with the term hangry, the food version, the water version is thangry.

• 16:56Fearne Cotton?

  That I've not heard of, I like that.

• 16:57Speaker 01

  It's not as catchy though, I think it's why it hasn't caught on. It doesn't quite roll off the tongue.

• 17:01Speaker 02

  Marketing team hasn't quite adopted that one.

• 17:03Fearne Cotton?

  Yeah, like, oh, I'm just desperate for a glass of water. It's less, you know, like if it's a burger or something, people are more like, I, I need, I need food, but we don't think about water in that way, but we need it. Like what you've just said there about how it impacts literally every part of our body and we don't really, I don't know, I don't give it much thought. I sort of, you know, I'll probably just drink while I'm thirsty, but what you're saying is we need to be ahead of the game, like drink so you don't end up feeling thirsty at all.

• 17:29Speaker 01

  Exactly, exactly. So that's kind of like the key message. And another reason why that's really important is once you get dehydrated, basically your body starts to move out from its kind of like normal operating range, right? I'm going to borrow your phrase Fern of it's moving outside its happy place, right? It's dehydrated and so consequently your body does something to re-correct and try and move back, right? And so what it does is it starts to release the stress hormone cortisol. So both the reason that when you're hangry or thangry, or when you're hot like today, your body temperature or your body starts to release cortisol and that signals to the

• 18:12Speaker 01

  rest of your body that you're under some sort of stress, right? Cortisol, stress hormone. So it's going to alter your mood, it's going to alter your attention, it's going to alter your ability to kind of like regulate your personality essentially. And so if that's already happened on a daily basis, then that's kind of like pretty detrimental.

• 18:31Fearne Cotton?

  Yeah.

• 18:32Speaker 01

  Right? And there's a, to put into context, how easy it is for that to happen on a daily basis, there's a really nice study where they, they basically took two groups of people, a group of people that didn't drink water, a group of people that drank more than this two litres a day, right? And they exposed them to some sort of stressful situations, like they gave a mock job talk, they did some maths tests in front of some people. So it's, we know that that's stressful, it's going to increase your stress levels. But what they found was the people that habitually don't drink water regularly, so they have maybe like one, one and a half litres a day, their spike in cortisol was much, much higher

• 19:16Speaker 01

  than the people that were actually well hydrated. So if you're, you know, everyone is encountering these kind of things throughout the day, right? Where they're kind of, you know, these little things that cause stress and, you know, if you're well hydrated, you're going to regulate through those a lot better than if you're dehydrated.

• 19:34Fearne Cotton?

  Again, I didn't know that.

• 19:35Speaker 01

  Again, it's a really simple thing that you.

• 19:36Fearne Cotton?

  It is. Like I know I've got a problem with that whole cortisol thing rush. I can feel it happening when, you know, probably I am dehydrated or I'm overtired or I'm, and I'm overstimulated and I can like feel that wash of cortisol adrenaline. And to know that actually there's a way we can quite easily fix it and it's by drinking water.

• 19:54Speaker 01

  It's very simple.

• 19:54Fearne Cotton?

  Is actually, yeah, it's so simple. Can you drink too much water?

• 19:58Speaker 01

  You can actually drink too much water. So just as dehydration is a state where you have too little water in your body, there's another, the term is hyperhydration, which means that you have too much water in your body. And essentially, then you start to, so I said earlier, everything's concentration dependent, right? So then you start to dilute all the ingredients, all the salts and other components of your body that you actually need for the various different chemical reactions. So they get diluted, and that also has a negative effect. It's a little bit harder to do that because your body will obviously like, remove the water that it doesn't need, whereas it can't create water that doesn't exist, right? So that's less of a sort of health risk and less prevalent, but it does

• 20:39Speaker 01

  exist. So if you drink more water than your kidneys can process within an hour, your water level is going to come up, it's going to affect your heart, you're going to have a whole host of other different problems as well.

• 20:48Fearne Cotton?

  We've heard the word electrolytes a lot. What does it actually mean? Like, I will throw that word around quite flippantly, but if you said, what is it? I have no idea.

• 20:57Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think it's something that's come up. I think people actually do know what they mean. I just think they probably don't know what the word means because it's kind of come to the fore recently. You've probably heard of things like minerals or salts, right? Electrolytes are the same. The difference being that salts, sodium chloride is the classic salt, sea salt, table salt. It's an ion of sodium, an ion of chloride. The sodium is positively charged, the chloride is negatively charged, they cancel each other out, and they create a salt crystal, right? It's pretty chemically inert, it's not that interesting. But when you dissolve it in water, then it dissociates and you get the electrolytes.

• 21:37Speaker 01

  So these are now positively charged or negatively charged. And those charges on the ions within the water mean that your body can use them to do some really, really interesting biochemistry. And just to kind of like highlight what this means for, you know, our bodies, and in fact, all living organisms. Basically, we know that life evolved at the bottom of the sea, right? And salt was eroded by the ocean from the rocks around the sea, and that gave rise to the fact that the sea is salty, right? The life forms that were emerging at that time, they're little balls of fat, essentially our cells have a lipid layer around them,

• 22:17Speaker 01

  lipids of fats essentially, and that's an excellent electrical insulator. So what the cells learned was this trick of concentrating the sodium and the potassium ions either inside the cell or outside the cell. What that does is it creates what's called an electrochemical gradient. That gradient is essentially a biological battery, right? So four billion years ago, the dawn of life on earth, the cells basically created a way to harness electricity and use that for biology. So that's why electrolytes are really important. So just like you can use a battery to like, get a radio to work to make sound, or get a torch to work to make light, or whatever, motor for motion, the cells can harness those

• 23:02Speaker 01

  electrochemical gradients, and they can use them to do a whole host of like really important biological functions. So we talked about the brain, your muscles, absorbing nutrients, all this kind of stuff. They all critically depend on these electrolytes moving across these electrochemical gradients. So that's why they're so fundamentally important for like, a whole host of different aspects of our biology.

• 23:23Fearne Cotton?

  That's so fascinating. I mean, this is like a science lesson, guys. I was not, this is like, I need to take notes. This is so fascinating. So like, we've covered salt. What about sugar? Because I think most people would go, oh, I know I probably shouldn't be having too much sugar. We hear the dangers of it. Is that an important thing? You mentioned sugar earlier in terms of experimenting with what our brain needs.

• 23:41Speaker 01

  Yeah. So the idea that sugar is bad, I think, has come from like ultra-processed foods that have lots and lots of sugar in them. And that is, that's definitely bad. You shouldn't, you know, that has some negative effects on your biology for sure. But your body also uses sugar. As I said, then your brain uses a huge amount of sugar every day to generate energy for, to all that brain activity. We, in the context of hydration, the reason that it's important is because there's this really amazing molecule called the sodium glucose co-transporter. And what that is, it's a molecule in your intestines that drives water absorption when you consume it, but only in the presence of sodium, so

• 24:26Speaker 01

  salt electrolytes, and glucose. So that's why all rehydration formulas have both of those. So it's kind of like a door with two locks, right? If you open one lock with the glucose, the door doesn't open. The other one with the sodium doesn't open. If you have both of them together, you open the door and then the water can flow into your body. And this molecule is like, again, it's like really, really powerful. So if you just have one glucose molecule and two sodium ions moving into the cell, that's going to absorb 260 water molecules at the same time. So one of these little proteins in one second will absorb 9,000 water molecules into your body. So it's a really, really powerful way to kind of hydrate your body more efficiently and faster. But, so in that

• 25:10Speaker 01

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

• 25:33Fearne Cotton?

  Right.

• 25:34Speaker 01

  So it's not like, you wouldn't see a grape and go, I'm not going to eat that because it's too sugary, right?

• 25:38Fearne Cotton?

  No.

• 25:39Speaker 01

  Or most people, I think, wouldn't. So it's not, yeah, it's all about not having like a binary understanding of stuff, but using the biological reality to help guide your decision-making.

• 25:50Fearne Cotton?

  There's a real alchemy to this, and I love it. I absolutely love it.

• 25:54Speaker 02

  Yeah, and it's difficult as well, you know, I think the marketing team would find it maybe easier if we could say sugar-free.

• 26:00Fearne Cotton?

  Yeah.

• 26:01Speaker 02

  But, you know, for the sake of one grape, what we're doing, we think for the scientific benefit, all that additional, you know, speed of absorption is very much worth it. So it's authenticity piece of it.

• 26:10Fearne Cotton?

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

• 26:48Speaker 02

  Keep walking forwards whilst taking punches. Yeah, it's been quite a journey. Like, it's, it's 10 years, which, so it hasn't happened quickly, hasn't happened overnight. It started self-funded with a group of four of us, and we've gone through a co-founder who's had cancer, we've gone through difficult times with not being able to pay ourselves or staff. I mean, this is, you know, you, you, look at the festival you've got on here, you would have gone through equally challenging times, as has every sort of small business owner. But, you know, we had real belief in what we did, what we're doing is going to have impact. Like, it's not a magic potion that can fix everything, guys. Like, but to be honest, it does, it's for the sake of 40p in your day to get ahead of it, that can have impact on your mood, can have impact on your exercise, can get you thinking clearer.

• 27:33Speaker 02

  Like, it has tangible science behind it, so we always believed in it. And we've just managed along the way, you know, through hard work, a bit of luck, we've gotten, you know, contracts with Emirates Airlines, we've sold to professional sports teams, and now we've got a great team here. Like, we were talking about it before, like, it took his wife to get us to put up our first tent from Alibaba because we, the four men founders were just like, I don't know, bumbling around a park for like, two hours trying to do this. And Bailey just got sick of it, and wanted, I think she wanted a beer or something. She's like, okay, do this, do this, do this. And the tent was up in two minutes. But, so now we've got a nice big tent here at Happy Place and a team of like 20 people putting it on. And it's kind of chalk and cheese at where we start.

• 28:10Fearne Cotton?

  If you want something done, ask, ask a woman.

• 28:12Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 28:13Fearne Cotton?

  They'll make it happen. We all know that. There's a bunch of women here. You know what we're doing. There's a few men. Hi, I see you. You're great too. I'm not slagging you off. No, it's, it's phenomenal. And, and to have gotten it to the, the size that you've gotten it in the scale, have you taken a moment to go, we're doing all right here? Because when you're in it, it doesn't stop. You know, there's not those moments, those markers where you can go, oh, we, you know what, we've actually, this dream that we've had is working.

• 28:39Speaker 02

  We don't really pause and reflect too much, and maybe that's something we should change a bit. But, I mean, it's quite crazy. Like, we've become the number one seller in the UK. Last year, we sold 65 million drinks. Like, like, I can't even,

• 28:50Fearne Cotton?

  Bad!

• 28:51Speaker 02

  You'd need a computational model to look at that properly, but that's insane.

• 28:55Fearne Cotton?

  Yeah.

• 28:56Speaker 02

  So, yeah, I think, you know, the team's doing amazing things and, you know, the ambition to keep going and, you know, introduce new products or introduce new markets. And where we can have impact with improved hydration is things that we want to do. And, you know, there's, there's, even we look at now today, okay, we're all blistering hot and sweating. And, you know, as Paul's talked about electrolytes, like, it's the sodium pushing the water out to cool you down, guys. Well, for those lucky enough to have a fan or electrical fan, that's also helping. But, you know, when we look at the winter, it's typically some area, an area of life that we don't think about needing additional hydration. But actually, when it comes to your immune system and cold and flu season, one of the first things that stops you getting sick is your hydration levels in, stop me, or you'll overtake in a second, mucosal membranes.

• 29:39Speaker 01

  Yeah, so Dan's done a very good job of picking up on the science over the years. And yeah, so one of the things that is important in the winter is your mucosal membranes. Right, so these are the linings of your mouth, your nose, your lungs. They're like the first barrier of getting infection, right? So normally what they do is if any bacteria, whatever, virus comes in, they get trapped on those, they get pushed down to your stomach, your stomach's a big vat of acid essentially, breaks them down, nothing to worry about. You become dehydrated and that barrier protection essentially is reduced or lost. And so it's something that people don't often consider as a, as a, another thing that like hydration is really important. As I said, it's like all of the different cells in your body use it for something. So it's going to impact all of these different aspects.

• 30:24Fearne Cotton?

  And you've got the vitamins in there as well, which is a massive boost. I mean, I've just finished filming a TV show and there was a lot of travel involved and we were, you know, the whole crew were kind of moving from place to place. We were working long hours, we were in all parts of the UK. When the heatwave started here, we were in northern, northern Scotland and we had hot water bottles and were shivering. And it was, you know, a full on, but brilliant production, but we had fizz everywhere. This is before, you know, they didn't know that you guys are going to be at the festival, whatever. It was everywhere on set. Everybody was popping one here and there just to get like a boost of when you're having that moment where it's probably, I don't know, a few hours after lunch, you're having a bit of a slump.

• 31:06Fearne Cotton?

  You know, you haven't drunk enough water because you're literally running from place to place. And it's just knowing that you've got that pick me up. Like you say, there's no one thing that's going to fix everything, but like doing all the right things in life where you can, even when you're really busy. And this is like, you know, an easy thing to fit into your day. It doesn't take any time at all. It's a nice little pit stop, a little ritual. And I mean, everybody on the crew massively benefited from that, just having them on hand there.

• 31:35Speaker 02

  Honestly, I think that's one of the reasons I didn't even know that story. But this is, we encounter this a lot of like, you know, we walk around and it's like, oh, I know fizz, I've used it for this. Or you go to some event and, you know, Formula One and like you find out that like the, I can't say the team, like they're using it and we haven't sold it and they've just gone and bought it. Or a musician pops up on their Instagram, it's in their rider in the backstage or like, these are the sorts of real moments, like you talk about 65 million, that's really hard to actually digest and understand. But the real life moments of walking, saying, oh yeah, I know that. Or actually my, that's, that's my brother uses that and they'll pull out the phone and be like, here's a picture of him with the.

• 32:07Fearne Cotton?

  Yeah, that's so cool.

• 32:08Speaker 02

  Uncanny bit, so.

• 32:09Fearne Cotton?

  It's amazing, amazing what you've built. Knowing what you both know from everything you've done with fizz and your backgrounds, what do you both make sure you do to make you feel good, balanced when, when things get busy or tough?

• 32:22Speaker 01

  Yeah, so it's actually harder, Dan has a great story, I'm sure he'll tell you about this in a minute. But like, it's harder than, you know, we have a hydration company, right? And so in my, in my experience, sometimes I'm in the lab for a really long period of time. For obvious health and safety reasons, you can't just like snack while you're doing experiments with like chemicals and stuff. So I have to remind myself, I need to go and have some water, right? Because if you don't, you're going to go through the whole day, you're going to feel absolutely exhausted at the end of it. So I think just prioritizing starting the day right with, you know, getting hydration. You're, you know, you won't have had any water while you're sleeping. You do lose a little bit of moisture as you breathe.

• 33:06Speaker 01

  So, you know, you're sleeping, you're breathing, can't stop that. You can't stop that water loss. And then just setting like regular reminders throughout the day. Some people even use like stopwatch or they have water bottles that have like the time of the day along to just give you that like reminder, just to make it easier because, you know, we both run a hydration brand and we still don't do it perfectly.

• 33:29Fearne Cotton?

  Oh, I run a wellbeing festival and I am 90% absolutely mental all the time. So like, I know what you're talking about. It, we can, we got, we talk the talk, but walking the walk is a whole other thing.

• 33:41Speaker 02

  Well, I mean, I don't even think my team fully knows this story. Like I run a hydration company and early this year I had a blood test and guilty as charged. Like I, you know, I think I played some sport in the morning, went into work, back to back meetings. And like the day just got away from me and I didn't have my fizz, I didn't really drink any water. And I had to rush off to the doctor for this blood test. I walk in, nice to meet you, okay, pull out the needle and they go to find a vein and they can't, they can't, they push it in, nothing. And they, and I was like, oh, like what's wrong? And they, so you're very dehydrated. And then I'm like, try it again.

• 34:16Fearne Cotton?

  That's so great, that's so great.

• 34:18Speaker 02

  Drunk some water, try it again. And they're like, even I know that it's not going to work, but I'm just like, no, this has to work. And then did it again, no, sorry. And they're like, so we can only do this one more time because legally we can only try three times.

• 34:29Fearne Cotton?

  Whoa.

• 34:30Speaker 02

  Like, well, we're going to try it a third time, guys. And I'm like, I can't even tell these guys what I do for a living. All right, do it. And it didn't work and I had to like embarrassing hang my head and go away. But it's, it's so easy to overlook.

• 34:40Fearne Cotton?

  Of course it is, no.

• 34:42Speaker 02

  And my realisation for that is like, you, you get that real like wake up moment. That does have such an impact on me physically, but probably was a dick in the office all afternoon in the meetings that I was in as well.

• 34:51Fearne Cotton?

  Well, this is it, but look, that's why I really appreciate you telling that story because I never want any of this to be prescriptive or like certain people are doing everything perfectly and nailing life. Like we're all racing around at a silly pace, trying to do way too many things and we forget the basics. And that's certainly what, what we're trying to do here and what you're doing with fizz is reminding all of us, us three sat here included, that like eating good food, drinking enough water, moving when you can, taking rest essentially is so important, but we all forget the basics all the time.

• 35:28Speaker 02

  Yeah, and we, we echo that completely. It is, look at the fundamentals and yeah, we argue hydration is one of the easiest and the cheapest things to fix. But it's not the only thing, right? Like one of our co-founders, actually, I won't say which one, he loves a nap. And that's not really on brand unless you're in certain parts of the Mediterranean to have a nap. But like meditation and just like taking your mind off things and going through a guided meditation where, you know, there's one brilliant stage next to us that's doing that. And that is amazing, take half an hour out and like the amount that you can just de-stress from that is massively important. It'll help you get to sleep. I, I definitely do a lot more in the last, even the last six months.

• 36:00Fearne Cotton?

  Yeah, I need, I've fallen off the wagon with that one. That's why I'm probably sleeping like shit, quite frankly. Um, I think what you guys are doing is absolutely amazing. Before we wrap things up, I'll ask you both, where is your happy place?

• 36:13Speaker 01

  My happy place, I'm actually very lucky, I'm going there on Tuesday, is my family's home in Cyprus. We're going to, all the cousins, like very much my big fat Greek wedding. Everyone comes over, we eat and relax and it's amazing.

• 36:27Fearne Cotton?

  I love that. How about you, Dan?

• 36:29Speaker 02

  My happy place is where my parents live in Queensland. It's just on the beach, it's, you know, nice little national park land. It's got little like rock pools, there's surfing, there's like dolphins and it's, you know, every time I talk, tell someone about it's like, well, what are you doing living in the UK? But no, it's not somewhere I get to go back to a lot, but I love going there.

• 36:47Fearne Cotton?

  Oh, brilliant. Well, look, I can't thank you enough for not only talking today and massively educating all of us because I've learned a hell of a lot, but also for being here, for sponsoring our talks tent, which is my favourite part of the festival. We've got so many fascinating podcasts and talks all day. So we are thrilled to have you as part of the festival. If anyone here hasn't popped into the fizz tent over there, do pop in, get a drink, learn some more. It's wonderful to have you here. Please give it up for Dan and Paul, everyone. Thanks, chaps.

• 37:17Speaker 01

  Thank you, thanks for having us.

• 37:19Fearne Cotton?

  Uh, Dan and Paul, that was like an educational break for me during the Happy Place Festival. I took so much away from that. And let me tell you, since guys, I've been drinking my two liters a day. I actually bought a really gorgeous water bottle at the Happy Place Festival and had my initials engraved into it. And I've been making sure that I drink three of them a day. And I, surprise, surprise, do you feel better? I mean, why was I, why was I not drinking enough water? We're just getting into bad habits. But anyway, they've been a big reminder for me and having the educational backup has really helped me get my arse in gear to drink enough water.

• 37:58Fearne Cotton?

  Right, I'm going to be back here in a few days' time for a seriously raucous episode live from the Happy Place Festival. It is gossip galore and you're going to love it. In the meantime, a massive thanks again to Dan and Paul and to you, you gorgeous lot.