Fat Loss Scientist: It’s Easy To Lose Weight, But Here’s Why You WON’T Do It! | Dr Andy Galpin

Performance Scientist Dr Andy Galpin reveals the BIGGEST sleep mistakes ruining your health, how to build better energy every day, why your sleep tracker could be making things worse, and whether health optimisation can actually backfire! Dr. Andy Galpin is a Professor of Kinesiology and Executive Director of the Human Performance Center at Parker University. He has spent over 2 decades working with Olympic gold medallists, world champions, professional athletes, military special forces, and also hosts the Perform with Dr Andy Galpin podcast. He explains: ◼ Why millions unknowingly have a sleep disorder that's silently damaging their health ◼ The morning routine that resets your body clock for better sleep at night ◼ The truth about melatonin, and why most people are taking it the wrong way ◼ The simple sleep tests you can do at home before visiting a specialist ◼ Why waking up exhausted after 8 hours could be a warning sign Independent Fact Check: https://stevenbartlett.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/08/DOAC-Andy-Galpin-Independent-Research-Further-Reading.pdf Chapters 00:00:00 Why do you do what you do 00:03:38 What goals bring people to you? 00:07:30 Health anxiety and over-optimising 00:08:33 Sleep disorders are a health crisis 00:10:29 Does sleep apnea disrupt sleep? 00:14:20 Why is sleep apnea so common? 00:15:17 Do I have a sleep issue? 00:18:28 Pros and cons of wearables 00:21:20 What causes a high resting heart rate? 00:21:48 Why is sleep getting worse? 00:22:58 Morning light and light pollution 00:25:16 How much does sound matter? 00:26:51 Best evidence-based sleep supplements 00:29:25 Do you recommend melatonin? 00:34:38 Is there a downside to coffee? 00:36:46 What mattress should I sleep on? 00:37:49 The real issue with screen time 00:47:08 Sleeping when you share a bed 00:48:48 Sleeping in new environments 00:49:34 Optimal temperature for sleep 00:55:34 Ads 00:57:32 Energy management for high performers 01:02:35 Steve's cholesterol results 01:07:06 Why healthy people can have an enlarged heart 01:10:20 Lowering cholesterol with lifestyle and medicine 01:13:55 Low vitamin D 01:16:42 Omega 3 and mercury levels 01:17:32 Exercise and the SAID principle 01:23:17 Use it or lose it with age 01:27:51 Ads 01:28:53 Is grip strength linked to mortality? 01:33:53 How to build muscle power 01:36:26 Does more exercise equal better? 01:40:59 What supplements do you take? 01:42:56 The best way to lose weight 01:50:25 Exercise and weight loss myths 01:52:32 The 54321 method for fat loss 01:54:08 Why am I not progressing? 01:55:50 Can AI create a workout plan? 02:00:06 What motivates people to change? 02:06:26 Are my goals bad? 02:08:43 What is worth doing if you might fail? Quiz Links: PSQI (Pittsburgh Sleep Quality Index) — https://link.thediaryofaceo.com/E41eW4P ASSQ (Athlete Sleep Screening Questionnaire) — https://link.thediaryofaceo.com/3yDF4PF ESS (Epworth Sleepiness Scale) — https://link.thediaryofaceo.com/9RKtDoZ STOP-BANG (Obstructive sleep apnea risk screener) — https://link.thediaryofaceo.com/7UxNsxH ISI (Insomnia Severity Index, PDF) — https://link.thediaryofaceo.com/4mgzHRs Follow Dr Andy: Instagram - https://link.thediaryofaceo.com/CQDR1q8 YouTube - https://link.thediaryofaceo.com/5Squ4wN X - https://link.thediaryofaceo.com/1Fw5A7k Podcast - https://link.thediaryofaceo.com/Fu8uPd7 LinkedIn - https://link.thediaryofaceo.com/5ykmlog Website - https://link.thediaryofaceo.com/8T6M9KJ Performance Coaching - https://link.thediaryofaceo.com/8QLLu9w The Diary Of A CEO: ◼ Join DOAC circle here - https://doaccircle.com/ ◼ Buy The Diary Of A CEO book here - https://link.thediaryofaceo.com/BWjLTZK ◼ The 1% Diary is back - limited time only: https://thediary.com/products/one-percent-diary ◼ The Diary Of A CEO Conversation Cards (Second Edition): https://thediary.com/products/the-conversation-cards-2nd-edition ◼ Get email updates - https://link.thediaryofaceo.com/5IB1H6E ◼ Follow Steven - https://link.thediaryofaceo.com/AGU9QP4 Sponsors: Ketone - https://ketone.com/STEVEN for 30% off your subscription order Shopify - https://shopify.com/bartlett Function Health- https://functionhealth.com/DOAC

• 0:00Speaker 00

  Everything you see on this table has a strong scientific evidence that it will help us sleep.

• 0:03Steven Bartlett

  So we're going to dig into all of those in great detail.

• 0:05Speaker 00

  So the first one is a really good one, kiwis.

• 0:08Steven Bartlett

  Kiwis?

• 0:08Speaker 00

  Yeah, so there's been good studies on them. So if you have two to three kiwis before bed, you'll see people sleeping better. Next on our list is sleep divorce. People generally don't sleep as well when you're in the same bed as others.

• 0:19Steven Bartlett

  Next, what about this?

• 0:21Speaker 00

  This has more evidence than the rest of these things combined, and it is effective. Another one to think about is sound.

• 0:25Steven Bartlett

  And it really matters, sound, when you sleep?

• 0:27Speaker 00

  Yeah, as much if not more of any other factor. There's also screen usage, light, your pillow and wearables. But the other thing is we're spending more on sleep and sleep is getting worse. And for the last 20 years, I've been doing science, coaching and education that enhances human performance. And I've been fortunate to work with the world's most elite athletes, entrepreneurs, leaders, and even 50% of athletes have a clinical sleep disorder. It gets worse. 70 to 80% of people who have clinical sleep apnea will go undiagnosed. And for women, it's somewhere in the neighborhood of 90 to 95%. And it is deleterious to your health because it's highly associated with long-term death risk, cognitive function, mood regulation, performance, recovery, metabolic health. And it happens for a bunch of different reasons and we can go through them.

• 1:10Speaker 00

  But we look at the 8 billion person population, we need more people to pay attention to their health. And so I just want to get the best possible out of people. So this could be energy, it could be metabolic, it could be cognitive function, it could be muscle growth or fat loss. And so I want to give every person listening to this the opportunity to reach their goals and dreams.

• 1:26Steven Bartlett

  I'd love to go through all of those. And you have a 54321 method. What is that?

• 1:29Speaker 00

  Yeah, it's just a little thing I came up with that says, all right, can we help people with fat loss? So the first thing to think about is.

• 1:41Steven Bartlett

  Guys, I've got a favor to ask before this episode begins. The algorithm, if you follow a show, will deliver you the best episodes from that show very prominently in your feed. So when we have our best episodes on this show, the most shared episodes, the most rated episodes, I would love you to know. And the simple way for you to know that is to hit that follow button. But also, it's the simple, easy, free thing that you can do to help us make the show better. I would be hugely grateful if you could take a minute on the app you're listening to this on right now and hit that follow button. Thank you so, so, so much.

• 2:16Steven Bartlett

  Dr. Andy Galpin, before we started recording, you said you want to do scientific research, coaching for your clients, and you said, education. You also kind of alluded to the fact that you were less interested in money and these kinds of things. So the question is, why, why do you do what you do? And what is it you're doing and who are you doing it for?

• 2:34Speaker 00

  The most concise way I can say it is, I want to give every person listening to this the opportunity to reach their goals and dreams. You want to look this way or not look this way? And you want to perform this way? How can we get you there? I want to remove those barriers. And if you get there or don't get there, it was because of you. It was not because something was holding you back that was in your way. And so that's why I get equally excited to work with the best linebacker in the NFL and some person who just wants to wake up and not be in back pain tomorrow.

• 3:06Steven Bartlett

  So tell me who you've worked with then, who has been a client of yours?

• 3:09Speaker 00

  Yeah, I've been fortunate to work with the world's most elite athletes for 20 years at this point. So this is your number one draft picks in every major sport, Hall of Famers, Cy Young winners, MVPs, Olympic gold medalists in many sports, world champion fighters. We've worked with hemiplegics and periplegics individuals. We've worked with, you know, the cliche executives, the mom and pops, the person dealing and struggling with perimenopause. Like, we've really done most of it.

• 3:38Steven Bartlett

  And what kinds of symptoms or goals do they come to you with?

• 3:42Speaker 00

  So I'll give you broad categories and specifics below that. Broad categories, we tend to say is either rebuild or upgrade. Rebuild is there's something wrong, hurt, broken, damaged, I'm overweight, I can't fix it, I'm dying from sleep restriction, I have a clinical sleep disorder, I have some injury, I have some huge clear limitation that needs to be resolved. The second half is what we call upgrade. I don't have any of that. I feel pretty good, feel okay. Now I just want to get the best possible out of my life. So this could be energy, it could be metabolic, it could be cognitive function. Why I can accomplish that and our folks I work with can is because I'm after the physiology.

• 4:23Steven Bartlett

  What's, what does you mean by that physiology?

• 4:25Speaker 00

  It's your biomolecular signature. Do you have a muscle imbalance that's creating neck pain, that's making it hard to sleep and that's giving you a hard time regulating your emotions? It could be classic things like inflammation, everything that is inside of your body in both the way that it is running and expressing itself.

• 4:44Steven Bartlett

  And what are your credentials?

• 4:46Speaker 00

  So my PhD is in what's called human bioenergetics. I started my lab in 2011.

• 4:51Steven Bartlett

  Your lab?

• 4:52Speaker 00

  So I'm an active scientist, I'm a professor, that's my real job for the most part. So we conduct and disseminate research there that enhances human performance. And then I started a number of companies and privately coached people. That's what I've been doing for over 20 years.

• 5:07Steven Bartlett

  We talked about the different personas and the types of problems they come to you with. If you had to, and this might be quite difficult, order them in terms of the frequency in which people come to you with these issues, what would that sort of top five be?

• 5:21Speaker 00

  I'll break them from our professional athletes and I'll probably spend more time on non-professional athletes, assuming most of your audience is probably not a professional.

• 5:28Steven Bartlett

  I wouldn't take that.

• 5:28Speaker 00

  Pretty close.

• 5:29Steven Bartlett

  I wouldn't take that, guys.

• 5:30Speaker 00

  50/50? We'll also say, we'll assume 50/50. The athletes typically come to us under two circumstances, frequent injuries I'm getting or tanked energy, bad sleep. They deal with the same human problems we deal with, right? The other one is, what we'll just say is the upgrade, the optimizer. Feel great, feel young, I just want to get ahead of things and I want to catch things before they start. The general public is a similar breakdown because we have a lot of people who are like, I do feel pretty good, I'm great, but I don't want to play the game backwards. I don't want problems to come up and then I got to go scrambling and figure it out. So let's collect baseline data now, let's get ahead of things, let's predict problems before they arise. But I've only got a few minutes a day. I'm not trying to like take over my whole life with all this stuff.

• 6:15Speaker 00

  Like probably the most common ones are things like sleep and energy, performance goals, can't seem to get stronger, can't seem to lose that little bit of weight, maybe touch a brain fog, I don't feel as sharp.

• 6:28Steven Bartlett

  Well, I'd love to go through all of those, sleep, energy, performance, strength, struggles, weight. But also, I've got my blood test results here, which Andy has taken a look at for me. It's not all good, okay? So that's a pre-warning, it's not all good. But he's going to run me through my blood test results in this episode, tell me how I improve things. And there was a couple of deficiencies that I had that I had no idea that I had because I thought I was doing everything right, which have completely changed my supplement, but also my behavior generally. And also, you've got this here, which is a gentleman, I believe, whose blood test results you did, similar age to me, and you took him from not so good to great. And we'll talk about that as well.

• 7:09Steven Bartlett

  So hold on for a second while we, we touch first on the subject of sleep and energy, which is one of the first thing you talked about. A lot of people listening struggle with sleep and they also, in their waking life, feel variances in their energy. If we start then with sleep, what are the like most people problems of sleep?

• 7:29Speaker 00

  This is a great question. We'll start off and in fact, I think this is a nice framing of everything we're going to talk about. We want to be weary of what we call health anxiety. This is over fixation, over concern, worrying too much about little things with your blood work, with your sleep, everything. You're in a really great spot. So we can look for some upgrade, but we want to be careful of pushing that line. Why that also matters is if we look at the 8 billion or so person population, we probably need more people to pay attention to their health than to not pay attention to their health. We're not in an abundance of people caring too much. But if you're listening to this show, you are probably not representative of the general population. And so I want to be really careful of everything I'm about to say for the next

• 8:12Speaker 00

  couple of hours. I don't want to create health anxiety. I don't want you to be so terrified to touch a receipt that it sends you into three day tailspin. Anytime we're talking about a health or performance, we want to run the spectrum of disease to optimization. We should not be playing around with optimization performance if we're in the presence of a medical disease. And why I say that is, sleep is probably the biggest place of clinical disease that exists that no one knows about. Somewhere in the neighborhood of 70 to 80% of people who have clinical sleep apnea will go undiagnosed.

• 8:49Steven Bartlett

  Wow.

• 8:50Speaker 00

  If that existed for a broken bone, right? If that existed for diabetes, you'd be like insane. It gets worse. 50%, depending on which study you look at, of athletes have a clinical sleep disorder. For women, it's somewhere in the neighborhood of 90 to 95% of women that have clinical sleep apnea will go undiagnosed.

• 9:13Steven Bartlett

  Why?

• 9:14Speaker 00

  If you were to look at me and you would say, if I said, Stephen, you think I have apnea? You'd say, no, right? If I were to bring in a whole table of 10 people and I said, pick the person in here least likely to have sleep apnea, you'd find the smallest girl.

• 9:29Steven Bartlett

  True.

• 9:29Speaker 00

  You don't think about apnea as something that can happen unless you're big and fat. Women also are less likely than men to complain. They're less likely to think about it as an anatomical issue. They're going to charge it to hormones, to their menstrual cycle, to their cognitive load, to what it's, the demands that it is to be mom. All these are true, by the way. It is also in the same point true, you could have apnea that has nothing to do with body composition.

• 10:01Steven Bartlett

  And let's define apnea for a second.

• 10:03Speaker 00

  You stop breathing at night.

• 10:04Steven Bartlett

  And that wakes you up?

• 10:06Speaker 00

  Sometimes it doesn't. That's, that's the problem, is it won't necessarily wake you up. But it is deleterious to your health. It's highly associated with consequences from long-term death risk to short-term cognitive function, emotion, mood regulation, performance, recovery, metabolic health. It's really, really nasty. In fact, one of the larger things that can go wrong in your health is, is not breathing at night.

• 10:29Steven Bartlett

  This might be a silly question, but does sleep apnea disrupt your sleep?

• 10:34Speaker 00

  It can.

• 10:34Steven Bartlett

  So it doesn't always?

• 10:35Speaker 00

  Doesn't always.

• 10:36Steven Bartlett

  Okay.

• 10:36Speaker 00

  This is why do you think it's so poorly diagnosed? So the classic giveaways, if you were that person who wakes up four counties because you snore so loud, snoring doesn't necessarily mean you have sleep apnea, but it's a really strong indicator. That's one form of it. So apnea happens for a bunch of different reasons. More evidence recently has suggested like neck size was this kind of original thing that we say like a big neck is just a problem. Doesn't look like that's as true. But certainly it is true, as you increase obesity rates, you'll see an increase in apnea as well. So what's happening here is now you're talking about, I'll call it anatomical or physical, like something physically is landing on your neck and your tongue and

• 11:20Speaker 00

  your throat, your larynx and esophagus, and it's stopping your breathing. And why this matters is when you're standing here or sitting here in this chair, you're in this vertical position. And as you go and lay down, anatomy shifts. You also have a lot of research showing that the larger the human being, the more fluid they have, which is pretty normal, right? So a person who's twice your size will have twice the amount of water in their body that you do. Imagine if you had, I mean, we'll take this beverage right here. Why do you have red wine? Well, anyways, we'll come back, in case you get thirsty. So you see the water is sitting vertically, right? If I were to shift this cup horizontally, the water would shift and it would, it would balance horizontally toward the gap in the air would be on the top, right?

• 12:02Speaker 00

  That happens in your body. So imagine this top piece start up here, that's your neck. Now, when you lay down, your neck is over here and I would tip this over, but it would spill everywhere. That fluid then shifts up into your neck. So it's not even necessarily a physical size thing, but it's the fluid associated with being a larger human being that the fluid shift can happen.

• 12:23Speaker 00

  What we're now finding is a whole series of other types of apnea. Now there are neural causes to it, there are environmental causes, there are positional causes. And so as a classic example to round the story out, traditionally, if you're told you have apnea, you're going to be given one of about three choices. Medication, what's called a CPAP device, right? So that's the big like Thoracicator breathing machine. Or potentially what's called an oral appliance. It's a mouthpiece that kind of repositions your jaw and neck. I'm for all of those treatments. Why they all have such low success rates is because they're given out generically. You come in, you have apnea, you get the same stuff.

• 13:07Speaker 00

  Now what the field is moving towards is precision and saying, you have this specific type of apnea, an oral appliance won't help here, you actually need this surgical intervention.

• 13:18Steven Bartlett

  I was looking at some of the data here and it says that sleep apnea is very common globally, much more common than I expected. It says, men who are middle-aged have a 24 to 34% prevalence of apnea. Women, 9 to 17%. Seniors, 30 to 60%.

• 13:41Speaker 00

  That's right.

• 13:42Steven Bartlett

  Post-menopausal women, 25%. So yeah, rough numbers. That means that listening now, if you're a middle-aged man listening, if there's three of you listening right now, one of you statistically might have apnea.

• 13:53Speaker 00

  Now that's clinical sleep apnea. That doesn't even count subclinical.

• 13:59Steven Bartlett

  And if you're a senior listening now, which is 65 years older, there's a 30 to 60% chance. Wow.

• 14:06Speaker 00

  Depending on some numbers you see, Stephen, you'll see a billion people across the globe.

• 14:10Steven Bartlett

  Yeah, that's what it says. It says a billion, a billion people.

• 14:13Speaker 00

  Now that's only apnea. That's not insomnia. That's not all the other sleep disorders. That's simply the one variant of it.

• 14:20Steven Bartlett

  Why is this happening? Because again, from an evolutionary perspective, sleep apnea couldn't have been great for survival.

• 14:27Speaker 00

  Yeah, three primary reasons why this is happening. The first is the fact that our environment is physically changing. Our ancestors never had to deal with this.

• 14:39Speaker 00

  Two, our current solutions for testing are either insanely outdated or incredibly difficult to get to. The third major one is our solutions that we provide people in public communication are wildly generic, thus not helpful. In fact, if you were to poll everyone listening right now, sleep comes up and you go, oh, great, they're going to tell me to sleep in a quiet room that's cold and dark. And they're like, I've heard it all. And you have. Where we need to get to next is how do we help people find these precision solutions based on their type of sleep issues? But that's, that's the three-part reason why this stuff is happening.

• 15:17Steven Bartlett

  I'd like to go into all three of them. I also would like to just pause on the diagnosis part because there'll be people listening here that might have a suspicion that they need help. But again, they're going off their feelings.

• 15:26Speaker 00

  Yep.

• 15:26Steven Bartlett

  How can they know for sure what help they need and what their problem is?

• 15:30Speaker 00

  Yeah, I always start with subjective. How do you feel? If you feel good, let's now like immediately take a breath. You have good energy, you wake up, you feel good. Like everyone's going to be a little bit tired. We also don't, we've actually had a, I've been working with for several years, a very close friend of you and I, we constantly have to battle because he'll just get like really honestly terrified because he gets sleepy at the end of the day. And I'm like, bro, that's the point. People that are hard chargers, high performers are actually afraid of being tired. We have to recognize and realize that is natural and needed. You need to feel a little bit sleepy in the early afternoon and you should feel tired, unmotivated, lack of focus at the end of the day.

• 16:14Steven Bartlett

  What if I didn't used to? Because that's what people will, they compare it to an old version of themselves.

• 16:18Speaker 00

  Sure. Again, we can say, natural. When you are sub 25, like you're, you're just a powerhouse, right? When you're past 25, we shouldn't just accept frailty. We shouldn't accept a permanent decline. But we do have to start to realize, we're not going to have the energy of a 20-year-old. Like it's just not typically super realistic. And if you do, you're probably getting there exogenously, right? Stimulants and other things which have a place, but we just want to be a little bit careful of those things.

• 16:51Steven Bartlett

  We'll talk about stimulants, melatonin and all these things, but going back to this point of diagnosis.

• 16:55Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 16:55Steven Bartlett

  So Jenny, who doesn't have much money, how does she get?

• 16:58Speaker 00

  Okay, great. So one thing we can do, and we can put these in your show notes for you for free, there are a ton of completely free short questionnaires that are scientifically validated.

• 17:07Steven Bartlett

  Okay.

• 17:07Speaker 00

  You can do these for RLS, you can do them for insomnia, you can do them for apnea, you can do them for circadian disruptions and disorders, you can do them for chronotype. Are you a morning person or tons? And I'll put in many of these for free. So my answer there would be start with one of those.

• 17:23Steven Bartlett

  Okay.

• 17:24Speaker 00

  If you flag that and you want to move up the next step, then you kind of have a couple of different ways. And your two options are what we'll call wearables, at-home tech. These are typically, we'll call them $100 to $600 range. Then past that, you have a true medical option, which is a sleep hospital. This is when you would go into, you know, the hospital, you go into that weird room and you sit there, you get all the wires, someone looks at you through a window, you sleep in for one night. You can see from the look on your face or you're just like, all right, who wants to do that? If you have a true disease, at this point, for the most part, the sleep hospital, depending on the disease, is where you need to get to. Now, what our group is working on and others is, can we bring the sleep hospital into

• 18:09Speaker 00

  the home? It's not super affordable at this point. We're going to get it there, but that is the clear future. If you have insurance, take that validated questionnaire just said, go to your doctor and say, here's what I scored this thing, will you order me that sleep study? It is a giant pain, I know it, but it is, it is probably worth it. If you want to use the wearable, you can do that. The problem with the wearables is numerous. They are awesome at things like awareness, at accountability, right? They're pretty good for things like total sleep time. They're really, really bad and a major pitfall for wearables is predicting things like deep sleep and REM sleep.

• 18:50Steven Bartlett

  Do you know what I, do you know what I was, I was thinking about? I was thinking about certain times where I've done certain things behaviorally and then I got in bed, woke up feeling terrible and my wearable said to me, you had a bad, really bad night's sleep. And I could kind of put two and two together and kind of establish cause and effect. And I could almost, I guess, test that then going forward and say, okay, don't do that, or maybe get in bed earlier, or the heat was, was way too high, whatever it might be. And I could sort of A B test my way to a better outcome.

• 19:19Speaker 00

  Yeah. So they can give you things like total sleep time, as I said. What you want to be careful of are the aggregate sleep effectiveness score, sleep quality score. That's the stuff that directionally won't be there. But you actually said something interesting a second ago, which is you felt worse. That's the only directional thing we need to have to pay attention to. If you go, wow, I felt worse today. And then you can go backwards and go, yeah, that's because I did A, B and C yesterday or I felt better today. That's not the only metric. And to be really clear, I'm not advocating to ditch all the wearables. We use them extensively. It's just really being careful about what data from those we pay attention to and what we don't.

• 20:00Speaker 00

  So stuff that we do now is find big themes that they're oftentimes missing. Here's a good example. We had 1,200 days of data from, I think it was an Oura ring. And we are actually to find that in, in one of our clients, for every one drop in resting heart rate, so his resting heart rate, say went from 65 beats per minute to 64, he got six more minutes of sleep.

• 20:27Speaker 00

  And so we were like, okay, great. You want to add an hour to your sleep? Let's continue to work on your cardiovascular fitness. Every time he got more fit, his resting heart rate dropped, he slept more. Additionally, every time you put and you invest and down regulation, you'll lower your resting heart rate going into bed, you will sleep longer. So he was a classic case of like, I try to go to bed. I do all the things, but I just can't stay in bed. So the key there to get him to more sleep is to put his physiology in a position that would allow him to have more sleep. And for him, like, that was the canary in the coal mine. So that's the type of stuff where wearables can be, like, you can't replace that. Not only from a data, but from a coaching perspective. It was so easy for me to communicate to him, here's your data. This is our target.

• 21:11Speaker 00

  And he's an extraordinarily busy, busy person. It's like, great, I got one thing to pay attention to. Do whatever it takes to keep that heart rate low going into bed. Copy that.

• 21:20Steven Bartlett

  What in his case was making his heart rate high?

• 21:23Speaker 00

  When it comes to something like sleep, anything that is in your physical environment, that's in your lifestyle, that's in your physiology, can impact it. I mentioned earlier, one of the reasons why sleep is getting worse is because these physical changes in our environment. Annual spend on sleep is like 600 billion right now. But yet we have seen a 60 minute drop in total sleep time over the last 60 years. So you're seeing an inverse. We're spending more on sleep and sleep is getting worse. I think your team printed out some cards here and we can go through them. The first one is a really good one. The world is physically brighter. In fact, there's data from NASA, satellite data that can look and say, the world is physically brighter now. You're expected to be communicating with Singapore and Australia and the US, which means you're going to be up later.

• 22:07Speaker 00

  Your business is going to be on, your lights are going to be on. There's also a phenomenon called sky glow, where the light from Earth is going up, hitting the clouds and being shot back down. And so it's keeping our world brighter. So when you hear people talk about things like, you gotta have these blackout curtains and masks, and you're thinking like, I never did that when I was a kid. Like, what's the big deal? It's because of this.

• 22:29Steven Bartlett

  I mean, there's some graphs that I found here.

• 22:32Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah.

• 22:32Steven Bartlett

  Which kind of demonstrate this, which I'll put up on the screen.

• 22:34Speaker 00

  Yeah, more people are moving into urban environments. And if you look at some of the studies, not to be dramatic, but some of the studies have found things as high as like anxiety and depression are up 20 plus percent when you move into the city. And that's largely attributed to things like light and sound. It's extremely bright and extremely loud in cities. It doesn't mean they're bad or you can't live in them. It just simply means that's why you have to take extra steps.

• 22:58Steven Bartlett

  I think a lot of people listening to this will think, well, Andy, my, my bedroom's very dark.

• 23:02Speaker 00

  Great.

• 23:02Steven Bartlett

  But that's actually not what you're saying, is it? Cause the way I was thinking about it is we are here in New York City now. And if I walked to the shop last night at 10:00 PM.

• 23:11Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 23:12Steven Bartlett

  And walked back, I was exposed to so, so much light outside at a critical time when my body should be not exposed to light, that it's going to impact me even when I get into that dark room.

• 23:23Speaker 00

  It goes even better than that. There's evidence now that the light exposure you have, both in the morning and throughout the day, dramatically counteracts what you just mentioned. So yes, you went for that walk, you went for that thing when light was still out and you had a brighter light exposure in, we'll just call it the three or four hours before bed than you would have had ever in the past. But you can mitigate that damage by seeing light appropriately during the day and in the morning.

• 23:50Steven Bartlett

  Oh, okay.

• 23:51Speaker 00

  And this is actually something my friend, Andrew Huberman, has talked about for years now. And I'm like, oh, he's joked and laughed at him. But then I'm like, damn, he nailed this. Like, he was way ahead in this one. Light exposure in the morning will impact your sleep at night, the next day. He always explains it as setting your circadian rhythm, but it's more than that, actually. It's like, that's the part where I was like, yeah, whatever. Like, I'm in the same times, so what do I care? And now I'm like, oh, because then if you were exposed to a high amounts of light later in the day, that exposure to light earlier will help reduce that damage.

• 24:23Steven Bartlett

  Wow.

• 24:24Speaker 00

  There's this whole cascade of things that influence when it is time to be awake and when it is time to go to sleep. And this is both hormonal based as well as neurally based. So your brain will shut down or activate in response to light, in response to exercise, in response to arousal, in response to food, in response to stimulants and a whole host of other things. That light earlier in the day sets that rhythm.

• 24:48Steven Bartlett

  Okay, so it's like starting the.

• 24:50Speaker 00

  It starts the clock.

• 24:51Steven Bartlett

  Okay.

• 24:51Speaker 00

  It starts the sleep pressure. This is, oh, this is the graph of rural versus urban plot. And so, yeah, I mean, you can see that pretty clearly. The red line here is the noise in a rural environment. And this is the noise here. The typical number you want to see for sound at night is like 35 decibels. Right? So if you see the rural environment, you're cruising about that. And you see the urban environment, you're looking in the 60 to 7 as a baseline.

• 25:16Steven Bartlett

  And it really matters, sound, when you sleep?

• 25:18Speaker 00

  Tons.

• 25:18Steven Bartlett

  Really?

• 25:18Speaker 00

  Yeah, as much, if not more, of any other factor. The, the big thing with sound is inconsistency. A lot of people will do things like put a sound machine in the room. Most people put them too loud because of that thing. So you put them, pretty common default is like 40 to 50 decibels for a sound machine. More, the data suggests, sub 40, especially for kids. If you're using a sound machine for your children, most people put them too close and too loud.

• 25:42Steven Bartlett

  What's a sound machine?

• 25:43Speaker 00

  Just a little device that makes a white noise. And what that does is it cancels out a bunch of low level inconsistent sounds.

• 25:51Steven Bartlett

  Oh, okay.

• 25:51Speaker 00

  So the dog getting up, the window creaking, the, you know, car driving by. And so it can kind of cancel that noise level out.

• 25:58Steven Bartlett

  How come I can have like a great night's sleep, listening to a podcast falling asleep? Whereas my partner can't. She needs silence and I, I almost feel like I need to listen to something to fall asleep.

• 26:09Speaker 00

  Most likely you would do better if you didn't do that.

• 26:11Steven Bartlett

  Really?

• 26:11Speaker 00

  Yep. You turn them off before you go to sleep, right?

• 26:13Steven Bartlett

  No.

• 26:14Speaker 00

  Yeah, okay. That will never lead to your best sleep.

• 26:17Steven Bartlett

  Okay.

• 26:18Speaker 00

  What happens is you get to bed and something is happening cognitively. And you're like, I need something to switch me off.

• 26:24Steven Bartlett

  To distract me.

• 26:27Speaker 00

  Great. If we took that away from you, you might sleep worse because you're going to sit there and struggle through that moment. If you wanted to go from upgrade, we would say, okay, let's figure out what is actually a way for you to down regulate cognitively, give you that same thing that won't then disrupt your sleep throughout the night.

• 26:45Steven Bartlett

  Have you dealt with people in that situation before?

• 26:47Speaker 00

  It's super common. Podcasts are incredibly common one with that, TV, books. My philosophy is let's step back and solve causes. Let's solve constraints rather than mask them. You've got a host of different supplements over here. Everything you see on this table has moderate to strong scientific evidence that it will help with sleep.

• 27:08Steven Bartlett

  What are those things?

• 27:09Speaker 00

  So lovely, delicious looking tart cherry juice. And I'll go through why that is there. You've got some chamomile tea. You would see this in the supplement form of apigenin. It's a really common way of that as kind of like distilled chamomile. Look at these lovely kiwis. What's funny here is this is actually what happens in, in research. They will give people two to three kiwis. They will eat them right before bed. And you will very routinely see people sleeping better after ingestion of kiwis. Other things that are high on the evidence based list are, of course, magnesium and various forms. More of the research now on magnesium for sleep is turning to a particular form called magnesium bisglycinate, rather than threnate. That's up there as well.

• 27:54Speaker 00

  You will also see things like omega three. This is your common fish oil. Oh, this is actually interesting because this popped up on your labs as something we have to work on.

• 28:03Steven Bartlett

  Oh, my test.

• 28:04Speaker 00

  Yeah, we'll come back to that in a second.

• 28:05Steven Bartlett

  Okay.

• 28:06Speaker 00

  And then, of course, you've got melatonin, right? The issue with all these is the same that you have with your podcast. These are doing the exact same thing. So one thing we could do is say, ditch the podcast and let's go with one or multiple of these options because they're doing the same thing. They're cognitive turn off. Apigenin or chamomile specifically will play that role. It is a reasonable switch that says frontal cortex turn off. And so you're getting there through the podcasts where you could get through theirs through food or supplements, if you'd like as well.

• 28:39Steven Bartlett

  Kiwis?

• 28:39Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 28:40Steven Bartlett

  Kiwis have scientific evidence that they improve sleep for some people.

• 28:45Speaker 00

  It's really common. If there's like levels to this, you'd probably like level one, two and three. Level one being things like, actually surprising enough, magnesium, chamomile, melatonin, of course, lots of randomized control trials.

• 28:57Steven Bartlett

  Level one being the.

• 28:58Speaker 00

  Best.

• 28:59Steven Bartlett

  The best of the best.

• 29:00Speaker 00

  The best, highest quality.

• 29:01Steven Bartlett

  And you'd say, what, magnesium, kiwis?

• 29:03Speaker 00

  Yeah, kiwis would probably be like a level two or level three.

• 29:06Steven Bartlett

  Okay.

• 29:06Speaker 00

  So there's been good studies on them, enough to put them on this table, enough to say there's data there. So you're getting some product below it. In this case, apigenin, in this case, other phytochemicals that either reduce a little bit of cognitive function, they reduce arousal, they put you in some sort of checkout state.

• 29:25Steven Bartlett

  And then there's this one over here, melatonin.

• 29:27Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 29:27Steven Bartlett

  That a lot of people are aware of.

• 29:28Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 29:29Steven Bartlett

  Strong. What level is melatonin?

• 29:32Speaker 00

  So melatonin probably has more evidence than the rest of these things combined because it's a medicine. It's a drug. There's a ton of research on it from children to aging to bone health and tons of other stuff, right? It's a hormone. You're going to be able to move some units with this one. Nobody is going to be super concerned about risk factor profiles with eating two kiwis. But you start getting to the level of something like a melatonin and now you have to have real conversations about risk versus benefits. We typically don't use melatonin at the dosage that's normal. So a common dosage for melatonin is like five milligrams, sometimes even up to 10.

• 30:08Steven Bartlett

  Wow.

• 30:09Speaker 00

  We will typically use like 0.3, maybe 0.5, so about a 10th that dose. A lot of times we're trying to find like one milligrams, cut them in half, kind of things like that. The only real reason we use melatonin, outside of some fringe cases, is when we actually legitimately need to reset circadian rhythm. Travel, jet lag, things like that. And it is effective and it is useful there. It is safe in small doses. Where people mistake melatonin is, I use it every night to go to sleep and/or I wake up in the middle of the night, can't go back to sleep, I go grab a melatonin.

• 30:43Steven Bartlett

  Why is that bad?

• 30:44Speaker 00

  It doesn't work.

• 30:45Steven Bartlett

  It doesn't work?

• 30:45Speaker 00

  No, because the thing that melatonin is supposed to do is realign circadian rhythm. If you're in the middle of the night, you're already in that rhythm. It's not going to do anything. You would in fact, not to, I don't want people to do this, but you would actually be better reaching for something like a chamomile perhaps, because if you're having a hard time getting back to sleep cognitively, this is not going to do it. The other issue is, we've done a lot of morning urine testing. There's enough studies that look at the dosage that's actually in the pill versus those on the label. And they can be up to 100X higher.

• 31:18Steven Bartlett

  100X?

• 31:20Speaker 00

  And we see this in morning urine. We have seen people who are consistently tired. Their sleep doesn't look horrible. They're doing all the right things. It's cold, it's dark, they're meditating, they're doing all this stuff. They're popping in even a moderate dosage of melatonin. And the amount of melatonin the next day in their urine is 100X the upper end of the reference range. Which means they're spending the rest of their next day in a hyperdosed melatonin state. So they have to live then on stimulants to get back to normal.

• 31:50Steven Bartlett

  How would they feel?

• 31:51Speaker 00

  Horrible.

• 31:52Steven Bartlett

  They would feel sluggish?

• 31:53Speaker 00

  You wake up the next day and you're like, man, it's what we call sleep inertia. You're wildly groggy, you can't get out of bed, or you're just getting throughout the day. This is like, don't talk to me until I've had my coffee kind of response, right? This is not a normal waking physiology that you should be going through.

• 32:10Steven Bartlett

  Presumably that's just melatonin from sort of cheap sources that haven't been tested.

• 32:16Speaker 00

  That's going to knock off a huge part of your problem, right? Only, this is why we'll always say, you don't, no one needs supplements. Like, no essential person needs to have any supplement to live a great, happy, healthy life. If you choose to use supplements though, just buy them from third party tested, transparent companies that place their testing on their websites, that give you open access to it for, for these exact reasons. Vitamin D's has a similar profile of inaccuracy. The other issue with that then simply, let's say you're buying it from a high quality source, you're dosing it too much and you're taking it too late. So take it earlier than you think before bed so that your body has a chance to break it down before the next morning.

• 32:56Steven Bartlett

  What kind of time? And how quickly acting is it?

• 32:59Speaker 00

  It's person to person dependent, but a lot of times you'll see things like an hour before. Some people will feel a response in 10 to 15 minutes. Some people will feel it closer to an hour, but that's a pretty good window.

• 33:09Steven Bartlett

  Hang on, if it's 2:00 AM in the morning and you're, and you're getting in bed, don't take it?

• 33:13Speaker 00

  Don't take it at all.

• 33:14Steven Bartlett

  Okay.

• 33:14Speaker 00

  We're going to use this in very specific situations and then we're coming off of it. This is, this should not be a part of your nightly routine, most of the time.

• 33:21Steven Bartlett

  What exactly is going on in my brain when I take melatonin? Cause a lot of people take it and we know that it makes us feel tired. But, but understanding the mechanism, I think, will help us understand the application.

• 33:30Speaker 00

  So it actually doesn't really make you feel tired. That's part of the issue.

• 33:32Steven Bartlett

  Oh.

• 33:33Speaker 00

  The mechanism is a circadian shift. So it's telling your endogenous system that it is his nighttime. So it doesn't hit you with like a, oh, my eyes are there. This hits you with a shift in cortisol. This hits you with a shift and a whole cascade of epinephrine, norepinephrine, serotonin that are moving around and saying, this is the milieu that you need to be in that is consistent with a sleep pattern.

• 33:55Steven Bartlett

  Okay, so I take it and then it regulates my other hormones, which would be getting in the way of me feeling tired, theoretically.

• 34:02Speaker 00

  That's probably more appropriate to what it does.

• 34:04Steven Bartlett

  Okay. Cause yeah, I've taken it a couple of times. Again, always for jet lag issues. And within about 30, 45 minutes, I feel a bit drowsy. And then I found my eyes going shutting and I'm off.

• 34:14Speaker 00

  Great. And then you get out of those, that two or three day window. Put it back away and you're off and going.

• 34:20Steven Bartlett

  Yeah.

• 34:20Speaker 00

  That's a good use case for it. The mistake is when this is like, I can't go to bed without.

• 34:25Steven Bartlett

  I'm generally scared of all these things because honestly, anything that's effective, I'm more scared of.

• 34:30Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 34:31Steven Bartlett

  And so.

• 34:31Speaker 00

  Sure.

• 34:31Steven Bartlett

  It's really effective, which makes me hesitant to use it frequently.

• 34:35Speaker 00

  Yeah, it's a good default position to be in, by the way. It's a good strategy.

• 34:38Steven Bartlett

  Yeah. Cause one of the things you learn from doing a podcast like this is you just learn that everything has a trade off.

• 34:42Speaker 00

  Always.

• 34:43Steven Bartlett

  And I, and again, this might not be logically sound, but I assume that the bigger the upside, the bigger the, like the trade I'm making on the other side, as a general rule. So do you know the only thing that I've still not been able to, I guess, understand the full trade off of is coffee?

• 34:55Speaker 00

  Hmm.

• 34:56Steven Bartlett

  Because the upside is so significant. No one can articulate to me the downside, other than they say, if you have it after midday, it's going to.

• 35:04Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah.

• 35:04Steven Bartlett

  Impact your sleep. But I'm like, come on, this has got to be.

• 35:07Speaker 00

  The phrase that I'll say in my class all the time is, there's no free passes in physiology. With coffee specifically, that actually, we have a meta analysis led by my colleague, Dr. Ben House, puts it together. But if you look at the research on caffeine and sleep, it's very interesting because if you go through sleep deprivation, your physical and cognitive performance goes down. No surprise there. Coffee can offset that. Caffeine specifically is, is the thing. But what it doesn't do, at least the data and the meta analysis suggests is, it doesn't actually put you back into the augmented spot. Meaning if you, did you sleep great last night?

• 35:46Steven Bartlett

  I think so, yeah.

• 35:46Speaker 00

  Full night, okay. Let's just say you're there. If we took you out and we had you throw that medicine ball and we did a grip strength tester and we did some sprints up and down, whatever you want to do, you would perform well. And then if we gave you caffeine, you'd perform better. It's why we call it ergogenic aid. It's a performance enhancer. Caffeine is really effective primarily at endurance based events, but it is a stimulatory thing that people will use. So let's just say you have normal baseline performance and then caffeine augments that performance. If you go into sleep debt, the sleep itself will reduce your performance. And the coffee can bring you back to normal. But it won't bring you back to that augmented state that you had when you rested and caffeinated.

• 36:28Speaker 00

  This is important because a lot of people will be like, ah, I'll throw away the sleep or I won't worry about it as much because I'll just take more stimulus tomorrow. And I feel great. You will feel as good, but you will not perform as well. So what you need to perform at your best, if you're a caffeine user, is to be both well rested and then caffeinated. Another thing you want to pay attention to in your sleep environment, labeled ergonomics here, is your pillow, your bed, your mattress. This is mostly based on feel.

• 36:58Steven Bartlett

  Is there any no goes in this regard?

• 36:59Speaker 00

  Not really.

• 37:00Steven Bartlett

  Not really?

• 37:01Speaker 00

  No, unless, let's say you have a sleeping partner and you're sleeping in a bed that is too small and that results in you hitting each other or touching each other and you don't like that. So other than those, the framework themselves, there's really no, nothing to be concerned with.

• 37:14Steven Bartlett

  What about these like eight sleep beds?

• 37:16Speaker 00

  Eight sleep is fantastic. So eight sleep is not a bed, it's a cover, which regulates temperature. If you are in a bedding situation where you're getting hot, then that's a problem. So if then an eight sleep will help you regulate that temperature, it's a great solution. If you're not in that situation, then you're going to be just fine. So temperature regulation is a really big deal. And you'll quite often see people that do that, whether that's getting a product like that or it's getting a sheet that's cooler or a mattress that is better with ventilation, then you'll oftentimes see them sleep a little bit better. Next on our list is screen usage. Everyone has been told and you know, perhaps nothing's more destructive to your sleep than a screen. What's more interesting here is the stuff that people generally don't talk about.

• 38:00Speaker 00

  It's not the fact that necessarily screen usage is shooting your face with a bunch of blue light. What's more dangerous about your screen is the arousal associated with the search for novelty.

• 38:13Steven Bartlett

  The search for novelty. What does that mean?

• 38:16Speaker 00

  You're engaging in a podcast, social media, a game. It is puzzle driven, it is solution, it is interest, it is engagement, it is search for the next. That's the stuff that more likely than not, cause sleep disturbance, disturbances. In the studies that have looked at things like TV time versus tablet versus phone versus reading, those all can be equally dangerous to sleep. Here is the example. I am a TV before bed guy. A giant TV with a blast of blue light. I sleep great with that. My wife is, really struggles with light before bed. She will read.

• 38:59Speaker 00

  And yet she chooses to read things that I don't think she should be reading before night. And then she'll wake up because of the topics that she's reading. Where I'm watching things on TV that are, you know, documentaries on Ilyciah Grant or something, and you're just like, that is the least engaging thing ever. So it's not the fact that the light is there. I use that stuff much like you use your podcasts, which is, my entire day is so driven by somebody wanting my attention and time. I have to have something that gives me a cognitive switch that says, you get to turn off.

• 39:27Steven Bartlett

  I wanted to add something to this, which I've been thinking about this week. So in Meta, Meta own Instagram and Facebook and WhatsApp, et cetera. In Meta's earnings call this week, Mark Zuckerberg talked about how they changed the recommendation algorithm on social media apps using AI. And this was something that we've always forecasted would happen. And we've been thinking about the creator economy and how it would impact it. But specifically for people listening, what essentially he said is every time you post something on Instagram, whether it's a reel or a, or a normal post, they now feed it to a large language model, an AI. And the AI effectively, and again, I'm summarizing here, watches it. And it can now understand the full context of what it's watching. So if it's watching a clip of you and me right now, it'll understand that that is Andy Galpin.

• 40:10Steven Bartlett

  He is holding a card, he's wearing a black t-shirt. He's, they'll look at the transcript, will know what you said. And this is all pertinent because it then can, without. In the past, needing to look at the caption and the hashtags, it can then decide with way more context than ever before, who exactly would want to see that? And the net impact of that for the user of Instagram or these other social media apps or TikTok, whatever it is, is you're going to be more retained now than ever before. And as you were talking about that, I thought, I wonder if they think about timing of day. Like, I wonder if they think at 11:00 PM, there's a certain thing that's going to keep Andy scrolling versus something at 9:00 AM when you're off to work. And of course they do.

• 40:55Steven Bartlett

  Because the, and you know, they were talking about on the earnings call, Mark was saying how it's increased retention by, I think, 15 basis points. And there's this quote where he said that there are already two large sets of content to draw from. First, from your friends and people you follow. And second, from creators that you don't follow. But now there's going to be a whole new and nearly infinite universe of personalized content, which from the eye and felt what they're saying is with their new large language model called Muse, is we're actually going to make new content to show Andy Galpin that no one made, no humans made. We're going to make stuff that we know Andy will like. And so I say all this to say that in this sleep conversation, we've been talking about it as creators. We've been saying basically it's going to get really difficult

• 41:39Steven Bartlett

  if you're a creator, because now if you have a million followers, it doesn't matter.

• 41:41Speaker 00

  No.

• 41:42Steven Bartlett

  If Jenny has zero followers, but she makes something that is contextually more interesting than the million follower guy, Jenny's thing's going to be seen to everyone. But actually now you're going to be competing with an AI that's going to be churning out super personalized Andy Galpin content. Like that just Andy would just love at 11:00 PM. I said to my team this week, I was like, just take care of yourself. Do you know what I mean? Like, just be aware, you know, when you open your phone, that the AI is doing everything it can to retain you.

• 42:09Speaker 00

  Yeah, I mean, just don't be on your phone. We've been making this argument for years, but jeez, you got every disadvantage possible coming in your way. And, and look, we're all human. I, I think I remember last time I was here, you were talking about how like you wake up and your phone's right there, but your, your fiance like doesn't touch your phone for the worst hour of the day or something. It's just like on the charger until noon or something. You're just like, what? I'm more like you, right? Where I'm like, my phone is in my room. It's not three rooms. Like, I'm just not doing any of that stuff, right? And we started this entire piece by saying the environment you're in is just different than it's ever been before. And it's not getting any better. And at some point you have to make that decision of,

• 42:51Speaker 00

  do you care about your own health? Do you care about the thing the next day that you didn't do well? And do you care more about that than you cared about that next reel?

• 43:03Steven Bartlett

  What is it that's causing us to understand everything you just said, but to ignore it and to pick up our phone anyway?

• 43:10Speaker 00

  You are hard driven, the entire biology of our species to search for novelty. In fact, I, I look at this from the lens of sports. Why do you care about high achievement? Why do I care about performance? There has direct translation. When someone breaks a barrier, we all benefit from that. And I could give you direct examples of this. But we have every story. You want to go to Joseph Campbell hero's journey, right? You want to go back to Hercules, the story of the marathon. Like you pull any story from history out and what are you actually looking at? You're looking at somebody did something that no one has ever done before. You care more about records than you do regular wins and losses.

• 43:55Speaker 00

  Why? Because they're novel. Why are you more interested in watching Messi break that record than you are the other team winning in the exact same shot? It's because you saw something, you got to be there when someone did something for the first time in human history.

• 44:16Steven Bartlett

  I get more of a dopamine hit from the novelty, from the new thing.

• 44:18Speaker 00

  It's more than the dopamine hit, though. It's a sense of purpose. Your life mattered because you got to be involved in something no one else has ever seen. And even as that bystander on TV, 30,000 kilometers away, you got to be a part of that. And that all comes down to, we are so wired to reward novelty. So then now that comes back to your life and you have to be thinking, how do you walk away from that core drive?

• 44:49Steven Bartlett

  I was thinking about a study I read about in psychology class in school with pigeons getting variable rewards. I'm going to butcher this, but bear with me. They took a pigeon and they got a little lever for it to press. And every time it would press the lever and sometimes it would get a reward. And they found from the study that if they made the rewards variable, i.e. it couldn't predict when it was coming, the pigeon was more likely to keep pressing the lever. I, it was more addicted to the behavior if it didn't know when the dopamine hit was coming or the, the treat in that case. Scrolling on social media is kind of like the slot machine of variable rewards. I just don't know what I'm going to get. But every fourth, you know, scroll, I get something that.

• 45:26Speaker 00

  Or every fortieth.

• 45:27Steven Bartlett

  Yeah.

• 45:28Speaker 00

  It's even better, right? Because the more unpredictable it is, the more likely you are to be like, one more, one more, one more, one more. Like if it actually comes too quickly, you care less. So you're going to scroll through all the boring stuff, boring stuff, boring stuff, boring stuff, boring stuff for the one at every 40 that gets you. That's what you're actually there for. I mean, if I gave most people and I said, like, you can have $10,000 or you can have $10,000 in equity in a startup. I, look at your face, like, I know what you're doing. You want to, like, people are, it depends on where you're at, right? But it's just like, okay. And if I said right now, the most likely scenario was that $10,000 goes zero.

• 46:07Steven Bartlett

  Yeah.

• 46:07Speaker 00

  Which is what happens, right? You're like, can I hedge? Can I go five and five? Like, you're going to, you're going to go, you don't, unless you need the 10 grand, which a lot of people do, but you get the point. Because you're like, man, walking away from belief, walking away from hope, walking away from what if is insanely hard to do.

• 46:26Steven Bartlett

  I deleted one of these social media apps just completely from my phone. And honestly, you, you always think that you're going to have like FOMO, you're not going to know what's going on or there's going to be some huge loss to your life if you don't have an app on your phone. And it's just remarkable when you delete these, some of these social media apps, how positive of a net impact it has on your life.

• 46:43Speaker 00

  I have a, a friend of mine named Sean O'Malley, a, a famous EFC fighter. He was sitting at his pool and he had, his daughter was like one or two years old. And he was like scrolling Twitter and was like, what am I doing? Like, my daughter's over here in front of me. She's two years old and like I'm on scrolling, like not doing work or not making a post, not, I'm just scrolling. Dumped it and was just like, team, you guys handle it. Not on any social media anymore.

• 47:09Steven Bartlett

  So that's screens.

• 47:10Speaker 00

  That's screens, my friend. Another one to think about, which we've sort of touched on is called the presence of other beings. This is our classic sleep divorce. I assume you, as I do, share your sleeping environment with your partner.

• 47:25Steven Bartlett

  Yes.

• 47:26Speaker 00

  Tough to make the argument of like, get a sleep divorce, right?

• 47:29Steven Bartlett

  Yeah, I'm not telling that guy. You can tell that.

• 47:31Speaker 00

  It's funny, if it was up to my wife, we would have a sleep divorce.

• 47:35Steven Bartlett

  You're joking.

• 47:36Speaker 00

  No, she's like, get away from me, don't touch me. She wants to be like, if we could have separate beds and separate rooms, she'd, I don't snore or anything, but she just like.

• 47:44Steven Bartlett

  My fiance is the opposite.

• 47:45Speaker 00

  It's not super realistic, but it is true. There are data behind it. People generally don't sleep as well when you're in the same bed as others. The realistic solution, try to get sheets or a sleeping situation in which when one partner moves, it doesn't roll the other person.

• 48:01Steven Bartlett

  Oh, like separate sheets.

• 48:02Speaker 00

  Separate sheets or simply the type of sheets. My wife loves to be really constricted. So she likes the sheets tucked in tight. She likes the bed and I hate it. Like, I feel like I'm in Shawshank. I can like break me out, like rip it all out of there. So there's little things like that that don't require you to buy anything. Where you can just change kind of the, the setup and the scenario to where their movement doesn't impact you as much. Noise would be the same one. If, if you are sleeping with somebody who makes a lot of noise, tosses and turns a bunch, you could put a pillow in between. So when they roll over and move, they don't hit you. Earplugs, things like that. So that one's a pretty straightforward one. But that said, it's pretty impactful. It can really make a big difference. And if you're really struggling, maybe do a partial sleep divorce.

• 48:47Steven Bartlett

  Okay.

• 48:48Speaker 00

  Next, sleeping in new environment. This would oftentimes be called first night effect. So your first night, whether it's back home, whether it's in a hotel or somewhere else, you don't feel as comfortable and as safe and you're circadian rhythms. The things that set your timing aren't there. This is sound, this is light, this is feel, this is temperature, this is smell. What you can do, if you travel a lot, our athletes travel every three to five days, right? This is what they do. You can try to mimic your sleep environment at home on the road. Some people will take their pillows. Other things that are on this similar list are smells like lavender. Lavender is moderately associated with helping people fall asleep. None of those is going to like knock you out.

• 49:32Speaker 00

  What you're looking to do is stack winds. Next is temperature. You want to be cool. Generally you're looking at 64 to 68 degrees. This is personally dependent. Some people actually like to be a little bit colder so that they can have a heavier blanket because they like that feeling. When this idea got popular a bunch, a few years ago, people just started raking the ACs, right? And you're just like, get the room as cold as you possibly can. That can become a problem because we're seeing this somewhat consistency where when people's air conditioners kick on, it actually wakes them up. And as we talked about earlier, with noise, it's not necessarily always about the volume, but it's the change.

• 50:11Steven Bartlett

  Okay.

• 50:12Speaker 00

  And sound. And so you have something kicking on, kicking off, kicking on, kicking off. Another thing we see is because of air quality situations, we've seen quite often when we have environmental sensors and stuff, that if your air conditioner is not clean and the fan is out in there, you can actually kick a bunch of dander and particulates and other things into the air. And then you start breathing those things in it overnight and your nose starts to get a little bit stuffed up. You can't breathe through your nose and then boom, you have this hypopnic or apnic event. The last component that comes up, you know, pretty often at absolute rest is fans. This can make your mouth dry. So if you're waking up with that and you're like, ah, I gotta get a drink of water or something, then maybe consider not having the fan blow directly out your face.

• 50:55Steven Bartlett

  An interesting thing I was thinking about there, which is, there was the viral experiment done in 2009 by Mind Lab Sleep Study, where they conducted the sleep experiment at the University of Sussex. Researchers hooked men and women up to an ECG machine to measure their brainwaves and played a variety of ambient sounds while they slept to see which noises triggered an immediate wake response. And the top wake responses from men and women was completely different. Men's top trigger was a car alarm. Women's top trigger was a baby crying. Men's top trigger was wind howling outside. Women's second top trigger, I should say, is a dripping tap. Men's third top is buzzing or flying of a mosquito.

• 51:38Steven Bartlett

  Women's was shouting outside and both of their fourth top trigger was snoring. But it was interesting that the thing that woke most men at their top trigger in that study was an alarm outside, but women's was a baby's crying.

• 51:52Speaker 00

  Yeah, every mother out there is going, yep. It's in, in fact, one of the largest causes of sleep disorders in women is having children. What happens after childbirth, and that's, it's a whole interesting field here of postpartum care is really poor in women. Like we just sort of like start paying attention to baby, stop paying attention to mom as soon as baby comes out. Well, I'm saying that because it is obvious and clear that the last trimester can present a lot of sleep challenges for women. And then especially as soon as the baby's there, like you're just going to have some known period of sleep deprivation, whether it's delivery or having a newborn, all that stuff. And that can actually cause patterns. This can cause insomnia. This can cause irregular sleep schedules, circadian disorders, natural thing. Totally fine.

• 52:35Speaker 00

  In some percentage of women, those patterns will persist. And so you'll see women who have sleep disorders, even with adult children, that started because of the childbirth. We are advocating at all times, like, yeah, get through it. I got two kids, you know, I've been there. But then just make sure you're, you're providing care and going back to try to fix those things. And why that is difficult is because of the study you just mentioned.

• 52:59Steven Bartlett

  It's worth saying, there is an evolutionary theory behind this that says, you know, men and women are attuned to different things. But there's also a counter argument that says the difference in who actually wakes up and who gets out of bed is often heavily driven by social roles, parenting expectations, and individual sleep depth, rather than a biological inability for men to hear the baby. So how, how do we close off on the subject of sleep? Is there anything that we haven't touched on that we should have touched on as it pertains to how to have incredible sleep?

• 53:25Speaker 00

  One thing that I think will help everyone, whether you're at any of those stages, free a little bit of money or you gotta go to full, enter the spectrum and use a hospital or a, a service like ours, is everyone has the ability to run self experiments. We, we have a, a free guide that anyone can go use. And it's just a, a quick tutorial about how to run your own self experiment for sleep specifically. Oh, there you go. Yeah. So this is up and available for free on our website. Anyone can check it out. There's a lot of stuff in here we've covered. You can get more into it, but the short answer of it is, we don't want to make people think sleep has to be the center of their life. I, oftentimes when sleep comes up, people start thinking, I'd love to sleep more, but I'm too busy.

• 54:10Speaker 00

  Hey, I'm the same boat. Like, I can't afford to have a 12 hour sleep routine. Where we should be paying attention to is sleep resilience. Steve, I want you to be as resilient to bad sleep as possible. I don't want you optimizing your sleep because optimization turns into that. Giant routine before bed. I gotta take 12 different supplements and four different cocktails. And if I have to do that along the way, great. The end game though should be resilient, meaning you had a bad night of sleep. Cool, and you still performed. We had this challenge, flight got delayed, great, we still executed. I want you to know how to get a, get a good night of sleep

• 54:55Speaker 00

  so you can feel as refreshed as possible, execute the next day and then get right back onto it. The way you get there is, and that's the way our company works, like we're just going to run a series of experiments. And everyone can do that. Start by changing one thing. Your trackers, your data are going to tell you how you're sleeping. But they're not telling you why you're sleeping that way. So that's your quest. Go figure out why you're sleeping that way. Is it your bedroom temperature? Is it your partner? Is it the fact that you're sensitive to light? Is it the fact you're exercising too late? Are you eating too late? Like, all these things are possible, one at a time.

• 55:35Steven Bartlett

  Just like John Jones, where marginal improvements in your cognitive performance can have a massive impact. Sometimes I podcast for 10 hours a day. Over the last couple of weeks, I've been in filming for a TV show and I have like one or two days off to get all of my work done, which means there's lots of cognitive load. And so I turn to ketones because I find myself more articulate, able to think more clearly, able to work out better when I'm fueled by ketones. And so the reason I became a co-owner of this company and the reason why they now are a sponsor of this podcast is because I remember one of my team members called Christiana. She tried it once and came up to my desk and she goes, this is the best product ever made. And I think in part that's because she really cares about those cognitive benefits, as I do, as John Jones does, and as I think most of my listeners probably will.

• 56:16Steven Bartlett

  So if you haven't tried these yet, all you have to do is go to ketone.com/steven and you'll also get 30% off your first subscription order. You'll get exclusive ketone IQ merch and of course, cognitive benefits that might just change your life. If you're thinking about starting a business, one of the first decisions you'll have to make is actually one of the most important, which is where do you build that business? Our product team, who manages everything we do, from our conversation cards to our diaries, has always used our sponsor Shopify. There are a few reasons for this, but one of the big ones is that when you're running a business, you really need your own store and your own customer data. And Shopify gives you exactly that. You aren't renting space from someone else's platform, hoping the rules don't suddenly change.

• 56:59Steven Bartlett

  And you avoid the classic founder challenges that inevitably come, like sorting out payments and logistics and storefronts because it's already built into Shopify. Those early days are messy enough without the infrastructure challenge to create extra problems for you. And Shopify's distribution piece is underrated too, because your products automatically get in front of people on Google, TikTok, YouTube, ChatGPT, which again, isn't something you have to figure out yourself. It's just already built into their platform. If you are serious about starting your own thing, start your free trial at Shopify.com/Bartlett. I guess one could argue that the antithesis of sleep is being awake. And when we're awake, the thing we care about is energy. Now, I had a really great conversation on this podcast

• 57:42Steven Bartlett

  with several people that talk about mitochondria and energy and those kinds of things. And some, some of those conversations have really, really changed me. If you hadn't, haven't listened to the more recent conversation we had on mitochondria in the channel, please do go listen to it.

• 57:55Speaker 00

  Martin Picard?

• 57:56Steven Bartlett

  Martin Picard. It was a real, honestly, it's one of my favorite conversations I've had this year just because I've, I knew about the mitochondria. Like I, I conceptually knew what it was, but I hadn't thought about it as being so central to everything in my life. Because energy is essential to everything in my life. Like my relationships, my ability to do this, my, my joy, my everything. If someone is trying to improve their energy levels, and that's what they come to you with in terms of a symptom that they self describe, where do you aim? Okay, so we've talked about sleep.

• 58:27Speaker 00

  Yep.

• 58:28Steven Bartlett

  But where else do you aim?

• 58:30Speaker 00

  Energy is probably the number one thing on our list of reasons people come to us.

• 58:35Steven Bartlett

  What do they say?

• 58:36Speaker 00

  I'm tired all day, can't figure it out. Or I don't have the energy I used to have. Or I can't sustain output like I used to, whether this is physical. My recovery is longer than it used to be. Or I just can't hang working as many hours as I used to do. I get fatigued at the end of the day cognitively. I'm not of the camp that this is entirely mitochondria. But I certainly will agree that energy would be the number one. In fact, probably the most common question ever in my career is, what separates these world performers from the rest of us? And people want me to say things like, they work harder. They, they, they don't. They are categorically though, better at energy management. That is the one thing that seems to be most consistent again

• 59:19Speaker 00

  with the world's highest performers, athletes, entrepreneurs, leaders, executives, you name it. However, you're defining success, when you get better at managing energy.

• 59:31Speaker 00

  You're more effective. This is everything from cellular energy to understanding things like your own interpersonal communication. What type of relationships give you energy? What type of relationships take energy from you? What type of activities give you energy? What types give you back? When can you be more efficient? When are you running for the sake of running and not actually running in a direction? And I mean this figuratively, not literally. This is all energy management. And what you'll see is these people are world-class performers, getting incredibly good at going, 80% of my energy suck comes out of here for 20% ROI, I'm going to switch that out. They're better at choosing what matters and what doesn't matter.

• 1:00:09Steven Bartlett

  Okay.

• 1:00:10Speaker 00

  And this is everything from what supplement is working to what type of person that they work with. Where people struggle is in the like, what if I could also be doing this? What if I could also be doing this? What if I add this on top? What if I add this on top?

• 1:00:22Steven Bartlett

  Okay, so I thought you were talking about, I guess if I try and put this into some sort of analogy or metaphor, the high performers wake up with 100 energy chips, let's say, and they're really, really good at allocating them against the most important thing.

• 1:00:36Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 1:00:37Steven Bartlett

  Whereas maybe Jenny and Dave listening kind of let it seep out. They put 20 on Instagram, 20 over here on this.

• 1:00:42Speaker 00

  And they spin their wheels.

• 1:00:44Steven Bartlett

  They spin their wheels.

• 1:00:45Speaker 00

  They go, okay, great, I'm gonna, I listen to this podcast and I got super excited about zone two, I'm gonna go hop into a bunch of zone two. And then I listen to this other podcast and I got super excited about journaling, let me go add journaling to my mix. And then what ends up happening is you see their daily routine and you're like, okay, your daily routine is 20 hours. And then at some point, like you didn't actually do anything that mattered. What is the one thing that can get you to that goal in the most effective way possible? And then everything else has to actively be stripped away. So the traditional thing we like to do is we give one to two, what we call active movements per week, which is, this is something, Stephen, you have to actively remember to do.

• 1:01:30Speaker 00

  You don't actively remember to brush your teeth, you don't have to actively remember to shower, blah, blah, blah. You might at this point not have to actively think about your gratitude practice or your meditation time. Like you probably have these things you've been doing for years, right? I don't actually call those additive because you do those, you're gonna get those in. But I might ask you to do one thing different. I don't know what that'd be, but I would look at this and say, here's your constraint. I'm not gonna ask you to do five things now. It's too difficult. Maybe this is a change in what time you eat.

• 1:01:58Steven Bartlett

  Okay.

• 1:01:59Speaker 00

  Your training style. Find what's constraining you from your energy.

• 1:02:04Steven Bartlett

  What things could it be?

• 1:02:05Speaker 00

  It could be sleep. It could be mismanagement of relationships. It could be you're working too much. It could be you're under fueling, you're not eating enough. It could be that you're overusing stimulants, sleeping poor, and you're in that cycle, right? It could be you're not seeing sunlight. So what you need to do is run a quick analysis and think, what is the single biggest thing in your way? Is it the fact that you're in pain? Great, maybe the only one thing I want you to go after then is, let's go figure out why that knee hurts.

• 1:02:35Steven Bartlett

  Okay, so for me, you've seen my blood results.

• 1:02:37Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:02:37Steven Bartlett

  So what things might improve my energy from the blood results that you saw?

• 1:02:41Speaker 00

  Okay, great. What are you, mid 30s, early 30s?

• 1:02:44Steven Bartlett

  I'm 33.

• 1:02:45Speaker 00

  33, all right. You're lean, you're active. The first thing that jumps out on your report.

• 1:02:50Steven Bartlett

  Yeah, can we skip that page, please?

• 1:02:53Speaker 00

  Skip the page? You're gonna see quickly the difference between medicine and performance. Okay, this is medical. So we're looking at cholesterol and cholesterol-related markers. You've got, I don't know, a dozen of them or so there. Not one's good.

• 1:03:07Steven Bartlett

  Ah.

• 1:03:09Speaker 00

  This is incredibly actionable.

• 1:03:11Steven Bartlett

  Can I ask a question about this? What does it mean? And then I was gonna ask a secondary question, which is, I was gonna try and self-diagnose why I think this is the case, but.

• 1:03:19Speaker 00

  I would love that second question. That'll actually tell us where to go. So when you look at things like blood work, these are secondary measures of physiology. They're trying to predict what we'll call an outcome, meaning in this case, we are looking at your heart health.

• 1:03:31Steven Bartlett

  Okay.

• 1:03:33Speaker 00

  There is an association, and I choose that word carefully, between cholesterol and cardiovascular disease.

• 1:03:39Steven Bartlett

  Okay. High cholesterol, low cholesterol, good cholesterol, bad?

• 1:03:43Speaker 00

  All of the above. Very traditionally, excessively high cholesterol is gonna be associated with earlier heart disease, heart attack, could even manifest itself in a strokes and things like that, right? So if we were to just like zoom all the way out and we say, all right, your cholesterol is extremely high, I'm concerned about your heart health. There's way more to the story, but at the top of it, that's where we're at.

• 1:04:08Steven Bartlett

  So the second question I was gonna ask is, at the time that I did these blood test results, I was frequently in a ketogenic diet?

• 1:04:15Speaker 00

  I know. There's a lot to unpack here and a lot of people are gonna get mad online. Cholesterol has lifestyle, dietary, and familial causes. Oftentimes, you might have high cholesterol and all these various markers, simply because that's a familial genetic inheritance and there's not a lot of action behind it. When you see these things, independent of obesity, now we have a different connotation. If I were to look at all this stuff and go, oh yeah, sure, you're 35% body fat, I know you drink alcohol, then I'm like, okay, this is true, but let's tackle those things first. Because those have so many robust implications on your health, that's the starting place. You don't drink alcohol excessively. I don't even know if you drink alcohol at all and haven't in years, I assume, right?

• 1:04:59Speaker 00

  You don't smoke, you don't like, I know, so all those things are checked off the list. This means this is actionable.

• 1:05:04Steven Bartlett

  I should give you some context here. My uncle died of a heart attack and my dad had a heart operation last week.

• 1:05:09Speaker 00

  Ooh.

• 1:05:10Steven Bartlett

  So.

• 1:05:10Speaker 00

  Do you remember what kind of heart operation?

• 1:05:12Steven Bartlett

  He had a pacemaker put in, but he's been on statins, I think.

• 1:05:17Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah, to lower his cholesterol.

• 1:05:19Steven Bartlett

  A long time. I think he's been on statins for about 15 years, if I was to guess, about 15, 20 years.

• 1:05:23Speaker 00

  Yeah. So when I look at this, independent of your obesity, with your familial history, do you remember what advice you got when you got these results of what to do?

• 1:05:32Steven Bartlett

  Do you know, I did two, two tests. I did this one with Function Health, who I believe are a sponsor, so I should say that. And I did the second one with Nico Health, where I'm a big investor in the company. They both said to me, like, Steve, stop eating steak all the time, bacon, stop eating bacon all the time. The way that I heard it was, damn, this ketogenic diet you've been on, Steve, you need to just take it easy.

• 1:05:53Speaker 00

  And have you done blood work since then?

• 1:05:56Steven Bartlett

  No.

• 1:05:57Speaker 00

  All right. First thing that would pop up, and this is the order I would do this in, when you get something like blood work, the value is not in the data, the value is in the interpretation. What they're talking about, why you heard that as steak, butter, bacon, is because those are food items high in saturated fat. Saturated fat is not evil. There are no evil foods. It's only evil context, right? So in your particular case, if we saw those, and we don't have this, but if we had your baseline before that test, and then we had this and we went, okay, when you change your diet and increase your saturated fat intake, and then we saw these numbers increase, most

• 1:06:39Speaker 00

  ethical people in this space would look at that and say, that's not a positive thing. That does not mean ketogenic diets are bad or unsafe. Not at all. It only means if we had those theoretical data, for you, it's probably not healthy. You stack that on top of the fact that you have your uncle and your dad in there, then I would triple down and go, talk to your doctor, I'm not your medical doctor, but I'd be really concerned about that. Then what I would do would be go to the next step. Let's run the experiment and see. This is an indirect marker. And remember, what is it trying to predict? Your heart health. Have you had your heart scanned?

• 1:07:15Steven Bartlett

  Yes, I have.

• 1:07:16Speaker 00

  And?

• 1:07:17Steven Bartlett

  They said that I had like, I had a thick wall.

• 1:07:20Speaker 00

  Okay. Exercise-induced cardiac remodeling, especially if it's left ventricular, it's a good thing, right? So if your heart has four chambers, two on top, two on bottom, the two on the top are called atria, ventricles on the bottom. Oh, you've got a great image there as well. Yeah, so you can look at this as a maze. Okay, so we'll use double modeling here. Can you see how the left ventricle is much larger than the right ventricle?

• 1:07:46Steven Bartlett

  Uh huh.

• 1:07:47Speaker 00

  There's a reason. The right ventricle only has to kick blood to your lungs.

• 1:07:51Steven Bartlett

  Yeah.

• 1:07:52Speaker 00

  Which are, you know, physically.

• 1:07:54Steven Bartlett

  Quite close.

• 1:07:55Speaker 00

  A few inches away. The left ventricle has to kick it up, out through your entire body, down to the tip of your toes, all the way back up against gravity, and then back up into your heart.

• 1:08:06Steven Bartlett

  Uh huh.

• 1:08:08Speaker 00

  And so what you're seeing here is strength training. This is resistance exercise. Your left ventricle's lifting weights. It has to be bigger, it has to be stronger, so that it can contract really hard and shoot all that blood up and down and up and out. If you said you had a thicker wall, either naturally or exercise-induced, just like when you lift with your biceps more, it's larger, the same thing is happening in the left ventricle, incredibly common and healthy adaptation.

• 1:08:36Steven Bartlett

  Okay.

• 1:08:37Speaker 00

  What we would be concerned about is if there was any type of blockage or any type of plaque buildup.

• 1:08:45Steven Bartlett

  One of the things that I remember them saying is they, again, I'm gonna butcher this, but they told me there's kind of like two types of plaque buildup in my veins or my arteries, whatever. And they said, the bad type, you haven't got. And they said, but the other type, you have got. And they, I think they were referring to like the bad type as being like more sticky.

• 1:09:04Speaker 00

  Yep.

• 1:09:05Steven Bartlett

  And it like doesn't go.

• 1:09:06Speaker 00

  It'll dislodge.

• 1:09:07Steven Bartlett

  Oh, okay, and that can cause a risk.

• 1:09:09Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:09:09Steven Bartlett

  They said, I didn't have the bad type, but I had this other type that can, is like temporary, but could turn into the bad type or something.

• 1:09:14Speaker 00

  Yeah, one thing you wanna be really careful of, and this happened to a dear friend of mine, Joel Jameson, young, super fit, all the things, no stress, doesn't smoke, doesn't drink, much like you, all this stuff. Family history, didn't think about it. Blood work came back totally fine. Still asked to get a CT angiogram, scan of his heart. His cardiologist said, no, you don't need it, you're young, you're all the thing, got it anyways. And he had a, I think he had a 50% blockage of his, what's called a widow maker. You're flipping the dice whether you're gonna die here, right? So this is a classic case to me where he's doing all the right things, but imaging saved his life. Let's not live in fear. Let's go look. You went and had a looked, I'll just trust your physicians.

• 1:09:55Speaker 00

  Great, then I'm less worried about this because this could be a direct response to your ketogenic diet, which it almost certainly was. And if it's presenting no risk to the place we actually care about, then I'm less concerned about your cholesterol.

• 1:10:09Steven Bartlett

  But is, if it carries on like this, could it create a risk?

• 1:10:12Speaker 00

  Absolutely could.

• 1:10:12Steven Bartlett

  Okay, because they all did tell me to fix this.

• 1:10:14Speaker 00

  Yeah, just keep getting a scan every few years. And if you see any aggressive, any buildup at all, then I would manage it.

• 1:10:19Steven Bartlett

  Okay.

• 1:10:20Speaker 00

  Now, in, what you're seeing over here is that client of ours, and so as an example, I'll give you a specific number, his total cholesterol was 347. We got him down to 223.

• 1:10:31Steven Bartlett

  What did you do?

• 1:10:32Speaker 00

  Fiber.

• 1:10:33Steven Bartlett

  Why fiber?

• 1:10:34Speaker 00

  Stress reduction. Fiber, depending on the type of cholesterol, will actually bind the cholesterol and clear it from the system. It will physically reduce it.

• 1:10:42Steven Bartlett

  That's why they, one of the supplements I was told to take is a fiber supplement.

• 1:10:46Speaker 00

  It's not always going to solve things, and I wanna be really clear. If you have numbers like you had, you need to work with a doctor.

• 1:10:53Steven Bartlett

  Uh huh.

• 1:10:54Speaker 00

  And you need to get screened. Don't just be like, I took fiber, I'm fine. This guy said on a podcast, that's not what I'm saying. But it is, it can be effective. The other thing we did was massive stress reduction. Guy was a very hard-charging CEO for a large company.

• 1:11:06Steven Bartlett

  How is stress reduction gonna impact my cholesterol?

• 1:11:08Speaker 00

  Things like cholesterol can be what are called acute phase reactants, some parts of them, not all of them. Meaning it responds to acute stress and stimuli. When you look at things like blood work, they aren't static. They're responding to the entire system. And so if you were to be stressed, and we'll, not to blame our name cortisol, but cortisol is elevated, you are in a heightened alert state. This causes short-term inflammation. In fact, if you look at, I think your inflammation was a little bit nuts over there, this guy as well. Probably like your most classic inflammation marker is called CRP. His was at two, which is really high. We got him from two to 0.2, so 10x reduction. That then allowed cholesterol to normalize.

• 1:11:51Speaker 00

  The easiest, most technical way to get to say it is it's an acute phase reactant, meaning it will change in response acutely to inflammation. Some markers will go up and some will go down in response to that, like D, like vitamin D goes down.

• 1:12:04Steven Bartlett

  If what? If you?

• 1:12:05Speaker 00

  In a stressed environment. Some go up, some go down. Blood glucose goes up.

• 1:12:09Steven Bartlett

  So you got your stress down, you got your fiber up.

• 1:12:12Speaker 00

  And that took him from 347 to 223, which is still high. Went from 223 to 163, now that took a statin.

• 1:12:19Steven Bartlett

  Oh, so you did give him a statin?

• 1:12:21Speaker 00

  We didn't, but his medical team did.

• 1:12:23Steven Bartlett

  Okay.

• 1:12:24Speaker 00

  And so this, why I wanna draw this point out is, we were able to go a long ways with lifestyle. But he wanted to go more, he wanted to be green, green, green, green, green. So that's when medicine came in. And I, to me, this represents a great marriage of the two. Some people are very anti-medicine, some people are, that's not my decision, that's up to you and your medical provider. But I think it's unfair to tell people things like, all of it can be done with lifestyle and there's no need for medicines ever. Or the opposite, I'm just like, oh, just take the drug, don't worry about it. He needed all of it. He needed stress reduction, he needed some changes in his diet, and that made a huge change in his biological health.

• 1:13:08Speaker 00

  So if you were to be like, look, this is so complicated, this guy, like, how can I make actionable advice of all this stuff this guy's saying? I don't have a private doctor and all. Cool, just run the experiment. Try more fiber, try to regulate your stress. If you wanna go the opposite route and jump right onto the medical side, that's fine too. But it doesn't need to be super scary or super daunting because these are not like, especially if your heart has been scanned, I'm not concerned about an acute emergency.

• 1:13:32Steven Bartlett

  The two things on here that I thought were, were shocking to me are my vitamin D levels and my omega levels, which I was told were deficient.

• 1:13:41Speaker 00

  Yep.

• 1:13:43Steven Bartlett

  I thought I was smashing it with those two, because I think, I was living in LA at the time and.

• 1:13:47Speaker 00

  Yeah, so your vitamin D was borderline low. Fairly traditionally, people of African heritage are going to be lower in that marker.

• 1:13:55Steven Bartlett

  Okay.

• 1:13:56Speaker 00

  You're at 37. Kind of lower end of that number is 40. That might actually be fine.

• 1:14:02Steven Bartlett

  I think I heard you say something about vitamin D. Again, I don't wanna butcher your words if this was what you said, but you kind of make the assumption that most people are deficient.

• 1:14:09Speaker 00

  Yeah, it is true.

• 1:14:10Steven Bartlett

  Why does it matter?

• 1:14:11Speaker 00

  So vitamin D is a nice microcosm of overall health. So what I mean by that is you will tend to see people low in vitamin D who are also tending to make poor health choices. So it's a little bit like grip strength and all that where it's kind of a one snapshot at saying, are you generally healthy or not? Why is it needed specifically? It is involved in every reaction from your brain to your gut, to your hormones, to your immune system, metabolism, and everything in between. It's critical to maintaining bone health, it's critical to being able to grow skeletal muscle. It's also clinically low in a high percentage of the population and even subclinically low in a vast majority of the population.

• 1:14:53Steven Bartlett

  So should we be supplementing if we are low?

• 1:14:56Speaker 00

  The real world will always win. Whole foods, sunlight, positive social environments, that's always the place to start. So do you wanna supplement with it? That's up to you. I would much rather you get sunlight, if possible. Now, enter everyone in the chat going, I live in the UK, there's no sun, sort of up here. Fine, if you wanna choose a supplement because you live in those situations, then that's absolutely fine.

• 1:15:19Steven Bartlett

  Or I work in an office for 12 hours a day. It's interesting, because there is a bit of a paradox here in, we're all in search of very natural solutions in a very unnatural way of living. I had this conversation with my fiance a couple of, couple of weeks back about a few things where in one area of our life, we're trying to be really, really natural.

• 1:15:36Speaker 00

  Yep.

• 1:15:36Steven Bartlett

  But I'm like, babe, like, look at the rest of our lives, it's so unnatural. We get on planes and have these smartphones and, and so almost forcing this one part to be natural is arguably gonna cause a bit of a problem.

• 1:15:48Speaker 00

  I mean, it happens to me, right? Like, I'll put in the entire hours of the day and not even realize I didn't step outside.

• 1:15:55Steven Bartlett

  Yeah.

• 1:15:55Speaker 00

  It absolutely happens. So what I think you have to do is, number one, give yourself grace, right? Like, you're not gonna be perfect. I'm especially thinking about like, single parents, it's just like, you're not gonna go out and spend 30 minutes in the sun.

• 1:16:07Steven Bartlett

  Night shift workers.

• 1:16:08Speaker 00

  Totally. Boy, that's a really hard thing. We've dealt with a lot of nurses and surgeons and things like that where you're on call, you're out. And that's when we can lean towards modern medicine, modern supplementation. It's why those things are not trash, they're not garbage, they're not fake. Our strategy typically is, that's, can we find one actionable thing? One thing that you're doing as a focus that is something you gotta go out of your way and do. And that might be, you have to go outside today, you have, that might be your one thing to pay attention to. When you start asking for more than one to two active things per week, you start end up failing.

• 1:16:41Steven Bartlett

  Okay, fine.

• 1:16:41Speaker 00

  So with your omegas, so your omega score at five is low. You want that to be eight, but you probably didn't notice your mercury was right on the line of high as well. Those things will typically track. The more omega-3s you consume, the more mercury goes up.

• 1:16:57Steven Bartlett

  Oh, really?

• 1:16:59Speaker 00

  Because most omega-3 sources are gonna be filled with mercury.

• 1:17:04Steven Bartlett

  But I was low omega and high in mercury.

• 1:17:06Speaker 00

  So what that tells us is, if you were to jack your omega-3s up, your mercury's gonna get into the line that we don't want it to be in. So, solution? You need to alter the source of your omega-3s. Get it from a higher quality place. So I'm not sure where you were getting them from there.

• 1:17:24Steven Bartlett

  All over the place.

• 1:17:25Speaker 00

  Yeah, but you would want to, to either choose your supplement more carefully or choose better quality foods.

• 1:17:32Steven Bartlett

  What actually moves the needle on this subject of energy, which is what we're talking about here, is there anything that is more consequential as it relates to these people that are trying to get more energy in their life? They feel lethargic. We talked about sleep as being a real foundation here.

• 1:17:45Speaker 00

  If you're looking for more energy, I would divide everything into two buckets. Hidden stressors and visible stressors. Visible stressors are things like, you're not exercising. We know from excellent databases, physical exercise enhances energy.

• 1:18:01Steven Bartlett

  Why? And how?

• 1:18:02Speaker 00

  Mitochondrial health is one of the many aspects of it.

• 1:18:05Steven Bartlett

  You'll have more mitochondria if you exercise more.

• 1:18:08Speaker 00

  Generally. Not only will you have more, they'll be larger and they'll be healthier.

• 1:18:12Steven Bartlett

  And mitochondria basically process your energy, so you get more efficient energy production.

• 1:18:16Speaker 00

  They're one of the ways you can make it. You can make energy a lot of different ways. It is the end path of all aerobic exercise. So in other words, anytime you're using oxygen as a byproduct to make fuel, mitochondria have to be there. So it is central and core to that. But it is more than mitochondria. You'll have more total blood.

• 1:18:33Steven Bartlett

  If you exercise?

• 1:18:35Speaker 00

  Yes. It's one of the primary adaptations to endurance, is you'll physically have more blood in your body.

• 1:18:40Steven Bartlett

  And that will mean?

• 1:18:41Speaker 00

  You carry more oxygen.

• 1:18:42Steven Bartlett

  Oh, okay.

• 1:18:43Speaker 00

  You have more red blood cells. So you're able to carry more oxygen to fuel those mitochondria.

• 1:18:49Steven Bartlett

  Is that a certain type of exercise that gives you?

• 1:18:51Speaker 00

  Generally, anything that demands blood flow will increase blood supply.

• 1:18:57Steven Bartlett

  Cardiovascular exercise.

• 1:18:58Speaker 00

  Can be, can be anything.

• 1:18:59Steven Bartlett

  Okay.

• 1:19:00Speaker 00

  Stress equals adaptation. Meaning if you put a demand on your heart to pump more blood, it'll get better at pumping more blood. If you put a demand on bone to resist tension, it'll get better at resisting tension. You run the whole cascade of connective tissue to cellular health. It is simply, it's called the SAID principle, S-A-I-D, specific adaptation to imposed demand.

• 1:19:23Steven Bartlett

  And also, is it fair to say then, if we take the word exercise out of the traditional definition, which is like in a gym, doing a thing, and we broaden it to work or just, you know, cognitive performance?

• 1:19:35Speaker 00

  Remember, exercise is a novel, made-up term.

• 1:19:40Speaker 00

  This is a new thing to us. Historically, humans have carried, have sprinted, have jumped, have climbed, have grappled, have done all those things. Putting that into a structured, non-daily activity is a last 75-year phenomenon. Right? It wasn't actually until we started to realize that stress reduction to the end of the limit is a bad thing. And then we had to recreate stress into our lives. One form of that was, we call that exercise. So yes, if you think about exercise as either running, cycling, swimming, or lifting weights, you have left a bunch on the table. I don't care how you're challenging yourself, even if that structured exercise in your example is more vocationally based. It's the stress being provided to the system.

• 1:20:24Speaker 00

  And so when you start to look at things like, what's the best exercise protocol for A, B, and C? One of the things you start to realize is all of them can have equal responses, given a few constraints. And if they hit that constraint, they work. So if you have a movement practice, you skateboard, you play pickle, you walk, you garden, fine, all those can have equal clinical outcomes. Mortality, joint pain, body composition, because they're getting to the same spot.

• 1:20:52Steven Bartlett

  Does this make sense then? So if I'm, say I'm a podcaster and I want to have more energy to podcast.

• 1:20:57Speaker 00

  Yep.

• 1:20:57Steven Bartlett

  I should podcast more.

• 1:20:59Speaker 00

  Yeah, you'll be more resilient to it, right?

• 1:21:00Steven Bartlett

  Okay, so you could apply that to sort of any vocation or activity. If I want to have more energy to lift my kids up and run with them in the garden, then I should lift things and run with them.

• 1:21:12Speaker 00

  Stress inoculation.

• 1:21:13Steven Bartlett

  And then in the future, my body will adapt and it will give me more energy for that particular activity.

• 1:21:17Speaker 00

  Yep.

• 1:21:18Steven Bartlett

  So sometimes when people say they don't have the energy for a thing, it's because they haven't challenged themselves in that particular activity enough to expand and adapt.

• 1:21:27Speaker 00

  It's really difficult, right? So if, if walking up the stairs is a VO2 max test for you, how likely are you to walk upstairs?

• 1:21:35Steven Bartlett

  Okay, so it's like a downward spiral.

• 1:21:37Speaker 00

  Too difficult, right? So then what happens?

• 1:21:39Steven Bartlett

  You don't do it.

• 1:21:40Speaker 00

  And you get?

• 1:21:41Steven Bartlett

  Yeah, let's get it.

• 1:21:42Speaker 00

  Able to do it, right?

• 1:21:43Steven Bartlett

  Yeah.

• 1:21:43Speaker 00

  So when we started thinking about energy, and I started talking about like hidden, visible stressors, right? I'm looking for constraints. Do you have an undiagnosed pathogen in your body? We have a major league baseball player, felt horrific. I'm talking like can't make it through a baseball game, legs are shot, no energy whatsoever. In his particular case, we were able to confirm in his blood, in his physical bedroom, and with a bunch of other tests for, actually, you test his eyes and you test a bunch of the stuff. He had a very gnarly exposure to mold.

• 1:22:18Steven Bartlett

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:22:19Speaker 00

  All we had to do, in large part, was get that cleared and his energy came back. That's an example of a hidden stressor. But one of the things where Louis is looking for is, are you in energy toxicity? Meaning, are you eating too many calories, which is not the same as being obese? Or are you in low energy availability? You're sleeping fine, but you're of low energy? Are you eating enough calories? Oh, you're not. Like, we have to go no further on this train. You are underfueled for what you're asking. So there's things that are hidden stressors like that. There are visible stressors, which we just talked about, like you're not actually doing the thing. Another easy way to explain this is cognitively. If you want to write a book and you don't currently write, and you sit down to write, it's going to be exhausting.

• 1:23:04Speaker 00

  And then you talk to a writer and there's like, oh yeah, I like, I need 45 minutes so I can crank out a thousand words. It's like not exhausting at all, right? Stress inoculation, this is exactly what you said before. You can build up endurance in those things by them.

• 1:23:17Steven Bartlett

  This is one of the things I've learned from this podcast and meeting all these exceptional people, is this like use it or lose it principle.

• 1:23:23Speaker 00

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:23:24Steven Bartlett

  You know, because I'm getting older and you start to feel the odd pain, you know, and so you start to like not use that part, you know, your back, for example.

• 1:23:32Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:23:32Steven Bartlett

  Or bending down. And so you find ways to not bend down properly so you can avoid the pain. And what's happening there is because something is difficult, you do it less, which then means it becomes more difficult, so you do it less. And there's this downward feedback loop to decline.

• 1:23:47Speaker 00

  Atrophy leads to atrophy.

• 1:23:48Steven Bartlett

  Yeah, and like, you know, I think the critical idea that got in my head a couple of years ago from someone I was interviewing on the podcast was that aging isn't always the excuse. And I think we assume it's just aging, so we accept it and we don't fight back.

• 1:24:02Speaker 00

  No.

• 1:24:03Steven Bartlett

  When I sat here with one of the exceptional PhDs that I interviewed, she showed me, I think it was a DEXA scan of a 70-year-old. He was like a pentathlete. And then a DEXA scan of someone that was like 30 years old. And this 70-year-old was just phenomenal.

• 1:24:19Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:24:19Steven Bartlett

  Their, their sort of bone, their muscle, et cetera. And she basically proved to me, I'll put up the scan on the screen, it really is a mind-blowing scan, I've actually sent it to my best friends because it really did, I couldn't, I couldn't get this idea out of my head, that I actually don't accept everything as an aging problem, because the minute you do, you go on this downward cycle. And it blew my mind, and that was such an important idea to get in my head at my age, at 30 years old. So when I feel like a pain in my back, my, my solution isn't, okay, Stephen, you're getting older, stop bending down and protect the pain. It is go to the gym and start squatting and bending, et cetera.

• 1:24:49Speaker 00

  There are some things that will go down with age. Sleep is actually one of them. We typically just see you will sleep a little bit less as you age. Fine, there are some aspects of that, but I think you can resist and fight as much of that as possible. This is actually, you're seeing a turning of the tide right now, that this is just starting to emerge with longevity. Longevity is currently being positioned as this anti-aging phenomenon. And people are already bored.

• 1:25:16Speaker 00

  It's like, is your goal to just not age? Or is your goal to dunk a basketball at 70? Do you want to have the four-by-four truck that has the best off-road package ever and it stays in your garage? Probably not, right? Like, you want to be able to be like, no, you, you want to live because you want to experience life. And so then you want to be able to take advantage of those capacities and functionality.

• 1:25:43Steven Bartlett

  Yeah, someone said to me, you want to extend your health span, not necessarily your lifespan.

• 1:25:46Speaker 00

  It's not health span, though.

• 1:25:47Steven Bartlett

  Oh, really?

• 1:25:48Speaker 00

  No, that's what I'm, that's what I'm pushing back on. Health span, cool. I mean, lifespan, fine, great, we're all past that. Health span, though, is still like, I don't want to be in pain. I don't want to be, I'm saying performance span. I'm saying I want you to be focused on having the most skill. I want you to just be crushing cognitively. I want you to be able to do anything you want physically for as long as we possibly can, and not just being like, well, that's going to go away, let's just stay alive and be out of pain. I want you to be thinking about, no, like, I'm going to be doing awesome stuff in whatever venue you like to do it in, for as long as you possibly can.

• 1:26:24Steven Bartlett

  I think people want both.

• 1:26:26Speaker 00

  Yeah, of course.

• 1:26:26Steven Bartlett

  Yeah.

• 1:26:27Speaker 00

  But let's not, let's just not leave that end of the table off and assume the performance has to go away.

• 1:26:34Steven Bartlett

  So on this point of energy then, I think we've, we've covered a lot of it and given me some sort of like really actionable principles there for how to have more energy. I do notice, I have to say, because I travel quite a lot, and so on, on occasion, my gym routine will be impacted.

• 1:26:49Speaker 00

  True.

• 1:26:49Steven Bartlett

  And there's quite a clear correlation for me between the amount of times I've gone to the gym in previous weeks.

• 1:26:54Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:26:55Steven Bartlett

  And how I feel in terms of energy today. I was thinking about this this morning, we're in New York here, and over the last couple of weeks, I've probably been going to the gym like three or four, like three times a week, if I'm being honest, whereas usually I'd go almost every day. And I have felt a difference in my energy, and I wasn't sure if that was just like psychological or if that was supported by science.

• 1:27:13Speaker 00

  Both. If you go and do a, a moderate to, to light, lower intensity exercise session, those are generally going to provide energy. If you're like, no, I did a, like, to the death training, I pegged it, I went all the way, whatever that is with your lifting weights intensity, whether you're getting your heart rate all the way up, then you might walk out of those and be like, whoa, I'm exhausted. But on aggregate, those will provide more daily energy. If you're traveling, sick, super busy, do the former. Like, just get in some motion, you'll feel better, you'll get a sweat in, you're there. If you're healthy and looking for long-term adaptation, then that's when you can start to push the pace on the training.

• 1:27:52Steven Bartlett

  I want to speak to the business owners listening and watching right now. I know what it's like to be personally responsible for every decision. I founded my first company at 21 years old, and honestly, the pressure can be immense. It's the kind of mental load that takes its toll below the surface. I recently did some tests through our sponsor, Function, which got me thinking about that invisible impact. I found that I had low levels of omega-3s. I had deficient levels of vitamin D, probably because I sit inside this dark room all day. And that has totally changed how I construct my day going forward. I get up in the morning and the first thing I now do is I go for a walk outside in the sunshine, in part to help my vitamin D levels increase, but also because it helps to reset my circadian rhythm. With Function, you can check your brain health, your aging, your stress, and so much more.

• 1:28:37Steven Bartlett

  They provide over 160 lab tests for what is equal to a dollar a day and member pricing on advanced imaging. Head to functionhealth.com/DOAC to join and use code DOAC25 for a $25 credit. Speaking of training, you know what this is, don't you?

• 1:28:55Speaker 00

  Sure.

• 1:28:56Steven Bartlett

  This is a, a grip strength machine.

• 1:28:59Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:29:00Steven Bartlett

  A lot of people told me that grip strength is the single biggest predictor of, I think they said like longevity and stuff like that.

• 1:29:07Speaker 00

  I wouldn't call it the number one predictor of mortality. It is a really nice scientific test. Late 1980s, Stephen Blair and his team started looking at giant databases and started to realize that cardiovascular fitness, VO2 max, VO2 peak, things like this, were predicting how long people are going to live. And in fact, they started to realize it was out predicting what we call traditional clinical markers, blood pressure, your cholesterol levels, things like that. And this launched an entire 45-year field that we're in now, which is like, wait a minute, these performance-based markers are actually predicting health more than these indirect markers. The unfortunate problem is that got like too, taken too far.

• 1:29:52Speaker 00

  And so when you hear things like people, and my colleagues have been on your show and said things like, oh, grip strength is an important predictor of mortality, it's good, it's great, it's an important message. But we have to be careful in being lost in what that means. Getting a grip strength device like that, which is probably under $40, is amazing. And what you will see consistently is those people that are really, really, really weak are in worse health on average. Where we come, become false to saying, okay, therefore, you need to alter your lifestyle to maximize grip strength.

• 1:30:23Steven Bartlett

  I did do my grip strength results, actually.

• 1:30:26Speaker 00

  Do you remember how they were?

• 1:30:27Steven Bartlett

  It was, it was good, it was, it was high.

• 1:30:30Speaker 00

  You know what that tells me about your health? Nothing.

• 1:30:32Steven Bartlett

  Okay.

• 1:30:33Speaker 00

  Why wouldn't it be high? You're young, you're fit, I have all those other markers, it's not going to tell us anything. You know when these things are really powerful? Somebody who doesn't have blood work, or doesn't have a body composition test, or doesn't have anything else, it can give us a crude strength, or a crude metric, and say this person's probably at a health risk.

• 1:30:51Steven Bartlett

  So I've always been quite confused by this, because is grip strength a proxy for my overall strength of my entire body? And therefore, it's just indicating that my overall strength is low? Or is it actually like my arm?

• 1:31:04Speaker 00

  It's both.

• 1:31:05Steven Bartlett

  Oh, okay.

• 1:31:06Speaker 00

  It's both, here's why. You know what you're really testing right there?

• 1:31:09Steven Bartlett

  What's that?

• 1:31:09Speaker 00

  Your nervous system.

• 1:31:11Steven Bartlett

  Oh, really?

• 1:31:12Speaker 00

  You're testing your brain.

• 1:31:13Steven Bartlett

  So you're not testing your strength as much?

• 1:31:14Speaker 00

  You are.

• 1:31:15Steven Bartlett

  But it's both?

• 1:31:16Speaker 00

  There's an overlap. That's why your grip strength, does it indicate general poor health? Yes. That's the value. Does it tell you anything directly about your? It can. And so this is when you see two camps here. So camp one is like, great, I'm going to open up a gym down the street and it's going to test your grip strength, and then we're going to focus all of your training on grip strength training. That is, we've exaggerated the point. The other camp is, it doesn't matter, it's all indirect. That's not true either. It is an actionable, useful thing, where you don't need to worry about us optimizing it, maximizing it. Like, if you're in the 80th percentile, going to the 90th percentile probably doesn't make you live a day longer. Over the last probably three years, I would imagine there's over 20 to 25 studies that

• 1:31:58Speaker 00

  have been published on a very specific type of grip strength, and that's grip strength asymmetry. Do you know why that matters?

• 1:32:05Steven Bartlett

  I don't, but I know that I'm, I'm stronger on my left side than my right.

• 1:32:08Speaker 00

  It's not uncommon. Typically, your force-dependent limb is not your neural control limb. So you write right-handed because you have to have fine motor control.

• 1:32:17Steven Bartlett

  Okay.

• 1:32:18Speaker 00

  Gross strength can be in the opposite side.

• 1:32:20Speaker 03

  Go like this, you know, keep it in here, don't touch your arm to the table at all, you have 90 degrees like that, yep. And then you're just going to squeeze, you know, one good effort as hard as you can.

• 1:32:31Steven Bartlett

  Wish me luck.

• 1:32:31Speaker 03

  All right, don't blow out now.

• 1:32:34Speaker 03

  All right, let's see.

• 1:32:35Steven Bartlett

  Oh, gosh, my head nearly exploded.

• 1:32:38Speaker 03

  130. So you're, you're above average, so not.

• 1:32:42Steven Bartlett

  Can I try this side as well? This is my, so this is my weaker.

• 1:32:46Speaker 03

  All right, here we go.

• 1:32:46Steven Bartlett

  My weaker hand.

• 1:32:47Speaker 03

  All right. You gotta beat it though now.

• 1:32:51Steven Bartlett

  Gosh, it's a bit slippery.

• 1:32:54Speaker 03

  I think you did.

• 1:32:55Steven Bartlett

  Did I beat it?

• 1:32:55Speaker 03

  Oh my God. Wow. 160.

• 1:32:58Steven Bartlett

  You're joking.

• 1:32:59Speaker 03

  160.

• 1:33:00Steven Bartlett

  What the?

• 1:33:02Speaker 03

  A lot of crushing there.

• 1:33:03Steven Bartlett

  Wow!

• 1:33:04Speaker 03

  130.

• 1:33:06Steven Bartlett

  Okay.

• 1:33:06Speaker 03

  On that side.

• 1:33:07Steven Bartlett

  And your left side?

• 1:33:08Speaker 03

  All right, let's see.

• 1:33:14Speaker 03

  110.

• 1:33:15Speaker 00

  Crushing, man, that's really good.

• 1:33:17Steven Bartlett

  But what it taught me is that it's not, it doesn't correlate to overall strength, because Jeff is definitely stronger than me.

• 1:33:21Speaker 00

  For sure, for sure, yeah. I mean, it's a very specific type of strength, right? So the asymmetry actually matters because most of the work in that area is in groups with neurological disease. So you're trying to look at early predictions of Alzheimer's, Parkinson's, and things like that, which ties into my earlier point, is it is not simply an overall proxy of your health. It can tell us direct things like nerve denervation and overall neurological health. So it, to me, is a, it's a great tool, but what we don't want to do then is optimize for that.

• 1:33:53Steven Bartlett

  What is a better marker of my overall health?

• 1:33:55Speaker 00

  There's not a single marker that will tell you everything.

• 1:33:58Steven Bartlett

  What about muscle power?

• 1:33:59Speaker 00

  Muscle power is great as well.

• 1:34:01Steven Bartlett

  What is that?

• 1:34:01Speaker 00

  Power is defined as force multiplied by velocity, right?

• 1:34:05Steven Bartlett

  So like, if I?

• 1:34:05Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:34:06Steven Bartlett

  If I throw this?

• 1:34:07Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:34:08Steven Bartlett

  Do you want to throw it?

• 1:34:09Speaker 00

  Go ahead.

• 1:34:09Steven Bartlett

  Okay, put your hand up then.

• 1:34:11Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, great.

• 1:34:13Steven Bartlett

  Is that, is that muscle power?

• 1:34:15Speaker 00

  Not, wasn't much power because you did it slow.

• 1:34:17Steven Bartlett

  Okay.

• 1:34:18Speaker 00

  So think about it this way, this is 12 kilos, right? 12 kilos, I don't know, pounds, kilos. That is mass. Kilos, pounds is a unit of mass. Force, that's what you think when you think of strength, that's force. Force is defined as F equals MA, as mass times acceleration is force, okay? So it's the mass multiplied by how you can, how well you can accelerate. Power is your force multiplied by your velocity. So here's the difference. If I were to take this 12 pounds of mass, or 12 kilos, and hand it to you slowly, okay, that is an expression of 12 pounds of force, is how I'll think about it. Now, if you hand it back to me in the exact same speed, that is the same amount of Newtons of force.

• 1:35:02Speaker 00

  How I create power is now I do that same thing with speed, ready? So the two ways you can get more powerful, more force, more velocity. You would use an implement like that because you're trying to say, give me a little bit of mass, but you can obviously lift more than 12 kilos. But now I'm going to emphasize the velocity in the spectrum. Where people make the mistake in training for power is if you go slow, the mass is too light to do anything. So you don't get stronger and you don't get faster. Why this matters in the current conversation is you see power and what some people will call, call things like power pnea. So that the term that we've been using for a long time is sarcopenia, and this is the,

• 1:35:47Speaker 00

  the accelerated loss of muscle and probably muscle strength with aging. You're going to drop some, but sarcopenia is, are you dropping faster than you should? And now there's a turn of scientific attention to power pnea, which is, are you losing the power faster than you should be losing power? That matters because it is everything from prevention of fall, catching yourself when you slip, to be able to move and accelerate quickly. And so you see that thing, that stuff highly associated with breaking of bones, fractures, dislocations, which are incredibly impactful to health, especially post-age 60 or 65.

• 1:36:27Steven Bartlett

  I think a lot of people listening, and me too, so I guess one of the questions we have as it relates to the gym and working out is, we often think that in order to get better results in the gym, and you can define that however you want to, fat loss, muscle gain, whatever, strength, we need to go more often. And I was curious, someone who spends so long with athletes, is that a bit of a myth? Because even my, even me, I'm thinking, well, if I want better results in the gym, I probably just need to, I'm currently going three or four days a week, I need to go back to going six or seven days a week to get better results.

• 1:37:00Speaker 00

  You could go either way. It is generally true that if you train more, you give yourself more opportunity to create stress, which is more opportunity to create adaptation. But that said, depending on the marker, the answer here could range from yes to no. Let's use muscle growth as an example. As long as you hit the same volume throughout the week, the amount of times you go to the gym doesn't matter that much, in theory.

• 1:37:28Steven Bartlett

  Volume.

• 1:37:29Speaker 00

  How much load did you lift, how many times?

• 1:37:33Steven Bartlett

  Does time period matter? I, if I lifted four weights in one hour versus lifting four weights in 20 minutes?

• 1:37:40Speaker 00

  Nope, because now all you've changed is really the rest in between.

• 1:37:43Steven Bartlett

  Yeah, does that matter?

• 1:37:44Speaker 00

  It does in the sense that if you take a short rest interval, and that leads to excessive fatigue accumulation, and then that compromises how heavy you can lift, or how many reps you can do, or how many sets you can do, that will have compromised your volume.

• 1:38:00Steven Bartlett

  Wait, so, because everyone talks about taking shorter rests in the gym to build more muscles.

• 1:38:06Speaker 00

  Not consistent with the evidence.

• 1:38:07Steven Bartlett

  Really?

• 1:38:08Speaker 00

  Yep. But this is, this is the game you're playing at all times, right? Who has the time to wait two and a half minutes between every set? You're going to be in the gym for an hour and a half.

• 1:38:18Steven Bartlett

  A lot of people are on their phones.

• 1:38:19Speaker 00

  Totally. And then because of that, they're like, I gotta get out of here. So they do half the amount of stuff they leave, because they're out of time. So the battle is, in an isolated world, if you were to probably spend 60 to 90 seconds or maybe up to two minutes resting in between each set, generally, you recover enough to have a higher quality set the next one.

• 1:38:41Steven Bartlett

  So is that the most important thing to be optimizing for, is the high, making sure the next rep you do is high quality?

• 1:38:46Speaker 00

  In my world, quality is always number one.

• 1:38:49Steven Bartlett

  So you're saying, take a bigger break as long as you can recover and are more strong for the next rep?

• 1:38:56Speaker 00

  As long as it doesn't put you in a position where you're in the gym so long that you won't do all the stuff you needed to do.

• 1:39:03Steven Bartlett

  But in a world where you had unlimited time, really?

• 1:39:05Speaker 00

  Generally. Depends on what adaptation we're working for. If we're working on endurance, then we don't necessarily have to do that.

• 1:39:11Steven Bartlett

  Okay.

• 1:39:12Speaker 00

  But if we're working on speed, or skill, or flexibility, or balance, or muscle growth, or fat loss, now we have options. So depending on the outcome you're looking for, you have tools. I think, I think the biggest point we want to make here is where the field struggles right now is making a little bit of information get in the way of motivation.

• 1:39:34Speaker 00

  If you're going to the gym three days a week, I'm clapping. Done. Like, we're winning. I don't want you to hear messages and go, oh, I'm doing it all wrong. I'm not going to get any results. I'm tanking my metabolism. I'm breaking my hormones. That's the shit that drives us nuts. You're motivated. It's hard enough to get to the gym. And when you get there to try really hard. We've gotten over the hill. Now, if you're past that point, we could start tinkering with some things. But I hate it when people leave conversations like this and go, oh, did you know that if you don't rest more than 60 seconds that you're not getting anything? That's not true. So we can get like upgrades, but in general, I think most people quality

• 1:40:18Speaker 00

  should be the biggest thing you pay attention to because this is going to reduce your likelihood of injury. And there's even evidence that whether you're trying to get stronger or grow muscle,

• 1:40:29Speaker 00

  the quality of the repetition as defined by your technique, as defined by your range of motion, as defined by your intent, as defined by what we call your mind muscle connection. So like, if you're trying to contract your shoulder, are you really contracting your shoulder? Like, all these things start to matter. And so what you'll see happen is you can get more results with less work and shorter time because each individual repetition is of a higher quality and a more focused intent.

• 1:40:59Steven Bartlett

  I mean, this might be a good time to just quickly take a, I mean, everyone's talking about creatine at the bloody moment. Do you have your athletes taking it?

• 1:41:06Speaker 00

  Yeah, of course.

• 1:41:07Steven Bartlett

  You do?

• 1:41:08Speaker 00

  Yeah, everybody.

• 1:41:09Steven Bartlett

  Do you take it?

• 1:41:09Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:41:10Steven Bartlett

  What do you take? What's in your supplement stack?

• 1:41:12Speaker 00

  My personal supplement stack,

• 1:41:15Speaker 00

  same with all of our clients and athletes. There's two things. Correct physiology, performance enhancement. Totally separate categories. Correct physiological divisional disease are, in your case, your vitamin D. What is low, what is high, what is off track based on blood work, right? We try to solve this through food. But what this oftentimes looks like is a high quality multivitamin, oftentimes fish oil. Now you have performance accelerators on the other side of that equation. This is when creatine can come in. If I'm traveling, I'm going to take things like fiber, right? Because it's harder to get vegetables when you travel. You probably know this, but airplanes, airports, restaurants, like vegetables are nowhere to be found. And so I know

• 1:41:59Speaker 00

  those are going to be struggle. I'm going to take fiber there. Or I'm generally not taking it as much when I'm home because I can control my diet. Performance enhancers are things like creatine, are things like beta alanine, sodium bicarbonate. So depending on what fitness training goal I have at the moment, I'm going to alter those based on if I'm looking for muscle growth or endurants or

• 1:42:18Steven Bartlett

  What are you taking right now?

• 1:42:19Speaker 00

  Zero.

• 1:42:20Steven Bartlett

  Zero. Vitamin D? Like this week?

• 1:42:22Speaker 00

  No. No, summertime. I live in the forest.

• 1:42:26Steven Bartlett

  Omega 3?

• 1:42:27Speaker 00

  Nope.

• 1:42:29Steven Bartlett

  Why?

• 1:42:29Speaker 00

  I got full control of my diet and we get a lot of fish right now. So we are good there. I also have unfortunate, I get to harvest my own meat. And one of the things you'll see pretty consistently is even in red meat sources, they're higher in a lot of nutrients, wild caught versus animal caught. So we're in a pretty good plus. I have my blood work. I know where my omega 3 numbers are, so I'm going to get there. If I don't have to take those things, I don't.

• 1:42:56Steven Bartlett

  A lot of people I imagine come to you for, with weight loss goals, whether they're trying to cut weight for a fight or if it's just mom and pop looking to lose a few pounds. What are the big misconceptions about weight loss?

• 1:43:07Speaker 00

  Yeah, it's the magic of it, right? It's the, there's one specific element you can't eat or one way you have to train or can't train. That is the biggest misconception around fat loss. The specificity. It is categorically quite simple to lose fat. It's practically hard. It's difficult human endeavor, but categorically it's incredibly simple. We only have a few things we have to do. And now you have a billion choices of how to get there. So if you are the type of person who struggles with moderation, then I'm not going to give you moderation.

• 1:43:45Steven Bartlett

  Moderation of calories?

• 1:43:46Speaker 00

  Could be, or exercise, or environment. Do you know the difference between baking and cooking?

• 1:43:54Steven Bartlett

  Uh, yeah, I guess so, conceptually.

• 1:43:56Speaker 00

  Baking is chemistry. You mix something together and put in the oven. You can't just fake the amounts. Cause it won't rise, it won't set, it won't do the things, right? If you're cooking on a stove and you could just be like, okay, what's in the fridge?

• 1:44:13Speaker 00

  You can't do that in baking, right? Depending on what you're baking. We will address this fat loss problem with trying to identify, are you a cook or are you a baker personality type? Here's what I mean. If you came to me and we were going to help you lose some fat, you're already pretty lean, but let's say you wanted to get super lean. All right, great. I will, first question I would ask you is, how do you want this to operate? You could, one of two ways. One way is I tell you exactly what to eat. You weigh and measure every single thing. You do not deviate. You track your weight every single day and you follow exactly what I tell you. The other option is I give you concepts. We have one to three rules. You're going to check weight maybe daily, maybe once a week.

• 1:44:57Speaker 00

  And I want you to stay airtight to those concepts.

• 1:44:59Steven Bartlett

  I prefer the concepts.

• 1:45:00Speaker 00

  Concepts. Great. Concepts are cooking.

• 1:45:03Steven Bartlett

  Okay.

• 1:45:05Speaker 00

  Baking, weigh and measure everything, right? Here's where this matters. You're a concept kind of guy. Why? You do not want to be thinking about all that little stuff because you have other stuff you'd rather be thinking about, right? It's great because it's freeing.

• 1:45:20Speaker 00

  You know, the downside is if you don't know exactly what's in your food and you don't have a really good eye and calibration, someone like you might have a hard time losing fat because you're already at the end. We need to be weighing that olive oil. We need to be measuring that rice cup. We can't just be like, oh, a little bit of rice over there, right? If you're trying to lose 100 pounds, we can probably eyeball a lot of things and get really, really far.

• 1:45:43Steven Bartlett

  Yeah.

• 1:45:44Speaker 00

  But personality type is what I'm really getting at here. Okay? If I gave that concept to some people listening, some people would be going, blah, blah, blah, like, whoa, whoa, whoa, like, how many meals am I eating? Like, what's, what's the fiber? Like, they want the detail, right?

• 1:46:00Steven Bartlett

  What's the, what's the concept?

• 1:46:02Speaker 00

  The concept could be something like,

• 1:46:04Steven Bartlett

  Give me an example of the three concepts.

• 1:46:05Speaker 00

  I want you eating fresh vegetables in every meal and I want you to have a dedicated protein source every time you eat.

• 1:46:12Steven Bartlett

  Okay.

• 1:46:12Speaker 00

  That might be the only rule I give you.

• 1:46:15Steven Bartlett

  Well, could it be an eating window?

• 1:46:16Speaker 00

  Could be. Sure. I could say eat whatever you want, but you're only going to eat between these hours.

• 1:46:21Steven Bartlett

  Okay.

• 1:46:22Speaker 00

  I could do whatever kind of one to three rules I want. I could say none of those things and I'll just say, all right, just cut out all your junk food.

• 1:46:29Steven Bartlett

  Okay.

• 1:46:30Speaker 00

  I'm not going to tell you what to eat. I'm just going to give you a list of things not to eat. I could only give you, I prefer to do the opposite, defer to give you things rather than take things away because you're going to take those things away, right? So I could play with your meal timing. I could play with your meal frequency. I could play with your meal composition. So what types of food you're eating, the combinations of them. I could do anything there. And why all those work? Cause those are simply different strategies to likely reduce food intake.

• 1:46:59Speaker 00

  That's all, that's all we're really doing. But some people hate that because it's not enough detail. There's no specificity. There's no precision. They get anxiety from guessing. I've had plenty of athletes before just be like, okay, but like six ounces of chicken or seven? And I'm like, 6.3. Like, okay, like, who cares? Like, it doesn't matter, but they're just like, they want, they don't want to make any decisions. You have to make decisions about what you're going to eat because you only have concepts. The nice part about the way you measure is you have no choices.

• 1:47:26Steven Bartlett

  I think the, the average people listening would rather have the concepts. Like, it's much easier for me to, they, they have, they're busy lives. They don't want to be weighing 6.3 grams of, so

• 1:47:35Speaker 00

  So you'd be stunned. Most people want that.

• 1:47:39Steven Bartlett

  Most people want the

• 1:47:40Speaker 00

  They want the detail because they don't have to think. They don't have to guess. They don't have to worry. They don't have to go, God, I like, maybe I ate too much today, maybe I didn't, whatever.

• 1:47:47Steven Bartlett

  But that's like hard to measure.

• 1:47:49Speaker 00

  Super hard. So here's the recommendation.

• 1:47:52Speaker 00

  Do the baking approach first for two weeks.

• 1:47:55Steven Bartlett

  And by that, you mean measure everything, understand what's in it?

• 1:47:58Speaker 00

  A hundred percent. Then you can back off and start to go, okay, I have a better sense of what a tablespoon of peanut butter looks like. I have a better sense of what a cup of rice is. I'm getting a better sense of what three ounces of this is, whatever. Now I can start toning things back.

• 1:48:15Steven Bartlett

  I think this is really great advice because I think the big shifts that I've seen in my own diet have, have been in that exact order where for one particular week I did, it might be calorie counting, or it might have been some of these apps where you can scan the food by using the barcode and it tells you what's inside there. And through that, it only took me a week or two to discover that the things I ate frequently weren't what I thought.

• 1:48:38Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:48:39Steven Bartlett

  Both in quantity, but also in like nutritional profile.

• 1:48:42Speaker 00

  I think it's just super important for as many people as possible to spend at least a week doing that.

• 1:48:48Steven Bartlett

  And then I could make informed decisions about what I wanted to keep and what I actually didn't really like that much anyway.

• 1:48:53Speaker 00

  You know, I used to run this experiment in class every year. These are graduate students getting master's degrees in this particular field. And we would have them do a seven day diet recall, just measure, weigh everything you eat for seven days. Consistent themes popped up. Almost everyone ate way more fat than they think.

• 1:49:14Steven Bartlett

  Is that a bad thing?

• 1:49:16Speaker 00

  If you're eating more calories than you need.

• 1:49:17Steven Bartlett

  Oh, so it's the calories is the problem versus the

• 1:49:19Speaker 00

  That's not bad for you. Again, there's no evil foods. People ate way more carbohydrates than they realized. Same answer. People ate way less protein than they think.

• 1:49:30Steven Bartlett

  What about sugar?

• 1:49:31Speaker 00

  Everyone knows they're eating sugar. What they're always stunned is they're like, whoa, I thought I was eating a small percentage, you know, 20% of my calories from fat. They didn't realize they're at 40%.

• 1:49:42Steven Bartlett

  This is why the keto diet actually did help me. Because it forced me to check everything for a while.

• 1:49:47Speaker 00

  So this is great.

• 1:49:48Steven Bartlett

  It was really learning. It was learning what was in all these things that I loved and keto forced me, you know, the, the principle of a concept that I had when I was on keto was that I could have about 50 grams of carbs a day, roughly.

• 1:49:59Speaker 00

  Stay in ketogenic, ketosis rather, yeah.

• 1:50:01Steven Bartlett

  So I would think about it like a budget. I'd be like, oh, I'd spend 23 carb, you know, grams of carbs on this particular thing. But, but to do that, I had to look at everything, research everything.

• 1:50:11Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:50:12Steven Bartlett

  And now I have an intuitive idea.

• 1:50:13Speaker 00

  Exactly. The point is simply your awareness and consciousness of what is actually in the elements that you want. And then if you want to change and tweak, you can do that because you know, but if you don't have the knowledge, you can't even play the game.

• 1:50:25Steven Bartlett

  What are the big misconceptions about exercise's role in weight loss?

• 1:50:28Speaker 00

  It is valuable. Forever we've been telling people, burn more calories than you ingest, right? And then it's still true. And then we had a bunch of research pop out that was sort of like, hey, exercise is not playing the role we think it is in fat loss. And those data still hold true in the sense that you don't burn as many calories in your workouts as you think. Most of the time, if you hop on a piece of exercise equipment and it tells you you burned X amount of calories, you burned most likely significantly less than that. It's also true that there's, there is places where you can get to with adaptive thermogenesis. Meaning if you burn, say 500 calories with exercise,

• 1:51:07Speaker 00

  if you are lean enough or non-lean enough, or fit enough or not fit enough, your body will change how many calories it burns throughout the day in response to that 500 calories from exercise. Meaning you could be in a situation theoretically where you burned 500 calories in your workout. But then your body down-regulated your energy expenditure by three or four or even up to 500 calories.

• 1:51:33Steven Bartlett

  To make up for it. So it was

• 1:51:35Speaker 00

  Neutral.

• 1:51:36Steven Bartlett

  Okay.

• 1:51:36Speaker 00

  When you're lean, like that, that can happen quite often, right? And so then what do you do? You pull more calories. You train harder. You get a more of a response. This is a like, oh, okay, calorie counting doesn't matter. Like, it absolutely matters. It may not be the strategy you want, but it matters there. So then there was a big push of like, exercise is playing no role in fat loss, which was fundamentally also not true. Because now we have meta-analyses in the recent years, as well as more studies showing probably the fairest way to say it is exercise is a fantastic way to burn some calories. It is not the only thing that you can do though, to lose weight. You can handle weight loss entirely through nutrition if you want.

• 1:52:21Speaker 00

  That said, people who exercise during their weight loss journey consistently are better at keeping that fat off over the weeks to years at the end of the diet.

• 1:52:32Steven Bartlett

  You have a 54321 method?

• 1:52:34Speaker 00

  Ah, sure. 54321 was, is just a little thing I came up with that says, all right, can we help people with fat loss rules? Five days a week, be active. Now, this can be exercise. It can be walking. It can be your vocation. I don't really care. But what was, has to happen with fat loss is you have to be able to produce caloric expenditure. And you got to do a lot of it. This is my way of saying be active. And also I'm saying, it's cool to take a rest day too. Like, it's totally fine to just veg. You can do that, but be as active as you possibly can. Then from there, I want four days a week of structured exercise. One of these days can be a super hard day. It can be light.

• 1:53:18Speaker 00

  One of those days could be a yoga day, like, not all four days have to be head to the gym, volume 11, like train as hard as you can. But four days a week where I want you doing structured exercise. At least three days a week, I want you training hard enough to sweat. If you're doing all that, you're active five days a week, you're doing structured exercise four days a week, three of those sessions, you're doing it hard enough where you're getting a really good solid sweat, you're probably doing enough to burn enough calories to give yourself a chance from the exercise perspective

• 1:53:53Speaker 00

  to losing weight. If you've done those first three, we could even, we could even just call it the 543. Like, you're in a pretty good spot. People may work granular. I would love a couple of days a week of strength training. And I would love at least one day where your heart rate's getting really, really, really high.

• 1:54:09Steven Bartlett

  So a lot of people, including myself, often think, you know, I'm going to the gym three, four days a week, but nothing's changing. I feel like I've stagnated.

• 1:54:15Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:54:16Steven Bartlett

  What is going on there typically?

• 1:54:18Speaker 00

  Typical solutions for this are lack of focus. And I don't mean in your training. I mean in your programming. So if you are looking at your program saying, I'm going to the gym three, four days a week, my first question would be, okay, what type of training program are you on?

• 1:54:31Steven Bartlett

  I'm kind of just winging it.

• 1:54:32Speaker 00

  That's why.

• 1:54:33Steven Bartlett

  Okay.

• 1:54:34Speaker 00

  If I said the same thing to you and gave you any business analogy here, you would look at me in the face and smile. You have a plan. Why would you expect without a plan to get to any particular direction?

• 1:54:44Steven Bartlett

  That's a good point.

• 1:54:45Speaker 00

  80% of the time, that's the answer. Now, here's the thing. And we have literature on this. There's good evidence. The plan itself isn't the biggest factor. It's actually just having a plan.

• 1:54:58Steven Bartlett

  Interesting.

• 1:54:59Speaker 00

  Because you have the ability to progressively overload.

• 1:55:02Steven Bartlett

  What does that mean?

• 1:55:02Speaker 00

  Meaning you were able to increase your number of repetitions than you did last week. You can do a few more sets than you did. You can increase the load. You can increase the range of motion. There's all kinds of ways that we can overload the system progressively. You can't do all them.

• 1:55:18Steven Bartlett

  This is, do you know, I think this is really the heart of it, which is most of us go to the gym and we do the same thing.

• 1:55:23Speaker 00

  Totally.

• 1:55:23Steven Bartlett

  We do the same thing we did last week. We put the, the Stairmaster machine on level eight and we do 10 minutes.

• 1:55:29Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:55:29Steven Bartlett

  And we did that for the last seven months.

• 1:55:32Steven Bartlett

  Whereas we should really just put it up one, but in order to do that, we kind of need a plan, as you say.

• 1:55:36Speaker 00

  Because you can't just go up one every time.

• 1:55:37Steven Bartlett

  Yeah.

• 1:55:38Speaker 00

  Like, how many, how many weeks in a row can you add five pounds?

• 1:55:42Speaker 00

  Three, four? Like, it's not going to be very long. This is the entire reason exercise is a scientific field. Right? We have that. So my strong recommendation would be, if you're an absolute beginner and you're not going to the gym at all, you're not doing anything, you can probably use AI tools and give you some basic starting program. In fact, I, people send these things all the time to me and be like, hey, I prompted my thing with like all of your content and I have a complete personalized training program from Andy Galpin. I'm like, great. And I look at him, I'm like, pretty good. All right, that's pretty reasonable. And it's, they're good enough to get you started. They're going to get you the basics, they're going to get you going. And then you have something to follow for six, eight, 10 weeks, whatever.

• 1:56:24Steven Bartlett

  Let me ask AI for Andy Galpin's.

• 1:56:28Speaker 00

  Put in your constraints. Tell it how many days a week.

• 1:56:30Steven Bartlett

  Okay, let's do it like, so everyone can hear.

• 1:56:34Steven Bartlett

  Hi, I want to go to the gym four days a week and I want Andy Galpin's formula for me to gain muscle. But what are the principles that I need to apply based on Andy Galpin's work over the next four months in order to gain this muscle?

• 1:56:50Speaker 02

  To gain muscle and strength over the next four months, you'll want to focus on a few key principles from Dr. Galpin's work. First, prioritize progressive overload by gradually increasing the weight, reps or sets over time. Second, use a variety of repetition ranges, incorporating both heavy, low rep work for strength and moderate to high rep work for muscle growth. Finally, ensure you're taking adequate rest between sets, usually two to five minutes for heavy compound movements to allow for full recovery and maintain high quality effort.

• 1:57:22Speaker 00

  Pretty good. That's not, there's a little bit of hallucination in there, which is AI, but that's pretty close.

• 1:57:27Steven Bartlett

  A lot of people aren't doing this now, aren't they? They're using AI as like their

• 1:57:31Speaker 00

  We've saw a huge pendulum in the last five years. 2020 almost ended health and fitness. Gyms went out of business. Everyone went home. Everyone bought their exercise equipment. And as soon as AI came on online, online coaching tanked and online companies got crippled. Cause everyone is like, why am I going to pay you a hundred bucks a month, 200 bucks a month, 300 bucks a month for that? And they were right. It's going the exact opposite now. It's already swung back. In-person training is way more in demand.

• 1:58:00Steven Bartlett

  I'm not surprised.

• 1:58:02Speaker 00

  Everyone's tired of that.

• 1:58:03Steven Bartlett

  It's also, personal trainers don't just tell you what to do.

• 1:58:06Speaker 00

  No.

• 1:58:06Steven Bartlett

  They make sure you do it, you know, so

• 1:58:08Speaker 00

  How do I do it? It's the emotion, it's the connection.

• 1:58:11Steven Bartlett

  It's the emotion, it's the connection. It's the like, holding me accountable.

• 1:58:14Speaker 00

  So what you're seeing is people going, it was never about the information.

• 1:58:19Steven Bartlett

  Yeah. We always had the information.

• 1:58:20Speaker 00

  We always had it. Nothing in that I made up.

• 1:58:24Steven Bartlett

  Yeah.

• 1:58:24Speaker 00

  That stuff's been around for, like, it's funny, every time I talk about like exercise prescriptions, somebody will hit the comments and be like, why don't you give credit to blah, blah, blah? They're the one that invented that. And I'm like, none of us invented this stuff. Dumbbells, barbells, like rep ranges. It's not the information, it's never been it.

• 1:58:41Steven Bartlett

  So what is it then? Like, why do people keep listening to these conversations when they kinda, a lot of them kinda know the stuff?

• 1:58:48Speaker 00

  I don't know what's happening on your platform. But a lot of people are not listening to podcasts anymore. Cause you're gonna see this probably in the comments section. Hey Grok, tell me the 10 actionable things from this three hour conversation. Cause they just try and extract the data, right? And then they don't do anything. You know who's gonna take action from this? The people who listened.

• 1:59:10Steven Bartlett

  True, yeah. Yeah, cause it's not, it's the-

• 1:59:12Speaker 00

  It's not the information.

• 1:59:13Steven Bartlett

  Yeah, and part of, in part it is the story. And I say the story in particular because one of the most compelling things that we see on these podcasts is when you tell me real case studies of real people. You talk about what Jenny did and you were training Jenny and she had this thing and she was perimenopausal and she did this thing with this thing and da. And people go, ah, okay, those stay with me.

• 1:59:31Speaker 00

  You know what I'm willing to pay for? You know what the world is willing to pay for? Have you done it before?

• 1:59:37Steven Bartlett

  Oh, yeah, yeah, true. Human experience, like lived experience.

• 1:59:40Speaker 00

  So when you see a story, you're able to go, okay, I believe that person's done it. And now I trust that opinion because I could just go grab the program, right? The other thing is it's saving me time. Like you could sit there and go, okay, here's all the prompts or whatever, throw it in there. And get your own training program. Or you could be like, yo, I'm just gonna go pay Andy. I know he's done it before. I trust him. And now I'm gonna go spend my time on this other thing that I care about learning about, spending my time on.

• 2:00:06Steven Bartlett

  Are there any commonalities in the catalyst moment that causes behavior change in people who are otherwise stubborn? So I think everyone that I sit with and just even myself, there's, there was a moment in my life where I heard something or something happened where I go, fuck, yeah. And that was the day, it was like a before and after moment, I call them. That was the day that I decided to take this shit seriously. And do you see any commonalities on what that is for different people?

• 2:00:30Speaker 00

  It's such a fabulous question and I don't have a good answer for you.

• 2:00:33Steven Bartlett

  Because it's always so different.

• 2:00:34Speaker 00

  It's so hard. I would love to say. It was the rock bottom moment. I mean, it can be true. It's not always true.

• 2:00:42Steven Bartlett

  Can I suggest another?

• 2:00:43Speaker 00

  Please.

• 2:00:44Steven Bartlett

  Maybe like big life changes like kids?

• 2:00:47Speaker 00

  Death, friend, family, life becomes real.

• 2:00:50Steven Bartlett

  I've heard that a few times on this show, actually.

• 2:00:52Speaker 00

  You'll see that.

• 2:00:53Steven Bartlett

  My dad had a heart attack in-

• 2:00:54Speaker 00

  That's crazy. The threat of death doesn't motivate anybody.

• 2:00:58Steven Bartlett

  Right.

• 2:00:58Speaker 00

  If it would have, we wouldn't have a 40% obesity rate.

• 2:01:01Steven Bartlett

  Yeah.

• 2:01:01Speaker 00

  Who doesn't know obesity takes, everybody knows. It's not a information issue. You know the risks associated with alcohol, smoking, social media. That does not change behavior. You get closer though, when it's at home. Right? Somebody died in a car accident. Fuck, I'll, I'm gonna stop looking at my phone when I drive. Cause my neighbor just died. My ex, like that's the thing that makes you go. Too close to home.

• 2:01:30Steven Bartlett

  That's so true. I was saying to my fiance when I was driving the other day in the car, cause I'm notorious for asking everybody to put their seatbelts on. If we get in a car, I'm the guy in a black cab or a taxi, I'm like, everyone, can you put your seatbelts on, please? My team know this as well. Like if we going anywhere, I look around at every single person and make sure they have their seatbelts on. When did this begin? When I was 10 years old. And they came to my school. I remember being sat in the front row, I almost remember my seat number, it was that vivid for me. Two things I remember from 10 years old. They brought a mother who had lost her child in a car accident. And then they brought out a police person and he described going to the scene of the accident, looking down at the person who had just been in a car accident's phone, realizing that they were deceased. And then looking down and seeing their phone ringing and it said, mum. And I just, I've never forgotten it.

• 2:02:16Steven Bartlett

  It was somewhat traumatic, but it's meant that for the rest of my life.

• 2:02:19Speaker 00

  For sure.

• 2:02:19Steven Bartlett

  I've policed seatbelts. And that's what I mean by these catalyst moments where an idea gets in your head and it just completely changes. And so I'm wondering what those ideas are for people as it relates to like weight loss and health. And so we ticked off some of them. Someone gets it in your family, maybe a diagnosis.

• 2:02:35Speaker 00

  In the performance perspective, this is when we'd argue for data. Because we've had this happen earlier in my career with a professional athlete who was not fast enough and was convinced he was fast. And then we put him on a force plate and we started collecting objective data. And at the same time, I had some of my students around and I had them do it. Kinda like what you did with your grip strength with Jeff. And it was like, you see how they're as fast as you are? And he was like, oh.

• 2:03:05Speaker 00

  Everything changed. Like he was totally bought in, made every training change that we asked. He had to see it in front of his face, like he had to see his data. So my other answer to that to you would be now that we've democratized health in this sense, the ability to see your own data. I would be willing to bet. Had I pulled up a blood panel? That had the cholesterol levels that you saw? And I said, oh, this is a client of mine. You would be like, oh, okay, great.

• 2:03:33Speaker 00

  But then when I pull up yours and say, this is, you're like, yeah.

• 2:03:36Steven Bartlett

  I started shitting myself.

• 2:03:37Speaker 00

  You know, Jedi guy is over. Like, we're done with that, right? Like, there's no question.

• 2:03:41Steven Bartlett

  I was looking for some research and there's some evidence here backed by some research that goes to answer the question. And I think we actually answered, we hit most of them, which is an acute health shock or diagnosis, which is the primary catalyst. Vicarious health events, which become wake up calls, which you talked about as well, which is someone else, a peer, a friend, a sibling. Number three, you touched on as well, which is this quantitative biometric feedback, so data.

• 2:04:03Speaker 00

  Yep, yep, yep.

• 2:04:04Steven Bartlett

  It says major like, this one we didn't touch on. Major life transitions, I E. Such as becoming a parent, turning a landmark age like 30, 40 or 50. Or reaching retirement. You see that a lot?

• 2:04:17Speaker 00

  Yep. You know what, actually? That made me think, here's one we've seen the most. Sold my company.

• 2:04:24Steven Bartlett

  Oh.

• 2:04:25Speaker 00

  That one changes everyone's life. It's similar to post gold depression.

• 2:04:29Steven Bartlett

  Oh, you've lost purpose.

• 2:04:30Speaker 00

  Fuck, what did I do?

• 2:04:32Steven Bartlett

  Ah, I need to do something.

• 2:04:33Speaker 00

  And I got, now I got money, now I have time.

• 2:04:35Steven Bartlett

  Interesting.

• 2:04:36Speaker 00

  I'm investing in my health now, like I didn't, I sacrificed my health the last 20 years. Ding, da ding, da ding. Now I gotta churn around and I'm like, okay.

• 2:04:44Steven Bartlett

  But is it also just like, I need a new purpose and my body then becomes the, the project?

• 2:04:48Speaker 00

  That's exactly what it is. Where in the past I had the excuse of sacrificing for the company. And I, I couldn't focus on myself. It was selfish. It wasn't fiduciarily responsible to do that. And now I have no more excuse.

• 2:05:02Steven Bartlett

  Well, looking at this list then, listen, we can't, we're gonna pray no one in your family. No one you know gets sick. So let's stay away from that one. The, the two of them there that can be quite motivating. And again, we don't wanna motivate you if you're completely fine, but this actually answers the question, is to go and get your health checked.

• 2:05:19Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 2:05:20Steven Bartlett

  That's like a simple solution because maybe you're fine and that's great. Maybe you're doing everything right, but also just saying, oh, I wanna lose a bit of weight or I wanna do this, isn't as solid enough as going and finding out how you're doing.

• 2:05:31Speaker 00

  One thing also I think is important. Cause I will default to performance and optimization and getting the best and excellence. Like that's just the language and stuff I do. But that's not the opposite of what you just said.

• 2:05:45Speaker 00

  To be really clear on that point.

• 2:05:48Speaker 00

  Not everyone gravitates the idea of being the best possible ever.

• 2:05:52Steven Bartlett

  Yeah.

• 2:05:53Speaker 00

  Totally fine, but that still doesn't mean it's okay to just check out on your health. You can have it both ways. You can be like, look, I'm not an optimizer, I'm not a maximizer, I'm not, that doesn't. Live with my ethos and cool. We can still though say, you still wanna live that life for as long as possible, right? All right, let's just make sure we're paying enough attention to where nothing catches up. And we're not waking up one day and be like, oh my gosh. Now I've gotta go invest all these time and resource, energy and all those things to go backwards and that. So pay attention enough.

• 2:06:26Steven Bartlett

  How important is it to get clear on your why?

• 2:06:29Speaker 00

  You're not gonna love the answer.

• 2:06:32Speaker 00

  Because traditionally, when people approach me, they already have that figured out. They're getting to me, they figured out why they're here or they're. If they haven't figured out, they at least have had the motivation to seek outside counsel like that. So now they're getting to the what and how part.

• 2:06:50Steven Bartlett

  What about bad goals? I, I look back at my life and I had some bad goals that set me up for failure.

• 2:06:55Speaker 00

  That's more realistic to what we'll do. And this is a, you're aiming at the wrong target.

• 2:07:00Steven Bartlett

  I was aiming at, my goal when I was 20, I think it was 27, was to go to the gym every day and I failed.

• 2:07:05Speaker 00

  Oh, yeah, yeah.

• 2:07:05Steven Bartlett

  I failed six months later, but then once I'd failed, it was catastrophic for me.

• 2:07:08Speaker 00

  And how are you not going to fail?

• 2:07:09Steven Bartlett

  Yeah, yeah, but yeah, and-

• 2:07:11Speaker 00

  Were you going to go every day the rest of your life?

• 2:07:13Steven Bartlett

  It was a terrible goal because the day that I missed one day because some, some flight. My, it was like my entire motivation was over.

• 2:07:21Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah, sure.

• 2:07:22Steven Bartlett

  And then I was like, how do I get back on the horse now?

• 2:07:24Speaker 00

  Here's an example. You wanna lose fat. Your goal is fat loss. Cool. Why aren't you leaner right now? And you automatically think I have to exercise more and diet. And I'm like, great, that's the tactic. I wanna know why you're not there right now. Like what is the thing that's actually getting in the way? Cause like calorie, fine, like yeah, yeah, like you know that though, but it's not working. What is really in the way? Do we actually have some hidden stressor? A lot of times people will say things like, I, I gotta lose fat so I can get healthy. And we will generally say, you need to get healthy first.

• 2:08:03Speaker 00

  And then the fat loss would be a whole lot easier. That's the bad goal. And so we'll ask this question, like, what would success look like? What would failure look like? And when we hear things like, oh, success is I lose these 25 pounds. All right, great. Let me ask you this.

• 2:08:20Speaker 00

  If we lost 12 pounds and then your shoulder pain went away. You have normal bowel movements now for the first time in 10 years. Your energy is way up.

• 2:08:32Speaker 00

  Is that all a failure? No, that's success. So then we didn't just find success properly. So it is a huge focus of, of how we help people actually make progress in those areas that they've struggled with.

• 2:08:43Steven Bartlett

  Dr. Andy Galpin, we have a close intuition where the last guest leaves a question for the next, not knowing who they're leaving it for. And the question left for you is if you were sure to fail.

• 2:08:54Steven Bartlett

  What would still be worth doing?

• 2:08:58Steven Bartlett

  What a great question.

• 2:08:59Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 2:09:00Steven Bartlett

  Fantastic question.

• 2:09:01Speaker 00

  I am.

• 2:09:04Speaker 00

  Ultra competitive. But I really don't mind losing. So my answer to that question was, it sounds like a cop out, but it's all of it. Cause I actually don't care about failing that much. It just doesn't bother me. Like I just like the competing thing. I like the doing thing.

• 2:09:21Speaker 00

  So my initial reaction to that was like, God, being around my kids, right? There's, you fail anything you want there and I'm like, we're winning, right? And then I went to business things and I'm like, I don't even really care about losing those, like.

• 2:09:33Speaker 00

  Cause you get to do it, you get to be active and whatever. So kind of a cop out, but my answer would be all of them, man. Like the process is dope.

• 2:09:40Steven Bartlett

  The podium is the process.

• 2:09:41Speaker 00

  Yeah, man.

• 2:09:43Steven Bartlett

  The process over the podium. Dr. Andy Galpin, thank you so much. Thank you. You're held in such high regard by everybody. I think there's two reasons. I think it's so, you're so deeply obsessed with this subject matter for reasons that we talked a lot about last time. But also I think the essence of your motivations is so unbelievably pure. You know, before we started recording, you were saying to me how like, you're really not that concerned with the business side of things. Because what you'd love to do is just be focusing on the research, the education and the coaching. And I think that says a lot about you and it comes through. People understand that you're just deeply obsessed about this stuff in a way which allows us to benefit tremendously from all the work that you have done. And you're a wonderful synthesizer of very, very complex things. So please carry on doing what you're doing.

• 2:10:23Steven Bartlett

  If people wanna go and listen to your show, or if they wanna go consume more of your stuff, if they wanna continue this journey with you, where do they go? Where's the best place to send them?

• 2:10:31Speaker 00

  Well, first of all, thank you for those kind words and to be invited back. It's, it's a huge opportunity and I will never be ungrateful for it.

• 2:10:39Speaker 00

  My podcast is called Perform with Dr. Andy Galpin, available everywhere. And then andygalpin.com and social media, Instagram and all that stuff is probably the easiest way to follow along.

• 2:10:49Steven Bartlett

  I highly recommend you go and subscribe to Andy's channel. And we're gonna link it down below now, but it's, it's, you're incredibly rigorous with all the work that you do. Having spoken to Andrew, Andrew Huberman, who's a, who's a good friend of both of ours. He, he's also told me just how utterly obsessed you are with truth and also your mission of helping people become who they could be. And that shines through in all of your work. So please go and subscribe to Andy's podcast as well, Perform. And I shall link all of his other resources below, including some of them that we've mentioned today, including the tests and questionnaires that we talked about. Andy, thank you.