Inside Tracker | The Largest Database Of Healthy People In The World

InsideTracker are a company from Boston MA who provide bloodwork analysis to athletes and the general public. The world is increasingly moving toward a focus on inner health, micro gains and a higher resolution view of our body's internal state. InsideTracker are at the forefront of this analytical movement. After sitting down with Professor David Sinclair at Harvard Medical School I went straight to meet with InsideTracker HQ Execs Jonathan Levitt & Carrie Kolb to talk through the trends they're seeing worldwide from thousands of bloodwork samples. Extra Stuff: Inside Tracker - https://www.insidetracker.com Recommendations - https://www.amazon.co.uk/shop/modernwisdom - Listen to all episodes online. Search "Modern Wisdom" on any Podcast App or click here: iTunes: https://apple.co/2MNqIgw Spotify: https://spoti.fi/2LSimPn Stitcher: https://www.stitcher.com/podcast/modern-wisdom - I want to hear from you!! Get in touch in the comments below or head to... Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/chriswillx Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/chriswillx Email: [email protected] - Music: www.bensound.com

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

• 0:00Chris Williamson?

  What's happening friends? I hope you are well and it's nice for me to finally be back in the UK after a lot of travelling. New York nearly finished me off last weekend, but I've just about recovered. Onto this week's episode, I'm sitting down with Carrie and Jonathan from InsideTracker HQ. Now, you may remember last week that both me and Professor David Sinclair spoke about blood work being done by the guys at InsideTracker. So I thought it was timely to release the episode I recorded with two of their execs who understand what athletes and professionals need, even if we don't know it ourselves. So yeah, today expect to learn what the largest database of healthy people in the

• 0:43Chris Williamson?

  world is identifying with regards to trends in people's diets, their exercise, what their blood work levels are suggesting, Carrie and Jonathan's predictions moving forward for the future of this analytical wellness movement and a whole host of other interesting things. Also, if you are interested in getting your blood work done from InsideTracker, just head to InsideTracker.com and they'll do the rest.

• 1:08Speaker 01

  Mr. President, my company told me of the explosion on our rig on October 2nd. Causing massive water displacement and triggering a tsunami. They all heap the blame on me. Tom Cruise is.

• 1:19Speaker 02

  Digger got us into this mess and Digger's gonna dig us out. From the director of Birdman and the Revenant.

• 1:25Speaker 03

  What would happen if I stopped drilling? You're stalled, you're freezing there, that's what.

• 1:29Speaker 02

  With great power comes great deniability.

• 1:32Speaker 03

  I'm not the first then.

• 1:33Speaker 02

  Digger, see the trailer online, only in theaters October 2nd. Rated R, under 17, not a minute without parent.

• 1:38Chris Williamson?

  Now, please welcome Carrie and Jonathan.

• 1:56Chris Williamson?

  Ladies and gentlemen, welcome back and joined by Jonathan and Carrie from InsideTracker. How are you today?

• 2:02Speaker 04

  Good, thanks for having us.

• 2:03Chris Williamson?

  Thanks for having us.

• 2:04Speaker 04

  Well, thanks for being here.

• 2:05Chris Williamson?

  Thank you for having me.

• 2:06Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 2:07Chris Williamson?

  Do you know what I mean? Thank you for having me. Thanks for coming. It's awesome. So. Can you explain to the listeners at home who you guys are and what InsideTracker is and what it does?

• 2:16Speaker 04

  Sure. So, we work for InsideTracker. I handle mostly the CrossFit division and Jonathan handles endurance. But we also are helping people out with their overall health or healthy aging. And what InsideTracker really does is we look at biomarkers in your blood that are scientifically tied to performance, overall health and longevity, and we create personalized recommendations for foods, supplements and lifestyle changes to help you get those biomarkers into optimized zones if they're not already in there.

• 2:51Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, it's a serious, a serious subject, isn't it? I've just come straight from Mr. David Sinclair's office at the Harvard Medical School. And it seems like longevity and this more analytical assessment, I mean, I'm wearing a Whoop band, right? Like, I've got always on heart rate tracking. Is it a trend that you can see at the moment with fitness that people are starting to take this sort of stuff more seriously?

• 3:17Speaker 05

  Definitely, and they're starting to care. So I've been at the company for four and a half years now. And when I started, it was all about, you know, we needed to help explain why this is something you should care about. And now it's at a point where everybody knows what it is. We have to show that we're better and that our, our platform is more advanced, more analytical and, and more personalized than, than anything else out there.

• 3:40Chris Williamson?

  So the dream's already been sold?

• 3:42Speaker 05

  Yes.

• 3:43Chris Williamson?

  Why do you think that's the case? Why are people more bothered now? Are they just looking for marginal gains or is it the just natural movement along with as the technology sort of continues? What do you think?

• 3:52Speaker 05

  Yeah, I think it's a little bit of both. I think there's more coming out about how you can improve longevity, what you can do to be better about yourself. There's a large group of people that are either getting older or they're seeing their parents get older, probably more likely, at least here in the States with, with baby boomers. And so, and so people are, are questioning their own longevity and, and looking at like, what can I do so that I don't get like that? Or what can I do so that I can be with my kids or, you know, something like that as, as they get older? And, and so people are looking for a way to make that actionable.

• 4:32Chris Williamson?

  So I went through the process, as the viewers will be seeing throughout this episode. I went to Quest Diagnostics in Redlands in California. And out the other side of that, I got my blood drawn. They got sent off to your lab and then within a few days I had a bunch of data that I waited for you to interpret on my behalf because I didn't, I didn't quite understand what everything was. But it does seem mad to me that out of a, it was quite a lot of blood, it was like 10 vials. Well, not that much.

• 5:03Speaker 04

  No, maybe it was six.

• 5:04Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 5:05Speaker 04

  Felt like 10.

• 5:05Chris Williamson?

  Felt like, felt like pints, felt like pints in your hands, but it wasn't. It is, it seems so mad that you guys are able to

• 5:15Chris Williamson?

  decipher so much about my diet, my training, my lifestyle, my cortisol levels, my free testosterone. Just from a couple of hours of blood that I had drawn on the opposite side of the country like a week ago. It's a mad, mad concept.

• 5:34Speaker 05

  It's mad, but if you think about it, people are looking for guidance and what's the most reliable source of data. It's not, how are you feeling today? It's not, you know, it's, it's not these, these, I have a garment and it tracks my sleep quality. And it, some nights it says I sleep for three hours and some nights it says I'm, I'm in bed at seven o'clock, but I'm, I'm not. And, and people are looking for analytics and people are familiar with, you know, going to your doctor to get glucose and cholesterol. But it stops there and there's so much more beyond just, are you sick today? Or are you, you know, coming from the performance side of things, who cares?

• 6:15Speaker 05

  Who, how you compare to 300 million Americans or, or a human in general. It's, it's all about, how do you compare to yourself? For someone that's training like you're training, for someone that's eating like you're eating. And then, you know, you might be, you might need to be here, you might need to be here. And you're currently here. And so it's that, you know, 1%, 5%, 10%, whatever it is, that there's, there's benefit to, to getting there.

• 6:41Chris Williamson?

  You are totally right that it seems so primitive now when I think about the fact that all of us are training in some form, especially if it's for performance. Right. You are looking to dial in marginal gains. If you read Ben Bergeron's book, Chasing Excellence, at the bottom, he's got character and then above that he's got process, which is making the most of minutes. Right. That is, in its very essence, the highest resolution, highest fidelity look at marginal gains that you can. And it does seem super like prehistoric to not be tracking sleep quality with something better than, I think I went to bed at 10 o'clock last night.

• 7:23Chris Williamson?

  And the same thing, it would appear now with guys like yourself, is being rolled forward for blood work. I was talking to David and he said he's got all of his data with you guys since like 2011. Yep.

• 7:36Speaker 04

  Yeah, that's the.

• 7:37Chris Williamson?

  Which is intense.

• 7:38Speaker 04

  Yeah, it's a cool part of our platform is that you can, no matter when you do Inside Tracker, you can upload past blood test results and kind of put in a little ping of what you were doing at that time in your life. So you can notice trends in, oh, my, you know, glucose was here at this time of my life. This is what I was doing. Fast forward six months. This is the next time I tested. Here's where it was and how I was doing that. So you can find trends, you know, in the changes that you've made to find out, you know, what can really affect your glucose and how to get that marker to move.

• 8:13Chris Williamson?

  So can you talk to the listeners about some of the athletes that you guys have worked with?

• 8:20Speaker 04

  Yeah, I mean, we work with, I mean, all types of athletes from CrossFitters like myself who are just, you know, going to stay healthy to the top tier CrossFit athletes that are going to the Games.

• 8:34Chris Williamson?

  Are there any household names that people might know?

• 8:36Speaker 04

  Yeah, we've tested Katrin is a big supporter of ours, Katrin Davidstetter. She works with Ben Bergeron, who's talked about Inside Tracker before, Cole Sager, Scott Panchik, who's going to the Games for the ninth time now. We've worked with Tia. We've worked with all of the CrossFit Mayhem team recently. So a lot of household names that you probably know richfroening.

• 9:04Speaker 04

  Yeah, they've done InsideTracker and have found, you know, a lot of value in it, so.

• 9:08Chris Williamson?

  What do you find when you look at these athletes? Is the, obviously, we don't need to go into specific details and find out that Katrin's actually got slightly higher glucose.

• 9:17Speaker 04

  We, we see a lot of trends with, with especially high level CrossFit athletes where their CK is usually a little bit higher, which just means, it's just a creatine kinase, which is a marker of overtraining. So you would expect to see, you know, that marker be a little bit high based on how often they're training, how many hours they're putting in per day. We also have seen glucose in CrossFitters be a little bit on the higher end, which is something that you noticed in your.

• 9:47Chris Williamson?

  Yes.

• 9:47Speaker 04

  And it's just because, for whatever reason, they're not eating enough soluble fiber, which is exactly what I think you were told this morning on your consult.

• 9:55Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, so I, I had yourself and one of your colleagues run me through my results earlier on today. I, I honestly thought that I wouldn't be, I would be further out than I was. I was expecting after a decade and a half of club promotion and undersleeping and some periods of pretty significant overtraining as well. I was expecting my inner age to come back at like forty-five and for the, just to be like every sound and alarm going off inside of InsideTracker, like the, the air red siren goes off and then the red light.

• 10:33Speaker 05

  Somebody pick up this guy, make sure he's not dead.

• 10:35Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, yeah, I mean, so, but it turns out that it wasn't that bad and that glucose was a little bit out, free testosterone was low, which I'm gonna guess is typical of people who train a lot.

• 10:47Chris Williamson?

  And yeah, have some more soluble fiber and, and stop taking a multivitamin and then see where you're at in three months.

• 10:56Chris Williamson?

  What uh what do you see with endurance athletes though?

• 11:00Speaker 05

  So for endurance athletes, it's different. It's more micronutrient related. We see fifty percent of our female population having low ferritin, so the storage form of iron.

• 11:12Chris Williamson?

  Yep.

• 11:12Speaker 05

  So that's fifty percent of women under the age of fifty that are doing InsideTracker. So this is someone that is proactive about their health and thinking about these types of things. So I would extrapolate to say that the general population of runners is probably a little bit higher than that. So we we can say, you know, there's a pretty high chance that by doing this and and knowing your numbers, you'll improve your energy.

• 11:38Chris Williamson?

  Yes.

• 11:39Speaker 05

  Low testosterone is also a a common trend. What else? We see the liver enzymes elevated. We see the creatine kinase elevated. So all of these indicators of of overtraining or or not resting enough. Because like CrossFit running is addictive and you want to do more of it. And these athletes are allergic to rest. And and so, you know, it's like, oh, when was your last? Like even just trying to schedule the test, oh, it's best done after a rest day or an easy day. Well, I don't have those.

• 12:10Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 12:10Speaker 05

  It's like, okay, you don't have to do InsideTracker to know that like you should probably have a few of those in your in your program. So for a lot of people, fundamentally, it's a shift of, okay, here's some data that says you're worked. Maybe maybe we back off a little bit on the on the volume perspective. And then the other big one is uh caloric needs. So many runners are running a lot, or even if they're not running a lot, they're they're running more than they're eating. So they're not eating enough to to replenish the energy that they're that they're burning. And so that puts you at risk for injury and it puts you at risk for overtraining and burnout and all that stuff that, you know, we want to avoid.

• 12:52Speaker 05

  So when I did my own consult with our dietitian, she basically said, you're you're under by 500 calories every day, and that's not on long run days. So it's like, okay, let's find another meal or another like two or three snacks.

• 13:07Chris Williamson?

  How does um under eating manifest in the blood work?

• 13:10Speaker 05

  So for me, it was a combination of high cortisol, uh LDL was unoptimized, and um the free testosterone had been had had gone down a little bit, given an increase in training. So I I, you know, test quarterly, and I was able to see as my training ramped up, those things all went the wrong way. And so we went through and also the soluble fiber. Um, and so this was January of 2018, and I I'm doing like 20% more mileage than I've ever done, eating more and getting more results. And it hadn't been injured, knock on wood, but um it it was a no brainer, like, hey, this is something that's a problem.

• 13:53Speaker 05

  It's very clearly identified in the blood work, and now it's having, you know, action reaction.

• 13:57Chris Williamson?

  It's taking a lot of guesswork out, isn't it?

• 14:00Speaker 05

  Yeah, for sure. Yeah, I mean, you remove the the um, you know, where do I focus? What supplements do I need? I know what I need, Carrie knows what she needs, and you know what you need. And there's probably some overlap in that, but if if I were to take what Carrie needed, or I were to take what you needed, that wouldn't, that's not what we need. So it's it's understanding your personalized supplement routine as something as simple as that.

• 14:27Speaker 04

  Or also like what you need to eat. And for, I was not told that I was under eating, just FYI, um after I got my consult. But if you're doing something where you're using templates or you're macro counting, and you um want to try to meet those numbers, but you want to try to meet them with the right foods, now you have something telling you exactly what your body needs. So that was really helpful for me to know, um, like for you. When you were told that you needed to eat a lot of beans, it was helpful for me to know.

• 14:57Chris Williamson?

  Twenty different types of beans.

• 14:59Speaker 05

  Also validates my um my sushi habit.

• 15:02Chris Williamson?

  Okay.

• 15:03Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 15:03Chris Williamson?

  Because what?

• 15:04Speaker 05

  You need fish and and shellfish.

• 15:06Chris Williamson?

  Okay, and that was keeping you optimal?

• 15:08Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 15:09Chris Williamson?

  Fantastic. I mean, anything that excuses you to eat more sushi or more of what you want.

• 15:13Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 15:13Chris Williamson?

  Sweet. Um, one thing that I thought was super interesting when I was looking at the recommendations. I don't I don't know what I was expecting um the recommendations to be. I think I maybe thought there would be something crazy, complex out the other side of it. Um, but having spoken to uh one of your colleagues, what I discovered was that between sleep, training, diet and supplementation, those are the only inputs that we need to be looking at to manipulate everything that's going on with regards to our blood work.

• 15:49Speaker 05

  Right.

• 15:49Chris Williamson?

  I don't know what I thought I was gonna expect to see.

• 15:52Speaker 05

  Like?

• 15:53Chris Williamson?

  It was some, I don't know, I don't know what I was expecting, like just something crazy, complex that was totally out of the realms of, oh, well, your your iron's out, so you need to do this ridiculous thing.

• 16:04Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 16:04Chris Williamson?

  But it's not, it's, everything's within your control.

• 16:06Speaker 05

  Yeah, so adoption is, it like, the whole program is worthless if you can't take the data and make meaning of it. So there there's a lot of, you look at pro sports, there's a lot of of meaningless tracking that's going on and.

• 16:20Chris Williamson?

  What like?

• 16:21Speaker 05

  People are, people are tracking GPS, people are tracking sleep, people are tracking power, people are tracking all these things that that pro athletes are having tracked, but it's just sitting in a in a

• 16:33Chris Williamson?

  Excel sheet or something.

• 16:35Speaker 05

  Yeah, exactly. And and I was at the National Strength and Conditioning Association Conference a couple of years ago. And and one of the presenters was basically saying, stop tracking just to tell your boss you're tracking this. It's a waste of your athlete's time and it's a waste of your time if you're not doing anything with it. And and so our our goal is to to make everything that we ask of you and everything that we take from you, literally your blood, meaningful. And so you may have noticed that there were a lot of questions on the registration process.

• 17:08Chris Williamson?

  Yes.

• 17:09Speaker 05

  We don't ask anything that we don't use anywhere. None of it's just for fun. None of it's for statistical

• 17:15Chris Williamson?

  Yep.

• 17:16Speaker 05

  purposes on our end.

• 17:17Chris Williamson?

  Yep.

• 17:17Speaker 05

  Everything that we ask on that registration process is used in a recommendation somewhere.

• 17:23Chris Williamson?

  Mm hmm. One of the things that the dietitian I was speaking to earlier on mentioned was that if she had the choice, she would have actually had like a hundred and twenty question questionnaire. Apparently, there's sixteen major food groups, sixteen questions that relate to each of those.

• 17:41Speaker 05

  Right.

• 17:41Chris Williamson?

  But she was like, I would be looking at breaking it, breaking down your veggies into like dark leafy greens and colorful veggies and timing and frequency and quality and all sorts of stuff. But I guess you guys have to mediate between how much are we going to get people to actually fill this in? If it's a hundred and thirty questions about your, you're going to get zero compliance or low lower compliance. But you need to mediate that with getting sufficient data.

• 18:11Speaker 05

  Right.

• 18:12Chris Williamson?

  So that you guys can actually make it useful, I suppose.

• 18:14Speaker 04

  And it needs to be realistic for people to to get recommendations for them and be able to implement them in everyday life, like Jonathan said. So it can't be, you know, a huge stretch. Like, one of our recommendations is to adopt a vegetarian diet for a day, and that's only if

• 18:31Speaker 05

  A day per week.

• 18:32Speaker 04

  A day per week. And that's only if you eat a small amount of meat. So if it's someone who is telling us they're eating, you know, meat every single day, we're not going to go tell you to be a vegetarian because that's unrealistic for that person.

• 18:43Speaker 05

  So it's making a simple, simple change versus a complete overhaul.

• 18:49Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, I I I wonder, I wonder how many people at home that are listening are on one of the extreme ends of the spectrum, one where they are um you doing data masturbation.

• 19:03Speaker 05

  Right.

• 19:04Chris Williamson?

  Um, and and over tracking, everything is down. I've got a couple of buddies who do that with their uh work pomodoros. Um, so they know every twenty five minutes of their day, they know exactly what they've done.

• 19:16Speaker 05

  Yep.

• 19:16Chris Williamson?

  Um, and then I'm sure that there will be a lot of people on the other end of the spectrum who are just flying blind.

• 19:23Speaker 05

  Yep.

• 19:23Chris Williamson?

  Um, but yeah, you are right. This this kind of addiction that some of us get into, which I I've swung in and out of.

• 19:30Speaker 05

  You've got paralysis by analysis.

• 19:34Chris Williamson?

  Absolutely. Yeah, you are right. Um, so for the normal uh everyday person, we've spoken about athletes. For someone who's just looking to exist through life feeling better.

• 19:45Speaker 05

  Mm hmm.

• 19:45Chris Williamson?

  Um, is blood work going to identify why they may have particular uh allergies to foods or particular deficiencies that could lead to more um

• 20:00Chris Williamson?

  more serious problems down the line? Is it an early warning system for some people or are there any other things to do with longevity that you guys really focus on?

• 20:07Speaker 05

  So the company was started for that first point. It wasn't to help elite athletes, you know, squeeze out an extra one percent. Um, our founder Gil Blander had a death in the family when he was a little kid and he said, I want to live forever. And so this is his project of, you know, how does how does Gil live longer, live better?

• 20:23Chris Williamson?

  Mm hmm.

• 20:24Speaker 05

  And he went the route of academia and he said, you know, I can publish some papers that some scientists will see. Or I can start a company and impact, you know, tens of millions or hundreds of millions of people, billions of people. And so he he. Went with option number two. And or he went with option number one at first and then, you know, transitioned over option number two. And and so the initial mission of the company was, like I said, was not to help elite athletes, but rather help anyone have more energy or better sleep or whatever. Athletes need that performance, whereas most people want to feel better. But the program works the same way for for those two people. It works.

• 21:06Speaker 05

  It uses scientific studies to provide recommendations to help achieve goals, specific goals that that are relevant to you.

• 21:15Chris Williamson?

  Even if the goal is just to feel more calm or lose some weight.

• 21:18Speaker 05

  Exactly. And then the food sensitivity question is one we get asked a lot. At this time, we aren't confident enough in the science and validity behind food sensitivity testing. So we don't include it. It's incredibly expensive and doesn't provide much utility on our end. So instead of, you know, just trying to make a few more bucks, providing a service that isn't as good of a quality, we just don't do it.

• 21:46Chris Williamson?

  I think definitely based on what I've seen of what you guys have given me as a feedback, remembering that you don't know what I eat typically. The things that were highlighted by deficiencies in my profile seem to tie in very closely with what I know that I don't eat.

• 22:03Speaker 05

  Right.

• 22:04Chris Williamson?

  So.

• 22:04Speaker 05

  Like beans and oatmeal, probably.

• 22:06Chris Williamson?

  Beans and oatmeal. I man, I just need to eat. I do just need to eat more beans, apparently.

• 22:11Speaker 05

  We had an athlete that wrote a blog about, you know, beans are are.

• 22:18Speaker 05

  It was a hilarious title and I'm blanking on on what it was. But basically beans are are her end all be all solution.

• 22:25Chris Williamson?

  She just wants to have beans all the time.

• 22:26Speaker 05

  Beans all the time.

• 22:27Chris Williamson?

  I mean, I don't know. Beans beans to me are, especially if you're British, like beans are not a very important food group. Like beans are what you have for breakfast. But apparently they're what I need to fix myself. So remain for elite athletes. What's the trend suggesting at the moment, do you think?

• 22:49Speaker 04

  Um, I mean, I think there's so many ways that obviously you can track different things um about yourself. Now there's, we can use the DNA plus blood um that we offer, which if you have your DNA sequenced, um and you also have your blood work done through us.

• 23:05Chris Williamson?

  I wish to splash myself in the face with that glass of water.

• 23:08Speaker 04

  We can use both of those um pieces of information to give you an even more detailed look at not only what's going on inside your body right now, but what you are um, what you are predisposed to because of um what your DNA is saying.

• 23:22Chris Williamson?

  Particular genetic conditions and stuff like that. Uh, David was discussing his uh Ashkenazi Jew genes that he's got. And he was just lambasting them, saying how it means that he's got a predisposition to be fat and he's.

• 23:39Speaker 05

  Can't do dairy.

• 23:39Chris Williamson?

  It's he's got, he's shy with dairy, he's not very good with, I think, like wheat or something else as well. And um, yeah, I mean, all of the things, we are the sum of our nature and our nurture, right? And if the nurture and the environment is able to be represented in the blood work that you guys do now and that the nature is able to be represented in your genes, you do have a pretty comprehensive picture of exactly what's going on inside of you. I wonder, moving forward, whether or not things like this and and more consistent testing, because you guys suggest to test every three months, right? Is that about right?

• 24:17Speaker 05

  Sort of like the gold standard, yeah.

• 24:19Chris Williamson?

  And that's to see, do something, get recommendations, make changes, reassess.

• 24:23Speaker 05

  Right, and so we understand that that's not, that's not going to work for everyone with their budget or with, you know, getting into a lab, whatnot. So we're looking to add in more inputs that are sort of lower friction points. So adding in Fitbit, adding in Garmin, adding in this physiological data so that you can say, okay, my goal is to boost sleep quality. I've improved my magnesium or I've improved my vitamin D and I see that.

• 24:52Speaker 05

  I see a related improvement in sleep quality.

• 24:55Chris Williamson?

  Yes.

• 24:55Speaker 05

  Or my sleep quality is poor. Let's look at diet about, you know, around how can we, how can we manipulate diet, knowing that we already know about you, to make a recommendation around improving sleep quality. So the, the goal is, and then, you know, adding things like microbiome or things, things as the science continues to support it. What are all the inputs that we can just mash into the, you know, inside tracker approach of taking science, stealing it into recommendations and, and helping you improve? That's, that's our process. And the more we can load into the, into the top here, the, the better and more personalized the recommendations and, and improvements can be.

• 25:39Chris Williamson?

  So you guys are working, I'm going to guess, majority of the on the front end, dealing with athletes.

• 25:43Speaker 05

  Yep.

• 25:44Chris Williamson?

  Speaking to people and so on and so forth. What are the people that are dealing with the backend, the science and the data? Like, are they just like fully plugged into the matrix?

• 25:55Speaker 05

  Yeah, Karen and I joked that we're the only two people in the entire company without advanced credentials.

• 26:01Chris Williamson?

  You've got a couple of letters after your name and then everyone else has got like

• 26:05Speaker 04

  I only have a couple of letters in front of my name. That's M, R and S.

• 26:12Speaker 04

  No, they are very smart, but very personable and awesome people.

• 26:17Speaker 05

  It's a good mix of like super cool nerds.

• 26:21Chris Williamson?

  Yeah. Do they, is everyone in one form or another into fitness or sort of?

• 26:25Speaker 05

  For the most part, yeah.

• 26:26Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 26:28Speaker 05

  So like our, our company outings, we went boxing and bowling.

• 26:33Chris Williamson?

  You went boxing?

• 26:33Speaker 05

  Boxing.

• 26:34Chris Williamson?

  Was it nice to?

• 26:35Speaker 04

  It was so intense. It was not, honestly, for a company outing, it was 10 million times harder than I thought it was going to be.

• 26:41Speaker 05

  I'm like still sore from it.

• 26:43Chris Williamson?

  Was it?

• 26:44Speaker 05

  It was in January.

• 26:45Chris Williamson?

  Was it nice to be able to unleash your, your fury on that receptionist that never, that never like passes on your messages?

• 26:52Speaker 04

  They were like heavy bags that we had to.

• 26:54Speaker 05

  Those bar.

• 26:55Chris Williamson?

  Wasn't each other, right?

• 26:56Speaker 04

  But I kept checking over to make sure our CEO wasn't like flat lined on the ground. He made it through it.

• 27:01Chris Williamson?

  Oh, wow. That is funny. Yeah, so do you guys understand or can you explain a little bit about the process of what happens when science comes in because it sounds like from the consultation I had earlier and from speaking to you guys here, until you're absolutely dead on that the science is going to back up something, you're not actually going to bother using it.

• 27:26Speaker 05

  Um.

• 27:26Chris Williamson?

  Um, so what's the process of, uh, I guess, absorbing the science and then delivering it to the system? Is it the, the super, the supernodes?

• 27:37Speaker 05

  Yeah, so we have a team of thousands of interns that are typing away on the computer, you know, it's a dozen or so.

• 27:43Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 27:43Speaker 05

  Um, constantly researching new studies and constantly, um, looking, looking at things that are, um, the biggest priority, like for, for the endurance athletes is the iron group. How do we make the iron recommendations better? Or how do we, we just added hemoglobin A1C. How do we lump glucose with hemoglobin A1C and make recommendations? So they're either looking for new studies or they're looking for specific topics and they find something, they talk about it in their, in their science meeting. It's a.

• 28:15Chris Williamson?

  In the supernode meeting.

• 28:17Speaker 05

  And the way it works is it's, it's, uh, it's an algorithm. So it's a big if then statement. So if this, then that. So there are a whole bunch of rules in the system and the rules are written by the scientists, but it can't just be scientist one saying, hey, here's something cool, load it in.

• 28:36Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 28:37Speaker 05

  It's scientist one proposes a rule, has to be validated by a second person and then it can be added into the.

• 28:45Chris Williamson?

  So you have like an internal peer review system almost.

• 28:47Speaker 05

  Yep, of peer reviewed studies.

• 28:49Chris Williamson?

  Yes.

• 28:49Speaker 05

  Uh, so they're, they're super.

• 28:51Chris Williamson?

  The eighty twenty of the eighty twenty.

• 28:52Speaker 05

  Exactly. So we're getting the best of the best from the best. Um, and then there's an algorithm that goes into ranking the recommendations. So we have recommendations from one to five stars that are, uh, that, that system is, is based on the recency of the study, the type of the study, the number of people.

• 29:14Chris Williamson?

  The degree of certainty to the recommendation, right?

• 29:17Speaker 05

  It's like the bean thing is, is a five star recommendation. The oatmeal is a five star recommendation, but, but there.

• 29:24Chris Williamson?

  Bean thing.

• 29:24Speaker 05

  I'm gonna keep drilling this bean thing.

• 29:26Chris Williamson?

  It's fine, man.

• 29:27Speaker 05

  You need, they're like ninety nine cents.

• 29:29Chris Williamson?

  I know.

• 29:29Speaker 05

  It's cheap too.

• 29:30Chris Williamson?

  I know, you are right.

• 29:32Speaker 05

  So the bean thing is something we're very confident in.

• 29:36Chris Williamson?

  Yes, five stars.

• 29:37Speaker 05

  Yeah, whereas there are other things that, you know, supplement recommendations that that might not be as as strong or or not. It's still valid and it's still but there haven't been, you know, 10 studies on on garlic for glucose levels or something like that.

• 29:54Chris Williamson?

  Let's say that someone who's at home might be feeling like they're just a little bit out. Do you see, we discussed typical trends amongst high performing athletes. Is there anything that you think or that you see consistently that you think people should consider doing immediately, even before they consider getting their blood work done? Are there some things, someone's like, oh, my energy levels are a little bit low or my mood appears to be a little bit out or my training is a little bit out? Are there some some kind of very common issues that you tend to come up against that you could recommend for people to maybe try do this first, then try do that first?

• 30:28Speaker 04

  I mean, I would say the easiest one and probably the most important that I can think of is just sleep. A lot of people who come to us, their cortisol is way off and and it's because they're not getting enough sleep. So our biggest recommendations are just cut the screen time, shut your phone off a half hour before you actually go to sleep so that when you are sleeping, it's eight quality hours and not, you know, off and on.

• 30:56Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 30:56Speaker 04

  Not in a good room. So I would say that that's a big one that we do see a lot of and and just something easy that you can implement into your daily life.

• 31:04Chris Williamson?

  Everyone's already doing it, right? What else? Is there anything else that you see that tends to be reflected in terms of diet? Is anyone eating or eating too much of something or not eating enough of stuff?

• 31:15Speaker 05

  Yeah, so we see 82% of Americans with elevated glucose and the best.

• 31:19Chris Williamson?

  Eighty-two percent?

• 31:20Speaker 05

  Eighty-two percent. So for the majority of people, adding oatmeal into their diet is the best possible thing that they can do.

• 31:28Chris Williamson?

  Really? Elevated glucose oatmeal.

• 31:31Speaker 05

  Oatmeal. We looked at, we published a paper on the impact of algorithm-based recommendations, or the personalized nutrition model that we follow. And we were able to look at recommendations, interventions, and improvement. And so we could see that that some things worked better than others in terms of compliance. Like another one we found was that the only thing that will improve low vitamin, low enough vitamin D levels is taking a vitamin D supplement, which sounds like it makes sense, but stand outside for 20 minutes a day. Didn't do it. Didn't work.

• 32:08Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 32:09Speaker 05

  Eat more fatty fish. Didn't work. Eat more mushrooms. Didn't work. So, so yeah, back to the glucose thing. So if you do nothing else, eat more oatmeal. We looked at what are some of the best interventions across the board for men based on biomarkers. Eating nuts on a daily basis is.

• 32:32Chris Williamson?

  Any specific type of nuts?

• 32:33Speaker 05

  Whatever, whatever you'll, you know, whatever you want, really.

• 32:36Chris Williamson?

  Yep.

• 32:37Speaker 05

  Almonds, walnuts, et cetera. That improves glucose, lipids, testosterone, liver enzyme, inflammation. And most of those metrics make up our inner age score as well, with glucose having the highest weight. So if you're looking at one specific food that can address the bulk of the metrics that impact male longevity the most.

• 33:06Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 33:07Speaker 05

  Nuts.

• 33:08Chris Williamson?

  Nuts.

• 33:09Speaker 05

  Nuts.

• 33:10Chris Williamson?

  Well.

• 33:12Speaker 05

  It's nuts, right?

• 33:12Chris Williamson?

  I can't, it is nuts. I can't, I can't get around. And I don't, again, I don't know what I was expecting to see or hear about training, recovery, or training, sleep.

• 33:24Chris Williamson?

  Supplements and diet. I don't know what I was expecting, but.

• 33:27Speaker 05

  I trained harder.

• 33:28Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, I don't know. I don't know what I thought it was gonna be like. I had to go and do some like. I had to open my meditation or I was gonna have to do whatever like.

• 33:35Speaker 05

  It's in there. You'll probably see that for cortisol.

• 33:39Chris Williamson?

  Interesting. So you guys have got so much data on the backend and like you say, you're starting to publish papers now. Is there a plan longer term with what you're going to do with the data? Obviously, people have got like privacy and stuff like that, but in terms of trends and things. The amount of data that you guys are capturing must be pretty powerful.

• 33:55Speaker 05

  Yeah, we feel it's the largest database of healthy people that exists in the world and.

• 33:59Chris Williamson?

  The largest database of healthy people that exist in the world.

• 34:02Speaker 05

  Yep.

• 34:03Chris Williamson?

  Fuck.

• 34:04Speaker 05

  Yeah. So like point blank, that's pretty powerful. And then we're.

• 34:08Chris Williamson?

  Does that not put a pressure on you guys?

• 34:10Speaker 05

  It does.

• 34:10Chris Williamson?

  You're now at the tip of the spear with regards to making sure that any analysis of this is as optimal as it could be.

• 34:18Speaker 05

  Right, for sure. And it's a huge opportunity and it's why the company was created. That's Gil's dream to have this power to to impact. Millions and billions of people. He looked at me one day. We were in a meeting talking about, you know, do we go after thousands? Do we focus on millions? And Gil was like. Seven billion. That's our number.

• 34:42Chris Williamson?

  Just get everyone.

• 34:43Speaker 05

  And yeah, and and he was totally serious. Like, his mission is to help every human on the planet. And however we get there, that's how we're gonna get there.

• 34:55Speaker 05

  But yeah, I mean, you look at. In the paper we published, we have some charts that are able to look at correlations between. As this goes this way, this goes this way. This data doesn't exist anywhere else because there aren't people doing full. You know, forty three plus biomarker tests on healthy people. Some of these tests are usually run on sick people to address from a medical standpoint. But we're able to see statistically significant changes.

• 35:25Speaker 05

  And make better recommendations from it.

• 35:29Chris Williamson?

  Is that a flaw in human nature or is it a flaw in medicine at the moment? That people only seem to look at getting this sort of thing done when there's a problem?

• 35:38Speaker 05

  Yeah, definitely a flaw in medicine.

• 35:41Speaker 04

  Healthcare.

• 35:41Speaker 05

  Yeah, I mean, we got a, every, you know, once or twice or sometimes three times a year, we'll get a customer. The customer will tell us that they were charged by Quest for the blood draw. So you walk into Quest and hand them your insurance card and say, here's what I'm testing. You're paying $2,000 for our 589 plan. And so it's unattainable for most people outside of, inside the way that the medical world currently operates.

• 36:14Chris Williamson?

  Yes.

• 36:14Speaker 05

  You either can't get this done or it's outrageously expensive. One of the reasons you can't get it done is because it's not the area of expertise for a physician, so they're not going to do it. They're not going to do something, it's the, you know, we were talking about before, monitoring data and not doing with it, something with it. They're not, they're incentivized to not do that. And they're incentivized to do things that they can help you with. And they, that's not their area of expertise. They're essential in what they do, but they're, you know, go to a dietitian or use Inside Tracker or something like that, they can help you with the, with the blood work.

• 36:53Speaker 04

  Yeah, and it's really preventative healthcare instead of just reactionary healthcare.

• 36:59Speaker 04

  And that's the goal is to have everyone do it and everyone's had their, you know, blood work done at some point in their life.

• 37:05Chris Williamson?

  Yep.

• 37:05Speaker 04

  So.

• 37:07Chris Williamson?

  But not everyone's got these recommendations, right?

• 37:09Speaker 05

  Right. So for the majority of people, the, the data you get for, from your physical is enough to use for our $49 DIY plan and get guidance on glucose and lipids. And so it'll tell you, it'll probably tell you to eat oatmeal and, and beans and nuts. But for the most part, you can't just hear that and, and know.

• 37:30Chris Williamson?

  You want something in front of you that says, this is for me.

• 37:32Speaker 05

  It's like a personal invitation. I have a friend who, she's an elite marathoner. And the way she described it was like, I know that I need to sleep more and I know that I need to eat more and I know that I need to take an iron supplement. But it took seeing it in front of me to see, this is Julia's needs to do list.

• 37:51Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 37:52Speaker 05

  Versus like, yeah. Most people should probably do these things.

• 37:56Chris Williamson?

  Perfect example of that is I've had a back injury for around about a year now and only recently did I get an MRI. I've been doing my rehab and I'd been kind of moving in and out of different types of rehab movements. But it was only until I saw that I've got two bulging discs, L5S1, and I've got a Schmolz node, as it's called, for me to actually go, right, stop thinking that you can do a lighter version of what you've been doing, quadruple down on your rehab and let's get this fixed.

• 38:24Speaker 05

  Right.

• 38:24Chris Williamson?

  There's something about seeing it in front of your face. So we've talked about nuts, oatmeal, sleep. Is there anything else? Is there anything else that people tends to be lacking in which manifests itself in the data that you guys see?

• 38:40Speaker 04

  I would say iron in women, Jonathan already touched on that, the ferridin's.

• 38:44Chris Williamson?

  Iron in women?

• 38:45Speaker 04

  Iron?

• 38:46Chris Williamson?

  Iron in women, though, not in men as much.

• 38:48Speaker 04

  We see it more in women, especially ferridin, which is a marker of your iron storage in your body, so.

• 38:57Chris Williamson?

  Length of fatigue and.

• 38:58Speaker 04

  Yeah, we see that tends to be low. And just like Jonathan said, if that happens, then, you know, even getting out of bed can be a large task because you just have no energy, so obviously training's out of the question. So if you had a goal in mind of running a race or doing a CrossFit competition, you know, something like a low ferridin level can really step in your way.

• 39:21Chris Williamson?

  What's the fix for that?

• 39:23Speaker 05

  Depends how low.

• 39:24Speaker 04

  Yeah, you can fix it through food or supplementation, so.

• 39:27Chris Williamson?

  If you're super low, you need to bring in the big guns of a supplement.

• 39:31Speaker 05

  Yep.

• 39:31Chris Williamson?

  You guys give out an inner age figure. What's that mean? What is inner age?

• 39:36Speaker 04

  So inner age is the age that your body is on the inside versus what the number says on your driver's license. So it's your.

• 39:44Speaker 05

  I like that.

• 39:45Speaker 04

  You've never heard that one before?

• 39:46Speaker 05

  That's good.

• 39:47Speaker 04

  Dump it down.

• 39:50Speaker 04

  And we use five markers that we've determined are the most important from the markers that we test in terms of longevity. So glucose, ALT, HSCR, P, vitamin D, and testosterone.

• 40:06Chris Williamson?

  Okay.

• 40:06Speaker 04

  And all those.

• 40:07Chris Williamson?

  Those combined.

• 40:08Speaker 04

  Those combined will give you your inner age.

• 40:11Chris Williamson?

  I'm thirty one and mine says that I'm thirty six. That is because I have quite high glucose. I'm right in thinking that that is one of the most heavily weighted.

• 40:21Speaker 05

  It is, yeah.

• 40:22Chris Williamson?

  Why is that the case?

• 40:23Speaker 05

  Um, research on longevity, uh, correlating, uh, glucose, consistently optimized glucose to better longevity.

• 40:32Chris Williamson?

  Okay. And eighty six percent of Americans have high glucose.

• 40:37Speaker 05

  Eighty two percent, yeah.

• 40:38Chris Williamson?

  Eighty two percent.

• 40:39Speaker 05

  Yep.

• 40:40Chris Williamson?

  What's that G two? Like, why is that? Why is that the case? Is it high carb diet?

• 40:44Speaker 05

  I mean, how long have you, how long have you been in the States?

• 40:47Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, yeah, a couple of weeks. There's a lot of, um, a lot of big servings, a lot of sugary food.

• 40:52Speaker 05

  Yep.

• 40:54Chris Williamson?

  Sedentary lifestyle. I don't know. I, it, it does, it does surprise me because although since I've been here, there are some large servings and some large people as well. Um, although that's the case, there's more wellness out here than there is in the UK as well.

• 41:15Speaker 05

  But you've been in LA and Boston.

• 41:17Chris Williamson?

  Yes.

• 41:17Speaker 05

  So, so.

• 41:18Chris Williamson?

  Is that representative?

• 41:20Speaker 05

  LA and Boston are, LA in particular is a very, uh, wellness conscious place. Um, I was just in Nashville, Tennessee for the weekend. Very not a wellness, uh, conscious place. So you get places like that, that, um, you know, it's a sign of, of status to, to go out to eat all the time. And, and we have research that shows the more you go out to eat, the more likely you are to have elevated glucose.

• 41:51Chris Williamson?

  Is that really true?

• 41:52Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 41:52Chris Williamson?

  Is that one of the things that you guys asked? I can't remember whether or not it was.

• 41:55Speaker 05

  Okay. How often do you eat out or, or get takeout?

• 41:58Chris Williamson?

  Okay.

• 41:58Speaker 05

  And, and so, um.

• 42:02Speaker 05

  I mean, that's true in other places in the country, too. Like, if you eat out a lot, maybe that's a good thing.

• 42:07Chris Williamson?

  You've got less control of your diet usually when you eat out, right?

• 42:11Speaker 05

  For sure, yeah. And even if you order, if you're intense or good, like, I'm gonna get salmon with, you know, whatever. You're getting sugar in the mashed potatoes, and you're getting sugar in the sauce, and you're getting sauce, and all these different things that you have no control over. So, some of our recommendations are around, you know, we've done blogs where we talk about, like, you're at a restaurant, and you can ask for your food however the hell you want it. It doesn't have to be what's on the menu. But, yeah, so, getting back to your question of why do we think it's so elevated sedentary lifestyle? People are sitting from nine to five every day,

• 42:56Speaker 05

  and they're exhausted by the time they go home, so they're not going to the gym. And they sleep, or they don't sleep, and they do it all over again the next day. And it's like a status symbol to be busy. And being busy is glamorized. And so if you're busy all the time, you can't do the things that you need to do for yourself. And so you're putting other things in the priority, and your health is the cost.

• 43:25Chris Williamson?

  The comment about being busy, being seen as a sign of status, was something that I was reading by the guys that make The Six Minute Diary. They did a free PDF called The Golden Evening Routine.

• 43:36Speaker 05

  Yep.

• 43:36Chris Williamson?

  And they talk exactly about that. That modern society praises busyness. It's a rite of passage and a badge of honor.

• 43:48Speaker 05

  Right.

• 43:48Chris Williamson?

  That people who are getting after it, like Gary Vaynerchuk, and all of the listeners at home will know my opinions about Gary Vaynerchuk. I mean, he's going to die a lot earlier than the rest of us because you can't talk about hustle and grind and sleep three hours a night, Gary, like, because it's biology.

• 44:05Speaker 05

  Right.

• 44:06Chris Williamson?

  Because your body will break down.

• 44:08Speaker 05

  There are anomalies to that.

• 44:11Chris Williamson?

  It's the same, it's the genetic code. If that's the same likelihood as you being hit by lightning.

• 44:17Speaker 05

  Right.

• 44:17Chris Williamson?

  Apparently to get that genetic mutation.

• 44:20Speaker 05

  Right, and those people are all at the top. Because they have stuff going for them in their genetics and because we have an athlete that that just raced or just broken fastest known time running south to north of Israel.

• 44:37Chris Williamson?

  Okay.

• 44:37Speaker 05

  So it's a thousand kilometers.

• 44:38Chris Williamson?

  Thousand kilometers.

• 44:39Speaker 05

  It took him ten plus days and he slept three hours a night.

• 44:43Chris Williamson?

  Just got through it?

• 44:45Speaker 05

  Yeah, running sixty six miles a day or a hundred, a little over a hundred K a day. And and he he does blood work through inside tracker and he just ran ten marathons in ten days, like two, three weeks ago. And and his data is great and he doesn't sleep a lot and and I'm sure he would be better if he slept more.

• 45:09Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 45:09Speaker 05

  But he is the exception to the rule that like you must get six hours of sleep or you must get seven hours of sleep. He literally does everything and and he's able to to do his job. He's able to be with his family. He's able to do sponsor obligations, things like that. But but he's the like point oh oh oh oh one percent and there's almost nobody like him. But the people that are like him are all at the top and and they're all role models of people who are like, oh, I'm gonna be just like this person. And and you can aspire to do some things that are similar, but like if it's not in your if it's not in your nature to like not need that, which it is for the majority of

• 45:51Speaker 05

  us, you're gonna burn out and you're gonna get injured and you're not gonna enjoy what you're doing.

• 45:58Chris Williamson?

  I'm gonna fall behind. Did a podcast recently with James Clear, the guy that wrote Atomic Habits, and he was talking about how our genetics, they do not predetermine, but they do predispose.

• 46:12Speaker 05

  Right.

• 46:13Chris Williamson?

  And I think that that as a little guiding influence.

• 46:20Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 46:20Chris Williamson?

  Towards what people do in their lives.

• 46:22Speaker 05

  Right.

• 46:22Chris Williamson?

  Like if you struggle to put on muscle, trying to become a powerlifter is probably a bad idea.

• 46:25Speaker 05

  You might enjoy it, but you're not gonna get to the top.

• 46:28Chris Williamson?

  You're not gonna become the best in the field. Yeah, exactly. And I suppose that, you know, your guy, like if if he was, I don't know.

• 46:39Chris Williamson?

  Say a long distance truck driver is probably wasted in that industry like where you're on a take a timer and you've got to be off the clock for ten hours or eight hours or whatever it might be like this guy doesn't need it like he's the guy that can go so he's found himself an industry within which you can find that so moving forward what do you see the future of this industry looking like have you guys got any new markers in the pipeline that you want to use and then on top of that what do you think um in terms of technology and stuff like that is there anything that the the super nerds have told you about that's kind of coming up

• 47:15Speaker 04

  well we're looking um not marker wise but we're looking to add more mindfulness recommendations to the platform as well um so for something like cortisol to implement um yoga if you told us that you weren't doing that kind of um exercise now so things like that we're looking to add

• 47:34Chris Williamson?

  how would that manifest in would that be cortisol again realistically in the blood work

• 47:40Speaker 05

  yeah so so it's not only looking at specific lifestyle interventions that we hadn't either considered we hadn't done a lot of research on but also more inputs as we were talking about before and so physiological monitoring uh microbiome things like that that uh are more new compared to uh blood analysis and then getting like talk about super nerd we can go super nerd on this imagine you get a notification from your phone that knows your blood work it knows your calendar it knows the weather um and it knows let's say your your vitamin D is low or

• 48:21Speaker 05

  your your cortisol is high and you have back to back to back to back meetings but hey you've got this block of fifteen minutes at two o'clock and it's sunny out go take a walk you get a ping Hey, it's sunny out and you have this little stretch of time that's available. Take advantage of it. So it's knowing.

• 48:43Chris Williamson?

  That would be so sick, wouldn't it?

• 48:45Speaker 05

  Yeah, super nerdy stuff, but people would dig that. Some people would dig that. So it's stuff like that. Our CEO jokes, I don't know if it's a joke though, about spitting on your iPhone and getting data and getting immediate recommendations. That's probably a long way away, but it's not outside the realm of possibility.

• 49:09Chris Williamson?

  I think there's been talk, I've been hearing on some podcasts recently about a future technology to do with like nanotech, where you can have these receptors that would just be placed in your blood. And they'll just be flowing around you all the time, giving like, I think it's a James Bond. In fact, I'm certain it's James Bond, where they like shoot something in his arm and then they're like, his heart rate's elevated and it's because he's having sex with someone.

• 49:34Speaker 05

  Yeah, I mean, like, there's something for everyone, but.

• 49:39Speaker 05

  No, meaning like you can go, you can go as advanced as that. Or you can peel back a few less layers and look at it through your iPhone or something like that.

• 49:54Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, I do get that. I think talking about the sort of the cultures and stuff like that, something that I've definitely noticed is a difference between the UK and the US is that busyness culture. Like, the US actually seems to be a little bit more relaxed. I think that the UK, and I'll be interested to hear if the listeners agree, I think that the UK does, I don't know what they're busy doing, because they're not getting, they're not getting after it, there's not this kind of entrepreneurship thing below the lines that there appears to be in the US.

• 50:29Speaker 05

  So you've spent time in two very busy places.

• 50:32Chris Williamson?

  Yes.

• 50:32Speaker 05

  So you're getting like the.

• 50:34Chris Williamson?

  Unrepresentative sample.

• 50:35Speaker 05

  Yeah, but it's it's true everywhere and and there are so many books and podcasts about like more, more, more, more, more. You must do more and and that leads to burnout. Now we're getting books and podcasts going the other way that says, you know, you need to, you know, you have your rest day for for training. You need a rest day for for life.

• 50:59Chris Williamson?

  In mind, yeah.

• 51:00Speaker 05

  Exactly. And and so we're getting to a point where like I have I have an Instagram account with a couple of friends called Rest Day Brags and and one of them is an Olympian and the other is a professional trail runner and obstacle course racer. So like

• 51:16Chris Williamson?

  Yep.

• 51:17Speaker 05

  they have some pedigree behind success and they both run themselves into the ground by trying to do everything. The one that went to the Olympics, you know, ten years ago now is still just now getting out of that hole that she put herself in.

• 51:31Chris Williamson?

  Really?

• 51:31Speaker 05

  And so we're we're glamorizing, like, sat on my couch for the afternoon, like, the only intervals I did today were couch to fridge and like, stuff like that, that that we're getting messages from people that are like, oh, my God, I thought I was the only person that that, you know, struggles with with taking time off or sleeping in or like, we now have people bragging like, got eight hours of sleep.

• 51:57Chris Williamson?

  That's such a good rhetoric to be pushing. I've never I've never heard of anyone who does do that, but you are totally right. It's just not, it's not glamorized. It's associated with.

• 52:08Speaker 05

  Being lazy.

• 52:09Chris Williamson?

  Laziness and complacency and not making the most of minutes.

• 52:14Speaker 05

  Right.

• 52:14Chris Williamson?

  But if it's part of the plan, I'm sure that Ben Bergeron, even with his making the most of minutes strategy, I'm sure that some of those minutes are rest.

• 52:23Speaker 05

  I mean, every Friday.

• 52:24Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 52:24Speaker 05

  Is is a rest day for his athletes, right? Through CompTran?

• 52:28Speaker 04

  I don't know if if everyone has the same rest day, but there's definitely both in.

• 52:32Chris Williamson?

  A lot of rest days in there. Perfect example, despite the fact that United Airlines broke my uh my phone holder, which is why I've got some slightly odd camera angles today. Um, I noticed that as you go through their uh in-flight entertainment, they have a Headspace app. Huh. And then uh that helps you fall asleep on planes. Yeah.

• 52:53Speaker 04

  Oh, that's cool.

• 52:54Chris Williamson?

  I mean, Andy Puddicombe is getting absolutely everywhere. He's partnered with Nike, he's partnered with United Airlines. Um, but you know, the fact that meditation has been adopted by

• 53:07Chris Williamson?

  a airplane. Yeah. Literally available on the street. You know, you think like, what am I gonna do? I'll watch another Harry Potter movie, Avengers or something. Like, no, no, no, I'll meditate based on this. And it's curated for being on a plane. And that was like.

• 53:20Speaker 04

  Did you do it?

• 53:21Chris Williamson?

  Uh, no, no.

• 53:22Speaker 04

  You watched Harry Potter.

• 53:23Chris Williamson?

  No, it's too, it's not cool. It's not cool. It's gotta be glamorized for you. It's gotta be, I know exactly. No one would have known because I'm not, I wasn't on Instagram at the time taking a selfie of it. Um, so I think that

• 53:38Chris Williamson?

  as we continue to move forward and as technology like boot bands and like inside tracker and stuff continue to move forward, that hopefully more people will be able to understand what's going on inside of their bodies. But one of the things that I do worry about is that paralysis by analysis thing that you were talking about. That people become so bogged down in the data that they don't really get anywhere. Um, is the, is the onus on the people to fix that? Or is it on the platform to make sure that it's giving them the right, the right output? Because obviously if people are just drowning in data, like what do they do with it?

• 54:13Speaker 04

  I think the thing that we try to do is um, out of all of these things that we can recommend for you, we try to have you choose, you know, between three and seven of these recommendations that we give you that you can actually use, you know, every day or every week. So if you narrow those recommendations down to only three or only five, then you're not gonna be bogged down with having to change so many things about your life. You can continue to live, continue to train, to recover. And if you make these important changes, then it will move the needle for you. So for us, I think that's, you know, an important part of of what we do.

• 54:49Chris Williamson?

  Incremental changes, right? What do you guys see? So to to begin to round up, what do you see as um? An impact on your athlete's performance. Have you got any stats like that? Obviously, I'm gonna guess they won't be putting their 5K times in versus all of their other things, but do you see any um?

• 55:10Speaker 05

  So, it's it's hard to get that on the individual athletes. We've looked at some of the data around pro teams we've worked with, related to injuries. So, games lost. Look at the San Jose Sharks, they've they've had a lot of success with that. Improving travel, improving around travel. So, again, San Jose Sharks had the year that we did this analysis, they had the best away record in the league. Meaning they were able to manage travel the best, based on the data that they were collecting around

• 55:52Speaker 05

  when do we change practices and and how do we improve, you know? How do I make this skate optional and this skate required? And get the players to buy in that they should sleep in on this day and they should they should show up on this day. So, so we looked at some data around that. I'm not sure we have much else at the organizational level or at the team level.

• 56:20Chris Williamson?

  Injury is gonna be such a big deal, right? Injuries are just a manifestation that something has been pushed so far, and that something might have just been formed.

• 56:27Speaker 05

  Right.

• 56:28Chris Williamson?

  It's not always gonna manifest, like someone's poor deadlift posture isn't necessarily gonna show up in the blood work.

• 56:33Speaker 05

  Exactly. We had another, we had an NBA team that the dietitian.

• 56:43Speaker 05

  Squat shaming. So, we had an NBA dietitian that that came to us and said, I think I think paleo is a problem. And I think it's a problem for our athletes because they're tired and injured all the time. And and

• 57:00Chris Williamson?

  Some things are problem.

• 57:01Speaker 05

  And she was like, she was like, and I'm the dietitian and they're not listening to to my nutrition advice. So I need this blood work done.

• 57:09Chris Williamson?

  Who's doing the paleo? The athletes just think that they know better than the dietitian.

• 57:13Speaker 05

  Yes. So the the culture at in some of these organizations is they listen to the strength coach or they listen to the head trainer. They listen to some some guy that's been at in the organization or in the sport for twenty thirty years. Whereas the dietitians are credentialed. They went to school for nutrition and they that's their job. So she was able to get the blood work done and came back and she was like, I'm right. Check that out.

• 57:41Chris Williamson?

  Yep.

• 57:42Speaker 05

  Now let's make some changes and injuries went down and fatigue went, you know, improved.

• 57:48Speaker 05

  It's not to say InsideTracker improved their injuries and fatigue, but the platform that we allowed them to use, that we that we were able to have them use, allowed them to show their athletes, look, this is a problem. Your lipids are out of whack, your cortisol's through the roof, calories, blah, blah, blah, vitamin D.

• 58:10Speaker 05

  Here's hard data showing you what to do and and it's saying exactly what I'm saying. Now I'm going to help you implement it. And she did and it worked.

• 58:20Chris Williamson?

  You're totally right about that. It it comes back to the example that I said earlier on about the MRI.

• 58:25Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 58:25Chris Williamson?

  Like, until I saw it in front of my eyes and because everyone wants to take the path of least resistance, right? Everyone wants to believe, oh, well, no, no, that's not for me. No, no, that's everyone else. That's everyone else's lipids. That's everyone else's oatmeal consumption.

• 58:41Speaker 05

  I'm the eighteen percent.

• 58:42Chris Williamson?

  Yes, absolutely. And when you think, when you think like that, you actually end up doing yourself a disservice because you believe that you're not culpable to the trends of the market and you're like, no, no, no, no.

• 58:54Speaker 05

  You are the trend.

• 58:56Chris Williamson?

  By its very fucking nature, it's more likely that you are than you are.

• 58:59Speaker 05

  It's like when people complain about traffic, right? Like you are traffic.

• 59:04Speaker 04

  I always complain about.

• 59:06Speaker 05

  Why are you gonna complain about something?

• 59:08Speaker 04

  Oh, yeah, I'm like going ape shit in my car.

• 59:10Speaker 05

  I love traffic.

• 59:11Chris Williamson?

  All of these other people also in their cars.

• 59:14Speaker 04

  These people are going to work today?

• 59:16Speaker 05

  I think it's hilarious. It's like, so anyway, it's the same thing. It's like, oh, that's not my problem. I'm just out for a Monday morning drive at eight thirty in the morning.

• 59:26Chris Williamson?

  Along with everybody else.

• 59:26Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 59:27Chris Williamson?

  I totally, I do totally get it. Um.

• 59:31Chris Williamson?

  I think if it's good enough for David Sinclair, it's good enough for me. And that was, that was like the first thing that I saw um when I was talking to him today, how much he is uh how much he's reliant on having something that comes out of the backend.

• 59:45Speaker 05

  Right.

• 59:46Chris Williamson?

  Because making the changes, it would be the same as, it would be the same as doing everything that a CrossFitter does, or a strength athlete does, or a runner does, without actually doing strength, CrossFit, or running.

• 59:57Speaker 05

  Right, yeah.

• 59:58Chris Williamson?

  You'd be like, right, well, I'm gonna make sure I get enough sleep, and I'm gonna make sure I get enough this, I'm gonna make sure I get enough that, but I'm not actually going to do the thing that tests all of the inputs. It's the output, right? And the output for most people is training, but also should be.

• 1:00:11Speaker 05

  Right.

• 1:00:12Chris Williamson?

  Some form of blood work. Um, I think, you know, it doesn't surprise me that this is coming out of America and not from the UK. I know that you guys offer a service in the UK and that people in the UK that are listening can get their work done. Link will be in the show notes below as always, but the USA generally to me leads, it kind of leads the UK with this. We're lagging behind. Like, people are still eating like mince pies and stuff.

• 1:00:38Speaker 05

  Beanless foods.

• 1:00:39Chris Williamson?

  Beanless foods, they're eating beanless foods. It's like, but honestly, like, like, you know, the wedges of oranges as a like halftime for rugby just is, is still a thing. Like, so.

• 1:00:50Speaker 05

  Those are my best memories of third grade.

• 1:00:53Chris Williamson?

  Wedges of orange.

• 1:00:54Speaker 05

  Soccer, yeah.

• 1:00:55Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, fair enough. Well, I mean, we've, we've adopted you at least. But um, yeah, I genuinely do hope that this is going to make people think with more care about what they're doing, because in the same way as the mechanism that makes uh mobility work for a lot of people. Effective foam rolling and passive stretching and massage therapy. Professor Quinn Hennock, Doctor of Physical Therapy for Juggernaut Training Systems. On episode thirteen, I wanna say, said that the mechanism that those things are working on isn't what people think. But if it makes them think about their recovery, then it is enough.

• 1:01:35Chris Williamson?

  And that's kind of almost what we're talking about here, that maybe even the blood. So for me, potentially with all of the markers, I might not have known that these things were gonna be out of whack. But it was probably pretty likely that I was gonna have low free testosterone because I'm overtraining. Probably like fairly common that the oatmeal and the beans, et cetera, et cetera. But because I wasn't thinking about it, it wasn't something that needed to. You don't know, you don't know. There we go. Well, guys, thank you very much for your time. I really appreciate you coming on. Thank you for having me out here. I'm I'm looking forward to seeing what happens if I do change up these my beans, if I change up my oatmeal. And I hope that the listeners at home as well will have started to realize how important it is to consider these sort of things.

• 1:02:19Chris Williamson?

  In the same way as David Sinclair was talking about the fact that people believe that aging is just this process that we're along for the ride with. I think people believe that a

• 1:02:30Chris Williamson?

  degree of ignorance of what is happening inside of their body is also like, oh, well, I'm just, I don't know. I can't see what's in my blood. I can't see what the foods, how foods affect me and things like that. And I think that hopefully as companies like yourselves and individuals like David begin to make people think with more granularity and like a higher resolution about exactly what they're doing with their health. It's not just enough to be like, oh, well, like I'm making sure that I'm taking the stairs to work. Right. It's like, okay, like, yeah, fair enough. Like, that might have been a thing thirty years ago. Right. When, or fifty years ago, when doctors were still smoking, like. They still are.

• 1:03:14Chris Williamson?

  Well, they're not smoking at the delivery table. True. I saw an advert not long ago that said it was for camel cigarettes. And the statistic was more doctors smoke camels than any. The cigarette and it was a doctor at like at surgery like smoking. Perfect. Wow. Yeah, terrifying. Um, but yeah, guys, if you are interested in getting your blood work done, a link will be in the show notes below to the Inside Tracker website. I will also probably be discussing um exactly what we went through on one of the catch-up episodes coming up soon as well. But for now, thank you very much for your time. It's been awesome. Thanks, Chris.

• 1:03:48Speaker 05

  Thank you.

• 1:04:00Speaker 01

  Mr. President, my company informed me of the explosion on our rig on October 2nd. Causing massive water displacement and triggering a tsunami. They all heap the blame on me.

• 1:04:09Speaker 02

  Tom Cruise is. Digger got us into this mess and Digger's gonna dig us out. From the director of Birdman and The Revenant.

• 1:04:17Speaker 03

  What would happen if I stopped doing it? You're stalled, you're freezing there, that's what.

• 1:04:21Speaker 02

  With great power comes great deniability.

• 1:04:24Speaker 03

  I'm not the first then.

• 1:04:25Speaker 02

  Digger. See the trailer online. Only in theaters October 2nd. Rated R. Under 17.90 without parent.