The Health Wake-Up Call Every Founder Needs: Andrew Coca's Story

Andrew Coca is still in the middle of his story. A pro-human technologist building Animal Base, running Modern.tech, and rebuilding his own health, all at once. In this episode Andrew walks Jon through where he came from, what almost cost him, where he is now, and what it actually looks like to do all three of those at the same time.

His story is personal, but it points at something structural. From there, Andrew and Jon turn to research showing only about 14% of packaged foods qualify as "healthy" under the FDA's own updated standard, and what that says about the system most people are trying to be good inside.

What we cover:

→ What "high performance" actually looked like behind the scenes
→ The symptoms Andrew dismissed for years and what they were really telling him
→ The moment that forced the change
→ Where Andrew is now, and what's still hard about doing this alongside the companies
→ What it looks like to build, train, and pursue health at the same time
→ What only 14% of packaged food clearing the FDA's own bar actually means
→ What Andrew would say to another founder running the same playbook

Mentioned in this episode:
"Only 14% of food qualifies as healthy by the FDA's own standard," published paper (Current Developments in Nutrition): https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2475299125030070

Follow Built Human at @builthuman for the most thought-provoking moments from the show and the small reminders worth carrying into your week.

Your hosts: Andrew Coca is the founder of Animal Base and President of Modern.tech, a pro-human technologist building technology that keeps people's health intact, at @andrew__coca. Jon Marchetti is the Director of Animal Base, documenting his own journey at @jon__marchetti.

For more on Animal Base, the curated marketplace built around what you eat, how you live, and how you rest, visit animalbase.com.

Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:00

Welcome to Built Human. I'm Andrew. This is John. The world keeps moving faster and faster, but somehow our health keeps getting left behind. We're here working that out in real time, questioning everything and amplifying what actually works. Let's get into it. We've got a really exciting show today. Obviously, I'm biased because I get to be interviewed a little bit, give a little more on the background, but you know, a couple more things as well in store here, a couple of news articles, and of course we'll we'll talk about what we're actively working on. So what's up first, John? First news article here.

SPEAKER_00 0:32

Yeah, you introduced this as a Built Human podcast, but really this is the Andrew Coca podcast, at least today. Um but no, we'll cover a little bit of news to start as we've had uh you know some exciting events or a lot a lot to process over the last uh last few weeks since we last talked. Um so here's an interesting update. There is a uh study that came out of WSU uh recently, right, that um that examined 3,000 food groups uh to understand whether they met the FDA's new definition of healthy. Now, the FDA recently updated their definition of healthy uh to mandate a minimum amount from a suggested food group. Um that would be fruits, vegetables, protein foods, um, et cetera, while staying within a specific per serving limit of added ingredients, so added sugars, added fats, et cetera. And so what happened here was uh Washington State University took those guidelines and analyzed 3,000 foods against the FDA's uh guidelines. And these were these were foods the FDA are already deemed healthy, to see what percent of those foods actually wound up being healthy. And the results were remarkable, with only about 14% meeting the new updated standards of healthy, meeting 86% of what we've been told uh foods food of healthy foods are no longer healthy. Um what I don't know. You you read this, Andrew. What uh what was your take on this in your your first glance?

SPEAKER_01 2:08

I mean, I I get a little bit of sticker shock with this one, but I honestly because it's so striking the fact that and a self-audit by your own standard, 86% are failing, but at the same time didn't didn't we know this. And so it's actually nice to see this and to see something take an evaluation of a of a basic standard of health and apply it retroactively. Um but I think it speaks to a lot of what we touch on where marketing and standards have been bankrupt for so long, right? Because if not the FDA, what is supposed to tell you what is a healthy standard? Yet if 86% are failing, how do you trust anything the FDA is going to tell you is healthy? If by its own measurements, its own new standards, it's it's taking that and saying, well, actually, almost everything that passes is unhealthy. So we pass things that are unhealthy, therefore we might pass things that are air quote safe, but if they're not healthy, how safe are they? So there's just friction in the whole thing. And I think it's it speaks to what we've known but struggled to quantify. And I so I like to see it quantified like this. I really enjoy that it's catching up and kind of demonstrating what we've all been saying for so long.

SPEAKER_00 3:26

Yeah. I think probably one of the most interesting parts of this article is understanding the breakdown on why these foods actually don't meet the limits, right? Because when we talk about containing a minimum amount of recommended food group, that's not really that hard to do, right? And I feel like um a lot of kids' brands uh within this food space often do that with their berry-flavored something or other, right? They they pretend that it's fruit forward or uh made up of of a majority of fruits while still containing a higher amount of additives, like yeah, like we discussed with with fats uh and and sodium, et cetera. And so I'll I'll direct to this in screen share this this part of the article we have here. But um here's the most interesting excerpt. High sodium and saturated fats, often added during the food processing and cooking, were the most common disqualifiers. So the new rule makes an exception for some nutrient-dense foods, but the most common qualifiers being added fats, right? And so when we think about um a slice of deli meat, a handful of crackers, a can of soup, all of these actually exceed the FDA, uh, the new FDA guidelines as far as added fats and added sodiums, right? All of these are these are preservatives, artificial preservatives meant to um to preserve shelf life, make make things last longer. And of course, obviously, if you have chicken in a can as part of chicken noodle soup, well, you really shouldn't trust that chicken for long, right? What makes it last on a shelf for years versus in your fridge for, you know, about a week, maybe maximum, right? And I think that that's where this is really telling is reading those exact words.

SPEAKER_01 5:07

Exactly. And I line it up to some of the other studies we've seen come through. Like one of them was saying a quarter or even a third of calories in a US diet were coming from soybean oil or the like, right? Like a lot of the additive excess fats from some of these processed uh seed oils and other bad things that are added onto the food that it then ceases being real food and becoming processed fake food. That's what we're eating. And and to your point, that's what led this study to flag all of these things, is because it's hard to find a staple product that isn't processed in this manner these days. It really is only the real foods that lack this type of processing. So I think it speaks to why we're so why why real food and natural living are our benchmarks, right? Real food, if it's real food and it hasn't been processed in this way, it's almost certainly not going to fall under this uh 86%. And I think that's the core, is like, well, you may not know what is and isn't going to fall there. You may not know what is and isn't healthy when you have to be really complicated, but you can simple you can simplify this, boil it down to real food. And if you stuck to real food and that's what was on your plate, you can pretty much trust that it's not going to fall under these these things that we're catching. So it's complicated, but it's also fairly simple when you when you actually stick to the values that we hold.

SPEAKER_00 6:45

And that's one of the biggest things we preach here at Animal Base, right? And I think when we were working through our brand vision, what we really wanted to hold on to and grip as a as a business, but also a community is this idea of real food, real ingredients, natural living, right? And if you follow that dialect of real food and real ingredients, really it's not that complicated when you talk about diet and shouldn't be that complex. Now, where I think this is finally starting to take a turn is breaking down the idea of healthy, because we've been told these things are healthy for so long because there are healthy portions of it, right? If you take something that is largely derived of fruits but still has over 10% of the daily value of added fats and other chemicals in it, again, that just that negates the health uh aspect of that food, right? And so that's that's kind of what it looks like the FDA is trying to establish, which I can really appreciate. I think part of that goes into this next portion of the article too, right? Where we talk about the sodium and fat that the FDA is flagging. It's not actually the ones in your kitchen, not the raw materials, the right foods, the real foods that you're talking about. When we talk about the sodium, that is disqualifying 80% of American foods, for instance. It is sodium nitrate and deli meats, sodium phosphate and processed cheese and chicken products, right? And modium sodium sodium glutamate. Can't even pronounce it, right? As a flavor enhancer.

SPEAKER_01 8:09

Another good rule of thumb, no?

SPEAKER_00 8:11

Rule of thumb, you can't pronounce it, it shouldn't go in your body. It's that simple. Um, and it goes on too to say here the saturated fat allows the same pattern that the FDA is capping. Isn't the fat and grass-fed steak, it's for fine palm oil, hydrogenated vegetable fats, and rendered animal fat from commodity operations. Processed at high heat is very important, right? Process at high heat, stripped of nutritional cofactors, and added back to the to the products for texture and shelf stability and quantities that bear no relationship to what that food would naturally contain. So all of a sudden, you're taking a natural chicken product, injecting it with all of these fats to increase uh shelf life, and it is no longer just a pure chicken. It is an injected modified pure chicken no matter how it was raised.

SPEAKER_01 8:59

Terrible.

SPEAKER_00 9:03

I think an important part that the study also goes into is varying costs, too, right? So when here's another excerpt directly from WSU Insiders, but by beyond availability, cost is a key factor in food choices. The researchers also compared the price of qualifying and non-qualifying items and found that qualifying items had a lower median cost per serving, but higher cost per calorie. It's cheaper to meet daily energy needs with calorie-rich nutrient, nutrient-poor foods. So this begs a really interesting question, right? Like I think a lot of the nutritional discourse on social media, the fitness discourse, has been calories in versus calories out, right? And now we're starting to take a different turn that, well, not all calories count the same. It's kind of when I read this excerpt, it has the same idea of a bag of chips, right? High calorie, but when you thought think about cost per serving, the service servings of the calories, it it's it's often a much higher serving, right? Yeah. Um and you can eat that whole bag of chips, and all of a sudden you're maxing out your calories and you're eating a ton of servings, and you're still feeling hungry because you're not eating real food. So when we talk about nutritional value, the cost per actual um, what did it say here? Serving, serving of foods being much lower, that's actually very important. Because I think one of my reactions here is a lot of people are gonna think, oh, I'm gonna be hungrier because I'm not consuming it nearly as many calories. But when you talk about this idea of empty calories, which is a whole nother discussion, like that is where we really begin to kind of decipher the science a little bit and what satiates you as a human and what equals a balanced diet or should equal a real diet, right?

SPEAKER_01 10:56

Yeah, I think the it's a really easy to open a cow can of worms with calories in out because it's uh it's one of those things where if you say that inside of the health community and even the animal-based community, there's so many different arguments happening, and and almost everyone is right when approaching it from their frame of reference and in a different angle, because it's always yes, but and then there's always the technically there's the law of thermodynamics, and then you get into hey, but what about how thermodynamics happens inside of the body in a way you're not considering? But then we haven't measured that incredibly, and then there's also that bioindividuality where people will process things differently than others, and so then it comes back to hey, the way you can trust definitely what you're doing is by the calorie number and by optimizing what the type of calorie is. So I think no matter how these debates play out, it's always like, well, hey, maybe you ought to try to optimize both depending on what your goals are. But then I think the the best thing I've seen is people kind of tend to fall away from needing to measure calories as long as they have really good inputs, if they don't really have a goal of either gaining weight or losing weight. But then the second you do have one of those goals, it's like optimize both. So I it's a can of worms when you start to talk about calories, but I think on a basic level related to this article, to your point, yeah, it's it's really telling when you introduce the caloric argument to this, because when you are adding calories and track, it's especially like you said, when it comes to the cost per calorie as well. I think that kind of puts the nail in the coffin in this thing, because I think we can all agree that it's the if you really wanted to track cost per calorie, if the way you're gonna get that down is by toxic fake foods, I think it's common sense that you don't just want to get the calories right when this is the method of doing so. I think that's common sense. It should be common sense that this is not how you do that.

SPEAKER_00 13:06

Yep. Exactly. This is gonna be interesting. I think it's the right move uh for the FDA to make, especially to save face a little bit. It's again interesting that it took us this long. Thankful that we're getting somewhere and being able to better identify what criteria goes into nutritious foods, real foods, right? Um and so what I don't want this to become is another organic label that you can beat around the bush, or another health label that you can beat around the bush with, right? And they are developing a new label specifically for meeting this new standard of healthy. So I'm sure we're gonna have this conversation again when that's all all finalized and saying, well, where did they miss, right? Where did um creative big brands, big CPG companies find a loophole? Um, and so something about this as well that's that's super interesting is this mandate won't kick in until sometime in 2028. I believe it's February or March of 2028. Uh, and until then, it's completely voluntary for CPG brands. And so what does that mean? Well, you know, by the time anyone notices this article or notices the findings and really dives into understanding that it's not saturated fats that are all bad, not all saturated fats are bad. We know that, right? But it's the additives that go into these types of foods that change the complexity of the food and the actual build of the food. Like by the time we realize this, and by the time it actually does become a mandate, it's too late, right? So I I'm hopeful that you know, at least just talking about this in the discourse that we we do uh raises some awareness for what you're actually putting in your body. There's always a good, better, best model, but even when you're in that that that better, there's there's still a lot of trade-offs that need to be made um consciously. Consciously.

SPEAKER_01 15:02

Yeah, well said. Well said. I think probably time to move on from this one because I could probably talk more, especially when you open the calorie in and out can of orbs. I mean, we'll touch on that a little bit in the talking about some of what I've learned through my journey, but it's just such a debate starter, right? Because I you could go to any health and wellness community, ours included, and you could ask someone how they feel about calories, and without fail, you you can start a debate with almost anyone. And yeah, probably one of the more passionate debates that everyone will have an opinion on. Uh, it's it's a surefire way to do so, I think.

SPEAKER_00 15:50

So Yep, yep. You're absolutely right. So uh we'll pivot here. I'm biting my own tongue uh to stop talking about cat calories itself as well. Um but I know this this is episode two, Andrew, and we're we're a brand new brand, we're a brand new podcast, and um people want to know who you are, why built human, why this platform animal-based, right? Like, so um there's a lot to learn about you. We'll we'll talk about the entrepreneurial side, we'll get into the the knee injury a little bit, the recovery and how you change your frame of reference. But let's just start simple, right? Before we get into all of it, like what did life actually look like for you four, five, six years ago? Um, we're not talking about like necessarily health-wise, but is specifically in terms of building companies, the stresses that come with it. You've talked about yourself as a CEO and entrepreneur on previous on the previous show. Um so talk to me a little bit about that. What did a life look like for you back in five, six years ago?

SPEAKER_01 16:55

Yeah, you know, I've had times where there's been more intense work periods and maybe less intense work periods, but one of the overarching things over the last decade or so was that there was always an accountability where the buck stopped with me as an entrepreneur. And so I I would say the stress of entrepreneurship has probably been the theme of 10 years where there's people counting on you, right? Like even from day one, I hired my first real estate agent back in the day. I had a real estate sales team, hired my first agent before I w could legally go and buy my first drink at a bar. And so from an early age, having this responsibility of not just my own mouth uh and family's mouths to feed, but taking care of a community and a collective. And, you know, that to give you a little bit of background in the audience, a little bit of background of that evolution, I'll I'll just say we we started selling real estate. I had a background in entrepreneurship. I went to Babson College, which is, of course, as you know, as you were there with me, the number one entrepreneurship school in the world. And so we had this entrepreneurial spirit and drive. And tech, we it's largely technology, right? You want to build technology, but there's also other ways to innovate non-technically, uh, maybe consumer brands and and elsewhere. You don't typically think sales in real estate or sales in a traditional intrapreneurship method. So I think what I got when I went and started that real estate group was a lot of really professional people working with a lot of purpose and a lot of structure, a lot more structure than we had at the entrepreneurship school with the entrepreneurs. And so the way that evolved was we grew our team to about 30 real estate agents in our group. And uh learning the real estate industry, we kept going, oh my God, we need to solve a bigger problem, not just sell real estate. And so the entrepreneur side kicked in and we started a company called Showingly, which was a technology product to innovate on home access. And ultimately, to speed that up a little bit, the story, I suppose, we uh had a friend of ours take over Showingly because we were struggling to break into the market, uh, selling to organizations called MLSs. We just didn't know what we didn't know at the time. And we were able to pull our team out, our tech team, and start a company called Modern.tech, which is a software services firm. And so if you asked me five years ago what we were doing, that was right around the time we were running Showingly, which was our first foray into technology entrepreneurship, raising venture capital money, raising friends and family money. And this was right before we kind of pulled our tech guys out and started the software contracting. So actually, starting at the five or six year point was probably the hardest time I would say of my whole life. Because though we've had ups and downs, and though we've we've had problems face us, uh, that five-year ago, six year ago mark was was definitely the worst. I mean, at one point, for example, we were working hundred-hour work weeks nonstop without fail, because uh, as the leadership, at least, and especially the devs, the devs were building product, but we were also facing that stress of not just sales but fundraising. And at one point, it got so bad, I think, that we we owed vendors money, like we were late on paying our bills, but then we also had to convince new investors to give us money that would immediately pay those bills off, but then also convince them why they should invest in us for forward looking for the future. And so the duality of that pressure, living with that day-to-day and having some of those times where it was almost like gun to your head, you have to survive, you have to figure it out, you have to find a way, there is no excuse. I I think also being uh early 20s trying to figure that out was especially challenging, right? Because through normal life, you have your parents to look to, you have uh in school your your teachers or your your advisors, but in entrepreneurship, especially as a founder, as a CEO, there's no one else to go to, right? You you are where the buck stops. And so living in those times with those stressful hours, with those just crazy, you have to do it or risk everyone's livelihood moments. And you have to find a way, even if it's not a traditional way. You can't just look it up on the internet for how you're going to figure out a problem. You have to get creative at times, right? That's the kind of thing that I think day in and day out of that. Was was just really incredibly challenging to handle. So, you know, I know we'll talk about what that does to somebody, but for sure at the time I knew nothing about health, right? Like my concept of health was go to the gym. And so at the time you get stressful, I I consider myself a stress eater. I have a sweet tooth. And so, you know, what better to do at midnight with your co-founders than, you know, drink a beer or order uh chicken schwarma to the office and and have uh uh we used to do this thing, for example, where it would be like 10 p.m. and we would order from a local Mediterranean place. We'd get like cartons of pita bread to the office because there was this loophole on, I think it was DoorDash, where you could get like a 50 cent pita bread order, but it would come with like five five pitas. So we'd get like 40 bucks of pita bread, and it would come in these giant cartons, and we would get Chick-fil-A sauce. Like we'd buy it online and just have Chick-fil-A sauce, and then we would like dip the pita bread in Chick-fil-A sauce for like another three hours at all night long while we worked. Like these were the kind of things we did to enjoy ourselves a little bit, right? And so, you know, couple that with some of the stresses, and it it definitely does a number on you over years and years.

SPEAKER_00 23:22

So safe to say you're a former seed oil fan, is is what it sounds like.

SPEAKER_01 23:27

For sure. I mean, it like I was probably eating a third of my diet on seed oils, like the average American diet, you know what I mean? It was for sure.

SPEAKER_00 23:39

So I think you talk about the stressors a lot, right? And in building a company comes with mental stress, comes with physical stress. You talk about how your diet was poor, your idea of being healthy was exercising. And when we think about the three main pillars of of life over here at Animal Base and in within built the built human ecosystem, we think the ability to eat your diet, right? Ability to live, which is all the in-between what you wash yourself with, what you cook with, et cetera, just what you need to survive. And three is your ability to rest and re-energize and take time off and not work a hundred hours a week, right? And I think you had there's a competitive spirit, and knowing you very well, there's a competitive spirit where a hundred hours a week is thriving, but that is also just not humanly true for um at a persistent pace. So working through all of this, at what point did your body start pushing back? It was a lot of slow accumulation. At what point did you know, okay, like I need to focus on this a little bit more?

SPEAKER_01 24:48

Well, I think that it's easy to build momentum in a positive and in a negative sense. So I think the times I did the worst was when things could spiral. Like, for example, there were times where I had injuries, right? Where if I stopped going to the gym, but then I didn't change the way I ate, well, all of a sudden, right, you're not exercising, you are eating poorly, and you are stressed out. And so things can quickly start to get out of hand. And I would say that before any of my injuries and and before w times where maybe I wouldn't work out, well, you can kind of mask one or two problems with one or two positives, right? I think it's a lot harder when they start to downward spiral. And so, you know, you mentioned that I had an injury, and probably about five years ago it was now, maybe six years ago, I had a knee injury where my knee buckled, it like a rug slid out and my knee buckled, and I tore my ACL fully. I tore my PCL and MCL and meniscus. I had all four. I did the major uh knee blowout, and I had to have surgery and then another surgery, and you know, that whole process for years. I probably gained 55 pounds, I think it was. I gained a lot of weight, and at the time I knew nothing about health. Like I said, I I my concept of health was working out, and so with that injury, it was like, well, can't really work out. I guess I could bench press, right? But like couldn't do a ton, couldn't play hockey, couldn't do any of the things that I really enjoyed doing. So during that time, right, you take someone like me who kind of stress eats, has a sweet tooth, that type of thing, doesn't know anything about health, so eating a ton of seed oils, um, working crazy hours, right? So not getting sunlight, not getting my feet on the earth, not not doing anything good for myself, right? And I think that's when that downward spiral is is really when it started to hit me.

SPEAKER_00 26:56

That I remember that very clearly. And as as your friend going through that, because it was a process of conjunction between the program and also business pressures all at the same time, right? Um how would you say the process was finding I don't want to say hope's the wrong, wrong word, but being enlightened a little bit by uh more than just exercise, right? I know you you you talk about this frequently in our private conversations about how you found Ben Patrick and he changed your perspective on um, you know, medicine recovery tactics, uh physical fitness, and also um diet to an extent, just being within that community. Talk about your recovery and and what you found in in Ben Patrick's practices.

SPEAKER_01 27:46

Yeah, you know, that that was really an eye-opener because at the time, right, I my concept of how to recover was okay, my surgeon said this, sent me to a physical therapist who said that, and I started doing all the things that people were telling me, and it just wasn't working. And when they also start to give you these broad condemnations, I sometimes, granted, you it is what it is, but when they tell me, hey, you're very likely going to have arthritis, you're very likely not going to play hockey anywhere near where you were because of the way it's not really progressing. Here's what we can do to make it a little bit better. When they start to say these like life-changing, altering statements that are gonna define how you're going to live the rest of your life, that's when there's just there's this part of me that just went, I know I can be different. I know that whatever they're telling me is my sentence is something that I can get around. And now, not all the time is that gonna be the case, I suppose, because we are all, after all, built human. That being said, though, the part of me that was thinking that was thinking not just that I'm special. It was thinking that there's something that's gotta be out there, that's gotta work, that they don't know about because they have this narrower frame of reference from what they've been taught, and they're not God, they don't know everything, right? So, so is there a way I can find more information that might help me break through this barrier? And so that thought, what I what I've often found in my journey as an entrepreneur as well, is is when you start to think like that, is usually when you start to have a breakthrough. Because it's like that uh quote where problems are only as great as the frame of reference from which they were created. I for I'm probably butchering an Einstein quote or something, but you know, it's a level of thinking you have where the problems exist. And if you can think differently and reframe and and find a blank slate to build context and problem solving from, you might be able to solve things with the with without the constraints that created the framing of the problem. And so taking it back to health, right? The second I started to think like that is I think maybe within three days I found Ben Patrick and his concept of knees over toes, which turned the model on its head because even my physical therapists were saying, you know, don't put your knees over your toes, that's too much stress on the knees, that's gonna be bad for you. Start with the hips, start building muscle around the area. But Ben Patrick's thing was build from the ground up, strengthen from the feet upwards, the toes upwards, right? The do exercises that build from the ground up and prioritize getting your knees over your toes, also prioritize a handful of other things like getting blood flow into the middle of the knee, things that my physical therapist and surgeon didn't even consider, right? And I actually um this is a whole nother topic, but I had recently torn my my labrum, uh shoulder labrum and went back to my surgeon. He asked me about the knees, and I said, Hey, do you know about knees over toes guy? And he's like, Who? And I tried to describe some of the exercises I was doing. He's like, Yeah, I've never heard anything like that. And I was like, Okay, I'm I'm gonna leave it alone. But you know, the the fact that some of these guys don't know these things is is mind-blowing to me. And so I found that. And here's the crazy part, right? Is it wasn't just theory. I was desperate. I was desperate to do something, and so I was experimenting and trying, and I tried this, and I swear to you, within two days of doing reverse out and e-pain protocol from him, I could do my day-to-day life without pain. And I'm talking like going up and down stairs used to have uh pain if I pushed it, maybe if I tried two steps at a time, that kind of thing, right? Little things throughout the day, no more pain. So I then I thought, okay, what if I got back on the ice? Because anytime I tried to skate, I'd be in pain for three or four days after skating. Went back, played, and I think the game was maybe a week after I started doing the protocol. And so after seven days, I got back on the ice, no pain skating, woke up the next morning thinking, here it comes again, but no, no pain the next day, and and from that point on, no pain ever again. Ever again to this day, no pain. And granted, I do incorporate these things into my routine on a day-to-day basis, but it completely changed my life, that that type of protocol. And so, you know, to your point, when did you start going down some of this rabbit hole and thinking that type of way about other things? That was definitely the moment that caused me to think that way, right? And that's when I started looking at other things, looking at, hey, Ben Patrick, he probably thinks this way. Who does Ben Patrick follow and hang out with? Um, that type of thing. He was on Joe Rogan, he did content with Paul Saladino. I think I actually may have even found Paul Saladino because I was following Ben Patrick. Um, might be making that up, but it's that type of thing, right? I found I found content in people who thought in a way that I thought. And I'm not just going to blankly accept everything, obviously, he or people who he was with are saying, but it was a good starting point, right? Is it a good way to kind of orient in the right direction and and start to go down that path.

SPEAKER_00 33:37

Totally makes sense. And when you think of Ben's program, right, and and everything you learned, do you treat, do you want to you mentioned you you still practice it today? Is it more of a uh a now proactive stance rather than reactive? I think when you found him, it was reactive, right? And how's that program working for you still to this day in in practice? How do you implement it to make sure that you are strengthening from the ground up?

SPEAKER_01 34:01

Yeah, that's a great question. I I get lazy sometimes, and it's not like I do it religiously every day, but it's second nature to the point where if I'm in a setting where I'm getting ready for a warm-up or working out, I by habit, I I do it. And I think in the back of my head, I I don't think I'm scared that my knee will be hurt again if I don't do it, but I think I just know that that's the way life is. You have to be consistent, you have to have good routines and good habits. And whether it's that old knee injury or a new one, you definitely want to be proactive. And so it's funny because you shouldn't have to wait for the injury to to make a change in your life, right? And I think a lot of people go, Oh, I don't need to do X, Y, and Z because I'm I'm doing fine. I I I feel fine. I don't I don't care about that right now. But then if they were to get injured, they would care a lot, right? And so where's the balance? Because it's not so black and white. And I think the balance is that there are good things you can do in your routines that are almost like prehab or prevention that make you more athletic, more fit. And so I always recommend taking some of Ben Patrick's stuff for for anybody. And so one of the things I do is if I'm gonna go and run on a treadmill or go for a run, go do any leg type of workout, if I'm at the gym, I just kind of by habit get on the treadmill and do a backwards walk. So I definitely think it's good to take an approach of building it in proactively. And yeah, every day when I go to the gym to do this, I definitely do build it in in that manner as best I can. Now, a whole nother question is do you go to the gym every day? So, of course, if if I'm only doing it when I'm going to the gym and then I'm not consistent with the gym, well then we have a whole host of other problems. So I don't think it's good to necessarily fixate on any one thing so deeply, but definitely it's become second nature to to make sure that I'm building it in.

SPEAKER_00 36:08

Awesome. Makes total sense. Building in the right practices too. I think when when I consider even just like going for a run or or or a gym, I completely forego stretching and that that I pay for it, right? Um, so having the right routine is actually very important and people overpass that a lot. Um, okay, so let's uh let's let's pivot a little bit here. So we've talked about how Ben Patrick's programs were great for your physical health. Now, when did you start pulling that thread into other areas of life, most more specifically nutrition, right? That's another passionate area of yours.

SPEAKER_01 36:48

Yeah, it's a great question. I mean, I tinkered around a little bit, I would say, with originally, that's why I say the calorie in and out is a can of worms, is because I remember I first started doing this low calorie diet where I was trying to lose some of the weight I had gained. And though I actually did end up losing like 15 pounds from doing it, which which is great and I think very helpful, it's like really at the expense of prioritizing nothing anywhere else, like just the calories, is that really the answer? Like it just it felt wrong. And I'm not gonna say that I felt so much better or worse doing it or not doing it, but I think the part of me that goes, what is the truth? Like where where does the truth lie? Just instinctually I knew that sacrificing everything but calories and and holding only the calories as the the number to hit was was just not the truth of of the matter. But I I think that was also and and we'll touch on this, I'm sure later, but also I don't want to say calories were bad to implement. Because especially for somebody wanting to lose weight, well, it's like, yeah, yeah, you you you should definitely go to a caloric deficit if you want to lose weight. It's it's just common sense at some point. I think the people who argue for the the calorie in and out being the holy grail, I like they're obviously not wrong about that. And I think they're so up in arms because I I I want to say they think that that's being questioned when when you question calorie model at all. So but I think just the idea that you should only worry about that and nothing else is is is kind of where I started and then gradually moved away from the more that I started to learn about things like like the seed oils, for example, and the more that I followed some of the content from people doing elimination diets like carnivore or just an animal-based diet generally, uh reading some of those types of books, like the books by Sean Baker and Paul Saladino, and learning about that was also really revealing because it played into a lot of what I had done in past years, right? In the maybe five or ten year ago version of myself when I was dieting, I tried, for example, the paleo diet, I've tried the keto diet to lose weight. And I think the bigger thing, like I'll just end with this, is those were diets. They were a means to an end, right? The calorie in and out thing I tried, it was a means to an end. None of them were intellectual frameworks, ways of life, ways of evaluating reality around you and creating meaning and making decisions. That's what was different about doing an animal-based diet, really a diet focused on real food. That's it wasn't just diet, right? It was also the natural living component. It was this way of life that was based on what we believe to be truth and doing what's best for your body, for others. And that's why when you're gonna do what's best for your body, it's not about a means to an end. It's about a way of living day to day, day in and day out. That's why this was different. You know, even though I do want to continue to lose weight, and I am, it's not a means to an end. That's probably why I haven't lost the weight necessarily as fast as I could have if I were doing simply a strict calorie deficit diet and simply prioritizing nothing else. Because I'm not necessarily trying to eat nothing every day. I'm trying to build good routines and good foundations and good fundamentals, and and I feel really great right now doing that, but I think that's the subtle paradigm shift, right? It's not a means to an end. And I think that's that's the biggest thing that I that changed the way I approached everything I was doing with health.

SPEAKER_00 40:55

And how much do you prioritize the sourcing, right, of of what you put in your body? Because you've talked about all of these diets that have either helped you or hurt you, right, in in some way or another. But I think I have a perspective on this, especially when we talk about inflammatory ingredients, right? Like how much did this shape the actual ingredients and sourcing of the products that you're deciding to consume?

SPEAKER_01 41:21

Yeah, it for a long time became kind of the number one priority for me was to understand the quality and the source of where I was getting everything I had as staples, whether it was meat or chicken or eggs or dairy, right? Because if you're getting it from some of these commercial production lines, and if you're getting, for example, the traditional eggs from the grocery store, like you start to see some of how these practices are. It's not just worse for the animal. I think what a lot of people don't realize is it's also worse for the human eating the animal. And so whether you are very selfish in that regard and you don't really care about the animal even, well, it's still not good for you. You know, if if you want what's best for the animal and you want to be kind of in tune with the natural living, natural law where, you know, you give thanks to the animal kind of thing, well, well, great. It's best for them and it's best for you. That the way that we uh the welfare that we treat our livestock uh with when we're going to eat animal products, it matters, right? And so when you look at, for example, grass-fed beef versus grain fed, I think there's also a lot of debate on, hey, does it matter that much? Should I now not eat grass-fed beef? And I think that's where you're talking earlier about, you know, good, better, best type of model, right? We I think need to have this balance of not being fear-mongering and and not being too rigid, because part of the art of this on the journey is to not make this false expectation that you already have to be at the end of the journey when you start the journey. And I think that it puts a lot of people off when all of these expectations get set so heavily, so early, it doesn't let the journey unfold very well for people. And I think that everyone needs to have that journey unfold a little bit more naturally. There is a starting point, and that starting point is never the end. So that's why I think you know, we can't be so rigid and so black and white. And sometimes people will call me rigid and black and white because in my personal life I'll make this decision like, oh my god, I'm not gonna buy that. It just bothers me. I don't want to buy it. But there's a difference between do I want to make a choice given the information in front of me? And do I need to tell people that they have to make that same choice? Right. Because the context of their circumstances may be far different than mine. And I I think that's where when people get preachy in black and white, I think they don't realize that you're not supposed to be. Supposed to be scared of like non-grass-fed beef. You're not, you know, you're not supposed to be scared of like pasteurized milk if you're one of those people who just likes to drink the raw milk. Now, obviously, everyone's like, oh, no benefit, blah, blah, blah, whatever. But the point being, they're doing the same thing in reverse now. Like, stop making everyone so scared. Like you're not supposed to be afraid. You're supposed to be unfolding this journey of like testing for yourself and trying to get better every single day. And I think if we support each other in that, there's a lot less of this, oh, well, you have to do it this way. And you know, if anything, when people are telling you you have to do something a certain way, like they're not telling you, right? They're telling themselves because they need they need to believe that to justify the actions they're taking. So I don't know. That I'll get off my soapbox on this one, but definitely uh very strongly opinionated there.

SPEAKER_00 44:59

No, it's it's a great point. And honestly, I'm gonna put you right back on that soapbox, right? So, because there's a version of this this story and in your story specifically, and and all this content that um you want to share with people where you just you keep it to yourself, right? You you recover from the injury, you go back to hockey again, and you move on, and you just you keep operating as the CEO of many different businesses under Evolve, under Modern.tech, under Source RE, right? The the businesses that you've you've brought to the the table already. So why share this story? Why start building this new business? Like what made you feel like other people needed to know exactly what you're saying right now?

SPEAKER_01 45:41

Yeah, it's a it's a good question because part of the reservation I had was I had kind of become very reclusive and not wanted to be in front of a camera and be in the public eye at all. I think an earlier version of myself, what uh my 20-year-old version of myself had this dream to be an influencer. I had all these like mentors that were YouTube stars, and I I built like, for example, this training program for my real estate team, and I built this self-development program, and I was putting these videos out, and I really wanted to live that lifestyle. But that was not ultimately for others deep down. I think that was for me, and there was some ego involved in that, right? And so when I ultimately let that go and I didn't need that anymore, it actually was a very like daunting and frustrating prospect to think it might be best to go back in front of the camera. And part of what led me there was when I went to the animal-based gathering in Costa Rica last year, and I was in this community of people who, you know, not just eating animal-based and carnivore and all that, but it was really just people who, like I said, didn't see health and diet as a means to an end. They saw it as it was a value system. It was a pursuit of truth and natural law, natural living, and shared human connection, right? And we were in the sun all day long, we were we were being active, we were just enjoying community, and we were obviously also eating in a very healthy way. I like they, for example, at the property took all the LED lights and replaced them with like circadian lighting, red lights, so that even if you were hanging out when the sun went down, you know, you weren't you weren't staying wide awake. You could pass out right when you went back to your room and get up and do things the next day. Uh a lot of really cool stuff there. And I just kept thinking to myself, this human experience, uh, this uh this what we were doing uh is so much the antithesis of what I do on a day-to-day with AI and technology and building things. And it just kind of dawned on me that where I believe we should exist as a business is not just cutting edge tech. It's this marriage of like the two do the duality, right? There's the cutting edge tech, and then there's that deep human experience. And and I didn't want to leave the humanity behind. And so I just thought to myself, uh, you know, our model, we have a software development company, we can build whatever we want for ourselves, not just for clients. We can start any business we want. We have a couple of businesses in the real estate technology space. And I just thought the next business I want to start is going to use technology to make this uh shared humanity, this journey uh more accessible to people. Uh and and I want to build something that I would use, that as I went through this journey, uh I'm struggling with A, B, and C, right? Well, if I had a solution that helped me do X, Y, and Z, well, maybe I would have struggled less. And so I just thought to myself, this space is growing, which is good from a business perspective. I believe there's truth to this movement, which is good from a longevity perspective, and really just kind of a filling your cup as a person in an entrepreneur perspective. And so I thought, let's build one home base for this movement, right? That was animal-based. That's the the marketplace and uh knowledge base and one place for all the thought leaders. And why don't we just get involved? Because uh we should be pushing this forward. So I so it let me kind of clarify what we're doing with all of our businesses in a better sense, right? It's like on one edge, it's it's AI technology, it's being at the cutting edge of innovation. And at the other sense, it's like prioritize humanity and health and vitality and try to make that uh more accessible to people. So I don't know if Animal Base is the only startup we'll ever make to that end, right? But it kind of clarified the the purpose of the duality of I felt where our company was going. And so when I realized that we were going to start a brand like that, it was like, well, the best way to do that type of brand is to go back in front of the camera and to kind of get over wanting to be out of the public eye. And for a few months and planning, right? It was like, hey, are you really willing to do this? You're not the most fit person leading a health and wellness brand, right? You're not necessarily at the end of your journey. You don't look like Paul Saladino, you don't look like half of these guys that have the washboard abs, and and you're not even tan. Why are you talking about getting sunlight, right? So it's like when when I was gonna do this, it was like, you know what, man, 99% of the people watching these videos are not either. And they're probably looking at the mountain they have to climb to get there. And it's just daunting. And if I have to hold myself to that standard before I can even talk about it, well, then no one's gonna talk about it. No one's gonna join the community, no one's gonna help each other to get there if they think that it's only for the people at the end of the journey. I I think it's just such a mistake to think that way. And so when I kind of let go of some of those limiting beliefs, and I just kind of knew that the people who had some of these self-limiting beliefs were going to start commenting and hating on me for doing that. But like, remember, people are gonna tell you things for themselves. They're not telling you for you. And so I think when I let all that go and I realized this was gonna be the best move, I was genuinely excited once again to get back in front of the camera. And I'm not a bad speaker. I speak at real estate conferences for our tech businesses, right? So I'm I'm not terrible at this, but it's like it's very exposing, right? It's yeah, you have to be comfortable with people seeing you and maybe not seeing you at your best, and maybe you're gonna say weird things, or maybe you're gonna look funny. Um maybe you're gonna hate the way you hear yourself talking, but you just gotta get over it. And so that was that was a nice six months of prep for me to just uh start doing this again, to be honest.

SPEAKER_00 52:11

Yeah, totally. And so you you've described yourself as a tech founder, obviously. You you've built quite a few businesses in the tech space, some still around, some sold off and and moved on from. Um, as a tech founder, how do building a health-based business and but having your story start within the health space that with your own experimentation? How has this journey, building Animalbase.com, uh, shifted the way that you think about the health space? And I want you to especially think about here, too, how there's a lot of people that come up from the health side of things with the uh education as as trainers, dietitians, and MDs and the like that come into the space and grapple or or or really struggle with the idea of technology as a solution. So, how is building this business changed your idea of the the health landscape and and possibly change it for the better?

SPEAKER_01 53:09

Well, a lot of what people do when they're health and wellness founders or influencers is they'll use the tech systems available to them. You know, like you could use Shopify out of the box to build a website, and you could use maybe some of these new trainer apps where you can have your own app or you can have your own program or course or things like this. But uh in our experience building tech with our company modern.tech, we can build custom web applications, mobile applications, databases, APIs, infrastructure, AI, right? And uh so I just thought like, what could we do that is unique to what we do on a day-to-day with our tech team? How can we build something from scratch that isn't just leveraging another platform out of the box to give us another advantage in in when we're gonna enter the health space, right? Use our strengths. And if health and following wasn't our strength and tech was our strength, what could we technically do? And so that's why we did a custom implementation of a few things and we did a hybrid as well using some things out of the box. And in the end, we were able to take a marketplace where we can sell all these other brands in the marketplace in a way that would have been really hard to do for anyone who wasn't building a custom solution. And I think that's what's nice. It gives us a leg up on anyone else who uh uh is doing the same thing because they would have had to hire devs. Devs are not their expertise, managing devs and building tech is not the easiest thing in the world. And so uh I think using our strength there was really nice. Um that was a you know, really crazy process to go through too, because there's this there's a balance of what actually is good for you as you're going through your journey, and then what is good for a business that you want to build, you want to make money, you want to grow. And so there's a few things in Animalbase.com that I think are not really money makers, but that I think are really valuable that that I would use day to day that I hope people will find valuable. Like when we, for example, made a knowledge base and put over a hundred scientific research papers in there. Well, hey, whenever I would talk to my friends and family and they would go, There's no science, or they would they'd be like, the science is settled, and it says blah, you know, it's like, well, no, no, it's not. And here's a hundred research papers that say otherwise, right? I I think that kind of thing would have been so valuable for me to have, and that's why I wanted to build it. But you know, it's not like we're selling it. It's not like it's gonna make us money, right? I think another one is the thought leader directory, right? It's like not selling it, not gonna make us money, but wow, wouldn't it have been nice if I could filter and find people that could have helped me on my journey, right? Like the Ben Patricks of the world. So I think that kind of thing is is the balance we're striking there. But I I think by doing some of the things that don't make you money, that's how you preserve the heart of the site and and and the mission itself, right? Is yeah, if everything was only to make money, I think people get a little fatigued. Um, and and so while the money will be a reflection of how much value you're adding, you also cannot only make it about the money when you're trying to build something that is meant to help people. You have to have that balance. And I think we're doing our best, and I think so far we're refining our footing, right? So, but it's it's been a process and we're so early on, but it's I've enjoyed it a lot. It's not like most things we do in the tech space. I'll I'll give you that for sure. It's it's way different.

SPEAKER_00 57:07

Yeah, and the the story reminds me a lot of um the dating app hinge, their old maybe old slogan, maybe current slogan. I I don't know. I've been off the dating scene for a while, but they had this slogan that was designed to be deleted, right? So it's almost counterintuitive in and of the fact that um you're building an application that you want users to be on, and you need users, you need daily active users spending money in order to make money, right? But um the ultimate mission and the heart of the mission of Hinge is to make real matches and real connections. So designed to be deleted so that you can help and support and enforce. And I think um what I've wished witnessed both, you know, across from you and along your your side in this journey is Animal Base takes a very similar approach where it's designed to help and support and inspire real action so that you don't spend thousands of hours a year following fats, right? And falling behind. But um I'm interviewing you, I'm not answering the question. So we'll move on to the the the the final questions we were.

SPEAKER_01 58:10

I agree with you. It's well said.

SPEAKER_00 58:14

The the last thing I have for you, someone's out someone out there is is listening to this. Um, they're in a similar similar situation to you, whether it's building business businesses and struggling or just struggling with their health journey, what's real and following fads, right? And not really coming across the aha moment of putting all of the pieces together. So uh what advice would you give to that personing person listening to you today?

SPEAKER_01 58:39

Well, I think you gotta let yourself off the mat. Like if you're like me and you're gonna ebb and flow and you're gonna have days where you struggled and days where you relapse and don't do so well, you know, the only for sure thing is that tomorrow will come. And so what? You've got to do something about it, right? Like, no matter what you did yesterday, no matter what you've done today, like tomorrow will come. And so you are going to have to face that down. You are going to have to live that reality. So just forget about all of that noise and and continue to optimize without thinking, oh my god, if I had started a week ago, and oh my god, if I had hit this goal and that goal, like it's it's one of those things where like life will happen. And if you spend too much time worrying about that and not taking the right actions and focusing on your habits and your day-to-day, like you're you're gonna spend too much energy wasted. And so I think obviously that that's one piece of the puzzle. Uh, you also, of course, have to try to be living to your whatever your values are, your ideals, whatever you believe. Like we talked a little bit about how if somebody tells you something is really black and white, maybe they're telling themselves. Well, at the same time, you have to balance the two things, right? Because you cannot use that as an excuse to not take action. Like if you have people who are like, oh, I should just be flexible because it doesn't really matter that much in the end, anyways. Well, okay, if you have no goals and you don't care to make progress to anything, that may work. So you also have to look at what your goal is. If you're like me and you want to lose weight or you, hey, you want to gain weight, you want to have some outcome in your life, well, then you do have to get really serious about how to achieve that outcome, right? It's not like somebody's advice of, hey, be be really flexible, and somebody's advice of hey, be really strict is actually right or wrong. Like it depends on what you're trying to get out of it. And so a lot of people are trying to approach this in a blanket way, but it really is going to be different for the person. And it's not better or worse. It really depends on how their life is going and what why and what are their goals for their life. And that's why we have to acknowledge that and not be so black and white about it, right? So if you're like me and you need to lose some weight and you need to undo some of the damages done from living the wrong way for years and years and years, well then yeah, let's do what I'm doing. And what I'm doing is I am prioritizing high-quality meats and proteins. I am getting the grass-fed beef, and I am getting corn and soy-free eggs, and I am getting my raw dairy. You don't have to do all those things necessarily. But build a base, you know, build a foundation of high nutrient-dense foods. And then from there, optimize the other things, you know, make sure you're getting in the gym, make sure you're working out a ton. Make sure that you are trying to not overeat, even though you'll be more satiated from these foods. If you're like me, you can still eat a little bit too much of them, right? So make sure you're not doing that. But hey, if somebody was trying to gain weight, God forbid, like you might tell them something different, right? You might, you might not tell them that same thing at all. So that's why I'm saying, like, you know, to give advice is great, but also not everyone should take what I'm doing and do it. I think the advice needs to acknowledge where people are in their journey, right? And so I think that's what's lost with a lot of this black and white prescriptive advice that we see everywhere.

SPEAKER_00 1:02:41

Very well said. Very well said. That's perfect. Well, you survived the interview. Now we can go back to our knowledge base. Um, I want to pull up, I want to switch gears here to a study, actually, uh, within our knowledge base. It is uh focused on better balance tied to lower mortality risk in midlife and older age. And so I'll just read the summary here for um for our audience at home, those who can read it, those those who can, and then we can we can dive into it for five or 10 minutes before wrapping up here. Um so this study um it focuses on the balance declines after midlife, increasing the risks of falls and poor health outcomes. The study examined whether the ability to complete a 10-second one-leg stance, defined as 10 S O L S, because everything has to sound scientific in these articles, uh, it is data, after all, is associated with all-cause mortality and whether it adds prognostic value beyond standard clinical measures. A total of 1,702 adults aged 51 to 75 were followed for a median of seven years. About 20% were unable to complete the 10-second balance test. During the follow-up, mortality was significantly higher among those unable to perform the test. So about 17.5% among that, uh, those who were not able to complete the test, while those that were able to complete the test uh survived their mortality rate was at 4.6%. So survival was markedly worse in individuals failing the test. And after adjusting for age, sex, BMI, and com comorbidity comorbidities. Apologies, I'll work on that uh pronunciation. Uh inability to complete the the 10-second stand was associated with a higher risk of death. So I don't know. I think we uh we gotta cut right out and cut back in and try this. Um I know we're we're not nearly at the the the age of of this study, but it wouldn't surprise me if if you did it lower to find very similar similar results. So uh this is where we'll cut in a quick little bit. Yeah, I'll take it.

SPEAKER_01 1:04:54

John as a goalie definitely has an unfair advantage, though I have scored on him a couple dozen times on the ice, so not that much of an advantage.

SPEAKER_00 1:05:03

Alright, here we go, Andrew. This is with that back. Two thousand years later. There we go.

SPEAKER_01 1:05:31

It'd be funny if uh correlation wasn't just or if this was causation, not just correlation, too. I mean, what if by not being able to stand you like fallen died or something? I don't know. This is a weird study. It's like obviously it doesn't imply causation, so it's like but at the same time, wow, I mean, the physiology involved with this, it kind of makes sense. You would have just never thought it would have been something so random. But um It's so telling, right? Because it's it's the little things like this, too. I'm sure there's a hundred other things like this that could be correlative to longevity into mortality. But not every day we see one like this, like like a almost like a child's game or like a weird athletic. Yeah, well, I don't know, Marsh. I don't even know if you can stand on one leg right now. So we'll we'll have to see if if uh your your prognosis is not looking too good.

SPEAKER_00 1:06:33

So we're not bringing my back pain into this. That's that's been a pre that's premeditated for 11 years, all right? We're just we're just we're just treating it. We're treating it. Treating it like healthily. Uh no, but I I I think the interesting thing from this this article is is it's telling that balance is a is a well, we already knew balance was a was a proxy for uh neuromuscular health, uh coordination, and how well your body is actually functioning, um, not just how it looks in in ways, right? So I I think when we talk about the the conversation of who's healthy and who's not, it's very easy to make a blanket statement assumption when you look at someone. But when we start to think of neuromuscular health, right, and how your brain functions with your body, which in in effect is balance, right? But balance is a good good measure of that. As a goalie, I'm I'm well aware about how hard it is to do, especially um, you know, you have to focus on one object if you want to efficiently balance versus watch a moving object. I think I I like to challenge myself in like yoga sessions by looking around the room, following a butterfly. Not that I'm doing too much yoga outside these days.

SPEAKER_01 1:07:42

Um as we like to see the goalie version though, you know. Like I wonder how uh goalies that can get into a butterfly position and up within uh 0.7 seconds at like a 20% lower mortality rate, you know, that kind of thing.

SPEAKER_00 1:07:59

Or career longevity, right? I feel like there's there's gotta be some correlated tests and click career longevity, and that actually makes me think of um even just QBs in the NFL. You've some that last very long. Tom Brady, shout out. Um, and then you have others that are just like in and out of the the league because of you know, these are these are specimen athletes, but they haven't prioritized brain focus and you know, neuromuscular health. So it's telling. Studies like this are telling. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 1:08:32

Well, finally, shall we move to etc.?

SPEAKER_00 1:08:38

Let's wrap it up with etc.

SPEAKER_01 1:08:40

What do you got first this time?

SPEAKER_00 1:08:42

I got first. Um throwing me right on the spot. I get it, I get it. I interviewed you for like 40 minutes. Um no, I I think like one thing on on the off the top of my head today is I actually woke up today with it with a ton of energy. I was I was you know super styked, uh stoked. I I felt positive, I felt energetic. And I drink coffee every morning. I drink coffee today, but like a lot of mornings feel draining. Um what was interesting about today actually was you know, I was out in the sunlight pretty early. I woke up uh about an hour earlier than I usually do, um, more in line with my circadian rhythm. Um, and I was active, slightly active. Um, you mentioned it a little bit earlier, right? Like I'm going through PT for um disc issues that um I suffered over 11 years ago. They happen to be coming back right now, which is, in my opinion, just a function from working from home and not prioritize walking, right? Like any of these little things that would have uh happened if I was commuting to the office. And um so and I'm doing PT again, and and I was able to get to the uh the physical therapist's office and we did our exercises and then I walked home. It was only a 15-minute walk home. Actually wasn't that sunny uh out, but just like being outside, being off my phone, just walking, taking in the air, seeing the sunlight, like it was actually very, very positive. And I do wear an aura, right? Like, so I I know my my sleep score. My sleep score was better yesterday than it was today. I think my sleep score yesterday was a 94. While today was like at 76, something like that. Um, and the the reason it's 76 is the latency, how long it took me to fall asleep, but I still felt a lot better today than I felt yesterday. And mind you, is crying waking up, but it was the routine that actually made a lot of that feel better, at least that's what I'm crediting it with. And um, as you know, I just came back from a little while in Arizona where he spent over a week. And what was great about Arizona is I was purely on that circadian rhythm. Like I was uh waking up in eastern time zone. So it was it was while working Pacific Pacific Coast hours, it was a lot easier to just wake up in the morning. It was a lot eager easier to wake up with the sun. I wasn't in a in a New England apartment, right? Um, and I got out in the sun relatively frequently. Like I'd take some meetings outside, I would walk around outside and just soak up the sun and and be more active. And my my mood and productivity was so much higher when I incorporated that into my daily life. So now coming back here uh to New England and trying to find those practices that um you know really energize me is super important. I'm glad I could find that today. I'm glad I could feel that today. Um, just something that going forward I'm gonna have to keep reporting on in these et cetera segments is is making sure I'm doing the right thing, hold myself accountable. But um something something worth noting today.

SPEAKER_01 1:11:40

Yeah, it's so good to hear, man. I mean, especially what you're going through with some of the rehab, it's like just forcing yourself almost to have to do that with some appointment, like yeah, hey, tomorrow, like I'll have to call you and tell you, make sure you go get outside, walk around a little bit, and I mean it's just so telling how you're right. I mean, starting the day off can can change the trajectory of the whole day, change the trajectory of the whole week. Um it's that type of day in, day out improvement and progress and focus that I think is lost in a lot of people, and like there's only one thing you can do, which is do it right right now. Right. And it's an upward spiral from there. So man, love hearing that. And mine uh my etcetera is not so life-altering and important. Um I've all I've been focused on this uh this week is I've I've had a little bit of um mental fatigue because of just so many little to-dos. So I I asked my um AI to help me sort out my travel schedule and make sure I'm actually sorting and thinking through things. I think I have maybe 20 trips I have to take this year because of business and and personal. And so just trying to get all of the dates ironed out and get everything actually scheduled. It's almost like I'm on the road every other week for the year, and most weeks, um, most of the time it's in groups, right? So it'll be like one or two weeks in a row, and then maybe a week off, and then another one or two weeks, uh, maybe even three or four weeks in a row. So yeah, it's just one of those. Um I don't have to count the number of calendar days I spend in in hotels or Airbnbs this year, it feels like. So um just it there's always if I haven't booked a trip, right? There's this little thing in the back of my head that's distracting me. It's like, hey, I'm forgetting to do something. And it kind of just I found that it's almost like computer tabs or like loops that are open, and it's like the more tabs that you have unop unclosed that are still just kind of taking little energy from your mind add up. So I just felt like this week I had a lot of tabs I needed to close mentally, if that makes sense. So it's it's just one of those like make big lists, knock out as many of the little ones that may not matter that much, but at least by knocking them out, it's like you're not thinking about them, and it makes it a little bit easier to do the other ones. So that's been my my last few days for sure.

SPEAKER_00 1:14:18

Yeah, I love that. And that's a topic we'll get into, I know in the future is the idea of closing your loops because that is tied purely to rest, right? And I've suffered through that as well. Um, speaking of closing loops, I keep forgetting to ask you a question. My bachelor party that Friday morning, you golfing with us or not? You haven't responded to the group text.

SPEAKER_01 1:14:36

Hey, I of course I am. Okay, you should have just known that you should you have my schedule because we work together. So you you should have I just assume we're in uh telepathy and that I was exempt from responding to the group chat.

SPEAKER_00 1:14:51

No, I'm kidding, but part of it is right, I I've assumed you haven't booked it yet because you haven't asked your AI about that. So this is even. I don't know where you're coming from.

SPEAKER_01 1:14:58

Well, a lot of it, like uh there's a business conference next week where they do a golf day at the end of the conference, and I was gonna golf and I did I'm not because I'm just I wasn't quite there when I had to make the choice with my uh rehab on my torn shoulder labrum. But your trip is about a month after that, and I believe I will be a full participant. I'll be activated off the long-term injured reserve list, and I will be uh I will be able to partake. So we're all set.

SPEAKER_00 1:15:29

Sounds great. Sounds great. So I'll count you in, and uh, even if you're not swinging the clubs, you will owe owe some birdie juice. So and then we can uh we can get into the pod next. A little bit of both.

SPEAKER_01 1:15:39

Yeah, we'll have to yeah, we'll have to save if if calories in and out was a can of worms, I think alcohol is the second best, second biggest can of worms, and I'm excited to open that one up next time. So amazing. Good deal.

SPEAKER_00 1:15:54

Well, beautiful. We'll leave it there, and uh yeah, that's a wrap. Build human pod two. See you guys next time.