https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yD3m_0zbm1g

Here's today's episode of the Gladden Longevity Podcast.

Welcome everybody to this edition of the Gladden Longevity Podcast. I'm your host Dr. Jeffrey Gladden and as always we're here answering really big questions in life like how good can we be? How do we make 100 to new 30? How do we live well beyond 120? How do we live young for a lifetime and how do we actually develop a 300 year old mind? And today I'm gonna be talking with a personal friend, actually friends of mine, Anthony and Aaron. Anthony is dedicated to competing in the 2028 Olympics. And we'll talk about his journey to do that. It's quite fascinating. Erin is an athlete herself, but I think you're gonna find this conversation really interesting in terms of people that are what we'll call reasonable athletes aspiring to greatness and how they're going about that. It's really quite fascinating. So I think you'll love this conversation. Welcome everybody to this edition of the Gladden Longevity Podcast. I'm your host Dr. Jeffrey Gladden and I'm here with good friends of mine actually, Anthony Empman and his lovely fiance I think at this point in time if I'm not speaking out of turn, I don't know, maybe I am, maybe I got ahead of myself. But if not, maybe inching that direction. Maybe you're married by now, I don't know. You've got anything could happen. but Aaron Neunfeld. So they live in Puerto Rico and I met them in Puerto Rico and they've become dear friends. And Anthony is on a mission here to become an Olympian as a Puerto Rico resident. So this is going to be a fascinating conversation about the elements of performance, if you will, and should be great. So Anthony, welcome to the podcast.

Hey, pleasure. Appreciate you having us. Looking forward to it.

Yeah, absolutely. So bring the audience up to speed a little bit on your athletic endeavors. I think since we introduced the Olympics right at the get-go, why don't we talk about that for a little bit? And then you have many other interests. He's a very accomplished thinker and he's involved with cryptocurrencies and a lot of other business related things, building a really interesting app and on and on and on. But let's just start with sort of a little bit of the athletic elements.

Yeah, no, absolutely. So I grew up in Washington State on a family farm and it's fifth generation actually. So my whole family has been there since the late 1800s and they are still there. That's pretty tough to move from.

This is not a little farm, by the way. How many acres is this farm? yeah.

So if you'll remember from Middle School History Class, the Homestead Act. So that's what my great-great grandfather did, 160 Acres. He lived there for five years, and then they give you the land. And fast forward to today, that's grown to, I think, right around 13, 000 is. It's all dry land. We, Timothy, Tricia Kaylee, hey, you know, all that. So, yeah, it's a fantastic way to grow up. We'll get to it later, but the Yeah. The lessons that you learn growing up on a farm about accountability and responsibility and discipline and failure and all of that is just, it's a very unique ecosystem. And I grew up in a pretty competitive family. Brother, older brother played sports. My mom is one of the most competitive people that I know.

Oh wow. Yeah. And.

She takes it to the absolute nth degree. She just, yeah.

And so what does she compete at? Is she also athletic or has this come down to card games or what are we talking about?

Yeah, everything, everything. If you go on a walk, she's gonna wanna beat you on the walk.

Oh, okay.

Horses are her just absolute genius. She just gets horses and she's got about 25 or 30 of them. She's had 'em for years.

Oh, beautiful. Yeah.

So her dream was to be an Olympian in a horse event. life kind of took her a different direction.

Okay, so now she's betting on this horse, is that what you're saying? Yeah.

My parents have, they know me well enough that whenever I come up with something that's like world changing or at that level at this point, they're just, I like it, let's go for it. There's no apprehension, they're just, the response is always, how can we help? that's right.

Well, they've learned not to put up a roadblock because you just plow it over, right? So it's like, okay, well let's just jump on board.

Okay, we're good. Better or worse, I tend to see.

It as a challenge if someone wants to do it. So you grew up in a competitive family. You had an older brother or a mother that was incredibly competitive. And did that rub off on you? Did that make you competitive? Some people react another way.

It's like, I just don't want to buy into that, right? So how did that impact you? yeah, I went to a relatively small high school. There's only 67 people in my graduating class and my brother is two years ahead of me. And he was very well respected and looked up to because he just had that grit. His mental toughness, he ran the 800 and track for example was just a gritty race. And he crushed it. And so yeah, that's just a fire for, well, I gotta live up to the reputation that my brother has set and then, you know, so I played track and cross country and basketball and I was never a, you know, I was not getting recruited. I didn't get a single offer from any university, you know, I ended up looking at the Air Force Academy because my grandfather on my mother's side was a fighter pilot F-101s in the Korean War and was a big mentor and inspiration of mine. and then if you get into one of the military academies, you get a full ride.

Yeah.

And so that I, I had it in my head that I was gonna have to pay for University, and so that was a pretty big Attractant for me.

Yeah.

I was just in the, the meal line at the Academy my freshman year, and someone looked at me and said, you ever played volleyball? You on a sport here?

And.

I ended up picking up volleyball and it was pretty good at it. I played for the Air Force and the All-Armed Forces teams for the next eight years, kind of all around the world, everywhere from, you know, the Netherlands and Germany and London, all the way to Hawaii and most of the places in between.

So you have athletic talent and I've seen you play basketball. You're pretty good. And just so the audience understands, you're not five foot two, right? How tall are you? you're not a point guard.

In my head, I'm a very normal height, and it's not until I go to the airport that I realize, I'm actually taller than average.

Yeah, so 6'7. Yeah, there you go. So 6'7, yeah. So that's a good height for a volleyball player or a basketball player, but yeah, okay. So athletic ability, you kind of stepped into that in the Air Force, it sounds like, and even developed that maybe a little bit further there. Okay. and then what? How does this all lead to the Olympics?

Yeah, so I think that most athletes that have competed, and Erin can talk about her experience with this later too, is that when you get out of university or you get out of playing professionally something, there's a hole, there's a gap, there's a vacuum that still needs to be filled. The way that you're wired, you still have this really strong desire to have a target that's difficult to reach, to wake up every day and work towards it. And that doesn't go away just because you turn 25 or 30. You still need to feel it. You'll see it's pretty common. People divert it to their careers and they'll go become a partner at that investment bank or that law firm or that consulting company and they'll run marathons or Ironman's. They were the ones that were varsity athletes and getting 4.0's in school. So they need an outlet for that energy. And we were watching the 24 Olympics and you'll remember that this is just maybe a handful of months after ChatGPT really started to get going. We were playing around in the application and we'd also recently watched the movie Moneyball. And it was just like putting in stats basically to ChatGPT. It was like, Hey, I am a male. I'm this old. I'm this tall. these are my natural strengths, my natural weaknesses. I live in Puerto Rico, you know, just giving it all the data. And asking it the question, what event would I have any shot at potentially getting to the Olympics in, given all of that? Like what's the highest probability? And you know, the end of the list is obviously going to be gymnastics.

That's right. And right next to that is probably playing second base for the A's, right?

So, yeah, exactly. rowing just kind of kept bubbling up towards the top. So I asked them different ways and rowing is an interesting sport in the sense that it's so driven by physics. It's one of the few sports that's genuinely driven by how much horsepower does your body have. What is the total amount of force that your body can create. And it is, that's why it tends to be beneficial to be tall, is you just have leverage. Yeah, leverage. You've got a larger frame that can pack more muscle onto it, which can create more force, more generally larger lungs, more blood volume. And yeah, so it is genuinely about horsepower as opposed to if I go compete and try and break the world record in pull-ups, it's like, well, relative to your body, it's like someone with shorter arms is gonna, they've got less work to do. Force times different.

Right?

That's part of why being tall is helpful for rowing.

So, Aaron, let's talk about you for a minute because you have a very athletic background as well. And why don't you, why don't you Tell the audience a little bit about that.

So I played volleyball in college as well. I played at University of South Carolina. I played indoor and beach volleyball my freshman year and then just beach volleyball my last three years. But I was not naturally gifted athlete or student really. I was kind of that person that.

Had to work really, really, really hard.

My sister is only 16 months older.

Than me and she is just so talented.

She was a four-time all-american at North Carolina.

Oh, wow. Okay. Yeah.

She had just letters coming in every day, like five a day from, you know, universities that were huge. They wanted her. And I really wanted to play, but no one was really wanted me, so I was the one sending out the emails with my home highlight reels. And, yeah, somehow I got, I got South Carolina and. I worked my way up there. I was just the kind of person that worked harder than everybody else. Talent, what's the quote about hard work?

What out beats talent.

Talent doesn't work hard. That was kind of my mentality with it. So I just worked harder than everybody. I showed up before everybody and ended up getting a full ride and becoming captain.

Oh nice. Yeah nice.

Kind of like what Anthony was talking about with the void that you feel after college, you know, missing that lot of goals. You know, I definitely channeled that into grad school and running 5Ks. I would like secretly, this is embarrassing, but I'd like kind of like look around while I'm running a 5K and see what girls looked my age to see if I could try to win my age group. So I'd see a girl that looked like in my age group and I'd run faster and, you know, I was secretly still trying to like win trophies and, you know.

Right.

So I, I, too, kind of felt that, that pull to do something.

Yeah. So that's interesting. So neither one of you were like, you know, the, what we would call maybe the truly gifted athlete, right? The hand-eye coordination, the, you know, whatever it was, that nervous system that enables people to kind of, you know, pick up a golf club and just hit it. Although I've seen you play golf, and I think you're pretty good. Certainly better than Aaron myself. But there's a work ethic there that I'm hearing, right? And there's a competitive attitude. And it's interesting, each of you had older siblings that were also competitive, but they were also on some level, they were maybe more inherently gifted or talented or whatever term you want to use. And yet, you ended up captain of the volleyball team, right? And you ended up playing kind of internationally for for the armed services, right? So what I'm hearing here is that you have a history of being able to play bigger than some people might give you credit for if they just looked at you, you know, right, in eighth grade and said, oh, I don't think so, you know what I mean? So that's very, very cool. It must have had an impact on your psyche, Antje. I mean, I must have given in both of you, really. It must have given you a sense of, maybe whatever I put my mind to, you know, I don't think you can, I don't think you can beat me if I really put my mind to it. I think there may be some element of that there. I don't know, correct me if I'm wrong, but.

No, yeah, no, 100%. It's, whether you think you can or can't, you're right. That's one of my favorite quotes.

Yeah, Henry Ford, right?

Yeah. I'm such a massive, massive believer in the power of the mind. Not only in terms of anything athletic, but also emotional and relational. And admittedly, everything in your body is driven by your mind. And so the story, the stories that go on in between your ears day in and day out have a very direct impact on all the way down to the cellular level. And I. Yeah, I've just been intentional about choices and practice around exercising the muscle between our ears.

Well, it sounds like you've been intentional about the stories that you actually choose to believe and the ones that you choose to tell yourself. And I think a lot of us or a lot of folks in general inherited stories. It was a story that their mom told them, their dad told them, their siblings told them, their teacher told them, their peers told them, whatever it was. we kind of live in the shadow of those stories as opposed to realizing that we can create a better story or a different story. And so, you know, kudos to both of you because I think both of you have really sort of stepped outside the shadow of those previous stories. So, what's the, no pun intended, but what's the story that you're telling yourself now?

Right? So, yeah, now, so the story that I'm telling myself now is primarily centered on self-confidence. I think all of us have this relationship with why are we uniquely valuable? You know, humans are such tribal creatures. We really, really need to have relationships in a tribe and a role in that tribe. And a lot of what gives us a sense of purpose and passion is a unique contribution to that tribe. It's what are we uniquely good at that I contribute to the tribe and the tribe appreciates me because of that thing. And to your point about the stories that you hear growing up, you know, the concept of a parent saying something out loud to a child and the child internalizing that and that becoming their story that's what they believe about themselves. That's, that is such a, once you understand how powerful that is, it's a transformative. You can use it for, for, you know, very good things or very bad things. That's right. The power of words. And so one of the muscles that I think about constantly mentally is this fear of failure muscle. And it is not something that just comes naturally. It is something that just as a muscle in your body, you have to push it to failure, no pun intended. You have to break it to where it can't go any further in order for it to then come back stronger. And if I ask you, Jeff, the question of tell me a story about one of the earliest failures in your life, one of those kind of emotional stories as a child to where you let your parents down or you let one of your siblings down. And there's probably a handful of stories that immediately come to mind. And maybe they have something to do with breaking a vase or a lamp or crashing a car that it's just kind of like, nah, it's just part of being alive. And then if I ask you, okay, Now fast forward a handful of decades and what's your most recent, real big genuine failure? And the gap between the severity of those two is massive as it relates to the potential impact on the direction and quality of your life. If you go get an offender vendor as a 15 year old with your driver's permit, that's entirely different than a marriage falling apart or a business falling apart and you've got to move or you've got to, you know, those are like, genuinely life direction changing things. And the ability to move through that, put one foot in front of the other, is entirely related to how strong is your fear of failure muscle. And this is what they do in military training. And we learned this at the academy is they just break you down. You get there as a freshman and you are worthless. They tear down all of your ego because no matter how strong you are, you reach a limit and that's all they're there to do is help you find that limit and push you past it. That way you understand failure and you're gonna get to the other side of failure and realize, hey, I'm okay. And so just about two and a half years ago, there were two big failures that happened in my life. The business that I had been building for a half decade and the relationship that was about that long as well, both of them took an about face and headed in the wrong direction and it looked like I wasn't going to have either of them all within about a six week period. And so the entire direction of my life was up in the air. But 48 hours after both of them happened, was actually the most confident that I had ever been in my life. Because I had arrived at this conclusion that the title on LinkedIn, that the number and the bank account, that any of that kind of quantitative or materialistic stuff was not actually why I valued myself or why others valued me. the sense of confidence was coming from something entirely different.

And.

It just manifested itself in this pervasive feeling of whatever I put my mind to, I believe I will be able to do it. And so now you arrive at where the Olympics comes from. It's like, oh, well, yeah, if I put my mind to this, yeah, absolutely. I believe I can do it. There's no reservations. There's not a little voice in my head that says, nah, you're not good enough, Anthony.

Right. It's an interesting concept, the concept of failure. Certainly I've had failures in my life, numerous ones, right? Some of them at the time were fairly devastating to me, you know, losing a family, you know, a marriage going sideways or upside down or whatever. and yet I will say that in my own, let's call it psycho spiritual journey, I've gotten to a point where there is no failure for me. Right. And so I think when we think about failure, when I think about failure, you have to give me your input on this. But when I think about failure, I think a lot of it boils down to whether or not we still feel like we're lovable on some level. Right. Whether we're still valuable, whether we're still lovable.

Right.

Whether you know, we're still good enough or whatever it is. And I think when you go through enough hard times and you start to realize that your worth is not related to things external to you, right? In other words, you move from external validation into internal validation where it's like, no, I'm completely worthy. I'm completely lovable. All of it, you know, sort of in that psycho-spiritual, interpersonal space. then it really kind of gives you an amazing resilience because what could look like failure on the outside is only part of the journey of learning, you know, what you need to be learning to move on to the next things that you're going to take on, right? So, in essence, when I look at your, if I was going to interpret what happened to you, I would say, yes, those were ruptures of one sort or another, but they were also deeply, profoundly educational to you and also help consolidate a sense of self that transcended external validation, if that makes sense, right? Which then gives you the internal strength and power to say, no, I'm aligned around who I am and now I'm choosing a different story and now I'm able to go forward and find the love of my life and I'm able to, you know, rebuild the business. I'm willing to, you know, take on the challenge of becoming an Olympian and, you know, all these other things, right? So I think that's kind of how I would frame it up.

Yeah, no, I agree. I think that Aaron has experienced that pretty viscerally over the last kind of two and a half years of dating me to where, you know, you were.

A- well, I mean, we would characterize that as a failure for her. I'm not sure how she feels about it. Aaron, I hope you recover from this, quite honestly, now. I'm just teasing.

Leaving the job and your identity there and then moving to Puerto Rico and identity with your family and talk a little bit about that. yeah, kind of the perception of failure or.

Yeah.

A sense of self and confidence and, you know.

Yeah. Move a little closer to the mic, Aaron, just if you would.

Yeah.

I, so I lived in New York before moving to Puerto Rico to join Anthony. That's, that's where we met. And, you know, I was, like I said, I was that overachiever 4.0, you know, 5ks and then to marathons and just. Just trying to do it all and trying to be really, really good in my career as a medical speech language pathologist. And I think I put a lot of my self-worth and identity in those things. And so when Anthony was saying, like, you know, you're going to be moving to Puerto Rico, you know, and I was getting on board with that. I was getting all sorts of nervous of, well, what am I going to do when I'm not a speech pathologist anymore? When I'm, you know, going out on a limb, joining you in entrepreneurship type things. And like this, I hold my identity be here and this is what I'm good at and what people like about me.

Right.

It's really scary to leave that behind and start a whole new thing and hope that my friends and family are along for the ride and like Aaron 2.0 just as much as they liked the other Aaron.

Yeah.

So that was a lot of soul searching there.

I think you're bringing up a good point though, which is If you're listening to this, I think one of the keys, no matter where you are in your life chronologically or developmentally, it takes tremendous, I think tremendous courage actually to actually step into the next thing and to find that sense of resilience inside yourself to bounce back or to take on the next challenge, if you will. And I think you can really measure your own development based on how much resilience do I embody and how much robustness have I developed around my sense of identity to be able to withstand external changes, if you will. But I think that's, for me, that's really key things because as we go through life, it's not just about going to the Olympics and winning a gold medal or having a successful business or a marriage. It's really how do we continue as individuals to grow and develop into a fully expressed human, right? The full expression of Anthony and Aaron or myself for that matter, to where we can bring all our gifts forward, right? And I think in order to do that, you have to keep yourself married to the questions of how do I keep going forward? How do I keep growing? And that fundamentally takes courage. And I think a lot of us can settle. It's like, oh, well things are pretty good. Let's just kind of keep it going, right? Even in a relationship, let's just kind of keep it going instead of asking the courageous questions of, you know, Can we do this better? Is there something different? Is there something missing or whatever it is? Right? So I really commend both of you because I see you at a point in life where you're really demonstrating a tremendous amount of courage, quite honestly. And that's really inspiring. So I hope the audience feels inspired by that. Yeah, very cool. Yeah. So tell us about the Olympics now. So you've got your eye on rowing. and you basically, I think, went and met with the Puerto Rican Olympic committee or team or something. Tell us a little bit about that. What happened? Yeah.

So if you're listening to this, just an FYI, I did end up going through Jeff's program back in January, went out to Dallas and we did two or three days together of a bunch of different testing and that was kind of the kickoff of, okay, if we're gonna start taking this seriously, let's figure out where am I weak, where am I strong, what do we need to really be focusing on to get the whatever is currently the ceiling pushed up. That way it's more in alignment with the other systems and learned a lot there that I'll talk about just in a second. And then came back to Puerto Rico and was able to get in contact with the Rowing Association down here, which is just, you know, club that gets together. Tuesday, Thursday, Saturday, and I've been going to that on and off to, you know, again, continue exploring this and actually ended up being able to row with the only Puerto Rican representative in rowing just about a month ago. She is currently a... Resident? Yeah, she's a resident in LA, but anyway, that was a great experience to be able to get in a boat with her for an hour. Yeah, 2020. Yeah. So anyway, just came back to Puerto Rico on the other side of all the testing with you came to the obvious realization that my aerobic engine is-- yeah.

Wasn't where you wanted it to be, right? Yeah.

We need to strengthen that. And so we've just been five or six days a week trying to optimize the training and the nutrition and the sleep and obviously the mind to start making progress. And to this money ball, red balloon kind of aspect to the story, money ball, the Oakland A's, like you said, just took a fundamentally different approach to figuring out how to win baseball games. And if I'm someone that has a relationship that I'm serious about and we want to start a family, , we've got a couple of businesses going and would like to train for the Olympics. It's very important that the training is smarter and not harder. And so just a massive amount of research around, okay, for every hour that you're able to spend in the gym, how can you maximize the output from that? It's a five or six minute race. Do I need to be doing slow, steady state stuff, you know, six days a week? two hours for each session, or is there a smarter way to potentially increase the aerobic capacity, get the lactate threshold up and be competitive at a global level? And so that's the Moneyball side. And then the red balloon side is the, this was a study sponsored by DARPA. And what they did is they put red balloons all around the United States. and they had a bounty for the teams of people that found the balloons. And what ended up happening is interesting in the sense that MIT created a effectively multi-level structure of if you referred a person that ended up finding it, you got X percent of the bounty. And then the further removed, the less you got. And it created this network effect. that they ended up finding the balloons, all of them, all around the continental United States in nine hours. Just an absolute...

I think they thought it was gonna.

Take like a month. Yeah, they thought it was gonna take a month. And it was just instant. That's the power of the internet. That's the power of instantaneous information dissemination around the world. And so what we're doing with this journey is same thing. It's totally public. Every supplement I take, every bowl of ice cream I eat, every hour of sleep I get will be public as a equation, as a science experiment for the world to help contribute to optimizing, you know, the engine. It's a pit crew of how do you get more horsepower out of the engine of Anthony as you get a contributing.

Yeah, exactly.

That's right.

You're an F1 car, essentially.

Yeah, not yet.

Yeah, right.

Right now, I'm still a go-kart.

Yeah, that's right. It's very, very cool. I love that about the DARPA piece. That's really inspiring to think about the networking effect, right? The ability to actually crack the code on things with a network. Yeah, that's really, really inspiring. So, and just so the audience realizes Anthony does have some real gifts when it comes to rowing. This is not a Don Quixote kind of endeavor, right? I mean, he's very, very strong and I think he generates lots of power. It's a question of really being able to do that over the five, six minutes that it's required, right? Which is pretty anaerobic kind of scenario, right? And so building lactate threshold and things like that. So, you know, we like blood flow restriction to do that, you know, it's a good way to build lactate threshold. There's many other things. And then, you know, you've gotten into an interesting space because you've had some injuries in the past. And we talked about, you know, how to heal those injuries, right? And so there's different things out there. There's stem cells and peptides and other regenerative factors and things like that. And you kind of took a hard look at that and kind of backed away from it. Maybe you can explain that a little bit to the audience, your take on all that. Yeah. Yeah.

Kind of a somewhat serendipitous and circuitous type of way that this came about, but just having gone through your program, end up receiving dozens of supplements, some of which were peptides. We got back to Puerto Rico and these shipments are kind of coming in every other day. I am someone that when I decide to do something, It's very much a zero or a hundred. It's not an in-between type of deal. Generally, what really helps me commit to doing something is the story of the why behind it. It's like, okay, what is this doing for me? If I go eat a bunch of ice cream or I go eat a bunch of chicken breasts, what's the difference? How does that translate to five years from now? What's going to happen in my body? kind of fast forwarded about a month, hadn't touched any of the supplements. They're all sitting on the table unopened. And I had actually received a, I think it was you that sent me a YouTube about kind of the 2000 Olympics and some of the, that kind of new testing. I had actually received a, I think it was you that sent me a YouTube about kind of the 2000 Olympics and some of the, that kind of new testing and whatnot that had been going on there. In volleyball, you know, in college and in the Air Force, there was never any, like, we're not under WADA. This is the first time that I had heard of WADA, which is the anti-doping association that all of the Olympics and professionals, there are a lot of sports around the world subscribed to. and so there was this really loose connection that just kind of started me thinking, well, I should probably look into this. And I went into, you know, chat gbt, and this is right after deep research had come out, and I was asking it about, all right, what's allowed, what's not allowed? And lo and behold, to your, you know, to your point, I've had raptured Achilles. bad knees, bad back, just playing sports, all the soft tissue and tendon stuff that the peptides would be super helpful to heal. But if we're doing this red balloon strategy, we can't go say, hey, this is everything we're doing and then leave something out. Because part of what that WADA research showed was, well, if you haven't declared for a sport, if you're not on a team, sometimes if you're not in competition, it doesn't matter. When you sign up at that point forward, you sign a document that says, hey, I agree that I'm going to be clean from here forward.

And.

What that ends up meaning for most everyone is they just don't talk about it. They do indeed go use peptides and a lot of the performance enhancing substances.

And.

The reality is you could absolutely get away with it. You could absolutely go over the course of the rest of this year, I could be using the peptides and then when I decide to go into competition next year, just say, Yep, I'm clean from here forward and just never talk about it. And that's kind of where this voice enters on your left shoulder and this voice enters on your right shoulder. thankfully it was a very quick conversation, but you do have two voices there saying, well you can get away with it and it's gonna make you better. And then on the other one is like, yeah, but it's too important that when you tell people that you're sharing everything, that you're sharing everything. That's the whole point of transparency is that you don't get to hide the bad stuff. You have to share everything. And so I talked to Aaron, I talked to Travis, once you kind of arrived at the understanding of the regulations, there's probably a five or ten minute conversation that is quick. And I was like, okay. And then I sent you and the team the email that said, hey, we got to do this in alignment. Totally understand that, yeah, we don't necessarily have to. We could just not talk about it and get away with it, but that's not the way that we'd like to approach it.

Yeah, and I think that's a choice, right? I think that's a choice. People could play that six different ways, right? They could say, well, I'm going to heal and then I'm going to commit or whatever it's going to be. But I think, you know, what you're outlining is a sense of integrity around the process, right, and the transparency. And I think there's also an underlying question there for yourself, which is, how good can I do this, you know, if I don't do any of the, you know, any of the real enhancing things? Now, I will tell you that you will end up doing enhancing things, right? You're gonna sleep, you're gonna, you know, you may take molecular hydrogen, you may do blood flow restriction, you may use bicarbonate, you may be, you know, there may be many things that you end up doing that are not illegal to do, and yet they're still going to be enhancing, right? I mean, oh, yes. There's no downside to being nutritionally replete or, you know, whatever else, right? So. So there is kind of a line in there somewhere. It's just a question of whether you step over into where you feel uncomfortable about being transparent about it. But I have a lot of respect for the transparency in what you're doing and it'll be really fascinating to see how far you can take this. That being said, when you were here, we showed you some things on how to actually make your ankles bulletproof again and do some things like that without peptides and some other things. I don't know if you've had the opportunity to use some of those. techniques or not or whatever. Maybe you can comment on that.

Yeah, you've got the jumpsoles, you've got.

The elevation training mask.

Obviously sleep. One of the ways that one of the team members of yours kind of put it is when you are going through a lot of training, it's a little bit like just having a revved up engine. The revved up engine is going to go through all of the nutrients, that it runs on.

That's right.

From oil to transmission fluid to gas to, you know, and no, it's no different in your body that the minerals, the electrolytes, you know, the things that are outside of what a lot of people think about, you just use them up.

Yeah. The B vitamins, they all get consumed more quickly. Everything gets consumed more quickly. That's right.

Yeah, exactly. And so just trying to. Ensure that all of that's, I don't know, I don't know. Optimized is all relative, right?

That's right.

Yeah, when we were talking in your office there, I'm probably on the less emotional side of the spectrum as it relates to food. That's not a difficult thing for me to not have too much food or you know, I've been overweight. I've been basically the same weight for the last 10 years, give or take, like two or three pounds. So, yeah, it's actually more difficult for me to add in. Okay, I do need to have these supplements because the engines run more. I do need to have more food because the engine's running more.

That's right.

Every pound that you put on needs to be a productive pound because you have to drag that pound through the water. If you're gonna have it, it's got to do something for you.

That'S right. Well, it's cool. It's a very cool journey that you're on. I think, you know, what I'm hearing is that you really have the right mindset about it. You've really committed to the, to the transparency of the whole journey and the things that you are doing, you'll, you'll be publicizing. Right. I mean, if you are using the jumpsoles or the elevation training mask or the blood flow restriction or, you know, certain supplements to replenish, you know, what you're burning through, that kind of thing. I mean, that'll just be available. And I, I will tell you that there's no, there's no athlete out there that's not fueling and training and using tips and tricks and, you know, recovery techniques and saunas and things like that. So, you know, one of the tricks for building aerobic capacity is to do cardio and then jump in the sauna. That's a nice combination. Right. So, I mean, There will be things like that that you'll report on, but they're not illegal. They're just ways to kind of hack the system in a mild way. I mean, the other way to do it would be to just walk on and see how you did, right? That would be the ultimate, I'm not even going to train kind of scenario, but I don't think that's the approach you're taking either.

Now, to your point, it's part of smarter not harder is recovery.

That's right.

You've got kind of, if you're training anywhere from an hour to six hours a day, the rest of the day is just recovery. So, regardless of what you do, you're always spending more time in recovery than you are actually working out. And so, something that we're both super deliberate about is our sleep. I've been tracking my sleep for almost 3,000 nights now.

Yeah, yeah. That's like eight years. Yeah.

We've got the eight sleep ad. You've got temperature control in your room. You're watching your heart rate recovery, your respiratory rate, all of that. We've got, like, a full recovery studio.

In the living room.

Yeah.

Mile board.

Yeah.

Boss balls, you know?

Yep. Beautiful. Beautiful. I love it.

One fun way that I've found to think about it in that sense is windows of opportunity. And so if you're looking at the Olympics in July of 2028, that means it's probably, I could check it real quick here, probably 1,250 days, days until 2028 Olympics. Yeah, just under 1200 days. So the way that I like thinking about that is how many eight hour windows do you have? You know that a third of all of those windows are going to be sleep. You know that you have the opportunity to maximize the other two thirds. And you know, when you go out to dinner with friends and someone says, oh, hey, let's have a cocktail. when you think about, okay, I've only got 3, 500 windows to take advantage of until race day.

Yep.

And if I go have a drink, and that has an impact on my recovery tonight. So if I had a really good lift today, and then I'm gonna dampen my recovery because my body's more focused on processing alcohol instead of contributing to regrowing, you know, the muscles. So that impact, that's one, one window gone, and then I'm gonna have a worse workout the next day, and probably the day after that, it's like two nights, you know? And so then you're going through this and we're like, oh, well, that just had a not only neutral but negative impact on a handful of my available windows. And so you're talking about, okay, that's like, you know, a quarter of a percent or half a percent of the overall amount of time that I have to train.

That's right.

And so why would you make the decision to forego that quarter percent or half a percent? It's just don't do it.

Yeah, what you're pointing out here is the compounding effect of the decisions that we make. And I don't think it's fully realized by most of us when we're making a decision that it has a compounding effect in another direction, right? I mean, if you're looking at quantum mechanics, and I don't know if you've been paying attention to quantum computing, there's some amazing things going on there. But, you know, we come to understand that each decision we make actually creates a new reality. And so, you can basically create this reality that's compounding benefit or one that's actually neutralizing benefit. And it does make, it really makes a difference. So, yeah, kudos for you to sorting that out. Yeah. Makes the decisions easier, right? When you realize that it has a ripple effect across future time, so to speak. Yeah, very cool.

Yeah, you're either getting paid for what you did over the last 10 years or you're paying for it.

That's right. There you go. Yeah. Well said. Well, this has been a really fascinating conversation, and I hope the audience has enjoyed it. So we're wishing you guys all the best here as you go forward with this Endeavor. And what we'll probably do is maybe do some follow-up podcast as we get a little closer to it, see how things are going. I'm sure people will be intrigued if people want to follow you or see what's going on. How do they do that? Where will they find you if this is transparent?

We can follow us on Twitter. And we have a website for the.

Brand that we're building right now as well.

So we'll get that information to you. The brand's called Path Eyes.

Okay. Path Eyes?

Yeah, patheyes.com will kind of be putting up everything.

So that's P-A-T-H-I-Z-E. Yeah, that's right. Okay.

That's the brand name, but we're going.

To be talking about everything that Anthony's got going.

Okay.

So Pete is there too, but just a landing page right now, but more to come.

Okay. So P-A-T-H-I-Z-E, if you're interested to follow them along as it goes along. Is that also the Twitter/X account as well?

Is that correct?

Yes, it's @PITHIZE. Okay, beautiful. Well, guys, thanks so much for taking the time to chat with us here. Really a pleasure. And I'm going to be in, we're going to be, Mookie and I will be in Puerto Rico in May. Yeah, so we can coordinate dates. So that'd be great. Awesome.

Thank you, Jeff.

All right, great to see you.

Thank you for listening to this week's episode of the Gladden Longevity Podcast. If you would like more information on what we've discussed or other topics, please reference the show notes or go to gladdenlongevitypodcast.com. you can also find us on Instagram, Facebook and Twitter by searching Glad and Longevity. If you've enjoyed this podcast, please subscribe to get future episodes delivered to you and share our podcast or this episode with someone in your life that may find benefit. Thank you for listening. We'll be back next week with another exciting episode. The Cloud and Longevity podcast is provided for informational purposes only. It does not constitute medical advice. This content is not intended to be a substitute for professional medical advice, diagnosis, Diagnosis or treatment always seek the advice of a physician or other qualified health provider with any questions you may have regarding a medical condition. The use of any information and materials linked to this podcast is at the listener's own risk.