Elite Human Performance with Andrew Herr

Andrew, a huge welcome to the Lead on Purpose podcast.

James, thanks for having me here. Really excited to chat today.

Oh, it's so great that we get a chance to actually get inside your head and inside your world and what you do and the level that you do it. So just to get the ball rolling, so to speak. When we think of human performance, how does enhancing that human performance influence leadership?

So you know, often people think about just enhancing individual traits, energy, focus, mood. But one, enhancing those individual traits can absolutely affect a business and decisions and other leadership capacities. And then two, there's a whole suite of socio emotional traits that you can enhance that directly influence leadership. So you know, from enhancing someone's energy and focus, which may have them make better decisions as a leader for the company, to changing their stress levels, their ability to generate trust with other people. And those things all then change the social dynamics within a company and allow someone to take a big vision forward without, or let's say in a way that's easier. Every big vision I think has its challenges. But if the team doesn't trust you or your stress is causing you to break down and interact with your team members or potential partners in a negative way, all those things can critically negatively impact your mission and obviously your individual leadership. So we think about everything from enhancing the individual decision making capacity to those socio emotional factors and frankly just the physical ability to maintain performance over long periods of time, which is also required. If your leader ends up in burnout.

You'Re not going to go as far.

100% and with your own experience, was there a team or an organization that you've worked with that really sticks out that you know what they did have to perform under extreme pressure and stress and you were able to do some research around what are those factors that really influenced them.

I spent seven years running human performance and biotech strategy efforts for the military. So if we're going to talk about extreme stress, I'm going to inevitably go back to that. The military and what we saw there was that there are absolutely units that can military units that can go through nearly unimaginable levels of stress and perform at a high level over weeks and months. You saw very high levels of performance for long periods of time in Iraq and Afghanistan. But then you also can go back to the Korean war, World War II and see units that were just faced with 10 to 1 odds against them of enemy soldiers and no sleep, freezing winters, and yet they still perform well. Whereas others seem to fall apart very quickly under much less enemy pressure and that actually Ended up being the subject of quite a bit of work I did is like, why do some units, why are they able to handle these levels of stress and perform well? And why do others fall apart?

It's amazing. And why is that? Because we're talking about units that are fighting in wars, but actually every day people in the corporate world or in the athletic world, they're fighting their own version of a war in terms of stress and endurance. So what are some of those things that you started to see kind of creep up and show themselves in terms of influential factors?

Yeah, and we absolutely see these not only at play in the military side, but in the sport and even in marriages. What we saw was if you have individual. Well, going back to the research to start, if you have an individual and put them in a high stress situation by themselves, their stress hormone levels, let's say their cortisol levels, will be highest. If you put them with a stranger, they'll be in the middle. If you put them with someone they trust, they'll be much lower. This is a really interesting way to show that trust basically can buffer physiological effects of stress. This matters a tremendous amount to the performance of individuals and groups because when you have very high levels of stress actually prevents fuel from getting into your prefrontal cortex, the higher thinking part of your brain. You don't make as good decisions, you're not as adaptable, which obviously under high stress you need to be adapting to the environment, adapting to new information, and it also prevents your body from recovering. And so again, you end up in this burnout state much faster. And so we saw that this the ability of a leader to generate trust in their unit, which I think is interesting to decompose into trust and confidence. Trust is, does someone have my best interests at heart? Would they intentionally do something wrong by me or will they not take care of me? And then confidence is, do they have the ability to carry through on it even if they want to? And so this magic mix of being able to generate trust and confidence allowed units to handle much higher levels of stress. But it wasn't enough. Interestingly, you've heard a lot about emotional safety and other things out of research Google did. But turns out that if you look at the industrial psychology literature that groups that really trust and care about each other don't perform better. And the reason we found was one, in a factory, you don't have as high levels of stress. You don't need to buffer it as much. But also you need a second component, which is this mission focus and if we're going to be super reductive there, it's about fueling the dopamine parts of your brain, caring about what the mission is, making small or large progress to it. And that also prevents you from burning out over time. And so when you have these units that had high trust and high mission focus, which really did come from the leadership, they could perform at incredible levels. And what's I think even to me was even more fascinating was sometimes you think a group is going to perform well and then they don't. And that's often when a group has high mission focus and low trust. They're performing well, they're performing well, and then the stress comes and they fracture and they were quite brittle. And so you never want to be high mission focus, low trust or low trust, high mission focus. Basically you need both of these at the same time to be an elite performer.

Fascinating. And with the trust piece, from your experience and watching it unfold and studying it, how does one as a leader or as a leadership group, how do we build authentic trust?

Yep. So there's some really clear behaviors, I would say, that are critical to understanding kind of where people do well and where people go wrong. And so the first one is, I always like to start what happens when a leader makes a mistake, because this is one of the absolute crucible moments for this piece. And the answer is there were two characteristics of leaders who were able to re energize their units or regain trust. And it was one, you had to acknowledge the mistake, and two, you had to get back on the horse or you had to basically be able to show that you had confidence in yourself and in your leadership. Again, if you don't acknowledge the mistake, people think you're going to make it. Again, if you don't show you've regained your own confidence, people won't follow people who aren't confident in themselves. Second, you have to manage uncertainty. Uncertainty and social judgment are sort of the two biggest human stressors, short of not having food or water. And so you need to really be focused on making sure your people understand what they know, what you know, and you know to the extent it's useful to share that with them and also just knowing what they or you don't know so that they understand sort of what they should be thinking about to show that you're competent. Credentials don't matter. You have to, you know, as I said, you have to acknowledge mistakes, but you don't dwell on them. You have to show your trustworthy, meaning you have to treat People fairly, but that doesn't mean equally, just fairly. And then something else we found really interesting was if you manage for collaboration, it's the most effective way to have your team work. Sort of like buffer each other. Turns out that if you're under high stress, prioritizing doesn't help as much because you'll always have, you know, 105% capacity. You don't really have the mental bandwidth to add new skills, but you have this ability to collaborate within your team that both balances the load, but also again, that collaboration, that trust can help buffer the physiological effects of stress. And then the last piece is just to cross train amongst your team because it doesn't allow a single point of failure because at a high enough level of stress, you will have failures within the group or within the team. And so if you have cross trained, again, it's that ability to step in for each other. So those are kind of the biggest things about mitigating stress and building trust. And then sort of a similar set we could go through about maintaining mission focus if you'd like to.

Yeah, I would love to, yeah. So how do we first of all get really clear on what the mission is and then how do we maintain a focus on that?

Yeah, so, you know, I think what's interesting is in the military on one hand the broader mission is very clear, but it's not always clear what the individual unit's piece in that is. And so in the military they have a concept taken from the German Auftrax tactic, which would we translate in the US as mission command. And that's this idea of tell people what needs to be achieved, not how to do it. I think we all recognize this is sort of the opposite of micromanagement. And so, you know, identifying what's your part of the mission is the first part. And then from there how do we show that we care about the mission? Well, first you have to as a leader, show you prioritize it over yourself. You have to be making sacrifices. And in military parlance, you can't let the BS roll downhill, meaning you can't just let all the grunt work fall on your subordinates. You have to show that you're willing to take your part. Second piece is you have to show that you prioritize the team over yourself. And so it's not just the mission, but also do you respect your subordinates? Do you share rewards fairly? Again, fairly doesn't mean equally, but if you're not sharing those rewards, you clearly don't care about the team over yourself. And then you have to enable your team to see progress, which means designing projects or missions for interim success, making the impact visible. You know, I was talking to a US Marine commander who mentioned something really fascinating to me once. He said he was there flying. He was an aviation unit, and they were flying supplies into Haiti where there had been a horrible earthquake. And he basically said he had pilots who would fly the planes, deliver the supplies. They flew over the country and saw the horrible devastation. Their part in the mission was clear. The second piece was he had maintainers, people who would fix the planes so they could keep flying. And their part in the mission was very clear as well, because if the plane isn't flying and you fix it, it's flying, you have quite immediate reward. And they did really well and they were focused. But there were a, a third group which was the people who calibrated the tools for the people who fixed the planes, for the people who flew the planes. And they were quite disconnected from the mission. And he said he could never get them to stay focused for more than four to six weeks at a time. And they would just become sort of like, lackadaisical. They'd make more mistakes. And what he realized he had to do was every three weeks or so, he would put them on the planes to go fly in, see the devastation, unload the supplies, come back, and they would be refreshed because they would be reconnected to the mission, even though their job wasn't as directly tied in. And so that idea of letting people see progress, seeing how they're, what they're doing matters, is just so critical. Because if our brains expect a dopamine hit or expect a reward, we don't get the same amount of dopamine released time after time. It's only when there's an unexpected reward or when you see some new progress that you get it released. And so you really need over time to just key people into seeing that progress in the mission.

That's really powerful. Thank you for sharing that. And when we think of stress, I guess the opposite of when I think of that is that we're. Well, there's a sense of wellness and well being. You know, is there a one size fits all approach to well being and wellness?

From our standpoint, there is no test or measure or battery of tests that you put together that can tell you exactly what will work for your mind, your body, your goals, your lifestyle. It's because humans are quite different, and so we shouldn't expect the same things would work for each other. The work we do is all focused around running experiments to help you identify what works best for you. We have clients who are absolutely flourishing on ketogenic diets, vegetarian diets, eating more frequently, eating one meal a day. The variation is really quite surprising. But if you look around you and you see how different people are mentally and physically. Some are taller, some are shorter, it's not surprising that physiologically will respond differently. And so, you know, everything we do we design around a concept we call an experiment journey. Because it's not just we run an experiment and then another one. It's that you run an experiment, you take that data, feed it back and figure out what's the most likely next experiment to help run that one. And there's this really beautiful iterative process. So, you know, again, we think about collecting as much data as possible to target the most likely experiments to work for you. But there's never a failed experiment because even when an intervention doesn't work, we've learned something about your body.

I love the specificity of that. And you know, it's as you say, it is experimenting rather than going, hey, I heard this thing works for this person or this team or organization, it's going to work for us. So getting very specific around your needs.

Yeah, absolutely. And so, you know, we have 80 different supplements, dietary supplements we might use with a client. And all of those dietary supplements obviously help some of our clients or else we wouldn't use them. And all of them are also bad for some of our clients. And so again, people ask, what about multivitamins? And I always reflect that in long term research studies, multivitamins do not make people live longer. But I do believe that in many cases somebody might be benefiting from something in a multivitamin, which means that there's something else in there balancing out, hurting them. So, you know, there's, if you're doing 100 things and you haven't run the experiment to see if they're helping or hurting, you may actually be doing some that are helping and some that are detracting. And you end up then very quickly in a situation where you can't get to that optimal. And that could be whether it's, you know, athletic performance, it could be, you know, for your work, could be, you know, optimal mood for spending time with your kids.

And how does a person figure out what they do need? What, what kind of process are you able to take them through to go, hey, I'm deficient in this, or I need more of this, I need to avoid this. What does that process look like?

Sure. So we start with, as I mentioned, collecting a lot of data. So we run a very high end performance optimization coaching program. And the way we think about it is let's collect all the data first and that's lab wearable and interview data. We spend at least 90 minutes with a client because we want to go deep on their goals, their lifestyle, family history, sort of all these factors. And then we synthesize all three of those data sets to say, okay, based on the client's goals, here's what we think is most likely going on. So is your challenge with energy in the afternoon driven by blood sugar inflammation? Is it driven by stress hormone levels in the morning that are preventing your brain from getting fuel in? Is it driven by.

Suboptimal recovery and sleep? Even just with afternoon energy levels, there's four or five physiological pathways that could be involved. And so then we'll design experiments to test and we'll obviously run the ones first that we think are most likely to work for you based on all the data we've collected. And then we'll think about not only customizing to your body, your goals, but also your lifestyle. Our clients are busy business executives, elite athletes, even frankly, people staying at home taking care of kids. If you're staying home taking care of two or three kids, it's a full time plus plus job. So basically run them through that. And then we want to look at all the tools that might help. So we think about nutrition, supplements, meditation, breathwork, sleep, light temperature, exercise, recovery, sort of all these tools that work for some people. And again, just do that triple customization. Your body, your goals, your lifestyle, run those experiments to figure out where we put you and then use the data from every experiment to feedback so we know where to go next.

Incredible. And you know, with the work that I do with executives and with teams, the more I look closely, the more I am seeing people engaging with wearables. And I'll often ask them, oh, tell me about that, what's that for? What does it measure? What do you do with that data? And sometimes it's like, hey, I seen this thing that came up on Instagram. It said it's going to help me perform better because it's going to help me manage my sleep. But actually they're not really using the data to help them. So what's your thoughts on wearables? What should we be looking at and what should we be considering using and why would we use it?

Yeah, I see a lot of what you described as, well which is people have a wearable, it tells them they slept well, but they kind of know they slept well that night. Or it tells them they slept poorly and they really know they slept poorly that night. And even in the worst case scenario, some people will note that, oh, it says I didn't sleep well, then they feel worse about themselves. But where they can be really valuable is you can't tell the difference between 5% better sleep or maybe even 10%. And so where they can be really valuable is back to the experiment approach. Running experiments and seeing if it improved REM sleep versus deep sleep. Did it help you fall asleep faster? And getting objective data for those experiments can be really beautiful as well as we don't just use them for sleep tracking. The major ones here in the US Whoop and Aura both do heart rate variability, which is a measure of how much activity there is in your sympathetic nervous system. Kind of the fight or flight system, which that can also tell us about stress levels and recovery. So we really love to use them as a way to measure the effects of experiments and then you know, from there they can tell us where to go next. But without doing that you just kind of end up learning something you already knew and you know, maybe getting recommendations that are quite generic.

100%.

And that's why like personally I've been reluctant to embrace a lot of that technology because when I have the information I think, well, what do I do with this? And you know, I've got to be managing and measuring what really matters to me, but then also having a bit of a strategy to hey, I've got to move forward and make these adjustments. So how could the say the non athlete, the non elite forces person really benefit from this work?

Well, I think, you know, the beauty of what we're doing is we have a long term strategy where we collect this really dense and high fidelity data around our clients. And it's the first data set in the history of the world that'll have dozens of experiments per person over, you know, as we grow thousands of people and really rich blood work and wearable data and self reports. So we will be building AI coaches over the next couple of years that can allow this to.

Go to people who can't afford the level of coaching we do now. But regardless of that, we also discover out of products that we can scale to people who can't afford our coaching business. So we can now send 95% of people anywhere in the world with no jet lag. That's based on some brand new insights from Work I did with the Navy SEAL community here in the US and then our clients were just requesting a solution to jet lag. And so we've developed it now, and we discovered that when you fly, there's actually an inflammatory process that gets kicked off in your body due to the pressure change in flight. And we now know how to turn it off using safe dietary supplements. And we have an algorithm tells you when to eat, sleep, and give you a kit and use the stuff in your kit. And yeah, it's really amazing to watch people fly to. From the US To Europe, Asia, Australia, and vice versa, and sleep well the first night.

That's amazing. Well, look, I'd like to take you up on that. So I've got a. From Christchurch to Auckland, then Auckland direct to New York, couple of days in New York, and then another long flight to Ireland, couple of weeks there, then back to California. So I'm chopping and changing so I can maybe test that out amongst all those time zones.

We'd love to get you set up. It's really, you know, we're really proud of what we've done there. We call the product flykit with two T's. And so, yeah, we're really excited and we're looking forward to getting you the experience.

So amazing. I see massive value in that. You know, for the everyday traveler, let's say someone who's going home to see family, they're traveling across five, six time zones. They've only got 10 days that they want to make the most of it. But also the corporate traveler, the team, say the professional team, who's traveling to compete at a World cup or just some big tournament, you want to turn up and not have to take two or three days to adjust. So that's a game changer.

Yeah. And USA Soccer, for example, is using it to go to the World cup right now as we speak. So we absolutely see that. We sell it to the military for special operations units. And it's actually only been a couple of weeks now where it's been publicly available to everybody. So we're really excited to get that out there and support a lot more people as we make that. And then we've done some work in women's health. We have a. About a 90% solution to some PMS symptoms that we'll be launching soon. And then, you know, then we just also have built up catalogs of tools that can help with sleep and other things. So, you know, anybody can run experiments on their own sleep and, you know, whether they have a wearable or not at least see, do I feel better in the morning? Did I sleep through the night? And so we really encourage people to listen to their bodies. And even if you don't have kind of the elite level data analysis to support you, there's all kinds of things people can do in each of these major categories that have an opportunity to help them and just live a better, happier, higher performing life.

Yeah, absolutely. And look, you guys, I think one thing that really sets you and a company apart from others is the level of research that you do, the depth of it, the quality of it. So for you, what makes good research? What's the difference between just saying, hey, we research and hey, we have quality and insightful research? What do you guys do that makes it really high level?

I think what's really special about us is everything we do is applied. So, you know, all of our clients are living real world lives. So when we start to see something working for a group of clients, it's not like, oh, this worked just in the lab, but then in real life it's not possible or it doesn't kind of, it gets washed out in the noise. We really do see things very much from the real world side. And then second piece is, you know, unfortunately a lot of products out there are mostly backed by animal research, mostly mouse models. And it's just the case that like, humans aren't mice. And.

Just like so much research that's been done on mice just falls apart with humans. So whereas the work we do, you know, when we recommend something to a client and happened to notice something unexpected happened. So for example, we were trying a supplement for workout recovery, didn't seem to work for that. But lo and behold, people got about 20% more deep sleep and felt just phenomenal the next morning. That's just a real world discovery in humans. And then we've tested it more and something really interesting happened, which is we found that it worked in about a third of people. A third of people, it did nothing. And the last third made their sleep worse. And what that tells you is that in a research study it would have washed out and the effect would have been zero. And the study would have said it doesn't work. But meanwhile, a third of people who use the supplement we've discovered that will probably commercialize as part of a sleep product in the next year. A third of people got the best sleep of their life night one. And a normal research study would have thrown that out. So I think it's the real world nature, it's all in humans. And as well, just, we're looking for things through such an individual lens that we're able to catch these things and we get lost on the aggregate.

A hundred percent is the difference that makes the difference with research. And it's interesting, you talk about sleep. So I was chatting with a friend who is the performance coach for George Russell at Team Mercedes Formula one, and I was just asking, what do you measure with George? What is it you focus on? And so he just said, look, a happy driver makes for a really good driver. And I said, well, one of the major influences of that happiness, that mental joy and wellbeing. And he says, look, sleep. We fly his mattress to Abu Dhabi, to Miami, to Melbourne, wherever the F1 is. We make sure his bed's there, his mattress, and get a good night's sleep. We really measure how well he sleeps, and we know that that definitely impacts his reaction times, his cognitive decision making. So for you, Andrew, if there was only one thing that a listener was going to measure, just one thing that could make a notable difference in their joy, their happiness, their wellbeing, what do you think that one thing should be?

Wow, this is a hard challenge. Sleep is a great candidate. We think of it as the master recovery tool. So sleep is a great example, not just because it's so valuable, but because so many things feed into your sleep quality that if you're optimizing there, it means probably not eating too close to bed. It means you're not overstressing your sympathetic nervous system. Your stress levels are relatively well managed. So I think sleep is an amazing outcome variable. But you do have to be careful because so many things affect it that can be hard to, you know, pick it apart for an individual. So, you know, I think if I could start with one area of activity as opposed to the outcome like that, I. I would probably play with sleep or nutrition. I think, you know, what we eat when and how much is just such a powerful lever, especially as today. There's so much terrible food available, so many terrible processed food products. So, yeah, I think I would play with nutrition or sleep. And so what would that look like on the nutrition side? I would test if I were someone. Does eating breakfast give me more energy in the afternoon or less? Does eating smaller meals more frequently or larger meals less frequently work better for me? Does eating carbs in the morning help or hurt? Does eating carbs at night help or hurt? And you could just go through these, like a B experiments where you compare one mode versus another. And I think most people will find that there's a tremendous difference once they dial in their nutrition. And then, you know, I think your Formula one team really has something quite important there as well with sleep.

Yeah, that's brilliant. It's interesting you say that because I do feel that when people start to look at, okay, how do I fine tune nutrition? It's almost overwhelming, like just mind boggling to where do I start? But that AB split testing is a great way to kind of get some of those larger items and start to see some differences.

Yeah. And look, you don't have to get down to the finest grain food sensitivity stuff right away. Just start with the big things, how much you're eating, when you're eating it, and then, you know, then the. If you're going to really want to dive into it, we definitely do recommend elimination diets. Super interesting to see what happens when you pull a bunch of potential allergens out of your diet and then add them back one by one. And the good news is people are like, oh, I did these things and I found I wasn't sensitive, I didn't notice anything. And they're kind of like sad about it almost because they wanted an explanation for the problem. But I think if you're not sensitive to something or it doesn't bother you, that's great, you don't have to worry about it. Then you want to cut out as many things as you can that don't matter. You don't spend your cognitive energy there. Spend your cognitive energy on things that do matter and say, okay, hey, it really matters if I eat fried food or if I eat after 8:30pm Good, then you can optimize against those. And just because you find that those things help you doesn't mean you have to do it every day. But at least you know, and then you can make choices, really informed choices about your performance. Say, hey, I'm giving a big presentation tomorrow to the board of directors. Maybe tonight I'm going to not drink. I'll eat earlier and I'll have fish over steak. But maybe you're at a birthday party two nights later and it's just fun and it's worth not feeling as good the next day, and that's fine too.

I love it. And one thing I want to ask you, in terms of the research you've done, what have you found in terms of coffee and alcohol? The two things that so many of us love, right? Coffee and alcohol? I would say there's a lot of listeners right now that are nodding their heads going, yep, the morning starts with one and the evening finishes with the other. So what have you find? What are the influences on our, our, our body, our systems, our thinking, our energy, what's, what's the connections there?

Yeah, I'd say coffee has quite variable effects on people. You know, we don't think of coffee or caffeine as a bad thing, but it can in some people increase anxiety. Two, it can sometimes be used to cover up other stress hormone or sort of inflammatory issues because you're kind of covering for lower energy than you should have. And then three, obviously if you're consuming it too late, it can then affect sleep. So as long as you're not doing any of those three things with coffee, I see absolutely no problem with it. And in long term studies there's no question correlation with longer or shorter lifespan. In fact, people who drink a few cups of coffee a day seem to live longer. So I think of coffee as generally a potentially positive tool. But if used the wrong way, it can either kind of degrade or hide things that are important. Alcohol is a little bit trickier. Alcohol decreases sleep quality in almost everybody. If you think about the last time you had more than a couple of drinks, maybe more than a bottle of wine or a number of shots of whiskey, Most people will recognize that they woke up in the morning or in the middle of the night, warm, their heart was beating faster, maybe a bit sweaty. It's because alcohol activates your sympathetic nervous system. I've mentioned a couple of times that fight or flight system. It seems to push adrenaline in the body. When we're stressed, we know we don't sleep as well. It's no surprise with more adrenaline in the system that we don't sleep as well. And so that really then affects your energy levels, mood, focus, the next day. People often the next day have quite a bit more anxiety when they drink. So what I'd say to people is a great test of how much alcohol is affecting you is if you do have a wearable, you'll get your heart rate at night. And when you drink, your heart rate's higher at night than when you don't drink, then it's likely to be having some effect. And the higher it is from your baseline, the more effect it's going to have. And that can be a great proxy that and your heart rate variability, which is a measure of that sympathetic nervous system. So, you know, basically, look, alcohol, if people want to have it, they should just know how it affects them and then they can make an informed decision about whether it's worth it or not. But in most people it definitely degrades your sleep quality and energy levels throughout.

Thank you for that. That's great. I mean, it's very enlightening to understand what it might do to the heart rate and being able to measure it, and that's where the wearables actually come, is really valuable to help you make better choices or to shift the relationship with alcohol. And what does a day in the life look like for you? Because I'm sure I'm not the only one that's probably thinking, wow, you've got access to all this incredible research, you've spent your life on it, you've got the education around it, you've got all the tools, you've got a whole company focused on it. What do you do for you specifically from wake up till to nighttime that really helps you? What do you measure? How do you measure it?

Well, I'll obviously focus on the things that I do that are quite odd because I'm sure those are the most interesting. I wake up and eat basically like a pudding. I make of mixing almond butter, olive oil and water. I've found that my body needs a lot of calories throughout the day and this is the cleanest way to get very high quality calories. So I make this pudding in the morning, eat about a thousand calories worth and just feel phenomenal through the middle of the day. And then in the middle of the day I do best by having some carbs, whereas in the morning I have almost no carbs with that without breakfast. And then at dinner kind of a moderate amount of carbs. I tend to work out because of my work schedule. And I'm an extreme night owl. So I tend to sleep till nearly before my first appointments, which is different from a lot of people who are early birds and wake up early in the morning. But I tend to work out because of that in the afternoon and that gives me great energy through the evening.

For me, of the many things that help with sleep.

I'm quite protective of myself from blue light at night. So you can wear blue light blocking glasses or in my, in my home I have lights that automatically go to orange, which means there's no blue in them at the right time at night and so allows me to kind of gently come down to sleep and allow my brain to calm down. And then another thing that's been shown in the research to help and is really tremendously valuable for me for sleep, a 10 to 15 minute warm shower before bed helps a lot of people sleep better. And so I'll always focus on that. So throughout my day I'm in often back to back meetings. We're growing our company to scale this human performance stuff to everybody. So I have busy schedule, I don't have time for everything, but I make sure my nutrition stays dialed in. I do things to ensure my sleep quality is as high as possible for as long as I get to sleep. And then those workouts are just so powerful.

And what are the wearables that you're using?

Yeah, so I personally use an Oura ring at night and I'm using that to track different sleep experiments I'm running for workouts. We also in the company use whoop straps or whoop bands as well. So we use both of those. And then depending on what other experiment I might be running during workouts, I may be wanting to look at my heart rate during the workout to measure what heart rate zone I'm in. Um, and we're obviously experimenting all the time with other wearables. Continuous glucose monitors can be quite interesting to watch your blood sugar change in real time. Done many experiments with those as well. So again, just a tremendous number of tools out there. And again, as long as you're running them, using them to measure experiments then can be very valuable.

And in terms of hydration, you know what, what's been the study and the research feedback that you've had around optimal hydration, how that affects our performance and decision making?

Yeah, it really depends whether we're talking about for an athlete or for a normal person. You know, for an athlete who's sweating a lot and training a lot, you have to really think about electrolytes because you lose salt, calcium, potassium, magnesium through that sweat and through urine. But for a normal person who's not sweating that much, electrolytes aren't nearly as important in there. It's just about the amount of water you're getting. And because you're getting plenty of electrolytes through food, if you're not sweating a ton of them out. So, you know, the first piece is how much water or liquid are you getting? And the second piece is the electrolyte piece. And again, most people who feel like they need electrolytes who aren't working out a lot, probably it's less important. But of course, as I said, you know, humans can be quite different. So we do see clients who actually need electrolytes throughout the day because their body doesn't like to hang on to them as well. So I would say, you know, our general, you know, there's, there's Some people who think you need less water, but we generally like people to be at 3 liters or above per day. And find that tends to enhance how people feel energy wise. And as long as you can handle going to the restroom a few times, that works. And then. But if people wake up in the middle of the night to have to go to the bathroom, may want to taper that in the evening and have more earlier in the day.

That's brilliant. And let's talk a little bit about Find, like why it was founded, what you guys are on a mission to do, and what the structure of the company actually looks like. So where did it all begin?

So you know, I ran this human performance efforts for the military and then I'd be speaking at conferences and business executives would come to me and say, hey, I get what the Navy SEALs, but like what should I be doing? So I built an executive coaching business and the big conclusion from those two work periods of my life was one, if you can find the truly customized program that's optimal for an individual, you can drive incredible results. But two, as I've already mentioned, there's no test, there's no way to predict it exactly for a person today. And so you have to have some sort of elite coaching to do it. But of course that doesn't scale scale. And so when we looked at this, we said, what are the options to scale this so we can make this available to more people? And the obvious first answer to that is can we use software somehow? But unfortunately, even though we have such powerful AI and other software tools today, you need good data to base that off of. And unfortunately the dirty secret of the health field is that the data is extremely poor quality. And so we said if you really wanted to do this right, you don't want a 20 or 50% clinical trial, you want thousands. You don't want one experiment per person, you'd want dozens. You could say hey, if A works for you, B doesn't, C works, what about E, F, G, H, I, J, K? And then of course you'd want instead of just one test at the beginning or one test at the end like in most experiments, you'd want regular blood work and wearable data and self report. But unfortunately to collect that data set is a multi hundred million dollar project if it was funded by the government and sent to academics. And unfortunately the government's not going to fund that and the academic world just isn't scaled to handle that. But we realized that in our coaching business we were already collecting this incredible high Fidelity data set. And so from there we said, if we can scale this coaching and deliver world class programs so people not only get great results, but we collect this incredibly high fidelity data, we can use that to build AI coaches that can scale this to millions of people. And so that's what we're doing at Fount. We are building the highest fidelity data set in the history of healthcare, just as we help our clients navigate their performance every day at the highest level. And the cool thing is we never have to sell that data. We just use it to build these AI coaches. So the people who do it now and who are participating now, they're actually helping make this available to people who couldn't afford it to the rest of the world. And so we've built to scale up the coaching business and build these AI coaches so what is today only available to executives and professional athletes will be available instead of for thousands of dollars a month, for 20 or 30 bucks a month. And then along the way, we discover really cool things like our fly kit, jet lag product, this work we're doing in women's health, these brand new supplements for sleep, and we'll just continue to make these products available to general consumers as we move forward as well.

It's incredible. Like, honestly, it's inspiring what you're doing and the rate at what you're doing. So what are the risks in that industry? Because obviously there's lots of regulations when you're dealing with people's health and data. What are the big risks and challenges that you're facing at this point?

Yeah, so we, because we're not medical doctors, we can't make medical diagnoses or give advice on prescription other things. So, you know, there's things we would love to do for our clients that we are just lines we don't cross. So we stay on the nutrition supplements, meditation, sleep, that side of the fence there, and for wellness factors and not for, you know, medical conditions. So, you know, we definitely want to always be smart about that. And then look, we just want to make sure what we're doing is safe for our clients and helping them not only in the short term, but in the long term. And that's one of the reasons I really love that we get regular blood work on our clients is because there are things that will make you feel better, but push your blood work in the wrong direction, especially your cholesterol and lipid levels. We see that not infrequently. And so the beauty of what we do though is if it's happening we can see it and reverse it or find a second solution that allows you to feel better and have kind of your longevity markers where you want them. So, you know, I think it's really about making sure you optimize for the short and long term. And then, you know, from our standpoint, from a regulatory standpoint, being very clear that we're not doctors and we don't, you know, this is not medical advice, but we're just helping people optimize. And I think it's. I think it's good enough for us to help people optimize their energy, focus, mood, sleep, gut health, longevity, fertility. All those factors that people end up pretty happy with that.

Yeah. Oh, massively. It's a very different life when you can start to see big improvements on those things. So the meditation thing really interests me. I've been meditating for, I don't know, maybe seven, eight years. It's a daily practice, and it's a challenge, but it's also, there's rewards that come with it. So what have you found through, you know, through practice, but also through research? The benefits of meditation.

My favorite analogy for meditation is to think of it like weightlifting. If I do a bunch of bicep curls, my biceps will get stronger and bigger. What you're doing with meditation is you're intentionally stressing the attentional circuits, the circuits that direct where your attention, where your mental capacity is going. Just like intentionally stressing my biceps with weights, if I do it to that parts of my brain, those parts of my brain will get stronger and actually denser, more than bigger. And so you can actually see in functional MRI imaging, parts of the brain, and people who are meditating a lot get denser new connections and different pathways. And so basically, meditation allows you to optimize being able to control your attention, which in some people means they can focus on work longer. And other people, it means you don't go to anxiety places with high anxiety in your mind. And so it can help with stress levels, anxiety, focus, mood, a number of different factors. We even see in studies where six weeks of medication can dramatically drop your cortisol stress hormone levels. So big, big potential benefits in the person who meditation works for. We also see some people who don't do as well with meditation do better with breastwork, for example. And again, there's no. There's not one that's better or worse. It's just about what works for you. And then, I guess, one other little tidbit that I find really fascinating. Most meditations, people start with are what's called focused tension meditation. You could be focusing on your breath or let's say one stimulus and just really if your mind wanders, you bring it back. And in studies that shows that right after you do that, you have this increased ability to focus on what you're working on. But interestingly, if you do another type of meditation called open monitoring, which is instead of focusing on one element, don't focus on anything and take in all the information. If your mind falls and crashes down into one area, then expand it back again. Open monitoring meditation has actually been shown to increase creativity in the hour after you do it. We find pretty cool to be able to enhance people's creativity as well as just their focus.

I love it. And for me meditation is like a twice a day thing. It's in the morning, which is usually quite brief, and then it's in the evening, which is more lengthy. So have you found any feedback around doing it more frequently and in benefits or even short sharp bursts throughout the day? Is there anything there of interest?

Yeah. So we did a review of over 1000 meditation studies internally and we found two things. One, for the hour after you meditate, you get benefits even from as little as eight minutes. In studies you can really do something quite short, less than 10 minutes and get benefits. Then second, across many, many studies, you get not just those short term benefits, but long term benefits from even three 20 minute sessions a week. So Monday, Wednesday, Friday, or pick any three days you can get 20 minutes in, you'll start to change the structure of your brain over time, over a series of weeks and just get tremendous benefits. And the other reason I love 20 minutes as an amount of time is because if you have a 30 minute block on your calendar and you block that off for meditation, but maybe you want to go to the bathroom, you got a phone call to finish, you want to grab some food afterwards, you can still usually grab 20 minutes out of that 30 minute block and you know, really just get tremendous benefits from it. So you know as little as eight minutes if you want the benefits right after. And then if you want those long term benefits, that 20 minutes three times a week appears to be a really tremendous kind of protocol.

I love it. Honestly, what you've shared so far, Andrew, is just so valuable. And I know that wellbeing and you know, thriving and flourishing, it's such a big focus for a lot of our listeners. Not only those who are on the sports field, but those who are running day to day life and being parents and showing up at work and leading others. So there's those stresses that we've got to try and manage so that we can enjoy our dying time. We can go on holiday and be present and we can feel good physically, spiritually, mentally. So what you've shared has been absolutely incredible. I'm going to make sure that we put in the show notes, a link where people can go and check out your incredible company, all your offerings, and you're truly a global company. What you're doing is incredible. And I love this idea of being able to travel and not have to worry about jet lag. I spent, I think one year was 130 planes or 140 planes and constantly traveling, and I felt terrible. I was constantly groggy. I wasn't able to think for longer than a few minutes. But having a product like this would have changed my whole experience of life. So thanks for putting the time into it. I'm looking forward to checking it out. But before we wrap up, I want to ask you a question. Actually, two questions. The first is, when you think of leadership, what comes to mind?

You know, I can't get away from the work we did with the military where we really saw the impact of trust and mission focus. So when I think of leadership and when I think about my own leadership running fount, my goal is to create a culture internally in the company where I can generate that trust and people not only trust me, but also trust each other. And that means that's a big question about who we hire and let go as well. And then we have that intense mission focus that we care about more in many cases than our individual selves. So we can really all band together to do something great for the world.

Incredible. I love that you bring it from the military. And those are two very simple pillars, but yet many of us wouldn't be clear and collective on those. So I love it. And the last question I'd love to ask you is if we fast forward to the end of life and you know it's your last day. In fact, you know it's your last few minutes, and a young person in your life really dear to you asks you this question. So they ask, how can I lead my life on purpose? What would your advice be to them?

My advice would be.

Find something that truly matters to the world and don't allow others to tell you it doesn't. Or don't allow others to tell you it's too hard. I think if I pull from my own history, there were plenty of people in the military who said, oh, this is too expensive. We can't roll this out to all the soldiers or. Oh, you know, the data is very hard to collect in the healthcare field. But I certainly, you know, with what we're doing now, I really believe we have a chance to change the world by saying we're going to do this the right way. It's going to be hard as heck, but it matters. And so we're going to go after it with everything we got.

Incredible. I love it. And it really comes from a place of doing and a place of knowing you're walking that walk right now. So, Andrea, that's amazing. I just want to say a heartfelt thank you for taking the time to share what you're doing and passionately share it. So I have no doubt that our paths will cross again and I'm going to be engaging in your products as you continue to expand your range as well. So a massive thank you and I wish you nothing but the best.

Thanks so much, James. It's really been a wonderful time chatting with you today and thanks for the opportunity to share what we do with your audience. And yeah, I look forward to getting you on the FlyKit program and making you feel better when you fly without all that inflammation.

Thanks a million. Hey guys, if you enjoyed the content today, please smash that subscribe button below. And if you want to become part of my community, I've got an amazing free Facebook group. Please come and join us the link in the description below. And also if you've got any questions about today's session, I'd love to know. Just comment below and I'll be sure to get back to you guys. Have the most amazing day.