The Fifth Freedom: Why Health Is Every Entrepreneur's Greatest Asset

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When you have your health, you can have 1,000 priorities. When you have poor health, you have one priority.

Entrepreneurs spend half of their health to gain wealth and then spend half of their wealth just to get back their health. And it's just so crazy. We don't have to be doing this if you just follow a proper health blueprint. And I'm so, so excited to bring on my good friend all the way out to a place that I'm starting to fall in love with out Denver, Colorado, Boulder, Denver, Colorado. We're going to bring on Dr. Sam Shea, DC FMCP, is a functional medicine expert, speaker, and and stand-up comic who helps people get out of survival mode and reclaim their energy, focus, and vitality through personalized functional lab testing and his signature NeuroHarmony model and genetics testing. This is some cool stuff. I love this topic because I'm in the grind. I'm not focused on my health as much as I should be, and I know I'm feeling it. And I know so many of my friends and colleagues in the entrepreneur world follow the same model, and we need to level this crap up. So excited. Thank you so much for coming on, Dr. Sam.

Thanks, Eric. It's good to see you.

All right. Well, that statement that obviously I didn't come up with myself, you helped me craft opening line over there about spending half of the health to generate wealth and then spend half of the wealth to get back their health. I mean, let's lean into that for a minute.

So entrepreneurs have a unique health. They have an extra special variable when it comes to their health and their longevity and their well-being and their performance. So on the one hand, entrepreneurs usually start out with hustle and we work the 10, 12, 14-hour days and And there's a lot of motivation, perhaps some desperation to try to make all the connections, do all the things in the business. And then when we do all the things and we get to the place where we can hire, then we're now doing less of the things, but now we're managing more people. And then as there's scaling and complexity increases, we may be trying to handle the complexity with better systems and more people, but we'll— it's still a thing that we're navigating. And usually whatever happens is that we are the ones that sacrifice our own health. And it could just be by a thousand cuts. So going to bed 5 minutes later, then 5 minutes later again, then 20 minutes later again, then 30 minutes later again. And then it's like, you know what, I'll just have an extra half cup of coffee in the morning. I'll just be able to work it out, or I'll just— I'll work out one thing less. I need fast food right now, or I just need faster food. And if I just upgrade from these food bars to elk jerky sticks. It's still fine because it's now higher quality fast. And I'll cut down on— usually sleep is the first thing to go. Then it's social time becomes— we're so busy, we kind of forget that the— that there is a social, you know, socialization is a nutrient just like water and food and sleep. And everything— the big theme is that there's constant kind of eroding away gradually over time. In the name of maintaining and of creating and then maintaining and expanding and optimizing the business. And the optimization of the business usually comes at the devolution of one's self-care. And one of the greatest entrepreneur coaches alive, Dan Sullivan, he came up with the Four Freedoms, why people become an entrepreneur, the four reasons why, the Four Freedoms: freedom of time, freedom of money, freedom of association, and freedom of purpose. Right. However, there is a fifth freedom, and that is the freedom of health. And without that freedom of health, number one, it's hard to create the business over the long term in a sustainable way to create those other four freedoms. And when you do finally achieve a place in your business where you have those four freedoms, but if you're lacking the fifth freedom, it's hard to enjoy, right, the freedoms you worked so hard for. So It's hard to have time, purpose, association, and finances when you're struggling with health. His primary colleague, Joe Polish, says, "When you have your health, you can have 1,000 priorities. When you have poor health, you have one priority." Something equivalent to that.

Yeah.

What I want to— Look, I'm an entrepreneur myself. I'm not saying this from an academic standpoint or some top-down judgy way. I have done this, ironically enough, someone in the natural holistic functional health space. So I deeply understand this impulse due to self-sacrifice in the name of the business to just keep throwing my own time and vitality into the endless bottomless maw of running a business. My one framework I want to offer to people who are entrepreneurs listening to this is not, oh God, now I have to add more health biohacky stuff to the other laundry list of running my business. It's like it's a burden or it's an extra or it's It's an afterthought. And I want to change that mindset. This is probably one of the most practical things you can walk away with if you're listening to this. And we're like barely 5 minutes into it. So the most practical framework and mindset to approach your health is budget for your health. And you want to go based on the numbers. Like you hire accountants, bookkeepers, CFOs, fractional CFOs, whatever. Fractional CFO will do amazing things for you. Even it's just once a month, you're checking in and looking at the data, looking at the numbers, making future projections, whatever it might be. What you want to have is a practitioner that is also numbers-driven, right? Just like your accountant, just like your CFO. And you need to have someone like— yes, some people can do this without a CFO. They can run their business. That's rare, right?

Really rare. And usually those kind of— well, I mean, you call CFO any level of accounting, right? Bookkeeping.

Any level. These people usually have a massive background, or they are the rare people who are just numbers talented. And those people exist, and they may be the exceptions, and they may get up on a TED Talk and pound their chest of how amazing they are and blah, blah, blah, whatever. That's not the norm. Just my, what I would say is think of your health as a budget item that you allocate on a monthly basis. Like, obviously, if you're going to hire us, like you've got the monthly maintenance thing, but then you've got this initial kind of outlay to get all the analysis in the initial time, the onboarding, all the rest of it. And just think of it like that. And suddenly it fits within the entrepreneurial mindset of, okay, this is a require— it's, it's not an expense. It's like, oh, I'm just throwing money away. No, you're investing in yourself. Like, literally, what is the point of being an entrepreneur is to invest in yourself and your freedom, your time, your association, your purpose, all that.

I want to reemphasize some things you said that hits hard for me as you're talking. I mean, a couple of things I love you said earlier, and I'm trying to relate to this as an entrepreneur and why, what gets in the way. First of all, I love your analogy of almost like health debt cuts by, or death by a thousand cuts on the health side. And you're right, like little things kind of add up and you don't notice them because, and it kind of goes to my second point. A lot of the things we're used to as entrepreneurs and where we invest money tends to be the stuff that everybody's so focused on, visible ROI. Like, I do these things and I get a return. I hire an accountant and I get to see the books. I do this and I get to see that. Even if you're hiring and you're doing functional, all that, you are seeing results and data and numbers because you're seeing blood tests and all that kind of stuff. So you see it. But I think where I— I'm just using me as an example and imagine others get held up on is it's hard to see the progress sometimes visibly made, sometimes not. Or people, I think, don't realize that you are making progress. But just like you don't see the death by a thousand cuts, sometimes the negative, sometimes you don't see the positive right away, although you will, I assume, in due time. Therefore, it's hard to mentally make that leap to say, wait a second, there's not that stress. It'll be okay if I wait a little bit longer. And a little bit longer tends to continue to go longer and longer and longer. And then now you're in a bad situation. And the final thing I'll say is I hear— I love the other thing you said too, is I hear so many people that have the stories of grinding, grinding, grinding. Now they're in their 50s and 60s and they had a big success story. They finally made it. And all of a sudden, like you're alluding to, all that work to get there and their health is shit and therefore they never even get to enjoy it. What a tragedy. Like you work your ass off and you can't even enjoy the stuff you did.

Yeah. I mean, Steve Jobs being one of the ultimate examples of that and many, many others. And sure, the cliché of having the heart attack in 54 or whatever it might be. And the The good news is that right now we're in a really good space where really effective diagnostics and tracking and communication has been demonetized and democratized enough that it's highly affordable to entrepreneurs at basically every level. And for people that are really truly struggling financially as an entrepreneur and they're in that very uncomfortable space of, I don't have— I'm going to sacrifice my business to try to keep my health up.. But if I have, but I want to invest in my business, but then if I don't, my heart, then it's kind of really uncanny valley. What to do? The good news is, is that there's a lot of strategies that you can employ that are very low cost. And then there's for people who have more, more they're able to invest, they're able to get easier and easier number metrics to then optimize in an easier and easier way. So for people that, yeah, let's dig into that.

I'm glad, Dr. Sam, I'm glad you're saying that because yeah, maybe let's talk through some levels. I really appreciate that. Like, so like, how would you, where would you start and how would you level up and Sure.

I'm going to start with a definition. There's Western medicine, there's natural medicine, and there's functional medicine. Western medicine is emergency. The philosophy of Western medicine is, is, was created out of emergency care, out of triage in World War I. You either, you missing an eye or a limb, are you bleeding out? And you didn't have missing eye syndrome or bleeding arm disease. You had the symptom was the problem. It was an emergency.

Right.

And so philosophically, Western medicine is there to get people from crisis to stability. And that's very needed in an emergency situation.

Correct.

Natural medicine is more like getting people from chronic to normal and then normal to optimal. It's not emergency care. Functional medicine is utilizing the best of Western medicine lab diagnostics with the best of natural medicines, lifestyle, diet, nutrition interventions.

Right.

So we're leveraging the technology, but our solutions are not drugs and surgery. Solutions or lifestyle changes prioritized according to the data. That's the difference.

Preventative, that's the key word, right? Preventative health, right? There's a lot of what I hear.

Well, it's not even just preventative health. It's actually restorative and optimization. That's the difference.

Got it.

Because some people are already worn down after 10, 20, 30 years of being an entrepreneur. And if you have an eye towards prevention, you're still in this mindset of Western medicine of the disease is forthcoming, better brace for it, better delaying for it. You're creating a bit of psychological learned helplessness that you are anticipating something awful. It doesn't mean— look, people are going to die eventually. Obviously something— there is a light at the end of the tunnel, and eventually it's going to be a train. But they've changed the definition of like blood sugar as like the normal— what used to be called normal is now called pre-diabetic. You see how sinister that is? Like they've changed the phraseology to like you're pre-diseased. Aren't you happy? So, so we're looking at, if you're, if you're working within a disease model, that's Western medicine, which makes sense in an emergency care situation. But from a functional standpoint, we're looking at going from chronic to normal, normal to optimal, and you can be anywhere on that continuum.

Okay.

And so, and the good news is that we have the testing, the data, the numbers to figure out where you're at. If you're starting out, there's a couple ways to get numbers. Again, we're If you're gonna be an entrepreneur, you wanna make data-informed decisions.

Right.

Really start there. The simplest way to start out, if you're looking at functional testing, is to do a genetics test to identify your genetics of your optimal diet and the genetics of health and long— uh, love and longevity. So for diet, you wanna check— and the reason why I say genetics first is cuz for— if you spend like a couple hundred bucks, you get the genetic data for life. For life. And it's a one-time investment.

It's not changing. This is you. This is who you are. You're making—

this is who you are. Now, how you live is interpreted through your genetics, and your, your health expression will change. You can have twins with identical genetics have completely opposite lifestyles, and they'll have different health outcomes. Of course, the genetics are the same. But at least if you know what your genetics are, you know the way to best understand genetics. It's how can you live optimally, and also where are the weak points in your genetic chain that may break if you yank on that chain long enough Well, then, so start with the genetics test, blood test. It's not necessarily blood, it's more cheek swab. I mean, there are, there are some blood genetics tests, but in functional medicine, there's multiple different tissue samples. You can do blood testing, which checks for— it's one window into the body. It's how do you— different tissue samples are like different ways to analyze your business.

Got it.

So some people will look at cash flow, other people will look at inventory over turnover, and you can have like 10 different ways you measure the health of your business. And so the same thing with health. You can have blood tests that have one window. You have genetics testing through cheek swab, which is another window. Urine testing is another. Like, blood is like fuel in the car. Urine is the emissions test. Blood is the quality of the fuel. Urine is what was used.

Got it.

Like the emissions test. In fact, some tests combine blood and urine, like mitochondria testing, to check, do you have the nutrition going into your factory to generate energy? And then how is that factory operating? Because we're checking the smokestack out of that, right? Factory, and that's most type is your urine. And then you've got hair, hair analysis. I usually check for just for heavy metal, specific heavy metals. You've got stool testing to look at gut absorption, gut inflammation, gut infections, gut beneficial bacteria, gut inflammation. You can also have saliva testing to check for cortisol hormones, etc., etc. So like having multiple different analyses available for your business, functional testing provides an array of different windows into the the business of your body, so to speak. So for, if you're going to start, when someone's new in business and they hit a certain plateau, I don't know, $50K, $75K, $100K, and you need to like have, it's now complex enough, you need like really someone to look at it. Do you start out ideally with a genetics test? Because you, you get the data for life. And I'll just give some examples of what you can learn from it. You can now learn genetically, are you best suited for keto, paleo, Mediterranean, or high carb?

Wow.

You can now test for this. You can also test for your food triggers. Are you sensitive to, and I, and I'm risking losing people by saying this. Are you sensitive to caffeine?

Right, right.

So people can have, like me, caffeine-induced anxiety and depression. That's genetic.

Wow.

Genetic. I just recorded an hour-plus podcast on the 3 genes that control people— caffeine-induced anxiety and depression. And some people in business be like, I run on, on caffeine. Yeah, you may run on it, but you also may be really winding up your anxiety and your depression. And it's— that's caffeine. It's not necessarily your business that's spiking your anxiety levels. Maybe your caffeine. That'd be important to know if you have caffeine sensitivity. Other examples are what's your genetic relationship to alcohol, your genetic relationship to gluten, to dairy, to food allergens. Also, are you genetically vulnerable to overeating, over-craving sugar, over-consuming sugar? And are you genetically vulnerable to avoiding bitter foods, which means you may be avoiding healthy green vegetables? And so all of these things, all of these genes that you can test for are practical. If someone like has a gene that means Dr.

Sam, but you start saying this, it's just, hey, thank you. It's so interesting. And it's like you look back on almost life in the Western culture, as you said, and it's almost like, and I imagine, I mean, you're such a pioneer and you're so into this world. I know an ultimate goal for you, I imagine, and people in your space is like, this is the stuff that should be mandatory as kids. This data is arguably more important than any other data we have, yet insurance ain't paying for it. It's just so backwards. And I look and think about, well, why would insurance companies want to pay for it? It's counterintuitive to the industries that make money off you being sick. Sick when you're essentially trying to optimize health for people. And if somebody knew, as my kids, like right now, 5 and 3, I'm like, damn, I want to go get them genetic tested right now because I can make their lives better their entire life. I could steer them in the right direction early.

If I had done the genetics test that I do with people now and when I was 5, my entire life and health and height and well-being would be completely different. In fact, my next comedy show is about what it was like growing up in the '80s as a child on a terrible diet and becoming chronically chronically ill. Like, how I became a functional medicine practitioner was because of that trajectory. My parents put me on the exact worst diet I should be on based on my genetics. Genetically, I have— so in your body you have a gene called the AMY1 gene, which makes the enzyme called amylase that breaks down carbohydrates in your saliva when carbs first contact your saliva. It's a special gene analysis that you look at not the, the version of the gene but the number of duplicates of it. So the best analogy I can come up with— imagine your gut is a and carbs charging the fort are Vikings. They're the Vikings in this analogy charging the fort. Sure. The number of copies of this gene that makes the enzyme is the number of cannons lining the fort.

Jesus.

The more cannons you have, the more enzyme you make to mow down these carbs. Now you can have up to about 20 copies of this gene, so you can have up to 20 cannons lining the fort, and it's additive. So someone with 5 cannons makes approximately half as much as someone with 10 cannons, which is half as much as someone with 20 cannons, which is 20x someone with 1 cannon or x someone with 2 cannons. So the number of cannons matters more than the version of the cannon, which is what the other gene tests to check for— what's the version of the gene, not the duplicates. When I tested my, my carb tolerance, I have out of 20 gene copies, I had a grand total of 2.

Wow.

Second lowest possible. And my parents put me on a high-carb, low-fat diet at age 6 because they thought my cholesterol was too high at age 6. And they put me on, you know, just grains, breads, boxed cereals, skim milk, I Can't Believe It's Not Butter, ramen noodles, SpaghettiOs, and all that stuff. We—

exact opposite of what you needed.

Exact opposite of what I needed. And, you know, in their defense, my parents didn't know anything about nutrition because after all, they were both medical doctors.

Wow.

Even better, psychiatrists. I can't make that up.

So, back to my point though. I mean, did I hit on it? I mean, if people understood this, why is this just not mandatory? Okay, I'm going to go in and give my child a vaccine test and I don't want to go down that rabbit hole, but why isn't just like, hey, let's just get every child a genetics test at the age of X?

Put them on the right path. Well, one of the reasons why entrepreneurs really understand and push the world forward is because we understand human incentive structures. The thing that certain, certain people with certain philosophical and political dispositions don't understand is human incentives. The human incentives drive everything. And so if you create an incentive structure where you increase your power, your profit, your prestige by keeping, by making and keeping people sick, whether intentionally or unintentionally, then you don't do things in order to empower people to stay well. There are certain insurance companies that have realized that there are two models of health insurance. One is we want to keep you alive for 80 to 100 years and you keep paying us for 80 to 100 years and we'll do everything we can to ensure that you have the information to stay as healthy as possible because we want you you as low-cost month-over-month paying client over decades. That's one model. The other model is we will charge you as much as possible. And then when you get really sick and break down and we won't give you any information, but then as soon as you need our help, we're going to gaslight you and deny you and make it difficult for you to claim because we're interested in short-term extraction as opposed to long-term mutual benefit. So there's different insurance models out there and depending on what insurance model you're in, there is some— like Dan Sullivan talks about this, like he has an insurance company, I don't know which one it is, where they want you to have all the genetics testing and the functional testing and all the rest of it because they know they want you around for decades.

Right.

Then there's just the sheer incentives that they're externalizing the costs but internalizing the profits. You really want to make sure that food is really, really cheap and available and are cheap and abundant, which makes sense, especially since post-World War II when there was food rationing, all the rest of it, the fear of starvation was really real. So then you have this explosion of the fertilizer industry, and then dwarf wheat was developed, for which there was a Nobel Prize given out, where now you can now have all of these calories through grains. So you want— you prevent acute starvation, but you now lose— you now create all this chronic disease from people having emptier and emptier calories. And then you want to prevent your citizenry from revolting, so you provide bread and circus, which is a sinister term from the Roman era. You just got to keep the populace entertained and full and they won't revolt. So you give everyone TV and lots of grains that are cheap and noodles and cereals. So no one is starving and everyone is endlessly entertained.

Right.

And there is a perverse logic to that. But again, health is not the objective. Maintaining order is.

Maintaining order and profits and all that kind of stuff.

Yeah. So I don't want to necessarily continue down this direct line of conversation. I think it's pretty dark pretty quick, but—

Yeah, no, I get it. I'm with you on a lot of these things and it's sad. I think fortunately, I definitely am seeing a movement. The circles you and I are in and Speakeasy Mastermind and others, I think you have a lot of people that think more cutting edge and I just feel like the light's starting to shine, the movement's starting to happen where I think people's eyes are opening up to this whole other world of of being with people like you and seeing people like you to make a big impact in their lives. And I think you're helping point out the difference and the importance of that. Everything you hear on this show comes back to one idea, proximity. I wrote the book on it, literally, Proximity Pays, my bestselling book available now at proximitypays.com.

I want to talk more about the layers of like what people can do in an increasing amount of investment.

Cool.

So there's the genetic testing, layer 1, and then keep So there's genetic testing and then there's lifestyle analysis. So lifestyle, there's numbers in your business. That's like testing. So there's genetic testing, then there's layers of testing, but I want to pause on testing and just quickly pivot to lifestyle analysis. So lifestyle analysis is like, okay, what are your habits in your, like, if you're your business is like, what are your habits in your business? Do you block time? How do you think about it? If anyone's an EO or EOA, like you've got your quarterly things, your weekly things, your daily things, like what's your rhythm? What's your lifestyle? What are your habits? Habits that are promoting and supporting the growth of your business without burning out something else in the background or in the foreground. The same thing applies also to your health. Do you have a methodology for lifestyle? And do you have a blueprint, a framework for lifestyle analysis so that your habits are congruent with your health goals? If you have a way to analyze— ideally you have someone who's more expert in your business analyze. I mean, that's why if you're in EO or EO, you go to the quarterly things and you talk to your peers and you hire a coach and all these other things. So in health, it's no different. You want to have someone that has a framework for analyzing your lifestyle, just like in business you need a coach that has a framework for analyzing your business. Now, in the health space, there's many different frameworks. There's the triangle of health, the 4 steps of this, the pyramid of that, the inverted hypotenuse of wellness. I don't care, it's some framework. Mine personally called the 10 Pillars of Health. And I picked 10 simply because I met a guy who had 37, and I said, good luck with that, no one can learn it. And if people, oh, there's only 4 pillars of health, it's sleep, it's stress, exercise, and diet. And I'm like, yeah, you're missing 6 others. I mean, it's a good place to start, 4, those 4 are great, but there's, there's 6 others. Uh, 10 was a number people could rock. It's not too big and it's not too, uh, simplistic. Whether or not it's 10 of this or 7 of that or 4 of this doesn't— it's just make sure you go to someone that has a framework, a My 10 pillars in brief, it's brain and one, brain and hormones. They all begin with a B. Brain and hormones, that's one. Pillar two is bowels and digestion, and it's pillar number two for a reason because that's my subtle sense of humor. Pillar number three is body structure, untreated injuries, head trauma, and bad dental work. It's the physical body.

Okay.

Bad dental work will ruin anyone's day. Just ask anyone who's had it. That's pillar three, the body, the physical body. Pillar four is burst exercise movement and recovery. Burst is the only, exercise-related word I can come up with. It starts with a B, so forgive me there. Um, it's exercise, movement, recovery. That's the fourth pillar. Fifth pillar is biotoxins and inflammation, or anything toxic that weakens you. Pillar 6 is bio-nutrients, diet, nutrition. Pillar 7 is breakfast and routines, morning and evening routine. This— that pillar came out of working with night shift nurses, that they were some of the sickest people I've ever worked with.

Wow.

Because the human Tetris, the hospitals would put them with their routines just all over the place. So your morning and evening routines, that's seventh Pillar 8 is bothers, stressors, and unresolved traumas. Pillar 9 is bugs, hidden infections, and mold. Pillar 10 is bedtime and sleep.

Got it.

10 pillars. Now, in my practice, I've got 20-odd questions per pillar, and then we organize and prioritize the pillars based on what you uniquely need. Pillar 10 is bedtime for teaching purposes, but it's usually priority 1, 2, or 3, especially for entrepreneurs.

Yep. Yep. I hear that a lot. Yep.

Have a coach that has a framework for lifestyle. Lifestyle is looking at you from the outside in, and then a framework for labs, which is looking at you from the inside out. You combine both those together, now that's holistic medicine. Labs and lifestyle, from the inside out and from the outside in, that is holism. And we have that available today because the inside-out stuff was a little tricky before a Western medical lab technology, right? So that's the lifestyle piece. I just want to pause there if you have any any things you want to discuss from that? So we've got genetics, we've got lifestyle, then we're going to hop back over to labs. Okay, so then we've got what are the next layers of labs. Ideally you have someone that has a framework for both and they can tell you after talking with you, okay, these are the priorities for their labs, and then we're looking at your lifestyle, this is probably for your lifestyle. But in a generic sense, if we're talking about increasing what's the next step after a genetics test, usually, not always, usually the place to go to is checking your gut And the framework for labs are there are 5 types of labs. There's genetics, there's gut labs, there's hormone labs, there's mitochondria metabolism labs, and then there's the weird stuff. The weird stuff being metals, mold, environmental toxins, hidden infections, viruses, things you don't want.

Okay.

Mitochondria metabolism, that's looking at how well are you, your nutritional status, your blood sugar, your mineral status, fatty acid status, amino acids, vitamins, nutrients, how well you're like handling your blood sugars, liver health, etc. Your mitochondria, which is how well you generate energy from eating food. And if you don't do it well, then you get super tired really easily, don't recover easily. So that's mitochondrial metabolism. Hormones, you look, there's adrenal hormones for stress and stress management, thyroid hormones for energy, P, and longevity. Then there's sex hormones, and then there's melatonin for sleep. And then for gut health, you've got 3 types of gut tests. You've got the SIBO, which is small intestinal bacterial overgrowth. That's, that's more of a breath test. If people get like super bloated from eating anything or they're not feeling they're absorbing their nutrients, then there's food intolerance testing under gut tests. And then the most important one, the gut testing is like a broad spectrum gut test. This is different from a Western medicine gastroenterology test where they usually check for 10 to 12 infections if you went abroad for vacation and got food poisoning. That's checking for only like 10 to 12 really bad critters. A really good gut test checks for about 40 or so or more hidden infections, checks for about a dozen or so beneficial bacteria like probiotics. It checks, are you digesting your foods, looking at your pancreas, your gallbladder, and it looks at gut inflammation, gut immune system. Do you have gluten antibodies? Like you're eating too much gluten and you're having an immune response. And it looks at, the original term was leaky gut, but it's been That term's been blackballed and it's now called intestinal permeability. Do you have holes in your gut that are then creating absorption issues and potential autoimmune reactions? So that's gut testing. Usually that's the next easiest step that's gonna give you the most valuable information because if you can't absorb your food or you've got hidden infections in your gut or you've got a leaky gut, then even the best quality organic food and supplements is gonna be less effective. Got it.

Got it. Got it.

And, you know, most of your neurotransmitters for your brain are made in your gut. I went to a 2017 3-day conference, Gut and Brain, in Australia, and like there were some luminaries in the room in the gut-brain world, and it was 3 days of just nothing but mind-numbing science on the connection of gut and brain.

Yeah, I'm hearing more and more about the gut stuff. I mean, it's— I'm a believer for sure.

Totally. So you have that like testing, it'd be like genetics, then gut, and then from there it's really like where are people at? Again, I'm speaking generically, generically, people may have other higher priorities based on individual situation, but in generically, it's like, where are people at? Are they feeling like, did they know they got exposed to mold or Lyme or some weird metal? Then maybe they need to go down the weird stuff pathway and check for all the toxic stuff. Or they're like, they know their hormones are out to lunch because they've got problems with libido or bizarre weight gain, or they've just like, they've got signs of thyroid issues, like they're feeling cold all the time, or they're losing their outside third of their eyebrows, or like gut. They're just feeling slow and tired throughout the day, or they just, they're lacking energy and brain focus, and they're having trouble, like, they're just constantly craving, like, sugar all the time. Like, maybe it's a mitochondria metabolism test. So you can actually triage based off, you know, ideally you have a professional who's triaging with you to figure out what the next most priority is. But I would say that from, from a functional testing, it would be be— if you were to start anywhere, it'd be genetics, gut, be the first in that order, those first two things. And then if you're needing other ways to track, I mean, there's so many biometric devices out there, whether it's Oura Ring or Whoop, uh, like there's like 10 other competitors out there, all with their pluses and minuses. And some people may say, well, that data isn't always accurate. And all this— well, you know what, I have 3 separate ways I track sleep, and they do not track evenly against each they track proportionally within themselves. Like one may say I got an hour and 45 minutes of REM sleep and one may say I got 45 minutes of REM sleep. But on the days that I got, according to one, only an hour of REM sleep, it's usually, it shows up I had like 20 minutes of REM sleep in the other. So the ratio about the same.

So no, I like, so of, you know, I'm an Oura Ring guy, like, and I have it, but I rarely look at the data. So like what data should I be looking at? And I want to go back to the testing in a in a minute. But what data would you recommend for those that have, let's say, Oura or Rob?

Oh, easy. That is so easy to share. Okay, the number one thing to look at with the Oura Ring is the time you actually go to bed, not the time you think you go to bed.

Okay.

And if you're hearing a little bit of intensity in my voice, that's on purpose, because the level of self-gaslighting and self-deception that people have over their self-concept of when they go to bed is cartoonish. I have actually calculated this. It is between an average of 40 to 44 minutes people deceive on average when they write and then report what time they think they went to bed versus what their Oura Ring says, right? It is about 40 to 45 minutes off on average. Okay, that is a level of self-deception that is, it's just so bizarre.

Sleeping score, if I'm looking at it, and that's a score, not the score.

No, no, no, no, don't look at the score. Look at the time to bed, the time you fell asleep.

Time to bed.

Okay, I use Oura Ring. Okay, so what you want is you just got to scroll The things to look at are total sleep under key metrics, time in bed, and then you want to look at the bar at the bottom that says time asleep, and it shows you where you started and when you woke up. It's the one with the little, like, the white bars, the light, the bright, the kind of the light blue, the medium blue, and the dark blue.

Yeah, okay, it's movement, that one, the awake REM.

It's time asleep. It's called— it's under details.

Yeah, yeah, it's up. It's like a bar graph, goes up and down.

Yeah, it's right above the average oxygen saturation. So when you look at that is where to look at what time you actually went to bed and how to understand like how and how much when. And then you want to look at total sleep, how much time you were asleep versus time in bed.

Love it.

And then other things that are useful to look at is average oxygen saturation. Now ideally, if you want to get your true oxygen saturation, you get a USB or a battery-powered pulse oximeter you put on your finger that, that Bluetooths to your phone to track your oxygen saturation like second to second over the night. I think the Oura Ring checks it maybe once every 5 minutes or something.

Yep.

The Oura Ring's an approximation because if you're having a too much drop of your oxygen, you're having apnea. So Oura Ring can— it's not the best device for it, it's really not. You can get a $50 USB rechargeable pulse oximeter that you can kind of straps to your longer that then wires all the info to your phone at night.

Nice.

That's better. That's a better one just for that thing. But if you are dropping in oxygen, your brain is suffering. That's bad.

I think I have a good score there, so I'm all right. I'll be okay. I bet 95% there, and I had a good sleep score yesterday. I knew I had a podcast with you today, Sam, so I made sure I had at least good.

Okay.

Right.

I'm glad you were pandering to your guests here. The next thing is go back out of the sleep score and go to your activity. Activity.

Yeah.

Oh boy, the most important thing to look for in activity for people to get started is simply number of steps.

Okay.

Like, if you were to start somewhere, like, other people look at, rightly, like zone 1, zone 2, zone 3, and all that. But if you're going to start somewhere, I make a distinction between exercise and movement. That's a really important distinction. Exercise, you look at your weightlifting, Sprinting.

I am the patient that you'd say, Eric, take some calls, walk around the neighborhood. You're sitting at your desk too long. I'd get—

or take the calls while you're walking around the neighborhood and just train your clients to do that. Or you get a walking desk.

That's what I need to do.

You get a little— you can buy a little desk treadmill for anywhere from $50 to $300 these days. I mean, when COVID hit, the desk treadmill industry exploded. The number one number to look at out of all of that is steps because a general metric for movement. Now, the two best ways to increase your movement is number one, get a pedometer. The Oura Ring functions as one. Or number two, get a pedigree, a dog, walk your dog.

Walk your dog. Yeah.

Okay. Get a ring or get a dog. Those are the ways to increase your steps.

Okay. I like it.

My little Frenchie, she is one of the, for so many reasons, she's been one of the most wonderful additions to my life. One of them is that I'm healthy healthier with her because I walk in the morning with her for at least a half hour and, and we get our movement in. Now, is that 10,000 steps? No, but it's certainly a big chunk of it.

Yeah.

And getting is really critical because movement is not just about, oh, it's blood circulation or whatever. No, movement is a nutrient to the brain. I'm not being hyperbolic or metaphorical, I'm being quite literal. Movement is a nutrient. Perception Feeds the brain. Perception. I used to be a functional neurologist for 9 years. This is before I switched to 100% virtual concierge care. You can't do neurology over Zoom. I'm sorry. It's just not, it's not a thing. So you need to have movement to feed your brain. If you're an entrepreneur, your brain is your most important asset. So movement is a nutrient, just like oxygen, just like nutrition, just like stimulation. So when when you get an Oura Ring, look at the steps as a generalized metric for movement and then work in strategies to walk to include micro walks. And even something as silly as parking farther away in the parking lot to force you to get an extra 100 steps to and 100 steps back. Look, little things add up.

I love that analogy, Dr. Sam. I think that's actually just even a psychological thing. Stop getting frustrated they have to park so far. You actually be happy about that because you're gonna get— you get an opportunity to take care of your body.

Totally. In a very real sense, like my father is now dying of dementia and this man has abhorred exercise, hated it, hated it with every fiber of his body. And I look at him as a cautionary tale and what's happened to him health-wise. I used to be annoyed every time I forgot something and I had to go back up the stairs to get it. Now I'm like, cool, I am happily getting extra exercise.

Love it. That's a great thing. All right, a couple more things. I know I've taken a lot of your time. One is, I don't know if I did this out of order or not, but I'm just thinking of my experience and I know others have done similar. I didn't follow your advice necessarily. I did get a test and sort of my early approach was I just did some blood testing to figure out how my body reacts, what supplements I need and what antioxidants work better for me. And then, I was able to get custom supplements based on blood test. Where does that fall? Because I didn't hear you sort of say that in your 5, but was I just— is that—

So, they did in certain places, but there's a difference. So, you're talking about— you're conflating and it's not your fault. You're in the lay public, you're not in the medical world necessarily. You're conflating blood tests with metabolism as the only thing blood does. And that's not necessarily— you can get blood tests for Lyme disease and infection. Blood is a tissue type of which you can get different types of data. Just like when you go into QuickBooks, you can get lots of data from the same dataset. So lots of analysis. So blood is a tissue type that is really good for specific types of information. Like hormones, CBC, anemia, iron, etc. And so blood is very useful for certain swath of types of testing. Urine test is ideal for certain things and not ideal for others. Cheek swab is ideal for some things, not for others.

So me getting a blood test to then adjust the supplements I'm taking, not necessarily a bad thing.

I mean, because it's not necessarily a bad thing, it just depends on what blood tests were tested for? Was the analysis accurate? And then were the solutions offered from that analysis correct for your current situation and your health goals?

Yeah, yeah. And I'm just saying, I would give a— that is a small piece of, I feel like, what you teach, because you're opening my eyes up to so much more. And you've inspired me because I just did that one thing, and just doing that one small thing with somebody that gave me the data and read my data and gave me recommendations has completely turned around how much I used to get sick. I was always the sick in my house and I have two little kids and now I'm the least sickest, which is crazy thinking about how many times they come home with stuff they bring back from school and I'm rarely sick anymore and I've completely done a whole customized supplement based on my blood work.

Yeah. And you can do that with genetics also. You can do that with gut testing also. So, the solutions— blood testing is great if it's the right things for the right person, the right solutions are offered. Genetics is great if you're testing the right genetics with the right analysis and the right solutions are are offered. Changes in diet, changes in supplements, changes in exercise. With genetics, you can get a very clear readout of like, here's my ideal genetic diet, here are the top 5 ideal genetic-based supplements because genetically you're more likely to be deficient in these particular things. So here are the supplements you need to shore up your genetic weaknesses. And then from an exercise standpoint, you can genetically determine are you a fast twitch, slow twitch, intermediate twitch, meaning what type of exercise is better suited for you. You can genetically determine if your collagen genes are weaker, so you're more prone to injury. So then it doesn't— if you're more prone to injury genetically, doesn't mean don't exercise. It means you must prioritize recovery and safety as much as you do the exercise itself. And if for a gut testing, you can analyze, okay, do I have any specific gut infections interfering with all of my metabolism absorption? Do I have all the right beneficial bacteria balance to make all the neurotransmitters transmitters? Do I have genuine issues with gluten that I need to be honest with myself to get rid of it? How is my inflammation in my gut, which then will create inflammation everywhere in the body? Like, taking an anti-inflammatory may be really useful, but why is— you need the inflammatory anti-inflammatory in the first place?

Yep, yep. Okay, no, I love that. I mean, I just want to— I'm just looking at the clock here because I do want to hit one last thing before we go. Um, stand-up comic. I mean, we have all this amazing genius coming out of Dr. Sam here, as we here, and at the same time he's got the comical side. How did that even come about? And share a little bit of that side of you.

This— I got into comedy the usual way, through tragedy. It was actually the same, same thing growing up in the '80s. I was so unwell and had such a hard time in school, having— being on the spectrum and having, shall we say, not very attuned and attentive parents. I retreated to watching sitcoms sitcoms growing up. Now, sitcom literally means situational comedy, right? Where you have the same cast of characters with the same personality thrown into different situations every week. That's The Simpsons. That's Family Matters with Carl Winslow and Urkel. Even though he's now a deeply, deeply problematic figure, that was The Cosby Show. That's Al Bundy. The sitcoms were— so I just like music. If you are exposed to music deeply when you're younger, you have the rhythm ingrained in you. I was exposed to comedy deeply and formatively when I was younger, and that continued. So it became a part of me. And so comedy right now is my advocacy work that I have, uh, right now. People can go onto YouTube, put in Dr. Sam Shay Neuro Spicy, all one word, Neuro Spicy, and you will find my free 1-hour comedy show called Neuro Spicy: Love, Life, and Comedy on the Spectrum, because it's the 1 hour I wish I 40 years ago to share with one, myself and my family and the school and doctors and other gatekeepers in the community to explain how my brain works and how I can better adapt to the normie world. And the same thing, my next comedy show I'm writing is on what it was like growing up with chronic illness and all the terrible food I grew up with and why I became and got into functional medicine because it's the same hour I wish I had 40 years ago to help explain why what happens with our diet and lifestyle and so on has such a long-term ramifications for our health and then practical things to do based on that. And my comedy is clean and observational. There's no politics. There's no cursing. There's no gratuitous body fluid jokes. It was designed to bring people together. That's, it's my advocacy and my education work. And I've even did my 1-hour show at the American Academy of Therapeutic Humor as a 2025 keynote, same stage Patch Adams spoke at years ago.

Wow.

And this is for anyone listening that wants a really hilarious and educational keynote for your stage or your conference. Or your seminar, you can also reach out to me for that. Because who would you rather have, a domain expert on stage or a domain expert who's also a comedian?

We call it edutaining. You're edutaining.

Exactly. Comedy is both education. It's also personally deeply therapeutic because to really do really good comedy, a really good comic can summarize 10 years of experience into 2 sentences. Like the level of precision and concision required in excellent, excellent comedy It can be mind-blowing, like describing the '80s as equal parts nostalgic and sinister.

You gotta go check out Dr. Sam's stuff online and get some good laughs.

There's a 12-minute highlight reel if you want an easy version. I have a 12-minute highlight reel of my hour comedy show, Neurospicy, and people can just start with that. That's a good way to— that's a good way to sample it.

Cool. And then my last question for you, and thank you so much for your time, is you've been one of our leaders since the beginning, the amazing Denver-Boulder chapter of Speakeasy Mastermind. Just share what you've enjoyed about Speakeasy so far for listeners who may not know about Speakeasy Mastermind.

So what Speakeasy Mastermind has done is it's combined the social element that a lot of entrepreneurs are missing, where we're kind of like lone wolves or in our own little entrepreneurial ivory towers. And it's really healthy and nourishing and even fun to get together once a month with our colleagues who genuinely want to help each other. And there's a different— like, entrepreneurs live a different life, and that's That's not a brag, that's not a better than, that's just a reality. We have a different life we're leading as entrepreneurs and we are better understood by other fellow entrepreneurs because there are things that we have to deal with that non-entrepreneurs just simply do not deal with. And it's a lonely world as an entrepreneur. And not only does Speakeasy Mastermind like help with the isolation, helps tactically. And you now have this hive mind opportunity when we do hot seats that really can help bust through a different layer just to help deal with the problem. And additionally, we've got an educational component that really keeps us on the forefront. Like, we are talking about— the thing that's nice about Speakeasy Mastermind Mastermind is that we've got some true world experts in the field that are happily sharing their expertise. People you don't really get to hear unless you know, like, the 3 podcasts that these people are hitting on to go and talk in. And we are staying up to date and staying current because to be an entrepreneur today is so overwhelming with the level of shifting technology that we need a community to keep each other current. It's not possible for one entrepreneur to stay current on their own. We need each other to— like we just did literally 2 days ago was our annual— sorry, monthly meeting where we brought in a gentleman named Nick Morgan who talked about the difference between AEO and SEO. SEO, and that AEO is now today where SEO was where 25 years ago, where if you knew about it, you shot ahead, and if you didn't, you got lapped. AEO is now where SEO was then. So if you know about AEO and you action it, now suddenly you can show up in the AI model summaries because the clickable links are going away.

That's right.

So like, I didn't know what that meant. I didn't even heard of AEO until I went to the Speakeasy Mastermind Mastermind until I went to the Speakeasy Mastermind annual conference in April. Which was like a month ago. And so now it's like, okay, we're bringing in the AEO guy and we're learning.

Love it. Love it. Well, appreciate that. And more importantly, thank you so much for all you've given to the community and to even the podcast and sharing, just like you mentioned, you sharing some of your expertise and nuggets. And I certainly got a lot of value from this, took some notes, and I can't wait to get back with my family and probably be calling you to do some stuff. So thank you so much, Dr. Sam, and look forward to talking to you again soon.

Thanks, Eric.

And that's a wrap from the Speakeasy Podcast. If something sparked for you, don't keep it to yourself. Share it, review it, and pass it to the one person who needs to hear this right now. Want in on the real mastermind? Tap the link in the show notes to apply. Until next time, keep scaling, stay sharp, and don't be the smartest one in the room. Hello, I've been noticing you've been following along to Inside the Speakeasy Mastermind Mastermind podcast, and the conversations I'm having out there resonates with you, then I'd like to invite you to apply to learn more about becoming a member of Speakeasy Mastermind Mastermind.