Fat Loss Scientist: It’s Easy To Lose Weight, But Here’s Why You WON’T Do It! | Dr Andy Galpin

Everything in this table has strong scientific evidence that it helps with sleep, and we're going to dig into all of these in detail.

The first one is kiwis. There have been good studies showing that if you eat two to three kiwis before bed, you'll sleep better.

Next on the list is "sleep divorce": people generally don't sleep as well when sharing a bed with others.

The next item has more evidence than the rest of these combined, and it is effective. Another one to think about is sound — it really matters when you sleep.

Sound matters as much as, if not more than, any other factor in sleep. There's also screen usage, light, your pillow, and wearables. But the other thing is that we're spending more on sleep, and sleep is getting worse.

For the last 20 years, I've been doing science, coaching, and education that enhances human performance, and I've been fortunate to work with the world's most elite athletes, entrepreneurs, and leaders. Even 50% of athletes have a clinical sleep disorder. It gets worse: 70 to 80% of people with clinical sleep apnea go undiagnosed, and for women it's somewhere in the neighborhood of 90 to 95%. It is detrimental to your health because it's highly associated with long-term death risk, cognitive function, mood regulation, performance, recovery, and metabolic health. It happens for a bunch of different reasons, but when we look at the 8-billion-person population, we need more people to pay attention to their health. I want to get the best possible out of people—whether that's energy, metabolic health, cognitive function, muscle growth, or fat loss—and give every person listening the opportunity to reach their goals and dreams.

I'd love to go through all of those. And you have a 5-4-3-2-1 method. What is that?

Yeah, it's just a little thing I came up with that says: can we help people with fat loss? The first thing to think about is—

Dr. Andy Galpin, before we started recording, you said you want to do scientific research, coaching for your clients, and education. You also alluded to being less interested in money and things like that. So why do you do what you do, what is it you're doing, and who are you doing it for?

The most concise way I can say it is I want to give every person listening to this the opportunity to reach their goals and dreams. You want to look a certain way or not look a certain way, and you want to perform a certain way—how can we get you there? I want to remove those barriers. And if you get there or don't get there, it was because of you, not because something was holding you back. That's why I get equally excited to work with the best linebacker in the NFL and with someone who just wants to wake up tomorrow and not be in back pain.

So tell me who you've worked with. Who has been a client of yours?

I've been fortunate to work with the world's most elite athletes for 20 years at this point: number one draft picks in every major sport, Hall of Famers, Cy Young winners, MVPs, Olympic gold medalists in many sports, and world champion fighters. We've worked with hemiplegic and paraplegic individuals, the cliché executives, mom-and-pops, and the person dealing with and struggling with perimenopause. We've really done most of it.

Clients fall into two broad categories: rebuild or upgrade. Rebuild means something is wrong, hurt, broken or damaged — being overweight and unable to fix it, dying from sleep restriction, having a clinical sleep disorder, an injury, or some huge clear limitation that needs to be resolved. Upgrade is the opposite: none of those problems, feeling pretty good, but wanting to get the best possible out of life — whether that's energy, metabolic health, or cognitive function.

The reason he can accomplish this, and the people he works with can, is that he targets the physiology. Asked what that means, he explains it's your biomolecular signature: a muscle imbalance creating neck pain that makes it hard to sleep and hard to regulate your emotions, or classic issues like inflammation — everything inside your body, both the way it runs and the way it expresses itself.

His credentials

His PhD is in human bioenergetics, and he started his lab in 2011. He's an active scientist and professor — "that's my real job for the most part" — conducting and disseminating research that enhances human performance. On top of that, he has started a number of companies and privately coaches people, which he's been doing for over 20 years.

Ranking the most common problems

Asked to order the client types by how often they come to him with these issues, he says he'll separate out professional athletes and spend more time on non-professionals, assuming most of the audience isn't professional. The host jokes that he won't accept that assumption, and they settle on assuming a 50/50 split.

Athletes typically come under two circumstances: frequent injuries, or tanked energy and bad sleep — they deal with the same human problems everyone else does. The other type is the optimizer: feeling great and young, but wanting to get ahead of things and catch problems before they start.

The general public shows a similar breakdown. Many people say they feel pretty good but don't want to play the game backwards — they don't want problems to arise and then have to scramble to figure things out. So they want to collect baseline data now, predict problems before they arise — but with only a few minutes a day, without taking over their whole lives.

The most common issues are sleep and energy, performance goals (can't seem to get stronger), struggling to lose that last bit of weight, and maybe a touch of brain fog or not feeling as sharp.

The host says he'd love to go through all of those — sleep, energy, performance, strength, weight — but also has his own blood test results, which Andy has reviewed. He warns it's not all good: there were a couple of deficiencies he had no idea about, because he thought he was doing everything right, and discovering them completely changed both his supplements and his general behavior. There's also a case study of a gentleman of similar age whose blood test results Andy took from not so good to great, which they'll discuss later.

The guest begins with a framing he wants to apply to everything discussed: be wary of what he calls health anxiety — over-fixation and excessive worry about small things in your blood work, your sleep, everything. If you're in a really great spot, you can look for upgrades, but be careful about pushing that line too far.

He explains why this matters: across the roughly 8 billion people in the world, we probably need more people paying attention to their health than not — we're not in an abundance of people caring too much. But if you're listening to this show, you're probably not representative of the general population, so he wants to be careful with everything he says over the next couple of hours. He doesn't want to create health anxiety — he doesn't want listeners so terrified of touching a receipt that it sends them into a three-day tailspin.

Whenever discussing health or performance, he says, we should run the spectrum from disease to optimization: we should not be playing with optimization and performance if a medical disease is present.

Sleep is probably the biggest area of clinical disease that exists that no one knows about. Somewhere in the neighborhood of 70 to 80% of people who have clinical sleep apnea will go undiagnosed.

If that existed for a broken bone, or for diabetes, you'd think it was insane. It gets worse: depending on which study you look at, 50% of athletes have a clinical sleep disorder. And for women, somewhere in the neighborhood of 90 to 95% of women who have clinical sleep apnea will go undiagnosed.

Why?

If you looked at me and I asked, "Stephen, do you think I have apnea?" you'd say no. If I brought in a table of ten people and asked you to pick the person least likely to have sleep apnea, you'd pick the smallest girl. People don't think of apnea as something that can happen unless you're big and overweight.

Women are also less likely than men to complain, and less likely to think of it as an anatomical issue. They attribute it to hormones, their menstrual cycle, their cognitive load, or the demands of being a mom. All of those are true factors — but it's equally true that you could have apnea that has nothing to do with body composition.

And let's define apnea: you stop breathing at night.

And that wakes you up?

Sometimes it doesn't — that's the problem. It won't necessarily wake you up, but it is detrimental to your health. It's highly associated with consequences ranging from long-term death risk to short-term cognitive function, emotion and mood regulation, performance, recovery, and metabolic health. It's really nasty. In fact, one of the larger things that can go wrong in your health is not breathing at night.

Does sleep apnea disrupt your sleep? It can, but it doesn't always — and that's part of why it's so poorly diagnosed.

Causes and warning signs

The classic giveaway is snoring loud enough to wake people in other rooms. Snoring doesn't necessarily mean you have sleep apnea, but it's a strong indicator. Apnea happens for a bunch of different reasons. Neck size was originally thought to be the main problem; that now looks less true, though it still matters. What is clear is that as obesity rates increase, apnea rates increase as well.

This is an anatomical or physical cause: something physically lands on your neck, tongue, throat, larynx and esophagus and stops your breathing. It matters because when you're standing or sitting upright, your anatomy is in one position, and when you lie down, that anatomy shifts.

Larger people also carry more fluid, which is normal — a person twice your size has roughly twice the water in their body. Picture a glass of water sitting vertically: tip it horizontally and the water shifts to balance where the air gap is at the top. The same thing happens in your body. Your neck is at the top when you're upright; when you lie down, fluid shifts up into the neck. So it's not necessarily a physical size issue, but the fluid associated with being a larger person that can shift.

Researchers are now finding a whole series of other types of apnea: neural causes, environmental causes, and positional causes.

Treatment: from generic to precise

Traditionally, if you're told you have apnea, you're given one of about three choices: medication, a CPAP device — the big "Vader breathing machine" — or an oral appliance, a mouthpiece that repositions your jaw and neck. I'm for all of those treatments, but they have such low success rates because they're given out generically: you come in, you have apnea, you get the same stuff. The field is now moving toward precision — identifying your specific type of apnea and recognizing, for example, that an oral appliance won't help and you actually need a particular surgical intervention.

How common is it?

Sleep apnea is very common globally — much more common than expected:

These are rough numbers, but they mean that if three middle-aged men are listening, statistically one of them might have apnea — and that's clinical sleep apnea, not counting subclinical cases. Depending on which figures you look at, roughly a billion people across the globe have it. And that's apnea alone — not insomnia, not all the other sleep disorders, just that one variant.

Why is this happening? From an evolutionary perspective, sleep apnea couldn't have been great for survival.

There are three primary reasons. First, our environment is physically changing—our ancestors never had to deal with this. Second, our current solutions for testing are either insanely outdated or incredibly difficult to get to. The third major one is that the solutions we offer people in public communication are wildly generic, and thus not helpful. If you polled everyone listening right now about sleep, they'd say, "Oh, great—you're going to tell me to sleep in a quiet room that's cold and dark. I've heard it all." And they have. What we need to get to next is how to help people find precision solutions based on their type of sleep issues. That's the three-part reason why this is happening.

I'd like to pause on the diagnosis part, because there will be people listening who suspect they need help but are going off their feelings. How can they know for sure what their problem is and what help they need?

I always start with the subjective: how do you feel? If you feel good, we can take a breath right there. If you have good energy and wake up feeling good, that matters — everyone is going to be a little bit tired sometimes.

I've been working for several years with a close friend of ours who constantly has to be talked down, because he gets honestly terrified when he feels sleepy at the end of the day. I tell him, "Bro, that's the point." High performers are actually afraid of being tired, and we have to recognize that feeling sleepy is natural and needed. You should feel a little sleepy in the early afternoon, and tired, unmotivated, and less focused at the end of the day.

What if I didn't used to feel this way? People compare themselves to an older version of themselves. When you're under 25, you're just a powerhouse. Past 25, we shouldn't accept frailty or a permanent decline, but we do have to realize we're not going to have the energy of a 20-year-old — that's just not typically realistic. If you do have that energy, you're probably getting it exogenously, through stimulants and other things. Those have a place, but we want to be careful with them. We'll talk about stimulants, melatonin, and all of that later.

Free questionnaires as a first step

So what about someone — call her Jenny — who doesn't have much money?

There are a ton of completely free, scientifically validated short questionnaires. You can take them for restless legs syndrome, insomnia, apnea, circadian disruptions and disorders, and chronotype — whether you're a morning person and so on. I'll put as many of these as I can in the show notes for free. Start with one of those.

Wearables versus a sleep hospital

If a questionnaire flags something and you want to move to the next step, you have two options. The first is at-home wearable tech, typically in the $100 to $600 range. The second is the true medical option: a sleep hospital, where you go into the hospital, into that weird room, get all the wires attached, have someone watch you through a window, and sleep there for one night. You can see from the look on your face — who wants to do that?

But if you have a true disease, the sleep hospital is, depending on the condition, where you need to end up. What our group and others are working on is bringing sleep testing into the home. It's not very affordable yet, but that's the clear future.

If you have insurance, take the validated questionnaire, go to your doctor, and say, "Here's what I scored on this — will you order me a sleep study?" It's a giant pain, I know, but it's probably worth it.

Wearables can be useful, but they come with several problems. They are excellent for awareness and accountability, and they are fairly accurate for tracking total sleep time. However, a major pitfall is that they are very poor at predicting sleep stages like deep sleep and REM sleep.

A common use case is using wearable feedback alongside subjective feelings to troubleshoot sleep habits: waking up feeling terrible, seeing a low score, and A/B testing variables like bedtime or room temperature to find what works. But while wearables track total sleep duration reasonably well, caution is required with aggregate metrics like "sleep effectiveness" or "sleep quality" scores, as they often lack directional accuracy.

The most important directional indicator remains how you actually feel. If you wake up feeling worse or better, you can trace that back to your behaviors the previous day.

Finding Actionable Signals in Wearable Data

The goal is not to discard wearables entirely—they can be used extensively—but rather to be selective about which data points matter.

Wearables are most valuable for identifying overarching physiological trends. For example, analyzing 1,200 days of Oura Ring data for a client revealed that for every one-beat-per-minute drop in resting heart rate (e.g., from 65 bpm to 64 bpm), he gained six additional minutes of sleep.

This insight created clear coaching targets:

• Improve cardiovascular fitness: As his conditioning improved, his baseline resting heart rate dropped, leading to longer sleep.
• Invest in pre-bed down-regulation: Calming the nervous system before sleep lowered his heart rate entering bedtime, helping him stay asleep.

For someone struggling to remain asleep despite good sleep hygiene, shifting the underlying physiology was key. Having that specific biomarker gave a busy client a single, actionable metric to focus on: doing whatever it took to keep resting heart rate low before going to bed.

Asked what was making his heart rate high, the answer is that when it comes to sleep, anything in your physical environment, your lifestyle, or your physiology can impact it.

I mentioned earlier one reason sleep is getting worse is these physical changes in our environment. Annual spend on sleep is around 600 billion dollars right now, yet we've seen a 60-minute drop in total sleep time over the last 60 years. So you're seeing an inverse relationship: we're spending more on sleep, and sleep is getting worse.

My team printed out some cards we can go through, and the first one is a really good one: the world is physically brighter. NASA satellite data confirms that the world is literally brighter now than it used to be. You're expected to be communicating with Singapore, Australia, and the US, which means you'll be up later — your business stays on, and so do your lights. There's also a phenomenon called skyglow, where light from Earth goes up, hits the clouds, and gets shot back down, keeping our world brighter. So when people talk about needing blackout curtains and sleep masks and you think, "I never did that as a kid — what's the big deal?" — this is why. There are some graphs that demonstrate this, which I'll put up on the screen.

More people are also moving into urban environments. Some studies have found that anxiety and depression can rise by 20% or more when you move into a city, and that's largely attributed to factors like light and sound. Cities are extremely bright and extremely loud. That doesn't mean they're bad or that you can't live in them — it simply means that's why you have to take extra steps.

Many listeners might think, "Well, Andy, my bedroom's very dark." But that's not actually the point. As the interviewer put it: walking to the shop in New York City at 10 p.m. means being exposed to a lot of light at a critical time when the body should not be exposed to light — and that affects you even once you get back to a dark room.

It goes even further than that. There's now evidence that light exposure in the morning and throughout the day dramatically counteracts that damage. So yes, you had brighter light exposure in the three or four hours before bed than you would have had in the past, but you can mitigate it by seeing light appropriately during the day and in the morning.

This is something Andrew Huberman has talked about for years. The speaker admitted he used to joke about it, but Huberman nailed it — he was way ahead on this one. Light exposure in the morning impacts your sleep the next night. Huberman explains it as setting your circadian rhythm, but it's more than that. The speaker used to dismiss it — "I'm in the same time zone, why do I care?" — but the real benefit is that if you're exposed to high amounts of light later in the day, that earlier exposure helps reduce the damage.

There's a whole cascade of things influencing when it's time to be awake and when it's time to sleep, both hormonal and neural. The brain shuts down or activates in response to light, exercise, arousal, food, stimulants and many other factors. Light earlier in the day sets that rhythm — it starts the clock and starts the sleep pressure.

A graph comparing rural and urban environments makes the contrast clear. For sound at night, the typical target is about 35 dB. A rural environment cruises at roughly that level, while an urban environment sits at 60 to 70 dB as a baseline.

Sound matters enormously when you sleep—as much as, if not more than, any other factor. The big issue with sound is inconsistency. Many people put a sound machine in the room, and most people set them too loud. A common default is 40 to 50 dB for a sound machine, but the data suggests staying under 40, especially for children. Most people also place them too close.

What's a sound machine? It's just a small device that produces white noise, which cancels out low-level inconsistent sounds—the dog getting up, the window creaking, a car driving by.

Why can I fall asleep to a podcast while my partner needs silence, and I almost feel I need to listen to something to fall asleep? Most likely you would do better without it. Leaving it on all night will never lead to your best sleep. What happens is that when you get to bed, something is happening cognitively and you want something to switch you off, to distract you. If we took that away, you might sleep worse at first because you'd sit there struggling through that moment.

If you wanted to upgrade, we'd figure out a way for you to downregulate cognitively—something that gives you that same effect without disrupting your sleep throughout the night. This situation is extremely common; podcasts are an incredibly common example, along with TV and books.

My philosophy is to step back and solve causes — solve constraints rather than mask them. Everything on this table has moderate to strong scientific evidence that it helps with sleep.

There's tart cherry juice, and I'll go through why. There's chamomile tea, which you'd also see in supplement form as apigenin — essentially distilled chamomile. And look at these kiwis: in research, people are given two to three kiwis to eat right before bed, and you very routinely see them sleeping better afterward.

Other things high on the evidence-based list are magnesium in various forms. Much of the current research on magnesium for sleep focuses on a particular form called magnesium bisglycinate. You'll also see omega-3 — common fish oil. That one is actually interesting, because it popped up on your labs as something we need to work on.

"Oh, my test."

"Yeah, we'll come back to that in a second."

And of course there's melatonin. The issue with all of these is the same one you have with your podcast: they're doing the exact same thing. So one option is to ditch the podcast and use one or more of these instead, because they all act as a cognitive turnoff. Apigenin or chamomile specifically play that role — it's a reasonable switch that says "frontal cortex, turn off." You get there through the podcast, but you could get there through food or supplements as well.

How the evidence stacks up

Kiwis have scientific evidence that they improve sleep for some people. If you think of it in levels, level one would be the best of the best — things like, surprisingly enough, magnesium, chamomile, and melatonin, with lots of randomized controlled trials.

"Level one being the best?"

"The best, highest quality."

"And you'd say what — magnesium, kiwis?"

"Kiwis would probably be level two or level three."

There have been good enough studies on kiwis to put them on this table — enough to say there's data there. What you're getting is some of the active compounds, like apigenin or other phytochemicals, that either slightly reduce cognitive activity, reduce arousal, and put you in some sort of checkout mode.

Among the compounds on the table, melatonin stands apart: it probably has more evidence than all the others combined, because it's a medicine—a drug and a hormone—with a huge body of research covering everything from children to aging to bone health. But that also means it demands real conversations about risk versus benefit, unlike eating two kiwis, where nobody worries about the risk profile.

Dosage: far lower than the label

A common commercial dose is 5 milligrams, sometimes up to 10. We typically use 0.3, maybe 0.5 milligrams—about a tenth of that—often splitting 1 mg tablets in half.

When it actually helps

Outside of some fringe cases, the only real reason we use melatonin is when we legitimately need to reset circadian rhythm—travel, jet lag, things like that. It is effective and useful there, and safe in small doses.

Where people go wrong is using it every night to fall asleep, or grabbing it when they wake up in the middle of the night and can't get back to sleep.

Why is that bad?

It doesn't work.

Melatonin's job is to realign circadian rhythm. If you're already in the middle of the night, you're in that rhythm, so it won't do anything. If you're struggling to get back to sleep cognitively, you'd actually be better off reaching for something like chamomile—though we don't want to encourage that habit either.

The overdosing problem

Morning urine testing reveals another issue: studies comparing the actual pill content to the label have found doses up to 100x higher. We've seen consistently tired people whose sleep otherwise looks fine—doing all the right things, cold, dark room, meditating—yet taking even a moderate dose of melatonin leaves their next-morning urine at 100x the upper end of the reference range. That means they spend the whole next day in a hyperdosed melatonin state and have to rely on stimulants to function.

How does that feel? Sluggish—what we call sleep inertia. You wake up wildly groggy, can't get out of bed, in a "don't talk to me until I've had my coffee" state. That's not normal waking physiology.

One might assume this is only a problem with cheap, untested sources, and better sourcing would knock out much of the issue. This is exactly why we say no one needs supplements to live a great, happy, healthy life. If you choose to use them, buy only from third-party tested, transparent companies that publish their testing on their websites with open access. Vitamin D has a similar profile of inaccuracy.

Timing and use

Even with a high-quality source, people dose too much and take it too late. Take it earlier than you think, before bed, so your body can break it down before morning. It's person-dependent: some feel an effect in 10 to 15 minutes, others closer to an hour, so roughly an hour before is a good window.

And if it's 2 a.m. and you're just getting into bed—don't take it at all. We use it in very specific situations and then come off it; it should not be part of your nightly routine most of the time.

What it actually does

What's happening in the brain when you take melatonin? People assume it makes them feel tired, but it actually doesn't really do that—and that's part of the issue.

The mechanism is a circadian shift: it tells your endogenous system that this is nighttime. It doesn't hit you with a "my eyes are heavy" feeling; it shifts cortisol and a whole cascade of epinephrine, norepinephrine, and serotonin, setting the internal milieu consistent with a sleep pattern.

So when I take it, it regulates my other hormones, which would theoretically be getting in the way of me feeling tired? That's probably a more accurate description of what it does. I've taken it a couple of times, always for jet lag, and within about 30 to 45 minutes I feel drowsy and my eyes start shutting. Great—and then you get out of that two- or three-day window, put it back away, and you're off. That's a good use case for it. The mistake is when it becomes "I can't go to bed without it."

I'm generally scared of all these things—honestly, anything that's effective, I'm more scared of. It's really effective, which makes me hesitant to use it frequently. That's a good default position to be in, by the way. It's a good strategy.

One thing you learn from doing a podcast like this is that everything has a trade-off. It may not be logically sound, but I assume the bigger the upside, the bigger the trade-off on the other side. The only thing I still haven't been able to understand the full trade-off of is coffee, because the upside is so significant. No one can articulate the downside to me other than saying that if you have it after midday, it will impact your sleep. But surely there's more to it than that.

The phrase I say in my class all the time is: there are no free passes in physiology.

With coffee specifically, we actually have a meta-analysis put together by my colleague Dr. Ben House. The research on caffeine and sleep is very interesting. If you go through sleep deprivation, your physical and cognitive performance goes down—no surprise there—and coffee, or caffeine specifically, can offset that. But what it doesn't do, at least according to the data and the meta-analysis, is put you back into the augmented state.

Say you slept great last night, a full night. If we tested you—throwing a medicine ball, grip strength, some sprints—you would perform well. Then if we gave you caffeine, you'd perform even better. That's why we call it ergogenic: it's a performance enhancer. Caffeine is most effective primarily at endurance-based events, but it is a stimulant people use. So with normal baseline performance, caffeine augments that performance. If you go into sleep debt, the lack of sleep reduces your performance, and coffee can bring you back to normal—but it won't bring you back to that augmented state you had when you were rested and caffeinated.

This matters because a lot of people think, "I'll throw away sleep, or not worry about it as much, because I'll just take more stimulants tomorrow and I'll feel great." You will feel as good, but you will not perform as well. So to perform at your best as a caffeine user, you need to be both well-rested and caffeinated.

Another thing to pay attention to in your sleep environment—what I'd label ergonomics—is your pillow, your bed, and your mattress. This is mostly based on feel.

Is there any no-go in this regard?

Not really, unless you have a sleeping partner and the bed is too small, so you end up hitting or touching each other when you don't want to. Other than those framework issues, there's really nothing to be concerned with.

What about these Eight Sleep beds?

Eight Sleep is fantastic. It's not a bed, though—it's a cover that regulates temperature. If you're in a bedding situation where you're getting hot, that's a problem, and an Eight Sleep can help you regulate that temperature, making it a great solution. If you're not in that situation, you'll be just fine. Temperature regulation is a really big deal, and you'll often see people who address it—whether with a product like that, a cooler sheet, or a mattress with better ventilation—sleep a little bit better.

Everyone has been told that screens are perhaps the most destructive thing for sleep. But what's more interesting is the part people generally don't talk about. It's not necessarily that screen usage is shooting your face with a bunch of blue light. What's more dangerous about your screen is the arousal associated with the search for novelty.

What does that mean? Whether you're engaging with a podcast, social media, or a game, it's puzzle driven. It is solution, interest, engagement — a search for the next thing. That's the stuff that more likely than not causes sleep disturbances.

In studies comparing TV time versus tablet versus phone versus reading, all of those can be equally dangerous to sleep. Here's an example: I'm a TV-before-bed guy — a giant TV with a blast of blue light — and I sleep great with that. My wife really struggles with light before bed, so she reads instead. Yet she chooses to read things I don't think she should be reading at night, and she wakes up because of the topics she's reading — while I'm watching things on TV like documentaries on Ulysses S. Grant, the least engaging thing ever. So it's not the fact that the light is there. I use that stuff much like you use your podcasts: my entire day is so driven by people wanting my attention and time that I need something that gives me a cognitive switch saying you get to turn off.

I wanted to add something I've been thinking about this week. Meta owns Instagram, Facebook, WhatsApp, and so on, and in Meta's earnings call this week, Mark Zuckerberg talked about how they had changed the recommendation algorithm on their social media apps using AI. This is something we've always forecasted would happen while thinking about the creator economy and how it would be impacted. But specifically for people listening: essentially, every time you post something on Instagram — whether it's a Reel or a normal post — they now feed it to a large language model, an AI. And again, I'm summarizing here, the AI effectively watches it and can understand the full context of what it's watching. If it's watching a clip of you and me right now, it'll understand that this is Andy Galpin, that he's holding a card, wearing a black t-shirt; it'll look at the transcript and know what you said. All of this is pertinent because, whereas in the past it needed to look at the caption and the hashtags, it can now decide with far more context than ever before exactly who would want to see that post.

The net impact for the user of Instagram, TikTok, or any of these apps is that you're going to be more retained than ever before. As you were talking, I wondered whether they think about time of day — whether at 11 p.m. there's a certain thing that will keep Andy scrolling versus something at 9 a.m. when you're off to work. And of course they do. On the earnings call, Mark was saying it's increased retention by, I think, 15 basis points. There's this quote where he said there are already two large sets of content to draw from — first from your friends and the people you follow, and second from creators you don't follow — but now there's going to be a whole new and nearly infinite universe of personalized content. From that I infer that with their new large language model, called Muse, they're actually going to make new content to show Andy Galpin — content no humans made, stuff they know Andy will like.

I say all this because in this sleep conversation we've been having as creators, we've been saying it's going to get really difficult if you're a creator: if you have a million followers, it doesn't matter anymore. If Jenny has zero followers but makes something contextually more interesting than the million-follower guy, Jenny's thing gets shown to everyone. But now you're going to be competing with an AI churning out super-personalized Andy Galpin content — stuff Andy would just love at 11 p.m.

I said to my team this week: just take care of yourself. Be aware that when you open your phone, the AI is doing everything it can to retain you.

Just don't be on your phone. We've been making this argument for years, but you've got every disadvantage possible coming your way—and we're all human. I remember last time I was here, you were talking about how your fiancée doesn't touch her phone for the first hour of the day, leaving it on the charger until noon, and you were amazed. I'm the same way: my phone stays in one room, and I'm just not doing any of that. We started this whole conversation by saying the environment you're in is different than it's ever been before, and it's not getting any better. At some point you have to decide: do you care about your own health? Do you care more about the thing you didn't do well the next day than about that next reel?

What is it that makes us understand everything you just said, but ignore it and pick up our phone anyway?

You are hard-driven through the entire biology of our species to search for novelty. I look at this through the lens of sports. Why do you care about high achievement, about performance? There's a direct translation: when someone breaks a barrier, we all benefit. Pull any story from history—Joseph Campbell's hero's journey, Hercules, the story of the marathon—and what are you actually looking at? Someone did something no one has ever done before. You care more about records than regular wins and losses because they're novel. Why are you more interested in watching Messi break a record than in the other team winning with the exact same shot? Because you got to be there when someone did something for the first time in human history.

I get more of a dopamine hit from the novelty, from the new thing.

It's more than a dopamine hit, though. It's a sense of purpose. Your life mattered because you were involved in something no one else has ever seen—even as a bystander watching TV from 30,000 kilometers away, you got to be part of it. It all comes down to how wired we are to reward novelty. So the question for your life is: how do you walk away from that core drive?

This reminds me of a study from psychology class about pigeons and variable rewards. I'll butcher it, but bear with me: they gave a pigeon a lever to press, and sometimes pressing it produced a reward. They found that when the rewards were variable—unpredictable in timing—the pigeon was more likely to keep pressing the lever, essentially more addicted to the behavior, because it didn't know when the treat was coming. Scrolling social media is like the slot machine of variable rewards: I don't know what I'm going to get, but every fourth scroll—or every fortieth—I get something.

Or better, because the more unpredictable it is, the more likely you are to think "one more, one more." If the reward comes too quickly, you care less. You scroll through all the boring stuff for the one out of every forty that gets you—that's what you're actually there for.

If I offered most people $10,000 in cash or $10,000 in equity in a startup, I can see it on your face—you hesitate. It depends on where you're at, but if I said the most likely scenario is that the $10,000 goes to zero, which is what usually happens, you'd want to hedge: can I do five and five? Unless you actually need the ten grand, which a lot of people do, you get the point. Walking away from belief, walking away from hope, walking away from "what if" is insanely hard to do.

I deleted one of these social media apps completely from my phone, and honestly, you always think you'll have FOMO—that you won't know what's going on, that there'll be some huge loss to your life from not having an app. It's remarkable how positive the net impact on your life is when you delete some of these apps.

I have a friend named Shaun Ali, a famous UFC fighter. He was sitting at his pool, his daughter one or two years old, scrolling Twitter, and he thought, "What am I doing? My daughter is right in front of me, and I'm not even working or posting—I'm just scrolling." He dumped it on the spot: "Team, you guys handle it," and he's not on any social media anymore.

Another factor to think about, which we've touched on, is called the presence of other beings — the classic "sleep divorce." I assume, as I do, you share your sleeping environment with your partner?

Yes.

It's tough to make the argument for a sleep divorce, then.

Yeah, I'm not telling her. It's funny — if it were up to her, we would have a sleep divorce.

You're joking.

No. She's like, "Get away from me, don't touch me." If we could have separate beds in separate rooms, she'd want that. I don't snore, but she just does.

My fiancé is the opposite.

It's not super realistic, but it is true — there are data behind it. People generally don't sleep as well when they're in the same bed as others. The realistic solution is to find sheets or a sleeping setup where one partner's movement doesn't roll the other person around.

Oh, like separate sheets?

Separate sheets, or simply the type of sheets. My wife loves to be really constricted — she likes the sheets tucked in tight — and I hate it. I feel like I'm in Shawshank, like, "break me out," rip it all out of there. There are little things like that that don't require buying anything, where you just change the setup so their movement doesn't impact you as much. Noise is the same issue: if you sleep with somebody who makes a lot of noise or tosses and turns a bunch, you could put a pillow in between so they don't hit you when they roll over, or use earplugs. That one's pretty straightforward, but it's also pretty impactful — it can really make a big difference. And if you're really struggling, maybe do a partial sleep divorce.

The next factor is sleeping in a new environment, often called the first night effect. On your first night—whether back home, in a hotel, or somewhere else—you don't feel as comfortable or as safe, and your circadian rhythms, the things that set your timing, aren't there. That includes sound, light, feel, temperature, and smell.

If you travel a lot—our athletes travel every 3 to 5 days—this is what they do: try to mimic your sleep environment at home while on the road. Some people take their pillows. Other options on a similar list are smells like lavender, which is moderately associated with helping people fall asleep. None of these will knock you out; what you're looking to do is stack wins.

Next is temperature. You want to be cool — generally 64 to 68 degrees, though this is personally dependent. Some people actually like it a bit colder so they can use a heavier blanket, because they like that feeling.

When this idea got popular a few years ago, people started cranking the AC to make the room as cold as possible. That can become a problem, because we're seeing a fairly consistent pattern where the air conditioner kicking on actually wakes people up. As we discussed earlier with noise, it's not necessarily about volume but about the change in sound — something kicking on and off, on and off.

The other issue is air quality. With environmental sensors we often see that if your air conditioner isn't clean and the fan is running, it can kick dander, particulates and other debris into the air. You breathe those in overnight, your nose gets stuffed up, you can't breathe through your nose, and suddenly you have a hypopnic or apneic event.

The last component that comes up often is fans. A fan can dry out your mouth, so if you're waking up needing a drink of water, consider not having it blow directly at your face.

An interesting related finding: in a viral 2009 sleep study by Mind Lab at the University of Sussex, researchers hooked men and women up to an ECG machine to measure brain waves and played a variety of ambient sounds while they slept, to see which noises triggered an immediate wake response. The top triggers differed completely by sex. For men, the top trigger was a car alarm, followed by wind howling outside, then the buzzing or flying of a mosquito. For women, the top trigger was a baby crying, followed by a dripping tap, then shouting outside. Both groups' fourth trigger was snoring.

That result fits a broader reality: one of the largest causes of sleep disorders in women is having children. The last trimester presents a lot of sleep challenges, and after delivery or with a newborn you're going to have a known period of sleep deprivation. That can cause insomnia, irregular sleep schedules and circadian disorders — natural things, totally fine. But in some percentage of women those patterns persist, so you'll see women with sleep disorders even with adult children, started by childbirth. We advocate getting through it — I have two kids, I've been there — but then make sure you go back and try to fix those things.

There's an evolutionary theory behind the study's findings, that men and women are attuned to different things. But there's a counterargument: who actually wakes up and gets out of bed is often heavily driven by social roles, parenting expectations and individual sleep depth, rather than a biological inability for men to hear the baby.

So how do we close out the subject of sleep? One thing that will help everyone — whether you're at any of those stages, have a little money to spend, or go the full end of the spectrum with a hospital or a service like ours — is that everyone has the ability to run self-experiments. We have a free guide on our website: a quick tutorial on how to run your own self-experiment for sleep specifically. It's up and available for free.

Anyone can check it out. There's a lot in here we've covered, and you can get more into it. But the short answer is this: we don't want people to think sleep has to be the center of their life. When sleep comes up, people often say, "I'd love to sleep more, but I'm too busy" — and I'm in the same boat. I can't afford a 12-hour sleep routine either.

What we should be paying attention to is sleep resilience. Steve, I want you to be as resilient to bad sleep as possible. I don't want you optimizing your sleep, because optimization turns into that giant routine before bed — 12 different supplements and four different cocktails. If you have to do that along the way, fine, but the endgame should be resilience: you had a bad night of sleep, cool, and you still performed. Our flight got delayed — great, we still executed. I want you to know how to get a good night of sleep so you can feel as refreshed as possible, execute the next day, and then get right back onto it.

The way you get there — and it's how our company works — is to run a series of experiments, and everyone can do that. Start by changing one thing. Your trackers and your data will tell you how you're sleeping, but they're not telling you why you're sleeping that way. That's your quest: go figure out why. Is it your bedroom temperature? Your partner? Sensitivity to light? Exercising too late? Eating too late? All of these are possible — test them one at a time.

Just as with Jon Jones, marginal improvements in cognitive performance can have a massive impact. Sometimes I podcast for 10 hours a day, and over the last couple of weeks I've been filming a TV show with only one or two days off to get all my work done, which means a lot of cognitive load. That's why I turn to ketones: I find myself more articulate, able to think more clearly, and able to work out better when I'm fueled by them.

That's the reason I became a co-owner of the company and why they now sponsor this podcast. I remember one of my team members, Cristiana, tried it once and came up to my desk saying, "This is the best product ever made." I think that's partly because she cares about those cognitive benefits as much as I do, as Jon Jones does, and as most of my listeners probably will. If you haven't tried these yet, go to ketone.com/stephven and you'll get 30% off your first subscription order, exclusive Ketone IQ merch, and of course cognitive benefits that might just change your life.

If you're thinking about starting a business, one of the first decisions you'll have to make is also one of the most important: where do you build it? Our product team, which manages everything from our conversation cards to our diaries, has always used our sponsor Shopify. One big reason is that when you're running a business, you really need your own store and your own customer data, and Shopify gives you exactly that. You aren't renting space from someone else's platform, hoping the rules don't suddenly change. You also avoid the classic founder challenges of sorting out payments, logistics, and storefronts, because it's already built in — those early days are messy enough without infrastructure problems on top.

Shopify's distribution is underrated too: your products automatically get in front of people on Google, TikTok, YouTube, and ChatGPT, without you having to figure that out yourself. If you're serious about starting your own thing, start your free trial at shopify.com/bartlet.

If sleep's antithesis is being awake, then what we care about when we're awake is energy. I've had some great conversations on this podcast about mitochondria and energy, and some of them have genuinely changed me. If you haven't listened to our more recent conversation on mitochondria with Martin Peard, please go do so — it's one of my favorite conversations I've had this year. I conceptually knew what mitochondria was, but I hadn't thought about it as being so central to everything in my life, because energy is essential to everything: my relationships, my ability to do this show, my joy, everything.

If someone comes to you saying they want to improve their energy levels, where do you aim beyond sleep?

Energy is probably the number one item on our list of reasons people come to us. They say things like: I'm tired all day and can't figure it out, I don't have the energy I used to have, or I can't sustain output like I used to — whether that's physical, with recovery taking longer than it used to, or cognitive, getting fatigued at the end of a working day. I'm not of the camp that this is entirely mitochondria, but I certainly agree energy would be number one. In fact, probably the most common question I've gotten in my career is: what separates world-class performers from the rest of us? People want me to say they work harder. They don't. They are categorically better at energy management. That's the one thing most consistent among the world's highest performers — athletes, entrepreneurs, leaders, executives, however you define success. When you get better at managing energy, you're more effective.

That spans everything from cellular energy to understanding your own interpersonal communication: what types of relationships give you energy and which take it away, what activities give you energy back, when you can be more efficient, and when you're running for the sake of running rather than running in a direction — figuratively, not literally. It's all energy management. What you'll see is that world-class performers get incredibly good at saying: 80% of my energy is going here for a 20% return — I'm going to switch that out. They're better at choosing what matters and what doesn't, from which supplement is working to which type of person they work with. Where people struggle is the endless "what if I could also be doing this? What if I add this on top?"

Let me put this into a metaphor. High performers wake up with 100 energy chips, say, and they're really good at allocating them against the most important thing. Whereas maybe Jenny and Dave listening let the chips seep out — 20 on Instagram, 20 over here — and they spin their wheels. They listen to this podcast, get super excited about zone 2, and go add a bunch of zone 2. Then they hear another podcast, get excited about journaling, and add that to the mix. What ends up happening is you look at their daily routine and it's 20 hours long — and at some point, they didn't actually do anything that mattered.

What is the one thing that can get you to your goal in the most effective way possible? Everything else has to actively be stripped away. Traditionally, we give one to two what we call active movements per week — something you have to actively remember to do. You don't actively remember to brush your teeth or shower, and at this point you probably don't have to actively think about your gratitude practice or meditation time; you've been doing those things for years. I don't call those additive, because you're going to get them in anyway. But I might ask you to do one thing different.

I don't know what that one change would be for you, but I would look at it this way: here's your constraint. I'm not going to ask you to do five new things — that's too difficult. Maybe it's a change in what time you eat, or in your training style. Find what's constraining your energy.

What could those constraints be? It could be sleep, mismanaged relationships, working too much, or under-fueling — not eating enough. It could be overusing stimulants and sleeping poorly, which puts you in a cycle. It could be that you're not seeing sunlight. So run a quick analysis and ask: what is the single biggest thing in my way? Is it the fact that you're in pain? If so, maybe the one thing I want you to go after is figuring out why that knee hurts.

Steve asks what might improve his energy based on the blood results the doctor has seen. The doctor notes he's 33, lean, and active, and says the first thing that jumps out on the report is the cholesterol page. Steve asks to skip it, but the doctor explains that this is where you quickly see the difference between medicine and performance: this is the medical side, looking at cholesterol and cholesterol-related markers — about a dozen of them, and not one is good.

Steve asks what it means, and says he was also going to try to self-diagnose why he thinks this is the case. The doctor welcomes that second question, saying it will actually tell them where to go.

He explains that blood work consists of secondary measures of physiology, used to predict an outcome — in this case, heart health. There is an association — a word he chooses carefully — between cholesterol and cardiovascular disease. Excessively high cholesterol is traditionally associated with earlier heart disease, heart attack, and even strokes. Zooming out: Steve's cholesterol is extremely high, and the doctor is concerned about his heart health. There's way more to the story, but that's the starting point.

Steve then offers his self-diagnosis: at the time of the blood tests, he was frequently on a ketogenic diet.

The doctor acknowledges there's a lot to unpack and that many people online will get upset, but explains that cholesterol has lifestyle, dietary, and familial causes. Often people have high cholesterol and these markers simply as a familial genetic inheritance, with little actionable behind it. When these markers appear independent of obesity, the interpretation changes. If someone were 35% body fat and drank alcohol, those issues would be tackled first because they have far more robust implications for health. But Steve doesn't drink excessively — if at all, and hasn't in years — and doesn't smoke, so those are checked off the list. That makes this actionable.

Steve adds important context: his uncle died of a heart attack, and his dad had a heart operation last week — a pacemaker put in — and has been on statins to lower his cholesterol for roughly 15 to 20 years.

With that family history, and independent of obesity, the doctor asks what advice Steve received with these results. Steve explains he did two tests — one with Function Health, who he believes are a sponsor, and one with Nico Health, where he's a big investor. Both told him to stop eating steak and bacon all the time. What he heard was: the ketogenic diet needs to be dialed back. He hasn't done blood work since.

The doctor's first recommendation, in order: when you get blood work, the value is not in the data — the value is in the interpretation. The reason Steve heard "steak, butter, bacon" is that those are foods high in saturated fat. But saturated fat is not evil; there are no evil foods — it's only evil in context.

In your particular case, if we had your baseline from before that test and then this result, and we saw that when you changed your diet and increased your saturated fat intake these numbers went up, most ethical people in this space would look at that and say that's not a positive thing. That does not mean ketogenic diets are bad or unsafe—not at all. It only means that, with those theoretical data for you, it's probably not healthy. Stack that on top of the fact that you have your uncle and your dad in there, and I would triple down and say go talk to your doctor. I'm not your medical doctor, but I'd be really concerned about that. Then what I would do would be go to the next step.

The next step is to run the experiment and see. This is an indirect marker, and the question is what it's trying to predict: your heart health. Have you had your heart scanned?

Yes, I have. They said I had a thick wall.

That sounds like exercise-induced cardiac remodeling, especially if it's left ventricular — and that's a good thing. Your heart has four chambers, two on top and two on bottom. The top two are the atria, the ventricles are on the bottom. You can look at this image as a maze. Can you see how the left ventricle is much larger than the right ventricle? There's a reason: the right ventricle only has to kick blood to your lungs, which are just a few inches away. The left ventricle has to push it out through your entire body, down to the tip of your toes, back up against gravity, and into your heart again. What you're seeing here is strength training — resistance exercise. Your left ventricle is lifting weights. It has to be bigger and stronger so it can contract hard enough to shoot blood up, down, and out. If you have a thicker wall, whether naturally or exercise-induced, it's just like your biceps getting larger when you lift more. The same thing is happening in your left ventricle. It's an incredibly common and healthy adaptation.

What we would be concerned about is any type of blockage or plaque buildup.

One thing I remember them saying — I'll probably butcher this — is that there are kind of two types of plaque buildup in my arteries. They said I hadn't got the bad type, but I had the other type. I think the bad type was the more sticky kind, the kind that doesn't go away and can dislodge. They said mine was temporary but could turn into the bad type.

One thing to be really careful of — this happened to a dear friend of mine, Joel Jameson. Young, super fit, no stress, doesn't smoke, doesn't drink, much like you — but with a family history he didn't think about. His blood work came back totally fine, and he still asked for a CT angiogram scan of his heart. His cardiologist said no, you don't need it, you're young. He got it anyway, and he had, I think, a 50% blockage of what's called the widowmaker. You're flipping the dice on whether you're going to die. This is a classic case of someone doing all the right things, but imaging saved his life. Let's not live in fear — let's go look. He went, had the scan, and if your physicians say it's fine, then I'm less worried, because this could be a direct response to your ketogenic diet — which it almost certainly was. If it presents no risk where we actually care about, then I'm less concerned about your cholesterol.

But if it carries on like this, could it create a risk?

Absolutely, it could.

Okay, because they did tell me to fix this.

Yes. Just keep getting it scanned every few years, and if you see any buildup at all, then I would manage it.

The client shown here is a good example with specific numbers: his total cholesterol was 347, and we got it down to 223.

How? Fiber and stress reduction. Depending on the type of cholesterol, fiber will actually bind to it and clear it from the system — you physically reduce it. That's why one of the supplements I was told to take is a fiber supplement.

But I want to be really clear: it's not always going to solve something. If you have numbers like you had, you need to work with a doctor and get screened. Don't just say, "I took fiber, I'm fine, this guy said it on a podcast." That's not what I'm saying — but it can be effective.

Why stress affects cholesterol

The other thing we did was massive stress reduction. This guy was a very hard-charging CEO for a large company.

Parts of cholesterol — not all of them — can be what are called acute phase reactants, meaning they respond to acute stress and stimuli. Blood work isn't static; it responds to the entire system. If you're stressed, cortisol is elevated and you're in a heightened alert state, which causes short-term inflammation. The most classic inflammation marker is CRP — his was at 20, which is really high. We got him from 20 to 2, a 10x reduction, and that allowed his cholesterol to normalize.

The most technical way to say it: it's an acute phase reactant, changing acutely in response to inflammation. Some markers go up and some go down in a stressed environment — vitamin D goes down, blood glucose goes up.

Lifestyle first, then medicine

So we got his stress down and his fiber up, which took him from 347 to 223 — still high. Going from 223 to 163 took a statin. We didn't prescribe it; his medical team did.

I draw this point out because we were able to go a long way with lifestyle, but he wanted to go further — he wanted to be green, green, green. That's when medicine came in, and to me this represents a great marriage of the two. Some people are very anti-medicine; that's not my decision — it's up to you and your medical provider. I think it's unfair to tell people either that all of it can be done with lifestyle and medicines are never needed, or the opposite — just take the drug and don't worry about it. He needed all of it: stress reduction and dietary changes, which made a huge change in his biological health.

If you're thinking, "This is so complicated — I don't have a private doctor, how can I act on any of this?" — just run the experiment. Try more fiber, try to regulate your stress. If you want to go the opposite route and jump straight into the medical side, that's fine too. It doesn't need to be scary or daunting, especially if your heart has been scanned — then I'm not concerned about an acute emergency.

The two results that shocked me were my vitamin D and omega levels, which I was told were deficient. I thought I was smashing it with those two, since I was living in LA at the time.

Your vitamin D was borderline low. Traditionally, people of African heritage tend to be lower in that marker.

The guest noted the host's vitamin D level was 37, with the lower end of the reference range around 40 — which might actually be fine, since people of African heritage tend to run lower on this marker.

The host asked why vitamin D matters, given the guest seems to assume most people are deficient. The guest confirmed that assumption and explained that vitamin D is a nice microcosm of overall health: people low in vitamin D also tend to make poor health choices, so it's a bit like grip strength — a single snapshot of whether you're generally healthy. As for why it's specifically needed, it's involved in every reaction from your brain to your gut, your hormones, your immune system, and your metabolism. It's critical for maintaining bone health and for being able to grow skeletal muscle. It's also clinically low in a high percentage of the population, and subclinically low in a vast majority.

Supplement or sunlight?

Asked whether we should supplement when low, the guest said the real world always wins: whole foods, sunlight, and positive social environments are always the place to start. Supplementing is up to you, but he would much rather people get sunlight if possible. Anticipating the objection — "I live in the UK, there's no sun" — he conceded that choosing a supplement because of those circumstances is absolutely fine. The host added working 12 hours a day in an office as another such case, and observed a paradox: we're all searching for very natural solutions while living a very unnatural way of life. He described telling his fiancée that they strive to be natural in one area of life while the rest — planes, smartphones — is deeply unnatural, so forcing one part to be natural arguably causes a problem. He admitted it happens to him too: a full day can pass without realizing he never stepped outside.

The guest's advice: first, give yourself grace — you're not going to be perfect. He was especially thinking of single parents who can't get out and spend 30 minutes in the sun, and the host added night shift workers. The guest agreed that's really hard — he's worked with many nurses and surgeons who are on call — and that's exactly when we can lean toward modern medicine and modern supplementation. Those things aren't trash, garbage, or fake. His typical strategy is to find one actionable thing per week that you have to go out of your way to do — which might simply be going outside today. When you start asking for more than one or two active things per week, you end up failing.

Your omega-3 score at five is low — you want that to be eight. But you probably didn't notice your mercury was right on the line of high as well. Those things typically track: the more omega-3s you consume, the more mercury goes up, because most omega-3 sources are filled with mercury. In your case, you were low omega and high mercury.

What that tells us is that if you were to jack your omega-3s up, your mercury would get into the range we don't want it to be in. So the solution is to alter the source of your omega-3s and get them from a higher-quality place. I'm not sure where you were getting them from.

All over the place.

Either way, you would want to choose your supplement more carefully or choose better quality foods.

When it comes to what actually moves the needle on energy — for people who feel lethargic and want more of it, with sleep already established as a foundation — the first step is to divide everything into two buckets: hidden stressors and visible stressors. A visible stressor is simply not exercising. Excellent databases show that physical exercise enhances energy.

One reason is mitochondrial health: exercise more and you'll generally have more mitochondria — and not just more, but larger and healthier ones. Mitochondria process your energy, so you get more efficient energy production. They're one way you make energy — you can make it a lot of different ways — but they are the end path of all aerobic exercise. Anytime you're using oxygen to make fuel, mitochondria have to be there, so they're central to that. But it's more than mitochondria: one of the primary adaptations to endurance training is that you physically have more blood in your body, meaning more red blood cells, so you carry more oxygen to fuel those mitochondria.

Asked whether a certain type of exercise produces this, the answer is that generally anything that demands blood flow will increase blood supply — it can be anything. The underlying rule is stress equals adaptation: if you put a demand on your heart to pump more blood, it gets better at pumping more blood; if you put a demand on bone to resist tension, it gets better at resisting tension. This runs through the whole cascade from connective tissue to cellular health. It's called the SAID principle — specific adaptation to imposed demand.

It's also fair to broaden the word "exercise" beyond the traditional gym definition to work or cognitive performance. Exercise is a novel, made-up term — a recent invention. Historically, humans carried, sprinted, jumped, climbed, and grappled; putting that into a structured daily activity is a phenomenon of only the last 75 years. It emerged once we realized that removing stress down to its limit is a bad thing, and we had to recreate stress in our lives — one form of that we call exercise. So if you think of exercise only as running, cycling, swimming, or lifting weights, you've left a bunch on the table. It doesn't matter how you challenge yourself; even vocationally based activity counts, because it's the stress being provided to the system.

That's why, when people ask for the best exercise protocol for a given goal, all of them can produce equal responses given a few constraints — and if they hit those constraints, they work. If you skateboard, play pickleball, walk, or garden, fine: all of those can yield equal clinical outcomes for mortality, joint pain, and body composition, because they get to the same spot.

Does that mean a podcaster who wants more energy for podcasting should podcast more? Yes — you'll be more resilient. The same applies to any vocation or activity: if you want more energy to lift your kids and run with them in the garden, then lift things and run with them. It's stress inoculation — your body adapts and gives you more energy for that particular activity. So when people say they don't have energy for something, it's often because they haven't challenged themselves in that activity enough to expand and adapt.

That said, it's a real difficulty: if walking up the stairs is a VO2 max test for you, how likely are you to walk upstairs? It becomes a downward spiral — it's too difficult, so you don't do it, and you get less able to do it.

When we start thinking about energy and I talk about hidden versus visible stressors, I'm looking for constraints. Do you have an undiagnosed pathogen in your body? We had a major league baseball player who felt horrific — he couldn't make it through a baseball game, his legs were shot, no energy whatsoever. In his case, we were able to confirm through his blood, his physical bedroom, and a bunch of other tests, including testing his eyes, that he had a very gnarly exposure to mold.

All we largely had to do was get that cleared, and his energy came back. That's an example of a hidden stressor.

One thing we're always looking for is whether you're in energy toxicity — meaning you're eating too many calories, which is not the same as being obese — or in low energy availability: you're sleeping fine, but you're of low energy. Are you eating enough calories? If not, we have to go no further on this train — you are underfueled for what you're asking of yourself.

So there are hidden stressors like that, and there are visible stressors, which we just talked about — you're not actually doing the thing. Another easy way to explain this is cognitively. If you want to write a book and you don't currently write, sitting down to write will be exhausting. But then you talk to a writer who says, "Oh yeah, I need 45 minutes so I can crank out a thousand words" — for them it's not exhausting at all. That's stress inoculation, exactly what you said before: you build up endurance in those things by doing them.

One of the things I've learned from this podcast and from meeting all these exceptional people is the "use it or lose it" principle. As you get older, you start to feel the odd pain — in your back, for example — and you start finding ways to avoid bending down properly so you can dodge the pain. What's happening there is that because something is difficult, you do it less, which makes it more difficult, so you do it even less — a downward feedback loop toward decline. Atrophy leads to atrophy.

The critical idea that got into my head a couple of years ago from someone I was interviewing was that aging isn't always the excuse. We tend to assume a problem is just aging, accept it, and don't fight back. When I sat here with one of the exceptional PhDs I interviewed, she showed me a DEXA scan of a 70-year-old pentathlete next to a DEXA scan of a 30-year-old, and the 70-year-old's bone and muscle were phenomenal. I'll put the scan on the screen — it's mind-blowing, and I've sent it to my best friends because I couldn't get the idea out of my head: don't accept everything as an aging problem, because the minute you do, you go on this downward cycle. That was such an important idea to internalize at 30 years old. So when I feel a pain in my back, my solution isn't "Stephen, you're getting older, stop bending down and protect the pain" — it's go to the gym and start squatting and bending.

There are some things that will decline with age — sleep is actually one of them; we typically sleep a little less as we age. Fine. But I think you can resist and fight as much of that as possible. You're seeing a turning of the tide right now with longevity. Longevity is currently positioned as an anti-aging phenomenon, and people are already bored by it. Is your goal to just not age, or is your goal to dunk a basketball at 70? Do you want the 4x4 truck with the best off-road package ever that stays in your garage? Probably not. You want to live, to experience life, and then take advantage of those capacities.

Someone said to me, "You want to extend your health span, not necessarily your lifespan."

"It's not health span, though. That's what I'm pushing back on. Lifespan, fine, great — we're all past that. Health span still sounds like 'I don't want to be in pain.' I'm saying performance span. I want you focused on having the most skill, crushing it cognitively, being able to do anything you want physically for as long as we possibly can — not just 'that's going to go away, let's stay alive and be out of pain.' I want you thinking: I'm going to be doing awesome stuff, in whatever venue you like, for as long as you possibly can."

"I think people want both."

"Yeah, of course. But let's not leave that end of the table off and assume performance has to go away."

Exercise and daily energy

On the point of energy, we've covered a lot and given some really actionable principles. I do notice — because I travel quite a lot — that on occasion my gym routine gets impacted, and there's a clear correlation between how often I went to the gym in previous weeks and how I feel energy-wise today. This morning I was thinking about it: we're in New York, and over the last couple of weeks I've probably been going three times a week, whereas usually I'd go almost every day, and I've felt a difference in my energy. I wasn't sure whether that was psychological or supported by science.

"Both. A moderate to light, lower-intensity exercise session will generally provide energy. If instead you went to the death — you pegged it, went all the way, whether that's lifting with intensity or getting your heart rate all the way up — you might walk out exhausted. But on aggregate, those sessions will provide more daily energy. If you're traveling, sick, or super busy, do the former: just get in some motion, get a sweat in, and you'll feel better. If you're healthy and looking for long-term adaptation, that's when you can start to push the pace on the training."

I want to speak to the business owners listening and watching right now. I know what it's like to be personally responsible for every decision. I founded my first company at 21 years old, and honestly, the pressure can be immense. It's the kind of mental load that takes its toll below the surface.

I recently did some tests through our sponsor, Function, which got me thinking about that invisible impact. I found that I had low levels of omega-3s and deficient levels of vitamin D — probably because I sit inside this dark room all day — and that has totally changed how I construct my day going forward. I get up in the morning and the first thing I now do is go for a walk outside in the sunshine, in part to help my vitamin D levels increase, but also because it helps to reset my circadian rhythm.

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The host brings out a grip strength machine and mentions that many people have told him grip strength is the single biggest predictor of longevity.

The guest pushes back: he wouldn't call it the number one predictor of mortality, but it is a really nice scientific test. In the late 1980s, Steven Blair and his team began looking at giant databases and realized that cardiovascular fitness — VO2 max, VO2 peak and similar measures — predicted how long people would live. In fact, it outperformed traditional clinical markers like blood pressure and cholesterol. That launched the entire 45-year field we're in now, built on the insight that performance-based markers predict health better than these indirect markers.

The problem is that the idea got taken too far. When colleagues who have been on the show say things like "grip strength is an important predictor of mortality," the message is good and important, but we have to be careful not to lose sight of what it means. A grip strength device like this one probably costs under $40, which is amazing. What you will consistently see is that people who are really, really weak are in worse health on average. Where it becomes false is concluding that you therefore need to alter your lifestyle to maximize grip strength.

The host says he did his grip strength test and it was high. The guest's response: "You know what that tells me about your health? Nothing. Why wouldn't it be high? You're young, you're fit, I have all those other markers — it's not going to tell us anything." These tests are really powerful for someone who doesn't have blood work, a body composition test or anything else, because they give a crude strength metric suggesting whether a person is probably at health risk.

The host asks whether grip strength is a proxy for overall body strength — indicating that overall strength is low — or whether it's actually about the arm. The guest answers that it's both, and explains what you're really testing: the nervous system. You're testing your brain as well as your strength; there's an overlap. That's why grip strength does indicate general poor health, and it can also tell you something directly.

This splits people into two camps. Camp one says: great, I'll open a gym that tests your grip strength and focus all your training on grip strength training — that exaggerates the point. The other camp says it doesn't matter because it's all indirect — that's not true either. The truth is it's an actionable, useful thing where you don't need to worry about optimizing or maxing it. If you're in the 80th percentile, going to the 90th percentile probably doesn't make you live a day longer.

Grip strength asymmetry

Over the last three years or so, the guest estimates over 20 to 25 studies have been published on a very specific type of grip strength: grip strength asymmetry. The host says he's stronger on his left side than his right. The guest says that's not uncommon — typically your force-dominant limb is not your neural control limb. You're right-handed because you need fine motor control for writing, but gross strength can be in the opposite side.

The guest demonstrates the test: keep the arm at 90 degrees, don't touch it to the table, and squeeze with one good effort as hard as you can. The host scores 130 on his right hand — above average. He then tries his weaker left hand and scores 160, beating his first attempt.

Let's see. 110. Crossing, man. That's really good.

But what it taught me is that it doesn't correlate to overall strength, because Jeff is definitely stronger than me.

Yeah, it's a very specific type of strength, right? The asymmetry actually matters, because most of the work in that area is in groups with neurological disease — you're trying to look at early predictions of Alzheimer's, Parkinson's, and things like that. Which ties into my earlier point: it is not simply an overall proxy of your health. It can tell us direct things like nerve denervation and overall neurological health. So to me it's a great tool, but what we don't want to do then is optimize

Asked what a better marker of overall health might be, the speaker notes there is no single marker that tells you everything, but muscle power is a great one as well.

What power is

Power is defined as force multiplied by velocity. To demonstrate, he hands a 12-kilo implement over slowly: that expresses about 12 pounds of force. Handing it back at the same speed is the same amount of newtons of force. Power comes from doing the same movement with speed.

Force is F = ma — mass times acceleration, which is what you think of as strength. So there are two ways to become more powerful: more force or more velocity.

The light implement is used deliberately: it provides a little mass — you could obviously lift more than 12 kilos — while emphasizing the velocity side of the spectrum.

The common training mistake

The mistake people make when training for power is going slow with a mass that is too light to do anything. That way you don't get stronger and you don't get faster.

Powerpenia and why it matters

This matters in the current conversation because of what some people call powerpenia. The long-standing term is sarcopenia — the accelerated loss of muscle, and probably muscle strength, with aging. You will drop some, but sarcopenia asks whether you are dropping faster than you should. Now scientific attention is turning to powerpenia: are you losing power faster than you should?

That matters for everything from preventing falls to catching yourself when you slip — being able to move and accelerate quickly. Losing it is highly associated with broken bones, fractures and dislocations, which are incredibly impactful to health, especially after age 60 or 65.

Many people assume that to get better gym results—whether fat loss, muscle gain, or strength—they simply need to train more often. The host admits he thinks this way himself: he currently goes three or four days a week and wonders if he needs to go six or seven.

The expert's answer is that you could go either way. It's generally true that training more often gives you more opportunities to create stress, and therefore more opportunity for adaptation. But depending on the marker, the answer ranges from yes to no. Using muscle growth as an example: as long as you hit the same weekly volume, how many times you go to the gym doesn't matter that much in theory.

Volume means how much load you lifted and how many times. Asked whether the time period matters—lifting four weights in one hour versus in 20 minutes—the answer is no, because all you've changed is the rest in between. Rest does matter in one sense: if a short rest interval causes excessive fatigue accumulation that compromises how heavy you can lift or how many reps and sets you can do, your volume has been compromised.

The host pushes back: everyone talks about taking shorter rests to build more muscle. "Not consistent with the evidence," comes the reply. But there's a practical trade-off—who has time to wait two and a half minutes between every set? You'd be in the gym for an hour and a half. Many people end up on their phones, then rush out having done only half the work.

In an isolated world, resting 60 to 90 seconds, or up to two minutes, between sets generally lets you recover enough for a higher-quality next set. Is making sure each rep is high quality the most important thing to optimize? "In my world, quality is always number one." So the advice is to take a longer break, as long as it doesn't keep you in the gym so long that you can't finish everything you needed to do. With unlimited time, it still depends on the adaptation: for endurance you don't necessarily need longer rests, but for speed, skill, flexibility, balance, muscle growth, or fat loss, you have options depending on your goal.

The biggest point the expert wants to make is that the field currently struggles with letting a little bit of information get in the way of motivation. If you're going to the gym three days a week, "I'm clapping. Done. Like, we're winning." He doesn't want people to hear messages like this and conclude they're doing it all wrong, tanking their metabolism, or breaking their hormones. Getting to the gym and trying hard is already the hard part. Once you're past that point, you can start tinkering—but he hates when people leave conversations like this saying that if you don't rest more than 60 seconds you're getting nothing. That's not true. Upgrades exist, but for most people, quality should be the biggest focus, because it reduces the likelihood of injury.

There's even evidence that whether you're trying to get stronger or grow muscle, the quality of each repetition—defined by your technique, range of motion, intent, and what's called the mind-muscle connection (if you're trying to contract your shoulder, are you really contracting it?)—all starts to matter. The result is that you can get more results with less work and shorter time, because each individual repetition is of higher quality and more focused intent.

With everyone talking about creatine right now, the question comes up: do your athletes take it? Yes, of course — everybody. And I take it too.

My personal supplement stack — the same for all of our clients and athletes — falls into two totally separate categories: correcting physiological deficiencies and performance enhancement.

Correcting deficiencies means fixing what blood work shows is low, high, or off track — in your case, for example, vitamin D. We try to solve this through food first, but in practice it often looks like a high-quality multivitamin and oftentimes fish oil.

On the other side of the equation are performance accelerators, which is where creatine comes in. If I'm traveling, I'll also take things like fiber, because vegetables are nowhere to be found on airplanes, in airports, or in restaurants. At home I generally don't take as much, since I can control my diet.

Performance enhancers include creatine, beta-alanine, and sodium bicarbonate. Depending on my current training goal — muscle growth or endurance — I adjust which ones I use.

What am I taking right now? Zero. Not even vitamin D this week — it's summertime, and I live in the forest. Omega-3? Nope. I have full control of my diet and we're eating a lot of fish right now, so we're covered there. I'm also fortunate to harvest my own meat, and wild-caught red meat sources are consistently higher in many nutrients than non-wild. Plus, I have my blood work, so I know exactly where my omega-3 numbers stand. If I don't have to take those supplements, I won't.

A lot of people come to the coach with weight loss goals, whether they're cutting weight for a fight or just ordinary people looking to lose a few pounds. Asked about the big misconceptions around weight loss, he said the biggest one is the search for magic — the idea that there's one specific food you can't eat or one way you have to train. Fat loss is categorically quite simple to lose; it's practically hard as a human endeavor, but in principle it's incredibly simple. There are only a few things you have to do, and then you have a billion choices of how to get there. So if you're the type of person who struggles with moderation — whether with calories, exercise, or environment — he won't give you moderation.

Are you a cook or a baker?

He illustrated the point with a question: do you know the difference between baking and cooking? Baking is chemistry — you mix something together, put it in the oven, and you can't fake the amounts, or it won't rise or set. Cooking on a stove lets you just throw in whatever's in the fridge. He approaches fat loss by identifying whether you're a "cook" or a "baker" personality type.

If you came to him already fairly lean but wanting to get super lean, his first question would be how you want the process to operate. There are two options:

1. Baking: He tells you exactly what to eat. You weigh and measure every single thing, do not deviate, check your weight every day, and follow his instructions exactly.
2. Cooking: He gives you concepts — one to three rules. You check your weight daily or weekly, and you stay airtight to those concepts.

The interviewer preferred the concepts, and the coach explained why that matters: a concepts person doesn't want to think about all the little details because they'd rather think about other things. It's freeing. The downside is that if you don't know exactly what's in your food and don't have a well-calibrated eye, someone like that might have a hard time losing fat — because when you're already at the end, you need to be weighing the olive oil and measuring the cup of rice, not eyeballing "a little bit of rice over there." But if you're trying to lose 100 pounds, you can probably eyeball a lot of things and get really far.

What the concepts look like

Personality type is the real point. Some people hearing "concepts" would immediately ask how many meals they're eating or what the fiber count is — they want the detail. An example concept might be: eat fresh vegetables at every meal and have a dedicated protein source every time you eat, and that might be the only rule. It could also be an eating window — eat whatever you want, but only between certain hours. He could use any one to three rules, or none of those and simply say cut out all your junk food, giving a list of things not to eat.

He prefers the opposite approach — giving you things to do rather than taking things away, because otherwise you'll take those things away anyway. He can play with your meal timing, your meal frequency, or your meal composition — the types of food you're eating and the combinations of them. All of these work because they're simply different strategies to likely reduce food intake. That's all fat loss really is — but some people hate it because it's not enough detail.

Some people get anxious without precision—they want exact numbers, like asking whether it's 6 or 7 ounces of chicken, when it barely matters. They simply don't want to make decisions about what to eat, since they only have concepts to work with. The upside of measuring everything is that you have no choices to make.

The other speaker assumes most listeners would prefer concepts, since busy people don't want to weigh out 6.3 grams of anything. But he'd be stunned: most people want the detail, because then they don't have to think, guess, or worry about whether they ate too much that day.

The recommendation: do the "baking approach" first—measure everything and understand what's in it—for two weeks. Then you can back off, because you'll have a better sense of what a tablespoon of peanut butter or a cup of rice actually looks like, and you can start toning the measuring back.

The other speaker agrees, saying his own big dietary shifts came in exactly that order: for one week he counted calories or used barcode-scanning apps that tell you what's in the food. Within a week or two he discovered that the things he ate frequently weren't what he thought, both in quantity and nutritional profile. He thinks it's important for as many people as possible to spend at least a week doing that, so they can make informed decisions about what to keep and what they didn't actually like that much.

He used to run this experiment in class every year with graduate students getting master's degrees in the field: a seven-day diet recall, weighing everything they ate. The consistent themes: almost everyone ate way more fat than they thought, way more carbohydrates than they realized, and way less protein than expected. Is the fat a bad thing? Only if you're eating more calories than you need—fat itself isn't bad for you, and there are no evil foods. As for sugar, everyone already knows they're eating sugar. What stuns people is the proportion: they thought maybe 20% of their calories came from fat when they were actually at 40%.

The other speaker notes that the keto diet helped him for exactly this reason—it forced him to check everything for a while. His principle was roughly 50 grams of carbs a day to stay in ketosis, so he treated it like a budget, deciding how to spend his carb grams, which meant researching everything he ate. Now he has an intuitive sense of it.

The point is simply your awareness of what's actually in the foods you want. Then, if you want to change or tweak, you can—because without that knowledge, you can't even start.

What are the big misconceptions about exercise's role in weight loss?

Exercise is valuable. For a long time we've been telling people to burn more calories than you ingest, and that's still true. Then a bunch of research came out saying exercise isn't playing the role we think it is in fat loss, and those data still hold in the sense that you don't burn as many calories in your workouts as you think. Most of the time, if you hop on a piece of exercise equipment and it tells you you burned a certain amount of calories, you most likely burned significantly less than that.

It's also true that there are places you can get to with adaptive thermogenesis. Meaning, if you burn say 500 calories with exercise, depending on how lean or how fit you are, your body will change how many calories it burns throughout the day in response to that 500 calories from exercise. Theoretically, you could burn 500 calories in your workout, but then your body downregulates your energy expenditure by three or four hundred, or even up to 500 calories to make up for it — so you end up neutral. When you're lean like that, that can happen quite often. So what do you do? You pull more calories. You train harder to get more of a response. This is where the "calorie counting doesn't matter" idea comes from, but it absolutely matters — it may not be the strategy you want, but it matters.

Then there was a big push claiming exercise plays no role in fat loss, which was also fundamentally not true. Meta-analyses in recent years, along with more studies, show the fairest way to put it is: exercise is a fantastic way to burn some calories, but it's not the only thing you can do to lose weight — you can handle weight loss entirely through nutrition if you want. That said, people who exercise consistently during their weight loss journey are better at keeping the fat off over the weeks to years afterward.

The 54321 method is a simple set of fat loss rules I came up with. Five days a week, be active. This can be exercise, walking, or your vocation — it doesn't matter. What has to happen with fat loss is that you produce caloric expenditure, and a lot of it. That's my way of saying be active. It's also totally fine to take a rest day and just veg, but be as active as you possibly can.

From there, I want four days a week of structured exercise. One of those days can be super hard, one can be light, one could be a yoga day — not all four have to be "head to the gym, train as hard as you can." But do structured exercise four days a week, and at least three days a week, train hard enough to sweat.

If you're active five days a week, doing structured exercise four days a week, and three of those sessions leave you with a really good solid sweat, you're probably burning enough calories to give yourself a chance at losing weight from the exercise perspective. If you've done those first three, you could even just call it the 543 — you're in a pretty good spot.

If you want to get more granular, I'd love a couple of days a week of strength training, and at least one day where your heart rate gets really, really high.

A common frustration: "I go to the gym three or four days a week, but nothing's changing. I feel like I've stagnated." What's going on there?

The typical cause is a lack of focus—not in your training, but in your programming. If you're going three or four days a week, the first question is: what type of training program are you on?

I'm kind of just winging it.

That's why. If I gave you any business analogy, you'd look at me and smile—you have a plan. Why would you expect to get anywhere in particular without one?

About 80% of the time, that's the answer. And here's the thing: we have good literature showing that the plan itself isn't the biggest factor—it's simply having a plan. That's what gives you the ability to progressively overload.

What does that mean? It means you can do more repetitions than you did last week, add a few more sets, increase the load, or increase the range of motion. There are all kinds of ways to progressively overload the system.

This is really the heart of it: most of us go to the gym and do the same thing we did last week. We put the StairMaster on level eight and do 10 minutes—and we've done that for the last seven months. We should really just put it up one. But you can't just go up one every time. How many weeks in a row can you add five pounds? Three or four, maybe—it won't be very long. This is the entire reason exercise is a scientific field.

For an absolute beginner who isn't going to the gym at all and isn't doing anything, AI tools can probably give you a basic starting program. People send me these all the time: "I prompted it with all of your content and got a complete personalized training program from Andy Galpin." I look at them and think, "Pretty good, that's pretty reasonable." They're good enough to get you started—they give you the basics and something to follow for six, eight, ten weeks, whatever.

Put in your constraints. Tell it how many days a week you can train.

The host then prompted AI live: "I want to go to the gym 4 days a week, and I want Andy Galpin's formula to gain muscle. What principles do I need to apply over the next 4 months based on Andy Galpin's work?" The AI answered: to gain muscle and strength, prioritize progressive overload by gradually increasing weight, reps, or sets; use a variety of repetition ranges, both heavy low-rep work for strength and moderate to high-rep work for muscle growth; and take adequate rest between sets—usually two to five minutes for heavy compound movements—to allow full recovery and maintain high-quality effort.

Pretty good. There's a little bit of hallucination in there, which is AI, but that's pretty close.

The pendulum: from online coaching to in-person training

A lot of people aren't using AI this way yet. We've seen a huge pendulum swing over the last five years. 2020 almost ended health and fitness—gyms went out of business, everyone went home and bought exercise equipment. But as soon as AI came online, online coaching tanked and online companies got crippled, because everyone asked, "Why would I pay you a hundred, two hundred, three hundred dollars a month for that?" And they were right. Now it's swinging the exact opposite way: in-person training is way more in demand.

It makes sense—personal trainers don't just tell you what to do. They make sure you do it. It's the emotion, the connection, the accountability. What you're seeing is people realizing it was never about the information.

It's never been the information

We always had the information. Nothing in that AI answer was made up—dumbbells, barbells, rep ranges, this stuff has been around forever. Every time I talk about exercise prescription, somebody comments, "Why don't you give credit to so-and-so? They invented that." None of us invented this stuff.

So why do people keep listening to these conversations when a lot of them already know the material? Many people aren't even listening to podcasts anymore—they'll just ask Grok for the ten actionable things from a three-hour conversation. They try to extract the data, and then they don't do anything. You know who's going to take action from this? The people who listened.

In part, it's the story. One of the most compelling things on these podcasts is real case studies of real people—when you tell me what Jenny did, that you were training her, she was perimenopausal, and she did this with that—people go, "Ah, okay, those stay with me."

You know what the world is willing to pay for? Have you done it before? Lived experience. When you see a story, you can say, "Okay, I believe that person has done it, and now I trust that opinion—because I could just go grab the program, right?" The other thing is it saves me time. You could sit there with all the prompts, throw them in, and get your own training program. Or you could say, "I'm just going to go pay Andy. I know he's done it before, I trust him, and now I'll spend my time on other things I care about learning."

Asked whether there are commonalities in the catalyst moment that causes behavior change in otherwise stubborn people, the guest said that for everyone he sits with—and even himself—there was a moment where they heard something or something happened, a before-and-after moment: "that was the day I decided to take this seriously." But he admitted he doesn't have a good answer, because it's always so different. He would love to say it's the rock-bottom moment, and that can be true, but it's not always true.

The other speaker suggested big life changes—kids, the death of a friend or family member—when life becomes real, which the guest said he'd heard a few times on the show.

Information alone doesn't change behavior

The guest's own father had a heart attack, and yet the threat of death doesn't motivate anybody—if it did, we wouldn't have a 40% obesity rate. Everybody knows obesity tanks your health; it's not an information issue. People know the risks of alcohol, smoking, and social media, and that doesn't change behavior. You get closer when it's at home: if your neighbor just died in a car accident, you'll stop looking at your phone while driving. That's what makes it too close to home.

He gave a personal example: he's notorious for asking everyone to put their seat belts on—in a black cab he'll say, "Everyone, could you put your seat belts on, please?"—and his team knows he checks every single person before they go anywhere. That began when he was 10 years old, when a school assembly brought in a mother who had lost her child in a car accident, and a police officer who described arriving at a crash scene, realizing the victim was deceased, and looking down to see their phone ringing with "Mom" on the screen. He's never forgotten it; it was somewhat traumatic, but it's meant he's policed seat belts for the rest of his life. That's what he means by catalyst moments—an idea gets in your head and completely changes you.

Seeing your own data

On what these catalysts look like for weight loss and health, they listed a diagnosis in the family, and from a performance perspective, data. He recalled a professional athlete earlier in his career who wasn't fast enough but was convinced he was. They put him on a force plate and collected objective data, and—like the grip-strength demonstration—he had students do the same test so the athlete could see they were as fast as he was. Everything changed: he was totally bought in and made every training change they asked. He had to see it in front of his face; he had to see his data.

Now that health data has been democratized—the ability to see your own data—he'd bet that if he pulled up a blood panel with the cholesterol levels discussed earlier and called it a client's, the reaction would be mild interest, but when he pulled up the person's own and said "this is yours," it would be "sit over here, we're done with that"—no question.

Research-backed catalysts

He cited research that answers the question, and noted they had hit most of the items:

1. An acute health shock or diagnosis—the primary catalyst.
2. Various health events that become wakeup calls, or someone else—a peer, friend, or sibling.
3. Quantitative biometric feedback—data.
4. Major life transitions, which they hadn't touched on—such as becoming a parent, or turning a landmark age like 30, 40, or 50.

Or reaching retirement — do you see that a lot?

Actually, that made me think of the one we've seen the most: "I sold my company." That one changes everyone's life. It's similar to post-exit depression — you've lost purpose. "What do I do? I need to do something. Now I have money, now I have time. I'm investing in my health now, because I sacrificed my health for the last 20 years."

But is it also just "I need a new purpose, and my body becomes the project"?

That's exactly what it is. In the past, I had the excuse of sacrificing for the company — I couldn't focus on myself, it would have been selfish, not fiduciarily responsible. Now I have no more excuse.

Looking at this list, though — let's hope no one in your family or circle gets sick, so we'll stay away from that one. Of the two that remain, they can be quite motivating, and again, we don't want to motivate you if you're completely fine. But this actually answers the question: go get your health checked. That's a simple solution, because maybe you're fine, and that's great — maybe you're doing everything right. But just saying "I want to lose a bit of weight" or "I want to do this" isn't as solid as going and finding out how you're actually doing.

One thing I think is important: I default to performance, optimization and excellence — that's just the language I work in. But to be really clear, that's not the opposite of what you just said. Not everyone gravitates toward the idea of being the best possible, ever.

Totally fine. But that still doesn't mean it's okay to check out on your health. You can have it both ways: "I'm not an optimizer, I'm not a maximizer, that doesn't fit my ethos" — cool. We can still say you want to live that life for as long as possible, right? So let's just make sure we're paying enough attention that nothing catches up with us — that we're not waking up one day having to invest all that time, energy and resources into going backwards. Pay attention enough.

Asked how important it is to get clear on your "why," the guest says the answer may disappoint: traditionally, people who come to him have already figured that out. They found their motivation, or at least had enough of it to seek outside counsel in the first place. So by the time they arrive, they're ready to work on the what and the how.

The interviewer pushes back: what about bad goals? Looking back on his own life, he had bad goals that set him up for failure. The guest agrees that this is the more realistic case to work with — it means you were aiming at the wrong target.

The interviewer gives an example: at 27, his goal was to go to the gym every day, and he failed six months later. The failure was catastrophic for him — once he missed a single day because of a flight, his entire motivation collapsed, and he was left wondering how to get back on the horse. The guest points out how the goal was flawed from the start: were you really going to go every day for the rest of your life?

The guest offers another example. Say you want to lose fat, so your goal is fat loss. The key question is: why aren't you leaner right now? Most people automatically answer that they need to exercise more and diet — but that's just the tactic. He wants to know what's actually getting in the way. You already know calories matter, yet it isn't working, so what is really blocking progress? Is there some hidden stressor?

Often people say they need to lose fat so they can get healthy, and his general answer is the reverse: you need to get healthy first, and then the fat loss becomes a whole lot easier. That original goal was the bad one.

To diagnose this, they ask: what would success look like, and what would failure look like? When someone answers that success means losing 25 pounds, he reframes it: if you lost 12 pounds, your shoulder pain went away, you had normal bowel movements for the first time in 10 years, and your energy was way up — would that all be a failure? No, that's success. Which means the goal wasn't defined properly in the first place.

Getting this right is a huge focus of how they help people actually make progress in the areas they've struggled with.

Andy Galpin, we have a closing tradition where the last guest leaves a question for the next, not knowing who they're leaving it for. The question left for you is: if you were sure to fail, what would still be worth doing?

What a great question. I'm ultra competitive, but I really don't mind losing. My answer sounds like a copout, but it's all of it, because I actually don't care about failing that much. It just doesn't bother me. I like the competing thing; I like the doing thing. My initial reaction was, being around my kids — you can fail at anything you want there, and I'd call that winning. Then I thought about business, and I don't really care about losing there either, because you get to do it, you get to be active. So kind of a copout, but my answer would be all of them.

The process is dope.

The podium is the process.

Or the process over the podium.

Dr. Andy Galpin, thank you so much. You're held in such high regard by everybody, and I think there are two reasons. You're so deeply obsessed with this subject matter, for reasons we talked a lot about last time, and the essence of your motivations is unbelievably pure. Before we started recording, you were telling me you're really not that concerned with the business side of things, because what you'd love to do is just focus on the research, the education, and the coaching. That says a lot about you, and it comes through — people understand you're deeply obsessed with this stuff in a way that lets us benefit tremendously from all the work you've done. You're also a wonderful synthesizer of very complex things, so please carry on.

If people want to listen to your show or continue this journey with you, where's the best place to send them?

First of all, thank you for those kind words and for inviting me back — it's a huge opportunity and I'll never be ungrateful for it. My podcast is called Perform with Dr. Andy Galpin, available everywhere. Then andygalpin.com, and social media — Instagram and all that — is probably the easiest way to follow along.

I highly recommend you go and subscribe to Andy's channel — we'll link it below. You're incredibly rigorous with all the work you do. Having spoken to Andrew Huberman, a good friend of both of ours, he's also told me just how utterly obsessed you are with truth, and with your mission of helping people become who they could be. That shines through in all of your work. So please subscribe to Andy's podcast, Perform, and I'll link all of his other resources below, including the tests and questionnaires we talked about today. Andy, thank you.

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