IQ vs EQ: The Hidden Key to Business Success | Andy Triana DSH #903

In general, not just his hiring process, which is uh quite novel, was based on that.

The intersection of your EQ to IQ was what he looked at.

And so, that's like your workable ability.

Whoa, if you have excess IQ, you're going to be limited, kind of what I said about the protein, by your lack of EQ.

And if you have the other that seesaw concept,

you're just not going to be able to optimize because that intersection is your true ability.

All right, guys, Andy Triana here.

We're going to talk uh optimization.

Yeah, Let's do it, baby.

Looking forward to it, man.

Yeah.

What you been working on lately?

I have a patent pending in the food science world that has to do with protein and optimizing it.

And I'm doing a lot of like just quote-unquote nerd stuff right now, scientific advising.

But as always, sports performance and looking at the vision, information processing portion and sensory motor aspect of the brain has always been my hot topic in sports.

Yeah, let's dive with the patent first.

So what are you trying?

You probably can't spill the beans on that.

No, no, I can spill the beans because we have some stuff going on.

The patentable portion is an algorithmic equation I created with some software in which I could take your standard amino acid breakdown of a gram of protein.

In the US, it's typically 18 amino acids.

You plug in your information and it spits out an optimized form.

Because essentially, especially in the early 2000s, when bodybuilding was kind of really taking a lot of hold on the nutrition world and the supplement world, it was all about leucine, driving more anabolism through mTOR and these very specific things.

And biology is overarchingly a balancing act.

When people ask me about health, I tell them the answer is synergy, not anything in particular.

And we disrupted the balancing act of protein.

And of course, these ripples into modern day proteins and the foods we consume today are unbalanced to a degree that we're unlikely to be in protein synthesis as long as we think we are due to some limiting factors.

And my...

algorithm hopefully corrects for that.

Nice.

That sounds intense, man.

Yeah, it's wordy, but in reality, just think about a seesaw.

The optimal biological outcome is a balanced seesaw.

And anytime you unbalance that seesaw, there's pros and cons that come into play.

And the amount of time you spend unbalanced is really the deleterious issue.

So I take that philosophy and I kind of applied it to food, sports, and I've applied it to a few things.

Nice.

So sports performance.

Were you an athlete growing up?

Yeah, I did wrestling growing up.

I did all the basic sports.

I really, really loved Strongman, though.

And that happened when I got to college.

There was a team that we had that did so in a great gym setup.

And that got me into the world of skill because Strongman, if you're familiar, is like lifting the rocks and cars.

And all the events are different, every single competition.

So there's so much skill involved and your ability to be flexible with that skill, the precision, and all that, I fell in love with.

And that transitioned me into the sports world, honestly.

Nice.

So is that the competition for World's Strongest Men?

Yes.

Oh, got it.

Yep.

There's heavyweights and they have a kind of their separate contest from everyone else.

Everyone else is still involved in the sport, but with like licensing, copyright, and TV rights, they're kind of separated.

Got it.

So you were competing in that.

Yeah, I did 90 kilogram, a little bit of 80 kilogram, but I was most successful at 90.

Okay.

And my first worlds, I took fifth.

Wow.

And it's funny how life changes.

At the time, I was so displeased with it because I felt like I underperformed for what I was capable of.

But now that it's been...

uh probably six years i i see it so differently especially working with athletes at the pro level quite often who have incredible talent and still get upset about something going wrong.

You know, I saw myself in them a little bit.

I was like, wow, it's so easy to feel that way and have the world look at you and be like, but you did X, Y, and Z, be happy, but that's not what they're feeling.

Everyone's reality is so individual.

It's easy to believe, even with your best friends, that your realities are kind of similar.

In, you know, not to use the same word, in reality, they're probably not, you know, pun intended.

Yeah, that's crazy to think about, actually, but everyone's in their own world in a way.

Yeah.

Like, so you have coffee, the guy next to you has coffee.

That's different.

And even if you have coffee on Monday, it's different than having coffee on Tuesday for you.

You know, and our whole life functions this way.

And oftentimes, we overlook that.

Right.

Were you using a lot of data and analytics when you were competing at the time?

Somewhere in between.

I think the intersection between data and humanics is where sports and life

most successfully tends to occur.

Because if you get too data-driven, you can't see the difference between two small facts.

And if you get too humanics-driven to, in your head, if you will, feelings-driven, you you also are subservient to potentially, you know, feeling something that's not real, a lie or a fleeting emotion and making decisions based on it.

So I think somewhere in the middle for everyone is most successful.

I have some athletes that...

They don't measure anything, but we'll make up a test for them to give them some semblance of objectivity.

And I have some athletes that love numbers and have intense Excel sheets, and that's how they function.

Right.

So you need both.

Yeah, for sure.

Yeah, for sure.

Because you need good genetics and good work ethic.

Yeah, you know, I worked with a very successful hedge fund owner for a really intense period of time.

And his overarching piece of advice in general, not just his hiring process, which is quite novel, was based on that, the intersection of your EQ to IQ was what he looked at.

And so that's like your workable ability.

Whoa.

If you have excess IQ, you're going to be limited, kind of like I said about the protein, by your lack of EQ.

And if you have the other, that seesaw concept, you're just not going to be able to optimize because that intersection is your true ability, if you will.

That's so fascinating.

So, when it comes to super geniuses with heavy IQ, they usually lack EQ, right?

Yeah, typically 120.

So, IQ in and of itself is a weird little subject to analyze, but typically 120 is when they see social decline, regardless.

Because think about averages, right?

Like, not that there's a normative person in the world.

We're also individual, but the average world IQ is roughly 82.

The average American is roughly 86.

It's that low?

Yeah, because don't forget, we're so common to think that everyone's literate and all this stuff, but there's still a good amount of illiteracy.

There's still a good amount of people that might immigrate from somewhere else and come here and don't speak the language and all that stuff.

It's going to impact your IQ score.

People think differently in different languages.

Orange is actually the most disputed color in the world.

Really?

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Different sections of the world define it slightly differently based on like the red, yellow hues.

And that goes back to the reality thing, right?

You know, if you grew up in one section of the world where the sunrise and sunset are very like red versus yellow, you're going to view the oranges a little differently.

Mmm, that's crazy to think about.

I always thought the average was like 100, but 86 is lower than I thought for sure.

So, 100 was intended to be average, but the problem with the IQ tests is the type of test you do.

You can do like ones that predict on it.

It also has correction factors.

So, if you answer really fast and you're young, you're more likely to get a better IQ score.

Rather, as you get older and speed declines at all, it will weigh on your score.

Do you think the lower attention spans are affecting IQ?

Because I took an IQ test five years ago and I took one two months ago and my score was lower.

So there's a lot of variables.

I think it's not as much as how

the IQ gets weighed.

It's the perception of the user.

So for example, like let's say you're going through an emotional period of time or you had a recent event that made you philosophically change.

There's ripple effects on that too.

So your brain and the frontal cortex will look at decision-making processes a little different.

So as you go through the ebbs and flows of evolution philosophically in life, that will oftentimes be reflected in your IQ score, even something like acute anxiety to make it go down.

I was pretty anxious while I was taking that, actually.

It was dealing with some personal stuff and business stuff on the side.

Yeah, totally.

That's why it's a weird number.

It's like, what's your average heart rate?

You know, it's like, well, you know what I mean?

And it's more of a gauge for, I guess, how far off your baseline you are.

So if we were, let's say in a scenario, we were working together and you're like, Andy, I'm feeling stress.

I did an IQ test.

It's low.

It's more likely to be that your stress manifests in cognition rather than seeing it maybe in your heart rate or your gut because some people get stressed and they're the same in between the ears but their guts ruin you know whatever it may be yeah i just took a heart rate test two days ago and uh my average beats were 59 but it it was only 10 minutes but it ranged from 47 to 77 and they noticed when i picked up my phone it hit 77.

isn't that crazy uh not surprising so your heart rate actually gets more consistent the more excited you are so when your heart rate's above 100 it's like very metronome metronome-like.

And when your heart rate is below 100, it's less metronome-like.

And that's one of the things that HRV, the score on the whoop and all that stuff, attempts to describe.

But it should go up because everyone wants to believe that, like, if you can operate like a monk all day, you'll be very healthy.

But monks purposely avoid things intervening with their life.

Double mean detox, right?

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

They, well, they not even a detox.

They just, it's a way of living for them.

They're not detoxing from anything.

You know what I mean?

They just live that way.

Whereas for us, we are culturally bound to stress.

You know what I mean?

Think about it.

It's always grind, grind, grind, do more, do more, do more.

And sure, that's a wonderful thing.

It's created all everything, all this, right?

But that has perils to it because you're now associating stress with a positive.

And not that it deserves connotation at all, but then all of a sudden, that's how you get to how did I get here scenarios.

Like everything was going so good and all of a sudden X happened.

That's a philosophical problem more so than a biological problem oftentimes.

Right.

How are you dealing with stress?

Or are there ways to mitigate it?

Yeah.

So it's funny.

I just had a little bit of a humbling experience.

I travel a lot.

Yeah.

And I got gut parasites.

Whoa.

I've never had any gut issue traveling.

And to put it in perspective, I'm 29 now.

I've been traveling internationally for work since I was 23.

I got a little lazy.

I didn't bring the same, you know, things I bring with me typically to an event.

I was open to more foods.

I wasn't paying attention to the food sanitation as much, especially because I I was international.

That's important.

Your gut microbiome is more of a product of where you live and what you've done in your life than anything else.

So the microbiome of all Americans is more similar to each other than like the world's microbiome, of course.

But I got the parasites, whatever.

It was kind of intense.

I got over it and I realized how much I was just forcing and using rigidity as a means to get things done.

And that in and of itself was making me a little more stressed than I needed to be.

I'm naturally fast.

I'm naturally want to do stuff.

So even going back to that seesaw, my behavioral practices should probably be skills that slow me down, not speed me up.

And I looked at what I was doing in life recently and I was like, all my behaviors are accelerants, if you will.

I'm already a fast person who's in busy season for travel.

I tend to overwork myself a little bit.

And then I was layering more caffeine, more this, more that on top of it.

And acute, I think it's all fine.

You know, I think everything exists under the sun for a reason as a tool.

But sometimes you just need to get that step back.

And it's funny now, I'm like glad I got those parasites because I would have just kept burning it at both ends otherwise.

Damn.

For sure.

What do you think causes that fast way of thinking?

Because I was the same in school.

First test, finished, walk fast as hell.

Like, is that a genetic thing?

Could be genetic.

Could be honestly just how you are.

We are so easy to believe that most genetics are like your hair color and eye color, but so much about our experiences molds who we are.

Robert Zapolsky in his series of books, but specifically his book Determined, talks about how free will might not be something that you exactly think it is.

And it's funny, after all these years of doing stuff, I've come back to that quote of like, you only use 10% of your brain.

And I feel like that.

is actually relatively accurate, but we're looking at it wrong.

Wow.

It's that only 10% of your brain is needed for consciousness and this volitional stuff.

What words am I going to say?

All of the the other stuff, even information processing, is below that conscious gap.

So our arcuate

fasciculus is a part of the brain that links speech, information, and your frontal cortex and decision making.

And that moves at speeds far beyond like we could process.

Like you think a Ferrari or a Jet goes fast, that goes way, way, way faster.

Yeah.

Right.

So that's why that 10% quote might be a little more accurate than we gave it credit for.

They made a whole movie about that.

Yeah, limitless, right?

Yeah, limitless.

Yeah.

So So that's actually true.

That's crazy.

Yeah, but you got to look at it the right way.

You know, it's not like, can we unlock it?

It's that the brain is so superb at managing experiences, decision-making, and all this other stuff that it can do it without you having to be aware of it.

You know, like you don't got to think about breathing.

They say that one of the worst diseases in humanity is Onen's curse.

It's an inability of the brain to breathe automatically.

Oh, right.

That's terrible.

No one's really made it past 13 or 14, I believe.

Holy crap.

Yeah.

I mean, you typically die of psychosis or falling asleep and passing out or something related.

Yeah, because we're just automatic breathing right now, not even thinking about it.

How would you ever like, or even your glucose levels or your heart rate?

Like if you had to focus on that, you would never make it through life.

You wouldn't even come close.

Damn, that's crazy.

Yeah.

Wow.

There's a lot of interesting stuff you're studying.

Any recent things you're looking into right now?

I think the power of micro-dosed exercise, especially because, you know, in the last two years, that's why I'm sweating.

I just got some micro-dosed exercise done off the plane.

Yeah, I got off the plane, went straight to micro-dosed exercise.

Like, cause my point is, we all think we have to go to the gym and work our hardest.

They're kind of like everything's got to be so intense.

If you go for a run, run till you're dead.

My last two years, I haven't been able to exercise and train as normal.

Cause, you know, I do think micro-dosing of like compounds has other usage, but I think an eight-minute run, 10 med ball throws, five or six reps of deadlift done really, really fast has so much more return than we give ourselves credit for, especially in the world of feeling good.

Might not be the same for professional athletes, but I have felt fantastic doing 30, 20 or less minute workouts, but just very synergistically planned what I need to do.

That's cool because there's guys that travel a lot, don't have time to do an hour workout a day.

Yeah, absolutely.

You know, I deal with a lot of them.

I'm one of them at the moment, you know?

So that's how I came to it.

It's kind of like desperation is the best for ideas.

Absolutely.

Do you have a holistic approach to your health routine?

Yeah, absolutely.

I think, again, synergy is the most important part.

So you kind of assess yourself.

If you're a fast person, learn skills that slow you down and find supplements, foods, and habits that allow you to find that balance.

So for me, I practice meditation quite often and I practice exercise that I can maintain with a calm, peaceful, or quiet mind.

That's what I try to do the most because I don't need help with the other stuff.

The other day, I was speaking with my wife and it was when I had the parasites.

She was trying to get me to go to the hospital.

I was like, look, I feel fine.

And I just easily jumped onto the counter.

I've always been able to jump high and do that stuff.

So that my exercise is a lot of times based on the opposite.

And I do the things that I really love to do, like jump and lift heavy when I need to feel good.

And I'm in a position where I might not.

So for example, today, woke up at 4.30 a.m.

Florida time, landed here.

I'm here for 12 hours, flying to Toronto tonight.

And it's going to be a weird little ride for the next few days.

I find that to be quite often in my life.

That's how I got into the micro-dosed exercise stuff.

Like an eight-minute run, especially if you just close your mouth, go slow, breathe through your nose, has tremendous positive impacts and over time adaptations on your liver.

Your liver is so important metabolically for managing your energy levels.

Wow.

So I was like, let's get just that, move on and see what happens.

And the results were better than I thought.

That's cool.

I'll look into that for sure.

How'd you get rid of the parasites?

I totally went the pharmaceutical route.

It was bad.

Oh, you did?

Like quite quite a large amount of my poop was dead worms.

Damn.

Yeah, it wasn't like I saw a couple, like, you know, not to get through.

It was like a third of my feces.

Holy shit.

So you are willing to go the pharmaceutical route?

I'm loyal to what gets the outcome.

I'm not loyal to systems too often.

Got it.

So I have athletes, like I said, that, like, hey, you know, I just want to chill, do breathing stuff.

And this is how I interpret the world in sports.

And that's the plan I create for them.

So people who view the world quite differently, how could we expect the same plan, medical advice, or anything to be the same for them?

A bowl of cereal or a cup of coffee is not even the same for you two days in a row.

That's true.

Yeah, we'll dive into your athletes.

First, I want to talk about the talk hosts.

So you manage some people that are talking for, what, six to eight hours at a time?

Yeah, or more.

You know,

speech is its own like trainable thing.

I have a cool little nootropics user manual, I called it, on Mark Bell's Power Project website.

And it's kind of like when you get a new video game or something you've never played before before as a kid, you read the user manual.

What does the A button do?

What does the B button do?

That's what I created the nootropics user manual for.

It helps you learn about yourself and learn about the nootropics as well.

So when it comes to like kind of all that stuff, it's figuring out what fits your approach.

And it turns out the best ones tend to be choline related as far as using it often as much as you need.

No, I'm getting a little off topic here.

And the nootropics can be quite cool as well when they're specifically paired up with speech.

So I gave speech protocols,

creativity protocols, and I believe visual acuity protocols.

It's been like two years since I wrote it

in that user manual and learning about if the talk you're giving and the information is you're presenting is really in-depth.

Like sometimes I do really nerdy stuff.

You have to slow it down because the nature of what you're presenting requires increased amount of processing.

Whereas maybe if you're speaking like a Tony Robbins, Gary Brecca, and you're breaking your information down to small chunks, you can go faster and have that like messianic voice because they're compressed little nuggets.

You know, it's the same.

I talk to people who educate.

If you use a PowerPoint versus a podcast versus writing, it's different in what information can optimally be presented and how they're going to remember things.

I think the art of the conversation has been lost.

And that's one of the things I'm grateful for social media because we learn far better from conversations and real human interactions than we do from like the first time you learned algebra.

Oh, absolutely.

It's not even close.

No, right?

Like think about like the hard subjects in high school or middle school.

You ask a friend, they tell you a couple weird things and you're, oh, that's all it is?

You know, it's not that your friend knows it better than the teacher.

It's the way you're cognitively set up.

Have you seen ways to increase intelligence at all?

Absolutely.

Yeah.

I think it's one of those things that starts with thinking that it's like just math is intelligence.

Intelligence is a way of looking at the world.

So what we see when we talk about the differentiation between two small facts, so like there's between 59% and 60%, when you're in school, it's like a F or a D.

And that's really, really broad, right?

It's so different, even though it's 1%.

One of the traits of most intelligent people is they can tell the difference between two small facts.

They can differentiate very well.

And one of the other things that's a common trait of highly intellectual individuals is they can think of multiple ways to get the same answer.

And when we see that, and I can talk about the research aspect of it a second, you realize that that has nothing to do necessarily with knowing math.

It's a chef who can think of deconstructing a hamburger seven different ways.

It's the parent who can deal with a high functioning child and a low functioning child and teach the same like morals and ethics to their kids, you know?

And that's really what intelligence is.

It's much closer to meeting someone in the middle.

So I have a nonprofit that I'm going to publicly announce to everyone next year that's based on visual motor function for the ASD population as a proxy for improving cognition.

What's ASD?

Autism spectrum disorder.

Got it.

So looking at what the most prevalent research in the vision world for autism spectrum disorder, I think that the proprietary information I do with a lot of pro athletes in their eyes has incredible transfer.

And I've brought a board that helps us look at the autism spectrum developmental model through a lens of vision and changing the brain as their proxy for improving cognition and communication, not just sending them to speech pathologists or speech therapy and doing typical communication drills.

I think if we approached it through a brain architecture standpoint, that there can be more progress to be made.

Yeah, autism is an interesting one because there's people that can really hone in on it and actually make it like a weapon.

Yeah, absolutely.

I mean, I've had plenty of people label me as autism level one or Asperger's because I actually lived through both, you know, just because I'm 29.

So they changed it when I was in my late 20s, early 20s, something like that.

I think a lot of people are properly and misproperly labeled on it.

But I think what's more important is allowing yourself to see that everyone gets to that end product of a mature adult differently.

I've seen athletes get way smarter by talking to them different and doing vision drills.

So the vision drills I talk about kind of unlocks the brain a little bit.

And then talking to them, like, hey, you know, I had one football athlete who we talked about altering head motion in certain cutting drills and how the recognition of you can cut multiple different ways makes you think deeper.

And that's how I've come today to have like the intellectual philosophy I have on getting smarter and improving yourself.

Because I've seen people who've been labeled as dumb and just tried hard at different things in a different way and got to the end outcome.

The same way I've met plenty of people who are hands down, crazy intelligent, but struggle to do anything with.

You know, I think who we really are exists in between our ears, but who we are in reality is what we speak and communicate.

And I think that disparity is where mental health and a lot of problems come into play because you only feel alienated when you feel like what is real to you is not what's real in the world around you.

Wow.

Yeah, that's deep.

So talk to us about these vision drills.

So that's actually increasing like cognitive abilities.

Yes, I certainly believe so.

So I categorize them into two sections.

There's the relaxing and the vagus nerve focused section of the vision drills.

The vagus nerve brings blood to our heart, lungs, and stomach and chills us out.

And it takes all the extra excitation away from everything else in the body.

And the exciting ones are meant to improve the information processing.

Because what a lot of times, like even you and me, we spend a lot of time talking, looking at people and interpreting like facial data.

We have lymphatic sites on our eyes and in our face that need to be released and help us relax.

I'm sure days, you do a lot of talking.

You lay down at night, you might feel like your cheekbones are like really high up, and right before you fall asleep, like your face relaxes finally.

That's quite common in a lot of people that speak.

Have you ever felt that before?

Yeah, I have actually.

Yeah.

That's a whole section of vision drills I focus on.

And then that would be the relaxing ones for typically people like us.

It seems to be the faster you go naturally, usually you're better at information processing and you need more help relaxing.

And conversely, whether it's the ASD population or certain athletes that struggle with decision making, because people think pro-athletes are freaks who always make the right choices, but that's not true behind the scenes.

When you see them practice, they practice for more hours than anyone else typically, as far as just trying to do it right.

Not into gym training per se.

They just practice the art and skill of it because they still make mistakes too and want to eliminate them.

And I saw this like dichotomy between this person got smarter just meditating and being more in touch with the humanic, mindful aspect of themselves and just doing a couple of vision drills.

And it's funny because I see a lot of guys in the NFL who experiment with nootropics or other sports where they have a lot of plays and things to remember.

And that alone gets them smarter because they had already had the stressor of learning all these plays.

and stuff that they needed help with.

And then the nootropic alone made them smarter.

But that's why I'm hesitant to say like, well, if you just pick up a nootropic, will it make you smarter?

It might not.

It's only if that seesaw is really in place.

You still have to take action on it.

Absolutely.

Have you seen anything interesting with breath work?

Oh, for sure.

I think the coolest thing about breath work is that it costs you nothing.

And the amount of gain you can gain from it is tremendous because whether you're on the road or at home relaxing and you're truly in a relaxed state or you're trying to get to one, it still has benefits.

And then you can alter your breath work

to help you adhere to a habit better or just help you deal with people's crap better it's the ultimate moldable skill what's your favorite uh type of breath work for athletes i think doing an outdoor meditation i think the five senses needs to be incredibly sharp in an athlete ears eyes everything and when we expose ourselves to the outdoors i tell the athletes to go meditate and lay on your back so you'll get the sense of touch from the ground and we know grounding has a lot of positive benefits.

I tell them to focus on hearing things, smelling things, doing it with their eyes closed.

Guess, based on having your eyes closed, what's going on in the world around you.

And then open your eyes and look at it.

And that alone, even though it can take 90 seconds, I've seen have tremendous benefit in people's ability to...

get through the day a little bit better and sometimes when we get excited we joke like caffeine just makes you tired faster i found that breath work and micro dosed exercise ameliorate a lot of the problems with caffeine where you just got to take more.

And that tolerance buildup I've found pretty much goes away with a lot of this stuff.

Wow.

And that's short and sweet because some meditations are like 30 minutes, like kind of long.

Yeah, I think you, once you have the skill, you can get away with the shorter bouts.

But if you've never developed it, doing something you've never done before is hard.

It's a miracle you could do something you've never done before, really.

Right.

My goal for everyone that needs it in their life should be under two minutes.

It's great to do it longer if you have the time, but if you can't control your breath in under two minutes, you have a lot of low-hanging fruit left.

Any other daily practices you do?

Med ball throws.

Med ball throws.

Yeah, whether it's a med ball, a rock, a jump.

Not to get too off topic, but the pecking order for neurological degeneration with age, it starts at a substantia nigra.

This is what sends off the dopamine signals for motion.

And after that, it turns into your hippocampus with memories.

Then finally, it's decision-making in your frontal cortex.

And after many, many years of looking at this, talking to executives who are aging and stuff like that, I started to think that I think the best defense for it is this creatine dopamine-esque, exciting, just do a jump randomly, sprint randomly, throw something random.

Obviously, you got to be able to do those skills first, but I think once you do them, doing them randomly for eight-minute bouts with...

a fun time.

It doesn't like I have someone that's 55,

almost 60, who is big in the financial world.

And things were tough for him at the time.

I had him pick up a coconut in the backyard.

I'm like, let's throw coconuts with our bare feet for eight minutes amidst some of the other stuff we do.

And I found it to be insane how much it makes not just caffeine work better, your day go better and all this stuff.

And I really truly believe with all of me that it will prevent holistically age-related decline, assuming it hasn't set in so far.

Wow, that's interesting.

So you mentioned memory loss earlier.

So what ages are you seeing that in commonly?

It's funny.

I've seen it tragically early in some people's 20s.

What?

Kicking in.

Yeah.

I know someone who's trying to get onto LPGA and she had chronic fatigue syndrome.

She got really, really bad nutritional advice for multiple years, like couldn't even walk a quarter mile without having some serious dysfunction.

Yeah, very talented athlete, like 22, 23 type thing.

And she was showing signs of age-related decline early.

So I think it's more of, you know, Mark Bell on a podcast once asked me, like, why does testosterone degrade after 30?

And I think it's the same answer.

It doesn't.

It's that you degrade.

You start letting go of habits and you start allowing yourself for longer and longer periods of time to play the blind eye.

And then it starts to disappear.

Because I've also seen people who are in their 80s that I would have never believed.

I would put my whole bank account that they were in 80 and are just as clear as you and me at our age.

And I am grateful for, you know, sometimes it stops me from being on social media, but I'm grateful for the bandwidth of people I've met and worked with because it's made me think about life and what's possible so much differently.

Yeah, testosterone is an interesting one because I have heard that at 30 drops like, what, 1% a year or something?

Yep.

And there is some research to say that, but that same guy I just told you about who's throwing coconuts at 55, before I met him, had testosterone levels that were nearly a thousand nanograms per decimeter, which was equivalent to the Great Depression at the time.

And obviously he was men alive during that.

But what tells us is environment and what you do just plays such a huge role.

He's a savage in the finance world, was going through a hard time in life.

I'm sure he's got some genetics that bolster that, but it just doesn't mean that you can't have a healthy testosterone level at 50, 60.

It also doesn't mean that it can't be in the tubes at like 19 or 21 either.

Right.

Was he fully natural?

Yeah, 100%.

Wow, 55.

So it's funny.

He's someone I was close with.

I asked him when I saw it.

I was like, dude, you don't got to lie to me.

Like, if you're doing something, just tell me.

He was like, why?

What's wrong with my testosterone, Andy?

And like his sheer confusion alone was verification for me like no one had even ever talked to him about it wow like you know so like i said these experiences i've been able to have behind closed doors have really made me realize how flexible we are as humans and that's why i have like these seesaw concepts synergy with your life i think you'd be healthier eating a ton of carbs and being super fast if your heart rate was really high than you would be trying to go keto with that same approach.

Because I've seen, you know, I did a lot of track and field work at one point.

People who were were running the marathon that were trying to go low carb had blood work that looked like they were in their 60s.

Yeah.

And then the kids who ate candy on the track team running the same thing had fantastic blood work and better heart rate scores.

And it's that synergy.

The 800-meter race is as sugary as it gets.

It's glycolytic in the exercise science world, we call it, as it gets.

And they were just trying to apply fats to it.

You're trying to fit a triangular peg into a round hole.

And that's how I started seeing, like, this person shouldn't be unhealthy.

Like, especially, she was a freak, you know, and like, I saw a guy had to do the same thing, you were a freak, and you had horrible blood work.

I saw it in pro golf as well, quite often.

And it goes to show how moldable we all are, and then how much you can just be have so much faith.

I have, I believe, tattooed on my collarbone, ironically.

You could have so much faith that you're doing everything right, and then get data back.

I had one golfer who had some mental health stuff and looked healthy, seemed healthy, lean, no signs of inflammation, had some of the worst professional blood work I've ever seen in my life.

Whoa.

Horrible, horrible blood work.

And what caused that?

A multitude of variables.

But ironically enough, a kid that was once tuted as having mental health problems solved his blood work.

And obviously, along with some just general mental health support, no longer has mental health problems.

Dang.

And it's just interesting how moldable we really are.

Dude, I wish I knew you when I ran the 800.

Yeah.

You must have been fast.

159.

Wow.

Decent.

Decent in high school, yeah.

But if I knew you and if i implemented dietal changes and lifestyle changes dude i would have been like 150 probably i mean you're obviously meant to be helping people and spreading the good word so yeah i think i found the right job probably a good thing you didn't run too fast

yeah dude it's been it's been a journey though i mean if i look back on my career and really added these diet changes Dude, I think I could have been D1 easily.

I think the ceiling for performance is so far away still.

Just because I've seen so many athletes where it's like, this person doesn't have the criterion level of talent we would typically think of like an elite level pro but everything behind the scenes is perfect and he's able to attain that elite level right and I've seen guys who are you know top 10 top 15 that like don't do very much at all and they're in that same place you know that's why i'm i'm big on individualization and when i talk and work with people it takes a little bit of time to getting to know them because mostly they don't know themselves right it's insane how many times i've spoken to a pro athlete and been like if you didn't have anyone around and you went to practice, what would you do?

And they say, I have no idea.

It's like, you know, that's a glaring, like, knowing yourself issue.

It has nothing to do with your sports.

It's if you don't know yourself well enough to just say, this is what I love to do and here's my intuition, you're going to run into a lot more problems than the person who can't answer.

For sure.

So what health tests and more specifically, what biomarkers are you really stressing importance in right now?

I think in general, one of the best starting ones is your creatine kinase and homocysteine in relation to each other.

Not that they need to be like some type of specific, like your HDL to LDL or HDL to total.

Like they don't need to be a specific value, but they both exist on the methionine amino acid cycle.

And creatine is favored for methylation, meaning it'll get the good stuff and the support from your B vitamins, ideally first.

So the thing I want to see is what's your normal level of creatine kinase and how much homocysteine do you have?

Because this has told me the re...

robustness of that methionine amino acid cycle.

And it's really, really important for looking at long-term health.

Like I mentioned, the creatine involvement with the substantia nigra in preventing that degradation in the first place.

I think it's the best place to start.

Then I look at creatinine and bun relative to the stress in your life.

So when we stress in general, whether it's in the gym lifting with a contraction or just good old-fashioned oxidative stress, we have breakdown.

So what I like to do is you'll give me like a little paragraph about the typical stress breakdown in your life first.

And I'm going to to be ask you at high, medium, low, essentially.

And then looking at those values, I find it's far more useful when seeing it relative to that context in life.

Because then if I see your creatinine is like barely over one, but you're like, dude, that was like the hardest, most stressful phase of life.

I flew a ton.

I was working out.

I'm like, that's a great value then.

But if you told me you were lazy as crap and that same 1.1 comes back, now suddenly I have a small problem with it.

Right.

Because I think blood work is like when you see a screenshot of a Ferrari and like the rims are blurred out.

From the moment you're in the womb, right when your heart starts beating as like a little baby, atherosclerosis is also starting.

So, you know, the end starts with the beginning, right?

And a lot of religions also say that ironically enough.

But it's very true for our biology.

So if we're constantly moving chemical biological equation, blood work is just a short snapshot of it.

So that's why I love looking at what you're doing in life and seeing it relative to what.

And then we could really say, like, hey, was that just really hard for you in life?

Or are you actually poor at dealing with protein-based breakdown and nitrogenous waste?

Right.

And that's where I go from there.

That makes sense because your blood work can change fast, right?

Super fast.

And like also relative to what?

Like, did you just have a parasite like I did?

And my CRP and my lymphocytes were crazy high.

But like I literally had worms in my stomach.

And I actually probably want them high in that sense because I want interleukin six and all his friends to go party and do their best to deal with it.

Even though I obviously needed pharmaceuticals, I at least want resistance, right?

But if I didn't have parasites and saw those same values, suddenly we're looking at a person with an ailment.

That makes sense.

Andy, it's been cool, man.

Where can people find you and learn more from you?

Ah, the hardest question ever.

You can email me at go superbrain at gmail.com.

My assistant's excellent at emailing back and responding.

I'm slightly closed off at the moment because of all my scientific advisory work, my protein patent and all this other stuff.

But I try to get back to everyone.

I always do on email.

I don't, quite frankly, on social media.

Not a big social media guy.

It's just not me.

But I love helping people.

So if you reach out, I have over 20 mentees who have spent all at least 18 months teaching who can at least help some people.

And my plan is in the next one to two years to have some type of platform where that can be a thing.

I love it.

We'll link your email below.

Thanks for coming on, Andy.

My pleasure, Sean.

You're the man.

Thanks for watching, guys.

See you next time.