The Exchanges

Q Stafford trade, I'm curious how you identified Stafford who played in it, I would assume a different system in Detroit and identified that he, you know, having experienced the same system for a while could make the transition to LA. And then what went into the thinking behind trading it for him? And yeah, there's an opportunity. What's the downside? How did you, can you walk me through that decision?

A Systems in the NFL do matter, right? They're, they're different. I think the average fan or just a fan in general, you know, that you look down and you go, okay, everyone's playing football, but, uh, there is a difference, right? In, in the tactics and the systems of each, right? Each NFL's teams, offense, defense, And even special teams. So, so here's the interesting thing on Matthew Stafford, and then I'll, I'll try to, I'll try to give some bullet points, and you can ask him there. We did think Jared Goff was a good QB, and there was a possibility that he could become a great QB. So when we made the move for Matthew, we felt like he was great now, and he could help us in our window of contention be great. That window of contention had players like Cooper Cupp, Players like Aaron Donald, Jalen Ramsey that were in their prime. So in our model, maybe it was going to be, right, a Better results if we aligned our core players with a, with a QB that was there already, but, and not in the process of getting there. So more, I always said, Jared was a, was probably a student for Sean. Matthew was someone who could partner with Sean. He's our head coach in our prime, but he's also our play caller. So that was going to be An alignment that we felt like would give us an edge. And, and, and going back to systems, uh, Sean was mentored by John Gruden and then mentored by Mike Shanahan. Th…

AI assessment note: “we felt like he was great now, and he could help us in our window”

Q out to me as a fan, uh, was that Jordan made the team better, not just on the court when they were playing a game, but every practice. He wouldn't let anybody sort of half-ass it. He wouldn't let them give anything less than a hundred percent, or he would just go after them. Is there a value to players who do that too, that we don't see as fans?

A Spot on. We probably do not win the Super Bowl. If we do not trade for Von Miller, not necessarily for the sacks or him harassing the QB. When he comes to work, like he, he's happy to come to work. Like he really likes going to a football locker room. There was this element, right, of, of, as we were getting closer to the playoffs, and he was able to connect with our Aaron Donald, our Jalen Ramsey, right? Because those two players, some of our best players on our team, But they respected Vaughn, but in a, in a very light way, And he brought the replica, you know, he brought one of his, uh, his replica Super Bowl trophy and put it in our locker room, uh, right there when everybody went to get their new clean clothes, pick up their laundry for the day, right? That trophy stared at you and he would handwrite a message, right? Of what we needed to do that day, each day before each of our playoff games. And I, and I do think, uh, I think when you're living through it, all of a sudden you can feel it, but when you reverse engineer it after there's been this special result, you can probably see these pivotal moments where, wow, we traded for Von Miller, not Ness. We didn't know if he was going to be a leader or not. We didn't know he would affect the passer, but then you see that, hey, I've got one of these. Uh, I know Aaron, you really want one of these. I know Jalen, you really want…

AI assessment note: “Spot on. We probably do not win the Super Bowl. If we do not”

Q One of the things, we're down a few rabbit holes here, and I want to come out of this, but you use the term mental models. What do you mean when you use the term mental model? What is that to you?

A This could be another rabbit hole, but we've, we've, a few years ago, my colleague Joseph Borders and Ron Visayan and I did a study of mental models in petrochemical plants, and going into this study, I thought that a mental model was a set of beliefs about how something works, whether it's a, a, a piece of equipment, a piece of machinery, it's an organization, here, here's how it works, here's, here's what happens, here's the kinds of Of, uh, components and how they fit together. So that was my belief going in, and we spent a week at a petrochemical plant running people through a challenging scenario to, to capture their mental model, and that was part of their mental model, but only part. We found that there was another part of the mental model of not just how does it work, but what are its limitations? What are its boundary conditions? Where can it go wrong? And people who are experienced are well aware of these boundary conditions. And so they, that's part of the richness of their mental model. And then we found another component, which is, um, what are the workarounds that I'm, that I can use if we run into one of those limitations? How can I recover from it? And then we found that there was a fourth component. We have actually a matrix of this, uh, a two by two matrix. The last component Is somebody with a good mental model can also anticipate where people might get confu…

AI assessment note: “now it includes all four of these components, how it works, what its limitations are”

Q I want to come back to something you said about experience. Is there a difference between experience and expertise?

A Right. There, there is a difference. And so one of the things I've examined is how do you know who's an expert? And I identified about seven or eight criteria. And the discouraging part is None of them are foolproof. There is no gold gold standard for who's an expert, but, uh, years of experience certainly contribute to, to expertise, but it isn't the same thing because there are people who just don't reflect on what happened. They don't learn, um, about what happened. Uh, one of the other criteria I use if I'm going to find, uh, gave somebody's expertise is I'll ask them, Tell me the last mistake you made. Let's talk about that. If the person says, I can't think of any mistakes. To me, that means this person may be competent, but it certainly is not an expert. Experts are well aware of their mistakes and their mistakes eat at them until they can, they can sort of imagine what I should have done is this and, and figure out a way around it. So experts are highly aware of mistakes. But people who are journeymen, many of them stay as journeymen because they, uh, they want to move on and forget about their mistakes.

AI assessment note: “There, there is a difference... years of experience certainly contribute to, to expertise, but it isn't the same”

Q together because now you have new information. And we've written a lot at Furnham street on the concept of decision journals. I'm curious as to what information, if you were going to create a journal that an employee had to fill out every time they made a decision, what information would you put in that decision journal to then use at these meetings where you're evaluating their decisions later on?

A I think the idea of a decision journal is a great idea. And I hadn't heard of that before. I would like to know when the employee is making a decision, what is the decision? What are the goals that the employee wants to achieve? The primary goal, but there may be other goals that the employee is aware of. What are the prime pieces of information the employee is using to make the decision? Who are the other people or, or teams that are going to be affected by this decision? Those are the things that I'd like to examine. And then in retrospect, you know, we can see were there, were there, were there cues that I should have been paying attention to that I wasn't? Are there goals that I should have been thinking about that I wasn't? But you have it in the decision journal. You have a record of what was the person thinking about at the time. I think it's a great idea.

AI assessment note: “what is the decision? What are the goals that the employee wants to achieve?”

Q Oh, I don't know if I intentionally make them, but I certainly have more than my statistical fair share of them. What is cognitive flexibility theory?

A Cognitive flexibility theory is the notion of trying to help people achieve expertise by Preventing them from locking in to routines and standard ways of doing things so that they can become more naturally adaptive. You can give them vicarious experiences that can't be handled by the usual routines just to force them out of their comfort zone and to get them into a mindset of not only being prepared to be adaptive, but enjoying being adaptive. Because that's another thing that I've noticed about experts. If they're doing the same job over and over again, they get bored, and then something happens, and they can't use the same routines, and the journeyman, they get really frustrated like that. It's not supposed to happen. I don't know. Who do I call? And the experts, their eyes light up. Ok, we can't use the techniques that have been successful for us up to now. What can we do? What can we, ah, invent? And so the eyes lighting up is like, for me, a key to cognitive flexibility theory is to get people into that mode where they're excited when things don't go as planned, and, and they're gonna have to improvise.

AI assessment note: “Cognitive flexibility theory is the notion of trying to help people achieve expertise”

Q And life sort of lost its meaning. Can you talk to me about that and what was happening?

A Yeah. So I'd had this very strange last couple of years where, um, you know, it was COVID. I hadn't really talked about what I did. So we had kind of quietly been building a company up here in Victoria, Canada for 15 plus years and been very quiet. You know, we had a few people, uh, who knew what we did, but I never talked about it publicly. And I started going on podcasts and tweeting because I was bored and I ended up Going down a total rabbit hole where I was, um, becoming like an influencer. Like suddenly I was posting every single day. I was comparing myself to other people with more followers on Twitter. I was beating myself up for not writing a tweet a certain way. I was getting misinterpreted on Twitter. Like just everything was, uh, was about that. And, uh, I also took a company public, uh, Uh, raised a fund. Uh, had to make a bunch of really difficult decisions around personnel, hiring and firing people, and I just kind of hit a wall. I woke up, uh, one day, uh, like August first, twenty-twenty-one, and I just didn't want to get out of bed, and it wasn't that I was depressed. It was like an ahedonia. Like, I just, all my usual tricks didn't work. Drinking a cup of coffee wasn't pleasurable. Going for a walk wasn't fun. Uh, you know, playing video games wasn't fun. I couldn't find anything I liked on Netflix. My phone gave me no pleasure, and I was like, I have no idea…

AI assessment note: “It was like an ahedonia. Like, I just, all my usual tricks didn't work.”

Q We were talking last night at dinner, and one of the things that you said was the things that make you successful also prohibit you from enjoying that success. Do you want to elaborate on that?

A Well, I think it's exactly that thing, right? It's that need to James Dyson. I read, um, so James Dyson is the guy who started, um, the Dyson company. They make fans and hair dryers and vacuums and all sorts of stuff. He has this great quote. He says, I'm perpetually, 20% dissatisfied with everything, right? He's 75 or something, and he still feels that way. And I think I always feel that way. I always want everything to just work better. Whether it's my house, you know, does, how does the dog get fed in the morning? Can I make a system to make sure that happens without me having to remember it? Um, to a massive business, you know, and AeroPress going, can we make the box 30% smaller so that we can ship it more cheaply? I just like systems. I like making things work better. And so if you have that desire, then it's hard to just be satisfied with your day to day life.

AI assessment note: “if you have that desire, then it's hard to just be satisfied with your day”

Q One of the things I want to explore with you is sort of the difference between hiring a CEO at an established company like Aeropress or a startup like Supercast. How do you think about the skills necessary, and what lessons have you learned from hiring hundreds of CEOs?

A Yeah, I, I think, um, Think about a business like Chipotle. So, um, there was the person that created the original burrito, right? That was the innovator. And then there was the person who said, oh, um, we should take the burrito, and we should do that in a fast, casual style. That's the founder of Chipotle. Then there's the person who says, um, hey, we should take this to, instead of five locations, to a hundred locations. That's a profile of someone who's aggressively going to take a concept, take an ember, Pour gasoline on it and scale it. And then there's finally the kind of steady state CEO who takes over and they kind of slowly grow it from there. And so those are the different profiles. Um, I think that a later stage company, you really just need to implement best practices. So what I look for in a later stage company profile is I say, I want to hire someone who's really kind of done this before in a similar or adjacent industry. And they've run a business that's at least double the size. And so, for example, when we bought AeroPress about six months ago, um, we hired the CEO, former president of SodaStream, and, you know, he had scaled that business to over two hundred million. And it's a very similar, it's different in some ways, but very similar consumer packaged goods business. And so, as I talked to him, I just found myself nodding along with all of his assumptions,…

AI assessment note: “what I look for in a later stage company profile is I say”

Q There's several rabbit holes we're going to go down here. One is why restaurants? Which are notoriously not great businesses.

A So I have this whole thing about, um, you gotta hire the right, the wrong person before you hire the right person, and I've always been fascinated by restaurants and food. I started my career as a barista and working in restaurants, and I've always loved them, and I think every, you know, originally I was a designer, and I think every designer loves the idea of creating a Physical space. If you've spent your entire life building ephemeral websites and apps that disappear after two years, the idea of building something tangible is really appealing. And so, um, maybe about seven years ago, I started a restaurant with a friend of mine, and it was a directional thing. I knew I wanted to do it. Uh, everyone told me I was going to lose all my money, and I did. I lost almost a million dollars, and I hired the wrong people. We had, you know, managers that were Some, one of the managers was sleeping in the restaurant and, you know, drinking all of our beer and employees were stealing and, you know, the concept was all warped and our lease was bad. We made every conceivable mistake. But, you know, Chris and I like to joke that we take forks and we stick them in electrical sockets and then we learn and we start calibrating. And so what happened was I started learning the best practices of restaurants And then about two years after that, I got approached by a guy who owned a bakery and del…

AI assessment note: “I think every designer loves the idea of creating a Physical space.”

Q colleague doesn't think I'm a good listener and I go to them and I say, okay, I'm going to change my behavior. And do you have any ideas for what I can do? And they still are going to see the world through this. I could be a great listener for six months. And then that one time that I don't listen, they're gonna, they're gonna key in on this.

A Well, this is a very, very critical point. This is why follow-up is important. Take scenario A and scenario B. Scenario A, you get feedback. I'm going to pick a simple example, making destructive comments. I picked that because you couldn't get simpler. So I get the feedback. I make too many destructive comments. Okay, quit doing it. Just quit doing it. I go seven months and never make a destructive comment about anyone. Now back to your good point. Seven months later, I say, idiots in finance, stupid bean counters. How do you get anything done in a stupid company that's run by accountants? You hear me, your reaction is, he's never changed. Here's what happens, though, when you do follow-up. I come back immediately, and I have this conversation. You don't believe I'm going to change. You don't believe I'm going to change. You think, well, I went to this course, temporary religious experience. This will never last. What happens, though, two months later, when I come back and say, it's been two months, I want to do a great job of not making destructive comments, be a good team player, give me ideas. Now you think about it. You think, wait, you've done a good job. Four months. Good job. Six months. Good job. Seven months. Idiots in finance. You know what you would say then? You know, you've really worked hard. You went seven months without doing that. You shouldn't have said that.…

AI assessment note: “This is why follow-up is important. Take scenario A and scenario B.”

Q is, is how we, we give praise or sort of, uh, recognize people for their contributions in the sense of it used to be you'd run into somebody at the coffee machine or the water cooler, and you can say, Hey, you did a great job on this. And now it's more scheduled meetings and back to back and not everybody's in the office. How do you think about that?

A I'm going to make a couple of reflections on this, because you really want a couple of different issues. I'm going to give you, all your listeners, one suggestion on giving recognition. And it works just as well in a virtual environment as it does an in-person environment. And I've never seen it fail. One of my clients taught me this. He went from a six percentile and provided recognition to a 94 percentile in one year, six to 94. So what'd you do? It's not too complicated. He made a list of everyone that was important in his life, friends, family, direct reports, colleagues, twice a week, once on Wednesday, once on Friday, look at the page. Did anyone on this page do anything I should recognize? If they did, email, voicemail, say thank you, little note, nothing too fancy. If they did, if no one did anything, he didn't say anything. He didn't want to be a phony. One year, six to a 94. That's all he did. To me, you don't have to have fancy programs to recognize people. You need to have the discipline to ask yourself, should I be recognizing people? That's one thing. A second technique is start asking people a question. Tell me, what are you proud of? So when you ask people, what are they proud of? They often tell you great things you didn't even know. And it's another great way you can recognize people. So I, I think, you know, a couple of things on giving recognition. The other…

AI assessment note: “one suggestion on giving recognition. And it works just as well in a virtual environment”

Q Talk to me a little bit about how you go through that process with someone. Do you start with the belief? Do you start with the behavior? How do you get that earned confidence to sort of say that I can do this even though you haven't done it, or you don't believe that about yourself?

A Well, what I do is I give everyone confidential feedback. So every leader I work with gets confidential feedback from their colleagues. The average person I coach gets feedback from 18 people. So, you know, this is, and these reports are very, um, they're hard to hear sometimes because they're not used to getting honest feedback. And so they get feedback from a lot of people. These might be board members. They might be direct reports, peers, and then they get this feedback and they say, okay, I feel good about X. I want to get better at Y. I said, fine. Then they need to talk to, if they're not the CEO, they talk to the CEO. If they are the CEO, they talk to the board, say, all right, is this, are these the right behaviors and the right people? And they say, yes. And then the next thing is I teach people how to respond to feedback. They go back and talk to everybody and say, for example, you know, thank you so much for participating in this process. The first thing I want to say is, you know, how grateful I am. I don't know who said what. Many people said many things to try to help me. I have nothing to lose and much to gain. Second, much of my feedback is positive. Ethical, dedicated, hardworking. I care about the company and our customers and creative and getting results. And these are important things to me. I hope mine score high and did. I do not know who said what. I know…

AI assessment note: “what I do is I give everyone confidential feedback”

Q That's fascinating. I want to go back to something you said earlier too about Um, how business helped you understand what the value of something is, and more importantly, what people were actually paying for. Are there any examples that come to mind when you think of that as a child?

A So I'll talk about three, four businesses that I did as a kid, and this is all before I had legal age to do anything at all. One was, uh, I built, uh, mixtapes which are downloaded music from the internet and made mixtapes for people on a CD and burnt it and give it to them. And I use somebody else's computer, somebody else's internet, because I had no access to any of these things and I would give them take rate. But I realized that people love the idea of being, making something personalized versus buying something from the store, which is mixtape of somebody else. And, and the idea of gifting They were okay to pay three to four X more than the normal mixtape that you would get from the market, because this is made by me, right? And, and I was very happy with this guy. So what I did is I started going to all the music stores and I said, I will make the mixtapes for your clients. This is my price to you. You can charge whatever you want. And they would make five X more profit selling my mixtapes than the music labels. And I understand that business was not Really legal. But as a 15 year old, I did not know better. I had to survive. Then I built another business, which was, I realized that people put henat to really differentiate themselves in Indian weddings, to really look better than I have the better design on my hands. Like, it's almost like a temporary tattoo that people …

AI assessment note: “So I'll talk about three, four businesses that I did as a kid”

Q You're on your second big startup now. How did we get here? Walk me through your first and what you're doing right now, and then we'll pick up where we left off here.

A So my first startup I built from 2010 to 20 15, um, probably the largest exit at that point of time in India. And that startup did the following. It, it allowed people to recharge their mobile phones. Uh, in India, 99% of connections are prepaid, which means they are not on any plan. People refuel their, this is again a low-trust society. Nobody giving credit to each other. So people just top up money. And use it and then top up again. But none of that was top up was done online. So I built that platform. But what I did is I allowed people to get some vouchers of retailers for recharging on our platform was called free charge. And it took off in a very big way because again, value of time, oh, I'm getting some incentive. People actually chose our platform versus going to somewhere else. And because it was more efficient, people just shifted in that direction. What I realized that I was going for the mass market through that, but it was impossible to monetize. They just did not have any money. So After I exited the first company, I spent a bunch of time. I was, uh, advising multiple companies, joining the advisory board or board. So one of them was a media company. Uh, one of them was Sequoia Capital. I spent a bunch of time understanding investments, and I was also angel investing in left, right, and center. I was probably, I'm probably an angel investor in maybe 200 plus compa…

AI assessment note: “So my first startup I built from 2010 to 20 15”

Q I want to go back to some of those human frameworks in Delta IV. When you're making an investment decision, what are the top lenses that you're thinking that through? So one was sort of the Delta IV framework, which we talked about. Well, what are the human frameworks that you're, you're thinking about that? What are the lenses that add the most value to your sort of filtering system?

A Yeah. I mean, it was more of a motivational, uh, lens, uh, but, uh, applying human motivation as a core loop, but there are other things that make it easy to detect startup success. For example, uh, a lot of founders who pitch to me are usually well prepared and make a presentation and come to me. And so I tell them that, Hey, I don't understand English very well. Can you explain this to me in Hindi? What does it do? Founders who really get what they're doing can switch language without a problem because they really get it. And language doesn't change anything for them. Many people who have just prepared their presentation and not really understand this very clearly, they struggle with the language change and their pitch goes for a toss.

AI assessment note: “I tell them that, Hey, I don't understand English very well. Can you explain this”

Q How do you think about the role of religion and happiness then? Because it strikes me as you're talking that religion had a ritual around most of these things, right? You would go to church every Sunday, you would see people, you would connect with them, you'd see different people than you, you would get a different perspective on life. Talk to me about that.

A Yeah, well, there's lots of work that specifically looked at religion and happiness, and, and overall, what that work finds is that religious individuals tend to be happier on average, um, but you could imagine that's for two reasons. One is that, you know, many religions come with a whole host of, you know, spiritual beliefs about, you know, the afterlife, about, you know, a god, and whether there's someone taking care of you, you know, power bigger than you, and so on. These religions also involve the thing that I think you're getting, Which is all these rituals, right? Like, they force you to be a little bit more social. You, you, like, hang out with everybody on Sunday, or on the Sabbath, or something like that. Um, often they involve doing nice things for other people, and being present in prayer, and so on. And so, when scientists really try to dig into that, which is tricky, you have to separate, you know, people who are very religious, you know, then they have really strong beliefs, but then don't go to services as much, and so on, versus people who are kind of like, you know, I say I'm Catholic, but I'm kind of agnostic, but like, you know, I go every Sunday, and I go to the spaghetti suppers, and so on. When you really do that work, what you find is that the effect of the correlation between religion and happiness seems to be pretty fully mediated by those religious b…

AI assessment note: “correlation between religion and happiness seems to be pretty fully mediated by those religious behaviors”

Q And, and are there cultural differences in terms of what makes us happy? We're going to dive into the evidence-based approaches here in a second, but I'm wondering how much of what we know about happiness is Western versus Eastern, and how much of it correlates across all cultures?

A Yeah, I think, you know, I mean, many of these studies are done in Western populations. Um, you know, the psychologist Joe Heinrich often talks about how psychology has a WEIRD problem, um, and he uses the, the acronym WEIRD for, uh, Western Educated Industrialized Rich and Democratic. Most subjects in every published psychology study are Western Educated Industrialized Rich and Democratic, like, and they, they kind of come from those things, and that, Leaves out a whole host of different populations with different kinds of identities and backgrounds. Um, so that is true of the work that we talk about. That said, you know, for a lot of the practices I'm mentioning, when you look cross-culturally, what you find is that these things work everywhere you go. Um, you know, take the case of, you know, pro-social behavior, doing nice things for others, which is one that I think has been best studied worldwide. Um, Laura Aknan, um, has done some fantastic work on this stuff. Where she looks at the correlation, for example, between volunteering or donating money and happiness worldwide, and, and she's able to do that because you have some nice, you know, big Gallup surveys that look at these kinds of things, and she finds it's pretty much true in, like, every single country you study, right? Like, the idea is it's probably a cultural universal, and my guess is for most of these things, …

AI assessment note: “when you look cross-culturally, what you find is that these things work everywhere”

Q What are some of the best mental models for athletic performance?

A I think the ones that we organically talk about don't explicitly talk about our feedback loops, uh, systems thinking. And one in particular, I'll give you a specific example. We'll take, uh, arousal control. So an athlete has a certain arousal control reference point. They have their set points. It's probably at a higher level than your average person because of they're playing under the bright lights in front of fans. Like, Their heart rate's up all the time. A lot of pressure's going on. Now, they're used to that. They have a certain reference point, and we even call it a number of intensity. On a scale of one to 10, what, what's your, what's your reference level of, of, of where you play at your best? A lot of players will say, oh, I'm at my best from five to seven, from six to eight. They describe what it feels like and so forth. Anything higher is too much. Anything lower is too small. And then what they create are these balancing loops. If they're too low, Okay, what do you do to get your number up? And if you're too high, what do you do to slow it down? Now, what's often happens in the playoffs or in the World Series, uh, in high leverage, stressful situations, players will recognize that their heart rate is up. Oh, there's a signal. I need to activate a balancing loop. I need to bring my heart rate down because my, it is getting outside of my, my reference level. What d…

AI assessment note: “feedback loops, uh, systems thinking. And one in particular... arousal control.”

Q but the initial results from that, those biomarkers seem to indicate that we're onto something with a few, a few, um, short bursts of these drugs, at least in the mice. How do you think about that? And is that also the future so that we control sort of like part of our aging and then what we don't control, we can use drugs to reverse or, um, slow down.

A We were working on this for a while based on the idea that we could find genes that would polish the scratches on the DVD. Um, and we came across a set of three genes called O, S and K for short, which are three of the six or so Yamanaka factors. Um, and about a year ago, we published that we could reverse the age of an animal. Um, and we restored eyesight to a blind old mouse and cure glaucoma in that animal. And we are now working towards human clinical trials. In Canada, we have a non-human primate study for safety to see how that goes, and within the next 18 months, if all goes well, we will be reversing aging in a human, if all goes well. So that discovery, in part, you know, there are a few other colleagues that are in this, but not a lot, led to a huge interest in this epigenetic information theory of aging that we started off talking about. And the idea is that we can Truly reset the age of the body and diseases of aging, like Alzheimer's and heart disease, even cancer will go away if we become young again. My company's called Life Biosciences. It's here in Boston. Uh, Altos has come along three years later and they're working on this too, but the goal is, is a great one. I wish them all the best of luck. I hope that they are hugely successful because it could be transformational for our species on the planet, the ability to finally control The rate at which we age, not…

AI assessment note: “we could reverse the age of an animal... within the next 18 months”

Q Let's talk about sugar before we get into some other, um, adversity states. What do we know about sugar and its effect on our biological age?

A Not that much. So the biological age right now is measured A number of ways. You can do a panel of 40 blood tests. Um, inside tracker is, is just one that I use. The other more, more, um, epigenetic related, so back to the scratches on the CD, you can measure those scratches. It's called the DNA methylation clock or the Horvath clock, named after Stephen Horvath, a scientist at UCLA. And these are the chemicals that get added or subtracted from the DNA molecule that tell genes to be on or off. And the sirtuins that I work on help control that process. And you can read these with a DNA sequencing machine. And DNA sequences, you know, we're using all the time now in the lab. And by reading those chemicals where they are and how they've changed over time, for instance, Shane, I could take your blood or a cheek swab and tell you biologically how old you are relative to others, your age. And so your birthdays don't matter as much for your health as your actual DNA methylation age or your scratches. Now we can measure that, but to your point, we haven't known about the clock long enough to know If glucose or sugar directly impacts that clock. What I can say is that people that eat a Mediterranean diet have a slower ticking clock and people that exercise and do the kind of things that I'm telling everybody today to do. In general, have a lower biological age than those who do all the …

AI assessment note: “we haven't known about the clock long enough to know If glucose or sugar directly impacts”

Q is like, as we age, we tend to sleep less, and everything that I know about sleep tends to tell me that sleep is super important for mental functioning, for age, aging well, for, um, All of these, like, health benefits associated with sleep, and you're telling me you get four or five hours, and you're 52, and you have a twenty-year-old biological clock, so maybe sleep isn't that important?

A Maybe, maybe. I'm, I might be 15 years old if I could get more sleep, but, uh, we'll never know. But I, I, what I know is that those sirtuin genes that I talk about all the time, and I've been studying for 30 years, they control the clock. And then the disrupted clock affects them because it's a big cycle. And if you get that out of whack in an animal, they will, if you don't let them sleep, they will age prematurely. If you stop a rat from sleeping for just two weeks, it will develop diabetes. It's really important. So I don't think there's any argument that sleep is important, but can you hack your way around it? Maybe that's what I'm showing. But I don't want to give the impression that I think that that's the best way to live life. I mean, I got, I got up at 5:30 this morning. I went to sleep probably at one o'clock. Um, that's not a good way to live. I, I am tired. Um, I, I do fine. I've got caffeine. I've got my NAD boosters, which do help me get through the day in the morning. But ideally, I would want more sleep. I think I'd have better memory and focus if I did that. There are two hacks that I'm doing that allow me to get away with less sleep now. Um, I've included meditation at night into my daily life, most days. Um, and that's been very helpful. Um, and the second is that I have a bed that reduces my body temperature in the middle of the night, and I get deeper slee…

AI assessment note: “I don't think there's any argument that sleep is important”

Q want to go back to the theory of adversity before we come to supplements and sort of like some of the stuff that you do and with adversity, there's other ways that we can introduce stress to our bodies, like hot tubs or saunas. What do we know about saunas and hot tubs? Like there seems to be a strong correlation, at least with saunas to longevity. Why is that?

A Um, well, so I'll admit when I started writing, uh, my book, which is, um, which was a number of years ago, Uh, the editor said, oh, you should talk about saunas and hot tubs. And I said, this is a serious book. Come on. I'm not going to put that fashion in there. But I was wrong, actually. There's now a lot of evidence that being in a sauna is good for heart health at a minimum. There's a lot of studies of thousands of mostly men in Finland that do sauna bathing, as they call it. And they are protected dramatically, like they are exercising. But, um, how does that work? Well, You know, there's lots of theories. It's hard to prove, but one theory is that we have what are called heat shock proteins in our body that get turned on when the body's too warm, and we know actually if you turn on heat shock proteins in animals, they live longer, and they do that because they help fold proteins correctly, and misfolded proteins and the recycling of proteins is very, very important. It's one of the reasons that I eat a plant-based diet mainly, is to turn over that protein, um, Uh, cycle. But yeah, so that's one. Cold is different. We think it's working through a process that is called browning of fat. We have white fat on our back that turns beige or brown by being cold. And then that revs up our metabolism. And this brown fat also seems to secrete, uh, little signals that make the rest …

AI assessment note: “one theory is that we have what are called heat shock proteins in our body”

Q If we fast for two meals, and then on the third meal, we eat as many calories as we would have eaten during the rest of the day normally, are we still getting benefits of fasting?

A Yes. Yes, yes, yes. We are. That's the great news that, so take me for example, I have big dinners, um, Because I'm making up for the lack of food during the day, and so I'm not losing weight. Once you've hit a set point, and you've got your, your body weight, and during COVID, I dropped from 150 pounds to 132. I'm now steady at that 132, feeling great, eating tons of food that I always wanted, but it's packed into an hour or two of feeding. Now, how do we know that works? Well, we know from blood tests in humans that it, it looks like it's Beneficial. You get the kind of changes that are seen in younger people. Things like I mentioned blood glucose, and then there's hormone levels and stress levels, which I've been measuring in myself for a decade. So I can tell you for me, it works. Um, but the, the other thing that's important is that from animal studies that have been done over the last hundred years in mice and rats and dogs, um, it's very clear that it's not just what you eat. It's when you eat. And there's a very famous study That was done by a colleague of mine, Rafael de Cabo at the NIH in Bethesda, and he made three different types of diets for mice. One that had a lot of protein, the other had carbs, the other had fat, and he thought he would find the optimal diet for the mice. Turns out it didn't make any difference. What mattered was when he gave the food, and if h…

AI assessment note: “Yes. Yes, yes, yes. We are. That's the great news”

Q So talk to me a little bit more about your father. Is he eating mostly a plant-based diet too?

A Yeah. Yeah. So he and I are very similar. I'm people think I'm experimenting on my dad, but I'm not. He's a scientist. He reads the science and we've come up with this protocol, which is the, uh, very low glucose. We don't eat a lot of sugar. We try to avoid desserts, low carb, don't eat a lot of Meat. He would eat meat very occasionally, but mostly it's plants. Um, he doesn't eat much during the day. He mainly eats dinner and he's, he's lean now. And, uh, what else? He does more exercise than I do, so he's better at that. He does aerobics. He goes a couple of times a week to the gym and does rowing and weightlifting. What else is it? He takes the supplement. So he's on resveratrol, NMN, metformin, uh, and that's his cocktail. He doesn't take athletic greens just yet. Uh, but he's a super healthy, 82 year old. He was not on that path in his fifties. My age, he was overweight. He had high cholesterol, looking at dying in his seventies. In his mid seventies, he went on this protocol and is now an 82 year old that's fitter than most people that age. He has no diseases, perfect mental health. His eyesight hasn't changed in all that time. And so, yeah, I mean, we're looking forward to this experiment being a successful one, but if nothing else, he's a beacon of hope that you can start late and have big effects.

AI assessment note: “He would eat meat very occasionally, but mostly it's plants.”

Q I think that's a great perspective on that. And you mentioned the IPO. Well, going through the IPO, you were also going through a pretty big personal issue. Are you comfortable talking about that?

A Yeah. Yeah, I am. Um, I would say I used to not be. And then I think what's been eyeopening for me is so many people go through a version of a health challenge and are trying to think about how to navigate their career while they go through it. And When I did finally start sharing my story, I was touched by how many people reached out and were experiencing something similar. And I think there's so much solidarity in that shared experience. Um, so in May of, uh, I was diagnosed with stage three breast cancer. I didn't have a family history. Uh, I had no reason to suspect that I would have it, and so it was very blindsiding, and this was shortly after Bumble had been acquired by Blackstone. I was loving and thriving, working with the private equity team, restructuring the business, working through the hundred day plan. It was terrifying, and Whitney was one of the first people that I told. And she was an unbelievable support through that process. But, but one of the things I felt like I realized pretty quickly is that I didn't have the same degree of emotional bandwidth as I might have before. I can specifically remember being, getting a biopsy and like awaiting the results and then going through my inbox on my phone. And like, like I couldn't even process some of the things that were coming up and like this person's title and like, when are these performance reviews and whatnot?…

AI assessment note: “Yeah. Yeah, I am... I was diagnosed with stage three breast cancer.”

Q woman-led businesses. My friend Kat Cole, who is one of our most popular episodes ever, recommended I speak with Sarah, and after you listen to this episode, you'll know exactly why. Sarah has a remarkable story. We talk about scaling a business, hiring others, her journey with cancer, woman-led companies, fundraising, boundary setting, and so much more. It's time to listen and learn. What are you obsessed with right now?

A Strength training. I've gotten really into lifting heavy weights. There's something that's so cathartic about just like picking up a huge kettlebell and swinging it many times. And I feel like I, you know, I've had various chapters with fitness in my life and mostly lean towards endurance stuff. Long distance swimming, running. I did, I did do an Ironman at one point, but had never really gotten into strength training until for health reasons. I was told, you know, my bones are at risk, so I need to pound them basically and make them stronger and started working with someone who's really helped me with that. And then love it. I do it twice a week. It's like the highlight of my week. So I would say I'm obsessed with training.

AI assessment note: “Strength training. I've gotten really into lifting heavy weights.”

Q and the diverse perspectives, uh, illuminate some of our blind spots with, uh, when other people have different experiences or different scenarios, because often we make decisions based on anecdotes or our personal experience. And so getting that other experience is, is really key. Talk about hiring people. You've hired, worked with, evaluated people to join companies for scaling. What, what do you look for? What lessons have you learned?

A Yeah, that's a great question. You know, I think first and foremost, it's commitment to the mission. And I've had the privilege of working at purpose-built, mission-driven companies, but you know, if, if all of the hard skills are there, but someone doesn't actually believe in what you're trying to do, That's a deal breaker, right? That there needs to be this belief in what you're trying to build. And I don't think that becomes an excuse for things like overwork or underpay. I think it becomes a unifying factor that helps people remember what their north star is. So I, I do look for that first and foremost. Look for a lot of curiosity. Um, one of the things that we would often ask in Bumble interviews is for feedback on the product. And We were expecting that people had engaged with the product in some way, shape or form. And luckily Bumble had, you know, obviously it's a, it's a dating platform, but also has friend finding tools. It has business networking tools. There's something for everyone there. And I think it's important that people had enough intellectual curiosity that they wanted to play with it, that they had ideas for improvement, et cetera. I interviewed a woman the other day, um, For a role that found, and you know, she came with a bulleted list of everything that she felt like we needed to change in the onboarding experience, and it was amazing, right? I just lov…

AI assessment note: “I think first and foremost, it's commitment to the mission.”

Q Wait, wait, how, what are those things? How do you, how do you test for this?

A I mean, some of it is like, how did they deal With the ambiguity of the situation, like how do they react if there's a super long line or if they couldn't find the place or if they're running late, like it's just little cues like that, that I think give you a sense of, of this person and how they operate. Um, there, there's an, another one, this is not an intentional interview question necessarily, but another thing that's very important to me is kindness and kindness over niceness. And one of the things That the, the easiest example that I can give is that a kind person will tell you, you have spinach in your teeth and a nice person won't because it's uncomfortable, right? But the kind person is going to set you up for a much better rest of your day because you're not running around with spinach in your teeth. And the moment I met the woman who is my current COO at found, she was in the business before I was, And I swear I didn't do this on purpose, but the very first meeting I had lipstick on my teeth and she told me right away. And I was like, this is it. Like, I know I want to work with this woman because I want us to be in a place where we sharpen each other and want each other to be our best. And that tiny thing was just such a good example of like setting me up well for the rest of the meeting. And maybe there was this like momentary discomfort, but not really. Right. Li…

AI assessment note: “how did they deal With the ambiguity of the situation, like how do they react”

Q of mind, but also our body. When we're stressed, for example, our field of vision like narrows and we, we have blind spots, not only with what we can literally see, but also with what we can cognitively see. Can you maybe take us through the relationship that vision and breathing have on our internal state and any behavioral practices that we can use to feel better and see more?

A Yeah. So we'll start with vision. Um, When we are relaxed, we are in panoramic vision. Even without moving our eyes or head, we actually have a wider aperture or field of view. Those from special operations communities will understand this as situational awareness. You have to be relaxed in order to see what's going on. Why? Well, the moment that you have adrenaline in your system goes up, Your field of view actually narrows. The pupils dilate. So, you know, um, police will look at, see how high people are by, if people are super relaxed, their pupils are very small. And if they're very, um, agitated, their pupils will be large, agitated or excited in a positive way. When the pupils are large, there's a movement of the lens of the eye and actually your visual field narrows. You get a soda straw view of the world. So when you're very stressed, you have a narrower aperture. And you're actually viewing the world. Um, just imagine trying to identify something in a scene by looking through binoculars, much harder actually than if you have the entire panoramic view. So stress in the visual system, relaxation in the visual system, I'm linked together. There's actually a simple practice that you can do. If ever you're in conversation or in an environment where you're stressed, you're trying to find a plane gate that you're running to. You're trying to find somebody God forbid you lost …

AI assessment note: “So we'll start with vision. Um, When we are relaxed, we are in panoramic vision.”