Health
Human 2.0 is coming.
Entrepreneurs are like high performance athletes. Except we don’t perform on the basketball court, in the octagon, nor the football field, but with our decision making. We should be approaching our lives like athletes -- with a diet, sleep, exercise, and recovery plan designed specifically for each of us so that we can make the best decisions. I went deep down the health and longevity rabbithole after suffering a heart attack from years of poor life hygiene as a startup founder.
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So much so that I get asked for health recommendations a surprising amount for someone who’s not a doctor. It's hard to give good answers without deeply understanding each person. If someone just wants to lose weight I tell them how. But staying on top of your health is hard. Most people don't do an annual checkup, and only my most health obsessed friends do annual bloodwork, track via wearables, or work with a doctor. Why? Well for one, it’s confusing AF. Finding a functional medicine doctor isn't easy, getting a dozen or so different tests done isn't fun, and interpreting the results is challenging.
Just earlier this year my functional medicine doctor gave me seven different blood draws that I had to do in various states of being fasted or not, a stool sample, and a urine sample… all of which I had to order and schedule myself with various different diagnostic companies. It was a nightmare. And that didn’t even include the genome sequencing and separate MRI scans I scheduled, each of which required more scheduling and running around to random offices that offered the service.
And let's not even get into to the complexity and tasks involved in following Bryan Johnson's longevity protocol; plus experimenting with some of the top longevity research and advice from Dr. David Sinclair, Dr. Tim Spector, Dr. Andrew Huberman, Paul Saladino, and Daniel E. Lieberman. In this confusing wasteland of labs, tests, doctors, and lifestyle recommendations, I think there’s a compelling opportunity. What if, rather than having everyone be their own researcher, nutritionist, and doctor you had a health retreat that acts as an all-in-one annual checkup for people who want to improve and optimize their health?Imagine you go to a luxury AirBnb or hotel that *feels* like a retreat, where you can get all your labs and checkups done in just a few days. You could get your genome sequenced, your microbiome analyzed, you could get wearables setup and working for you, and a nutrition and supplement plan custom to YOUR body. A place where people who care about their health can go annually and get all their labs done, adrenals checked, discuss diet, longevity, and aging while in the sauna or ice bath, have a chef cook all their meals, and leave after two days with a full understanding of their health and a plan to improve it over the next year.
I suspect there’s demand for something like this since the Mayo Clinic executive health program does over $100M in revenue per year. The program experience feels very hospital-like and is super old-fashioned. It requires a visit to one of their clinics in Jacksonville or Minneapolis and mainly focuses on early cancer detection. It doesn’t address the root cause of any health concerns nor touch performance optimization and longevity. It's something you do for work when you're old and it's not a fun, enjoyable experience.
Personally, I’d love a place where I could go for a few days to make sure I’m functioning at a high level, have no concerning health trends, get recommendations on optimizing my longevity and performance, and hang out with a bunch of other interesting entrepreneurs.
So I built it... and I hope you join me.
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People have asked why I decided to do the above and if it's worked for me. Here's the story:
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LeBron spends $1.5M per year on his body. He's put together a team of people to keep him operating at the highest level.
Why don't Silicon Valley CEOs or Wall Street investors take extreme ownership over their health to get an edge like LeBron?
I think it’s time to kill the adage that knowledge workers and startup founders should work 18 hours a day, barely sleep and eat ramen. Founders are knowledge athletes and need to be treated like pros.
A super legit investor in Silicon Valley agreed and offered me the opportunity to coach him in a David Goggins esque health bootcamp.
While it was a a lot of fun, it required a lot of sacrifices that aren't sustainable. I was his shadow, lived with him, and had to be 'on' 24/7.
I wanted to up the intensity and re-create that experience with other legit investors or entrepreneurs without moving into their homes.
Navy SEALs have to go through Hell Week before becoming a SEAL. I thought founders would benefit by going through a "hell weekend". I rented an AirBnb in Miami, hired an ex-UFC fighter and Navy SEAL to put us through a civilian version of Hell Week.
Needless to say beyond the first couple hours when everyone was just hanging out, masterminding waiting for everyone to arrive, NOBODY enjoyed the experience. One person even sent a legal letter demanding their money back or their legal team would sue for 'damages causing bodily harm' (they could have quit/left at any time).
After experimenting with great success with David Sinclair's recommendations and Bryan Johnson's health blueprint, I decided to put together a health retreat. Instead of a grueling David Goggins esque bootcamp, people got to relax in a luxury AirBnb while unboxing their new wearables and longevity gadgets. We dunked in cold plunges and in the sauna, had our bloodwork done, had a chef cook all our meals, got our genomes sequenced and a personalized nutrition and supplement plan.
I genuinely think this should be a new way of life.
50 years ago society thought that smoking was healthy. Nobody batted an eye to smoking on planes, in restaurants, or around young children. Society today can't even imagine that world.
Today, the same thing is going on with the average western diet. People stuff their faces with high fructose sugars for breakfast, lunch, and dinner causing massive spikes in their blood glucose, destroying baseline health, and compromising their immune system.
People are literally eating petroleum products (yes like oil) in foods like candy, chips, crackers, packaged baked goods, mints, or any product with olestra. They use mineral oil because it's not food. It doesn't go rancid like vegetable oil. And yes this is all FDA approved.
I would argue our biggest existential threat is not AI. It’s our hijacked biology.
There's at least 14 invisible health wars we are all fighting:
- air pollution•
- BPA plastics•
- toxic tap water
- polyester clothing•
- parasites in food• •
- mold and allergens•
- environmental estrogens
- disrupted sleep cycles•
- EMFs from our devices•
- heavy metals in our seafoods• •
- social media and dopamine addiction•
- pesticides, herbicides and chemical fertilizers like glyphosate•
- low quality soil results low quality food/nutrition
- preservatives, emulsifiers and artificial flavor enhancers
The compounding effect of all this chemical exposure on this scale goes unstudied and we walk around not even knowing what is happening in our own bodies.
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Knowledge workers know infinitely more about their company from dashboards than they do about themselves.
Why? When we have all the tools necessary to understand this stuff at a relatively affordable price for most knowledge workers.
There's a reason why Jeff Bezos got jacked and Mark Zuckerberg started working out and training MMA. You can have all the money in the world but if you don't take care of your health you'll still feel and look like shit.
It's worked for me.
After 10 months on my longevity protocol I've managed to reduce my epigenetic age from 38.2 years to 30.7 (chronologically I'm 28.9).
That's an insane amount of age reversal over the last few months.
It required an investment of several thousands per month but here's a few simple things everyone can do to increase their healthspan:
- Don’t smoke, limit alcohol, avoid refined sugars like it’s the plague
- Sleep 7-10 hours per day
- Drink 3-5L of water daily
- Be active. Go for a walk, do body weight exercises (squats, pushups, pullups)
- Prevent and manage stress
- Eat all your food in a 6-10hr window (intermittent fasting), walk after eating to stabilize blood glucose
- Eat the rainbow / as many colored organic fruits as you can to diversify your gut microbiome
Bonus: heat & cold exposure, and get your bloodwork done to understand exactly what you need to work on.
Here's what Dr. David Sinclair from Harvard recommends:
I share more people's health stacks in my newsletter so check that out if you're interested.
In the future, I think we'll have hardware like sensors that measure what's happening in our bodies in real time. We'll all have our genomes sequenced so we can actually make sense of the data, and get a perfectly customized meal for you based on your goals, your mood, your genome, your biomarkers etc.
I'm living in something close to that future today and it's been the best decision I've ever made. If you want to join me and a handful of others reach out and apply to join Ownership.