Podcast Transcription: The Busy Executive's Guide to Longevity: Making Time for Health in a Hectic Schedule with John Berardi, PhD

Ted Ryce: John Berardi, thanks for coming back on the show. It's a pleasure to connect with you again. I think it's been a couple of years actually. 

John Berardi: Yeah, maybe more than a couple, a couple of gray hairs too, but, uh, yeah, it's wonderful to be back. It's good to see you. Thank you for having me. I don't know what episode number you were on when I last appeared, but it was maybe a couple hundred ago.  

Ted Ryce: Yeah, that's true. You know what? I have them in front of me right now. You're on episode 382, "Fitness Success Secrets for 2020 and the Power of Coaching." And then you were also on, I forget what year it was, but episode 262. So long overdue. And ... 

John Berardi: Yeah. Okay. Yeah, what number is this today?   

Ted Ryce: oh gosh, it's like in the 400s, late 400s.  

John Berardi: Congrats on keeping the project going so long when many don't.   

Ted Ryce: Yeah, I appreciate that. Talking about consistency, that's going to get into our conversation today because I know you're at a very different place in your life than we last spoke. You sold your business and you founded something called the Changemaker Academy. You also hosted the Dr. John Berardi show, but just to update people in case they haven't heard episode 382 or 262.  

You are a person who was my mentor. I credit you, not just for my development, but also for so many other coaches who I've met helping people to start to recognize, helping coaches and personal trainers start to recognize that, you know, coaching is a separate skill from understanding rep sets, carbohydrates, and all those other important scientific facts, but the psychological side of coaching, motivational interviewing. So, yeah.  

John Berardi: Yeah, thank you. Thanks. I appreciate that. It was a really fun part of my life with transferable skills into all dimensions of life beyond, you know, uh, for those listening and the company is called Precision Nutrition that I founded.  

Sold it in 2017. You mentioned a couple of my ventures after selling, but mostly since I've sold the company, I've really been a stay-at-home dad. That's been the primary thing. You know, the Changemaker Academy is a really fun project that I started with some friends and the intention was always, "Hey, I'll just check in with y'all a couple of hours a month. And you all go out and do amazing, wonderful things with the business and the brand and go educate," and it's more of a career development business. 

And the podcast was originally supposed to be just a fun a few hours a week. And any seasoned podcaster understands the folly with which I'm about to speak. But I'm like, you know, we pulled our kids out of school after we sold PM and we were doing homeschooling. And that was like the full-time gig. And I was like, yeah, you know, but maybe a few hours a week, I'd like to scratch a grown-up work itch.  

And so, I started the Dr. John Berardi show and I thought maybe 10, 20 hours a week max, and that thing started spiraling like 50, 60 hours a week. So, it was going really great. We often were appearing on the top, you know, top Apple podcasts next to Tim Ferris at the time and Joe Rogan at the time.  

But, I had to shut her down because it was taking away from the number one priority in our life, which was family. Uh, and then... 

You know, since then I've just been chipping away at little projects, but mostly just stay-at-home dad. 

Ted Ryce: I know you say that, but I've also seen you on Instagram how you've taken up track. And one of the reasons it seems from reading your Instagram posts is because of your daughter.  

I saw that you both went and got your body fat tested. And so, when you say that you're retired and you say that you're mostly a stay-at-home dad, can you talk a little bit more about like, well, you're not just, because you're in phenomenal shape. I think your body fat was around 13 percent or something. You look totally shredded. And can you talk a little bit about that? 

John Berardi: Yeah, so, yeah, well, sure. Yeah. Absolutely. Yeah. I mean, I have, like health and fitness been a big priority in my life for a very long time. You know, I, but it wasn't because I was an athlete growing up and stuff like that. I was actually born very premature. I lived a good chunk of my first few months on this planet in the hospital with folks trying to keep me alive. 

And so, as I was growing up, I had definitely delayed development. And then I also had things like asthma and allergies and a host of maladies. And when I got to high school, I wasn't involved much in sports and stuff like that. I come from an immigrant family and my Italian mom wanted to shield me from being out in sports and getting hurt and having an asthma attack and all these things.  

So, I wasn't really exposed to much physicality and I kind of felt like I wanted to be, but it just wasn't a part of my life. And when I got to high school, I just started reading about exercise and nutrition. And this is what kind of lit the initial flame. And I started doing stuff that I was learning and I was like, oh, wow, like I'm getting stronger.  

All this, these nutritional choices I'm making are making me feel far more healthy and all I don't have any asthma attacks if I go out and jog or go for a run or whatever. So, I came to sport quite late.  

Um, but it was this sort of fixing myself kind of a template that, that really, uh, encouraged me to want to do this professionally. Um, and that's what I really started. You know, I got exposed to some sports. I ended up running track and ended up playing football in university. 

So, I made up some of the lost time. Uh, and I got into bodybuilding, competed, won a couple of national championships, uh, many moons ago. And, uh, the one sport that I always wanted to return to, uh, was track and field. And so, in my forties, I started training and running again. Um, I just, uh, competed at the provincial championships here in Ontario, Canada this past summer, got a couple of medals at that. Um, and I'm playing for world championships next year.  

So, track and field, I mean, and for those people, you know, whatever track and field, uh, don't have much exposure experience, like I'm really lucky that I like the sport because it may be the best kind of training as one gets older. 

Like, if you had to map out all the types of exercise you could do – and I'm not saying it's the only one to do, obviously – ways to preserve your fast-switch muscle fibers, which are highly correlated with aging well, and when they decline quickly with falls and breaks and mortality.  

Flexibility and mobility into age, like everything that a proper track and field program is designed for, it also overlaps with everything that you would want as you get into aging. And I had a fun chat with someone the other day because we all have our own biases coming into this.  

You know, I've been doing a lot of work with health span lately. And for those who've read Peter Attia's book, I think he does a really nice job with a book called "Outlive." 

And now, Peter talks a lot about things like his own two cardio. So, for everyone who's been hearing that phrase come up over and over again, uh, Peter's really been a champion of that. And I think a lot of people have picked up on that from his writings and encouragement of people to do more of it.  

And I think it's great, but it's really fun because you sit down with someone like Peter and he says, "Zone two cardio is really essential for longevity and health span, dot, dot, uh, what were Peter's sports growing up and currently?"  

All endurance things. So, he likes endurance things. So, he's like championing that. So now you have this guy here, right? Who's like, you know, hey, if you want to age well, it's got to be stuff like track and field training, short distance sprints, repeat sprints, the mobility and flexibility and strength work that you do as an adjunct to that. This is the way to age well. And you're like, well, what does this guy like to do?  

And good at and did growing up. Oh, it's sprints, okay. So obviously, I mean, I think this is a wonderful lesson in general for folks out there consuming information, trying to learn, trying to figure out what next to do in the context of their own lives.  

To say, hey, people, everyone out there giving advice has their own biases based on their own experiences and the things that they like. No one is immune to that. It's not a problem. It just exists. 

So, factor it into your decision making, right? So, if you read Peter's stuff and you love endurance training and you want to follow the protocols he does and that fits your body great and you feel stronger and more energetic when you do it, beautiful, go do that. But there's another pathway too, right? That you can do some of the things I'm talking about here.  

So yeah, I mean, this has been part of my retirement and all four of our children have been blessed with some combination of muscle fiber type genetic benefits and also they love working hard and they love putting in the effort to get better so they're all really high performing track athletes as well we have four kids and they all they all run with me which is a beautiful family thing you know one of my favorite things over the last couple years has been piling in the car putting on hype songs rolling to the track getting workout in with the four kids. 

We're spent at the end, putting down some, putting on some chill down music, driving home all kind of dead from training, having our post-workout drinks. It really feels like living the absolute life that I want to live, you know, when we have moments like that.  

And so yeah, our oldest daughter you mentioned is 13. So, she's been doing really, really well. And as of our 11, eight and seven year olds. And it's just... 

Even the youngest one just gets in on the action because she's coming with us anyway. So, she's like, I'd like to try running too, and then she doesn't she's like whoa I'm actually pretty fast so yeah, so that's been a big family activity for us. Our kids also do a number of other competitive sports.  

But that's been the big family sport over the last little while and I've been coaching them and that's been absolute blast from a way to connect right all the way to a way to age well for me. 

Ted Ryce: Yeah, that brings up a few things for me. And it was kind of funny in our email exchange, you said, I don't really know what I can add to your podcast right now with the conversation because I'm retired, I'm a full-time dad, and yeah, I'm doing these sports, but the way you put it. 

And for me, I couldn't wait to get you on the show to talk about this because one of the most common questions I get in my coaching program is what does maintenance look like? What does maintenance look like? And it's like, well, you can maintain your weight, but there is no maintenance of life. You have to keep in the game.  

And one of my clients, he's almost 80 now. This is a former client actually. He said, as I get close to 80, he said, I realize that retirement, there's no such thing as retirement, that I need to stay ahead. I forget the way he said it, but he's like, I need to stay ahead of life because to make it to 80, it's not that easy. 

There is no such thing as retirement. And it really hit home for me because I feel like one of the reasons that people will get into a weight loss program, they'll hit their goal and they'll be like, okay, well I achieved that goal. Now what do I do?  

Well, I'll just go backwards because I don't know what else to do. Cause this is kind of boring. And I would love for you to talk about what, how you think about that. Like there is no, you say you're retired, but you're not really retired, right? 

John Berardi: Yeah, yeah, it's true. Yeah, I mean, it's like a convenient thing if people ask what you do, and you want to give them a one-line answer, whether it's silly or simplified, you know, like, and so retirement is the easy, simple answer to, because most people are asking, like, how can you show up to everything, everything that the kids do?  

Like, how are you volunteering at their school? Like, how do you have free time to train? Well, I'm retired, you know, but, but retirement for me - and I'm in a really blessed position to be relatively young to be in this situation. Yeah, I'm turning 50 right around the corner – yeah, so yeah, so retirement for me looks like training for the World Championships in track and field. It looks like learning Italian. Our daughter was selected for a big international track meet to represent Canada in Italy. 

So, I was like, oh, that's awesome. Well, let's learn Italian together, buddy. So, we're learning Italian.  

So, it also looks like following a number of curiosities that I wouldn't have had time to follow necessarily in my professional career when eight hours a day or however many hours were spent building our business.  

One of the projects is I've always really been interested in sort of development, you know? So, like building and I think this may be just a response to creating digital things for so long, you know, websites and online coaching programs and all that. Like, what would it be like to actually go out and build some stuff in the world and like put it in, put it in there and people can come show up and say, oh, what are you up to? Oh, that and I can point to it and they can see it with their eyes, right? 

So, I bought a couple hundred acres of land, and we started doing a big development project where we're essentially building a town. I mean, there's 500 homes, apartment complexes, gas bar, schools, walking trails, playgrounds, sports fields, nature park, things like that.  

So, we're building a pretty cool little ecosystem for folks. And that's like, I was super curious about that, really interested, had a couple of friends who did this, so I partnered with them on it.  

So that was a curiosity of mine. I talked about the health span work that I'm doing. This isn't a, it's not a product or a service I intend to sell, but I've been just really curious about. I think a lot of people rush into interventions.  

So, like, what stuff should I be doing? What should I be eating? How should I be exercising, et cetera? And I get why you'd go there. But the curiosity I've had is like, what should you be measuring at what points in your life to take your attention and focus it in on the thing that you need to be focused in on right now to prevent a decline in that particular domain, right?  

So, if we think about our health span or our lives, meaning like the number of functional years that we can live doing the things we want to do, the things that'll like put a dent in that and shorten that are, it's only a couple of categories, like cardiovascular disease, you know, metabolic health, cancer, a cancer diagnosis you know, inject growth of cells in the body, some kind of neurological dysfunction, and some kind of like neuromuscular dysfunction, right?  

So even for people who like have a pretty good, holistic, healthy lifestyle, they exercise routinely, they eat well, they put some attention on sleep and recovery, they maybe think about stress management. 

And that's a tall order for a lot of people, just those things right there. But even for the people like tackling those things on a regular basis, as you get older and you start approaching, you know, my age, you know, 50s, or even your former client's age, 80s, you know, some of those systems are going to just start to break down no matter how attentive you are to a holistic lifestyle. So my curiosity has been, you know, what are the dashboard indicators? 

That can tell you very early on which system is starting to slide first. Right? So, my classic example is like you measure your blood sugar and your hemoglobin A1c, which is a trailing marker of blood sugar levels. It kind of tells you what your average blood sugar has been like over the last few months.  

And so, you measure these things and so they're in the healthy range, they're in the healthy range year after year. But if you're going to have metabolic dysfunction and eventually get maybe a type 2 diabetes or pre-diabetes diagnosis, and hopefully no one listening does, but some will, one day you'll just trip over that line, the magical 0.1 number, and now you're diabetic.  

But if we had been tracking that year over year, we would have seen a slow increase in blood sugar, a slow rise in hemoglobin A1C, and we'd say, oh man, this is trending badly, well before a diagnosis, well before a massive metabolic dysfunction, and then you can say, all right, cool, I'm following a holistic, healthy lifestyle already, but I should put some more energy into blood sugar management now, after two or three years of slow increase, or maybe that's a cardiovascular measure, you know? 

Or maybe it's a measure of neurological function. And so instead of being like, all right, I'm doing all the healthy things, I consider this like a limiting factor analysis. You say, no, but yeah, that's great. I love that you're doing all that, but what's the one limiting factor now?  

What's the one system that's starting to go a little haywire on you? Let's catch it super early, and then let's do whatever interventions are necessary there. And I may need to pull something away from this healthy lifestyle domain and stick it right in that spot right now to fix my blood sugar. 

And oh, look at this! I worked on it, my blood sugar came back down to what it was five years ago. Okay, let's manage that and we'll keep measuring. So, it's been another fun project of mine. Again, I don't really have any plans to monetize anything around it. I'm just putting it together for me and then share it with my friends and say here's what I'm thinking of measuring every year. 

Here's what I'm thinking measuring every five years. Here's what I'm thinking measuring every ten years. And once we figure those things out, then we can talk about interventions. But right now, people are talking about putting the cart before the horse.  

They're talking about blood sugar management before they even know what their blood sugar is or what their five-year trailing blood sugar looks like. You know what I mean? 

Ted Ryce: It reminds me of a comment I got on Twitter the other day where I said something about magnesium and I think there's a, you know, we can get into this, but over, over focus on supplements.  

But I was talking about magnesium and someone said, well, oh yeah, I just read that magnesium is really important for vitamin D. So maybe I should, you know, start to pay more attention to that. I'm like, well, do you know what your vitamin D level is? 

Because we get lost in this, oh, well, magnesium will affect the vitamin D and oh, it's just comp it's like, yeah, but did you measure it? Do you know what it is? Maybe you have like, is there any benefit to taking magnesium if you're for vitamin D specifically if you're in the right range? And so, I love what you're saying. They're really important. 

John Berardi: Yeah. Right. Yeah, yeah, it's, I mean, what you're talking about there, it's so easy to do, you know, I have a lot of empathy and compassion for folks who are out there just trying to navigate and they read it. I mean, I used to say this all the time, you know, if you have a client who's out reading, like personal trainers and health coaches, sometimes when they get in a little closed room, they'll complain about clients about certain things, you know. 

I remember when I started our company and we were building out our customer service client care team, I read a book about this and they talked about, hey you have to give your client care team a door, a room with a door that they can close without any bosses around and certainly without any customers around to just complain about the dumb things they have to do within their day. And let them offload it there so that they can come back happy with the customers. 

And the boss can't be in the room because the boss is going to try and solve these problems and it's going to hear this kind of talk and be like, you can't talk about the customers like that. So boss, go. You know what I mean? Let us just offload.  

So, coaches and trainers will do that. And one of the things they sometimes get annoyed about is clients being out in the world reading things that the trainer or coach doesn't agree with. Like, oh, you're out there reading this dumb stuff and it's making my job harder.  

And I always like to help them get a little reframe. If your client is going out on their own time to read about and learn about health and fitness. Is that a good thing? Of course, it's absolutely a good thing, right?  

Now, they may be stumbling into bad information, and hopefully you have the kind of relationship where they can bring that to you and you can discuss it openly. You know, hey, that information might be questionable. 

Oh, I see that you seem really interested in following this particular thing. Now, it doesn't feel right your situation to me, but we could certainly give it a try and I want to monitor you or whatever, right?  

So, you can have like a good conversation about it. So, part A is if someone's reading about vitamin D and magnesium, and I know you weren't saying otherwise here, I first say, hey, good for you for going out and seeking information, education. I love that. Okay, next step, let's put it into proper context in your life, you know? 

If you don't know anything about your magnesium levels or your vitamin D levels then we need to step one step back and then we can start building up the complexity from there, you know? So yeah, I mean, again, this health span stuff has been really interesting to me for these reasons because I'm like, let's figure out. And I don't know, this longevity clinic just opened up around the corner from my house. And so, I went to their website to see what they're up to, you know? 

Now if I lived in like Southern California, you know, this is old news, but I live in Niagara, Ontario. There's none around. This is the first one I've ever seen in our region. So I went to their website, see what they're up to, you know, and I'm like, okay, this is cool. They're measuring some cool stuff. It's really expensive, though, you know. So, I'm like, to sign up with these guys, it's like 20 grand a year. And you get like a doctor monitoring you and unlimited visits and all that kind of stuff. And then all the testing and all that. 

But I was like, man, who's going to be able to touch that? You know, like what people do I know that are going to be able to touch 20 grand a year? And most of the people I know are in the same situation as me with like a young family and whatever, right?  

And, but they didn't sell their company, you know? And so how are they going to do this? So, I was like, what would it actually cost for real if I were to try and put this together myself in Ontario, Canada or whatever, right? 

And what I'm finding is it's a fraction of the price. I mean, you could probably do something like a grand a year to get some really in-depth monitoring of yourself. And for like the bigger tests like whole body MRI and measures of plaque in your cardiovascular system, tack on an extra like five grand every decade or something. And probably do a more comprehensive assessment this way.  

Like you can get more stuff done, like more informative stuff for a much lower price. So, I've been super interested in that. And then the other, and this is kind of a fun thing that anyone listening today can do if they're really curious. I mean, one of the predictors of risk for folks is genetics, as we know. 

And conventionally, like what your doctor would just ask if there's a history of heart disease in your family, right? And so that's a good early indicator. Well, my dad died in his 60s and my grandpa died in his 50s.  

Oh, all right, cool. Cardiovascular system is what we need to be working on every day and monitoring really closely for you, right? I don't know if you've heard of the comedian Mike Birbiglia, but he just did a new standup recently and he was he was talking about like my dad died at 56 from a heart attack, my grandpa died at 56 from a heart attack.  

I think I'm just going to take that year off. I'm just going to move next to the hospital, you know. I'm just going to live my 56th decade right next door to the hospital. So hopefully it'll take care of me early and I won't have the same fate. But you know, this idea of genetics is something that with AI, like ChatGPT for example, and 23andMe or any other genetic test you want to do, can give you so much information.  

So, I mean, I'll give you an example. I was just, this was some months ago, I was really curious, could ChatGPT give me a rundown of the most valid scientific relationships, you know, based on all the current genetic studies between just the things I talked about like musculoskeletal, neurological, metabolic, cancer, cardiovascular disease.  

So, if I type in a chat GPT and say can you scour the current literature and let me know all the genes that are correlated with each of these systems and causal of disease in each of these systems. Could you give me that breakdown? 

And GPT's like sure I can, right? So, it literally says and I'm like give me give me it organized by category with bullet points tell me whether it's causal or correlated and tell me like the scientific communities confidence in this right? So, like are we sure that's causal or is it like low confidence, right?  

So, I asked it to do that and it gives me this really nice report. So, it's like here are the genes that are correlated with bad cardiovascular disease outcomes. And for those listening, correlated means we don't know that it causes it. We just tend to see cardiovascular problems in people with those genes, but it could be something else altogether. But then there's ones that are causal and a great example is ApoE. So Chris Helmsworth was in this series called Limitless, I think, recently. 

And then the final episode of the series, you saw this, he discovered he had the APOE4 double allele gene. And that means that Chris Helmsworth, unless he dies young, will have Alzheimer's disease. He knows it. And so, the next step for him is like, okay, cool. How do I learn more about neurological conditions? What are the steps I can do to delay it? Right? 

It's inevitable. He'll probably have it. He may delay it till the final year of his life or whatever. And so, there's still hopeful possibilities for him. But this is what a causal gene would be, right? Like we know you're going to get this 

So, I want to know what all the causal and correlated ones are for all those things, right? And so GPT will tell me. 

And then I wasn't sure if it would be able to do this, but I asked and I was like, hey, I have a 23andMe profile and I have all my raw data if I were to plug in my raw data for each gene, like all those A, G, C, T base pairs, would you be able to tell me what my risks are? And GPT is like, yep. And so, then I just went into 23andMe, which I did a hundred years ago, like when it first came out, right? And it's still got all my raw data. And I'm not like, my genetic code isn't changing, right? And so, I just went to the, you type in the gene that GPT tells you to look for, and you copy.  

And in some cases, it's a lot of ace pairs, you know, but whatever, you just copy it all, you plug it in, and then it tells you, right? So, I can find out in two seconds, like I don't need a $20,000 medical relationship to figure out if I have APOE 4 or 2 or 3, you know? And so, this from start to finish took me probably two hours one day, where I just went through, like figured out what the right prompts to write in chat GPT are, figured out all my raw data, and just started plugging it in. And now I have a full risk profile on myself for each of these domains based on my genetic profile.  

And this is an interesting thing because you only really have to do it once and then maybe follow-ups later just to see if the literature has changed. 

Like, have we discovered any new genes that are correlated or causal? You know what I mean? So maybe every five to ten years you ask it to rerun the thing, you know? So, I just saved all the prompts and I recorded them in this big spreadsheet I'm working on and again that I can share with my friends later and say, "Hey, if you want to do this just go do these prompts," you know? So anyway, that's a fun thing I've been working on that probably a lot of your listeners would be interested in knowing you can do nowadays. 

Ted Ryce: Yeah, absolutely. It brings up so many things. Yeah, just to just to go back to the vitamin D example, I'm with you and I think your mentorship actually helped me. You know, I love when my clients ask questions and I don't get mad anymore. Luckily, I do a good job of attracting the right people these days and repelling the wrong. If they want to do raw carnivore diets, they know I'm not the guy to talk to.  

But, I think you're bringing up something really important. It's a great thing to be interested in your health and to learn about it. Just keep making sure you're refining what you know and listening to people like you, John, to make sure that you're focused on the right things and starting with an assessment. And then, you know, when it comes to, I recently had a client who signed up with me and he was working with a doc on like longevity stuff. 

And what they don't do, I guess some clinics do and some don't, but once you get the information, you got to know what to do with it. And the reason he switched was because the guy was like, "Hey, these are your levels. And yeah, by the way, your testosterone, it's like 500, but maybe you want to get on TRT, but maybe not because it has risk."  

And he's like, "I just want to lose weight." So, it wasn't really helping out with that to know what to do in terms of even if you get all this diagnostic stuff, you still have to change behavior and that's something again you helped, I think, not just me but the entire industry with is to focus on that because it's one thing to know what to do. It's another thing to follow through with it and to talk. I would love to hear more about, you know, the assessment. I would love to see that sheet actually.  

But you're bringing up something that doesn't get talked about enough. It's like let's get let's get our 23 and me and let's have that available because our doctors in general don't have time to get into that. So, it's like, Okay, well, I'm going to run my genetic risk profile.  

And so, I know what's going to happen in the case with Chris Hemsworth, like what you stated, that's just a causal gene. And if he lives long enough, he's going to get that could be to, to your point, the last year of his life, but it's going to happen. 

Right. If he lives long enough. So, then you can focus on based on your genetic risk profile, what you can tease out, what might've been lifestyle with some of what our parents dealt with versus what are actually a causal.  

And also, like what you said, make sure you run the data again based on updated research because the correlations may change the causations.  

So, getting this, so just to get back on that conversation. Is that what you would recommend someone who's interested in their genetic risk profile? To go and get a 23 and me or is there another one that you think would be good now? 

John Berardi: Mm-hmm. Yeah, I'm, I mean, I'm kind of out of the loop on what all the companies are that are doing that stuff. This is one of the benefits of my retirement, I don't have to care what the genetic wars are going on like or whatever. But I believe 23andMe still exists. I only mentioned them because they were like the first. They were founded by the wife of one of the Google founders.  

So, they obviously had big money and big marketing machine to get their stuff out. And they were really cheap back in the day. I don't know what it costs now, but it was 99 bucks to profile me.  

I have our whole family profile because I remember when they came out and I used to be able to write this stuff off because I'd do a story on it for the company and I didn't get a tax write off for all these kind of medical pseudo medical expenses. So yeah, I mean, our whole family has 23 and me. So yeah, I don't know if folks should do a little bit of research. 

This is where I use chat GPT every day nowadays because for those who aren't familiar with it or don't use it, I mean, it's, it's not just a better Google. I mean, it's, it's like a, it can be a decision-making engine for you. 

So, the first thing I would do if I wanted to know what the best quote unquote genetic testing company is nowadays is I would go into chat GPT and I would be very specific with my prompt. I'm a 50-year-old man who's very interested in health and fitness and I'm looking for a genetic test that can help me do X, Y, and Z.  

So that can help collect as much genetic information as possible on me so that I can determine my risk factors by plugging into an artificial intelligence engine. You know what I mean? So, you just say, this is who I am and exactly what I want to do. 

Tell me which company will be best for that if there are multiple companies available then please give me bullet points on each. I'd like to know price, I'd like to know how comprehensive their assessment is, and I'd like to know how user-friendly their readouts are. And then you just ask, and then the GPT will give you a whole report on that.  

That's how I would do it nowadays anyway. So that's how I begin to search. And again, if 23andMe still exists and they still provide the same kind of reports I got, I think it's a great option. And then speaking of the behavior change piece, I made a little note here, you know?  

So obviously there's lots of writing now and lots of podcasts and lots of discussion about behavior change and we can delve into any of that you want to. But the thing that occurs to me first in the context of this conversation is what motivates me to take positive health steps might not motivate others, you know? And just a great foil would be... 

Anyone who's like, "Oh hell yeah," when they hear me saying all this stuff about plugging in the GPT and getting my risk profiles and all that and targeting annually my blood sugar to make sure if it starts to increase slowly over time to just do a thing and fix it. Anyone who's saying that is like me in this context.  

So you may be motivated by self-knowledge, data, etc. My father-in-law. Awesome guy. He's one of my partners on some projects that I do. I love spending time with him. Super smart.  

Demotivated by all this stuff. Like I offered to buy a 23andMe for him and he said I'd like to not know. You know what I mean? Not motivated at all. This would just scare me. If I found out something that was a risk factor that I didn't want to know about, then I... and he's like I'm in a different phase of my life. He's like I'm in my 70s now. 

For him, he's like, I don't need any bad news. I get it every day with age 71 and 72. So demotivating for him, actively demotivating. I don't want to know it. Don't show it to me, please. It's not going to help me in any way. So, behavior change, I think, begins with some deeper understanding of what would motivate you to change in the first place what would motivate you to want to do certain things? 

Is it information or knowledge? Is it pain? Is it some kind of hopeful future you're wishing to strive towards? What is it? Now, my father-in-law isn't a guy who's against in any way exercise, nutrition, healthy lifestyle stuff. He makes good choices and he's probably in all of our children's grandparents and uncles and aunts and all that stuff. He's probably one of the most conscientious about his portion choices, his food selections, getting regular movement.  

It's just, he's just not motivated in any way by what we're talking about here. So that to me becomes like an underpinning, right? What, what will motivate you for some people, it's not data. For me it is. 

This stuff is really super interesting to me. I'm a data nerd. I went and got a PhD and took all kinds of statistics classes it's like what I was saying earlier about track, right? So, then I'm going to be the one who's a little bit biased towards track training instead of zone two training. And Peter Attia will be just a little more biased towards endurance slash cardiovascular training than I would be. So, it's the same. 

So I think if you're a coach, then you have to remember people are just built different than you. You know what I mean? They're going to be motivated by wholly different things. And one of the lovely things about enhancing your knowledge as a coach is that your menu of ways to help people grows, right? So, you can say, oh this person hates, you know, sprinting, whatever, right? 

Well, we don't have to do that to promote health and longevity through exercise, right? This person hates knowing data about the risk factors. That's all right, we don't have to do that to get them motivated about health and fitness, we just have to find the domain that does push their button and make them want to do better or be better or try harder or whatever the case may be. 

Ted Ryce: Yeah, important point. And I don't know how many fitness professionals or coaches listen to this show, probably a few, but if you're a person who, our target audience, let's say, would be executives and entrepreneurs who really want to focus on their health, and I think it's important for them to know if they have the right coach that if someone's trying to push their biases on them or their preferences may not be a great fit. 

John Berardi: Absolutely, yeah, then that's what I was going to say. That's the flip side of this, right? If you're a coach, there should be some things that you do. If you're a client, there should be some things that you know, that you should think about with respect to coach-client relationships and stuff, but also just about yourself, right?  

What is going to motivate you to want to do this, right? If you're seeking out a coach, you obviously got the kickstart you needed to go look for help, right? 

If you're not seeking out a coach yet, this may be something to consider. I often tell potential clients or clients or health and fitness people who are looking for some help, coaching doesn't always have to look like the traditional sense, you know what I mean?  

Like sometimes you could hire a health coach that you meet with like once every three months and they give you a thing to go think about for the next three months. It didn't have to be, "Oh, I meet my personal trainer three days a week." You know, there's all kinds of ways to craft a relationship that fits your lifestyle.  

The critical part is like meeting a host of them, figuring out who will be most in alignment with what motivates you and the kind of things that you're likely to do, and then really run with that relationship and then set the boundaries on it. You know, here's what I need, here's what I don't. Here's where I'm not sure. 

So, help me decide on these, you know? So, be really clear on who you are, figure out who this other person is, right? And then there's some always gray in the middle. And then there's a bunch of, I'm not sure. Okay, well, let's negotiate that as well, you know? 

Ted Ryce: Great advice. Yeah, it's funny. I always frame, sometimes, because I always say, you know, I've been in the business 24 years. I kind of lead with that to promote my experience, of course, right? And then people expect me to tell them exactly what to do. And I'm like, well, I can tell you exactly what the data says, what the research says, but I don't know you well enough as you know yourself.  

So, I don't what is going to motivate you here. And I always talk about optimizing for consistency first before the results, because, you know, as you know, you know, from working with so many people, it's like you got to be consistent. And if you're not, then there's no point. 

John Berardi: Yeah, and my framing here, and I don't know, maybe this works for some people, maybe not, is like, I really like to invite people to co-create with me, you know, as a coach. In the early days, I did it, and I didn't understand this idea, and I think maybe subconsciously too, I knew it would take more work, you know, it takes... 

John Berardi: takes a little dance of negotiation and getting to know the person. And if I just tell you what the science says, then we're done in five minutes, you know? But then you realize, oh yeah, but when you do that, only, you know, 10% of the people will actually follow it or come back or, you know, so it hurts your business financially. It hurts your success with the people who've come for help. So, you know, this idea of co-creating, but now I'm... 

The coaching that I do nowadays is just in the context of some of the projects I work on, like coaching our team, you know, and I coach a lot of youth sports now. 

So, I coach our kids in track and field and that's like as a family, but I also coach a couple of like football teams and a couple of soccer teams. And, you know, so I'm in a different coaching context than health and fitness now. And I would say more of my life is spent on the flip side where I'm trying to learn new things that I don't know very well. 

And I need coaches or whatever you want to call it mentors, believable people to help me make decisions. This one I sold my company was the biggest skill I realized that I needed to develop in the next stage of my life. It was how to walk into a room full of people who know more than I do about subject that we're there to talk about and ask the right questions and discern how to make the next decision based on lack of expertise. Right?  

My earlier career was all in a domain that I had a PhD in. Right? So, I was arguably the best trained person in the room to make the choices about those things. But when I sold my company, and I walked in all these other domains, I was the beginner in the room. And there was actually a time when I realized, oh, I have to get good at this. 

So, we sold our company, it was sold it for a couple hundred million dollars. Very shortly thereafter, I'm on an elevator up to the top of the tallest building in Toronto, which is the biggest bank in Canada.  

And we're on the top floor. And there's just a room of like lawyers and accountants and finance people and private bankers and insurance people and all older than me all in suits, you know, and I'm looking around this room and I'm like, man, I need to build an apparatus to be able to sit in these kinds of rooms because it's the decisions we're making about my financial future about my business ventures about our family's future. 

And I don't know any of this stuff. You know, what are you supposed to do? Oh, shit, you have to get good at sitting in rooms where you're not the expert and asking questions and figuring out who ought to be in the room so we can co-create and build that skill of then deciding from that place. Like how do I quickly learn from the most believable, smartest people? 

The things that I need to, right? Not the things that they think about all the time because they might not overlap perfectly so that I can make the next decision. And it really became a new worldview for me because I'm like... 

Alright, cool. Well, this is in the context of making decisions about our financial health and future. Well, what about my own body's health and future, right? So, I actually started calling this little project I'm doing my net health project. So, the project at the top of...  

Ted Ryce: Is that on the internet somewhere? My Net Health Project?  

John Berardi: No, no, no. It's just what I call it like in my working document or whatever. 

Again, I got nothing to sell people on this front. Yeah, so like the, and the concept for me was just like when I went to the top of that building in Toronto with all the finance people, that was my net worth project. Right? So, I have systems to monitor my net worth, right? 

This was like, oh, this is my, so I have spreadsheets and whatever. So, this is, I'm like, oh, this is, this is that. I'm doing the same work with believable experts, the right metrics, the right strategic interventions as required, but for my health. So, this is my Net Health project. So, I have two spreadsheets that I check regularly. One is my Net Worth spreadsheet and one is my Net Health spreadsheet. 

Ted Ryce: Got it. Yeah. It just, it reminds me, so I'm, my goal for 2024 is to get my Brazilian, my black belt in Brazilian jiu-jitsu. I've been a brown belt forever, had to start and stop because of injuries. And I was in, I'm taking private lessons. I have my jiu-jitsu coach who I meet with to help me. And I just remember seeing, um, I had this, you know, it was right after our session. I remember.  

As I was doing my one-on-one session, there was a group going on and there was this guy who has a blue belt which is the second belt up from white white's the first and after the group class was done, then he did a small group class. Now he was wearing his key and now he's wearing no gee and only this guy's going to be amazing in a much shorter time than me right then all the time that I spent and it was just... 

John Berardi: And just, you mean just based on accumulating more matte time. 

Ted Ryce: more mad time and also from the expertise. And I was just like, you cannot, there's this belief at least, you know, with Americans, we're very individualistic. It's all about individualism. And it's like, you can't afford to be without mentors and guides and experts. And we already know that because nobody, who runs a business does their own taxes, right? 

Or some of these other things. They're not going to represent themselves in court or whatever the case may be, but in other areas, we just kind of, you know, we try to listen to podcasts, read a book, and I was just, it just dawned on me, like you really have to have, you know, obviously you're in a position, John, where you can afford to have maybe a group of mentors around a specific subject, but it's like, if you can afford it, you just can't not afford to be without proper guidance. 

John Berardi: I want to add some color to this too. I agree with you. But I'll say, most of the learning that I've been able to do in a lot of contexts is it doesn't cost anything. Now, I may benefit from having a visible public reputation from my previous career where when I reach out to people and they Google me, they'll be like, oh, okay, this guy's had some success. 

He's not a time waster, right? So, it may not be money that gets me in the door. It may actually be a reputation that precedes me. But honestly, most of my mentorship and most of the new domains that I'm working in have cost me absolutely nothing. I remember I learned this 

This was like my early strategy before I had any money from the late Charles Poliquin, who's a legendary strength coach, now passed. And Charles was a very polarizing figure, and some people love him and some people hated him, and whatever anyone thinks about him as a person, I got to speak with him. He is a few years older than me, so I was just getting started, and he was really pretty established in the field when I was coming in. 

So, I got to go on a couple speaking circuits with him. And from my understanding, he didn't like get along with or like a lot of people out on these things, but for some reason he took me under his wing and was always very nice to me and to my wife, like because she would come sometimes with me. And he would just like say, hey, I come, he'd always eat alone, but then he'd periodically invite me over, say, come eat with me. And then he would just like share things with me, right? 

And I remember I learned so much from those little dinner conversations or whatever, but one that I still talk about is what he calls his brain picking fee. 

So, he used to be like, man, life is too short to try and have to learn everything from scratch that you want to learn, especially if you're like a practitioner who deals with varied clients and varied conditions. You know, he's a strength coach, but he did a lot of nutrition work and he did a lot of work with new technologies and all this kind of stuff.  

You just can't become an expert like by reading the papers on your own. He's like, so what you have to do is find the experts, right? So hey, I want to learn about vitamin D and magnesium, which you brought up earlier. Well, let me just dig in. Nowadays, it's even easier than then before you would have gone to PubMed and seen who the authors who published the most papers on this were. Now you just ask GPT, who's the world's leading expert on magnesium and vitamin D? Bam! Here it is.  

Great. Then you just reach out to that person. Usually it's a professor somewhere, right? And you say, hey, listen, I read a couple of your papers on vitamin D and magnesium. I have a couple of questions that I'd like to ask about that. I think it would really benefit me to know it, but also these clients that I work with, here's what I do. What's your brain picking fee? I think I'll probably only need like 30 minutes or an hour of your time. And I was like, oh, that's pretty cool. I didn't know how it would work. 

But I was like, let me give it a shot. And I'd say like eight, nine times out of 10, they are happy to do a free call with you. You know what I mean? They just say, well, I'm happy to talk to a young person who's super interested in my work and interested in the field, who asked thoughtful questions and offered money for my time. Yes, free, you're the kind of person I want to talk to. You know what I mean? 

So, a lot of my life has been that, like, hey, I really admire your work, I've learned a ton from reading it, you're obviously the world's leader in this thing. I'm thinking about it for these reasons. Is there any chance I could get like 30 minutes of your time? What's your fee for that? And most of the time people say, no fee. 

Here you go, some thoughtful young person who I can mentor because I learned this over the years when I sort of graduated from always needing mentorship from others to be able to provide some mentorship for others, right?  

I don't think folks should ever think of themselves as I was a mentee for years and now, I'm a mentor because if you've done that, you've stopped growing and learning because you still need to learn new stuff.  

And if you do, you need mentors for that, right? But when I started to be able to provide mentorship for others, I realized, oh, the money, the fee, the benefit, the currency, is the feeling of passing your wisdom and knowledge on to someone who's going to do something with it.  

Like, later in your career that's worth way more than money. So anyway, to your point, like, there are some things that I pay for to learn. Most of the things I don't. 

My visual representation of this is who is around me? That seems to have this thing mastered. How can I go stand next to them for a little while? Right? And a great like embodiment of that was, you know, our kids, I never played soccer growing up, but our kids have really taken to the sport and wanted to learn it, get better at it and play it and whatever.  

And I'm like, okay, cool. I'm looking around. Most of the coaches here are just parents volunteering. In some cases, not very good at any aspect of coaching, not the technical or the tactical or even the, you know, team management and relationships. 

So, I'm like, I know, still knowing nothing about soccer. I'm sure I could do a better job if I learn more about the support. So, there's this guy from England who moved to our town. He became the technical director of the club in our town. And I watched him for a little while and I'm like, this guy knows what he's doing. He's really smart. He runs great trainings, whatever.  

So, he was putting together an academy. So, I showed up one day as he was setting up and I just started carrying balls around and setting up cones with him. I introduced myself obviously, whatever.  

And then over time I just like was around. I just showed up, you know, and I didn't like make a big deal about who I was or what I had done in my career or anything. I just was like, hey, I have been watching you. 

I think you are a fantastic coach. I see how you are with the kids. Give me, any menial task you need me to do, as long as I can hang around and learn how you do stuff." And he was like, okay.  

And so, I stood next to him for several months, learned a ton about soccer coaching, drills, tactical, tactical, became a good friend, and then I started coaching our kids in soccer. You know, so it's just stand next to people who have become masters at what you do, or what you want to do, at what they do. 

And then the other criteria that I layer on is what I call believability, and I picked this up from Ray Dalio. This is another example of standing next to smart people. So, for those who don't know, Ray Dalio's one of the wealthiest guys on the planet, ran Bridgewater, which is a big hedge fund.  

So, a good number of years ago, Phil, my business partner, started PN with me and I had discovered this document that Ray had created. It was on the Bridgewater website. It was just an internal document. It was his principles for how to work and how to work together.  

And so, Ray did not have the profile he does nowadays. Like he's become virtually a household name. But back then he was just some guy who ran a hedge fund. You know, pretty wealthy guy. Known in those circles, but that's it. 

And so, Phil and Phil is excellent at this far better than I am. And he just shoots at different targets. Like I find the guy who's mastered his craft locally. Phil goes and finds the guy in the world who's done it, you know? So, he found this document. We published books all our career.  

So, he took this principles document, had it copy-edited and created just a couple copies. He hired one of the best book designers in the world, this guy, Rodrigo Corral had just done Jay-Z's book to make a couple copies of principles that was fully edited, turned into a high-quality book, leather-bound, it's this beautiful object. And then went through the mechanics of trying to get a copy to Ray, right? 

So eventually the book landed on Ray's desk through some interesting twists and turns and machinations. I mean, it's hard to get access to folks like this. And then a couple months later, Phil's in Italy on vacation, gets a phone call. Hey Phil, it's Ray Dalio. How are you? I got your book, right? And he's like, I loved what you did with it. Are you available to come to Connecticut? I'll send my plane. I want to talk to you about a project, right?  

So, Phil and his wife, he sends a plane to Rome to pick them up, flies them back to Connecticut. Uh, and he says, I've been wanting to turn my thoughts into a book for a long time now, and I just, I've tried and I didn't have the right partners. Would you, would you lead this project for me? And Phil's like, well, listen, I have on my own business to run and stuff. 

So, I can't do that, but I can help. So, he helped the team create what you went on to become Amazon book of the year principles, right? Um, the fun story, and then Ray became a mentor of ours and helped us with our sale, helped us think about how to sell a company, how to build a company to sell and how to manage our finances after we sold.  

And so, I picked this tip up that I'm about to share from Ray, but the story itself is a really good example of how do you stand next to smart people and learn from them and mentor with them.  

Never paid Ray a cent. And sold a business for a couple hundred million dollars based on his advice. In fact, he paid Phil. You know what I mean? So how does this happen? So, this is how. But what we picked up from Ray is when you're looking to learn from folks, there's a criteria you need. And he calls it his believability criteria. And there's basically three things in it. One is, has this person done what I'm hoping to do before successfully? So, it's only one. This isn't enough. 

Two, have they done it under different conditions? So, if you're like him and you play the markets and stuff like that, then have they done it in up conditions and down conditions and everything in between successfully, right? If so, we can still talk.  

And then three is, is what they're doing making sense to you in the context that you can understand it, right? Like if I can't understand what you're about to tell me or you're telling me then I can't use it. A. And B. It doesn't make sense in my situation. 

Right? Could I actually use any of that with what I do? So that's the criteria, right? So whether you're trying to do a health and fitness project or an entrepreneurial project or a project in your business or with your family, and you need advice, you need help to make better decisions around those things.  

Because I mean, that's ultimately why we seek out advice. Right? Like whgey get mentorship? Well, there's a lot of information. I'm not sure how to sift and sort it and I'm not sure how to make decisions around it, okay, that's where I need help. 

So, when you're going out for that kind of help, you need these believability-weighted experts, right? And so that's how I think about all this stuff, right? So, whether it's getting your black belt in jujitsu, whether it's learning to coach soccer, whether it's getting your cardiovascular disease in check. 

Go out and read everything you want to if you've got time for that, but make sure to believability weight the advice that you're getting, the reading that you're doing. Because none of this happens in a vacuum.  

I may go out and seek three or four high believability people to learn from, but I'm also reading stuff as I go. And I have to remember, what believability rating should I put on this? 10? 1? Somewhere in between. 

Ted Ryce: Wow, that is a crazy story with Ray Dalio and Phil and you. And I had no idea of that backstory that he mentored you on how to build a business to sell. And that was how you sold PN for hundreds of millions of dollars. That's incredible. I love, and it's funny that he flew Phil from Rome to Connecticut. I couldn't help but to think about the jet lag. With that I've made a lot of international. Oh my gosh. But but such a good such a good example of what we're talking about. I like that you brought up. You know you don't need to pay for mentors. You can the way you but the way you reach out is really important. 

Yeah, that's right. Because they did. They met with him, turned around, went right back to Rome. So, I don't know, maybe I was better and what Pollock and said about life is too short to become an expert in everything that you want to be an expert in.  

So important, by the way, a great episode if you're listening to this podcast, you have no idea who Charles Pollock Quinn is. I think the best interview that I've heard was when he went on Tim Ferriss' show. I really liked that one a lot. So. 

John Berardi: Yeah, that turned out really great. And that was, that was toward the tail end of his life, actually. It may, maybe like two, three years before he passed.  

Ted Ryce: Yeah, yeah. And so, something we can maybe throw into the show notes if you're interested. Lots of good strength gyms without opening up the can of worms on Charles and some of his experiments.  

But yeah, it's a really good lesson for folks who are actively looking for mentors right now or also for people who are just getting started. I know I have some younger. You know, people in their 20s and maybe early 30s listening to this show. So yeah, great talk. Great advice on that and again really appreciated that story. 

John Berardi:  Yeah, thanks. And I would also say one of the games I always play is I always try and look on the flip side of everything, right? So, you're like, okay cool, if you're looking for mentors, here's the stuff we just talked about is what you should be thinking about. What if you are a mentor? Okay?  

The worst sin you can commit if you're listening to a podcast or studying and learning a thing is if someone says, hey, this is for someone looking for mentors and you go, oh, then that's not for me, right? 

That's bad form and you need to get better at it. The next thing you have to say is, hmm, I wonder if I can use that in providing mentorship. Right, like I mentor a lot of people, you're just talking about what those people should be thinking about. Hmm, well, if I want to sell mentorship, for example, okay, so let's say I provide coaching or mentorship in some capacity. Think about the believability criteria. 

Can you demonstrate that you've done this with success before in multiple environments and conditions? And can you make this make sense for people? So, they can both understand what you're talking about, so you're not talking about their heads, and how they can fit it in the context of their lives.  

So just another life lesson that I've learned and something that I try and be really diligent about. When I hear someone giving advice and they're talking in the words and examples, that aren't exactly applicable to my life, instead of checking out, I go, can I use this in what I do? What lesson is in here for me? As you mentioned, I'm back on social media now and I took a year off, no socials, but I started posting again recently. And I did like a post five things I learned from coaching youth sports, right? 

And so, a bunch of people were like, oh, well, this doesn't apply to me. And I was like, oh, this is like the greatest sin of information, uh, acquisition and knowledge, right? You spent time reading it. And then instead of going, how can I use this in my life and the kind of coaching I do or the kind of coaching I want? You spent the time wasted the time to type to me that it wasn't applicable to you.  

What an egregious squandering of an opportunity. You know what I mean? So, I, this is really top of mind for me.  

So, I'm like, hey, if I said anything, it doesn't perfectly fit the examples that you need in your life during this conversation, go back and think about how you can use it to your ends, because I promise there's stuff there for you. 

Ted Ryce: Such a powerful lesson and I think, you know, we could get into a whole conversation about mindset, social media, and, you know, some of the things that happen on social media and some of the behaviors and how it's reflective of some of the, you know, more internal challenges people are facing these days.  

But let's save that for maybe a follow-up podcast. I would also love to have you back, John, and talk more. I loved today's conversation. It was great. 

And I'd love to hear more about the, um, you know, some of the things you talked about, we didn't get too far into the power markers and tests and analytics, but I'd love to have you back on soon and talk about that. If you're up for it.  

John Berardi: Yeah, yeah, that'd be great. I mean, I, you know, I, I don't try and set up a shingle as the leading expert here because it's really just a curiosity for me. But, and but you know what, I mean, I'm... 

Ted Ryce: Your name's not Brian Johnson? Oh really? 

John Berardi: That's right. You know, it's funny, I only discovered Brian Johnson, like, this week. I'm not kidding at all. Yeah, I never heard of him before. And then one of the projects that I'm working on is I'm working with Football Canada.  

So, flag football is a new sport in the Olympics. Our three oldest children play it, I coach it, and it's essentially like a startup sport in most countries, right? I mean, it's different enough from football to be unique and distinct. And now countries need to create pathways to Olympians. 

And so, you know, I've been brought on to help create a high-performance pathway in the sport, because I coach it, I have kids who are in it, I have sports science background.  

Anyway, I was at an ID camp for football this last weekend. One of the other coaches and I were standing around talking, and he was like, hey, do you follow this guy, Brian Johnson at all? Who's Brian Johnson? He's like, oh, I'm going to text you this. 

And so, I spent like a couple of minutes this week going through what Brian Johnson is up to. And I mean, it's intriguing. Like I'll admit, it feels like some percentage of American psycho-ish, you know what I mean?  

But that said, I mean, an interesting exploration of the range of things that are out there for folks who are intrigued by this. And I guess you can be a fly on the wall as he tries to learn stuff and experiments with things, you know.  

So, I can see some pros and cons to that type of project being out in the public domain, but yeah that's not my vibe at all to your point.  

My vibe is like, and you know this from years of following our work at Precision Nutrition, I'm like what are the few things that are actually worth doing in this domain that most people can do in the context of I didn't sell my company for $800 million life. You know what I mean? I have a family life. I have children life. I have other pursuits life, you know?  

When he's swallowing the 86 pills in the morning, you know what I mean? Out of that like organized drawer of the pills, I'm like, whoa, whoa. I mean, this is like, this is step one of the day, and most people are done. You know what I mean? 

This is the first five minutes. So how can we figure out the few tests, you know, and instead of doing them, you know, all year long, you know, is this something you just do every 10 years, you know, just put it in your calendar?  

Like, we have a rural property. And so, you know, it's we have a cistern and you know, we're not connected to city waters that we have a basin that collects all the stuff. 

And I just have on my calendar, like every three years, it's got to be pumped out, you know what I mean? So, it usually happens in the summer, so July in 2026, it's on the Google calendar, you know?  

Like, can we set it up like that? Nice and easy for folks. So yeah, I'd be happy to come back and chat about it, but I will add all the disclaimers, like this is a curiosity for me that I'm just sorting out myself, and here's the things that I'm measuring, you know? Found a whole-body MRI clinic. Went and did my first appointment there. So this is one. 

Ted Ryce: Which one? Prunevo? 

John Berardi: No, there's one. There's one in. So, I think you're talking about which device you mean, you mean?  

Ted Ryce: Well, Prunuvo is a company. Yeah, it's a company who's offering that. And I've been trying to get this CEO on the show, and we haven't been able to connect yet. But I'm. 

John Berardi: Oh, that's exciting. Yeah, I think I read about them. Yeah, I think. Yeah, I don't even know if they have any in Canada. They might have one coming to Toronto. I think I actually put my name on the list because they were going to put one in Toronto. But no, there's an, you know what? Again, these are my bias always. And I'm sure they're a fantastic company. My bias always is to find the practitioners locally that are doing stuff rather than the famous ones. 

You know, again, this is the difference between Phil and I. When he went out to seek mentorship, he's like, who's the top in the world? You know? And my bias is always, well, who can I see on a random Wednesday if I need to? You know? Well, it's going to be someone who lives nearby. I don't want to have to fly from Rome to Connecticut to have a 20-minute chat. You know? So, uh, I love that Phil always provided, as my, my partner, those kinds of opportunities for us, but my bias was always this. 

So yeah, for that company, I know I put my name on the list, but then I just found a whole-body MRI clinic closer to me that is less expensive. And I could see right away. 

Ted Ryce: Yeah, sure, sure. And I just mentioned them because it's something that I'm new to. By the way, I'm somewhat new to Brian Johnson as well. Only a couple of months ago did I learn about him when someone retweeted something. But, but yeah, getting I'm just new to this stuff and I'm 46. I'm about to turn 47. I'm really interested like yourself from a personal perspective.  

I'm know that I'm not the leading expert in longevity by any stretch, but it's something I'm personally interested in and I do want to focus more on helping clients with this. 

And at least guide the way, not maybe, I'm not going to be doing the DNA tests for them, not my company or the MRI, but at least I can help navigate, like what's the Pareto principle here? What's the 20% that makes the difference? What's the 80% of the shining the red light on your, you know, nether regions and all the other craziness? Or the 86 pills, what's the 20, 80 of that? 

John Berardi: Yeah, yeah, that's how I feel too. That would be the conversation we would have where I'm like, hey, I looked at all this stuff and, you know, how do we narrow it down to something I could do?  

Like, I have financial resources, but I don't even have time for all those appointments. You know what I mean? Like, just the appointments, going to the appointments themselves. I'm relatively time-poor. So, how do we figure this out for folks, you know? And how do you just get on where you're not thinking about it every day? 

I don't want to think about this stuff every day. I just want to check in at whatever the right interval is. So that's the other thing. Like how often, you know, is it a blood test every year?  

You know, every five years, a, um, certain, let's say cancer and cardiovascular screenings and every 10 years, a whole body MRI. Is that the right? So that's what I'm kind of working on. What does that look like for folks for me? That's really for me. And then I'll just go into my friends, is anyone interested, curious? You can look at mine and you can, you know, personalize it for you from there. 

Ted Ryce: Two thoughts about that before we wrap things up. I really appreciate that. And I think that, you know, I say I'm not an expert, certainly not, and you're saying that as well. And the reality is that nobody is, that's the problem with longevity right now. Is we don't have long-term studies with people who live their whole lives and here's all the tasks and here's what worked and here's what doesn't. And so, 

John Berardi: Yes, that's exactly right. Yeah, even the folks who the aggregators who write books on this aren't experts on it either. You know, they're just people reading the literature, you know, and I love that they do that. And I read their stuff so that I can learn more. But you're right, there are no true experts. I mean, certainly in extending lifespan. I mean, if anything, as a society, we have the wrong information because lifespan is shortening in North America. 

It's not extending. You know what I mean? So as much lip service as the niche in Silicon Valley or whatever, uh, is, is giving this, uh, the collective lifespan in North America is shorter.  

So, it's going the wrong direction folks. So, we don't really know what we're doing yet, but, um, uh, that's also part of what I like. It's the fun discovery phase, you know, it's like helping out with football Canada and the flag football. I'm like what better a scenario for me? 

It's in the sport that I coach, that my kids do. It's sport science and it's a startup. That's my favorite environment, you know what I mean? Which is tends to be the theme. Like when I look back at my life and say, what projects did you like to get involved in? It's startups, stuff at the beginning. Let's build a town that wasn't there before, you know? Let's build a new sport, right? Let's learn about health and longevity and healthspan at the very beginning, you know? It's my favorite thing. 

Ted Ryce: John, is there, you know, well, two things again. One was about the experts and someone I just had on the show. He was saying that some of the Blue Zone information, meaning the centenarians weren't actually centenarians because they just don't remember when they were born. 

John Berardi: Yeah, errors in birthdate and stuff like that. Yeah, yeah, yeah. 

Ted Ryce: Yeah, so I didn't, I'm very focused on, you know, my business and I didn't catch it, but, but even the blue zones, but I wanted to ask, is there a longevity or health and fitness emphasis on what you're doing in, um, in this community that you're building? 

John Berardi: Mm-hmm. Yeah, no, not necessarily. I mean, uh,  one of the most fun parts I so first of all the climate in Ontario, for example Is that we have way more people coming than we have housing for so it was just a smart decision. Uh, the second reason we did it is One of my partners, uh was a farmer for most of his career and he's at the tail end of that, So there was all this land available, right? and uh the for that land, so the elected governors of the land there had zoned it like high growth.  

So, they're like, this is where we want to build stuff, right? So, I'm like, okay, cool. I can get land there easily. They will approve of growth and development in this area. What can we envision that's pretty cool and special and a little bit different? You know what I mean? So, for that, so you got to put up homes. That's the first thing, right? And you got to put up the kind of homes that they say. 

They're like, we want this number of single-family homes and this number of mixed-use homes and this number of low-density versus high-density homes. But then the rest you get to play jazz with. So, you're like, okay, cool. There's some areas that we can't build houses on. What should we do with that? Well, wouldn't it be cool if there was like a walking trail that went through there with like a little nature observation area? Sweet! And what if we could connect the entire community we're building with walking trails? 

And then every so often there's like a kid's playground. And then what if there was like kids' sports fields at the one end? You know, what if the walking trails connected to schools? Like I always remember when I was younger, before I had kids, I went to visit a good friend of mine in Northern California.  

And like I stayed over the one night and then we were going to walk the kids to school the next day. And this whole community, it was big, had walking trails from the backyards of each house to the school. So, like in the morning, everyone walked to school or biked to school and you saw all your neighbors and you saw all the kids from school.  

And I was like, man, I'd never seen anything like this in my life. This is a cool community design. If you're in that scenario where you have kids that are going to school and you have a family. So, I kind of use that as a little bit of motivation. It's a little bit different, but as some motivation for how to build this thing out. 

So yeah, it's not really, it's a little far from where we live now and where our life is set up, so we're not necessarily going to move there. And it's not necessarily designed to be a health and fitness community. But I think if you are going to build something like that, at least for me, like the exciting part is envisioning how could you add little elements of community building, play space, physical activity space for all the community members it's likely to be a good business decision too, because it's a unique selling feature, you know. 

Ted Ryce: Yeah. Well, thanks for sharing about your projects and what you're up to and into at the moment. And John, I'm serious. I want to get you back on. I'm dying to know. I'm fascinated by our conversation today. And I'm also dying to know about like what you've discovered so far.  

John Berardi: Yeah, that's great. Yeah, yeah, we're both, we both are. Yes, yeah, we both, we all are, right? So that's why this is important. Awesome, well, thank you. Yeah, thanks for the great chat today. I look forward to another one. 

Ted Ryce: So, let's do it. Absolutely. And if you want to see more about what John is up to, you can find him on Instagram @DrJohnBerardi.And of course, that link will be on the show notes page. And you can also go to johnberardi.com.  

John, thanks so much. It was a lot of fun and I'm looking forward to catching up again soon. 

John Berardi: Yeah, me too. Thank you, Ted. Thanks everyone for listening.