The Power of Self-Driven Growth: Zach Schreier’s Diabetes Journey To Being On Shark Tank

Of course. Thanks for having me, Dwight.

I’m excited. As I mentioned to you before, we were starting to record when I came across my email that you wanted to be on my show. I was just like I was stoked. And I am stoked. I think this is going to be an amazing conversation. You have so much to share. And for those that are listening, Zach looks like to be like a very young man and he’s slaying in the world, and I’m sure that you can learn a lot from him. So let’s get at it. Zach, one of the things that I focused on, as I mentioned to you, is a person’s origin story. And the reason for that, for people that are newly watching or listening, is our origin, is our earliest recollections of our lives, not just what happened to us after, let’s say, high school. It’s about what happened to Zach and his life that made him be that driven go getter, being that person that wants to serve and help others. What ticks, what makes Zach tick and what ticks Zach off, we can get into both of those. So, Zach, do me a favor, brother. Tell me your origin story and what key things from your childhood to adulthood that led you to where you’re at currently.

Yeah, sure thing. Well, usually I start in 6th grade because that’s kind of like where my entrepreneur journey has its roots. But maybe for you, I’ll go back a little further. Sure. I was always sort of interested in almost the sort of abstract questions that would almost destabilize people, like things that were still sort of open questions or uncertain, and I would sort of pick up on that. People didn’t actually have a very clear concept of something, and I would usually press pretty hard on that. So I’ve got a recollection of being on vacation with my parents and I was wondering about what the evolutionary value of aesthetics was. Why do we find things beautiful? It doesn’t seem to have much purpose, especially like, places. I was like, I can’t imagine what the world that’s for. And my parents were like, that’s just how it is. I was like, that can’t be right. There has to be reasons. And I remember similarly in 6th grade, right before my diagnosis with diabetes, we were reading a philosophy book. And of course, people are familiar with the problem of other minds, which is that you’re even conscious in there. I can’t know what’s going on in your mind, if there is anything at all. And so I was challenging my classmates to prove to me that they were actually thinking instead of just robots responding to my questions. So that sort of thing always kind of caught my attention. And I guess the thread still stands. A lot of what I do, I say, is informed by a deep philosophical approach. So even though I’m an entrepreneur in the packaged goods space, really I’m wondering about how we should organize our lives. And of course we all need to consume things and the things we consume make a difference to the way we feel and the way we can perform and questions of long term health as well. And so I’m really trying to come at this from a place of understanding the foundations and then building up from there. An additional sort of piece of my journey growing up was getting diagnosed with diabetes when I was eleven. And that really changed the game for me. Before that, I ate whatever the high I wanted. Didn’t think about it. I probably didn’t have a green or a micronutrient in my life up to that point and despite my parents wishes. But starting that, I really had to take my health into my own hands. So that has been, I guess, more than half my life I’ve spent with diabetes, managing my sugar each and every day.

Wow. I love the fact how you talked about even before 6th grade, your person had asked abstract questions which would destabilize people. And I think about that now with my own kids. They’re all adults, five kids, and they’d ask specific questions. And some of them were just nonsense, right? They were just being kids. They’re trying to figure things out. But I had one daughter that would ask questions that would kind of like you said, destabilize a person. And when I think back on it now, it’s a great memory because we’d have long discussions all the way up to now. She’s 30 years old. She looks at things through different lenses. And that’s the way that I get the impression from you. You’re a person that looks at things not so cut and dried, right? You want to know more details, more information, and it makes you feel that’s your grounding, I guess, right. Understanding all the logistics or all the little nuances of things. And I appreciate that because I do too. I’m probably not at the same level as you, but I can appreciate that. I know my one daughter was the same way because abstract questions, I do that to people all the time. I’ll ask them questions and sometimes I watch their body language, as I mentioned before we started recording. I like watching body language and becoming a student of human behavior better every single day. And I’ll ask questions and sometimes people are like, why are you asking that? Because nobody’s ever challenged them to not give a robotic response, as you mentioned. Are people a free thinker or are they a robot like you were doing in 6th grade? I think that is priceless. That speaks volumes about where you’re at in your life. You definitely are a free thinker. And isn’t our society today so as an offshoot question for that, what do you think our associations have to do with our ability to be a person that’s just puking responses, being a robot versus a free thinker? How do you think our associations, not just people, but our associations of what we read, what we watch and listen to, how important do you think that is to us? Being a critical free thinker, being a knowledge leader?

That is actually a really interesting question. And this idea of regurgitating responses versus actually generating them yourself, I think there’s actually probably a mechanistic basis for that meaning. Okay, we’ve got these cortical columns, these units of neurons that encode patterns and each one can basically understand some aspect of the world, maybe even the way that aspect of the world is connected to other aspects of the world via intervention with other pattern recognizers, basically. So that’s this whole sheet of pattern recognizers in our brain, I think people that when people are regurgitating and not really thinking, but repeating, you can almost think of them having stored patterns, stored responses about how a certain domain works, but they can’t actually generate those patterns themselves. So they can’t take you to the roots underneath those patterns and say here’s why these patterns are as they are. They can just remember and tell you that thing that they have decided they believe. So I think of a free thinker, and especially a structured free thinker, somebody that actually can think in a valuable way. Not just somebody that is very open and associative and potentially creative, but not generative. So a free thinker of this kind, I think has a model and they use that model in order to derive answers to questions rather than simply starting with the answers that they’ve remembered.

So do you think that people that go through like I’ll use this as an example. I went through electronics engineering. I wasn’t originally in the finance game and I worked for engineering, electronics engineering. And there was 185 of us that went into that program. It was a two year technical based engineering program at a technical college in my city. And out of the 185 that started with me, only 15 people graduated. 18 went across the stage. Three of them were in the three year program. They struggled, but 15 of us graduated after two years. Do you think that people that are a high level free thinker have a better ability to be the person that’s going to finish school and graduate, because they have the ability to look outside the box and not just stick to that pattern or what the instructor is teaching or what’s in the book. They’re able to develop their own cognizant thought process and that helps them get better and be able to pass.

Right. That’s interesting. I think it depends what process you’re using to be free. So there’s ways of being free that are non compliant, they diverge, so they wouldn’t probably confer benefits in a setting like a school setting. But I think if what you’re doing is asking deeper questions about the material or even deeper questions about adjacent topics that are related, then you might accumulate this foundation from which you can understand the topics that are being discussed basically with more robustness, from more angles. I think it probably depends exactly how you’re using that freedom. It’s not just something that correlates one to one with success.

Just something that popped into my head. I thought, hey, why not ask Zach to see what his opinion is? Because I know the more I ask questions, I could have got off the phone with my son here a while ago and he’s in college and he’s going through some electrical, electronic stuff. He’s in a similar program. And I was just talking to him, I said you need to challenge yourself. You need to go and have conversations with the instructor, other students. Well, what happens if they’re worse off than how I’m feeling? I said well, it can make you think differently, it can challenge your thought process. The biggest problem is I find in society people’s thought process gets stagnant, they jump onto a hamster wheel of life and they go to work, go home, get paid. Their associations are always watching the news or hanging out with people that are just couch potatoes. And I’m not saying a person can enjoy life, they can’t relax. But if you truly want to be a free thinker and not a robot, your associations and what you do, and I love how you said it, the questions we ask, right? Just ask questions. And if the person you’re asking questions to starts retaliating, then you’re asking the wrong person. Go ask the next person until you find like minded people in order to continue to climb. And that’s what my life has been about. I’m a climber. I like climbing and moving forward and why my whole mission statement and book is about helping people live life on purpose and not by accident because we get stuck in those patterns like you put it. So you mentioned as well being since eleven years of age, being a diabetic and just eating whatever you wanted to do, even though your parents would like you to have some green stuff on your plate. Did you find it a challenge? Obviously it’s a lot to have to put on to an eleven year old. What was the thing that really made a difference for you? Did you research and study yourself? Did you have an adult say, hey will help guide you, or have you always been self driven even from that young of an age?

Yeah, actually I never had anybody manage it for me. I did speak with nurses basically daily for a few months as I was diagnosed, but most of what I learned was driven by experimentation on myself. So the doctors and nurses encouraged me to keep a journal of everything I ate, of all my blood sugars, of all the insulin I did just so I would have a record and be able to understand the patterns. So I did that and I took that really seriously and actually did sort of went above and beyond and it did extra experiments. So I would prick my finger 30 times in the morning just to see exactly how my budget was moving. And so over those first few months I got a pretty good handle on what the variability was like, what things created, what kind of outcomes in me. And then of course, as I’ve grown up and introduced new elements to my life, then the ground is always moving and you have to keep adjusting and keep learning. But by having this experimental mindset, I really quickly got a handle at least on the basics.

That’s amazing though, most people, because I know in my industry I do finance, but I also do healthcare and life insurance, critical illness and stuff, and I deal with diabetics all the time. Plus my dad, now in his 80s, has become diabetic, my brother in law in his sixty s. And not everybody is going to be as critical or be a free thinker about it and want to figure it out like you. So for those that don’t really I was going to ask this later on, but since we’re on the topic, can you explain to the listeners and people watching what exactly is type one diabetes? And even if you want to explain diabetes, because there’s more than type one, type two, and it’s a catalyst for change, as was mentioned in the breakdown that I was looking at, not a death sentence. But do you mind sharing more about diabetes and exactly how to affect somebody’s life and some of the things that people can do to better themselves? Maybe you can be that catalyst for them to be a free thinker and go out and live a better life.

Sure, yeah. One thing just as a lead into this I was thinking about as you were talking about your daughter is Dan Dennis, who’s a modern philosopher, probably the most famous modern philosopher, has this idea of competence before comprehension. So typically we know how to do before we actually understand how it is that we do that. And he also got this idea of a need to know basis. So if we can be competent, we may never even need to comprehend in order to function. So what is comprehension even for in that case? If competence can do the job just by itself? So, for example, my calculator has no idea what it means that I’m doing all these things, but it can produce the outputs I’m looking for. So it doesn’t need to know math because it is confident in math, it doesn’t need to understand it. So basically, I think what comprehension is for is that comprehension allows you to generalize. So in the case of diabetes, if I learned that this piece of bread requires me to do this amount of insulin, and I do not understand the principle why it would be this amount of bread and this amount of insulin, then I can’t go and take that to a new case. I wouldn’t be good in a novel situation. But if you start to understand some of the things about glucose metabolism and the role of insulin and the different variables that basically affect how your insulin works in the body things like exercise, things like sleep sickness then you can start to build a causal model, basically a comprehensive understanding of the situation rather than just a competent ability in the situation. And that lets you be just a more general actor, understander, it gives you more control ultimately. Okay? So now diabetes, all types of diabetes basically have to do with insulin and glucose. And so broadly, the similarity across the types is that you have insufficient insulin. Now, more specifically, in the case of type ones, you don’t produce any insulin. So your immune system has attacked the insulin producing cells of your pancreas and basically make it so that you’re no longer producing any insulin pretty quickly over time. And then what that means is that the glucose would pool in your blood because it requires insulin to bring it from the blood to the cells. Now, that’s not a way to live. I mean, you can’t live that way because glucose is required for energy and you need it to be in the cells, not in the blood, and it does damage when it’s pulling in the blood. So all type one diabetics have to be on insulin therapy, meaning they have to give themselves the amount of insulin that their pancreas otherwise would be making if they were a regular person. And that’s a constant battle. You always have to offset any glucose that you eat. You have to basically make sure you don’t overdo it on the insulin or underdo it on the insulin in order to keep sugar flat. And yes, it’s quite a trick. Just to give just some sense of how difficult this is actually. Let’s say you’re a regular person eating about 200 grams of carbohydrate per day. 200 grams of carbohydrate, if I did not do any insulin, would take my sugar from about 100 milligrams per deciliter, which is the standard amount for everybody, all the way up to 900 milligrams per deciliter, which would put me in a coma. So if I just had a regular day like a regular person and didn’t think about my diabetes and ate like normal, then I would be in the hospital by the end of the day. So that’s just how intensive is that.

What they call is that similar to what they would call the Eagle to diabetic shock? Is that what I’ve heard that term before?

Yeah, I’ve heard diabetic shock, too, and I’m not sure that it has a technical definition. I think it might be grouping a bunch of different things that can happen.

Generalizing.

Yeah, right. Generalizing, but not in the way that confers additional comprehension.

Yeah, exactly. Which would frustrate you and my absolutely. That’s why I just thought I’d ask, because I’ve heard it so often. Even in my industry, they throw that term around. Right.

Yeah. So you could have complications if you went low. So if your sugar was, say, 50 or lower, you might have a seizure, you might pass out. In the worst case, your brain could stop functioning after some time. So I compare that to, like, you’re flying plane close to the ground, and you absolutely can’t hit the ground. That’s the first rule. Now, if your sugar is too high, then you can have diabetic ketoacidosis, meaning you’re burning fat and producing byproducts, and those are acidic, and then your organs are compromised as a result of that. So I think those are maybe sort of two end of the diabetic shock spectrum. So type two diabetes, basically, you still have the ability to produce insulin. It may not be enough insulin, given your lifestyle and the way in which your cells are sensitive or not to insulin. So basically, type one has zero insulin, and type two has not enough, given the circumstances. But in the case of a type two, you can modulate that by doing things like exercise and modified diet in order to reduce your insulin needs so that you might produce enough and actually sensitize your cells to insulin so that they respond and you need less of it.

Okay. Yeah. My oldest daughter, which I haven’t even thought of mentioning her, she was diagnosed with diabetes probably four or five years ago. She’s got a sensor on her arm that actually she’s advanced and now she can use I think it’s her she uses her phone, but she has to constantly check her sugar levels and watch and track what she eats because she’s type one. And then I have family members that are type two. And is diabetes in society today really taken seriously enough? Because I know so many people that are diabetic. When I think about it, in the realm of my clients and friends and family, is it worse than people realize, or is it just it is what it is. I don’t understand I haven’t looked at the statistics of it, but obviously you probably would know. Is it something that’s becoming worse in our society because of all the junk that people ingest? And I’m not talking just too much sugar and processed foods, I’m talking about the dyes, I’m talking about everything that we eat as a nutritional society. Has it made diabetes worse over the years? Like are the numbers spiking in North America?

Yeah, they definitely are. So probably worth also treating type one two separately here type one is becoming more prevalent and onset is happening sooner in life. So I think it used to be like the average age of diagnosis is like twelve and now it’s like ten. It’s thought to be a hereditary disease, meaning it’s supposedly not that sensitive to lifestyle factors at least whether it happens or not in your life is basically determined by genetics. But this earlier onset thing would indicate that there’s some lifestyle inputs at least to when you come down with it. And as you mentioned, it might be toxic load from things that we’re having in the environment, things in our food, things that we’re breathing that might contribute to this autoimmune response that ends up leading to diabetes. Type two is also definitely getting more prevalent. Oh, just for a sense of the numbers, I think about one in 200 people in America have type one diabetes.

Wow.

It used to be like one in 500 and it is worse than people think in the sense of it’s quite an intensive and expensive disease to manage. There are no days off, there’s really no hours off and so it’s quite a burden for people that have it. And I’m lucky that I like numbers, I like systems and so I can at least be myself most of the time while managing it. But I imagine somebody that is not as interested in systems would really have a difficult time with it.

Well, they need more technology. I know my daughter when she first was managing in hers and then went to a point now years later where she doesn’t have to prick herself all the time, whatever is embedded in her arm or whatever and it’s made it easier for her. She’s very analytical but it’s made her life easier to manage because she has other alpha issues besides diabetes, unfortunately in her mid thirty s. And I think technology would be a blessing for many people today because we probably have a lot higher death rate because of diabetes as well. If this was in the heard of people dying from diabetes, do you know much about that? Are people being able to manage it better because the technology, even though they’re not analytical like you yeah, I think they are.

I think we definitely have gotten better at management and hopefully that means the complications are lessening, including the life expectancy issue. So yeah, as you’re mentioning, I looked at some cohort studies from diabetics in the people that have now aged 50 to 70 years since diagnosis. And those numbers are pretty dismal. So diabetes was somewhat of a life sentence, but it’s getting less so. So I think I saw some some numbers out of Scandinavia from like a cohort from the 90s or the like type ones that could expect roughly a decade less than peers. But my hope, and actually what I’ve heard from doctors, is that based on how well we’re managing it now, hopefully it would just be a matter of a couple of years. But that is something that has weighed on me somewhat and definitely contributed to my fixation on health. The issue really is cardiovascular complications. There is a higher cancer rate also because insulin is effectively a cancer promoting hormone. Okay, but cardiovascular disease is the main issue that type ones run into, and that’s because basically all this variability in the glucose in the blood does put a strain on basically all your blood vessels and your heart. So, yeah, that’s something that’s freaked me out, for sure. But really what I can do is just live as well as possible and.

Try to spread the word though. Like spread the word and communicate about it and let people that have diabetes know that they can have hope, that there’s solutions, they can put some effort in or reach out to somebody that can coach and help them because not everybody’s going to be at as a high level of a thinker or a doer as that is. Right. So good for you for being willing to be vulnerable and share about it. Because I do know people that have diabetes that don’t want to talk about it, they ignore it or they sneak away from their loved one that is trying to help them and they cheat. Right. I know my brother in law, he’s got diabetes and my sister is very going to use the word anal about it, very matter of fact. She makes sure he tests this and this and that and he might cheat once in a while. Well, she knows when he cheats even if he’s not around her because she’s tracking and journaling and following all the numbers. Right. So I get it, people listening, it’s no different than anything in life. If it’s worthwhile to you, you’ll figure it out. Yes, you might miss something, but there’s always something that can replace it. You got to tell yourself, what is my endgame? What is the prize I’m looking for? My prize is a healthy life longevity. If I have to have insulin, like Zach saying, it can cause complications in regards to cancer, et cetera. So my prize is living a healthier life. So you can’t eat that. Oh, well, like myself, I’ve gotten over the last 20 years because I have two kids that are not kids anymore. They’re adults that had nutritional issues. And I started tracking and I get people what are you doing? Well, I got a journal. What are you journaling for? Well, I’m making this because I was a single dad of my five kids. So I cooked their meals and I’d literally see how this child would respond. And I’d see the next day, okay, this is something different. And I literally would track and I was the guy in the grocery store already 20 years ago. You don’t see that very often looking at the labels, right? And people were like, dad, can’t we just be like everybody else and toss the stuff in the cart? No, we can’t. Dad. My friends, they’re eating out of a box. Their mom gets home and she’s tired and cooks chicken nuggets and stuff out of a box. And again, I’m not here to criticize people because they’re living their life. Mine was I got to figure out how to cook for my kids in 30 to 45 minutes. Nutritional meal, it’s got to have a certain amount of vegetables. It’s got to have protein. And I was already studying macros back then and can you imagine? I’m serious. And people would be like, what are you doing? You got any pop? No, I don’t have pop in my house. Why? Because I’d be a child abuser. Well, what do you mean? Well, people give pop to their kids and those listening, it’s going offend some people and sorry, but not sorry. You give a kid pop and it triggers what? It triggers glucose. It triggers their body to act differently. They’re behaviorally different. And what the parents do, they get mad at them, they punish them, they yell at them because they’re bouncing all over the walls. And guess what they give them the ignition to the dynamite called a tan of pop. So I stopped having pop in my house when my kids were before. Some of them weren’t even teenagers yet. I just started doing more research because I was pattern taught, like we talked earlier. You mentioned about patterns. I was taught patterns as a kid. My mom and dad had a pop fridge and they had here’s the chips, my grandparents, here’s the chocolate bars. It was all about, let’s pleasure ourselves with all this non nutritional stuff that’s going to make us go through energy levels, highs and lows and spikes. So maybe it was a good thing that one of my kids was starting to have health issues and I didn’t like what the health professionals were saying. And being analytical like I am, I started journaling everything. I started reading as much as I could. Obviously there’s more information on the internet now today than there was back then. But even buying stuff now today, there’s so much better things, right, and stuff that’s not sugar based, that has natural sweeteners. Because I don’t like artificial sweeteners whatsoever, because I’ve done so much research on what it does to your brain and what it does to your body, artificial sweeteners. But anyway. We could spend the whole podcast talking about this, but I really appreciate you sharing, brother. Is there anything else you want to add before we go on to the next thing?

Yeah, sure. You asked about how large a problem this is and whether we drive awareness. I think for type one, the thing that would help is just if people just more recognition as to the onset. Because for me, it was a surprise. My parents had no idea what was going on, lost a lot of weight, I felt very sick. And then finally I showed up to the hospital a month later and they know immediately what’s going on. So I do think awareness would help, at least to minimize some of that upfront difficulty that people experience when as they’re diagnosed. But for society at large, type two is the larger problem. I think about 10% of us has type two diabetes. So that’s a pretty significant strain on the healthcare system and most importantly, on people’s quality of life. And so, as you’re saying, I wouldn’t even necessarily frame it in terms of cheating, staying good and cheating. I would think about holistically upgrading your life so that your body is functioning better. And if you manage to do that, then potentially you can sometimes have a piece of cake or something like that.

But a person like you knows how to offset that because you’re tracking everything and know exactly what is going to cause the spike and how to offset it. The average consumer just doesn’t have that. I’ve dealt with too many of them. So I agree with you. You could have that piece of cake. But I look at the fact of all the things that I’ve taken out of my diet over the last five years, like root vegetables and stuff, things that they’re starchy that can cause your sugar levels to go up and how it would make me think. My thought process, my brain fog went away when I started doing intermittent fasting and different things over the last five years. And really, at the end of the day, to live a life where our body, which is an engine, runs well, it takes effort. Yeah, you look at the people that go to the gym and they work out and they come out eating a Snickers bar. Like, come on. I’m not saying the Snickers bar isn’t good, but come on. We need to educate and help society elevate. It would be so much better for our healthcare system. It would take such a burden off of it. And we’d have people living longer. We’d have people that aren’t as grumpy going to the carb hunger where they need to eat because all they live is a life of eating carbs. Not that carbs are completely bad, but there’s a difference between good and bad carbs, as you know for sure.

I think it’s just sort of coming into public consciousness now that what we eat changes the way we feel. And it’s not only the sort of energy and fitness side of things, it’s also like mentally, psychologically, having a healthy diet because of more stable sugar, also because of nutrients that go and actually build the building blocks of a functioning brain. All those things can make a very positive difference to the way we feel. And I think there is this sort of detachment between mind and body. We think that you either do therapy or you medicate the brain and then the body is just a whole different question. But I think as it happens, the way we feel is a system for rendering the states or the value of the states of things are happening in the world, things are happening in the brain, things are happening in the body. And so there might not be any levers that you have to pull besides just eating better things and aligning your circadian with your sleep and your eating. And then all of a sudden you thought you were worried about X, Y and Z, but it turned out you were just feeling unhealthy and feeling bad as a result of that. So I think that is a major lever for people to pull.

The direct correlation between nutrition and how we feel is so prevalent. Again, we could talk the whole podcast about this. I’m enjoying this a lot because obviously you most likely are at a way higher level than I am in regards to it because of your diabetes. I’m not diabetic, but I know just changing nutrition and following certain processes and have I had those moments where I struggle? Yeah, usually it’s because I’m traveling for business or whatever. I’m in the US. And it’s really difficult, depending on where you are at, to follow a specific nutritional lifestyle. Right, because I don’t call it dieting. Everything’s dieting. People that eat meat and potatoes, that’s a North American diet. People that are vegetarian, that’s a, that’s a diet. That’s a nutritional diet. People are so hung up on the word and they’ll say, well, you’re dieting. I said, no, this is a nutritional lifestyle. This is the way I live. I track these macros. This is what I do. Why do you do it? Because I feel better, my energy is better. I don’t have aches and pains like I used to do. Inflammation is lower. Like people listening. Having a proper nutritional diet, it’s a game changer. That’s the way I can put it. And hopefully they’ll figure it out, reach out to you or reach out to me or use that little tool called Google and start watching some great videos. There’s people that talk about it and yeah, anyway, we’re going to move on because otherwise I won’t get through all the other great questions I have for you, if you wouldn’t mind. So, Zach, you co founded Quavos as a freshman in college. Most are focusing on studying and passing classes. Brother, you may be aware as well. However, what changed to want to get you to pioneer the development of healthy chips made from egg whites?

Sure, yeah. Frankly, I might not have been as focused on studying and passing classes as my parents would have hoped.

That’s why I brought it up. Because dude, I was a college dude. My kids have gone to college and university and the difference between me and other parents and my kids, we’re real and we’re honest with one another. I’ll tell them, you know what? Hey, I did stupid stuff. Let’s get past it. Thanks for sharing. Let’s talk about it and let’s move on, right? We are a culmination of our life mistakes and turn them into lessons and move on. So continue on, please.

Sure. Well, I’ll just share one little story about that actually. So at the end of freshman year of college, this is not actually because of the business, by the way. This was just me being lazy and frankly wanted to smoke pot with friends instead of studying. So I had a statistics class and we had to learn R, which is like a language for doing stats. And it was the most unappealing thing in the world to me to learn that. And so I decided to pass the other class just so I wouldn’t have to do all that well. So I started not doing the assignments, showing up only once in a while. And then by the time the final came around, I had a 62% order to pass the class. I needed the 60 or above. So I had to spend my whole finals period basically learning all the staff that I missed. And fortunately it worked out. I didn’t have to come home with a failing grade, but I came pretty darn close.

I have things like that too. I can remember taking statistical analysis and oh my gosh, some of the unappealing good way to put it, unappealing, useless is another way to put it stuff that we get taught and even what my son is going through in school right now. And I told him, I said, you know what, keep your enterprise. That useless stuff. You’ll never have to use it. But really it’s teaching you to be a more of a critical thinker and see whether or not you’re the cream that rises to the top or are you going to be the person that’s a quitter. Right? Maybe like you realized at the last moment you had to put the pedal to the metal, but you did it. That’s the difference between you and most of society. And I’m not here to pick on society, but the correlation of numbers between people being successful or being robots in life and following the process of what society does. The numbers of people that are leaders are small compared to the followers. Right. There’s very few leaders. And people in our world need people like you that are analytical, that are critical thinkers that are free thinkers that are willing to share and willing to learn and develop and climb and share that story because somebody only one person listening to this podcast, only one, and it triggers them to change their nutritional lifestyle. Or maybe they’re diabetic type one, type two, and they seek more help. We’ve done our job, brother. One person is all I’m looking for. And people go, oh, you should try hitting the masses. You know what? I’d rather in darts. You’re not hitting the masses. You’re looking for a bullseye. I’m looking for one. Right, so continue on. What happened in so you had that class and you managed to pass it. What happened with you being pioneering the development of a healthy chip made with egg whites? What was it? Did it have to do with the fact because you were diabetic and you were sick and tired of trying to find healthy chips to eat?

Yes, certainly. When I was diagnosed, I got pretty into eggs as just like a really convenient snack, because eggs don’t have any carbs, and carbs are the thing that you have to manage. It’s not to say carbs are bad. In fact, diabetics should have some carbs, but sometimes it’s easier to avoid the hassle and avoid the variability. So I loved eggs for that reason. I discovered pretty early on that I like those flaky bits that would coat the pan. We didn’t use, fortunately, nonstick pan in our house, and so I would always scrape those off on my plate, and I sort of recognized that that was like a crunchy little bit that wasn’t carvey, like other crackers or other chips were. Actually, going into freshman year college, I revisited this idea. I’m not sure when I came up with it in the first place. I think probably end of high school. I’m sorry, end of middle school, early high school. But right after high school, I had some free time, and I called up my best friend and I said, hey, I’m going to work on those egg chips again. Do you want to come over and experiment with me? And so we did. We spent a few weeks, I think, kind of using different devices. We used the air fryer, we used the pan, we use the toaster, we use the microwave, and just played around, didn’t get too far. But then kind of had in mind that maybe this was a business we would start after college. We would try to make it happen. And then actually, his sophomore year of college, he applied to an incubator at his school, and basically we got accepted. We made the finals, we won the pitch competition. We got a small check from the school, and then that kind of kicked things off. So by the summer after my sophomore year, we kind of had a business that was starting at that point, decided to take a year out of school to work on that, getting that product off the ground. Apologies. My dogs are in the background here.

That’s okay. That’s life, brother. Right? Anybody listening, watching it happens. I’ve had a single data interviewed in the first year. He had his little boy. He was like literally single parent of a little four year old boy. And one moment he was eating and his dad was like, this is going to happen. I said that’s, okay. I left it in the podcast because people laughed. You know what? This is life. I don’t want this to be a robot. Is it what it is, right? So he was dealing with his little boy, even going to the bathroom, right? It was whatever, right? Some of it. Some of it I had to add it out because it was a little too much. But most of it I left in. So don’t ever apologize. So that’s amazing, though, that you like the eggs, because I’m quite familiar. I love eggs, too, and being a person that keeps my carbs, I track my carbs and keep them low. And I only focus on good net carbs. I’m more focused on healthy fats and proteins. I like eggs, too. And I smiled when you said that because I like the crispy things and the pan, too. So I’m going to have to definitely check out your product. I don’t even know if it’s available because I’m in Canada. I don’t know if I mentioned that to you or not. So you got the small check. You took a year off, freshman part of me, after your sophomore year. Where did it go on from there? What was the journey like continuing on from that point?

Yeah, so that year we really had the foundation. So we raised capital. We developed the product in the home kitchen and then scaled it up to a manufacturing process at a commercial kitchen space and developed a package. Sort of learned what we needed to know in order to be able to distribute that online and then also in retail stores. We landed our first retailers that year, actually, some of it was just like in person, walking in and giving it back to the store owner. But we were on a local TV show and had a competition, and the prize was a contract with a retailer. And so, yeah, all that happened. It was a blitz that year, just in terms of one thing after the next.

What year was that?

That was 2018 to 2019. Summer 2018.

Wow. Not very long ago.

Yeah. But what I would say is even though there was a lot going on, I wanted more academic stimulus again. I was feeling fairly lonely and somewhat bored. It felt like, just, this is going to take forever, and I really want to be in a social environment again because I was just back at home living with the parents, and my only social life was with my co founder and investors. And things of that sort, but I really wanted that academic engagement again. It was sort of like philosophy was just calling to me every single night, and I wanted to kind of finish up the work day in order to be able to think about the things I love thinking about. So I was really grateful to have had that year, and it taught me a lot. But I ended up going back to school. My cofounder, Nick, continued to work on the business full time. Actually, he has these last five years. And so he didn’t even go back to school and graduate. He just became a full time entrepreneur.

Wow. And your newest venture, which is with Vincent, right? That’s right, Nick. So he’s running the ship. And are you still quite involved with it, or are you just a silent partner that helps push along the process? Are you still quite involved?

Yeah, I’ve been a board member. So we were co founders, co CEOs, and I decided to give the reins over to Nick. But at that point, we set up a formal board. We found a third member.

Wow.

Yeah. And I became a board member. I guess we’ve got officially quarterly check ins on the books, but there’s always stuff that comes up. And I talked to Nick a good amount. We’ve had maybe 20 or so strategic considerations that have been kind of like big picture stuff. And those things Nick and I always talk about.

Well, congratulations, though. You’re welcome. You’re the type person I love being associated with and developing friendships and networking with, because though I may be in my 50s, I’m not dead yet. People that are listening, I still have desires and dreams. You mentioned, Zach, that you were just kind of feeling lonely and kind of had a sink in life, because you’re a person that has a thirst for learning, thirst for growing, and what I tell people to climb. I’ve been in narrative to what they call a valley of despair. And I think to myself, why am I here? It’s usually because my brain, which is a computer just like yours, and everybody listening or watching it doesn’t know the difference between the truth and the lie. I got to feed it what I want to feed it, and it wants to learn. And then a majority of the population camps their brain when they get into their already into their mid 20s, maybe late 20s, early thirty, s. And they wonder why their emotional state of mind is lonely, camped, sad, depressed. Because they’re thinking about the past. They’re anxious about the future. They forgot their brains and computer feed it some knowledge. And you decided to go back to school. Good for you. I’m the same way. I’m constantly learning, brother. And I tell people, they laugh. Some people understand it, some people laugh. I’m a working project till the day I take my last breath. I want to learn more I don’t read books like I used to. I listen to books. It’s just timing my Audible account. I’ve always got two or three books and they go depending on my mindset. I’m listening to this book. Oh, I want to listen to this one today. So I got multiple books. I got podcasts I’m not listening to again, story listeners of this chokes you. But I don’t listen to true crime podcasts. I listen to podcasts fry people that are entrepreneurs, that are critical thinkers, that are people that are going to help elevate my life. Some of them are nutritional, some of them are business. Some of them are just, you know, hey, you thought about this. Make things that make you go, you know what I mean? So I can appreciate what you were saying, going back to school and just keeping on keeping on feeding that brain ears and your free thinking process and the ability to be a thought leader. And most people don’t even understand what a thought leader is, won’t get into that. But in your case, you’re one of those, you are a thought leader in my mind and a very short period of time. I can see that. And I’m going to thank you for society, for being a person that is a thought leader and wanting to change people’s perspective about life, helping them with their nutrition and just pushing the needle forward. Good for you.

Well, thank you. Okay, I have one more piece about the childhood. I’d love that, but it relates to this point. I was always looking for arbitrage opportunities. I wanted to make money for free. I wanted to find that little hack where explain Arbitrage to people.

I know what arbitrage is. Explain that term before you continue on because there’s a lot of people that are not going to know what it means, unfortunately.

Yeah, so Arbitrage is when you can basically reliably transact in a way where you capture profits. So it said differently, like somebody has this thing they’re selling over here for $2. Somebody else has stated an interest to buy something, the equivalent thing for $3 and they’re not talking to each other. If they were talking to each other, then they would figure out somewhere between two and three, maybe 250 and everybody walks away happy. But if you see the person selling, the person buying and realize there’s a dollar gap, then you can go buy that thing, sell that thing, make the dollar. So it depends on having basically visibility and reliability in the transactions. If it’s only that the person might buy it for $3, then you’re taking a risk. But if it’s that you know they will, then there’s an opportunity that where you can guarantee profits.

That’s good explanation.

Thank you. So I wanted to trade stocks and options and all this stuff to just figure out how to cheat the system almost or not even cheat it, but just like hack it figure out the way to do it. Over the last maybe five issue years, I have come in the mentality that the real hack is deeper knowledge and the real hack is cooperating and just trusting that if you do good, you’ll get good. And so I’ve moved away from that sort of orientation towards just like, figuring out the easy way. The real easy way is actually just persistence and keep your expectations low and your efforts high and keep going.

Awesome. This is an amazing conversation, but yeah, we really at the end of the day, life is in session. I say this all the time. This isn’t a dress rehearsal. And to live your best life involves being curious and then satiating that curiosity by seeking out knowledge. There’s so much knowledge. People listening or watching. You know that book that you’ve had sitting on your shelf that you’ve never cracked a spine? Guess what? There’s so much knowledge in it. Right? Obviously, if it’s fictional, not so much, but nonfictional, we just need to what’s your passion? Like? I sit and have conversations with people that I coach. And again, my brand is Give a Heck. Right? My podcast is give a heck. My mantra has been for 20 years now in my finance industry, now that I’ve gravitated into brand is how to help people live life on purpose and not by accident. Well, that’s helping them understand their passion, their why. Why do you want to do that, Zach? Blah, blah, blah. Why is that? And continuing to have those good questions to make people’s brain expand and actually stop being camped is thrilling to me, right. Because it helps me continue to grow. And I know you’re a person that’s inquisitive and you’re always wanting to feed yourself. So again, I can’t help but raise the fact of who you are as an individual and the fact that you’re out serving others. And thank you again and those listening and watching, hopefully you’re appreciative of people like Zach and how he’s going out and working hard to develop and curtail what he’s sharing with the world, but he’s using himself as the vessel and trial and error. Because I guarantee you’ve had situations, Zach, where things aren’t perfect, you’ve had to recorrect. And just like, somebody, they have a mentor or somebody that helps correct their lives or just maybe they’re just somebody that you can talk to and you realize it yourself just by talking to them. Maybe that’s your type of person that’s that way. But good for you. I appreciate your brother.

Yeah. Thank you.

You’re welcome. So, Zach, you appeared on ABC’s Shark Tank in 2021. What was that process like from the application to finally securing an investor? What was that whole tell us the story of Shark Tank and how that came about and you getting involved with that.

Yeah, sure. Shark Tank actually saw us written up in a magazine, and so their producers reached out and said, we’d like you to apply if you want. And it had always been a dream for us. Both of our families had washed Shark Tank growing up, and we always had it kind of in mind that with Quavos, we’d want to be in the tank eventually. So we applied. We went through the whole process. This was 2019, and we got accepted, and then it must have been September of 2019, we flew out to La. And we were on the set ready to film, and essentially, we were 8th in line on that first day of filming, and things were running a little slow. And there’s a family on set, and kids can’t be on set for more than 6 hours, so they bump that family up right in front of us. And so it’s like 530, and the family is going, and we’re still waiting our turn, and then they come and say, oh, the sharks are getting tired, and so we’re going to have you come back tomorrow. And we’re like, oh, that’s too bad. We spent all day getting excited for this, and now it’s tomorrow. And then we got a call that night, hey, tomorrow’s looking pretty busy. Come back next year. So flew home.

I’m not trying to offend anybody, but that’s just wrong. That’s rude. Like, holy they’re devaluating the fact of your time, not just our time, where seconds tick your brain power, everything. Oh, wow. So continue on. Sorry.

Well, one thing that I’m not sure if this was part of their calculus, but I think we weren’t very ready. There’s a bunch of different aspects to the presentation on Shark Tank. You’ve got your display, you’ve got your pitch, you’ve got the Q and A, you’ve got the ask. So you know just how much you’re asking for, what percent of equity. You’ve got, like, the whole story of your business so far. You’ve got your traction. So all these things kind of play into the quality of your appearance on the show. And frankly, we’re lacking on a number of those different measures. So I think it was kind of blessing disguise that we came back the following year, that, you know, a year later, we, like, basically had ten X as much revenue as we did in 2019. So, yeah, that that was a we were we were very glad with how it took out, but yeah, that day was definitely disappointing. It felt like we were so close.

So you say a year later, you’re basically ten extra revenue. When you say ten X, I think a grant grant cardone. But at the end of the day, I guess it is what people say. Sometimes things happen for rhyme or a reason. We don’t understand it. Life happens for us, not to us, and we just have to go with the flow. So good for you that you did that. So what happened a year later? You’re better prepared. You’re on track, and you show up at Shark Tank.

That’s right. And it was 2020. So folks know what happened in 2020. And so we were basically cooped up in a hotel room for eight days, quarantining before the show incident even allowed in the hallway. Now, it was a nice spot, and that also was actually a blessing disguise because we had the whole week just to focus on getting ready. We watched a lot of the show each night. We did a lot of pitch practice. We would call mentors and they would kind of grill us like the sharks would. And so that was a very helpful kind of like, preparatory week for us. We really got in the headspace, and then it went well. Of course we were nervous, but also jittery and excited, and we felt ready. And so I think when we went out there, we had enough confidence because we knew we had the answers we needed.

Wow. Congratulations. I was an avid watcher of Shark Tank, my son and I, when he was younger, I had PVR and we’d watch it all the time. The last few years, I’ve been so busy with my own finance practice and building my brand of give a heck that I haven’t watched it. So obviously, I’ve never seen an episode that you’re on. Hopefully I can find it on YouTube and check it out. But congratulations. So you ended up getting securing an investment, and where has it gone from there? What’s it been like working with that shark?

Yeah, our relationship has been very good. Daniel has been super helpful with just advice on brand advice, on channel strategy, growth, fundraising, all of that. And so we’re very grateful that we walked away with that relationship. We’ve had challenges, for sure. Cost has been a primary challenge for us, and so we’ve had to make the manufacturing process more efficient without sacrificing quality. And that took a lot of effort and a lot of capital went into that. And actually, I think we could say this now because it’s somewhat public. We actually just did a partial exit, so we just basically handed over the reins to a new owner and CEO. And that happened just this month, I think, January 23 or 24th. That closed. We’re really happy with how the whole journey took out. I don’t think I can provide details on the transaction.

That’s fine. You don’t have to. That’s fine. It’s just very interesting that you go from Quevos to now, this newer venture, to being on Shark Tank, to already getting to a point where you have a partial exit from it. What’s next for you?

Well, I guess what’s next is the second venture I’m working on called Livestocks.

Okay, so it is lifestyle. Okay?

It is livestocks. Yeah, it partializes. It was for Quavos, and actually I took my payout from that and invested it straight into Lifestyles. So basically what we’re doing with Lifestyles is, as we’ve spoken about nutrition. Enables you to be your best self. And there’s certain ingredients that are very powerful at basically supporting different aspects of cognition and physical wellness. So we’re taking delicious science backed products infused with these powerful supplements and nutritional ingredients and basically creating products that really raise people up in a way that they can notice and also that helps them in the long run. So basically I’ll compare it to a capsule. So if I give you a capsule, say of turmeric or of a B vitamin or whatever it is, you might get an immediate effect from that. You might get a long term effect from it. You probably won’t enjoy the consumption experience so much. It will be something that you just have to do and you have to remember to do so. Our thesis is that if we combine powerful supplements into single formulations that are balanced and repeatedly effective and we make those supplement combos delicious and enjoyable to consume, then people are going to really actually enjoy including them in their day. So they’re going to look forward to taking these things. They’re going to feel better after they take them and they’re going to be benefited in the long run. So our very first product along these lines is a coffee creamer. It’s MCT based. So it’s a healthy fat, it’s vegan and keto. And then we have a supplement stack that is basically designed to support cognitive functioning. It makes you feel good immediately and it supports brain function over the long run. I’m really confident about that product. I think people already 70% of Americans consume coffee every day and most adds something to the coffee. Some have it black, but everybody knows that the caffeine is a temporary fix. But then you probably need a second cup in like 4 hours. There is that afternoon crash. And so what we’ve discovered is that the right ingredients can actually make it so that you need less caffeine and it lasts longer, it feels better, and it doesn’t come with some of these deficits like the crash.

Well, the MCT is important. A lot of people don’t understand what healthy fats are. And I’ve tried different creamers and stuff. Most of them just number one. It’s not just the fact of being healthy, it’s got to taste good or what are we worried about? I personally, I’m drinking coffee right now. I use sweet leafs. I use a stevia, liquid stevia in there. I put a little bit of liquid stevia in for flavoring. Otherwise I stopped. Majority of my life, I always was that person that put in, you put in at one time sugar. Obviously what sugar does, then you put in cream. And the heavy cream, which is what I still use on the weekends, is a healthy fat. It still affects something that I want to get into another conversation with before we wrap up the podcast. And that’s fasting. You got to be so careful with even heavy cream. Though it may not be carb based, it can still a calorie and it still throws out your fasting. So unless there’s something else you want to add, I’d like to get into the conversation of fasting, if you wouldn’t mind.

Sure. Yeah. Well, actually what I will add is you should go ahead and try our MCT. We use MCT vanilla flavor and stevia. And so it’s like totally clean, natural. The MCT is also bound to Acacia fiber, and that’s how it is a powderized MCT. Okay, so basically there’s really nothing in there.

And the brand is smart Stacks.

It’s livestocks.

Lifestyle.

Sorry.

I apologize.

No worries.

Lifestyle. Definitely the hardest thing though, for me in Canada is getting the great stuff that I can get from other countries like the US. I’ve got a couple of different companies that ship to Canada, like New Life Marketing, it’s called. Iherb. So hopefully there’s somebody online that because I doubt the product would be on our shelves in Canada. It would be very hard to find. But there’s a lot of great online companies, so I’d love to try it. Listeners, check it out. If you’re like me looking for a great coffee cream here, because I still like that cream taste. This is something that we need to check out, especially when it’s MCT based. And you said it’s vanilla. That’s even better.

Yeah, we’ve got three flavors.

Oh, wow. Congratulations, man. That’s awesome.

Thank you. Unfortunately, we’re operating just a single channel right now, which is our own shopify website.

Oh, you have a shopify website. Okay. What is it?

Lifestacks.com.

Okay.

We do ship to Canada.

Oh, dear.

But let me know if you have any trouble with checkout. Sometimes shopify is a little buggy when we’re shipping to Canada, but I can manually override anything.

So I have a connection now? Is that what you’re saying? I have an end to making sure I can get this fabulous product and try it out, because I will try it out. I’m here to give a heck about as I mentioned before we started recording, I’m here to serve you. And what can I do for you to help you better your circumstances so that you can continue to serve others? Because in my life, the more I serve others, I’m always taken care of the universe, God, whatever people believe in comes back and says, good on you for doing the right things. And I’m always taken care of right. So I will make sure that goes into the show notes as well. For those that are listening, if you missed it, don’t worry about it. Go to giveaheck.com go into the show notes and you will make sure that that link is in there for lifestyle.com. And yeah, I can’t wait now to try that product. That’s awesome to find out that you ship to this. So I’m glad we got into that conversation. So, Zach, let us talk about fasting and why most fasting protocols do not work and cause failure. I have done intermittent fasting now for over five years. I do a 16 and eight, whether it’s a good way to fast or not. But that’s how I’ve been doing and how I maintain my weight and my actual energy levels, and my thought process is even affected by my fasting. I know you educate people on how one fast properly without restricting. Can you share with us your experience with intermittent fasting and how people should approach fasting correctly?

Yeah, of course. I’d love to talk about fasting. I do have one comment on something you just said, actually, right before that you mentioned. When you do the right thing, some sort of magical force just ensures that it comes back your way and that you’re lifted up as you’re helping others. And this is very interesting to me. I think there’s sort of a belief, a way of viewing evolution as a competitive enterprise. But one thing that’s very interesting that has cropped up in recent years in the evolutionary literature is actually most of evolution is about cooperation. So essentially only at the highest level. When you’re looking at organisms in a competitive arena attacking each other or sharing them or having them scavenged from the same food supply, then it’s like it’s either or it’s a zero sum kind of dynamic. But when you actually look at the organism itself, it’s just the biggest corporation, the biggest kind of cooperative regime that you could ever imagine. Like, trillions of parts that are that are working together to create, you know, basically shared outcomes. And part of part of it is just like people working together at a company or members of society work together. The cells share fate, and so they have to sort of contribute to the betterment of the vehicle that they’re in. Otherwise they cease to exist also. And so there’s one more anecdote along these lines. John von Neumann, who came up with the computer architecture that we use right now, also invented Game Theory. And the biggest criticism of his Game Theory that came out in the years after he published was that he failed to account for antagonistic or competitive dynamics. He was mostly interested in getting equilibrium, where people would cooperate. And people were like, what are you talking about? Game Theory or economics is in part about competition, and that’s how society works. But for him, things actually got done. Things that mattered happened when people cooperated. So it wasn’t about us, me against everybody. It was about what can we do together? So yeah I think potentially like that is the secret of growth in the universe is cooperative regimes well synergy working.

Together and uplifting people and not having a society where I’ll help you and always having my hand out expecting back and not just helping with the it may sound corny, but people listening or watching. Like sometimes you need to give just for the sake of it making you feel good. Right. Knowing that you helped another human being elevate or live a life or live a moment on purpose or whatever the case may be. Sometimes that’s just enough. And as you mentioned, it just comes back. Right. And we don’t always have to be uber competitive. Yes, competitiveness. I know. I get some entrepreneurs that listen to my show. They’re probably going, I thrive on competitiveness. Well, you do you, they’ll do them, I’ll do me. Right? Yeah. We got to do whatever makes us happy. But I appreciate you bringing that point up that working as a collective and working as a community, moving forward. We don’t even all have to be in the same space, but our thoughts can support and drive us to continually move forward, right?

Absolutely. So fasting?

Yes.

I liked what you said earlier about it’s a lifestyle, a nutritional lifestyle, not a diet, whatever you’re doing, that’s your diet. But we view Fasting not as this sort of like intervention to lose some quick weight or anything like that. It can be used that way, but it’s more a way to structure your consumption and whether it’s repeatable and healthy. So briefly, I don’t know what the stats are about Canada, but in America, people eat basically every hour of the day. So you’re just constantly having one snack or a meal, and there’s really no time off of them. When you’re sleeping. That’s a problem because when you’re always consuming exogenous calories, you’re never using the calories that you have stored on your body, namely fat, excess weight. If you’re always eating, you’re not going to have an opportunity, basically to utilize the fat that you’ve got on you and you’re just going to accumulate. And so that is what is happening in America. People are mostly just gaining weight year after year. And that in itself is not the worst thing. There is a way to be healthy and have additional weight, but it really comes down to metabolic health. So not only are you gaining excess weight, but as a corollary of that, you’re becoming less sensitive to insulin. In some cases, you’re having foods that are creating inflammatory response and doing damage and not having foods that are nourishing. So, yeah, basically we view fasting as just a perfect antidote to this sort of modern pitfall of this modern trap of overeating all the time. Fasting gives you a way to for your body also to emphasize this other pathway of so sometimes you’re taking in parts and using those parts, and sometimes you’re basically the parts that you have on board already, you’re rearranging and cleaning up those parts. So it can’t always be inflow. Sometimes you have to have the sort of breathing room to clean up the trap that you got going on inside. So in this case, it’s like you accumulate damage in your tissues. And we’ve got endogenous health defense systems that repair that damage. And if you’re never giving your body an opportunity to do that, then you’re just going to accumulate. So fasting is a very good way for the body to basically activate these health defense systems, use calories. It’s got endogenously as fuel and basically keep the body healthy and young and keep your cells fresh. And also, as I’m sure you’ve discovered, it’s a great way to keep your consumption in check without feeling very restrictive. As soon as you get used to it, the body just doesn’t feel hungry all the time. It’s like, I don’t have to eat till noon and I’m totally comfortable with that.

Well, what do people say? Like, one of the largest industries in the world today is the breakfast industry. You got to have breakfast. You got to have breakfast. But what are they eating for breakfast? Pancakes, syrup. So they’re having starchy gluten based sugar and are they eating donuts or they’re drinking their fancy $8 starbuck drinks and the list goes on. And they wonder why they’re not firing on all cylinders. And they say, how can you think properly without breakfast? It’s the most important meal of the day. Yeah, the breakfast industry wants you to believe that because they’re a billion dollar industry. Good for them. I said initially, until my body, I guess I would use the term detoxify or healed, as you were mentioning, at different levels. And my body had the ability to realize, hey, this guy cares about me. He’s going to let me actually digest what he ate. He’s going to give me 8 hours, 10 hours, or whatever to digest his food. And he can take internally from his fat stores to feed his brain because unless I’m incorrect, your brain feeds better off of healthy fats than it does off of carbs. Right. It just does. So for me, fasting made me think more clear. I’m more alert through the day. Like I won’t eat now until 06:00 and people go, how can you do that? That’s way too long. Okay, based on what? What’s your knowledge? What’s your facts? Where’s the facts of what you’re talking about? I’ve been doing this for five years, and I’m not saying I’m perfect at it because again, sometimes when I travel or I go visit my folks, to them, breakfast is important. And my mum in her 80s wants me to have breakfast. So that’s okay. I’ll have a few eggs, right? Whatever. I still am cognizant of my nutritional lifestyle, but sometimes I don’t have a fast. That day I’ve only had, let’s say, 10 hours or have had, whatever the case may be. But fasting to me has been a savior. Right? It really has. For my cognitive ability, my energy level, my swelling in my limbs, and just like that inflammation, it’s been a game changer.

Yeah. For me as well. I really do like it as a lifestyle. I think I was yeah, everything you said, basically performance, mental, sharpness. And also one thing I noticed was my most my food my food cravings actually subsided the more I fasted. So, like, I used to I used to not be able to stop myself from like if I were to have some sugar, I would need to have a lot of sugar. But now, actually, I never really understood how people could have a bite of something and enjoy that enough to stop. You have a bite because you’re about to have 100 bites. That’s just the first one. With fasting, it’s like with less effort, my behaviors can be more controlled. And I think it’s because in part, maybe my bodies realize that it actually likes the fuel that it can use that’s already stored. It doesn’t need that external food all the time, basically. So I feel healthier doing it well.

Do you sleep better too, because of fasting? Have you noticed it?

Yes, I think probably sleeping better. Well, one thing I definitely have noticed is the longer I give myself between the end of my eating window and bed, the lower my nighttime heart rates are. And on a day when I’m under nourished, in terms of calories, my heart rates can get really low.

I love how you brought that up because this is my third Apple Watch. I got an Apple Watch.

Eight.

My kids got it for me as a present in my birthday in the fall, like, right when it was released. And I was checking it before, but I don’t know, I’ve got a little bit more anal about going in and checking out the sleep and seeing how much ram I’ve had. And I’ve actually looked on days and going, why is it kind of out? And I’ve tied it directly to my nutrition. Right. The eating window, like you said, when my eating window ended and when I went to bed, oh my gosh, 2 hours before I went to bed, I had this. And it may be still within my nutritional lifestyle, but my body is having to work at digesting that when I’m trying to sleep. So it’s affected my heart rate, even my breathing, because I don’t know if a lot of people don’t realize that it can actually track your breasts right. Your respiratory along with your heart rate. So I love how you brought that up. It is tied together again. Work in progress, Dwight’s. A work in progress. I’m learning, adapting and not going well. That’s the way it’s always been for me. I’m just going to stick that way. Any listeners watchers thinking that way while I’ve been my friend, did this and this and that. They lived into their 90s. Yeah. Well, what was their quality of life?

Right, sure. Yeah. That’s crucial.

Yes. So Zach, if you had to give our listeners one last closing message, what would you tell them in regards to giving a heck and never giving up?

Well, okay, one last message. Well, we’ve covered a lot of ground here. Let’s see. Well, okay, you already said this earlier about sort of discovering purpose and the why of things. But I think maybe the most useful orientation for being less a robot and sort of taking advantage of your days and your months, figure out what meaningfulness actually looks like to you. Not like not a superficial version of what fun can be on a good night, more like how a whole week or how a month looks when you’re thriving. Maybe it’s something in distant memory. So maybe the last time you really felt great was ten years ago when you were doing X, Y and Z. But I think it’s it’s there’s this idea of a positive deviant analysis. So if you look at a bunch of results and then do an analysis of what contributed to the most extremely good results, there’s often insight in that. So when do you feel your very best? And what can you learn about the way you work as a person based on that set of experiences? And especially if you come by them naturally, if they were things that are repeatable and not drug induced and things of that sort, maybe they’re social, maybe they have to do with the way you’re living your life, maybe they’re work related. Whatever it is, I think use those as a sort of North Star, like the conditions under which you feel fulfilled and meaningful. That is what you should be trying to create for yourself going forward. Now, the past is a good place to look for inspiration, but of course, everybody’s life circumstance changes, everybody’s aging, and so you need to transpose whatever brought you meaning from the past onto your life and make it actually fit and maybe discover new things that have that form.

Yeah, exactly. The past doesn’t have to be indicative of our future, but it is a good story, right? Not necessarily a story, but it’s a good indicator. And I like how you put that. You can look at the past and say, what made me happy, XYZ, and bring that forward, but adapt it to current life of where you’re at. Because we can’t live in the past, but again, it can be a good indicator, but it’s not indicative of what’s going to happen. We still have to put effort in and apply what happened to what’s where we are, like you said. So I love how you put that. Our time is almost up. I’d like to respect our listeners in your time, whoever, before you end, what’s the best way for people to reach you?

Zach people can reach me at Zac@lifestyle.com. That’s Zac. And lifestyle is lifestyks.com. And actually on Lifestyle.com, we’re doing a try before you buy an offer, so you can basically have the price shipped to you for free, and then you only pay if you like it. And if you don’t, no questions asked, we never charge you. And frankly, that’s because we know you’re going to love it and so it’s not a risk for us.

Oh, sweet. Is that for Canadians, too, or is it just for Americans?

That’s a good question. If people are having any trouble doing that at checkout, just email me and I’ll take care of it for you.

Okay. Because my podcast is listened to about 60 40. Well, I shouldn’t say that because I listened to in 34 countries now, but majority of my listeners are located in the US and Canada. Right. So that’s why I asked international people that are listening to this email, Zach, maybe it can hook you up in the future. And maybe if you really want to try it, you can grease them a little bit and give him some extra money and he’ll see if you can get the product out to where you live. Because, again, 34 different countries, there’s a lot of different places that are listening to my show. But I really appreciate you being on Brother. This has been an amazing conversation. You’re a plethora of information and such a great guy to talk to. I’ve had a great combo with yeah, you too.

Really appreciate it. Dwight.

Yeah. Is there anything else you want to add before we wrap up?

Thanks for having me.

Yeah, thank you for being on Zach. I appreciate your time and sharing some of your experiences so that others, too, can learn. It is never too late to give a heck.