New Content, Big Announcement

Thirty years of waiting ended this month!

I'm finally announcing what I've been building, and it's the thing I've wanted since the first day I ever put a sensor on an athlete. Scroll down for that one.

Also in this issue:

The drug that takes 25% of your body weight, and the question I can't answer about lean athletes.
Why the fastest solo sailor on earth never sleeps more than twenty minutes.
Half the F1 grid just refused the cooling vest. They might be right.
There's an Inca road in Peru that lasers found and nobody alive has walked.

Retatrutide's Phase 3 numbers are the largest weight loss ever produced by a drug. 25% at 80 weeks, 28.7% in the knee osteoarthritis trial. The body composition work says roughly a third of what comes off is lean tissue, and the authors call that proportion reassuring because it matches other treatments.

Fine. Now put it in a lean athlete.

Every weight-restricted sport is already a place where people do stupid things to make a number. Motorsport, fighting, jockeys, climbing, gymnastics. Retatrutide is not approved yet and it's already circulating in the gray market.

Here's my honest position: I don't have one yet. The trials studied people at 100 kg with metabolic disease. Nobody has studied a 68 kg athlete at 9% body fat, and I don't think the ratio holds when there's barely any fat left to give.

So I'm asking you. Would you? Would you let your athlete? Hit reply.

She's alone in the Southern Ocean and she cannot sleep for more than twenty minutes.

Not won't… Cannot…. Ellen MacArthur is chasing the solo round-the-world record on a 75-foot trimaran, and out there the wind can go from manageable to catastrophic inside of ten minutes. Fall asleep for ninety minutes, and you might wake up to a boat that's massively off course.

So she steals sleep. Twenty minutes. Ten. Whatever the ocean allows.

Everyone assumed that wasn't real sleep. The neurologist who worked with her proved it was. Claudio Stampi spent decades logging sleep data on more than a hundred solo sailors, and when he compared two skippers in the same round-the-world race, the one who slept longer performed worse than the one taking many short naps.

Not equal. Worse.

Here's why the pieces work. Adenosine is the molecule that makes you tired, it builds every hour you're awake, and clearing it is most of what sleep is for. You don't need deep sleep to start clearing it. Twelve minutes moves real weight.

But slow wave sleep opens up around 20 to 25 minutes in, and that's a trapdoor. Fall through it and you get sleep inertia, the concrete-headed thirty minutes that makes people announce they're not nap people. They're not wrong about the feeling. They're just sleeping past the line.

I nap 10 to 15 minutes and it feels like the cleaners came through and reset my brain. Whole new day.

It did not work like that at first. Sleep onset is trainable and most people quit on day three, lying there wide awake, deciding they can't do it. Lying there wide awake is the training.

Cap it under 20 minutes. Go afternoon around 2 pm. Give it three weeks.

One honest note: Stampi never recommended this as a lifestyle. He built it for people whose situation made sleep loss unavoidable.

The nap fixes the day you're already in. It doesn't buy you more days.

I have been waiting almost 30 years for this.

When I started coaching athletes, the most powerful performance system in the room was still an experienced human brain. A great coach can watch an athlete move, hear the hesitation in one sentence, remember how that athlete responded to travel six weeks ago, connect it to sleep, pain, fuel, stress, heat, and training load... then change one thing that alters the entire day.

From the outside, that looks like instinct. It is not. It is pattern recognition built through thousands of repetitions.

Mine came through more than 40,000 clinical visits, work with 12+ sports teams, and over 100 sporting events. I began using digital health devices with athletes in 2008. By 2010, I had built an integrated sports medicine facility around tracking, recovery, and performance.

Then came five years spent building in AI and digital health.

All of it kept pulling me toward one question:

What if we could teach a system to hold the whole athlete in view?

Not just heart rate. Not just last night’s sleep. Not just bloodwork, reaction time, training load, nutrition, travel, stress, pain, cognition, or the story a driver tells the coach that morning. All of it. Across time. Connected.

For most of my career, the technology could not do that. The sensors were too limited, the data lived in separate boxes, and no system could hold enough context to reproduce the layered reasoning happening inside an elite coach’s head.

Now it can. It does not replace the coach or engineer. It gives their best questions a memory and thousands more chances to find the pattern.

Honestly, I feel like a kid watching the science fiction I grew up with pull into pit lane and become real. The kid who built computers. The biochemist. The clinician. The sports medicine director. The athlete. The digital health architect. Every strange chapter of my career suddenly belongs in the same sentence. This is it!!!

Motorsport is where we prove it. No sport understands telemetry better. The car is studied down to the thousandth of a second. Yet the human in the cockpit is still scattered across wearable apps, lab reports, coaching notes, driver feedback, travel schedules, and somebody’s memory. The data exists. The model does not.

The Most Measured Driver Project is building that model.

READ THE FULL INTERVIEW →

The FIA called a Heat Hazard at Monza this weekend and half the grid still won't wear the cooling vest. Hadjar says it works for ten minutes and then it's warm again. Norris doesn't even run a drinks bottle. They're not being tough for the camera. They're telling you the tool is worse than the problem.

Here's what nobody's arguing about. Ten to fourteen days of deliberate heat exposure and your body builds its own cooling system. Aldosterone climbs, you stop dumping sodium in your sweat, water follows it back into circulation, and plasma volume goes up somewhere between 4 and 15 percent. More blood to move heat to your skin. More blood to fill the heart. Same output at a lower heart rate.

Chase the 15. That's the whole assignment. Sit in the sauna, train in the heat of the day, stop hiding from summer. Two weeks of being uncomfortable on purpose and you carry the adaptation for a month.

A vest can quit at lap 30. Your blood volume doesn't.

Everyone thinks Machu Picchu has been solved. Bingham showed up in 1911, and now 1.5 million people a year file across the terraces and take the same photograph from the same rock.

Then in July, a team from the University of Warsaw's Center for Andean Studies flew lasers over the cloud forest east of the citadel, near a place called the Mandor Wall. LiDAR fires pulses down through the canopy and measures what comes back, which means it sees the ground through the trees. What came back was more than 2.5 kilometers of Inca road nobody had ever recorded. One route runs at least 1.2 kilometers, zigzagging up through the mountains, built the way the Inca built. Platforms and terraces alongside it that no modern person has stood on.

Here's the part that gets me. They won't say where it is. The Ministry of Culture is withholding the coordinates to keep treasure hunters out. Archaeologists plan to physically walk those roads starting late this year into 2027. Some of them may lead toward a sacred mountain.

So there is a road, in Peru, right now, that the Inca built and nobody alive has walked.

Machu Picchu was always about the sky. The Intihuatana stone catches the solstice. The whole place is oriented to things happening 93 million miles away. And the technology that just added a chapter to it works by throwing light at the earth and listening for the echo.

Stand up there at dawn when the clouds are still below you, knowing there's a stone road out in that green somewhere that the lasers found and human feet haven't reached yet.

One of my favorite youtubers on this type of topic: LUKE CAVERNS

Check out his youtube channel here!

Go find your edge. That's where resilience lives.

— Dr. Dave

Guild of the Wild — The frontier of human possibility. Field tested. Truth told.

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And if something in here sparked a question, a story, or a thought you can't shake — hit reply. I read every one.