Right now I’m more excited than I’ve ever been. I worked for years to get here, and I’ve finally got the money, the time, and a head full of things I want to build.
At 21, I’d lie awake picturing this life. Now I’m living it, and I feel exactly like I did back then. Nothing inside me has aged.
If you’re winning right now, whether you’re 25 or 45, you know exactly what I mean. You finally have the life you worked for, and the last thing you want is your body quietly taking it back.
I’ve seen where that ends up.
I love my mum deeply. When I was a kid, she had this energy about her. Around her, it felt like anything was possible.
But over the years, I’ve watched her health slowly slip. As soon as something hurts, she gets a medicine. It started small, but it turned into one medication after another.
Honestly, it breaks my heart. Pill by pill, she stopped living and started just coping.
The pills treat what hurts. Nothing treats why it hurts.
And the worst part is, all of this is preventable.
I fix things. It’s who I am. But I can’t fix this. I can’t even help.
I’ve explained. I’ve offered to pay. But she’s been doing the same thing for so many years that it’s just become normal. Autopilot takes over.
Nothing changes, and it is draining to constantly care more about someone’s health than they care about it themselves.
That’s hard for me, because I’ve always been the one who sorts things out.
Growing up, my environment was chaos, and nobody was coming to save me.
So I had to figure out money. I had to figure out business. I had to figure out dating, and even my inner self. Taking responsibility for my own life became a big part of who I am.
But health was the weird exception.
Since nothing was broken, I never thought about it. I was a busy founder with ten things going on at once, and my health wasn’t one of them.
And by health, I don’t mean how I looked on the outside. I mean what was going on inside.
Then, over the last two or three years, small things started showing up. My skin didn’t look the same. Grey hairs. Brain fog crept in. I just thought I was growing up.
One day I was sitting in the barber’s chair, and he asked, “You want me to blend it in up top?”
Blend it in? Blend what in?
He held up a mirror to show me the back, because I couldn’t see it myself. Under those bright barber lights, I could see thin spots on my crown I’d never noticed before.
My stomach dropped. I know it sounds dramatic, but it honestly felt like my life was coming to an end.
I don’t know how to explain it, but it felt like a small shred of my youth fell out with every hair. (I’ll come back to my hair later.)
Inside I still felt 21.
The mirror didn’t agree.
Have you ever had that oh shit moment, where something you’d been ignoring suddenly became undeniable?
My heart was going, and I couldn’t stop thinking about one question. If this is what I can see on the outside, what’s going on inside that I can’t see?
What’s in my genes? What’s been quietly building all this time?
So I went down the rabbit hole. Books, podcasts, anything I could get my hands on.
One of the books was Dr. Peter Attia’s Outlive. He talks about markers in your blood that most checkups never look at, and he tells stories of people where something was building for years before anyone caught it.
Reading that, I thought, “What are my numbers? What if something’s already building?”
I wasn’t sick. But I had to know.
So I got an advanced blood panel. Bali doesn’t have that kind of testing, so I flew all the way to the US for it.
When the results came back, something was off: my ApoB, the best marker for heart disease, and my Lp(a), a genetic heart risk marker, were both very high.
Lp(a) is genetic. It’s been high my whole life without me knowing, and genetic means it came from somewhere, my mum or my dad.
I’d never once asked either of them about their health.
So I called my parents. I was nervous, because I had no idea what I was about to hear.
Turns out both were already on statins (cholesterol medication). Neither had ever mentioned it.
Honestly, that shook me. If I hadn’t taken that test, I don’t think I’d ever have known.
That’s when it clicked. Everyone assumes their health is someone else’s responsibility. Including me.
I’d spent years watching my mum’s health slip. Now I could see where I was heading too. Statins. Heart problems. Maybe Alzheimer’s (my grandfather had it).
And the whole time, I felt completely fine.
I’m guessing you’re the same. Health is out of sight, out of mind. If nothing’s broken, you don’t think about it, and you assume it’s all going to be okay. That’s exactly how I was.
I used to think my annual checkup, where the doc says “everything looks good, see you next year,” was actual healthcare.
But a checkup looks for what’s already broken. It doesn’t look at where you’re heading.
The only reason I caught my heart markers now, instead of in twenty years, is that I got scared enough to look. That’s luck.
And I don’t want my health to depend on luck.
The part I kept coming back to was this:
Nothing broke. I felt fine today, and I was still heading somewhere bad.
Think of the most expensive, most beautiful watch you can buy. A Rolex, a Richard Mille, a Patek Philippe. A real piece of art. If you’ve done well for yourself, there might be one on your wrist right now.
Even a masterpiece like that loses a couple of seconds every day.
Two seconds feels like nothing. But over a year, that tiny drift adds up to more than 12 minutes. The year after, it’s 24. Leave it long enough, and it’s nowhere near the right time.
Your body works the same way. It’s a little off today, a little more next year, and you don’t feel any of it until it’s a big problem.
This is what I call the drift.
Nothing breaks overnight. Things drift. And if nobody’s watching, you only find out when it’s too late.
The funny thing is, catching drift is what I do for a living. For ten years I’ve run ads, checking the numbers every day and fixing anything that slips before it costs me.
But I’d never done it for my health. I had more data on my Meta ads account than on my own body.
I’d never let a campaign run blind for a week. Yet I’d been running my body blind my whole life. Most founders I know are.
Not anymore.
I started testing everything. Blood, heart, gut, genes, sleep, fitness. If I could test it, I tested it.
For the first time in my life, I actually knew what was going on inside me. Which numbers were heading the wrong way, while there was still time to dial them back in.
Remember the barber?
If I’d been testing back then, I would’ve seen it coming.
I talked to doctors all over the world, in Canada, the US, India and Turkey, because I wanted to stop it before it got worse. Not one of them could tell me why it was happening. They just gave me medication.
So I kept looking into it myself. It took a while, but I eventually figured it out: it was the hard water in Bali. By then the damage was done.
And honestly, all of that could have been prevented.
The health stories we usually hear are recovery stories.
Someone gets the diagnosis. Diabetes. Heart disease. A chronic illness they’ll carry for life. Then they change everything, and their whole life ends up built around something they’d never heard of a year before.
I don’t want to need a recovery story. Or a diagnosis.
Because I know myself.
If I got to 50 and found out a chronic illness had been building for twenty years that I could have caught earlier, I’d be fucking furious at myself.
That’s why I’m building Dialed In.
I want people to have someone on their side. Someone who knows their history, watches how it’s changing, and flags what’s heading the wrong way before it turns into something bigger.
I’m not a doctor, and I’m not a longevity guru. I’m a normal guy who went down the rabbit hole and figured it out for myself.
But taking responsibility for your health shouldn’t mean having to figure it all out alone.
I still feel 21 inside, and I want to keep it that way. I can’t stop getting older, but I can slow it down, because I didn’t work this hard to get here just to watch my body take it back.
Things drift. You dial back in.
