Notes on technology, leadership, and sports.

This weekend was the rowing World Championship, and it reminded me of something that few Board Members, Coaches or Investors ever talk about but is critically important to CEO performance: block your workout before you block anything else. I give CEOs the same instruction in the first thirty days, and I was just telling Anna-Marie Makarova, who runs a stellar Swiss start-up called RegCheck, about blocking out time for exercise, so I thought I'd share the data.

Most CEOs I know treat working out as a nice-to-do, but research says it's a high-performance prerequisite. University Hospital Bonn had athletes complete a single session of high intensity exercise, then scanned their brains. What they found: a single workout — even a short one — visibly changed the connection and efficiency between two brain regions. The amygdala (the fear center) and the precuneus (self-reflection and rumination).

In a healthy brain, these two regions usually move in opposite directions — when one lights up, the other quiets down. That balance is exactly what weakens in people worrying or anxiously debating a choice. In this study, a single high-intensity workout session strengthened that opposing relationship, making choices clearer and more effective. One workout produced measurably better brain communication almost immediately.

Caveat: the study was on men. Like most exercise neuroscience, it tells us nothing about the effects during a menstrual cycle or through perimenopause, when hormonal shifts already change mood regulation and stress response. That's a gap in the research, not a footnote (and an interesting open question in this field that Stacy T. Sims, PhD is working on).

I'm not going to tell you exercise completely cures anxiety — the study's participants were already fit and not particularly anxious — but what the study does show is that exercise changes the biological state of your thinking, in real time, not just over months.

For a CEO making high-stakes calls under pressure, working out isn't just wellness, it's also solid decision making infrastructure.

"If the body be feeble the mind will not be strong. Not less than two hours a day should be devoted to exercise, and the weather should be little regarded." — Thomas Jefferson (who was pretty f'ing productive).

You don't need two hours. Thirty minutes, four times a week, with intensity, moves the needle more than an hour of easy cardio. Put it on the calendar before the first meeting, not after the last one. And if a big decision is looming and your head won't stop circling it — go workout. I've preached to my kids: go for a run or walk before a big test at school. And I've always been known for walking meetings at all my companies. Walking and talking is the most productive form of a stand-up meeting.

The board doesn't see the workout. They see the decision it made possible. Do you have a workout on your calendar?

In 2004, I nearly died on an operating table at Johns Hopkins. The docs told me if the operation wasn't successful I'd have two weeks left; so say your goodbyes and get your affairs in order.

I had a rare form of leukemia. But it wasn't just about me — my wife was six months pregnant and my beautiful daughter was just over a year old.

Everyone who has seen the end remembers some small and bizarre detail. But what I didn't expect: buried underneath the terror was regret mixed with relief.

I spent my whole life afraid. Flying was my biggest fear. Failing was a close second. Looking foolish or being rejected was up there. I'd built my adolescence making decisions around fears I never said out loud, but felt tremendously ashamed about inside. And in one sentence from a doctor, every one of those fears was revealed as what it always was — imaginary. The real one, this ultimate fear, had information in it that all the fake little ones running my life never did.

Death, or the fear of it, told me exactly what I loved, it showed me exactly what I'd been postponing, and highlighted how much of my life I'd spent negotiating with dangers that didn't really exist, while the actual clock on the real one ran nonstop.

So when I got my second chance, the first thing I did was go after the biggest imaginary fear on the list. The man who was terrified of flying signed up for flying lessons. Holy shit, that was a mind-blowing moment.

Three things happened. First, when we hit turbulence during lesson 2 in that little two-seater plane I shat myself — I mean just a tiny bit, more of a shart than anything, but you get the picture. Second, after lesson 9 or 10 I fell in love with my fear. Flying became one of the most fulfilling things I'd ever done — I fly aerobatics now, for fun. Third — overcoming that one fear cast a courage halo over everything else in my life. Courage, it turns out, compounds because you train a part of your brain called the sgACC. You fire these new neurons into beating one fear and it renegotiates your relationship with all of them by rewiring a faster pathway to that courage center. Neuroplasticity — neurons that fire together wire together.

Fifteen years later I wrote a best-selling book about what fear does to the brain (Fear Is Fuel). But the entire contents of six years of research and 35 of the top neuroscientists' work basically comes down to what I learned at Hopkins:

Fear is information and most fear is fake, just imaginary fear that is nothing more than noise. And most of us spend our lives obeying the noise. We make decisions one of two ways: out of fear or out of opportunity. Want the life of your dreams? Recognize when you are making a decision that's important and ask yourself, "Am I choosing this way because of fear, or is this the biggest opportunity?" Let your gut tell you the answer.

What's the fear you've been obeying that — if you're honest — has never once shown up in real life?

Five athletes change four tires and fuel a 200 MPH car in nine seconds.

Your leadership meeting is probably ninety minutes.

Which one has more impact?

The first time I stood close enough to a pit stop at Daytona to feel it was with my social media start-up dwinQ. Watching a pit crew work taught me more about what a meeting is actually for than most meetings ever have. Every person on that wall has one job, knows exactly when their nine seconds start, and disappears the moment it's done. No status updates. No "let's take this offline." No meeting that exists just because it's on the calendar.

Most leadership meetings are the opposite of a pit stop — long on ceremony, short on decisions. If your team walked away from your last meeting able to say, in one sentence, what changed because of it, you're running a pit crew. If they can't, you're running a parade.

Issue #9 of The Founder's Creed goes deeper on this — link in the comments.

"Get back on the horse."

It's the most common piece of advice given after something scares you, and most people think it's an old adage, but it's more than that. There's real neuroscience behind exactly why it works — and why avoiding the thing instead makes it so much worse.

Last week I wrote about my son's engine failure on a flight home, and my decision to get him back in the air before the fear had time to set. The comments turned into a collection of near-misses.

Maria B. was flying Sky Harbor to Portland over Thanksgiving when her plane was forced down near Gunnison, Colorado — everyone down the slides, after a bomb threat mid-flight. She never found out if it was real. She got a nice dinner, a night in Denver, and was back in the air the next day.

Joseph Barna was climbing out of Sky Harbor when he heard a loud bang at 300 feet. He turned to see the man across the aisle white as a sheet — then saw why. The right engine was visibly imploding, pieces coming off the back of it, as the plane leveled out mid-climb.

They are both back in the air flying all the time.

Here's the mechanism behind getting back in the saddle. When something frightening happens, your brain doesn't file it away and move on by default. It waits to see what you do next. If you avoid the thing that scared you, your brain reads that avoidance as confirmation: that was dangerous, good thing we ran. The fear doesn't fade. It gets reinforced — and it can quietly calcify into something much bigger than the original event ever was. That's because we store that new memory emotionally in the amygdala.

But if you go back — relatively soon, while it's still uncomfortable — and the catastrophe doesn't repeat itself, something different happens. The brain updates the newly forming memory. The threat gets rewritten as survivable. This is the actual basis of exposure therapy, and it's well established in behavioral psychology: the fear doesn't fade because time passes. It fades because you show up again before avoidance gets to win.

"Get back on the horse" isn't a metaphor. It's neuroscience discovered by cowboys.

I couldn't get on the plane for my son. All I could do was make sure he didn't have the option to quietly let the fear make the decision for him instead.

What's the thing you avoided a little too long — and what did it cost you to finally go back?

My son was headed back to college on a United 767 about 10 minutes out from Geneva airport when the engine exploded and stopped running. It shook him up. He's just old enough to drink in the US, but he was stone sober, and for a while there at altitude, he genuinely didn't know if he'd land the same person he took off as.

I know that feeling of fear better than almost anything else in my life. I spent half of my life afraid to fly. Not nervous — terrified. The kind of fear that makes you start doing the math on every trip before you've even booked it.

So when he called me after, shaken, I had a decision to make as a father. Let him avoid the next flight — reasonable, understandable, nobody would blame him. Or help him get back on the plane before the fear had time to calcify into something permanent.

I chose the second one. Not because I don't take fear seriously, just the opposite. Because I know exactly what it costs when you don't face it early and face it head on.

Here's what I told him, and what I fully believe: a 2024 MIT study found the risk of a fatality on a commercial flight is roughly 1 in 13.7 million boardings — and that number keeps improving, not worsening, year over year. I also made a comment about my bigger fear being his mother's driving, but that's another fear. I also reminded him modern aircraft are engineered to fly and land safely even with an engine not functioning. What happened to him was frightening. It was also, statistically, about as safe an emergency as you can face.

He got back on a plane a few hours later.

I didn't get back on one for years, and it cost me some great opportunities.

Fear is fuel if you use it early. It's a cage if you let it sit.

If someone in your life is white-knuckling their way past a scare right now — the flight, the deal, the diagnosis, the break-up, whatever it is — sometimes the most loving thing you can do isn't protect them from it again, and it isn't to tell them to go to their "safe space" either, that's a coward's way out. Your job is to help them walk back through the door and grow their courage center (the sgACC) before that door closes for good — like the Stoics say, Premeditatio Malorum: imagine your death and let it help you live. Good job, Cool Breeze. I'm proud of your courage.

I wrote The Founder's Creed to help create 1,000 unicorns. So here's a fun fact: Google has produced more unicorn founders than any company on earth — 218 of them, but not the highest likelihood. Why does that matter?

OpenAI has produced 21, just 10% of the same total number as Google.

If you only looked at the first number, you'd back Google alumni every time. That's Observing — counting what's in front of you. But remember what Col. Boyd said about the OODA loop — the place most people go wrong is the Orientation phase.

Here's what Orienting properly reveals: an ex-Google employee is 2.9x more likely than baseline to found a unicorn than an average founder. An ex-OpenAI employee, however, is 14.7x more likely to create a unicorn. That's observing the exact same data, but orienting around a completely different signal. It comes down to asking the right question — this is hyper-critical when you are betting on a pair of founders; bottom line, it's easy to be overly impressed by a Google pedigree.

Ilya Sutskever left OpenAI with no product and no revenue. Safe Superintelligence is now valued at $32 billion — built almost entirely on team and conviction (belief, in the BOODA world). Dario and Daniela Amodei, Mira Murati, David Luan, Aravind Srinivas — the list of OpenAI alumni building unicorns keeps growing, and Murati is the standout woman among them in data where women remain sharply underrepresented at every stage.

The entire Orient phase of the BOODA Doctrine can be seen in one chart: don't just Observe the data — re-Orient around what it actually predicts, listen to what the data is telling you. That's how great investors pick winners — they listen to the signal from the market and let the PR, hype, and other noise fade away.

What's the "Google" in your world — the obvious, high-volume answer (the 2.9x likelihood) that everyone chases while the real 14.7x edge sits somewhere with a smaller, sharper signal that others might miss? I know where it is in the sports world... but I'm not telling.

Want to live longer? Play beer league.

Fifteen years ago I joined a beer league hockey team. No real reason beyond missing the game and looking for community.

Turns out I was accidentally doing some of the best longevity hacks available.

A new study out of Rockefeller University, published in Cell Reports Medicine, found that three total minutes of sprinting — six 30-second bursts with rest between — triggered far more dramatic molecular changes than 90 minutes of steady, moderate exercise. Nearly a quarter of measured proteins shifted in the sprint group. The moderate group barely moved the needle.

These weren't small effects. The altered proteins were tied to blood vessel growth, tissue repair, and hormone signaling — and when researchers cross-referenced them against health data from over 53,000 people, most of those same proteins were linked to lower risk of diabetes, obesity, and cardiovascular disease.

Here's the part that made me think of Monday nights at the rink: you don't get those bursts from a treadmill unless you force it on yourself. You get them for free from a sport that forces them on you, and it's fun and competitive.

Hockey shifts are sprints. So is a basketball fast break, a boxing or martial arts round, a hard-fought tennis point, or a fast ski run. The best longevity training I know of doesn't feel like training at all. It feels like beer league. It feels like fun.

This is exactly why I think some of the most interesting investment opportunities in sports right now aren't just the leagues we watch — they're the ones we play in. Adult rec sports, built right, might be one of the most underrated longevity plays available. Fun as the delivery mechanism for something your body actually needs.

What's the sport you'd never call a "workout" — but secretly is one?