The best companies in the world aren't the ones that pay the most. They're the ones that refuse to set their most valuable asset on fire.

In 2024 I ran a project with a desk of elite commodities traders where the only metric that mattered was money. If they made more, we succeeded. If they didn't, we failed. We spent zero dollars on gadgets — no recovery beds, no biohacking toys — and their sick days dropped by half. The savings from that alone paid for the entire engagement before a single trader made an additional dollar.

This episode breaks down what we actually changed, why almost every company spends more on health every year and gets a sicker, less productive workforce in return, and the difference between buying health and what most companies actually buy: the late-stage bill for the health they ignored.

We get into the real cost of burnout, why your sick-day count is the cheapest thing an unhealthy employee does to you, why most wellness programs fail, and the research linking purpose and being cared for to lower mortality and longer retention.

Read the full written breakdown — the testing, the biology, and the leverage that drove it: https://www.weareollin.com/articles/training-for-profit

Train with intent.

00:00 The claim: care beats pay

00:21 The trader project and the $0 result

00:48 Why pay stops holding people

01:16 The data nobody wants to hear

01:56 Purpose is a clinical variable

02:50 What being invested in actually moves

03:10 Who these traders really are

04:18 The results

05:04 What companies spend on health

05:32 A disease budget, not a health budget

06:20 The cost you can't see: presenteeism

07:26 Why wellness programs fail

10:31 Why money isn't enough

11:06 The real asset was never the salary

11:53 Where to get the full breakdown

Before launching the new OLLIN endurance program, I opened a Q&A to the membership and answered what came back. This is that conversation.

The through-line: most endurance programs make you good at one thing — one movement, one event, one finish line. That's a finite game. This program is built to develop aerobic ability generally, the capacity to provide oxygen and blood flow across anything you ask your body to do. Running and cycling are in there because they're the easiest ways to extend effort, but so are carries, sleds, rows, lunges, burpees. You build the base; you make it your own.

What we get into: how to find your real deficiency (nine times out of ten it's base, not intensity); what the German team that broke the four-minute team-pursuit barrier actually did in training, and why it was mostly low intensity; whether nasal breathing and conversational pace are good zone-two cues (they get you in the neighborhood, no further); why chasing a precise zone two is close to useless if you're not racing; the minimum dose to maintain endurance once you have it; stable versus volatile traits and why most people defend the wrong ones; wear, tear, and longevity with running; and the hybrid problem — trying to hold strength, power, and endurance at once is how you end up with none of them.

There's a story in here about accidentally hitting my best competition shape ever while training out of a backpack in London — all zone one and zone five, no gray middle — and a friend named Jamie whose aerobic base makes him, in his own words, light-years ahead on the mat. Endurance is compound interest. It's the trait that amplifies every other trait you have.

The endurance program is a 12-week build, live now and included in the OLLIN membership: https://weareollin.com

Got a question I didn't cover? Send it in and I'll do another one of these.

00:00 Endurance is compound interest

00:21 What this Q&A is, and what the program is

05:06 Finding your deficiency: base vs. intensity

06:13 What the German pursuit team actually did

09:53 The London backpack story

12:03 Is conversational pace / nasal breathing good for zone two?

18:10 Why precise zone two is useless if you're not racing

19:15 Building vs. maintaining: the minimum dose

21:18 Recovery and how endurance fits the week

24:40 Stable vs. volatile traits

25:23 Wear, tear, and longevity with running

30:50 Concurrent strength, power, and endurance

31:32 The cookie jar: interference

33:26 The hybrid / SOF problem

35:02 Why "that day" never arrives

38:24 What most endurance programs get wrong

39:44 What this program is (and isn't)

40:36 Fueling and recovery alongside strength

49:33 How many days a week of each

46:54 Jamie Lavelle: endurance on the mat

50:37 Why endurance amplifies everything

How do you describe a feeling to someone who's never felt it? There's no single word for what the 12th hour of a maximal effort does to a person — the pain, the haunting that arrives when it's just you, your effort, and the dark. I can't give you the word, but I've spent more than 20 years in the country it belongs to: triathlons, a decade of road racing, 100-mile gravel, a 24-hour assault bike world record. Next to the athletes I've coached, my own résumé looks amateur. That's the humbling part — the further in you go, the less of it you realize you've touched.

This episode is about endurance, and the argument runs against almost everything the fitness industry sells. We have the origin story backwards. Bramble and Lieberman (Nature, 2004) found 26 traits in the human body that make little sense for walking and perfect sense for running long — springs in the leg, a foot built to push off, shoulders free of the head, and the ability to sweat. A chimp is stronger than any of us; nearly everything on the savannah is faster. We won because nothing could outlast us. The persistence hunt is the whole philosophy in one act: the antelope chose intensity, the human chose duration, and duration won.

From there: why intensity is the inverse of duration and you can't buy one with the other; why endurance isn't a thing you possess but a process you move with; the empires that ran their most urgent messages on legs, not horses; the monks who built a religion around the thing you feel at hour 12. Then the practical map — the three training traps, the 80/20 split (Seiler), Maffetone's 180-minus-age, and the "can you double it" gut check. And finally the part it took 20 years to say clearly: endurance is a relationship with yourself, and the word for what you're building is trust.

Show me yourself after 12 hours of continuous effort, and I won't need to tell you who you are.

The full endurance program is live and included in the OLLIN membership: https://weareollin.com

00:00 No word for the witching hour

01:00 20 years in endurance — and still an amateur

02:00 We have the origin story backwards

02:28 Bramble & Lieberman: born to run (Nature, 2004)

03:22 The persistence hunt: duration beats intensity

04:28 Intensity is the inverse of duration

05:03 Endurance isn't a thing you possess — it's a process

06:51 Aerobic system as infrastructure, not accessory

07:13 The Aztec couriers and "ollin"

07:46 The Inca road and the Chaski relay

08:36 Pheidippides: the myth we chose to keep

09:13 The Tarahumara — running as prayer

09:51 The Tendai monks and the kaihōgyō

11:10 Songlines and the walkabout

12:00 How we got seduced: the intensity deficiency

13:07 The three traps and the gray zone

13:32 The 80/20 split (Seiler)

14:02 Finding "easy" without a lab: Maffetone and the double test

15:01 Endurance is a relationship — and the word is trust

16:43 "Just go" is the highest expression of trust

16:59 The revolt: when the math says you can't

17:15 24 hours on the assault bike, one minute at a time

18:36 What's on the other side: dissolution

19:23 Underneath it all: love

19:59 Back to "ollin" — the movement that holds up the world