Are Home Health Test Kits Worth It with Hamish Grierson of Thriva

00:00 Welcome to the Team Super Dad podcast. In this episode, I talk living longer, avoiding illness and taking charge of your own health with Hamish Grierson, founder of the home health tech company Thriver.co. Role theme. Welcome to Team Super Dad. Real dads creating their best lives ever. More time, more money, more fun. You are not alone. You're on Team Super Dad. Hey, everybody. Welcome to the Team Super Dad podcast. In fact, hey, welcome you. Yes, I'm talking to you, the individual in your ears, in the car, wherever you're at.

00:43 This is the Team Super Dad podcast. It's great to have you here. We, if you haven't heard before, are a community of motivated dads, generally around the 40 plus age, because we're at that stage in life where we really want to create the life we desire. We've worked hard, we've got the family, and now we're like, what else? What else? How can I make this better? How can I transform my relationship? How can I have more time, more energy, more sex, more fun? And of course, part of that quality time is time spent with our children and our friends as well. It can't all be work, work, work. We need to have the money. We need to have the fun.

01:24 We need to have the good people around us. And that is everything that Team Super Dad is about, creating the life you desire, doing it with like-minded men. I do have plans for Team Super Mom as well. I'm just waiting to meet the right people to team up with and do that. But today, Hamish Grierson, this conversation is about the health area of Team Super Dad. And if you want to get involved, the best way is to go to teamsuperdad.com forward slash network and get yourself signed up there. It's all free. And we'll put you in the free community and give you access to the free checklists and support and help. And of course, there's some paid stuff as well, which you'll find out about when you join up.

02:08 Health. I first got interested in the idea of biomarkers and health tests for the home or doing it yourself when watching the biggest loser USA. Or if you're in the USA, it's just called Biggest Loser. And I talk about this with Hamish, but the idea that you could find out how you were, like whether you've got diabetes, whether your biological age is way lower or way higher than your actual physical age and what that really means to your lifestyle. And at 47, just starting a new relationship, I was really interested to find out about my testosterone levels and my sex drive and

02:48 being the best man I could be in that relationship. So whether you're in a relationship or looking for a relationship, this subject is really, really important. Of course, if you've got a history of things like diabetes in your family, then again, this conversation is going to be really powerful for you. Also exciting for me, the company Thriver.co. So the company's called Thrive and the website is Thriver.co. They're a UK-based tech company because this is all about tech. You get a sample kit in the post, you send that back to them, you get your results online and the app will be out soon. So it's really a tech thing and for all of us to take charge of our health is massively powerful.

03:31 I'm certainly excited about it and to meet a UK-based company with such a dude in charge of it, as you're going to find out in this conversation, was really, really exciting for me. So without further ado, enjoy this. If you're not subscribed to the podcast already, please do. If you're not part of the community already, then get that done at teamsuperdad.com forward slash network. And apart from that, I'd love your feedback. Let me know what you think of this. Have you had your test done? I have got my results back and I'll be summarizing those in a follow-up episode. So watch out for that. Or if you're listening to this, feel free to get to the end and then jump to that episode.

04:08 It'll be out in a couple of weeks. It will probably be episode something, season three, something like episode 30, 31. So go and look out for that. Anyway, let's get on with a conversation. Hello, Hamish. Good to have you here today on the Team Super Dad podcast. Absolute pleasure to be here. Thanks for having me, Johnny. Today, Hamish, we're talking about home health tests, which I first kind of got, became aware of the idea through The Biggest Loser USA, which doesn't do your business any justice, I'm sure. But in that show, about two weeks into it, they send everybody off to get their blood tests.

04:52 And then they come back in and it's all dramatic. And they say, oh, yes. So you're a 38-year-old dad. You're clearly overweight. By the way, you've got three years left to live. You've got type 2 diabetes, and your physical age is more that of a 75-year-old. And then they're all crying. I mean, it's kind of serious, but I think that that is something that just pushes on people's consciousness about their health and why all of us to get a better understanding of what's going on in our body is so absolutely vital. So, you know, today we're going to jump into that. We're going to start with

05:36 Thriver and what is this thing that people can do at home? What's it worth in their business? And then in the second half of it, we'll dive into some of the Thriver story because it's so inspiring for dads to hear how you've created this business and how your love for it seems to just grow and grow and grow the bigger the business grows. So that's my introduction. Hey, Misha, how are you today? It's good to have you on board. Yeah, no, thank you very much indeed, Johnny. I am, I'm all right. I'm all right. I, as a dad with three kids, one of them is six months old who is not sleeping through the night, ever so slightly run over, truth be told.

06:19 I absolutely have no reason to complain, though. Generally speaking, yeah, very lucky, fit and healthy. Most things in life are good. Yeah, what's the, you know, of your boys and girls, what their age is? I've got two boys and a girl. So the boy is, or the boys are five, two, and Annie, my little girl, is six months old. So yeah, a three under five, if that is any consolation to anyone who's got a lot of people. Who's got that? If I see you slapping yourself in the head whilst we're talking, I won't take it personally. I know that you're just trying to get through the day. Desperately trying to keep myself on track.

07:01 Yeah, exactly. Yeah, exactly. And for what it's worth, you know, that the age of my first child is about as old as the company is. And I know we'll get back to it at some point. But there was a moment where with a fairly new mortgage, a fairly new wife, and a decision to be made about starting a company where we were trying to persuade people to pay us to inflict some harm on themselves and bleed into a tube with a lot of people thinking that we were absolutely barking mad. Yeah, very much looking forward to sharing

07:41 a few of the insights over the intervening five years. But yeah, as you say, starting with, I guess, just what is Thriver, right? Maybe I can launch in with a bit of that. So a few of the basics of Thriver is a UK-based health technology company. We have a really simple ambition, and that is to help anyone to get a fairly regular, affordable, intuitive set of insights as to what's happening inside their bodies. And exactly as Johnny said, so we practically do that using some at-home test kits.

08:24 And you collect a small sample of your own blood, usually, though we do sometimes look at things like saliva, and you post it back. One of our lab partners will analyze it. They're the same sort of labs that you get your NHS bloods run through. And then we take that data and do quite a lot of stuff with it. So we have one of our GPs comment on it. It's really easy to read in terms of the kind of graphing and the way it's presented. We'll show you not just what average looks like, but what optimal looks like, wherever there's good science behind it. We'll help you to understand what it means for you given your goals. So let's say you're more interested in

09:03 fitness as opposed to living longer or sleeping better as opposed to having a baby. We'll zone in on the things that really matter for that particular result. And then for us, just as importantly, we'll kind of help you to understand, okay, what are the things that I can actually go and do tomorrow morning to try and have a positive impact on those numbers? And that's a part of the product called Health Plan. So yeah, I mean, it's, I think, in ambition, fairly straightforward. What's still crazy to us in truth is that most people, they just don't really have a direct connection to their bodies, right?

09:42 We are still living in a very information-rich era about lots of the world around us, thanks to the internet and our smartphones. And yet, for the most part, rely on. intuition, which can be hugely misleading as to what's really going on inside our bodies. And that doesn't actually need to be the case. We do have the ability to start arming ourselves with some really powerful information. And that's something that we want to help with. And just to say, I guess, last part, as a company, we've got a direct-to-consumer brand. So if you have a Google Thriver, that's what you'd see. But we also now are powering third-party organizations, so actually hospitals, some GP surgeries,

10:30 and we're working with the government on some projects where they want to get at-home testing as part of their offering, and they work with us as well. So I'll leave it there. There you go. That's a quick ripdown of what Thriver is and does. Yeah, and this sort of falls into the area, just like you mentioned there, about people taking more responsibility for their health, being aware of what's going on. I'll just put a link up there. So thriver.co.uk, sorry, thriver.co will take you to there. And if you backslash Team Super Daddy, the Thriver crew will see how many people we're sending to them.

11:11 So that's quite fun for their marketing team to look at. But yeah, Thriver.co will get you over to Thriver. And there's various different, depending on what times you hit their site, there's new offers for new customers as well. So you should definitely take advantage of those. But yeah, taking advantage of situations falls beautifully into the question about being responsible for our own healthcare and not just expecting our bodies to keep going until something goes wrong. Because by the time something goes wrong, it's more than likely something's really gone wrong.

11:52 But whereas the indications for that problem are probably spot, you know, you're able to spot them much more earlier. Like, I guess, checking your breasts or checking your balls for cancer and stuff. This kind of testing gives people the ability to go inside their body and do those checks way in advance. Yeah, and I love the metaphor, right? It's a bit like the skin is this really unhelpful sort of dark zone creator. You can't go and just, you know, yeah, heart looks okay. You know, veins look okay. You know, bro.

12:34 We are really, really bad at being able to connect with the sort of, I described it the other day as our biological truths, which sounds a bit pompous, but it's just this idea that you're right, we've got this stuff inside us that actually tells us a lot about what's happening. And it's often the first thing to move. So we see it regularly where some of our customers, they'll go on a real health kick or they'll stop smoking or something. And one of the first places that they'll see it isn't necessarily in weight loss,

13:11 though obviously that tends to happen fairly fast, but they will see it in their biomarkers. And there's so on the one hand, you've got, yeah, there is a pick things up early reality to what we're doing. And we, you know, we're very lucky that we've got lots of amazing testimonials around it working like that. And we've also got, you know, people who are changing their lives as a consequence of something slightly broader, which is actually just kind of waking up. And this sounds really basic, and it is really basic, but it's also really important. Waking up to health as something that they can and should and get some enjoyment from engaging with.

13:53 And it's that difference between people who sort of see it as someone else's problem. It's amazing to me that I used to be this kind of person. I sort of had my moment of waking up to health probably in my late 20s. And I find it astonishing that I, for so many years, effectively thought that my body's reality was kind of someone else's problem, i.e., the doctors. And it just is a completely backwards piece of thinking, right? Ah, NHS is a wonderful thing, but what it isn't there in design purposes to achieve is to keep you out of the NHS, right?

14:35 Other than some of the screening programs for cancers and stuff. It's just not a keep you well product or service. It's like a last balloon in many ways. Yeah, and they know that it is. to give them their dues, if it was just left alone to be that, I think it would probably be even better at doing that. And they are alive to the fact that now is a great moment in time because people have, I guess, become more aware that health information is there to be got at and they want it. So, you know, people are investing their own hard-earned cash in actually starting to understand this stuff.

15:19 And yeah, I guess the NHS recognize that maybe it isn't going to be them that's able to solve that proactive, preventative, participative side of the health spectrum or journey. Yeah. And just to put in to the conversation at this point, what are the kind of things that we haven't actually listed this yet? What are the kind of things that this home health test like Thriver, these biomarkers, what can we test for? What can we find out? Yeah, so it's a maybe it's a depending on how much you know about blood testing, a surprisingly broad array from a relatively small amount of blood. So oh, yeah, good to mention that, isn't it? It's not like it's not like you take a shot

16:02 and you prick your finger, right? Yeah, exactly. I haven't got one of the little vials, but it's a yeah, it's 600 microliters of blood, so it's a very small amount of blood. And yeah, the very, very, very, very large majority of people have no problem collecting it at home. So a full lipids or cholesterol panel. So both your LDL, which is your quote-unquote banned cholesterol, and your HDL, which is your good cholesterol, but also your triglycerides and some of the ratios. So a full cholesterol panel, which typically has a really strong connection with cardiovascular heart attack, stroke risk. It's those sorts of kind of mass population health issue dynamics.

16:47 I think it's still true to say that cardiovascular risk is, or cardiovascular disease is the thing that kills more people around the world than anything else. Because primarily, unfortunately, we've evolved to become a rather more sedentary and poor diet society. Anyway, so cardiovascular risk. HbA1C is a marker for diabetes and pre-diabetes. So it looks at an average of your blood sugar over three months. That's the kind of snapshot that you get. So you get a risk of diabetes or an indicator of risk for diabetes. Massively on the increase in kind of middle age to older, you know, middle age plus people, the rate of diabetes is going up and up and up.

17:33 Yes, I think, I mean, the state, the stats are absolutely staggering. I think they think it's going to get to, if left unchecked, it will get to a third of the population will end up as pre-diabetic or diabetic. It's just absolutely bananas. And yeah, if you look at some of the dietary drivers, it's probably not that surprising. Then you've got some of the sort of core vitamin and nutritional deficiencies. So vitamin D is a very topical nutrient at the moment because of its relationship to COVID-19 severity, vitamin B12, iron, folate, full thyroid.

18:17 We tend to find women are more focused on thyroid than men, but we on the male side have testosterone. We have my brain's going a bit blank. This is where the tiredness and memory crash. It's some of the obvious illnesses that we all worry about, heart attacks, cancer, diabetes. Some of those vitamin markers you mentioned are all about mood, depression, energy levels, sex drive, testosterone, obviously,

18:55 ability to folate, ability to get pregnant. These are everyday things that people struggle with, but sort of go, oh, yeah, well, you know, it's my age, or yeah, well, you can't expect to be, you know, feeling too good when. But actually, if there's an underlying medical, not even about a medical addition, there's just a deficiency in the body, let alone a suggestion that something's wrong. Then by taking, by doing such a test, people can make step gains in their well-being, in their experience of life.

19:32 And this is why I'm so keen to do this podcast today. And it's why home health tests are part of the fitness area of Team Super Dad. And finding a UK-based company with. with flipping dudes like you in charge is actually really exciting because that taps into my digital marketing background and my involvement with lots of digital companies there. So it's a powerful thing to be making available to people. And what I heard when you were talking about what people are able to do with that information. So on the one hand, I can see that it's a great comfort and a release to people to be able to find these things out, particularly if you have a history of cancer in your family or diabetes in your family.

20:20 But the flip side of that is it's going to be a real good motivation. If you're trying to work out, you're trying to give up smoking or you're trying to change your diet. How do you stay motivated if you can't see the difference on the outside? This actually gives you an indication of how your health is improving on the inside, which of course is directly linked really to your longevity, which if you're a dad and you're thinking about your children and grandchildren, even you're going to want to live a long time. Yeah. Also, just to be just to be straight on the cancer front. So unfortunately, the science on the testing front at the moment doesn't enable us to test for

21:01 the broad suite of cancers. It's very much on the roadmap. I mean, we have, there's one particular testimonial which I'm very proud of where one of our customers was testing for something unrelated to cancer, but found some pretty deranged results. They picked it up with the GP. The GP ran the tests and diagnosed early stage cancer. The GP was like, this is a completely asymptomatic cancer, but it's really problematic or can be. How did you find out? And she was like, well, I just did this test with Thriva. So you can find that some systems interrelate enough that

21:43 you may find something that is correlated, but it's not the test set out to pick it up. So yeah, I don't want to pretend to be something that we're not there and would love to be, to be clear, and very excited for the scientific developments that are coming. Yeah, I mean, I think there's so much truth to the fact that people, you know, they have to at some point change the sort of internal narrative and appreciate that they are the ones that both benefit from and are penalized by their health reality, right?

22:25 And I think the thing, the kind of single piece of learning for me that stands out, you know, I'm not a medic, don't come from a medical background. I'm very lucky that we've got an astonishing team of clinicians and medics in our company, of course, is that the body as a system is a phenomenally interrelated system. And the things that you will often see when you do something good sit across a variety of different systems within the body. So I, hands up, I went on a bit of a sort of happiness drive over the course of the start of this year.

23:07 So I started it, I think, on the 2nd of January. And I decided to try and work out every day to try and do some sort of fairly meaningful exercise every day. And I was previously doing it, running a startup and having three kids isn't particularly conducive to working out a lot. So I was doing it, and there goes my excuse. I was doing it once every couple of weeks. And I thought, no, I'm just going to see what happens. I'm going to force myself to do something every single day. And the number of things that showed up as a benefit were fascinating for me. From, you know, the obvious better sleep, better physicality, you know, libido is increased. It's just all of the stuff that happens that isn't necessarily directly related to the thing that you were doing it for was amazing.

23:51 And I saw some of the key biomarkers that I keep track of improve. So yeah, for me, it's just a part of the picture, right? It's a really important part, I think, but it's just a part of the picture that everyone should have as part of their daily lives. And I get that I'm completely and utterly biased in opinion here. I think in five years' time, this is just going to be the norm, right? Apple Watch, Fitbit, Jawbone, the sort of blazed trail around wearables and the information they give off. I really just see this as the next bounce of the ball. We know that people want to know more about their bodies.

24:35 They want to quantify where they're at. This is just a slightly different lens on the same reality. reality. Yeah. I mean, I had a Fitbit. I loved it. I upgraded. I don't think Fitbit would, well, maybe Fitbit would admit that the Apple is an upgrade, but just the broader amount of information that I get out of my Apple Watch to my Fitbit. And that's been my journey to start with. I was like, oh, my steps. Oh, how much I sleep at night. And now, or obviously, of course, my running and recycling and things. But now, with the apps that are available through my Apple Watch, understanding about my sleep and sleep deficit, your dad with young children sleep deficit, you'll be like, oh my God, you're probably running at about 30% or something like that.

25:24 But that's powerful in terms of relationships. I know, obviously, people who listen to the Team Super Dad podcast regularly will know about my divorce and my wife's health challenges and the impact all of that had on our relationship, my burnout and my mental health. But sleep, just as an indicator of ability to manage yourself, your business, your children, your relationship, how you respond to situations, how much fun you are to be around. These are, I guess, gateway bits of information. But if you take that same concept, that same idea of knowing this helps me be better,

26:05 start to understand, oh, my vitamin D is really low. My sugar levels, I mean, I'm just actually waiting for my first Thriver test to come back. I'm interested in my sex drive. And I'm 47 years old. I've just started a new relationship. It's interesting to me how that's going, basically. Yeah, and you know something, Johnny, there's a there's an interesting there's an interesting sort of psychological sort of two-parter or back and forth there. So I had a really interesting conversation with my wife the other night, who herself is having some

26:49 health challenges. And she's been speaking to some really excellent functional medicine doctors. And the commonality is stark. And it goes like this: right, list of the realities you currently face. Okay. If sleep is on the list, fix sleep first, then sort anything else out. Yeah. Because there isn't, anyone listening to this podcast is a fan of, I think his name's Matthew Walker, and he did the book on the science of sleep fairly recently, much to much to the appreciation, I think, of anyone who's ever been challenged by it. And

27:31 there is nothing that doesn't correlate with sleep from a disease perspective. So sleep, you know, it is, as he put it, incredibly resilient to the vagaries of evolution, right? If we could not sleep, evolution would have long since done away with the need for us to sleep. But we are absolutely reliant on sleep. And as soon as you start mucking around with it, the amount of fallout is pretty stark. Now, where I think the interesting back and forth is, is I know my levels absolutely inside out because I've started a company and I have the great privilege of done, you know, having done a whole bunch of testing over the last five years.

28:14 So for me, actually, I know I'm all good on all of the key parameters that most people probably have as a question mark. And that really helps me when I do that little thing of, why am I feeling so buggered? Okay, well, I know it's not those things. So we're all good there. Then I think about, oh, is my voice a bit scratchy? Yeah, okay. It's probably a virus or something bacterial. Or how, okay, how was my sleep? Am I feeling a bit pissed off? Is it just tiredness? And eight times out of ten, the little check-in of,

28:50 what is going on? I'm tired. It's okay. I'm just tired. And that is incredibly powerful because what it actually ironically takes away is a lot of the what ifs. What if it's this? What if it's, you know, could it be, I read about this thing, maybe my vitamin D levels are. And you're just like, not that. And therefore, the confidence with which I can say, yeah, I'm just good at understanding that I'm just tired now and that that's all right. For me, it's been this is sample size of one. Yeah, it's just really powerful. It really helps me to get on the other side of that mental state.

29:30 Yeah. And I can, as you're explaining that, I can see what's coming out of that. that is confidence, confidence in your day-to-day life, confidence in managing situations. And so much of being a man, being able to get on with the things that you need to get on with, comes from an inner piece, a confidence that I've got this under control. I can handle this. I can handle what's coming down the line. And so it is a new thing explaining this to people and saying it's really useful to have. Is you've got to get it into their mind about, oh, there's another cost in my life. It's another expense.

30:10 But really, the information that it gives you and that peace of mind, that freedom, the confidence, you start to put if you could put a monetary value on those things, you're like, oh, well, actually, this is as obvious a regular cost as having the heating on or having water, let alone paying the sky or other things that don't actually give us that much back apart from a fat ass. Right, there's a hilarious kind of reality check that it's a sort of logical argument, so it ultimately doesn't win people over. But we spend more MOTing our cars than we do on our bodies by a massive margin.

30:55 And we check in on our teeth at least once, sometimes twice, sometimes three times a year. It's like, what really? Like, we've evolved for that to be the norm. Like, come on, like, that is not quite right. The car one's good. How big are the cues at the car washing places, let alone the MOT places? Yeah. And 15, 20 quid a week, even a fortnight, maybe even once a month, but they're spending that money getting their car cleaned. Yeah. And at the end of the day, you take your body with you, right? You take, and that analogy was historically used for your mental state. You take your happiness or unhappiness into the tent or the castle, right?

31:38 It doesn't matter. Whether you have made a load of money or you haven't, you know, you are, you take your biological truth with you wherever you're going to be, right? And therefore, yeah, as I say, fully get my own biases here, but yeah, I find it contributes to, yeah, just feeling more clear, more certain, and that I kind of know where I am. And that for me is a really good thing. Well, there's an interesting subject around this as well. And I experienced this with my wife when she was unwell, which I'd love to hear your perspective on this.

32:21 Is that when you go to the doctor, even if you are ill, they have a range. So that was a thyroid condition, right? So you go and get your blood stone. This was the experience with my wife, thyroid condition. And she was just within the kind of norm zone. But then through considerable amounts of research by me on the internet, doing the old Google Doctor thing and finding forums, and you realize that her size and body weight and everything else that had gone on, actually, for her situation, being at that level, it was clear that something wasn't right.

33:01 But the parameters that the doctor and the NHS was able to work in, all they could say is just, well, you're in the safe, you're in the okay zone. And is that quite, it kind of fits back into what you were saying about the NHS is great to save you in an emergency kind of thing. But is that quite normal that we could fall within what doctors consider the norm, but actually for ourselves, we're outside of it. And that's why it's important for us to know ourselves what's going on in our bodies. Well, there's a few, there's a few strands there. I mean, look, we have an advanced thyroid test because we got in on when we when we launched our first thyroid product, we got inundated by people, maybe like you or your wife, saying, no, look,

33:45 this is the reality. This is the kind of test you need to run. And then we went away and we engaged with some leading academics to really understand some of the science. And we put together what is, we think, a cutting-edge test. And, you know, are they making that available on the NHS? No, typically not. And there's a few parts to that. You know, the average doctor can only be expert at a certain number of things. And there is a reason that what's typically called functional or integrative integrative medicine have emerged as fields. And they effectively are trying to appreciate that you have.

34:29 you have to treat the whole human in front of you. So, back to that thing of sleep and stress being determinants of some of the health realities you might be facing, just as snapshot examples. A doctor isn't trained like that, right? They weren't designed systemically to be the providers of that kind of insight and care. So, no, they aren't very good at doing something like that. But again, to give them their dues, they weren't asked to be that, you know, systemically, they weren't trained in that sort of area of specialty.

35:11 And also, the science is evolving all the time, right? And if you were trained as a doctor 20 years ago, functional medicine wasn't even on the horizon back then. It always astonishes me, again, from a place of enormous privilege, having the wonderful work that the doctors all do. And I've got lots of friends who are amazing doctors. The average doctor is given something like a day's training in nutrition. And when you think about the impact of diet on health systems in the body, I find that absolutely staggering. But equally, it's because they've got this absolutely massive, broad church of other knowledge that they have to go and go and learn and assimilate. So, yeah, it does happen.

35:57 And I think what you're sort of seeing start to emerge is where there are areas of real nuance to the science and to the medicine. Private companies are stepping in to devote the resources that they have and build up an expertise around that particular specialty, recognizing that it's just not fair to assume that our much-loved GPs are going to be the ones to be able to do that. Yeah. And this kind of technology and service actually gives them the freedom to say that without it being a cop-out or an admission of failure.

36:41 It actually can define their role much better and make these services available. Brilliant. So, just to recap, Thriver, it just comes in the post. People take a fingerprint, put a small sample of the blood in the thing and send it back to you. Then what happens after that? Yeah, exactly. So it's about 12, 15 droplets of blood, something like that. And usually within about 48 hours, you'll get a ping from us to say, Johnny, your results are ready. And yeah, you log into your personalized dashboard and then you'll see a comment from.

37:16 So we still think that a GP in NHS trained is a really important person to have eyes on your, both the information you give us digitally, so any health background or particularly egregious symptoms or whatever, and then a look at your blood test results themselves. And they'll look at both of those in tandem and then provide a comment on your situation. And then, yeah, there's a whole wealth of information about, okay, what is vitamin D actually doing in my body, to use the example we were discussing. If there is an optimal range, so not just what the average, to your question around lab range is not just what the average lab range is, but what specifically is the optimal range for this particular thing if there's science to support it.

38:01 And yeah, I mean, depending on what you want to do, you can either leave it there and be like, right, I've understood it. And I'll come back to it another day. Or if you want to really, really zoom in, you can understand, okay, what are, for me, the small number of things that I can do to start improving this result? And that's based on the very latest, most cutting-edge research. So everything's on the table from mindfulness to supplementation to exercise diet, you name it. We've got recipe tips, or not recipe tips, recipes, as in actual recipes, for people who are looking for an easy way to say, okay, well, how do I take a first step here?

38:44 Yeah, so it's designed to be, if hailing a taxi used to involve sticking your hand up in the air of the pouring rain compared to what it's like pulling your phone out of your pocket and grabbing Uber, Uber felt like the future, right? It just, it felt, but it was actually just basically using a core technology in the form of GPS and putting a really amazing, kind of pretty game-changing layer on top. We're doing the same thing. We're taking a tried and tested piece of data, which comes out of the lab and putting a game-changing layer on top of it to help you understand what it means and put you in the driving seat.

39:24 we talk a lot about empowerment and having an adult to adult conversation with our customers, not an adult-to-child conversation. And that's our goal. We want to have people walk away thinking, right, I'm leveling up. I'm getting to grips with this. I'm clear on what this all means. Yeah. is exactly what got me excited about what you do about getting my results back and uh and blind me you know in regards to some of the stuff we went through what is now 10 years ago i think it would have been transformational in the miscarriages in dealing with the fallout after that in managing my

40:12 own well-being um i think the pressure that we were under um if we'd have been getting tests like this done as part of our process the counseling and the working things out i think it would have been uh very powerful in helping us make some better decisions back in that time and and that's what everybody should realize from this is it's about making powerful effective decisions around something as fundamental to ourselves as our own well-being absolutely awesome so yeah so that's thriver.co um we are we we love it here at team superdad and uh and we're encouraging people on the on the hero in the hero academy to uh to get their um their tests done as part of uh almost like a like how are you doing like what's like uh like

41:01 like top trumps kind of thing looking at each other's can i like that yeah we haven't yet gotten a uh a top trumps card printed you can pull it out what's your bit of indication 84 yeah cholesterol three so listen just you know in the second part of this i i didn't expect to do this but in my in my researching the business and having one of the founders of of thriver on uh to to literally tell us what it's all about straight from the horse's mouth i started to just to learn about the your

41:40 entrepreneurial journey um the growth of of thriver um how you've got gone and got funding you know at one level but as you just alluded to at the beginning how you got your wife to be okay with the idea at the beginning and even people might not have realized but you did touch on um this was this wasn't something that you started because you had a medical background you started because it seemed like a bloody good idea and there will be dads i know there is because we talk about this in the finances section of of team super dad many men have business ideas but they don't

42:17 chase after it or they have one business idea but because it doesn't work out they then think oh well that wasn't worth doing it and and and and don't start up another business you've had businesses before this this is the one that's going gangbusters at the moment i'd love to talk and hear a bit about about some of some of that jay oh and also i found out how tight you are as a family with your brother and stuff which is something close to close to my heart as well so that's that's what we're going to talk about in this in this sort of second section of the of the podcast and johnny i this is a huge apology not least of all to to you and the any folks listening i've i've got i've got a meeting that starts at two o'clock um

42:58 let's let's let's uh one thing we could do we could come back and do it another day but just in in in essence then well should i shall i try and do a real a real quick sort of post as no no don't don't worry about that we can we can cover that for a dad out there for a man out there thinking about starting you know they've got an idea in their mind but they're thinking i don't really know much about that but i think it's a bloody good idea i don't really know how to start a business but i really want to you know feed into those guys to give them some encouragement that it that it that it is an option that they can go for it yeah i'm i'm i'm really really passionate about this um for a whole bunch of reasons the first is that thing that you have in your head about entrepreneur bold leader um

43:43 fuck that put it down it it's complete and utter rubbish from one end to the other um leadership like anything else is a skill and you'll pick it up if you're interested in it as you go along it's not entrepreneurship is not a character type i firmly believe that um what it is going to require you to do is to assimilate some knowledge about the problem that you're trying to solve and the way that i um frame it to any of the uh kind of younger younger and newer entrepreneurs that that i'm talking to is around um set yourself a very clear goal and my personal suggestion is always

44:23 and I'm completely nicking someone called Kevin Kelly's 1000 true fans heuristic here but imagine what it would take to earn enough to pay yourself your current salary forget trying to build Facebook right the chances of that coming off are one in a gazillion and it's also not necessarily going to give you that much more enjoyment than just becoming the master of your own ship with a team of two 10 20 30 you know so just get clear what's it going to take to earn enough to pay your own salary back because if you can get there then the opportunity to go and create facebook or whatever it is that you see as the next

45:02 big thing are i can't even express the number a trillion times more likely than if you try to set out and build facebook from day one now if you happen to be the kind of person that is just hell bent on solving this thing this way then you won't be listening to me anyway so it's absolutely fine you'll just go off and you'll you know you'll you'll find another path um so yeah find find the smallest first step that helps you to build confidence that you're solving a real problem yeah and that's that's the financial level you're living at so that's your first goal right what can we do to do exactly exactly and there's so much good stuff that happens on the back of that not least of all you realize often not always but i can do that now okay i don't need a team how am i gonna how am i gonna leave my salary job is the

45:57 opening gambits of 400 questions right and the answer is often you don't need to you can get going with something in your spare time providing you're willing to to put your shoulder against the wheel for a bit um yeah very very good topic could spend a lot of time well we uh we are connected now and uh if there's the opportunity to to discuss that uh you're a very busy man obviously but uh it's been an absolute uh pleasure having you on the the important bit of today's conversation was about the the home health test kits um and uh yeah there's other companies out there but uh i encourage people to to to go and pick thriver um hamish thank you very much for having me johnny it's been an absolute pleasure yep awesome thanks all right thanks

46:44 wow love that hamish grierson what a dude as well not just like chit-chatting about the what thriver does for you but chit-chatting about his entrepreneurial journeys family and just how possible it is you know he's not a doctor he just had a cool idea and he went out and made it happen put the right people around him that can be you whatever it is what idea passion commitment desire if there's a burning thought in your mind about a business or even in your mind in your gut like you just know instinctively it's something you should do bit like nick askew when i interviewed had a conversation with him on the podcast go back and listen to that episode you know sometimes you just get an idea a hunch something that if you follow it through you will find out that it is your actual calling it is the thing that you were supposed to do and uh to me that is an important journey to go on

47:38 it's an important conversation to have with yourself so team superdad the hero academy the work that we do there there are multiple elements where we work together to really look at what is it that you want to do what is that burning desire what is that idea do you hate your job are you doing something you don't want to do equally important because who you are at home is impacted by who you are at work and when you're lit up when you're inspired when you're following a vision and purpose then without doubt you're going to be a better husband dad um uncle brother son friend

48:19 it really is about being the best version of yourself and i want that for you so thanks for listening it's been a real pleasure and i look forward to seeing you don't forget of course on fridays we do the wrap-up so get the latest episode of the wrap-up to enjoy uh this weekend it is certainly our more light-hearted uh dad chat banter and piss taking between a couple of dads sometimes more but yeah i hope you've enjoyed this and i know you're going to enjoy the wrap-up as well i'll see you on the next episode of team superdad podcast and hopefully in the teamsuperdad.com forward slash network community thanks again team super dad out

48:59 bye this has been team super dad find us at teamsuperdad.com join the program and create the best life ever for you and your children children. You are not alone. You're on Team Super Dad.