About Andrew Herr

Website | Twitter | LinkedIn

‍“You can do incredible things if you are truly dedicated to it and surround yourself with the right people.” – Andrew Herr

Andrew Herr is the founder and CEO of Fount, which is on a mission to help everyone look, feel, and perform at their very best. Fount offers a highly customized three-month program that's born out of Andrew's work, enhancing the performance of special forces warriors in the U.S. military, including the Navy SEALs.

Before founding Fount, Andrew spent seven years running human performance and biotech strategy for the U.S. military special forces. WIRED Magazine described Andrew's work for the U.S. military as giving our soldiers mutant abilities. Andrew holds master's degrees in microbiology and immunology, health physics and security studies. He studied at Georgetown's famed School of Foreign Service in Washington, D.C., and he unsurprisingly comes from a highly decorated and long-serving military family.

In this episode, you'll learn why Andrew considers his ability to put massive sets of data and observations into frameworks a superpower, and how that helps him orient and make decisions, the lessons and values he's taken away from his family's long and decorated military service, the biggest lessons Andrew learned working with the Navy SEALs and special forces warriors, including Delta Force and Green Beret soldiers, how Andrew thinks about the commonalities of peak performance across disciplines, and why Navy SEALs are not all that different from startup founders, elite athletes, and some of the world's best investors.

Andrew shares the little things we should all be doing throughout the day to maximize our performance, including doing small two to three-minute workouts between calls and meetings. He shares some of his favorite books, including The Making of the Atomic Bomb, and why Who is his favorite book around hiring, and more including the advice Andrew would give himself if he could go back to the start of his career.

Chapters

In this episode, we deconstruct Andrew Herr’s peak performance playbook—from their favorite book to the tiny habit that's had the biggest impact on their life. In it we cover:

00:00:00 – Introduction
00:02:33 – From polyphenols to trust and mission focus
00:05:04 – How the brain acts under stress
00:10:15 – Simple health experiments everyone can undertake
00:12:59 – Patriotism, giving back, and dedication
00:14:40 – Organizing things into frameworks
00:18:03 – Commonalities of peak performance
00:20:36 – Listening to your circadian rhythm and optimizing breakfast
00:22:09 – The books that changed Andrew’s life
00:25:16 – There is no “room of adults” in life

‍

Listen to the episode on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Overcast, Google Podcasts, Amazon Music, Castbox, Pocket Casts, Player FM, Podcast Addict, iHeartRadio, or on your favorite podcast platform. You can watch the interview on YouTube here.

An Idea Worth Trying

Andrew recommends a short meditation when you wake up in the morning, before checking your phone. It helps you get ahead of any stressful work or social media items.

Our Favorite Quotes

Here are a few ideas we'll be thinking about weeks and months from now:

“It comes down in the end to trust and mission focus. If you have high trust, it allows you to operate under high stress without having as high stress hormone levels. Trust actually buffers the physiological effects of stress. Then mission focus allows you to keep your brain systems going to prevent burnout, keep those dopamine systems going.”
“I think the best performers in the world are able to handle the challenges that slow or stop other people, so they make decisions under uncertainty. They can move forward consistently even when the stress levels are high, and they often have the ability to laugh about some parts of it.”
“A month of meditation a few times a week changes your baseline stress hormone levels and how you respond to stress. Putting people in a high-trust team dramatically changes how much cortisol you'll release in response to a stressor.”
“People who typically work really well under high stress typically also have some more challenges when things are really slow. There's very little in this world that comes at no cost anywhere in your life.”
“Make the right choice the easy choice.”
“In every other industry, we don't criticize someone if they want it to be made easy for them. We expect good UX and other things, and so why is it that we can't make it easy for people in health today? That's what led me to the big vision we have for data and collecting different types of data, and then using those to build this high-UX version of health in the future.”

Books Mentioned

The following books came up in this conversation with Andrew Herr:

Who: The A Method for Hiring by Geoff Smart and Randy Street
The Making of the Atomic Bomb by Richard Rhodes
Amp It Up: Leading for Hypergrowth by Raising Expectations, Increasing Urgency, and Elevating Intensity by Frank Slootman
The Black Swan: Second Edition: The Impact of the Highly Improbable (Incerto Book 2) by Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Ready Player One by Ernest Cline
Snow Crash: A Novel by Neal Stephenson‍
Seveneves: A Novel by Neal Stephenson

Selected Links

We covered a lot of ground in this interview. Here are links to the stories, articles, and ideas discussed:

Navy SEALs | US Navy Sea, Air and Land Teams

‍

Transcript

Daniel Scrivner (00:06):

Hello, and welcome to another episode of 20 Minute Playbook, where each week, we sit down with an elite performer from iconic founders to world-renowned investors and bestselling authors to dive into the ideas, frameworks, and strategies that got them to the top of their field, all in less than 20 minutes. I'm Daniel Scrivner. On the show today, I'm joined by Andrew Herr. Andrew is the founder and CEO of Fount, which is on a mission to help everyone look, feel, and perform at their very best. Fount offers a highly customized three-month program that's born out of Andrew's work, enhancing the performance of special forces warriors in the U.S. military, including the Navy SEALs.

‍

Daniel Scrivner (00:41):

‍

Daniel Scrivner (01:09):

‍

Daniel Scrivner (01:41):

‍

Daniel Scrivner (02:12):

You can also follow Andrew on Twitter at AndrewHerrBio. That's Andrew H-E-R-R Bio. You can learn more about Fount by going to fount.bio. With that, let's dive into Andrew Herr's playbook.

‍

Daniel Scrivner (02:26):

Andrew, I am thrilled to have you on 20 Minute Playbook. Thank you so much for joining me today.

‍

Andrew Herr (02:30):

Thanks so much, Daniel. Really looking forward to chatting.

‍

Daniel Scrivner (02:33):

I love to start by always asking guests about a recent fascination, something that you can't stop thinking about, something that you're obsessed about. What is on your mind lately?

‍

Andrew Herr (02:43):

I'll give you two. One is pretty deep technical about the work I do. If you look at fruits and vegetables, people will tell you those are good for you. Eat more berries. They'll say because there's antioxidants in them, which turns out actually not to be correct, but there are these plant compounds that are good for you, and there's different ones, right? A blueberry is blue, and a strawberry is red because there's different compounds in them. It turns out every fruit or vegetable has a different mix of these compounds called polyphenols, and they're not all the same.

‍

Andrew Herr (03:16):

They're not just "antioxidants." They're not just anti-inflammatories. They each have different effects on the body. Then the mix you get naturally from a fruit or vegetable is doing things as they work together, and so they interact with your microbiome that are absorbed into the body. We're doing a lot of work trying to unwind what these very specific compounds do, because we've already found unexpectedly in some cases that they do things with sleep that we hadn't ever noticed before, or they do things for athletic recovery when you give them in different mixes to different people.

‍

Daniel Scrivner (03:51):

It's fascinating. Is that the... You said one was deep and technical. You have one other.

‍

Andrew Herr (03:55):

The second piece is I ran an effort for the military, trying to look at this question of why do some teams perform incredibly well, despite the huge stresses of combat, and others seem to fall apart? It's a little bit of a longer discussion, but it comes down in the end to trust and mission focus. If you have high trust, it allows you to operate under high stress without having as high stress hormone levels. Trust actually buffers the physiological effects of stress. Then mission focus allows you to keep your brain systems going to prevent burnout, keep those dopamine systems going.

‍

Andrew Herr (04:30):

But the part that I've been thinking about a lot lately is how this plays out in marriage and choosing who you're going to date. We talk a lot about love and caring about the other person. I think often that's really that trust component we're talking about, but how do people think about what they want in their life? This is from finances to kids and other things. Where do you want to live? I'm thinking a lot about how this work I did for the military, which we already know applies there, it applies in startups, but how does it apply to your intimate relationships? It's been a topic of a lot of thought for me recently.

‍

Daniel Scrivner (05:04):

That's fascinating. Before founding Fount, you ran... You just talked about this a little bit a second ago. You alluded to it. You ran human performance and biotech strategy effort for the U.S. military for seven years, working really closely with the Navy SEALs. What were the biggest lessons you took away from that experience, either from working with the Navy SEALs, or from just spending seven years studying and optimizing human performance?

‍

Andrew Herr (05:27):

We actually have some really interesting data about what metrics predict someone's going to make it into special operations, or will bounce out and won't be selected. The fascinating thing is these aren't physical things for the most part. These are all about how your brain operates under stress. I mean, some of this is the ratios of hormones in your blood that predict these things. But at the end of the day, it hearkens back. Napoleon said the moral is the physical as three is to one, and so how people think and how they operate under stress has got to be the most important piece.

‍

Andrew Herr (06:05):

It's cool because those are also things. Some of that's inborn and you won't change, but some of that you can change. As we all want to perform better, then you often think about how do we take people with an average response to stress, and change the way they individually respond, and then put them in teams, and change how they respond? Obviously, I referenced that trust component a moment ago, but that's not the only way you can affect that.

‍

Daniel Scrivner (06:30):

It sounds like if I'm understanding it correctly, we all have these default characteristics. It sounds like if you're talking about hormones in the blood, I don't know how malleable that is. Does some of that point to just physiologically the way that people are wired being a really important determinant, and then how much of that is malleable? Maybe that malleableness is the team and the people you put that person with that brings out certain attributes, or are there things that people can do, I think, to change some of those?

‍

Andrew Herr (06:58):

It's both. You're certainly born with some biology, and some people get a little bit of a better card there, and some people can get a little bit of a more challenging card. Then your early life, let's say as a kid up to age 18, which would be maybe when we would first see people coming to the military, those experiences influence that. It doesn't necessarily mean having a great childhood was the best piece, or having a hard childhood. You see both of them, and there's this interaction between your physiology and the experiences you've had and the environment you are in, but you can absolutely change that.

‍

Andrew Herr (07:36):

A month of meditation a few times a week changes your baseline stress hormone levels and how you respond to stress. Putting people in a high-trust team dramatically changes how much cortisol you'll release in response to a stressor. Then probably the two biggest stressors for humans are novelty and social judgment. So, if something was new in the environment 10,000 years ago, it could potentially kill you, so you had to be really wary of it. Then if you have a problem with your tribe of 100 or 200 people, and you get kicked out, you're in a very bad situation, so evolutionarily makes sense that these are major human stressors, but there's all kinds of things you can do about them.

‍

Andrew Herr (08:18):

If you look at the best teams in the world, they train. They train realistically. They train repetitively. Before they go in to do a raid to get bin Laden, they build his compound, and train in that compound. That's taking novelty out of the system so that you're there. You know what it looks like. Your brain registers it as something you understand. So, again, there's things you can do at the individual level. There's supplements that affect... This is one of the coolest findings, or maybe one of people's favorite findings.

‍

Andrew Herr (08:47):

There's actually extracts of cocoa, these flavanol compounds in there, that decrease your stress responsiveness. So from the supplement and meditation point nutrition, there are team building things. There's training things. There's a whole spectrum of things, but some of it is definitely inborn. It's one of the challenging things. It's like it's not fair in some way, but it also is true. On the other hand, these people who typically work really well under high stress typically also have some more challenges when things are really slow. There's very little in this world that comes at no cost anywhere in your life.

‍

Daniel Scrivner (09:28):

Maybe another way of saying that is that there's no one that's geared for all situations and circumstances. We all have a default gearing where we do well.

‍

Andrew Herr (09:35):

There's some people who have a very broad thread, but for the most part, there is rarely a totally free lunch.

‍

Daniel Scrivner (09:46):

This makes me fascinated and want to just jump into all the questions I have for you about Fount. I'm just going to try to keep that to one or two in this interview. At Fount, you've taken all of what you've learned, optimizing performance of special operators in the Navy SEALs, and you've brought that now. You're working to bring it to everyone, and you obviously started with elite athletes, CEOs, investors, people wanting to optimize their performance. You just alluded to a massive gamut of things that you work with people on at Fount to help them optimize their performance.

‍

Daniel Scrivner (10:15):

I wanted to ask a little bit of a simpler question, which is so obviously, anyone chasing peak performance can come to Fount, and they can work with you on a one-on-one basis to be able to optimize their performance. What is generalizable that everyone should be doing just as a solid baseline? I think another way of asking that would be when people come to the program, what are the super simple do this, do this, do this that makes the needle start to move a little bit?

‍

Andrew Herr (10:39):

If you take somebody who hasn't experimented a lot in this space, the first thing I'll tell you is make the right choice the easy choice. You crave sugar. Try not to have candy in the house. You're not a sugar person, but you love salt. Try to avoid keeping Doritos in the house. I love Doritos. I do not eat a lot of Doritos. They make me feel bad, but I don't keep them in the house because there are times when I would eat them. On the other hand, I keep two rotisserie chickens in the fridge at more or less all times, and it is absolutely no more work to go and rip a piece of a rotisserie chicken often to eat it than it is to open a bag of Doritos.

‍

Andrew Herr (11:16):

Want to make the right choice the easy choice. I have a trap bar between me and the bathroom. It's loaded with body weights, so it's not super heavy because it's a trap bar. It's safer to do. I don't have to be totally dialed in. It takes me 60 seconds to do a set of five reps on the way to the bathroom. There's very few times when I'm so busy that I can't pull that off a few times during the day. That would be the first thing. Second thing is getting breakfast right is a really high leverage. For some people, that means starting to eat breakfast. For some people, that means stopping eating breakfast.

‍

Andrew Herr (11:53):

So if you tend to have lower blood sugar levels and higher stress hormone levels, eating is usually helpful. If you have higher inflammatory levels, maybe intermittent fasting or not eating till lunch can be useful. Some people do better on low carbs. Some people do well with some high quality carbs like berries in there. It's a fairly simple set of experiments to run. That is one of the highest leverage things we see, and then maybe a couple other things, shower before bed, go from the bathroom into a dark room at a cold bed, turn down your temperature and or these pieces of tech like Eight Sleep and Chili pod or OOLERs are really effective for most people.

‍

Andrew Herr (12:33):

The last one I'll leave with is meditation programs can be harder for people to implement, but if you can meditate or do breath work in the morning before you check your phone the first time, it's a home run for people, because you get ahead of any of these stressful work or personal things. When you build that resilience in before the rest of your day comes at you, that's a huge win for people.

‍

Daniel Scrivner (12:59):

It's fascinating. Your family has a long and decorated military history. I wanted to ask if you could share, I guess, a little bit about that. One of the questions I was curious about is what values or lessons you've taken away or your family has taken away from this family history?

‍

Andrew Herr (13:16):

It goes back really far. I have great grandfather, great, great, grandfather, and there's many generations of service, including my generation. My grandfather served in the Pacific and World War II. He was one of the first Marines to reach the tops of the cliffs in Guam, won every medal, short of the medal of honor, took a Japanese bullet to the chest, survived. There's a lot of that lore in my family, and a lot that I'm very proud of. I'd say the biggest takeaways are one, mission and giving back and responsibility. I'm a quite patriotic person, and that ties all those things together.

‍

Andrew Herr (13:59):

The second piece is you can do incredible things if you are truly dedicated to it and surround yourself the right people. You read these medal citations, like the one from my grandfather. I mean, it's basically like they're coming onto the beaches as Marines. There's Japanese entrenched in these cliffs. They're shooting down at them with mortars and machine guns and grenades. I mean, this is incredible stuff, and people can do that. It's a little... It's a nice reset when I'm running a startup, and things are hectic and stressful and busy, but there's no one shooting at me at that moment, so that's pretty good too.

‍

Daniel Scrivner (14:40):

Having maybe a crowded email inbox seems a lot less stressful and a lot less of a challenge when you compare it and contrast it. I'd love to switch gears and talk about you a little bit. One of the questions that I always like to ask is where you think you have an edge or a superpower, and how that shows up in your day-to-day work. This could be either just on the personal side in your own chase of peak performance or in building Fount.

‍

Andrew Herr (15:05):

I've come to believe my superpower is the ability. My brain loves to organize things into frameworks. So if you give me a bunch of data, interview questions, books I've read, it will always try and rack and stack that into a framework to help me organize and understand it. I found that's been a huge advantage, so it's helped me build frameworks for how we coach. It's helped me design products based on disparate information. I mean, one of the products we have was based on work I did with Navy SEALs on diving, clients asking questions about jet lag, reading research papers.

‍

Andrew Herr (15:41):

You bring that all together, and then it clicks. I always laugh about it as the moment you see the code in the matrix, and it all comes together. Then I think at the end of the day, it's been most powerful for me with Fount for developing the big vision. How do we think about what's missing, and why can't we do what we want to do today? People just want to have a simple answer to what to eat, take, and do to look, feel, and perform like they want.

‍

Andrew Herr (16:07):

In every other industry, we don't criticize someone if they want it to be made easy for them. We expect good UX and other things, and so why is it that we can't make it easy for people in health today? That's what led me to the big vision we have for data and collecting different types of data, and then using those to build this high-UX version of health in the future.

‍

Daniel Scrivner (16:32):

For someone whose brain isn't naturally wired to think about frameworks, I think it might be helpful to go just a level deeper. I'd be curious to hear your perspective on why a framework is so helpful. It seems like part of it is maybe making sense of a massive amount of data that can just be overwhelming and confusing. Maybe it's orienting you on the reason there. Help explain for people listening why a framework is so helpful, and how to think about the importance of a framework.

‍

Andrew Herr (16:56):

I think about them as heuristics or shortcuts for how to make decisions. For example, I mentioned this trust and mission focus framework I developed based on work I was doing with the military. That helps me decide who to hire. So when I think about culture for our company and who to hire, those are the big cuts. When I need to solve a problem physiologically for a client, it would be very difficult to start from zero, and build everything up every time.

‍

Andrew Herr (17:27):

So, when I know that I can think about often certain challenges or a few are caused by inflammatory factors, stress hormone factors, I have these building blocks that I can use to rapidly get to a solution. The beauty is I don't look at these as perfect solutions. I just need to get to a 95% confidence, and then I can run the experiments or do other work to get to however high confidence, or get the client to where they need to go. It's about shortcuts and being able to rapidly understand what's happening in the world to make decisions.

‍

Daniel Scrivner (18:03):

I want to go back to a little bit of your work with the Navy SEALS, and ask a little bit of a higher level question, which is... You have this deep experiences. You spent seven years working with Navy SEALs, other special operators. In your work now at Fount, I imagine you've worked with tens, maybe hundreds of clients optimizing their own peak performance. I would imagine you have a pretty big data set of just peak performers and what peak performance looks like. One of the questions I wanted to ask is just how do you think about the commonalities of peak performance?

‍

Daniel Scrivner (18:30):

Because one, I think, a lot of people like to try to bucket peak performance. I guess in my experience, it seems that actually all peak performers share a lot of attributes. How do you think about that, what that looks like?

‍

Andrew Herr (18:42):

I think the best performers in the world are able to handle the challenges that slow or stop other people, so they make decisions under uncertainty. They can move forward consistently even when the stress levels are high, and they often have the ability to laugh about some parts of it. That doesn't mean that people aren't stressed, and you hear a lot of discussion of very successful people with bipolar or other things, but you've got to be able to laugh about some parts of it sometimes.

‍

Andrew Herr (19:23):

There's a Jimmy Buffett song where he says something like if we couldn't laugh, we would all go insane. I grew up with Jimmy Buffett playing in the background, so it comes to mind. I think, the ability to operate under uncertainty and high stress are the biggest pieces, especially in terms of making decisions and moving forward and not getting stuck.

‍

Daniel Scrivner (19:43):

That bit about humor makes me think a little bit differently about Elon Musk's Twitter feed of memes and all sorts of just ridiculous stuff is maybe that's actually just a way of blowing off steam, dealing with some of the stress that he's dealing with day to day.

‍

Andrew Herr (19:56):

I think, the more creative someone is often, the more they see absurdities. I think, you would imagine that a lot of his humor is related to absurdities, and so he sees these things that don't match his mental model. It's funny to him, and he has no evidence from the environment that putting those memes and things out there hurt him. In fact, as best I can tell, it's helping his brand really quite a bit. I don't blame him, and I like having humor in my life. I think being able to laugh about even the hard times has been critical for me to push through running a startup for the last three plus years.

‍

Daniel Scrivner (20:36):

When you think about yourself, is there a tiny habit or practice that you've incorporated? This can be anywhere. It can be in your work, in your personal life, that's had an outsized impact, and what is that?

‍

Andrew Herr (20:48):

I do so many things. Obviously, this is my day-to-day life that I get... I have a coach in my own brain to help me optimize. I mentioned breakfast earlier, optimizing breakfast for me, which was... I'm not a morning person. I work really late. My circadian rhythm runs really late. By the way, for all the other people out there who do that, you're not lazy if you don't get up in the morning. Some of us are genetically tilted to have a later circadian rhythm. Actually, it makes sense from an evolutionary psychology perspective. You'd want some people who are up late to protect the tribe.

‍

Andrew Herr (21:21):

You want some people who are up early to protect the tribe, and then most of the people you want in the middle. But all that aside, I need to get up. I want to eat something super quickly. I want to have great energy levels, and be focused throughout the morning and rest of the day. I have found through experimenting that this very weird mix that I drink of almond butter and olive oil and water mixed together into a pudding is just a home run for my body and my brain. Getting that dialed in has been... It gives me... Imagine having 30% better performance every day, that probably gives me that much benefit versus no breakfast or the wrong breakfast.

‍

Daniel Scrivner (21:59):

It's a massive delta. It makes me want to get the recipe for Andrew's weird pudding. It's almond butter and water and olive oil.

‍

Andrew Herr (22:06):

I'll get that to you offline.

‍

Daniel Scrivner (22:09):

In your work building Fount, are there any business, fitness health, peak performance books that have had an outsized impact on your thinking and approach? I think, one of the topics we always like to try to pull out is just books that have been impactful. For you, it's pretty wide spectrum. Any that come to mind, any that you frequently recommend or cite to others?

‍

Andrew Herr (22:29):

The book that's probably changed my life the most that I don't know if it's as relevant. Maybe the rest of the group, I'll get you some more relevant business books in a sec, was a book called The Making of the Atomic Bomb. That's Pulitzer prize, winning history of the Manhattan Project and the U.S. atomic bomb program. The first part of the book starts with all these scientific discoveries that led to understanding that a bomb was possible, and then making one. Before we get into the Manhattan Project, we're actually going to do the research to actually engineer and design these weapons.

‍

Andrew Herr (23:02):

It is incredibly inspiring to read this short period of time, 20 years where they go from not knowing really anything about nuclear physics to these every year and sometimes month by month Nobel prize worthy discoveries. Two things came out of that for me. One, I can't help but read that, and ask, "If I'd been there, could I have done it? Could I have been making these discoveries? Do I have what it takes to be this good?" That to me is a motivation. Then two, it really motivated me to go deep into the science.

‍

Andrew Herr (23:40):

I ended up doing a program in undergrad that was more of technology focused. Then I went to grad school for science, and having that deep background has been really valuable for me. On the more business side, for hiring, I really like the book Who. For mission focus, which I've talked about a bunch of times here, I'm a amp it up Frank Slootman fan. For mental models, Nassim Taleb's Black Swan, that series of books, I like. Then two other things, one, I like reading books about startups and founders, because the honest ones tell the story of how challenging things were at different times.

‍

Andrew Herr (24:20):

We probably think of the PayPal mafia as the best entrepreneurs of our current time, but multiple times in that run, PayPal almost goes bankrupt. It's good to remember that they're obviously incredibly smart, successful, talented people, and they almost put that ship into the ground. It's okay to not have things be going right every time. Then I read science fiction books, and I think that keeps my brain flexible and thinking about different things, and adds to the creative component as well.

‍

Daniel Scrivner (24:56):

Is there any favorite science fiction book? I'm a big fan of Ready Player One. I've been going through Snow Crash recently, obviously both weird metaverse focused. Any science fiction books you would call out or point people to?

‍

Andrew Herr (25:07):

Neal Stephenson books for sure would be my top picks. Seveneves would be another great one that there's a lot of an interesting biology component to as well.

‍

Daniel Scrivner (25:16):

It's fascinating. Finally, if you could go back to the start of your career, and whisper some advice in your ear, is there any advice that you would give your younger self?

‍

Andrew Herr (25:25):

I started working in the Pentagon. At first, I'm a junior person out of school, and you're talking to a colonel who's been there for 20 years. You're like, "Wow, this person's important." Then you talk to these people. You're like, "I don't think this person knows what they're talking about," but let me meet the generals, because there's a lot of colonels that meets the general. Then you start having these same feelings, but you're like, "But there must be a room of adults somewhere."

‍

Andrew Herr (25:52):

Of course, the big conclusion is there's no room of adults. You have to do it yourself if you want to change it. So, I think, the big takeaway that I would've given myself even earlier is there's no room of adults. If you think it should happen, figure out how to make it happen. In a big bureaucracy, the way to do that is to turn an insurgency into a conspiracy, so get the people at the bottom, find the people at the top, crush the middle that's in the way. That's the model for how to do it as best I could tell.

‍

Daniel Scrivner (26:19):

That's fascinating. It's a perfect note to end on. Thank you so much for joining me on 20 Minute Playbook, Andrew.

‍

Andrew Herr (26:24):

Thanks for having me. Such a pleasure to chat.

‍

Daniel Scrivner (26:28):

Thank you so much for listening. You can find the show notes and text transcript for this episode at outlieracademy.com/128. That's outlieracademy.com/128. For more from Andrew Herr, listen to episode 127, where Andrew joins me on Outlier Academy as part of our Outlier Founder Series to break down what he's building at Fount. Fount offers a highly customized three-month program that's born out of Andrew's work, enhancing the performance of special forces warriors in the U.S. military, including the Navy SEALs. Before founding Fount, Andrew spent seven years running the human performance and biotech strategy for the U.S. military special forces.

‍

Daniel Scrivner (27:04):

WIRED Magazine described Andrew's work for the U.S. military as giving our soldiers mutant powers. To listen to that episode, simply visit outlieracademy.com/127. It's outlieracademy.com/127. You can find videos of all of our interviews on YouTube at youtube.com/outlieracademy. On our channel, you'll find all of our full-length interviews as well as our favorite short clips from every episode, including this one, so make sure to subscribe. We post new clips and videos every single week.

‍

Daniel Scrivner (27:33):

If you haven't already, follow us on Twitter and LinkedIn under the handle Outlier Academy. Thank you so much for listening. We'll see you right here with a brand new episode next Friday.

‍

On Outlier Academy, Daniel Scrivner explores the tactics, routines, and habits of world-class performers working at the edge—in business, investing, entertainment, and more. In each episode, he decodes what they've mastered and what they've learned along the way. Start learning from the world’s best today.

Explore all episodes of Outlier Academy, be the first to hear about new episodes, and subscribe on your favorite podcast platform.

Daniel Scrivner and Mighty Publishing LLC own the copyright in and to all content in and transcripts of the Outlier Academy podcast, with all rights reserved, including Daniel’s right of publicity.

‍

Tagged:

Health

Wellness

Entrepreneurship

Andrew Herr

Peak Performance

#128 Fount’s Andrew Herr: How the Brain Works Under Stress, The Commonalities of Peak Performance, Working with Navy SEALs, and More | 20 Minute Playbook

#128 Fount’s Andrew Herr: How the Brain Works Under Stress, The Commonalities of Peak Performance, Working with Navy SEALs, and More | 20 Minute Playbook

About Andrew Herr

Chapters

An Idea Worth Trying

Our Favorite Quotes

Books Mentioned

Selected Links

Transcript

#128 Fount’s Andrew Herr: How the Brain Works Under Stress, The Commonalities of Peak Performance, Working with Navy SEALs, and More | 20 Minute Playbook

#128 Fount’s Andrew Herr: How the Brain Works Under Stress, The Commonalities of Peak Performance, Working with Navy SEALs, and More | 20 Minute Playbook

About Andrew Herr

Chapters

An Idea Worth Trying

Our Favorite Quotes

Books Mentioned

Selected Links

Transcript

Next Up