The Expedition: June '26 Edition

17 new ideas to make you smarter, healthier, and wealthier this month.

The Expedition is our monthly journey into thoughts, opinions, ideas, observations, studies, facts, figures, etc.

Good ones, insightful ones, interesting ones, weird ones, and ones you can use to live better and longer.

It’s a roundup of all the worthwhile stuff I’ve discovered in the last month. The Expedition is a bit of an island of misfit toys. But, hey, the greatest journeys are winding.

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In this month’s Expedition, you’ll learn:

• Friday’s podcast on why health beliefs function like religion.

• A good podcast on women’s health

• Numbers on:

  • Pro wrestler lifespans.

  • The cost of good sleep.

  • The only rule of Waffle House.

  • The global wellness market.

  • The steroid Olympics crash.

  • The safety of walking at night.

  • The Knicks’ game 4 comeback.

  • The physiological toll of the Knicks game 4 comeback.

  • What that comeback did to an entire city’s heart rate.

• What happened when a reporter wore four popular sleep trackers to bed at once, then slept a night in a Stanford lab to see which ones were actually telling the truth.

• A tech founder’s contrarian take on sleep trackers that struck a nerve with thousands of people.

• Why the fight over banning GLP-1s in sports is suddenly heating up, thanks to one very famous comeback.

• The five “enemies of greatness” Nick Saban warns about (you’ve almost certainly met at least one).

• Why I quietly stopped calling an Uber at the airport, and what I do instead.

• Why I keep sending people the same two-minute video of one underrated exercise.

• Plus a new (and possibly unhinged) addition to the family.

Latest Two Percent Podcast

Quick note. Monday’s podcast poll results are in. Most of you want podcasts mentioned in the Wednesday/Friday letters. We’ll make the change now. The poll was rather split, though, so I’m considering a Saturday podcast digest. That’ll give us fewer emails but a dedicated home for podcast updates + extras.

Topic: Why health beliefs have become the new religion, and why that’s leading us to make worse decisions about our health.

Guest: Alan Levinovitz, a religion scholar, writer, and author of Natural: How Faith in Nature’s Goodness Leads to Harmful Fads, Unjust Laws, and Flawed Science (a great book).

Why I spoke with him: Alan argues that our health beliefs carry the same hallmarks as religion—purity, contamination, salvation, gurus, and tribes that turn into mobs when others question the doctrine. He recently wrote a feature for Wired magazine arguing that long Covid research has been corrupted by cultural pressure. Online groups tried to destroy his reputation. The backlash proved his point.

Listen here.

Watch it here.

A reliable women’s health podcast

Pushkin, Malcolm Gladwell’s podcast company, released a new podcast on women’s health with a great host. Dr. Elizabeth Poyner has a hell of a background: magna cum laude from Princeton, MD from Columbia College of Physicians and Surgeons, PhD in cell biology and genetics from Cornell. Her show, Decoding Women’s Health, covers women’s wellness, disease prevention, and how to age well. Check it out here.

By the numbers

3

Years less, on average, that professional wrestlers live compared to the general public.

“The most common causes of death were cardiovascular disease, external causes of death (ie, drug overdose and suicide), cancer and neurodegenerative disease,” wrote the scientists.

Steroid use likely drives up the heart disease number. It impacts the heart and tends to elevate obesity rates.

Source.

~50

Percent the Enhanced Games (A.K.A. “Steroid Olympics”) stock crashed shortly after many drug-free athletes outperformed those using performance-enhancing drugs, and only one world record was set (quite controversially).

Of the Enhanced Games sprinters, Usain Bolt wrote “Them Slower than a Parked Car.”

Listen to the Two Percent podcast episode with two journalists who were on the ground chatting with Enhanced Games founders, athletes, and outside scientists before, during, and after the games. Their stories are wild.

Source.

5

Hours of sleep per night that, if you got and died at 75, you would have spent just as many years awake as a person who sleeps 8 hours a night and dies at age 89.

Which: I have no idea what to do with that information.

50

Percent you should tip your server at Waffle House. That’s the rule at Waffle House.

And we must follow it because it’s the only rule at Waffle House. Evidence.

$6.8 Trillion

Total worth of the global wellness economy in 2024. That figure is double what it was in 2013.

Source.

26

Percent of all sports anti-doping rule violations are traced back to contaminated supplements. Another study found that 12 percent of supplements tested included a substance banned by the FDA.

The takeaway: An alarming amount of supplements are tainted. Use products tested by a third party for purity. Like Momentous.

Source.

73

Percent of adults worldwide feel safe walking alone at night.

Source.

27

Points the Knicks trailed at halftime during Game 4 of the NBA finals, before coming back to win in epic, buzzer-beating fashion. Here’s the full ending.

In NBA history, 23 teams have trailed by 20+ points at halftime. Every other team lost by double digits.

3.7

Beats per minute above baseline heart rate recorded across New York City during the insane ending to the Knicks’ Game 4 NBA Finals comeback. The data comes from Oura ring users in the New York City area.

The city’s sleep scores and next-day readiness scores also dropped by 1.5 and 1%, respectively.

Source.

Which sleep tracker is most accurate? A Stanford Sleep Lab analysis