0:01 [Music] who are you and where are you going what do you want for the next 24 minutes we're going to design and attain your ideal life on the way to wow show together we'll find the ideal path to get you back on the track to success and happiness
0:36 on the way to wow show with your host kevin bemel if you're thinking something unusual is going on here at the way to wow show you'd be right i mean no coat and tie what's that about today we have dr andrew walsh on the show and we're going to be spending the whole time having him show us how to break through
1:12 the self-imposed barriers that we all have he's going to show us how to get to our way to wow once upon a time there was a young lady from massachusetts who went to the university of hartford and got a degree in musical theater but somehow life upon the wicked stage was not for our guest bartender who from now on we're going to call them
1:48 wow tenders because i mean wow katie o'donnell is here on the way to wow show and she's going to now demonstrate what she learned over her subsequent career as a bartender and now as a representative for bond and regal right bonded royal bond and royal well regal royal i was pretty close yeah i'll take it she's going to she's going to tell us a little bit tell us a little bit about yourself and then we'll talk about the cocktail you're going to make sure yeah so true i am a musical theater major from massachusetts but i came out here about nine years ago and
2:24 i fell in love with the hospitality scene of la and i was serving tables and everyone said you'd be a really great bartender you should really bartend and i never wanted to i felt like it was a trap it would be trapped behind the bar i couldn't have been more wrong it's the most liberating profession in the hospitality industry i think i mean you're in control of so much magic that happens and so much of the way that people's evenings go and you meet so many incredible people it was a really great place to be so i bartended i learned craft cocktails craft spirits heritage brands all of those amazing things and transitioned into a portfolio manager role for sazerac spirits company's heritage
3:00 portfolio called bond and royal wow wonderful that's where we are and so what are you going to make for us today um i'm going to make so sazerack the company that is the parent company of mine is based in new orleans and so there is a historic and a classic cocktail that is the legitimate cocktail the certified cocktail of the city of new orleans so we're going to make a sazura cocktail oh fantastic pretty exciting yes i've read about it so why don't you just tell us a little about a little bit about what's in it and how how it's mixed up that kind of thing sure it's actually a cocktail that's heated i'm sorry rooted um very much in
3:35 new orleans history so it dates back all the way to the mid-1800s with a gentleman named antoine patio who was making up bitters out of an apothecary in the french quarter so he was a haitian immigrant or at least what is now today haiti and he wasn't making any money selling his bitters so he decided to become a bartender there's like a little bit of we have kind of a similar path of life exactly it wasn't working out so we shifted fields so he starts working at this azerite coffee house and they were making cocktails there but his signature cocktail was mixing cognac with his bitters and sugar
4:11 and at the sazerac coffee house which was named so because of a cognac they were importing from france that was called sazerac de forge so the house cocktail became patio's creation and therefore it was labeled the sazerac cocktail so pretty cool but fast forward a couple years 1870s phylloxera hits france which if you don't know what phylloxera is it's devastating about grapes right i mean you have a wine selection so i think you're probably yeah yeah i've read about it a few times yeah exactly so it hit the cognac production and thomas handy who was another name in the sazerac world of bottle labeling that you can
4:46 look up he was the bartender at the sazrat coffee house at that time and he switched out cognac 4 american rye whiskey and they wanted to have a little french influence still in there so they added in absinthe as a rinse and the cocktail today is a little bit different it's still made with rye whiskey but it's traditionally made with herb sink which is a imitation and away absence that's made in new orleans because wormwood was banned and you could not get absent in the us from 1912 until 2015. right so now we we're beyond the wormwood band and we've got we've got excellent so we are using some absinthe
5:21 today which is really cool we're going to keep in the tradition of using the soundtrack american rye absolutely and then pesho's bitters also is um this is a kosher household and peshawar's bitters is not kosher so i brought some bitterman's bitters which i'm going to combine and make a little riff on the sazerac oh nice so you'll get to taste something that's similar but not exactly the same but i love it a good riff on a on a classic you make it your own doesn't have a name yet so okay we may call it the katy wow or something okay so we're gonna we're gonna go do the next segment we're gonna let you get to some cocktail making and enjoy your cocktail after we're done thanks
5:58 [Music] so when i think about what i thought about the guests that i wanted to have on the show one of the first people who left to mind was dr andy walsh i met andy back in 2017 or 18 the first milken conf global milk and milk and global conference you were at and andy was on a panel discussion with a couple of other people and the room was standing room only it was packed and people were just riveted by what you
6:33 were talking about and at the end of the session everybody's going well i want more i want more i want more and so andy said well maybe we can do a workshop tomorrow we'll see if we can get the milk and people to do it and i was i was talking with andy about this while we were waiting to set the shot i guess it had to go all the way up to michael milken for him to say yes do this so six o'clock the next morning there's i think 100 200 of us back in the room to do this exercise to show us how we could break through our self-imposed barriers and i know for myself it was
7:09 just it was such an amazing experience because i always thought of myself as someone who oh yeah of course you know i can do this i can do that but no matter what we all have these these barriers so so dr andy walsh is a human optimization specialist i think that's probably a pretty fair description right at one time you were you were involved with uh red bull and in their team and um now you work with a hugely diverse group of clientele from corporations sports organizations individuals the military the government
7:46 anybody who's really looking to help their people get from where they are to a more optimal level of performance so andy it has come here today and and he's going to take my colleague sierra and me through an exercise so you can see right here right now that we all can break through our barriers it's it's it's not the thing that you got to be some special you know super person to do it we can do it so so i'm going to kind of turn over things to you and and tell us a little bit more about your story
8:21 how you got here and and what you're doing and then we'll we'll we'll get down on the mats and have you put us through our pieces yeah thank you well thanks so much again for having me on and uh yeah i think that little uh introduction at milken was really sort of the the premise we want to share with everyone is the idea that human potential human optimization really the science of all that has come so far in the last you know 10 15 years that we are now in a position to be able to share it more broadly than in traditional cases so in the past as you mentioned you're a lead athlete or a very special government operator or a high-level business person
8:56 you could access some of these tools but we're seeing now that the the they have such potential when put in the hands of sort of everybody and and they can have such impact it's a democratizing the sort of lessons we've learned from all these extraordinary performers really is what we're about so that's sort of the journey that we've been on for the last few years is how do we still work with the top talent and so keep learning and growing from that engagement but at the same time taking the sort of simple parts of it the best parts of it if you like and bringing it sort of to a more a broader audience so for for the typical person who's who's watching this who you know
9:32 probably isn't an elite athlete or you know isn't a you know a navy seal or a you know delta force or something like that right where you know it's it's their job right to pursue ever higher levels of performance so for the average person like sierra and me how how can we use performance optimization in our lives i mean is it is it just in our professional lives or i mean how do we apply it it's a great question i think what it boils down to and sort of the models we've learned over the years sort of
10:07 are really simple and actually sort of translate broadly because they anchor in first and foremost on you as a person so the idea being sort of in our most casual sense it's sort of better at you and then better at what you do is sort of how we think about it so all the basic principles start with sort of uh self-awareness self-reflection and understanding of what you enjoy what makes you tick what you don't like you know and and then those skills whether you want to be a better partner better mother father to your kids better business person better talent better
10:42 athlete it doesn't really matter it all starts with this sort of introduction to sort of a a greater sense of yourself and that really opens it up so that's what we like we like to train you so that no matter what impact that the the or mastery or area of mastery you're maybe embarking on the skills cover everything that you're engaged in so it's uh yeah you may be training for something very specifically but the skills apply home work business whatever it may be so it's really it sounds to me you're you're looking not only to optimize in the short term but really to
11:17 help people create paradigm shifts in whatever they're involved in so can you give us oh can we get oh okay i'm getting the high sign so i just say can you give us an example of how to do that well so um um use us as the example yeah there you go see see this is why sierra is is on the show because she keeps me doing what i need to do fantastic so we're gonna we're gonna do an exercise where you show us at least how to break through our short-term potential i guess we may not do a paradigm shift here today but maybe we'll we'll have you back and
11:53 we'll figure out a way to do a paradigm shift on camera or something yeah yeah i think the context of what this exercise is is really back to that first conversation we have which is self-awareness and holding your breath naturally creates anxiety it actually puts trash on you and but it's completely harmless but it allows you to navigate that space between okay i think i can do this we know you could probably do a lot more and just so you know the the record for static breath hold i think is around 11 to 12 minutes now somewhere out there so it's a long time oh that's a long time yeah we're expecting to break that
12:28 yeah breakdown record today but you're going to get this opportunity as how you frame it it's okay things are going to get for me i'm going to hold my breath and things are going to get incrementally a little bit more challenging that's the name as you move from sort of comfortable to less comfortable to uncomfortable the the only thing today is to think about how am i responding to that and how am i navigating that conversation with myself and i'll cut to the chase classically people beat themselves up especially when doing in the group i'm not going to do as long as i thought
13:03 i'm not going to do as long as the person next to me there's all that self-talk that starts to uh basically hijack the process so your opportunities to just sort of relax and observe what you're saying and just accept it and and and just be in that present moment as you're holding the breath and then no right or wrong if you start to have the thoughts and negative just let them if you can just observe them just watch them pass in front of you and as we try and hold our breath you're getting a chance to recognize your own innate responses to challenge and threat which translate more broadly as a bigger understanding
13:39 of self-awareness and then when you're out there as part of a team or a group when things start to get challenging you'll probably recognize some of the default behaviors that you have okay and then you start to think about well how do i manage and that's for the next episode how do we move through that right it's kind of a self-study this is where i thought my limit was i can go farther than that and who knows how much farther i can go and that's just one example of just a general awakening of your own awareness of self under a bit of threat and the beauty of holding your breath is you can't talk to anybody you're just going to talk to yourself sorry kevin you're on your own yeah that's okay this one today is just the
14:16 first steps to just learning a little bit about the breathing so we start with just hand and hand chest and sorry hit your microphone hand and belly and the first thing is just learning how to inhale what they call level one breath so it says breathe in by extending the belly pulling down the diaphragm and filling up the bottom part of the lung so it's like and you should feel it just your lower hand moving not your upper chest yet so the trick would be if you breathe through the upper chest you'll feel you'll feel that that right but you're trying to
15:01 just your belly nice and easy just relax keep breathing okay and this is just teaching us to use and fill up the bottom of the lungs when we take our breath relax for a second because the second thing i'll get you to do is when i say deep breath in just for your mental model is to think about filling the lower part then filling the upper part so rather than just going think about think about this just like level and we'll do it the whole time you'll breathe in sort of belly chest belly first then chest
15:38 breathing through the belly then through the chest fill up the lungs relax nice and easy so that's all we did just so why don't we lie down and we'll just practice the easiest way to do this is to do it do you want a pillow or something for your heads or are you comfortable lying on that one i'll have a drink waiting for you on the other side yeah that's that's really that's right so the first question we always ask is how long can you hold your breath for oh i don't know what got 30 seconds in you yeah got a minute no idea no idea we'll find
16:15 out done it before but before you did it the first time where were you at i was right at about a minute yeah yeah like most people can suffer up to a minute you know if they really want to do it without practice this technique we should at least see you starting to break through that but more importantly the time which is kind of irrelevant is being able to watch that inner dialogue as things start to get increasingly a little bit more challenging remember that that first urge to breathe is going to be just co2 building up in your system so you actually have a ton of oxygen so let's do the breathe up
16:50 and so we're going to do a few minutes just to practice the slow repetition of the breathing i would close my eyes relax breathe in pause pause breathe out two three four five six seven eight pause pause relax breathe in pause pause breathe out two three four
17:26 five six seven eight okay when i say so i want to see that index finger come up for a 30 second signal in three two one 30 seconds you look great nice and easy you're gonna feel that little bit of an urge to breathe just let it wash over your body relax into it if you can watch that conversation you've got plenty of o2 left nice and easy coming up on one minute in ten nine eight seven
18:01 six five four three two one breathe three three good breaths three good breaths watch one just good breath another hard breath another breath give me an okay signal we're doing okay good before we go any further feel okay feel alright uh-huh gets a little harder at the end yeah just i thought that just let it relax let it sink in and if you come out early
18:39 yeah i just came out a little early but that's okay if you come out everyone's different everyone does this differently everyone progresses differently just start do those three breaths just and then be like all right i'm just going to start my breathe up again nice and easy even if we go so this time we're going to go for a couple of minutes longer and then we'll try and go for a 1 30 breath hold okay all right so start breathing up three two one breathe in pause pause and breathe out
19:15 two three four five six seven eight okay nice and easy three two one deep breath in and hold hold that breath now now relax straight away let your arms go let your legs go let your shoulders go with your upper back your neck relax your jaw relax your forehead let things go we're gonna do signals
19:50 at the one and and then one will finish at 1 30. you guys are doing great you'll feel that urge to breathe it's just natural you don't need oxygen just try and imagine what you had for breakfast walk through the day think of your favorite song you're doing great guys that urge to breathe is just the body trying to figure out what's going on plenty of o2 left we're coming up onto the one minute a one minute signal on five four three two
20:26 one minute signal please great you got it guys just keep going no movement nice and easy you might feel a little urge in your throat a little tickle try and relax the jaw watch that conversation you're almost there nice and easy relax into it in five four three two one and breathe out one thirty one thirty nice and easy nice and easy three breaths
21:04 one more of these and then we'll do our light press and then just the last breath hold of the day pause pause breathe in pause pause breathe out okay give us five shallow breaths okay just lie there relax now
21:41 nice and easy last one today just think about what you did last time and maybe a little bit longer three or four more seconds three two one deep breath in and hold let everything go straight away start with the toes relax your toes relax your ankles let your muscles and your calves go let your quads your hamstrings relax muscles around your hips your lower back let everything just sink into that mat your chest your
22:18 shoulders your arms down to your hands and your fingers your neck let everything go nice and easy we're going to go as long as you feel comfortable i'm going to check in for signals at the 1 and then every 30 seconds after that just letting it go let that wave wash over you watch the thoughts don't let them unpack you one minute signal in three two one one minute signal okay relax straight away great coming up on the 130 signal the 130
22:54 signal in 5 4 3 2 1 1 30 signal great good job guys fantastic now relaxing right into it letting it go relax the neck relax the arms relax the legs great job 145 there sierra keep going coming up on the two minute signal two minute signal and five four three
23:30 two one two minute signal great keep going keep going good job relax relax relax breathe breathe well done well done both of you [Laughter] yet again i'm thinking to myself you can go farther you can go farther and all of a sudden it's like the post nasal drip is killing me stay there for a second just relax and as you're unpacking it what did it feel like sierra tell us how because you went better you got better and better and better every time what were you doing being someone with asthma that was really exciting for me
24:06 um i prior to this and trained myself to know a minute based on a john legend song so i started singing that to myself so i knew what i was getting that one minute so i was like if i just keep going it'll be fine but the weird thing was i felt as if my heart was thin beating on my like abdomen which was so strange but that's what helped me was just like singing that song and being like oh no you know the lyrics where are you going to stop did you find yourself beating yourself up a little bit towards the end or what was you just as it started to get tough what was the conversation like then i i didn't beat myself up because i knew
24:43 i was getting farther than before and as long as it's progress i'm okay with that even if it's not a lot some is great and i also knew kevin's done this before so he's gonna kick my butt anyways that's fine i made peace with that did you find that last one easier though the time went but you got to one third it was so weird yeah it didn't make sense in my brain but i was like it was like you said with the ocean kind of like we made this rhythm of breathing and actually sounding like the ocean between us and then just imagining like and now you're in the ocean not listening to it you're in it that did help yeah and that's it you sort of
25:18 came in thinking one thing with a little training a little tools a little instruction a little knowledge and that's what coaching is and and human performance the sort of two things one we're giving you the tools and the and the techniques at the same time you're starting to learn about your own responses and what works for you what didn't the john lennon thing was what you used and that's how people navigate their own performance journey they start to identify that they have tools they have techniques they have things that work for them and how do you start to just bring that to light and sort of try and amplify it how about you kevin you you easily went to the two minutes but i could see it at the end yeah so i was i could feel it um in my
25:56 nose and um i have post nasal drips so i you know in retrospect if we had had a pillow but it was so funny because we're coming up on the two minute mark i'm thinking oh no problem i'm going to be able to make 230 without a problem and um and just as we were lifting for the two-minute thing and all of a sudden it all sort of went back into my sinuses relaxed yeah and it just and all i felt for a moment like i was drowning which wasn't you know different that i couldn't breathe you know the brief so that was it was somewhat unrelated to uh to the
26:31 holding breath exercise how were you navigating your thought patterns what was going on for you so um i was you know at first i was saying no come on you know you've got to get to at least what you did before and then i said i said no don't do that don't do that so i actually started thinking about when i used to walk my dog and he'd be chasing after the birds and stuff and i would just watch him you know sort of gambling along on the lawns and such and i was just i was just sort of enjoying that picture um as i was you know holding my breath so just you know i got a happy place yeah yeah again but it's also that proxy
27:07 for you're learning how to navigate your own performance with one particular exercise and it becomes challenging so it you you have to think about how am i going to manifest what i who i am and what how i'm going to respond in that moment as you get further into it you just start to push up against that edge figure out what works oh try that didn't work try this out did work and and that's all the sort of we joke in our business it's human performance is literally about just trial and error really navigating a landscape that's important to you an area of mastery that's important to you but doing it with your own tools your own journey in your own way yeah listening to other people and
27:44 thinking about how others have done it helps but ultimately it's about your journey and who you are and how you want to be in that that's sort of this little exercise is just one simple example to give you a chance yeah all right absolutely yeah if you get you should be okay now to stand up just get up easily don't get up quickly you got it well there i'm worried about you oh actually yeah i'm a little i'm a little bit dizzy that's weird have some water before you have this very strong cocktail um no no i we worked hard for the cocktail
28:19 okay some people work hard for the money we work hard for the cocktail so we've got some um sazeracks right all right here i'll i'll pass them along there you go so these are modified we still have to come up with a name for them thank you very much next time you're meditating in breath thank you so the human potential sazerac maybe yeah absolutely i'm done with that so we just leave this here in sip or it's up to you so the garnish with the saze rack is much it has much controversy around it so you can either decide to i did not rim your glasses with it so if you want the oil essential
28:55 oils on the outside of the room go for that if you want to dump it in there and have it for uh as just aromatics throughout your drink you can do that or you can throw it over your shoulder and someone will come pick it up later no no that's someone's me don't do it oh cheers everyone thank you cheers thank you sir thanks guys ma'am thank you miss oh that was good yeah so we did a little different of the soundtrack cedric normally comes in a really bright vibrant pink color from the pesho's bitters so this is definitely a more aromatic
29:30 more rich it's almost richer in flavor in a lot of ways it's it's spicy but it's also i don't know there's another underlying lots of layers gentle at the same time right yeah like it is it's strong i was expecting a little kick in the teeth but the soundtrack ride really helps out with that it's a really beautiful six-year-old rye so it's mellowed out a lot doesn't have a lot of bites so this this goes right in with uh you know relaxing yeah you know introspection hey exactly exactly people have that at bars i guess sierra thank you for helping with this segment thank you so much for watching me
30:05 i appreciate it andy cheers cheers thanks so much that's our show for this week a special thank you to our team member sierra barrett for joining with all the fun during andy walsh's segment next week stay tuned when the way to wow show goes international we'll be talking to kara macklin who really is going to help us shape up our mindsets courage at all times my marie you're still my bell darling
30:51 [Music] you