I’m not going to put my mother’s business on the internet, so here’s the shape of it. Her health has slowly moved outside her control for years. There’s a prescription for one thing, then another, more of them every year, and somehow the bigger picture never seems to get any better.
I’m not anti-medicine. What always bothered me was that nobody seemed to step back and look at all of her. Something would be wrong, that thing would get treated, she’d go home, and life would carry on until the next thing.
And I’ve had to make peace with the fact that I can’t change that for her.
You can explain, you can offer to pay, you can book the appointment and sit in the car outside. But eventually the person living in the body has to want to take hold of it themselves. If they don’t, you love them anyway, and you watch.
It hit me harder than it might have, because taking responsibility for my own life has always been a big part of who I am.
I had to figure out my money. I had to figure out business. I had to figure out dating and relationships, and eventually how to manage my inner self.
Nobody was coming to do any of that for me. If something mattered, I learned about it, looked at what was actually going on, and made the best decision I could with the information I had.
Health was the weird exception.
When you’re young, health is easy to put out of your mind. It’s not a priority, because nothing is broken.
I remember telling my doctor once that I had no energy. He checked my iron, found it was high, and told me to donate blood. I did. My iron came down, and I moved on.
I took that at face value. The number was back down, so I thought it was handled. I never found out why it had been high in the first place.
I didn’t think anything of it. Why would I? That’s what the whole system is built to do. It waits for something to go wrong, and then it reacts.
The problem is: what if nothing feels wrong?
I hadn’t really thought about that until I read Dr. Peter Attia’s Outlive. He wrote about ApoB and Lp(a), two blood markers that had never come up in any of my doctor visits in Canada. I didn’t even know these were things I could check. It made me wonder what else I was missing.
The next time I was in the US, I ran a full panel with Function Health. Over a hundred markers, instead of the handful you get at a normal checkup. I wasn’t sick. I just wanted to know what was actually going on instead of waiting for my body to give me a reason to look.
My LDL (bad cholesterol) came back over 200. My Lp(a) came back high, and it had been high my whole life. I just never knew.
Lp(a) is an inherited particle in your blood that raises your risk of heart disease. Diet and training barely move it, and a standard panel doesn’t look for it.
It runs in families, so I called my parents, and this is where it got strange.
Both of them were already on statins (cholesterol medication). Neither had ever mentioned it to me. Not because they were hiding anything. It just wasn’t information anyone had ever told them their kid might need to know.
So I asked them to get their genetic markers tested.
The elevated Lp(a) came back on my dad’s side, which was the exact opposite of what I would have guessed. My mother’s side was the one with the obvious heart history. Her father had a bypass, spent years taking heart medication and eventually died of heart failure. My dad’s side had nothing like that.
What I’d read in Attia’s book started to feel a lot more personal. Heart disease can develop over decades. By the time it changes your life, damage may already have been building for years. I started wondering what else I should be paying attention to now, while I had time to do something about it.
Feeling fine is not the same as being fine. The only way to know which one you are is to look.
I found it because I happened to read the right book, became curious about the right thing, and ordered the right test.
I don’t want something this important to depend on me getting lucky enough to ask the right question.
Because I know myself. If I got to 50 and found out something had been developing for twenty years that I could have known about earlier, I’d be fucking furious at myself.
At the same time, as I was doing more inner work, I started thinking more about the kind of man I want to be as I get older. Strong. Sharp. Making my own decisions.
And I want to be the one in my family who raises the standard. Not only health. How we think, how we live, what we treat as normal. You can’t raise a standard you’re not living.
I’d spent more than a decade obsessing over numbers for businesses. I could tell you where money was leaking from an ad account or what happened when we changed a conversion funnel.
But I had more data on my Spotify habits than I had on my own body.
I started wondering what I’d learn if I put that same curiosity into my health.
Once I decided to understand it, I went deep. Bloodwork, DEXA, VO2 max, genetics, cellular aging, sleep, cardiovascular testing.
Some of it was humbling. Years behind a desk had left their mark on my VO2 max, a measure of cardio fitness.
But more testing wasn’t the answer on its own. I needed to know how my health was changing over time.
I needed something to compare the new results with, so I started gathering my old bloodwork and scans.
The information was scattered. Bloodwork in one place, scans in another, sleep in an app, notes buried somewhere else.
I tried bringing it all together in spreadsheets, but eventually they became too hard to manage.
So I built software to hold it all. It now has years of my results and records in one place, so I can look back and see what’s changed.
I started sharing what I was learning with people around me.
Soon, they were asking for help with their own health.
- “What should I test?”
- “Where do I start?”
- “Which numbers actually matter?”
At first I sent them the books, podcasts and tests I’d found useful. Then I realised they didn’t want the rabbit hole I’d gone down. They wanted the outcome: to know somebody was paying attention, to know they were on top of it without turning their health into another full-time job.
I’m not a doctor, and the goal was never to replace one. My doctor is the expert when I need medical judgment. I’m not a longevity guru either. I’m a normal guy who got curious.
But having a doctor doesn’t mean handing over all responsibility for my health, any more than having an accountant means never looking at my own finances.
The health stories we usually hear are recovery stories. Something happened, someone got the diagnosis, and then they changed everything.
I’d rather not need one.
This is why I’m building Dialed In. I don’t want anyone’s health to come down to whether they happened to read the right book.
I want people to have someone who knows their history, keeps track of what’s changing, and helps them understand what needs attention.
Taking responsibility for your health shouldn’t mean having to figure it all out alone.
I don’t know what happens to me as I get older. Nobody does. I just want to know I paid attention, acted on what I could control, and did my part.
