A man walked off a plane at the foot of Wudang Mountain without knowing he stood at the birthplace of Tai Chi, or that the month ahead would fracture his life into before and after. Hands that wouldn't obey. A body built from years of pushing. Five days a week, six hours a day, waking at 5:30 AM to train. Then the shifu said something that changed everything: slow down.

Nick Onken spent two decades at the top of his field—building brands for recognizable entrepreneurs, developing AI tools for personal identity, working with names like Lewis Howes and Jim Kwik. At 47, he did the opposite of what built his success: he stopped, went to China, and learned that kung fu means repetition until mastery, not martial art. He discovered that the body learns at the speed of honesty, not ambition. In this episode of Health Is a Skill, Nick brings the systems thinking of a creative technologist to the slowest practice on earth, and Todd extracts the operating principles that transfer directly to your nervous system, your recovery, and the cost of sustained high performance.

Todd Vande Hei recognizes something in Nick's journey that his own fifty-eight years of sprinting between projects has been trying to communicate—that the next threat isn't the grind itself. It's the hypervigilance the grind creates. This conversation is about what happens when ambition finally meets the body's actual language, and why the fastest path forward requires stopping.

About the Guest: Nick Onken is a brand strategist, creative director, and AI developer who has spent twenty years building identity systems for high-performing entrepreneurs. His work spans personal branding, artificial intelligence applications, and now embodied practice through martial arts training at Wudang Mountain. His background includes collaborations with some of the most recognized names in performance and education.

Your health is a skill you can build. Start with the free resources at podtodd.com or explore team-based health optimization at stark.health

I broke. For years, I thought discipline would carry me through the pressure. It didn't. The body simply couldn't sustain what the mind demanded.

This episode dismantles the mythology around stress as a performance tool and exposes what chronic pressure actually does at the cellular level. You'll learn why high performers age faster, how gray hair biochemically reverses when stress lifts, and why 60% of your cellular energy gets diverted to crisis management under sustained load. Most critically: why stress doesn't just fatigue you—it impairs cognition, dysregulates appetite, and ages your biology faster than time itself. Understanding these mechanisms isn't theoretical; it's the assembly line blueprint for building a body that handles what leadership demands without biological cost.

Todd Vande Hei, CEO and founder of Stark, carries this knowledge as lived experience. He's operated at the scale where the margin for error disappears, experienced the biological age gap firsthand, and now teaches what he had to learn the hard way. On Health Is a Skill, Todd leads with his own body as evidence: the seizures, the firing, the financial collapse, the depression—because vulnerability is what earns the right to push you toward real change. This conversation is about building systems that work when the pressure is real.

Your health is a skill you can build. Start with the free resources at podtodd.com or explore team-based health optimization at stark.health

The entire foundation of medicine is shifting faster than most people realize. Not in theory, not in projections five years out, but right now—in clinical trials, in regulatory approvals, in the actual molecules people are taking. The transformation is so fundamental that calling it an improvement misses the point entirely. It's a different category of performance.

This episode explores what happens when artificial intelligence enters drug discovery. You'll learn how AI transforms an impossible search problem into a solved one, bringing treatment to diseases previously abandoned as unprofitable, and how the tools physicians use are becoming exponentially more powerful at detecting patterns no human clinician could process alone. Discover why a drug that once required five to seven years and $150 million to develop now takes eighteen months and $6 million—and why that compression changes everything for rare diseases with no treatment pipeline. Health Is a Skill means understanding the systems that govern your body; that principle now extends to the systems that create your medicine.

Todd Vande Hei, host and CEO of Stark, has built his career at the intersection of performance and health, operating at scale where margin for error is thin and physiology must deliver. His deepest conviction: the future of medicine isn't guesswork—it's data. For the first time, the tools exist to make that real at scale, and this conversation reflects what that shift means for how you'll manage your health.

Your health is a skill you can build. Start with the free resources at podtodd.com or explore team-based health optimization at stark.health

You wake up one morning and feel it—a sudden shift, not gradual but unmistakable. Energy returning for the first time in years. Euphoria. A moment so disorienting you almost don't trust it's real. But it is.

Chris Mearns has spent years mapping the mechanism behind this experience: why so many of us operate in what he calls an energy debt, where fuel surrounds us yet our cells starve. In Health Is a Skill, he walks through the specific biology—how fructose degrades the mitochondrial battery, how high-glycemic carbs and alcohol trigger the same conserving signal that kept our ancestors alive through famine, and why cutting sugar alone often deepens the crisis. He reveals what people with essential fructosuria—those without the fructokinase enzyme—teach us about metabolic disease, and what that exposes about the system running beneath your own health decisions.

Todd Vande Hei has lived this fight: the withdrawal, the cravings, the moment willpower collides with cellular alarm systems. He brings that struggle into the room because he knows restriction fails when biology fights back. What emerges is not another restriction protocol, but a mechanics-first approach to targeting the mechanism itself—practical, immediate, and built to work with your body instead of against it.

About the Guest: Chris Mearns is a researcher and educator specializing in cellular metabolism and mitochondrial health. His work focuses on understanding how metabolic dysfunction develops at the biochemical level and how to reverse it through precision nutrition and lifestyle intervention.

Your health is a skill you can build. Start with the free resources at podtodd.com or explore team-based health optimization at stark.health

There's a moment when everything stops being about effort and starts being about architecture. Your mind will break under constant pressure—not because you're weak, but because your physiology can't handle what you're asking it to. That's the pivot. That's when the conversation shifts from motivation to design.

On this episode of Health Is a Skill, Todd Vande Hei breaks down the five-modality movement stack that separates sustainable performance from burnout: mobility, strength training, zone two cardio, zone five cardio, and NEAT. You'll learn why removing even one component collapses the entire system—and why business leaders under relentless stress confuse motivation for architecture. The insight lands hard: your aerobic base, mitochondrial density, and daily movement architecture aren't optional. They're the foundation determining whether you sustain performance at work, at home, and over decades.

Todd has spent years watching students transform their health by running the full stack instead of chasing isolated wins. He built Stark on this principle: the body operates like an assembly line. When one station fails, throughput collapses. For anyone managing high-stakes responsibility while fighting fatigue, this framework shifts the question from "How hard can I push?" to "How am I actually designed to move?"

Your health is a skill you can build. Start with the free resources at podtodd.com or explore team-based health optimization at stark.health

A stroke arrives at an age when it shouldn't be possible. Not from genetics or bad luck, but from the exact habits that built everything—the discipline, the relentless optimization, the refusal to stop. The body has a breaking point, and stress has a physiology that most leaders never learn until it's too late.

In Health Is a Skill, Todd Vande Hei maps the four levers that move heart rate variability—the metric that predicts whether your nervous system can sustain your ambition. You'll learn the critical difference between stress tolerance (what you white-knuckle through) and stress capacity (what you build deliberately), and exactly how to rebuild both. This is not wellness philosophy. It's infrastructure: the assembly line model for recovery, the quality control metrics your body needs, the systems thinking that separates executives who optimize themselves into collapse from those who scale sustainably.

Todd leads this conversation from his own line. The seizures, the financial collapse, the AFib diagnosis—these weren't theoretical obstacles. He rebuilt his body the same way he rebuilt his company: through measurable systems, ruthless priority, and the willingness to challenge everything he thought he knew about what drives performance. If you're running anything at scale—a business, a team, yourself—this conversation is about the one optimization that actually matters.

About the Guest: Todd Vande Hei is CEO of Stark manufacturing and founder of Stark Naked, a health optimization platform built on the principle that recovery is a skill, not a luxury. His work bridges executive performance and functional health, translating complex physiology into operational frameworks for leaders.

Your health is a skill you can build. Start with the free resources at podtodd.com or explore team-based health optimization at stark.health

All her labs came back normal. Imaging was clear. Nothing wrong, her doctors said. But her body was shutting down—hours collapsed in bed, winded by stairs, words dissolving mid-sentence. Then a mold inspector found it: high levels growing in the walls where she lived. That single discovery unraveled everything medicine had missed, pointing back to a problem documented in Leviticus that modern practitioners stopped looking for entirely.

Ariana Thacker and Dr. Scott W. McMahon, MD explain biotoxin illness—a multisystem cascade that rewires the immune system in ways medical schools abandoned decades ago. They've identified 25 million Americans severely impacted by mold exposure, yet most never connect the dots. For those with genetic susceptibility—24% of the population—mold triggers sleep apnea, cognitive fog, hormonal collapse, and a symptom constellation so varied that doctors chase lupus, MS, rheumatoid arthritis diagnoses and never land on the actual answer. In Health Is a Skill, they decode why mold is neither niche nor simple allergy, and how to recognize what medicine overlooks.

Todd Vande Hei runs health systems and has spent his career pulling the hardest levers—sleep, movement, nutrition, metabolic disease. He arrives at this conversation already carrying mold's legacy in his sinuses, which is why he recognizes immediately what most health professionals miss: in a landscape of complex systems failures, mold may be the simplest failure to reverse.

About the Guest: Ariana Thacker and Dr. Scott W. McMahon, MD are functional medicine practitioners specializing in biotoxin illness and mold-related immune dysfunction. Their work focuses on identifying and treating the environmental exposures that conventional medicine overlooks.

Your health is a skill you can build. Start with the free resources at podtodd.com or explore team-based health optimization at stark.health

A man collapses on a golf course with no warning. The doctors find AFib—atrial fibrillation—silently triggering seizures his body had been hiding for years. A stroke follows, same root cause, still invisible to every annual physical. He was running hard, ignoring every warning light, until his body gave him no choice but to listen.

Todd Vande Hei, CEO of Stark, reveals the cascade that high performers don't see coming: how chronic stress systematically dismantles your hormonal infrastructure. Cortisol suppresses testosterone. Testosterone kills your cognitive edge. Your entire system runs on fumes while you call it a rough quarter. You'll learn why your standard physical misses the real damage, what comprehensive testing actually looks like, and why a testosterone level marked "normal" might be eroding your leadership capacity. Health Is a Skill demands you understand the machinery before it fails.

Todd built this episode—and Stark itself—because his own body forced him to learn what most executives never do until crisis arrives: that performance without infrastructure is just scheduled collapse. His seizures, his firing, his financial ruin taught him that your physiology isn't separate from your business. It is your business. This conversation is the operations manual he wish he'd had.

About the Guest: Todd Vande Hei is the founder and CEO of Stark, a comprehensive health optimization platform built on functional medicine principles. He has led Fortune 100 operations and now applies that same systems-architecture approach to human physiology, helping executives and high performers understand their body composition, hormonal balance, and metabolic flexibility before breakdown becomes inevitable. Learn more at starknaked.com.

Your health is a skill you can build. Start with the free resources at podtodd.com or explore team-based health optimization at stark.health

Nobody talks about your feet. Not in the boardroom, not in the biohacking forums, not when you're debugging why your knees burn after a decade of "doing everything right." But a guest arrives with a radical claim: the comfortable shoes you've worn your entire life have made you deaf to the ground beneath you. Your body compensates in ways that feel like aging but aren't. High performers who optimize everything from the neck up are building a house on sand.

This episode maps the cascade: weak intrinsic foot muscles, lost proprioception, force leaking out before it reaches your legs, your hips and knees burning energy on stabilization they shouldn't handle. You'll learn why a 2021 study and 25% year-over-year industry growth point to thousands of executives whose chronic knee pain and lower back tightness aren't coming from their hips at all. Health Is a Skill means understanding the assembly line from the ground up—literally. What you'll implement this week will change how you move, where you feel tension, and what's actually load-bearing in your body composition and movement quality.

Todd Vande Hei, CEO of Stark, has spent fifteen years watching high performers hit the same wall. Before he learned what builds resilience, he broke under pressure—and learned that optimization without foundation is just postponement. This conversation is about what's been underneath all of us the entire time, and what happens when you finally pay attention to it.

Your health is a skill you can build. Start with the free resources at podtodd.com or explore team-based health optimization at stark.health

There's a moment when the explanation shifts from VO2 metrics to confession: discipline alone didn't carry him through. He broke. Stress accumulated until his physiology couldn't buffer the load anymore. This isn't about training protocols or fitness zones. It's about what happens when a leader running a manufacturing operation discovers that willpower fails when the body fails.

In Health Is a Skill, Todd Vande Hei reframes aerobic capacity entirely—not as a fitness number, but as the clearest window into physiological robustness. Your brain consumes enormous energy. Leadership is sustained decision-making under stress. When oxygen delivery fails, so does clarity, emotional regulation, and cognitive performance under pressure. This episode maps the direct line between VO2 max and longevity, between aerobic capacity and the quality of decisions made when stakes are real.

Vande Hei built Stark while operating at a scale where margin for error was thin. His health had to perform but didn't. He speaks here to anyone carrying real responsibility—anyone who has felt the weight of people, capital, and consequences sitting on their shoulders every day—about what it means to build a physiology that can actually handle that pressure, and why treating your body like a system, not a problem to willpower through, changes everything.

About the Guest: Todd Vande Hei is the founder and CEO of Stark, a company built on the principle that health operates like any other managed system. He has spent his career applying manufacturing and operational excellence to human physiology, combining functional medicine with the discipline of corporate systems architecture.

Your health is a skill you can build. Start with the free resources at podtodd.com or explore team-based health optimization at stark.health