B (3:03)

Yeah. So tell me more about Sam. Why is it that Olympians trust him? Like, who is this guy?

A (3:08)

Yeah, so Sam is really interesting. He was a high level rower, he competed in college. So he has an athletic background himself and he was working in finance. And as it often goes, he found himself exhausted, burned out. He walked into working in, you know, the corporate environment being in great shape. He walked out feeling weak, tired, burned out, as I said. And so he started looking into sleep optimization techniques himself. So he actually founded his company, Sam Neem Performance, in response to that, essentially. So he, he founded that in 2020 and since then he's built up this roster of clientele. And some of the Olympians that he's actually worked for are Lucy Renshaw. They're both actually team great Brit Jordan, Olympians, because he is London based Lucy Renshaw, really famous judo athlete. And then Isabel Petter, who goes by Izzy, who I had a chance to connect with. She is a field hockey athlete. She competed in 2020 and 2024, and during the 2020 Olympics, she actually helped usher in a bronze medal win.

B (4:12)

Oh, wow.

A (4:13)

Yeah. It wasn't until the 2024 Olympics that she reached out to Sam because she was in Paris for that and she was having trouble sleeping and essentially she was like, this should be one of the happiest moments of my life, but I'm struggling with this insomnia around these important events and it's detracting from the joy that I feel. And I'm feeling tired and distracted on the field. So that's why she sought out his help.

B (4:38)

Yeah. I'd love to hear a little bit more about what sleep optimization looks like. You know, there are all these things that we hear broadly, like, you need eight hours of sleep. It should be dark. Like, what, what else is there? Like, what makes, like, his version of sleep so special and so effective?

A (4:55)

Well, it was interesting because he actually didn't give me, you know, hard target numbers for certain things. He wasn't like, you need X amount of sleep. Although I did look into the research myself and some of what I found was that, you know, seven to eight hours, as we hear all the time, is recommended if you're getting less than that, it can cut your productivity down by as much as 20%. You can end up eating an unhealthy diet, which I'm sure we've all binged on snacks after getting like three hours of sleep. And it also can impair your reaction time, similar to drinking alcohol. Not maybe, you know, having a night out on the town, but drinking a few beers. So it actually can make you put you at risk when you're doing things like driving, for example, or trying to make decisions in the workday. So sleep is really important. It's become very buzzy in longevity communities and people are, you know, biohacking and talking about sleep. I don't know if you've seen, like, people, you know, wearing their wearables, boasting about their sleep scores, but this has been an area of focus. And it's interesting because it can seem very elusive. Because if you're trying to sleep, then it sets your mind running. Sometimes that makes it harder. He gave me about six or seven tips, and he said it wasn't like, right to think about it as tips because it works best if you do them all together. But there were a series of recommendations, everything from ditching your phone first thing in the morning and late at night. Something I found interesting about Sam's recommendations were that your best night of sleep actually starts first thing in the morning.

B (6:20)

Yeah, I was going to say, why? Why do you have to ditch your phone in the morning? Like, I'm awake then.

A (6:26)

Well, he said first 30 to 40 minutes of the day. If you can do that without your phone, then it's crucial, essentially because your phone is, you know, offers your brain hits of dopamine, as we all know, scrolling through social media, but it's also very stressful. And spiking your cortisol first thing in the morning sets a negative tone for the day. So he was essentially saying that if you can spend those first 30 to 40 minutes doing something without your phone, then that's a better way of easing your way into it. Something else about the morning that he mentioned was important was viewing bright light. And I mean, don't stare into the sun, but essentially opening your window or curtains first thing in the morning isn't even enough because sometimes the light intensity coming through your window can be 300 times less than going outside. So in that first 30 to 40 minutes, if you're able to go out and take a walk, see some bright sunlight, it signals to your brain that, you know, it's ready to get up and get moving. Another Good recommendation for the morning would be getting in a heavy workout. The workout recommendations were interesting because you know, when you're working in a very high intensity job, you have to maybe cram in your exercises when you can. But if given the choice, he recommended doing heavier lift higher intensity workouts in the early morning or before the mid part of the day. So like weightlifting, anything super strenuous, again because of cortisol spike and that wakefulness. And if you can only work out in the evenings, he recommended lower intensity cardio or things like yoga.

B (7:58)

Interesting. Was there anything that surprised you the most about what he recommended?

A (8:02)

There were definitely some hot takes which he told me about, particularly for the evening time. One of them had to do with creating the perfect bedroom environment. And you mentioned this earlier, but he essentially recommends that people create a cave like environment in their room.

B (8:20)

Cave?

A (8:21)

Yes. He mentioned living like a caveman a few times, which I thought was interesting. One of the recommendations with that, you need a cool bedroom, so a window cracked or, you know, air purifier if you live in a city and you have ambulances passing by, blackout curtains or earplugs. Again, if you live on a busy street corner. He said he lives in the countryside. There's horses outside his window, so he could easily just keep his.

B (8:44)

How charming.

A (8:44)

I know, very charming. But one of the other things that he said was hets and spouses should not be in the bed.

B (8:51)

Ooh, that is a hot take.

A (8:53)

It's a very hot take. But essentially it was to avoid the possibility of, you know, getting kicked or getting run across in the night. So that was one of the things which I thought was controversial, but I can imagine, especially for an Olympic athlete, for example, or an executive prepping for a major presentation or a meeting, perhaps sleeping alone for the few nights leading up to it might be the best option. Another hot take that I thought was interesting had to do with wearables. Actually, his take was that, you know, wearables can be good, but again, in that crucial lead up to the competition time, it's best not to wear them. And this has to do again with the same sort of thing as looking at your phone. First thing, if you are looking at your wearable and you see that you got a poor sleep score, that's just

B (9:39)

gonna stress you out.

A (9:40)

Exactly. So seven days prior to a competition, a major event like the Olympics, he said athletes really don't need the extra stress of a wearable. So he said to get rid of those altogether.

B (9:51)

Interesting. Did you change anything about your sleep habits?

A (9:55)

One I didn't even mention was caffeine. And this one, I have changed, and very unscientifically speaking, it's working for me. I was worried he was going to say caffeine is the enemy because I love my gigantic mug of coffee.

B (10:07)

Yes, it's important.

A (10:09)

But his actual opinion was that you can have as much caffeine as you want as long as you cut it off by about 12:30.

B (10:15)

Okay.

A (10:15)

That's because when I was doing the research behind some of his recommendations, caffeine actually has an average half life of five hours in healthy individuals. It's a range, though. It can go anywhere from two to nine. And the half life is essentially the time it takes for half the effects to wear off. So if you think about it, 10 hours later, from 12pm when the effects are finally worn off, you can get a good night's sleep. So it's a good way to think about caffeine intake as sort of a long acting, you know, drug in your system versus, like, I have this coffee now. I'm gonna be feel, feeling tired in an hour, so I might as well have another one at like 4pm My again, unscientific cutoff prior to this was about 2pm just because I found that that worked for me and any later was an absolute disaster. But since talking to Sam, I have cut my caffeine off around 12, and I do think I'm getting a better night's sleep.

B (11:04)

Yeah. Wow. I'm just thinking back to my college days of a. Of a 5pm black coffee.

A (11:10)

It's very dramatic, Rebecca.

B (11:11)

Super detrimental to my sleep, but I had to get through my Canterbury Tales class. I'm curious how we should be thinking about this when it comes to business leaders, you know, people who are not in the Olympics. But do you need to optimize whether it's for, like a big investor meeting or, you know, just their everyday, like, running their company? Are there any things that they could be, you know, prioritizing and also like, that they could be talking to their teams about in terms of making sure that they're getting good sleep too. I would assume, like, workaholic culture is kind of in conflict with this.

A (11:45)

Yes, I think you'd be right with that. These tips are all meant to be used for anyone because Sam doesn't just work with athletes. He works with major executives as well. What's interesting about corporate culture, an executive can travel a lot. So something that another strategy that I didn't discuss that I found interesting was if you're able to Sort of recreate your bedroom environment on the road. Then he recommends doing that. And that can be anything from blackout curtains that sort of like suction onto the window to ensuring that your hotel room is as dark and quiet as possible. But one strategy that was super interesting that I could stick totally see a high level executive doing is bringing your bedding materials with you. This was actually something that was famously done during the 2020 or 2010 Tour de France. One of the teams brought their mattresses with them on the road. He said a more accessible way of doing this is bringing your pillow with you. And he said it not only has to do with comfort level, but also kind of like smelling the smells of home that you're used to can help you sleep better. So that was something interesting. But more broadly speaking for leaders, if you're trying to be a high performance leader, you'll have to be thinking about your employees too. It can't just be the top tier executives who are sleeping well. If you really want your organization to function and you know, given these statistics that we discussed about optimal sleep and how getting less than the recommended amount of sleep impairs your performance, you'd want that for the rest of your employees too. So he recommended that leaders check in with their employees as often as once a week just to see if anyone's struggling with sleep. And he found that if they are, he'd recommend giving them resources, inviting a coach like himself or someone else to come and chat with them and share some of the strategies. But crucially speaking, it's important to create boundaries. We didn't really discuss phones at night, but his recommendation was that you have a pretty strict cutoff from work. You sleep with your phone outside of the bedroom. You use a conventional alarm clock to avoid obviously disturbances in the night, but you know, doom scrolling or spiraling about work stress in the evening. But that can't happen if a leader isn't allowing their employees to sort of detach at a certain point. So constructing those boundaries is absolutely important for folks to perform their best when they are on the clock.

B (14:04)

You mentioned alarm clocks. I need you to give it to me straight. How bad is it that I press a bunch of times?

A (14:11)

He actually didn't mention that. I mean, I would love to know that myself. And here's perhaps another problem with wearables. Now that I have my alarm from my phone on my watch, I don't even have to move to like snooze my alarm.

B (14:23)

Oh, that's dangerous, right?

A (14:25)

He didn't actually say anything about like once you hear your alarm, you should just drift out of bed. But I can imagine that snoozing a million times probably isn't the best.

B (14:34)

Yeah, yeah. So I do have some friends that track their sleep and tell me about their scores and everything. I'm not a part part of that, but I'm always very curious. And one thing I hear a lot about is sleep debt. Is that a real concept?

A (14:47)

This one's a little bit controversial. You know, Sam mentioned this and he did mention that the research is scant in this area, but he still recommends it. And I looked up myself, there is some promising research in this area, but again, most experts say it needs a little bit more, you know, evidence. But essentially what this is is, you know, sleeping to compensate for missed sleep. And with Olympic athletes or, you know, high performing leaders, executives preparing for a major event or travel or meetings, he knows that the night before a big event, you're probably not gonna sleep much at all. So what he recommends is that athletes or executives bank their sleep ahead of time. So in the couple of weeks leading up to the competition, he'll recommend that their athletes sleep as long as possible. And he recommends that coaches work around this, ensuring that their athletes have maybe later start times or get a chance to go to bed earlier at night. But getting like nine, even 10 hours of sleep in the lead up to a competition ensures, in his opinion, that the night when you're not sleeping almost at all, even if that's the night before the competition, you have all of this backup sleep to sort of coast on so that you aren't feeling absolutely haggard that day. Yeah, again, interesting concept. Needs more research, but Sam swears by it.

B (16:01)

That does seem like a really good tip. So all this considered, Chloe, how did you sleep last night?

A (16:06)

I slept great. I have to admit. I just bought a new mattress for the first time in like 10 years. It was an investment, but I slept like a dream and I cut off my caffeine at 12:30, so it was great.

B (16:18)

Might have to try some of these tips myself. We'll return in a minute for Circling Back. Now it's time for Circling Back. This is where each of us shares a story we just can't stop thinking about. Chloe, what story did you bring today?

A (16:48)

Well, Rebecca, this week I want to talk about aliens. So the Atlantic had a great story about prediction market Kalshi. So someone placed a massive bet on February 23rd in the evening for about $100,000, betting that by December of this year, the Trump administration would reveal that aliens or alien technology was real. Apparently the alien betting market on Kalshi had been open since about December, but it had only about a million trades, which is actually pretty low volume when you consider all of the trading that's gone on on Kalshi. But what was interesting about this was there was this $100,000 bet, and then about 35 minutes later, someone placed another bet that was almost twice as large. Wow. And since trading on Kalshi is pseudonymous, we're not sure if it was the same person. But this obviously led to rampant speculation about aliens, with two theories emerging, which experts have sort of on prediction markets have stated is probably the case. So one of them is that this person's simply an alien enthusiast and a sloppy trader and they don't know what they're doing. But the second theory, which has garnered a lot of excitement, is that potentially there's some insider trading going on where this person has some interesting information that they already know. And of course, we've seen with these prediction markets, because of what I said, people can use pseudonyms. The potential for profit is massive. Insider trading has been a problem on these platforms before. We saw this with Mr. Beast. We've seen this whether we're talking about Kalshi or polymarket. So that's led to some of this speculation. And of course, what kind of kicked this all off was that former President Barack Obama actually made a comment on a podcast. He was asked about aliens, and he essentially said, yeah, they're real, although I haven't seen them. He did backtrack a little and say that he believed that not because he'd seen any specific evidence, but because of the size and complexity of the universe. But people really latched onto this.

B (18:43)

Not at Area 51 or anything.

A (18:45)

Well, not that he was ready to admit anyway. You know, I want to believe they're true. But essentially this has created all of this excitement. President Trump seized on this. He did actually order Pete Hesgath to begin the process of identifying and releasing government files related to UFOs. Of course, people have speculated that this is in fact just a distraction mechanism for other more high profile issues like the Epstein files. So that's kind of what's going on here. There was a rash of other activity after these major bets were placed, but the story, unfortunately didn't leave us with anything solid. Essentially, we're gonna have to wait and see. If by the end of the year we find out aliens are real, then we'll know that this person had insider knowledge. If not, maybe they're Just a sloppy trading UFO enthusiast.

B (19:33)

Do we know what Kalshee is going to consider adequate proof of aliens? Like what if Trump just posts on Truth Social? Like, yeah, aliens are real. Is that enough?

A (19:43)

I'm not sure. They didn't actually define, you know, at least in the story. I didn't see them defining any particular metrics for determining that, but I would assume it would require more than just a social media post.

B (19:55)

Yeah. And can this person cash out their money at any point? How does it work on Kalshi?

A (20:00)

I'm not a huge expert on the prediction markets. I haven't really covered them myself. But I would assume that we'd have to wait and see after the deadline has passed to see whether or not this is true.

B (20:10)

Interesting. So someone's either going to win big or, you know, we just continue living life not knowing if aliens are real or not.

A (20:17)

I know maybe one day we'll find out and maybe prediction markets will be the catalyst for that.

B (20:22)

Yeah, I guess the truth is out there, right?

A (20:24)

Okay, Rebecca, so have you found a story that outdoes aliens for this week?

B (20:30)

Well, it's definitely a very different topic. Have you ever heard of a company called Hanky Panky?

A (20:34)

I haven't, only from reporting in house.

B (20:37)

So this is a story that reporter Ali Donaldson worked on recently. Hanky Panky is a famous underwear company. It launched in 1977 which is the same year as Victoria's Secret Secret. And they're most famous for their one size fits all. Obviously not actually one size fits all, but you know, a product of its time. It's stretch lace thong, super famous, sold like in like rolled up little balls that you would see at like boutiques. Very popular with like the SEC sorority crowd. And basically they have existed under the same ownership for almost 50 years still run by the co founders Gail Epstein and Lita Orzek, who are nearing 80. And they finally decided to sell the business to private equity. Just going to refer to my notes. They are now owned by Crown Brands Group, which is a relatively new private equity firm based in New York City. The co founder and CEO Raymond Dayen said that he wants to own Hanky Panky for the next 50 years. He himself is 30 years old. And they're also working with Rafar Group as the operational lead. And that company has a CEO, Yossi Nasser, who co founded the Intimates brand Lively with Michelle Cordero Grant, an entrepreneur we're very familiar with here at Inc. And that company existed in the Athleisure lingerie space. They were very famous for Bralettes and things like that. And they sold a $150 million exit within three years. So they definitely have some good experience here. The co founders basically decided, like, their company needed cash. It was not doing super well, particularly because of how the retail environment has changed in the past couple years. You know, they sold. They saw so much success being in retailers like Nordstrom and being in these small boutiques. And as we've seen E Commerce really take over, especially since the pandemic, they weren't seeing as much success there. But there is a world where they could be a skims. You know, they have so much brand equity from being this company that so many, like generations of women know and love. They decided that Crown was the right purchaser for their company because they trusted, you know, that the vision was going to stay intact, that the quality and the domestic manufacturing was something that they weren't going to compromise on. But at the end of the day, this is still a sale and things can, can happen after you sign the paperwork and you're no longer involved with the business. But I just thought it was such an inspiring story to see these two female entrepreneurs, you know, hold onto their business for so long, really build something. And I do think that they felt like they. They were walking out, like, on their own terms. You know, they very long careers. They built up this massive iconic brand. There was actually a really fun story that they had told Ally about how they went to Union Square Cafe to celebrate the sale. It was like right before Christmas, their server asked them if they were celebrating anything and they said, yes, we just sold our company. And she asked about the company and they were like, oh, have you ever heard about hanky Panky? And the server was actually wearing their underwear. Oh, my gosh.

A (23:40)

Yeah.

B (23:40)

So probably like a very full circle moment for them. Great to see, you know, their impact. But yeah, I think it's just one of those great stories about entrepreneurship and how you can really build something super iconic. They started the company with $15,000 of their savings and it lasted nearly 50 years under their purview. So pretty iconic. Chloe, thanks for being here to share one smart business story.

A (24:05)

Rebecca, thanks so much for having me. Excited to be on this side of the desk for once.

B (24:09)

Yeah. Welcome. The business model is an Ink podcast. You can find episodes every Monday and Friday on our YouTube channel, so make sure you subscribe and check out some of our other videos. You can hear the audio version on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts.