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Fraser Bailey introduces the Business Athlete Podcast, emphasizing the importance of health for success in various aspects of life. He shares his personal journey of overcoming mental health struggles through nutrition and lifestyle changes, advocating for a holistic approach to wellness. Bailey discusses the significance of being a role model and highlights the need to prioritize self-improvement before trying to change others. Through his experiences, he emphasizes the impact of diet, exercise, and mindset on overall well-being, encouraging listeners to focus on personal growth and optimal health. All right guys, Fraser Bailey here, and welcome to the Business Athlete Podcast, episode one, the first one in the mix. And just think of this episode as a bit of an introduction. I'm gonna run through a bit of housekeeping stuff, what you can expect from the quality of this show, and all the interesting things that I think will really help you grasp why this concept, why this topic is so important. First thing I will say is, if you can hear some noise in the background, it's because I'm on my walking pad. Many of you guys who know me, you know how I operate. I love my office setup. I have a standing desk and a walking pad, and I actually find, to be honest, that my creativity and my ability to articulate thoughts and a message is heightened while I'm walking. It's very much like if you go for a walk and talk with a friend, and you have a really good quality conversation. In part, it's the same principle. And so just know that with any noise in the background, I'm okay with that because I want to multipurpose my time, and I wanna make sure that I'm consistent with these, and I wanna make sure that I give you really good quality information. First of all, a little bit about me, just quickly background sort of check. I'm from New Zealand originally, but I've been living in America now for about 13 years. I'm a US citizen, a proud patriot. I love what this country was founded on. I love the principles behind it, and I've been an entrepreneur for many years, and in the world of nutrition and human optimization, studying nutrition and human structure and function at college. I left, and it's funny because like so many college degrees, most of what you learn to become a good practitioner in anything you do is after you leave. It's in the real world. It's in the trenches with your students. Working together as a team to problem solve so many different challenges that I've seen people face, and I've worked with a wide range of people, in many ways because I feel like I'm quite a diverse person myself. I have different interests and different perspectives on things, and so I tend to be friend and can connect with a wide range of people, but everyone from retired special operators, former Navy SEALs, Army Rangers, Green Beret, to SWAT first responders, all the way to CEOs, professionals, veterinarians, attorneys, hedge fund managers, all the way to famous musicians like Chris Daughtry and Danny Wosnop from Asking Alexandria, and so I've really seen a very diverse bunch of people in my journey, and the common thread is that they all wanted to create that better version of themselves, and you'll hear the same a lot in these shows. You'll hear me talk about this notion around becoming a lighthouse. You see, in people's journey, when they are starting to change their life, they will get all excited about the changes and all these new bits of information and this new stuff they're realizing, and they will become a tugboat. To everyone around them, they'll be the tugboat. They'll be the one that's sort of nagging them and inadvertently gaslighting them or just trying to drag them over the finish line. Come and do this thing with me and I need you to do this thing, and it's very forceful, and it's one of those things where I find that the most beautiful byproduct of you letting go of needing to change anyone else but yourself and just being a beautiful example of what's possible is you become a lighthouse, and so that boat comes into the harbor, and rather than the tugboat having to hook up to the boat that's broken and it's bobbing around in the water and it needs the tugboat to come to pull, pull it to the destination using force, using pull, the lighthouse, it just shines. It just illuminates the path, and the boat finds the destination because you are just illuminating the path, and so I say that when you're thinking about all of these concepts, constantly come back to thinking about the only thing that you can really change in this life is yourself first, and then whatever happens beyond that, that's just part of life, and so one of the areas that I've really grown an affinity for over the last few years is this idea about being a business athlete. What is a business athlete and why is it important? So a business athlete, guys, is someone that understands that in order to be a better leader, a better CEO, a better professional, better at everything that they do, a better husband, better wife, better spouse, better parent, that your health is the foundation of all of that because let's think about it. If you want to be a better leader or a better manager or a better CEO or a better parent, it's pretty damn hard to do that at a high level if you are feeling foggy and you can't concentrate and you're getting digestive issues and you're not sleeping well and you feel exhausted all the time, which makes you feel irritable and anxious. How are you meant to perform at any reasonable level when you don't feel good? And I'll tell you this. If you don't look good, like if you're overweight, that in and of itself is a degree of inflammation that will be having some type of negative effect on your psychology. Your physiology, your physical body is intimately connected to your psychology, aka your brain chemistry. And I really wanted to unlock these concepts because I have two children. So my wife, Lauren, homeschools our children. So Zia is seven at the time of the recording of this podcast and our little son, Xander, is about six months old. So we have young children and I've been married to Lauren for 13 years now. So I say all this because not only as an entrepreneur and a consultant, but as a parent, as a spouse, as a friend, I've wanted to be the best that I can be. And part of the reason why this is so important to me is because I spent so many years early on struggling. I spent so many years early on really, really struggling. And so I was, in my teens, I was diagnosed with bipolar depression, severe social anxiety, ADHD. I was heavily medicated. You know, I was on a high dose of Ritalin, clonopin, which is a benzodiazepine, very addictive, and just a raft of medications, sedated, numb. And at that time, I didn't realize that diet had such a key role in brain chemistry and hormones and how you feel. I didn't realize that training, I didn't know any of this stuff. I just thought it was a genetic thing. I was told for the most part that it just runs in the family, it's genetic, it is what it is, you just have to manage it for the rest of your life. So I spent many years just trading water, just surviving, just trying to hang on there for dear life. And when I started to get into health and fitness and I went back to study and I started to understand that, wow, food is like software and my body and my mind are like the hardware. And in a world where most people, they're inadvertently uploading malware to their supercomputer and then wondering why it's crashing, I started to make the connection that, wow, I can upload a good operating system update onto my computer and actually make it perform and run more optimally. And that's when I really started to unlock levels. And so through this process, over the last, I would say 15 years, tapering and weaning off all the medications that I was on, replacing it with a clean micronutrient-rich, diverse diet. And I'm plant-based, by the way, but I don't just advocate for that. My whole role is to help people find what's perfect for them. But I use a lot of blood work analysis and a lot of more interesting tactics and tools to determine what that even looks like. Anything from food sensitivity testing, hair mineral analysis, Braveman test, detailed comprehensive blood work, biofeedback, all around gut health, hormone systems, brain chemistry, immune system and central nervous system function, optimal fat loss tactics, optimal muscle building tactics, anti-aging concepts, peptides, supplements, you name it. I have a very diverse knowledge base because I knew that if I did not pull all the tools out of the tool belt and solve my own problems, I would be forever shackled to this previous life that I had, sedated, numb, highly medicated. And so I realized that not only did I just wanna feel better in general, I was also at one point fat and overweight and I was also thin and skinny. So when I was on a lot of Ritalin, the Ritalin really crushed and suppressed my appetite. So I was thin, skinny fat, basically. And then when I got off a lot of medications, it's almost like my coping mechanism was the food. I realized that a lot of my emotional strain was then channeled into eating and drinking as a way to manage the stress. And so I got kind of fat. And so one of the beautiful things I look back now is that I actually am thankful for that because it gave me experiences at both ends of the spectrum. So I'm not just this guy who's always been in great shape, so I have no idea what it's like to be overweight and self-conscious. I've been on both ends of the spectrum so I can put myself in that position and remember what it feels like. Remember what it feels like to be really, really self-conscious about the way that you look. My skin was terrible, I had really bad acne, which was really tough. Obviously, if you know you don't look good, it's very hard to be confident with meeting people. It's very hard to be confident with achieving anything that you think is worth achieving because you're consistently up in your head and getting in your own way. And so when I came over to the US, I'd already started working on my personal development. I'd started to clean my diet up. I was learning, and I was learning the ropes. But once I got married and when I had our first child, Zia, that's really what flicked the switch in me because all of a sudden now I realize that, okay, I'm a role model now, whether I realize it or not. And I have these little people that need me to be that better version of myself so I can support my family. And it's a really big sense of duty that I know a lot of men and a lot of people feel across the board. And also to recognize that you are constantly modeling to the people around you standards. And I thought to myself, I wasn't necessarily modeled great standards as a child. My parents separated when I was very young. They have their own challenges and issues that they face. So I was never really modeled what it looks like to have a stable family, but also to have someone that has stable, healthy, solid routines. And I just knew that that had an effect on me growing up. I didn't know what I didn't know. And so I really struggled with my mental health early on, like I said. Now, if I can avoid that and repattern and recondition my habits the way that I show up to model a high level of standard to my family, I must do that. And so the business athlete concept came out of this idea that as a nutritionist and a health coach, I could see a lot of these business type guys. They're basically, the classic one is like the fat Ferrari owner. The fat Ferrari owner that has a Ralph Lauren polo shirt on, a baggy Ralph Lauren polo shirt. They've got the Gucci stuff. They've got the Rolex. They've got the Ferrari, but they're hiding all of the soft, squishy dad bod underneath all those layers of materialism because they somehow think that they can put on enough Rolexes and slap on enough Ralph Lauren and put on enough Gucci and sit in a Rolls Royce that people won't notice the soft dad bod. And I know that might sound triggering to some people. Some things I'm gonna talk about in these podcasts will challenge you. I actually want that for you. I want you to be triggered at times because very often, those are the areas where the work can be done and those are the areas where your own growth can be expanded. But I always come from a place of compassion. So I could see these guys who were big into business and real estate, into investing, talking about business all the time, deals, making money, and yet they looked 10, 15 years older than they were. I would see their blood work, their blood look terrible, so they're burning out their nervous system, all the inflammatory markers in their body are sky high and they're only in their 40s. So they look like they're 55, terrible blood work, puffy face, tons of water retention, burned out. And I know that when you look and feel that way, there is absolutely no way that you are showing up as the best husband, father, leader that you could be. Because what happens is people build these businesses, they build these lives on a foundation of sand. The sand is the weak, soft, untrained, ill-disciplined body. And there's a lot of mastermind groups and tribes out there that talk a lot about business, but they don't talk about it from a place of a foundation of health. Just think about this, like I said, the way that you think, the clarity of thoughts that you have, the memory and the retention that you have, your ability to articulate a thought, it is geared around your brain chemistry. What do you think drives your brain chemistry? All the things that we talk about, your diet drives your brain chemistry, your lifestyle, light exposure, your sleep patterns, your movement. Why do you think I'm walking right now while I'm doing this? Because that walking stimulates the lymphatic system, it stimulates the dopaminergic system, and it stabilizes blood glucose levels, so I don't get the peaks and the troughs and the crashes, which subsequently cause the brain fog to feel tired. I don't get that. So I know how to keep my system very, very, very stable. And that stability allows you to perform at a level that most people just cannot perform at. And you guys will notice, like if you follow me on social media, you'll see me posting my stories every day where I'm up at two or three a.m., and I go all day, and I don't burn out, and I don't have yo-yo dieting periods, and I don't have periods where I just suddenly got fat. I never get sick. I'm always locked in. Does it mean it's easy? No, it's not easy. But my why is big enough. It is difficult at times. It does require me to get out of my own way, and we all have our challenges. I'm not gonna sit here or stand here, walk here, and claim that I have it all figured out. I'm an absolute student. I'm unlearning every day. But one thing that I do know is that the idea of becoming a business athlete is going to be the way that the true leaders operate in 2026 and beyond. It's not enough now to just be a fat Ferrari owner and a multi seven, eight, nine figure earner, but you're obese, and you look like you're 15 years older than you are, and your blood work's terrible. Because none of that stuff matters if you are sick. That's the thing. You can have all that money, but if you're getting cancer and heart disease and all these mental health issues, and you're not connecting with your children or your partner because you're just not dialed in, none of that stuff matters. You know it and I know it. It does not matter. But what I will say is that just like the best athletes, just like the Kobe Bryants, just like the Michael Jordans, just like the Tom Brady's, you look at how they played a game, and the longevity that they had, because they took everything so seriously. They had the nutritionist, they had the physical therapist, they did the recovery protocols. They had all the systems. Being a business athlete requires you to operate that way. So it's one of those things where this notion that business performance is inseparable from physical, mental, and biological performance. It's not hustle culture. It's not motivational fluff. And it's not biohacking for biohacking's sake. It's ROI, return on investment, driven health, sustainable performance. And it's understanding that your physical appearance is an outward projection of your internal health and your internal state. Junk in, junk out. If you show up and you look sloppy, people will subconsciously deduce that you have sloppy internal workings. And I'm telling you guys, you might even be good at what you do. I'm not even disregarding that. And in fact, more power to you if you've achieved a lot in your life of business and you've done it being overweight and out of shape, more power to you, because that would have been very difficult to grind through, to have the mental grit to push through how you feel and look to still achieve an outcome. But imagine this. Imagine how much more effective you could be and how much better your life could be if you approached business where you are your primary ROI. You're a walking billboard. Being a business athlete is essentially like being a walking billboard. And I say this often. I say a walking billboard is, do you realize that you're a salesperson? Someone might say, I'm not into sales. I'm not selling stuff. You are. You're selling things every day. You're selling your ideology. You're selling your beliefs. You're selling your habits. You're selling your routines. All of that on a subconscious level, even to your children, to your partner. Like if you are in great shape, got abs, athletic, lean, great energy, vital, mentally clear, that is sending a message that you are, you take your self-care very seriously and that your ax is sharp. And if your ax is sharp with this stuff, it's gonna be sharp with many, many other things. And so I find it, and I can say this firsthand, my own experience, that when I go to a grocery store or when I'm out in public, I'll often get people comment just about bodybuilding, how I look, all of that stuff. And people are always very curious. There's a curiosity that comes with looking a certain way and it sparks conversations all the time. You become a magnet. I will say that it's not just about how you look. Being a business athlete, it's not just about how you look. It's about how you show up. It's the type of energy that you have, that lighthouse energy. It's not enough to just be a guy who's jacked in a great shape or a gal who's got that perfect hourglass shape. If you're an asshole, if you're nasty, I want you to become that high-energy, mentally clear, happy, balanced, stable, attractive virgin of yourself. That's the foundational principles. And it comes from all the stuff that I had to go through. When I got off all my medications and I was figuring all these things out, that's where I really got into a lot of these business athlete principles. Getting comprehensive, detailed blood work done. Doing the hair mineral analysis. Doing food sensitivity testing. You don't have to do all of these things to start. But they can be very, very useful tools to help you truly figure out how to dial yourself in. Because I think to myself often, if I'm gonna work really hard through the day, I don't wanna get to the end of the day and be so burned out energetically that I don't have any time or bandwidth or energy to pour into my family. I wanna be able to connect with them on some level that makes me proud. So I say all this because this show, it's gonna be a combination of all of that stuff. We're gonna be talking about human biology and physiology, different systems in the body. Everything from gut health, so your mouth, your oral microbiome, skin health. How do you look younger with your skin? Your hair. How do you recover faster from training? How do you optimize sleep? How do you build more muscle and retain it as you age? How do you make sure that you don't get sick all the time? How do you bolster your immune system? How do you improve your energy levels so you don't have these peaks and troughs and peaks and troughs, and you don't need to slam 600 milligrams of caffeine a day to function? And you don't fall into this trap of feeling like you've got ADHD, so you need Adderall. You don't need that. I promise you, most of you guys don't need those things. So part of it is asking these questions. And also part of it's understanding the driving forces behind a lot of why we do this. I often think to myself that if you're just doing this for vanity metrics, when push comes to shove, you'll just burn out. You have to tap into deeper drivers. So I'll be talking about mindset tactics, psychology, overcoming mental health issues. I'll be talking about business tools, business tips, business tricks, the way to lead people, the way to consult, the way to motivate and inspire people to take action, to be a lighthouse. Just think about it. If you can learn simple yet potent concepts around health, and you can hybridize all of that with your habits and routines, the way you communicate and your leadership skills, the way that you share your message like a walking billboard, the way that you train, and the way that you operate across the board, think of the ROI that will have on your relationships, on your children. It's an absolute gift to them. So with this show, guys, we're gonna be covering all the different sections, all the different tactics. So anyone who is an aspiring high performer or a high performer, and you're a professional or an entrepreneur or an intrapreneur, and you just know that you want more from life, and you want to learn, this is gonna be the show for you. This is gonna be the place where we just flesh out some epic strategies. And this is my way of giving back. So I would just encourage you guys, the way you can give back to me for creating this and producing this is just to share it. Share little snippets of it. Share it with your friends. Let people know about this. Let's get this information out to people. There's gonna be some amazing topics coming. A lot of the podcasts will be monologues where I'm just talking about like a masterclass, a lesson, a concept, but I will have interviews and dialogues woven into this experience as well where I'm talking to other famous musicians and eight and nine figure CEOs and entrepreneurs and people that have walked all kinds of paths in life and have a depth of wisdom that I feel like they embody what it means to be a business athlete. Guys, before 2026, achieving stuff as an entrepreneur and a business person, you could do that and be out of shape and people still frickin' love that. I feel like we're at the point now where people really start to understand that you are so much more than just your bank account number and yeah, sure, you can have some monetary success, but I've seen and met too many people that are just totally burned out, exhausted, getting sick, not good role models for their kids. No amount of money is gonna fix that. It has to come from you. It has to come from you. So guys, the Business Athlete Podcast, thinking about being that lighthouse, thinking about being that walking billboard, envisioning the man or the woman that you can become over the course of this year when you add in these principles, processes, and pillars that we will be touching on across the board. So I wanted to say go out there today, take imperfect action, fail forward. And start in the storm.