You're listening to the Impact Theory Podcast, your source of empowering ideas and actionable techniques from the world's highest achievers.

Join host Tom Billio, serial entrepreneur and co-founder of the billion dollar brand Quest Nutrition, on a journey to unlock your potential and realize your vision of success.

Welcome to Impact Theory.

Everybody, welcome to Impact Theory.

You're here, my friends, because you believe that human potential is nearly limitless, but you know that having potential is not the same thing as actually doing something with it.

So our goal with this show and company is to introduce you to the people and ideas that will help you actually execute on your dreams.

Today's guest is a globally recognized super stud in the world of elite human performance.

For more than 20 years, he's been hell-bent to demystify and democratize talent via boundary smashing, experimentation and scientific rigor, and his results are astonishing.

He spent nine years as a director of high performance with the Olympics, snowboarding and skiing teams, and when he took the job, America was in seventh.

By the time he left, they were competing for first.

His secret was developing custom programs that take people way, way outside of their comfort zones and showing them just how much they're capable of.

Whether he's having elite athletes parachute into the Australian outback with Navy Seals, forcing them to crawl blindfolded through a box of snakes or surprising them with a real life-charging grizzly bearer.

He doesn't promise that it will be easy, only that it will work.

He believes we should treat our entrepreneurs, researchers and scientists the same way that we treat elite athletes, and as such, he's worked with a litany of people and organizations ranging from Fortune 500 clients to DARPA and everyone in between.

And in his current role of director of high performance at Red Bull, his work has branched aggressively into the realm of optimized creativity through collaborations with some of the world's biggest artists, musicians and cultural influencers.

In 2013, his very unique work garnered him the Outstanding Contribution to Performance Innovation Award at the prestigious Leaders in Performance Conference.

Please help me in welcoming the man who led the performance team for Red Bull Stratus, the group that helped Felix Baumgartner with his record-breaking jump to Earth from the stratosphere, the man who thinks it would be revelatory to push someone out of a helicopter and into the ocean without telling them first.

Dr. Andy Walsh.

It's a pleasure to have a man of your possible madness level on the show. I think what you do in the way that you look at optimizing performances is really awesome.

It's knowing what those custom programs look like though. It's pretty intriguing. How do you come up with stuff like crawling through a box of snakes or having people charge that by a grizzly bearer, which... I mean, that was pretty freaky.

Seeing the images of that where people don't expect a full-size grizzly bearer to be charging at them, what's the thinking behind that?

Well, the thinking we always try and draw back on the science of what's going on. And the fundamental principle there was designed around managing the flight-of-fire response, which is a many high-risk, high-stress situations.

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