RECESS: Juliet & Kelly Starrett on NCAAs, Healthy Aging, Dean Potter, and the Meowfia
The Ready State Podcast
Kelly Starrett & Juliet Starrett
4.9 • 623 Ratings
🗓️ 8 May 2026
⏱️ 34 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Welcome to the first episode of RECESS, a new, more personal series from us, Juliet and Kelly Starrett. In these shorter, looser conversations, we’re pulling back the curtain on what’s going on in our lives, what we’re learning, what’s making us laugh, and what we’re thinking about across health, movement, longevity, performance, parenting, and everything in between.
In this episode, we talk about Kelly’s experience coaching Cal Women’s Water Polo at the NCAA championship and what it’s like to compete at that level. We unpack the “bronze medal mindset” and some of the biggest lessons we’ve learned from elite sport. We also dive into the Dean Potter documentary and reflect on our own experiences in 90s extreme sports culture. Plus, we share why we’re concerned about nicotine being normalized in wellness and what stood out to us at the Stanford Healthy Aging Conference.
And of course, we get into some lighter moments—including Kelly’s definitely-not-a-cat-group: the Meowfia.
What You'll Learn in This Episode- Why we’re still debating whether Kelly is in a cat group
- What Kelly learned from coaching at the NCAA championship
- How we think about loss, silver medals, and the bronze medal mindset
- Why the Dean Potter documentary hit close to home for us
- Why we’re concerned about nicotine products in wellness culture
- What stood out to us at the Stanford Healthy Aging Conference
- How we’re processing our youngest daughter’s senior-year milestones
00:00 — Why we’re starting RECESS
01:17 — The Meowfia, taco cat, and the funny-off
03:15 — Bringing fun back into health and longevity
03:58 — Kelly’s reflections from the NCAA women’s water polo championship
09:03 — Losing gold, winning silver, and the bronze medal mindset
13:51 — Red Vines, fat-free diets, and 90s athlete nutrition
17:24 — Dean Potter, Dark Wizard, and extreme sports culture
22:45 — Nicotine pouches, health washing, and wellness influence
27:34 — Our biggest takeaways from Stanford Healthy Aging
29:02 — Strength training, creatine, isometrics, and old cat syndrome
32:28 — Parenting, graduation, and figuring out how to cook for two
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hey everyone, welcome to the first episode of The Recess. |
| 0:07.0 | What is the recess, Kelly? |
| 0:08.0 | It's a good question. |
| 0:10.0 | Look, we thought about just having a quick 30-minute chat between us about what's going on, |
| 0:17.0 | the things that we're thinking about, talking about, because sometimes in our podcast, it's very formal |
| 0:21.2 | and we're really interested in the mission of talking to the person |
| 0:25.7 | about their thing, and we don't really get to express ourselves |
| 0:28.0 | through our movement. |
| 0:29.1 | Our goal with our regular podcast episodes |
| 0:32.3 | is to highlight our guests and their awesome work and their thinking. |
| 0:36.4 | Although when we first started the Ready |
| 0:39.0 | State podcast, the real mission was to sort of bring people into our dining room table |
| 0:46.3 | because our work and professional lives have always intersected so much. And we wanted to be |
| 0:51.9 | able to share all these cool conversations we were having on the |
| 0:55.0 | sidelines and we love how awesome the Ready State podcast is and how many amazing smart cool |
| 1:02.3 | expert guests. But we can't see how funny you are. Well, so I mean, for those of you who don't know, |
| 1:08.5 | we have this contest in our house and it's a running thing that goes on about which one of us is more funny. |
| 1:14.9 | And I'm going to start. |
| 1:17.3 | I was going to start with something else with today's episode. |
| 1:19.7 | But what I want to start with is Kelly's in what I call a cat group. |
| 1:24.7 | Oh, I can't believe you did that. |
| 1:26.7 | A cat group. |
... |
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