The Default is Decline: How Performance Medicine Builds Resilience Before You Need It

The Full Listener's Guide

Photo by Ryan De Hamer on Unsplash

🎧 In This Episode

We sit down with Dr. Rich Joseph, a Harvard-trained physician and founder of VIM Medicine, to explore a radically different approach to health.

Instead of waiting for disease to strike, Rich introduces us to Performance Medicine - a proactive model that builds resilience before you need it.

We dive into why the default trajectory is decline, how to catch drift before it becomes dysfunction, and why managing your health requires the same intentionality as managing your wealth.

Listen Now

• Chase Club

• Spotify

• Apple Podcasts

Sponsored By

• Function Health - Health data platform

• Cozy Earth - Bamboo sheets & cozy blankets

• Momentous - Creatine Lemon Powder

• Monarch Money - Personal finance tool

• MUD/WTR - Coffee alternative

Quick Preview

• The default is decline. Left alone, our bodies tend toward disorder. Building resilience requires intentional energy input across physical, metabolic, and emotional domains.

• Drift happens imperceptibly. Most of us don’t notice the slow decline in capacity until it becomes dysfunction or disease. Rich makes the case of doing the work to catch drift upstream with objective metrics.

• Health is a strategic asset. Like wealth, health requires proactive management. We can’t outsource our health to a 10-minute annual physical anymore - we must become agents of our own wellbeing.

---

❤️‍🔥 A Deeper Dive

Big Ideas

Performance Medicine redefines “performance” as presence, not productivity

We usually think of “performance” as athletic achievement or work output. Rich defines it much more broadly: “Your capacity to bring energy and attention to what matters most to you in your life.” This reframes health not as vanity metrics or optimization obsession, but as the foundation for showing up fully in the moments that matter - whether that’s playing Go Fish with your kids or training at the gym.