Eric Zaltas grew up in a 75,000-person apartment complex in the Bronx, winning spelling bees and getting pushed around on the playground. He needed to prove there was a body connected to the brain. So he became a competitive cyclist, raced in 47 states, rode through Harlem and the South Bronx on Saturday mornings to get to Central Park, and eventually turned a passion for sports science into a career that took him from Berkeley to Nestle headquarters in Switzerland — where he helped fund the research that now underpins how most endurance athletes think about carbohydrate intake.

Now he's back in the Bronx, recently remarried, co-founder of a startup called Addra Labs, and still swimming in a 50-meter pool between meetings at a local city college.

Eric sits down with me to talk about the arc of a life built around curiosity — what it was like to be beamed up to Switzerland with a young family, the London Business School professor who told him he should be running a startup instead, the near-death moment that almost killed Addra before it launched, and the strange experience he had writing a memorial for his best friend that he still can't fully explain.

We also get into what it means to age well, what he learned from his first marriage, and why his 85-year-old dad still emails him at 4:30am every Wednesday to critique the science newsletter.

This one is for the curious ones.

Eri’s IG: https://www.instagram.com/ericzaltas/

ADDRA IG: https://www.instagram.com/addra_labs/

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