[00:00] You're listening to the Biohackers World Podcast.
[00:30] for longevity, right? And makes things a lot easier and more accessible. Yes. Amazing. You're also the host of Data, Driven Health Radio podcast. Yes. Great.
[00:42] Well, thank you for having this conversation with me. Thank you. So I feel like everyone who I speak to in this space has a story. People just don't move into this without something happening. Completely agree.
[00:54] So was it a personal health challenge or was it something that you just saw that was lacking in the medical system that you felt like you needed to get involved with? It was really a lot of passion.
[01:08] And it was early for me, 2011, 2012, when I first started going down the rabbit hole of just how can I find levers to improve my own personal health?
[01:20] Okay. Were you struggling with anything or you just wanted to? No, I was just one of these Silicon Valley overachievers trying to squeeze a little extra juice out of the lemon. Yeah. And I saw this article on sfgate.com because I was living in San Francisco at the time.
[01:36] It was Dave Ashbery on the front page of the website, and he had this band on his head with these blue lights coming out of it. And I'm like, what the heck is that? And it was the first ever device on the market that was giving you real biofeedback about sleep.
[01:53] Oh, okay. I'm like, okay, this is interesting to me. So I bought the device, and I started measuring for like two weeks. And if you had asked me, how do you sleep, I would have said great.
[02:07] But I had just adapted to chronic undersleep, and that became my new normal. I think that's such a common issue with so many people. They don't understand the importance of sleep, but also they don't know how to quantify their sleep.
[02:21] Totally. So I look at these numbers, and they're complete trash. Yeah. I'm like, there's no way. and it turns out it was right. It was pushing too hard in the gym. These were the days when we went into the office.
[02:34] Right. So there were long commutes and I'm getting like five, maybe six hours a night of restful sleep. Okay. But I had not intellectually connected that back to any real numbers. I just had a general idea that I slept fine.
[02:49] Right. And that biofeedback data, as simple as it was, changed my behavior significantly. It made me want to improve.
[03:01] I'm sure. And I started learning on the website of this stupid device, right? It's extinct now, like lots of devices. Yeah. But the website had all these amazing things you could do to improve the quality of your sleep. And they were all really good things I'd never thought of before.
[03:15] The temperature of the room, the lighting in the room, the quality of the bedding, when you eat, stuff that I had no understanding of at all. Do you also shut down the EMS when you're sleeping as well?
[03:28] I don't. Probably should add that one too. Yeah. But I do sleep in an environment that is what I would call more, there's just a lot of trees and water around.
[03:42] So it's very serene. Right. But it is a condo nonetheless, which means there's probably Wi-Fi bombardment. Right, your neighbors. But what was the aha moment for me was as a layperson in health care.
[03:55] I was working in tech at the time. Okay. Just getting some data back helped me change my behavior in a very profound and positive way. Now, someone who comes from a tech background, I would imagine that to be able to quantify something was probably very interesting to you intellectually
[04:12] to be able to see something, a health marker, based on something that you could actually read the data. Well, that's what I was doing for a living. I was gathering all these data points from computer systems.
[04:24] Yeah. And I could go in and fix issues on those systems that companies didn't even know were there. So I was really good at finding these needles in the haystack of numbers. But I had never really applied that mindset to health because I'd always just been healthy.
[04:39] so I didn't really like need to look at it and so then I just that aha moment of like wow this this simple biofeedback yeah that my doctor didn't really ask me about I just figured it out on my own And did you bring it to your doctor and for dentists No it was just a regular GP that I go to for like my checkups and stuff like that It not in their scope of practice to look at some wearable Yeah So I just started going down the rabbit hole at that point And that led
[05:13] me to measuring more things about my health. Okay. I read Tim Ferriss's book, The 4-Hour Body, one of like the early luminary books. Yeah, yeah, he's great. And he's like, go get a DEXA scan. I'm like, never heard of it. Sure enough, there was one in the Bay
[05:27] Area. I went and got it, and it gave me this readout on my body composition. Had a lot of work to do there, too. And so then I modified my diet. Okay. And I did another DEXA scan three months later.
[05:40] What kind of dietary changes did you make? I went, at that time, everyone was on this paleo thing. So I'd never had an understanding of nutrition. I grew up in small town prairies of Canada, like the canola oil capital of the world.
[05:56] So for me to start cutting out processed food and just eating natural foods, that led to significant improvements in my blood work and my DEXA scan. I did both of those tests pre-post.
[06:09] Okay. I did blood DEXA, changed my diet, did blood DEXA again. Great. And I just put the data side by side in a spreadsheet. I'm like, oh, all the lipid numbers got better. Well, you're also sleeping
[06:22] better now. Totally. You're eating better. Yeah. You have that going for you. So at that point, I was addicted. And I'm like, I love this stuff. It's fascinating to me. And I was always tinkering with my health from there on. But I needed a way to track all this stuff for myself. I had a massive
[06:38] spreadsheet I was building with like pivot tables and formulas to like give me the answers I needed. I would be so dizzy, Rob. But it was like, okay, I've got actually better data now than I've ever had before. I can see patterns that my doctor can't see just because he doesn't have all the numbers.
[06:54] And I'm like, well, this is really helpful for me. Maybe it will be helpful for somebody else. Definitely. So I built version one of the app. Okay. And I just threw it out there. So what did version one look like?
[07:06] It did the basics. You could upload all your PDF results from your doctors, and we'd put all that data together for you. So is there a way to pull back from history of medical care, let's say, for a patient over a course of several years?
[07:19] At that time, you had to call your doctors and ask them to ship you your records. Okay. This was pre-patient portals. Yeah, okay. And the patient portals that did exist would not allow a system like mine to pull the data out.
[07:31] Okay. So I lived in Boston when I went to grad school. I had a few doctors, so I called them all. Okay. And they all shipped me my information, and you put that in the system. and then we could connect to MyFitnessPal.
[07:44] Oh, okay. I use MyFitnessPal a lot. Yeah, so that's when I started tracking my macronutrients. Again, this is stuff that was novel to me. Yeah. And I learned how to modify carbohydrates. I learned how to put my body in and out of ketosis.
[07:58] So the version one of the app could connect to MyFitnessPal, bring in your blood work. You could track your weight, body fat, blood sugar. Was there a CGM component? They didn't even exist at this time.
[08:11] Okay. You had to use a glucometer. Old school. Oh, yeah. That's right. The CGM thing started more like a few years ago. Yeah. Well, you could get them back then, but they... I don't know if you had to be diabetic or pre-diabetic.
[08:24] I don't know if the average person can use it just to quantify their... It was still early. They existed, but they were not on my radar screen. Right. Okay. So I was using a Keto-Mojo, which did blood sugar ketones.
[08:37] Okay. So I just put it out there for free and crickets. Okay. That's encouraging. I'm like, you know what? It's like it was a passion project.
[08:49] And then I started seeing people logging in pretty regularly. And I saw this one guy who was logging in like 20 times a day. And so I shot him an email. I'm like, hey, man, what are you doing in the system?
[09:03] I'm happy you're using it, but like what are you in there doing? This was like 2016. Okay. And he said, I'm on the keto diet. I'd never even heard of that before. But I'm like, well, great.
[09:15] I'm happy that it's working for you. But on keto, you have to track your macros pretty precisely. If you want to eat enough and be in ketosis, it's an art form.
[09:27] So I tried it, the keto diet, and I got a meter, and I got myself into ketosis. and that was another big aha moment because the moment I got into ketosis for the first time,
[09:40] I realized that I had a level of control over my appetite that I'd never had before. Yeah, I can do that. I was still largely eating a lot of carbs and processed food,
[09:54] but when I was in ketosis you could put anything in front of me and I could take it or leave it So it was something that was affecting my ability to self in ketosis that I did not have when I was out of ketosis
[10:07] That was my insight, basically. And so then I just started putting the app out there for people in the keto community. And we got our first 1,000 users just from people on keto.
[10:21] And Keto in 2016 was, like, huge. It was just popping. And people were using exogenous ketones. Totally. It was, like, it was such a popular thing back then. Yeah, so I just became the Keto app. Okay.
[10:33] Back then. So a user could be, like, anybody. They didn't have to be a practitioner. No, it was for people like me just trying to figure stuff out. Okay, okay. And then that's how we found our traction.
[10:46] Any company that builds something, it's like, who's your first people that just need what you have? Right. And it was the people doing keto because it's a very precise diet to do it properly. Definitely. And to do it, you can do it wrong, too.
[11:00] Oh, I'm a nutritionist, so I've seen in the practice that people do keto and they, yeah. Exactly. So this was the only system that could pull in the macros, pull in the weight, pull in the body fat, pull in the blood sugar, pull in the labs.
[11:15] Okay. Now you can kind of see the whole story unraveling. So that's how we got our early traction. And then it just kind of took on a life of its own from there. Wow. So from then to this point in time, how has it progressed?
[11:28] And I know that you're also working. So you were working with MyFitnessPal back then, but now I think you're working with Oura Ring and some other different types of technologies that have showed up over the past few years. Yeah, we've had a few things happen. We've had this explosion in sensor data, which there was no Oura Ring back then.
[11:44] Right. I think that came around like 2018, 19. Yeah. So we have more ways to measure ourselves now. And there's more metrics that we can measure at home on our own as individuals.
[11:58] Right. So we connect to a lot more things now than we did before. There's a lot more diagnostics on the market now that you can order. There's biological age testing. There's microbiome testing.
[12:11] There's DEXAs and in-bodies. So there's just lots of other diagnostics you can do now as well. So we pull all that stuff in. And I think the biggest change has been that we shifted from selling the program to individuals.
[12:25] And we now mainly exclusively sell to clinics who want to have a way to track outcomes for their clients. So the clinic would be responsible for gathering all the lab work and then you –
[12:38] They already have it in their EHR. It's just – we'll bring it all to life. And then they interpret the information to their patients typically? Yep. Okay. It'll help with interpretation. Think of a typical office and a doctor.
[12:51] They might have an EHR, and a lot of that data is in PDF, or it's in other ways that are just not designed for analytics. Right, right. So we'll work with the clinics.
[13:04] We'll help them get all their data just, like, in a better state. We'll give them more powerful ways to visualize that data, like data visualizations will help bring in the wearable data, if they want to, from their members or clients.
[13:19] So when you get outside of just insurance care, there's just a lot more data that's being collected. So we help them get it all ready. We give them more insight into it. And then now we're starting to put AI on top of that data.
[13:32] Yeah, I mean, that's the whole thing with AI. Like, in some ways, it seems so scary because it's like this monster. You're like, well, it can do so many good things, but also it's a little frightening.
[13:44] But in terms of health, the possibilities are endless. I mean, it seems like it'll just transform in the way that... I think it already is. Yeah. Just look at some of the AI companies on the market that do ambient scribing for doctors.
[13:59] The most miserable part of the job sometimes is after a long day in clinic, you've got to go write all the notes into the EHR. I know, yes. And that problem is now gone. That is true.
[14:11] And by the way, AI writes the notes a thousand times better. It knows exactly how to write them so they're optimized for reinsurance, reimbursement. Right. And it's just a speaker in the office. And so there's companies that have built these AI scribes that they've gone
[14:29] from like zero to multibillion-dollar valuations in 18 months because it's such a massive problem that is now largely solved.
[14:41] So there's a lot of good in healthcare that can come from AI, because it's such a clunky, inefficient, monstrosity of an industry that like, has a lot of room to improve. I totally agree with you on that And I also have another question about what you doing because I know a lot of it is quantification And also the whole world is biohacking And this is sort of something that
[15:04] I struggle with a little bit, because I love biohacking. And I understand the idea of quantifying data, it's helpful. But there's also this piece that I feel like is lacking sometimes, which is
[15:16] the spiritual, emotional piece, the nervous system, and how do you see that tying into health, the spiritual, emotional aspects of our being versus the quantification, right,
[15:30] and the intellectualizing of our health? Yeah, well, I was hoping you'd ask that. I'm happy you're open to answering it. Yeah. At the end of the day, they're one and the same at some level.
[15:49] Your psychospiritual health is going to show up in the numbers. Can it actually show up in your numbers? If someone is psychospiritually unhealthy, they have symptoms of disease.
[16:07] Okay? Yeah. So a lot of people who have autoimmune, who have cancer, who have fibromyalgia, at some level there's a trauma there.
[16:20] I 100% agree with you. And so that may show up as the presence of disease pathologically. Yes. But the root cause is psychospiritual.
[16:34] so hearing the psycho-spiritual side of things we don't really we know how to do it but we don't know how to quantify it right so
[16:46] I believe there's a lot of factors at play that we don't understand yet as humans or how to explain or measure and so
[16:58] I don't really care if you can measure them or not we know how to fix them and there's lots of good ways for psycho-spiritual healing now. I think there's probably more conversation on that now
[17:10] before. I think the world is changing in terms of their openness to psychedelics, to mental health conversations. I have so much respect for a lot of the athletes who come forward and other really
[17:26] public figures who have a platform and share their own journeys with mental health struggle and destigmatize it. It seems like so much of the world, we live in a society where we feel like we have to hide that.
[17:43] It's like the more proactive you are, the more you have going on, the more success. But on a human level, all of us are really struggling, and that's why I feel like we're seeing these increasing rates of not only, I understand the environment plays a big role,
[17:56] but also our emotional state, the trauma, the turbulence, all of this. and we try to hide that, but I think it's important that we're bringing it to surface now. And also the tools like you have, once you uncover that you were dealing with one of these issues
[18:11] that maybe came from a trauma, but now you were able to correct some of the fallout from it, like poor sleep or glucose regulation, high blood pressure, and now you understand while you're working on that that if you can combine it synergistically,
[18:29] I feel like the two marry together so well that it really is helpful. I mean, like what you're saying is something that I would totally use with my clients. I work with a chronically ill population, and just to have this kind of data is so useful,
[18:44] and I'm first learning about it. Well, it's useful for you for sure. Yeah. It may or may not be useful to the patient, and only you as their clinician can decide if they're ready to look at numbers.
[18:56] That may increase anxiety of the situation. That's where we need you to come in and say, hey, I'm going to measure data on you, but you don't really need to pay attention to it. I'll handle it. And then you're going to have other people who actually stand to benefit.
[19:11] They can have a healthy relationship with it. That's the nuance of working with data. It's not for every patient. And you are in a position to make the determination on when or that may or may not be helpful.
[19:24] Well, this has been, I'm fascinated. We can go on here for like another hour. I know. I feel like there's so much more. I think we need to continue the conversation. We have to continue the conversation. Yes. This is like headspace. It's kind of blowing my mind right now.
[19:36] Yeah. Headspace. But this is awesome. So I'm so happy that we got to connect. Yeah. Thank you. It was an insightful conversation. For me as well. Thank you so much. Yeah. Thanks. I'm already looking forward to the next events in 2026.
[19:49] Los Angeles and to Chicago and to New York. And I know in January after there's going to be Miami as well.