Tracking Biological Age with AI and Blood Biomarkers | Tyler Smith

Artificial intelligence is rapidly changing how we understand our health — not just how we feel today, but how fast we’re actually aging.

On this episode of Live Long, host Peter Bowes continues his personal experiment with Hundred, the AI-powered longevity platform that combines advanced blood testing, wearable data and personalized insights to track biological age and guide smarter health decisions.

After introducing the app in an earlier conversation, Peter reconnects with Hundred’s founder, Tyler Smith, to go deeper into the idea of a “health operating system” — essentially a personal doctor in your pocket. Together they explore how continuous testing and AI analysis could help prevent disease, spot risks earlier, and motivate lasting behavior change — while also addressing the realities of over-testing, false alarms, privacy concerns and health anxiety.

Peter also shares the results of his own first round of testing, what surprised him most, and how he’s using the data to shape his approach to longevity and healthy aging.

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Transcript

Tyler Smith: 0:00

You can have leaderboards or the biggest sleepers. Peter. That's awesome. Or hey, who gets the most steps? And people want to be around people who are thinking about health and wanting to improve their health and live longer. And so I think there's an interesting way to do something like that publicly.

Peter Bowes: 0:21

Hello again. Welcome to the Live Long podcast. I'm Peter Bowes. In this episode, we're going to reconnect with Tyler Smith, founder of Hundred, the AI driven longevity platform which aims to help us measure, understand and improve our biological age using rigorous testing, blood testing and personalized interventions. I've been using Hundred for the past approximately five months. I'll talk about my experience and we'll get an update from Tyler on some of the platform's pretty exciting new features. To understand the background, I would encourage you to take a look or listen to our original episode. There's a link in the show notes to this episode, and if you're watching this on screen right now, there is a link to that first conversation. But Tyler, it's it's good to talk to you again.

Tyler Smith: 1:13

Yeah, I know, I was trying to think back. It's been it feels like it's been five years. I think that's just startup world and how it works, but.

Peter Bowes: 1:20

Well, I had my blood test. That's my kind of benchmark at the end of August. So we spoke before then, which was when I originally got involved with you and the app. So it was it was summertime when we originally spoke. But yes, the months fly by, don't they?

Tyler Smith: 1:34

They do. The days are long. The years are short.

Peter Bowes: 1:37

Exactly, yes. And isn't that the whole point of this? That the years are short and we want to extend them as much as we can. And a lot has been happening. We'll get to it in a second in terms of the new innovations for the app. But just give me a sort of quick overview as to what's been happening over the last few months.

Tyler Smith: 1:51

Yeah. So look, I think we're just we love to build. So we've been heads down building. I think what we have experienced internally was, look, we want to be super users of our own product that we built. And what we learned early on, call it, I don't know, seven, eight months ago was like, this is fantastic. It's given us back a lot of really great information and details and insights into how our bodies are operating. But how do we make this an app that really feels like a health operating system? And I think in order to do that you have to have usage. And so yes, we can put all the really hard things together on all the plumbing and get back really good evidence recommendations. And we built our own evidence repository. Yes, yes, yes. But how do you get someone to take action and daily action and use this and use it every day. And that's what we've been internally been doing is like, why aren't we using it now and why are we what do we need to do? And what would I have value in using it? And so we can talk about a lot of those things, how we think about it and how internally we've been going through this kind of, I would say, transformation. And I think what we built is really cool. And I personally use this very, very often every day, every other day. And I get a lot of really interesting insights on a weekly basis. And so I think we've done a really good job at that. And we're very far away from where I think it needs to be. But I think it's really, really cool of what we've done.

Peter Bowes: 3:17

Yeah, it's fascinating. And at the heart of this is at least one of the data points is biological age. And we'll do the sort of big reveal in terms of what the app is telling me about my biological age in a second. But just recap for us, what is that number and why is it significant?

Tyler Smith: 3:34

Well, I mean, I think everybody wants to live healthy and long, right? For the most part, I want to live a long life, but I want I don't want to be like, in a in a bed or feel crippled or feel like my kids have to take care of me. And so I think, like when you think about biological age, it's essentially your body's true age. How well are the systems functioning compared to your chronological age. And to me, I think about it like it's driven by, you know, biomarkers across all sorts of different ways, categories from inflammation, you know, you know, cardiovascular health recovery, etc.. And then what we do is we use a North Star metric because it reflects how your daily behaviors and interventions are actually impacting that long term kind of health trajectory. And so look I think it's a number of people can associate with I think it's something that they can hold on to. They want to see are they older or younger. And then what they do is they start to see how to make changes. And that's what I personally went through. Remember I was 39. It said I was 47. And I've worked really hard to change that, reversed it quite, quite a bit. And it's funny because a lot of things that you do on a daily basis affect that in such a huge way.

Peter Bowes: 4:43

Yeah. Interesting. So my biological age, according to the app, is 55.1, which it says is eight years and four months lower than my chronological age, which is 63, which is obviously great news. And it tells me that my aging cells, or at least my cells, are aging slower than my actual age, which is is nice to know. But then, of course, you delve into the data that isn't the full story, and the up breaks down in terms of each individual biomarker. Whether you are in the out of range section, optimal range section, or in range and just to and I'll not bore you or indeed people listening and watching this with every single data point that it showed me, because we'd be here all week. There's a tremendous amount of information, but of the 110 biomarkers analyzed for me, 61 came back in range, 31 optimal, but 18 out of range. And of course, we're all human. I initially focus very intently on those 18 out of range and a little bit more research, sort of outside of the app tells me that that range of in range optimal and out of range is about what you would expect for someone of my age. But the key point is to look at those out of range numbers, see what they are. Some are more significant than others, and then they are using AI tells me or suggests to me what I can do to improve those numbers at a future blood test, so that the headline figures. For me, those are the details. As I say, there's a lot more that we can learn if you delve very deeply into those numbers, but it's that headline that focuses the mind, isn't it?

Tyler Smith: 6:29

Initially, yeah, yeah. No doubt. I mean, I'm curious how you felt when you got your results back because I think everybody's different. And, you know, the headline, you know, number kind of grabs your attention, you know, but the real value sits underneath it in my opinion. And, you know, when you think about AI, it's just not going to be flagging what's off. You know, it's going to be interpreting, you know why those markers matter. what specific actions, you know, we can do to move those markers. And that's what makes I think it powerful. you know, it connects the dots between the data and your daily behavior. So you can actually make change or get on that right track. And I'm always fascinated. One I just did my retest blood literally. I just got my final results back a couple days ago. It's like I'm looking at the app all the time and what improved, what didn't. And I'm like, oh, my daughter was sick. I was a little sick. I should have waited. It's so funny how we all, we want this score or this age or this number or improvement. I think that's what first off, what's great about America, I think to be American and to want to do that and improve and like humans in general, just want this. But I think also a lot of people can get fearful, right? Oh my gosh, is this is this something wrong with me? is this normal? And what we've tried to accomplish was like educating everybody on what this means. And you know, where they stand against their peers and where you're in optimal range, and then also how to fix those things. Like a lot of folks, we see lipids right there. Cholesterol the number, the highest panel that's usually out of range. And there's things to do from how you eat on that. There's things to do from how you use interventions like supplements. And there's also things to do from a medication standpoint. There's all three tiers. And so it's interesting to find how everyone thinks about their out of range. and not only like those aren't the only things you should focus on. We look at your sleep, we tie in your wearables. There's so much. But we all focus on this blood only. And it's only, I believe, one piece of the puzzle, right? One piece of the entire picture.

Peter Bowes: 8:31

It's one piece, but it's an important piece. And you're right to highlight lipids and cholesterol because precisely that is the area where I had most of my numbers out of range. And I'm working on that. And I'm, I'm talking to my doctor about that, and I'm taking external advice on that as well, because I think that is a crucial point to make that the app in terms of what it can suggest to us is not the end of the story. There's a whole new chapter or ten to go that involve the things that you can do for yourself in terms of taking practical advice from people that you trust, and that is your medical professional, and not just exclusively relying on what the app suggests to you. Because you and as I say, I'm not going to delve into every little bit of data, but there were some pieces of information that the app gave me and suggestions for follow ups that because I know my health history, I understood perhaps to a level that the app wasn't explaining to me. And those are the areas I think, that we need to be very careful in terms of the next stage that we need to do our homework. And I think understand that this is is part of the bigger picture.

Tyler Smith: 9:44

Yeah. Now, one thing I think we're really proud about, we've all been internally testing this. What we've done is we've realized what you just said. How can you really make precision or really personalized interventions to someone if you don't have the full story? And so what you'll do is you'll log into the app, it'll say, hey Peter, take a photo of your ID, verify your identity, and what we will do is we will pull in all of your existing medical records. And so think about that. I'll give you a great example. We did this for my wife. And I usually like to sit back and watch her do it, see how she interacts. I'm a wild user. CEO like, likes to see how users use products. And she gets through it and she goes like, yeah, what's it going to? What's it going to say about my, my history? And she had 456 medical records, over 25,000 pages worth of information. While all the way from something two weeks ago, she had some stitches removed because she had some little mole cancer removed. But it had her pregnancy. It showed her BMI, the fluctuation. But what's really interesting about that is you get a really clear picture of what that person's gone through throughout their life. You can see things from where they diagnosed with certain things at a young age depression, anxiety to or were they taking any type of prescriptions and why? How long they were on those prescriptions, any type of surgeries, chronic disease, clinical notes, even the Dexa scan the smallest of Dexa scans comes back in this. So imagine having all of that information and using it for context. And then what you'll see, Peter, is we do this something called internally the Ronald Reagan trust but verify. You'll now say I still have this chronic disease or I'm still suffering from this or I don't have this anymore. That's the past. And our goal is now we know a lot of the history of what Peter has gone through. And now when you do your retest, we'll now know who Peter was, historically, who Peter is based upon your last blood results that we did in August or wherever. Now we'll have a baseline of where you're at today, and now we'll have a really clear picture, contextually, of what type of medication you may be on, because that changes, right? People change medications or they get their blood work done from their primary. And that might have been in between our two blood works. It's very comprehensive and I think you'll see and appreciate that. And what we'll also do is we'll allow you to take that. You'll be able to download that. Let's say you go to your primary care and go look, in case you want to know, here's all of my history. And we'll do it in a way that they'll understand. You're not going to give them 25,000 pages. That would be crazy. But you will be able to give them a summary of the different things from any and all doctors or physicians that you've been with, if that makes sense.

Peter Bowes: 12:23

Yeah, exactly. And you use the word context, which I think is at the heart of this. And it's interesting to hear that you've essentially, with your team, gone through the same thought process that I've been going through and maybe expressing some of my frustrations with with what I've seen, knowing that it hasn't been 100, 100% the full picture. Maybe it will never be 100%, but it could certainly, as you say, if it can embrace all of those medical records. It can certainly have a better picture of where I am now, but where I've been, which obviously has a bearing on where I am now and where I'm likely to go in the future, and the likely interventions that potentially next week or next month are going to help me. But without that information, it's very difficult to, I think, totally, reliably learn from what this app can tell you.

Tyler Smith: 13:11

Yeah. Look, I mean, context is everything. I think we both know that without it, even the best data can be misled. That's a true fact. And so that's why for us at hundred, we we thought, how can we build this and have this, you know, unified medical history labs, real time data, you know, your, your wearables and all of this in one place. And I think context is going to be the most valuable. I mean, what we see and you see a lot of people out there, they'll go get their blood work from whoever, and that's only one picture and they'll upload it to an LM. But LM doesn't know your past history and you might have fed it whatever you want, but we don't know what we ate for lunch last Thursday, let alone we were diagnosed or took this medication, or I had this surgery or there's just too much to know. I mean, it's really comprehensive. I mean, these records are very, very large data sets. And even for a physician to go through these, we brought them to here. It's just the average time a physician is with a patient is less than 15 minutes, so they wouldn't even have time to go through that. This allows for both. You grab it. We can give you the highlights of what's important. You can see what is true today and versus in the past. And now that context is locked in. And now we can really put something around you that's really personalized. It's really unique, personalized experience.

Peter Bowes: 14:27

And how easy is it for someone to be involved in that process of uploading of medical records? Because I think one of the first thoughts that people might have is, well, I've been with various doctors over the years. I've had treatments at different hospitals. I've had different health insurances over the years. How on earth can we collate all of that information and make it easily available for this app.

Tyler Smith: 14:49

Yeah. So for us, what we did was we did a lot of hard work upfront. We've been working on this for over six and a half, seven months now. For us, we think it's simple because of how we implemented it.

But like we integrate with hundreds of hospitals and major EMR systems: 15:03

Epic, center, Athena, Eclinical, Allscripts, you name it. Plus, we also have access to the national kind of, you know, this network under the 21st Century Cures Act. And so when you tie all of that together now, it's about how do you one verify identity. Very easy. There's several tools to do that. Once we have that then we can go out and we can, you know, request all of that information. It all comes back less than six minutes. Now we have to go through that information. That's the more complex part. And it's not as easy as some just go through it with AI. It's complex because you have to look at different reasonings. There's ICD ten codes. There's CPT insurance codes. It's it's very intense. Extensive. and then what we do is we go, what is the really important information? So for us, I mean, we build technology, we understand how to do it. But it was a lot of work as far as the integration, once the integrations are done, pulling it in is quite easy. And then sometimes you even have to go further. It might show that you saw this physician for this type of chronic disease or episodic condition, but that's all it tells us. But we know this episodic condition is really important, so we have to take it a step further and go request additional information to get that for a human to do that. Quite, quite extensive and a lot of work now with where we're at with technology and how we've built it, it's actually quite easy. It's just a lot of grunt work up front, which we've done, but it comes in and in a way where now we can normalize that data, understand it, give context to it, and then we feed it into our process and our model.

Peter Bowes: 16:37

And in terms of privacy and data security, I guess, I mean, clearly this is something you've thought about, but ultimately it comes down to the individual and our own threshold with what we feel comfortable with.

Tyler Smith: 16:50

Yeah. Like, look, if you we have to identify your, verify your identity because, look, we're pulling medical records and we have to make sure you are who you are. Why don't you make it past that step? It's pretty simple. We do have some folks internally because we're testing this, like, look, I don't want to verify my identity, so they'll self-report this information, but I will tell you, it's not as thorough as you know. Right. Like, what medications were I taking? Do I have cause of family history? A lot of that's coming in. I can see the BMI over several years especially. Think about for a woman, they go to the doctor. Well, a lot more than a male, right? For regular routine checkups, we can see weight fluctuation. It's it's it's really, really incredible. And so yeah, privacy is super important for us. It's a non-negotiable. Everything we do is HIPAA compliant, fully encrypted end to end. You control your own data at every step. We don't share or sell that full stop. and then you authorize the retrieval. And you can also revoke that access at any time as well. We also give you a summary of it in the event you want to bring it to your physician. We found this to be super helpful. I'm going to my my primary. I can say here is my history. Here are the top things you might want to know. And we're finding physicians going like, this is fantastic. I don't even have this type of information or it's really hard for me to get this type of information. and so yeah, privacy is super, super important for us. Our job is to protect your data and make sure it's useful only to you.

Peter Bowes: 18:11

And I'm wondering if greater access to my health history, the user's health history, is going to reduce the number of false positives that require some sort of follow up, because the information is there, it can be collated and and ultimately better understood about the individual. I know we talked about false positives last time. This is essentially when the data suggests that there might be something wrong that ultimately isn't wrong, but to determine that, you have to go through a series of future tests. And that in itself is a separate issue in terms of what we're we're comfortable with affordability. And I think the potential for anxiety that that false positives cause people. But I'm wondering the fact that you're going to cover more bases in terms of understanding me, is that going to help in that area?

Tyler Smith: 19:00

I think it could. Look, that's a good question. I think when you have full context, which we will your labs, your medical history, medications, real time data, etc., I believe that the system can distinguish between what's actually new and what's already explained. And I think that dramatically cuts down on false negatives.

Peter Bowes: 19:19

That's what I'm thinking.

Tyler Smith: 19:20

Yeah, that's how I'm thinking about it. Instead of like flagging noise. Maybe it would highlight what's truly actionable so you and your doctor can focus on, I believe, what matters the most or what really matters. Um, but I would I would say, yeah, it should cut down, for sure on false positives.

Peter Bowes: 20:15

And just to, just to delve into that a little bit more. Of course, it is still an issue of whether we are over testing, and I come across this all the time, and I'm sure it's a question that you hear from many people as well. Should we be testing ourselves to the extremes that it appears that something like this might be going to? It's the same kind of issue that people that have full MRI body scans face as well, that potentially it can lead to. Well, certainly anxiety, if it highlights something that might be wrong, ultimately turns out not to be a problem. And the financial implications of going down, sometimes seemingly rabbit holes to try to establish what a situation is. Where do you where do you stand on on that? And how do you explain it to people in a way that certainly reduces that anxiety level?

Tyler Smith: 21:09

Yeah. Look, it's a fair concern and I think everybody has a different opinion on it. We're not trying to turn people into a full time patient. We actually say we don't ever want you to be a be a patient. That means you're probably in the hospital seeing a doctor. We want you to be a user. Right. And then eventually, as if you if you're on the prevention side, hopefully you can course correct change and have a look under the hood. But the goal isn't to test more, it's to test better, in my opinion. I think by by connecting some of the things that we've done, medical history, etc., labs, real time data, biometrics, etc. we can focus on markers that actually matter for you and for any member. So when you think about, okay, you brought up a full body MRI, is that required? Is that necessary? I think that some people do want to do that. They hear about it. They see it. They see, someone that is in, of a celebrity type style doing this. And they're saying, should I do this? I have family history. Or I can tell you myself personally, I my first daughter was born when I was turning 39. I'm an older father. I think about life differently. Okay. How old am I when my daughter is graduating high school. How old am I when she's actually bringing back her first, you know. You know, partner from the, you know, prom or whatever. You think about all these different things and you think, I want to live a lot longer. What I don't want to do is I don't want to have to fix something once there's a problem. And so you can argue what is too much testing or what is not. I think it goes back to the comfortability of the person. I do full body MRIs every year. I do a grail test every single year. That is me. Do I think everyone needs to do that? No. I think I'm being more on the prevention side. And by the way, I do when I go to get these tests, do think about them more than I should probably. I do think, okay, if something comes back, is it going to lead me down a rabbit hole? And those are all true and fair comments. What I will say this, I had a really, really, really, really defining experience in my life. I am part of Ypo and EO, and we had a meeting and we went to this gentleman's house and no one was told what was going to happen. And in these organizations you talk about truth and it's a circle that you can share and you can be very open and honest. That's what it's all about. And you share the most significant part in your life at the moment, right. That gets to the like the bottom, the the bottom 2%. Right. Like the things that really matter. And this gentleman was said, I've got 15 days to live. So imagine we're all in this house. We're all there. 15 days to live. And what he did was he was very, very kind to share his experience as he didn't see life and all the things that now matter to him and how he would do things different and how literally very well off man, very well off. Can't even get on an airplane to maybe go overseas to get certain stem cells and things that are required because he can't even get on an airplane. And I'll say this, he said someone asked in the audience and said, I just want to go when it's my time, why should I even test? And he said, if I would have tested, I could have caught this early on. And so I think about that a lot because what he said was like, look, there's people that I'm affecting and there's my family. So he went through all the things that now he has to figure out, I would not want this. It was a very emotional and a very different experience, as you can imagine. But what stood with me was he said, that's selfish. If you have a family and you have people who care and love you, I'm not saying to go get tested every week or every month. I'm saying don't be blind or don't go in with that mindset of hey, when it's my time, it's my time because there's a group of people in the world that love you, that you've affected, that you've touched, that love you, that depend on you. And it's your duty to, you know, to try to prevent things from happening. And so a baseline that doesn't mean you need to do an MRI. Let the baseline of testing tell you lead you into where maybe you want to go next. Get multiple opinions. Use different platforms to understand things. Educate yourself. I think the big picture is we now get to take control of our health. You know, post Covid, I think everyone said I want to take control of my health now, and now we get to do that. and so that's how I think about it, whether that's the right or wrong answer. That's how I personally think about it though.

Peter Bowes: 25:29

Well, yeah. No. And I think the crucial thing you just said is, is get many opinions, use multiple apps, don't just focus your attention on one thing because the world doesn't work like that. And we need to get second opinions. We need to verify what we're reading on one platform with information we can get elsewhere. And I think it does take a certain personality to want to to enthusiastically want to do that. Notwithstanding all of the reasons, the very good reasons that you heard about from your friend there. But I think it takes the kind of personality who will devour the information and then want to to verify that information and and seek further advice. You have to be, I think, that kind of mindset for this to work for you. But I think what you're saying in terms of how you're developing the app is particularly exciting. I wanted to go back to what you said about having your second round of of blood tests. At what stage does the app suggest you do that or facilitate you doing?

Tyler Smith: 26:28

So you were early. I think you're a cohort, maybe two.

Peter Bowes: 26:32

Number two.

Tyler Smith: 26:33

Yeah. So, you'll probably see this any day now that retesting is going to be open. So you'll see it'll prompt you and say, hey, you, you have capability of retesting and you can do that today, tomorrow, next year whenever. We've all internally just went through it ourselves. And it's been pretty fun to see. It's like we're all geeking out on it. We're all talking. Oh, I see, we've seen I mean, we've seen employees in cohort one just massively changed. We had a guy say, I love your marketplace. I buy all your supplements on it. It's great. Do you have can you sell me a belt because I'm down 20 pounds. You're like awesome. Like, it's just like it's cool to see and to see people's improvements. so you'll see that here soon. And a lot of other really cool things coming, that I think you'll be really, really excited about. Yeah.

Peter Bowes: 27:19

You say geeking out on this, you know, colleagues talking to to coworkers about what you found. It occurred to me that there is room here, if indeed you're not doing this already for some sort of, online community of people who are using the app. Maybe we don't know each other, but I think it is good to talk, to use that expression and for people to to swap stories, to perhaps swap their own personal analysis if they're happy doing that. I think we often, especially men, will live in isolation in terms of their own personal health. And something like this really could facilitate that conversation.

Tyler Smith: 27:56

Yeah. So we built something for employees only, and we're going to commercialize it for we're doing a lot of partnerships with employers. You can imagine, employee wellness is super important. healthy employees are happy employees. They call in sick less. When you invest into employee. Every dollar you invest, you get three back. When you invest and show that you're investing into their health. It's a really, really great way of showing instead of maybe giving them free lunches or, you know, whatever that may be. So internally, we all kind of I wouldn't say compete, but we're all looking at all of our wearable data. So we're not looking at each other's blood work. We don't do that. But you can have a feature if you're a part of an employer where you can share your bio data. So for example, your wearables, your steps, your exercise, the type of strain, your calorie burns, your sleep. So you can see every week when we do a weekly all hands, we're all like, oh, you jumped up. We're watching everyone change dramatically because they see it. So I think what you're saying is, how do you create? And I think there's a way to do this where how do you create this community where if you want to join and make certain pieces of your data public into this kind of form where you can have leaderboards or the biggest sleepers. Peter. That's awesome. Or hey, who gets the most steps? And not this like Olympic experience, but this kind of, you know, people want to be around people who are are thinking about health and wanting to improve their health and live longer. And so I think there's an interesting way to do something like that publicly. We're currently doing that for employers, and it's early. We have a couple in beta doing it where they can compete on steps. Call it minimal things, but how do you now do something globally where everyone can kind of participate? I think that's a really cool idea.

Peter Bowes: 29:40

Yeah, exactly. Actually, I used to be one of the health insurance companies that I used to be with had a thing. It was a corporate platform, but we could compete with each other, coworkers, actually, coworkers that we'd never met work in a different city in terms of it was focused on steps. It was purely steps. But it would list publicly within the group the number of steps that you'd done the previous day. And if you chose without using your name. So you could just user 21 or whatever. And so for me, working in Los Angeles, I was actually quite remote to some of my other coworkers, but I was in the kind of friendly competition with them without actually knowing which ones I was competing against. But it inspired me, and we're all a little bit competitive, and you always want to be at the top of the league table. And ultimately, what was the product? It was better health.

Tyler Smith: 30:29

Yeah, I think it's really cool. I mean, I think we're all somewhat, competitive in some way or we want to thrive or we see someone doing something one way and we want to oh, I can maybe I can do a couple more steps or, you know, Shannon's take going from nothing to something. I can do that, you know. What are you doing? I think it's just people when they get on this journey, what I have found is they want to be around other people on the journey, and they want to talk about their journey to others. That's very, very, very useful.

Peter Bowes: 31:00

Yeah. And you say you don't share blood work, but again, it depends on your own personal threshold. I think if I was sitting with, with you or or someone who I knew and were going through the same process, I'd have no problem saying, well, look at your cholesterol there, that number there. What have you been doing to to reduce that? And, you know, as long as it's someone you trust and you're friendly with and you both feel the same way, I see no problem in being kind of open about what the data shows you, but equally, some people choose to be more private.

Tyler Smith: 31:27

Yeah I agree. Like, look, I before all of this, I had my apple health and I was sharing my apple health with, you know, six people and we're all we called each other blood brothers and we're like looking at it and going, oh, you're doing this. That's great. And I think we have to think how to do that in a way where it's easy to understand. People understand that the safeguards in place and they know who they are, you know, sharing that with. so that's why we didn't start with that specific one. I just think health is, is is sensitive. And, data is really important, especially security and making sure people understand what they're doing because, look, I mean, everyone's at different levels of, of understanding how technology works. So.

Peter Bowes: 32:03

Yeah, exactly. So let's talk a bit more about the future and what you're planning with the app. You've touched on a few of the things there, but you're going to, in the next few days, weeks kind of revolutionize what we see on the app and how we integrate with it every day.

Tyler Smith: 32:17

Yeah, I'll give you a couple of things. So medical history is one. We talked about that. It's very, very interesting. So now we have a really great full picture. We'll have about 17 or 18 more wearables that will tie into, eight sleep flow app for female menstrual cycles, continuous glucose monitor. So you'll see a slew of that. So now you have a really good picture. We have Peter's medical history. We have Peter's baseline. We have Peter's follow up. Now we have all of his wearables how he's sleeping if you're wearing something like that, how your steps are, what's your HRV is your resting, etc.. Now we have all of that. What we want to do is obviously give you back the information, tell you where you stand, understand it. But it's a lot of data, Peter. It's a lot. So a couple of things that you'll notice. One is a weekly podcast, Peter's Monday weekly podcast that'll ask you, hey Peter, what are your favorite podcasts? Of course you're going to pick yours, so it's going to give you a weekly podcast curated in the tone and voice that you listen to. So think about you now, get a weekly podcast and you get to consume it. How you consume podcasts today, but all about your health, if you think about it, we're pulling a lot of different biomarkers, data, wearables. How do we keep you educated and not bore you, but also in a way where it's bite sized pieces, and we have established a way of doing that in a podcast form on your own biology. And so you're going to learn things of why lipids are important, why, hey, don't fear this. The majority of people, lipids are out of range. Here are ways to fix those. And by the way, when you're thinking about groceries this week, Peter, these are some things you may want to think about that are going to specifically help your lipids. You know, here's one new habit. Can you introduce it? So it's a really cool podcast talking about the past, the last week, what happened, how your sleep was, etc. and how you should think about this week. I do believe the future is every day you're going to get a notification right of you're in debt. This much on food, you're in debt this much on sleep. This is what you need to change. Don't do a strength training. Do a hit. I think that's the future. But today we are starting with a weekly podcast.

Peter Bowes: 34:20

And this is on an entirely AI generated podcast. About me.

Tyler Smith: 34:24

Correct? Yep. In the tone and voice and how you want. So if you listen to Rogan, it's going to sound in the tone of voice of Rogan. And my wife listens to Alex Cooper Call her Daddy. It's that type of banter of call her daddy, Alex Cooper. But for my wife, about my wife and all of the things that has to do with health with her, I mean, it's it's pretty cool.

Peter Bowes: 34:44

It's very cool. I'm just a little concerned it's going to put me out of business. But that aside, I think it is a really good idea. But yes, I mean, ultimately you're just making it more personal. Yeah, that's.

Tyler Smith: 34:55

One thing

Peter Bowes: 34:55

Like talking to yourself.

Tyler Smith: 34:57

Yeah. I think the biggest thing that we've noticed internally and look, we're all about using this app ourself, right Right away. Six months ago, I said, guys, we built it. We did all the plumbing. We got it here. You can easily get your bloodwork done, tie your wearables. This is fantastic. But why are we not using it every day? That's a problem. That's a problem for many things. Is one. I should be getting value out of this. This is a true health operating system for me personally. I should be using like I use my phone, right? Like, why would I not? It's my health. It's actually more important than anything I'm reading or consuming. It's my health. And so the podcast was what came out of that session. Another thing was, look, we all go to dinner. It's extremely hard to be, committed to your protocol, especially if you don't have the information in front of you. So what are you gonna do? You're gonna go out to dinner. You're gonna look. So I used to have my assistant tell me before I go to a dinner. This is what you should eat. This is what you need to eat. And here's why. So I didn't even have to think about it. That's easy, because the choice was made. But without that, how do you now do that when there's all these really cool specials and there's a summer squash that's really good that like what's really healthy for me. So imagine taking now a photo of that menu. Hundred already knows the foods you should eat and the foods you should avoid. And what we're targeting in this 100 days, what what whether we're targeting hormones or your lipids or whatever that may be. And imagine it saying, Peter, for you, you should choose the Chilean sea bass. You should substitute the twice baked potato for legumes. And this is what you should imagine having that. So now and here, Peter, why we came up with this decision. So now you're at a restaurant, snap a photo, quickly get feedback, understand what you should eat, make a conscious decision. Even if you don't make the decision, you're thinking about it, that's for sure. And you get to talk to your friends about health. Guys, I'm eating legumes because this is why legumes are good for me and personally for me. And it's going to help. My lipids and my lipids are out of range. So we're starting to think about how we use this in our day to day activities. You'll start to see, in January we're going to have where you can now chat with 100. Well, make me a meal. Give me a grocery list for three curated meals this week. Like this is not that difficult if you think about where we're going in the future, but how can you now have again, context, right? If you just feed that to a general LM, they're going to give you generally healthy things. But how do you now have context? How do you have people's religion based upon dietary restrictions on that? Right. People have different things. They eat and don't eat from a religious standpoint, let alone a medical standpoint. So context is really important. When you build that contextual data set, you can do some really powerful things that now you start to use this all the time or often. So what you'll do is you'll go through and we'll say, here's your protocol. You need to commit to your protocol. Now, Peter, and I think this level of commitment psychologically plays into our, our ourselves a lot.

Peter Bowes: 37:50

Does the function of taking photographs of your food in restaurants, does it serve as a essentially a food diary in that it collates the data and the breakdown of the components of the food, because I know that's a frustration of a lot of people that we all use lots of different apps, and it wouldn't it be wonderful just to use one thing to gather all of the information that is relevant to our health, and that's food. That includes exercise as well.

Tyler Smith: 38:13

Let me break that down. There's two things there. So right now what you'll see is you'll be able to take a photo of the menu and we'll tell you what to eat and why that's important. That's number one. So let's put that to the side. We do tie into a lot of those food apps. And we are building a way where you can take a photo and get feedback on the food. So we all do this. The biggest change I had in my life was, hey Tyler, track your food for a week. I'm like, well, it's hard, just track it because you, you are going to be so awakened on how you think you eat versus how you eat. So of course, I had almonds on my desk. I was always eating almonds. I mean, just grabbing almonds. They're healthy. I was eating a lot of almonds. And during the day, almonds are great. They are very, very good. However, I was eating so many that the calories and macros in the fats were way higher than I would have ever thought. And so what we believe is, how can you either integrate with those folks which we do like MyFitnessPal or Cal AI, etc. but let's do feedback. Do I think every user is going to take a photo of all their food? No. But what we built is this habit tracker. So when you commit to your protocol, which what I was talking about, you're going to put your thumb down, it's going to vibrate your thumb. You're going to say I Peter, I commit, I'm going to start my protocol in three days from now, five days from now, ten days from now. And now we know when you're going to start. And we do this cool countdown. And now we can build habits daily and weekly habits for check ins, on water, on sleep, on foods. And one of those check ins is let's get feedback on some of the food that you're eating. Take a photo so it's not track all my food. And by the way, you and I, the geeks would probably want to do that, right. Because it's going to give you more context.

Peter Bowes: 39:54

That's what I'm thinking. Use it at home as well as the restaurant.

Tyler Smith: 39:57

Exactly. And we'll do I think we'll do that. But how we think about it is how do you get my mom, who's never taken a photo of her food, to take the first step of, take a photo of your food and let us give you feedback. And so now help operating system a coach in your pocket. Now I can go, wow, this was bad. So this is why this was bad. Or hey, you had these sweet potatoes, but the macros on this, you could have probably had half or hey, you can really use more protein. As you get older, bodies become more frail and proteins really important to retain muscle. And like imagine getting that type of feedback. Not every time you take a photo, but as a habit of once a week you're going to take a photo of your breakfast, your lunch and your dinner. We're going to give you feedback. And so that's how we're thinking about it. Look, we have a lot on our roadmap to build, but we're really trying internally to go, how do we the team members, the employees, how do we use this every day? Guys, what are the challenges? And so we are literally eating our own dog food with this and trying to see why I didn't use it here. Did this feature go stale? That way when we release it, we've internally seen the value behind it. If that makes sense.

Peter Bowes: 41:03

Yeah, it makes a lot of sense. I'm just curious what kind of more general feedback have you had from people over the last six months or so that have been involved in the various stages of, of the launch of this? Has there been a particular message or 1 or 2 messages that you've got back from people that have been a bit of a light bulb moment for you, that have made you realize that you might be on the wrong or the right track.

Tyler Smith: 41:24

I think the biggest one is this 100 day protocol, which we worked with a PhD to help us think through what is not too long, where people can drift and fall out, what is short enough for someone to stay committed. And we use a lot of psychology around this. I would have never thought people all I mean all most all of our people are like, we want to test the day 100. I would have thought that. And they want to test more than just the panels that we give them. Like, I want to test all my out of range, or I want to even go even further in some of these other markers. That would have been a surprise to me because that's what I want to do. And but we found people who this is the first time they've done blood work in a very long time. Want to test at day 100? They're like, I completed my protocol. So I'll give you an example of what we did. We heard that they're like, I'm done with my protocol. We're like, wow, we don't know if they started. We assume they started. But that's why we now have this. I commit and you pick a day when you're going to start. We had some people go, hey, can you hold my protocol for ten days? I don't want to start yet. We're like, there's no holding it. It's just there. You start it when you want. So now we have like a pick a date to start because people have this like sensation to commit and they want to follow a plan. I, I thought that that's how we wanted it to work, but I did not assume that would happen, that people want to stick to this plan. They they're on their journey and then they want to see improvement and change. And so that's how we've even come up with how do we check in with Peter after ten days of his protocol? Hey, Peter, you've never had a protocol. How's it going? And by the way, we have your wearable data. We can see. Peter, we've told you to do a strength training session and to do this and to do that, and you're not doing it, you know. And so to be able to have now, again, that context, I think that was the for me, the biggest surprise, that people want to test more often. I would not have thought that at all.

Peter Bowes: 43:15

And so for existing users who didn't have that defined start point of the 100 day protocol, does that kick in with a future cycle? How does that work?

Tyler Smith: 43:25

Yeah. So what you'll see is retest will come and it's going to be available. So when they retest those results will come in. We will ingest all of those new results along with any of the medical records along with any of the existing results that you, Peter had and any new wearable data. And then what we will do is we will say your protocols ready, just like you've got your protocol before. It'll say your protocols ready. Let's build. Almost like we think like build a bear. Build your protocol. Here are the five exercises that are going to be the best based on what you've previously done, based on what the evidence supports. Which exercises do we want to commit to? So right now, if you look in your app, you might have three, five, seven, I don't know however many exercises. But now we're going to say these are the exercises you should be doing on Monday, Wednesday, Friday or whatever twice a week, three times a week. So now it's it's not a vague protocol, you know. And I'm not saying our protocol is vague, but it's it leaves it up for too much slippage, I would say, or drift where I kind of played tennis, but I didn't. It's like, no, you want to commit to playing tennis. We're going to hold you accountable to playing tennis twice a week. So now if you remember, our mission is helping others achieve their goals. And we spell goat GHOAT Greatest Health of all Time. The key word, as much as it's fun, is to say GHOAT. And everyone wants to be a GHOAT, it's there. Peter might want to play tennis twice a week. We want to meet you where you're at, and we want to be your coach, to hold you accountable. But if you have tennis and pickleball and strength training and aerobic training and zone two. How do you really know which days to do those things? And so you'll now build your protocol with all of the options that we give you, because we're going to tell you these are the best things you don't want to do. Tennis. It's cold out. I'm in the winter, but I'm going to do this instead. You'll stick your thumb on the app literally. Like this. It'll have habit, vibration, haptic vibration. And you'll pick the date you're going to come in. And once you pick that date, we now say welcome to day one. Here's what we've committed to. Here's what we're going to do. And now you start to check off habits. Did I work out. And if you have wearables we'll already automatically do that. Did I take my supplements. You have adherence issues Peter. Remember you forget your supplements often because we asked that question now. So we'll go through and we'll hold you not accountable but really be your motivator, your coach, to get to your greatest health of all time. I can easily see in the future of what is the greatest health of all time look like for Peter? Is it with his family? Is it golfing? Is it sailing? And then painting? I think, and this is kind of crazy. I think about how can we visualize that for you in the app so you know what you're working towards. Because that's how we all think about a goal is a dream with a deadline. So how do we kind of help you think why you're doing this? You know what I mean? And that's the future. Future. But that's how I think about it.

Peter Bowes: 46:14

You're doing a tremendous amount and it's almost information overload. What you're telling me now, but it's in an exciting way. Is there anything else that's changing? You mentioned supplements a few times. You've changed the way or you're evolving the way that you're making supplements available to people?

Tyler Smith: 46:31

Yeah, we built a and we didn't have this when you first signed up. We built a members only place. A lot of our folks said, hey, where do I buy my supplements? Is Amazon a good place? And we all know Amazon has a lot of fake, brands, but also a lot of things sit in warehouse, they're past the expiry date, etc.. And so we said, okay, if we're going to build a marketplace for our members. It's got to have two things. One, very great brand that we stand behind that people can have trust to come to us for. So we've built some of the greatest brands in our marketplace. We have 29 brands today, 600 products, and we look at all the CofAs, which is the third party testing. We make sure that the ingredients they state are on the package are in fact in there. So very high quality brands. That's number one. The second thing was we said, look, when we started to get into that space, we realized it is wild. The margins on supplements. It's like why the supplement business does so well. So what we're going to do is we're going to pass the majority of that savings back to the user. We're going to give the lowest possible price. So I can tell you right now, if you go buy any supplement on our on our marketplace compared to somewhere else, it won't be beat. We pass off a lot of that savings to the user. Remember, our original goal is how do we build what I was able to get, which was very expensive into a digital experience and make it available to the 99% of people, not the 1% and I believe what we built. You go to any high end concierge doctor. I think you're going to get more value from our app, from how the experience is, the type of testing we do, the type of feedback we get. Yes. You're not going to sit in front of a doctor, but I can tell you it's on your mobile. It's here. It's not a PDF. It's not hard to find. It's all native right here. And so we thought, how do we build this experience? I was getting for the 99% of people in the marketplace. We thought we have to have the best possible pricing. And we think that cost savings will just offset the cost of the product where you're already buying supplements. It's just it's a no brainer. And so we've built that out. We now you're going to see in the next year you're going to have other type of household goods like toxin free pots and pans. So like almost this like lifestyle type of products as well as supplements and then other things like different type of olive oils or what are the best salts that don't have, heavy metals, etc. because it's so hard in today's world to know what's of great quality and what's a good value and what are the brands I should be trusting and so real proud of what the team built out. Everyone loves the marketplace there. It's natively built into the app. You can see it today. You click it, you purchase, it ships. I mean, we've done a lot of work in the back end and make it seamless. And it's been getting a lot of really great, great great reviews.

Peter Bowes: 49:09

And ultimately it is still personal choice. It is up to you what you buy, whether you buy any supplements at all. Clearly the app is making recommendations, but it's not as if you're being forced to buy things through the app

Tyler Smith: 49:22

In fact, what we're finding is people will go, I want to purchase your five, but I also want to take these two. And you told me not to, but I still want to take them. Okay great. Or hey, I don't I don't want to take this. This hurts my stomach. I get GI issues when I eat, when I've taken this in the past, I want to remove that. And so what we've found is they're modifying what they want to take. And then what we do is we get to update the protocol on why that's a good choice or bad, again, meeting them where they're at. Right. It's their greatest health of all time, and now they can make those types of decisions.

Peter Bowes: 49:51

Tyler, this has been fascinating. I'm really excited to see what happens next and how all of this unfolds, and particularly looking forward to my second round of blood testing, which you say is going to happen very soon, just to really see what what changes I've made. And I'll happily share the results with you, because I think talking about this is, is is a really good thing. Thank you so much for your time. Again, all the best with the weeks and months ahead and we'll talk again.

Tyler Smith: 50:16

Looking forward to connecting soon.

Peter Bowes: 50:18

The Live Long Podcast is a Healthspan media production. I'm Peter Bowes, you can contact me through our website, livelong Podcast.com, where you'll also find show notes for this episode.

DISCLAIMER: 50:29

This podcast is for informational, educational and entertainment purposes only. We do not offer medical advice. If you have health concerns of any kind or you are considering adopting a new diet or exercise regime, you should first consult your doctor.