MINDWORKS

Can technology save us from ourselves? The data-driven future of health and wellness with Jessica Lynch, Phil Wagner, and Angelica Smith

June 08, 2021 Daniel Serfaty Season 2 Episode 4
MINDWORKS
Can technology save us from ourselves? The data-driven future of health and wellness with Jessica Lynch, Phil Wagner, and Angelica Smith
Show Notes Transcript

After more than a year of coping with COVID-19, Americans are more concerned with their health and fitness than ever. The fitness and wellness market is today a $1.5 Trillion business. There’s been huge growth in this industry not only because of the increased prevalence of chronic lifestyle-related diseases like diabetes and obesity, but also because of explosion of technologies in this domain. Join MINDWORKS host Daniel Serfaty as he talks with Wishroute founder Jessica Lynch, Sparta Science CEO Dr. Phil Wagner, and Aptima’s Marine Corps fitness planner engineer Angelica Smith as they explore how the intersection of human nature, technology, and data could truly transform our health and wellness.

Daniel Serfaty: Welcome to MINDWORKS. This is your host, Daniel Serfaty. This week, we are going to talk about something all of us think about, or perhaps should think about, that some of us even obsess about. And that is a need to understand and improve our fitness, our health and our wellness. All of us are very much preoccupied about this topic, especially after more than one year of COVID. I recently read that the fitness and wellness market is a $1.5 trillion business. That's trillion with a T. There've been a huge growth in this industry, not just because of the increased prevalence of chronic lifestyle related diseases like diabetes and obesity, but also because of the explosion of new technologies that are entering this domain. 

Therefore, it's not just important to understand how we can maintain our fitness as individuals and as a nation, we need to understand the big business and the new technologies around it. And my panel today is extremely well-positioned to show us the way. Today I have with me, a management expert, an engineer, and a doctor, which sounds like the beginning of a joke. Each of whom brings a unique perspective to understand this business of fitness and wellness, as well as the challenges we face as individuals in this area. 

My first guest is Jessica Lynch. Jess is a prior PWC consultant and a Babson College MBA, who turned her investigating talents towards figuring out how to achieve fitness goals after being inspired by her own family's unique experience with lifestyle changes. In 2018, just founded Wishroute, which enables wellness companies to add human support to text message conversation to their platform, and to provide the personal touch and encouragement that is critical when people are trying to build new habits. 

My next guest is Angelica Smith. Angelica is an engineer with more than 12 years of experience, performing quality assurance or QA and leading tests initiatives on software projects. At Aptima, she manages US Marine Corps physical training platform called the FitForce Planner and Mobile App, which allows her to work directly in the field with both fitness trainers and Marines.

And last, but certainly not least is Dr. Phil Wagner. Phil is the founder and CEO of Sparta Science. He's a physician and a strengths coach whose own athletic career as a football and rugby player was cut short by a series of avoidable training injuries. Phil's commitment to data-driven coaching and athlete development began when he was a coach at University of California at Berkeley and at University of California, Los Angeles, as well as a rugby coach in New Zealand and Australia.

Phil received his medical degree from University of Southern California focusing on biomechanics. His passion for protecting athletes health and longevity through injury resilience inspired him to found Sparta Science, a Silicon Valley based company dedicated to helping the world move better. Welcome to MINDWORKS, Jess, Angelica and Phil. I'm going to start with a question, because after all you come from very different parts of the profession, what made you choose this particular domain, human performance and health and fitness as a field of endeavor. Jess, you want to tell us that?

Jessica Lynch: Absolutely. Well, thanks for having us. I'm excited for today's conversation. Personally, I have a deep passion for wellness from my family's experience with lifestyle change. My brother was diagnosed with juvenile diabetes as a kid, and my mom actually wrote a book about how our family rallied around the disease and changed our lifestyle one little habit at a time. Through that experience and book tour, I got to tour the country, helping other families change their lifestyle in the same way and have just always been so inspired by the power of not feeling alone with change. And the power of breaking changes down into super small achievable steps and how once they're ingrained as a habit, they don't take energy to sustain and it's your new normal. So that's been a big inspiration for why I entered this space and with what we're doing with Wishroute. 

Daniel Serfaty: So a personal reason?

Jessica Lynch: Mm-hmm (affirmative). 

Daniel Serfaty: Phil, why are you here? You're a bonafide medical doctor. 

Phil Wagner: Yeah. I ultimately came to this space, I was an athlete. Had about a dozen different surgeries to the point where the NCAA, which is the governing body for college athletes basically said, "Yeah, you're done. We're not allowing you to play anymore." So I moved to New Zealand to play pro rugby and got injured my first game and really said, "Okay, that's it." I've got to figure out for other people who want to be active, whether they're an athlete or someone serving their country or someone that wants to enjoy being active in their everyday life, how can we equip them with the exercises and the information to do so, because there really shouldn't be a physical limitation to activity. It really only should be your will. And that's really why Sparta was started and why I've come to work in this area. 

Daniel Serfaty: So two really personal reasons. Angelica you and I work together. I have the privilege of counting you as a colleague, and I've seen you work on different projects, but you seem particularly passionate about this one. 

Angelica Smith: I am. I can say I am definitely passionate about this. However, I might be the exception in that. I feel like this industry chose me. I don't know if I necessarily chose it. I was simply fulfilling my obligations as a QA engineer on the software development team. And a few years later I became project manager. So it was probably due to my many voluntary trips to the FFI school house at Quantico because I live 20 minutes away. And I was constantly there every six weeks, delivering briefings and trainings. And so I was unknowingly becoming the face of this thing, but I've enjoyed being in the space ever since. 

Daniel Serfaty: Great. So you're going to become an honorary member of the Marine Corps-

Angelica Smith: Yeah. 

Daniel Serfaty: With that happening. Very good. The three of you came at it from very different angles and yet it's a domain that's once you're in it, I feel there is more of a passion there than in other domains in technology with technology applications. And so it's important for our audience to understand, what do you actually do in your day job today? Jess, what do you do? You're CEO of a startup, you probably don't get much sleep, but what do you day-to-day?

Jessica Lynch: I try to prioritize the sleep because if you're trying to create something extraordinary, I always say you have to have extraordinary input to get extraordinary output, and sleep is important for everything we do, including exercise. But I'll give you a little background on what we're doing with Wishroute. We offer a personal yet scalable way for wellness companies to keep customers engaged and successful adopting their product. So right now, we all had this experience, you have an idea for something, you download an app and you never return to it. Most wellness apps lose 90% of customers by day 30, which is painful for the companies and painful for the individuals that have a good intention to lose weight and meditate.

Daniel Serfaty: You say 90%?

Jessica Lynch: 90%, yep. 

Daniel Serfaty: Of people drop off?

Jessica Lynch: Drop off, never return. 25% only open the app once, never come back. And it costs these apps upwards of $5 a user to get them to even download it. And like I said, stinks for the individual who had the good intention and didn't get the support they needed to follow through and actually build the habit. Behavior change is really hard as humans, it's just a difficult thing to do. And app notifications we know are automated and don't make us feel accountable. So Wishroute provides the high touch support in key moments of the user journey that people need like onboarding or during a free trial. And we personally text with our partners end users to help them stay motivated and form healthy habits around our partners programs. So essentially the accountability companion.

And we use automation and a variety of AI technologies alongside real life, caring humans to power these personal text message conversations. And this gives our customers the scale they need support all of their end users in a personal way, which they don't have an affordable way to do right now and increases customer success and company success. So on a daily basis, I'm leading my team, I'm refining the product, I'm talking with new companies and that's a day in the life. 

Daniel Serfaty: So that's really a multi-pronged activity. I mean, the value proposition of your business, but also the fact that you are the CEO and founder. As a CEO and founder, Phil, what do you do in your day job? And tell us something about Sparta Science too. 

Jessica Lynch: What don't we do, right? As a founder.

Phil Wagner: Yeah, [crosstalk 00:09:29] to Jess's point, that's why I'm laughing. It's like, it is more of a what you don't do as opposed to what you are doing within a startup. So probably just starting with what we do is the company itself uses a machine learning platform to analyze movement, generally a balance test or a jump test. And from that generates your injury risk and subsequently a individualized plan on how to reduce that risk, whether it's something that could happen or whether you're going through the rehab process. That's different based on the individual, we serve sports, we serve the military and then even growing into senior living facilities. 

So my work generally is spent on really making sure that that technology is adopted in a way that's seamless into whoever we're serving and their environment, because each one of those environments is different. And to Jess's point, at the end of the day, it still comes down to habits, no matter how good your technology is, no matter how good the data is. There's a great quote we have up at our company, our facility, in that innovation is about adoption, not invention. Because the invention and everybody can come up with good ideas, that's not the challenging piece. Challenging piece to innovation is the adoption side. How can we get folks to adopt it as part of their normal workflow and habit structure?

Daniel Serfaty: I'll get back to that later when we talk about innovating in this field. But yes, and many people learn that lesson the hard way. 

Jessica Lynch: All those different environments that have it, that you need someone to adopt, it's going to fit into their life differently to use the tool. Very interesting. 

Daniel Serfaty: Angelica, what do you do in your day job when you work on as a program manager for the Marine Corps and at the same time responsible for the technology that you are to implement, can you describe to our audience a day in the life of Angelica? 

Angelica Smith: Well, let's see. My duties probably aren't as complex as Jess and Phil's. However, in general for the company, I'm actually, like I said before, I lead software quality assurance efforts. So I'm ensuring quality across our software development projects, but on FitForce I'm project manager, I'm wearing a lot more, a lot more responsibilities with managing that project there, which includes, of course, all the financials, all of the budgets, managing all of the different resources that are required for the success of this program, such as employees. Who's going to be doing what, making sure they have the correct skill set for the software requirements that we're trying to achieve. 

Of course, looking at our allocations, given that particular budget, and then just managing sort of the day-to-day making sure my team, they have the tools they need to be successful for what they're contributing to the program. And so right now, the FitForce team, I think there's a good, solid, maybe seven or eight of us. So at any given moment, I'm shuffling around hours or shuffling around resources and making sure so-and-so has what he needs. 

Daniel Serfaty: But when you interact with the user of that fitness app, Marines basically, how do you do that work? I mean, you go to the field, you go literally on the ground. 

Angelica Smith: Yeah. So with the Marines at the school house at Quantico, they have these six week cohorts, every six weeks they get a group of new Marines who are there training to be these instructors, they're called Force Fitness Instructor or FFIs for short. And so about every six weeks I go down there and I train that class and show them how to use FitForce Planner and FitForce Mobile. I help answer questions they might have, help them troubleshoot. We walk through a demo, I give them a walkthrough of the user guide that I also created with them. And then afterwards, I'll probably sit down with the head instructors and if they've communicated that they had seen some issues, then we sit down and we kind of walk through some of those issues and we talk about features that they'd like to see in the next version and things like that. 

But I oftentimes get to sit down and see how they develop these programs. What goes into that, what's expected of these FFIs who have a range of knowledge. You have some of these FFIs who are trained in creating these plans because of whatever their background is. And then you have some FFIs who have no idea, they have no background in physical fitness or musculoskeletal health and things like that. And so they're just coming in as a newbie and going through the six week training to understand how to create these plans. I'm there to make their job easy. I help them go from using this paper-based PT planning process to using a no kidding 21st century planning tool. 

Daniel Serfaty: Thank you for describing that interaction because it's not... engineers sometime design things for engineers, not for users. And this is a case in which those users, and we're going to talk about the athletes or even the regular customers that are not professional fitness folks are using these. And the way people are using those tools as both Jess and Phil reminded us before Angelica, it's really key. But if people ask us, so what's new here? At the end of the day, people have been in fitness for a long time, in different ways, at least in America. 

From a technology perspective, and your three companies that are actually using technology or science, or psychology to offer something to their customers. What is new here fundamentally in 2021, when we look at those technologies? Phil, can you take us there? You've been looking at this field for a while, but what is really, really new here? 

Phil Wagner: The big thing that people are now starting to realize is, what are we going to do with this data? Because I think what's happened over the last five, 10 years, there's been some great technologies that have collected data and that made it presentable in a nice way. But I think we're getting to the point where individuals are looking at it saying, "Yeah, I know I slept seven hours because if I went to bed at 10:00 and I got up at 5:00, I've spent money on this device that helps me do that math, right?

And so, now I think the challenge to technologies are now they have to deliver back. They're gathering information, now they have to leverage that in a ethical way to say, "Here's how you can use that data to add and change habits." Because just telling me, I slept seven hours is no longer enough. And I think the hard part is, we're all limited by time. So you can't just say, "Well, just sleep eight hours. What's the problem?" You can't make the day longer, so what things in your day should you not be doing to allow more time for other things? So technology should be individualizing what you need to strip away, so you can do more of what you need.

Daniel Serfaty: That's very interesting. So you're making the point that just collecting data with the Fitbit's of this world is necessary, but certainly not sufficient. We need to transform this data into useful and actionable information. 

Phil Wagner: Right. And just say you got to sleep eight hours, that's just the lazy insight. We all have that, right?

Jessica Lynch: We have these great recommendations now, we're starting to get better and better at individualized, personalized recommendations for actions people should take. But then how we pick up the problem from there is, we're human and most of us need external accountability to follow through something and break out of our current habits to form new ones, and take a detour from what we were doing yesterday to now do something different. And we don't feel accountable to things that aren't human, and caring, and knowing that someone cares about what you accomplished. 

So we're enabling that human heart and care to be delivered in a way that is based in behavioral science and motivational interviewing psychology to help people feel accountable and actually adopt those changes in an achievable way. So it's really that continuum of, "I completely agree follow data into more personalized recommendations, and then get those personal recommendations broken down and delivered in a way that actually helps people adopt them. 

Daniel Serfaty: It's amazing that it's not just about sets and reps, or [inaudible 00:18:07] prescription, but there is so much thought behind, as you say, accountability, but also the science of it. That basically it becomes more of a diagnosis and recommendation almost, dare I say, almost like a medical profession. 

Phil Wagner: Absolutely. Yeah. It's pharmacology at the end of the day, it's just in this case, the medicine is the exercise. You don't go to a physician and say, "Go take an antibiotic." It's like, "Well, which one, how often? How much, when do I stop? When do I change?" Whereas we've kind of looked at exercise like that, where we've said, "Well, just go walk for 20 minutes." Well, one of the biggest breakthroughs in pharmacology was the extended release once a day pill, because it reduced the barrier for thresholds. So if we say, "Hey, just go walk 20 minutes." And that person says, "I've got 10 minutes a day." They're going to choose option B, which is nothing. So how can we grade it much like medicine has done with pharmacology?

Daniel Serfaty: Angelica, on this data question, how do you see in your experience, I mean, after all, you're the one actually touching the data with your fingers. How do you see the relationship between us looking at data, making some recommendation for exercises and the ability of the actual trainers, or trainees for that matter to take those data and trust them and actually comply with the recommendation?

Angelica Smith: So one of the things that I'm seeing, at least for my end users, the FFI, they don't seem to be as interested in the data. It's the leadership that wants the data that I think the FFIs were simply looking for a tool that's going to allow them to do their job, create these plans easier, faster, and distribute them easier. And that's what the mobile application does. It delivers it to the end users. The FFIs they're responsible for hundreds and thousands of individual Marines physical fitness. And so I don't think they're looking at the data as much, it's not as important. They just want to get these programs out to these guys and try to reduce injury, whatever that means. 

But then you've got the leadership, they want to know how healthy the fleet is, how healthy the unit is. And they're looking at the data to better understand how effective is this plan, in fact? And so you've got these two different groups and what they care about. And that's what I gather from being boots on the ground. 

Daniel Serfaty: That's a very interesting observation. At the end of the day, the person who do the exercise wants to have reasonable recommendation, that's what Phil was saying earlier. It's not so much that your heart rate is X that matters, is what do you do about it? Or maybe as you say, as the leaders, or the managers, or the commanders are more interested to see, to have some statistic about the general health, the general fitness of their units. These are two different stakeholders in this particular case.

But that's a big lesson that despite the extraordinary enthusiasm for people to measure everything, it remains to see whether or not those measurements lead to improvement. You need an intermediate step in between. One, is making sense of those data, but also encouraging people to comply with the recommendation in order to be effective. So Jess, could you describe a day in the life of one of your user? You're the one that is addressing actually the most, all of us, at least with your tools and your services in a much wider population. These are not elite athletes or special forces soldiers, they are basically us. 

Jessica Lynch: We have worked with some pretty unique groups, including frontline healthcare workers, during COVID, which was extremely rewarding and challenging, because they were all being challenged emotionally, physically, mentally. But a day in the life of working with an individual, our business sort of has two key sides of it. Most of our business is working with other wellness companies, helping them increase compliance and engagement of their end users. But we also work directly with individuals as a testing ground for our partners to develop new programs and insights that we can bring to our partners. 

So I'll give a day in the life, it's a pretty similar the end user in both. But we help people focus on one healthy habit at a time. So trying to break things down into achievable, sustainable steps. So if someone's working on exercise with us at the beginning of the week, they pick a daily goal for each day, one thing, and then each day they're getting a reminder or something inspirational in the morning, maybe a suggested podcast to listen to if their goal is to walk that day or a inspirational message, 10 minutes out of your day is 1% of the time, something like that. 

And then at night, we check in for accountability and that's when we're asking about their daily goal, did you go for your walk? And when they text us back, there's always a Wishroute guide to personally respond to them. And we've created a judgment free coaching methodology, that's providing positive reinforcement, encouragement and the help to game plan if it wasn't a good day. It's really important to make people feel comfortable saying, "No, I didn't do it." Because that's when we can be most impactful. 

And I would say the biggest kind of aha is just every day we hear, "I wasn't going to do it, but I remembered you'd check in and I wanted to have something positive to report back. So even though I only had 10 minutes and my workout I was supposed to do was 20, I got out and made the most of that 10 minutes and I did a walk and some squats. And there it is." And so just knowing that someone's going to check in is incredibly powerful. 

Daniel Serfaty: So it's an actual person. The Wishroute guide is a person who calls the [crosstalk 00:24:07] and asks them-

Angelica Smith: [crosstlk 00:24:08] and text message. Yep, so we're texting people in the morning and at night and whenever they text us, they're getting a personal response back. 

Daniel Serfaty: But that sets of recommendation that you provide in the morning, given a particular fitness goal, "This is what we recommend. You watch these, you go walk, you do this exercise." Those are automated, or these are actual... you said they are texts? 

Jessica Lynch: Yep. It's a mix of automation and personalized recommendations, which are automated. I mean, it's a set of preset selection and a mix of personalized things based on someone their own goals. So we're not a prescriptive service saying, "You need to do X, Y, Z." We're giving people inspiration to follow through with the goals that they've set and with our partners, we're helping people follow through with the goal with the partners content. So if it's a fitness app, we're sharing, "Here's the live workout schedule in the morning," or, "You said your goal was to increase flexibility, here's a yoga workout we think you're going to enjoy." So it's personalized and related to a preset set of messages. 

Daniel Serfaty: So that personalization is an important theme today, because we are all different, we learn differently, we practice differently. And Phil, I know this is some of the key part of the technology that you're proposing. It's not only very precisely diagnosed, but it's also very personalizing the diagnosis is for that person. Can you tell us a little bit about how you use basically technology and machine learning to turn these measurement, these very precise measurement that you're doing with the machine learning plate for the athlete to the user?

Phil Wagner: There are two key, I guess, case studies we tend to see with folks that we work with, whether that's athletes or fighters, or even in the employer's face it's, "I only have so much time," and that's a piece and a big part of data's role that we see is to convince the user to let go of things. And that could be something that they found to be useful in the past, or that could be something they're clinging to because they're really good at it and want to keep doing it. A good example is, if we think about war fighters, soldiers, CrossFit's really cottoned on in that group. 

Why? Because it's hard and it makes you really sore, and it's really difficult and challenging. The question would be, does that group that has incredible grit, and strong and explosive, is that what they need, or do they need yoga to help promote flexibility and breathing techniques and recovery, or do they really just need to continue to endure more challenging circumstances? So I think technology's role should be to help aluminate some of these things to teach the individual and say, "Hey, this might be something that's not serving you. You may enjoy it. You're going to have to make a decision. Are you training to serve your country, are you training to be in the cross the competition?"

Both are okay goals, but ultimately you can't serve two masters. And we have this all the time. When we started in sports with football, offensive linemen, they squat for living, every play they squat to get in their stance. They go in the weight room and what do they do? They squat all the time. Best way to have an ACL injury is too much squatting, too much quad dominance. You got to make a choice. Do you want to be an offensive lineman that plays a 20 year NFL career, or do you want to be someone that's really good at squatting and a short career? You can't do both. And I think data helps educate the individual. So they come to that conclusion because ultimately that's what's going to make it stick. 

Daniel Serfaty: There is a lot of that in the military. Angelica knows that, she works a lot with them. This notion of gaming for example, is very popular in the military because it's like flight simulation. It's like war fighting simulation and people like to play games. They like they're engaged with it. Whether or not that serves the purpose of learning the skills that they need to learn in order to be better war fighters is an open question. [crosstalk 00:28:37] enjoyment, and actually skill acquisition. Your example is the wonderful one too, in that direction. Angelica, was there something during the performance of this project that suddenly you had like an aha moment, you were going in one direction and by interacting with the Marine Corps, with the Marines themselves, or with what you call the FFIs, the fitness instructors, you realized that they say something, they behave in certain way that prompted you to change the direction of the project?

Angelica Smith: We used to have a capability within mobile to launch a workout for a group of individuals. So you'd have this roster feature, you can kind of say, "Who's in this?" And you can check off all of the participants, and then whoever's leading that course, they can know whoever took, who was there in class and things like that. And so we thought that was a good feature and we thought that would be something they would use and then it turned out that they didn't like the feature, they want the feature. So we actually took the feature out and then it came back around during COVID we needed to put this group feature back in, and folks were working out individually.

But then as things started to kind of go back to normal, these group workouts, they were relevant again. And so without the customer coming back and saying, "We want this group feature." Then I say, "We need to put that feature back. We dropped the ball on it when we took it out." So we did come to the conclusion that even though they didn't want it, they definitely need it, but it was an aha moment. They don't really know what they want or need, we know they need this and we need to put it back. 

Daniel Serfaty: Well, it's a bit related. It's this notion that the user know what they want, I think the Steve Jobs famously said, "I'm going to tell the user what they want." And so it happens in our field too, and we should absolutely respect what our users want, but we should also understand what they need. And sometime by a gentle guidance towards from what they want to what they need, this is what will do the best service we can provide to them. 

Angelica Smith: During some of my face-to-face meetings and trainings with the Marines, I'd get all sorts of requests for crazy features, "We want to see this." And some of it was kind of gamified, some of it was like leaderboards and things like that. But some of the FFIs did, I think it was the more experienced FFI that had a background in health and fitness. They did have a better sense of what they wanted and what they needed to perform their jobs better and not just do the bare minimum of creating these plans, whether they're effective or not, and then distributing them to the fleet. But then, like I said, you had some other Marines, they just had some super wild wishes of things they wanted to see in the app that just didn't make sense.

Daniel Serfaty: I'm not surprised they wanted to see a leaderboard. This Phil's feels analogy to CrossFit. They want to see who can bench press the highest weights.

Angelica Smith: But that's dangerous. That is very dangerous, if you tried to do that for Marines. So we steered clear of that.

Jessica Lynch: I have an example of that. In our early testing with individuals, we found people had the best success when they had opted in to their daily goals, they had set them of what they were going to do each day. And then as we were working with more individuals, all different fitness levels, we learned that sometimes the step of setting those goals was too much for someone that week. And so we were skipping the check-ins. If you don't set your daily goals, we'll just have you start next week and set new ones. 

And we started testing, we'll pre-set the goals. We're still going to check in with you on something and report back on anything you did for your fitness that day. And that actually got people then more motivated to set their goals, but they actually were checking in and responding and engaging. So a little bit of a nudge even when someone doesn't opt in, it's got to be a mix. Still find the best success when then we get someone to take more action and be proactive in setting what they'd like to do, but our own intervention there, has proved quite powerful as well. 

Daniel Serfaty: Yes. Thanks for sharing that. I'm going to change a little bit of the topic and Phil, you said something earlier from your own personal experience, as an athlete with injury and fitness, it's not just about maintenance of health. It's also about recovery from injury or even injury prevention. Can you tell us a little more about that? How your system at Sparta helps people both in recovery of injury, but also in prevention? 

Phil Wagner: Yeah. Back to the example of identifying habits that could be improved, I mentioned the offensive lineman who squats as part of their sports and then goes and squats as part of their training. That's where data can say, "Okay, well, you shouldn't do that because it increases your risk like this, on the flip side, here's what you should do instead." So no one likes to hear, "Don't do this," and not have an alternative, right? So the data should guide you to, "Hey, this isn't serving you well, here's something else you can do similarly to satisfy that need." Almost a craving, if you will. If someone wants to lift heavy weights, "Don't do this exercise heavy, do this exercise heavy instead." That's really where a technology can feed to identify, but also suggest most importantly, an alternative habit to adopt. 

Daniel Serfaty: Have you had, Jess and Angelica in that order, this notion of injury, how do we, after all, we are giving people advice on their health, on their physical health, on their fitness, how do we deal with this whole dimension of they can injure themselves following our advice sometimes or not following it right. 

Jessica Lynch: For us in the work we do with individuals and partners, it's about making sure that they are motivated to talk to someone who's a professional and looking at their individual body and injuries and hands on, and looking at many kinds of wearable data and getting in there. And so a lot of us ignore pain and symptoms and so we view our role as not the ones to diagnose and give you that game plan, but how to rehab or what to do, but to motivate you to go talk to someone who you can be in person with and get that more personalized advice, and then we'll help you follow through with that. 

Angelica Smith: This is a big challenge, and that's something that we are looking at addressing this whole idea of injury prevention. Within the app, we have opportunities for the Marines who are executing these programs to provide feedback to the creators of these plans, right? You have a creator of plan who has the set of expectations on how effective the plan should be, how difficult the plan is. But then the unit that he's distributing this plan to, they could be at all sorts of levels, beginner level, advanced, and working out and physical physique. And then you have those users who execute these programs and how they feel the plan was, they thought perhaps it was more difficult, more challenging than the creator of the plan. Well, there's a huge gap.

And so we put in place an opportunity for the individual Marine to say, "This plan was a lot more difficult. You said it was a five, it was for sure a 10, And oh, by the way, I got injured by trying to do this plan that should have been a five, but really was a ten." And so the data that we collect, we're hoping it's going to help the FFIs who are the creators of these PT programs, revise plans appropriately. So as a feedback comes in, they can say, "Oh my goodness, out of the 1000 users who launched this program, they thought it was more along the lines of a seven. And we thought it was more along the lines of a five. Let me go ahead and adjust this program for my users." And so we are looking at trying to fill in those gaps and really help prevent injuries. 

Daniel Serfaty: Good, good. I think this is an essential part of what we do. So Phil, I'm going to use your physician training. There is a big trend in medicine right now, that we are actually copying in the general training and education market called precision medicine. And precision medicine hypothesis is basically, we're all different, we all have different genomes, literally. And in the future, medicine will be hyper individualized. So somebody who has cancer or who has a heart disease will have a very unique treatment that is totally adapted to their individual makeup.

Obviously we are not at that level, not at the genetic level yet for education and training, but there is a big trend now, precisely because of the availability of large amounts of data, about people and our ability to process it fast as a group and tailor it to have this notion of, "I'm going to give you a prescription," translate here, maybe a fitness program, "That is just for you at that moment in time for what you want and for what your goals are." How close are we to that level of individual treatment? In a sense, Jess, in her technology and her services does that, but with a lot of human intervention in between, how do we do that? Are we close to doing this precision fitness goal? 

Phil Wagner: Yeah, I think that the technology is, and a lot of the data sets are there. The key piece is making sure that the data that is or has been collected is good data, that's one of the challenges with a lot of wearables, is you're bringing a lot of data, but how much of it is noise? How can you really sift through and identify what activity was what? So you can create those models of, when someone is at risk and how that risk was reduced. And so I think that data is there right now. Now it's a lot more on the cultural side of things, of how organizations can position it in a mutually beneficial way, because that's kind of this next part that's coming, if it hasn't already, which is, "Okay, all this information is being gathered on me, is that going to be used against me in some way?"

And we're already seeing it, and people forget that that's an issue within the military too. The army is rolling out a new army combat fitness test, and the scores are hidden from most military leadership. And the reason being is, there is a complaint and a fear that the performance on this new test is going to dictate promotions or not. That's the cultural piece that when we get into insights within an organization to keep your organization healthy, that's going to be the next challenge here is, we need to make sure that it's presented shown in a way that, "Hey, this information we're analyzing and providing you as a way to help and not judge your future prospects within the company."

Daniel Serfaty: I think this notion of what do you do with this data, both the data you feed into the system, and the data that is being produced as a result of the recommendation is a huge issue. We're going to explore it a little later in the podcast today. Any comments, Jess or Angelica about this notion of precision fitness, in a sense that everybody having not only their own personal trainer in a box, but also that that trainer will recognize your particular circumstances, medical, or mental, or whatever at that moment in time, are we moving towards there?

Jessica Lynch: I think the whole industry is moving in that direction. And it's really exciting because everyone needs to find what works for them, and there's a lot of ways to be successful. And so tools that open up people's perspective of what a workout can even be and what it looks like and how it feels and something that's going to get them better results than doing what they thought they should do based on some not science-based conception, they read in a magazine. It opens up a lot of opportunity and will help people feel better, because unfortunately, most people don't feel that good, and that's thanks. 

Angelica Smith: Yeah. I do think it's a very exciting time for this. I think we are close, I don't think we're that far off. I think this is what executives want, this is what the leadership of USNC, of the army, this is what the military wants. I think they're ready for it, and I think it's going to change the way we train our war fighters and it's going to change our expectations of a war fighter, I think for the better. So it's a very exciting time. 

Daniel Serfaty: We'll be back in just a moment, stick around. Hello, MINDWORKS, listeners, this is Daniel Serfaty. Do you love MINDWORKS, but don't have time to listen to an entire episode. Then we have a solution for you, MINDWORKS minutes, Curated segments from the MINDWORKS podcast condensed to under 15 minutes each and designed to work with your busy schedule. You'll find the minis along with full length episodes, under MINDWORKS on Apple, Spotify, Buzzsprout, or wherever you get your podcasts.

I believe that Phil, shared with us a little earlier the large number of wearable sensors and fitness apps in the market. What do you make of it in a sense that, what's good about them? What other limitations with mostly our people, is America more fit as a result of all these technologies that people wear around their wrist, around their arms, around their belts sometime, are people more fit as a result of the sensors? It's a big question. Do we know anything about that?

Phil Wagner: No.

Daniel Serfaty: No, they're not. 

Phil Wagner: No question. 

Daniel Serfaty: Why is that? 

Phil Wagner: Well, if we look at, at least the areas that we primarily are rooted in, which is worse than military, musculoskeletal injuries are drastically higher. Mental health is also higher in terms of diagnoses or symptoms. So we've got a higher injury rate and a lower mental health functioning ability. And we've also got infinitely more technologies and data sources. So we have more data and more problems. 

Jessica Lynch: Do we know why that is, Phil, do you have an understanding? 

Phil Wagner: It's hard to say like, "Well, I know why." But my theory is that a lot of information, when it doesn't present insights, just causes more anxiety. And we've seen that with a group we met with in the air force, they said they stopped using a tracking sensor, a wearable company that's very, very prominent. They stopped using it because pilots were so obsessed about getting their sleep, it prevented them from getting sleep. So again, rather than just telling you, "You slept this amount, you need to sleep more." There needs to be, "Okay. You can only sleep this amount, here are some tactics that you need to do, or some other things un-sleeping related to help support and compensate for that lower level of sleep."

Jessica Lynch: That are achievable. 

Phil Wagner: Yeah. 

Jessica Lynch: Accessible and realistic, [crosstalk 00:44:50]. Yeah.

Phil Wagner: Totally. Totally. Because if you're, to Jess's point, they've got to be realistic. Otherwise, it actually has a net negative effect because if you're saying, "I slept six hours, you need eight to be optimal." You look at your schedule, you say, "I can't sleep better, so my life is sub-optimal." You're better off without it, that data. 

Angelica Smith: It's interesting because the military, they're evaluating all of these sensor technologies. Why don't they have this data, why don't they have this understanding, why is there such a huge range of technologies they're evaluating? Have they not seen these effects? I'd just be interested in understanding the rationalization for doing so. 

Daniel Serfaty: It's a general fallacy of the technology availability will cure the ills of society. 

Phil Wagner: Absolutely. I mean, the analogy we use all the time is, it would be like someone's standing on a scale. And assuming that standing on that scale causes you to lose weight. It doesn't work that way, right?

Jessica Lynch: Information's power. It's important to know where you are to help form where you could go. But that's what's exciting of this next phase of being able to have enough data sources and points. And we have so many devices that are collecting these things around us but, did you start turning the lights lower before you went to bed? When's the last time you had caffeine? All these things can help us optimize on an individual basis of what's going to help them get better quality sleep within those six hours that they have. But right now, a lot of these apps are just recommending, "20 general things you can consider to get better quality sleep," and that's overwhelming and it can be detrimental, because it's like, "Oh, well, how do I even?" Or, "I'm not going to do anything." And then they're back to where they were. 

Daniel Serfaty: I believe that is a general fallacy. By providing people access to all the information channel, all the news channel, just with a push of a button, doesn't make people more informed. There've been a lot of measurement about that actually that made people more frustrated as Phil say that they are not informed enough. If anything, will give people the illusion of being informed where actually they are not. And the same thing, I mean the data about the proliferation of diets, for example, and yet the obesity rate in America keeps growing. Why is that?

So it's really something to think about. And when you look at the collective solution that are represented by the three of you, fitness, nutrition, wellness, health, recovery from injury, where do you see the market is going right now? I mean, are we focusing primarily on physical fitness, on something more role, that has many component. Let's call that, wellness for now, both emotional, and mental, and physical. Can you make a prediction to see where the trend is going to be, where people are going to focus more in the future? Anyone want to pick up that dangerous question? 

Angelica Smith: I think the focus is currently on the physical aspect of health, but I think we are embarking on the idea of total fitness. I see that it's very immature right now, but I do believe that's where the industry is headed maybe in another 10 years with prescriptive abilities. So that's my short response to where I think we are and where I think we're going. 

Jessica Lynch: I think there's an exciting new wave of focus on mental and emotional health and meeting people where they are and making it okay to not feel okay, giving people the individual support they need with different apps that now connect you to mental health professionals. But also these consumer fitness companies like Peloton just created a new series based on mood. "Here's a workout to do if you feel sad," or if you feel confident. It's really just interesting with this wave of mental health, innovation and investment in the VC community. So it'd interesting how that the emotional side of making change and focusing on your health moves into every other aspect of health.

Daniel Serfaty: I wonder if that's something invitation with a lot of quasi science and charlatans to enter the market because for sad it is zucchini, but if you are angry, eat a pepper. People are going to come up with those ideas-

Jessica Lynch: Well, in this case, it's still just trying to get you to move. So the positive is no matter how you're feeling, you can still do something and you can still, rather than sitting on the couch and increasing your BMI. So I like that aspect of it, do something, no matter how you're feeling. 

Phil Wagner: There's kind of two populations, we all represent on the call. One is people that just need to get up and move to Jess's point. And so anything that can help inspire them to do that is helpful. And science really isn't necessarily there, that's more of marketing, how do you speak to the individual? The other piece though, is where that kind of messaging can be dangerous as people that are already active. I mentioned the air force talking with some air force pilots, they love Peloton. The challenge becomes if they have low back pain and tight hips from sitting in the compact cockpit, small cockpit all day.

If you ask me, what's the worst thing you could do? I would explain that it would be getting on a bike and riding a bike hard. Because if your back hurts and your hips are tight, you should do zero Peloton, zero biking. And so I think it becomes important too for the science more so on the groups are already active to direct them into which activities are okay. Because sometimes it gets lumped into the non-active population where anything's good. And the air force or the athletes might not be the same way. "Well, anything's good. I got on the bike." It's like, "Well, no, in your case it's not. Everything is not good."

Jessica Lynch: Differentiation. 

Phil Wagner: Yeah. 

Daniel Serfaty: That's a very, very insightful remark here, Phil. You're right. Depending on which level you're at and what are your needs, you should have a particular prescription for you and not everything goes. Again, only because it's engaging and only because there is a score in the lower left corner of the screen. That's good. I'm more interested also to continue on something that, Jess, I know you mentioned a couple of times today, but I know it's at the center of the whole value proposition of what your company is doing. Is this connection often talked about, but seldom implemented, of the connection between physical fitness and emotional fitness or even mental fitness? How do we balance that with technology when we don't have a psychotherapist on site, in a box or even an MD in a box, how do we combine these two? 

Jessica Lynch: Well, there's an opportunity to combine less of that professional one-on-one time and more of a lower grade, you don't need an MD to ask if you went for your walk that day, or if you followed the diet plan that was specified in your last dietician session. So it's blending the two, but ultimately we're human, and we like to feel that positive reinforcement from others. And we like to know that we're not alone and that if we had a hard day, it's not a reflection of our own worth. And we're still worthy of getting up the next day and investing time in ourselves versus all the other things that we're doing for everyone else around us.

It's really difficult for parents, it can feel selfish to do things for themselves when they otherwise could be doing something for their kids. And so feeling like by doing something for themselves, you're actually doing something for someone else can be very motivating. And so I think it's about creating the structure around the prescriptive recommendations to help people follow through, adopt it and be successful. But can't forget that we're human, we're going to have good days and bad days. You need to be able to maintain your motivation and feel encouraged to keep going, because there's going to be plenty of bad days. 

Daniel Serfaty: Jess was describing disconnection between the physical and the mental for the larger consumer, the population. I wonder if it also applies at the end of the curve, basically with people that are professional athletes. 

Phil Wagner: Yeah. And I actually think more so with trained individuals because they actually are closer to their physical capacities, to the point where if someone's sleeping seven hours a day and they're very well-trained, we often recommend, "Hey, train one day less a week, take that time and use that to sleep more. And that's a workout in and of itself." Because if the goal of exercise for you is to perform at your job higher, or run faster, or lift more weight, if that's part of your job, sleeping plays a role over that just as much as lifting weights.

So start changing that mindset of a singular goal, optimizing better through mood, but also physical and you can't separate those out. I think the other place this comes into play more in the future if we look ahead is, in the war fighting and athlete community, and at least for a lot of type A males, speaking for myself, no one's raising their hands saying, "I don't feel good mentally." No one's saying like, "I want help." They should, we all should be doing that more. But physical exercise can be a leading indicator for that mental health. If individuals are exercising less, are less motivated, or performing at a lesser level, that could be a more effective leading indicator, than surveys in groups where they don't want to admit there's a weakness.

Daniel Serfaty: That's very interesting that we have to pay attention more, as you say, for the professionals than just for the general population, because of that reluctance. Do you see that in your world, Angelica too, with the tough Marines, they think that just going to the gym, will fix it as opposed to meditating, or taking a break, or doing something for their mental health?

Angelica Smith: Yeah. Unfortunately that is how my experience has shown that what's important to them is just kind of that physical aspect of health. But like I said, previously, I've seen certain individuals within the Marine advocate for mental health and other aspects of health, not just the physical training part. So you've got people who are advocating within the military who want to see more of that research and want to see tools that affect advancements in that area and performance in that area for our war fighters. I don't think we're exactly there yet however.

Daniel Serfaty: Yes. Maybe that's a population that self-select, so like maybe professional athletes, because for particular reasons, think about that. Talking about, again, mental health and physical health, just as we look back at the past 15 months of COVID, what kind of change did you see in the way people use your solutions and technologies? And did that change the equation in terms of how people look at their fitness, whether it's physical or mental? Jess, you want to take that on? 

Jessica Lynch: We saw two big changes. First, more interaction. A lot of people were very isolated and being able to feel connected with other people during that are in that time made a big difference, especially being able to share some of the hardest things that were going on. Like we were working with a lot of frontline healthcare workers and we got reports of, "I had five friends commit suicide this month," and to have a safe space to say it was really powerful. So we saw people wanting to interact more and share more than we had ever seen.

And we also saw people adjusting their definition of what a workout meant because they had always gone to the gym, or they had always gone to a class and now those facilities were not available to them. They were in a new location and needing to find new ways to move that worked for them. So we saw a lot of people experimenting and trying a lot of new types of exercise that they hadn't considered before, which is really joyous because if you dance or do [inaudible 00:58:05], or lift weights at home with things that you didn't realize counted as weights, and it means you're doing something.

Again, this is for people who are coming off the couch, not trying to optimize performance after already being over 80% of what they could achieve. Everyone's having to redefine what their routine is and wanting more human connection, which I hope sustains, because ultimately everyone's going to be more successful if they find what works for them and can adapt to any situation they're in, more resilience. 

Daniel Serfaty: That's interesting as a coping mechanism and the important of being connected to something or someone that will tell them how they're doing, or they will listen to them. How about on the high end of the training, Phil, Angelica, how did COVID affect the way people use these technologies?

Angelica Smith: I would say similar to Jess, we saw our numbers skyrocket because gyms were closed and they couldn't do group exercise. Now, although we saw an increased number of users and an increased number of plans that were created, those plans didn't include dance or yoga, things like that. But we saw an increase in usage. And then afterwards, there was a time when after COVID that those numbers began to drop, as things began to open up, unfortunately those numbers went down quite a bit. But we did see a great amount of usage around COVID for about two months. 

Phil Wagner: From a diagnostic standpoint movement wise, we just saw a lot more heterogeneous population coming in. Because before in a given military unit, or a given sports team, or even employer people would be doing a program that was set, formalized, given to them, supervised. And people would gravitate to move a certain way as a group because they were all doing relatively similar things. Then when COVID hit, everybody was dispersed and then folks chose what they want to do.

And that range from Netflix bingeing as a workout, to running more and utilizing where they're at to be even more active. And so what it did is created a lot greater need for a diagnostic in terms of, okay, everybody's coming back into the company, it's like everybody got deployed and now everybody's coming back in. So where's everybody at so we can be able to triage who needs what.

Daniel Serfaty: It's fascinating to see how many of those adaptations are going to linger way past COVID. I'm really observing that now in all kinds of environments, some things are going to stay, what exactly we don't know. So I have one last question and then going to ask you for a prediction and a piece of advice. So my last question, I want to go back to the notion of data. There's a lot of data that's floating around here, whether it's actual data that goes to feed the machine learning algorithm or a recommendation engine or data that comes to actually float to your Wishroute guides.

And these are quite personal data, data about physical fitness. So mental, or sometimes even maybe medical, some medical detail may be entered there. Is that an issue? Or do we have to think when it comes to this data about fitness and nutrition and personal health, et cetera, do we have to worry about HIPAA compliance or at least some kind of protection? What are the ethical boundaries of what we can do with all this human data floating around?

Jessica Lynch: Ethical, and Phil, I liked your comment earlier about people only want to give you that information if they know it's not going to be used against them. So as you think about using these tools in organizations, you're not going to get people to adopt some if they worry that it's going to cause them to not get promoted or be judged, not liked by people around them. So the framing and privacy is extremely important. Internally, we remove any identifiable information about the individual to our staff and processes. So nothing that someone says to us can be tied back to an identifying factor about them, essentially, anonymitizing all of the information coming through. So that's one of the key things that we do to protect people's privacy. 

Daniel Serfaty: But you do that voluntarily, not because there is a regulation that says that you should, is that right? 

Jessica Lynch: We do that voluntarily. Yes. 

Daniel Serfaty: How does it work Angelica, Phil, for your own technologies? How do we protect those data? 

Angelica Smith: I actually had a question for Jess. I was wondering if someone does submit PII or they submit some piece of information they shouldn't... I mean, I know you're collecting that, but how does that work? What do you then do with that data? 

Jessica Lynch: There's certain parts of the system where we collect certain data points and those pieces of information wouldn't flow through to key things we're storing about the individual, because we're not prompting for anything related to something that would then fall into that category. In the daily conversation, which we do ultimately capture someone could share something like that with us, but we don't then assign it to their profile and store it in our systems related to that person's record, if that makes sense.

Daniel Serfaty: Okay. 

Phil Wagner: Similar to Jess, we're very careful about de-identifying personal information. We actually have gone out and gotten fully HIPAA compliant and treat all our data with that lens because we believe even though it's not required or mandated, we believe that that information is HIPAA information and that it is medical data. It certainly is personal information, but I think we need to start treating it as such much like we would a medical record. And I think it's important that that standard is set and communicated because that's only going to enhance that trust where individuals don't feel it's going to be leveraged in some way against them. 

Daniel Serfaty: Absolutely, yes. That's exactly what I was thinking about. In fact, this is one case where the feeling of having data protected may actually render the two much more effective because of that trust, as you say. People are pretty obsessed is that they don't want those data to end up in some pharmaceutical company that is going to try to push some pills on them because they know something about their condition, for example. Thank you for that, because I think that's probably on the minds of many people in the audience, if providing my data and receiving data is going to make me more fit, that's great. I just want to make sure that some people are watching what's going on with that data. And I think you just reassured them that even the industry is not as regulated that say the pharmaceutical industry, people self regulate right now in anticipation of that. 

Angelica Smith: I'll go ahead and go on record and say that FitForce was developed in a way as though we do not collect any of that information. I should probably make that statement, PII, HIPAA stuff. We developed it in a way that we do not encounter any of that information, and so we're not even going down that rabbit hole.

Daniel Serfaty: Okay. But you might one day and then these are good guidance that you have from Phil and Jess about how to deal with that. 

Angelica Smith: Yes. I see that in the near future. 

Daniel Serfaty: Yeah, absolutely. Good. So now I'm going to ask you to put your prophet hat on and then your guide hat on. Close your eyes, it's not 2031. Is America more fit as a result of these next generation technologies? More fit, less injured, feeling better, et cetera. Basically what we learned that just the sensors by themselves do not accomplish, is this combination, this industry going to make America more healthy? So 10 years from now, we wake up and what? How do people use those? We will say that prediction is very difficult, especially about the future. So who wants to make that prediction?

Phil Wagner: I can start. In 10 years, I think that at least from a domestic standpoint, the US will be a fitter, healthier population, in three years will be worse than we are today. And I believe that, and maybe it's just by Silicon Valley perspective, there's going to be a bubble that will burst over the next few years and that all these technologies and gadgets that are gathering information, our judgment day is coming. And they're going to be judged in a few different ways, which we've covered on this call. One is they're going to be judged on how they handle that data. The privacy, the HIPAA compliance, we're seeing it right now with Apple, who's throwing down the gong. 

The other way, they're going to be judged his insights, and Daniel, you brought this up before ultimately all data's going to be shared. So it's a matter of how comfortable we are with the transaction and what we get back, right? We being the consumer, the patient, the employee. So ultimately those companies are going to be judged on that security and the insights that are actionable for them as an individual. And then ultimately I think there's the science piece because it's very easy to create something to measure things, but in order to stand the test of time that it has to be an accurate scientific variable, or at least metric that's being tracked.

Jessica Lynch: I'm optimistic on two levels. One, it is absolutely amazing what's possible because of the smartphones in everyone's hands and the baseline that we've established with the tools that are currently in existence and the exciting innovations that are coming and are being worked on right now to make things more personal, more specific, more human, back to more human. And then the other side of it, I'm optimistic because unhealthy people cost a lot of money and that's a big problem that there'll be continued more and more eyes on. So as the US population gets more unhealthy, there's only more resources going toward trying to fix that problem and more money to be made fixing that problem. So the mix of the technology innovations that have happened over the 10 years and the motivation of people to make money and reduce costs, I think will get us there. 

Daniel Serfaty: That's excellent. Angelica, you've heard two CEOs with two long-term optimistic view. Even if in the short term, things are going to be messed up. What's your view?

Angelica Smith: I'm conflicted. I'm essentially an optimist at heart, I want to be optimistic. I feel like the industry will provide the technology and the means, but I don't know if the population will use it appropriately. A huge part of health is diet, and we struggle with maintaining a good diet. The things that we put in our bodies, are these applications going to address that. If your budget is $30 to feed a family of six, McDonald's is up the street and you're pressed with time. And so a home cooked dinner isn't... the app is recommending you cook a home meal, but you don't have the time or the money and so McDonald's it is. So I think the technology might be there, I don't know if people will be ready to actually utilize it.

Daniel Serfaty: That's a very important point here. The interaction between these technology solutions for physical fitness and our own society and the social dimension, social economic dimension of all that, are good lessons for our listeners to ponder on. Talking about our listeners, this is where I'm going to ask you for a piece of advice as a way to wrap up. We have a lot of young folks in the audience that are considering a carrier that may be in college or before college and they are listening to those three brilliant people, coming from very different perspective. 

The medical athletic perspective, the technology software engineering perspective, and the entrepreneur management expert consultant. And the question is that what if they are fascinated by this field, fitness and the technology to help people feeling better about themselves, be more healthy, what's the career advice you would give them? What should they study to get into that and to succeed in that Angelica you're ready to talk, what advice do you have? 

Angelica Smith: I would give some general advice just for them to be bold, get involved as much as they can, whether that means taking a class or several courses, interning with a company that's doing similar work that interests you. And lastly, I would say to remember, it's always easier to ask for forgiveness than permission. 

Daniel Serfaty: Jess.

Jessica Lynch: I think having the confidence to be comfortable being uncomfortable is one of the most important things in life. And so just as Angelica said, go pitch an early stage startup to be an intern. I hire 10 interns this summer, and there's so many ways to get involved and get that experience. And I think one of my biggest aha moments career-wise early on was it doesn't matter how much experience someone has. They don't know everything, they don't have everything, figure it out and we all bring unique perspectives and critical thinking to the table that are valuable. So yeah, be bold, go get some experience. There's so many open doors. Sometimes you just have to knock and ask and be comfortable being uncomfortable because that's going to serve you well, your whole career. 

Daniel Serfaty: Thank you. That's very wise. Phil, for somebody looking for a career path to succeed in that direction, what would you tell them? 

Phil Wagner: Yeah, I think that uncomfortable piece is certainly great advice. That things don't work out like in the movies. There was a lot of discomfort that's necessary in the learning process and to recognize that and be okay with that. I think the other thing probably to add on is how important the soft skills are. I think if you're going to be involved in health and human optimization, human performance, data is critical, but having good data, good science, it's not enough. There has to be an understanding and an empathy of who's using it and why they would want to use it. And that has to be really understood, not only initially, but on a really ongoing process and never losing the touch that there is a human piece to this. And there has to ultimately be some sort of engagement, and whether that's a wearable or another device. 

Daniel Serfaty: Well thank you for very wise advice. All three of my guests gave you right now some nuggets that I hope you will use as you make choices. These are nuggets that they learn not because they're read it in a book, because they practice it themselves in their daily job. 

Thank you for listening, this is Daniel Serfaty. Please join me again next week for the MINDWORKS Podcast. And tweet us at @mindworkspodcast or email us at mindworkspodcast@gmail.com. MINDWORKS is a production of Aptima Incorporated. My executive producer is Ms. Debra McNeely and my audio editor is Mr. Connor Simmons. To learn more or to find links mentioned during this episode, please visit aptima.com/mindworks. Thank you.