How AI is powering Olympic-level wellness

23:27And so My first team member that I went out and saw was a sports psychologist. And, you know, people always want to know, okay, what does a sports psychologist do? I'm like, unfortunately, it's not like getting hit by lightning. Like there's not just like this amazing wisdom that's imparted to you. It is like going to the gym. It is building the tools on how to manage emotion and your physiology of your body through your brain and your thoughts. And then I was technically very good, but my body was already broken down as an 18-year-old because my sport is pretty brutal. So then I went and sought the very best strength and conditioning coach that I didn't have access to.

24:06He was training the men's hockey team, the Montreal Habs, and I was able to convince him to take me on as well. And so rebuilt my body from the ground up with these experts. But then I had everything from regular osteopath, deep tissue masseuse, nutritionist, Pilates. I had a technical coach. I actually had two technical coaches. So it goes on and on. But the interesting thing about my team, which I think truly differentiates it even from a lot of elite teams, is that it was truly athlete-centered. And my performance was about finding this performance envelope where I was mentally healthy as well as physically healthy.

24:45And we see that, you know, a lot of athletes get pushed to the brink where they're not emotionally, mentally, which reduces the length of their careers. But I was very lucky and my experts communicated. So everything was tapped into this one goal where they were in their own environment optimizing based off of what the other one was doing. So if my physio found an imbalance, he'd call my strength and conditioning coach and we would work on that and vice versa. So when my strength and conditioning coach saw I was super tired, he'd call my physiologist and we would maybe reduce training load. So it was this interconnected nature, which is the dream of everyone, right?

25:25It's holistic health. That was us operating, you know, on all cylinders.

25:31Pioneers of AI hosts:What is your vision? And what is the definition of performance that is going to resonate with, you know, the average person? So, I mean, our vision is very simple. It's how do we take these elite experts and make them accessible to everyone using technology and AI? And in order to do that, we have to dig into the technical pieces to make this really shine. But that's really that simple. Especially on women's health, there's a lot of research that's been lacking. And we can get into those statistics, but it's not great. Like women have not been treated based off of their own unique physiologies and are often dismissed for conditions because they're not understood.

26:14Pioneers of AI hosts:Let's actually unpack that for a second because that is important. Most research has not been done on female bodies because it was deemed too complex with our hormones. Well, turns out our hormones drive a lot of our health and support, you know, through the different phases of life. They're absolutely critical to understand. So we're coming around to that. But the fact that, you know, women's health conditions like menopause, PMS, endometriosis, they account for 14 % of the disease burden, but they're less than 1 % of the overall investment in research. So there's just this disproportionate gap that shows up in our lives.

26:51Like, for example, a couple years ago, I had this like tremendous fatigue. And that is not something that I've ever had to deal with in my life. Fortunately, I have a lot of energy. and so I went to my doctor and I had gained weight. I had fatigue and she looked at me and I was like, can we do some investigation? Like, I'm feeling really crappy. She looked at me and she said, welcome to your 40s. And so, okay, and it's just like nothing you can do. So I was like, oh my god, I thought the decline was more like 70. I was like, oh my god, this is the cliff? And so, like, I had this reaction. And of course, there were some tears.

27:30I was like, wow, the beginning of the end. So then I was like, no, this isn't right. So I went to actually I got a massage and my massage therapist was like, you have so much like fluid retention in your body. And I was like, oh, this isn't just like weight. This is like fluid. So I started to do some tests. Turns out I had the highest level of parasites in my body that cause fatigue. And all I needed was two weeks of antibiotics. So if I wasn't stubborn, and if I didn't know how to advocate for my health, and if I didn't know what my baseline was, I may have accepted that for a lot longer. But this is the reality that women, you know, are completely dismissed when it was two weeks of antibiotics that changed everything.

28:15And this is a very common experience. And so, you know, our company, I've been advocating for, you know, change in sports for women and now health. And I'm kind of tired. Like my contribution now is action. And so I don't want to be spending a ton of time explaining the people that don't want to invest in women's health or think that it's charity. I just want to provide solutions to women. And that's where I'm putting my effort and my time.

28:43Pioneers of AI hosts:Yeah. Amazing. So OpenAI found that 40 million people ask ChatGPT a health-related question every day. And I know I have for sure. And so just in the past, you know, few weeks, OpenAI launched its own health platform. So I think this goes to show how much potential there is in harnessing AI to address health. I'm curious, why do you think people are so drawn to AI for health kind of applications? And part two of this question is, are you worried that OpenAI has released a health platform? So let's start with, am I worried? You probably get this question a lot. Yeah. Yeah. So when it comes to OpenAI and their approach to health, like this is a very important topic that is underserved for all people.

29:31So to me, this is the next frontier of AI. And I am so excited to be in this space at this time. And we're taking a completely different approach to how we're solving this than OpenAI is. So OpenAI is really about a more generalized approach to health. So they train their model based off of doctors coming to the table and helping train this AI. We're taking a very different approach where OpenAI has this breadth, but we're going for depth. So we're going to the very best minds on very specific topics. and we're taking that and creating this digital twin of this individual where they're also tuning and collaborating this.

30:13But we're going for hyper-depth and then we're letting people go, you know, from the best mind on one topic to the other rather than this generalizable answer on your health. So I'm really excited because I think we have something very unique and very like high-end to contribute to this space. And then we have like this multi-agent infrastructure where if you're talking to the wrong expert, we'll get you to the right expert. So that I just find exciting and very validating of the problem. And why we see everyone here? Well, you know, our healthcare systems, unfortunately, are broken and they're not going in the right direction.

30:51So, you know, I think it's one in three have no access to a basic family physician. You know, you have the insurance challenges in the U.S. In Canada, you have the wait lines where you may be insured, but you can't get to a doctor in a timely fashion. And so there's this need for information. And, you know, 90 % of your doctor visit is actually explaining your symptoms and getting basic information back and this educational content. And so AI is very good at doing that front end load and then bringing in those experts for the more complex cases or more challenging cases. So I think also because healthcare has been so inaccessible, people don't have great health literacy.

31:41A lot of people aren't connected to their own bodies in the day-to-day. That's where I feel really grateful is I know my cycles. I know my energy. I know that recovery is as important as pushing through. And so I feel that in my body because that was my job was to tap into those signals. So I think this gives people this opportunity to learn about themselves in a new way. That's certainly what we're creating on our platform. And then you ask a question about performance. So performance sounds like elite, right? Right. It sounds like only for athletes. Totally, totally. So this is both an opportunity and a challenge in terms of how we share this.

32:18But performance to me is as simple as what is your goal? Is your goal to wake up in the morning and have more energy and feel good? Is your goal to run your first 5K? Or is your goal to be like the ultimate weekend warrior of a certain sport? It doesn't really matter. Whatever your goal is, I think everybody has an ambition on how they want to show up in their life and their day to day. We actually see this as an opportunity to communicate this language to women who have been mainly marketed around weight loss and beauty. And we're like, no, this is about what are your goals? How do you want to feel?

32:55How do you want to show up? And we want to give you the expertise to do that.

32:59Pioneers of AI hosts:Yeah, super cool. So let's go behind the scenes and kind of unpack the technology that you're building for Revel. But I first want to start, I guess, what would the experience be like Like for somebody like me on the Revel platform, you have a waitlist and some beta users, I believe, but you haven't opened it to the public yet. Yeah. So what would the experience look like? Yeah, well, it's coming real soon. Within, you know, weeks, we're going to be opening up access from the waitlist. So for us, what's really important is it's a simple, uncluttered experience. And so that, again, comes to the way in which I was privileged to access my team is that it very much was like this concierge experience, right?

33:45They're bringing you in there, you know, you're discussing what the objectives are, and then they're bringing a lot of their craft to the table and kind of giving you a little bit of a needs to know basis. And if you want to know more, you can certainly ask. So we want to simplify the journey. We don't want this to feel like a burden, you know, where you're have research articles and, you know, you have to put on your magnifying glass to understand what any of it means. You can see the research articles. We reference all of those. We're very transparent. That's super important to us. We have an app.

34:17You download the app. You log in and we have multiple modalities in the way you can interact. So voice is the primary way that we want people to interact because it's much easier to speak about your health than it is to, you know, type it out and all of those pieces. But we give you the chance to share your data so that we can get a better picture on you, which allows us to have a more tailored program. So that can be anything from uploading, you know, lab results. We actually have computer vision where we can analyze your gait or your movement, which is what these elite experts do to figure out, you know, if you have chronic back problems, well, you know, it's probably coming from your hip.

34:55And so what does that look like? How can we create a plan? We even look at voice because there's a lot of correlation between the tonality in your voice and chronic pain or distress. And so we can start to create this picture, this longitudinal picture, which is every elite expert or doctor's dream is to have this richness, but they don't want it in a way that's uninterpretable. And so we're interpreting that data. And then when you engage with one of our experts, we use that data to give you hyper-specific advice based off of your goals and based off of what we know about you. And that profile only grows over time.

35:33And so it's like this amazing asset that, you know, we want people to use this proactively. But if you do get sick, if things do change, then you have this asset and this very clear baseline to move forward if you need treatment or whatever that may be, which would be off of our platform. We don't do that. But, you know, this profile is a huge asset in addition to the advice that we're offering.

35:55Pioneers of AI hosts:One of my theses is that the trifecta of using sensors, multimodal data, and both predictive and generative AI will unlock new opportunities for health span and performance and longevity. I wear a Whoop. I used to wear a glucose monitor. Are you thinking of allowing users to share all of this data with the platform? 100%. Yeah. So we're integrated already. Any wearable you use, you authorize it if you want it on the platform, which is obviously secure and compliant and all those pieces. We take privacy and security really seriously. But if you want to share that data, that's all available to you.

36:36So we can get a very complete picture on your health based off of your health records, based off of this day-to-day monitoring through these wearables. So we see that as one piece. We want this multimodality used to create this picture on your health, this most complete picture.

36:54Pioneers of AI hosts:Amazing. So one of the key, I guess, differentiators of your approach is creating these digital twins of health or performance experts. What does that experience look like? And why would an expert come on the platform? Like what's in it for them? Yeah. So, you know, there's a lot of fear, rightfully so, around AI replacing humans. We actually see this very differently where our specific approach is about elevating the humans. So we're taking these experts who have dedicated their life and their craft to developing expertise, to doing research, whether, you know, that's Danny Langford who works with the Warriors around player rehabilitation and also has a practice around women's, you know, postpartum rehabilitation.

37:41we take that expertise that she's garnered and we create basically a digital copy of that, of her knowledge base. I mean, if you become one of these experts, generally, you're very passionate about, you know, moving health forward. And so we're a platform that allows them to do this and get their knowledge out of these very niche, you know, places. Right now, Dani's incredibly busy. She works with 20 players, but she has the ability to reach hundreds of thousands and millions of people on our platform. We don't see this digital twin as a one and done copy. This is like a living being. So they have to continually audit it to make sure that it's operating in the way they want.

38:23Pioneers of AI hosts:Yeah. On this podcast, we've covered this idea of the virtual human economy a few times with Natalie Monbiot and others. And it's this idea that, you know, real expertise doesn't scale, right? A lot of the people you're talking about, they can't, even if they wanted to, they can't see hundreds of users and customers at a time. It's just too much, right? The time does not scale that way. And so I guess AI provides an opportunity to clone that expertise while they still stay in the loop, which I think is really powerful and very exciting. Are there any functions that Revel won't be able to do? Like, I don't know, make a diagnosis or suggest medications for people?

39:03Yeah, exactly. So we are not a diagnostic tool. That is a medical grade device. So we operate below that. And that's also where we think we can have the greatest impact. And we're also not a tool for clinicians, right? I think a lot of AI tools are being built for them. We really want to focus on the individual because we think they're so grossly underserved. And we see, you know, women are looking for solutions. They control 80 % of the spending. They're the most proactive with their health. You know, thousands of dollars are being mobilized every year per person. And so that shows us that there is hunger for solutions.

39:38And that's who we want to serve. We're not doing those pieces around clinical practice.

39:44Pioneers of AI hosts:Yeah. I want to talk about privacy because there are some concerns around sharing your health information with AI chatbots. And I'll just play one scenario out. So say you're having a conversation with Revel or ChatGPT and none of these have legal privileges. And this could get dicey. Like, so for example, if we're talking about women's health, a woman is pregnant and, you know, she lives in a state where abortion is illegal and she asks for resources on how to get misoprostol online, there could be like serious ramifications. So how do you think about privacy and who has access to what information and what questions should an end user be asking when they're evaluating the different options they have in front of them.

40:28Yeah, I mean, we talked about OpenAI and their approach and how we differ. I mean, another critical piece is, you know, you're uploading your information with no control on OpenAI. Like, I do not recommend that. So I think, you know, there is very good reasons for people to feel nervous about this and to be cautious and to evaluate their options. You know, we're operating under full, you know, HIPAA compliance. All of our data is encrypted. For us, the number one issue is consumer trust. We have to earn that. We have to prove that. We meet all of those standards. And so it's hyper important to consider.

41:08And then it also is what you're comfortable with. Like, you don't have to share all of your medical data with us to have value. We can personalize it further, but there's that scale for each user to decide what's right for them. And so, yeah, moving forward, it's such early days that it's easy to be like, oh, oh, I really want this answer. I'm just going to upload, you know, my lab results into OpenAI. But we will see the consequences for that.

41:34Pioneers of AI hosts:We're going to take a short break. When we come back, how you can tap into an Olympian mindset, whether or not you're doing flips on the slope. Stay with us.

42:01Pioneers of AI hosts:I have heard you talk about how free skiing is a mental game in some of your other interviews. And I believe entrepreneurship is also like it requires a lot of grit and resilience and dealing with a lot of uncertainty. For any of our founders who are listening to the show, what are some of your best tips to stay grounded and to stay emotionally and mentally resilient? I've already been on quite a journey as an early stage entrepreneur. And I think it's really easy to take too much feedback and take too many opinions. And I think that that really impacted me in a negative way. Because as an athlete, you have coaches and you have people you trust around you where you're very open to feedback.

42:47What I learned early on is that I have to be more selective with my team around me and whose feedback I'm taking because it's very easy to, you know, be a pinball in a machine if you're taking everybody's feedback because, you know, not everyone is an expert in the way that you know the space or, you know, they may have a different perspective or may specialize in something totally different. So that was a piece I had to learn and remind myself to be grounded. And trust, trust your intuition and trust your expertise, right? A thousand percent. It's not different than standing at the start line, trusting I can navigate this crazy course at high speed.

43:25So that's a big part of it. And then just get up. You know, when you crash, you just have to stand back up and have a support network. I think there's like, you know, yes, you have to hustle, but also you have to be careful burnout. And so where are you recovering? So key. What are you doing to make this sustainable, these efforts. Yeah.

43:46Pioneers of AI hosts:In my early journey at my company, Affectiva, I was approaching this as a sprint and not a marathon. And I do think, you know, at some point I realized, you know what, self-care is important and prioritizing time for self and just sleeping well and eating well and doing all these things. For the first few years at the company, I was not doing that. And I think that kind of hurt my performance, but also kind of it set the wrong tone for the team. So I totally agree with you that it's so important. I'm a sprint athlete, so I have to watch myself, but it's like, it's a series of sprints. It's a series of sprints.

44:23Yeah. And to your point, as a leader, how do you make sure your team's coming with you, right? You're not burning them out too. And you're creating the culture where you can find that joy. If you're like exhausted or, you know, full of anxiety, you squeeze that joy out of the experience for everybody. and, you know, there are sacrifices to want to join an early startup for, you know, employees. So you have to make sure you're creating that space for them too. Yeah.

44:48Pioneers of AI hosts:Okay. So in honor of the games coming up, I thought it would be fun to play a little AI Olympics game with you. Oh, wow. Okay. Yeah. All right. So let's go. Okay. So who's getting gold, silver, and bronze? ChatGPT, Claude, or Gemini? Love it. I think it's going to be Claude. Oh, sorry. Claude. Gemini ChatGPT. Sorry, I'm only focused on winning. Okay, great. Wearable tech. Wristband, ring, and glasses. And let's do the full podium. So I want the least invasive. So I'm going ring, I'm going wristband, and then glasses. AI created workouts. Yay or nay? It depends from who. Are we talking generalized information?

45:34Or are we talking, you know, about from one of our experts who has trained 40 Olympic medalists, Scott Livingston. I'm going to take the latter on Revel. Yeah, absolutely.

45:44Pioneers of AI hosts:I love it. All right. Olympic level sports require a lot of practice and consistency. For our AI novices out there, what's one way they can start practicing using AI in their daily lives? Oh, well, you know, it's pretty easy. Just open one of the models and ask anything you're curious about. That's it. I do want to say AI has, it's amazing. It's been so rewarding to build in this space because I think it does open up the number of people who can contribute to AI, right? You no longer need to code to be able to help influence this technology. So yes, it's intimidating, but like having that first step into it, it's amazing what can open up to you.

46:25Pioneers of AI hosts:Yeah, amazing. Jen, this was so inspiring. We will be on the lookout for incredible results at the Olympics. Thank you for joining us. Thank you so much. Such a pleasure.

46:38Pioneers of AI hosts:Like many of us, I want to have agency over my health. I do my best. I exercise every day. I eat clean. I sleep well. I practice mindfulness. But often I wonder if I'm doing it all right. And I don't know about you, but to make it worse, we are all inundated with so much information. Should I be doing intermittent fasting or not? Should I be on a keto diet? How much weightlifting should I do? I want science-backed, personalized recommendations, not the latest trend. And this is what Jen is building. Revel will amplify elite expertise so the rest of us can get access to this information. Because you shouldn't need to win a gold medal to have agency over your health.

47:20Pioneers of AI hosts:It was great having Jen on the show, and I'm rooting for her and Team Canada on the slopes. Thanks so much for listening. We'll be back in your feed next week. www.waywhat.org

48:00Pioneers of AI hosts:music by Ryan Holiday. Our head of podcasts is Lithal Moolad. You can join the conversation across social media platforms. Just look for us at Pioneers of AI. Thanks so much for listening.