Eric Litman - Aescape & The Future of Wellness Robotics

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[00:03:25] Eric Littman, welcome to the Future of Fitness. Thanks, Eric. Great to be here. Yeah, I say this all the time. I'm always excited for these interviews. But this morning, I got a nice hot cup of coffee. It's sunny out here in Northwest Montana, and I'm about to sit down with you and talk about robots. So it's a pretty cool Friday overall. And what you guys are doing, I was telling you, I've met someone from your team a couple of years ago, and they're explaining what it was. I'm like, no way. No way. What? Like robot masseuse.

[00:03:55] And then they're like, no, it's actually really happening. And now I've been following you in the media and the things that's been happening and talking to friends. And man, it's the future is now, I guess. It's not even in the future. So Eric, there's so much to talk about with what you're doing at Escape. Wellness robotics, I believe, is how this is maybe you termed that or it's being framed as a category. So I'm really excited to get your thoughts on the expansive concepts that could go in that direction. Right. But let's start with this. I know you have a very extensive entrepreneurial background.

[00:04:23] Maybe give us a short summary of how you got to be where you are with Escape and the founder of that. And then we'll take it from there with the million questions I have for you. Sure. You got it. And then, Eric, I love being on the show. Thanks for having me in. My pleasure. Yeah, I've been doing this tech thing for a while. Started very young. And over the years, I guess I've just embraced more complexity. I've looked for harder and harder projects to go after. And this one, at this point in time, just felt like the right thing to do. It was a bit of my own personal health journey I was going through,

[00:04:50] where massage became an integral part of my life and something I needed to do regularly. And I couldn't find a solution to the way I wanted it done. I needed something very specific. And ultimately, I just decided, all right, I'm just going to go see if I can figure this out. And it turns out a whole lot of other folks kind of right around that same time, late 2010s, figured out that robots were something that could be real in the world. And we could start to bring real automation to all sorts of categories. But now we see them everywhere, right?

[00:05:16] Your LinkedIn feed, your Instagram feed, YouTube feed are all filled with scenes of humanoids and jumping dogs and automated guns and all the things that are coming soon. We're bringing a different category. We were bringing in robots that are specifically designed to help people and help people's lives. And we think there's a big opportunity there. Yeah. You know, I was sitting in the barbershop yesterday. And as I was waiting for my... It's one of my favorite places to go because the conversations are always the best.

[00:05:46] But I was preparing for this interview. I was doing some research. And I was showing my barber. I'm like, check this thing out, right? And everyone automatically, it just stirred conversation across everyone who's waiting, everyone who's getting their hair cut. And it just became this thing about robotics and can they cut hair and all this thing. It really captures the imagination. The human imagination is some... We're fascinated with robots, right? Right. And what you guys are doing, just the look of it, I happen to get to try it.

[00:06:15] But maybe you can explain simply like what is the consumer experience? What is the human experience from start to finish when we become firstly introduced to it? Like roll us through the whole thing. It's the best way to describe this, I think. Yeah. Yeah, great. So the way to think about this is we've opened up this whole concept of an on-demand massage. So if you were going to go get a massage right this moment, what would you do? What would be your process? I wouldn't even do it.

[00:06:43] I would call my friend who's a masseuse and she'd probably be like, yeah, you got to stop by at six, right? So there's no way. Yeah. Yeah. It's hard, right? And inventory is disaggregated. And how do you get through the ratings? What are you going to get at the end of the day versus the beginning of the day? You just don't know these things. So we built an app that just, it feels like an app you've used before. You're going to open it up and you're going to see a map with a view of all the locations around you that have available massages.

[00:07:11] And you can go instantly book a massage on demand or go book one for next Saturday at two o'clock. You go into a facility that has one of these. You're going to find them in gyms. You're going to find them in hotels. You're going to find them in spas. You'll find them in professional sports teams. If you happen to be a pro athlete, you'll find them increasingly in places where people take very good care of their bodies. And as you go in, you're greeted by front desk attendant. Typically you're given a set of clothes. This is really unique to our massage.

[00:07:37] It was very intentional, but these clothes are designed to remove the need for oil or lotion. And not that those aren't great and not that they can't be great. But if you're thinking about massage recovery, you're thinking about it as part of your ongoing fitness and wellness regimen, and it's not necessarily a spa-like getaway. And it turns out that's how most massage dollars are spent, people trying to fix themselves. Then the idea of meeting a shower afterwards and having to smell like lovely essential oils

[00:08:05] for the rest of the day might not fit into your life. So we've removed that. You don't have to be nude in front of a stranger. You don't have to be nude in front of sensors. And it also opens up massage to a whole class of people that otherwise wouldn't necessarily want massage from a therapist because maybe they're all the concerned with the body today. Maybe, maybe they've had an experience they didn't enjoy. Maybe they have some social anxiety or maybe they just want a moment to themselves, right? And they just want self-care the way they want to do it.

[00:08:32] So then you put in these clothes, you lay on the table, sensors overhead, scan your body. We create this complex 3D model of you as you're laying on the table. And then as you lay there, you're looking down at a big touchscreen that shows off your body in 3D, lets you make changes to the massage. You can change the pressure. You can change where it is on your body, how much time it's spending in each area. You can change the music. You can really just tune it into the experience that you want, or you can go into beautiful visuals that take you to another place, or maybe even just turn the screen off, right? You don't want anything at all.

[00:09:01] You just, you want to enjoy. Arms come in, pair of robot arms, work on the body simultaneously. Notably, this is really important. These arms are only strong enough to give a good massage. Typically, when people think about robot arms, they think about things that can lift a panel, move a car, those sorts of things. And those are great, but that's not what we're using here. These arms are specifically designed to have a limited amount of force, a limited amount of pressure that they can apply to the body fit enough to feel great. So as you're going along, you can, you can at any moment in time, stop it, pause it,

[00:09:30] change it, just dial it into what you want. Change where the armrest is, the leg bolster. And then over time, as we get to know more about you, we will eventually deliver massages that are more and more personalized to your body. All the things we learned from you and everybody else that gets on one of the tables. I would describe it like this. It's at the same time familiar and something entirely new. Like you're going to get on the table and you're going to think, okay, this is, this

[00:09:58] is a massage, but it's not a person. It's not intended to replicate a person. We don't want it to necessarily feel like a person. We want it to feel like great massage. We want you to get up off the table and think, wow, that was 30 minutes while invested. That was an hour. I really enjoy it. Or in a lot of cases, what we hear from people is I fell asleep, which we hear from therapists is like the hallmark of a great massage. Yeah. When I think when people, and I'm just going to say people as in me, because I think I'm

[00:10:26] probably about as educated as the average American when it comes to robotics. I think when we think about robots, we think of just kind of the mechanical nature of it. But there's a lot of technologies layered in here. I mean, from what I heard, you know, is, you know, touching sensors, 3D sensors, a lot of stuff. So maybe give us an idea of like how challenging from an integration of different forms of technology was this to develop? Because I mean, the hallmark of great technologies you look at, I'd be like, oh, that looks so simple, right? Yeah. But you've been doing this for a while.

[00:10:56] So yeah, give us insights and how complicated exactly is this? It's a hard problem. And it's a hard set of problems. We are safely and autonomously coming in contact with human bodies. That's a big responsibility. It's something we take very seriously. Humans are remarkably varied. We share similarities. But when you get into the details and millimeters matter in what we do, we vary quite a bit. We vary in tissue stiffnesses. We vary in size, shape, position on the table.

[00:11:26] People breathe differently and they'll scratch themselves and they'll move a bit and they'll adjust their clothes and all the things. And being able to handle that and handle it gracefully in all scenarios takes a tremendous amount of thought and care. We have, I think the number now is six or seven apps that are built against this from consumer booking to partner management to the apps on the table to provisioning and otherwise. There's a complex vision and sensing system. There's complex motion planning systems. There's all the fleet management behind this.

[00:11:56] There's all the marketplace dynamics. It's an insanely complicated project here. But to your point, all you notice as a consumer is, wow, it's really pretty. I get on the table, it feels really good. And I know that this is going to be the same sort of experience the next time I go in. Yeah. Incredible. So last time I checked, I mean, I researched 80 million in funding. I believe you guys were going for a series B or maybe give some updates. Like how's it been received by investors?

[00:12:25] Raising money for deep tech projects is hard, just fundamentally hard. We're really lucky to have some great investors behind us who've been here with us through the years and who put quite a bit of capital to work into building out what we have today. And the business is really starting to work. We just, we spent seven years building this. Seven years away from the market with nothing but a hypothesis. The hypothesis was people are going to want to get massages from a very different way than they get them today. Launched in July and we're seeing tremendous consumer adoption.

[00:12:55] We're at north of a 20% repeat utilization rate. We've had super fans that have been in as many as 16 times for massages. We sell 52 packs of massages. So blocks of 52 of them. People are, the numbers play out, which is really great. And the more the numbers play out, the more the capital markets become receptive to greater and greater investments in the business. Eric, have you seen any definitive points to start making some conclusions? Like who's using this? I mean, it's early adopters now, but like from a demographic standpoint, obviously geographically,

[00:13:25] you guys aren't everywhere yet. You're in, you know, I think the last time I saw it be like eight, nine, 10 different markets, but who tends to be the person who's using this? You know, it's a mix. So there's certainly the early adopter type, the early adopter on technology. There is the early health adopter, which isn't necessarily the early tech adopter. We have people who are regular massage goers. We have people who are fitness and wellness enthusiasts.

[00:13:49] And then interestingly, when we did our early consumer insights research into the business, we found that there was about, there seemed to be about a doubling of the existing market of people who said that they would regularly get massages if they didn't, if they weren't from a person. It turns out it's playing out in the wild. Like a significant percentage of the people who come into us, people that don't otherwise get massages because of all the things we talked about before. And now they've got a solution and now they can come in. They can just be themselves.

[00:14:17] They don't have to feel uncomfortable about any of the environments. And many of them are bigger repeat users. Early health adopter. That's new to me. Maybe expand on that a little bit. I think our audience would find that curious. Yeah, I think it's a bit of a new category, right? With this consumerization we're seeing in healthcare, and so much information now published direct to the consumer about how to care for themselves, care for their bodies, care for their lives.

[00:14:46] But there are now people who opt in to the bleeding edge of wellness services. Maybe bleeding edge is the wrong term, but they opt into the leading edge of wellness services. Yeah. And it's not a direct one-to-one overlap with people who adopt technology services. Yeah. Yeah. Fascinating. I like that. I'm going to be using that. Thank you. What is the go-to-market strategy? I mean, you guys are in market, but overall, are you guys taking a partnership angle? Are you doing a commercial sales angle?

[00:15:14] What are you guys looking to do within the marketplace now?

[00:15:45] Yeah.

[00:16:14] We have professional sports teams. Can you do a commercial sales angle? We have professional sales angle on the market. We have professional sales. We have free-to-date clients who are marketing sales sales angle on the market. And I also have any of the clients where you're ordering on them.

[00:16:41] We're networking, especially with people who are marketing sales. Do you guys drive, you know, uh, through business through the app or new consumers through the app, or is it up to them to market it? Like how, how is it specifically in use cases drive revenue? Yeah. So, so it ends up being a bit of both depending upon the partner and depending upon what it is they're looking for. So we're in market building the brand of escape. Yeah. A because we designed the massage as a closed massage, people tend to want to show off their

[00:17:08] massages. So there's a lot of social media buzzes, a lot of organic traffic around this. Hmm. Uh, we do brand building outside of that. We help our partners with a nice, with a, with a meaty onboarding and marketing kit that we provide to them to help them with their constituency. And then they're setting the price. So there's a price floor to this. We want to make sure the market is level, but they get to set the price to the consumer. And the model today

[00:17:33] means that they're all, they only need a couple of one hour massages a day to be unit profitable on the table and everything is margin on top of that. Nice. Nice. And I know you guys have specifically Equinox, right? I saw you have one in pause studio, I believe in LA. Is that correct? Like what other brands, you know, across the fitness and health and wellness sector would people be familiar with? Yeah. So we, we've initially focused predominantly on luxury and kind of premium luxury

[00:18:01] category. So you're going to find us in really gorgeous properties. You've mentioned Equinox, they were a launch partner of ours. We were delighted to be able to launch with them. Perfect. Pause studios. Every time I'm in LA, I stop in for contrast therapy there. So that may, that one made me really happy. We're in Ritz Carlton. We're in four seasons, JW and a host of other brands and growing substantially. We're thoughtful about grows for thoughtful about taking on partners that we know are going to deliver a great experience because we think particularly in

[00:18:29] the early days, it's the experience, the consumer experience just matters so much. And we'll grow that quite a bit this year. You know, from kind of going back to the beginning, Eric, like what other, was there any other places where robotics and AI have, have gotten a strong foothold that inspired you to do this or you borrow concepts from like, I think about surgical settings, right? That was the first thing I saw. I'm like, it looks like a robotic surgery device. Like where,

[00:18:54] where have you consulted with, or where have you borrowed ideas or inspired or inspirations from? Yeah. Look, I think there are a number of what I would just sort of call like spiritual ancestors to this business. They exist somewhere on the historical lineage. If you think about the evolutionary chart, I look to the connected health and fitness devices, their ability to drive and build an ecosystem and a community. I think that's really interesting. There are parallels that were very, we're a very different business. I looked to the surgical robotic space. There's been

[00:19:22] tremendous advancements there over time. And the tip of the spear in introducing the concept of human robot interaction into the world, very different level of invasiveness, very different level of intensity. And there's somebody with North of 20 years of experience, typically teleoperating the robots in surgical space, but nonetheless, there are parallels there. And then overall, I look to like the, the wearables market. I look to this whole self-quantified

[00:19:48] movement that started with, with Fitbit and others, and now has advanced tremendously into the mainstream where people are just increasingly thinking about their bodies, thinking about the metrics, behind it. And we're all so much better capable of managing ourselves through data than we ever were before. Now, admittedly, we're not delivering a tremendous amount of data to the consumer just yet, but we're, you know, we're on a, we're on a path to be able to do so. And I think over time,

[00:20:16] combining the sorts of interaction that we have with the body, with the sorts of data that we can report on. And in the ecosystem of all the other data you have about your health from your wearables, your sleep tracker, your, your, your bed that's reporting on your movements and snoring in the night, I think there's just an increasingly interesting and comprehensive picture that allows us to manage and maintain healthspan as long as we possibly can. Yeah. I mean, that was my, I immediately thought of eight sleep mattresses or something like that,

[00:20:45] where it's like, it started as a very, the function and the deliverables are very clear. Like it's going to manage temperature to help you sleep better. But then it's turned into like, uh, it gives you a lot of data, man. Like it's, it's pretty incredible how much data it gets from you. And then, but I think what we're missing, and I'm curious to get your thoughts as kind of a visionary aspect, is we're missing that one thing that pulls all the data together, right? Like that one, it takes my wearable, it takes my mattress, it takes my workout device, it takes all these

[00:21:14] different things and pulls it in and makes it super usable and valuable to the consumer. Where do you think we're going with that? I mean, this is something I would imagine every once in a while pops in your head, right? I think about it all the time because I have so much data and I measure everything. I do, I do all the tests. I do all the labs. I use all the services. I trial everything new that comes out in the space just about to some extent, you can pull

[00:21:40] it together in the platform health systems and Apple health and Google house, but they just haven't hit the mark yet. I don't think anybody's really hit the mark. You can, you can aggregate data from many sources, but not all. And the minute you're, many of you have disparate sources that aren't tied together. All of a sudden your analyses are, they're challenging at best. And there's a tremendous amount of just fatigue drop off that occurs. Nobody's built a great consumer experience

[00:22:06] around this. I'm really quite surprised it hasn't been Apple. It hasn't been Google. They haven't really figured this out, but I'm, I'm hopeful. I'm hopeful. Yeah. Yeah. Me too. I mean, it's, it's inevitable. It's just a matter of who does it first. Go back. Sorry. I'm kind of jumping around and going back to the go-to-market strategy, you know, looking at the markets you guys are in and let me know if I'm missing anything here. I saw New York, LA, Miami, Baltimore, Atlantic city, Nashville, Orlando, any other big ones that I'm missing immediately there?

[00:22:37] Chicago, DC. I think, I think those are, I think this is the one. Apologies to anybody I'm missing. Yeah. Yeah. Of course. So mostly Metro, right? Is there any thoughts on like the type of markets that this is going to work really well? I mean, is it too early to say, I mean, obviously in a New York city, it's, it's no brainer, right? But how, how, how of a small of a market do you think can, can support something like this? I think the market is everyone who would potentially get a massage today and all the other people who wouldn't potentially get a massage today. I think,

[00:23:06] I think it's big. I think, I think there's about a doubling of the total market available to us because we can service both of those markets. And I, I don't think this is Metro only. I think as a, as a country, people are healthier. People are more thoughtful about their lives. There's so much information in the media constantly about the steady streams of innovations and health span improvement opportunities. I don't think this gets sectioned off to, to just any particularly large city.

[00:23:33] Yeah, I agree. I mean, I live in a small market, you know, it's a, we have 8,000 people here in Whitefish, but it's also a resort town and it's very active in the population. Probably would love to have more access to massage, but there's really like three masseuses here and one of them is a good friend. And like, I still can't get in to see her for months. Right. So I think there's a lot of different applications depending on the type of, of people like Park City would be a no brainer for

[00:23:57] something like that. I believe, you know? Yeah. Yeah. Resort, resort towns, you know, anywhere, anywhere where people aggregate corporate destinations are, are really interesting, but honestly just neighborhoods where people are living pattern lives, right? They get up, they work out, they go to work, their bodies hurt. Yeah. Think about all the people who are out

[00:24:21] that do shift work. People who are lifting heavy things or standing at a counter all day. Like who needs a massage more than, than the people who are putting these really hard strains on their bodies. There's no limit to where that exists. Yeah. And over time, the hope here is we bring this down. This doesn't have to exist in the luxury and the premium category. We make this much more mainstream accessible. We bring the cost down. We make it more and more accessible and we democratize. We make it,

[00:24:49] we make it so that people can get really good self-care whenever they need that, that fits into their lifestyle. Well, that's, that's a hope, right? I mean, I've interviewed so many people who are bringing such cool health technologies to the market right now. And you know, it's expensive to start. It just has to be that there's, there's very little way around that. Right. But the hope is like all this stuff does start to settle and democratize and become very accessible to everybody. And then that, you know, people want to use it, that they, you know, they see the benefits of it and they want to be healthier, which I think we're seeing, especially in the younger generations.

[00:25:17] And like, you know, I look at my nieces and nephews in the twenties and they're way more health conscious than I was at that age. I was very reckless. I would actually say many times. Well, you have to be healthy now. Everything's on camera. Yeah. Good point. I want to get into like the zoom out a little bit too, and talk about the future of wellness robotics and what that looks like. I mean, if you could, okay, we're 2025,

[00:25:43] 2035. Like, where do you think wellness robotics is going to be? Is it going to be in every day? And you know, this is just a fun question. No one's going to hold you to it. Although maybe we will, where do you think it's going to be? Like, what's it going to, what's life going to be like? Where's wellness robotics going to touch our lives? I, you know, the, the adage in technology that we dramatically overestimate what will happen in a few years and underestimate what will happen in 10. Yeah. And we've, we've never seen the pace of

[00:26:12] change in technology like we're seeing right now. And that pace is only increasing. And it feels like we're within 12 to 24 months of AI models, breaking free of their training, meaning being able to think about novel concepts, think about things they've never done before, which means that AI is going to start to train smarter AI. And that pace just accelerates beyond anything we, our brains can even

[00:26:36] comprehend. So it's really hard for me to imagine 10 years from now, what that impact truly is on the body. But I would say, if you think about the collectives and what we're seeing in biologics and therapeutics in opportunities for extremely personalized medicine, I think we're going to shift the dialogue from this post-disease state treatment that we do today to preventative medicine, to preventative healthcare and to preventative wellness. And I, I think that will just become

[00:27:03] the norm. I think the integration of those three will be seamless in our lives. We're going to be much better trained on it. I think the infrastructure will accelerate incredibly rapidly because the technology will power us to do so. And I think even having a conversation about robots starts to get a little bit strange. Like we don't talk about computers today. We talk about the things that they do for us. I sense is that robotics and automation are just going to become such a part of our lives that we think about it in that context rather than as an element of technology.

[00:27:33] Yeah. Well, it does feel like we are the, and I'm not, this isn't, it sounds negative, but we're the frog slowly boiling, right? Like we just don't see it happening. And that's, and that's bad because boiling a frog sounds horrible and painful and terrible. We're just, things are happening so quickly and we're just becoming so used to this rapid change, but yet we're not quite catching up to it. And then you throw in like potential quantum computing and AI being

[00:27:57] driven by that. It's, it's, uh, it's pretty wild. It's super exciting. And I think we're, we're now among the generations that will have the potential to see our lives meaningfully extended, or at least the quality of our lives meaningfully extended above and beyond what our ancestors have seen. And particularly the younger you started that, I think the better shot you have at taking advantage of all of really interesting things that are coming out right now, but I'll say this, I'm with you.

[00:28:24] It's, it's going to be a wild ride. Yeah. I mean, I'm, I'm 48 now and right. I'm mostly just focused on maintaining my current fitness and health as well as I can, because I have a feeling in the next 10 years, if I can just get hold that, right. I'll extend it for a while. I don't know. This is the shit that goes through my head, Eric. Uh, but that's, that's kind of like my, my goal for, for this time being. I'm a hundred percent on that same page. Okay, good. Okay, good.

[00:28:50] Yeah. The existential question that must pop up, you know, I'm sure in other interviews and things like that, like, you know, when you look at something, the first thing that a lot of people are going to think when they look at your, your technologies, like that's going to take jobs, right? It just, it's just part of it. People are going to say that. I don't have to tell you that, you know, think about autonomous cars, big concern. There's a lot of truck drivers out there. There's a lot of things that will happen if these things become mainstream. So,

[00:29:15] and then the potential of, you know, things going wrong and the fear that people have about technology and they're not quite trusting it yet. So when you look at the existential question of, of robotics and AI technologies within our, within our communities and our populations, like, is there anything that scares you a little bit or are you completely optimistic? Look, I think it's, I think it's a mix. I think it's sector by sector and I think it's time dependent. Humans are incredibly resilient. Like we've just figured things out as we've changed the environment

[00:29:45] around us. And there's always fear associated with change and change isn't always necessarily a hundred percent good. There are, there are people or sectors of the economy. There are things that can be negatively impacted during change, but on the balance, the world tends to get better. We tend to get smarter. We're less hungry. We're less poor in general, like things in general are on a,

[00:30:11] on a trajectory that kind of speaks to the interest that we all collectively have in continuing to, to introduce change. When I think specifically about what we're doing, there's a massive labor gap in the market for massage therapy and even related services around. It's a really hard job, super taxing on the body. The average career span is only about seven years after you've gone through up to 1200 hours of schooling that could cost you up to $40,000. And people leave the profession with

[00:30:39] chronic repetitive strain injury and lower back problems. There are really great massage therapist practitioners that have long careers and they've managed to take very good care of themselves. They're thoughtful about their practice. I think we elevate that. I think automation will come in and provide a baseline and open up services to more, both in massage therapy and beyond and other areas of automation. But I also think in many instances, human contact, human connection is going to become

[00:31:07] the most important thing. Emotional, emotional quotient, emotional intelligence, the personality and the personification of the moment all become incredibly significant and probably will have a substantial premium placed on it. Will there be displacement in a variety of industries through technology? Absolutely. Always has been. We collectively reskill, retool, we work on the new things. We have to build the things that are doing the things we were doing before and

[00:31:34] we get more productive and hopefully have more time to do things that don't demand us sitting in front of a desk or working a physical job quite as much as we once had to do so. Yeah. I remain optimistic. Yeah. Well, I mean, you have to, I mean, the role that you're in and the company that you're running and the vision that you have, you have to be optimistic, right? And it's up to people like me to, you know, kind of dwell on the negative at times just for conversation's sake. And that's just what I do. Look, and we're, we're specifically working there. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

[00:32:03] Aren't you? You're invited. We're year to year to help people live better lives, right? Period. That that's really important. And the motivation that drives us is when we see people get up off the table and they're relaxed, they're feeling great. Something that was hurting them doesn't hurt anymore. That's incredibly human. Whether it was delivered by automation or not, that is an incredibly human moment. Yeah. Awesome, man. I know time is tight for us today because you got to get on CEOing,

[00:32:33] but, but what can we help you with? And I asked that in the spirit of as an industry, like the health and fitness industry, the wellness industry, are you looking for partnerships? Are you looking for talent? Are you looking for, you know, that all of the things like what, what do you need help with if people are going to reach out or seek out a conversation with you? What's, what's your highest priority? Yeah. Look, I, that, that's a great question. I love that you asked that. We're here building an ecosystem. We're looking for really great partners that

[00:32:59] know how to operate, that know how to deliver a great consumer experience who can be a home for our form of self-care. And we're going to roll that out at scale over the course of this year with the right partners. And, and we're incredibly interested in the relationship where we can bring the very best of what we do with the very best of what they do. Outside of that, we live in a tech ecosystem. We live in a wellness and a fitness ecosystem. Being able to better and more deeply integrate

[00:33:28] ourselves in that ecosystem gets more interesting. The more we develop products, we're particularly focused right now on making sure we really deliver our great experience around what we have. But over time, we'll increasingly integrate further into the ecosystem. We'll be looking for great partners to work with, to bring more to their users and ours. Very cool. Very cool. And are you guys raising money right now? Currently? We're just in the middle of closing another round. Awesome. Last question. I know I said last question already, but are you guys going to be at events as we kind

[00:33:57] of kick off the event calendar this year? Is there any places where people can go check this out or, you know, meet with your team? Yeah. Where will we see it? Yeah, for sure. So you can go to any one of our locations at any one of our partners around the country, fire up the escape app, book a massage. You can experience us there. Our headquarters is here in New York. We love having people into our office. We have an office in San Francisco. We have an office in Taiwan. All of these have tables. You're welcome to come to any of those. We'll be at

[00:34:24] Peter Diamandis' Abundance 360 in March. Shortly following that, we will be at iSPA in Colorado. The team will be at a couple of other spa events, and I'm sure there are going to be more things popping up in the calendar too. Yeah. Very cool. Eric, thank you so much for spending part of your busy Friday chatting with me and answering all my questions. It's been really cool. I'm glad we finally made this happen. I've been following this for a little while. And yeah, hopefully I'll see you at one of the events or in New York in June. This is great. Hey,

[00:34:52] thanks for having me on. Appreciate this. It was fun. Yeah, it was. Ladies and gentlemen, Eric Littman. Thank you. Thanks a lot. Hey, wait, don't leave yet. This is your host, Eric Malzone, and I hope you enjoyed this episode of Future of Fitness. If you did, I'm going to ask you to do three simple things. It takes under five minutes and it goes such a long way. We really appreciate it. Number one, please subscribe to our show wherever you listen to it. iTunes, Spotify,

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[00:35:49] from our listeners. So thank you so much. This is Eric Malzone and this is the Future of Fitness. Have a great day.