Gil Blander : InsideTracker - Your Guardian Angel of Health

Hey everybody, welcome to the Future of Fitness, a top-rated fitness industry podcast for over two years and running. It is 2021, and I am your host, Eric Malzone. I have the absolute pleasure of talking to entrepreneurs, innovators, and cutting-edge technology experts within the fast-paced industries of fitness, wellness, and health sciences. Stop by futurofitness.co to subscribe and learn more. Do you want to add more years to your life and more life to your years? Of course you do, which means you need to make a change. And that is what Insight Tracker is all about. Founded by leading scientists in aging, genetics, and biometric data from MIT Tufts in Harvard, Insight Tracker is a personalized health and wellness platform like no other. So what's their secret? First, Insight Tracker uses its patented algorithm to analyze your body's data and offer you a clearer picture than you've ever had before of what's actually going on inside you. Then Insight Tracker provides you with a concrete, science-backed action plan for living a longer, healthier life. And it tracks your progress every day, every step of the way. For a very limited time, Insight Tracker is offering future of fitness podcast listeners 25% off store wide. Visit InsightTracker.com slash future to get your offer code and try to Insight Tracker today. Insight Tracker, because change is an inside job. Well, I'll answer that question for you. You're not, because you can until now. Morpheus arms coaches with accessible, intelligent, communicable client insights to save coaches time and ultimately increase your value and earn more money. By collecting lifestyle data from 90% of the current wearable market and combining that data with cutting-edge proprietary technology, Morpheus provides an accurate and reliable recovery score for all of your clients served up on a simple and elegant dashboard. No more guessing, just the real, honest data alongside the insights from Morpheus into what to actually do with it. The Morpheus platform also provides live heart rate training for your clients that can be tracked and shown anywhere, in the gym, in a home, outdoors, with personalized heart rate zones for each individual client. Combined with custom alerts, in-app messaging, and other amazing features, this is the ultimate coaching machine. Go to trainwithmorpheus.com to learn more. That's trainwithmorpheusmo r-e-us.com. Please go check out our wonderful sponsors. And if you get value out of this show, I ask you to do three things. Please go subscribe, give us a favorable rating, and share this episode on social media or wherever you like to go chat with friends. I am your host, Eric Malzone, and once again, welcome to the Future of Fitness. Kids deserve our best. Period. Full stop. Brand X has dedicated themselves to doing what is best for kids for over two decades. Here's the facts. 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So whether you are a gym owner, coach, educator, parent, or simply anyone who cares for the future of our children, Brand X is offering a 20% discount on all digital education products for a limited time. Go visit thebrandxmethod.com forward slash future to get your code today. Again, that is the brandxmethod.com forward slash future and claim your code. Do you want to add more years to your life and more life to your years? Of course you do, which means you need to make a change. And that is what Insight Tracker is all about. Founded by leading scientists in aging, genetics, and biometric data from MIT Tufts at Harvard. InsightTracker is a personalized health and wellness platform like no other. So what's their secret? First, Insight Tracker uses its patented algorithm to analyze your body's data and offer you a clearer picture than you've ever had before of what's actually going on inside you. Then, Insight Tracker provides you with a concrete, science-backed action plan for living a longer, healthier life. And it tracks your progress every day, every step of the way. For a very limited time, Insight Tracker is offering future fitness podcast listeners 25% off store wide. Visit InsightTracker.com slash future to get your offer code and try to Insight Tracker today. Insight Tracker, because change is an inside job. Please go check out our wonderful sponsors. And if you get value out of this show, I ask you to do three things. Please go subscribe, give us a favorable rating, and share this episode on social media or wherever you like to go chat with friends. I am your host, Eric Malzone. And once again, welcome to the future of fitness. All right, we are live. Gil Blander, welcome to the future of fitness, my friend. Thank you so much, Alec. Yeah, this is so first of all, Insight Tracker is a sponsor and partner of the show. And there's a reason that I'm so thrilled to work with you guys because uh I love what you're doing. I love the insights that you're providing. I love the actionable way that you're presenting complicated data to people, right? And helping people live healthier, longer lives. So I just want to say that I'm I'm really excited to have you. And then learning more about you and where this all came from and where the technology is going is super exciting. So the best place to start, Gil, is if you can just start off with through kind of your origin story. How did you get to be the chief science officer of Inside Tracker?

Yeah, that's a great question. Uh, and I try to make the answer as short as I can. Uh, so as you can hear from my accent, I was born and raised in Israel. Um uh from a very young age, I was fascinated by the aging process. I wanted to live forever, I wanted to delay the onset of aging-related diseases, I want to increase the quality of life. Uh, and before of that, because of that, I decided to study biology. Um, I done my PhD at the Weizmann Institute of Science. Uh and uh as a graduate student, I study a premature aging syndrome that's called Wellness syndrome. It's basically a very rare uh uh premature aging syndrome that occurs mainly in Japanese. But what is interesting about that is that uh uh in this syndrome, you uh your development, during the development phase, the human look exactly normal, but then uh at the age of around 20, they uh it starts a rapid decline, and they usually die at the age of 40 or so from a premature aging, uh they have a premature aging uh phenotypic uh characteristic, gray hair, cancer, and other characteristics that show that they uh basically uh age fast. Uh fast forward um a few years after that, I graduated from the Weissmann Institute and joined the lab of Lenny Garente at MIT. Uh, this lab is uh, I would say one of the leading labs in the study of aging. Uh, they found the gene called CIR2, which is uh one of the most notable uh longevity genes. Uh so I spent five years there. Uh, very exciting work, uh, some highlight. Uh I found that uh uh this gene is uh actually uh delay the onset of uh colorectal cancer. I found that uh uh this gene is actually also a player role in the uh differentiation and uh aging of uh human keratinocyte, and actually, this work was done together with uh uh the uh Estel Auder or the cosmetic company, and uh it was very interesting to work with a company like that uh during my uh postdoctoral fellow at MIT. And during that time, I uh I started to be exposed to the bio biotech pharmaceutical environment of uh what we call Kendall Square. Kendall Square is an area of uh around one mile around uh uh MIT that you can find there all the biotech, high tech, pharmaceutical companies, uh, but also a lot of startups. So that actually uh uh because of that I started to realize that maybe I can contribute more to humanity for start my own company than being a professor in the academia. And I decided uh after five years at MIT, which were uh very exciting and uh I learned a lot, uh, to join the industry, work there for a couple of years, and then come with an idea of a company that will help people to live a longer, better life. And that's what I done, and then two years later, uh I came with the idea of Insta Tracker together with two other uh scientists. And the idea is let's look inside our body, understand what's happening inside our body, and based on that, give people recommendations what food they should eat, what supplement they should take, what exercise they should do or do less, and what lifestyle changes they should do in order to live a longer, better life. So that was the idea. Uh, we are now 12 years later, and the company is much more mature, but I wouldn't say that uh it was an easy ride. We had a lot of ups and downs like every other company's. And but I think that uh now we are a pretty established company, we have a lot of uh users uh all over the world, but mainly in the US, and uh uh I can see that we are uh giving them a lot of value, and we published a paper, a peer-reviewed scientific paper a couple of years ago that showed that in a cohort of 1,000 uh users of Insta Trucker that tested the baseline and follow-up, we have seen a very significant improvement of the blood biomarkers of a lot of biomarkers that are very important for all of us. Um for wellness, but also for uh performance and longevity, so lipids and glucose, but also a marker of muscle damage such as creatinase and other. So I think that it's a uh I think that we could say that Insta Trucker can help people uh improve the wellness. I cannot say yet that they can uh allow people to live longer because it's very hard to show it. But definitely we can see a lot of markers that related to longevity, such as the lipids and glucose and inflammation, that uh uh our users uh can improve significantly following using Insta Trucker.

Yeah, fascinating. I mean, I can't imagine how much useful data you guys are collecting. We'll get into that later in the conversation because I'm really curious about it. But I want to get into you know what it is that Inside Tracker does. And I've um, you know, had the pleasure of doing the DN test DNA test, the blood tests, and getting all that information served up to me really nice in my own inside tracker profile and page and access point, you know, through the platform. And it's been really uh insightful. It's been really insightful. And I talked to Roy as well from your company, and he put it in a really great way is that you you get uh the DNA test is kind of the cards you've been dealt, right, as a human, and then your blood work, which you should be getting, I think, you know, quarterly or every six months, whatever you guys recommend, it's kind of how you're dealing, how you're playing your cards, right? And uh it was all very, I mean, there's there's a lot of different DNA tests that you can take out there nowadays, but what you guys have and and putting it together with everything else and that combination of it, I find uh just useful, you know. And I think one of the things that we've seen over the last year and a half, I hope this is what I hope, is that people are focusing more on their health and taking more responsibility for their own health. And I love all that. Explain to me how does it all work in the layman's term, like that deliverable that came to me, I love it, super valuable. How does that all work? And how'd you guys finally get to like this is where you're at and this is where you decided to live and and this is what we're gonna get. We're not gonna give people too much because you'll just confuse them and maybe they won't do enough, but give them enough that they can actually take action on it. So, yeah, give give us more insights on that.

Yeah, so it's a very good question because uh we have in the company a lot of PhDs in biology and uh in data science and in other uh directions, but uh in other ways we need to translate the data in a way that uh uh not an extremely educated person should understand. So we are working very hard to uh communicate the data in the most uh simple way that we can. And I can tell you that it's not an easy task, and uh I'm working on that in the last uh 12 years, and I'm not happy yet. I think that we can make it even uh simpler. But I think that currently is uh decent enough that uh explain the user what uh that they should do. But if you uh look at the uh the sequence of events, so user can come to insert tracker.com, uh order a test, and uh it can be a DNA test, a blood test, both. It can also have the data for a connect is activity tracker. Currently we have Fitbit and Garmin. We are working on adding uh Apple Watch, and then we have in the roadmap a few other uh activity trackers that you can connect. What we are doing then, we are getting a lot of information from you because in the blood we have more than 40 blood biomarkers. Uh, in the DNA, we have uh our array have 800,000 uh single nucleotide polymorphism that we are uh basically combining some of them into a score. The score can be you have a high chance to have high uh glucose or high chance that to have high inflammation, and that's what you call the carb before. And then we are looking, we are combining it with the blood and say, hey, it's not only that you have a high chance or high risk to have high glucose, you also have high glucose. So, what does it mean for me now? And uh then we're combining a lot of DNA and a lot of blood together and trying to build a plan for you, and the plan is based on all the biomarkers that are not optimized for you. Uh, and in addition to that, you can choose a goal. So the goal can be overall layers, basically, what you're saying, leave in the tracker the decision what biomarker to focus on, or it can be a goal like I want to sleep better, I want to lose fat, uh I want to distress, I want to recovery faster. And then based on that, we are looking at all the biomarkers that are related to that and giving you the recommendation for that. So uh if we are taking one step further right now, we based on all of those biomarkers uh and the goal and your profile, we can start giving you some recommendations. And we have a uh, if you think about it, we have a lot of food items that are available for us today. Actually, if you look at the USDA catalog, there are around 8,000 different food items. And if you look at the average American in average week, we consume maybe 20 of those. So we have a universe like that, and we are consuming something like that. But even more than that, the majority of us consume the same food. We eat uh uh poultry and we eat uh dairy and we eat eggs and uh I don't know, uh tomato and cucumber. But there are so many other foods that are available for us that we are not trying. Um, so my philosophy is let's use food as a drug of choice, or let's uh move the drug cabinet from the bus onto the refrigerator. So, what we are doing, based on all the information, all the biomarkers that are not optimized, based on your goal, uh based on your DNA, based on your profile, we are coming and telling you, oh, this uh food is uh good for you, or this food is not good for you. So basically, we are coming and finding in a way your superfood. It's not like a I know that uh people really like kale, and kale is a superfood. Yeah, it's it might be a superfood for you, but it might not be superfood for me. It doesn't work for me. So yeah, so so we are coming with a superfood that is uh uh uh really good for you because it can help you, for example, improve your glucose, or it can help you improve your iron, or whatever issues that you have, and and then so so you get a food or your own superfood, so that's one way, and then on top of that, we are also recommending you what supplement you should take. Supplement is a very easy solution, and not everyone has the time or the uh uh accessibility of uh a specific food or uh the willpower power to do something and change the nutrition. So, supplement is something that it's pretty easy to do. Pop the pill once and then you are good. Uh, but also we are giving you some recommendations about exercise and uh about lifestyle, and all of that together give you a plan of uh let's say uh five to ten recommendations that you should uh incorporate into your day. Uh all of that comes via a mobile app that uh um uh we allow you to check in when you need to check in. If you have an activity tracker connected, some of the check-in are automatically check-in. So, for example, if you need to sleep more, uh we know uh the uh how long you slept because you have an activity tracker. Or if we are asking you to do a cardio uh six times a week, we know that you've done a cardio six times a week, uh 30 minutes, and if you haven't done it, we can send you a notification. Also, the data from the activity tracker can give us a data that is very interesting and it's very time-dependent. So if I'll go uh uh one step back, the blood is uh liquid gold. It's giving you a lot of information, it's the value of uh it's in the level of uh the data that uh the medical community makes decisions. So I see the blood as a big mountain. It's a big mountain of data and a big mountain of excitement, excitement for the user. But you are not testing the blood every day, you might test it every six months. So uh if you look at that, I don't want you to have only one mountain and another mountain six months later. So the uh data from the activity tracker giving you the uh the hills between the mountain. So your deep sleep was low. We give you recommendation via pro-tip. We'll send you pro-tip and telling you, hey Eric, your deep sleep was uh low uh last night, because of that, you need to eat this food. Or because of that, two hours before sleep, uh use your blue uh light blocking uh glasses, or because of that, uh keep the temperature of the room at that temperature. Giving you a lot of information like that that allow you to uh optimize yourself between the big mountains of the blood test, uh, and then you test again after a few months. Uh uh, hopefully you improve some of the issue that you had before, but most likely you will have a new issue because uh we are very complex machines. So uh the issue that you had last uh six months ago might not be all the issue that you have today. You might have a new one, you might have uh less, you might have more. So we are trying to allow you to optimize uh all the time, and hopefully uh because of that, you it will allow you to live longer, better life.

Yeah, well said, yeah, it's uh I think through my I and for people listening, you can try all this. If you go to insight tracker.com forward slash future, uh, you can get a hefty discount on trying all of this. So want to throw that out there for the people listening now. Um the recommendations I got, and I talked to Jonathan Levitt, who's part of your team on this show uh a few years ago, and I asked him, like, well, out of all this data, like what are some of the things that you've that maybe surprised you or some things that have been consistent across the board? One of them was uh men should eat more oatmeal, right? That seemed to be a very big takeaway. But as you're starting to look at all this, what are some of the has there been any surprises for you, or is it all kind of gone? You know, have the has this has the research led to you to where you think it would have gone, or is there anything that's been completely out of left field that shocked you or surprised you?

Yeah, I think that the uh one interesting point that I've seen, and again, I'm looking at our customer as a population, is that in the paper that they in the peer review paper that I discussed before, uh, as I said, we looked at a cohort of 1,000 users. And when uh we looked at the recommendation that they chose, uh, this cohort of 1,000 users selected 500 different recommendations. So basically, uh the majority of the recommendations were selected only by a few customers, meaning that uh it's a real personal nutrition. It's not like, as you said, everyone chose oatmeal. Yeah, a lot of them chose oatmeal, but they also chose other recommendations. So I think that one of the surprises that I had is that people like variety and they like to find their own personal superfood. It's cool. You know that uh I know that uh for me, beans are great for me, and I know that uh uh avocado is good for me, and I know that uh uh all the berries are good for me. They might be good for me, so that's my superfood, but they might not be uh good for you. So I think that the people really like to find okay, what is the best fuel for me? Because I really see it like a car. Uh, you don't want to feed the car with a lower gasoline grade than what you need, because you want the car to drive fast and live as long as possible. And it's the same for us. We don't want to feed our body with the lower grade of uh our gasoline or food because then we won't live long enough and we won't perform the best uh as best as we can. And it's either to get into the uh on top of the podium or to perform in the broad boardroom. Both of them, you need the best fuel. You need to make decisions and uh you need to get where you want to go, and fuel or uh food is so important to do that. Yeah, that's great.

You know, it's it's it feels like it's filling such a gap. I mean, now every medical, every doctor that I know, general practitioner or even specialist, like they're all great people. They're just they're struggling in a system that we have here in the United States that doesn't enable them all the time to give as much care as they want to the each particular individual, right? So there's a lot of space, a lot of gray area for people like you know, the doctor I go to, I like him personally, see him once a year, kind of the same things. We I have to ask for a blood test, which most people have to do. Like doctors, many doctors don't automatically get a blood test for your annual anymore. So it's it feels like the the gap here is is pretty evident. And really, people, like I said earlier, people really need to take more responsibility for their own health. And this is a great place to start. That being said, I'm curious, have you gotten pushback from the medical medical community? Like, hey, this isn't this kind of stuff shouldn't be left up to the individual. They should be working with, you know, um, someone who is a professional in the area. Have you seen anything like that so far?

Yeah, uh, especially at the beginning. So I think that uh when I started the company 12 years ago, I remember that I was uh meeting with a lot of people, and uh I would I would say at least half of them saw that I'm crazy. And they said, Who is this crazy guy? When I'm talking now with uh uh uh I'm talking at least with the same amount of people, and I would say 95% of them say, Wow, it's great, I want to try it. So I think that they a lot of change have been changed in the last uh 12 years. I think that as you mentioned before, COVID made uh a lot of uh push it even faster. But even before of that, uh personalization is starting to be everything. And even when uh I don't know, when you buy your earpod from Apple, you can engrave your name. So that's personalization. Or when you choose the insult of your uh shoe, uh you can have it in a different way, and there is a machine in the shoe store that says you need to take the blue one or the yellow one or the gray one. Um, so personal everyone is expecting personalization today, and and and the consumer also expects the personalization for himself. It's not enough that all of us, as I said, will eat a cheese and uh egg. They want to know exactly what they should eat. And I think that it's uh uh coming and it will be more and more uh uh uh obvious in the in the future. So I think that uh uh it was a challenge before, but now we have a lot of physicians that are starting to use Insert Tracker. And I really think that uh when I started this company, my goal was to help everyone in the world to live a longer, better life based on uh understanding what happened inside his body and change his lifestyle. And uh I think that uh now it's uh uh obvious to a lot of uh uh other people that they should do it. It's not as crazy as I have seen uh 12 years ago. And a lot of physicians, a lot of coaches, a lot of nutritionists are uh uh starting to do that. And we have uh a lot of them right now uh using InstaTracker. We have uh, I know that you uh uh in the pre-show you uh you said that you want to raise it. We have a pro solution now for a professional like that, uh physician, nutritionist, uh uh coaches, um, that basically they can uh uh use Insta Tracker for their uh customers or followers, and they have uh what we call a coach dashboard that they can see all of them and then help them to make the right decision and support them. Because uh, as we discussed again before, uh it might be that uh for some people uh just coming and working on the platform, on the online platform alone is not easy enough, but they need someone to support them, help them to make decisions, also understand it. So we think that uh having a pro like that that can come and take this person, explain it to him, and help him to understand and guide him to the right direction is a great uh uh direction for uh those poor. And we see a lot of uh interest and a lot of uh excitement for the pro that they're using in Satra today.

Yeah, I that's I love that you guys are doing that. Having that kind of access, you know, have I've been a coach for a long time, and having that type of access, I mean, I went through um a certification, uh nutrition certification many years ago that was long and expensive and enabled me to um pull lab tests for clients, right? And see all the stuff. It's a it's a complicated, tight rope to walk as a fitness coach. But what I would I think there's so much value in the Inside Tracker Pro platform, which once again, people are listening. If you go to inside tracker.com forward slash future, you get your get your discount on that. Uh because walking that line, Insight Tracker takes that kind of responsibility off the coach. Like you can get the DNA, you can get the blood work, you can have it delivered in a nice way, and then you can utilize it and you don't have to worry about legalities of walking those lines of like you can talk about it what you can't. It's been somewhat for you, but here's the thing is people still need coaching, people still need someone to talk to about it. There's a lot of people like me who won't sit there and read a ton of data and need someone to spoon feed it to me. Uh, and there's a lot of people out there, so I love that you're doing that. I'm curious where what made you what made what sprouted that idea? Was it you know demand from the market? Was it something you guys thought of? Where'd that come from?

Yeah, I think that it was top-down and bottom-up. Uh, we are hearing a lot from our users that uh they would like to have a coach, someone that uh will sit with them and help them. And that's not our business model. We uh we we would like to be the expert, the let's say the nerd behind that uh uh sitting in the uh in the in our room and uh collecting data and feeding our expert system. And uh we know that there are a lot uh uh of pro like that that's their job, they are doing it much better, they are expert in that, and we show that it will be great for them to uh to do it for their user. In the other hand, uh a lot of pros like the you came to us and say, hey, we need something like that because we are busy, we cannot read every paper that's published every day. We need to, we are basically busy of serving our customers, and we need a a place that we can trust that can give us the recommendation and we can communicate to our customer. So I think that in both ways it's a win-win, and uh, we felt that it's no-brainer to do that. And uh we started uh that a few months ago, and we see a very uh high uptake of uh pros that they are using in Satracker, and uh so far we've seen a very positive response from them.

Yeah, that's great. Uh it's it is well needed, and I do think there's so many different ways now that you know, as we were talking pre-recording about technology and science, that you know, we didn't have as coaches to these tools 10 years ago. We just didn't have them, but now they're sprouting up everywhere, and the data you can get from wearables and and things like that, it's it's time that we really learn how to harness it. One of the functions I really like, um, and I maybe just because I'm competitive, uh, inner age, right? Maybe you can explain a little bit about that because I love how it to me, it's like, oh, oh, I can do better on this, I can get a better score, right?

Yeah, yeah. So yeah, I I also really love Inner Age because uh it's uh connected to longevity. So from the moment that I started the company, I should uh we should thought what should we do in order to connect to longevity? And what we realized that it's very hard for a uh the average user to understand all these 40 markers together because it's very complex, just to understand to know what is ALT and AST and SHBG, it's like it's really scary. Um, so we said how can we combine all of them to, or not all of them, most of them to one number and also try to connect this number for a longevity or age. So what we have done, and we done it uh in 2015, we came with the first inner age, and that was done together with David, uh Dr. David Sinclair from Harvard and Lenny Garente from MIT, is to try to look at the literature and find what biomarkers are changing with longevity, and what does it mean for uh the longevity? So, for example, if your glucose at the age of uh I don't know, 40 is uh 80, what does it mean for you? Uh what is the effect on your longevity? Okay, so we found papers like that and we combine it, and basically uh based on all of that, we came with the first version of Energy that was based on a peer-reviewed scientific publication. Uh, in that version of inner edge, we had only five blood biomarkers because that's what we found in the literature. Fast forward to last year, our uh user base grew dramatically, and we had enough data from our user base to start looking at the data from our user base and try to see trend with longevity. Basically, try to see what blood biomarkers are going up with the aging and what are going down with aging. And then we selected those blood biomarkers. We have 18 of those that either going down or up with the aging process, and and then we try to plot where do you stand comparing to the line, to the regression line. So, for example, if the biomarker is going up and you are below the line, that means that you are younger because you were supposed to be on the line. But if you are above the line, that means that you are older. So we are taking all of those 18 biomarkers, combined them with an algorithm, and give you an inner age that gives giving an estimation how long you are based on all of those blood biomarkers. Um, and then we can compare it to your chronological age and see whether you are younger or older. But more than that, because we know each biomarker, whether you are younger or older, we can also tell you you are older because your glucose is too high, or you or a I don't know, uh A1C is making you younger, or cholesterol making you older. And then we got we're giving you some recommendation of how you can optimize those blood biomarkers and either getting uh uh uh from older to younger or from younger to even younger. So that's basically the inner edge, is one number related to longevity that allow you to uh understand in one number where you are standing and also giving you actionable recommendations, what should you do in order to become younger?

And I'm I'm proud to announce that my I'm 44 years old, but my inner age is 42, but I believe I can get it into the 30s in the next year. So that's that's my goal. It's great. I love it. I think that's what people need is they need that singular focus that allows them to move the needle either direction. And it could probably like talking to Roy from your company, kind of shared his results, and he was like, Yeah, it was kind of alarming when I got my first inner age score, but he's worked on improving it.

Exactly. Yeah, I I completely agree. They need one number, and I I actually really like people that start older because they are they're starting very frustrated. And it's great when you are frustrated, you'll uh you want now to show everyone that you can be better. Um, so I think that it's a it's a great motivation for the user to try and do the right thing in order to be younger. So it's like a game, but in a game, you're just wasting your time and playing. Here it's a game that will allow you to live longer, better life. So, what a better game than that for everyone? I think that's no-brainer. Yeah, it's a great game.

Uh so you, Insight Tracker, like you alluded to and you know, talking to your team as well, you guys are seeing some serious growth right now as a company. Um, what is uh what's fueling that? Was there something to do with the pandemic? Is it just kind of the the natural stride of the company? Where do you think the growth is being is coming from?

Yeah, I think that it's a very good question. So I think that uh definitely the environment and the pandemic uh uh help us uh uh to grow faster, but it's also uh we uh as I as I said before, we developed the company in the last 12 years. So we we took a stand that uh we need to have a very good product before we will go to the mass market. And I think that again, if you ask me, the product will never be very good, but I think that it's good enough right now uh for a uh a customer to use it, to benefit from uh from it, and to improve. So, because of that, we decided to start marketing. Before uh a year ago, we spent almost nothing on marketing, and now we realize that the product is good enough, so we started to market it, and we see a very nice response from uh the market. Basically, uh, I think that we have a good market fit right now, and the value of the uh a product is no-brainer for our users to start using it, recommend to their friends, and continue to use it. So I think that that's the reason for the growth that uh the product is good enough uh for a customer to enjoy and to see the benefit.

Yeah, awesome. Uh when you when you look at the health sciences, I'm just gonna kind of clump it all into one. Um is there any particular technology or field or anything that has you really excited? Things that are coming down the pipe, things that you think could really um drastically and improve you know health and longevity of people who are focusing on it?

Yeah, there are uh a lot of exciting news from uh let's say from the research in the academia. I think that the uh stem cells is something that is uh uh really exciting right now, that uh theoretically we can take stem cells and program them to be whatever we want and uh you know create uh another a new kidney for you if you don't have kidney. Even uh there was a publication uh uh a few months ago from a David Sinclair lab that showed that uh you can program uh stem cells and allow a blind mice to start seeing. So there are something that we can never think about it before. So if you think about uh longevity, if you have a liver disease, maybe we can create a new liver for you. And what is nice about it is you don't need to harvest a liver from different person. We can take a few stem cells from you, develop a liver, replace the liver, and that's it. And your liver is as good as before. Um, so I think that stem cells is a very exciting technology. Another one called CRISPR, it's basically a way to make a specific change in the DNA and very directed, very accurate. So uh there is a disease that's called sickle cell anemia that uh make the red blood cells uh uh not uh functioning very well, and there were some uh uh experiments that showed that you can revert it with uh CRISPR. So if you can do that, that's I think that that's the first uh uh example. The sky's the limit. You can take a lot of diseases and maybe change them completely just with a CRISPR. Um so I think that both of those can uh make a lot of changes. There are other technologies that are uh exciting to me. Uh, one of them is uh uh what we call the Horvath Clock, is uh basically similar to inner age, but more on the DNA methylation that was developed by Steve Horvath, which is a professor at the UCLA. And I think that the what is exciting about the Horvest Clock is that it's very, very accurate. So it can tell you in the I don't know, by uh one hundredth of uh a year what is your age, and it's very accurate to your uh to your age. Uh so I think that that's a nice technology. I think that the limitation right now with that is that uh you cannot modify it. What is nice with our inner age is that okay, your inner age is higher, change your uh uh nutrition uh lifestyle, and you can uh decrease it. There, you cannot do it yet. But we are working right now to try to find a way to find a overclock that is lifestyle responsive. So I think that that can be also very uh interesting technology. So I I think that there are a lot of technologies right now that are coming, and uh I don't think that it's a science fiction that uh maybe even in our generation people can live to 150. Um but uh uh we need to work hard for that, and it's not for slackers. So uh uh eat well, uh exercise well, sleep well, uh, because you want to be ready for the uh you want to be in the your best condition when the the drug will come. Very similar to COVID. If you look at COVID uh and think about the uh the bad effect of COVID happen to people that are obese, diabetic, uh having uh uh other diseases, and the healthy people that exercise well and eat well and sleep well, they go the COVID much much lighter than those people. So it's the same here. Uh let's try to optimize ourselves and uh hopefully when the technology will come, we'll be ready and we'll enjoy it.

Yeah. How about bourbon? A little bit of bourbon every night. Just asking, you know, for a friend. Is that uh how's how's that gonna affect my air age, you think?

I don't know. I haven't I don't have a data about that, so I I cannot say.

Um, you know, it's all these technologies that you mention, um CRISPR, especially the DNI side. Is there anything that scares you a little bit?

Um, so because I'm scientist, I'm excited about that. So uh I don't think that it scared me. Uh, but I know that a lot of uh uh uh people have uh excitation about using the DNA test, for example, because they are really scared about that uh I don't know, the life insurance will find that they have some mutation, and because of that they will need to pay a higher premium or uh something like that. Uh, but I think that it's in everything it's the cost versus the value. And I think that our responsibility as an entity that supplies uh a value to the user is to give much higher a value and also decrease the uh the risk or the cost for the user. So, for example, with the DNA, we are giving you, we are trying to give you a lot of value, but also we are very careful with the security, uh, we are very careful with your uh uh uh personal information. So, for example, if you don't want us to use your DNA data for a research, you just need to click checkbox, one checkbox, and then we won't use it. Uh, we would like you to use it uh to allow us to use it because that will allow us to give you better value. Uh, but if you don't want to, we won't do that. So I think that it's it's again it's a cost versus. The risk or the value. And we are living in the world that everyone knows everything about everyone. It's crazy. Just look at the Facebook on everyone and you know exactly that this guy is, I don't know, went to the grocery shop today, or I don't know, he watched this movie. So we are living in the world that anyway we know so much about each other. It's very easy. You can open the internet and research about everyone, and you know, you know his house, and you know his uh phone number, and you know his email, and you know uh his occupation, and you know his wife, and you know the kids. It's crazy. It's uh so I think that uh in such a world, uh it's very hard to hide. And I think that the best approach is to come say, Yeah, uh I know that it might uh be uh uh available to others, but the value is higher than the risk. That's the way that I'm seeing it.

Yeah, that's that's a really good optimistic way to look at it, and I appreciate it for sure. Uh and it's true. I mean, even just you know, getting ready for this interview, I just googled your name and found tons of interviews. I watched a couple videos, I feel like I know you already, I kind of knew all of your background, where you came from, all of it. Right. And then that was that was 20 minutes of research, and I found out an incredible amount. It's it's pretty wild the world we live in. And I never would have thought of it 30 years ago when I was young that we would have all this. Exactly. Yeah. Um so looking forward, you know, if you could give us some insights into you know some of the exciting things that Insight Tracker may have coming for both, you know, end consumers, uh, professionals, coaches, all that. What do you what do you guys got coming down the pipe?

Yeah, so I what what we're trying to do is make the value of the uh of using Insta Tracker much higher, more exciting, and let's say more sticky. Because as uh the example that I gave you for uh games, there are gamers that spend all the time on games, but that's uh uh in my view, it's a waste of time. It's much better for them to play the InstaTracker game and uh come and say, hey, uh I like uh I hate that or I done that or I exercise that. So I think that uh we need to make uh Insta Tracker as addicted, uh as addictive as the games. So that's one way. We want our user to use it more because every time that you come to Insta Tracker, you have a better chance to uh be healthier, long uh live longer, and uh improve your performance. Um and uh another way is to increase the uh exposure of InstaTracker. So, for example, right now uh our app is only on iPhone, and very soon we'll have it also on Android. So basically, we are expanding uh the availability of uh of our uh product. Uh another way is uh in expanding the availability of the product is not only have Fitbit and Garmin but also have Apple Watch or other uh uh activity tracker. Um and another way to uh to do that is give other value. Like I think that a big challenge today for uh everyone is to do a search. We use Google, but it's very hard to track uh to trust it. So we are trying to build something that's called Academy, that basically you do a search and you find information that's already vetted by our scientists. So basically, uh remove the doubt from the user. So, for example, you want to, let's say that you want to eat blueberry, we can you you search at InstaTracker and uh we will tell you, hey Eric, blueberry is good for you because you have this biomarker high or this biomarker low. But by the way, Eric, uh maybe Blackberry is better for you because you have a bit more of that or a bit less of that. Okay, so something that uh you can search and not only look at our recommendation because sometimes you look at your cabinet and you find this kind of food and want to know, okay, is it good for me or not? Or you another example is uh if you walk uh in the uh it's very hard in the wilderness of uh Montana, but let's say that in the in the town that you live at and you have a few restaurants, we can maybe tell you which restaurant is uh the best for you and also what dish is good for you is the best for you, based on the biomarker that you have, the physiomarker that you have, and the DNA. So our goal is to give you the highest uh value based on what we know about you and be your guardian angel of health. Help you to make a decision every time that you need to make a decision. Uh, and we know that uh uh an average person is doing around 200 different nutrition decisions in a day. Uh, should I eat or should I don't eat? Should I eat apple or should I eat banana? So every time that you have this uh uh getting into those folk, we can help you and guide you to to the right decision. So I think that if we'll do that, that will be enough for me. That will make me very happy.

That's that's more than enough. I think uh that would make a huge impact for sure. Um Gil, this has been fascinating. I I really and I'm not just saying this because I partner with you guys, which I'm extremely proud of and really happy doing, it makes me it's very fulfilling, but just because I think it's filling it's it's entering this space that people need, you know. It's that well, that confusion they have of being on their own, and then the medical profession, which they're very limited in how they can access, that whole space in between you guys are filling in really nicely. And what you said about being the guardian angel of health is perfect. I think you just named the episode of the podcast. So thank you for for making my job easy. Um, Gil, if people want to search you or get in touch, or what where where do you send people online? Where would you like people to go?

Yeah, they can come to instatrucker.com uh about us and they can find more information about me. Uh, they can also find me on uh LinkedIn and Twitter and uh Instagram wherever they want. I'm there. Uh and uh yeah, we we we actually like to talk with uh uh customers, so uh I'm trying to do it uh once in a while. To if someone's sending me a question, I would love to answer it, and our team is uh uh very engaged. Uh uh I I think that uh uh the user of the uh application are uh they understand and they struggle, and if they have an issue, I want to to know what is the issue and try to solve it to them. I cannot guarantee that I will solve every problem because we have uh a lot of users, and if it's a specific problem only for you, it might not be uh justified for us to solve it just for you. But a lot of the problems are problems that everyone faces, and then we definitely want to solve.

Right on. Well, Gil, thank you so much for taking time out of your business day. It's a beautiful day in your backyard there, as we can see from the from the Zoom screen. And uh so go enjoy the rest of the afternoon and thank you so much for spending time. Uh, it's been fantastic talking to you. Thank you, Eric. My pleasure. Ladies and gentlemen, Gilblander. Hey, wait, don't leave yet. This was your host, Eric Malzone, and I hope you enjoyed this episode of Future of Minutes. If you did, I'm gonna 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, Castbox, whatever it may be. Number two, please leave us a favorable review. Number three, share. Put it on social media, talk about it to your friends, send it in a text message, whatever it may be. Please share this episode because we put a lot of work into it and we want to make sure that as many people are getting value out of it as possible. Lastly, if you'd like to learn more, get in touch with me, simply go to the futurofitness.co. You can subscribe to our newsletter there, or you can simply get in touch with me as I love to hear from our listeners. So thank you so much. This is Eric Malzone, and this is the future of fitness. Have a great day.