Does AI know you better than your doctor? (w/ Ōura CEO Tom Hale) | Pioneers of AI

If we have a large physiological model that makes predictions about you, and those predictions aren't just like, hey, you're getting sick and in 3 days you're going to be on the couch. It's more like, hey, in 10 years, if you don't change your course, you're going to have a heart attack. That's so powerful. It's powerful from so many different dimensions. We're going to see more of that healthcare sort of trickling to the edge, to the digital edge, the experience that you're having on your device with your wearables. And there'll be automated, you know, there'll be an AI doctor in your pocket or in the cloud who is looking over you using your large physiological model to understand where you're headed. And that is a transformation in medicine. I think it's going to be incredible.

Hi, Ron. Thanks for having me on the show. Appreciate it.

Sorry, wrong podcast. Sorry, we're on the wrong podcast.

Uh, yeah. Well, it's important for you to have some knowledge of your body and your sleep and all that stuff. It's powerful.

You're right on it because you know actually not as many people know the trick of not eating too close to bedtime and so like it's actually weird you actually you know you're sort of almost your body incentivizes you to eat closer to bed if you stay past your bedtime. So tricks for me. I mean, I don't know if you know the story, but it was the fall of 2021. You know, COVID was still in effect and the kids were struggling and I was struggling. It was a tough time. There was a lot of stress and I...

Yeah. Teenagers like sort of, you know, making the transition into being teens and so and as you can imagine, it's just like it's tough anyway, right? Throwing a dose of COVID it's extra tough. But the point is is that I'm a championship sleeper. I can fall asleep at a moment's notice. I stay asleep for a long time. I'm just like I can really I'm good at sleeping. But this moment in my life I actually lost sleep. And for the first time in my life, I was waking up in the middle of the night. I was having trouble falling asleep. I was having trouble staying asleep. And I started researching, you know, kind of solutions and I bumped into Oura. I got an Oura ring and I'd been a wearables person for, you know, quite some time. I've always had a wearable or two. And this one was really different. What happened is I changed a couple of my behaviors. The obvious ones, stop drinking coffee late in the day. Stop drinking alcohol to kind of take the edge off the coffee. Started trying to go to sleep without, you know, staring at the phone before you go to bed.

So, and I started sleeping in a cold room and I started like kind of really getting into the sort of how do you really optimize around sleep? And let me tell you something, when I recovered sleep, it was as if I was walking out of a black and white television screen of my life experience into a full color 4K technicolor, you know, movie. It was amazing. I literally was like asking people like do you feel like this all the time? Is this how people feel? It was amazing. And so it was such a transformation.

It so it was mood, it was energy, it was mental clarity. It was modulation of like you know kind of your energy during the day. And so it was a really profound transformation for me. And I was like, 'Wow, this product is really affecting people's lives. It affected mine. I need to be a part of this company.'

Well, yeah. I mean, that's always been my intention. I mean, I'm sure there are people who are very very good at their jobs but don't, you know, love what they're working on. I'm not one of those people, you know. I have to find something that I love. And because if I'm going to put my heart and soul into it, it's got to be, you know, something I'm passionate about. And so for everything that I've worked on that's been true. This is a fascinating domain. You know, it's like physics and physiology and human behavior and health and you know, there's so many things that are just fascinating about it. So all those things scratched the itch. But maybe most importantly, the company itself is a mission-driven company with an idea that it can, you know, have a role in rethinking the transformation of healthcare from a sick care system to a proactive preventative medicine, you know, and I think an ounce of prevention, you know, is worth a pound of cure. You can get people to change their behaviors and you can get people to understand the kinds of behaviors that will mitigate in favor of long-term health. You know, some people call it longevity, some people call it health span or if they say we're shortening the time of sick span towards the end of someone's life. There's obviously the benefits to all the people. If you can really, you know, get people doing healthy things, they will be healthier and I think ultimately happier. If you can do that, you'll also bend the curve on the cost of healthcare. And in our society, you know, in our country, you know, one out of five dollars is spent on healthcare. And, you know, I don't know about you, but your healthcare experience isn't great. It's all oriented towards the end of life. You know, it's all about, you know, sort of this last 10 years. And boy, wouldn't it be great if we could do a better job. So, I think that sense of mission for me, honestly, I was very attracted to that.

Thank you.

Well, I think it's a couple of things, you know, it's never one thing. A part of it is just the flywheel of customers. You know, we have quite a few customers and they're out there telling, you know, their friends or their parents or their kids or their husband or their partner or whatever coworker, that this is a good thing and they should do it. And many times it's a gift of care. You know, I want you to take care of yourself and so I'm giving you this tool. And I think, you know, maybe to address this upfront, I think a lot of people think of wearables as fitness. I mean, you know, you should know how fast you were going and what your heart rate was and all that stuff. And Oura does that as well. But maybe uniquely Oura orients more around health and maybe more importantly not health just in the moment. You know, what's my heart rate right now as I'm, you know, finishing my running exercise, but what's my trend over time and am I improving? Am I not improving? What's going on? And in some sense it's providing you this sort of sense of your physiology over time in a way that you might not perceive because it's actually hard for humans to perceive things over a long period of time. Computers are very good at that. Humans are not. AI is particularly good at it. And it's also sometimes things that you just can't sense like you know you and I we don't know what our blood sugar is. We can't because it's just not something that we can sense. So if you have a glucose bio sensor, you know, then you can have a number that tells you what your blood glucose levels are. So, this idea of being a wearable that's around health, that's the first thing that I think has been maybe central to our success. Sleep is also a very large TAM. Everybody on the planet, we hope, is going to go to sleep tonight. And in fact, they're going to be, you know, depending on how they sleep, they're going to be at peak performance or maybe not tomorrow. So that's maybe a baseline. I think the other things to recognize is that as a product, it has a couple of pretty interesting properties. The first is that measuring from the finger is really important.

Yeah, why the ring form factor? I mean, there's lots of reasons, but let's start with accuracy. Turns out that, you know, your heart pumps and sends a wave of blood going down to your arteries, and it stops right here. This is the first stop, you know, on that journey. Whereas, if you contrast that at the wrist, it's actually on its way back to the heart. It's capillary action. Your veins actually they have valves in them. They kind of close so that there's no backwash in your blood. They close as the blood goes through. So, you're actually getting both a sort of a weaker signal and maybe less information captured in that signal. And you're also sensing through things like hair and bone and all these sort of, you know, very confounding factors. Whereas, of course, here it's, you know, 2 mm of pretty uniform tissue that you're sensing through. If you've ever been to the hospital, where do they put the sensor when they put a PPG sensor? They put on the tip of your finger for all the same reasons. So, the second part of it, too, of course, is that at night, you know, you're looking for comfort. And so, this device, which, you know, weighs all of like, you know, 4 g and is very low profile and doesn't have any lights on it. If you're not sleeping, the last thing you want to do is like you don't want to be looking at your clock and be like, 'Oh, 3:00 a.m.' You know, that's always rough. So, we kind of adopted this kind of calm tech strategy of being quiet and sort of receding into the background and that was really those are really essential elements of sort of differentiation. And so, we learned we saw this when we started introducing the product is that people would wake up in the morning and they would look at their phone and they would see a score that sort of said like, 'How did you sleep?' And then there would be sort of a prediction about how your day is going to go, what's your readiness and you know that score turns out to be a really powerful score because within one second you're like hey maybe I should push it today or maybe I should take it easy.

Readiness is about nighttime recovery. If you look at the components of your readiness score and I'll pull it up just so that...