How Building Muscle Can Add Years to Your Life & Ozempic's Long-Term Effects w/ Krystal Zell | EP #110
18 Jul 2024 · 47 min
Krystal Zell, CEO of Tonal, discusses how strength training extends lifespan and why muscle loss from drugs like Ozempic is becoming a major health concern. Tonal's AI coach guides at-home workouts with real-time data tracking, and the company is betting that personalized digital fitness will outpace human trainers.
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What do you think the number one reason that people don't work out is?
That's a great question. People who are going on a weight loss journey, think about cardio because that's kind of the dominant narrative in America is get on a bike, you know, go to a cardio class and that's how you lose weight.
Go for a run, sleep, diet, exercise, mindset, the right, you know, supplements and meds. If you have to do one thing, it's muscle mass, its strength.
The bottom third of the population from a muscular perspective has a 50% increased mortality rate.
The number one thing to do in terms of reducing all cause mortality is building muscle. Welcome to Moonshots. Today we're going to talk about one of the most important aspects of longevity and that's building muscle mass, it's building strength. If you could have a single thing to do that extends your health span, not just your lifespan, it is building musc. My guest today is Crystal Zell. She's the CEO of Tonal, an AI powered at home training system. She previously was at Bain, at Starwood Hotels, at Simon Property Group and recently the Home Depot. And she's running a company that is making your ability to get in great shape to build muscle and strength really easy. If you believe that time is your problem or knowledge is your problem, or money is your problem, Life, listen up. This is an important episode. Her moonshot is really to make this accessible to everybody. All right, let's jump in and if you enjoy this podcast, please like this, please share it with your friends, share it with your aging mom and dad because the number one thing you could do if you're over the age of 60 is work out. It reduces all cause mortality by 50%, reduces cancer, reduces falls. It is your number one longevity supplement and therapeutic. All right, let's jump into the episode. Welcome to Moonshots. I'm here with Crystal Zell, the CEO of Tonal, a company I have admired. And in full disclosure, I've got my tonal ordered for installation shortly. Crystal, good to see you. Welcome to Moonshots.
Nice to see you. Thanks Peter. Thanks for having me.
I see the tonal in the background over your left shoulder. If I've got the directions correct, I want to start with an assumption. What do you think the number one reason that people don't work out is?
Well, that's a great question. I think it's a combination of things. I think part of it is as the habit formation. I think what we know is people who work out consistently, they form a habit and then it just becomes built into their lives. And when you talk to them, they can't imagine not working out. But formation of a habit is so hard. You have to have the intent to have the habit, then you have to have the time, and then you have to have the solution and the plan of what you're going to do. And I think for a lot of people, they could have a time problem. And we can always create time. But sometimes there are periods of life where time is really challenging. Then for others, it's the what do I do? An example is I was talking with a fellow mom the other day of a friend of my son's mom who we were talking about the importance of strength training as you get older. And she says, I know I am supposed to do it, but I don't even know how to start. I don't know what I'm supposed to do do. Which was a great way of having the conversation to begin the process of what should you do. So I think, I think it's a lot of things, but I definitely think time and know how are two critical ones.
I think you're right. There are three in my mind. I think the number one reason people don't work out is they say, I don't have time, I'm busy, I'm up and running at the moment. I get up and, God, I can't get to the gym and do this. I think the second reason a lot of people don't work out is they don't realize how critical it is in their lives. And I think I've heard you say this, I've said this on stage. If you had to do only one thing. So it's sleep, diet, exercise, mindset, the right supplements and meds. If you had to do one thing, it's muscle mass, it's strength, especially if you're over 60. So I'm 63 next month, and it is the number one thing I'm focused on doing over everything else. So number one, people think don't have time. Number two, they don't know how important it is in their life. And the number three is probably, like you said, knowing how or what's the right way to work out or how should. What should I be doing in a workout? And if you're listening and that's you, if you're just like, I'm going to sleep when I'm dead, I'm going to work out when I'm dead. If that's your mindset or you just haven't clicked in with how important it is, because for me, Crystal, this was not always me. I was in reasonably good shape. But I never had a focus on physical strength training, on weightlifting, on those practices, because I didn't realize how important it is until I really went on this longevity journey and longevity moonshot for myself over the last 10 years. I was like, oh my God, I have a lot of catching up to do. And the numbers, we'll talk about the science there in a little bit are extraordinary. And then what to do, right? You can hire a coach, a workout coach, which I do. I belong to three gyms and I have two workout coaches. I have zero excuses other than, oh, shit, I woke up too late. I've got 20 minutes or 30 minutes and I'm gonna do some push ups, I'm gonna do some pull ups and stuff like that in the bedroom. But total solves a lot of that, doesn't it?
That's right, yeah.
And let's dive into. I want to dive first into the science. I want you to, to understand if you have not committed to your workout, right? And we've had lots of different podcasts on sleep, on diet, on meds and supplements and so forth, but let's get people hot and bothered about the need to work out. So share. What's your number one convincing data here?
Well, I think the first one I would share is that as we age, starting at 45 or so, we lose 1 to 2% of our muscle mass a year. I mean, we really start to lose muscle. And then if you start with that starting point, what you see in the data is that those individuals with stronger starting points from a strength perspective, they do better from a mortality perspective. So I think for me, there's a very staggering statistic which is that the bottom third of the population, from muscular perspective, when you test muscle strength, has a 50% increased mortality rate. When you think about longevity, it's incredible. Then the other thing, there's a ton of science around how strength as you age prevents falls. Falls are incredibly detrimental. As all of us know who've had parents or grandparents go through these experiences. There's nothing like a fall to really ruin your quality of life as well as potentially your lifespan. And I think even just getting injured, we know this as we go through our lives. One little knee injury, one little elbow injury, it can be minor, can have a massive impact on your life. And so the best way of preventing any of those things from happening is to have strength and have a strong focus on balance as you go through, as you go through your life. So there's just the statistics are so clear, the data and the science is so clear about how absolutely crucial strength is for aging.
Yeah, let me echo that. There is a direct correlation between the amount of muscle mass you carry on your body and your longevity. And that comes from a multiple areas. Like you said, if you fall and break a hip or pelvis over the age of I think 65, your one year survival rate is relatively low, which is crazy because you end up in the hospital with a pneumonia. And that's how my dad passed. Right. He was in his 80s, but it was a fall, broke his pelvis and ended up in the hospital. And it was a downward spiral. I know so many folks who've done that. And muscle mass and strength allows you to catch yourself and prevent that. And also, by the way, the stress that weightlifting strength building puts on your bones helps maintain your stronger bones. The other thing is, and the data is very clear that if you're over the age of 60, the number one thing to do in terms of reducing all cause mortality is building muscle. And it doesn't take that much each week. It's an hour twice a week or half an hour twice a week. Let's talk about the simplicity of tonal. And I want to get into how does the system work, how is it installed, how do you use it? I want to paint a picture for folks around this. But what I love is the ability to get rid of excuses when you only have a small amount of time.
Please. Yeah, that's right. So absolutely. And then the only thing I wanted to add one last comment to before sort of transitioning to how tonal solves that is as a female sort of, sort of in this space which is very mostly men, I think really very much focused strongly in the fitness and the strength space. And I want to use that as a platform. The fact that I am a female for the women out there, because for men I think it's even a bit more part of our culture around driving to doing strength training. And for women it isn't. And it's almost more important for women because as we go through like from a menopause perspective and the shifting in your body that you have to do the strength work because you're not naturally getting it any other way and you're losing muscle even more so. So I say this because I just think it's important that I use this platform to help also educate women about the importance of strength training. Because we do see it, it's a harder adoption cycle for women to decide to do it. So. And that's why tonal is great, because from a practicality perspective, there's a bunch of benefits about it. So I'll just kind of describe the product. The product itself is a digital weight system. So it essentially replicates a gym of weights and free weights. And it puts it in a very small space, seven by seven, because it goes on your wall, and on your wall you basically see. If you can see behind me, the device, you see a screen. Behind the screen is basically sort of some motors and cables and computers. And what the device does is it allows you to have a very personalized and tailored weight training experience. So it will respond to your body, will understand what you're able to do, it will set weight appropriate for you. Then on top of that, you pair great content. So you'll choose a program, a class, and you'll have an instructor come on the device and walk you through everything you're supposed to do. And then the weight will automatically adjust for you. And so it's just completely personalized and tailored to you in your home. It's definitely a home device. Um, you won't find it in a gym. This is a home device. Uh, and the intent of it is to be super convenient. So you can go from rolling out of bed to getting your strength routine in very quickly. You don't have to worry about going to a gym. You don't have sort of that. So take back to the kind of concept of time is my problem. Takes away the time issue. You can do. Honestly, 10 minutes goes a long way. I mean, you can do a lot in 10 minutes. You could do a full lower body set of squats and lunges in five minutes or in 10 minutes. And it has a huge impact. So you can do that 10 minutes at the beginning of the day, 10 minutes at the end of the day, which is not a whole lot out of your life. And you can get your strength training in. So it's incredibly convenient, super personalized to, you know, and also to your whole household. So you can have. My husband has an account. He does a totally different set of things than what I do and how I focus. And so it serves the entire household. Super convenient, super personalized. And that's really the power of digital weight.
Yeah, no, I love that. How long does it take to install and how is it installed? You order a tonal and what happens?
And so we do. The first thing you have to do is a little bit of a survey. So we know what kind of wall we're going to install on. We can pretty much install on any wall. There's a few exceptions, but pretty much any wall. So we have to understand, like your home and make sure you have the right space for pretty much everything. It's pretty straightforward and easy in that regard. Then within two weeks, you're going to have an appointment to have your tonal installed and you'll have professionals show up. They'll fully install it. So the customer doesn't have to do any installation. It goes on the wall and it's a large device, but it's really not that different than a TV mount. So there's sort of a bracket that goes on behind it. The the device gets installed, you hook it up to the WI fi and then from there you set up your account and then you get started. And that's really all there is to it.
Everybody, I want to take a short break from our episode to talk about a company that's very important to me and could actually save your life or the life of someone that you love. Company is called Fountain Life, and it's a company I started years ago with Tony Robbins and a group of very talented physicians. You know, most of us don't actually know what's going on inside our body. We're all optimists until that day when you have a pain in your side. You go to the physician in the emergency room and they say, listen, I'm sorry to tell you this, but you have this stage three or four going on and you know, it didn't start that morning. It probably was a problem that's been going on for some time. But because we never look, we don't find out. So what we built at Fountain Life was the world's most advanced diagnostic centers. We have four across the US today, and we're building 20 around the world. These centers give you a full body mri, a brain, a brain vasculature, an AI enabled coronary CT looking for soft plaque DEXA scan, a grail blood cancer test, a full executive blood workup. It's the most advanced workup you'll ever receive. 150 gigabytes of data that then go to our AIs and our physicians to find any disease at the very beginning when it's solvable. You're going to find out eventually. Might as well find out when you can take action. Fountain Life also has an entire side of therapeutics. We look around the world for the most advanced therapeutics that can add 10, 20 healthy years to your life. And we provide them to you at our centers. So if this is of interest to you, please go and check it out. Go to fountainlife.com Peter when Tony and I wrote our New York Times bestseller LifeForce, we had 30,000 people reached out to us for Fountain Life memberships. If you go to fountainlife.com Peter will put you to the top of the list. Really, it's something that is for me, one of the most important, important things I offer my Entire family, the CEOs of my companies, my friends. It's a chance to really add decades onto our healthy lifespans. Go to fountainlife.com Peter it's one of the most important things I can offer to you as one of my listeners. All right, let's go back to our episode. One of the things that has been a recent increase for you is incorporating AI into the system and really becoming a data driven workout system. I think about the notion that when I join a gym and I'm a member of, like I said, three gyms and two coaches, and the coach is the part that is the expert, that helps me and motivates me. But you do that with video and with AI in the system. Can you speak to that and how much data have you collected over people and how are you using that data? Because data is the oil of AI systems.
Yeah. And we have incredible amount of oil, so to speak. So I'll start with the data collection. So from a privacy perspective, I want to reassure the audience we don't do anything with the data other than make the experience better for you. There's no selling, sharing anything like that around the data. The data is just to create better workouts and to provide personalization. So we collect data on everything that the user does. So the weights that were set, if they were adjusted, how many reps you did, how many sets you did. And then as you get stronger and we add weight, we see all of it. So we also note any time that's taken as rest time. So every piece of data about the experience around the individual is tracked. We have over 150,000 members who've completed millions and millions of workouts. We've, we've tracked billions and billions of pounds lifted. And so we're able to take all of that data. And then we also. The benefit too is we longitudinally see what happens to everybody. So one great status, a new member in their first year, their strength score. So the strength score is this kind of calculation. It's a bit of an algorithm that kind of assesses your strength. And the great thing about it Is you can watch it grow and you can watch it improve as you get stronger and stronger. And our average member, their strength score, goes up 80% in the first year of using tonal. It's just incredible. They grow and actually a lot of the growth happens in the first several months, which is fantastic to see. We also see that they're using. There's a lot of usage. So we track all of our usage data and we see the cohorts and the patterns. We see the spikes in January, we see a little bit of the dips in March, we see people start to get ready for summer bikini weather. You see sort of all of it. The great news is we have this amazing foundation of data, and then we're leveraging the data in two ways. The first way I talked about that already was the original use of AI in the device was to create the weight pattern needed for the member at their point in time. We're setting the weights that they need. Then what we're working on now, which is really exciting, and it's in beta mode, so we have certain number of subscribers who have access to it. We'll be rolling this out as we go along this year, but it's truly getting to taking the language models that everybody's so excited about right now, working them with our data so that the member can get direct advice. It's easy to process, and it also gives the member a way to tell us what's going on with their lives. So you could say something like, for me, for example, right now, I've had it as a goal for myself that I've never learned to play tennis. When I was a kid, I have two kids that love tennis. I have a husband who loves tennis. So I was like, I need to learn to play tennis. I have to do this. I have to get decent enough at tennis that when the kids are grown, we can all go out on the tennis court and have a fun little family tennis match. So you could say to Tony, which is what we're calling our AI, you could say, tony, I'm training for tennis. I'd like the best set of programs for me to get better at tennis. And then literally, the AI will sort of feed back to the customer based upon all the data that we have, and there'll be a logic process to it. So it's like understanding, okay, if you're going to be good at tennis, you need to be good at serving. Shoulder work would probably be really useful because as I've learned, a lot of serving is in the shoulders. And the legs. And so we would say, okay, here's, you know, the exercises that you should do for this purpose. And it's, it's, it's a, it's super cool. We're really, really, really excited about it because. Tony, talk to you to understand. Yeah, Tony. I mean it's, yeah, it's a full conversational. Yeah, conversational. So it's, we're. But we've never before getting. I mean, I've been doing consumer work my whole career and the holy grail is understanding the customer. Like every good consumer executive wants to understand what their customer needs and deliver it to them. And it's always been so hard to understand what a customer really wants and what do they need. So this is so exciting because we can have a conversation and we can say, what do you want to accomplish? Like what's important to you? And then we can go back into our data sets and we can help, you know, help give that member guidance and advice. And of course it's going to get better and better over time. So we're truly getting to like incredibly personalized recommendations.
I want to, you know, again, there's a lot of entrepreneurs listening here who are working on their massive transformative purpose, their moonshots, they're starting their companies. I am curious about the origin story for Tonal. You've been the CEO now for how long? Last year or two.
Yeah, that's right. Yep.
Yeah. And so what is the origin story? And just give us a little bit of background on how this device, what it looked like in the beginning and how far has it come in terms of iterating your market, you know, product market fit.
Yeah. So Ali Araidi is our founder and I'll do my best to channel him. He does such a better job than I do talking about his story because this is really his story. And Ali's story is that he's an engineer and incredibly talented, both hardware and software engineer with a, a lot of phenomenal experience. And earlier in his career he worked and worked and worked and worked and worked and worked and worked and worked and worked and his health fell by the wayside. So he got to be overweight. His, you know, he went in for physical. The lab results were not good. He started to think, I have got to do something about this. I've got to get healthier. He quit his job and decided to go on a health journey. He did a ton of research and he realized how important strength is. Not only we've been talking about strength from a long term and a Longevity perspective. And I think a lot of the research he was doing at the time also painted the picture that strength is incredibly important for weight loss. People who are going on a weight loss journey think about cardio, because that's kind of the dominant, you know, narrative in America is get on a bike, you know, go to a cardio class, and that's how you lose weight, go for a run. And certainly there's so many benefits to cardio, not to disparage that at all, but there's incredible benefits to strength training as it relates to weight loss. You know, the more obviously, the more muscle mass you have, the more calories you're going to burn, et cetera, et cetera.
Amazing. Yeah. And very, very true. I mean, it's literally when you see weightlifters who have built a significant muscle mass, they're pulling in multiple Thousands of calories, 5, 6, 7,000 calories, because they're burning so much in their muscles.
That's right. So he said, okay, I'm going to focus on strength. So he was in the gym every day, and he sort of looked around and he's like, I'm an engineer. Everything in my world is digital now. Everything I do is digital, right? We've digitized everything, and everything has an intelligence kind of layer built behind it. And here he is, like, in a gym, and he's like, okay, so my options are to hire a personal trainer, kind of do what they say, kind of do some research online. But then there's all these gaps in the experience. So the muscles I train, I have no record of the reps I do. I can't see cause and effect because it's only going to be as good as, like, how my bookkeeping is. And do I go then take all the reps and I put it in Excel, and then I try to see, you know, did I see growth? I mean, like. And it's so funny because it reminds me of when I was. I remember being in my 20s, I was before I got married and had kids, was in the gym all the time, every day. And I remember keeping an Excel spreadsheet of all the. All the. All the things I did in the gym. Every weight or every move, the number of the amount of weight, the reps, the whole thing. Because I was trying to see correlations in outcomes with the work that I was doing. And so here we were, even many years after that experience, and he's like, there's no. Why is there no better way? Right? Like, why is. Why is there no no better way? And he said, I'm going to create a better way. And so he got to work on this notion of digital weight, which is I'm going to create the sensation of weight. I'm going to create this experience of weight. And then because it's done digitally, every element of the experience will be tracked. We'll have better understanding knowledge of how cause drives effect truly when it comes to weight training, and then can build a platform for personalizing anybody's weight loss experience, their muscle building experience, their aging experience, all of these different kind of experiences, which can be completely changed really by having this platform.
As humans, especially if you're an entrepreneur, there's a competitive element in your life. You set objectives and you try and hit them. And being able to measure your progress is really important. I mean, so I have a in body scale that I use that measures my lean body mass and my muscle and my total weight. And I'm like, that's. Last year I set a goal of adding 10 pounds of muscle, which wasn't easy. But I remember the reason how I met Tonal was I was speaking at an event and I mentioned this and your chairman was in the room and he said, you should do it with Tonal. I said, okay. I did it by increasing my protein intake to a gram per pound, adding creatine, and going from a couple workouts a week to literally obsessing on trying to get five workouts per week. Really, in that regard, it consumed a lot of time. And now the challenge for me is maintaining muscle mass. Right, because as you said, I mean, the term is sarcopenia. And it's the loss of muscle and the ability and the difficulty of adding muscle as you grow older. And there are lots of different approaches to it, but the one approach is actually doing the work. And so I'm excited about getting my Tonal installed for the specific reason of getting to from, you know, from four days a week to five or six days a week so that I can always squeeze in those, you know, probably not 10 minute sessions, but probably 20 minute sessions, 30 minutes.
Yeah, yeah, that's right. I mean, that's. We see. So an average member session is 35 minutes. And that's because we have members doing a full session, 45 minutes to an hour or a lot. And we have, we have every variety as you can imagine from a time perspective. And then you see, you know, people squeezing in 20 minute sessions in between. And you know, we're still, a lot of us are still in these remote worlds where we're, you Know, maybe a couple days a week at home, and you can squeeze it in in between a couple of meetings and get it done, which is. Is really an incredible. An incredible value.
Yeah, yeah. I remember reading a science fiction story years ago where it was. I forget the name of it. It was basically individuals that were put into these mech suits, like an Ironman suit. And the mech suit could be programmed to become your workout buddy. So every time you moved, it was adding resistance in every direction that you were going. I was like, that sounds pretty cool if you want to be squeezing micro workouts throughout the day. And I do think this is probably the closest thing to it. I think there's going to be eventually an extension of tonal that will be your AI that's traveling with you, that incentivizes you to take the stairs instead of the elevator or tells you to break out onto a jog for the next 30 seconds to get your heart rate up or whatever it might be. And it's incorporating. We need incentivization. Some people are incentivized by intrinsic. Some of them are extrinsic, and some just like someone there to kick their butt.
So. Right. Yeah, that's right. We have, you know, badges and all the kinds of things that people that help people as they go on that journey. Because sometimes you just. You just want that, like, immediate reward, that feedback. So. That's right.
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Yeah, that's right. So it is an initial purchase and a subscription. So I would think about it as the initial purchase is all the hardware that's 39.95 plus some accessories which includes a bench and some different handles. And then the subscription which is 59.95amonth, really gets the content, the trainers, the AI, that whole experience. And so we think of it as you're sort of buying the equipment like you would home gym equipment and then you're paying for all that great training. And so we really try to think of the training as being in replacement of personal training. You know, obviously it's not a person in your home, you know, yelling at you to go, go further, go, you know, one more rep. It's not that experience but we have great coaches and they're super personable and the way the device is, it's different than certain other kind of connected fitness where because it's strength training, the way you do the class is you, you do take your, you kind of move at your own pace and you can kind of do that with the class, if that makes sense. So it has a lot of flexibility to it. But yeah, so that's the, that's the cost. Now we do offer a firm financing and so you can get it to a monthly rate that's significantly less than a normal gym membership and you know, a monthly rate that is less, much less than a single personal training session. So we kind of like look at it that from a value perspective to the member we, you know, from you, you can get it to a price that's, that's well within the realm of what a typical gym or trainer would be.
And people forget, I mean, you know, a good personal trainer is, is going to run you, you know, three digits per session. You know, it's going to be 100 bucks or more and that's on top of your gym membership. And, and this is you Know, I like to say everybody on the planet is got one thing in common. We all have 24 hours in a day, seven days a week, you know, 365 in a year. And it's how you use your time that makes you the most efficient. And so it's always time optimization. So do you want to trade the drive time to the gym and you want to, you know, trade the convenience here? So, I mean, for me, that's why it's a. It's a great and exciting solution. And it's the other thing I really like about it compared to some other options I've seen, is you can literally go from writing an email to hopping on it and being working out in what, a minute, two minutes? Turn it on.
Thirty seconds. Yeah, yeah. It's really easy. Yeah.
Very little setup.
Yeah, yeah. Very, very little set up. You move the arms down and that's pretty much it. Turn it on.
Let's talk about where this industry goes next. You've got an incredible background at Bain and at Starwood, at Home Depot. What is your vision? Where do you think this industry? What's the moonshot here for five or ten years from now?
Yeah, I think big picture. So there's one thing I love about this industry, which is that it is very friendly and collaborative. So, you know, we're all together building a completely new industry and a new industry segment, I think specifically in Connected Fitness, but I would say also fitness in general. What's incredible is, despite being big, we're still so much smaller, obviously, than pharmaceuticals, than all the things that deal with the problems that being out of shape creates. There's this really incredible feeling among leaders in this industry that we are trying to make the world better by helping make people healthier. And there's a true mission in it. And so each of us has our own approach to how we do that. And the consumer needs to figure out what works best for them. But there's different approaches in nutrition, wellness, fitness. But what I love about this industry is that there's just like, we are here to make the world better by making people healthier. And what a great mission. What I love about that is just separately, it helps us recruit great employees. And we have wonderful, wonderfully talented people that work at tonal, wonderfully talented people that work in the fitness industry because they're drawn to the mission and the purpose of making the world better by making people healthier. I do think that it's a really young and immature industry. Um, and so the. There's going to be a lot of evolution and change. There's going to be a ton of incremental innovation. They're still figuring out what works best for consumers. There's the, I think processing the post Covid period. You know, Covid in lots of cases fundamentally changed people's behaviors and I think around health and fitness fundamentally changed people's behaviors. People are more focused on their health than they were before. They really are. And yet people's norms are still landing around work and home. There's this sort of. People have been focused on experiences for the last couple years as a reaction to Covid and travel and things like that. I think over the next couple years what happens is consumer preferences begin to settle into a new, into a new normal. I think long term there's tremendous, massive growth in this industry for, and it'll benefit everybody, not just, you know, individual companies. But I do think that there's a strong trend line around flexibility, around how you work out and achieving your goals. So, you know, being able. And I think a lot of people like putting a lot of things together. A boutique fitness class at home solution, a hike, right. Like there's, there's no one size fits all. People want to put a lot of things together. We play a specific role in enabling that convenience in the home. But I think that, I think the industry is going to evolve. I think it's going to grow. I think consumer preferences are going to sort of evolve. But I also think the other thing I would say is the role of intelligence is going to grow because, you know, I think people have not. We talked about this at the beginning of the conversation, like, what do I do? I want to be stronger. I don't know where to start. I don't know how to do it. Or maybe I'm advanced in my learning, but I'm hitting a plateau and I don't know how to push through the plateau or I just, I can't figure out how to lose this last five pounds or whatever it is that the intelligence that AI is going to provide for consumers is going to be massive. I think in terms of.
Tony's going to help out. Tony's going to help out.
That's right.
Yeah.
You know, it's interesting hours, right? Like lots of, lots of AI that people are working on. Yeah, yeah.
No, it's. There's an old adage that said like if you could put exercise into a pill, it would be, you know, the largest single trillion dollar pharmaceutical ever. Exercise is really the process of telling your body, I still care, I still Alive. I'm not ready to roll over and die yet. The stimulations that it has throughout every molecular process, it is the number one thing you can do, period. And I can't stress that enough. I think about my three top priorities are exercise, sleep and minimizing sugar. And out of those, the top one is exercise. You know, I think about, you know, I do a lot of work in the AI space. I have a venture fund there, I start companies, I support entrepreneurs. And, you know, we're going to have human level AI and then digital superintelligence that will follow thereafter. And you're going to have an AI, which is your physician. Right. It's an AI that is you. You say to it, listen, I'm interested in maximizing my muscle, minimizing my weight, whatever, whatever it is, I need more energy. I want to live longer. And that AI is going to then guide you and try and incent you throughout the day. If you turn on, you know, bug me mode, take the stairs, don't eat that, you know, drink more water, and being able to have a tonal system that is like you've got 15 minutes free in your calendar right now you're doing legs, go and jump on the tonal, go see Tony. But I do think that is where we're heading towards and excited to have that kind of capability in hand, for sure.
I, I think that's right. I also think, you know, we didn't talk about the GLP1s and all the data, like just looking forward to the industry. All the Data on the GLP1s is that, you know, people lose muscle mass when they go through that. And, and, and there's going to be even stronger awareness, I think, generated as a result of that, that you've, you've got to work on building muscle mass and protecting the muscle mass you have. And so I also think that's going to be a huge, huge trend for the industry.
Yeah, 100%. And let me just use that. If you're on Ozempic or any of the GLP1s, please. It's a miracle drug in some ways. But the downside is loss of muscle. And again, I've said this, my number one objective is maintaining and building muscle mass. And you don't get it by hoping, you don't get it by just thinking about it. You actually have to do the work. So if that is, you figure out what your plan is and it's either getting to the gym on a regular basis, installing a tonal in your home or office, wherever it might be it's changing your diet, it's changing your supplements, but it's mostly committing to yourself that this is important for you. And if longevity is your objective, especially if you're in step two of your life in your 50s or 60s or 70s, and I say step two out of maybe 10, I'm hoping for long. How long do you want to live, by the way, Crystal, do you have a longevity objective?
Yeah, you know, that's a great question. I would say like 95, but I'd really like to have a really, like, strong set of healthy years after 65. Like, I saw that headline in the New York Times, not that I read the article maybe a couple weeks ago, and it said the average American gets one healthy year after their 65th birthday.
Yeah, you know, it really is health span, not necessarily lifespan. You know, we just, I just announced $101 million incentive competition called the Healthspan XPRIZE. And it is teams around the world focusing on reversing the ravages of aging in cognition, immune and muscle. And so it's really, how do you roll back sarcopenia by at least 10 years or 20 years? And honestly, the best way is go in with great habits and with a good amount of muscle in place and maintain that. There's a concept. That's a great question. I used to have a ridiculous number people on this podcast probably heard me say it a few times. But when I was in medical school years ago, I remember learning that bowhead whales could live 200 years and Greenland sharks could live 500 years and they could have babies at a 200 year age. Imagine having more kids at 200. I said, if they can live that long, why can't we? Why can't I say it's either a hardware problem or a software problem and this is the decade we're going to understand that. But there's a concept called longevity escape velocity. Have you heard about that concept? I have, yeah. So right now, for every year that you're alive today, science is extending your life by about a third of a year. Right. There are new breakthroughs in early cancer detection or in new meds or supplements and so forth. But we're in the steepest part of the acceleration on medical breakthroughs coming from AI in particular, gene therapies and so forth, cellular medicines. And there's going to be a point in time where for every year that you're alive, science is extending your life for more than a year. And all of a sudden, that's longevity escape velocity. And so I changed my answer from some ridiculous hundreds of years because if you can live that long, you can live forever. I said my goal is to reach longevity escape velocity. So when is that likely to happen? Ray Kurzweil's prediction is 2030. Right? That's six years out. Your job is to stay healthy and not die from something stupid in the interim. George Church, David Sinclair and a few others put it at 2035 to 2040. But again, that's still just 15, 16 years out. That should be, if you care about it, if you're excited about life, that you should be able to motivate yourself to get there and intercept these breakthroughs. You don't want to be the last person dying, so to speak. Just to wrap up here, tonal is your answer. If time is short, even if you want to do it the most cost efficient in terms of gym memberships and training. And the other thing that I love is you're unlikely to have your trainer or your gym continue to improve on an exponential growth curve. But Tony is going to continue to improve on an exponential growth curve. So join the club there. Where do folks go to learn more about Tonal?
Tonal.com Tonal.com and if you have any questions, we are happy to answer them. Um, so, yeah, yeah, but it's also great. I mean, you know, it's convenient and it's a good value, but the product is, it's just better than working out in a gym too. That's the other thing is once you start using it and you feel the difference in the weight, the smoothness of the weight, the like it, it's just, it's just a better workout. It's hard to describe, but it really is. So I think a lot of your, your listeners may find that, and maybe some of them already have a tonal and they'll, they'll comment on that, but.
Love that and I can't wait to get mine installed. Crystal Zell, thank you so much for joining us on Moonshots. A pleasure.
Thank you. Peter, it was such a pleasure. Thank you for having me.
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