265. Jim Donnelly, Co-Founder & CEO of Humanaut Health — Fitt Insider

We are in the real medicine business. Like, we are in the real healthcare business, and that is our number one priority. Our number one priority is to create great efficacy and great medical results.

Welcome back to the Fit Insider Podcast. I'm your host, Joe Veneri. Today I'm joined by Jim Donnelly, co-founder and CEO of Humanaut Health. In this episode, we talk about building a network of tech-enabled health optimization clinics. Jim shares how his experience scaling wellness companies led him to create a comprehensive preventative healthcare solution. Plus, we discussed democratizing longevity medicine. Expanding nationwide and changing how people approach their health. Let's get into it. Today's episode is brought to you by Egym. Egym provides fitness and health facilities with smart workout solutions built on its ecosystem of hardware, software, and partners. But it's more than cool tech. Their connected training experience delivers business results while helping members reach their wellness goals. If you run a gym, health club, YMCA, or any kind of fitness facility, you should check them out. Visit egym.com to learn more. Hi Jim, welcome back to Fit Insider. Thanks for joining us again.

Hey Joe, it's a pleasure to be here and, and, um, I'm excited to, to be one of the few two-timers. It's great. Thank you.

Some folks have been on a couple times and you're, I think, the first that's, um, back with two different companies. First time around was Restore Hyper Wellness. This time Humanaut Health. And I think that's, that's probably a good starting point. Like, what are you working on now? How did that kind of transition take place?

Yeah.

Bring us up to date.

Yeah. So, um, Humanaut Health is my newest company. Think of Humanaut Health as a place for health optimization. You know, we take a fully integrated holistic approach to your health. Um, we focus on all the foundational things, movement, sleep, nutrition, stress, cognitive health. We do that through a whole series of diagnostics, 100 blood panels, epigenetic genetic testing, DEXA scan, full body MRI, and 50 other diagnostics. So in other words, we leave no stone unturned. We take that data, create personalized protocols, and they're built around all those foundational aspects of health. And then once we get you on a good glide pattern, we can then work on specific things, whether that be metabolic health or menopause or sexual health or joint pain. And we sprinkle in all the cool stuff, hormones, peptides, stem cells, exogenous molecules. And, um, you know, we think we're the solution that does, does it all. We think we're the solution that's your, your true copilot that helps you with behavior change and everything else to get good results.

Yeah, you're certainly kind of nailing this. You, you said health optimization, uh, longevity clinic, biohacking, so many of the different words, you know, trends. How did you kind of land on this approach and kind of package versus, you know, some of those other options, whether it's wellness clinic studio or med spa, or even some of the things that you had been doing at Restore?

Yeah. So first of all, I say it's a 20-year journey. I could not have started with Humanaut. Humanaut is a culmination of multiple experiences and companies. So, you know, I've, I've owned high-end health clubs for 20 years now on the East Coast, the Charlotte Athletic Club and some others. I've done med spas and what we called men's grooming lounges, which, you know, had a, a sort of med spa component to it. And then obviously Restore for 8 and a half years. And so, a couple of things happened. Number one, my life kind of took me to different stages. Life events happened. And then my entrepreneurial sort of kind of philosophy and construct kind of took me to the next things. And so Restore was the last time we talked, you know, I, I did Restore for 8 and a half years. Um, and I'm not that kind of entrepreneur, to be honest. I'm the entrepreneur that likes to create something. Build something, build a great culture, bring on an amazing team, grow it to a certain point. But I, you know, I've always talked about a 5-year fuse. I think that that's when I'm the best. I also think that an organization needs a different voice. You become wallpaper to a certain extent. And so I've learned that there are things that I do really well and things that other people enjoy more and are better at. So Humanaut was partly a function of that. I was ready to leave Restore. And then also I wanted to take things to the next level. Restore was a lovely experience. I'm super proud of it. I tell people all the time, we're one of the few medical concepts that truly scaled to be a nationwide thing and a leader in the space. But, you know, Restore is the sort of first tier. It's the foundational tier. And it takes you so far, but it doesn't take you all the way. I think everyone should do heat and cold and contrast and hyperbaric. Those are all lovely things. But there were two things about the Restore business that sort of spurred me to do Humana. One is I hated the fact that our best customers left us so often. They would come in and they'd do all the stuff, and then eventually they'd set up their house. They'd have a cold plunge and a sauna and a red light. And so shoot, where's Joe? Like he used to come in every day. And so I hated that. And then I also hated the fact that people got confused. I think Restore is fantastic for giving you tailwinds to do the things, but it's not the things, you know, it's, I think sometimes people confuse doing a cold plunge with I've done everything I need to do today. It's like, no, no, no, no, that's the thing to get you going. That's the thing that gives you some energy. Reduces some inflammation and pain, but now you got to go do the work. And so I think in the ecosystem of health and wellness, Restore has a very important part. It's lovely. But Humanaut brings it all together. And so when I started to build this concept of Humanaut, people actually told me, Jim, you're trying to do too much. And I said, okay, riddle me what you would pull out. Would you pull out nutrition? Would you pull out movement? Would you pull out sleep? Okay, would you pull out sexual health, menopause? Would you pull out hormones, stem cells? I mean, tell me the pieces that you wouldn't do, because what I'm trying to do is take this to the next level. I'm trying to do something that hasn't been done at scale. I'm trying to make it more democratized so that it's not just the purvey of rich people. I'm, I'm trying to make it more understandable. And most importantly, I'm trying to make it so that the entire piece or the entire puzzle can be navigated by a person without having to go 10 different places.

You know, you're hitting on a lot of aspects of holistic health, of health optimization as you called it. And it's in some ways this natural evolution from, okay, we have a health club, now we have a spa, now we have a boutique studio, now we have a med spa and all these things that became fractured. And some places are trying to now put them all under one roof.

Yeah.

You know, like a gym, health club, bringing in aspects of the clinic. And now at this other end, I think what Humanaut is doing is how do we be this, you know, kind of top flight, everything end-to-end health-focused membership and experience? You mentioned, you know, with Restore, some aspect of maybe it didn't have all the pieces or it was limited in some aspects. One of the questions I had coming into this was, you know, how do you make that decision to say this is that standalone concept that does this thing and is positioned around just health optimization versus, hey, how can we pack this into an existing offering? Why not start, start offering some of these things under the Restore banner or maybe another separate operator thinking like Oh, we want to do nutrition, longevity, recovery. Is it a standalone brand? Is it within this kind of offering that we offer already? How do you kind of parse that out?

It would've been very hard to, for instance, put this into Restore. Um, Restore had a certain set of things that it did. And number one, it's very difficult to change the entire direction of an organization. And this is not Restore. This is totally different. Anybody that's been in both immediately says, oh, I get it. This is totally different. This is like your PhD. If Restore is sort of the elementary school foundational entry point, um, this is the higher level stuff. And, and I, I think number one, that you have license to do certain things in a place and not other things. And so I think it would have been difficult to have license to do everything at Restore because this is very high level stuff. For instance, regenerative medicine is very complex, different kind of procedure rooms. It's like a real X-ray guided procedure. Like you're not putting that into a restore. And I don't think the restore customers think of us as a place that would do that. Number one. Number two, you just have physical constraints. The store is a certain size. Okay. Riddle me how you create 2,500 square feet, 3,000 extra square feet all of a sudden. With all the other things that are already there. So you would have fundamentally had to change very obvious things and it just would have been really hard. And then you have a franchise system, people signed up for a particular offering. It just would have been really hard. And I actually think some of these offerings, whether they're health clubs or, or other things that kind of after the fact, go back and add some of these things. I don't think they necessarily have that permission from the customer to go that you know, you don't think of your health club as the place that you take your most personal medical issues and deep medical issues. And yeah, there might be a doctor there, but really their core competency is something totally different. So I just find it hard to believe that when you're talking something as holistic and integrated and as a human art, that people want to go to some of the places that are trying to add some of these things. So, So the way I think of that is great, they're going to get a little taste of it at those places, and then they're going to look for the fully baked solution that they can go as deep as they need to. So, so, you know, maybe arrogantly, I think of all those things as a feeder to Humanot, that at some point you get a taste of, yeah, it's great to see my blood diagnostics. Yeah, it's great to have a DEXA scan. It's great to have a fitness plan, but I kind of need somebody to bring it all together plus some more stuff. And so where do you go? And I will say being able to start from scratch was a gift. And so you can kind of have a tapestry up on the wall that's filled in and that you got to overlay your stuff on top of it, or you can have a blank tapestry. And I told the team from the beginning, it is a gift that we get to start from scratch. We get to take 20 years of learning. We get to pull ideas from fitness clubs, and we get to pull ideas from, you know, Restore. We get to pull ideas from the med spa world, and we get to create this thing that is, you know, the first, what I would call, you know, fully integrated technology-enabled omnichannel virtual plus retail clinic offering and, and it's done with the end goal in mind from day one. I just think that's a gift and people underestimate the difficulty of integrating something into something that exists already.

Maybe even from the member experience. Now we talked about like basically how these pieces came together and what separates it. What does that look like? I walk in, this is how I'm Choosing my experience. This is what I can— you mentioned some of the things from DEXA to blood panels to fitness nutrition, but what are those offerings? How does it come together in the membership? And ultimately that, that omnichannel kind of experience that you described.

Yeah. So, so we go into it knowing that we need to look at a bunch of data on you. So every level of membership has a pretty significant number of diagnostics. Then we also know that after those diagnostics, there are going to be many things that we're going to need to do to truly improve your health. And create, you know, a very high level of efficacy. And so we embed that into every level of membership. And then we have a membership that is sort of the entry-level membership at, you know, essentially $200 a month, all the way up to a membership that's over $3,000 a month. And the difference is sort of the number of diagnostics, the number of interactions with the medical team, the level of the medical team, the number of services that are included, the, you know, I could go on and on, but there's just layers of, of number of services, number of diagnostics, number of interactions. Do you have coaching embedded or not? And there's a little matrix and then you kind of choose your flavor. And our goal actually is that for you to have a menu that you can go up and down on. There are times in your life where you need to go really deep and you have a really serious problem. You know, and I, I use women, for instance, and they're sort of 45 to 58 year old range when they're going through menopause. You want to go really deep and, and you gotta have like someone who's looking at you holistically and knows you. And now there are other times in your life where I got it under control, you know, like Yeah, I still want to do the diagnostics. I still want to know how I'm doing, but everything's pretty good. And so give me a little bit of optimization, help me improve a little bit. I'm good right now. And so we like the idea of being able to go up and down. And we also like the idea that I don't think of this as something that a person has a membership in a vacuum. So my whole family interacts with HumanEye. And so I like the fact that my wife and I have one level of membership and my kids who are healthy have a different level of membership. Number one, I want them to see their diagnostics and learn from a young age that this is important. The sooner you start, the better your results will be in the end, but they don't need the same level of care that I need. I'm 55 years old. Like, you know, I got problems with my A1C and my ApoB and my Lp(a) and all that. If I started talking about that with my kids, they were like, yeah, dad, um, we're good. But it's never too early. That's part of the lesson. And everybody has a different level of care that they need. And, you know, 2 and a half years ago, 3 years ago, when I got in a really bad traffic accident, I needed a ton of care. But, but right now I'm actually in a pretty good place. And so I kind of go up and down depending on, on how I'm doing in life.

Personalization and flexibility is, you know, I'm sure something that makes it appealing and people can fit it in, like you said, where they need it based on all sorts of other things, not only their, their health, but finances and, and what they're, what type of care they're getting elsewhere, which is another question that I had. How do you think about this integrating with whether it's traditional healthcare or primary care or doctors that and specialists that somebody might be seeing, do you also interact with them? Does this sit completely outside of that? Do you see those things kind of merging in any way?

Well, I think they, they need to work together in an ideal state. And so what we talk about is what I call the curation of health and wellness. So the things that we don't do in our four walls, we navigate for our customers. So you could think of the things that are downstream or upstream. An upstream example might be you get all of these diagnostics, and the very first layer of testing that we're doing is to rule out the, the four apocalyptic things, you know, cancer, neurodegenerative disease, cardiovascular disease, metabolic disease, you know, like, so we need to know about that first. If we find someone, and this is a topic that's near and dear to your heart, and unfortunately my dad just died of cancer, you know, like the key is finding out as fast as possible. And then getting someone to the right person. We clearly are not treating people for cancer at HumanEye, but our diagnostics tell you, and that is the key to cancer. The sooner you know, quick, quick, quick, and then getting to the right person. So we help you figure that out. We help you get to the right person and we help get you at the front of the line if we can. And so that's an important example on the sort of downstream. You might think of your primary care physician that if you get a strep throat, to be quite frank, we don't want you bringing your strep throat to Humanite. Now, ideally, because we're so preventative and proactive, the incidence of that goes down exponentially. I can't remember the last time I went to the doctor. And at our concierge level, if you have something like that, we'll of course navigate it for you here. But, but we don't want to be your primary care physician. We want to make your primary care physician something that is used Very, very, very rarely, but we have partnerships with primary care physicians. And by the way, we have partnerships with the primary care physicians that we appreciate, the ones that take the preventative proactive approach that don't think that what we're doing is completely out of line, you know, so getting alignment the whole way and, you know, and that curation goes to all other kinds of things. Like if someone wants to do cold therapy, great, go to Restore. Like I can vouch for it. It's awesome. Or let us help us get this at your house. We'll, we'll create your wellness room for you. So I hate the places that, that miss the fact that there's so much in this health and wellness world. People don't know where to turn. They don't know what to trust. And so we don't just say, sorry, go figure it out yourself. This curation component is really important to me.

Yeah, there's a huge need for that. And I think people, you know, they look for brands like Humanaut. Yes, all the services, the membership, everything that you're talking about, but just, hey, who do I trust? Like, what's legit and what's not? How do I do these things? You know, essentially, who do I take these questions to besides Dr. Google? And so when, when you're thinking about, you know, putting this entire kind of package together, And again, you mentioned like omnichannel. There's, there was and still is like this huge kind of rush around digital longevity clinic, or if not that, like, you know, maybe a, you know, you get a whole body scan or your lab testing and there's a digital wrapper on that that essentially helps you navigate this thing. Was there any type of decisions around like, hey, we could do this all digitally, we could do it entirely brick and mortar. We— this is what the perfect kind of, you know, hybrid experience looks like and the trade-offs that go along with that.

Yeah, we think the hybrid is definitely the way to go. I, I don't know how you deliver great healthcare without a physical clinic. There are times when you have to do things, you know, you cannot do stem cells virtually. You can't. Like, I don't know, riddle me how you— whenever— you can't. And there are times that That's what you need to do. And, you know, we're dealing with joint pain and issues like that all the time. And we need to be able to put our hands on you and actually do the procedure. So, and we think that we will do it better than sending you to someplace that we don't really control the experience. So I also think that there is still human connection that's important in this world. If you can't create a high level of engagement with someone, then I don't know how you have the trust you need to help them with something as sensitive and, and hard as their health. And so we want to see our clients in the clinic as much as we can. And we create lots of opportunities to do that. Having said that, people are busy. People travel. In our concierge level, these are folks that, you know, we have multiple major league baseball team owners. We have people that have crazy, crazy travel and schedules and they need for us to have a virtual component. We need to be able to interact with them when they can't come into the clinic. And also, you know, where you've opened our first clinic, it'll be a lot easier for me to say this when we've opened our 100th clinic, which we will do in the next 3 and a half years. And we've got those commitments, but we're not all over the country right now. So we have clients that are in multiple states. There are like, non-negotiable times when they have to come in the clinic for certain diagnostics and other things. But the vast majority of their time is actually a virtual experience. And because we go really deep with the data and the diagnostics, and we know them as an N of 1, there's a ton we can do virtually. But I do not think you can get the best results if that's all you do. I just fundamentally don't believe it. And I think quite Frankly, people, their best experiences with Humanaut are in the clinic. They, it's this collection of people. It's this collective experience. It's all the little nuances. It's like, yes, this feels solid. I trust these people. More importantly, I like these people. Here's something that I don't think healthcare has enough of. Playfulness, like fun, like riddle me how you're going to do that virtually. Like you, you just, sometimes it's just part of it.

I think the Fit Insider podcast is brought to you by our friends at Egym. This is an exciting partnership for us and not just because Egym makes some of the most innovative fitness products out there, but because the entire Egym team led by their CEO, Philip, is committed to making health, fitness, and wellbeing more accessible for everyone. And that's a mission we can get behind by combining their smart equipment with integrated software and hundreds of connected partner brands, Egym helps fitness facilities stand out by delivering a personalized, gamified workout experience that improves outcomes and member engagement. So if you're a gym or health club operator thinking about how to best serve your members while driving business results, go see what Egym is up to at egym.com. I guess to that point, in the kind of clinic experience, You know, there, there is also kind of like this lane we talked a lot about, like the evolution of the kind of wellness and fitness spaces. And now this kind of like clinic model. There's also like this club/wellness hangout type of like, where do you sit in that spectrum? You know, is it, hey, we want people to come in, we are building community, you hang out, you socialize? Or is it like you're coming in to see a doctor, get a service and you know, it's not intended to be maybe that type of social environment.

Yeah, I think there's a continuum and you can go too far, too little, and it's a balance. I do not think of Humanod as a social club. The clinics are beautiful. You can certainly spend time here. When people are doing diagnostics, they spend many hours in a day here. When they're getting procedures, multiple procedures, they certainly spend a lot of time here. So they enjoy being here, but I don't think of it as a club. I think that is a different muscle in a different area. We, we are in the real medicine business. Like, we are in the real healthcare business, and that is our number one priority. Our number one priority is to create great efficacy and great medical results, and that's where we lean. And now, community is important to us. Environment is important us, but it is not the, the thing. It's a, it's a part of it. And so I think we strike the right balance. By the way, I think community is going to be one of the most important aspects of human life, but I think of community in different ways. So I think of it on a micro level and a macro level. On the micro level, the way I think about community when it comes to someone's healthcare is who are the 3 or 4 most important people in your life. That's your microcommunity. And if you're trying to create real behavior change and real health improvements, those people have to be a positive influence. And so we're working on some tools that every Humanot member has the ability to activate their microcommunity around their health goals. And that's important. So, So then you talk about macro community. Well, the whole idea of Humanaut is it's a movement, it's an ethos, it's a type of mindset. And so on a macro level, we want there to be this aspirational set of Humanaut experiences and people out doing great things so that you can be inspired by what's possible. Seeing an 80-year-old man do some of the things that they're capable of when they've led the Humanaut lifestyle. That's inspiring. Finding ways to make different kinds of training interesting, you know, like zone 2 training. Yeah, it's great to say go do a bunch of it, but how do you make it interesting? Like you get inspiration and aspiration. And, um, if you lean too much into things like a social club and community without understanding what we're really here for, I think you can kind of lose your way a little bit. And I do think we strike a good balance. I can say definitively everyone who comes to the clinic says 2 things. This is beautiful and I love the people.

In doing it, do you think of it, and then planning franchise, you know, you mentioned 100 locations in the next 3 years. Is the intent like, hey, this is the kind of beta proof point, like proof of concept, or this is the testing ground, or no, we already have it fleshed out and like, this is just kind of ground zero as we ramp up. How do you think about, you know, 0 to 100? Is you obviously have the experience over a number of different brands and years, but it's no small task to do that and maintain the type of, you know, as you say, efficacy and delivering a healthcare experience.

Yeah, this is ground zero. So a couple of things. Number one, we have the experience in multiple other brands, and this is definitely not a Jim alone effort. If you looked at our executive team, It is chock full of folks that have been in the medtech space. They've, we've got 7 exits of companies that were valued at $250 million up to $2 billion. We've got multiple franchise experiences. We've got experience implementing medical clinics at retail in multiple states. We've obviously got the Restore experience. We built one of the world's best communities in I Go, You Go that won a Webby Award as the top travel community in the world. Like, I could go on and on. You have a certain set of things that you have to be good at in order to create ground zero and then propagate quickly. And, you know, the feedback I've gotten, we've gone through a round of investing, we're going through our second round of investing from investors, is normally we professionalize a startup team. There is no professionalizing your team. Your team is already there. And to be quite frank, it'd be hard to replicate this team. So I think we look different than anything else in the health and wellness space. We hear it all the time. Health and wellness companies, we're gonna scale, we're gonna open a bunch of clinics, and it just doesn't happen. And part of it is they have the wrong skill sets. They've never done it. And so we, we know what that looks like. So we didn't need to create as big a proof point for people to have faith that we knew what we were doing. And so we've already sold 60+ clinics. We, we know what the first 60 are gonna look like. I can tell you exactly where they are going to go. I can tell you exactly when they're going to open. And we think that we'll have the entire country sold out by next summer. And so we're very particular about franchisees. We've got a great reputation in the space. We want folks that have great operational capabilities, that have the right capital capabilities, and that are mission-oriented, that they really get what we're trying to do and they gravitate towards this kind of business. Um, we don't want the guy that says, well, I'm looking at 4 businesses in 4 different categories. Okay, go do the other 3. Um, so there's a lot of things like that that are a part of it. And by the way, we have some proof points, like this clinic has been open not long, but we've been treating our members for 6 months now. To this day, we've never lost a member. And I'm very proud of that. There's all kinds of things that you do have to validate and show to franchisees. And we're a little early on some things, but Everybody that's coming into our system says, but you got it. Like they talked to our CMO. She's Carrie. She's, she's wonderful. You know, she's a Harvard Business School grad. She's worked at two different health techs. You know, she's got all these other, she talked to our CTO. He's had three companies in the medical space. He's a Harvard Business School guy. By the way, I'll throw out Harvard and Stanford and Johns Hopkins. You got to be careful about that nowadays. Like to some people, that's great. To others, it's not. I'm not trying to. To, you know, say that's the only way to do it. But it is an indication that when the person leading your franchise development's a West Point grad and, you know, these are smart people, there's high intellectual capacity, they're experienced, they've done these things. And when people come and get the pitch for why become a Humanaut franchisee, they're like, I tell you what, that was, they got it. I'm not, I'm not worried about it. And they'll give you some, That was— we did that at Restore too. We were very picky about the franchisees. And so, but I'll tell you, I couldn't have done Humanaut if I hadn't done those other things, including Restore. Like, there are things about franchising you got to understand. It's got to be a big win for the franchisee. It's got to be a big win for the franchisor. The franchisee wants to open a franchise because there's a playbook, and the playbook's got to be executable again and again and again consistently. So you got to take the complexity out of the thing. So we, we've made many decisions at Humanaut that will take the complexity out of the four-wall units at the franchisee level so that they can focus on the things they have to be good at and be successful. So that doesn't just happen. You have to have done it. There's so much brain damage I have over the past 20 years of being in fitness and med spas and restore. It's how self-aware are you. And I say my superpowers is I'm self-aware and relatively egoless. I know what I'm good at and I know what I'm not good at. I know what everybody on my team is good at and not good at. By the way, I just talked about the corporate team. You then have to go get a badass medical team. You know, we've got people like Amy Killen. She's one of the country's leading experts in women's health and sexual health and hormones. And she's got a charisma and she's got a sort of likability and approachability that's super important. And she does funny things. Like on Instagram, she posted a rap video on the Women's Health Initiative. Like, that's the, like, weirdest topic in the world to do a rap video around. And by the way, it's funny and quirky and it's serious. Like, that's a serious thing. The Women's Health Initiative messed up a generation of women because of the misinformation about hormones. But the fact that she could pull that off and even do it and do it in a very educational way. It's the kind of thing that made me love her as a partner and all of the medical team. They are incredibly experienced. They've been doing this for a long time. They've got a charisma. They've got a passion. They've got a mission-driven sort of approach to it. And they've kind of left the, world of there's only one way to do it behind, and, and they've fiercely embraced this sort of functional medicine, integrated medicine approach, and, and are smart enough to know that if you just fix one thing and you don't address the other things, you don't really get great results.

It's really interesting to hear you talk about the, the team and what that looks like, and as you scale up, because, you know, it's one thing I talk to a lot of you know, franchise operators and there's this, hey, how do we get somebody in to maybe be the cycling or yoga instructor, getting somebody in on the kind of medical healthcare level to deliver that type of very intimate, very, very personal, very serious type of, you know, treatment. How do you do that at 100 locations with like the, the kind of healthcare qualifications?

So here's what I would say. There are a lot of folks in the medical space that hate their job. They hate all the education that they went through. And then the sort of thing that they hoped they were coming into underdelivers. The bureaucracy, the insurance dynamic, the, you know, everything, the sick care dynamic, the, I have 5 minutes to deal with this patient. And of course, I, there's, 80 other things I need to talk to them about, but I don't have time and I don't get paid for it. And so I can't do it. And so there are people on the traditional side that are thirsty and craving something like Humanaut. And so when you roll into town with Humanaut, you're the cool kid on the block and everybody wants to work at the cool kid place. And the doctors kind of raise their hand and say, this is what I've dreamed of doing. And, and we actually have not had a hard time finding incredible talent, both on the corporate side and the, you know, this is a mission-driven company. Like we are impacting the health of society. Our mission is to add 20 years of healthspan to our customers. And by the way, we're adding 20 years to their life, good years to their life when they're at the height of their powers. So the societal impact is actually greater than just adding 20 years. You're adding 20 years to people who have resources and wisdom and money and affluence and all that. Think of the societal impact from that. Well, who doesn't want to work there? And then, oh, by the way, we hire really good human beings. We have fun. There's no need to worry about the guy to your left or the woman to your left or right. You know, they're a good human. You know, they're smart. You know, they're mission-driven. And you kind of create a culture that, that highlights that and it really isn't hard. It kind of builds on itself. And, and that's the thing that I think is also interesting is like, I think back to the Restore days, you'd go into Dallas and it's like, okay, we're going to open 25 clinics. And, and by the way, we're going to have a manager that's making, let's say, $65,000 a year. And we're going to have this, that, and the other. Well, Humanat's totally different. We're going to roll into Dallas. We only have to open 2 clinics, maybe 3 clinics. So we don't have to find 25 teams. So you got to find 2 or 3 so you can be more selective. By the way, everything's up-leveled. The general manager makes 2.5 times as much money. That's a different human being. So you can get more sophisticated about how you manage a clinic. And it's just everything has been thought through based on all of those other experiences. And we're pretty good at creating mission-driven companies with great culture. So. People give us a little bit of benefit of the doubt at this point.

Maybe a couple more questions before we wrap up. I, I don't know that I intended to, to go this route when coming into the conversation, but hearing you talk about it and, you know, your experiences to date and how the kind of path from 0 to 100 locations right now, it's becoming more common in the, you know, broader, call it health, fitness, wellness landscape. To either build a platform or portfolio of brands across fitness, weight loss, you know, some, to some extent, healthcare, and companies certainly interested in doing that. Do you see an opportunity to say, hey, we have a platform and a portfolio of brands, or we want to roll up or partner with or sell to? Like, how do you think about this kind of shift and how those pieces are fitting together, especially when you're talking about oftentimes like PE money coming into that to fund some type of expansion and just the opportunities there?

Well, I do think that Humanaut as constructed is incredibly attractive to investor partners, including, you know, we're a little early for PE money, but I will tell you the fundraising in now two rounds has been incredibly straightforward. Forward quick and drama-free. So people appreciate that this business as constructed is really interesting. Do I see permutations off of the back end of Humanout once we get to scale? Absolutely. I don't know what those are going to be yet. I do think there's a consumer pain point though, when you think that I have to have one relationship for this, another for this, another for this, another for this, and there's fatigue. And sometimes it's as simple as we're talking about where you go work out. Sometimes it's, well, what's helping me with my sleep? What's helping with my cognitive health? It's really daunting. And then even places that, you know, I take something like the Cooper Clinic. Cooper Clinic's amazing. It's been around forever. And, but they're missing a piece. And so what does the Cooper Clinic do? Does it go embed coaching in the Cooper Clinic or does it go hire a coaching or buy a coaching company? I don't know. but unless you sort of integrate those things really well, you're not going to get great results. And so then it becomes like a really cool executive physical. That's a point in time. Awesome. I don't have cancer. I, you know, my cardiovascular health's good. I'll see you in a year. And so there's just lots of ways to do it. And we've just found that when you try and piece together too many pieces, you don't get the, the sort of 1 plus 1 equals 3 dynamic. You get the 1 plus 1 equals 1.8 dynamic. And then there's this sort of dissonance around how much you can handle, how many relationships you can handle, how much you can process. So we're trying to solve all that. We're simply trying to be people's copilot. And we think we have enough embedded in this offering that, that we don't have to go out and cobble together more things. Having said that, when we don't do it, that is where the curation comes in. If someone needs a particular type of training, And, you know, we're gonna know in Austin the 5 best trainers, and we're gonna know the person that's gonna respond well to you and vice versa. So we're gonna connect you to that. You know, we, we have a little long— so like longevity movement dynamic here where we do actual movement diagnostics. We do VO2 testing. You can work out here, but we're not trying to be a gym. We're actually trying to train you with data on all the things you need to work on, create an actual plan for you. You can work out here, but honestly, what I'd rather you do is take it outside, you know, do real kind of movement stuff. And to the degree you have another workout place and you have a trainer, you actually take him what he needs to create a real plan. No offense to trainers at these big box gyms, but they don't know what the hell they're, they're doing sometimes. And they'll give the 50-year-old dude the same thing they give the 25-year-old dude. And so I don't know, man, I'm skeptical of cobbling together all these pieces and thinking you're going to have this integrated approach that's going to create great results. I'm just a little skeptical of it.

And all that spells is, you know, a lot of untapped opportunity to whether it's solve this in, you know, greater depth for people or put those pieces together, as you talk about curation or a platform to connect those dots. Yeah. And hopefully it all continues to trend in the direction of healthier, happier longevity, all those things that we're— I think we're collectively working towards.

And listen, man, a rising tide raises all boats. There are going to be multiple winners in this space. I, I would say, who's the big winner in the longevity space right now? To be determined. Who's the big winner in health optimization? To be determined. By the way, those are kind of similar, could be the same, you know, but there's going to be lots of winners. And in order to tackle this massive problem that is proactive health and wellness in America, when that has not been the model to date, lots of different things are going to get tried and lots of things are going to fail and lots of things are going to work. You know, once again, we put a lot of work and thought into this and pulled together pieces. Are we going to look exactly the same in a year? Today, I suspect we'll tweak some things and add some things and drop some things. But, you know, like, I do think it matters, like, how you put together your first offering. Like, you shouldn't have this fait accompli, like, yeah, we're going to have to change a bunch of stuff. No, you go into it thinking you've got the right offering. But when I hear people say things to me like, well, what do you think about those guys down the road? I think awesome. Listen, people have different styles and different tastes. If, if they're going down the road to this different offering because they like a particular component of it better, and it's also helping proactively with health and wellness, we all win. And there will be some winners and losers, obviously, but, but we're so early, man. We're, we're like at the beginning. We're at the baby steps. And you and me are in this ecosystem surrounded by biohackers and this and that optimizers and And so we think that the whole world is there, but then you go to a dinner party and you talk to 5 or 6 people and you realize, oh, wait a minute, like what we're doing is going to require massive education still. And there's so many people that have even sniffed this. And so I love seeing winners. The more winners, the better. It was one of the things I was the most proud about Restore. Like you wouldn't believe the number of competitors that came to me and said, Jim, thank you. And I was like, for what? And they said, well, when you got that big General Atlantic investment, it showed us all what was possible. It showed us all that this is real. It showed us all that you can build a real business. And so I think Humanaut's going to be one of those beacons. I think people are going to, a year from now, say, holy shit, like, they got 25 locations open. This thing is massive. This thing is crushing it. And we want to be that beacon again. And when you do that, the financial opportunities are obvious. We'll, you know, figure that out, but I'm not waking up thinking about money. I can tell you that.

I think all of that, obviously we're completely aligned in both a lot of work to be done and a lot of opportunity ahead. And I do think it's one of those situations. If you look at even, you know, health clubs and fitness studios, it's like there's I think the most recent numbers is like 75 million people. And that's also in a society where the vast amount of majority, the majority of people are not exercising enough. There's a host of chronic conditions. And so even in that industry that of the collective is maybe the furthest along, it's still not even scratching the surface. And there's how many brands and how many different studios and how many different digital players that go along with that. So.

As, and they're playing with stuff. Yeah. They're playing with stuff. Like, could you have ever imagined Lifetime having a doctor on site like 5 years ago? Like, no, like, you know, the things that Equinox is doing and the things that LA Fitness is doing. I mean, you know, once again, I question some things here and there, and I'm not going to name any specific names, but I love the fact that people are digging in and experimenting and coupling things together. Because it takes the collective effort in this category to educate the world. And if it were just up to Humanaut to create that level of education that's going to be required to build this category, man, that's a daunting thing. And so I love it when all these other things pop up. And once again, I have my thesis on what's good and bad about each one. I have my thesis on why Humanaut is great for a particular set of people, but, and I welcome all of it. It's, it's great. I, Restore, I hope Restore crushes it and thrives because I feel like that's a feeder. And, you know, we, we really pride ourself on working with what a lot of people would call competitors. I'm like, no, we're not competitors. We're, we're all trying to make this person healthy.

Yeah. There's a lot more to look forward to and potentially a part 2 of this conversation as you get things, fully up and running. But where should people go to learn more, follow along? Website, social, what's the best way to—

Yeah, I just go to humanothhealth.com is the best place. If you want to get in touch with me personally, the best way is LinkedIn.

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