HYDRATION & Rapid Magnesium, Calcium Testing with Vivoo | Miray Tayfun @WellnessAndWisdom

60% of Americans are not meeting their daily magnesium intake and it's 70% for calcium intake. So please be mindful of what you're eating as well as your counting calories. Try to count nutrients as well. Some of the metrics we track is like calcium daily intake, magnesium intake, vitamin C intake, salt intake, hydration levels, urinary ph and ketones.

Mirai. Welcome to wellness Wisdom.

Thank you so much. Josh, how are you?

I'm doing really good. I just got through a little bit of sickness, the springtime sickness. So it's perfect timing for us to talk about biomarkers and this little test strip that I got, it's called Vivo, which is beautiful. It's got a QR code on it. We're going to talk about this technology in depth. But if people don't know anything about urine testing, when did that actually start up in medicine and functional medicine and just give people a really high level view. We'll get into the details as we go into the podcast, but give people a high level view of how this technology actually came to be for people's wellness.

Sure. So when I talk to people, they sometimes think that we invented urine tests. This is not correct. Urine tests are actually 30 something year old technology. It's been used, these colorimetric sensors has been used for decades now. What we're trying to do is build a health tracker just like your Apple watch or your Oura ring, turn urine testing into a health tracker so you can be on top of your biomarkers. And some of the metrics we track is like calcium daily intake, magnesium intake, vitamin C intake, salt intake, hydration levels, urinary ph, ketones, and for example, ketones. I'm sure you did keto tests before you bought from Amazon, etc. It's a similar technology. What is different in vivo is you don't have to rely on manual process. Our image processing, which is enhanced by machine learning, captures the image after you urinate. All you need to do is just take a picture of it through your app and your results will instantly come to your mobile application along with your obviously personalized recommendations about what you should eat, what you should do, et cetera.

That's pretty cool because it takes the guesswork out of it. And I've always been a big proponent of testing quantified self 2015. I went down to the Wharf in San Francisco when they just started doing the Quantified Self wellness and health technology. And it was a really big movement at the time. But you know, the thing was, is it was too complicated. It was like people couldn't figure out how to send things in. And there was this component where you would do some type of testing at home and then you would send it to a lab and you'd wait like six weeks and then you'd get back your results. That is not the case with this, which is really cool. The test takes 90 seconds. So you urinate takes 90 seconds. And I want to go right into these markers too, because it's really big for us. We always love to talk about the intelligence that the body has. The the body has so much intelligence, we just have to listen to it. And I noticed in your branding it says your body's voice. How did you come up with that branding and what do you mean by that?

Your body's voice, it's actually now expanded to listen to your body's voice.

Even better.

Yes. Because your body's voice was confusing a little bit. So we said, okay. It's actually meaning listen to your buddy's voice and you actually really summarize it. Well, a body knows it all. It's just sometimes we have to listen to it or understand what it needs. And unfortunately we don't have sensors. Like, wouldn't it be amazing your arm turns into green when you're calcium deficient? Right. That would be amazing.

That'd be a cool Halloween costume.

But we don't have those sensors. Obviously. Side effects or long term deficiencies. Side effects can occur really after decades after the deficiency starts, like osteoporosis. You see it after 65, but actually you can take maybe some obstacles. You can change it while you're 30, 35, 40. If you had a tool to see that you're not taking enough calcium daily, that's where we started actually.

Yeah, it's really cool because I've always thought blood tests was the standard, but urine is just as accurate. If not, why did you decide as a company to go to the urine route instead of saliva or blood? What is special about the urine specifically?

I wouldn't say urine is better or urine is stronger or anything. Urine is different than blood. For example. We cannot say you're calcium deficient. We cannot say you're magnesium deficient. We can only see daily intake and your daily habits results. As you're accessing, your body is removing the excess amount which is indicating how much you're taking daily. The reason we picked urine is actually it is so simple to collect and there are so many colorimetric and lateral flow tests that can give instant results when it comes to blood testing. By the way, I did all the tests that you mentioned. I did all the every levels. Let's get checked. Viomes 23 mes. And the process is a little bit broken. You're right. Collect your sample at home, wait for weeks to get your result and once you get it, it's just a number. And to see actually if you can improve it with lifestyle changes, you have to pay another $100, $200. And it is just not cost effective. It is not fast. If it's not giving feedback, it's just giving you a number. So that's actually how where we see urine is, is a shortcut, basically providing instant information. Obviously, if you're calcium deficient in a really clinical way, you should be taking a doctor's guidance on multiple type testing, multi supplements, etc. But vivo is highlighting your daily intake, which can actually result in deficiency in long term.

So every single day. You wouldn't take this test every day or do you, what is that? What is the adequate testing for the strip?

It depends on you. So we have customers testing themselves two times a day or once a month. We are seeing it all and, and at first like people were like, no, everybody should test once a week. And I'm like, no, they don't actually like, if they find their own pattern to be on top of their metrics and whatever the frequency they need, they can test themselves in that frequency. I test myself once in two days, that's what I love. My husband test himself once, once in two weeks. Some of our customers test themselves twice a day.

So there's no real recommendation as far as this is what everyone should be doing. It's dependent on the user's needs themselves. So what type of person is attracted to this technology compared to other technologies?

By the way, we recommend weekly testing just as a starting point. But I saw that after that, like a couple of tests, people evolved into their frequencies. So obviously we started with biohackers, keto diet, paleo diet, followers, etc. And I thought these early adopters will be our consumers for a long time. But what we saw as a interesting transition is elder community who are using a lot of drugs are using vivo to track their hydration and sodium levels. Obviously ladies who are getting into menopause, tracking their calcium intake. So people who wants to lose weight, tracking all of their metrics to be on top if they're lacking some mineral that will actually end up as they're eating more, etc. So we're seeing a lot of different Audiences finding different values in vivu. I think it's because we're testing a wide range of metrics for a really affordable price. It starts from $5 a test. So compared to all the other tests out there, we were super affordable and giving so much more information. So we are seeing so many different audiences.

It's really cool because a lot of times people just go off of quote how they feel. But when it comes to hydration specifically, I think I've read some statistics. Maybe you can chime in on this. Most people are chronically, chronically dehydrated. And it's not just drinking water. You know, I go through four or five of these 24 ounce glass jars of water every single day. But without having some kind of barometer to teach yourself, I guess that's really the question here. Teaching yourself what it truly feels like to be hydrated, but not just from water, from sodium, from potassium, from magnesium. Right. Can you expand on that a little bit?

Yes. I actually have a really funny, horrible story about it. So before we launched vivo 2.0, we didn't have sodium, calcium, magnesium, none of these metrics. We had only hydration, ph, ketones, you know, standard temporary urine dipstick metrics. And my hydration was always great and I was so proud of myself. I was like showing, look at my hydration every time I pee. It's amazing. And then we launched our new product and what I saw was I was always loving sodium, always, always low in magnesium, always low in calcium. And it was just like, oh my God, a wake up call. Well, you're exercising, you're drinking always water. When you're salting your food, you're always conservative because you don't want to take too much of it, you don't want to be bloated or anything, which results as actually fatigue, chronic fatigue. And then I start, then we have this amazing advisor, Dr. James, who wrote this book called Salt Fix. I actually read that book and I'm like, oh my God, I was doing it all wrong. And I started to introduce salt in my food. First it made it taste good, really good. And now I feel much better. And it followed by some magnesium supplementation. I opened myself for actually not family nuts to increase my calcium intake. So when you have limited data points that you're tracking, actually you might be blindsided. That's why I'm like, okay, this is amazing. Now we have all these metrics, but what we are missing, because something can be looking good on the surface, but deep down you might be lacking a lot of electrolytes, which is my fault. I should have been a better biohacker myself. But now I'm really glad that I can track all these metrics in terms of hydration. I guess that's one of the metrics in average is really low for our consumer. We are good at drinking this, right? And we are good at now taking our electrolytes as well. But people are actually missing, especially America, they think drinking Coke or drinking a juice is equivalent of drinking water. Drinking coffee is the cologne of drinking water. And they don't hydrate themselves properly and that ends up with fatigue. Focus problems, sleep problems. Yeah. Energy problems, everything.

Have you seen, you know, it would be a beautiful company for you to collaborate with is lmnt. You know, the salt hydration packets. Magnesium, potassium. I remember we had Rob Wolf on the show and we'll link the notes here below, wherever you're watching this so you can learn more. But Rob was saying when you go and do the sauna specifically, yes, you're losing water, but you're really losing salt. That's the big one. And so somebody might drink 24 ounces of water when they're done with the sauna, but they might think that that's an incorrect baseline of them actually having proper sodium. But when you actually do the test and you see it in real time, that can start to give people a real behavior change curve over time. Yes. Have you seen this play out?

Yes. Just run a couple of miles and do a VWOOD test. You'll see it. Actually, you can see that's another benefit of instant feedback for some of the sodium and high hydration. Also, PH is giving almost instant feedback.

The pH one's interesting. So I have a cold tank in the garage and I have a little PH strip and I add in alkaline or acid. Our body's the same way. Is there an optimal range for us to be as far as ph? And how do we use the app and the strip so that we can identify our PH and make adjustments accordingly?

The PH is an indicator for us to acidic load of your diet. And what we're trying to do is make you be in a more balanced range of pH6 to 7. But for what we realize after years of use of data, vegan people and vegetarian people have more alkaline ph naturally just because they eat more vegetables? If they're doing a good diet. Yes. So if you're seeing alkaline results, don't be panicked. But if you're seeing acidic results, you can just maybe recall your day of diet that day. If you drink coke, if you drink coffee, if you ate chocolate, if you eat so much animal protein, you can see more acidic urine ph, which is normal. But try to balance it with more vegetables, fruits, etc to make it more alkaline. That is the goal here. It actually kind of shows like it's so funny, like it kind of highlights. But you cannot for sure know if they drink coke or coffee or alcohol for sure. But they obviously did something to that aciditized their urine. Yeah.

There's something really special that, that I've always explained as a mirror of mindfulness. When it comes to any type of tracker, you know, anything we wear in our body. And I wear the ring too, you know, I wear the OURA ring. We're not affiliated with them, they don't have an affiliate program. But I enjoy looking at the data. But sometimes I actually find that I can stress out and I've had people write in about this too. Stressing out about the data from the mirror of mindfulness from the tracker can actually cause more stress than just living your life. But Vevo is a little bit different because it's not like you're wearing it right. It's something that you're checking in on. So how is this a healthy mirror of mindfulness?

Really great question. So, you know, I had a late flight to SF and I had early meetings and I knew I could only. I was only going to be able to sleep for six hours, which is less than I normally do. So actually last night I took out my aura, put it to the bedside and in the morning I wore it back again because when I woke up, I didn't want it to see 63%, 50% recovery rate. So I would feel mentally, I knew like I would be here like so down. I didn't want to face that. And I'm aware of that fact as a user of these products myself. And in vivu, I think we have long way to go. But I want people to be encouraged by their results. I want people to be like, oh, okay, it's a little bit above the average. How can I improve it? And next time seeing that they improved it, and maybe you saw vivu's language, it's a little bit more friendly then more like rigid. The reason behind that is we don't want to panic people. We don't want to make people sad. We don't want to make them feel punished because they're not hydrated. But we want to help them to be hydrated for the next test. If that Makes sense. I think that's the people are not, I will say lack of, I don't know, information right now, people is lack of motivation. Like we all know what to do. I know what to do, you know what to do. But sometimes we just skip it just because we don't feel like it. We don't have the motivation.

Yes.

And a product, an app should be encouraging you, not making you feel down.

Yeah, that's beautiful.

Aurora is a great product by the way. But just as an example.

Sure. No, it's beautiful. And I think about too. You know, you're the founder and so the feminine awareness that you bring to the messaging and to the behavior change, it's much different than a male led company. I think it's actually a breath of fresh air. Have you considered that? And is your team made up of mostly women or is it a nice blend of both? Because I could see being the founder yourself, you know, your ability to give people behavior change recommendations without it being so forced and so serious could probably make people in the long term change their behaviors more easily.

We have a 70% woman team. It happened organically. It's not like we were discriminative to men or anything.

Sure, sure. Yeah.

We have a big development team too. They're all men. There's no woman there. We couldn't find any women should call it more maybe like it just because I'm a woman. Maybe and the bigger audience for these products are women. Like 70% of me was useful woman shops more. 85% of e commerce is run by women. So we are basically selling to women who are buying for their husbands if the man is using. So I see. There are so many opportunities for vivo to evolve in the future. For example, period tracking. Period tracking is something so simple that we've been doing for years with flow, Apple, health, clue, whatever. But now we have magnesium daily intake and we can alert people when their period is coming. Hey, you haven't been taking enough magnesium. This might cause cramps which is a proven fact by scientific world. Or hey, you should hydrate more to have a better flow. Or hey, what would you like to move? Here are some yoga moves for you. Like more holistic approach rather than just tracking dates for example or during pregnancy, after post pregnancy there is a lot of can do in terms of nutrient tracking because prenatal market has no ability to test themselves unless they're paying hundreds of dollars every time. Can this be a tool for them? We are not serving by the way to that market. If you go to that Market, all the ranges will be re evaluated, evaluated for prenatal market and maybe we will add more metrics like hormone tracking, etc. But what I'm trying to say is I guess being a woman makes me see some of the missing elements in the market because some of these period apps also founded by men.

Well, that seems kind of counterintuitive. So I love that you said it's 70% organically. That happened that way. And I think about the technology component of this too. You have this machine learning that's really interesting. You know, sometimes people might hear about artificial intelligence or machine learning and they might be like, oh my God, is the robot spying on me? That's not what you're doing with your company. Talk a little bit about the machine learning aspect. How does it learn about the user over time and then truly help them over time.

We are using actually machine learning in multiple areas of our company. It was our savior, I would say we wouldn't be able to launch without machine learning. To read these colors as accurate as an optical device, which is getting no sunlight from outside was a really big challenge. And we did everything we could do. Every method on the market we tried until we come to machine learning. Machine learning means we basically teach our machine hundreds of thousands of different variations of these tests. And when a new test comes, despite the lightning can be different, your form model can be different. Whatever is the parameter is different. Machine predicts the result. As accurate as a lab test test. It's better than human eye and it's close. It's the closest to the lab test when we use standard computer vision. I don't want to like use so much terminology. But first our image processing, like how we capture the data color change accurately is done by machines right now. It doesn't mean machines are spying on you. It just machine gets your strip anonymously and assign you results. And those results come to you from backend to your phone and again through APIs without even knowing who you are. That's how the technology works at the moment. We don't have to know Josh has acidic ph in his urine. We don't have to know that Josh is just encrypted Persona. In our backend, all your data is encrypted and safe. Another element we use machine learning is actually right now we're working on it. It's not launched yet. Personalized advice generating. If you try the product you might felt like okay, they're advice, but they're just advice. How can it be more personalized? How can it Be more precise. That's why we are using machine learning right now. Another area is actually how can we create better analytics information about which state is hydrated, which state is, which city is doing better on calcium intake and what are the reasons behind that? Like for example, we did this research and we saw Hawaii was the best hydrated place. And I was thinking why it can be, why it can be. Then I realized they banned the plastic bottles there and they have water fountains everywhere and everybody carries water bottles. Can it be the reason like making these predictions to improve overall society's well being is another area they're using.

So you have geolocation. So do you notice in like the south where they have a lot of barbecue and salty foods? I'm here in Texas. Right. So a lot of people are eating a more, I guess you could say it's a blanket statement, but they're eating more of an acidic diet. Are you seeing that in different locations in the United States specifically? Because it sounds like you found that in Hawaii they were hydrated. So are you seeing that people have more of an acidic diet with the geotagging?

I would be honest. In overall America we are seeing more acidic urine compared to the global. So I don't know, maybe I have to check if Austin or sorry, Texas in general is more acidic than compared to United States. But US actually is more dehydrated compared to Europe and more acidic compared to Europe. We have customers in Europe too. Obviously these are all anonymous data. Like please don't think that Josh has acidic urine. No, like Josh is a number in our backend and you're seeing these multi data becomes more meaningful analytics. What we saw though richer I will say are higher income places are starving themselves more like keto diet. Like they have more ketones in their urine. If they're like a higher income area.

Apostle code, like there's more pressure for them to look better or something. Right?

Yeah.

Wow, that's fascinating. So I think about the MDA for oxidative stress. We chatted a little bit about this before we hit record. But I've always learned that oxidative stress was something from the blood. But you can get an MDA marker through the urine. Why is that so special? The mda? When we look at oxidative stress, what can that actually show people? How do they change from that mark marker?

Well, it's one of the most common actually byproducts of lipids, peroxidation. If I could pronounce words right, it's melanaldehyde. Actually MDA if you want to research it. And again, free radicals have multiple forms. It's just not mda. There are multiple free radicals just like there are multiple antioxidants. And it's something that we can track track from urine with a colorimetric test. We are seeing as a pattern if there is a UTI or if the patient, if the customer is having an infection, we are seeing an increase. We also have saw some increase on smoking audiences, smoking customers. But in general it should be around the normal range. But I think it's again, I saw this like the two parameters I would like to take it further is free radicals and white. The reason behind it is free radicals should also maybe come with your postal code and some air pollution alerts in your app, not just MDA metric from your urine. And also it should maybe look at your vitamin C and other antioxidant levels from your urine to match your MDA levels. So it can have a more complex algorithm in the future. And vitamin C is another metric we would like to improve because the detection limit of it, what we can see is the lowest detection. Like if there is no vitamin C in urine it can mean two things. Either you're deficient or you're taking just enough, barely enough. So low means that in vivo. And we're trying to improve our detection limit with further testing for vitamin C. Other than that sodium, magnesium and calcium have more obviously rigid background in terms of daily intake to urine. Result has been correlated by scientific articles already. Unfortunately, urine is not well studied. That's a problem for us. It's studied for some areas, but some of them we have some articles and we always have to repeat it with our own clinical trials because you cannot build a product based on torte.

Yes, yes.

And I wish Turing was studying more. And I think vivu's contributions to scientific world in time would be significant because we have a big amount of data that we can actually indicate some important, I will say biomarkers and diseases and chronic diseases and lifestyle etc future here in the app.

And I haven't dug too deep into the app. I've done a handful of tests that were really eye opening for me. I actually had a significant amount of oxidative stress. I think it's just because I got over the flu. So there was a direct mirror there. But I was wondering, do you have sickness?

We see that by the way.

Yes. So I wasn't too shocked. I'm like, let me take that in a couple weeks when I'm feeling awesome. But I'm curious With the coffee drinkers, with the caffeine drinkers. How does this impact the results with the test strip across the board? In other words, if somebody's chronically drinking coffee, three, four, five cups a day, or energy drinks, multiple energy drinks, how does that show up on the test strip if they're a chronic caffeine user?

I was a chronic caffeine user. I recently quit. It's been three weeks now.

It's an interesting relationship with caffeine, isn't it? It's like this back and forth love, hate relationship.

It can be after I quit, literally. It's like you quit something so funny. It's because I. It started with I whitened my teeth so I couldn't drink coffee. Then I started to feel, oh my God, I was addicted to coffee because I'm like constantly. So I let me just ease that. And what I see is my urinary ph. That's the biggest thing. I was always acidic. Such a shame for me because I'm eating all these beautiful. I'm following a Mediterranean diet because I'm from Turkey. I eat so many vegetables, olive oil based, home cooked vegetables, beans, etc. Then coffee actually makes my urine always acidic. Acidic. Acidic coffee and alcohol, I would say. So after I quit, I started to see no life change, no diet change. My urine ph is always alkaline and I actually started to feel better, especially at the night times. And people also show sleep score as well. Through your apple health data, my sleep score also improved. I wouldn't say anything bad about coffee because if you want to lose weight, it also helps you to burn your fat and it gives you a lot of energy. But also after you quit for a while and you drink it, it made my stomach really uncomfortable as well. What is your take? My relationship with coffee is so weird. Yeah, it's personal now.

Yeah, it's definitely personal. It's like if you bring up caffeine at a table, everybody's gonna say, well, I can't live without my morning coffee. I used to drink coffee. This is interesting that I used to drink coffee and about six months ago I started only doing espresso. And I looked at some of the research with espresso versus coffee. Coffee can be 16 to sometimes even 20 ounces or more of very acidic liquid. But with espresso, it's 2 ounces or less. And I looked at some of the tannins and some of the, I guess you could say what it does to your physiology, you know, the actual ingredients and what's inside of Espresso. And I really love the research and I just personally love the way that I feel. I'll make a two ounce espresso, I'll drink maybe an ounce of it, and then I'll give the rest to the birds, you know, because for me, I have a very sensitive immune system. And so if I'm pushing the gas pedal down, and this is for all of us that might feel tired, who might have brain fog, pouring gasoline on a fire that's already burning too hot is not necessarily gonna make you have a better day. It's just kind of like cheating. It's almost like people are cheating. So that's why I was curious. With the caffeine intake, it's not just from coffee. We see energy drinks out there. There's a lot of drinks that people are using to mask the way that they actually feel, which is tired. Maybe they need more sleep. And it begs a deeper question. What are some of the other tech parts, platforms or some of the other health applications that can dovetail with Vivo to make sure that people are correcting the ship, to make sure that people are coming back to homeostasis? Are there other relationships that you have in place that helps people actually look at their phone and get like a heads up display of how they're showing up?

Yeah, definitely. For coffee and alcohol, we're seeing that we heard this a lot from our customers. Yes. I can see why it's acidic because it's not just the result of your ph. It also comes to the recommendations area. And we always warn about, hey, limit these foods, chocolate, coffee, alcohol, and increase these food. And they instantly understand. Again, it's like we're trying to give them the ability to sense something in time. It doesn't make sense, maybe. But my hope would be you can, before you urinate, you can actually sense your PH of your urine. It sounds stupid, I know, but no, it sounds perfect if you do it long enough. Like when I urinate now when I look at the texture of it, I can see the hydration, not just the smell or anything from the sound of it. Because I did it so many times, it kind of gave me this ability to sense it. Just like learning artificially. Basically, yes.

And so people come to this. They don't have to be to use the product. You don't have to be a technology focused person. It's really easy. I mean, I don't know anybody that doesn't have a phone. Pretty much everyone has a smartphone of some type. And so you really just have to have a phone and to be able to just urinate on the stick for two seconds or so. And that's it. Right? You don't have to be very technically illiterate and very high technical with your mind to use the product.

No. And if, if you guys, when you try, if you don't understand anything, let us know so we can make it more simple because it is an everyday product for everyday users. We are trying to eliminate the scientific language as much as possible. But for people who'd like to learn more, you always have learned more in the application with more references, scientific references, articles, etc. So we're trying to cater to Voltvert.

That's beautiful. Okay, so right now we're still going to talk a little bit more about your story and the science, but right now your company gave us 30% off, which is amazing. So if you guys are feeling excited and you want to start learning about your ketones and your ph and your hydration, just go to joshtrent.com vivo V I V O O and you can use the code Josh to get 30% off. And we'll obviously link this in the show notes and at the end, the day of our podcast as well. I'm curious for you, like how did you even get into this? You know, a woman growing up in Istanbul, Was it something that you always leaned into with technology as a young lady or how did that come online for you?

I'm a bioengineer, so I always wanted to do something in biotech field. But how I met with urine is actually a funny story. So I had this internship, I was back in Istanbul, it was like 2010 or something, 2011 or something. So I had this internship and I went to this hospital and they put me into biochemistry lab. And what I did is I dipped urine dipsticks to urine and put it to optical reader, then look in the microscope if there are leukocytes and took notes. And I did this for a whole day and I was so disgusted by it. I was like, oh my God, like I don't want to see one more pee. I don't want to see one more urine or stool. I was also doing stool testing, I was doing blood testing and I went to the management, I said, guys, I'm a bioengineer, I don't want to be here. Take me to another laboratory in your hospital. And they took me to this amazing stem cell treatment center for leukemia, sorry, blood cancer patients. And it was life changing for me because I saw people basically they were taking all of their Blood from one vein centrifuge, separate the stem cells, give it back to to the body and then apply chemotherapy, radiotherapy. Basically empty all the stem cells fuels of your body then give your stem cells back to cure the cancer. And it was such a life changing experience for me. But all I remember from the internship is that experience, not during tests. I hated them. I never wanted to see them again. Years after years. So I started this company for mobile diagnostics. We were testing cattle on field. We were testing cows for Brucella, salmonella, like infectious diseases with portable sensors. And on those years I remember there was, there were these urine tests that changed colors. I just remembered them and I ordered a set and then I by that, by this time I moved to the United States for this company, the cattle testing company. And I was looking at Amazon and seeing amazing reviews like people were using it for self tracking and people were understanding their results. So what we were doing in a hospital was actually used by consumer humor. And at that time I was also such a biohacker myself. I was spending all my money on tests and devices and everything. And every time I get a device I remember I was so disappointed because I paid so much money, so limited data. Why can it be affordable? So everybody can do it. These are good, good, good, good services. And yeah, so it was just an idea like hey, can we make this read by mobile phone because optical reader is not necessary now. It was 2018, 2017, mobile phone, mobile phone cameras were strong, really strong. Started to change and it was an idea. The first prototype was you were urinating on a test, taking a picture and emailing it for us. That's when we raised pre seed money from 500 startups and we had to let go our previous company. But we were so lucky because our previous company was never raised a penny. It was a government grant funded company. So we had this amazing laboratory and tools and office space that we could actually do further R and D for other products. And we just gave this all this laboratory that we have to vivo. We just transferred it with no cost and we started building a test for at home. And when we started, I wouldn't even dream of having such a wide range of testing and such a great app. It was so simple. And now I'm more excited about what can turn into in the next couple of years.

Yeah, what are you excited about with that? No, it's a beautiful story. It came to you not because you were planning on it, it came to you because it organically showed up. That's what I heard. From you.

Yeah, it happened and I'm so glad it happened because now we're actually making change in consumers life. We're getting so much nice notes, Josh. And again, it's always something as simple as hydration. They're thanking us. Thank you. My father is now using vivu. It was so hard at first, but we managed to teach him to scan himself and now he's checking his hydration every week so he doesn't have to rely on once or twice a year doctors visit to know if he's hydrated. Something simple. But it is changing that person's life. It's so beautiful to hear.

It's fascinating to me because I look at the strip here and if you're watching with us on YouTube, it almost looks like beautiful stained glass, like a beautiful stained glass window. But inside of each one of these colored squares there are markers that the camera picks up. And so how did you actually make this? And how did. Every single one comes in a sealed package so that it's not contaminated by air I assume, or any liquids. Air, light and air or light. So as soon as you take this out, you need to use it right away. So I need to use this one today because. Because I just opened it up. How did you actually bake the technology inside of this little strip? I could see how that would be incredibly daunting and challenging.

Yes, yes. So there are chemical reagents change color with the analytes presence and based on the amount of the analyte present. Which means for example, let's say ph is the simplest. But let's take nitrate. We have if there is nitrate present in your urine. Nitrates come from nitrate producing bacteria and we have nitrite nitrate oxidizing here. When they meet it turns into a pink color. And if there's more like let's say if there is X milligram it turns into light Pink. If it's 10x milligram it turns into really dark pink. And it goes on and on for hydration. For example, we have a range from green to yellow. Dark green means you're super over hydrated and yellow means you're dehydrated. And you can test actually with different fluids at home. You can see the color changes if you salty water, if you do supplement like vitamin C, you will be seeing this metric. This is vitamin C turn into almost white from this blue. So how we do it, by the way, this design is made by our designer. This is the second version of our product. We had a different one before. This is for Comfortably urinating on it. And you can't believe how many people peed on it before it comes to your hands. So it is user friendly to pee on it. All these materials around it actually doesn't change color when you urinate, but only the colorful pets. That's another ip actually it's something so simple, but it took months to perfect the reference colors. And the other metrics don't change colors when you urinate, but the ones we want changes colors, things like that. Yeah, it's so much hard work on it and we're working on different products. We're trying to make this disappear right now we want to integrate something to your toilets so you don't even actually need this.

Okay, what would that be like? What's the Gen 3, Gen 4 in the mix?

Hopefully we will be launching next year if everything goes well. So what we wanted to do is this is a simple process. You tried it, but how can it be more simple? How can it be more simple especially for the elder community who needs it most. And we designed basically toilet approaches that anybody can buy and integrate. And it won't be this wide range of metrics when we first launched, but it will have a couple of the most favored by our customers.

What has surprised you the most with this technology, in other words, you know, lots of customers. How many customers across the world now have you had?

So we have over 60,000 users and around 35,000 customers. Users means, for example, you are not a customer, but you're a user. Yes, you can go back to the website and purchase. You will be a customer as well like that. Because we give a lot of tests away for people to try it and give us feedback. What surprised me most is I guess how quickly we grew. I guess because we have a natural barrier which is a test. I'm sure you know, the hardware companies and software companies, they have different barriers. Like software companies that can scale forever so fast. But hardware companies, you have to, to produce it, ship it and be produced in house. We have a manufacturing facility in Turkey, where I'm from, that we are on top of every detail, which is a really hard process. I wish we outsourced it at the beginning, but now we are on top. We are so on top of every detail. We just don't want to let it go to IP to China or anywhere. And we saw that because it's a hardware which is paper based, it is much faster to produce, it's more affordable and it helped us to scale much faster. And if I could, I would give Millions of millions for free. And in the next years that's where we are planning. Like if you could give these for free and people can take the taste of it if they want, they can come back and subscribe or they can just test themselves for free and. Yeah, wow.

Because I could see like you're right. If it was just on the phone and you didn't have to send them an actual test, people would probably do it more. But we're a physical body so we need a physical apple apparatus to test with. I don't see that ever changing. I mean obviously we're not going to be urinating on the phone. That's not going to happen. We have to urinate on an actual piece of paper. Right. So I don't see that ever being something that could be a huge barrier to entry. It seems like I don't see how much easier it could get is what I'm saying. It's so simple to do. It's like two seconds of urinating on the strip here. Is there going to be something in the future where, where you can get even more of these biomarkers, even more of these body signatures or do the 11 parameters now that's good enough.

No, it's not good enough. Again, we are always working and as you know, there is a huge lateral flow of testing which is like almost like COVID testing or pregnancy testing methods which we have developed multiple tests already to expand the testing rate in terms of hormones like cortisol, like vitamin B, etc. But more, more, more of those plus colorimetric tests, plus I think our smart toilet can turn into basically an unlimited capacity. Just because urine has. If you go to human metabolome database you will be seeing urine carries more than 4,000 metabolites. Around half of it is actually quantifiable. We are talking about iron, we are talking about melatonin, we're talking about some growth hormones. There is a lot of data. We cannot measure all of them with colorimetric tests. But we don't have to stay in this limitation. We will be expanding for sure. But there is one important criteria for us. It has to be at home. We don't want you to collect pee on a cuff, send it to a lab. We don't want that. And second, it has to be affordable. If it's going to be a hundred dollar a test, like nobody would want to do it and I don't want to sell it, I don't want to try to grab as much as money. But I want to scale this as big as possible. And third, the most important, it should be engaging and motivating. If we have these criteria, we can add anything that can come into our system.

I could see this being paired really well with the cgm. Are you familiar with the continuous glucose monitoring? So I think about my diet and I worked with a company called Nutrisense. They're one of our partners. And I really loved when I would eat certain foods, whether it be bean or rice. I did the N equals one test. I was so shocked at how some of these foods would spike my glucose and some of them would not. So I started playing around with food combining. Have you ever cross referenced data from a CGM with I have a diary.

I don't have the details. We can actually chat about it. I have a diary. Vivu. I actually, it got even crazier. I was also saliva testing, vivo testing and CGM and cross checking everything with a diary. I don't remember. I was so excited. I was like, detective, a CGM is the same thing. Actually. It's just I use, I don't know, maybe 10 batches for 15 days. 15 days. Now when I see a food, I can see the spike. Like it just, it just taught me that, please, by the way, introduce us with nutrients. We would love, love to talk and partner with them. We can create some amazing data that maybe is super competitive that no other company has.

Yeah, because, you know, when we're dehydrated, when we're under slept, it can affect our blood sugar just as much as food. You know, just as much as food. And people don't realize that. We'll link that below as well, you know, as we round out the podcast. I've been curious about this for a long time. Someone who is very technologically savvy, you know, you're the founder of a technology company. How do you define wellness? You know, wellness in my eye and in my heart is mental, physical, emotional, spiritual, financial. It's the amalgam of what I call the, the pentagon of wellness. All these different categories that we've signed up to be here on planet Earth, we have to have mastery in these categories. But from your lens, is it really about the technology or is it about technology teaching us how to be well? And then also, how do you define wellness? How do you live your life?

Well, it's simple. As for me, wellness is listening your body's voice, listening your mind's voice. Listen. If it's financial wellness, yes, like listening, actually maybe your bank account's voice. What is it telling you? What is it showing you? What are the trends? So just giving it, giving it, giving it some thought, giving it some interest. I think that's, that's what it is for me. And my health and balance is, is a, is such a big topic. I realized if, if the, if the whole is strong, if one element goes down, for example, I've been flying for days and I am sleepless. But I, I was extra careful to hydrate myself, to eat well, to breathe because my, my heart rate is right up always, it's so high. But if I make my breathing exercises, so if, if the hole is strong, even if, if a piece falls down, you can stand up strong. That's my approach. So I'm trying to always see everything as a holistic. It's not just about my vivo test results. Did I also walk enough? Did I also read enough? If I don't read every day some sort of book or some nice articles. I also feel I'm deprived. It's not sleep, it's not food, but my mind is deprived. It caused me unhappy, it results me as being unhappy and I eat bad stuff. It's just like a spiral. So, yeah, it's too holistic for me, I guess, like every element is important.

Well, you're definitely speaking our language and I totally agree. The tool and the intention, really, the intention behind the tool is so important because what I got from you was this curiosity about making sure that the whole is strong and then if one thing falls away, it's not the end of the world. You know, if you don't get enough sleep, then make sure you catch up on, on your sleep and don't make any poor decisions. At the bakery when the cupcake looks amazing, like, don't do that. You know, don't, don't go there. So I've really enjoyed this and I love this technology and I am going to be signing up to make sure that I'm properly hydrated because sometimes I do a lot of sauna. It's very hot here in Texas. For people like myself that live in really, really warm climates, it's important. We can't always go off of quote how we feel. Sometimes it's really important to have data. So we covered a lot of ground. Is there anything that you have not been asked on a podcast or is there anything about the technology or, or any of the biomarkers that possibly we missed?

I can just maybe highlight one more time that let's not forget, I think around 60% of Americans are not meeting their daily magnesium intake and it's 70% for calcium intake. So if you're not testing with vivo, it's fine. You don't have to test with vivo. But please be mindful of what you're eating as you're as well as you're counting calories. Try to count nutrients as well, because we're living longer. I'm gonna see over 100, probably, right? I'm 30 now. 90 something, easily. I will see, but I want to be healthy when I get there. I don't want to be, like, barely walking and suffering for decades. So these nutrient deficiencies are really, really, really important. You should keep an eye on. And thank you so much, Josh. It was so fun. Thank you.

Yes. I really enjoyed this. And like I said to everyone who stayed with us Here, it's Josh Trent.com vivo it's V I, V O O. And the code is, Josh, give this a test. It's 30% off. You really don't have anything to lose. You actually have everything to gain because you're going to know who you are from the inside out. So thank you, Mirai, for coming on the show. And until we see you again, the entire global community, we're wishing you and everyone else love and wellness. We'll see you again soon.

Sam.