# Putting individuals in the economic driver seat of their health Journey — Jean-Philippe Diel

- Channel: [Edge City](https://streameth.org/edge_city)
- Date: 2024-10-21
- Duration: 12:11
- Watch: https://streameth.org/watch/671608218f864ede039733ae
- Download: https://vod-cdn.lp-playback.studio/raw/jxf4iblf6wlsyor6526t4tcmtmqa/catalyst-vod-com/hls/ff3ck0cz7ve9fg9q/720p0.mp4

## Transcript

Yeah, this should be all right. How's everybody doing? Thank you. Some enthusiasm. Hi, my name is Jean-Philippe Diel. I'm the founder of Symbionic Labs and the Symbionic Foundation. I'm really delighted to be here today. I'm actually not a biotech or anything like that. I'm a consumer tech guy. What is a consumer tech guy doing here? Basically, I guess I started my life selling beer and then I fried people's brain with mobile phones. I wanted to start giving back and this is also my personal struggle with health and trying to fix myself and then Peter talked about different phases you provided me a perfect transition there because I feel like I've had a few tectonic shifts already I'm turning 55 this year and I'm the yo-yo guy I lose 30 kilos take them back lose 30 kilos take them back I've done these three times and as of yesterday I'm on one of those GLP-1 inhibitors, so hopefully this is going to sort of hack me forward so I can get back to an active lifestyle. But I want to convince you today that it's all about the data. And we talked about measuring in different ways. We talked about . How many of you are using wearables? Let's have a quick show of hands. Great. Any comments on how you feel about those and whether you feel they're providing you enough of a plan, maybe? Sleep parameter is always interesting. Boyang? I would say multiple drivers thaters that they disagree with. They disagree with each other. Data tracking in silos. We all agree, right? I also have been measuring stuff for years now, and one of my big frustrations is they don't agree with each other. I've been wearing Uri Ring, Ultra Human Ring, and Whoop. They trend towards sort of the same thing. And I tend to think that it's like, okay, because it's a consistent error and I can just follow one and it'll kind of help me. But actually, they're all trained on different data and they're all kind of, you know, there's no, what's the right truth? You know, where is the right information? Because nobody's, there's no institution to harmonize anything, right? So whoever comes out there with their algorithm and says, mine's better, that's the word of mouth, right? So I want to make the case for data in health and longevity, but I want to make the case for user-centric data. I think at the Symbionic Foundation, what we're wanting to build is an ecosystem for that sort of data lake, personal data lake, that you would actually be able to use to power personalized insights. I'm hearing a lot of different things in DeSci, and it's a great space to be in. I guess this is the first time I do this talk in front of a DeSci audience. Most of the other talks I gave were more generalistic audience. But there's great movements around aligning IP. There's great movements around aligning funding. There's great movements around, recently I've seen projects get funded around aligning consent. I have not heard user-centric initiatives as much. And I think this is missing. So this is my thesis today. But let's move on. The first question I want to ask is, does data really make a difference? So there's an OpenAI paper saying data is everything. And it was an allusion obviously to the transformer paper which said attention is everything. So whether or not you believe we're going to defeat aging or whether you're in this field for different flavors of longevity, my thesis is you can't do it without the data. And in this longevity sort of gold rush, I want to offer you the peak and axis of the longevity rush. If you think about the human body, everything is interconnected, right? But the approach we've got today is very siloed. We talked about that before. Everyone in healthcare is very familiar with this. Healthcare is basically seek care. It's basically very reactive and it's concentrating on actual symptoms, but it's not looking at the root cause or it's not looking enough at the root cause of things. So our bodies are very complex systems, right? They're very complex biological systems, and doctors specialize in specific areas. We don't really have a holistic perspective. It's not like we don't know that we need a holistic perspective. It's that it's very complicated. I mean, if you're familiar with, for example, the metabolic system, there's a beautiful map of all the chemical pathways. We understand the map. What we don't understand is why in some individuals things get expressed more and some get expressed less in other individuals. So the challenge is really about understanding these systems and maintaining sort of long-term health. Now, we always fall back to the simple stuff. And we know nutrition, exercise, mental health are the simple stuff that's in our control that we can actually do something about. So we talk about the food we consume, we talk about, you know, exercise levels, we talk about mental health levels. But like Peter said, there's different phases, and it gets harder at every tectonic shift. Like I know for a fact that right now, the reason I'm on a GLP-1 drug since yesterday, it's because I'm getting skeletal problems. I'm too heavy. So I want to be active, but I just herniated a disc. So how do I get to the next level if I don't kind of hack this and then start getting on the loop? Because three times in was okay the first time, better the second time, and it's harder and harder. When you want to understand things in medicine today, you do what? You do a clinical trial, right? And that's the gold standard. So we're isolating factors, having a control group, and comparing. Now, this is great, but we all have only tools that are like a window on something. Blood tests, scans, MRIs, et cetera. The current test methods are limiting. They provide a snapshot. Now, thankfully, we have more and more wearable device. And that's where, in some ways, we can talk about the sort of merger that's happening out there between the fitness and wellness industry and the healthcare industry. between the fitness and wellness industry and the healthcare industry. Because we have more and more continuous monitoring data, CGMs, IoT devices, and we're moving on from snapshots to ongoing health insights. Now, we're also getting better and better monitoring devices. We're having wearables, and now we're going to have implantables or ingestibles. This is the next revolution that's happening out there. And so I'm predicting a Cambrian explosion of health devices and sources. And, of course, this is happening at the same time as we're having an AI revolution and that we're able to go from more reliable data sources, enhanced AI-driven analysis, and approaching what I call the health singularity. Now, the problems I have with that is this. We're moving from a situation where we're looking at platform economies that are basically asking you to surrender all your data, and I'm not seeing enough of what's in the right where I want you to nurture all your data and I'm not seeing enough of what's in my right where I want you to nurture and grow. What do I mean by that? Well, right now in the platform economies and all the different manufacturer wearables are in this, so I'm talking Apple, I'm talking Google, I'm talking Garmin, I'm talking all these people, right? They just want to hoard all the data. They just, one thesis is scroll down, tick the box, surrender your data. Why? Because we're going to help you. We're going to cure cancer. We're going to do this, that. What do you get in exchange? At the moment, with a few minor exceptions, is mostly death by dashboard. Like, I look at dashboards and this is going up, this is going down. Okay, great. What do I do? Like what do I change? I know my sleep is improving. It's kind of really intuitive. I'm not getting clear data. And the reason I'm not getting clear data is because the data is everywhere. I've got data with wearable companies. I've got data with doctors. I've got genomic data with another company, et cetera. It's not coming all in one place. And until it does, I am convinced that we're not going to crack it. So my thesis today is if we want to nurture and grow something, we have to move on from a platform economy to user-centric economy. So we call it protocol network economy. That's not a term that I coined myself. This was Chris Dixon from A16Z in his latest book. And that's why we're using Web3 to build our platform in Symbionic Foundation. It's because all these AI data-hungry scenarios that want you to surrender the data, we need another architecture. We need an architecture where you have personal control over data sharing, you have personal control on privacy, on monetizing your data, getting rewarded for it. If we put the user at the center and we make them an economic actor of their own health, we're actually transforming completely the model. And so this can also only be done in a collaborative way and an open source way. This, for me, I call Linux for health. You know, we want to be the middleware layer. So what we've built on today is that middleware layer and a health wallet. The health wallet basically helps you authenticate into other services. It guarantees that everything funnels down to you. Now, of course, the system clips the ticket on all the transactions. That's how it funds itself. But it's a community-driven system. And the user makes most of the money out of that and drives all the benefits out of that in terms of personalized insights. So the goal number one is to help users hack themselves, understand their biology better. And we know we fail, we keep failing. So that takes in control all that sort of behavioral psychology side of things as well. So that's why there's a reward mechanism, gamification mechanism, and then you can monetize your data anonymously and privately. So that's kind of what we're about. We believe that if we achieve this and it's truly community-owned, we actually don't want to do this alone. So it's a call for partnerships as well. We believe we can actually build the biggest biobank, the ground up. Like every single user walk around with their phone or their nap and the health wallet inside can actually contribute to science. Thank you very much. Any questions?