Building a Better Future for Health & Performance

Our diagnosis of the problems in the health and performance space today and how to fix them.

Welcome to the rejuvenated Fount Blog. We’ll be sending out regular content and welcome any comments, requests, or suggestions via blog@fount.bio.

If you’re new to Fount, this article is an introduction to how we think about the health and performance world today and what we’re doing to improve it. You can learn more about the company on our website at www.fount.bio and on social at @FountBio, @AndrewHerrBio, and @TheClayMethod.

Diagnosis

Our society keeps getting sicker. There’s something wrong with our food. Our lifestyles are poisoning us. The medical system is failing, and trust in it is faltering. People just want to know what to eat, take, and do to live, feel, and perform like they want, but they don’t know where to turn. 

Most doctors only get a few hours of training on the most important areas for health, like nutrition and sleep, in all of medical school. They don't have strong incentives outside of prescribing drugs, and they’re stuck with only 5 minutes to spend with you. So, it’s no surprise that they push drugs or give you 10-second advice so generic it's useless. Even they hate what medicine has become!

Meanwhile, the most appealing messages on health are crafted to sell products, not help people. The internet is full of one size fits all recommendations, short-term fixes that cause long-term problems, and unrealistic ‘must do’ lists. 1000s of supplements and devices claim that they’ll cure your ills and boost your performance.

When we look at the state of society, it’s clear that the current products, information, and tools are not working. Why?

First, people really are different, so one-size-fits-all advice fails. With no apologies to the zealous influencers from vegan to carnivore and keto, none of these work for everyone; just because something worked for you doesn’t mean it is right for rest of us. I see each of these approaches help some people, hurt others, and change from helping to hurting over time for still others. The best approach will vary person to person and over time for each person. 

Second, despite this, most influencers stick to one size fits all because the best sales tactic is to become a guru and tell your followers that you have found the answer! This is much easier than being nuanced. It’s also difficult to convey enough nuance through short-form content to give your followers tools to figure it out themselves. And even if they could convey it, most influencers don’t have this knowledge themselves, so it’s no surprise that most of the health content we consume isn’t very helpful!

And third, most of the data we have today, at least in the way we receive it, is interesting, but ultimately not useful. If your sleep wearable says your deep and REM sleep were down last night, what should you do? If you didn’t intentionally change anything the day before or do something out of the norm, then there’s not much you can take from it about how to sleep better tomorrow. Often, wearables leave you with more questions than answers and ultimately just ‘neg’ people into feeling worse than they really are when they get a low score.

There are coaches and experts who can help work through these nuances, but the irony is that unless you’re an expert yourself, it’s difficult to tell who’s a charlatan. And even when you find the ‘good ones,’ their services are typically so sought after that they don’t have available appointments or charge rates that are inaccessible to all but the wealthiest clients.

But reading studies will surely show the way, right? Probably not. Very few people have the time to go deep enough in the scientific literature to handle the contradictory findings, sniff out the poorly run studies, figure out what to do with mouse data, and identify when scientists are spouting highly technical, but incorrect conclusions. 

Even if you do have the time and enjoy it, would you want to run your life, your company, or your marriage based on the average results of 50 other people, companies, or couples? Probably not. You want to take into account the unique attributes, preferences, advantages, and disadvantages of your specific situation. So, while studies of 50 people who aren’t you may give a sense of whether a drug, a practice, or a diet is better than a placebo on average for those people, the results do not tell you if it will work for you, let alone if it’s the best option for your body, your goals, and your lifestyle. Meanwhile, some of those tools that ‘didn’t work’ in studies were spectacularly effective, but only for a subset of the group. If something only works for 15% of the group studied, even if it works spectacularly well, it will typically show a negative result on average, but maybe you’re like the 15%!

Prescription

Thankfully, there is a way out of this morass: run experiments yourself, on yourself.

When researchers describe studies, they call the number of people in a study the “n” value. N=50 means 50 people participated in the study. When you run a study just on yourself, we call this an n=1 experiment. And the beauty of running n=1 experiments is that you’re no longer hoping a doctor knows what’s right, praying you’ve found the right influencer, or betting on the average results for other people. You’re seeing what works for you.

Today this is difficult to do today because it’s hard to know what to try at all and especially what to try first. It’s also inconvenient to run and track the results of experiments, but thankfully, these are solvable with curated knowledge and technology.

Validated protocols are the first piece. We’ve spent the last 4 years working 1-on-1 with clients to understand what goals people truly care about and assess protocols to find the ones people can run without disrupting their lives and that help a meaningful proportion of people. Based on this work, we have a curated repository of 100s of “high-ROI” protocols across nutrition, supplements, meditation, breathwork, sleep, light, temperature, exercise, recovery, and mindset, each with all the information you need to run it. No individual protocol works for everyone, but each protocol we validate has a good enough chance it will work if targeted properly, with a large enough benefit when it does, that the amount of effort required to run the experiment is worth it. And somewhere within our repository of protocols are the ones that will help you.

Targeting is the second piece. People need to know which protocols to run first and where to go from there, or many will get discouraged and derailed. We’ve gathered data to understand what protocols are most likely to work for you based on whatever data you bring, whether it’s blood work, wearables, interviews, self-report data, or all of these. There is a lot more work to do in this area, but we can already give you a great place to start and help you know where to go from there. And the beauty of better targeting experiments is that you get results faster. Most people talk about the benefits of personalized health in terms of better outcomes, but faster may be more important. People are busy and have limited attention spans, especially for things that don’t work. If we can help them see progress faster, this has huge implications for compliance and long-term benefits.

The third piece is making it easier to run, track, and analyze n=1 experiments. We have built a system that makes running experiments as easy as interacting with your task list or schedule. We’ve tied this directly into a system designed to collect data, ranging from sleep wearables to the weather outside to how you’re feeling, in as effortless and simple a way as possible, and the analysis layer is automated and easy to understand.

Thankfully, all three parts of this are right around the corner in the new Fount app and services we’re getting ready to launch. We’ve purpose-built it all to make it easy to run n=1 experiments, collect and analyze data, and to know where to go next, so you can feel better quickly.

Building an Operating System

N=1 experimentation based on well targeted, validated protocols with simple data collection and analysis is the cornerstone of an operating system to optimize longevity and performance. This is the vision for what we’re building at Fount. And it’s not just our team working towards this. Our customers are helping build it with us: their experiments are helping to train the algorithms that will make this operating system increasingly scalable, so millions of people can finally get access to real answers about what will help, quickly, without expensive coaches. We want everyone who can afford a couple of streaming services to have access to what currently requires an expert coach and thousands of dollars a month.

Our mission at Fount is to amplify human potential so people can build a better future for themselves, their families, their communities, and the world. Building the operating system to democratize n=1 experimentation is the path to get there. We’re early in the journey, but our path forward is clear. Thank you for joining us in our quest.

// Thanks to Clayton Kim for comments & suggestions.