How to Biohack Your Burnout With AI

Jeremy Grater (00:00)
Can AI spot your health problems faster than a doctor?

all know the grind, long hours, too much stress and that feeling of burnout that never seems to go away.

medicine often just slaps a bandaid on the symptoms, leaving the root cause unaddressed.

But what if there's a better way to get to the bottom of what's really going on with your body?

health tracking can pinpoint hidden health issues, how to use your own biometric information to have more productive conversations with your doctor,

and find out which simple lifestyle changes can make a massive difference in your mental and physical well-being.

that information you're tracking into something useful.

Jeremy Grater (00:37)
This is BroBots, formerly known as The Fit Mess. We're the podcast that tries to help you use AI to safely manage your health and wellbeing. Our guest today is Garrett Wood. Garrett runs Gnosis Therapy and has a pretty unique backstory. Multiple head accident that would make most people swear off anything with wheels,

But instead of accepting the medical shrug of the we don't know, he turned to AI to decode his own health puzzle and it worked. Chat GPT helped diagnose what doctors missed. His blood work proved the AI right. And now he helps other guys stop guessing about their health and start optimizing it.

Garrett, that's the short version of the story. Why don't you fill in some gaps for us?

Garrett Wood (01:19)
Yeah, so I've had a few head injuries, ⁓ pretty decent ones snowboarding, and I've always had a hard time trying to maintain like healthy testosterone levels. so, you know, chatting with trying to get some DNA, what's going on with chat, ⁓ went through and actually through that process, it was like, well, if your testosterone levels are this and this, and this is your history, it could be coming from ⁓ hypo...

gonadism, I think is what they call that. And there's primary, secondary. And so because of my head injuries, they speculated that it was this. So I was able to go and actually reach out to a provider and kind of endocrinologist and walk them through my history, my symptoms. And then they were able to get some blood test order. We confirmed the suspicions that AI had for me, which was pretty wild. ⁓ They seemed very skeptical at first. And so we went through the blood work and then intervention, then came back. And then they're like, okay.

Jason: An AI Companion (01:47)
Yeah.

Garrett Wood (02:15)
All right, so hopefully there'll be other people who'll pave the way for some doctors to be less skeptical of the AI sleuthing out there that's going on.

Jason: An AI Companion (02:22)
You

remember the biomarkers that it actually pulled out in as far as the blood work goes, was it like looking at different testosterone types where they're like Billy Rubin was there things like that that are actually showing potential issues there?

Garrett Wood (02:33)
So was overall testosterone free. ⁓ I forget if it's LH or but like the, yeah. And then, yeah, free versus fine. And so that was pretty interesting. And then with my history ⁓ of head injuries, they're thinking shearing force on the pituitary gland.

Jason: An AI Companion (02:38)
Yeah, yep, free versus yeah.

Garrett Wood (02:50)
And then that would signal the secondary piece. The

Jason: An AI Companion (02:51)
OK. Yeah.

Garrett Wood (02:54)
hard part is AI, I've actually been in a motorcycle accident where if you looked at it, it looked like what someone had taken a sledgehammer and slammed it into the top of the gas tank, ⁓ right where actually my, ⁓ my genitonia hits the gas tank. the AI was trying to decipher, is it the head injury from snowboarding or is it the actual trauma to your genitals during a motorcycle accident? ⁓ So it seems to be coming from the pituitary gland.

Jason: An AI Companion (03:07)
No. Right.

Garrett Wood (03:20)
But that was pretty fascinating to

Jason: An AI Companion (03:22)
Yeah.

Garrett Wood (03:22)
kind of work through that with someone. I don't think a doctor, you'd ever have the time to sift through, you know, two hours of trying to get through the nuts and bolts of that. ⁓ I wouldn't know if my insurance would cover it or what that medical bill would cost out of pocket to try to do that work.

Jason: An AI Companion (03:22)
And

did you have multiple blood tests after that to go back through and validate what the effects would be?

Garrett Wood (03:42)
Yeah, so we went back, we did full blood panel. It came back pretty low, but I'd taken the blood sample about 10 o'clock. So we went back and actually did it even earlier. So the first I could get in for the testing was at 8 a.m. So even then it was substantially like 50 points higher on the total. I forget what the units of measurement are.

But that wasn't enough to really do anything. So we were looking up really low testosterone, 42, and it was like in the 300s, which is pretty low. And I'd had a history of that earlier, even when I was 23. And so it was pretty shocking to kind of see that. ⁓

Jason: An AI Companion (04:08)
Yeah.

Garrett Wood (04:17)
We went back, we did a little ⁓ tamoxafil and kind of tamoxifen intervention and it went back to 650 within three weeks.

Jason: An AI Companion (04:24)
Wow.

Garrett Wood (04:26)
So that was a really hyper response to that. And I was having some puffiness in my chest and some like gynecomastia. ⁓ Nothing hard in there, but definitely tenderness and like putting on like my messenger bag, brushing, like putting on a seatbelt. I'm like, what is, this is not a normal feel. What is this feeling?

⁓ hypersensitive breast tissue. I'm like, okay, that's not a normal thing. ⁓ But that all resolved within four weeks, I think, actually. So pretty,

Jason: An AI Companion (04:52)
Yeah. Wow.

Garrett Wood (04:56)
pretty significant.

Jeremy Grater (04:58)
you do a lot of work now helping others because of the situations you've been through. Are you able to incorporate any sort of AI into that work? Are there things that you're seeing that are helping men? You work a lot with burnout. Are there things you're seeing that are helping men deal with burnout that can be enhanced by the technology as it advances?

Garrett Wood (05:17)
Yeah, it's been pretty interesting to kind of work with people, ⁓ taking their blood tests and throwing it through chat and seeing what they come up with. When you're working with burnout, there's a lot of different reasons. mean, burnout specifically defined as like a workplace issue, but it doesn't just stop there. It bleeds over into the rest of life. And if you can't get to sleep at night because you're thinking about work and you can't ever kind of get out of that chronic stressed state, everything else kind of unfolds really quickly. And so it does become like a cascading effect. ⁓

biopsychosocial piece of that. So I try to bring in as many different practitioners as that client presents with issues. So through a little assessment, we're like, okay, great. Maybe it's a conflict with you your boss or you and your team. Maybe it's a conflict with the budgets that year and you got to do a new sales process. But maybe it's something going on mentally, emotionally about how sensitive you are to those triggers. Or maybe it's something that you've gone through ⁓ physically like I had in my TBI injuries. But it also could be nutritional, could be something as...

benign as like sleep apnea and getting that kind of checked out. So it's really interesting to be able to have them take their symptoms, their blood work and run that through chat and then ⁓ sitting down with them and kind of going through and troubleshooting it with them. It's been fun.

Jason: An AI Companion (06:26)
It's funny, I actually I have sleep apnea

I have multiple high stress jobs. spent years in the road to 85 % travel. And I definitely I'm a bit older, I'm 50. So I went through kind of my whole break when I was 40. And I had to do something very similar. And you talk about the cost and expensive it. Yes, it was $850 of blood tests that I went through these things. They tested my testosterone, all of my all my chemical markers, all my mineral traces and came back and they basically said, you need this sleep lesson eat better. It's like,

Garrett Wood (06:29)
Mmm. Mmm.

Mm.

Jason: An AI Companion (06:59)
Okay, thanks. I think we knew that. getting to the level of actually going through and finding enough data to say, you know, here are the protocols we're going to look at. not necessarily TRT, but looking at taking out their supplements, other component pieces. had a naturopath that I worked with very closely. And, you know, we've slowly brought that up over time and fixed a lot of the, I guess, general metabolic state issues. How much of, I guess I'm looking at the kind of executive piece that you're looking at.

Garrett Wood (07:21)
Mm.

Jason: An AI Companion (07:26)
How many executives out there are actually in this level of physiological and psychological ⁓ distress that they ⁓ either just don't know about or I guess it's an ego thing for me. Like I'm tough enough. I can do this. I can keep flying. I mean, I'm doing it right now. I just got home at one o'clock in the morning from a flight from New York. I took my wife to the airport at four a.m. and I've worked enough for three hours to sleep, went to CrossFit, performed terribly. ⁓ And now I'm here doing a podcast.

And I know better. I've been through the downside and I keep doing it and I keep putting my soul to this ringer and I'm a bit better. I'll sleep more. I'll get some more pieces in. ⁓ How much success have you seen people have post two, three, four, five years and adjusted these patterns and behaviors to make sure they don't get themselves back in these cycles?

Garrett Wood (07:58)
Yeah.

Yeah, and so if you've burned out once, you're more susceptible to it multiple times, right? Because it's a lifestyle thing, which is driven by choices, right? But it's choices that are really driven by priorities.

You have to maintain relationship with your wife if you want to have a good relationship. You have to maintain your health. You have to maintain resources. You know, most people didn't have to work and they didn't have to have a family. They could dedicate their entire life. I think a lot of times we think of mindfulness as like the old guy on the mountain who's like somewhat of a hermit. He's got his beard down to his like belly button and he's just out there meditating all day. And like good for him, I guess, right? Like that's not the life I would want to have. It wouldn't be stimulating enough for me. Maybe I need more mindfulness. I don't know, but.

Jason: An AI Companion (08:57)
Sure.

Garrett Wood (08:59)
I don't think he actually benefits

from all of his skill of mindfulness. I think a little bit of that for someone else can go a long way in between board meetings, in between when they're getting off the flights or traveling. ⁓ And I do think we can think of it as performance improvement to get through that. And if we go that route, it's not so much the stimulus, it's your recovery from it that actually improves the performance.

And so you could be hard charging. You can go through a nice 24, 48, 72 hour period of like really high intensity and you can recover from that. You just can't do that all day, every day.

Jason: An AI Companion (09:30)
Yeah, yeah,

yeah, it's keeping making time for you to actually recover and recoup, which I'm taking a nap after this. To try to make sure you get this. Yeah, yeah. No. So along those lines, ⁓ there are several different wearable technologies out there these days that can go through and track multiple different biomarkers. So I mean, there's ones that will go through and check hydration levels. There's a million different sleep trackers out there.

Garrett Wood (09:36)
Yeah. Perfect. There you go. work. Knaps really work. Yeah.

Jeremy Grater (09:37)
You

Jason: An AI Companion (09:54)
There's a whole bunch of things that will track blood oxygen, pulse ox, and then even like CGM that's going through and tracking those pieces. And I think somebody is working on a way to start tracking, ⁓ not glucose, the other side of this, ketones. Being able to have ketone wearables that go through and track these different component pieces, especially looking at metabolic distress and high chargers who go out drinking with partners for long periods of time. Are you doing any active work incorporating these in the data analysis piece that you're looking at?

Garrett Wood (10:14)
Yeah.

Jason: An AI Companion (10:23)
or is that still kind of on the fringe for you?

Garrett Wood (10:27)
No, I mean that readiness score that the Oura ring gets for people, I think it's really important, right? ⁓ There's old school manual ways to kind of test this. ⁓ They call it monotasking, which is kind of interesting. But if you didn't get a good night's sleep and you're like, am I going to go to CrossFit today? Am I going to try to go for my PR? am going to take it easy and just like do some mobility and kind of market and pick the lightest weights? Nothing prescribed, right? I'm not going to set my friend time today. It's okay. ⁓

Jason: An AI Companion (10:29)
Yeah.

Yeah. Right.

Garrett Wood (10:54)
If you wake up and you want to see if you should push or not, you could do the Oura ring, which is great, but there's another old school test which is like kind of used by performance

athletes, athletic trainers back in the day. It'd be standing on one foot, taking your head and turning it side to side, humming a tune like happy birthday or something like that, and then like moving your toe in a circle or counter circle. If you can do all of those things and it's seven different skills manually that you can do, you're going to perform at your best that day, cognitively, emotionally, mentally.

If you're down to like two, three, or four, hey, maybe take the day off from the gym. Or if you go, make sure it's like you're gonna spend more time in the sauna, or you're gonna spend more time in the hot tub, or you're gonna be just sitting there drinking your nutrients, thinking through the emotions or whatever's showing up for you. It's pretty cool.

Jason: An AI Companion (11:37)
And we should definitely put a link to

that in the show because ⁓ I could use that as opposed to trying to wear my wearables all the time.

Jeremy Grater (11:40)
Yeah. I was going to say, I

Garrett Wood (11:44)
Yeah.

Jeremy Grater (11:45)
wear my wearable every day. you know, I check it every morning. You know, I wear a ring. Same thing. I'm looking at that readiness score. And one of the first thoughts I have every day is, is that right? Because it's either like it says, like that's the best sleep anybody's ever slept ever. Or did you even sleep, bro? And, you know, I'm kind of measuring it against how do I actually feel? And sometimes the two do not match. And

Garrett Wood (11:55)
Hmm.

Yeah.

Jeremy Grater (12:10)
I mean, even on the days that it says I'm ready to rock, like I'll, I'll wake up. I feel exhausted. I feel like shit. And I'm like, okay, well it says I can do it. I'm going to go do it. And in contrast, there's days when I wake up and go, ⁓ man, I got it. I'm, I feel great. This is going to be awesome. I'm going to hit my goals this week. And it's like taking, you know, where's the couch go lay down. You need a break. So how do I know who to trust? mean, this test sounds like it would, you know, would definitely help help weigh the argument one way or another, but how much do you trust the data?

from wearable.

Garrett Wood (12:42)
Yeah, and it's a great question because they're not foolproof, right? They're getting better every day, the sensors are getting smaller, they're getting more of them in there, but you do have to kind of match that to your own intuition about your body. No one is an expert in you except for you, so you know what you feel like on your best. And they can't kind of pick that up. Unfortunately, they are trying to correlate some of the biometric data with mental-emotional distress or lack of distress, where they're asking you to check in and how do you feel in this moment?

because if they can kind of see, you know, whether your glucose levels are high or low or what's going on. One of my favorite things coming up with the glucose monitors is I had a lady who, every time she went to work, she would have like, she'd be stuck in traffic, this is pre-COVID, so lots of driving, lots of people on the road, and she would get stuck in traffic same time every day, and she would have a little panic attack on her way into the office. And so we're trying to figure this out. She says she loves her job. She says she has a good relationship with her boss. Okay.

Nutrition's okay, she's got breakfast in her system. She ended up getting a constant glucose monitor and every time she

Jason: An AI Companion (13:43)
You

Garrett Wood (13:44)
got, we're in California, so it's like the 405 and the 10, just passed the pulpit over there, there's like a crushing traffic. She thought maybe she was developing anxiety to the traffic because she was so frustrated by it. Very well could be, but the constant glucose monitor came back, her sugar was crashing. So her caffeine was dropping off in her system, the sugar in her caffeine was finally...

It spiked and then she was crashing. And so she had this very visceral sense of impending doom and she had no reason to have it. So she was looking around, okay, what am I experiencing? Experiencing a car in traffic. Maybe it's that. She's like, I'm thinking about the case I have at work and my boss and my work I to do and the email that I haven't answered. Maybe it's that. But when we have this very real physical experience, we don't necessarily know where it's coming from. And so whatever we're experiencing, we start associating it with.

And so some people will develop a fear or a phobia that way to cars, to elevators, to strange things that no one would ever think of. And it's actually just because their glucose is dropping consistently enough associated with that consistent environmental trigger that they're like, oh, it must be this thing over here. Interesting. So that was really cool to be able to see that bio. So

Jason: An AI Companion (14:52)
Yeah. Yeah.

Garrett Wood (14:55)
you can't lean one way, can't lean the other. You got to be able to do both and troubleshoot.

Jason: An AI Companion (15:00)
And full disclosure, I've got a little med tech startup that I run and we take CGM data and we take wearable data and we overlay them, put them in a time series graph and look at the same pieces and you can overlay your nutrition pieces. But we saw that too. Like we saw the regular cortisol spike in the morning pump up everybody and everyone's glucose jumps up to the roof. And they go and they have a cup of coffee. ⁓ They move, typically speaking in the morning, they work out and then all their glycogen reserves are sucked into their liver.

And then they go and sit in the car and it's like, battery just powers all the way down. And I, I never thought about people creating associations of I feel bad. This thing is stressful. I must be developing a condition or an anxiety related response to it, but that makes perfect sense. Like, so many of the things that we deal with are just, are physiological triggers that we just don't understand. Yeah, that's, that's really cool.

Garrett Wood (15:51)
There's,

yeah, there's a guy, ⁓ Alan Jeffers, Dr. Alan Jeffers, he's out of MIT. He's got a book called The Biological Mind, and he really challenges what we typically would think about ⁓ about mental health, where he talks about it essentially as an extension of physical health. And so he's fully invested in the biopsychosocial model. I would argue that he's mostly on the bio side, because that's an argument all the way through. ⁓ But it can go the other way as well.

Jason: An AI Companion (15:57)
Hmm

Garrett Wood (16:20)
We can have social things that stress us out. I had a CGM there for a little bit just out of curiosity. It's affordable tech. like, hey, might as well check. Type 2 diabetes runs in my family. I feel like I'm healthy, but who knows? Let's find out. And everyone responds a little bit different based upon their gut and whatever else. Their sleep, how well hydrated they are. So I was wearing one, and I got in a fight with my partner. And later, I was looking at the data, and we don't fight.

Very often I'm very lucky that way. So if it was always like that, I wouldn't have been able to see this. Yeah. But when I went back and looked at the data that day, within 10 minutes after that fight started, my blood sugar went through the roof. It just like skyrocketed the data. It was wild to see that fight or flight response actually in real data. You're like, ⁓ this is like social stress is very real biologically on the other side.

Jason: An AI Companion (16:49)
We need another podcast and how you do that

Yeah.

Garrett Wood (17:15)
So I just get really fascinated and encouraged when you're able to see this data, how it overlaps with the biopsychosocial model, no matter where, it's all one piece, they're all one system working together to create your experience. It's just cool to able to see the data, you know? ⁓ It's a little geeky, but it's fun.

Jeremy Grater (17:31)
It is

and the thing that that I always get stuck on when we talk about these things and how game changing they can be and I know there's talk about trying to you know, get some device of some kind on every you know, person in North America. The trick is, you can have the information but if the if the behavior doesn't change, it means nothing like you're you're very well aware of how crappy you're treating your body and how crappy you're living your life.

Garrett Wood (17:43)
Yeah.

Jason: An AI Companion (17:44)
Human being.

Jeremy Grater (17:57)
But the actual motivation to change, how do you actually take that step? How do you work with your clients to take that data and incorporate it into something that will move the needle and really turn things around for them?

Garrett Wood (18:12)
I think people want to change, but I think they get, I think everybody wants to change. I do think that everybody kind of even knows some really good ideas about how to get started. ⁓ But there's a reason why they do what they do. It serves a purpose for them. ⁓ Even if they don't know, like even smoking a cigarette serves a purpose. Hey, I gotta get away from this environment for a bit. I gotta say bye to everybody. I'm gonna go outside. I get five minutes myself where no one can bother me.

I'm not expected to do anything. And then I can sit there and take some long slow deep breaths. I get nicotine, which boosts my brain, nice little neurotransmitter, so I can feel more focused on whatever I was thinking about. And I'm not bombarded by a bunch of stuff. With people with like sensory sensitivity stuff, where they're overwhelmed in an office and they're getting stuck on a cognitive problem where they're just like hitting their low and their executive functioning, that is like a really tasty way to create a significant change and like a pattern interrupts that they can come back and now be more focused.

Is cigarette the best way to do that? I don't know. You know, it's an incidental one that definitely works and it's worked for a long enough period of their life. Can we make it better? Sure. But I don't think taking that solution away from them is actually gonna be lasting beneficial behavioral change at first. And I think that's where people get stuck in knowing that they should do something but not wanting to because it's not taking away the good, fun, healthy stuff that works for people because now their life actually sucks worse.

they're taking away a really good solution that they've been able to rely on and now they have nothing? Oof, that's not improving their wellbeing. In the long run, it's good natured, it's like, well, in tension, but in the short run, until that change sticks, it's not actually helpful. It's actually making it harder to be them that day. And if they're going through a really hard time in their life for whatever reason, it's gonna make it even harder to change.

Jason: An AI Companion (19:59)
And another piece, like, how do you trust and interpret the data that you have from the signals that are coming towards you? So if you're getting bad interpretation of signal data, you might be doing these things that you think are going to be life changing. But ultimately speaking, if they're making you feel worse and you don't know why,

That's a demotivator. I mean, it's, walking this line. I guess along those same lines, ⁓ most people don't have time to sit there and spend and filter through their data sets. And then not to mention go through and try to understand cross correlation of time series data sets over a protracted period of time. And then trying to understand what all the other biomarkers and blood markers mean in interpretation of that. AI can obviously play a significant, I guess human augmented relationship with that data.

So we can actually understand those things, you know, maybe not at a physician level, but at least from the perspective that we can feel more informed. What are some of the prompts that you're using with AI to try to actually interpret this data in a more effective and meaningful way? And are those things that you actually share with your clients? Yeah.

Garrett Wood (21:03)
Yeah, so put together a little one pager for like blood results, right? Where it's like talk to your doctor because they are the expert. Okay, extract as much information as possible about your symptoms and the tests

as you can from this person. Okay, so now that you have like four more minutes left, right? Because that's all that you hang out more with a nurse than you do. You're the physician, right? Just like you're hanging out with a receptionist more than you are, you know, and our medical system is tough here in the States for that. So this is honestly why there is so much interest in this other stuff.

Jason: An AI Companion (21:14)
The doctor, right? Yeah.

Garrett Wood (21:32)
is because there are people that are motivated. They know what they're experiencing isn't optimal and they're frustrated. And so they're trying to actively seek change. And it's much easier to take the time on your own and be able to correlate the data with something that can correlate all of the studies that have been out there. And so the idea is like, hey, here's my blood markers. What are these usually mean? High, medium, low. What are things that you see as the outliers? Okay, great. What are the possible further tests you could do? And then the question becomes,

Jason: An AI Companion (21:48)
you

Garrett Wood (22:02)
I have all of these symptoms. Is there any way that these might be correlated or not with some of these markers? And that's enough to kind of get whoever AI system you're using to be chatting well enough that then you can actually have somebody to go and speak to your doctor more informed about. And a lot of doctors have messaging app now. So you can type those questions in really specifically. And I think for doctors, when they have that and they can read it, it actually triggers something in their mind where they're focusing in on, they've already done a lot of the pre-framing work forms. So now they can get really quick and be like, great question.

Jason: An AI Companion (22:18)
Yeah.

Garrett Wood (22:32)
Here's this two sentence answer. And now it's enough for the client to go back and have that continued conversation ⁓ with themselves, essentially, and this huge nice database in a language that they understand. And a lot of people, they were starting to record their doctor's visits just so they can go back, take that text and type it in to be like, hey, explain this to me at whatever grade level I need to understand. I five-year-old understanding of it? Am I 10-year-old? Am I 15-year-old? Am I 25-year-old understanding?

Because a lot of the language is what gets people like misunderstanding of what's happening and they don't even know how to take that data and interpolate it into a way where it's meaningful change for themselves.

Jason: An AI Companion (23:03)
Yeah.

Jeremy Grater (23:10)
Well, like you said, there's pressure in that moment to it is you're in there for four minutes or whatever it is, and you're just trying to like absorb whatever is quickly and like, try and think of what questions I mean, it's a firestorm of information typically, where you're like in a stressful situation trying to be respectful of their time, they're trying to brush out the door to the next thing. That's a brilliant idea to capture that and then try to use the AI to interpret what do I need to take away from from this brief conversation?

Jason: An AI Companion (23:13)
All right.

Garrett Wood (23:35)
Yeah, and what

else could it be, right? Let's get creative with this, right? Yeah.

Jeremy Grater (23:37)
Yeah. Yeah.

Jason: An AI Companion (23:39)
And also

kids make sure you check with your state and local laws to make sure that those conversations are allowed to be recorded Yes, yeah

Jeremy Grater (23:43)
Yes. Yeah, typically you just need to ask, but definitely,

but, speaking of that, I mean, there's also lot of concern about, you know, sharing this kind of blood work data, like personal health information with these big AI tools. you, are you concerned about that? What, what, what safeguards do you take to protect your, the folks you work with?

Jason: An AI Companion (23:54)
with the AI.

Garrett Wood (24:02)
I am out there raw dogging the data, unfortunately. Yeah, that's unfortunate. It really is. I'm a big believer in privacy and I think like it's, we don't have any. And I think that's like a real problem. ⁓ I do think that that is something that I'm not in a position to advocate for as much as possible. Unfortunately, I'm a much more convenient person and I am focused on health and wellness and my mental and emotional experience. So in the

Jason: An AI Companion (24:05)
Bye.

Jeremy Grater (24:07)
Hahaha!

Garrett Wood (24:32)
current state, I've had to choose between those two values and yeah, data privacy lost, unfortunately. So I'm out there. Yeah. Yeah. But then I get, you know, those headlines where it's like, what the biggest hack and all your data is leaked anyway. So I'm like, okay, well, I guess it didn't really matter. It was already out there. I missed the boat. Maybe I could start over now, but yeah, I'm not sure who has my DNA information. I'm sure it's some database somewhere, a few of them at least now.

Jeremy Grater (24:39)
It often does, it often does for the sake of convenience for sure.

Jason: An AI Companion (25:00)
It's definitely been sold a few times, I'm sure, but I think we all have. Along those same lines, the US specifically, insurance companies themselves,

⁓ do you seem to be very interested in collecting more and more of our biometric data and biomarkers and more of the interpretation of this data seems to be happening by people that are set up there to deny claims. ⁓ how much risk and exposure do you think there are for people that go through and actually track this information and then choose not to do anything with it and allow what may be a potential, ⁓ catastrophic genetic abnormality that they're more prone to.

now becomes used against them by these insurance companies to deny coverage and fight clients. Is that anything that you're actually actively looking at or worried about? Yeah. ⁓

Garrett Wood (25:49)
That sounds like a great bill to be written and put into law. That actually sounds actionable, right? Like, hey, you cannot deny claims based upon this. And then now everybody can go get it and not have to worry about that, right? That sounds easy enough to consolidate and have some protections around, because we're talking about specific policies that they can or cannot deny.

But I do think that people have been collecting information in insurance companies for a long time. Kaiser Permanente did that big A study originally where they were like, hey, these people

whoever they are, using our services a lot across like cardiovascular type 2 diabetes, the more sick days in general, like more higher cardiovascular disease, stress response, all these lifestyle things. What's going on? And they would interview them and they're like, do you smoke? They're like, yeah, sure. But even after they controlled for all of those normal low lying fruit, smoking, drinking, they still were using the services at a higher rate than average. And they were trying to figure out what's going on. And that's how they came up with that 10 question questionnaire. Have you been neglected?

Did you live with someone who was incarcerated? ⁓ Did you separate? Did you live with parents that were separated? Were you abused? Were you neglected? Were you sexually abused, right? But that study, I think, in itself is really fascinating, which was initiated by Kaiser Permanente Insurance Company. And they have access to data in a way that no one else does. And for us to be able to now understand, unlike a mental, emotional, psychological, developmental level, that those incidences at a young age carry over for the entire lifetime of you as a...

as a person unless it's taken care of and treated, we wouldn't have that insight had Kaiser not had access to that data. So I'm not so much worried about them having data. I'm much more concerned with how they choose to use it to maximize profits and shareholders' values. And yeah, yeah. The insights ⁓ excite me more than the other part kind of turns me off. So that's my personal balance on it, right? Like I'm not a policymaker, so.

Jason: An AI Companion (27:32)
Yeah, the total lack of guardrails. That's my concern.

Garrett Wood (27:47)
Not my job, but...

Jeremy Grater (27:47)
Sure,

Jason: An AI Companion (27:47)
Very fair.

Jeremy Grater (27:50)
I have sort of the same question, but in two different fields to sort of end things on. And basically, what is sort of the big takeaway for anybody who is considering using AI

to sort of manage the different things you help folks with, maybe primarily. And then...

I guess, parallel to that, getting away from AI. What are some simple things that you often rely on to help folks start to make those behavioral changes that actually do move the needle for their burnout issues?

Garrett Wood (28:22)
Yeah, so with AI, you could literally give it like a 24. You could give it, if you have biometric data, you can share it. And you could ask for like very clear click and clear interventions and it can provide them for you. But you probably already know that. You probably already know you should be sleeping more. You probably already know you probably be drinking more water, having more vegetables. Is it enough to move the needle? And I think that's the hard part is people don't know, okay, if I eat three extra servings of vegetables a day, how long before I can see the change in my mental health?

physical well-being. And I don't think we're really bad at those types of feedback systems versus like gambling. You're like, cool, pull the slot machine. Nope. Okay. Let's go again. It's like a really quick feedback mechanism. Right. And so I do think that when people have a way to create more feedback sooner using a wearable, they're actually able to see that, which I think is really beneficial. ⁓ And then interpreting that data to make it actionable is great. Cause now you can go to AI and be like, me some

Jeremy Grater (29:03)
Right.

Garrett Wood (29:19)
ideas. Okay cool, let me implement them. Let me try a little experiment that's not terrible. Maybe I go out and take my cigarette break but instead of smoking a whole cigarette I smoke half and I do push-ups the rest of the time. I don't know. Whatever works for that person, right? There's, they got an extra... There.

Jason: An AI Companion (29:31)
I'm gonna see the pushes with the cigarette in the mouth like that's

Jeremy Grater (29:34)
Yeah, but simultaneously.

Let's get efficient here and do both at the same time.

Jason: An AI Companion (29:37)
I'm not

saying I may have been drunk in Barcelona doing that at Mobile World Congress in 2013, but I may have been drunk in Barcelona at Mobile World Congress doing that in 2013.

Jeremy Grater (29:41)
Ha ha ha.

Garrett Wood (29:43)
There we go.

There you go. Reminds me of the old school pictures of the cyclist on the Tour de France, they're just like, cigarette out their mouth, just like, still smoking.

Jason: An AI Companion (29:51)
Yes, exactly. I must keep going.

Eating Brie on the way, it's amazing. There's no water, only champagne on the route, so enjoy.

Garrett Wood (30:00)
Yeah, appetite suppressing. I don't know, you know, whatever. ⁓

enjoy carb

loading at its finest right there. Yeah. ⁓ but with that opportunity to put your intervention with AI and then having the wearable device to give you that feedback, it tightens that loop down really quick, faster than any doctor could, right? Which is kind of cool, because then it's encouraging, because you run an experiment, it can be appropriate to you, and then you can be like, hey, no, yes, no, was it worth it? And I think that's what we need more of to make lifestyle interventions more effective, instead of being like, here's a good idea.

Jeremy Grater (30:08)
Thank

Garrett Wood (30:33)
or like here's a very specific idea, let me modify it for myself so I can make sure it actually aligns with my values and my things I can choose to do, and then did it work or not. And the tighter we can get those experiments, the easier it is to maintain your own motivation. Yeah.

Jeremy Grater (30:46)
Yeah, absolutely.

Jason: An AI Companion (30:48)
it's almost like we have to start encouraging people to be biohackers and maybe not use CRISPR to go through an altered.

DNA, but I going through and making these small changes, moving the stigma around the idea and the concept that you can go through and actually be in charge of your own health, I think is, it's huge, especially because in Western medicine, we're not taught that we're just taught that doctors are the authority. ⁓ Do you advocate being your own authority and looking at these pieces and having multiple different doctors and multiple different signals, or do you work with kind of a specialist and then do your own interpretations?

Garrett Wood (31:22)
Yeah, so I encourage all the above, right? There's no fight here, right? Yes, we are all on the same team here. ⁓ People are living longer than ever. They use some of the treatments for medical stuff just to watch it because they're probably going to die before it affects them. Like that was, that's not bad standard of care because if you do intervene and you do cause harm, you could speed up that process because you could actually be doing something that's harmful for people. ⁓ So with medicines burden-approved, it's really, really high when it comes to that. When we talk to like lifestyle medicine,

Jason: An AI Companion (31:34)
you

Garrett Wood (31:51)
It's a little bit different. It's like, hey, if I smoke half a cigarette, is it better than it's a full cigarette? Sure. Yes. What's the downside of that? I don't know. You know, we don't have a deficit of cigarettes in our health. So it's pretty challenging to not make that type of an argument. And people are living really long now. So instead of looking at the medical model or even the biomedical model, even in psychology, where we're talking about like, how do we help someone with depression or anxiety? Sometimes it's how do we help someone improve their wellbeing?

Jeremy Grater (32:01)
you

Garrett Wood (32:20)
Because if you have a better, healthier lifestyle, including all the different markers that are scientifically shown to improve your wellbeing, it is protective against diabetes and type two, sorry, cardiovascular disease. And the more access to positive emotions daily for whatever reason, even if it's just walking stupid videos on TikTok, like that actually does boost your immune system. It makes you more resilient against these pathogens that you experience every day. So I do think we need to shift a little bit more into the like,

positive piece of that, like improving well-being instead of just mitigating these negative effects. And if we get ahead of the curve on that, think doctors will be happy because they won't have to be trying to do something they're not meant to do. Right? It's like setting a guy with a gun to care for someone's mental health. That's not his job. That's a tough job. Right? So maybe we need a fireman out there, not a policeman responding to a call. Maybe the doctor isn't the best person to go to, even if they are the most resident expert about the medicine and the medical process going on.

Jason: An AI Companion (33:00)
Yeah.

Jeremy Grater (33:01)
Yeah.

Garrett Wood (33:18)
If you're trying to improve your life, they may not be the best person. And they often feel that. They're like, sleep more, eat better. And you're like, great. I knew that, now what? And that's not really good answers, right? So we need better.

Jason: An AI Companion (33:30)
Right. ⁓

Jeremy Grater (33:31)
Well, and even-

Even the scenario you mentioned with the person who is getting stressed out in the car, like I could see that person going to a doctor and getting some sort of anti-anxiety medication because of this thing that they're dealing with when in fact, you know,

maybe let's just time the caffeine a little bit differently, right? Like a doctor's not gonna look at it that way. They're gonna hear, nail, here's my hammer and hit it. You know, like that's sort of the position that they're unfortunately stuck in in those four minutes they have with you. They're not gonna dig deep and go, when do you drink your coffee and how much later are you then hitting that traffic jam? That's just a very interesting

way to frame that.

Jason: An AI Companion (34:03)
We are a big fan of our quick fixes of symptoms versus the actual underlying conditions. Yeah. Right. Right.

Jeremy Grater (34:05)
Yes.

Garrett Wood (34:08)
They're doing triage and they've been doing triage, right?

Jeremy Grater (34:10)
Yeah.

Garrett Wood (34:11)
And that is their job. And I do want them to do their job. They just shouldn't be the only person. Like that should not be it. If that's all we have, it's an impossible thing. Like it's just not gonna be helpful.

Jeremy Grater (34:13)
Absolutely.

Well, and Garrett, you're one of the other tools in the toolbox for folks, another option for people to work with. How can they find you and reach out to you?

Garrett Wood (34:28)
They can look me up on LinkedIn, know, Garrett Wood, 2Rs2Ts, my mom's a little extra so she gave me a little extra in my name there. ⁓ Or it's underneath Gnosis Therapy with a silent G, so it's G-N-O-S-I-S Therapy. So that's also my website, so people can find me there as well. Yeah, so I have an assessment out there. People want to make sure they're going to be successful in five years or burned out in five years and they're curious where they're going to end up based upon where they are right now.

Jeremy Grater (34:34)
You

And you had an offer for our listeners, I believe.

Garrett Wood (34:56)
There's a quick little assessment, it takes about five minutes and they'll know based upon what's going on and where they're going to be. ⁓ And so in there too, it's really specific. ⁓ It's not just general advice, like get more sleep, because that would be not helpful. It would actually be like based upon where you are relative to burnout and what is the specific hidden driving factor behind your burnout. These might be the easiest places for you to start. The one simple thing you can do that'll make a difference today that you'll feel tomorrow, right?

Jason's gonna feel after his nap after he gets done later this afternoon.

Jeremy Grater (35:27)
I was going to say, you have one

that'll tell if this is about five minutes away from burnout? Because I think we may be there.

Jason: An AI Companion (35:28)
That's

too good

Jeremy Grater (35:35)
⁓ And where can we find, is there a link there that we can throw in the show notes here to get that?

Garrett Wood (35:39)
Yeah, absolutely. And then all my LinkedIn and Instagram as well.

Jeremy Grater (35:43)
Our thanks to Garrett Wood from Gnosis Therapy for joining us today. You can find all the links that we just talked about as well as that at home test you can do for yourself to make sure you're ready to take on the day despite what that ring tells you about how you slept. All of that's in the show notes for this episode at BroBots.me.

While you're there, make sure you sign up for our newsletter so can get even more tips on how to use AI to safely manage your mental and physical health. That's all available at brobots.me and that's where we'll be back in just a few days with a brand new episode. Thanks so much for