Episode #585: Democratizing Preventive Health-Hunter Ziesing's Vision for Longevity and Data-Driven Wellness

0:01 This is Pete Moore on Halo Talks nyc. I have the pleasure of bringing Hunter straight from Longevity Health to tell you about the future of health and Halo. Hunter, welcome to the show. Thanks for having me on. Awesome. So you've got a background similar to mine, so why don't you just talk about your progression, on how you got into the longevity, anti aging and the health game from where you started, and then we'll talk about what your mission is. Sure. Thanks. Yeah, at an early age, I went to Wall street, specialized in healthcare, consumer and technology companies for 20 years. I was always a huge athlete into sports and health and wellness. And in fact, Lance Armstrong used to come in the office all the time because my, my boss was the founder of the Discovery US Postal team. So I got into cycling. But, you know, when I turned late 30s, early 40s, I started losing friends to, you know, various infectious diseases. All my fraternity brothers were getting out of shape and always turning to me for, you know, health advice. And then I lost three or four friends to infectious diseases. My dad died from complications from mental issues and pancreatic cancer, and a lot of that stuff was preventable. So I, I took a wide out in my early 40s and I founded a nonprofit to help raise money for cancer prevention. Lance was focused on Livestrong, the yellow bracelets, which was an incredible product that helped people once

1:32 they got cancer. We focus more on prevention, and that's what I'm kind of doing with Longevity Health. It's kind of building the Livestrong model, but for the masses, for health. Got it. And then from a standpoint of how you attacked that angle of cancer prevention, was that through partnerships? Was that through just direct education and trying to get people to change their lifestyles or. Great question. I started a national cycling series in benefiting Livestrong cancer centers, where you had to fundraise and exercise and ride 100 miles to be part of it, and you had to raise money. So we did that. We raised tens of millions of dollars for cancer research centers all around the country.

2:17 But there was a, there was a social element to it, you know, fundraising, getting people together on teams to, you know, like, go, sort of go fund me, like, and, you know, we were changing people's behavior. So in addition to, you know, focusing on seeing money for cancer as we were motivating and moving people. Yeah, I was involved early on, not as a, not as a founder, but a friend of mine had gotten some sarcoma and started Cycle for Survival and ended up partnering up with Equinox and Memorial Slope Kettering. So yeah, same concept. Shout out to Jen Goodman and Dave Lynn. Yeah, they've raised hundreds of millions of dollars and that's gone directly towards research without any, you know, expense ratio, you know, that kind of drops out. So from there you decided to now turn this more into a for profit venture with longevity. Two years before I started this company, I was with a startup called Paceline, which is a company that you wear a Garmin, a Fitbit or an Apple watch and it tracks your heart rate.

3:20 And each week you elevate your heart rate to 150 minutes of elevated heart rate, which could be a run, a walk, a ride or just going to the gym. Slightly better than your resting heart rate. And the American heart association recommends 150 minutes of elevated heart rate each week. And you'd be surprised how hard that is to do. So each week you would get a reward such as a dollar. And we built that to a million user downloads and really proved that we can change behavior with it because people would fight to get to their 150 minutes each week at the same time. I was very familiar with the health system and very frustrated with, I'm very frustrated still with our health system. I think Obamacare certainly is sick care. And I've always wanted to build a company to use people's data to help them guide themselves through health prevention. And some of the common tests that you're seeing today, which are pretty incredible, like blood tests and DEXA scans and sleep studies, ORA ring, all this data. And my mission is to really, you know, give people the Peter Attia. You know what Peter Attia charges $150,000 for, for as little as 30 cents a day. So giving the masses the tools to use their data to help them, guide them through there. And I can get into that in a second. So that's, that's where I went from pipeline to behavioral change. And now I got to get in the health system and build a platform that democratizes data for consumers.

4:50 Right. You know, there's all this data sitting at the health club operators and the wearable Companies such as MyZone is a company that does a lot of heart rate monitor tracking and it goes up on the LED displays. The one thing that I've been shocked by is that one, anyone who's collaborating in the data ecosystem, they're the ones that always say, I own the data. Everyone thinks they own the data. I think the individual actually owns the data. But you see that they're sitting on the data, but it's not being used in a preventative way, yet everyone talks about that. It's all this golden information. And are you basically like the, to use kind of like a broadband analogy, but are you kind of like the last mile to say, like, look, we've got all this information out now I'm going to actually tell you how to utilize it, deploy it and turn it into action. Okay, so you last mile Longevity Health is the last mile of the, of the game here on the health. Now, we're also the first mile.

5:54 So first of all, all that wearable data, gym data, it's clinically irrelevant. Aura is great. I'm going to partner with Aura. That stuff's better for gamification and behavioral change or using this part as coaching plan. So if, like Pete, you've got an issue with your in your health and it requires certain types of exercise, we'll track that data and then we'll remind you through the app. But for me, it really starts with, you know, why? Why are people doing this and what's going on in your life and what are the resources that we can use from all your data, your test data, your medical data, a longitudinal data, not just a blood test, not just because you went to the gym last week, but looking at every aspect of your life from your medical records to your wearable data. And it's your data. You should own your own data. Consumers should own their own data.

6:49 And that's changing because Apple, Google, I think Microsoft were just back in D.C. last year advocating for consumers to own their own data. You know, like Aura, I think doesn't give you all your data, right? You only get part of it. So that's changing. And then nobody has really taken this data and power the consumers and then layered an AI engine on top of it that analyzes it. And that's something that we're doing right now. You can literally talk to this. I can demo it on your call here. You can talk to the AI agent. It'll read all your stuff and make recommendations. And then eventually, when the regulatory environment is available, we can allow an AI agent overlooking your data to become your primary doc.

7:34 This is Pete Moore. I want to let you in on a little secret. There's this company called Promotion Vault. And what they do is they give out rewards from retailers that allow you to incentivize your members without having to do zero down and one month free or giving away shakes or giving away T shirts. What you want to do is build a rewards program that lasts, that people value and that doesn't discount your own products and services. So here's the deal. There's something called Rewards Vault. The Rewards Vault is going to allow a member to set up their own profile. They are going to answer questions, you are going to get those answers, you're going to be able to target those members and you're going to reward them in, inside your club, inside your spa and outside of the club and outside of the spa to get them to become loyal, to get them to pay their monthly dues and to be rewarded properly for the actions. A lot of companies are cutting back on rewards.

8:30 You shouldn't be promotion vaults. Your answer, trust me, this is real. So let's, let's dig deep in for a second. On, on the AI side, have you actually trained the answers to that AI or is that already embedded in the learnings of whether it's a Gemini or ChatGPT and they're feeding that out or are you actually kind of refining what the answers are and results or action plan with longitudinal? The latter. Gemini and OpenAI do some amazing things, but AI is still, it hallucinates and makes mistakes, stakes, doesn't find all the right data. So we're training, you know, we're running a rag on top of that and training it. And that's why we're actually raising capital right now to, you know, we're beta testing this AI product, this voice agent, which I'll demo in a second. And then we are, we are training the models on top of. We'll never build our own AI model. In fact, OpenAI and Anthropic are doing what we're doing now. They're announcing, they've announced in the last week they're going to consolidate your health data. But in my opinion, they'll never figure out the clinical system side. We'll be able to go across your data and be a clinical doctor on top of that model and maybe we'll partner with those guys. Maybe, you know who, you know, because I want a billion users on this platform. This isn't, isn't a, a toy story. Yeah. So, so when you say I want to build users on that, you've got the AI, that, that, that's helping

10:01 scale that. Do, do you also have people with, with the knowledge to basically, you know, when they see something that gets kind of flagged and then you, you, you actually, this human interaction and human, you know, modifications to, to what's going on. You'Re, you're asking amazingly great questions. I'll give you some credit. So first of our first product is Peter attia he charges $150,000 for a longevity clinic. We're, we're in market with our own right now. It's a virtual clinic. We charge $10,000. We do a lot of testing, blood testing, DEXA scan, all this stuff, then we analyze it. It's a HIPAA compliant business. It's not highly scalable because it's 10 grand a year now. Right now we're testing. It's a great product because if you go to a bricks and mortar longevity clinic, they're going to charge 20 or 30,000. We do it for 10.

10:55 We want to be in that business while AI catches up. And we want to be a clinician because like I said, I don't think anthropic or OpenAI is ever going to be a clinician. And a lot of these testing companies out there are selling you supplements and tests and all this stuff. And we want to be. We want to help people with their health. So the next version we're testing right now in a private beta is $100 a month and you can store all your data in one place on an AWS server and the read your records and make recommendations. And then to answer your question, which is a smart question because AI is not proven completely yet, a doctor still looks at it.

11:39 Gotcha. So. So you want to do. I'll just give you a quick example. I'm just going to call it. This will take. Yeah, yeah, I was just going to say, like, do a demo. Yeah, yeah, I'll just, I'll just call it right now. It's a little wonky, but here I'm just. It's got all my records. I'll just. Here we go. Pretty good. Can you hear me, Jesse? Yes, I can hear you perfectly. How have things been going for you? Pretty good. Hey, say hi to Pete. I'm on a live podcast right now and maybe we'll get him into the program and pull up my last blood test and sort of give me a quick summary. Hello, Pete, it's great to have you listening. And Hunter, I'd be happy to give you a quick summary of your last blood test. So I'm pulling up the results from August 9, 2025 right now.

12:27 Did you name it or. Jesse's like. He's. He's like the guy for the entire network. Yeah, there shouldn't be a delay, so. So like I said, it's still wonky right now. Are you still there? Yes, I'm still here, Hunter. I apologize for any delay or technical issues on my end. Ready to continue whenever you are. All right, actually, pull up my DEXA scan for me and give me a quick summary. All right, Hunter, I'm pulling up your dexa scan from July 11, 2025. It showed a healthy BMI of 24.4 and a total body fat percentage of 24.7%, which is within the normal range. Your bone mineral density was also within normal parameters, and there were no values that stood out as concerning.

13:12 Overall, it was consistent with a healthy profile for your age. Does that make sense? It does, but why is my BMI so high? I'm. Maybe because I gain weight. That's a great question, Hunter. While your BMI of 24.4 is technically in the higher end of the normal range, it's important to remember that BMI doesn't always tell the whole story, especially for active individuals like yourself. Yeah, thanks. Hey, send me a copy of my exercise plan and I'll check back with you later. I'm going to jump back on this call. Absolutely, Hunter. So I'll get a text in an email with my. My diet plan. It's so funny. I'm. I've been an avid cyclist my whole life, and, like, I have, like, zero body fat, but I. I've started this company and I put on weight. I don't look fat. I'm probably 10 pounds over my race weight.

14:00 My BMIs at the high end of the range, I gotta. I gotta kick out that. That's funny to talk about. How that information got into your system is that somebody did. So if I. If I was to join one of your clinics or virtual longevity retreats, or what do you call it? Just our longevity clinic. Yeah, so. So I would get that done at a local outlet here, or I'd go get my. Get my done. We're partnered all over the country with. With labs and testing facilities. We'll never open our own. We just partner with everybody and we just make the process really easy. And when you get your test done, it automatically downloads through an API into your private account.

14:51 And then. Then the AI reads it and makes recommendations, and then our doctors over, you know, look at it. Remember I said, I just got my text. Text of my plan. The doc. Our doctors read over it. That's $100 a month. So it's. It's on the way to becoming an AI doctor. And if you've had other tests done, you can download them, but the very first call is going to be much more personal. It's like Joaquin Phoenix in the movie her from 2016, where he falls in. Love with the computer, you'll talk to him. It's gonna say, hey, Pete, what's going on in your life? How old are you? What are you worried about? What, you know, what happened in your family? What do you. Have you had any tests done? What's. What are you trying to achieve? And then it develops a relationship with you and it remembers your conversation and it builds a file on you. And then you can start downloading more and more tests and data. That's where we are right now. Eventually, everything in there, which we can do now. All your, Your aura ring data, your Strava data, your workout data, your egym data, and then we will incorporate coaching plans into that and then provide you incentives to follow it. Now, do you have a trademark on the use of the, of Longevity Health as the name of the company? No. Okay, but is that, that is going to be the name of the company that isn't?

16:06 Yeah, I mean, I mean, I'd be curious of what your, any of your investors or listeners think, you know, do we come up with a brand name? Like I was calling. My previous company was called Health Hub, which was, you know, sort of like an anthropic open AI way of combining all your data. There's no money in combining data. It's a data aggregation play. You need to provide clinical value. So I think. Yeah, yeah, I, I think so. I think just storing data doesn't do anything and we have to. So I think Longevity is, is a. Not a bad name. It, it's not really. We're not prolonging people's lives. We're really increasing health span and reducing health care costs. So maybe wonder if you. I wonder. No, I, I like it. I was, I was curious if you actually would be able to get that copyright just given the use. I think it's. I don't know about copyrighting the name Longevity Health. It's kind of like it's such a ubiquitous name.

16:56 Yeah. I don't think anybody, anybody. And we might just become the de facto. When I go to con. We're a small company, but I was at the JP Morgan conference, small meeting and like, oh, Longevity Health. We know you guys. I'm like, no, you don't. You know, but people, people think we're this big company, which is great. Yeah, it's great. Well, I mean, if, if you do those demos and you got this guy pulling data like that, you know, it's almost as if the size of your company or the amount of employees you have might be irrelevant. If you have the right technology in the right, hey, I think I can. Build a multi, multi trillion dollar business by changing the nature of preventive health with data for 20 to 30 cents a day globally and partner with everybody. So everybody, we become everybody's friend and maybe OpenAI is going to do it and they're going to give it away for free. But like I said, I think you need provide clinical value to people and AI can do it.

17:59 This is Pete Moore. Here's the last tip for you of the podcast. We are partnered up with a company called higher dose higherdose.com they are the leader in workout recovery products. Infrared technology, LED light masks, neck enhancers and other products such as PEMF mats and sauna blankets. If you have not gotten on the workout recovery train yet, your time and your stop is now. You got to get these products in there before these workout recovery and spas end up saturating your market. Having your members walk out of the club and going into one of their locations for 200 bucks per month where they're paid 39 to you. Let's become an expert in workout recovery. If we are already an authority in workouts, Higher Dose, check it out. There's a wholesale code and we look forward to helping you augment your products and services to meet the demands of your members. And hey, let's get people happy, healthy and sweating and the recovery should be.

19:05 Just as good as the workout. And so, so as, as you kind of think about, look, you, you, you came from a, a finance background. You, you're, you're a capitalist by trade. Obviously you went out and started a non profit and, and did a lot of great things for a lot of people. So at, at this point in, in this company, how do you kind of toggle between I'm going to create a multi trillion dollar company. I also want to help like 10,000 people make sure that they stay alive and, and use my data and on the phone with Jesse, you know, as much as they can. How do you kind of balance your entrepreneurial spirit and your like capitalistic, you know, desires. It's a tough, that's a tough one because we do need to raise some capital to build this out. I don't want to raise too much money and dilute the company or the younger employees that are going to be in this for 20, 30 years. I don't want to raise too much money and just buy the business, you know, using marketing dollars to buy consumers. I think, you know, and I'm also at the stage of my Life.

20:08 I'm not, you know, fresh off the, you know, the birth boat here. I'm in my early 60s, I have the energy of a 30 year old and I've got an amazing young team working around me and I've just been around long enough that I have a lot of contacts in Washington D.C. and then major Silicon Valley companies who are behind me and that I have this mission to change the nature of preventive health. So I don't want to, you know, drop names, but there's some big, some big likes of, you know, the Amazons and the Metas of the world, the Stravas of the world, Apple Computer who, Anthropic, all these guys. I'm talking to every one of them like, look, I don't want to be your competitor. I want to change the nature of preventive health. I'll use your platforms like Amazon. I'm not going to compete with, with One Medical and maybe One Medical will build this themselves. But if I integrate into One Medical, why wouldn't One Medical just use us to help consumers be more efficient? Because guess what, they're going to go get procedures done at One Medical.

21:06 So the answer is I think I can scale this thing through major partnerships and not buying it with venture money. Yeah, well, I do, I do think that they're, look, I mean if I, if I hearken back to high school and, and everyone was using Microsoft Windows and Excel and you start to use those systems or you, or you get On Gmail, right, 20 years ago, what do you do? What are you on now? I'm on Gmail. Right. So I feel like there's a first mover advantage in where you're at right now. Where, if you could aggregate enough influencers and like early adopters and super users, what would be the rationale for them to port their information off of your system? If you're providing everything that they need from a data request standpoint, like we just did with Jesse, from a, a prescription basis, I, I, I, I'm just a creature of habit and I think a lot of people are. So once I get on a system and it works like, you can never convince me to like go on Android, right? I'm, I'm an Apple user. So I guess my point is like if I'm on Longevity, Health or whatever, you name it, I got all my information there that's provided me what I need and I'm getting the results I want. If somebody came to me and said, hey, for, for 24 cents a day instead of 30 cents a day you could get on my system. Why would I do that? Right. It just doesn't make sense. So I feel like you might be. Like, that's why I say anthropic and open AI might do that. They might make it free and they get the land grab.

22:39 But we'll find ways to layer into those by adding an AI engine on top of that for clinical value to actually provide value to you. So yeah, that's a good question. And one of my competitors raising money might just do, do very much like you know, I started a company similar to gofundme when I was with my non profit and gofundme got the category. They, they became the category killer. And sometimes you need to raise a shitload of money from VCs to go buy the business. I. Right, I hope I don't have to do that because I want to do exactly that. I want cradle to grave data owned by consumers. So when you're like 85 years old and your kids are taking care of you, all your data is there. They know what you're eating, they know where you like to travel, they know what you like to wear, you know, they know how to change your diapers. The caregiver comes in and knows what to do. But right now we don't have any of that. It's a mess. So we, we would love to have that land grab. Well, let's do this. If you can get us the, the information, we'll put it up on the show. Notes on, on the cap raise. I, I do agree with you that building a business and not just trying to create a moat by the, the amount of money you raise and hope that you know, you, you outspend people. Like it sounds like you're pretty, you know, grounded in the fact that if I deliver everything you need, I know what you, what, what people need and I can see around the corner people are going to gravitate towards that anyway. Yeah, I mean, yeah, we'll see. I mean we are, we're at a million run rate right now with

24:11 our base business on our way to 10 million. That's correct. We are raising 2 million right now to offer engineering and development. We anticipate Hopefully a 5x valuation round later this year to do a big seed round. So I'm looking for, you know, if any of your investors are looking for this particular round. This is the, the cheapest that people can get in. I don't want to call it the riskiest. We could raise a lot more money and I'm looking for People that not only drink my change the nature of health Kool Aid, that people that can help us make those introductions to distribution partners. Lastly, we just booked a huge B2B trial yesterday because eventually this will go all B2B. You'll still own your own data, but your company will have access to the data. And we can trump all the actuarial data from claims data. Using health data to help companies reduce healthcare reserves and costs.

25:05 So I'm looking for investors that can make more introductions. Awesome. Well, feel free to use our Halo acronym because we're trying to get people to live a halo lifestyle. This is a huge component of that. And let's see if we can be helpful to you not just on the investor introductions, but our whole business on the advisory side is really bricks and mortar health and fitness companies and boutiques and large chains. So that's where, that's where the people are that are actually motivated to do this. Who's some of the bigger chains you guys are working with? We work, we do a lot of work with Planet Fitness. We do a lot of work with Orange Theory, Crunch Fitness.

25:46 We've done transactions with eos, which is a big chain out in the Southwest. Choose Fitness. So yeah, a lot, a lot of the bigger bots, middle market clubs is where the best market is. We work with Crunch and with Orange Theory and. I know, I know, I know. Brahm at Lifetime. I mean, they're trying to do their, they're trying to do their own thing in health. But ultimately, like partnering with those fitness clubs are, are going to be where we're going to grow this company. Because one, we can put blood tests that we can do the DEXA scans in there, we can do the blood tests in their centers, we can give them a revenue share or we can white label this platform into theirs. So it's Planet Fitness, you know, by Longevity Health. So there's. Those are incredible. I'd love to talk to you more offline about it. Yeah, let's do that.

26:37 Well, thanks for coming on. Love what you're doing. Keep up the great work and let's see if it could be helpful to you and go Halo. Thanks. Awesome. This is Pete Moore on Halo Talks, your captain speaking. I am the founder and managing partner at Integrity Square. We've been around now for 15 and 1/2 years. We have been helping people like yourselves get capital, do mergers and acquisitions, consulting, strategic advice in the health, active lifestyle and outdoor halo sector, trying to help as many entrepreneurs as possible get to the next level. Take that inflection point and be the force behind your growth. We are helping companies that have at least $3 million of EBITDA, around $10 million of revenue, and we are positioned to help you get institutional growth capital or to negotiate deals with strategic partners. If you go to integritysq.com forward/isq, you can see our capabilities. Deck Happy to set up a consultation. At any time that is free of. Charge and we look forward to helping solve obesity, loneliness and diabetes.

27:52 Go heal. Sam.