As a former NASA astronaut and U.S. Navy Captain, Commander Scott Kelly is no stranger to pushing the boundaries of human performance. With a remarkable career spanning multiple space missions, including a year-long stint on the International Space Station, he has consistently demonstrated an unwavering commitment to advancing our understanding of human health and resilience in extreme conditions. Now, as a pioneering figure in the realm of personalized medicine and self-tracking, Scott is applying the lessons he learned in space to help others optimize their well-being here on Earth.
In this captivating interview, Scott shares his insights on the transformative power of personal data and emerging technologies like artificial intelligence. From his own experiences with continuous glucose monitoring to his vision for a future of AI-augmented healthcare, he paints a compelling picture of how these tools can help us unlock our full potential and live healthier, more fulfilling lives.
You can check out our full conversation with Scott here:
Here are five of our favorite moments from this week’s episode to give you a preview of what you’re in store for:
As wearable technology and health apps become increasingly sophisticated, the ability to continuously monitor our own physiology opens up exciting possibilities. Scott emphasizes the potential of combining this personal data with AI for individualized health insights:
"If you're tracking certain health metrics, at some point you'll be able to put those into ChatGPT or something similar and have it give you advice."
By proactively collecting and analyzing our health data, we can unlock a new era of personalized wellness guidance. AI-powered tools will be able to sift through our unique physiological patterns, offering tailored recommendations and flagging potential issues long before they manifest as symptoms. This shift towards predictive, preventative healthcare empowers us to take control of our well-being like never before without even needing to make a doctor’s appointment.
For many people, the abstract concept of "healthy living" only becomes tangible when they can see the direct impact of their choices. Scott discovered this firsthand when he began using a continuous glucose monitor (CGM):
"A year and a half ago, I used this glucose monitors levels app that basically teaches you about your metabolism... since then I've lost weight and exercise much more than I did before. That was a powerful thing. Probably one of the best investments I've ever made in my life."
Watching his glucose levels rise and fall in response to meals and activities was a revelation. By making the invisible visible, CGMs provide a powerful feedback loop that can motivate lasting behavior change. As this technology becomes more accessible and user-friendly, it has the potential to help millions of people optimize their metabolic health and prevent chronic diseases.
It's easy to feel overwhelmed by the sheer volume of data we generate today. But as Scott points out, capturing that information now is an investment in our future selves:
"There's an analogous relationship to our own personal data. We don't know now what we don't know. This stuff might be really useful later in life."
Just as historians rely on preserved records to piece together the past, our personal data serves as a comprehensive archive of our lived experience. By collecting it diligently today - even if its applications aren't yet fully apparent - we're giving our future selves and healthcare providers an invaluable resource. As machine learning advances, having a robust, longitudinal dataset will be the key to unlocking groundbreaking insights and interventions.
While individual health metrics are undeniably valuable, the real magic happens when we start combining them. Michael Tiffany shares a fascinating example of this in action:
"Our co-founder Ash pulled his CGM data into his dashboard along with his sleep data and he found a glucose spike correlation with his sleep. And if he changed when he ate carbs, he'd also get better sleep outcomes, which was mind-blowing. We did not think that those two things would be related..”
By integrating his glucose and sleep data, Ash discovered a previously hidden connection between his diet and sleep quality. This type of cross-disciplinary insight is only possible when we break down the silos between different aspects of our health. As more people adopt tools like Fulcra to aggregate their personal data, we'll likely uncover a wealth of similar correlations - each one a potential key to optimizing our well-being.
As impressive as the current generation of health tech may be, Scott believes we're just scratching the surface of what's possible. The exponential growth of artificial intelligence, in particular, holds immense promise for the future of medicine:
"AI is scary, scary smart in some ways... I can't imagine how smart this thing's gonna be in a couple of years... Just think about the medical field, you put all this data in there and it's going to figure out diagnoses, treatment, and new modalities."
By training on vast troves of medical data - from genomic sequences to high-resolution imaging - AI algorithms will be able to identify patterns and connections that even the most skilled human physicians might miss. This could lead to earlier detection of diseases, more precise treatment recommendations, and entirely new therapeutic approaches. As our personal health data becomes increasingly interoperable with these systems, we can expect a new era of truly personalized, AI-augmented healthcare.
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