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Our Mission To help people live healthier & happier lives
Gyroscope was named after one of the main instruments in an airplane — the directional gyroscope.
If you’ve ever been in a plane cockpit, you’ll see a dial that looks like a compass. It shows which direction you’re heading. As you can imagine, that is important to know!
Imagine an airline that didn’t have any instruments, where the pilots flew by instinct and hoped to end up at the right airport. Would you fly with them? Likely not, even it was cheap. Yet, most people are winging their lives and core health decisions with no instrumentation or data.
Instrumentation help us navigate, prevent crashes and reliably get to our destination. Sometimes (like on a sunny day) these tools may not be necessary or seem excessive. However, when the conditions worsen (in a storm or at night, for example) our lives can depend on them. The same is true for our health, where everyone truly needs good tools to manage their life.
Until now, tracking health for most people has meant a yearly visit to the doctor, an occasional blood test or some casual wearables.
When we started Gyroscope ten years ago, the tools and monitoring for a normal “healthy” person were nonexistent. When people started using the app, it was often the first time they could see what was going on inside their own bodies.
The consequences of not tracking or managing our bodies can still be seen everywhere. More than third of adults in the US are estimated to have prediabetes or type 2 diabetes.
Without monitoring, many still don’t know it, and may discover one day when they have to have a limb amputated or worse. More than half the country is already overweight or obese. Despite billions being spent on workout classes or weight loss programs, these numbers are getting worse.
Why is this happening? Even though we now have advanced technologies like rockets and artificial intelligence, why are humans not able to control their own bodies?
Why invest in your health?
You can easily look up your annual salary or your credit score on various online dashboards, but (until Gyroscope came out) there was no easy way to look up your health.
The health of your body is arguably even more important than your financial health. If you lose your money, that would be unfortunate but you could get a job and get it back. However, if you lost function of your heart or your brain or your liver for even a few minutes, chances of recovery are low and you would likely die.
It can be tempting to put your health on the backburner and just focus on making money. One of the most successful investors and richest people in the world, Warren Buffet, has a quote about investing in your own health...
“Let’s say that when I turned sixteen, a genie had appeared to me. And that genie said, "Warren, I’m going to give you the car of your choice. It’ll be here tomorrow morning with a big bow tied on it. Brand-new. And it’s all yours!"
Having heard all the genie stories, I would say, "What’s the catch?" And the genie would answer, "There’s only one catch. This is the last car you’re ever going to get in your life. So it’s got to last a lifetime."
If that had happened, I would have picked out that car. But, can you imagine knowing it had to last a lifetime, what I would do with it? I would read the manual about five times. I would always keep it garaged. If there was the least little dent or scratch, I’d have it fixed right away because I wouldn’t want it rusting. I would baby that car, because it would have to last a lifetime.
That’s exactly the position you are in concerning your mind and body. You only get one mind and one body. And it’s got to last a lifetime. Now, it’s very easy to let them ride for many years. But if you don’t take care of that mind and that body, they’ll be a wreck forty years later, just like the car would be.
It’s what you do right now, today, that determines how your mind and body will operate ten, twenty, and thirty years from now.”
This is obviously good advice. Your body is priceless. If your heart or brain gets damaged, they’re nearly impossible to replace. Game over. Though almost everyone would agree this is good advice, almost nobody actually follows it.
Until now, it has been too difficult for most people. Especially for people who are busy with life, like parents, business owners, doctors, CEOs, or many other people, health easily falls on the backburner and gets neglected.
Without the right tools, implementing Warren’s advice to take care of our bodies is kind of impossible.
What about my doctor?
The medical system is amazing. If you get into a car accident, break your arm or have a thousand other common problems, it is fantastic that you can go to the hospital to fix it.
However, the medical system isn’t designed for lifestyle choices or to help you manage your day to day decisions.
A doctor can’t prescribe sleep, eating healthy food, avoiding sugar, exercise and the dozen other things that are needed to maintain yourself. They’re not pills you can simply take. Even if they mention it as a recommendation, they won’t be there to follow you around for the rest of the year to make sure you actually do it — and so most people don’t.
We are creating Gyroscope to be the first layer of defense, creating a preventative firewall to blocks those problems from happening in the first place.
Your new operating system
Our organs: our brain, our liver, our heart, our two kidneys, and dozens of others — have almost identical structure to a human 1,000 or even 10,000 years ago.
Though we have significantly altered the world around us (with nice houses, cars, air conditioning, cell phones, restaurants, agriculture, internet, virtual reality, and thousands of other innovations) our bodies and minds and essential organs are basically running the same operating system.
This means almost all humans are running on the same out of date operating system — homo sapiens 1.0.
The body is a marvelous and intricate system, with complex hardware and an operating system that has evolved over millions of years. Similar to your computer or phone, it has software and advanced capabilities. Instead of push notifications showing a message, you experience sensations like hunger or pain or fatigue when the system has an alert.
Your consciousness has access to some “apps” like thinking and talking, but most important things like heartbeats or immune response happen automatically in the background without any thinking. Instead of being programmed in C or binary code, your body’s operating system is written with DNA and RNA. Instead of being powered by electrical current from a lithium battery, it is powered by mitochondria, microscopic batteries for each cell that also need to be charged.
When this operating system works smoothly, it requires no attention and is pretty marvelous. However, these days it seems to be failing more and more frequently. It was just not designed for this world. It needs an upgrade — that is where Gyroscope comes in.
Though our organs function roughly the same way they did thousands of years ago — our heart still beats at around 60 beats per minute, photons still go into our eyes to create vision — the world has changed considerably in the last few hundred years. Old systems that used to serve us well on autopilot — like hunger or stress — no longer give us proper guidance in the modern environment. Like a compass taken into an electrical storm, they have malfunctioned and need to be adjusted.
If you live in a modern city, or work on a computer, or have a cellphone, or eat processed foods, or a dozen other common factors... it is likely you are struggling with your health. It is just inevitable, like taking a fish out of water.
Of course, we cannot get rid of progress. We are not proposing getting rid of electricity, internet, phones, cars, and everything else that we have invented in the last hundred years. But something definitely needs to change: us.
A software update for humanity
When the original iPhone came out, it was a great device. It quickly changed the world, selling thousands of units and beating out competition like flip phones or the blackberry.
On the day it launched, it was far more advanced than any other phone. But now, just a decade later, it is basically obsolete.
The human body is in a similar state. It was once cutting edge and worked well, but now it is starting to get old and needs a significant refresh.
Our mission is to rewrite the human body’s operating system for the modern age. Instead of being stuck with the same exact software that was used thousands of years ago, we want to make the human body upgradeable and create new algorithms that better serve our members.
It’s always day one
For lack of a better option, people are currently using obsolete code to manage their bodies and run their lives.
Hunger 1.0 was written a million years ago, and is still being used by many humans to decide when and what to eat. However, it has now been hacked by food companies.
Sleep timing 1.0 beta was just 2 simple lines of code: if it is dark, then go to sleep... Now with artificial lights and glowing screens emitting blue photons at 2am, this old code is resulting in sleep deprivation around the world.
Stress V1.0 alpha is a similar program: if someone was angry at you, a few thousand years ago you may have been shunned by your tribe, not allowed to sit by the fire, and eaten by wolves. This is no longer common practice, but our brain still operates this old programming when we receive a text message. Even though our chances of being eaten by wolves are probably 0.000001%, many people’s nervous systems have this hardcoded at 50% and are in a state of extreme stress.
Liver logic 101 is also obsolete. The old motto was “if we are presented with some rare fructose, let’s stash it as bodyfat because we calories are very rare and hard to find.” It doesn’t know the “chance_of_experiencing_a_famine” constant has gone from 50% down to 0.001% and that you can get nearly infinite calories at any time.
Since the entire system is failing so dramatically, we are beyond small patches. Many people hope that one new habit will turn the tide, like walking 10,000 steps, or buying a wearable, or going gluten free.
Some lifestyle changes may help slightly, but aren’t a lasting solution. Instead, we need to fix the root cause and set up a comprehensive solution to patch all these problems at once.
A software update for humanity
The human body is not written in literal computer code, but essentially these types of variables and functions do exist within each person. Instead of being written in C and run on a silicon chip, they are powered by carbon-based computers and stored in DNA and RNA.
Billions of dollars are spent updating software every year. We believe the human body should get even more care and high-quality software.
Gyroscope’s mission is to rewrite the operating system of the human body for the modern world. The human body can now be monitored, connected and upgraded, the same way our phones are.
It is essential to use these tools to improve ourselves. The same playbook that we use to manage our businesses or our computers can be applied to our health... setting up tracking, creating a network, enabling alerts when things go wrong so they can be fixed proactively, adding artificial intelligence for improved performance, and so on!
Once all humans are connected and able to contribute, the pace of innovation and improvements should rapidly increase.
A new healthcare system
For now, this upgraded operating system can be used to patch urgent issues.
This will provide solutions for widespread problems like obesity, heart disease, diabetes and depression that are currently affecting almost every human in the world, and currently getting worse.
Our short term goal is therefore to improve the body composition of all of our members.
But our ultimate vision is much more than just a weight loss tool. Eventually healthcare will be solved, and we can move beyond damage control to truly enhancing the human experience.
The same tools that were used to patch problems or keep us alive can then upgrade our lives, helping people achieve new frontiers, unlock their true potential, and truly enjoy life.
It is like you have a high performance racecar. Right now, there is some engine trouble, so getting it to start is a hassle. But it is essential to realize that it is capable of amazing performance and fun, something people dream of. Not just maintaining it and changing the oil, but taking it on the track and pushing it to the limits is the entire point.
Increased creativity, more productivity, and even enlightenment are within our reach. All goals can soon be accessible to all humans.
We are creating Gyroscope so everyone will be able to reach their full potential, rather than spending their lives just struggling to get by or fighting against their biology.
Are you ready for your upgrade?