As we navigate multiples cities and juxtapositions of industries and attendees this week and last, we toke 30 min. today to compare notes and had a few aha’s real-time. This was a very efficient way to keep sharing timely insights amidst our time shortage. Crazy as it may seem, we are going to find ourselves in the SAME PLACE along with our friend Erin Martin at our mutual friend Ryland Engelhart Sovereignty Ranch down in Texas for his Food Is Medicine event starting tomorrow - (Tickets) for a “weekend of homestead-skill-building, legislation-changing, self-healing discussions and workshops. We’ll spend 4 days challenging the systems that keep us sick and dependent, and emerge a healthier, more food sovereign community, and we’ll do it together.” JOIN US!
I must admit when you pair this with a dinner Monday night in DC full of CMS officiaLs, a day in NYC that included foreign royalty, followed Thursday night by a dinner meeting with a middle Eastern leader about Lifestyle Medicine… ending it on a world renowned regenerative ranch with my peeps will be a relief AND go down as the craziest week yet. Notice how I say yet.
Attached is our recording and below is a rough summary of what we covered.
The DIY Health Crisis
Here’s what hit me during Carter’s debrief from the Canaccord Genuity wellness conference in New York: 320 million Americans are essentially DIYing their health span and lifespan. They’re pulling from three separate, poorly coordinated buckets - food, supplements, and pharmaceuticals, to achieve something that should be integrated.
Think about it. You eat food. You take supplements. You consume pharmaceuticals. Each has its own “experts,” its own delivery system, its own economic model. But inside your body? It’s all one chemistry experiment, and you’re the unlicensed lab technician trying to figure out the recipe.
The Apple Analogy That Changes Everything
Carter made a comparison that stopped me cold: “Can you imagine Apple saying, ‘oh, you know what, we’ll give you the hardware, but you got to go to these other people to get the software’?”
We accept this fragmentation in health because... well, because we always have. But somebody at Apple sat down and said, “we can make more money if we integrate these things.” The result? They became one of the most valuable companies in the world by eliminating customer friction and taking responsibility for the entire user experience.
When Pharma Starts Thinking Like Apple
Here’s where it gets interesting. Novo Nordisk showed up at this wellness conference announcing they’re developing a high bioavailable protein supplement to go with their GLP-1 drugs. Why? Because they’re seeing massive drop-off after 12 months when patients should ideally stay on for 24-36 months.
This isn’t just about being “capitalist” - though it certainly is that. This is pharma recognizing they need customer success. In software, customer success teams replaced support teams when companies realized they wanted customers to actually succeed with their products, not just troubleshoot problems.
The Missing Customer Success Layer
There’s a company with a supplement that matches a $40,000 biologic pharmaceutical for IBS. When patients struggle with complications from the expensive drug, they often quit. This supplement keeps them on the therapy. The pharma company suddenly got very interested when they realized: “Oh wait, you have a supplement that keeps people using our $40,000 drug AND you have digital information about our consumers that we don’t have.”
Tesla has customer success. Apple has customer success. Pharma doesn’t. Food doesn’t. Healthcare doesn’t.
You walk into an Apple store with iPhone problems, and an attentive Gen Z employee makes your problems disappear. You go for an ultrasound, they forget to tell you not to drink liquids, then act like you should have known better when you show up with coffee in your system.
The $10 Trillion Market Restructuring
When you add food ($1.7T), healthcare ($1.9T due to poor nutrition), and wellness together, you’re looking at a $10 trillion market opportunity. Not separate markets - one restructured market.
The wellness layer isn’t just spa trips and vitamin supplements. It’s the missing healthcare layer that should be true prevention. When you reformulate food properly, you can integrate many of those wellness tools as part of a redesigned prevention system.
Prevention 3.0
We came up with a new framework around prevention thank’s to my healthcare’s narrow lens that defines it today":
* Prevention 1.0: Doctor tells you to eat your peas
* Prevention 2.0: Noom coaches you
* Prevention 3.0: The system is designed so you don’t have to make the decision
In Prevention 3.0, no matter what bread you buy, it won’t affect your health negatively. No matter what meat you buy, it won’t affect your health negatively. The system removes the friction of having to be a health expert just to grocery shop.
The Healthcare Reality Check
Fresh from a healthcare dinner in DC, and I have to be honest - I’m growing exceedingly impatient with that room. CMS leaders, health tech executives, policy folks - all having the same myopic conversations.
On the food side, decision-makers are genuinely curious about meeting consumer health demands. They’re scared, unsure, worried about following false trends, but they’re in the conversation. They’re willing to engage.
Healthcare? It’s like an empire that will continue doing what it does. The sentiment had the same themes
* Food is for somebody else to solve.
* We can’t pay for food for everyone (yet that wasn’t even implied…)
* Let’s take soda away from SNAP recipients and get rid of corn syrup that is more important than reformulation.
* People don’t care, people won’t try.
* How can we care about food when rural healthcare funding just got cut?
And then the conversation returned to build the next shiny object that makes something 2% more efficient.
Nobody’s talking about reversing disease. They’re talking about managing it more efficiently.
The Frequency Mismatch Problem
Carter raised a concept from physics - impedance matching (not something I think I’ve ever referenced btw). You need to transmit on the right frequency and receive on the right frequency. Sometimes you don’t see technology adoption because you’re not on the same frequency.
CPG companies get accused of not understanding health, but maybe nobody’s transmitting on their frequency. No startup walks into the General Mills C-suite and says, “What you need to do is launch a reformulation exercise across 100 SKUs in the next six months, report it to the street like you did with Lean Six Sigma, and have central procurement build suites of better ingredients for your product teams.”
The ingredients companies are calling line managers about individual sweeteners. The C-suite is thinking about portfolio transformation. Different frequencies entirely.
The Open Field Opportunity
Here’s what’s wild: this customer success layer for health is an open field. Costco’s Kirkland brand touches 20 million brand-loyal people, but even they haven’t fully captured this integrated health experience.
The opportunity is to make health span and lifespan not DIY. To own that integrated experience where consumers don’t have to be experts in biochemistry, nutrition science, and pharmacology just to take care of themselves.
Consumers spend 25% of their household income on food and health. They’re optimizing for health span and lifespan whether they call it that or not. They’re willing to pay more if you can stop them from having to DIY it all.
Breaking Healthcare Into Chunks
We need to be careful how we talk about this transformation. Healthcare needs to be broken into chronic and acute care. The acute function - cancer, sickle cell anemia - has its own distinct challenges and deserves the complex system we’ve built. We shouldn’t make it seem we don’t think that needs to remain.
But chronic care - Type 2 diabetes, hypertension, metabolic syndrome, inflammatory conditions - that’s where this integrated model makes sense. That’s where Prevention 3.0 could conquer 70% of what’s making us sick.
The Bottom Line
Consumers are DIYing their health because the system forces them to. Food, pharma, healthcare, and wellness are all operating below their potential because they’re not thinking about customer success.
There’s an economic opportunity for someone to own this integrated experience. The question isn’t whether it will happen - it’s who will figure out the right frequency first.
The $10 trillion market is there. The consumer demand is there. The technology exists.
Someone just needs to stop making customers be their own systems integrator.
And now to try to get one good night sleep in my own bed and change out what’s in my suitcase. I’ll share my crazy day with royalty and celebrities in NYC soon. Want a preview? See my LinkedIn post from Wednesday…
Oh and if having us in the rooms to share our insights and related design thinking is useful for you, please convert to a paid subscription. Travel costs don’t seem to be getting any cheaper anytime soon…
