GAIN Momentum - Lessons from Leaders in Hospitality, Travel, Food Service, & Technology

​GAIN Momentum episode #68: The Trillion Dollar Wellness Opportunity Across All Segments | with Lou Zameryka
===
Adam Mogelonsky: Welcome to the GAIN Momentum Podcast, focusing on timeless lessons from senior leaders in hospitality, travel, food service, and technology. I'm joined today by Lou America, founder of Alively. Lou, how are you?
Lou Zameryka: I'm doing great, Adam. Thank you for having me here.
Adam Mogelonsky: So we're focusing on timeless lessons and there's so many lessons related to health and wellness, and this is a huge multi-trillion dollar opportunity for hospitality as well as travel and other industries direct to consumer, et cetera. What is Alively and how does it fit into this massive area of growth?
Lou Zameryka: Yeah, it, it is a massive area, area of growth. I mean, just before coming on here, you know, I was scrolling LinkedIn on a Friday afternoon, and one of my favorite, uh, industry, you know, wellness industry publications, fit Insider, literally just posted, you know, real quick, I scanned it. The wellness economy's growing faster than GDP, right?
So, this is a rocket ship. Um, and Alively is meant to solve kind of the, uh, the fact that wellness. Has been dispersed, you know, from a consumer standpoint across many different verticals within wellness and many different kind of direct to consumer companies, which of course that's not a bad thing, but it was, wellness itself is missing a marketplace. Um, and therefore I believe is missing, uh, you know, a real digitized version of that entire wellness ecosystem. So what we're building with O Lively is not going to be the kind of, uh, you know, click and filter marketplace that we're used to nowadays. Right. That started getting built in the two thousands, you know, my former employer, booking.com and others that are built great marketplace businesses, but we are really building it on hyper-personalization using all the data that's available in health and wellness to actually make the right product and service recommendations based on your own data. And then track the impact of your choices, where you spend your time and money versus your goals and data. So we're really taking that hyper-personalization by using, you know, just the amount of data there. So it's really more of like a, a personalized marketplace, if you will. You could still, of course, go on the front page and, and search for what's, what, what's, uh, trending. But really it's meant that your account page is your marketplace page.
Adam Mogelonsky: Yeah, it's really interesting because, you know, I have a lot of conversations about wellness and for people that haven't taken the red pill, so to speak, they don't know where to start. And there is decision fatigue because as you said, it's so fragmented. So having not only a marketplace where people can discover under one platform, but also a recommendation underneath that.
And I'm wondering because you're, you're in the process of building this and this is a network effect. Let's go through the day-to-day life of Lou in terms of building that network effect and getting that data so that way there is some form of scalable, uh, personalization engine. How, how are you doing that?
Mm-hmm.
Lou Zameryka: Yeah. What's, what's really amazing to myself and my co-founder Andrew. So Andrew has founded two companies, actually, also in the travel industry, a marketplace business, and a FinTech business. I spent 17 years@booking.com. Obviously an online marketplace. The thing that was so, we, we should have known, but you don't know or realize what you realize until you really get face to face with it. It's amazing how much is able to be built now off the shelf, right? The amount of API access to whether it's suppliers for the marketplace. Whether it's data access, it's outstanding. So to your point, building an ecosystem has a lot more plug and play and arranging than it does truly. Uh, building the entire, you know, a PII mean, back at booking, I mean, there was no such thing when we wanted to move hotels off the extra net for rates and availability
into, uh, you know, real time connectivity. Everybody had to build everything on their end or on our end. I mean, you know, it, it wasn't common. So it was interesting to see that. So, you know, for us, we're able to use, partner companies to grab data from all of the different wearable devices. Tests, things of that nature, make it very easy for our beta test users to upload their information or connect and sync their devices with our marketplace. Uh, we have access to great recommendation engine technology through companies that specifically make recommendation engines for different industries. Right? Which is, again, something you did not have, right? Booking was like first hiring data scientists, maybe 12 or 13 years ago to start improving our recommendation algorithm and then just building an army of data scientists for that kind of thing. Um, it's, it's very interesting in the world of just whether it's artificial intelligence or whether it's just the advancements in technology, just what can be done nowadays, uh, again, semi off the shelf with arranging the parts very cleverly. So, you know, from a scale standpoint, the foundation we're building, uh, is inherently very scalable. From both, uh, how many people you need to put hands on the tech process, but also how much information you can take in and process. Uh, and then from the, uh, brand side, what's very interesting is that on, on in the brand ecosystem side, the marketplace channel is not a developed channel in the wellness, uh, CPG or consumer packaged goods industry or services industry. Um, you know, basically the way distribution had always worked there was wholesale, right? So wholesale into retailers or direct to consumer as I mentioned. And then eventually you got around to setting up an Amazon storefront, but there really wasn't, uh, this large scale online marketplace that you would distribute your products to. And thanks to, you know, backends like Shopify and things like that, you can now easily connect with hundreds of different brands. Those brands can easily connect with different endpoints. Suddenly you can stand up partnerships significantly faster. So, the suppliers themselves are ripe for wanting to marketplace. So you have a lot of different, you know, opportunity headwinds there. And then of course, as we mentioned, just the consumers are very interested in, in living healthier longer, whether that means being healthier tomorrow or just maintaining their health for a longer period of time. So, you know, the, the opportunities to get in front of people that have that interest using technology that scales and partners that are willing to move into this type of, uh, distribution format, uh, really gives you some tailwinds.
Adam Mogelonsky: That is the core driver is health as wealth. And this is the profound shift that is a century long trend of people really, really valuing their health and the compounding evidence around lifestyle changes that promote the cluster of better health, better fitness, weight loss or better physique, better cognition and better mood, and, being better for your, friends', family, community, et cetera.
It's this, this whole cluster, and we're seeing an emerge in the terms like the biohacker community or various forms of fitness communities, like the high rocks or run clubs and all that. It's happening together, but as you said, it's, it's fragmented that these are all disparate entities and there's nothing really combining them together.
with that in mind, you're right now, you are building this centralized recommendation system and marketplace that has network effects. What's your process for reaching people on the platform? What's your actual reach out to get those consumers to use it? And then, uh, you can explain the business model a little more.
Lou Zameryka: Yeah, sure. So the, the early customer acquisition model is actually using, social media, right? Because just like a thousand years ago, people recommended things through word of mouth, uh, and word of mouth is very powerful now using all the different tools of social media. Um, and there is an entire, you know, group of people that we consider to be, uh, basically accredited influencers, right?
So they hold some sort of credentialing. As to why you may follow and listen to them. And so we looked at that and said, okay, these folks themselves, right? So we built Alively as a marketplace under these core five pillars of healthspan, right? So to bring in fitness, nutrition, sleep, and recovery mindset and social connection. And we said, okay, these are areas that anybody who's pursuing their version of living their best life, they're, they tend to be touching all five of those. But these experts typically get a bit pigeonholed into their expertise, right? So people ask them to talk about maybe fitness, maybe nutrition, maybe, uh, mental health and mindset, but we know they, as people practice across all those things. So we said, I think people would be interested in talking about that, and the followers would be interested in hearing about that. So we created a podcast called The Home of Health Span. We started to invite these various, health and wellness influencers on. So just talk about what do they do, you know, what does their routine look like?
So not only their background, but uh, their day-to-day across those five dimensions. Um, and as a result, they get provided with clips of course, that they can share of their interviews, and we build them, uh, pages on Alively that they can easily share as a one-stop shop to check out and convert any of the products that they use themselves. so, you know, really it was a social media play because we also know that right now in the, you know, if we started this five, six years ago, we probably would've early put money into, pay-per-click marketing and other performance marketing channels, right? But so much is also changing there and will change, right?
My former employer had probably the biggest budget for keywords in the entire industry. And, uh, you know, billions. and even there, you hear doubt in how this will play out over time, right? Like what will happen with search. So for us, we said well tried and true. People listen to other people in word of mouth and community is very strong nowadays.
And the se and the, the drive to be even more part of community. So we went with social media and these role models and what that really did, which was, unexpected to us. But again, we should have realized when we talked to these role models, as we call them, brands we would then talk to. Were so interested in collaborating with the role models.
They were like, Hey, that person that you work with, we could you introduce us to them because we think they would be a great fit or to at least try what we do? We're like, sure. And they said, okay, well what's the cost to that? We're like, there wasn't no cost. That wasn't the model, right? The model wasn't make money off of introducing people.
We're not like a creator or influencer network, uh, set of, uh, software. So we would start introducing brands to new influencers. We would introduce, new influencers to brands. We would introduce the new customers to brands. So it was all these things were starting to happen in, in one place. And it became quite interesting that really there is this, uh, flywheel effect and, and that's what we're looking at.
So social media has been very good for us in terms of finding, uh, the early and initial audience.
Adam Mogelonsky: Wow. And how does hospitality and travel fit into the ecosystem?
Lou Zameryka: Yeah, well, it, it doesn't naturally, right.
So, I have another, uh, company called Ventures Hospitality that was created with, uh, a, a guy I've known for a long time in the hotel industry. He is a hotel developer named Charles Snyder. When I left booking.com. I still had some time, uh, before my, my lively co-founder Andrew, was free of commitments he had for the company he had exited. so we weren't getting started and I kept getting job offers in the hospitality space and I kept saying no. And then I was talking to Charles, uh, and I was like, well, I wanna stay busy, so maybe I'll say yes to a few of these. And Adam, you know, what really happened was people knew me in the travel industry as a runner and as a generally healthy guy. And when they knew that I was leaving booking to start on a wellness path, most people just assumed it was a wellness travel or wellness hospitality path. But what, what happened that was very kind of coincidental at the same time is hospitality and travel got amazingly interested in health and wellness, right?
Like I, I think in 2023 as I was planning to leave, booking their own travel trends survey. Had like sleep retreats as a number one, trend for 2024. Hilton had the same and everybody was talking suddenly about sleep and wellness. So all my travel industry friends just kind of said, Hey, while you're learning wellness and you know, travel, could you just help us with a little of that? So with Ventures, hospitality, we do some of that, but it, it wasn't directly connected with travel. Now as the world works, a lot of the wellness brands I talked to are interested in talking to the hotel brands especially, but the travel industry. So when I talk to brands and they find out I used to work at Booking and I know everybody in the travel industry, they're like, Hey, we wanna kind of do some collaborations with our products or services in the hospitality space.
Could you introduce us? So again, you know, I'm a partnerships guy. I believe firmly in the power of creating win-win partnerships to, you know, get a nice one plus one equals three outcome. So I don't mind doing that while I build Alively two.
Adam Mogelonsky: Yeah, it's interesting because hotels can use your platform to find new brands and vice versa. And just as your, just as regular people are having this problem of where to start on their wellness journey, hotels are in the same boat where it's, there's so many different products, even within the recovery space.
these stuff you can put in your spa, like the compression pants, uh, for lymphatic drainage or the sleep masks you can put in the room that now have built in like. Massage units now and motorized massages and all the various photobiomodulation stuff that's come out. it's super interesting, but it's also super overwhelming
Lou Zameryka: Yeah. gotta have a clear purpose for how and why you do it for your, you know, like adding wellness to a hotel. 'cause when I speak to hotels, they say, Hey, we wanna add wellness.
You know, it, it is a great thing to say you wanna add wellness, but in all honesty, you have certain business drivers and KPIs, right? So let's think about how you were gonna achieve those with wellness involved, right? Versus just kind of, 'cause you could just pick tons of, you know, tons of things to go down and you'd be down a rabbit hole. But there's some things that just operationally make more sense that maybe brand or customer base make more sense. And depending on what you're trying to achieve with your core business, we can find the right, uh, flavors or taste or approach of wellness. Because, you know, as well as I know wellness was just, do I have a gym? Do I have a spa? Can I get some healthy food on the menu? That was kind of it. But now as you point out, there's so much more in recovery and sleep and mindset.
Um, so you can explore a lot more and it feels more relevant to your consumer.
Adam Mogelonsky: Well, here's a, here's the other way is how do consumers and travelers who are interested in. Health and wellness. Find hotels that meet their specific purpose for wellness, be it a fitness oriented hotel, a sleep oriented urban hotel, a uh, spiritual wellness resort that's in a highly amazing destination.
whether it's Alively or otherwise, how do consumers find, find the wellness hotel they want?
Lou Zameryka: Yeah. See, unfortunately, I don't, I don't think it is easy for them, right? So, I'd like to change that and I've had some conversations recently that maybe could go in that direction, but, you know, uh, there isn't yet kind of a, uh, a place, whether it's an OTA or a standardization for understanding, you know, how you would tag or make filtering for wellness and wellness opportunities.
So really, right now. the only thing that's catered somewhat like that is the very high end of travel, right? In luxury travel, you can like look for and Google and search and find some companies that have aggregated a bit of wellness travel. Uh, still your comparison of offerings is gonna be challenging, right?
The interface and the user experience aren't there for that. But if you're talking about luxury, they're doing a pretty good job of it. But of course the majority of, of the hotel industry is, is not luxury rooms, um, and not luxury travelers. So I think there's a lot more that could be done there, probably along the lines of, maybe industry associations that could build certifications or things of that nature. Um, and I, I do think it's warranted now because I do think that this is just, as you know, we rush to build health and safety, uh, systems and protocols and certifications during covid. I would say that that was because of an acute challenge with health, but but if you look at the typical, uh, kind of American profile, we're in an acute situation with people's health as it is and it's ongoing. So if you were looking for an acute situation to help people with that is kind of mission critical and isn't going away anytime soon. Like the wellness problem and that health span gap in, in America is, is one of the things. And really all over the world developed nations.
Adam Mogelonsky: Yeah, it's, uh, the, well just to break it down here, the, of course, the luxury and you have the wellness primary travel where people are specifically going to these resorts, most likely resorts for some form of multi night retreat to specifically to solve certain health and wellbeing challenges. There's different resort brands that tackle them in different ways.
Either the more scientific ones, like, like Canyon Ranch, like Lan Zoff in, in Europe, or uh, Chanel Palace or uh, uh, Clinique, la uh, those ones. But then there's ones that tackle it from a more spiritual angle, like, let's say, an integrated wellness or integrated medicine approach. Like Six Senses or, um,
Lou Zameryka: Miraval has some nice stuff.
Adam Mogelonsky: yeah, Miraval's great.
They're part of Hyatt now is to represent their high end Four Seasons has programs as well all over the world. So it's, uh, as I say, it's almost a top down innovation where a lot of these programs now have started off at the five star, six star level, and now they're going down into the four star and three star
Lou Zameryka: Yeah, and Hyatt's doing a nice job. Their, their wellbeing Collective is probably the, the best effort of any of the major brands to put something together that is, is approachable for, like you said, you know, from that four star up to luxury. and they seem to be taking it really seriously.
Adam Mogelonsky: Yeah. But, uh, as you're saying earlier is, is there should be a protocol for three star hotels to quickly plug and play.
Lou Zameryka: yeah, it's, it's necessary, you know, the, the whole reason why, I didn't go into wellness and leave the travel industry that I love so much. Uh, because I thought it was a great business opportunity. Like I do believe it's a growing business opportunity. I did want to try something different.
I've been in hospitality since I was 19 years old, right? So, uh, but I'm a mission-driven guy. And the thing that I started to see about four or five years ago, so about five years ago, I turned, well, literally my birthday's next week. So five years ago I turned 40.
And when I was 39 in January, I was at an awards ceremony for a running group. And they started in reverse order and the gentleman got up from the 90 to 95-year-old age group and got their awards. And you had to run a multiple races in a year. You don't have to win 'em, but you have to run like at least six out of 10 races in a year to, uh, get the award. And it just dawned on me.
And then I had a few more of those type of situations where I said. Wow. You know, life is actually long. You know, people always say life is short. And as you mentioned earlier, biohacking was typically focused on longevity, adding more years.
But then I started to look at how unhealthy some of the older people I knew were versus how healthy some of the ones, you know, I ran with or I lived in Costa Rica with. I said, Hey, I think the big threat people will soon wake up to is that modern medicine will keep them alive with pill bottles and surgeries to 95 to a hundred. Who knows? But they will have fallen apart at 60 or 65.
And therefore it's almost like no one's letting you die for 30 years. You're not truly living your life with vitality. You're just not dead. And I said, I think people will start to realize that this is the threat that they need to correct versus I just wanna live longer.
Adam Mogelonsky: Right. So I think we have to unpack some terminology. At this point. We have three terms to show some differences. We have longevity, then we have lifespan and health span.
So could you offer some simple ways to differentiate between those three terms?
Lou Zameryka: Yep. So, you know, longevity is really the total duration of life, right? Which is also similar to lifespan, right? How many years you live health span is how many healthy years you have as a portion of the years you are alive, right? And as I mentioned earlier, developed nations, especially the United States, have quite a large and growing health span gap. So people basically are at their, health span kind of termination 0.7 to eight years before their lifespan actually ends. So they're spending seven to eight years alive, but completely unhealthy. And this is only growing, right? It hasn't, it hasn't shrank. And at the same time, if you kind of remove for covid, the average person is living longer in developed worlds, and it's likely that medicine will continue to be able to intervene to keep that lifespan longer. It's just that health span gap is staying there. Right. That health span is not changing because typically our, you know, our behaviors and diet just do not, uh, line up with what you need to do to have vibrant energy and vitality like today, tomorrow, nevertheless, for 99% of your 95 years. Right. And that's really my goal is like, I want people to have 99.9% uptime, and if they die at 85, great. If they die at 95, great. Die at 105. Great. Just, you know, a 10th of a percent where you're like, I don't feel too good and then drop dead. You know, not, not anything less.
Adam Mogelonsky: Well, I mean the, way I see it. This is part of the longevity revolution when you listen to all the godfathers of biohacking and all this is that the longevity revolution is not just about lifespan extension, but it's about health span extension, where we can have people who push the upper limit of our known age limit around 125 years, and you're essentially living to age 1 50, 180.
And then as you said within that last year is when you basically are making a conscious decision that your, your time on the planet is done
or
planets at that point.
Lou Zameryka: yeah, exactly. You know? Biohacking and pursuing longevity have been around for a while, but it, it didn't catch on with the masses necessarily because, you know, it has two things that people tend to not like. Right. Delayed gratification and not a great model. Because you would typically say to somebody, Hey, if you do this now in 40 or 50 years, you'll live longer. And then you say, look, you could live from 90 to 95. But then you showed someone a 90-year-old and they said, well, not only do I not like delayed gratification, but those years don't look so good anyway, so I'm certainly not doing it. But if you said to somebody, Hey, you're not going to die until you're 95, however, you are likely going to fall apart 30 years before that and have to spend your time in this kind of purgatory that gets people acting right.
So I, I believe that, yeah. As people start to understand that, you know, they will wanna address it. The other element, 'cause I'm an optimist. Optimist, I would prefer that people. Listen to what, especially my, my co-founder Andrew talks about, which is many people don't know what it's actually like to live with vitality versus how they feel.
Right? Because we're not, Adam, you and I aren't necessarily thinking about right, the absence of illness.
We're thinking about true on health and vitality, and a typical person doesn't even realize the upper bounds. You know, even, even someone like yourself or myself that are very into this, we can acknowledge that there's these phases of our own time in working in this area and practicing it where we reach new, you know, plateaus and you're like, whoa, okay.
I thought I was pretty good at, like, managing my own energy levels or whatever, but, that was another level, you know, and, and vice versa.
Adam Mogelonsky: The term that I would use to describe that effect is called habituation.
Where if people are living for, let's say the past 10 years of their life at 80% of what they are capable of, then they think that that 80% is actually their 100%.
Lou Zameryka: Yes.
Adam Mogelonsky: And then imagine. Just if we were to unlock that additional 20% across the entire world.
Right. And that's what we're talking about here.
Lou Zameryka: Massive economic impact, right? Like, it's all the good, all the good feels right. We'd all feel happy about it, but the economic impact of taking that drain off the healthcare system, but also putting that level of, you know, mental and physical, uh, productivity to play would be amazing.
Adam Mogelonsky: Well, it's, it's not just the healthcare system. Think about this is they've done studies on prison inmates where they've given prison inmates real food, not processed garbage and recidivism, and violent violence in the prison goes way down.
Lou Zameryka: Yeah,
Adam Mogelonsky: So we're talking also about a move towards a more peaceful planet as well.
Lou Zameryka: Yeah. One of the most fun things I've, I came across, uh, because of my background in hospitality was a study that was done and published, uh, in Harvard Business Review, I think is where I came across it. And it was about housekeepers, right? So hotel housekeepers where given a, uh, I think it was like a pedometer and it was gonna track their steps, and one group was told that they were exercising when they clean rooms, right?
Counts as exercise and this and that. And one group wasn't. The group that, uh, was told they were exercising and had this pedometer, you know, lost more weight, started eating healthier over the period of time, all with just the message that, hey, the work you do in a room and throughout the hotel is exercise. Um, and I thought that was great because, you know, uh, that that ended up being a study done for Remington Hospitality. And the CEO is a good friend of mine has been, we've ran on race teams together and suddenly I realized it when I was reading it a couple years ago. And, you know, I mean, but it is, it's about this reframing, whether it's diet, whether it's mindset, it's amazing what you could do to unlock, like you said, some kind of 80% level, you know, back closer to a hundred.
Adam Mogelonsky: Well, you mentioned the five pillars of Alively that you're just trying to touch on. Uh, just to restate them for everyone. Those are fitness, nutrition, sleep and recovery, social connection and mindset. And really what we're talking about here is my belief that mindset is the core pillar of all of them, where you have to have this sense of purpose, this iki guy, this willpower that then will propel you to take incremental steps along your wellness journey, towards a better life for you and everyone that you touch in your life.
Lou Zameryka: Yes, exactly. So we, often are talking about mindset and social connection,
uh, as well as purpose as being really those, that is the, the key area, right?
the others only get amplified by how, right? You get your mindset by how well your social connection reinforces values around this and allows you to live your purpose, you know, and then suddenly, especially with the strong set of social bonds, you can really start to reframe, and put into action. What you value. You know, people talk with me a lot about, well, you know, man, you wake up at 4 55 in the morning to go running and you can't do this if you wanna do that, what a sacrifice. But like, my value system is so opposite, right? So it's really not a sacrifice, you know, going out at night to the bar, like, I'm running a race on Sunday and Saturday night's a big fundraiser for the school here, and I would love to go hang out with my friends and I don't drink much, but I would have a beer. but I'm like, well, I can't, 'cause I'm gonna be in the city. I got a race in the morning. But no no regrets whatsoever about that, right? And, and vice versa, right? If I didn't have that race and my, my good friends were doing something that I felt was amazing because I value social connection as part of my wellness routine, I would also be able to go all in on that, right? and that really helps you to start to think about how you, you know, live your life.
Adam Mogelonsky: There's a, there's a lot to unpack in what you just said there. the whole idea of shifting lifestyles on mass and how that can have societal level effects. So if, if everyone is waking up to run or just to meditate or do yoga at five in the morning. Then how does that adjust the fundraisers that maybe start at seven, 7:00 PM Maybe they start at 3:00 PM
and you have to decide on that and you can still have the beer, but you also have a larger portion of non-alcoholic offerings, uh, as well.
Lou Zameryka: and we're seeing that a lot, you know, here in New York City, I, I love athletic brewing company 'cause, uh, again, I like the flavor of a beer, so I don't mind having one. But Athletic Brewing is non-alcoholic and they have quite the selection and now great distribution in New York City. So I remember about two years ago was the first time I came across one in a bar. I was at a networking event, right, for the hospitality industry, and I wasn't going to drink anything. But then I saw that they had athletic brewing company. I was like, yes, okay. I can enjoy beer. It was a beautiful day in New York in the summer, you know, I was like, this is great. I'm gonna have this beer hang out with some people.
And everybody knows, basically I'm on some kind of eight 30 train at the latest, right? Like,
but it, took time to get people used to that. And I think y yesterday, or today on, even on X, Brian Johnson said something similar, right? So he is going for the massive, kind of best possible longevity and health span.
And he said, you know, a party that starts at six can also be cool.
Adam Mogelonsky: Yeah. uh, we had a previous podcast. We were talking about the book Drunk, which talked about the social benefits of alcoholic beverages. To a degree, right. It's a, it's a push pull. But really as well is when you get, pull it back to the idea of mindset is you have to ask a question within all this is, why do you need alcohol all the time?
Why do you need alcohol to form social bonds, to, to elevate a conversation above just boring, small talk.
Lou Zameryka: I've always thought about that. Right. I'm like,
the whatever we're doing must not be so interesting. If we have to kind of change our, our mindset around how or where or who we are. To then per, you know, uh, participate in it. Uh, I've been going to other ship and if you're, you're in the hospitality industry, like the more other ships that could be in hotels or resorts, the better, you know, it's a massive sauna per kind of performance
sauna.
Adam Mogelonsky: I live five blocks from the original other
Lou Zameryka: Ah, you're in Toronto. Yeah. Very nice. Yeah. So, you know, I mean, that is, I'm doing that on Wednesday with my wife. She's never gone before. I was like,
it's my birthday midday. We're going to like a noon other ship class with 70 other people in a sauna and then in a cold plunge. And that level of, community I find as invigorating as anything else.
So you're right, I mean, it's, it's turning the corner right now. I could tell you that much.
Adam Mogelonsky: Yeah. I mean, for, for everyone who's, who's listening and watching other ship is a contrast therapy lounge where, you know, you go and you have the sauna, then you have the, the cold plunge next door, and you basically go back and forth either in a guided session with maybe some sound healing involved or just breath work or they have the free flow, uh, time slots you can purchase.
And it's a company found in Toronto. They've since moved, moved into New York City and it's a massively growing trend. And the Thursday night socials where just. As you said, they're packed with 70 to a hundred people in a sauna. Then they have, they have dancers, they have, uh, live jazz, uh, you know, a, a saxophone player there and a dj, and there's no alcohol.
It's just herbal teas and, uh, people just wanting to spend their nights sobering. It's a huge growth area.
Lou Zameryka: Yeah, it's, it's amazing and you see it just more and more where I'm in New York City and, you know, I'm 45, but there's younger folks that are, like this is their, their way of socializing
more than it ever has been. So it's gonna start to look maybe awkward to that group where, you know, I don't watch much television, but if I ever see television or a movie, it seems like every pinnacle moment, whether it's a, an up, an uplifting moment or a, a terrible scene, someone's reaching for alcohol. And I'm like, man, we just like can't keep it out of the frame for more than a few minutes. But I think the younger generation doesn't think like that, especially 'cause they have more flavors to access. Right?
I, I mean, if I didn't drink alcohol in a bar, I was basically drinking water or tonic water.
Right. Or club soda. That would get boring after a while. So now at least you have some more flavor profiles in a bar and restaurant, and you might actually get me there.
Adam Mogelonsky: Well, yeah, the, I mean, the opportunity for hotels, here is you gotta have a non-alcoholic menu strategy, mocktails, herbal teas, adaptogenic beverages, all the, all those new options that are out there. And what we're talking about here is essentially a coming paradigm shift where what the Gen Zs are, are opting or voting with their wallets for, is a healthier lifestyle.
And that is gonna trickle up into the millennials, the Gen Xers and the Boomers to basically say, Hey, the, those, those young guys, they're younger, longer, they're seeing it and they come to believe it, and now they're drinking less. Now every single restaurant around the world is going, oh, uh, we don't have alcohol to pat our margins with those markups.
What are we gonna do to keep people coming in and, uh, make this business solvent?
Lou Zameryka: Yeah, that's true. It's, it's a real shift. Uh, and like I said, in New York City, you can see it.
Adam Mogelonsky: Yeah. okay, so just going back to the point about mindset here, because this is an important part of travel and hospitality, is that my belief is that hotels can serve that purpose of helping people discover their sense of purpose or, to experiment and, and adjust and transform, or to help them to, you know, go through a midlife crisis or this new term entrepreneurship, which is people who have, you know, exited a company and now they wanna.
Find what they can do post exit, because retirement is just boring and retirement is actually now associated with lower health span. So they are coming to realize that and they wanna do something. What do you see as the opportunities there? And feel free to discuss your thought process for how a, Alively can help there.
Lou Zameryka: Yeah. Mindset is, is a critical one. And I do think that hotels, you know, like hotels are actually in such a great spot, right? Because
people are, sleep is trending, and hotels, you know, basically are sometimes only occupied by some of the guests for that duration of sleep. So you can actually have an impact there. But the other one on mindset, it's very true. Like, you know, although people like to think that when everything is lined up perfectly and smooth in life, they will be able to successfully change their habit. Actually habit change takes, uh, takes hold better when you've had a pattern interruption, right? So there is, and, and this is, you know, research, it's not like me figuring this out, but, uh, and so. In theory, in habit change, coaching times of pattern interruption are great times to inject a new way of either thinking or acting. So a pattern interruption for many people could be, you know, that semi-regular travel they do right?
Where they're in a different place at a different time. So it's a great place to be ex able to expose people to a slight habit change. I also think that you hear a lot of people talk about being present, right? So in the mindset world, there's so much value placed on being present, and you as a hotel have a very nice opportunity to remind and enforce the very present with your guests, right? Because they are now here in a new place. They are now here in the present. And I think that there's a cool opportunity there to kind of own that in, in the certain hotel spaces, whether that's in how you welcome people, whether that's a welcome gift you give or, or some kind of services and concepts on, uh, on property. But I, I believe that mindset because of habit change from pattern interruption as well as the present nature of traveling and trying to get people to realize that they've came to a new destination are now present. There, uh, are great opportunities.
Adam Mogelonsky: Yeah, the, the, there's so many examples here that we could drill into, and we probably should to give people the, the visual here because hotels. Travel. It is a very diverse field. And if we're talking about something like a sleep retreat where we're interrupting their pattern at home of poor sleep, poor sleep hygiene, sleep offset, insomnia, various problems that afflict people, and they can go to this new place and then, and then have a program schedule that will then help to re-pattern their sleep.
So that way then when they return home, those new patterns are more likely to, to stick and to carry forward.
Lou Zameryka: I mean, you could literally help them adjust their entire circadian rhythm, right? Like
forget just their habits. But you could, you could try to already start to influence that. Um, I think, I think both are really, you know, are really options for that kind of thing.
Adam Mogelonsky: Yeah. Another area is in groups where right now, uh, the, the way groups are structured is basically you're bringing people into a room, a ballroom or. Outdoor banquet, uh, tent, whatever, and then you're padding that with f and b catering. And really we talk about set and setting here and shifting the disruptions.
And within the group setting, there's so much opportunities to inject wellness where people want to be present for this moment in time and they're arriving to a wedding jet lagged, or they're at a conference for three days and the third day they're just exhausted because they're not sleeping well.
'cause the room is whatever, and they're on their feet all day. And then the third day, this actual whale of a potential lead comes along and they're not, they're at 80%, not a hundred percent. So they can't actually be present enough to understand how to, how to take the next steps and to have a great conversation.
Lou Zameryka: Yeah. even a, a really simple one that I, uh, started to create in my own professional life out of, uh, you know, out of my habit of liking to run and the kind of ridiculousness of what really business travel is, was, uh, you know, people go, oh, you travel all the time. That must be amazing. But, you know, I did a lot of our negotiations, so sometimes I'd fly to a city and then just go into a pretty generic meeting room in an office somewhere.
Hotel headquarters are similar and sit there with lawyers and other people for days and then fly back and sure I got a nice dinner out of it and maybe the hotel was nice, but. You know, or a conference, it's pretty rare sometimes to see the destination you're in. Right? So you're not even present. I could be anywhere. So I was kind of sick of that. So I said, you know what, for every conference I'm gonna, I'm gonna reach out to the, uh, organizers and say, I'll lead a group run. So in the travel industry, I've led tons of group runs before conferences for conference organizers because I was like, look somebody and walks right?
I've had colleagues of mine@booking.com and said, Hey, I'll, I'll lead the walking group. So we left no one behind that wanted to actually maybe see a little of that city by waking up, you know, 45 minutes earlier than, than typical. And then we're, you know, it served two purposes. Of course it was one, they got to see the city, well, three, one, they got to see the city.
Two, they were doing something healthy outdoors, getting some energy spent. And three, they got to meet other attendees in a different context, right? And create a little bit different of a bond so that when they did walk into that 500 person ballroom later, I. To have breakfast and to get the keynotes going and stuff.
They had some familiar faces that they actually did something meaningful with. So it created a whole new level of connection. And I, I had to do it because I was like, this is crazy. Who, who puts a million, million and a half miles on there, you know, on, on an airplane and like sees a bunch of beige rooms and not actually the city.
Adam Mogelonsky: I know it's, it's, it's such a shameful part of our, of our job or, or just the modern capitalist lifestyle. Uh, what you're talking about here with this wellness connection of. You organize a run club or a walk, you actually see it. And because of that different setting, you're facilitating more social connection because of that.
And so you're, you're ticking multiple boxes. And even, you know, if the run is amongst nature, you have something called the aome where you have forest therapy that's been studied, so you're getting, uh, the smell of pine and all that good stuff and that that fresh air actually is wellness as well.
Lou Zameryka: Yeah, I mean, that time in nature is, is, amazing,
right? It, 'cause you're right, it's, it's not just the, the physical activity that gets the endorphins going. It really is your surroundings, the fresh air, the smell of that fresh nature.
Um, and I, I really enjoy seeing over all of these years, those relationships really stuck between those people. 'cause again, you know, there were a group of people that you got sweaty with that you had maybe a 30 or 35 minute conversation next to. Got to really ask questions that had maybe something to do with business, maybe nothing. Right. Maybe just about running and then suddenly, oh, who do you run with? Oh, are you, do you, do you go anywhere when you go running?
And do you, have you done a race? Oh, who? You know who in your family?
Adam Mogelonsky: Yeah, but what we're shifting to here is wellness, designed for mice, travel and, and conferences. And this could be an opportunity for hotels to have your sales team present turnkey wellness solutions for upcoming events or groups that can be offered to increase the total contract value, or that could be on the Destin, more on the exhibition center destination side to offer plug and play.
Solutions to groups that are staying at hotels.
Lou Zameryka: Yeah, I've spoken to a very large, uh, you know, uh, chain of mostly kind of meeting and event properties, just about this conference services offering, you know, really wellness and group wellness activities.
and I will tell you that, and this is part of maybe the secret sauce, so you know, I'm giving away some of the, nah, this is the, this is the good stuff.
You know, oftentimes hotels will ask about reaching. They're the wellness consumer, right? And in, in the US because about 80% of our hotels are part of a hotel chain. Uh, you know, if you're a property, you don't have as many levers as people would think to reach your leisure consumer, right?
And really influence the marketing of whatever that brand is for. Control the website, things like that. But what I've said similar to what you just talked about, is you have these corporate travelers that are repeating either at your hotel or at hotels within your brand. Due to the nature of their negotiated rates and the way they travel, they are employed by employers who typically have employee benefit schemes as well as insurance cost pro plans. And if you could design something that created this flywheel for those, you know, those top tier corporates that, you know, you book a lot of room nights with regularly for their corporate, negotiated rates. I mean, you could start to take share and that's a group you can communicate with, right? So your, your Monday through Thursday ish, uh, occupancy, a lot of that is your, is through your sales team, is through, you know, marketing your, to your in-house accounts. That's very much in the control. That's very much, uh, area where those road warriors need that support. And if you package it right with their employers, it suddenly becomes an interest to the employers in lowering their own healthcare costs because the places they put people are actually taking better care of them.
Adam Mogelonsky: And it's an incentive for the companies against turnover because we know that, uh, wellness is, wellness does work in that way. We can cite studies to shock, talk about the effect on morale on short-term, uh, time off,
Lou Zameryka: Yep.
Adam Mogelonsky: et cetera,
Lou Zameryka: I think that's the dimension that hotels are just not looking at, right? They're thinking about this leisure wellness consumer,
but the group side and the corporate is, is really an interesting one for that.
Adam Mogelonsky: Yeah, and as you said earlier with your run club and walking example, it doesn't need to be that elaborate
Lou Zameryka: No,
Adam Mogelonsky: for it to work. Right.
Lou Zameryka: not. There's a, there's a hotel brand that's testing right now. Um, they're doing like, you know, the adult coloring books, but they're doing coasters at the bar, um, where you could color. And I was like, oh, that's great, because, you know, not only is that good for mindset and decompressing if people wanna do it, but I also see it as an opportunity for social connection, right?
Because Adam, if we go into a hotel bar, and if the bartender is not particularly jovial and kind of connecting people and there's not maybe a sport that people have in common on the television, well, people are gonna pick up their phone. And once you have your phone in front of you, you're kind of closed off, right?
You're given that closed
off signal to the world. But if you're doodling on a coaster and I got a coaster in front of me, you're still open, right? There's still a chance that you, you and I could suddenly make a connection over that. And so I look at it as it facilitates the mindset of the individual that chooses to color on it, but it also facilitates a potential social connection in an environment where otherwise solo diners would've basically signaled that they're closed off.
Adam Mogelonsky: Yeah. And it's just a matter of getting creative with it because it, it doesn't need to be. Anything elaborate, like, uh, as an example how this ties into a destination? I was at a conference in Orlando recently, and you get into the hotel where the conference is at, every event is inside and in chambers, and you're at a golf resort and it's, and you're 20 minutes drive away from Disney World.
So you'd, you'd expect being in Orlando, you go, okay, there should be a night out, at some place in Disney World to pad the event, to really, really cement it as something unique or, or at SeaWorld or
universal or at least there should be something involving the golf course there. Get people outside, whether they play golf or not.
you could divide people up into lessons versus, um,
Lou Zameryka: There's a putting
green always at the
driving range at a golf course. You know, you can just put,
Adam Mogelonsky: yeah. Or just walk around the golf course. Get in that, the smell of the fresh grass. Right. Get outdoors, get out
Lou Zameryka: yep. I used to always tell people when they were booking the meetings@booking.com, I'm like, do not put me in a really, like, do not pick a beautiful resort and then not let me get out there. Like, I don't want that. Like, just pick any, you know, pick the cheapest place you could find and gimme no windows because I do not wanna see nice things out the window where we can't actually touch them.
it would drive me crazy.
Adam Mogelonsky: Well now also I guess the technology application here for hoteliers is you negotiate a shoulder night on either side on that, that room block.
So that way you're incentivizing people to stay an extra night by offering that same Right. So they actually can spend that extra day just to go out to Disney World to one or two of the parks.
Lou Zameryka: Yeah,
no, I think people are craving, again, this outside this connection and, and you see it like when you, when you participate in the wellness industry, not just the hospitality industry, you see what's happening with what consumers are craving and that then plays into where they're making choices to spend their time and their money. So it's a really important thing to kind of pay attention to because again, the wellness industry is growing so fast because it's an innate desire of the consumer, right? So you have to facilitate that desire in an industry where you are inherently serving that consumer's time and their bodily presence, right? You don't have to worry about it too much if you're a car company. You don't have to think about it too much if you're in certain other areas of business, but hospitality, you really do.
Adam Mogelonsky: Yeah. Okay. So we both have. Drunk the Kool-Aid, right. Uh, taking the red pull, we, we, we believe in the power of wellness and there is lots of stats to back that up, by the Global Wellness Institute talking about the cumulative annual growth rate, et cetera, et cetera. Let's put that aside, the statistics, because the human brain is not really designed to absorb numbers with the same impact as something more personal.
So somebody is still skeptical about the ROI of wellness for their hotel, for their restaurant nightclub destination, et cetera. What is one thing, one visual, that you could leave in their mind to sort of show that this paradigm shift is happening in real time right now?
Lou Zameryka: Yeah, that's a, that's a great question. I think, what I would say is if you look at. The wellness industry, right? So let's say the core representation of the health and wellness industry was for a very long time. The gym, right? Like I go to the gym, fitness club, whatever. If you look at what's happening in the gym space right now, they are basically becoming hotels, right?
They're getting so close to becoming hospitality businesses. In fact, weirdly enough, let's call it the least, and most no frills gym there is, planet Fitness has three hospitality executives leading the company now after a shakeup. But if you look at things like Monarch Athletic Club and others, these are models that are, you work out here, you recover here, you eat.
Here, you get actual kind of medical, especially preventative care and functional medicine here. There's only a matter of time where basically you're sleeping there, right? I mean, New York Athletic Club in New, in New York City on Central Park has tons of rooms for members. So I think you're seeing that the core of fitness, which was the gym, is going beyond the juice bar and fully building out concepts that are mirroring hospitality businesses. So that leads me to believe that if, if you're a hospitality business, you have an opportunity to truly meet, uh, the desire that people are building ground up for. They're shifting an entire industry to, to accommodate this. And we have some of those core elements, right, in our own, uh, hands, uh, in hospitality. So I think that's one of the things that is most compelling.
Adam Mogelonsky: Yeah. The, the whole idea of these new age clubs, lifestyle clubs, and some of them even have a library. You think about mindset. one of the best ways to improve your mindset is to read books, and that's, that's a Warren Buffett lesson right there. Mm-hmm.
Lou Zameryka: think if, if you wanna really from a business standpoint kind of drink the Kool-Aid of what's happening, I mentioned earlier the Fit Insider, you know, podcast and newsletter. I mean, Joe and Anthony, their two brothers that found the Fit Insider, they cover the, the wellness industry amazingly. And you just really get a sense of what's coming up, right?
What are these trends happening? Because again, these are trends of how people are choosing to spend their money in their life, which is also what travel is or was, right? And so it's important to pay attention to that because it's the same kind of bucket of experiential that travel fits into. Um, and as it converges, there's opportunities there or there's threats there if you don't kind of recognize the convergence.
Adam Mogelonsky: Okay, so we, we have a, a shift here. We can talk about what's upcoming in the wellness world, and I know you are a, like me, a big proponent of, I guess what's called multimodal. Wellness where we're approaching some sort of issue through multiple and different modes of action. Can you unpack, uh, what's meant by this and give perhaps an example?
Lou Zameryka: Yeah. Um, you know, on a bit zoomed out of an example, it even fits with these pillars of health span, right? So before thinking about fitness, nutrition, uh, mindset, social connection, and sleep and recovery, I was speaking with some people I run with and we recognized as well that, you know, we get into running and start running. Then you start kind of cross training to prevent yourself from injuring yourself when you run. So now you're in the gym a bit mainly for injury prevention, also to get your legs a bit stronger, to include, you know, to improve running, but either of those dimensions. But then you plateau again and you're like, well, to improve my running times, I need to fuel better. Right? So now suddenly you're changing your diet or adding supplementation to improve your performance in running, but it's still related to that first action, which was running, right? We're getting through modalities already. Then you start to plateau again, and you're like, well, I have to really dial in my sleep, right?
I need the energy, or I have to recover my muscles better between the harder workouts. So you're into sleep and recovery, then of course you're pushing yourself, so you're thinking about mindset at some point, right? Like, I can only unlock that next level, that beat, that next plateau. If I hone my mindset and my, my positive self-talk, my mantra is when I'm running. and then of course. It's pretty hard to keep all that up on your own and you start to gravitate towards a community, like a run club. The run club scene is exploding. So now you're into social connection. So even just there, what started as running and you wishing to kind of improve your times at a local five or 10 K started to move you between modalities, right. To in essence improve the running it. It wasn't necessarily that you were like, you know, I don't go to the gym because I'm like, I'm gonna get so buff and strong. I go to the gym because it's gonna make me a stronger runner and a less injured runner. You know? But that's a second modality already on my running. And I do the compression, I do all that other stuff like, you know, I use the nor the, the NormaTec compression afterwards or a ragone on my muscles or this new thing called Firefly, which was pretty cool. I tried a couple weeks ago. and it really is this multimodality. And that's either to strengthen something that you're doing already or you use it for prevention as well, right?
Or in or injury prevention or to deal with acute issues that you have. What do you see as a like, give, give the audience a multimodality example that's near and dear to you.
Adam Mogelonsky: Okay, so first off, we have the wellness journey and the whole idea of incrementally improving. As well as tinkering, which is the core of what biohacking is. It's just you're treating yourself as what's called an N of one experiment, and you're seeing what works for you and within who you are within your environment.
So I can do things as a single guy living downtown, no dog, no, uh, parents in good shape, no kids to look after. I could do things that people that have kid, young kids and a and a spouse to look after and maybe, you know, have some outstanding, maybe college debt, et cetera, things that I can do, things they can't do
to experiment with on.
you know, I, I have, uh, right now I have a, a hooah grounding mat that I'm sitting on in my desk. Uh, I have my, my diet is dialed in with, uh, just for quickly today I was, I was eating, uh, my yogurt bowl, which is sheep, yogurt, kefi, walnuts. Frozen wild blueberries from Costco, organic raspberries, and then a bunch of these weird powders that I'm adding like the reishi Mackey berry, um, beet root to keep the blood going, and that's cognitively there to keep your mind going while you're sitting down recording episodes.
Combine that with, of course, this morning, woke up, I did my mobility training, didn't have time to go to the gym, but I could still fit in 20 minutes. I have a little foot balancer. If you've seen
those those little ones, they can fit in any suitcase everywhere, anywhere. They cost $75 now and you're training your inversion e-version of your foot to thereby help improve your balance of your ankles and your hips, so that way when you do go for that run, your joints are tracking properly and you don't need as much recovery.
and then of course right after this, uh, today is my recovery day. So I'm going to the gym. I'm gonna do some, some zone two cardio while I read the news on hospitality, just on a bike or walking on a treadmill, maybe even walking backwards on the treadmill for a little bit to get the CNS going.
just walking backwards, doing some light stuff, zone two. So just getting slightly above, a slight pant but nothing too severe for a longer period of time. Combine that with, uh, sauna and steam and then I'm done and I'll be asleep by 9:00 PM
Lou Zameryka: Sounds like a beautiful day.
Adam Mogelonsky: that's, that's my multimodal Right.
On a recovery. And, and I call that, I call that a gangbuster Friday.
Lou Zameryka: Yeah. and and this is, this is what I think is really important for people that aren't yet involved in this, to really understand that
in the wellness community that is growing, that is now common, right? It is significantly less common to meet somebody that just goes and does one thing. You know? They're like, oh, I just go to the gym and lift weights three days a week. Like so uncommon.
Adam Mogelonsky: Yeah.
Lou Zameryka: So the customer wallet is being spent on this. And the experiences that you can tap into are just more varied as a hotel, right? Like, if you're not gonna have the gym where I can go do a certain weight routine, like that's okay if you have something else, right?
As long as I know it and I can account for it, that's fine. Because I have all these modalities. Maybe you'll delight me in another way. Right? Maybe you'll support me in another way.
You didn't
just fail because I can't bench press, you know, in you're a gym.
Adam Mogelonsky: and in some other way, as you said, because we're disrupting this, the setting some other new way that people wouldn't necessarily try at home
Lou Zameryka: Yeah. I think that's, you know, when you're, when you have the right mindset and values, you can, you can roll with the disruption, right, of the routine because you, you know, it's coming and you just make a plan for it and then you go, okay, what else is there? You know, I can access my health and wellness many different ways.
I'll just have to do a different one. This.
Adam Mogelonsky: Yeah. And, and a great report that, uh, that's released every year is Acor one of the big chains. They release their wellness trends for the year. So a big one this year is athletic escapes. And most of the time people think of the resorts, right, that you're gonna go to, to try out, uh, kite surfing or, you know, some sort of water sport.
Or you're going to a destination that's close to a great mountaineering, hiking trail and all that's well and good. But then you say, okay, how can I apply that to an urban location? And you, and then I had this conversation last week with a hotel that was looking for ideas from me. You go. Okay. Well, one of the benefits of mountaineering is the altitude training.
And now they have like these Bain masks you can get that are low altitude simulators. So you say, okay, how much would it cost to actually rent those out to people coming to your hotel gym where you could just rent them out for $30 a day and that incorporates your cleaning fee? That just ties into a housekeeping SOP.
Or you can outsource that and you have an additional feature in your gym that has no minimal
Lou Zameryka: Yeah,
Adam Mogelonsky: require any more, any more floor space.
Lou Zameryka: I, I agree. That's, that's the key thing is, is really thinking about you, you know, the modalities clear enough that you can find the things that fit operationally for you,
you know, because, Yeah.
And it's interesting you brought up a core that, that's a good one because Lin, right at a core is really considered like one, like the wellness person for kind of hospitality, um, in the wellness industry. Uh, and I didn't think of a core earlier. I'm not necessarily seeing it come to life in the portfolio as much, especially in North America. You know, like there's limited, like, and it's more I love as a collection and I, bet there's a lot of opportunity in that collection of brands to bring these different modalities to life.
So I'd love to see that continue.
Adam Mogelonsky: Yeah.
they're steering, um, you know, a super carrier here. So it does take time. And of course when you read the, their report, they do highlight specific properties where they're testing out these different ideas and these different concepts. And then the whole idea there is to scale that internationally.
But it does take time. They wanna proceed more, more diligently with it.
Lou Zameryka: Yeah. You and I, Adam are gonna have to help the hospitality industry to, to get to scale. Right. And that's, that's, I think the interesting thing is again, like if you look at modalities with a bit broader of a lens, you can scale. Like, if you're only gonna think about where you could put a juice bar, a gym, a spa, or something of that nature, that's CapEx intensive and square footage, uh, is a requirement, then you're gonna keep finding, you know, barriers to scale, right?
You're gonna go, well, I could put it here, but not here. I could put it in this region, but not across every brand. And then there's, you get trouble with brand standards. But if you're able to think more broadly in ways that are still desirable by the consumer, you can certainly start to own some of those spaces.
Adam Mogelonsky: that's part of why Alively as a marketplace is so great, is if you think about the classic marketplace. Going back 3000 years, it was not only there to buy your groceries, you already knew you were getting there, but to discover new items, things you hadn't previously thought of.
And, uh, you know, even there's, there's gotta be like a, a discovery portal as people are going along and they're searching for, arm bands to apply to their gym or the foot balancer, then they discover that you can buy the, the face mask, uh, for either, you know, e watt, um, that's the oxygen trainers or the, the low altitude to simulate mountaineering.
Mm-hmm.
Lou Zameryka: And that's, that's what we're really trying to help people understand is that there are kind of, you know, many ways to skin a cat. So it's about, let's, let's pick first, you know, using your data, we're gonna identify what's the best first step for you. And if that first step resonates, great, that's becomes your goal. And then we're gonna say, okay, here are ways to do it. And based on what you pick, our personalization will continue to get smarter and smarter. Right? Like my wife is an Ayurvedic practitioner. She is. Loves anything hot, right? Hot water, hot teas, whatever. So if I said to her, Hey, to improve your sleep, you could either take magnesium or something like that every evening like a pill, or you could drink an ashwagandha type tea. If I put that magnesium out, she's never gonna take it. Like the habit change for the magnesium is so against her core desire of, you know, being more of a naturopath. But if I say, Hey, just drink ashwagandha at 8:30 PM every night, she's gonna remember all the time 'cause it's like a guilty pleasure to drink a tea. And like, that's what we have to help people to realize. It's it like there is a way that works for you. Even if the top three interventions that would have the biggest impact on your goal, if, if those, if there's three and you're not gonna do any three of those three, well then number six, that has somewhat of an impact is perfect for you.
Start at number six. We'll get you to other places. You know, we'll build on that. But people often try and find like. That one thing that is so not them, that habit change becomes like impossible.
Adam Mogelonsky: Well that's, that's one of the beauties of hospitality and of wellness is that everyone is different and therefore you take them for who they are and you give them suggestions that work, and then you personalize the journey along that.
So for your wife who's, you know, she's into Ayurveda, she likes hot things, she's trying to keep that prana alive and uh.
She has the tandis. So now you can have that integrated with medic medical research that shows that the active ingredient in as ashwagandha, it works by lowering, uh, lowering, uh, cortisol. So now you gotta say, okay, during sleep time, we want lower, lower cortisol and maybe we want something that upregulates the serotonin melatonin pathway so we can give her, you know, the tea along with um, you know, some dried kiwi fruit that's inside of there, or, uh, something else that still fits that naturopathic makeup but is gonna upregulate the tryptophan five HTP serotonin melatonin pathway so she can elongate her sleep as part of that collective goal.
Lou Zameryka: And all, all this research, you know, is there. So that's what we're doing. Like every time we, you know, we're gonna make it painfully easy for people to just see, okay, here's my data and this is what it's saying, right? No chart, no graph, like plain English. This is what it says. Here's like a benchmark chart comparison so you know what it's talking about, but you don't have to look at a bunch of graphs and determine what it means. Here's what you could do for a manual intervention. Here's some products or services that support it. As we start to grow in transactions and we can look at what happens to people's data when they choose different things, we'll be able to say, Hey, the last a hundred people who purchased this saw this happen, you know?
But we can also say in the studies, like, this study is paired with this and it indicates this. Just put it all in one place so people could actually do that and keep coming back. Right. To seeing, to your point, what their own end of one experiment looks like. Because you can't do that if everything you buy or do is disjointed.
Right. It's basically you're, we're trying to create your preventative health record. You know, instead of that health record that's kept with your doctor that you kind of can't add to, you can't look at and you're not sure who really cares about it. We're gonna create the preventative version that you own.
And it looks a lot like your Amazon recent orders, or you know, what you've been, booking ticket wise on, uh, you know, on an event site. But instead it's your services and your purchases and your choices of habits all in one place.
Adam Mogelonsky: And of course once you throw wearables into the mix, you have more data to act upon for that preventative, uh, medicine record.
Lou Zameryka: More people are wearing more wearables and tracking data from smart devices than
Adam Mogelonsky: Yep.
Lou Zameryka: and every day it increases. So like, let's make use of that data.
Adam Mogelonsky: Well, I, I was gonna say is that the, one of the biggest problems we have in all this is the, adversity to delayed gratification. And if you're measuring what you're doing on your wellness journey, you are adding that gamified element to show people the physiological benefits that are occurring that are too small to notice in the short term on a, on a pheno, phenotypic level,
Lou Zameryka: we have a designer we're working with, and he and I both have, uh, a background as children playing roleplaying video games. I loved the Final Fantasy series, and we said, it's kind of crazy that if you gave somebody a roleplaying video game, they would spend a lot of time building this avatar up, right?
Like
they would say, oh, I gotta build the strength. I gotta equip 'em with this. I gotta level them up and this and that. But that doesn't exist for your life, right? You don't check in every morning and go, okay, how am I doing across. My metrics, right? Did I want to increase strength? Did I wanna do this? Do like
you don't do it, but, but if, if it was a video game, you check every day and try and move this character up. But we don't have a dashboard for life, right? If you're a sales development representative, you go to work and you have a dashboard and it tells you, you know what to follow up on, what to do, where your biggest opportunities are, that there's no dashboard for when you wake up in the morning.
Adam Mogelonsky: Yeah. Well first off, I was, uh, I was more of a balder's skate. kid myself. Uh, not necessarily final fantasy, but yeah, it's essentially we're, we need a digital avatar for ourselves where we can then quantify our leveling up in terms of that raw xp that, that is then allocated to the strength, intelligence, wisdom, whatever the other classes are.
And, and your, your goal, you know, you said you're a runner and now your wellness journey is along that, you know, maybe, you're a runner or you're a paladin, or you're a, soer whatever, whatever class you're trying to go to, right?
Lou Zameryka: Yeah, no, it's true. And like, you know, the things you choose to buy or utilize, right, are, are levels up like an armor or an item would be,
but then you can inherently level up through actions and things like, so it, you know, that level of gamification we are really thinking a lot about because it just seems strange that we don't take that into account, you know, for our own life.
And again, when you, think multimodality and, and again you incorporate mindset and social connection, it helps you to under, like, social connection is such a key because it allows you to not just go down the rabbit hole of going like, I gotta keep working out, I gotta keep doing this. Like, because you, you kind of force the idea that, well, social connection is as valuable as those other pillars. You feel good about the times you choose social connection. And so you can kind of balance that idea of like, you know, because you meet people that are like, I can't go to this birthday party 'cause I have to, you know, lift weights and it's like. Nah, you can go to the birthday party. Like, 'cause that's, that's part of your wellness.
if you lift weights 365 days a year and you go to no birthday parties, you'll be basically as unhealthy in the long run as if you didn't lift those weights.
Adam Mogelonsky: What they say now is that Jomo is the new fomo,
Lou Zameryka: Yeah,
Adam Mogelonsky: of missing out
Lou Zameryka: yeah, yeah, yeah. And I think there's an opportunity to kind of make sure that we don't understand that, that there's JOMO and fomo, but it's about a choice of who you spend your time with, where you get your energy from, and make that a conscious choice of what the trade-offs are and acknowledge that, you know, one is not an unhealthy trade-off.
Right. Like, spending time with friends. You know, if, if you have an epic night planned and I have a long run the day after, I will figure out what to do to make sure that, that, you know, but if you have nothing really going on, you're not gonna see me that night. I'm gonna go to bed early, I'm gonna have that nice nine o'clock night.
But if you say, Hey, you know, I like BA College basketball. If my friends say, Hey, St. John's, they're making it into the final four of the NCAA tournament, we're going, I will like that trip means a lot to me. So I will make sure that that area of social connection gets touched
while other things don't fall apart.
Adam Mogelonsky: Well, part of that as well as a devil's advocate to what you just said is that you've, you've leveled up so much that you actually know what to do in that situation to, to maintain your health while on the road and to do, incorporate certain hacks or certain, certain things that you can adjust in the moment.
So one of, one of my hacks you mentioned you like beer. I will only drink, I'm a wine guy myself. 'cause I've optimized for wine and I think that it is the healthiest form of alcohol consumption that's around. But if I were to have a beer, because beer is a delicious tasting beverage, I would opt for a lager, a pilsner, not an IPA because IPAs have the phytoestrogen that lowers testosterone, which isn't good for men.
So that's like in the moment of my biochemistry brain, just going like, how can I navigate this, this bomb of a menu here that is. This diner out in the middle of nowhere where everything is, is, you know, covered in in vegetable oil and, and deep fried and all this. And they're trying to sell me.
They're trying to sell me Coca-Cola at every single turn. How do I navigate this to know what I can do in the moment? And you see a lot of, a lot of guys in Instagram are really big on this, like Paul Saladino, Dave Osprey, um, Tom Lauer, all, all these guys where they're like, okay, what can you do? Going to the airport is, is unavoidable and airport food is notoriously horrible for your health.
Or it's just very expensive. What can you do? Well, okay, you can bring snacks through. You can bring solid snacks through. And then Paul Saladino, like he's bringing, he says that the way you get good water that doesn't, isn't in plastics. You don't get microplastics through the, through the security gate is you're allowed to bring through coconuts.
So he'll bring through like a bag of six coconuts with a metal straw that's also allowed, that can penetrate it without needing a
needing a machete to get through the coconut. And then that's his drinking water while, while he is in the
Lou Zameryka: you you can also freeze, like frozen water is not considered water,
so you could also freeze it. 'cause we, you know, my daughter and wife with Celiac, we often are bringing food with us. So like, we're making sure, like the ice pack thing didn't melt right? No it didn't. So it doesn't count. And you could bring an ice pack through,
you know, things of that nature. Uh, you could bring food in a thermos through, so, you know, there's always something to get around it.
Adam Mogelonsky: But, uh, I mean the, the point here is, is the more personal, the more universal is people are doing these little hacks, or they're trying to figure them out because the collective, the collective, place is not solving that issue.
Lou Zameryka: Yep.
Adam Mogelonsky: starting to, like you see juice bars at airports?
Lou Zameryka: The farmer's fridge things. Yeah.
Adam Mogelonsky: Yeah.
But it still is very expensive for the common
person. So they're like, why don't I just, you know, they're, they're, they're giving me a, a bag of walnuts there for $20 us. Why don't I just go to Costco and bring plan to bring a Ziploc bag through with that? Or, you know, you, you mentioned, uh, celiac disease is making sure that you have a proper gluten-free menu and it's well advertised.
So that way, um, that way in advance of coming to the airport, the people know that that's a possibility. And replace the word airport with hotel and it's the exact same
Lou Zameryka: Yeah. Oh man. Yeah. Us going places is quite challenging. It's better than it would've been years ago.
But it's still pretty challenging with the gluten thing. And, uh, I'm very thankful for how high level quality delta lounges are nowadays
from a, healthy food, uh, tasty selection as well as, you know, keeping the gluten free food.
It's not that hard, right? Like, I lived in Costa Rica for two, uh, like two full winters. And because basically everything is like corn tortillas, rice grilled fish, grilled meats, not that hard to avoid gluten.
It's really just an Americanized challenge where you're like, okay, somehow we had to gluten almost everything that we want to eat.
Yeah.
Adam Mogelonsky: Yeah. For flavor profile or mouthfeel or whatever. But hold on. You, you raised an interesting point, Delta lounges, personal question. Does the quality of the food of the Delta Lounge, does that influence your decision to choose Delta over other carriers?
Lou Zameryka: Now it's, it's hard to tell, like it's mainly because I live in New York and, and on Long Island, and Delta basically owns like every gate as a premium airline at LaGuardia and, and JFK. Uh, so it was really more of a journey thing. Like I traveled to Amsterdam all the time for booking and Delta and KLM work,
so it just played up.
But Delta, because they wanted to be like the US' version of a premium carrier, like, you know, some of the Middle Eastern carriers and things like that, or the Asian carriers, they just kept trying to step up their game.
Uh, definitely in, in the world of how I choose to spend my money or time, I am always looking for businesses that are gonna make it generally easy for me to be, to enjoy the food that they have, like price point aside and everything.
Like just, you know, help me to find things that I want to eat that are filled with flavor.
I'll worry about your price tag later because to your point, Adam, like everything is super expensive nowadays. The worst food for you is still really cheap, but like middle of the road food is almost equally as expensive to like any healthy option you choose.
Adam Mogelonsky: but people are voting with their wallets and, uh, then economies of scale are catching up. For instance, 20 years ago, a SAE was very expensive as a powder. now it's that middle of the road supplement that you can find relatively cheap to give you that antho, cyan, and antioxidant blast with every, every yogurt bowl that you're putting it in.
So these things are going, and as people vote with their wallets, there is some economies of scale that are reached for, for some of these things.
Lou Zameryka: yeah. No, I, I see it happening, you know, every, every week or every month. It's, better and better the selection out there. Um, and it's, it's a great opportunity for anybody in hospitality, food service, things like that.
Adam Mogelonsky: Yeah. So, so to, to wrap up here, 'cause we've been talking for a while, and again, this is a huge, huge mega trend.
Probably the mega trend of all megatrends. If you think about the longevity revolution,
where will we be in five years time?
Lou Zameryka: Yeah, I mean, it seems like if, if you listen to some of the, the minds around longevity, uh, as well as the progress of artificial intelligence, we're, we're going to get to, you know, back to Brian Johnson.
Like there's this concept that people believe in this escape velocity, right? Which is like, just stay healthy enough now so that when they figure out how to really extend a lot of lifespan. You will benefit from it. So I, you know, I don't know if that means we get to 150 or things like that, but I do believe that because of the way we are going with people voting with their dollars with science, catching up with people, you know, improving the quality of foods we eat, things we drink, we're at this point where I think that wellness is going to be a very common desire of people, right.
To be healthy, to act, healthy, to make choices. It's not gonna be uncommon anymore. and then secondly, that, that group of people, you're gonna have to adjust customer lifetime value, uh, you know, calculations and businesses because if you ga gather a share of their wallet, the duration that you will have them as an
Adam Mogelonsky: Yes.
Lou Zameryka: is gonna go through the roof,
Adam Mogelonsky: Yeah, I've talked about that extensively, uh, with CLV calculations about how all CLV calculations are, are based on standard average lifespans, but then the wellness community is not average. They're optimal and. Even if you have an average that is affected by things like Covid, where it's actually come down, or the other thing we haven't discussed, which is, uh, deaths of despair amongst young people, which is also bringing down the average lifespan, whole other very dark conversation.
But you have this wellness community emerging where your lifespan calculation, your healthspan calculation is not based on the standard of 81 82, it's based on 120,
Lou Zameryka: Yeah.
Adam Mogelonsky: uh, you know, as a hypothetical, but that's an additional 40 years of potential interactions from brand to customer.
Lou Zameryka: Yeah. If, if I don't kind of, you know, go the route even of, even 90 to 95, right? If 90 to
95 is not. Sitting somewhere just getting Medicare treatment.
That's five more years of me being a, you know, a customer, an active member of society, and to your point earlier, potentially a very, uh, active member even of the workforce in some ways. So I, I do think we're gonna, in five years have to start rewriting a lot of things. I, you know, I, when I started Lively, I was thinking, I, I wasn't sure what form it would take, but I, I was on a run one day and I was like, well, no matter what, what I'll do is real estate and wealth management are very big businesses.
If I start a business where I get a bunch of leads of people that are gonna live longer, then I could sell those leads to real estate developers that need to develop a different version of an old age community. Or I could sell 'em to, you know, wealth management people that need to rethink the entire kind of portfolio structure of their clients. These clients are not gonna just sit there and take defined payments of, you know, enough to eat and keep a roof over their head for
20
years.
Adam Mogelonsky: they'd go broke.
Lou Zameryka: Yeah. So I was like, I'll just sell the leads of to these people. Like worst comes to worst
because I do think fundamentally you're gonna have to think about how to redesign communities where you have active, more active people seeking more social connection, how to redefine wealth management.
Adam Mogelonsky: And, and the insurance industry in terms of actuarial tables and all that, it's, it's so far reaching and it's all happening at the same time in various levels, in different countries, different regions, that it's, it's hard to really tabulate in real time versus in hindsight and say like, oh wow, people are eating healthier than they were 10 years ago.
it has such, these, these widespread effects. You see it, wellness communities, resorts, uh, the wealth management side. Even, even just the retirement age, which is a huge. Point of discussion. Like every time they even mention that in France there, there's, they, they're throwing burning trash in the streets of Paris.
Lou Zameryka: Yeah.
Adam Mogelonsky: it's a huge, huge problem as well as a huge, huge, huge opportunity.
Lou Zameryka: Think about what generational travel would look like if great grandparents, grandparents, parents, and kids are all going on a trip, right? The vacation
home rental industry and the extent kind of all suite hotel industry would have to have a kind of a makeover. And that's not unreasonable. I just lost my grandfather, you know, so my kids' great-grandfather like, uh, six months ago,
he was like doing great for his entire life.
So you go, okay, if that's gonna be the norm. 'cause you have those two things happening, right? You have medicine and AI fixing acute care. Intervening to keep, you know, real sickness and illness away. And then you have people through their desire to be healthier, acting on that desire to be healthier, which is durational again.
So, I mean, five years could look tremendously different.
Adam Mogelonsky: I mean on, on your point about multi-generational travel, we're seeing that right now in real time where, particularly in the luxury and ultra luxury sector, but it's the grandparent who is healthy and has come to the realization saying, well, you know, just sitting here retirement in the same places. It's not fun and it's not good for my healthspan slash lifespan.
So instead of just transferring my, my wealth when I die, I'm gonna ha, I'm gonna spend it with my family and we're gonna go on that $200,000 safari in South Africa, or I'm gonna. Just me and my wife going to this, Hawaiian resort. I'm gonna pay for a, a three bedroom, uh, villa or someplace, and we're all gonna go together and we're gonna spend our wealth, but we're gonna get great experiences out of it.
And all those experiences, we're gonna have a wellness component,
Lou Zameryka: Yep,
Adam Mogelonsky: it or not.
Lou Zameryka: of course. Yeah. No, it's, it's,
gonna be really like five years is gonna feel like a whole nother world again because of this, I don't know that society has, has ever had, you know, a growth rate of interest in, in pre and preventative care and wellness that it does right now. So I don't know what that looks like when suddenly people are more fit, more present, more, uh, and have a greater duration of lifespan.
Adam Mogelonsky: I would say it looks like all of the above.
Everything ever, everything everywhere, all at once. And that's the hardest part to fathom is. there, there's so many different opportunities. You simply have to define what your brand is and then find those modalities that work within that brand as well as ways to, to scale that while still staying personal as possible.
Yeah.
Lou Zameryka: I look forward to, to exploring all that with you. Right. Um,
Adam Mogelonsky: Yeah.
Lou Zameryka: be fun.
Adam Mogelonsky: Well, uh, Lou, this has been a fantastic one and a half hour long conversation, and hopefully people can realize the opportunities. Uh, they'll check out Alively to see what, what you're building and, they'll make the personal changes that they wanna make and, uh, live a longer, healthier life.
Lou Zameryka: Yeah. And if people are listening, you know, they wanna talk about any of this, not just the business side. I keep some open hours, so I have a link that I can send out and people can book and we can just have health span conversations, you know?
Adam Mogelonsky: Yeah, I said wealth of knowledge right there. Thanks Lou. Thanks for coming on.
Lou Zameryka: Thanks Adam.