Jim Kean Talks Biomarkers, Building a Spectator Sport:
While Krauss may be the king of cholesterol, he’s actually not the first person to mention the importance of measuring ApoB particles! In this podcast with Jim Kean, we go in-depth into the biomarkers that he personally monitors. Why is this relevant? Jim Kean played a pivotal role in making consumer blood testing available to quantified selfers throughout the United States by founding WellnessFX, a company that allows consumers to directly order relevant blood tests and view that data as trending data, and prior to that he also founded Sapient Health Networks, which went on to become webMD’s consumer health business. Jim is also the former CEO of the National Pro Grid League (NPGL), which is a co-ed, professional spectator sport in which teams compete in human performance races utilizing elements from olympic weight lifting, gymnastics, sprinting and body weight movements.
Jim also has a rich personal history in the world of athletics, having been a college football player, track runner, ballet dancer, long distance hiker of the pacific crest trail, and also a regular CrossFit games participant (ranking 256th this year). More important than that, though, Jim thinks like a scientist about his own health and is constantly running his own n=1 experiments using hard data. In other words, Jim is the consummate quantified selfer.
In this podcast Jim and I discuss:
•The quantified-self movement and the importance of measuring biomarkers more than once.
•The gut’s role in cholesterol.
•Serotonin in the gut versus in the brain.
•The role of exercise in preventing neuroinflammation.
•The effects of overtraining on sex hormones.
•The psychology of constructing a new, non-gender segregated, team spectator sport and bringing it to market.
•What the NPGL and the psychology of constructing a new televised spectator sport and bringing it to market.
•The factors that separate a professional spectator sport from any other form of entertainment: including patriotism, justice, and vicariousness.
•The mathematical nature of the sport and the floor coach’s role in monitoring athletes before they start “redlining”.
•How NPGL teams may find new ways to tune their gameplay and find an edge on the competition in the future by stepping up the use of more advanced athlete-level analytics.
Sound good? Great! Now go check it out…