On this episode of the Full Stack Leader, we’re talking with Freddie Kimmel a renowned wellness & podcast specialist.
Freddie is a Transformational Coach, host, and creator of the Beautifully Broken Podcast and part of the management team at AmpCoil. He has been featured in, The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, “State of the Arts” on LA talk radio, and in Dance Magazine. He is also a proud survivor of metastatic cancer, Lyme, and mold.
Freddie has a Bachelor’s of Fine Arts from SUNY Brockport and in conjunction with starting Freddiesetgo.com has performed all over the country in Broadway touring productions of Phantom of the Opera, Billy Elliot, and played the title role in the Broadway-bound Cagney the musical in New York City
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Show Transcript:
Ryan: I’d like to visit. Hello everyone and welcome back to this week’s episode of the Full Stack Leader Podcast this week. Again, I’m here at South by Southwest 2023, talking to lots of amazing innovators about the future of what’s happening in technology. , today I’m joined by Freddie Kimmel. He is a podcaster and wellness specialist, and, I’m excited to talk about some of the things that are coming out in that world.
Great to have you here.
Freddie: Oh my goodness. I’m glad to be here. What a, an amazing festival. This is such a collection of thought leaders and technologies and innovation in one room.
Ryan: Yeah. One of the things I’ve seen a lot is like different industries from different places coming together to like see where they meet and, uh, it’s, it’s really interesting.
You could be talking to a wellness person on one level and then I might talk to a hardware specialist on another level and then somebody in the travel industry. So you, you know, you really get such a mix. It’s great. Yeah. What’s been one of your favorite things you’ve seen since you’ve been here?
Freddie: Oh, goodness.
I came here to see friends, so I have friends that work with a, a stem cell supplement that boosts poly pleural stem cells within the body called STEM Regen. And then I ran across some other people over here doing a thing called the. Sleep crown, which is a, it’s a, it’s a solution that helps you nasal breathe and cover your eyes and feel like you’re being hugged in bed.
And then I just wandered over and have just seen some other, Amazing technology has a lot to do with like content capture. New types of lenses, new types of microphones, people that are helping other creators get their message out, which I al it’s so important, right? There’s a lot
Ryan: happening with the technology of the way the body is interacting with machines and technology.
And I know that you’re, , pretty heavily engaged in some of that. There’s also a lot in the world of biohacking and the way that we can actually optimize, the efficiency of our body in so many different ways. Yeah. And I know you’re deep in that. As you think about kind of the future of, of how all of this is starting to come together, everything from like health kits within the phones, all the way into really amazing devices, like we were talking about the lymphatic, , the lymphatic body glove kind of thing.
Yeah. What are some of the things that you see coming up that are going to be
Freddie: very exciting for everybody? Yeah. Well, you’re gonna have people. First I have to say, you know, you have to look at the, you have to look at the, the health of the United States population, and it is embarrassing amongst, I think we’re like number 83 in the world.
You know, we make a lot of money here, but we don’t put our priority first or we don’t have a good understanding of what health is. And for me, we have these, these stats that are coming up and, and they’re just, they’re a forced function of the way we’re living, the way we’re eating, the way we’re interacting, or we’re not interacting as a community.
So, I like the interconnected nature of health. And, and when I talk about like the suit, like Flo Preso mm-hmm. Is a New Zealand technology that helps move lymphatics. It helps move the interstitial, the space between space. Mm-hmm. Um, it’s a full body suit that does full body compression and thermodynamic heat, as well as deep pressure therapy.
But what you’re gonna see on the other side about after being hugged for 40 minutes is that your resting heart rate drops. Your sleep scores are better, your anxiety is, uh, greatly diminished. People with long-term PTSD even have an experience where they just don’t feel that severity because the body has been felt and seen as it’s need to be held.
So it’s, I always look at like, where are people really hurting? And that’s why I like events. That’s usually what I ask. I’m like, what’s your pain point? You know, a lot of times when you talk about technology and integration, it’s like people are like, I know what to do. I know all the things. I don’t show up for myself.
So like, that’s a really fascinating question. Like, man, I know there’s great information and thought leaders, and why am I not doing it? Mm. You know? So I think we overestimate what we can do in a day. So I look to AI or technology to really help us prioritize our time to understand that the human body has limitations.
You know, how do I meet myself? Where, what I, what, where are my capabilities in running a, whether it’s a functional medicine practice or a technology company? Right where in the eighties or the nineties maybe it was like a badge of honor to say, oh, I worked a 14 hour day and I never, I haven’t taken a vacation in 18 months.
People are starting to see the toll on that and the escalation of cancer rates. Yeah. Um, you know, we can look at, and again, I look at cancer as a forced function of, um, the body out of extreme balance. And, and these are things that, you know, doctors are starting to see. Uh, That, that a tumor could, could have formed 10 years ago.
And you’re just seeing that expression of late stage disease finally after almost a decade. So this, as this conversation expands, I just, I think technology and the learning systems will be able to hold up a mirror to the shitty lifestyle behaviors that we’re, that we’re, that we’re standing in. Do you
Ryan: think, do you think that there’s sometimes, Too much information for the average person to be able to take in.
So we’re dealing with everything from work information or school information, depending on your age, to family information, to all kinds of things. And then you suddenly have to like also take into account all these aspects of your body. How does a person sift through all of that and figure out what’s
Freddie: right?
Yeah, you have to, again, it comes back into how do I, how do I. Pause and listen to what my body is telling me. Cuz if you ever have had that feeling where you feel like the hard drive is full, I can’t take anything else in my brain and I’m starting to have basic tasks go awry, like going in and out the house and forgetting my car keys a few times.
I’m where my leaving things, that’s a sign that the brain is just full. I do think that the amount of information that we’re exposed to, you can look at the um, I mean, look at where we were a hundred years ago. I feel like I just saw stat, like the refrigerator was only invented a hundred years ago, right?
Yeah. And now we have super computers in our hands that we can get anywhere, anything information to whenever we want it. And I don’t think that improves quality of life. I think if you look at happiness scores, so the quality of life scores, people feel a greater sense of lack. And so, I would, I would take all this, this overwhelm, and I would just remind that there is a model that works perfectly and that is the democracy of nature.
And so there is a rising in setting of the sun. There’s a time when lights are out and we should probably be thinking about down regulatory behavior and sleep. There is a seasonal aspect. To when we might follow certain type of foods that are presenting themselves. Now we go into Whole Foods. We get every vegetable every day, all year long because we can.
So I think within the model, the democracy of nature are some great lessons that we can draw from. And I think we can use, we can, we can, we can put that code into technology, right? Mm-hmm. We could tell a smart home when it is to it’s time to stop work. You know, maybe there’s an override button and a point system, but there is a, you know, there’s a sleep temperature in which if you were sleeping outside on the ground, you’d be getting a certain level of electrons.
You’d, you would not be toasty under four comforters. You know, we’ve seen that this advent of, uh, cold and ice exposure dramatically affecting people’s hells and re, re reminding my body. I’m like, oh my God, it’s good to be freezing cold in water for three minutes. The immune system and that triggers the immune system so that the immune system responds very favorably.
All my neurotransmitters, my neuro epinephrine, my dopamine all get jacked up. And no, I’m no longer clinically depressed. And the fact that we
Ryan: can discover and see that scientifically now is, is, uh, is really different than even just 10, 15 years ago. Like, like, like I think there’s been a lot of these kind of things that have maybe existed within humanity for a long time, but they’re just now becoming like very clear on a, on a data level for everyone to work with.
And. It’s a lot to like, take in. Yeah. Uh,
Freddie: like many other things out there. Yeah. It’s really, it’s a complicated conversation because you can, I, I’ve never seen from moving through, I went through metastatic cancer and Lyme disease and severe autoimmunity, and my labs never reflected my day-to-day fluctuations in health.
My barometer for that was always how I felt and what my lived experience was. So I’m not sure AI or technology’s ever gonna overtake that. If we can use these systems and the numbers and the data to greater hone like what mine North Compass is like, you’re, you’re never gonna override a human heart. I am a quantum computer.
Think about all the sources of input that drive me to like a feeling or a, but just an intuitive trend that know, that’s good for me. Or maybe it, maybe it could be, you know, our. Our bias is so easily swayed by data and numbers, so I do see the need for a balance, you know, things like heart rate variability.
Thank you. You know, tracking, I have a, a meter called bios strap, which measures my body temperature, my time between successive heartbeats, my sleep scores, my recovery scores. So I can look at this strap and I can look at the data on my board and I can see how I recovered the night before. Mm-hmm. And, and I can usually align that with my day, where I’m like, damn, I’m crushing it today.
My brain is on fire. I feel so good while I had a 93 recovery score. And my heart rate is pure coherence for the last eight hours. Right? And then I can also feel, I can start to establish a feeling or a greater knowing of what a recovery score of 23 looks like, where my, my heart rate variability is tanked.
It’s just like a metronome. My body’s tired, and it’s not the day for me to go push weight. So I can start to use that information to tap into the knowing I’m saying all that with, once you establish what that knowing is, I think we need to take a break from these things and get back into what does that feel like for you?
So,
Ryan: so a lot of my audience is are, are engineering leaders and they’re working with, they’re working with people who, tend to put a lot of time behind computers, tend to like, uh, work really, really hard. And I’m wondering like how important. It is for them to recognize the kind of body performance of the people that are working for.
I’ll give you an example. I, you, you look at an athletics team that, that’s so much concentrations put on like how body performs et stuff. That’s at an elite level, like working with it, but just at an average level of, of body performance. S it can dramatically affect the overall quality of efficiency and, and delivery and creativity of humans and stuff like that.
How does, how does an engineering leader put more focus on that with people like that might
Freddie: be working on their team? It’s, it’s a great, it’s, you know, people have to, these companies have to step up and they have to do this for their employees. They need to think outside of the box. And I say, how am I gonna embody this in my staff?
How do they see it in their employees? How do they see it in their place? Yeah. Well you could start with a subjective experience intake form. Sure. And just ask your employees, ask how’s everybody feel? Is everybody happy working here? What’s your pain point? Well, I sit in this chair all day. Yeah. And I have, uh, I have sciatic pain and I have hip pain in my pelvic floor from sitting in this chair.
You’re gonna come up, you’re gonna, you’re gonna identify a big bell curve where there’s a lot of people saying a relatively same thing. I guarantee it’s somewhere around not moving enough. So we look at this base baseline of 10,000 steps a day. Yeah. You know, we know these people doing this programming work and coding.
Don’t get this. So I’ll go really, really simple for you. Um, it could be something as simple as, and let me just step it one step back. The 10,000 steps are allowing the smooth muscle to contract around the lymphatic system. So to move limb. So we’ll just, I spoke about Flo Preso. There’s no reason that company can’t have a room where people get 20 minute Flo Preso sessions.
There’s no reason that company can’t have a room where there’s a full body light panel that is releasing nitric oxide in the cells and boosting systemic circulation, also helping circadian rhythm. There’s no reason those guys can’t have blue blocking lenses on their glasses or a timer on the screen that is slowly dimming the sensitivity or the the severity of that blue light on the computer.
Towards their shutdown time. At the end of the day, you can, you can engineer the, in these things serious into the work, work life model. So you’re saying invest
Ryan: in that versus ping pong tables
Freddie: and Red Bull? I, I think, you know, you, you could argue, listen, and, and what I’d say is, uh, if it’s working for you, don’t change it.
You know, look at your, you look at your employee retention, right? Look at how many people who would get off the phone and say, man, I love fucking working here. This is an amazing company the way they treat me. I think if I went into a company and I, my doctor’s office does this. My doctor’s office has the ARX technology, which is a computer biofeedback.
It’s a whole gym and a sled system. One machine or two machines. They have an ice bath, they have red light therapy, they have massage chairs. This all comes with my being a patient of this doctor. Mm-hmm. Caleb Greer in Austin, Texas. Got it. So this model is an incentive model to stay well. So I don’t know why a company wouldn’t just test it.
Cuz you could job in a company or consultant like myself and say, Hey, let’s set you up for three months, four months. Yeah. Maybe nobody uses it. You might, you might find that, you know, human humans are, we gotta find the way where it’s like the person’s identified those three or four things that say, oh, that looks as compelling as the Red Bull in the table tennis.
Right. Maybe. Maybe that’s something I want to just try for four to six months and check out sick days performance. Happiness scores. You could go next level, you could put a or a ring on everybody and check everybody’s recovery for, for six months and partner with one of these tech companies who’s pulling biometrics.
Mm-hmm. Yeah. If people are open to it. Yeah. So if people are open to it, but then you’re gonna look at things like the hospital industry and nurses and if you look up the number of nurses that are experiencing burnout and deserting the hospital systems right now, it’s shocking. Yeah, it’s shocking. In big cities like LA and New York, they’re completely understaffed.
I know that there’s a huge layoff that just happened in, in the Austin, Texas area of travel nurses. And so they put the burden of nurses who are already already overwhelmed. Already overwhelmed. They cut it in half. So the,
Ryan: the acute, the acute problems become more and more intense. Yep. Cuz we’re not taking care of ourselves
Freddie: on a regular basis.
And, and then when you do experience cancer, when you do have a, a car accident, when you do break a bone, you will, you will feel firsthand. The limitations that our medical system is under. And so it’s a trickle down effect. So I think it’s gotta be, you know, you gotta do it for the coders, you gotta do it for the first line responders, you gotta do it for the firefighters.
You know, look at the testicular cancer rates among firefighters right now from theorize from the flame retardant gear that they’re wearing is assimilating into their skin in the lymphatic tissue. Oh wow. Skyrocketing. Wow. Skyrocketing. And, and this is something that we’re sort of aware of. I don’t see people moving fast enough and it’s, um, it, but it’s, it’s everybody, right?
It’s not just that industry. It’s everybody can use this help. So I really, really think there is, uh, an immediate need for this conversation to be forwarded. Cool. Well, I, I know
Ryan: you gotta run. Yes. Um, but it was amazing talking to you. I could go on literally for days. Um, totally. Uh, can you tell everyone where they might be able to find more information about you and
Freddie: kind of what you’re doing?
Yeah. I do a, a, a podcast, which is totally free. It’s called The Beautifully Broken Podcast. Big, big importance on the, the website is beautifully broken.world, and so lots of the different modalities like ozone therapy or red light therapy or. Uh, full body stem cell makeovers is on this site. Great. And then I speak all over the world, so if there’s an event, it’s on that, it’s on that site.
If I’m gonna go travel somewhere, things like South by Southwest or a four M mm-hmm. Or the upgrade conference in Orlando, all the biohacking stuff. Yeah. You know, I tend to hang out at those areas and Cool. Expand this conversation.
Ryan: Yeah. Great. Well, it’s, uh, it’s an exciting area of technology growth and an important part of, uh, I think tech leadership that we, people are taking.
paying attention to, but I think more and more need to, need to have that at the forefront of the conversation. So, yeah. Appreciate it a
Freddie: hundred percent. All right. Thanks for, thanks for joining us. Yes, Ryan. Thank you. That’s awesome. Thanks. Cheers.