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Why I’m obsessed with health wearables (and you should be too) | Michael Snyder | Your Body on Tech
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Adam Grant
Foreign.
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Anoush Zamorodi
You're listening to TED Talks Daily where we bring you new ideas and conversations to spark your curiosity every day. I'm Anoush Zumarodi. I am sitting in for Elise Hu. I host the TED Radio hour podcast, usually over on npr. I'm also an author, a two time TED speaker, and this week I'm here with a special series of episodes all about how you can live a healthier life in our high tech era. So why am I here? Okay, so I had the honor of guest curating a session at the recent TED 2026 conference all about my obsession, tech, the human body, and what is keeping us human in this digital age. Every day this week we are bringing you one of these talks from my session, followed by a conversation with that speaker to go deeper. These are people who are at the top of their field and today we are talking about wearables, all those SM watches and smart rings and glucose monitors that more and more of us are putting on our bodies to monitor our health. But what can we actually do with all that information that we're collecting? Well, today's speaker has some answers. Michael Snyder is a professor of genetics at Stanford University and director of the center for Genomics and Personalized Medicine. Over the last 20 years, he says he's collected more personal health data than almost any other known human. It's all part of his pursuit to show how we can treat each body as an individual, not as a population average.
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Michael Snyder
And even when we practice healthcare, if you think about it, it's a pretty archaic process. You'll travel to a physician's office. When you're there, they'll take lots of blood. And from all that blood, in the time you're there, they actually don't make very many measurements. And from those measurements, they'll treat you based on population averages rather than the individual. We're trying to change all those steps. And one area in particular is remote health monitoring.
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Anoush Zamorodi
When it comes to wearables, there's an analogy that Michael likes to use.
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Michael Snyder
What if you can measure your health with sensors and a dashboard, much like your car dashboard?
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Anoush Zamorodi
So think about your car and think about the dashboard right behind the steering wheel you can see like, do you have enough air in your tires? How much gas is in the tank? Now, what if you had the same sort of thing but for your body? That's where wearables come in. And he believes this tech is one way healthcare systems, especially here in the US and can start serving people in better, smarter ways. I personally have been tracking the findings from his lab because he has made some fascinating discoveries about how we age and what kinds of diabetes there are and how the human body changes depending on genes and the environment. He does this by collecting and analyzing just terabytes of data. So I'm nerding out here. I think you will too. Michael's talk and my conversation with him. That's coming up right after a short break.
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Anoush Zamorodi
And now, our TED Talk and conversation of the day.
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Michael Snyder
Our healthcare system is broken. Our laboratory in the last 17 years has been trying to improve it. And along the way, I've even learned a lot of new things about my own health. It's broken because we practice sick care rather than healthcare. And even when we practice healthcare, if you think about it, it's a pretty archaic process. You'll travel to a physician's office that really hasn't changed much in the last 40 years. When you're there, they'll take lots of blood, and from all that blood, in the time you're there, they actually don't make very many measurements. And from those measurements, they'll treat you based on population averages rather than the individual. We're trying to change all those steps, and one area in particular is remote health monitoring. What if you can measure your health with sensors and a dashboard, much like your car dashboard? That's what we've been trying to do, and you can now do that thanks to a revolution in wearable devices. Smartwatches, rings, and hosts of other devices. These devices will measure things like resting heart rate, heart rate variability, skin temperature and conductance, blood, oxygen, even sleep. All of these things we know are very important for our health, and we can now measure them continuously 24, 7, as long as you keep them charged. I'm such a big fan of these devices. I wear eight of them every single day. I'm wearing four smartwatches, two rings. Even my hearing aids are sensors. They measure physiology, like these other devices, but they also measure my socialization, which is important for your health as well. So you can track all of these things in real time. And we've been doing just that. When they first came out as fitness trackers, we put them on a cohort of people we were studying for health tracking. And what we discovered is that you could tell when people get ill in advance of symptoms from a simple smartwatch, in this case, smartwatch and pulse ox. The first case was when I discovered my Lyme disease, of all things, with, in fact, a pulse oxygen and a smartwatch. Where my blood oxygen dropped, my heart rate went up. It was all pretty symptomatically. And then I did visit a physician who actually diagnosed it as Lyme disease. And in the end we got it treated early and I wound up not getting anything serious. I was cured right away simply because of early detection. And so that turned out to be the first case. And then we went on to show that you can detect respiratory viral infections with a simple smartwatch because your heart rate jumped up in advance of symptoms. When the COVID pandemic came along in spring of 2020, we built a real time detection system that follows your baseline and looks for a jump up in resting heart rate and other measures and then sends a red alert. And it turns out this alerting system works very, very well for Covid because Covid has a long pre symptomatic period. It will detect Covid 80% of the time with a median of three days in advance of symptoms. It's not specific for Covid though, I should warn you, it does pick up other viral infections, which we think is a good thing, but it also picks up other stressors and the number one trigger of red alerts is workplace stress. So it actually is both a physical stress detector with viral infections, but also mental health detector. And we're actually exploiting this further to try and tell when people get anxious and have depression from a simple smartwatch. Infections are not the only thing you detect with these devices. My colleagues at Stanford have actually shown you can pick up afibrillation, which is a heart condition that if you catch it early you can treat it with machine learning and AI. We actually were able to show that smartwatches are pretty sophisticated. They can actually tell your red blood cell count and other measures, things associated with anemia and hydration, but also even your blood glucose and hemoglobin A1C as it's called, which is important for diabetes. You can also pick up with a smartwatch thanks to the skin conductance measure on these things. So these are many, they're very sophisticated devices that can make many measurements as early signs of disease. They're not the only devices that are out there. Continuous glucose monitors are very, very powerful too. They'll measure your glucose every five minutes. And we have a diabetes endemic going on that's worse than the COVID pandemic. 11.6% of people in this country are diabetic in the US and 20% of them don't know it. 38% of people are pre diabetic and 80% of those don't know it. And those numbers are going up by the way. And the pre diabetics, most of them will become diabetic. So we think it's very important to catch glucose Dysregulation early so that you can prevent diabetes. And it also turns out glucose spikes are associated with cardiovascular disease, which is the number one killer in the US So we actually put these on so called normal people and pre diabetics. And we did discover that some people are normal, they have good glucose control. Some people are moderate glucose spikers, so they spiked somewhat. And some people are severe spikers, just
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as bad as diabetics, but they didn't know it.
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And we can pick this up with the glucose monitor. We then went on to discover that different people spike to different foods. Some will spike to bread, some to pasta, some to bananas. Here's an experiment we did recently where we had 55 people eat seven different carbohydrates. Identical amounts, but the carbohydrates are in different forms. Beans, berries, grapes, bread, pasta and white rice. It turns out most people are rice bikers. In fact, rice is worse than ice
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cream for most people.
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Some people though are pasta spikers, some are potato spikers, bread, grape spikers. We're all different. What's going on? We think this has to do with the heterogeneity of type 2 diabetes. It's not just type 1 and type 2, but type 2 has many subtypes. And that's because our glucose regulation is very complicated. We have our pancreas, we have our liver, our muscle, even our brain is a major glucose consumer. And we have many biochemical pathways. Insulin, the GLPs you may have heard of these days are also important regulators. And there are other hormonal systems as well. And together these control your glucose. Turns out subtypes of diabetes exist that are actually very evident when you actually
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start looking at this.
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And so we took pre diabetics and normal folks and typed them for their glucose dysregulation. We discovered we typed them for muslins resistant, hepaticins resistant, as well as beta cell defects and incretin defects, the GLPs. And it turns out once again, everyone is different. I myself am a type 2 diabetic.
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You might not have guessed it.
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I'm a beta cell defect. We're all different. You can actually tell the subtype of glucose dysregulation you have by drinking a shot of glucose and looking at the shape of the curve. And using machine learning, we can now tell your subtype just from the shape of that glucose curve, whether your muscle is resistant or have a beta cell defect. And so what used to be $1,000 or several thousand dollars set of tests, you can now do for 50 bucks from a local drugstore. Not only that, you might say, why do I care about my subtype? Well, it turns out your subtype determines
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the food you'll spike to.
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So if your muscle insulin resistant, you'll spike to potatoes and pasta, but not if you're insulin sensitive. Likewise, if you're a beta cell defect, you'll spike to potatoes. You may know that if you actually eat your salad before your french fries, you can generally reduce your spikes, but that's not always the case. We tested this further with regards to subtypes. So we had people eat protein, fiber or fat prior to eating white rice, which spikes them. And it turns out that if your muscle is resistant or have a beta cell defect, nothing happens.
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You'll still spike when you eat your white rice.
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But if you're insulin sensitive or normal for beta cells, you actually can suppress those spikes with fat and fiber. So once again, your subtype actually determines not only what foods you'll spike to, but how to mitigate those spikes. We took this to extreme by actually looking at a group of people who were subtyped and then we actually looked at their glucose by these continuous glucose monitors, as well as had smartwatches on them. The idea was to track what they do and when they do it with their effect on glucose and according to their subtypes. Just to get into this in a little more detail, we learned some things that you might already know. If you eat your first meal, your biggest meal, first thing in the morning, you'll have lower glucose. If you have it late at night,
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you'll have higher glucose.
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Starchy vegetables, higher glucose fruits and less starchy things will give you lower glucose. It turns out most people don't sleep enough. So if you sleep longer, you actually lower your glucose. The same logic can be applied to these subtypes. It's important to know your subtypes so you know what lifestyle things will mediate, will mitigate that problem and you can actually turn. Turns out you take this one step further. The medications I use are also very dependent on my subtypes. So I respond to certain medications that promote insulin release from my pancreas, but not other kinds of medicines.
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Actually, I don't respond to metformin, which
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is the most common medicine. So these glucose monitors are very, very powerful, we think.
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What about other biochemical measures?
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Well, it turns out that we've been working very hard to see if we could detect molecules from a single drop of blood. And after spending seven years on this, we discovered, we set up a method for taking drops of blood from your fingertip and your shoulder and being able to measure 7,000 different molecules from that drop of blood. Now, I know what that sounds like, but ours actually does work. Then we could do, once again, fun experiments with this. We were able to take have 32 people drink this shake, very common shake, and looked at their response. And once again, everyone was different. We had some people, their carbohydrates went down, others went way up, others stayed flat. One of the interesting results was inflammation. It turns out when some people drank this shake, their inflammation went down, others went up. Same shake, pro inflammatory on some, anti inflammatory on others. And we think this is important to know if you have digestive issues from the food you eat, which turns out
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to be about 10% of the U.S. population.
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We've taken this to the extreme where we basically had one individual take a micro sample every hour for seven straight days during waking hours. And the idea was to try and correlate once again what they do with its effect on their physiology and biochemistry. What we discovered is lots of associations, thousands, actually. But one of the interesting was we discovered that alpha synuclein, which is involved in dementia and Parkinson's, shows a very interesting pattern that correlates with certain stresses. The idea is that if you could actually mitigate alpha synuclein spikes, what you might do is actually be able to
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push off people getting dementia or Parkinson's.
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Where is all this going? Well, I envision a world where all of you, many of you are already. We'll actually be doing remote monitoring in the form of sensors and micro sampling to get yourself measured more frequently and to stay healthy. The nice thing is these technologies are very inexpensive. They could go anywhere around the world.
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The whole world is capable of wearing these things and using microsampling.
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And with this, we can actually better manage their health and be able to even hit underserved populations. And then together with other technologies like genome sequencing and yet other sophisticated advances in science, we can better predict disease risk, manage people's health better in terms of early diagnosis, monitoring and treating disease. And the ultimate goal, of course, is have everyone live long, healthy lives. Thank you.
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Anoush Zamorodi
That was Stanford genetics professor Michael Snyder. In a minute, my conversation with Michael and what he thinks you need to know about how you'll use technology to stay healthy in the future. His thoughts also on data privacy. Not so sure how I feel about that one. That's coming up.
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Anoush Zamorodi
Okay, so, Michael, I want you to tell me something. How long have you been collecting all of this information?
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Michael Snyder
Well, I've been collecting deep data on me for about 16 and a half years now. It started out as a omic study, if you will, where we sequenced my DNA, that's your genome. But then we also collected blood and did lots of molecular measurements from that. And there we studied things like the proteome, your proteins, your rna, that's your transcriptome, your metabolome, meaning your metabolites and so on. And then the wearables came out as fitness trackers about 12 years ago, and we started putting them on me and other people we were studying to be able to better see what was going on with their physiology. We thought they might be powerful health monitors. And they are. And the reason for that is they track things like your resting heart rate, your heart rate variability, your blood oxygen. Something you don't get in a doctor's office called galvanic stress response. This is conductance on your skin. And it turns out that when you're stressed, you're sweating more, so your skin gets more moist. And when you're diabetic, your skin gets more dry. Some of the watches will, at least one of them will detect blood pressure and measure that. So Quite a few different things.
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Anoush Zamorodi
I mean, I think people have been wearing, like, smart watches or collecting how many steps they're walking every day and on all kinds of data, sort of ad hoc. This has been going on for a while now, as you said, like, over a decade. But are we at some sort of tipping point when people actually know what to do with this information? Like, for example, I've been tracking my steps for six years, and I. I rarely even look at the data. But is something changing when it comes to collecting information about our bodies?
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Michael Snyder
We believe so, because when these first came out, it says, you say they were fitness trackers. And realistically, people put them on their wrist and they would, you know, wear them for three months, say, yep, I know my pattern, I'm done. Then they throw it in a drawer and be done with it. But I think what the tipping point is that you're referring to is that they're actually health monitors. They can track a lot more than just your steps. For example, resting heart rate, heart rate variability are really good indicators of your health. We've used them to be able to pick up when you're getting a viral infection in advance of symptoms, because your heart rate goes up, it's very easy to pick up because, again, you're collecting a lot of data in real time. More recently, we've shown it's indicative of mental health stress as well.
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Anoush Zamorodi
Hmm. You actually told me a story about a Stanford researcher who had a heart attack, and there was data behind that that could have predicted that he was going to.
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Michael Snyder
Yeah, it was a very interesting study. A little bit tragic, to say the least. There's a person working in my lab for two years, very wonderful person, high energy. You meet this guy, you assume he's in great health and in great shape, and it turns out he was very much a believer in all of the wearable things that we were doing. He had an Apple watch and an OURA ring, which, by the way, is great for tracking sleep. And he was wearing these. He would exercise pretty regularly on a peloton, which also has tracking data. And one day as he was running on his peloton, actually quite intensely, and it turns out he died right after that. He had. Yeah, it was really quite tragic. And his wife knew how much he liked the lab and being there and shared the data with us and asked us to take a look at it. And because he had the latest Apple watch and also the Oura ring, we could track what was going on. It was very clear. Four months before he passed away, he Had a significant, what I like to call step function, meaning his resting heart rate went up, his heart rate variability dropped. His gait, which you can also get from a smartwatch, shifted, and his sleep also shifted. And it's very clear all at once, four months earlier. And so there was a sign something was off, yet there was no system to relay that information back to say, hey, something's off, you should go get checked out. And I think that's what we need to do next. We have this for viral infection alerting, but we don't have it for all these other things, which is what we need to. And so we're now trying to study this further. You know, track people's, if you will, cardiovascular state and then build a real time alerting system. We need to run proper studies first. But that is the goal. When you see something's off, you may not always know what it is, but it does tell you something's off. And I think that should give you pause to look at this further.
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Anoush Zamorodi
I mean, it's interesting. My dad has a pacemaker that sends data constantly back to his cardiologist. But of course, it took him having a cardiac issue for him to need a pacemaker, which then sends back all of this data. So describe to me, like, how you see this working in the future, especially if it's not data that's specific to one particular organ function. Right. You're talking about data that collected all together forms a picture of someone's health.
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Michael Snyder
The way I see it working is you wear these devices. Right now they're on your wrist or your ring or even in your ear if they're a hearing aid. I think in the future they may also be implantables. And. But the point out of all this is that we can track this stuff passively. You can get quite a bit of data. For example, we can get a signal for red blood cell count because of the way the devices work. They measure your oxygenated hemoglobin, so hemoglobin with oxygen that's in your red blood cells. And then there are other parameters like the conductance on your skin that's important for dryness I mentioned earlier, that actually isn't sign of diabetes. So they not only just tell you things are off, but they can give you some clues as to which direction they're off. Now, the early devices, we can't tell the difference between a respiratory viral infection and anxiety attack, a prolonged one, but we will very soon because we now have better measurements for some of these things. So I think they will Pull invaluable data, and they'll just. The way I see it working in real time is that just like your car, you probably look at your speed and your gas tank, but otherwise you don't really look it much in your car. And so the way I see it working is that there'll be all these sensors running in the background. And then when something goes off, you'll get a red alert on your phone. You know, if it's something obvious, like if you run a marathon, your heart rate will be up. That gives red alert, so you'll probably ignore it. But if you're just sitting around, you know, not doing much, and suddenly you're getting red alerts, something is off, and you should probably go get it checked out.
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Anoush Zamorodi
When you talk about your hearing aids, you said that they're also monitoring your social interaction. Tell me more about that.
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Michael Snyder
Yeah, so basically, it's well known that people wear hearing aids have better cognitions than those who don't, because those who don't basically self isolate. They socially isolate because they can't hear. I did see that my father, as he lost his hearing, he basically walked into a restaurant. He really couldn't hear, so he stayed kind of quiet. Not that he was an overly social guy to begin with, but he really shut down in these environments. And so the idea is if you have a good hearing aid, you will stay engaged and stay communicating. And so the study we're running is actually having people with these hearing aids. We're measuring how much they're interacting and the kinds of interactions. So how much they're in conversations, for example, with others, and how much they participate in this. We're not violating privacy. We're not collecting information about what they're saying, but more whether they're in these conversations or not. We also measure, you know, TV time, how much they're on the Internet by the voices announced, how much background noise is in their environment. And I think what we're going to learn from this hearing aid study is exactly what kinds of interactions are important for keeping your cognition up. It's the number one thing people worry about most as they get older is their cognition. They're afraid of dementia and Alzheimer's, and I don't blame them. No one wants to live like a vegetable as they hit their later years. And so everybody wants to be sharp. And maybe some of these, the kind of data we collect will help us. Maybe being in conversation four hours a day, I'm just making this up, is very useful for keeping cognition up. Those kind of things. So that's what we're trying to learn. And maybe watching too much Gilligan's island reduces your cognition. These are sorts of things that we could get into. I'm probably.
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Anoush Zamorodi
I would say yes to that for sure. I did love Ginger. You start your talk by saying that the healthcare system is broken. I mean, in the United States, I don't think there are many people who would argue with you. But how do we get to a place where we think more of healthcare as preventive of using, how you refer to it, like a personal dashboard to monitor our health in a sort of more holistic way?
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Michael Snyder
Yeah, well, we have to change the financial incentives. That's number one. What happens is people really only go to the doctor when they're ill, and so therefore, they only go every few years, typically, because the healthcare system is extremely expensive. People spend a lot of money on this last few years of life when people are very unhealthy. There are studies now that show that people live the last 11 to 15 years of their life, on average, with chronic conditions, meaning they're living their last decade of life unhealthy. And that's not a good situation to be in. What we want to do is keep everybody healthy all the way to the end. It would save money to the entire system were we to do that. Some of the big companies have wellness programs, and they know they do that because if they keep their employees healthy and happy, they actually are more productive. There's plenty of studies around that. And so we need to really be engaging employers, engaging health plans to be able to do this. And so we've got to make it easy for people to be measured. And I think wearables are very powerful for that. And I think we need to rearrange our financial system so that you do it. You should actually be given a smartwatch when you join a new health plan and get points for actually walking your 10,000 steps. And so I think as these technologies get cheaper and cheaper, as they get more facile, if we automatically have people's information from their devices going to their doctors, doctor's office, that would actually be much more accurate, because your resting heart rate first thing in the morning is way more accurate than what's in a doctor's office. So I think we can pull in information a lot better. And then the physician, Instead of spending 15 minutes with you in the office, they'll spend maybe 25 minutes, get an extra few minutes because the data's already there and they can make better assessments and spend Less time on the routine things and spend more time on more complex things.
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Anoush Zamorodi
Okay, my spidey sense, my worrying radar is going off beep beep, beep. Right now. I want to push back on a few of these things. So first of all, digital privacy. Who's in charge of all of this data that's being collected? And if an insurance company is using it to incentivize me, couldn't they possibly also punish me or hold a pre existing condition against me?
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Michael Snyder
Well, I have two answers for that. One is you do lose privacy when you're collecting it at some level. Meaning if you are pulling these data in, they'll go somewhere. In principle you should be the one who owns it and be the one to decide where it goes. In practice you could get hacked. Right? It has to go in the database somewhere. So that is always a risk. But I would argue the good should outweigh the evil for this sort of thing. The other argument I have that might be a little more flip, I'd say privacy, get over it. Nothing's private. You have a credit card for example, as do most people. There's a lot of personal information on that credit card. But we all use them. Why do we use them? Because nobody's going to walk around bags of cash. Right. It's not practical, it's not safe. So I would argue that this health information, which is a lot more important in my opinion than credit card information, more important to you, is worth collecting and a possible risk of privacy breach as it exists right now. I think most insurance companies and health plans, they aren't using it to discriminate people. Now, whether that's the case in the future, nobody now discriminates somebody from a genome sequence because they don't really know how to interpret a genome. But as it moves and becomes more facile, maybe they would. And we do need, I think, I would argue laws that protect people then in those circumstances. So I have two petabytes of data online. That's a lot of data and anyone can download it, look at it, and I've certainly never been abused by it. Now you may say I'm in a more privileged situation than the average person, which is true. But nonetheless, I haven't heard of people being abused by this kind of information.
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Anoush Zamorodi
Yeah, I mean I'm thinking of for example 23andMe, which I, God, I've been reporting on digital privacy for a decade and then I decided to bite the bullet and did it. And wouldn't you know, a year later they had that privacy Breach, where everybody's information was out on the dark line.
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Michael Snyder
Right. But did anybody ever get abused by that? I'm not so sure.
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Anoush Zamorodi
Well, maybe they don't know how to yet, but maybe they would in the future. Right?
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Michael Snyder
Right. That's possible. It is possible. And that is always the case. You can always prepare for the worst case scenario. Now, I would argue that again, if you got your genome sequenced, you're more likely to learn something useful. Like imagine, you know, I hope you don't, but imagine. But imagine you have a cancer predisposition gene to learn. That can be very valuable because then you will get tested for that, whereas you otherwise might not know. So I think there is good to come out of it now. Yeah. Would an insurance company, if they learn that, would they charge them more or drop them right now? No. In the future, I would hope not. Again, we should set up laws to protect it. But I would argue it's still useful to know that.
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Anoush Zamorodi
The other concern I would have is that right now this sounds like a rich person's health care system. I mean, you know, having someone to actually give your data to, a physician or a clinician, that means that you are seeing a doctor to begin with. How do we begin to make this more accessible right now? This is an expensive proposition.
- [36:19]
Michael Snyder
Yes and no. So you're right. The way we do deep data profiling, only rich people can afford it. And it's rolling in the concierge services and things like getting your genome sequence and some of these other things, only people who pay out of pocket can do it. So there, I would say, yes, some people won't have access to that. But the one area where they will have access is the wearables. That's a neutralizer. Because there are $50 smartwatches that can do everything we've been talking about. They can detect infectious disease, atrial fibrillation, which is a precursor to heart failure. So even a cheapo smartwatch should be able to do this. And you could get that for $50. You can do it remotely too, Right? You can live in the boonies and have this data transferred to your phone. Most people do have a phone, even when they live in remote parts of the world. 60% of the world has a phone, believe it or not. All you have to do is link it to a smartwatch and you've got a health tracking system that can track a fair number of things. Again, resting heart rate, heart rate variability. Heart rate variability. It's kind of a new metric that's popped up that turns out to be a really great gauge in people's health.
- [37:27]
Anoush Zamorodi
I mean, that is just fascinating to me that like things that we used to take for granted, we start to see that tiny little, almost imperceptible differences can tell us so much. And yet medical treatment right now mostly relies on averages. I think many people think, well, as long as I'm in the average zone, I'm fine and if I'm not, then I'm in big trouble.
- [37:51]
Michael Snyder
And that, that's really a false assumption because population measurements, they are important. Don't get me wrong. If you're out of, you know, an individual range and you're very high on certain things, it is worth looking into. But equally important is knowing your baseline because we all have very different baselines for heart rate, for skin temperature, for all these different things. And when you go off from your health, you'll get a jump up in that and you may still be in the normal range, but, but by today's world, if you're still in a normal range, nobody says anything to you. And a good example is, let's say your heart rate is normally 60 and suddenly your resting heart rate goes to, let's say goes to 75. Something's off with you. Whereas 75 could be very normal for other people and probably wouldn't be flagged on a population average. So it's that trajectory, it's that delta. And I think we need to get this into medicine. There's two things that count. One is your shift from your normal baseline and the other is are you population average out of range? Both of those are important and I would argue the first one's even more important. Shift from your baseline and we can pick this up with wearables. It's very important to know your trajectories.
- [39:11]
Anoush Zamorodi
We're going to go to a quick break, but we'll be right back.
- [39:14]
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- [41:40]
Anoush Zamorodi
Is there ever a point, though, where all this information is too much information that people become hyper vigilant about every little thing that their body is doing? Keith Diaz, the researcher at Columbia with whom I partnered, he says I can't wear a smartwatch because because tracking my steps makes me crazy. I'll find myself looping around my backyard to make sure I get enough steps. Where's the line?
- [42:05]
Michael Snyder
Well, obviously we want everyone to be a healthy life. You don't want your devices making you unhealthy. You don't want people freaking out. People get their genome sequence and they're anxious about this sort of thing. You don't want them waking up every morning, oh, am I going to get breast cancer? But I'm also a big believer that these numbers can be used. If you see things are going off, you can adjust accordingly. I would argue that that's how you use these measurements, if you will, to basically try to keep yourself in a good fit, both mentally and physically fit state. So that's how we should be approaching it. Obviously you don't Want these devices and things stressing you out.
- [42:46]
Adam Grant
That's not.
- [42:48]
Anoush Zamorodi
We've got to hear your boss saying, like, get up and walk. Walk around the conference room nine times, go, yeah, yeah.
- [42:54]
Michael Snyder
But I. My own view is there's no such thing as too much information, that this stuff is very, very valuable. Having the information relayed back to your physician, if you're willing to share it, your physician can definitely see when things are going off, and you can see it, too. Imagine when you go into a doctor's office and say you're not feeling well. First thing they ask is, so when did this start? You can almost always tell from your watch when it started. There's a shift, and suddenly you could correlate that with maybe something that happened. In my case, when I got Lyme disease, it was picked up with a smartwatch and a pulse ox. And I saw these shifts, and I knew. Two weeks earlier, I was in rural Massachusetts helping my brother put up fences where most ticks are. Lyme infested in rural Massachusetts. And it's pretty clear because I was there one day, and then two weeks later, I saw the shift up. It raised a strong possibility it was Lyme disease. And that turned out to be correct.
- [43:55]
Anoush Zamorodi
I've been learning about this concept of interoception over the last year, this idea of the body sort of indicating to the brain what it needs. Some of that is subconscious. You know, take another breath. Or it's giving you signs that something is off or wrong and that we have to be able to hear what our body is saying. I mean, I hear people who are like, I don't even know if I sleep well anymore. I look at my device and it tells me. And sometimes I'm like, really? That's all I slept. I thought I slept well. Do we start to lose touch with our. Our embodied sense of self when we start outsourcing all of our functions to being collected and tabulated by wearables?
- [44:36]
Michael Snyder
Well, this is a great question. I would argue wearables for certain kinds of things, like infectious disease, things like this afib. Those are really, really valuable. Right? It's hard to argue with that. And to be honest, they are more sensitive than your internal systems. So I think there are situations where it's good. Now, you picked the example of sleep, which I is one of the more interesting ones. One of my colleagues here at Stanford has run a study that shows that depending what you tell people determines how they feel. So regardless of what the value is on their sleep device, you know, from their sleep scores Say aura or whoop or what have you. If you tell them they had a good night's sleep from their score, even if they didn't, they actually wind up functioning very well that day. They do well if you tell them they had a bad night's sleep, they actually don't function so well. So I think there people are very influenced psychologically by the score. So maybe that is a trickier one.
- [45:35]
I think you have to look at it objectively.
- [45:37]
Like I know I don't sleep very well and I don't mind backing up some of that with numbers and things I get from my devices.
- [45:45]
Anoush Zamorodi
You mentioned implants or implantables earlier in our conversation. I mean, I think we're already starting to get to that right? With like I see people, lots of people wearing glucose monitors. Does that count as an implantable sort of. Right? It's a well sticking into your body.
- [46:01]
Michael Snyder
Yeah, well they are measuring interstitial and they are poking you. But they're not generally referred to as an implant. I was thinking something like where, like for the dog where you slip it in under the skin completely. But yeah, the glucose monitors are super powerful. People always ask me what's the most important wearable to wear and I always tell them a continuous glucose monitor because it's in part because we have so many people who are out of control with their, their glucose. These continuous glucose monitors are so visual that once you wear them, you'll never eat the same again. And I mean that in a good way. Meaning you'll see exactly what spikes you. And this is very personal, different foods spike different people. So you see what foods spike you, which ones don't and you just gravitate towards the ones that don't and avoid the ones that do. And if you are going to eat the ones that do spike your glucose, well go do that brisk 15 minute walk and that'll suppress the spike. So there are things you can do to mitigate these. And in general spiking is bad for your health. It correlates not only with diabetes, but cardiovascular disease. So I think we've got to get this under control.
- [47:06]
Anoush Zamorodi
Yeah, Diabetes is such an interesting example and like when you say that it's an epidemic and we've gotta get it under control. Give me like the beautiful scenario that you see that if you could wave your wearable wand would make happen like people would wear it, people would get under control. What would it look like?
- [47:25]
Michael Snyder
Yeah, well, well for one thing I would say everybody wears one at least once a year more if they're heading in the wrong direction, meaning their glucose out control and it's getting worse and they do it before they're diabetic. So prevent diabetes, keep people healthy. And a lot of so called normal people are starting to do glucose spiking and some of them are just as bad as diabetics. They don't know it. So we need to get them on these folks earlier. And because it's so visual, you will change your behavior in a good way. And like I'll tell you, when you wear one of these things and you drink a McDonald's shake, your glucose just goes through the roof and you'll think twice about drinking that shake again. And I think the wearables and things we've been talking about are good ways to give feedback to keep people motivated to stay healthy. I think if we get them out there, we can have a big transformation in preventing diabetes, in my opinion.
- [48:24]
Anoush Zamorodi
One thing I really wanted to ask you that was not in your talk, which I find fascinating, which is that you have looked at so many people's data at such a granular level for so long that you had some research that went viral a couple years ago and indicated the two sort of real turns or chapters where people age dramatically. One is around age 44 and then another around age 60. Did I characterize that right?
- [48:53]
Michael Snyder
Yeah, that's right. We're revisiting a lot of that now. I think the most important concept around aging is that we're all aging differently. Meaning some people, they're what we call cardio ager, their heart is aging more rapidly, or cardiovascular system, I should say. Other people are kidney agers, some are metabolic. We're all different. And what I like about that is because we're all different, you can zoom in on the things that you think are going off first and better manage them. So for example, just like your car, if certain parts of your car are wearing out first, well, you can drill in and zoom in on those. For people like say your kidney function's going off, there are very specific things you can do to actually try to correct that. And same with your liver, maybe you would drink less if your liver enzymes are going off this sort of thing. And we can pick all that up in simple blood tests.
- [49:47]
Anoush Zamorodi
Now when I read about that stuff, it was really revelatory to me because I felt like I woke up on the day of my 45th birthday and everything had changed. And I thought, did something happen to me? But I think what just happened was I was starting to get older. It just helped Me understand it.
- [50:05]
Michael Snyder
Yeah. Well, I do think people's lifestyle shifts as they're moving, right? Because, you know, a lot of people, they get very career oriented. They have kids as they're in their 30s, and I don't think they keep up on their health as much as they should. I think it does hit people as they hit their 40s, no question. And certainly for me, I had many personal changes. I hit my 40s in terms of caffeine sensitivity, things like that. I stopped drinking caffeine afternoon as a consequence. So I think there are these shifts that do happen. The nice thing is we're in a world where we can now track all that and see what's going on and then make adjustments accordingly.
- [50:43]
Anoush Zamorodi
So, Michael, you end your TED talk saying that wearables have the potential to change healthcare globally. I mean, that's tantalizing. Can you expand on that vision a little bit? What do we have to do to get there?
- [50:58]
Michael Snyder
I think if you put a device on 20% of people, you could actually track the next pandemic as it's emerging because you'll start seeing areas where heart rate shifts globally. And we've simulated that. So imagine though, that we put it on 80% of people, which is very doable. These devices, they're not expensive now and they're only going to get cheaper in the future. So I really think then you could have people really not only tracking pandemics like you just described, but you could keep the individual people themselves healthy by catching when they first get ill, treat them, catch heart conditions. I think there's going to be a ton of stuff. Catch mental health problems like depression, anxiety. We're doing a lot of research there. Cardiovascular disease, we talked about all these things are, you know, it's not going to be a perfect system, but even if we could catch 50% of these, it'd be amazing.
- [51:52]
Anoush Zamorodi
Thank you again, Michael. Great to see you. I am of two minds about Michael's work. I love tech and I love the idea that he's uncovering the subtle variations in diseases like diabetes that could mean there are really simple fixes like changing when you eat certain foods, for example. His vision and enthusiasm are contagious. But also, here's the worrying part. All this data collection that will likely get into the hands of private companies who we have little reason to trust. We need regulation to make sure they comply and keep our most personal information safe, secure, not exploited. I recently spoke to a bunch of academics who are looking at how people relate to health technology like this and their concern was that people get so obsessed with optimizing their health tracking every little thing that they forget that the simplest things don't need tracking. Like making sure you have close friends that you get outside enough that you give yourself time to think and relax. How do we make all that available to everyone too? Wearables are about so much more than tech, data and health. They can remind us that we are on a lifelong quest to find the right balance between the knowledge that all this information can bring us and the deeply human wisdom that cannot be quantified. That was Michael Snyder at TED 2026 in conversation with me, Minouche Zamorodi. If you like this episode and others from the week, you can hear more on the TED RadioWower podcast throughout the summer. You can also see Michael's full talk@ted.com thank you so much for being here. On the next episode, Dr. Dhruv Kular this physician writes for the New Yorker and he shares his thoughts about GLP1s and the new discoveries about how these drugs do more than just help people lose weight. They're changing the way we think about addiction and how we treat it. That's it for today though. If you're curious about Ted's curation, visit ted.comCuration Guidelines Ted Talks Daily is a podcast from Ted. This episode was produced by Phoebe Lett, Lucy Little and Rachel Faulkner White. It was edited by Alejandra Salazar with editing producer support from Maggie Bishop, Martha Estefanos, Sanaz Meshkinpour and me. This episode was mixed by Steve Bone. Michael's talk was fact checked by the TED research team and our conversation was fact checked by Avery Keatley. The TED Talks Daily team includes Martha Estefanos, Oliver Friedman, Lucy Little, Emma Tobner, and Tansika Sangmar Ni Vong, with support from Daniela Ballarezzo, Valentina Bohanini, Ban Man Chang, and Lainey Lott. Special thanks to Sanaz Mesh Kinpour and my team at NPR's TED Radio Hour for all their help on this special takeover. And to my co curator at TED 2026, a very special thank you to David Biello. You can hear more from these speakers on the TED Radio Hour with episodes coming out throughout the summer. I'm Anoosh Zamorodi. I'll be back tomorrow with a fresh idea and conversation for your feed. Thank you so much for listening.
- [55:22]
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- [56:37]
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- [57:40]
Adam Grant
Hey, it's Adam Grant from Ted's podcast Rethinking with Adam Grant. This episode is sponsored by the Amazon Kindle Scribe. Up until now, people have had to choose between the focus that comes from writing on paper and the efficiency of laptops and tablets, which might come at the cost of distracting pop ups and notifications. The Kindle Scribe's exciting new AI features are designed to streamline your workflow for maximum efficiency, but what's not on it is just as important. Scribe comes with no email, messaging or social apps, so you can unlock your best focus. Use Scribe's AI Notebook Insights to ask your notebook a question and instantly comb through handwritten notes for fast answers. Or pull up and Mark PDFs with PDF markup right on your screen. No printer necessary. The Kindle Scribe makes it easy to keep your notes organized with everything you need in one place without having to sort through paper files or type notes on your laptop. I love how the Kindle scribe brings my notes to life while making them impossible to lose. I know what I'm working on moving forward. What are you working on, Kindle Scribe?