We started to get a lot of traction in the baseball space and then quickly
into golf. Hand We have adoption from tens of thousands of individuals age eight
to ninety eight, including Patrick Mahomes. John Rahm is a regular user spencer,
tatam As trainers on our advisory board, Justin Verlander, Damian Lillard,
Tony Ferguson. Basically across all major sports, the LISK goes on and this
is all organic word of mouth growth. We want to be very cautious about
building the brand and the trust we have with customers because there's a lot of
noise in this space and a lot of gimmicky stuff and this is the opposite
of that, but you can easily be perceived as a gimmick because of how
different it looks. Hi. This is Steve Young from Gearhart organ and I
play at the Gearhart Golf Links. It's the oldest course west of the Mississippi.
And this is Golf Smarter number nine hundred and forty nine, unlocking the
golfers athletic potential using proteus, featuring the founder, Sam Miller. This is
Golf Smarter sharing stories, tips and insights from Great Golf minds to help you
lower your score and raise your golf IQ. Here's your host, Fred Green.
Welcome to the Golf Smarter Podcast. Sam, good to be here.
Freendz. Thank you for having me. It's good to have you on.
This is a fascinating topic. You know, we talk about so many different
things on the Golf Smarter Podcast, ranging from golf itself to stories to healthcare
right for the golfer. And talk to a lot of pets, physical therapists,
and exercise experts. And I also like talking to inventors. And when
I can combine inventors with the physical therapy and exercise, I think we are
onto something big. Tell me about proteus happy to Most active people struggle with
getting results from fitness programs, like performing veteran sport or staying pain free.
And one of the primary reasons that we've observed why that is the case is
they're not necessarily focusing on the right movements or the methods that meet their specific
needs because they don't have the information they need or kind of the right tools.
And when that happens, you know, most active people get unmotivated,
they waste time, they don't see progress until all of a sudden, they
quit, get beat or get injured. And so what Proteus does is we
specialize in a fitness technology for commercial gyms and physical therapy clinics to deliver precision
fitness, athletic training, and physical therapy services. The reason why kind of
so many active people love produce is because it's the single most effective way to
get targeted, personalized training insights to help you move better, live longer,
and perform at your peak. So Protece is primarily a physical assessment tool that
allows you to be able to quantify multiplanar, rotational and functional movements for specifically
around strength and power in a way that has not been possible for in a
matter of minutes, get targeted results to see where you stand, and then
hyper personalized training recommendations, and then secondarily produce doubles as a resistance training tool.
So it's a very unique combination of measurement and training. We have four
hundred partner sites in the US and Canada, seventy five thousand users that range
from age eight to age nine, and that includes some of the best athletes
in the world across all major sports. That's amazing. That's amazing when you
say it targets training insights. Uh, let's flesh that out a little bit
more. Tell me sure. So we have a you know, it's a
listener that's you know, is not familiar with what produces. It's a it's
a hardware system, you know, roughly the size of a treadmill, and
then there's a twenty seven inch touchscreen attached to it. And within the software,
we have a library of performance tests. So I give you an example.
We have a one standardized test that's very popular that's called the General Power
test, and it the screen walks you through a battery of movements from basic
unit planar isolated muscle bicep tricep to a single legg squat into rotation. That
test actually has a jump in it, right, there's all these different combinations
of movements, but you basically go through you know, normal test is about
fifteen movements and you do that in four to six minutes, and which is
the equivalent of We like to say it would take twenty pieces of equipment in
a laboratory in three hours of time to get ten percent of what Proteus does
in five minutes. Wow. And what it then does is it gives you
a report, and the report one of the unique things that we patented is
the first ever way to be able to quantify physical strength and power for multiplaner
movements and functional movements. And so we've taken that capability and rolled it into
what's effectively you know, it's almost like a sports science lab in a box,
but with this report output that's super easy to understand and immediately it will
tell you, Okay, you just did this test of fifteen movements just for
example. You select filters of who you want to compare yourself to, what
demographic? We have a billion data points. We've exceeded a billion data points
that we've captured. This is new normative data. And you've select you know,
age, sex, height, weight, sport, position, skill level
if there is one, and contextualize the results and it tells you where you
stand amongst that compared to that group. What's your biological power rage for example,
what's your what percentile are you in for the overall tests? And then
by movement where are you deficient, where are you imbalanced? And then what
should you work on? And what should you work on comes in the form
of do you need to be training strength, power, speed, right,
heavy, resistance, light resistance, and what body areas and so this is
it's kind of a like a hack for being able to determine what I capable
of, where do I stand against my peers? Am I improving? Am
I declining in what ways? And then what do I do about it?
And the recommendations are kind of equipment diagnostic. So we view Proteus as the
data hub that informs how you should be training, what other tools you should
be training. And that's how it's used in the field, where people will
walk away with these reports, a lot of them, some of them purchase
them and it will give them that guidance or they're there will give it to
their trainer and that their trainer will use it as a basis of our program.
And we've got a new feature of an automatic program generation, which I
can talk about a little bit later. That's in the pipe. Okay,
we'll talk about it later. Then, well, I can talk about it
now, you'd like no, No, we'll talk about it later, because
I want to go back to multiplaner movements. You're talking about three D resistance,
correct, Is it correct? What you mean by multiplaner? Yeah?
Well, well, we just think about movement and separate three D resistance for
a second from that. Just you know, I think one of the observations
that we've made is that there's been all these advancements in technology that really are
focused on these important pillars of human performance. So sleep and recovery. We've
got wearables for that, right, We've got cameras for biomechanics. What is
the equivalent for physical strength and power? Is it how much you can bench
press or squad Because I would argue, are those really the movements that are
really important to measure and quantify as we're trying to profile what you're capable of
the answer is no, those are just easy, right, and they're important,
but they're easy. What really matters, though, is your ability to
rotate. Right, So that would be a multiplaner movement. You're moving through
multiple planes of motion. And when I say functional, writ's an overused term,
but really we like to we view everyone as an athlete and we move
and exist in a three dimensional space. So when we're trying to quantify or
assess somebody's capabilities, especially if you're if you care about golf, which is
very much a rotational sport, you really want to be thinking about your ability
to generate force and speed and acceleration for rotational movements and moving through movements that
move involve moving through multiple planes of motion and involve various muscle groups working together.
Because that's what's going to translate to to the game of golf, for
example. Good because I want to talk about how this relates to golfers,
and we're going to do that in just a moment. How does this relate
to golfers? Okay, I can I can understand that you can target many
different types of athletes and see what they want to do. But uh,
let's talk about golfers, and then let's talk about the level of golfers.
You know who who specifically we're talking about. Sure, So one of the
things I want to go back to is to answer that question is is that
Proteus is both a performance testing tool and a training tool. And what what
I want to call on I think this is a really important point, is
that the key invention that we've developed and patented many times over is and why
why Proteus has this unique kind of shape and form factor is we created a
new resistance modality R and so you and what that what that looks like is
we call it three D resistance, and it feels like you're moving through a
fluid. It's like a force field. It's constant no matter what speed or
direction you move. And this is really important for two reasons. One is
that is from a resistance training benefit standpoint right. So what it does is
it's a very low impact on the joints. It's very safe and user controlled.
You can perform any conceivable movement on proteus with no setup. It's just
adaptive hardware, and it provides a resistance that you have to overcome throughout an
entire range of motion. So, for example, if you were to try
to do a multiplanar movement on a cable machine, you would position your body
in a certain way relative to the machine such that you would get this kind
of peak resistant resistance that you're encountering at a certain part of your movement,
and then the end ranges, for example, you're encountering a totally different level
of resistance, and that's because of the angle of the rope a cable.
So as we created this rigid arm and mechanical system that we've patented that allows
us to provide multidirectional forces simultaneously which produces feeling of like training underwater and you
can move the change the discuss of the fluid. What that does is it
stimulates the neuromuscular system and creates a muscle activation that we've proven with one of
our research partners, the Hospital for Special Surgery in New York, can produce
up to ninety five percent greater peak muscle activation than doing the same movements with
a free weight or a cable machine. But it's not to necessarily compete with
those things. This is just a tool for priming the muscular system. It's
for It has great benefits for the fascil system, coordination, prop reception,
and it's the ultimate tool for developing we say triplanar power in the speed and
as a training tool, it is a tool in your toolbox. And I'll
come back to what that benefits are. So when we have guys like you
know, Brendan Todd, Uh, Brendan Todd, you know, got a
proteus UH and UH. One of the trainers that you're working with is another
client of ours, a guy named Jared Phillips, a trained PMT in South
Lake, Texas. I've been working with Brendan and Brendan will do the kind
of almost do a warm up on proteus which enables him to I mean,
we have the documentation and reports of this. An increase of five miles,
five miles per hour and ball speed in one day. That's the kind of
one day. That's the kind of priming that it does, right and uh
and this is at the time that he read as he staggered second place finish.
I think of the the AT and T pro am and uh, we've
got stories on uh. Uh from Revolution Sports in Orlando is another great one.
Uh, increasing acceleer ration, which just translating directly to a club ed
speed by fifty percent in two months. And so these So introducing proteus as
a one of the training tools in your toolkit, it's not meant to be
a replacement for all the training tools that you use, can have extraordinary benefits
for especially around your ability to generate power and acceleration, which ultimately translate directly
to clubhead speed, ball speed, et cetera. And then then there's the
testing component, the assessment component. So what proteus is so the three D
resistance that I was talking about before. The primary reason we invented this is
because if you are trying to measure strength right or power, strength is your
ability to move against a force. So if you are trying to evaluate somebody'sational
strength or power right, you then need to have like you know, doing
a multiplaner movement, you need multiplanar forces right, because it's your ability to
overcome force right in that range of motion. That's not something that exists right
as I was explaining about the kind of a cable machine, it's a one
directional resistance. It's not mirroring the direction of your movement, it's not equal
throughout the range of motion. It's not actually possible to get a reliable,
consistent, or anywhere close to an accurate measurement. That's certainly not repeatable a
from a cable machine for a multiplanner movement, it's physically impossible. So this
constant resistance or constant force that we create allows us to measure strength and power
throughout an entire range of motion like rotation, really for the first time ever,
and then do it really efficiently from a time perspective, grouping these different
movements together, and so the report outputs will expose things like you have an
imbalance between your power and your acceleration, right, so you might have we
see this a lot that people are focusing on strength strength improvements when for certain
movements, when what they actually should be working on is speed. And what
proteus helps you understand is when and what movements and so and what are the
implications? Right, So we often see no matter the demographic we look at,
you know, core power is deficient across the board, no matter the
demographic, right, we see sagital plane movements are often overtrained for strength,
that's like up and down, like a squatting type movement are overtrained or overtraining
strength or undertraining speed. So you know, and those are just general observations,
just a couple of them. But the key thing is that this lets
you know what do I need to work on, where do I stand,
what do I need to work on specifically? And that information then is used
to inform personalization to someone's training program, and the results of that can be
in the form of we've seen Greg Chalmers is a great story. Greg Chalmers
had to take a medical year in twenty seventeen because of backben he couldn't finish
tournaments. He been working on proteus with this is again Jared Phillips in the
South Lake, Texas at trained PMT Basically with this plan got him out of
out of pain. He went from one hundred and six mile hour swing speed
to one hundred and fifteen reported to his highest ball speed ever in his career
at one hundred and seventy four miles per hour at fifty years old at the
I think it was the Byron Nelson Tournament last year. And so there's all
these just phenomenal stories like that that we love to hear. Where it's it's
a huge onlock the data what it informs about how you need to be training
specifically to really if you're going to use your time, you know, improving
and use it efficiently, focus on the right areas. Don't just do the
you know, kind of the cookie cutter, Well, I need to train
strength for these moves. It's just not true, and we've got the data
to back it up. It really depends on who you are and your unique
characteristics and produce exposes that there are so many different types of exercises that people
can do that may provide some of the resistance aspects the proteus can give,
but they're not quantifiable and you know, I'm thinking about I swim okay,
so that all resistance, no impact, zero impact, same same here,
and but I think of other things that I'm doing and it's resistance only like
in one direction. Right, So this is this is with the huge advantage
that this provides not only the quantifiable and the metrics, but you've got it
in all directions. You can do this in one simple, simple move.
I mean, you know you need training, you need a trainer with you
until you figure it out. You know, you're you're accustomed to it.
But this is not a consumer product, is it yet? Well, it's
not. It's not consumer. Consumer is not our focus in the sense that
we we we we sell our primarily b to be the sense that we sell
our hardware and our software UH license to UH to primarily commercial gyms. We
have cut clients that include pro and college sports teams, sports performance gyms,
physical therapy, chiropractic, BIOHA backing mainstream commercial gyms. We have because we've
got seventy five thousand users and at those locations. Though, the consumer kind
of product that is being developed right now is a remote training program that you
can purchase that is developed automatically for golf, specifically, after you do a
Proteuce test in person, so that would be, for example, you go
in and take a Proteus test that those results automatically create a hyper personalized program
for you that's delivered through a partner mobile application, and you can do follow
that program, you know, using tools that you have at home or at
a different gym. Right and three month long program and some of the results
from these, the beta program that have been in development and with some of
our partners have produced extraordinary, extraordinary results. So that's where we're kind of
headed with this as we as our I guess first foray into having a consumer
product, but it is a digital product that is an extension of five after
getting it after a five minute test in person with Proteus at one of our
affiliate partner sites. I was playing golf yesterday with a somebody in his late
twenties and he's just starting to play golf. And this is a kid who
in high school, I guess it was as a late teenager, he started
lifting weights and he's done a lot of that kind of resistance training, just
weight training to build up his chest and his arms, and it's a glorious
thing to see when he pulls off his shirt, which I've known him for
a long time, so I've seen him take his shirt off. It's like
wow, Okay, but now that he's playing golf, he's recognizing that he's
got no flexibility whatsoever. Right, pretty common? Yeah, yeah, and
he's like, uh, yeah, I look great, but I cannot turn
my hips at all. Right, he can't get his shoulders around, and
he kind of gets stuck and sweeps at the ball. How would how would
proteus work for someone like that? Yep? So, so proteus is not
a tool that was developed for the purpose of beach muscles, right right.
Proteus is the purpose of it is to you know, is to basically unlock
your athletic potential. And the beautiful thing about it is that we so that
example that you just provided, we see that kind of thing often, especially
with high school and college lovel athletes, which is that's our largest that's our
largest demographic of users, but our fastest growing demographic of users is the fastest
growing is thirty to sixty year olds. Okay, and so, but what
we see with the high school and college athletes in particular, is there whether
it's their high school or college. You know strength program that the whole team
is doing or whatever it may be, or something they're doing on there and
is very strength oriented, right, like heavy weight, you know, slow
moving reps and and that is a critical foundational piece of the puzzle. You
cannot be a great athlete without a foundational strength. Right. There's a point
in time that is often earlier than most people realize, way earlier that you
need to train along the force velocity curve. So you need to start training
at a higher speed with a lighter load all the way to the kind of
extreme ranges where you're training with a very light load as at maximum speed,
and you need to be training along that curve, right. And so what
we often see is that the that there's an over training on the foundational strength
side, which leaves a complete door open of untapped potential around uh, you
know, the the starting to train power and acceleration, which we're finding our
highly highly predictive of on field performance. For example with baseball players. You're
finding the same thing with golf and swing speed. We start starting to correlate
data with the track man, and it's unbelievably compelling. What it really does
from a training standpoint is that it helps you tie individual muscles and isolated movements
together into a cohesive movement more efficiently. And how it does that is it
kind of one of the things that first time user on Produce will experience as
we often see someone you kind of like fall back on your heels or stumble
back at first. We call we literally call this the proteus stumble and it's
because people that are using it for the first time are not necessarily used to
having to engage their entire core and produce force from the ground up to be
able to move through against the resistance that's resisting you throughout an entire range of
motion. And it always helps people feel better when we tell them that.
Like, so, Patrick Mahomes has been a user of Produce for about two
years and he we were you know, Produces in three episodes of the series
on Netflix called Quarterback, right Yeah, We and and Bobby Stroup, Patrick
Borhan's trainers are on Produce as Scientific Advisory Board and so. But but Mahomes
has been using this for a while, but the first time he ever used
Produce, he literally stumbled back onto his So it helps people feel a little
bit better when they're like, okay, this is just and then he picked
it up like that. We often see it's a very short learning curve,
but it's it. It forces you to take an athletic stance, produce force
from the ground up to engage your core and your entire body and tie these
muscles together to do any movement. And that's the one of the beautiful,
beautiful things about it. Well, it's good. I did get a chance
to try it out in San Francisco. There's a cute little uh storefront there
performance for golf, and I want to thank those guys for inviting me down
and getting a chance to try it. And I too experience the proteus stumble.
So I'm really glad that it's not just me. It's not. It's
not it's not and that's why you got it. You got to go back
too, because it's it is a once you start, once you you kind
of just clicks at a certain point. It's a different moment in time some
for some people it's after one second, for some people it's after one session.
But once you get that, then it's a there's no going back.
It's the kind of thing that it kind of becomes addicting in a way because
it's just there's no sensation like it. You know, where you're moving through
you feel like you're moving through mud or quicksand right as you increase the resistance,
and it's it's a neural experience that has extraordinary benefits, especially for the
aging population too, as we're starting to get more into longevity. You've heard
of cyclopaenia before, right uh, you know, loss of muscle uh uh
over over time as you age. But power penia is now a new term.
It's basically how power changes as you age. Power is a biomarker now,
and so it's a really exciting moment in time now where like strength and
power no longer confined to what has historically been the best athletes in the world
and bodybuilders. It's now directly tied to the length of your life and the
quality of your life. And so we've found things. We've got a billion
data points new normative data users that are age eight stage ninety eight. We're
putting out of this State of Power report, I think in the next two
weeks that reveals a number of these insights and findings, including how does it
change as you age and spoiler alert. One of the things we found are
the movements that decline most rapidly as you age are rotation. Rotational movements.
If there's anything that you do as you'd older, and it's not strength,
it's actually speed. That's the kind of thing where if you're walking is rotational.
If you fall, you need to be able to quickly rotate to stop
yourself. Those are the most kind of Those are not just most efficient,
Those are the ones that decline at the fastest rate, and so those are
those are the movements pay attention to as you get older. Interestingly, two
weeks ago, I walked out as a single played with this group. Guy
was sixty eight years old, and he said at one point, he goes,
you know, three years ago, I could hit my driver two forty
five two fifty. Now I'm struggling to get it two hundred. And I
said, well, that's interesting because you know we're similar in age. And
are you doing any daily exercising, stretching anything, And he goes, no,
I guess I should huh, like, well, then, why are
you surprised you're losing distance at our age? Right? Yeap? And and
interestingly too, you actually keep strength for a long Once you have foundational strength,
you actually keep that for a long time. What you what you don't
and so you don't need to train it as much power, Right, the
ability to take that strength and generate speed power declines rapidly. That's just something
that happens in like detraining and uh, you know, so it's one of
those things you is something you need to be training way more often, uh
not just as you age, just for anyone just to kind of exercise science
principle. And so those are the kinds of movements that and and types of
training that you should be doing. And that's what that's really what our kind
of assessment component of the product is all about. Is it just identifies those
things in a way that hasn't been possible before and and kind of delivers it
in a way that's really consumable, understandable and and uh and and actionable.
So and I'm not sure when you tried produced you actually go through a test
or no, because you just did a you did a performance test, or
it was it just a look at workout and try it. It was Yeah,
it was more of a demo and a workout. And I was very
lucky because there was a young woman there who was a high school golf coach
and she was a beast. And so Sean had heard Kayla uh do some
of the movements for me and it was like, you know, okay,
Fred, you try it right, and then Kayla comes on It's like like,
okay, now I understand what you're trying to do. Yeah, yeah,
amazing. If you're going to get tested, it's kind of like,
you know, remember those carnival games. You swing the sledgehammer as far as
you can, right, you know, it's it's that's what you're It's what
you're trying to do. It's it's meant to be for the test. On
the testing side of things, it sounds like you didn't go. You didn't
get a full report, which I'll have to share with you after this because
it's it's it's such an incredible it's like a fitness program vending machine in a
way, but in a way that's hyper personalized with insane precision. And we've
been working at this for for years. I was going to ask you,
how did you get to this point? What brought you to developing this product?
Is it a vision that you had or were you something that you did
as a kid or were you inspired from something else? A combination of things.
So I grew up outside of Boston and I was an actor. I
grew up in a town called Wellesley. Oh of course. Okay, my
wife from Brookline. Okay, go ahead, from Brookline. Awesome. I
know. Well I lived in Brookline for a period after so it's kind of
nice. Uh sho cola. Uh yeah, I lived in in Cleveland Circle
for two years or something after college. But it's not far from Coolidge,
Kana. So yeah, So I grew up in Wellesley and not a place
where there was a prevalence of the thick Boston accent. But yeah, nevertheless,
I grew fond of it. But I was. I grew playing every
sport imaginable, you know, but my priority spore was soccer, though,
and I had a really painful condition in my knee. It's called osteo chondritis
desiccans. It's like it's just really really painful. It's starting at age nine.
So from age nine to fourteen, I was in and out of physical
therapy and training, and my you know, soccer career was just like up
and down. And I distinctly remember walking out of a training session with one
of my teammates. I'm coming back from this kind of you know, reaving
in this knee condition and getting into training. He's got this severe oblique strain,
and we each had a sheet of paper that had the same training program
on it. And to me, this just exposed I think this is the
beginning for me of realizing this lack of information that's easily accessible, especially around
the measurements. And when I was doing getting assessed, it was all isolated
joints, isolated joint movements, and I struggled to kind of translate that to
whole body movements and rotation and multiplanner movements, which mattered, you know,
to suport, it mattered to sport. So fast forward, you know a
number of years. I went to Vanderbilt, the Nashville, I went back
to Boston. As we're going a different career. I became super interested in
I studied economics and history, and then I got into engineering, and I
was in a different career field than construction management, building, you know,
life science and biotech spaces. I got super interested in biometrics and I started
to see this urgence of all these connected fitness companies and technologies and all of
them from my perspective, were around like digitizing and existing piece of equipment,
right, put a sensor on a bike, put a screen on a cable
machine. And where I was seeing this kind of void in critical void in
data around physical strength and power, I realized that to solve that problem you
actually need to create a whole new machine altogether, invent a resistance as force
in all directions to be able to get these measurements and build software. And
that was something that nobody was doing because I think everyone had been thinking about
that. It's like the heavy Ford moment of like you've got somebody what they
want, they say, a faster horse. It just requires like a total
reimagination. So I got inspiration for the mechanical system from something that my dad
invented at MIT in the early nine wow, and he spun out of MIT.
He's a brilliant still a lot of today not involved in Proteus, but
he's a big obviously big cheerleader. But he spun out of MIT in the
early nineties and in the basement of my house in Wellsley growing up, he
was like a mad scientist trying to build this contraption that he was trying to
have this thing for simulating sporting movements, but it didn't do any It didn't
work, It didn't mechanically it was a brilliant concept. It didn't have resistance.
It couldn't have resistance. It didn't have there's obviously no software, and
it was kind of a show and tell type piece, but with a brilliant
foundational element. And that's actually twenty years later what I used to say,
Okay, wait a minute, if I can redesign this mechanically and make that
work provide resistance, I can use that to build software and data capabilities around
it. And then I left my job in previous career Intoy fifteen, bootstrapped
for eighteen months, found to the company in twenty sixteen, and that was
the beginnings of Produce and we basically spent four years in heavy R and D
mode, you know, really humble beginnings, me and one to three other
people in like a windowless startup incubator type closet, building machines with my own
hands and driving them around in a truck, trying to get somebody to you
know, experience it, use it. And then you know, we started
to get a lot of traction in the baseball space, and then quickly into
golf adoption and basically after you know, four years of you know, partnership
with the Hospital for Special Surgery and these great you know in kind of trainer
endorsements that we're all just organic. We have grown in the last two years
about twenty times and we have now had adoption from you know, tens of
thousands of individuals age eight to ninety eight, including Patrick Mahomes, John Rahm
is a regular user spencer TATA and as trainers on our advisory board, you
know, Justin Verlander, Damian Lillard, Tony Ferguson, basically across all major
sports. The list goes on, and this is all organic word of mouth
growth. So it's not like we you know, we are kind we are
venture backed, but we're not like you know, pumping artificial you know,
dollars into like you know, spend to get like artificial marketing boosts. And
it's all very much this is the real deal. There's a lot of layers
to it, and this is we want to be very cautious about building the
brand and the trust we have with customers because there's a lot of noise in
this space, a lot of gimmicky stuff and this is the opposite of that.
But there's you can easily be perceived as a gimmick because of how different
it looks and appears. And so we always just say, like we'll talk
to the real customers and users and they'll they'll tell you this is this is
this is not a joke. This is going to be uh, continue to
grow at a really rapid base. So when you and your buddies were your
partners, were developing this in a little cubicle there, how often were you
able to reach out to your dad and say, we're kind of stuck at
this spot here or what was your thought was he was he helpful and he
had all this amazing insight for all the work that he had done. You
know, a really good question. The answer is actually no, but not
not because of a lack of interest in wanting to. There's really two reasons.
One is that what we were doing were stress ato sphere is beyond what
he imagined or kind of capable of, which so it's really interesting that what
where we are today is not possible without what he did right. But at
the same time, so like you know, it's what we're doing is built
off of that, but we're also we're doing things that he couldn't possibly do
or have done or conceived of. So it's this really interesting kind of like
mutual relationships. So as I I had to kind of figure it out and
and and also at the same time, he was he he has had a
couple of strokes. He's actually doing. His recovery has been really good.
But but nevertheless, like everything that he like you know, remembered and had
documented or not documented for the earlier years was just like out the window.
So it was unbelievably challenging, uh to first of all just figure out the
hell was he doing? And then you know, how did he do X,
Y Z things? Actual he led me down some really bad roads because
there were some things that he started to do that were not right, and
it took me a while to figure out, a wait a minute, that
was not the right direction, you need to go this way. And then
then we got very quickly to a point in time where like we were just
doing things that were way beyond his capable of software data. You know,
but it must have been difficult for you to separate yourself from those original ideas.
And luckily you had hopefully you had partners and and you know, colleagues
there that can say, hey, I know what you're thinking, but hang
on a second. Yeah, yeah, from a different angle, totally,
totally. Yeah. It's one of the things that we are prideful of.
Is I think that is an advantage for us, I should say, is
that so I come, I'm an outsider in this space, right, I
don't have a formal background in exercise science, in you know, in in
uh, you know, athletic training, in physical therapy. I am a
homeschooled right to know, definitely way more than the average person, and enough
to be very dangerous. But the thing is I also and the same is
true as an engineer. But I think the benefit of that is when you
combine that with like, I don't have an ego. All I care about
is very just. This is an interest that turned into a passion, not
an obsession. And aside from my wife and kids, this is my life.
I love to be told you're wrong or don't do this, and push
the limits of it and I listen. And that was part of the journey
on the engineering side, is I could bring very unique perspectives from a design
standpoint, and so forth and sketch things out on paper, and then I
have our engineers kind of translate that into real life. And that's how my
brain works and kind of three dimensions. The same is true on the exercise
science side, where I've able to think outside the box, but I will
use our We have an advisory board that's literally some of the best trainers in
the world across all sports who check me. They check me on all these
things, and I expect that and and and sometimes I'll come up with something
that they'll say we actually have. It's very different than I always been thought
about before, but that that works, right. So it's it's I think
we've got a really we've got a really talented team that is very pridefull of
our ability to not have an ego customer first in all ways, and we've
are developing a really excellent I think reputation that's about we're the hardest working people
in the business, the grittiest, scrappiest, and uh, you know this
is a we're playing a long game here. I know you've got a hard
stop in just a couple of minutes, So let's make these last two answers
quickly. What do you see as the future from Proteus. The future for
Proteus, I think. I think the vision that I see is that produces
could become ubiquitous. Uh. Especially the ultimate vision is we think it's going
to be in you know, belongs in more places than a treadmill. From
a from a physical footprint stand point, we are feeling the market pull in
all those directions that are showing the signals that that is possible. We think
this is going to become really, really widespread. The real future that we
are most excited about is we have such a head start with this new data,
this new normative data, a billion data points, years of capturing it
and figuring out what it means and how to use it. How we work
that into the software products to deliver basically diagnostics and automated programming at a level
of specificity, accuracy, and precision that's not just never been possible before.
Is produces incredible results. And that's basically the roadmap that we're on. Generally
awesome. And is this distributed internationally? So far? Are you just in
the continental US? Where are you US and Canada? We have a how
do we how do we find where is whe near US? Good question?
So go to our website and proteusmotion dot com, Proteus O t e U
s proteusmotion dot com. That's correct, and there is a location finder map
on that that just shows our affiliate and ambassador sites. If anything, just
tap the blue button that says get a demo, say that you're if you're
a facility owner, or say that you're an athlete looking for the nearest produce.
You can kind of choose what who you are, fill your information and
will take you right to the right place for in terms of like resources and
how this is used and who it's used for Instagram and Twitter at Proteus Motions
and great great resources there, YouTube channel, all the above. So we're
strong on the content side and there's a lot of layers to produce. So
we highly recommend taking the time to learn and you'll be hearing much more about
us, you know, in the coming weeks, months, years. I
have a feeling you're absolutely about You're absolutely right about that prediction, that is,
we are going to hear a lot about it in the future. Congratulations,
Sam, This has been an amazing education for us and I wish you
a lot of luck. Thank you so much. Frev. I appreciate it.
I want to thank this week's Golf Smarter Ambassador, Steve Young from Gearhart,
Oregon, as our newest Golf Smarter Ambassador. Steve gave up his NFL
broadcasting career. Oh it's not that, Steve Young, and I'm not the
first person to make that bad joke. Okay, Well, Steve took advantage
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