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Nina Davies & Edd Baldry
56 Plays4 years ago
In episode 40 we welcome Nina Davies & Edd Baldry from Byrd.run.
Byrd is a new EQAI coaching platform which works with everyday life and is built around you!
This was a very intriguing chat about Byrd and I hope you enjoy listening to how artificial intelligence and a more human, emotional understanding are being built into the Byrd Coaching platform.
If you have any questions or comments about this episode feel free to message UKRunChat or Byrd via our social channels. You can also email us on info@ukrunchat.co.uk
You can connect with Byrd and sign up to their waitlist on the links below.
Recommended
Transcript
Introduction to Episode 40
00:00:00
Speaker
Welcome to episode 40 of the UK Sportset Podcast.
Meet the Guests: Nina Davis and Ed Baldry
00:00:04
Speaker
My guests today are Nina Davis and Ed Baldry from birds.run, which is a new EQ AI coaching platform which works with everyday life and is built around you.
The Role of Technology in Coaching
00:00:18
Speaker
There's no doubt that as technology has progressed and it advances, it plays more of a role in all aspects of our lives. This was a very intriguing chat about Bird.
Bird's Unique AI and Emotional Approach
00:00:28
Speaker
I hope you enjoy listening to how artificial intelligence and a more human, emotional understanding are being built into the Bird coaching platform.
Engagement with Listeners
00:00:38
Speaker
If you have any questions or comments about this episode, feel free to message UK Run Chat or Bird via our social channels. You can also email us on info at ukrunchat.co.uk. In the meantime, have a great rest of your week and see you on the next episode.
Ed's Personal Running Journey
00:00:57
Speaker
Welcome, Nina and Ed. Thank you for coming on.
00:01:01
Speaker
Thanks for having us. Brilliant. And thank you for supporting UK Run Chat. Thanks for sponsoring the hour last night. How did you find it?
00:01:11
Speaker
It was a lot of fun, a lot of fun. Yes, some really lovely, amusing, unexpected responses, which is exactly what we were hoping. Yeah, great fun. Thank you. Good. It'd be great if you could both just give us an introduction to yourselves, please, before we dig in and speak about Bird.run. Ed, would you like to go first?
00:01:35
Speaker
Sure. Introduction to myself. I'm a designer. It's my professional background. I'm from London in terms of geographical background. I now live in North Italy via Bristol, which was how Nina and I met.
Running's Impact on Life and Bird's Creation
00:01:53
Speaker
I got into running, if we all want the running story, when I was quite
00:02:02
Speaker
I got quite large after university, slightly embarrassed to say. I stopped wearing myself after 20 stone because I didn't really want the bad news to keep coming in. And my girlfriend at the time dragged me down to the gym
00:02:18
Speaker
and sort of told me to sort myself out which I didn't really do because I just sort of saw the calories on the treadmill and then we got by the chocolate after that. But slightly but surely something did click with running. It's a
00:02:33
Speaker
And I sort of found that it became part of my day-to-day life. And that was where it changed when it stopped being a sort of transactional event. I needed to be compensated for going out running by other things. But I actually started to enjoy it and I started to become quite a bit faster at it. So I guess in 2019, at Berlin, I ran a 238 marathon. Still seems a bit mental considering that I couldn't
00:03:02
Speaker
run really for, you know, that joke of not being able to run for the bus. I was that guy. So, so yeah, it did all right with that. And I suppose Bird was, I mean, I guess we might get onto it later, but Bird was sort of born out of my experience of all of the research and work I did around the training and coaching related to, yeah, getting myself from that point of being
Living in Italy and Running Culture
00:03:30
Speaker
you know, really severely overweight through to getting a championship time for London Marathon and then going and running even faster than that in Berlin. Yeah, amazing. That's an amazing achievement. And where in Italy are you? So I'm in a small town called Cunio, which is about an hour south of Turin. So the Alps kind of do a curve round to the sea and we're in the curved bit.
00:03:59
Speaker
It's lovely, the maritime Alps here.
Nina's Design Background and Running Story
00:04:01
Speaker
There's some beautiful nature and some beautiful trail running. So very lucky. Very nice. Yeah, I remember a school trip to just outside of Turin when I was 16 for a skiing night. Yeah, very nice. Yeah, it's good skiing here. Yeah, our team meetings are just a tease now, Joe. You see the kind of backdrop of an ambulance on the edge there. I bet.
00:04:29
Speaker
Nina, would you like to introduce yourself? Yeah, of course. Hi, Jo, thank you. Yeah, so I'm Nina.
00:04:38
Speaker
My background actually also was in design, but more in kind of brands and graphic design. I was a brand strategist and founded my own branding agency 12 or so years ago, which I exited. And one of the things I did when I had a bit of time after that was lean back into my passion for running. And that was where I met Ed and Bristol, as he alluded to. But yeah, I guess my background for running, I mean, running
00:05:07
Speaker
running for me has been something I have always been into, to be honest. My dad was a marathon runner and I kind of grew up around that whole time. But it
Running and Mental Health
00:05:17
Speaker
was always something that was very kind of in and out of my life and very kind of yo-yoing. I was one of these people that would kind of like hit a kind of marathon training plan super hard and kind of like
00:05:28
Speaker
crash and burn and then kind of like not do anything for months and then do another one. It was always a means to an end to a kind of competitive result, I guess. And that coincided with growing up, not finding ways to manage
00:05:45
Speaker
mental health particularly well and culminated in losing my head while a peace show when I was in my 20s and really making me have a kind of wake up to really rethink about how how I could look after myself better really and I guess over the years through
Bird's Philosophy and Platform Discussion
00:06:01
Speaker
working with a with a coach and embracing a different approach to running and similar to ed that kind of approach where it actually becomes a much more positive celebration of the journey of running rather than always thinking about that end point and bringing on anxiety about kind of have I done enough to reach that goal and and you know not blindly following a kind of meaningless process but just really understanding how it can be a cornerstone of your health and well-being which you know I'm now lucky enough to have found that really
00:06:31
Speaker
you know, healthy, happy relationship with my running. And it's an absolute pleasure. And that's what draws me to bird really is to kind of, you know, is the approach that bird is taking in a similar way, which we'll talk about later, but you know, being able to bring some of my personal experience into that is very exciting.
00:06:51
Speaker
Yeah. Thank you both. That's really great for me and for everyone listening to understand that, you know, to those journeys that you both described there. And I'm sure that that passion that took you through those journeys has been now channeled into Bird as well. So should we talk about Bird? Tell us exactly what it is.
Bird's Coaching Flexibility and Adaptability
00:07:13
Speaker
I know we had an intro on the hour last night, but if one of you would like to introduce us, what is Bird.ram?
00:07:21
Speaker
Nina, do you want to take that? I'll take that. Yeah, I'll take that because I alluded to it then, I guess. Bird is a coaching platform. Its first manifestation will be as a kind of personalized coaching product and app. But what is unique about it is the approach that we've both talked about in our experiences is not being built as a
00:07:50
Speaker
as a one size fits all plan that's based on hitting a goal and his goal orientated and all about performance. It's actually a coaching mindset that helps you understand the progress of running and how that can and celebrate the small milestones along the way to ensure that it can fit in with your life. And we've talked to hundreds of runners over the last year and know that so many people might start with good intentions and a
00:08:18
Speaker
an exciting goal in mind. They might work to a plan to try and hit that, but then what happens so often is life gets in the way, the plan doesn't understand their life and their complexities, doesn't adapt with them and they fall off that plan and don't really know how to get back on it. It can be a very demotivating and very destructive process.
00:08:42
Speaker
So Bird is designed to adapt and be specifically built from the ground up for you, for everyday types of runners, understanding that life changes and adapts. We talk about, you might have seen a kind of bit like the Google Maps of running. So you kind of want to get from A to B, wherever that might be, and it's not necessarily a race goal. But there's not only one way to get there.
00:09:08
Speaker
We all want to be able to kind of maybe take that detour every now and again but know that we're still on track.
00:09:14
Speaker
Yeah, so often we see online, it's good you say that, we'll see people who are following a plan and they're so into this plan that they must stick to it, that they might miss a day because life gets in the way and then the next day they might double up or they might try and catch up effectively, which we all know that's...
00:09:41
Speaker
Well, it's going to lead to injury. It's too much. You need to adapt as you're going through these training plans, don't you? Or through a journey towards a specific goal. Okay. Go on, sorry. No, no. It's also recognizing that running's not always the most important thing in our lives, right? I mean, running is a super important bit of our life. I remember one of our beta users saying that, I can't remember what they said now, but they said they'd had to
00:10:10
Speaker
not go out and see their friends because Bert had told them to do something. I was like please don't do that ever again. You know like going out with your mates is far more important than not missing a run kind of thing. The whole point of why we're building something like Bert is that it does get built up, built from the ground up for you as an individual responding to your actual everyday life and your everyday life involves
00:10:34
Speaker
socializing or kids or going to work and all those sorts of things. And running should be working around that and birds facilitating that relationship so you can keep your running habit going, but not the detriment of all other things.
Emotional Intelligence in AI Coaching
00:10:48
Speaker
We're not, you know, we're not pro athletes where running has to take the, you know, the top point in our lives.
00:10:56
Speaker
Okay. So let's go into a bit more detail about what it is exactly then. So looking on your website, I've seen that it talks about an EQ, sorry, an EQ AI coach. Tell us more about the product then please. I guess I can, oh Nina.
00:11:17
Speaker
That's good. I was just going to introduce maybe EQ AI and then maybe you can talk a little bit more about the AI part of it. I just, you will do that better than me. Go for it. I mean, we talk about EQ AI as the, so EQ being the emotional intelligence and AI being the artificial intelligence and all the data. Joseph is
00:11:38
Speaker
The power is in the combination of those things. And I think we heard again, if you're talking to run us this year, is data is on the rise all around us here. We've all kind of plugged into our devices that give us so much data every day and quantified self. But the real richness comes in then actually what does that data mean and giving that data some human meaning.
00:12:02
Speaker
No, we're just we're we all know kind of where we are. And looking at that data through the eyes of kind of emotional intelligence, that what we bring to it through our intuition, our feelings, that real coaching, coaching mindset rather than just kind of data crunching. And, you know, we all know that coaching mindset is about
00:12:22
Speaker
asking questions and listening and understanding people and working in that framework that still gives you space for growth rather than being just rigid data and stats. And that's what we mean by the EQ AI. It's recognizing the holistic benefits and journey of running.
00:12:42
Speaker
And just for anyone listening who hasn't come across EQ before, so that's it. IQ is the acronym that everybody knows, isn't it? But EQ is your emotional quotient. And I seem to remember back in a corporate day, being on a training day, and somebody was talking about your PQ, your political quotient as well, which is an interesting one. Yeah. So EQ is the
00:13:13
Speaker
So EQ is the emotional tide, is that what you're saying? That's right. Yeah, emotional quotient is exactly, as you say, what it stands
Training AI for Empathy
00:13:21
Speaker
for. But we more commonly think of it as our kind of emotional intelligence, our human intuition. Yes. Ed, would you like to touch on the AI part?
00:13:34
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, Nina's actually covered it pretty well. But from an AI perspective, we're using just over 1 billion variables to crunch many, many numbers. I guess to Nina's point, the reason you need the human intuition and the human intelligence involved in it is computers are exceptionally good at making very fast calculations. But if you put junk in,
00:14:01
Speaker
you'll get junk out the other side. You'll just get it done really quickly. And so what we've worked really hard on over this past year and we've done lots of testing and there's been lots of failures and lots of frustration at computers doing things that we as runners considered dumb is refining those algorithms, refining that artificial intelligence. So it does things that are correct from the perspective of a human.
00:14:30
Speaker
which can sometimes counter intuitively not be what a computer would necessarily expect the right answer to be. So that's been one of our big challenges is how do you make the machine understand the world in which we as humans live, which has been an interesting challenge and a lot more complex than I think we initially anticipated. I think it's fair to say we underestimated the complexity of using probabilistic models or
00:14:59
Speaker
essentially tried to make predictions about the future state of an individual or the future state of a coaching plan. We underestimated just how many hundreds of thousands, millions of variants there could be once you start getting quite a long way into the future. Yeah. Because that was one of my questions from looking at some of the stuff on the website actually is how does technology show empathy and understanding?
00:15:29
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, it's a really good question. I suppose the quick answer is that technology doesn't, right? Technology is not neutral because humans build it. So it can't be neutral because humans aren't neutral. But technology has no concept of morals or of emotions in the way that humans do. And so part of what we've had to do is to train the artificial intelligence to recognize signs or patterns
00:15:59
Speaker
uh, or indications that something might be up with the runner or the individual to them, be able to ask them questions, to get user feedback, to try and give that sense of empathy to the user around, you know, either saying, actually you need to, you need to slow down in terms of your training at the moment, or actually you've probably got, you know, you're just not being as confident as you could be in where you could push yourself moving forward. So that it's that attempt is.
00:16:28
Speaker
as humans, we would rein someone back in or push them forwards depending on where they are in their stage of the journey. I remember a story. I think it was Facebook. Did they have some AI and they had to switch it off because they were talking to each other and they had programmed it. They didn't understand it because
00:16:51
Speaker
it had become more efficient. It changed the language and it had become more efficient to switch it off. Yeah. It was, it was Microsoft, I think. Yeah. No, there's been some, there's been some horror stories of, uh, yeah. I mean, especially with natural language generation, which we, which we do have within the product. Um, natural language generation is scary because you essentially are training it on the problem that Microsoft had was they were training it on real world conversations on the internet. As we can all imagine, there are some fairly
00:17:20
Speaker
unsavory conversations happening on the internet. And if you don't go in as a human, say actually that conversation about glorifying really awful politics there, that probably you don't learn to say that. It's like when you bring your kids, tell them not to swear. We have actually had, I mean, not nearly as bad as the Microsoft example, but it did seem in the early days that Bird was very obsessed with morning coffees.
00:17:50
Speaker
felt like any run you went on in the morning. It's good that you had your morning coffee before that run, or make sure you go and have your morning coffee. It's very strange. I'm not sure how it got so obsessed with morning coffees, but anyway, we've hopefully removed that now. Well, it was an argument to say that runners are obsessed with coffee. Yeah. Go on, Nina, sorry.
00:18:17
Speaker
No, no, it's good. I was going to say, it must have, it must have, it gives you a clue as to our kind of human intuition of the people behind it. It talks about coffee all the time.
Development of Bird's AI
00:18:29
Speaker
You touched on that there's a bit over a billion inputs. So how much, forgive my lack of
00:18:35
Speaker
programming vocabulary, but how much AI programming is in this then? So how many hours have you had to work on this, for example, for it to be that kind of level of inspiration? So that's an interesting question to frame it that way. We've been working on Bird now as a small team for, so there's been five of us working on it for just over a year.
00:19:04
Speaker
Before that, there was probably a year's work of me trying to codify. I had a mad scientist spreadsheet that I was trying to make work for my own sort of training and some coaching I was doing for friends at the time. I don't know what that equates to in terms of actual like person hours going into the product a lot.
00:19:27
Speaker
And there's certainly a lot of lines of code, though probably by this point we've deleted more lines of code than we've got in, which is a good thing. It means we're improving as it goes along.
00:19:42
Speaker
Yeah, there's been a lot. We've been on a journey with Bird as much as we have with our running. When we started Bird, I suppose I alluded to it earlier about the complexity of the future and how we'd underestimated that. We thought we could use just lots of rules. You say, okay, well, if someone's been for a speed run today,
00:20:04
Speaker
let them go do a recovery run tomorrow, or if they've missed a run today, well, we can distribute minutes from this run, you know, up to a certain point in the next two weeks worth of running or whatever it is. And actually we realized pretty quickly when we had other runners who had no understanding of that whatsoever, the way that they would run,
00:20:31
Speaker
it was impossible for Bird to actually function taking that rules-based approach. And that's interesting because it's in terms of from an artificial intelligence perspective, that's the journey that AI has been on. If you go back to the mid-90s, very much it was rule-based applications of, you know, you would say this and then that would happen. And you know, it's that if this, then that concept.
00:20:57
Speaker
And what's happened over the last 20 years is actually AI has become substantially more powerful because machines have been given parameters or bounds to work within, and then they're essentially allowed to go and get on with it. You give them a series of probabilities, for example, that they will generate a certain set of criteria or things, and they go off and do it.
00:21:24
Speaker
we've gone from this rules-based world within bird to much more, allowing the machine to get on with it within the parameters that we're setting as humans. And that is working much more
AI Evolution and Language Capabilities
00:21:38
Speaker
efficiently. So I don't know whether that answers the question of how much AI is. Yeah, it does. Thank you. And also what you're saying is compared to 20 years ago then that the AI in terms of being more powerful, it's
00:21:54
Speaker
So I went to a conference about 18 months ago, and at this, it was a technology conference, and they played a telephone call, and it was an artificial intelligence piece of software ordering a takeaway. And the conversation was just seamless. You've never known, so it seemed,
00:22:14
Speaker
it, from what you've just said there, it seems to have gone from something that is rule based to something that when I heard it in action, it was just like a, it was just not, it was almost natural. It was like, well, it was you got I couldn't tell the difference when when I heard this, this phone call was incredible. Was was that the that sounds like the Google their
00:22:36
Speaker
Yeah, they're, they're software to be able to call people on behalf of users, so they could make that kind of thing. Yeah. Yeah. And what's, what's really interesting about it is that they made it sound natural by deliberately slowing it down and making it sound more human, right? As humans, we have arms and we have pauses and you know, we, we stopped to think about things and we're a bit hesitant. And that's exactly
00:23:03
Speaker
what computers aren't very good at. Sometimes they just, you know, go full steam ahead. And it's been interesting within Bird. There's a few occasions where we've tried to show how efficient the algorithms are. And so, you know, you can do certain things in tens of milliseconds and we've ended up having to slow it down because actually what we discovered was even for ourselves who are building the product, we didn't have confidence that it had done the correct thing because for a human it would have taken, you know, the calculations would have taken 10, 20 minutes.
00:23:33
Speaker
the idea that something could do that in 10 milliseconds felt laughable.
Human-Centered Coaching Model
00:23:39
Speaker
So you had to deliberately say pause for one second whilst I as a human get used to the idea that you've been able to do this thing. Yeah. Wow. Just talking about the, um, the coaching side of it. And there was a question that you asked that was asked last night on, on the hour around running to heart rate and running to feel.
00:24:02
Speaker
So again, I'm thinking about the size of this project. It's amazing. How much of all that coaching and the EQ part of it, time and effort and all the different outcomes have gone into that?
00:24:23
Speaker
a lot of time talking to a lot of people over the last year and coaches actually being a really important part of those discussions. I think
00:24:33
Speaker
You know, one of the things that I guess as a team we were anxious of at the beginning in talking to coaches was being seen as almost a competition for them. You know, we didn't want to, we actually didn't want to feel like we're kind of taking, taking business away from them. And actually through those conversations, we've realized how complimentary Bird can be to what, to what they do. And a lot of coaches by their own admission sort of say to us that,
00:25:00
Speaker
the number crunching bit of what they do and it takes up so much of their time and actually the real value-added stuff is the human element that they add on top, the asking people how they feel, understanding their life, knowing that they've got a heavy work schedule that week or whatever it might be and that's obviously
00:25:20
Speaker
the ultimate of that one-to-one human relationship that we're not going to be able to completely replace. But we know that their time is limited. We know that some people don't feel like they can access a personal coach and they don't
User Empowerment and Feedback Integration
00:25:35
Speaker
they don't feel like they have permission to have a personal coach some of them you know i'm not good enough for a coach so you know our aspiration was to be able to bring some of that human element and make it more accessible and going back to your point around heart rate that's and running to feel that's one of those elements that a human coach will really help you understand,
00:25:54
Speaker
how you should feel after each run, how you can judge whether that, whether you were working hard enough or whether you weren't, what sort of runs you should be pushing your heart rate on and which ones you aren't and how does that feel on different sorts of terrain. And that's what we're going to be building in with Bird through the feedback and encouraging people to understand their rate of perceived effort rather than measuring heart rate and giving people, prescribing people specific heart rate zones to run in is
00:26:24
Speaker
is less helpful than helping somebody understand how they can control and be accountable for their own feel in their run. Yeah. Okay, so if I'm... I know that you're due to launch, is it September or autumn time? Yeah. How does it work if when I sign up, if I went on the app, am I going to be... I'm imagining I'm going to get asked a series of questions, am I?
00:26:52
Speaker
What's the kind of process that we'll go through and ultimately what we'll have in front of me? Yeah, so there's a conversation that you go through with the product, with the EQ AI coach.
00:27:08
Speaker
A few levels to it, depending on what you as an individual want to share with the product, because actually one of the things we've realized is that people care about privacy and they care about how much data they're sharing at any one time. And so we've worked hard to make sure that the product can coach somebody, even if they're only wanting to share a reasonably limited amount of information with us.
00:27:33
Speaker
But ignoring that side of thing, that's just a bog standard normal person coming on, we will be asking for your running data. That's the most important thing for us. And we're looking for a few pieces of information around that. We're looking for how long you've been running, how consistently you've been running, the sorts of amount that you've been running. So your weekly averages, those sorts of things.
00:28:00
Speaker
The speed that you've been running will be identifying races that people have done in terms of if they are interested in performance stuff so that we can identify, okay, well, the fastest they've ever done American is X and slowest they've ever done it is Y, those sorts of pieces. And we'll then be asking lots of attitudinal questions. So essentially how somebody wants to be coached, how somebody
00:28:27
Speaker
where they want to go in their journey. Nina talked about it being like Google Maps and how we all have different destinations, but there are hundreds of thousands of different ways that you can arrive at that destination. So understanding how that person would want to be coached is very important.
00:28:43
Speaker
and with all of those pieces you will then be given a coaching plan and you will be able to see a few different levels of that plan so you can see today as in the next run that you're being suggested or it could be a rest day.
00:29:00
Speaker
but assuming it's the next run. And then there is, if you want to look to the future, there's a detailed view of the future for the next 14 days, though, of course, with the explanation always to the user that that will change depending on, you know, what they do and it will respond to how they behave.
00:29:21
Speaker
And then there's an overview going further forward towards if they're aiming for a performance goal or if they're aiming for a specific event or a specific experience, then they'll see an overview up until that point. Because what we discovered when we were talking to users was actually if we don't show someone how they can, you know,
00:29:45
Speaker
the map, as it were, between now and the destination, there's a bit of a lack of trust because, again, a bit like Google, Google Maps, the main thing is you're being shown the next junction, but you also want to be able to occasionally look at the entirety of the journey just to check it's not sending you somewhere completely daft and off track. Yes. Yeah, very interesting.
00:30:10
Speaker
If I was to put, well, I'm really tired. I've been up all night with the kids and I've just had a terrible run. Would it update for the next day as well or would it just be beyond that 14 days? Is it kind of like an instant update?
00:30:23
Speaker
Yeah, no, it would update instantly. And Nina alluded to it after each run, there's certain questions that the coach will ask. And it will depend. You'll be asked different questions at different points in the training plan or depending on what the coach might have seen within the run. So if you ran more slowly than you expected, or it was a shorter run than expected, or you ran faster, or you ran further, those sorts of things will throw up ever so slightly different questions.
00:30:53
Speaker
but we're interested in exactly that right because and it's part of the reason to be using perceived effort rather than heart rate because heart rate can kind of hide a lot of things within it you might actually have a reasonably low heart rate but still feel really grim on your run and asking the question about how someone felt
00:31:13
Speaker
why they felt that way and then asking them, you know, here are some options about what we can do about it, which sounds best for you, is a combination of empowering them as an individual and making sure that the computer isn't going beyond the realms of what the computer should or could be doing, because it's very difficult for a machine. Ultimately, algorithms are
00:31:37
Speaker
are blind to the outside world. And it should be the individual themselves making the judgment about, okay, well, actually I need the training right now to be tapered off slightly, or actually, no, I'm
Future of Sports Technology
00:31:50
Speaker
fine. It's just, you know, I was tired, but I'll catch up by tomorrow kind of thing. I find it fascinating technology and how fast it advances and that you can do these things. It's incredible.
00:32:02
Speaker
Where do you see things in another five years or another 10 years with artificial intelligence or bird and technology in the sports arena? It's such a difficult question to answer, isn't it? I mean, if you think about how far technology has moved to just in the last five years, it seems
00:32:27
Speaker
Yes, it seems like you'd have to be a fool to guess at what will happen in the next five, 10 years. But I think the piece that we believe in at Bird is that you will have lots of devices talking to one another. One of the things that we have deliberately done
00:32:49
Speaker
in terms of the infrastructure and the foundations of the product, is that the product will talk to any other system that wants to talk to Bird and will make sure that Bird can give information in the other direction if it's requested. Because what we can't do as a single company is produce all of the widgets and the gadgets and the accessories and sensors.
00:33:16
Speaker
And you never quite know where the new thing is going to come from. So at the moment, heart rate variability is a really interesting piece of technology, which, of course, you know, you get from Woop or from Garmin or, you know, various other manufacturers.
00:33:34
Speaker
that I am, I have absolutely no doubt that there's currently research being done into other metrics, to other devices, to other senses that will be equally interesting for how people can train or how people can think about their running. And we want to make sure that we're able to integrate that within birds. So, you know, I don't know exactly where it's going to go.
00:34:01
Speaker
But I do know that there will be many, many more senses and many different ways to measure more things about us as human beings in the coming decade.
Holistic Health in Sports
00:34:10
Speaker
And we want to make sure that we're building a product that can integrate all of that learning into the product. There's been a real shift over the last few years in sports technology that's just very data driven into being more holistic and recognizing
00:34:28
Speaker
well-being and experience within that same space. And that obviously reflects our move in health in general to be more proactive in managing our health. And that's an exciting area, as Ed said, that kind of combination of building in more emotional recognition into that process is very exciting in the future of HealthTech. Yeah, I think a lot of people
00:34:57
Speaker
runners as much as they've missed events. We've seen comments throughout since the beginning of lockdown of how much they appreciate running more holistically and the emotional part of it as much as just having events to aim at and the social part of it's huge, but that whole holistic part has been more prevalent than ever, hasn't it? This last 12, 18 months.
00:35:23
Speaker
We've heard a lot of people saying that actually that space to remember that running is a fun experience and it gives some freedom to have headspace and manage their thoughts and help manage anxieties and everything else going on has been a lovely reminder. And I think if we can try and help people retain some of that understanding and knowledge and augment the experience in slightly more than just performance and PBs and race goals, then that will be a really positive step forward.
00:35:53
Speaker
Yeah. The interesting thing in terms of being reminded that, you know, running's more than racing is that it also helps. I suppose I talked about it at the beginning of the podcast about being able to realize that running wasn't just this transactional relationship. And it was at that point when it became part of my day to day life, when it became an actual habit that was
00:36:17
Speaker
counterintuitively, that was when I got better at running. And I think that's part of what we're trying to do at Bird as well. We're not trying to say, you know, we're not saying we're anti-competition or anti-competitive, but actually, if you want to be competitive yourself, that's cool. But the first bit to work on is the experience side of things, that it's just how important running is to your sense of self and giving a sense of purpose and control to everyday life.
Join the Bird.run Community
00:36:47
Speaker
Thank you both very much. I've learned a lot and I could keep talking, keep digging in about this. I know that you've got a wait list, so if people are interested and they want to sign up for that, could you just tell us where they should go and what your social media handles are and all that good stuff so people can interact with you? So if they head to bird.run, so bird, B-Y-R-D dot run,
00:37:15
Speaker
I UN even, I think everyone can spell run, but birds sometimes tricks people up. Um, and the waitlist button is, is top of the top of the page there to, um, to get themselves signed up. There's, um, there's also the possibility to answer some additional questions to then join the beta list. Um, so we've, we've talked about how we've been speaking to hundreds of runners over the past year.
00:37:42
Speaker
And we've learned invaluable things from having other people running with Bird. And I have no doubt we will learn huge amounts in the coming months from people running with Bird as well. So if you want to get earlier access to it than the launch later in the autumn, answer the additional questions and you'll get on the beta list and we'll be rolling it out through the summer to them. Wonderful. Nina, Ed, thank you so much for coming on. It's been great to chat.
00:38:12
Speaker
Thanks so much for having us. Thanks very much, Jo. Enjoy the view. Thank you. Thank you.