18:40
- There are two activities that are often recognized as sex, wrestling and horseback riding. And I'll leave it there. You can draw your own conclusions. Hi, I'm Tom Hale. I'm the CEO of Oura, makers of the Oura Ring, and I'm here to answer every question you might have ever had about Oura. I actually care about all of them. You know, we love all of our children, some of them we love more equally than others, but the number that I care about the most actually is glucose, rice.
Turns out, the way my body, my physiology, my gut microbiome, all the things respond to rice, it's actually really, really a sugar bomb for me. And this is true for many people, but, you know, generally, not everybody responds to rice the same way. Basically, now I'm forbidden from eating some of my favorite foods, which are Chinese food and sushi. Famously, Oura introduced a partnership with Gucci. They designed a ring that was. First of all, it was epic. It looked like the kind of thing you might wear to the Colosseum if you were the emperor of Rome, and you know, you had to decide on whether or not the gladiators were gonna live or die.
That would be the ring you would wear. And when they came to us, we were talking about how to price it, and they said, "Oh, you should price it at a thousand dollars." And our jaws fell to the floor. We priced it at a thousand dollars, and we sold through them like that. If you think about all the things that are happening on this device, it's basically a small computer that you're wearing on your finger. And so maybe the question isn't, why is it so bulky? The question is, how did you make it so small? Now, that being said, people with small hands, men who don't want a bulky ring, they can consistently ask, "Hey, can you make it smaller? Is that possible?"
And what's exciting is, we have. So this is the same size ring as the one I'm wearing on this hand, but if you look at it, it's about 40% smaller. And so the Oura Ring 5, I think, is the answer to that question, because I think by now, I think you'd comfortably say, it is not bulky at all. First of all, it's about two millimeters narrower. It's about a millimeter and a half thinner. And by the way, that doesn't seem like a lot, but when you put one of these on, you really feel that difference.
People who are wearing this device, they lift weights, they do pull-ups, they don't realize that they have a ring on. The degree to which you feel like you're not even wearing anything, it's pretty profound. So it is better technology, with new features in the software, in a much, much smaller form factor. One of the obstacles for some people has been, "I have very, very small hands. And so having a large device on small hands doesn't fit my aesthetic or my desire." The other phenomenon that we've observed is that for men in particular, the sort of desired form factor is something that is kind of a wedding-ring scale.
We see this today. We see lots of people wearing Oura rings as wedding bands. We think that's only going to increase. So in some sense, it does expand the market to include maybe those two segments. We just think it's gonna be more relevant and more applicable to a larger audience. The power of Oura isn't, "Oh my God, I had such a terrible night's sleep." Because as you say, you might know that. If you have 12 tequilas, you know that you're probably gonna sleep poorly and you're probably gonna feel pretty terrible the next day.
But what if you have half a tequila? What if you have a quarter of a shot of tequila? What's the impact on your physiology? And quantifying that and giving you ability to see the impact of that on your baseline metrics measured in an incredibly accurate way, gives you a sense of what's optimal for you. The whole approach to the product is to mitigate against anxiety. Now, that being said, some people do become obsessive. I think there probably is a point where you're probably not sick, and you are so obsessed that you're making yourself crazy. And those are the people that we say, you should take this off.
I think we are philosophically aligned with the idea that we should be a calming influence on your life. Moms with new kids, you know, when you're walking with a perambulator, you know, with a buggy with a baby in it, your hands are sitting on the thing as you're pushing it. And so what we don't get is the normal signal of this, which is motion that's really easy to identify as walking. It's because that's gone. And so we've actually been working really hard to get that particular activity to be something we can recognize with a high degree of confidence.
There are ways, probably, that we can make a pretty good prediction about sex. We have made the decision not to make that a prediction. However, lots of people tag sex in the app. You can label an activity as sex. You can create a custom tag for sex. You can do all of that. If tracking sex is important to you, you can do that. It's just not something that we put a lot of emphasis on. Now, that being said, we have read on Reddit that there are two activities that are often recognized as sex, wrestling and horseback riding. And I'll leave it there.
You can draw your own conclusions. Frankly, there's a lot of demand for wellness. People wanna feel good, they wanna look good. That is a universal human need. Quite honestly, I think if you can address that and you can help people feel good and look good, you are gonna have a nice, successful business.
If there was one of those that was the most important, actually, it's sleep. Sleep is the foundation of health. It is when your body is rebuilding itself. You work out, you strain yourself during the day, and sleep is when your body recovers and builds it back again, stronger. We talk a lot about this idea of the doctor in your pocket. You'll see in Oura Ring 5, the introduction of an online clinician.
It'll give you clinical advice. The AI clinician is going to be a feature of everyone's life, and it addresses the problem of, there simply aren't enough doctors and nurses to provide preventative care. That is the future. And I think the mission of Oura is to bring that vision, not just to the lucky few, but to everybody on the planet.
