#21

Interesting… I’ve noticed in the podcasts Peter no longer wears the Oura ring during the podcasts which I thought was a little odd, and he’s talked about it much less. I will listen to the full video above, but have just started listening to right now.

From the standpoint of screwing over your technical advisors of a company… really bad idea for Oura to not keep a technical advisor happy and following through with the stock options that were planned. I’ve found that the stock options you give to technical and scientific advisory board people (at least when they are really actively engaged and helpful) is so valuable it makes the stock given in exchange a small cost for the company.

Lets face it, most startups fail, so if the stock you’ve given to a technical advisor to the company is actually worth anything it means the company has done well, the employees and investors have done well and its ridiculous not to share the good fortune with your advisors. Most advisors (who are typically paid in stock) get zero value for their efforts.

9 Likes
Peter Attia article on Pentadecanoic Acid (C15:0) aka Fatty15
#22

Agreed. There’s always two sides to the story (or dispute) but I think Attia had more to lose with this revelation. I don’t think badly about a company promoting its products. But these internet influencers pretend to build a relationship based on trust with their audience. It’s why they disclose “partnerships” and financial interests. I haven’t fully trusted Attia for a while now. Zero trust now. And I’m looking forward to learning about the Samsung ring.

3 Likes
#23

@Beth Thanks Beth! I appreciate it.

2 Likes
#24

Funny, the guy you trust is one of my least trusted people. Oh well.

4 Likes
#25

Please, do tell!!! I would sincerely like to know!

(I mostly followed him for covid related things but he seems to be a great source of other info as well)

#26

I don’t know. Whenever there is a paid relationship with an advisor / influencer and a product/company I think you have to disregard that influencer’s opinions and information on that product/company, and thats fine but it doesn’t mean the information provided by a given medical expert/influencer in other areas untainted by money is necessarily suspect (IMHO).

Without the actual “Advisory” agreement between Oura and Attia its hard to know what his expected contributions were, but in the advisory boards I’ve created for startup companies it typically includes new product development input and some marketing activities. From the sounds of it, the agreement is likely pretty typical of what you’d see in a small startup company and someone like Attia.

If you’ve never worked in industry / marketing this type of situation might be disappointing and revelatory, but its all quite standard in the industry (tech / startup ).

Just doing a little more research on the background of this situation:

From Reddit:

If I parsed the legalese correctly, Attia and the CEO of Oura entered into a contract whereby Attia would be compensated for his advisory and promotional work for Oura with 20 000 options. He signed an agreement to confirm this.

In 2021, these had a value of $1.3mm, current value unknown. Later that year, the CEO resigned.

Attia attempted to exercise his options in 2022 when they vested, with the understanding that they expired in 2023.

Oura would not pay out. I am not clear on what they are claiming, something to do with Finnish law. They also claim that the CEO misrepresented them, and did not have the authority to make the agreement he did with Attia. Oura has taken that CEO to court.

Attia seems to have been screwed over here by Oura. The emails submitted in his doc are pretty clear - Oura definitely agreed to award Attia 20 000 options in compensation for his work for them.

Also, when Attia says he is an ‘advisor to’, it means he is also paid to promote the product on all social media channels. Oura goes so far as to direct him towards individual twitter threads. I dunno, seems like taking advertising dollars to me. ‘We will pay you to promote our product’ pretty clearly seems to be advertising.

Link to trial management memo from judge in Attia case

Attia’s original complaint

4 Likes
#27

@RapAdmin interesting. It appears no one is innocent here. But if my company was getting an actor to promote my health product that’s one thing. If my company was paying a doctor to promote the health benefits of my product, that’s another.

The company looks bad if the product doesn’t work. The doctor looks bad if it comes out that he was being paid to say the product was good.

I didn’t mind Attia saying he thought Oura was great if he thought so. He said he was an investor which I understood to mean he put in cash. This made sense to me if he believed it was a winner. The scripted promotion is too much. It was not advertising. It was a paid ride on the credibility coattails of a person who sold access to his trusted relationships. Maybe this was illegal for Oura. It sure ended what was left of my trust in Attia.

3 Likes
#28

In my opinion, and the opinion of others, Topol put out a lot of misinformation about Covid and the vaccine. He’s definitely on the “Covid will be the end of the world if everyone isn’t vaccinated a hundred times and wears a mask forever” side of the argument.

5 Likes
#29

What is surprising about this revelation? For me, only that both Oura and Peter Attia have allowed this to be exposed publicly createing reputational damage for both parties. Neither party can take the moral high ground, they are both in disrepute. It’s the seedy, greedy side of business being exposed.

Legally, Peter Attia looks to have a solid case.

  • Oura’s calculus is probably that Attia wouldn’t risk his reputation with a law suit.
  • Peter Attia probably decided, through hubris, to call their bluff.

I doubt that punitive damages could be claimed by Attia so this is “dumb vs dumber” for a relatively small business claim.

It won’t stop me following Peter Attia’s excellent interviews and scientific analysis, nor will I drop using my excellent Oura ring.

But shame on them both for their subterfuge and ethical depravity.

10 Likes
#30

@JazzMann What do you find most useful about the Oura ring?

#31

I’m 100% with JazzMann’s summary/conclusion. Personally, I like the sleep tracking and “readiness” scores of my Oura Gen3 (to detect trends), and I really like the new features they just added – Cardiovascular Age score (based on pulse wave velocity) and VO2max estimate (6 minute walking test). I just hope they are actually valid because my cardio age is 11 years younger than my actual age and VO2max is High :grinning:

8 Likes
#32

Thanks for posting. It is certainly an eye opener. Most alarming is his deal in the Cayman Islands with David Sinclair! I said something similar last week when Brad Stanfield, whom I really admired, posted a health study about taurine and ended it with a commercial for his own branded vitamin. He’s obviously not making them in his kitchen so he has a sponsorship deal with a supplement company.

3 Likes
#33

Yes, the Oura ring is a remarkable device and gives some useful, interesting and actionable biorhythm and physiological assessments.

I was an early adopter of the Oura ring, I just counted and I have six of them. I’m also part of the Oura user testing community so I get the betas. For disclosure: I use a Garmin and a Polar Heart Rate Monitor (HRM) for for exercise times, speeds, distances, VO2max, Heart Rate Variability (HRV), etc. The Oura ring for me is primarily for improving sleep.

I think we have to be sober about what we can reasonably expect Oura to deliver given its size, proximity and from taking readings thru the skin of one’s finger. Oura uses infrared, red and green LED sensors to get its readings. I believe the respiratory rate, heart rate, blood oxygen levels, and body temperature measures are surprisingly accurate. I think the heart rate variability (HRV) is a little more “approximate” but still a good indication of sleep HRV, if you don’t need to know precisely. HRV doesn’t measure during the day time other than perhaps providing data for some of the new features.

The Oura algorithms, and each new version of the ring (current V3) have all improved massively helped by a growing community of users (I think I read that there are over a million rings sold) and the incredible user data they have collected. The online Oura Portal is impressive for data analytics and geeks. I think sleep, in all its forms and readings, is quite accurate.

The Oura accelerometer logs your activity and movement. Not its best feature but seems to work ok for indicative data and its amazing to put it into a small ring.

The measures of stress, heart health and resilience are indicative, fun and novel but even clever analytics are limited by the ring placement and sensors.

HRV is important and valuable data but more difficult for the Oura sensors to pick up but it’s useful for indicative sleep HRV without strapping up in bed. I occasionally want a better measure of HRV so I use the Elite HRV App and my Polar (HRM) for this measurement.

As for the new cardio vascular features analysing age-related observations for cardiovascular age, ie VO2max and arterial stiffness and pulse wave velocity (PWV). That sounds wonderful but I have to say, I’m dubious about the Oura ring delivering any level of accuracy in these areas and I’m a little bothered that they feel the need to hype what is already an extraordinary device. I really hope they can deliver accuracy for these new features.

Perhaps Samsung entering the market has them spooked? Samsung are a smart company and they know how to build great technology but I think that Oura’s collected user data is a goldmine that will help them refine the capabilities. I’ll be waiting for Samsung V2 before I change rings.

3 Likes
#34

Can you talk more to this, is this open to everyone or only to testers?

What is your perspective on whoop, have you used that?

#35

The very bottom of the web page is where you access the Oura portal

Here is an image

image
image1920×1059 101 KB

3 Likes
#36

Well the other disingenuous aspect to Attia’s approach to listeners is that he offers his membership version of The Drive because he “doesn’t take on sponsors” on his podcast and the membership revenue allows him to “continue to bring free content to his listeners”. Well we didn’t know that he was making millions of dollars by promoting products within that content.

My rule of thumb is that when any influencer says some product is “A GAME CHANGER!”, be very skeptical (sorry Ben Greenfield).

14 Likes
#37

It’s pretty good that you can run correlations on the fly between different metrics.

1 Like
#38

Not necessarily. He could simply be doing his own private label. I don’t have any problem with that.

3 Likes
#39

An answer to this could take some time but here’s a go.

Firstly, not everyone would care about the level of data or the analysis you see in the Oura Ring Portal. Personally, I’d love Garmin to provide a similar feature for my 10+ years of running, cycling and hiking data.

Data really matters to me, like many athletes I find it useful, motivating and actionable for doing serious training and events. Not that I’m as serious as yesteryear.

The Oura ring portal comes as part of the sign up although I’m not sure how many people know about the feature, or us it? If you have an Oura ring then you can go to this URL Oura on the web, sign in and this takes you a Dashboard. I mostly use “Trends” Oura on the web

The Oura Portal aggregates all of your captured data, in my case since 2019, and they provide you with some neat visual graphics of data point correlations. Having 5+ years of data I can make some decent assessments on how I’m tracking things like sleep, resting heart rate, HRV, HR, etc. You can select all the data, or a date range, and then compare two data points.

For instance, I can see that my deep sleep has a “moderate positive correlation (.41%)”, to my HRV, over the five year period. Therefore, the more deep sleep I get the better my HRV. Interesting? To me yes, to my wife, not so much! :slight_smile:

For disclosure, I started early with Oura ring and the early adopters don’t pay the monthly subscription fees. After all, we did debug the first iterations.

On the question of the Whoop. To be clear, I see the Oura ring as a “health and wellness device”. It is NOT a sports device. I use Garmin for all athletic pursuits, currently the Garmin Forerunner 955 solar.

Yes, I’ve tried the Whoop 4.0 and it is pretty good, if you want something between the health and wellness and a sports watch. The Whoop app seemed to be about increasing and improving performance. There’s great merit in that! Personally, comparing Oura to Whoop, I think that the Oura ring is more elegant and less obtrusive. The cost of ownership of Whoop is higher, even if I paid the monthly Oura subscription. Oura does the things I need from a “health and wellness” wearable perspective, better than Whoop. I think the Oura ring is currently more functionally complete and better debugged and refined.

I hope that’s helpful!

PS I gave the Whoop to one of my daughters.

5 Likes
#40

Yeah, Attia’s shilling is quite transparent. He is not upfront about what his conflicts are or what he even considers as conflicts. Most of the stuff he tries to sell is mildly positive, although the value may not be proportional to the amount of money it costs. For e.g., CGMs (Dexcom) or Oura are mostly OK. On the other hand, he also sells actual snake oil like AG1 that is not excusable at all.

4 Likes